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