The federal government has supplied local police departments with military uniforms, weaponry, vehicles, and training.
July 5, 2011 |
Just after midnight on May 16, 2010, a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of a 25-year-old man while his 7-year-old daughter slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. The grenade landed so close to the child that it burned her blanket. The SWAT team leader then burst into the house and fired a single shot which struck the child in the throat, killing her. The police were there to apprehend a man suspected of murdering a teenage boy days earlier. The man they were after lived in the unit above the girl’s family.
The shooting death of AiyanaMo’Nay Stanley-Jones sounds like it happened in a war zone. But the tragic SWAT team raid took place in Detroit.
Shockingly, paramilitary raids that mirror the tactics of US soldiers in combat are not uncommon in America. According to an investigation carried out by the Huffington Post’s RadleyBalko, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement over the last 30 years, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work. In fact, the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
Some 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. And as demonstrated by the case of AiyanaMo’nay Stanley-Jones, these raids have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries.
How did we allow our law enforcement apparatus to descend into militaristic chaos? Traditionally, the role of civilian police has been to maintain the peace and safety of the community while upholding the civil liberties of residents in their respective jurisdiction. In stark contrast, the military soldier is an agent of war, trained to kill the enemy.
Clearly, the mission of the police officer is incompatible with that of a soldier, so why is it that local police departments are looking more and more like paramilitary units in a combat zone? The line between military and civilian law enforcement has been drawn for good reason, but following the drug war and more recently, the war on terror, that line is inconspicuously eroding, a trend that appears to be worsening by the decade.
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 is a civil war-era law that prohibits the use of the military for civilian policing. For a long time, Posse Comitatus was considered the law of the land, forcing militarization advocates to come up with creative ways to get around it. In addition to assigning various law enforcement duties to the military, such as immigration control, over the years Congress has instituted policies that encourage law enforcement to emulate combat soldiers. Hence, the establishment of the SWAT team in the 1960s.
Originally called the Special Weapons Attack Team, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units were inspired by an incident in 1966, when an armed man climbed to the top of the 32-story clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and fired randomly for 90 minutes, shooting 46 people and killing 15, until two police officers got to the top of the tower and killed him. This episode is said to have “shattered the last myth of safety Americans enjoyed [and] was the final impetus the chiefs of police needed” to form their own SWAT teams. Soon after, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) formed the country’s first SWAT team, which acquired national prestige when used against the Black Panthers in 1969.
Use of these paramilitary units gradually increased throughout the 1970s, mostly in urban settings. The introduction of paramilitary units in America laid the foundation for the erosion of the barrier between police and military, a trend which accelerated in the 1980s under President Reagan, when the drug war was used as a pretext to make exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act.
In 1981, Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which amended Posse Comitatus by directing the military to give local, state and federal law enforcement access to military equipment, research and training for use in the drug war. Following the authorization of domestic police and military cooperation, the 1980s saw a series of additional congressional and presidential maneuvers that blurred the line between soldier and police officer, ultimately culminating in a memorandum of understanding in 1994 between the US Department of Justice and Department of Defense. The agreement authorized the transfer of federal military technology to local police forces, essentially flooding civilian law enforcement with surplus military gear previously reserved for use during wartime.
Between 1995 and 1997 the Department of Defense gave 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across the country. But this was only the beginning.
In 1997, Congress, not yet satisfied with the flow of military hardware to local police, passed the National Defense Authorization Security Act which created the Law Enforcement Support Program, an agency tasked with accelerating the transfer of military equipment to civilian police departments. Between January 1997 and October 1999, the new agency facilitated the distribution of 3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment to over 11,000 domestic police agencies in all 50 states.
By December 2005, that number increased to 17,000, with a purchase value of more than $727 million of equipment. Among the hand-me-downs were 253 aircraft (including six- and seven-passenger airplanes, and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles.
The military surplus program and paramilitary units feed off one another in a cyclical loop that has caused an explosive growth in militarized crime control techniques. With all the new high-tech military toys the federal government has been funneling into local police departments, SWAT teams have inevitably multiplied and spread across American cities and towns in both volume and deployment frequency. Criminologist Peter Kraska found that the frequency of SWAT operations soared from just 3,000 annual deployments in the early 1980s to an astonishing 40,000 raids per year by 2001, 75-80 percent of which were used to deliver search warrants.
In 1997, Kraska observed that close to 90 percent of cities with populations exceeding 50,000 and at least 100 sworn officers had at least one paramilitary unit, twice as many as in the mid 1980s. RadleyBasko correctly points out that the trends giving rise to SWAT proliferation in the 1990s have not disappeared, so it’s safe to assume these numbers have continued to rise and are significantly higher today.
