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Violence of Wars Fought Overseas, Gets Back to US: Expert

Violence of Wars Fought Overseas, Gets Back to US: Expert
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Wars which the US government has been fighting overseas for more than a decade, have created new security challenges back home. Radio VR is looking into the issue together with Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent and former FBI Minneapolis Division legal counsel.

Wars which the US government has been fighting overseas for more than a decade, have created new security challenges back home. Radio VR is looking into the issue together with Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent and former FBI Minneapolis Division legal counsel.

The news of the week has been the recent scandal of the White House intruder involving an Army veteran who jumped the White House fence and managed to penetrate deep into the residence of the US President. The scandal resulted in the resignation of the US Secret Service Director Julia Pierson but somehow failed to highlight broader challenges to public security.

According to a recent FBI recent report, there has been a sharp rise in the number of the so-called “active shooter incidents”. The report released on September, 24, analyzed 160 mass shootings between 2000 and 2013. It concluded that “the trend over the study period showed a steady rise. In the first half of the years studied, the average annual number of incidents was 6.4, but that average rose in the second half of the study to 16.4, an average of more than one incident per month”.

Says Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent and former FBI Minneapolis Division legal counsel:

“The head of the secret service who resigned, I believe, is being unfairly blamed for the White House intruder and some other issues of security. There are always going to be some of these cases. Obviously, if you call back, Ronald Reagan was shot and there was an attempt to shoot Gerald Ford. And, of course, that is the duty of the secret service to protect the president. But there have been far more serious cases in the past. And there are always minor little things like this.

Now, I think the much more serious problem is why in the US are we experiencing increased violence, especially in the form of spree killings and especially, like this White House intruder, the cases of really mentally ill, suffering from post-traumatic stress returned Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. There have been many-many cases of both homicidal and suicidal violence on the part of these returned veterans. So, that is the much bigger problem that you will never see mentioned. And the secret service director, when she was being grilled, was never asked those questions. She, of course, did not even offer to volunteer that there is a much more serious problem going on here.

There was a study in the US, just about two or three weeks ago a study came out that these what they call mass shootings, or spree killings, where somebody goes either back to the workplace or they go to a theatre, in one case they went to a Sikh Temple, they go to places of worship, they go certainly to places like the White House and to monuments, but that has at least doubled or tripled in the last few years. So, you know, people should be asking the question – why is this happening?

We had a movie that came out. It was called Bowling for Columbine. And it was made by Michael Moore well over a decade ago, I would say, maybe 12-13 years ago. And it asked the question (and this was long before these spree killings had even increased) – why in the US do we have this greater degree of violence, gun violence especially, than they do just across the border in Canada? And he tried to answer the question rather unsuccessfully about why this was the case.

And a lot of people attributed it just to the number of weapons and guns that exist in the society. I don’t think that really is the case either. I think a lot of it is the culture at this point.

And no one is asking the questions about the war mentality, the militarism, about the difference in the deadly force standard that soldiers use when they are fighting in a war, they essentially can shoot at everyone in front of them, at the enemy. Whereas for a police officer, who is supposed to be serving the public domestically, the standard is an imminent threat. So, they are supposed to actually see a weapon pointed at themselves or at least they have to experience an imminent threat that the Grand Jury then will be able to evaluate, whether they were under that imminent threat.

And it is very different in a war, where the standard is a lot more relaxed and looser. And so, you see the police now having the same problem of the war mentality, having migrated back home, and they are seeing the public as the enemy, and they are employing these looser standards.

So, on every level I think that they need to ask questions about how this endless war that the US has gotten itself into (and now it is going forward on Syria and Iraq again), how its blowback is coming back to the US. It is increasing the number of spree shootings and mass killings…the report called them… Oh, gosh! They had came up with the term that they use, it means that you’ve shot like two or three more people at the same time, that you are senseless and they even have a rhyme or reason why this is occurring.

Anyway, why is that happen, why are the police now engaging in more shootings with the lower standards – those are not being asked and answered. And just merely having a change of a leader at the top of the secret service, probably, in my opinion, is not going to have any ability to rectify the underlying problem.

When you are talking about the effect of wars and the psychological change it brings, the events in Ferguson, are they of the same order?

Coleen Rowley: Of course, the domestic law enforcement is very-very different than in a warzone. And so, they need to have completely different standards. In domestic policing you want, normally, you want to have due process and present evidence to an impartial Grand Jury before the so-called punishment occurs or the seizure.

You don’t normally want a police officer to take someone’s life, which is the greatest seizure and the greatest lack of due process that exists, you don’t want that to occur. In the emergency situations when an imminent threat exists and the life of an innocent person is at stake or the life of the police officer, of course, it is allowed for a police officer to use self-defense and\or to protect the life of an innocent person.

