• How the Drug War and 9/11 Led to Battle-Dressed Cops Cracking Down on Peaceful Protests

• If the infrastructure of a police state is created, it’s only a matter of time before those aggressive powers are used.

• The Creeping Militarization of Civil Life

Heather “Digby” Parton, Al Jazeera English / AlterNet

Submitted by David Culver

Photo Credit: Joshua Holland

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it’s supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as “kettling”) against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and “rubber” bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use of force. But it is hardly the outer limits of the possibilities.

More…

Related:

The Creeping Militarization of Civil Life, John Glaser, Antiwar.com

• Also included is the steady rolling back of the Posse Comitatus Act, which basically prohibits the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement.

• The Strange and Dangerous Militarization of the US Police Force

• Our Creeping Police State: How Going to the Mall of America Can Land You in an FBI Counterterrorism Report