Then there are the effects of the war on terror, which sparked the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the introduction of DHS grants to local police departments. These grants are used to purchase policing equipment, although law enforcement is investing in more than just bullet-proof vests and walkie talkies. DHS grants have led to a booming law enforcement industry that specifically markets military-style weaponry to local police departments. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is law enforcement’s version of the military-industrial-complex.
By instituting public policies that encouraged the collaboration of military and domestic policing, the US government handed a massive and highly profitable clientele to private suppliers of paramilitary gear. Following the breakdown of Posse Comitatus in the 1980s and ’90s, Peter Cassidy writes in Covert Action Quarterly that ”gun companies, perceiving a profitable trend, began aggressively marketing automatic weapons to local police departments, holding seminars, and sending out color brochures redolent with ninja-style imagery.”
Private suppliers of military equipment advertise a glorified version of military-style policing attire to local police departments and SWAT teams. One such defense manufacturing company, Heckler and Koch, epitomized this aggressive marketing tactic with its slogan for the MP5 submachine gun, “From the Gulf War to the Drug War—Battle Proven.”
Today’s latest in paramilitary fashion sweeping through local police departments is the armored tank, which is making appearances all over the country at an increasingly alarming rate. The police department in Roanoke, Virginia paid Armet Armored Vehicles, a private company that specializes in military vehicles, $218,000 to assemble a 20,000-pound bulletproof tank with a $245,000 federal grant.
Not to feel left out, the Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) in Lancaster, Penn., was recently seen sporting the LencoBearCat, a camouflage colored Humvee-styled tank that can knock down a wall, pull down a fence, withstand small-arms fire and deliver a dozen heavily armed police officers to a tense emergency scene. The BearCat was purchased a year and a half ago with a $226,224 grant from DHS, yet it has spent nearly two years sitting in a garage at the county’s Public Safety Training Center.
The most widely used justification for the purchase of heavily armored war machines is that violence against police officers has increased exponentially, necessitating the tank for protection of the men and women who serve our communities. But examination of the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, a database that tracks the number of law enforcement officers killed and assaulted each year, reveals that this is simply not true. According to the UCR, since 2000 an average yearly toll of about 50 police officers have been feloniously killed, the highest reaching 70 in 2001. So the notion that militarization is a necessary reaction to a growth in violence against police officers is absurd, considering that violent crime is trending downward.
Others argue these tanks are needed in case of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. But on September 11, 2001, I do not recall the NYPD complaining that a lack of armored tanks was impeding its policing efforts. And during the catastrophic tornado that tore through Joplin, Missouri earlier this year, heavily armored vehicles weren’t present nor were they needed to assist in the aftermath.
The majority of paramilitary drug raid proponents maintain that military-style law enforcement is required to reduce the risk of potential violence, injury and death to both police officers and innocents. The reality is that SWAT team raids actually escalate provocation, usually resulting in senseless violence in what would otherwise be a routine, nonviolent police procedure.
Just consider your reaction in the event of a SWAT team breaking down your door in the middle of night, possibly even blowing off the hinges with explosives, while you and your family are asleep. Imagine the terror of waking up to find complete strangers forcing their way into your home and detonating a flash-bang grenade, meant to disorient you. Assuming nobody is hurt, what thoughts might be raging in your mind while the police forcefully incapacitate you and your loved ones, most likely at gunpoint, while carrying out a search warrant of your home. Assuming you were able to contain the mix of fear and rage going through your body, consider how helpless you would feel to know that any perceived noncompliance would most certainly be met with lethal force.
Training and technology-sharing between the defense and civilian law enforcement seems responsible for the pervasive culture of militarism plaguing domestic law enforcement. In fact, an estimated 46 percent of paramilitary units were trained by “active-duty military experts in special operations.” Lawrence Korb, a former official in the Reagan administration, famously said that soldiers are “trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” As police officers continue to emulate soldiers in their weaponry, language, tactics, uniform, and mindset, it won’t be long before they vaporize instead of Mirandize as well.
We have created circumstances under which the American people are no longer individuals protected by the Bill of Rights, but rather “enemy combatants.” The consequences of such a mindset have proven time and again to be lethal, as we now rely on military ideology and practice to respond to crime and justice. For some insight into the implications, one needn’t look any further than minority communities, which have long been the victims of paramilitary forces posing as police officers. Black and Latino communities in the inner-cities of Washington DC, Detroit and Chicago have witnessed first-hand the deadly consequences of militarization on American soil. Military culture now permeates all aspects of our society. Does anyone really believe that heavily armed soldiers trained to kill are capable of maintaining an atmosphere of nonviolence?
