According to William F. Jasper in an August, 2009 New American article entitled TERRORIST TARGETING OF POLICE, law enforcement should expect attacks to intensify around the world. The article cites statistics from another article by Lieutenant Raymond E. Foster (Los Angeles Police Department, retired) showing that “as of August 14, 2005, world-wide, there have been 554 terrorist attacks targeting police officers. These attacks resulted in 2,546 injuries and 1,327 fatalities.”

Many of the attacks (on the increase since 2005) against police are the work of “Islamic extremists”. But many “Islamicists” maintain open cordial relations with non-Islamic governments, including Putin’s Russia. Jasper notes the history of Islamicist back-channel relations with the Russian KGB-FSB and GRU. Such channels provide arms, munitions, and explosives.

The Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (a Communist text), authored by Brazilian Communist Party member Carlos Marighella, has been translated into many languages and has become a handbook for Islamic terrorists. The Mini-Manual instructs terrorists to focus on police commissaries, police stations, jails, and military and police vehicles:

The roads followed by the police vehicles must be mined at key points along the way and at forced stopping points. When the mines explode, the vehicles will fly into the air. The police will be caught in the trap and will suffer losses or will be victims of ambush.”

Jasper explains the reason for concerted attacks on the police:

In a free society, the police are indispensable agents for protection of the rule of law; both for protection of the citizen against aggression by criminal elements, and even more importantly for protection of the citizen against aggression and abuse by government officials. In the totalitarian society that the terrorists hope to create — whether modeled on Iran, Cuba, Russia, or post-Soviet Kazakhstan — the police are purely instruments of oppression for the central government, whose power is unrestrained by constitutional checks and balances. Although the urban guerrilla and his street demonstration accomplices vociferously denounce what they claim is oppression and brutality, their true aim is to escalate violence to a level that will provoke the government and the police to suspend civil liberties, invoke emergency powers, and dismantle the constitutional structures that protect against the concentration of power.

Thus, the goal is to alienate the government from its own people. As Marighella’s Mini-Manual states:

The government has no alternative except to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life in the city unbearable…. The armed forces, the navy and the air force are mobilized to undertake routine police functions….

Rejecting the “so-called political solution,” the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act.

Marighella did not originate the strategy, however. A 1980 book, THE TERROR NETWORK, by Claire Sterling explains that Marighella was part of Brazil’s pro-Moscow Communist apparatus for forty years.” Castro’s DGI and the Soviet KGB provided the techniques from which Marighella developed the MINI-MANUAL.

A 1948 event occurred at the Pan-American Conference in Bogota, Colombia that became a prototype from which Marighella’s text would draw. The Soviet and Cuban game plan included assassination of Colombian politician George Gaitan. The city of Bagota was full of Western leaders. Urban guerrillas directed by a few handfuls of hand-picked operatives, including Fidel Castro, generated violence that overwhelmed law enforcement.

THE COMMUNIST ATTACK ON U.S. POLICE, by W. Cleon Skousen, showed how more than more than 1,000 corpses were left lying in the streets. Many of the people associated with the Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party and other radical groups associated with the 1960s are still active in radical politics. Jaspers cites Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as two examples. Most of the public does not understand that solid evidence has linked Bill Ayers to the murder of San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian McDonnell on February 16, 1970:

Larry Grathwol, a former FBI undercover informant inside the WU, says that Ayers admitted to him that Dohrn had planted the bomb for him. Ayers and Dohrn, who are friends and supporters of President Barack Obama from his Chicago “community activist” days, have never repented of their revolutionary activities, and in fact, Ayers is still actively involved with the communist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Fred Burton and Ben West describe in Stratfor Global Intelligence how a Greek police officer, Nektarios Savas, was shot and killed while guarding a witness in Athens on June 17, 2009:

Savas was parked in an unmarked vehicle outside the residence of Sofia Kyriakidou, the wife and key witness in the trial of Angeletos Kanas, a convicted member of a defunct Greek militant group. At 6:20 a.m., shortly after sunrise in Athens, Savas had just gotten coffee and was settling in for his shift when two gunmen approached his vehicle and fired 24 rounds into it, hitting him 18 times and wounding him fatally. The assassins then sped away on motorcycles driven by two other accomplices. Savas was never able to draw his weapon.

