Terrorism is the main problem in Maine, millions may die!

[Keith and stuff]

7 communities in Maine to received expensive military vehicles because terrorism is very frequent in rural Maine. 1 of the worst hit communities in Maine is Paris, ME with less than 5,000 people. If Paris doesn't get this military vehicle, millions, if not billions of people may die!

These vehicles cost over twice as much as BEARCATs! These vehicles only have 1 purpose, and it is WAR!

Oxford County Sheriff’s Office to receive $650,000 armored personnel carrier
By Peter L. McGuire, Sun Journal
http://bangordailynews.com/2013/10/03/news/lewiston-auburn/oxford-county-sheriffs-office-to-receive-650000-armored-personnel-carrier/


PARIS, Maine — The Oxford County Sheriff’s Office is planning to beef up its fleet of vehicles with a bulletproof, explosive-resistant armored personnel carrier, courtesy of the U.S. military.

At its meeting Monday, Oxford County commissioners voted to accept the vehicle, which is being offered for free through the Pentagon’s Law Enforcement Support Office, which shifts surplus military equipment to U.S. law enforcement agencies at significantly reduced or no cost.

Oxford County is one of seven law enforcement agencies in Maine to receive Navstar Defense MaxxPro Mine Resistant Armor Protected vehicles. The four-wheeled units weigh 38,000 pounds, are about the size of a tractor-trailer truck and run on diesel fuel. They carry four or five stretchers and are worth $658,000.

Cumberland and Franklin county sheriff’s offices, and Brunswick, Sanford, Old Orchard Beach and South Portland police departments were also approved to receive the vehicles.

The vehicles were designed to protect U.S. soldiers from deadly improvised explosive devices on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest of the article if you want. But I warn you, it might cause you to throw up! http://bangordailynews.com/2013/10/03/news/lewiston-auburn/oxford-county-sheriffs-office-to-receive-650000-armored-personnel-carrier/

Here is a family friendly quote.

“The Western Foothills of the State of Maine, primarily the Oxford County area as well as the area surrounding Oxford County, currently face a previously unimaginable threat from terrorist activities,” Cayer said in a six-page memo.

So what do these war machines look like?
http://www.army-technology.com/projects/maxxpro-dash/images/4-maxxpro-mrap-vehicles.jpg

http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/image2-620x463.jpeg

[WM_in_MO]

It took him six pages to say he couldn't imagine a scenario where his town would be targets for terrorists?

[HOLLYWOOD]

What's amazing is how government and those that thrive on; Wealth, Control, and Power, can sell such bullshit fear and scare into people. Yeap, because there's nothing like terrorist have time and resources for, then to focus on the state of Maine. How silly is the story, how silly is it from 'Mainiacs' to believe the statist bullshit?

Maybe I'm wrong here, there were rumors hijackers wanted to retaliate against those invading Lobster boats... :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

PS: You know exactly what this is about... free stuff to be used on the people. "When it comes to oppression, never pass up a 'good time' in getting military amour gear for hometown, Maine, USA."

[ItsTime]

Being from Maine and lived near Oxford County I can tell you the if the moose organize we are all screwed and you will be thankful for the tanks.

[Keith and stuff]

What's amazing is how government and those that thrive on; Wealth, Control, and Power, can sell such bullshit fear and scar into people. Yeap, because there's nothing like terrorist have time and resources for, then to focus on the state of Maine. How silly is the story, how silly is it form Mainiacs to believe the bullshit?

Maybe I'm wrong here, there were rumors hijackers wanted to retaliate against those invading Lobster boats... :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

PS: You know exactly what this is about... free stuff to be used on the people. "When it comes to oppression, never pass up a 'good time' in getting military amoured gear."
This is also why the Iraq war should not have happened. $150 million in military equipment going to terrorists in Syria. $4 million in military equipment going to police in Maine. 100s of millions going to fund police around the US, all military equipment designed specifically to kill people! People like you. Get ready to be murdered by your government. That's part of the point.

[AlexAmore]

Being from Maine and leaved near Oxford County I can tell you the if the moose organize we are all screwed and you will be thankful for the tanks.

We've already had an incidence where a raccoon attacked my friend's cat just over the border in NH. The cat is okay and fully recovered. Keep an eye open.

[69360]

Maybe I'll buy one for mud season when they show up at the county auctions in about 4 or 5 years. They are never going to use these things.