It’s important to remember that police officers are not responsible for instituting these policies. Over the last three decades local police departments supplied with military uniforms, weaponry, vehicles, and training, were told they were fighting a war on drugs, crime and terror. The politicians who instituted these policies are responsible for the militarization creeping into civilian law enforcement. What might the end result be if the distinction between police and military ceases to exist? The answer is a police state — and certain segments of our society are already living in one.
Just days after Al Hallor, San Diego assistant port director and an officer with Customs and Border Protection, admitted that weapons of “mass effect” had entered a port somewhere in the San Diego area, Dr. Vahid Majidi, the FBI’s assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate has stated that there is a 100% chance of a WMD attack in America.
Speaking to Newsmax, Dr. Majidi seemed eerily sure of an imminent attack in America.
“The notion of probability of a WMD attack being low or high is a moot point because we know the probability is 100 percent,” Majidi says. “We’ve seen this in the past, and we will see it in the future. There is going to be an attack using chemical, biological or radiological material.”
With documented evidence that Al Qaeda was created by western intelligence and that the FBI has literally given lone wolf terrorists multiple bombs, the idea that the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate is openly declaring a WMD attack will happen should raise alarms throughout America.
While Majidi did say terrorists would most likely employ chemical, biological, or radiological weapons rather than a nuclear device, the idea that a major nuke could go off in an American city is nothing new.
On February 9th, ABC 10News in San Diego interviewed Al Hallor about security issues at a San Diego Port. Hallor then went on to drop a bombshell, admitting that an unamed government agency had recovered a weapon of mass effect in the last year.
The rumors of missing nukes, illegally transported on a B-52 from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, have lent credibilty to the fact that rogue elements within our government and the Israeli government are planning some sort of nuclear “false flag.”
In early August, Gordon Duff writing for Veterans Today warned of a possible nuclear attack which involved Israel, Pakistan and Iran.
“The National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Science, heavy on politics and light on science, announced that America was no longer able to track nukes threatening our shores. Their report titled Nuclear Forensics: A Capability at Risk, released last week, outlines the details of a secret study requested by the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense and Energy, specifically the National Nuclear Security Administration.”
Essentially the report highlighted the fact that if a nuclear bomb was detonated we would be unable to tell who made it.
“Another piece of the puzzle involved a federal task force, Defense, Energy, FBI, descending on a warehouse in Greenfield, Indiana under the guise of a “records search.” This “Waco style” assault on a facility storing furniture for college dorm rooms was much more than it seemed. No case, criminal or civil, provided any underlying reason for the search,” wrote Duff.
Listen to our early August interview with Gordon Duff here.
Similar to the months leading up to 9/11, the public is being conditioned to accept the fact that a nuclear or biological weapon of mass destruction WILL go off in an American city in the very near future. This is absolutely unacceptable considering Homeland Security is installing a police state throughout America yet somehow cannot stop cave dwelling ninjas?
Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?
Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?
Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.
Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?
Are Americans aware that the same neoconservatives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?
The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?
The bottom line answer is that the “war on terror” is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides “security from terrorists,” but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties.
The US government creates terrorists by invading Muslim countries, wrecking infrastructure and killing vast numbers of civilians. The US also creates terrorists by installing puppet governments to rule over Muslims and by using the puppet governments to murder and persecute citizens as is occurring on a vast scale in Pakistan today.
Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources
Documents reveal that Blackwater has been busy expanding its corporate reach by providing intelligence services for agencies such as the Canadian Military, Netherlands Police and corporations like Monsanto.
Blackwater is a private, mercenary army. They’ve been called the ’shadow army,’ and most notoriously worked for the United States in Iraq, where the company courted controversy. Journalist Jeremy Scahill, who wrote a book about Blackwater, wrote an exclusive for The Nation, revealing general details of the extent of the Blackwater business operations. Scahill managed to obtain documents that, according to Scahill, show
“… entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The Nation. Blackwater’s work for corporations and government agencies was contracted using two companies owned by Blackwater’s owner and founder, Erik Prince: Total Intelligence Solutions and the Terrorism Research Center (TRC). Prince is listed as the chairman of both companies in internal company documents, which show how the web of companies functions as a highly coordinated operation.”
A spokesperson for Monsanto, reached by Scahill, first denied the relationship with Blackwater, but then admitted that Monsanto had paid Total Intelligence for intelligence reoprts
“… about the activities of groups or individuals that could pose a risk to company personnel or operations around the world which were developed by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information. The subject matter ranged from information regarding terrorist incidents in Asia or kidnappings in Central America to scanning the content of activist blogs and websites.”
