The Department of Defense is training all of its personnel in itscurrent Antiterrorism and Force Protection Annual RefresherTraining Course that political protest is “low-level terrorism.” *
The Training introduction reads as follows:
“Anti-terrorism(AT) and Force Protection (FP) are two facets of the Department ofDefense (DoD) Mission Assurance Program. It is DoD policy, as found in DoDI 2000.16, that the DoD Components and the DoD elements and personnel shall be protected from terrorist acts through a high pirority, comprehensive, AT program. The DoD’s AT program shall be all encompassing using an integrated systems approach.”
The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, “Knowledge Check 1” section reads as follows:
Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?
Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.
O Attacking the Pentagon
O IEDs
O Hate crimes against racial groups
O Protests
***
The “correct” answer is Protests.
A copy of this can be found on the last two pages of this pdf.
The ACLU learned of this training and on June 10, 2009 sent a letter toGail McGinn, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Personnel andReadiness, objecting to their training all DoD personnel that theexercise of First Amendment rights constitutes “low-level terrorism.”
For those who have worried about a trend -evident, for example, in the USA PATRIOT Act, the universal and ongoinggovernment surveillance of all of Americans’ electronic communicationsthat began in February of 2001 (seven months before 9/11), the global war on a tactic (terrorism), therefore making this war unending, the unprecedented pre-emptive arrests of protestors at the 2008 Republican National Convention withthose protesters being charged as “domestic terrorists,” thejustifications for torture, pre-emptive wars of aggression, ongoingoccupations, American gulags such as Bagram, suspension of habeascorpus, and “prolonged detention” for acts someone mightcommit, not what they have done, FBI et al infiltration of protestgroups and the government’s acknowledged use of undercover agents (agents provocateurs) in said infiltration, thus giving the government under the rubric of fighting domestic terrorism unrestrained and unsupervisable power tosuppress legitimate political activities, the unleashing andjustifications for Christian fascists to murder those they do not like(such as the assassination of Dr. George Tiller and the killing at theHolocaust Museum a few days ago) – this news adds further fuel to the fire.
Theseare not items from some famously vilified, non-US dictatorial regime.These are items from the good ole USA, land of the free and home of thebrave.
*We have to wonder if Mr. Loo, leftist author of the above, considers Muslims who kill those they do not like as “fascists;” or whether or not he thinks massive Mexican protest marches demanding amnesty ought to be considered low level terrorism. — Ed