Minor Drug Dealers Now Considered Terrorists?

June 4, 2014 in News by The Manimal

Source: Politically Suspect

To all of you drug warriors, I am obliged to point out the case of the Georgia toddler whose face was blown off by a flashbang grenade during a no-knock raid.

This is a direct consequence of the drug war. SWAT teams initially existed only for the most critical situations—hostage situations, school shootings, etc. Yet arbitrarily proscribed drugs equip police officers with an excuse to act like Special Forces commandos going after a Taliban commander. Sure, they’ll say the dealer was a kingpin, and that a no-knock raid was necessary for the safety of officers. And the truth is that I would like to be able to give the officers the benefit of the doubt. Yet they ruin their own credibility when it turns out the raid was the result of a $50 meth sale.

flashbang

In addition, the officers said they had no idea that there were children involved, which speaks to a deficiency of detective work. The victim’s lawyer claims the father regularly played with the now critically injured child in the front yard (which he may never get to do again, since the child may not survive). In fact, had the police done any surveillance at all, they would have known that the dealer they were after, Wanis Thometheva, wasn’t even at home at the time of the raid. (He was later captured at a different address.)

Granted, I don’t know a great deal about capturing drug offenders, but it would seem wise to know whether your target was physically present at the address before storming in with grenades and automatic weapons. It may not be the most exciting part of the job, but it could eliminate burned babies, house fires, fatal address mix-ups and other consequences of acting before thinking.

Here’s what one of the officers had to say about the incident. If you have just taken a sip of coffee, I might advise you to swallow it, lest you spit it all over the keyboard,

“Wanis Thonetheva, that’s the person I blame in all this. They are no better than a domestic terrorist, because they don’t care about families – they didn’t care about the family, the children living in that household – to be selling dope out of it, to be selling methamphetamine out of it. All they care about is making money… It’s domestic terrorism and I think we should treat them as such.”

Wait, a domestic terrorist? That’s a bit of a stretch, wouldn’t you think? Is this a clue as to the kind of rationale the cops use in deciding who to raid and how?  Last I checked, examples of domestic terrorists included the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh, you know, people who blew up their fellow countrymen with bombs. Now that label is being applied to minor drug offenders?

Yes, Wanis Thometheva is probably guilty of endangering the welfare of a child. And yes, despite the fact that most children these days can get legally prescribed amphetamines so long as they fit the symptoms associated with ADHD, it’s unwise and unlawful for laymen to try cooking up the drugs themselves. Yet the rush to label these individuals as terrorists only suggests police will continue to act as I described them at the beginning—like soldiers hunting the Taliban instead of officers of the peace.