Agency created to protect against terror attacks now policing free speech
The DHS appears to have finally found a use for all those bullets it’s been buying. At a Tea Party protest outside an IRS building in St. Louis yesterday there were no regular police – only armed Homeland Security guards.
Video footage from the demonstration at which protesters, including Infowars,com readers, chanted “no more harassment,” shows numerous DHS Federal Protective Service vehicles along with several armed DHS guards. There is not a regular police officer in sight.
The St. Louis demonstration was just one of numerous similar protests against the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups that took place across the country yesterday. Homeland Security agents also kept a watchful eye on a Tea Party rally in Florida.
The DHS was supposedly founded to protect against and respond to terrorist attacks, man-made accidents, and natural disasters. It was not created to protect the IRS from peaceful protesters, but in the decade since its inception, Big Sis has morphed into an entity that polices and monitors political free speech as one of its primary functions.
Homeland Security has routinely been caught spying on protesters from both ends of the political spectrum via its nationwide network of “threat fusion centers”. Government documents unearthed in April revealed that the DHS, “conducts daily monitoring of peaceful, lawful protests as a matter of policy” and functions as a “secret political police force against people participating in lawful, peaceful free speech activity,” such as ‘Occupy’ demonstrations.
In 2011, the DHS asserted that it had every right to spy on peaceful protest groups and had been using Federal Protective Service (FPS) agents to do so since at least 2006.
In March, Arkansas State Fusion Center Director Richard Davis admitted that the federal agency spies on Americans deemed to be “anti-government,” noting that the DHS concentrates on, “domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti- government. We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information,” so-called threats which included people, “putting political stickers in public bathrooms or participating in movements against the death penalty.”
A 2012 Senate subcommittee investigation of DHS data fusion centers found that millions of dollars had been spent not on gathering important anti-terrorism information but on collating “a bunch of crap,” which was “unrelated to terrorism” and in fact targeted Americans peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.
In its promotional material for the ‘See Something, Say Something’ snitch program, the DHS has routinely portrayed white, middle class Americans as the most likely terrorists. Mock news reports and security drills run by the DHS have also depicted gun owners and homeschoolers as violent terrorists.
It’s no surprise that the DHS is now deploying its agents to defend the IRS against the ire of the American people given that both federal agencies have gone to extreme lengths to target law-abiding, conservative, or God forbid “anti-government” Americans as domestic extremists and even terrorists.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 5:49 am