But that is very different from the standard used in a warzone, where we allow all the military to take the lives, obviously, without due process, without any presenting of evidence to grand juries. And in a warzone there is collateral damage. Many innocent civilians are killed simply because there is no due process. And so, we cannot blend these two standards together.

I should mention that there is one more thing going on here in the US, that the little boys especially, not so much little girls, but little boys grow up now playing violent video games where they are constantly shooting and killing other people in their game. And so, when they are ten years old, they are getting used to this idea that I've got to kill my enemy etc. And this is used as a recruitment tool in the US for the so-called all-volunteer military.

So, little boys grow up thinking – I will be a hero if I shoot somebody, because I've grown up on these video games and I win the video game by shooting as many people, as possible (which is obviously very similar to the military mentality, that people are trained to kill as many enemies, as possible). When you have that culture going on, even form the earlier stages of young boys growing up, and the warship and the adoration of military heroes, you can just imagine now when certainly mentally challenged people think that picking up a gun and killing someone is the answer to my problems.

And many of these shootings we think of as very senseless, like the shooting of the first-graders, the shootings in a theatre etc, when you look at these, you say – what was behind this, it makes no sense, this is somebody who is mentally ill. That is true for many of the shooters, but they are being cultured in this idea that the use of a gun and violence is the answer to my problems.

And so, again, after the shooting of the first-graders at Sandy Hook, there was this question asked – is it our culture, is it these violent video games, all of the movies in Hollywood? There was that question asked once, and then immediately the special interests that are behind these violent video games and movies said – don’t get into that, we want to keep going, do not ask that question. And so, again, this thing is part of that whole militaristic society, and I think these video games are part of it.

But what needs to be done? First, can the situation be somehow changed? And second, when people try to avert the attention from real problems to like blaming the security services, doesn’t that actually impede the work of the security services?

Coleen Rowley: Absolutely! The director of the secret service should have responded in a broader way to this. That is politically incorrect and at that time she probably didn’t know she would have to resign. But her resignation is simply what we call switching the chairs on the deck of the Titanic as the answer. People think – okay, we’ve rectified the problem, we’ve got rid of that. It has nothing to do with the leadership of the secret service. The deeper issues which I've just gone into: the cultural issues, the change in policing, this can be easily fixed. I shouldn’t say easily fixed, because changing culture is not that easy at this point, but they can be fixed.

And I’ll just mention that up until about 9\11 the standard for policing was called Community Policing, and all of our police departments trained on Community Policing. And it was more like the days where the police officer was considered to be the friendly public servant, and that they would not of course resort to force, and you want to be able to trust your police officer. So, all of the police departments in the country aspired to the model of Community Policing.

There is an old TV show in the US that was about a police department in a small town Mayberry. And the Sheriff Andy Griffith of this town was the model of Community Policing, because everyone in the town liked the Sheriff and they rarely-rarely ever had to get tough or resort to force. And so, that was the model. All that went away after 9\11 and now we’ve got much more into this militaristic model of treating the public as the enemy. So, that needs to be changed. I mean, it was changed already once, so it can be changed back.

The other thing is these violent video games. They really need to be looked at, because who wants to go to a school, when there is a school shooting every other week or so. I have children and grandchildren and if my kids were to be shot by a fellow student or somebody not in the school, I would be furious about this. But very few people are understanding what is really causing this large excessive increase in these types of shootings, that don’t exist anywhere else in the world except here.

And again, we just think – oh, it is senseless, you know, this poor mentally ill person decided to go shooting in Santa Barbara. No, there is a reason for why people are seeing guns and shooting others as the answer to their problems. And I think a lot of it comes from this growing up playing video games. And we could easily change that. I should say, I said “easily” again, but it can be changed. Maybe, not that easily, there are really strong vested interests now that are making a lot of money of this violent military culture: the gun industry, the violent video game industry and even military contractors.

So, there are a lot of interests that are making a lot of money and that would make it difficult to start these changes, and even to ask the questions. But still, if you have the political will, then affecting the changes would not be that difficult. We know what we need to do, but the people in power are not listening to the people like myself, who are mentioning this.

I've been actually pointing to what we call domestic terrorism, which is not the international jihadist type terrorism, but the people in the US, whether they are worried about the governments coming to get them… I mean, these are the people who form paranoid groups about government intrusions and whatever. Well, that’s been on the increase along with homicidal and suicidal violence on the part of returned veterans.

And I've been pointing that domestic terrorism is much-much greater a threat for the American citizens, than any kind of international terrorism. And yet you see very little attention to that”.

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