Nothing, I repeat, nothing happens in oxford county, it's literally the middle of nowhere.

For reference-

http://pix.epodunk.com/locatorMaps/me/ME_2276.gif

[idiom]

Well, now the rebels will have interesting things to steal during the civil war.

[Anti Federalist]

War on Us.

[phill4paul]

War on Us.

Doom...on us.

[Icymudpuppy]

the MRAP. (Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carrier)

Designed to be resistant to the IEDs (improvised explosive devices) common in Iraq. They are very heavy, and prone to rollovers. Best defense is ditches and other road obstacles that will cause the vehicle to tip beyond a 30 degree angle sideways.

[Tod]

One time years ago I was driving on 302 late at night. Pulled the van onto an unused (recently) logging road along the ME/NH border and drove south a mile or so to sleep. Very peaceful and quiet and dark.

Maybe these guys could use some help changing the oil on these things?

[Carson]

"Build it and they will come."

[Mani]

Does this mean our military has so much EXCESS equipment that we can basically give away $600K vehicles for free???

[Anti Federalist]

None of this will be affected by the "shutdown", that much is certain.

[69360]

Does this mean our military has so much EXCESS equipment that we can basically give away $600K vehicles for free???


Only until the next war when they need to give trillions to the contractors to build it all again.

[Keith and stuff]

Does every town with less than 5,000 people need these on the streets to protect us?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Navistar_MaxxPro.JPG

[presence]

Tip me over

Tip me over

Tip me over

[Origanalist]

Does every town with less than 5,000 people need these on the streets to protect us?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Navistar_MaxxPro.JPG

And serve, don't forget to serve.

[KEEF]

http://www.mikechurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/oprah-tank-banner-612x300.jpg

[Scrapmo]

"currently face a previously unimaginable threat from terrorist activities."

It was unimaginable. Now you have imagined it. Get back to me when its tangible.

I think south park did an episode on when imaginations run wild.

[PaulConventionWV]

It especially annoys me how the US military can just hand over free vehicles like it's nothing, from one government buddy to another. It's worth nothing to them because they didn't pay for it. They buy all this unnecessary crap with our money and then just pass around all the blessings between the ruling class without any regard for the American people. We are getting boondoggled worse than ever before and we don't even say anything, we just continue to worship the police and the military as they oppress us.

[Origanalist]

And this goes here...

"Pedro Offers You His Protection": The Preston PD Gets a Combat Vehicle
By William Norman Grigg
Pro Libertate Blog
October 11, 2013

Preston, Idaho is a town of roughly 5,000 people that earned brief notoriety a decade ago as the setting for the whimsical film “Napoleon Dynamite.” It is blessedly devoid of violent crime, and has no need for its six-officer police department.

Yet Chief Ken Geddes believes that Preston’s superficial placidity disguises the potential for apocalyptic violence. At least that’s what he’s saying to pre-empt potential criticism of his decision to acquire a combat-grade armored vehicle from the Department of Homeland Security.

The Preston Police Department is one of two in Idaho to receive a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (MRAP) through the Pentagon’s Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO). Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security purchased more than 2,700 of the combat vehicles – which were developed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan – for distribution to local police departments and sheriff’s offices across the country. Most of them have very few, if any, miles on their odometers, and were scheduled to be cut up for scrap.

Through the LESO program, law enforcement agencies can receive MRAPs free of charge (apart from the initial expense to the taxpayers incurred in manufacturing them). Hundreds of police chiefs and sheriffs across the country have eagerly applied for the vehicles, urgently insisting that they meet previously unknown needs that didn’t become apparent until the Pentagon made the war-fighting vehicles available.

When I asked Chief Geddes why a police department in a town the size of Preston needs a military assault vehicle, his immediate response – expressed in a tone of theatrical indignation — was to invoke the Sandy Hook massacre.

“There isn’t much violent crime in Preston – but how much does it take?” Chief Geddes responded. “There wasn’t much crime in that little Connecticut town [Newton] before Sandy Hook – but it would have been nice if they would have had an MRAP on the day of the school shooting.”

