Just like in Crimea in 2014 – “little green men” have entered the streets of Portland, Oregon. They drive around in unmarked vehicles and randomly apprehend people that look like “left wing activists”. Some are just beaten up, some are brought to federal buildings, harassed, registered, questioned, abused, and then released. The “little green men” are all dressed in unmarked camouflage or black uniforms. Some of them carry the word “Police” on their uniforms, but they are not – they come from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Federal Protection Service, and they are a new federal task force – put together on an initiative from president Trump, to work like the Russian paramilitary task force “OMON”.
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The incidents being described in several medias the first weeks of July sound eerily reminiscent of the CIA’s post-9/11 rendition program under George W Bush, where intelligence agents would roll up in unmarked vans in foreign countries, blindfold terrorism suspects (many of whom turned to be innocent) and kidnap them without explanation. Only instead of occurring on the streets of Italy, at the Swedish Bromma airport, or the Middle East, it’s happening in downtown Portland.
Portland Police Dept can’t act
The Federal task force moves freely around the city in it’s unmarked cars, and young people in black clothes and often of color, are picked up. BLM-demonstrations are attacked with teargas and there has been some extensive shooting with rubber bullets. These attacks come without warning, and in front of astonished and appalled city police from PPD and also Oregon State police. These have in several incidents been physically hindered to uphold their authority.
The City Mayor orders federal troops out
Ted Wheeler, the Mayor of Portland have ordered these irregular troops out of his town. Virtually all of Portland’s local leaders, as well as Oregon’s leading representatives in Congress, have condemned the situation and called for an investigation. But so far, DHS and the Trump administration do not seem deterred.
The acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, made a statement Friday July 17 lamenting that Portland had declined the department’s “offer” of “support”. So DHS goes ahead and uses its troops anyway. DHS’s list of reasons for invading Portland and implementing its terror operation, amid what it calls “rampant long-lasting violence”, consists mostly of graffiti incidents and minor property damage, following the “Black Lives Matter” reaction to George Floyds death.
“We will defeat the radical extreme left!”
It is obvious now – that a major part of the Trump election campaign will now circle around what the President in his Independence day speech called the “violence and lawlessness of the radical extreme left”. The President and his team are now trying to build up a confrontation that will divert the eyes from the Corona pandemic and the President’s shortcomings facing the economic crises that are rolling in all over the union. The new strategy – is a strategy of confrontation and polarization.
“Inspired by the Russian ‘OMON’”
According to U.S. military sources, this new DHS federal task force is clearly inspired by the Russian “OMON”, in organization, in training, and in implementation. It has been recruited by known Alt Right activists from a “subculture of military and police rejects” with “known right wing connections”, and includes former CIA-agents with “experiences from abroad” acting as instructors. The U.S. military and also FBI closely monitor this build up, “with a certain degree of worries”.
“This State is no Banana Republic!”
Demands from local Portland communities and politicians that the Portland police will be ordered to protect its people, “if necessary – by force”, are this weekend discussed in the City Hall.
A representative in congress said Saturday July 18;
“These are provocations from the Federal level, against State authority, State institutions, elected politicians, but mainly – against the people of Portland. The Trump administration wants excuses to use more violence, to divide, and to declare a State of Emergency before the election! This is incredible… it’s beginning to look like a build up – for Civil War…”
In this heated situation – rhetoric on all sides moves rapidly to exaggerations, but the words “civil war” have been repeated in the debate in the U.S.A. for some time. Since at least 2018 – the far right movement in the USA have very vocally prepared for “Civil War”, in rhetoric that for Europeans sounds both naive and ridiculous. I have written about this in previous Newsletters. But the rhetoric is persistent and spreading among the alienated militia groups and former Alt Right activists who tried to take over the Republican party. FBI monitors this development closely, on “mid level”, and have publicly expressed worries about this maybe leading to more domestic terrorism, bombs and individual acts of terror like the U.S. have seen before.
However – the Department of Justice, A.G. Barr, and the new leadership of FBI – have rejected this, and ordered the agents to “back down” and stop several investigations into the extreme right wing environment.
Now, some of these advocates of “Race War” and “White Supremacy” – according to US military sources – can be found in and around these special task force units of the Trump DHS, and patrolling the streets of Portland… We really don’t know what perspective they have.
Sources now tell me they believe “this is a sort of training, in smaller Portland, before they move into neighboring Seattle in Washington state. Seattle will be a much worse battle ground, as the liberals and the left are so much bigger and better organized in Seattle”.
Is President Trump – again – playing with fire…?
Should we expect more confrontations this fall? In Seattle? In other big cities? All over the Union?
And – what significance will the growing divisions within the Union lead to? We now can see growing tensions and frictions between state and federal levels, between state and federal institutions, between different sorts of “police” and “security”-organizations, and between the federal administration, and it’s armed forces. The alienation and dismantling of the DOJ and FBI will be a major problem ahead. These tensions are serious and dangerous. There are centrifugal forces at play that create their own logics, and they soon will be uncontrollable. Theoretically we could face a disintegration of the Union, like the downfall of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. The Corona pandemic and the severe economic crisis worsens everything. The only thing we can be sure of – is that nothing today is “predictable”.
Only Russia and China can profit from this.
Article by Somebody, July 19, 2020, 07.00 CET.
Sources: CNN, NYT, The Guardian, AP, Fox news, Statements from Oregon state representatives, The Portland Mayor’s office, DHS, US military sources, intelligence sources.
