Thread by @doctorow

A terrifying aspect of last summer's uprising in Portland and elsewhere was the spectacle of anonymous federal police, bearing neither insignia nor identification, snatching people off the street and disappearing them.

1/

These were "little green men" - a term from the Russian annexation of Crimea, when Russian soldiers adopted the pretence of being local militias of Ukrainians who wanted to secede and dressed in generic uniforms while seizing Ukrainian territory.

2/

America's little green men come from the zoo of specialized federal police agencies created by dick-measuring bureaucrats and petty official who each created their own federal force to act as a kind of honor guard.

pluralistic.net/2020/06/06/rea…

3/

Barely trained, growing at the rate of 2500 cops/year, these microforces now outnumber the ATF, mostly trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. They are cursorily overseen and largely unaccountable. They are mired in continuous scandal.

4/

Almost none of them have permanent chiefs, because that requires senate approval, and NRA lobbyists scuttle every single nominee as being soft on guns, including Chuck Canterbury, former head of the notorious gun-grabbers the Fraternal Order of Police.

5/

Last week, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an epic shitshow in which the US military was again handed an effectively bottomless budget. Moreover, Democratic congressional leadership squandered an opportunity to tie $2000 relief payments to its passage.

6/

But there is one tiny light of positivity in the NDAA trashfire: thanks to a bipartisan amendment, the NDAA requires the badly trained, badly overseen, unaccountable federal cops who snatch people off the streets to identify themselves.

7/

This is the most minuscule of victories, obviously, and the fact that we needed a law that requires heavily armed government goons to tell you who they are and which agency they work for before they disappear you like a Pinochet death-squad is disgusting.

8/

But you know what's worse than needing to pass this kind of legislation? Needing to pass it...and NOT passing it.

It's not much, but it's a win, and we should take it.

thehill.com/opinion/nation…

eof/