He also took issue with the assumption that because Preston is small and relatively tranquil, his department doesn’t need to expand its paramilitary capacity: “Boise has a much larger population, and much larger police force, and much greater capacity than we do – but are we to believe that the people in Boise are more valuable than the people in Preston?” This assessment of relative value omits rational calculations of risk. It also assumes that enhancing police capacity conduces to public safety, which is at very best a thoroughly questionable assumption.

Although the advertised law enforcement purpose served by MRAPs and other armored vehicles is force protection, Chief Geddes suggests that the vehicle could also be used to evacuate citizens who are threatened by an active shooter. That claim is robustly implausible: There isn’t a recorded instance in which a SWAT team responding to an active shooter made anything other than “officer safety” is chief operational priority, and Preston isn’t likely to set a precedent – assuming that such a situation were ever to arise in that bucolic southeastern Idaho town.

Chief Geddes points out that his department and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office (which is headquartered in Preston) are receiving training and assistance from “a military agency” regarding the operation and maintenance of the MRAP. This blending of functions and equipment summons concerns about law enforcement militarization that the Chief quickly and impatiently dismisses.

“I’m not at all concerned about it,” Chief Geddes insisted. “We’re not looking in that direction in any way. But I have to say that in the event of a Hurricane Katrina-style disaster – an earthquake, or a flood, or another large emergency – we’d welcome their assistance.”

Public concerns about the militarization of domestic law enforcement occur because the public “lags” behind their protectors in perceiving dangers and needs, according to Geddes. The general population simply doesn’t have the preternatural sense of incipient danger Chief Geddes acquired through years of patrolling the inhospitable streets of Preston and the danger-laden back roads of Franklin County as a sheriff’s deputy.

“Law enforcement may know things you don’t know,” he told me. “All you think about is sunshine and happiness, but police can’t go in with their eyes shut.” Although Geddes maintains that he’s received no negative feedback from the public in Preston, he readily deploys the familiar “uniforms that guard” trope in dealing with potential critics: “People who resist this trend, who say that we shouldn’t be getting equipment like this, live under the protection of what the protest.”

From Chief Geddes’ perspective, it’s unlikely that police can ever be too powerful, because their conspicuous presence is the only thing that prevents violent chaos from descending on society.

“How many people are saved because of law enforcement – because of crimes that weren’t committed, or violations that didn’t occur?” he asks. “How many people are alive because we patrol the streets and highways? How many people would have committed crimes if we weren’t there? Sometimes they didn’t do anything because they saw the force [that the police represent].”

Chief Geddes, who intended that those questions be taken as rhetorical in nature, is apparently unaware that they were answered more than four decades ago. In 1972, with financial backing and technical assistance provided by the Police Foundation, the Kansas City Police conducted a year-long study to measure the deterrent effect of police patrol. That survey concluded that police patrols had no documented impact on the crime rate.

Police patrols over plentiful opportunity for pro-active intervention to obtain revenue, or enforce regulations that do nothing to protect persons and property. This means that they are worse than useless from the perspective of those who value individual liberty more than state-imposed conformity. It’s reasonable to say that Chief Geddes resides in the other camp.

In an op-ed column he wrote for the Preston Citizen newspaper, Chief Geddes admonished the public to be “thankful” for Pentagon’s generosity in providing the MRAP to his department: “I appreciate our government and our military for the security they give us and for their help to increase our strength here in our schools and home.”

The problem, of course, is that once police are given access to exotic instruments of repression, they will find a reason to use them. This is illustrated by the ease and haste with which the Taser – introduced as a substitute for firearms in situations involving deadly force – has become an implement of pain compliance used to administer summary punishment upon Mundanes who discomfit their uniformed overlords in any way.

An even better illustration of this dreadful trend is the promiscuous use of SWAT teams: When introduced in the late 1960s, SWAT units were described as special-purpose teams to be deployed only in extraordinary circumstances, such as armed robberies and hostage situations. Now, however, there are, on average, approximately 220 SWAT-style raids each day. Won’t the acquisition of military-grade hardware to police departments simply exacerbate this tendency?

“That is a valid concern,” admitted Nampa Police Lt. Tim Randall, who represents the department’s Office of Professional Standards, when I posed that question to him. He also acknowledged that the department had received a great deal of public comment “concerning the possibility of police militarization, which we can certainly understand.”

Nampa, a city of about 70,000 people, has a crime rate slightly above the state average, but well below the national average. Why would its police department (which last year acquired two military-issue Humvees from the National Guard) need an armored combat vehicle designed to protect soldiers from land mines and sniper fire?

