In the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, many mainstream media outlets featured guests who shifted the focus from police brutality to “black-on-black” violence.

FBI statistics show that intra-racial homicide is high for both blacks (90%) and whites (83%), so it’s puzzling when people bring up black-on-black homicide as if it’s a pathology endemic to black people. Nevermind that when a white suspect opens fire at a movie theater, elementary school or on a Congress woman, white-on-white homicide is hardly ever mentioned nor discussed.

There’s long history in the United States of racist law enforcement and mistreatment of African Americans. But this red-herring tells black people they should concern themselves with intra-racial violence as opposed to police violence, patently dismissing legitimate grievances African Americans have in regards to the over-policing of their communities.

Black communities are very concerned about high rates of gun violence and homicides, as well as the socioeconomic conditions that put black youth at risk for experiencing violent trauma. In many communities across the country, there are several neighborhood organizations working to reduce gang and gun violence. Cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Oakland and Chicago have hospital-based or hospital-affiliated violence intervention programs that help reduce recidivism among those who have experienced violent trauma using biopsychosocial framework to mitigate associated risk.

Those who wish to deflect attention away from unarmed black men being murdered by police and point fingers at community neglect don’t seem to care that these programs and organizations exist. Just because the media doesn’t show protests against black-on-black violence doesn’t mean they are not occurring.

Unaccountable police killings are rampant across the country and color lines, but black men are gunned down by white police officers with impunity at a rate 21 times higher than their white counterparts. People are waking up to this disturbing trend and participating in mass at protests and die-ins nationwide to express their outrage towards police impunity.

While President Obama seems to think requesting hundreds of millions of dollars to outfit officers with body cameras will prevent these violent encounters, the murders of Eric Garner and Oscar Grant were both caught on camera. Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for the death of Garner while BART police officer Johannes Mehserle spent only 11 months in prison for the murder of Grant.

America’s two-tiered justice system continues to exhibit that life does not matter, especially when it’s African American. It will only take a sustained, collective movement to end violent, racist, and militarized police practices across the country. The black community is working hard to address the serious issue of black-on-black violence. So next time you hear this sensationalist argument, shift the conversation to where it really matters: the system.

Ken Peeples is working in social behavioral and biomedical research in Philadelphia. His background is Political Science and African American Studies. @StatelessMan18

Photo by flickr user Barry Yanowitz

As unrest erupts from Oakland to Egypt, there’s one weapon of war that has come to define the militarized police state: tear gas.

And while a St. Louis judge ruled recently that limits must be placed on the use of tear gas in Ferguson, he didn’t rule that tear gas should only be implemented as a last resort.

Around the country, contingents of peaceful protesters are being confronted by assemblies of heavily militarized police officers that regularly use chemical agents to disperse crowds. But usually the act of getting doused with chemicals is so infuriating that it only incites chaos.

People have a good reason to be afraid of tear gas, considering it’s a banned agent of war under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. Here’s the catch – there’s a clause in the treaty that includes an exception for domestic use. Yes, it’s illegal for the US military to use tear gas against ISIS, but cool to use against American citizens.

The US ensured the exception, claiming it was afraid the convention may prohibit lethal injection. Because of this caveat for riot control, countries around the world regularly and irresponsibly use chemical agents against their own populations. In American cities like Ferguson, police deploy tear gas at the drop of a hat, often at cameramen and journalists.

Despite all of the apocalyptic imagery associated with the weapon, government officials maintain tear gas is perfectly safe, including Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson, who said “There are complaints about the response from some people… but to me, nobody got hurt seriously, and I’m happy about that.”

He forgot to say yet, considering how Ferguson police are using tear gas canisters from the Cold War era and are so old, there’s a severe risk of shrapnel flying into crowds. Make no mistake, this “less than lethal” weapon can actually be quite deadly. Look no further than Palestine, where a man was killed from a tear gas canister hitting him at close range in 2011. Or in Egypt, when a policeman shot tear gas into a caravan holding  37 protesters, choking and killing them all.

Horrifyingly, tear gas also causes amputations and miscarriages. In Bahrain, Physicians for Human Rights reported that many pregnant women had miscarriages after exposure with the chemical agent. Officials assure there are no long term health effects, but that hasn’t been proven given the lack of long term studies. Sven-Eric Jordt, a leading expert in tear gas, says

“I frankly think that we don’t know much about the long-term effects, especially in civilian exposure…There’s very few follow-up studies. These are very active chemicals that can cause quite significant injury. I’m very concerned that, as use has increased, tear gas has been normalized. The attitude now is like, this is safe and we can use it as much as we want.”

And boy, do we. As the world’s leading military and arms supplier, the US is also the biggest producer of less than lethal weaponry. During Egypt’s revolution, while police gunned down protesters and made mass arrests, they liberally used tear gas that read “Made in the USA” (at a little place called Combined Systems International of Jamestown, Pennsylvania). According to VisionGain, the non-lethal weapons market has exploded over the last decade, and is worth a whopping 1.6 billion dollars this year.

Somehow the government has convinced the American people that using tear gas is perfectly harmless, despite stark evidence to the contrary. So, next time it tries to sell us another war because *this leader gasses his own people*, remember that claim isn’t so far from home.

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Abby Martin Breaks the Set on the Lethality of Tear Gas

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Abby Martin / @AbbyMartin

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Housing discrimination against African-Americans, also known as redlining, has long been a form of institutional racism in the post Jim Crow era.

