Fully Armed U.S. Troops Patrol Minnesota Neighborhood

Guard members previously hunted insurgents in Iraq

Paul Joseph Watson
http://www.infowars.com/fully-armed-u-s-troops-patrol-minnesota-nei...
Tuesday, May 1, 2012

A photo showing fully armed U.S. National Guard troops patrolling a quiet residential street in Crookston, Minnesota has gone viral, once again underscoring concerns that Americans are being conditioned to accept the gradual imposition of martial law.

Although the photo is undated, Guard troops from the local Crookston Armory routinely take part in off-base exercises which train the local population to accept the sight of armed soldiers patrolling their neighborhoods as normal.

One such exercise in February 2011 dubbed “Urban Operations Training” involved military Humvees and 27 armed soldiers conducting a drill around the Bridge Street area of Crookston.

According to “Maggie,” the woman who took the photograph, when she started taking pictures of the troops one of them told her, “Just training Ma’am. Joining up with another patrol at the rally point.”

When Maggie asked why they were training on the streets of a quiet residential area, a younger soldier responded, “To be honest ma’am, I don’t know.”

Members of the same Guard unit shown on the photograph – Minnesota National Guard, Unit 2-136 CAB / B Company – have been deployed to Iraq where their duties would potentially have included rounding up alleged insurgents and taking them to prison camps, a frightening prospect given that the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act allows for American citizens to be similarly kidnapped and detained without trial.

National Guard troops are routinely involved in ‘urban warfare training’ drills but they usually take place within the confines of military bases. Many fear that the increasing presence of armed soldiers patrolling residential neighborhoods is a precursor to martial law.

Indeed, back in 2008 the Washington Post reported how 20,000 U.S. troops returning from Iraq would be stationed inside America under Northcom for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011 onwards.

Northcom officials were forced to subsequently issue a denial after the Army Times initially reported that the troops would be used to deal “with civil unrest and crowd control.”

The use of U.S. troops in law enforcement duties is a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act, which substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement unless under precise and extreme circumstances.

Section 1385 of the Posse Comitatus Act states, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

As Alex Jones exposed back in the late 1990’s, U.S. troops have been training to impose martial law for a considerable amount of time. During numerous urban warfare drills that Jones attended and reported on, troops were trained to raid, arrest and imprison U.S. citizens in detention camps as well as taking over public buildings and running checkpoints. During role playing exercises, actors playing prisoners would scream “I’m an American citizen, I have rights” as they were being dragged away by troops.

The fact that such drills are now set to involve Russian soldiers training on U.S. soil to hunt “terrorists” has also caused consternation.

Federal authorities in the United States have clearly been preparing for domestic civil unrest for a number of years. The Department of Homeland Security recently purchased a staggering 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets as well as bullet-proof checkpoint booths that include ‘stop and go’ lights.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.