Salahuddin Haider
MILLION dollar
questions. Can
he can he not? No simple answer for that. The wave of agitation and protests has virtually overtaken the entire America from East to West coast, arson, looting, police firing rubber or resorting to several other kind of defensive measures but the wave if assuming threatening proportions.
The killing of black man named George Floyed ignited smam protest against police brutal behavior but when backed by those at the helm, it took frightening shape, igniting small fire into an inferno, and now President’s unnecessary threatening language to let loose blood hounds and murdering those adventuring onto the White House.
But mob mentality has its own psyche and a good number of blacks raided the White House, forcing the US head of State to take refuge in bunkers and switching off the presidential residence light to turn into total darkness, the police sympathies with crowd, are all bad signs for American socity.
But is happening, forcing crowd to come out on streets in England and France against police brutalities on unarmed citizens, and opting for negotiations to end a crisis that assumed horrendous proportions now and seems on the threshold of destroying American society and its economy, its moral values ets.
The New York Times commented that President Trump’s vow to “dominate” demonstrators protesting police brutality has mobilized the full might of federal law enforcement, from border agencies and the Drug Enforcement Administration to F.B.I. hostage rescue teams, working alongside local law enforcement, the military police and the National Guard.
The extraordinary deployments have reached the streets of San Diego, Buffalo and Las Vegas. But nowhere is the show of force as strong as in Washington, where Mr. Trump is seeking to demonstrate his might by flooding the city’s downtown with agents from the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection and the Defense Department, turning the nation’s capital into a heavily armed federal fortress.
Even Transportation Security Administration officers have been called out of the airports to help protect federal property in the “national capital region.”
“D.H.S. and its partners will not allow anarchists, disrupters and opportunists to exploit the ongoing civil unrest to loot and destroy our communities,” said Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “While the department respects every American’s right to protest peacefully, violence and civil unrest will not be tolerated.
We will control the situation and protect the American people and the homeland at any cost.” In all, nearly a dozen federal agencies and components have joined in Mr. Trump’s effort to quell protests incited by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ostensibly to put an end to rioting and looting — and determine whether anarchists and other extremist groups had infiltrated the protests But local officials say the federal response has gone beyond acceptable, verging on overkill.
The mayor of the District of Columbia called it “shameful.” A Virginia county pulled its officers out of Washington rather than deploy alongside federal agents. The governor of Illinois said the federal presence had actually undercut efforts to restore law and order, while Texas said it needed no help from the U.S. military. Regardless, Attorney General William P. Barr promised to deploy “even greater law enforcement resources” in Washington on Tuesday evening.
“I can’t remember the last time this number of federal agencies were brought together to try and deal with a large number of demonstrators,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a police research and policy organization. He said the rush of multiple federal forces into the city could be a recipe for “chaos.”
The tension is more evidence of a schism that has opened between federal and local governments — first over the pandemic and now over how to respond to protests provoked by a spate of killings of black people.
Neither side has coordinated clearly with the other, and neither has been willing to take responsibility for some of the ugliest episodes between protesters and officers. While mayors and governors express sympathy for the demonstrations, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. have monitored the protests for domestic terrorist activity.
The department said in a bulletin to law enforcement agencies that militia extremists and anarchists could use the protests to cause violence and mayhem, according to an official in possession of the document, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the memo. A dim ray of hope emerges from Blacks support who stood behind Trump, but some senators now seething with anger and want to Trump to be logical and saner in his attitude. Whether that would happen remains to be seen.