Under the Federal Housing Act, federal loans were systematically denied to African-Americans, which helped create ghettos and further segregated blacks from whites. Ferguson is just one example among many which employed the practice.

The latent effects of racism are rooted throughout Ferguson. 93% of drivers arrested are black, yet only 67% of the city’s population is black. One-quarter of the town’s revenue is due to fines issued by a police force that disproportionately targets African-Americans.

There are unabashedly racist cops, like police lieutenant Hayes, who ordered officers to racially profile minorities. According to a whistleblower, Hayes said things like “let’s have a black day” and “make the jail cells more colorful.” Adding insult to injury, the police broke the law while investigating him.

With this reality in mind, fatal police shootings of black teens like Mike Brown are bound to happen.

The mass protests in Ferguson caused Amnesty International to make an unprecedented deployment of observers to the streets, including Jasmine M. Heiss, who told Media Roots that “Ferguson has sparked an intense and overdue conversation about race and justice in the United States.”

Heiss also witnessed the racial divide created in the West Bank, where Jewish settlements and surrounding Palestinian population had been segregated by walls and checkpoints. While illegal settlements in Hebron enjoyed basic necessities, Palestinians were denied access to human rights like water. After witnessing numerous arrests of journalists and peaceful protesters amid the tear gas, rubber bullets and sound cannons in Ferguson, Heiss said she felt like she was back in the West Bank, noting the striking similarity between the two cities in their militarized crushing of dissent.

Journalist Max Blumenthal has documented this parallel, underscoring how Israeli security state tactics have been outsourced to the US in a trend he calls the “Israelification” of American police forces. In fact, according to Electronic Intifada’s Rania Khalek, “at least two of the four law enforcement agencies that were deployed in Ferguson—the St. Louis County Police Department and the St. Louis Police Department—received training from Israeli security forces in recent years.”

Enforcing security based on racist ideology has long been field tested by Israel, which uses Palestinians as lab rats before outsourcing its defense and intelligence capabilities to other world powers. Whether it be Israeli forces training ICE officers in Tacoma, outsourcing a Behavior Pattern Recognition security system for US airports, or intelligence contractor Elbit Systems winning multimillion dollar contracts to patrol the US-Mexico border, Israel’s idea of security has now become America’s. As a result, Big Brother’s gaze is discriminatory, and racial minorities are unfairly targeted by the system.

When the state engenders unjust policies like those epitomized in places like Ferguson, the press has a duty to engage, raise awareness and advocate the reinstatement of justice. Standing in solidarity with the oppressed and amplifying the plight of the voiceless is the primary function of the Fourth Estate. Unfortunately, the police state has appropriated the corporate press and criminalized journalists who challenge systemic injustices.

In response to the police killings of Mike Brown, Ezell Ford and Eric Garner, activist groups like Black Youth Project 100, the Dream Defenders and the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, have gained traction. To be sure though, the Defense Department has been anticipating the growth of such activism, whether it be Muslims in Michigan, blacks in Ferguson, or any other minority group which could “threaten social unrest.”

In a four-part series for Occupy.com, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed unveils a government data-mining project dubbed The Minerva Initiative. Under the guise of enhancing the drone Kill List and targeting American-Muslims that have the “potential to become terrorists,” the flawed algorithms used to search out ‘terrorists’ abroad are now being retrofitted to seek out political dissidents on US soil.

Ahmed details how a nexus of metadata and social media are being used by the Pentagon to develop a “radicalism scale” for potential social uprisings in the US, and the unconstitutional spying operation is being aided and abetted by Universities like Arizona State and the University of Washington. Effectively, social sciences are militarized with professors acting as spy proxies reporting back to their DC overlords.

One specific DoD project “seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate, and what their characteristics and consequences are.” As Ahmed states in an interview with Abby Martin, Ferguson is an example of what the Minerva Initiative sets out to suppress.

Even more disturbing, the use of predator drones on American soil is a real possibility considering the direct correlation between data-mining and extrajudicial executions. If current trends continue, American skies could soon be populated by drones targeting and potentially even executing non-violent activists.

Given the aggressive characteristics police displayed during Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson combined with the Pentagon’s intent to seek out and destroy potentially “threatening” movements, the War on Terror has officially come home to roost.

Written by Michael D. Micklow, image by flickr user Tony Webster

logo taken from an actual NSA spy satellite exterior called: NROL-39

PBS’ United States of Secrets is a stunning, must watch documentary covering the detailed history of the post 9/11 NSA mass surveillance program.

The two part series lets state officials prop up the narrative that such spying is needed amidst a ‘War on Terror’, but juxtaposes their rhetoric with stories from NSA whistleblowers’ who were targeted for speaking out.

Incidentally, the history of ‘The Program’ derives in large part from an internal leaked document, which outlines how former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales helped shield the Bush administration from the illegality of dragnet spying. After Obama inherited Bush’s spying apparatus, he charged multiple whistleblowers with espionage for leaking information about ‘The Program’ to the press.

United States of Secrets puts the Snowden leaks in context with the NSA’s sordid past, and cogently outlines how the surveillance state got to where it is today.

MR

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You can watch United States of Secrets on You Tube, albeit in lower quality than PBS:

United States of Secrets Part 1 of 2

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United States of Secrets Part 2 of 2

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