Jose Guerena survived two combat tours of Iraq, only to become a casualty of the Regimes longest war the one waged against its domestic subjects in the name of drug prohibition. The former Marine was slaughtered by a SWAT team during a May 5 assault on his home in Arizona.
Guerenas wife, Vanessa, heard a noise outside the couples home near Tucson at about 9 a.m. Jose, who had just gone to bed after pulling a 12-hour shift at the Asarco Mine, suspected correctly, as it turned out that his family was threatened by an armed criminal gang. Grabbing his AR-15, Guerena instructed his wife and four-year-old son to hide in the closet while he confronted the intruders. According to Mrs. Guerena, the stormtroopers from the Pima County Regional SWAT team never identified themselves as police; they simply stormed into the home and started shooting.
I saw this guy pointing me at the window, Vanessa recalled in a television interview. So, I got scared. And, I got like, Please dont shoot, I have a baby. I put my baby [down]. [And I] put bag in window. And, I yell Jose! Jose! Wake up!
A deputys bullet struck the side of the doorway, causing chips of wood to fall on his shield, recounts the Arizona Daily Star, paraphrasing an account provided by Pima County Sheriffs Office (PCSO) functionary Michael OConnor. That prompted some members of the team to think the deputy had been shot. Guerna never fired a shot; the marauders who invaded his home fired no fewer than seventy-one. As is standard procedure in such events, the invaders claimed that Guerna had fired on the officers, as he had every moral and legal right to.
Neither Jose nor his wife had a criminal history of any kind. The attack on their home was described as a narcotics enforcement operation, but there are no reports that narcotics were found at the residence - even though the invaders reportedly seized (that is, stole) something that belonged to the victim.
Tucson is notorious for home invasions and we didnt want it to look like that, insisted PCSO spokesman OConnor, exhibiting the dull-witted refusal to acknowledge the obvious that typifies tax-feeders of his station. He also maintained that the death squad went lights and sirens and we absolutely did not do a `no-knock warrant, a claim refuted by the only surviving witness, Vanessa Guerena. Such details are morally inconsequential, since there was no reason apart from the institutional vanity of the PCSO and the indecent eagerness of the armored adolescents who compose its SWAT team to conduct a paramilitary raid to serve a routine search warrant.
I never imagined I would lose him like that, he was badly injured but I never thought he could be killed by police after he served his country, lamented the wife of the murdered ex-Marine, who died on his feet, a rifle in his hand, and his face to an unexpected enemy. The grim but unavoidable truth is this: We shouldnt be at all surprised that a Regime capable of sending Americans abroad to terrorize Iraqis in their homes would employ the same state terrorism against Americans here at home.
Poster Comment:
...We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. ...
- Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Declaration of Independence