The spokesperson told Scahill he was told Total Intelligence was completely separate from Blackwater. The news that Monsanto hired a Blackwater company for intelligence reports is rocketing around the world via anti-GMO activists. Blogger Rady Ananda summed up the relationship between Monsanto and Blackwater as
“… A death-tech firm weds a hit squad.”
Citing the growing movement to destroy GMO crops, Ananda thought Monsanto was hoping to be able to quell dissent through infiltrating actvist groups that take direct action. Ananda concluded his article saying
“… Monsanto, by hiring a mercenary army and former CIA field agents, is deadly serious about protecting its deadly products. Yet, this contract further discredits the company. The public can now paint an even bleaker picture of the firm that brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, rBST, DDT, aspartame and, now, hitmen.”
Writing on Above Top Secret, Airspoon commented on Monsanto’s hiring of Blackwater, saying (sic)
“The above quote is pretty scary and indicative of how corporate interests are acting against our own, though most of us already knew that. For any of the deniars who tried to refute that such tactics were used, one need only look at the plethora of information coming out about Xe and Blackwater due to the scandal in Iraq. I think that the best thing that could be done, is to boycott these companies as much as possible. Monsanto might be a little hard to boycott for some folks, though the other companies shouldn’t be. In fact, Monsanto shouldn’t be either for most folks. Blackwater (Xe) is one of the most dangerous entities facing the American people. It’s like the enforcement arm of corporate interests that does not have to operate under the same “restrictions” that
Yesterday Magazine is a San Diego based music magazine that doesn’t shy away from controversy. Their second issue just launched and it features a twelve page spread on 9/11 truth. The layout is an interview with four members of San Diego 9/11 Truth alongside David Dees illustrations and my artwork. They have an awesome, slick publication that interviews the best bands in San Diego and their publication is widely distributed throughout the city. I am sure this article will stir some dialogue…
Did you know that attending a meeting to organize a bake sale for new band uniforms can put you on a terrorist watch list? You don’t have to join a peace group or protest oil drilling to be considered dangerous. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hired ITRR, the Instititute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Jerusalem based company owned by the Mossad and tied directly to the Israeli Ministry of Defense to track “dissidents” and “activists.” In the process, they managed to find the most dangerous terrorist organization of all, the governor’s own non-profit organization, one supporting school funding initiatives. From ITTR’s website:
“All of the information ITRR’s staff creates is sent to its monitoring center in Jerusalem, where it is analyzed”
Governments, states, cities and even rural towns, believing they are participating in a Homeland Security initiative, have contracted with this and other organizations under foreign control, read “Israeli,” tracking organizations as diverse as the Tea Party and the Sierra Club. Reports submitted by ITTR showed them spying on nearly every organization they could find, no matter how innocent, patriotic or public minded. Organizations tied to Jewish causes, however, managed, somehow, to slip under the radar.
Those that were included are so comprehensive that it would be nearly impossible for an American to escape having confidential files, collected under government authority and financing, paid for by American taxpayers, held by Israeli intelligence agencies. In fact, databases include every organization, regardless of its membership or policies, with personal information on members being stored in databases in Israel.
Never before has America or any other nation funded a FOREIGN spy organization to catalog and watch our own people. This is one of the greatest intelligence coups in history. Combine this with control of America’s airport security and total control of America’s communications networks, everything, mobile, internet, even landlines….we might as well pull down the flag and roll over for Israel.
Governor Rendell expressed shock at the gross violation of constitutional rights involved in hiring this company, one that is said to be working for state and local governments across the United States. Rendell said he was “stunned” when he learned about the spying relationship, one he characterized as “ludicrous.” From Governor Rendell’s apology to the people of Pennsylvania at a capitol news conference this week:
“I am deeply embarrassed and I apologize to any of the groups who had this information disseminated on their right to peacefully protest”
As early as December 2001, not long after the 9/11 incident, Fox News investigated Israeli spying on the United States. However, not long after airing the Carl Cameron Report with Brit Hume as Host, not only did the show itself disappear but all transcripts as well, at least “almost all.”
BRIT HUME, HOST: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for the Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence.
At first, Israeli leaders claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but later took responsibility for his work. Now Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have known things they didn’t tell us before September 11. …
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.
