Troops referred to Ferguson protesters as 'enemy forces', emails show

[Suzanimal]

As the Missouri national guard prepared to deploy to the streets of Ferguson last year during protests sparked by the shooting death of Michael Brown, the troops used highly militarised language such as “enemy forces” and “adversaries” to refer to citizen demonstrators.

Documents detailing the military mission divided the crowds that national guards would be likely to encounter into “friendly forces” and “enemy forces” – the latter apparently including “general protesters”.

A briefing for commanders included details of the troops’ intelligence capabilities so that they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities”, which the “adversaries” might exploit, “causing embarrassment or harm” to the military force, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by CNN.

And in an ominous-sounding operations security briefing, the national guard warned: “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities.”

In less military-style language, the briefing then goes on to detail how protesters might obtain this intelligence – a list of sources no more technical than public records, social media and listening to conversations “being carried out in public” by civic officials or law enforcement, according to the report.

The Missouri governor, Jay Nixon, deployed the state national guard to Ferguson in August after local police forces caused international uproar by firing teargas on demonstrators while armed with gear that even US military veterans said was better suited for the streets of Afghanistan than an American suburb.

“It’s disturbing when you have what amounts to American soldiers viewing American citizens somehow as the enemy,” local alderman Antonio French told CNN.

...

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...otesters-email

[Root]

War on us indeed

[KCIndy]

I've been sayin' it,

I've been sayin' it!

I've been sayin' it for years now.




I hate being right.






But I've been sayin' it.

[enhanced_deficit]

Once tapes come out, that is probably also how DC cops, saluted by Congress, treated the unarmed black mother Miriam Carey who was shot mutiple times in the back of her head.

[FSP-Rebel]

It mostly has to do with a mostly white police force wearing their macho gear and referring to the mostly black crowd as the enemy. However, whenever these guys are called in to handle and dispel a riot, they're going to feel like they're being ganged up upon and thus think of that crowd as not being on their side.

[navy-vet]

Well, the crowd won in the end, yay.... Those evil stores are all gone now and the place is in ruins.

And the evil guard have returned home to their peaceful and orderly lives.

....and that's the end of that.

[Pericles]

There is one one to get US troops to fire on US citizens. Have the citizens be in the process of murder or stealing stuff, and they tend to react as you would.