The group believed to be responsible, according to the authors, was thought to be an ideological spinoff from the Greek terrorist group November 17 (N-17). The ideology shared by many such “left-wing” groups in Europe is also common to Islamic operatives; i.e., the adherents to such ideologies reject democracy, capitalism and outside influence — especially from the United States. EA also rejects EU policies in Greece that it claims hurt the working class.

Stratfor Intelligence warned in the July, 2009 article that N-17 has a history of assassinating police officers, diplomats and industrialists by using small arms at close range:

Periodic attacks by anarchists and left-wing militant groups in Greece date back to 1975, when the emerging N-17 shot and killed CIA Station Chief Richard Welch in Athens. In 2009, however, militant attacks have become more frequent and lethal. There have been 16 attacks so far in 2009, compared to 10 in 2008 and 4 in 2007, and Savas was the first casualty linked to EA or similar groups since 2004.

Burton and West delineate a pattern of such assassinations aimed at police in Greece over the course of several years:

On Jan. 5, 2009, during protests in Athens following the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy in December 2008, gunmen shot and seriously wounded a policeman standing watch outside the Culture Ministry building (EA claimed responsibility). Then on February 3, three gunmen on motorcycles fired on and threw grenades at a police station in an Athens suburb (claimed the next day by a group calling itself the “Sect of Revolutionaries”). And in December 2004, a policeman was shot and killed while guarding a British diplomat by a man believed to be linked to EA.

Such groups may initially place warning calls before detonating bombs. At first they may conduct attacks at night to lessen the potential for loss of life. Early EA attacks seemed to be more the acts of vandals than terrorists- like the environmentalists in the Northwest:

“Recent EA attacks, however, are clearly intended to kill. Due to this escalation, EA has begun to look more like N-17, and its recent attacks appear to be borrowing from N-17’s playbook.”

N-17 was responsible for assassinating 22 people over 25 years. Although its small cadre of operatives targeted corporations and other symbols of capitalism, it employed simple attacks with firearms in making targeted attacks.

One single .45-caliber automatic pistol was linked by ballistics to five different attacks over a 20-year period. N-17 attacked the U.S. Embassy in Athens in 1996 and assassinated U.S. Navy Capt. William Nordeen in 1988.
Small-arms attacks against foreign diplomats and Greek businessmen were N-17s stock in trade. The targets were hit entering or exiting vehicles or stopped in traffic.

N-17 operatives shot a CIA station chief outside his home as he was coming back from a Christmas party. In 1983, N-17 killed Navy Capt. George Tsantes while he was in his vehicle at a traffic light. N-17 seems to favor drive-by motorcycle executions which work well when the targeted vehicle follows routine schedules.

In 2007 and 2008, militants detonated a series of improvised incendiary devices made with camping gas canisters under vehicles belonging to Saudi, Turkish, Philippine, Italian and Bosnian diplomats. Note that such attackers began like Christopher Monfort began- by planning attacks that destroyed vehicles but caused no physical harm to anyone!

Low-level attacks require surveillance and provide practice in following the basic attack-cycle. The budding terrorist conducts preoperational surveillance to determine where a car is parked at night. By determining where an individual parks his or her vehicle, the terrorist begins moving through a learning curve but he or she still needs additional intelligence in order to conduct an assassination that targets an individual.

Another aspect of N-17 and EA that has similarities to Monfort’s lone-wolf assassination is the accusation of police brutality to justify acts of terror against police. Economic crisis may also be used to justify terrorist attacks. Foreign companies and governments or fat-cat bankers may get the blame. In Greece, international banks and investment houses are in the crosshairs. Are attacks on Citibank in Greece harbingers of what we can expect in the U.S.?

Countersurveillance, using a team of individuals trained to detect surveillance, can interrupt surveillance of a target before an operation ever begins. A team that detects surveillance while an operation is still in the planning stage may cause would-be attackers to move to another less challenging target.

If you are a police officer or public official, you are a high value target! A single officer often must keep herself safe while watching another person or location. It is difficult to remain alert when nothing seems to be happening. Complacency becomes your biggest enemy! Burton and West noted that danger is amplified in the age of iPhones, Blackberries and laptop computers. The lack of situational awareness can be very deadly, even for trained security personnel.