There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are “tie-ins.” But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying,
the American states were united at war with Great Britain and had just declared their Independance. But what did it mean? What does it mean now? - Independence. This nation acted like one of England’s colonies for hundreds of years and in that time had grown to become one of Great Britain’s most productive resources. Then the French American War began and England came to defend the “colonists” incurring great debts and finally winning the war. Britain decided that it needed to keep troops here even though it did not have sufficient forts and that it could not afford to build such forts; therefore they decided to compel the people here to quarter the British troops in their homes with room and board; for protection of such troops they confiscated the peoples guns; the King also created a sales tax. The rights of the colonists became so abused that it became necessary to stand against Great Britain’s abuse over, “the last straw” — though most of the sales taxes were dropped, on a few key imported items like tea and shugar they went from from 3% to 6%. In response, rather than paying the increased tax, some of the colonists had a party (the Boston Tea Party) and threw a load of tea into the harbor; while others formed the Declaration of Independence and went to war.
When the War was over they formed a new foundational document, The Articles of Confederation, that document recognized this nation as a nation made up of independent sovereign United States, and gave the name “The United States of America” to the new government. Many of the people of this new nation felt that it was wrong to leave England. Sure there were rights violations but those were livable and their future was a certainty as an English Colony. Now that they were on their own nothing at all was sure.
Over the next ten years conditions in this country continually got worse. The individual States gave little regard to any other State and paid nearly no attention at all to the central government. After ten years of independence from Great Britain conditions were far worse than they had ever been under Great Britain’s rule and protection. Many wanted government officials to go back to Great Britain and beg the King to take us back, and they almost did.
“To form a more perfect Union”
That movement was considered too severe to take without first attempting to resolve the problems of this new nation by the sitting of what later became known as the Constitutional Convention. Each of the Sovereign States gave authority to (deputized) a few men to form a college to review and reform the present form of government and to eliminate the errors made in thier first attempt at the Articles of Confederation. In other words those few men were collectively entrusted with the peoples’ sovereign authority to reform the government. The Deputies created a Trust Indenture. Though some people say the Indenture had no title, because there was no Title written in bold letters at its head, its title, “The Constitution for the United States of America”, was given in its Preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”It containes VII Articles, concluding with the signatures of the twelve States’ Deputies present at the convention. Once agreed to on, September 17th, 1787 and signed by the Deputies, the Trust was formed. This Indenture, (Constitution) with the intent and authority of the sovereign people, created a “Constitutional Republic” form of government in trust. Though the Deputies were empowered to reform the government to more perfectly align it with the will of the people, the States had not fully expected that their sovereignty and control over the land would be removed, wherefore the Deputies resolved to take the Trust back to the individual States for their respective ratification. The States conditionally refused ratification until limits were placed upon the new government that would secure man’s God given inherent rights.
Remember, under the Articles of Confederation, these individual States were recognized as individually Sovereign States, which was the problem with the Articles of Confederation, there was no accountability or control over the individual States. Without accountability whoever was in power simply ignored the central government and moved forward literally however they saw fit (in violation of individual rights, or not). In essence, they were each absolutely powerful kingdoms. It was obvious that if something wasn’t done to unite the Union of States as, “United States” they would be destroyed from within or without. So when offered the Trust Indenture, the individual sovereign States’ leaders could see that they would no longer be sovereign if they accepted the Trust, and they would be destroyed if they didn’t accept it.
Not much of a choice, but the war with England ended only a little over ten years earlier and they didn’t want to go back, so they demanded that if they were to give up their sovereignty, the people’s rights must be preserved from the central government. Thus they conditionally refused the Trust until the insisted on “Bill of Rights” were added. Therefore, the Trust document was first created to create a Trust known as the “United States”. The Trust created a government controlled by the Trust. Government officials were set up within the Trust as Trustees with specific defined responsibilities and functions. The People were set up as the beneficiaries of the Trust and when any government official takes office he/she is required to swear an oath of allegiance [make a contract with the people to uphold the Constitution]. Remember, at this point the government has already been created in trust, by the signed Constitution.
As yet the Trust has nobody sitting in the offices of government, however, the States are not willing to support the Trust and authorize its officers to function with control over them unless the people’s rights and the State’s rights are secured. The Conventioneers went back to work to draft the requested, Bill of Rights, which were later provided as the First Ten Amendments to the, Constitution of the United States of America, a document that was created to bind officers in an Oath to uphold the Trust of the people and securing the peoples rights.
Then the Trust, the Constitution for the United States of America (still signed and unchanged from its original version as first presented to the states), along with the “Bill of Rights” as the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America, were returned to the individual States and were ratified by each of those States and returned to the Constitutional Convention where the new government was made effective and put in operation on or after, December 15th, 1791, the “Effective date of the Constitution which was then rewritten with the Title, The Constitution of the United States of America, including the Bill of Rights.
Now let’s go back and again review the documents created in the process by name. (Names are about to become (more…)
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