Former Rep. Ron Paul said the police response to the Boston Marathon bombings was scarier than the bombing itself, which killed three and wounded more than 250.
“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul, a Texas Republican, wrote today on the website of the libertarian writer Lew Rockwell. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”
Paul said the scenes of the house-to-house search for the younger bombing suspect in suburban Watertown, Mass., were reminiscent of a “military coup in a far off banana republic.”
“Forced lockdown of a city,” he wrote. “Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.”
Paul, a libertarian icon who made three separate bids for the Republican presidential nomination and whose son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, is widely regarded as 2016 presidential candidate, argued the shutdown of Watertown and surrounding communities did little to ultimately capture the suspected bomber, Dzhokhar Tsmarnaev.
“The suspect was not discovered by the paramilitary troops terrorizing the public,” Paul wrote. “He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police. And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.”
Paul’s work with Rockwell, who was his congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, has caused problems for the former representative in the past. Rockwell reportedly oversaw “The Ron Paul Political Report,” a 1980s and ’90s-era newsletter whose controversial assertions about race, homosexuality and other topics were used against Paul in both of his presidential runs.
Read more at POLITICO
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s/o make him shtikah
someone make him be wuiet
While Mr. Paul has a considerate complaint about the searches, the time was so chaotic and fearful of further harm that it may have been a consideration that many people could live. In the facts of the situation, people were not apprehended for any reason although the mainstay was to catch the terrorist. As for the shut down, this is to be expected in an egalitarian society whereby situations arise to destroy our freedom by choice of demanded hatred. Mr. Paul is a wild voice of irregular conceit.
Ron has got a very good point. The inept Government did absolutely NOTHING to catch this suspect! They’ve learnt NOTHING since 9/11! Yeh, keep making Americans take their shoes off when they take a flight. Yeh, I feel so secure now! This Government/Law enforcement is so petrified of being called the “R” word by the ACLU, they’d rather just have themselves blown up by a REAL terrorist! We are lost as a nation!
Everything that was seen, the deployed high tech vehicles, weapons, ssnipers, etc. could have been replaced with two teams of tracking dogs and say a ten man firepower backup. The cost of deployment would have been less, and lo miboye, the cost of shutting down the city. Law has moved on to the heat seeking helicopters, and other gadgets and abandoned the bloodhound route. It may have had another hidden benefit in cowing the public.
Don’t always agree with Ron Paul, but he is absolutely right here. All these brainless overboard knee-jerk-reaction NKVD-Gestapo methods don’t have any real safety benefits. Meanwhile, our basic human rights are evaporating – “for our own safety” of course. Example: how many terrorists did TSA naked-scans actually stop?-none; how many human beings lost their dignity?-tens of millions. It’s amazingly easy to turn a constitutional democracy into a police-state-prison literally overnight – as long as gullible sheep are willing to trade their dignity and freedom for a mere promise of safety.
Its very easy to second guess after the facts! Cynical presidential candidate……