According to Jasper there is “extensive evidence that Putin and company are orchestrating the terror offensive. It is the same terrorist offensive experienced during the 1960s and ’70s, but in a new phase, under a new guise; instead of the ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘national independence’ movements, Communists used as covers in that earlier period, they have adopted and co-opted Islam to serve their purpose.”

During the last three months, Seattle-Tacoma area has experienced several shocking attacks against police officers. None of them have involved Communist or Islamic terrorism. Except for the strange case of Christopher Monfort, apparently a loner who allegedly ambushed two Seattle law enforcement officers, there is very little in the way of ideological baggage that is apparent in these incidents.

Despite the lack of apparent connectedness, there are cultural factors that should not be ignored. Note that there have been many scholars over the years that have identified the way in which social forces create a “Spirit of the Age”.

The Bible speaks of this concept in spiritual terms and German philosophers like Hegel and Nietsche have also identified the concept of social forces that link up with individual world views. The spirit of the current age tends toward larger and more powerful government. Many people now identify with various social movements that call for more government power. Terror is becoming an over-arching social issue and a force that divides our society and that could even create a split between law enforcement and the rest of us. That is the goal of the socialist “politicization” strategy. Keep in mind that local law enforcement is the first line of defense against totalitarian tyranny. Nevertheless, the first line of defense against garden-variety criminals and totalitarian activism is a vigilant and well-armed citizenry.

A recent Socialist Worker article about the attacks against police officers is an example of the socialist mentality toward such violence. Socialists inveigh against the cynicism of the media and cops’ so-called law-and-order agenda when it comes to Monfort and Clemmons:

Despite his political passions, no friends or acquaintances from his past believed that Monfort would resort to violence to get his views across.

Whoever killed Officer Brenton, his death, along with those of the Lakewood officers, is being used to mount a right-wing, law-and-order campaign. Law enforcement agencies and their political supporters have seized the opportunity to claim a greater share of public resources at a time when budget cuts are forcing cutbacks of vital government services.

Rather than recognize our law enforcement officers for the safety they provide, socialists (including many in the “mainstream” media) minimize the violence directed toward law enforcement and argue that law enforcement officers systematically victimize minority members like Monfort and Clemmons!

Know who your local LEOs are and make yourself known to them. You and I should and do appreciate what LEOs do. The job of being a policeman (or police woman) gets much more difficult in a society where lawyers and media second-guess every move and crazed individuals are waiting for LEOs to drop their guards in order to gun them down! Even though the recent killings seem random, there are forces and powers and principalities at work even in heavenly places- for good and evil. So be vigilant!

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”

Friedrich Nietsche

For the weapons of our warfare are not those of the world. Instead, they have the power of God to demolish fortresses. We tear down arguments.

2 Corinthians 10:4

See Fred Burton and Ben West Stratfor Global Intelligence

Almost immediately after posting the material herein reports developed of an attack that killed twenty police officers in West Bengal.

See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/20-jawans-feared-killed-in-Maoist-ambush/articleshow/5577167.cms.

The reports were all but ignored by Western news media because attacks that kill large numbers of police officers are now commonplace in India.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Ciudad Juárez is ground zero in Mexico’s war against drug cartels.

After gunmen blasted away at a taxi and killed two men and a woman, the army and police were unable to obtain information from any of the witnesses:

Capt. Velásquez scrambled to the site of the killings, where the gunmen had already vanished. He and his men yelled questions at dozens of eyewitnesses: How many killers were there, what kind of car did they drive? “Not one person said a word. Not even what direction they had gone,” says Capt. Velásquez, 42. “Executions here happen at any time, at any place. That terrifies the population. They don’t trust anybody. And they don’t talk.”

On December 21, 2009, cartel hit men carrying AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles burst into a house in eastern Mexico killing several relatives of a slain Mexican Naval Special Forces officer named Melquisedet Angulo. Angulo, 30 years old, was recently killed in a firefight with the Beltran Leyva cartel that controlled smuggling routes in central and southern Mexico and the Mexican capital. The cartel was allied with the Gulf cartel. The Gulf cartel and the notorious Zeta hitmen, control northeastern Mexico.

Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the head of the Beltran Leyva cartel and other members of the cartel were also killed. The attack against the mother and other members of the slain Mexican hero’s family is a message to the government that things are leading to a new level of terror in the war between the Mexican government and the cartels. The leaders of the cartel are intent on intimidating any opposition and can and do extend their reign of terror across the border into the United States.

Mr. Angulo’s mother, aunt, a sister and a brother were killed in the attack Tuesday. A sister was badly wounded. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The shooting came just hours after the enlisted sailor was buried with a military honor guard for his role last week in a Navy Special Forces operation that killed Mr. Beltrán Leyva, the highest-profile drug lord taken down in Mexico since Osiel Cárdenas, former head of the Gulf Cartel, was arrested in 2003.

Mexico’s powerful drug cartels and affiliated gangs are battling for control of the city and President Felipe Calderón has sent 7,000 soldiers and 2,000 federal police into the urban warfare. The residents of Mexican war zones like Juarez are helpless as murder rates soar in Mexico, a nation where citizens that are not members of the police and armed forces are prohibited from owning guns:

In 2008, 1,600 people were killed in drug-related hits. This year, more than 2,500 have died. By some estimates, Juárez’s approximately 165 deaths per 100,000 residents make it the murder capital of the world. That compares with 48 violent deaths per 100,000 residents of Baghdad.

In the Philippines, possession of guns is much more highly regulated than in the U.S. Nevertheless, well-armed rebel groups, bandits, politicians and ordinary people obtain all kinds of weapons, including home-made military-style weapons that are often just as effective as those possessed by police and military personnel anywhere in the world.

Last November, a Maguindanao politician’s son, Andal Ampatuan, Jr., allegedly participated in a massacre in Ampatuan township. Local gunmen, allegedly including six officers and the Maguindanao provincial police chief and his deputy, diverted vehicles containing journalists and the wife, two sisters, an aunt and several supporters of Ampatuan’s rival. The Ampatuan clan has previously provided heavy political support to Philippine President Arroyo.

Ampatuan’s political opponent, Vice Mayor Esmael Mangudadatu of Maguindanao’s Buluan township, sent several female family members along in the convoy in the belief they would not be harmed. The convoy was forced to a secluded location where fifty-seven were hacked, raped and shot, then buried in a brave that had been prepared with earth moving equipment in advance. At least thirty journalists were among the dead.

The point of these anecdotes is to show that an armed citizenry is always in a more powerful position when armed. Keeping and bearing arms makes citizens disciplined, vigilant and alert to danger whether it is from domestic political factions, criminal organizations or foreign enemies.

Mexico’s government has waged war with the drug cartels by militarily occupying many areas within Mexico:

Mr. Calderón’s war on drug gangs has defined his presidency so far. Within months of his 2006 inauguration, he dispatched the army to states where drug-related violence was on the rise, calling powerful drug cartels a threat to national security. Three years later, some 45,000 troops—about a quarter of the army—patrol areas ranging from Ciudad Juárez to Mr. Calderón’s home state of Michoacán.

Jorge Tello, Mexico’s National Security adviser, stated that Mexico has done more to fight drugs and violence in Ciudad Juárez than any other place in Mexico. Many residents of Ciudad Juárez are demanding an end to the military occupation. Soldiers cover their faces with black balaclavas in order to conceal their identities from the narcotistas. The government deploys .50 caliber machine guns during patrols.

Despite machine guns and constant patrols, the local Juárez Cartel, the Aztecas and a cadre of corrupt cops and ex-cops called La Linea oppose rival gangs acting on behalf of Joaquin Guzman that aim to take over the drug trade in Juarez; namely the Artistic Assassins and the Mexicles. The gangs simply observe the timing of the patrols and then change the time and locations of their attacks accordingly.

The drug gangs have diversified and extortion has provided a new motivation to increase the body counts:
The extortion wave has spread to funeral homes. Last month, an assassin and his driver parked in front of the Funeraria del Refugio, a squat, yellow building on a crowded street. The killer walked in, interrupting a funeral, and locked mourners in the bathroom, yelling that he had come to collect a protection payment. He then executed the funeral home’s manager, police and eyewitnesses say. The next day, the men returned and burned down the funeral home.

Former soldiers, known as “Zetas” are the Gulf Cartel’s enforcers. They decapitate rivals and law enforcement officers. Another deserter from the Mexican army is Manuel Aponte. A former lieutenant in the army, he deserted in 2004 and is now a top lieutenant for Joaquin Guzman, the cartel leader.