“Well, first of all, it’s free,” observed Lt. Randall. “It’s also the case that even a small agency like the Nampa PD has a big need for armored protection.” Employing the same Department of Homeland Security boilerplate language retailed in press releases from other departments around the country, the Nampa PD insists that the need for the MRAP is underscored by “a rise in mass shootings and incidents of terrorism” nation-wide.”

That rationale is rooted in a lie: Mass shootings have not been increasing, and domestic terrorism – a category that doesn’t include the FBI’s Homeland Security Theater operations – is all but non-existent.

Although Lt. Randall emphasizes that he doesn’t anticipate that the Nampa Tactical Response Team would “drive up to a house” in an MRAP on a routine warrant enforcement call, he reported that the vehicle had already been used twice in the first two weeks after the department obtained it. The first was a response to a carjacking at knife-point, the other a call involving a suicidal man. Like Chief Geddes, Lt. Randall also believes that the MRAP is valuable as a “psychological deterrent” to public disorder.

The obvious question is: Whom, exactly, does the Nampa PD seek to “deter”? I think the answer was embedded in Lt. Randall’s explanation of the department’s “need” for the vehicle: “Here in Idaho, practically everybody around here has a gun, and when we go on a call it is useful to have a vehicle that will enhance the safety of the responding officers.” He also pointed out that after the Pentagon-provided MRAP arrived, the department took its aging armored vehicle to its gun range and discovered that “rifle fire would just go right through it. We had it for years, and didn’t know that it offered no protection against ballistic arms fire.”

This belated discovery would be considered alarming if we ignore the fact that this was the first time gunfire had ever been directed at the vehicle. So far, the Nampa TRT has suffered only one fatality – Corporal Jed Webb, who died of a heart attack earlier this year at age 51.

It has been more than eighty years since a Nampa police officer died in the line of duty. Yet the people running that department appear to be convinced that their safety depends on their ability to “deter” the gun-owning public.

The Pentagon has a stock of about 20,000 MRAPs, most of which will eventually find their way into local police arsenals, along with Predator-style drones and other military hardware field-tested overseas. Although an MRAP has no discernible practical value as a tool for protection of life and property, it is tremendously useful as a prop in the ongoing campaign to indoctrinate police regarding the unacceptable danger to “officer safety” posed by an armed public — and the need for conspicuous displays of potential force to deter potential threats.

“General Colin Powell’s Doctrine of the U.S. Armed Forces is that the United States should be the `meanest dog in town’ to frighten a potential enemy,” wrote career law enforcement officer –and SWAT instructor – Edward Leach in the October 2001 issue of Police Chief magazine. “When force is used, it should be with `overwhelming strength and no half-way measures.’ In law enforcement, these principles are routinely applied in both field and tactical operations. … Law enforcement [application] of the Powell Doctrine is clear: have overwhelming and superior resources available, primarily as a deterrent, but use them decisively when needed.”

Leach, who until a year ago was Undersheriff of Idaho’s Kootenai County, unabashedly depicted police as a military occupation force. He doubtless understands the message being sent when police in a town the size of Preston acquire a combat-grade armored vehicle. So should we.

VIDEO BONUS

In this scene from “Napoleon Dynamite,” a pair of gang-bangers in Preston act as private peace officers, peacefully intervening to protect property against aggressive violence – and they didn’t need an MRAP to do so:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HJp7RUC0Ies

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/10/william-norman-grigg/every-little-town-with-a-cop-tank/

[Carson]

It especially annoys me how the US military can just hand over free vehicles like it's nothing, from one government buddy to another. It's worth nothing to them because they didn't pay for it. They buy all this unnecessary crap with our money and then just pass around all the blessings between the ruling class without any regard for the American people. We are getting boondoggled worse than ever before and we don't even say anything, we just continue to worship the police and the military as they oppress us.

WE have a winner! Good point.

[fr33]

Since it will most likely only be used to serve search warrants on suspected drug dealers, I hope for a drug dealer to take it out with an IED.

My reasoning is that it's a stolen vehicle (paid for with stolen wealth) that will be used to stop free market capitalism. Death to socialism. Literally.

[Icymudpuppy]

And here, I thought that Maine's biggest threat was Rumplestiltskin and the Evil Queen...