Is the Army rounding up American dissenters?

NO.

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, Brannon Howse posted something that made me worry for half a millisecond about what I was seeing. He reposted a YouTube video and took the liberty to give it a title:

While These Protestors Are Nuts, Why is the U.S. Military Being Used to Arrest American Citizens? The Military is Not To Be Used as Police Against The American People According to the Law (Video clip contains swearing)

One of the principle errors that the conspiracist makes is to take a fragmentary piece of evidence and extrapolate it to represent a much larger phenomenon that is not, almost ever, justified by the single piece of evidence.

In asking the question, "Why is the US Military Being Used to Arrest American Citizens?" Howse has made the erroneous assumption that the military...yep, is being used to arrest American citizens.

Here's the video, and, yes, it looks chilling:



I'll quote the Buddha here. Or at least make up something that sounds Buddha-liscous:

"That which you know is knowledge. Knowing what you do not know, that too is knowledge."

Sounds all zenny, no?

We see men in camouflage putting a man in a car. What we do not know is who these people are, if soldiers are the only ones who wear camouflage, or who this person is. Indeed, we know almost nothing about this other than what we see, and to the uninformed mind encountering unfamiliar stimuli, we grab onto whatever explanations we have available, many which come from popular culture:

1) "People who wear cammo are soldiers."
2) "People hustled into cars are being kidnapped."
3) "People who are hustled into cars by soldiers are in deep trouble, probably political detainees."

The thing that tripped my skeptical alarm is exactly what Howse put in his headline: "The Military is Not To Be Used as Police Against The American People According to the Law." This is absolutely true, and is exactly why someone should be skeptical about jumping to the conclusion that the government is disappearing kids with backpacks.

I contacted my cousin, who commands a SWAT team. His team generally doesn't, but sometimes his colleagues do. Also, my cousin has the same haircut as some of the "soldiers" in the video. While it sheds no light on the identity of the people in the army get-ups, it does show that police tactical teams sometimes wear cammo. If this is true, and as Howse himself says, "The Military is Not To Be Used as Police Against The American People According to the Law," suddenly you find that a more reasonable assertion becomes more evidently plausible: The men in cammo are cops.

Now, the footage of the incident has all the clear and unambiguous information of a Bigfoot video, but you can discern a couple of things from freeze frames:


It is indisputable that riot ready police officers are already on the scene, and the guy being hustled off is being hustled from their direction. This suggests to me that the people who are picking up the little guy are working with the riot police. Who works with the riot police? OTHER POLICE!

Check this out:
Look at the tip of that weapon. It has a red tip. I believe that this is Universal Cop for "I don't have live ammo in here. Or at least not killing ammo." Now, check out the uniforms of the guys doing the rounding up:


The thing about military uniforms is that they are supposed to be, well, uniform. If Commander Buzzcut wants to wear his tan shoes one day, it's generally frowned on. If he forgets his insignia, he's scrubbing toilets. If this is the Army, it's F-Troop. Let's look at their military rides:

When did the military trade in its Hummers for sedans? I believe this is what we call an "unmarked police car." These have been around since at least 21 Jump Street.

Here's a picture from later on, with apparently the same guy, pals and ugly car with the guy on the ground in plastic cuffs.

I suspect they did not cuff the guy, who was reportedly vandalizing private property, for a few reasons. It was the middle of a riot. The people taking him out were not protected in any way that I saw. This is not the show Cops, where they can sit the guy on the curb and talk down to him. He had a backpack on, which made it impractical to handcuff him. They got him out as quick as they could to process him safely.

There is every reason to doubt Howse's interpretation of the video, and, should he decide that he does not know enough to make a rash judgment (which he clearly does not), he should take down the video and explain that he had not done his research.

HJ

Raison d'être

Listen.

We are looking at a scary uptick in American conspiracism. I'm deeply concerned for the safety of public officials, police and judges. There have been numerous conspiracy-related murders in this country since the election of Obama.

• 3 cops were ambushed and killed by a conspiracist in Pittsburgh. He thought they were going to take his guns.
• 9-year old and her father were gunned down when militiamen stormed the Flores home in Arizona. The mother lived. Here's the 9/11 call:

• The shooter at the Holocaust museum had conspiracist literature in his car when he shot and killed a guard. Not insignificantly, van Brunn was once imprisoned for attempting to arrest members of the Fed.
• Scott Roeder, who killed the only full-service OB/GYN provider in Kansas, was a member of the Freemen Militia, another conspiracist group.

The recent coincidence of two reprehensible acts compel me to set up this website. I was not surprised when Howse put on the quack Vitamin-D merchant Mayer Eisenstein on his radio show. Eisenstein's company, which raises fears about the most successful public health program in history (childhood vaccination) and advocates home-birthing, lost one of the largest wrongful death suits involving a newborn ($30 million). Par for the course. At best, Howse does not do his homework. What got me was when a fellow blogger informed me that he had had correspondence with Howse, had mentioned the concerns surrounding Eisenstein's record. This blogger said:

I posted on the Howse site with the salient points on Eisenstein, including your links and I closed with a bible verse. I have had success with posting there before, debunking idiotic junk about the ark and modern seagoing vessels.

Brannon wrote me back a very nice short note, stating he had been advised of that and thanking me. But he didn't allow the comment on the site.

This is where I call foul. A responsible person would say, "I made a mistake." It's even manly in some cultures. I have never, ever once heard Howse say he was wrong. Not once. And this is a big one. Howse and Eisenstein were claimed that there was some sort of conspiracy to somehow kill or injure people with a flu vaccine. Howse has a damned responsibility, if he is to have any claim at all to honor, dignity or decency, to issue a big damned retraction and a right grovelling apology for waiting so long to retract this stuff.

The final straw was the apparent lynching of a Federal census worker. A law enforcement source reported to the AP that the body had the word "fed" scrawled on him. Howse, a few months ago, actually suggested, and it is baffling even to repeat this so much later, that GPS data gathered during the census would be used by the UN to target Americans. Seriously. This is the type of irresponsible statement that gets people killed, and if it is determined that the worker was killed because of his job, I hold irrational fear-mongers partly responsible. Those who use public airwaves to broadcast hate are every bit as responsible as King Henry II, when he asked aloud regarding Thomas a Beckett, "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"

Tomorrow, my first real post on this site will go up. At this site, I will try my darnedest to follow the example of Robert Lancaster, whose site "StopSylvia" is devoted to examining the claims of psychic Sylvia Browne. I will cross post with Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes from time to time, I'm sure. That is my main website. This one is specifically to collect all of the posts there that relate to the extraordinary claims that issue from Howse and his site. This is not a departure from what I have been doing, only a more visible and focused critique. It is the same stuff and no skin off my rosy nose to cross post it.

HJ