Another example of dysfunctional government intervention is the United Nations. The UN is allegedly involved with joint military operations in the eastern Congo that have resulted in the deaths of 1,400 civilians. The United Nations urgently needs “a new approach to protect civilians,” according to a Human Rights Watch report.

The presence of about 19,000 United Nations peacekeepers has not only failed to protect women and children from rape, torture and murder but actually may have aided and abetted the slaughter, according to a number of reports including the New York Times.

Human Rights Watch researchers describe “girls being summarily killed after being raped, and other victims being tied together before their throats were slit”.

Many governments are working under the auspices of UN programs to disarm citizens. Even some Western Washington politicians seem to look to a nebulous UN agenda in their attempts to violate state gun laws, ban assault weapons and create sanctuaries for illegal aliens.

In some under-developed countries, governments have virtually declared war on their own people in efforts to ban guns. Uganda is one example of extreme violence perpetrated by the Ugandan government against selected tribes that hold onto their guns as protection in the midst of appalling ethnic conflict that is all too often enmeshed with governmental policies.

Many of the worst human rights violators around the world sit on UN committees that condone violence against Israelis or those of other ethnic and national origins. You could almost say that the world has become a mirror image of Chicago in the days of Al Capone- or today, for that matter!

The dictators around the globe are like Chicago aldermen that receive favors for keeping their neighborhoods in line. Every now and then, we hear about genocides (sometimes after the UN disarms the victims as it did in Rwanda) that remind us of the Valentine’s Day massacre, when gangsters dressed like cops gunned down Capone’s Irish rivals on the North Side. The best antidote to the tyranny of crime-related violence or political gangsters is a disciplined, trained and well-armed citizenry.

The day after we proposed a community event honoring First Responders, a Seattle police officer demonstrated a degree of vigilance and preparation that exemplifies the qualities exemplified by many in law enforcement and other professions. Benjamin L. Kelly, 39, has over four years experience with the SPD and is a military veteran. Officer Kelly showed alert presence of mind during a situation that started out very routinely.

While on patrol, Kelly saw a car with the hood up and the engine running. He ran the plates; the car had been reported stolen early the same day so there was paperwork to be completed. One of the challenges in staying aware of your surroundings is that most situations present distractions.

About 48 hours earlier, four officers were drinking coffee and using laptop computers in a Lakewood coffee shop when Maurice Clemmons turned around and opened fire. Did any of the four victims look up and make eye contact with Clemmons as he entered the coffee shop, passing them moments before he started shooting?

Kelly sitting in his patrol car doing paperwork, observed a man walking up behind him on the driver’s side and recognized that the man was Clemmons! Imagine how the officer felt exiting from the driver’s seat. He was close to becoming another victim when he ordered Clemmons to stop and show his hands. Clemmons did not show his hands and began to run away in the other direction going around the vehicle.

Again telling Clemmons to stop, the officer drew his gun. Clemmons seemed to be reaching for a gun. Kelly fired shots at Clemmons and at least two rounds stopped Clemmons who had already been shot in the torso two days before during a struggle with one of the officers slain in Lakewood. At the time of his death, Clemmons was armed with a .40 caliber pistol taken from one of the officers at the scene of the premeditated ambush against Lakewood LEOs in the City of Parkland.

Kelly was justified in using deadly force to stop Clemmons because he had reason to believe Clemmons had already committed the violent murders of four officers. Thus, even if Clemmons had not presented an imminent threat to Kelly, Clemmons would have posed an imminent threat to the public if he got away!

Clemmons was an individual who wrestled with his own private demons. Society extended compassion towards Maurice Clemmons when he convinced an Arkansas parole board and Gov. Huckabee that he was a changed man. Many mistakes are bound to occur in a compassionate and open society like ours. The watchmen at the walls may let down their guards. In some nations, the guardians themselves commit violence against the people they are entrusted to protect.

In one sense you and I are no different than the officers that walk the thin blue line. You and I need to exercise situational awareness. Whether you are sitting in your car, relaxing in a restaurant or walking in the park with your family- stay on guard! The best piece of safety equipment we have is an alert mind. Take your gun but don’t leave vigilance behind.