For all of their xenophobic paranoia about United Nations conspiracies to take over America, the militia movement is playing on some fears which are, alas, very real. All those sightings of mysterious unmarked black helicopters, for instance, are not hallucinations. The black helicopters are real. But the enemy isn't the UN, it's Uncle Sam.

That's what Montana tax-resister Calvin Greenup should have realized when an Idaho National Guard chopper swooped down over his ranch last March. He got on the horn to his militia buddies, and within a half-hour some 20 rifle-toting rednecks had arrived to protect his land in the military onslaught that was expected to ensue. But the AH-64 Apache didn't return that day. Officials later said the chopper was on a routine training flight, and overpassed the Greenup ranch by accident.

However, the local Ravalli County Sheriff's Department, upon hearing of the militia gathering at the Greenup ranch, mobilized its own forces and Cal's fears nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. All it would have taken was one itchy trigger finger.

Militia members also went to the home of the local federal marshal in Darby, MT. Both sides knew how close to the edge they were. A militia statement in response to the incident read, "Only by exposing these despotic, degenerate maggots to the general public will we be able to live in America without having the New World Order shoved down our throats." Responded Ravalli Sheriff Jay Printz, "They're forcing bad to happen. They're really trying to force it."

Greenup had long been expecting the authorities to serve him a warrant for back taxes, an illegal landfill and an unlicensed elk farm on his property. But more than once, the local militia have scrambled for their guns upon hearing reports of military movements along the Canadian border only to find that instead of invading UN troops, it was the National Guard on joint maneuvers with the INS (immigration and Naturalization Service), Border Patrol and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). The threat to Constitutional rights is real. But it is coming not from foreign conspiracies, but from Washington's own War on Drugs.

Last August, the US Military Task Force joined the DEA and Oklahoma state agents, including the National Guard, with two black helicopters for a marijuana raid on an ordinary house trailer in Tulsa County. The raid went wrong when one of the choppers flew into a power line and went down in a ball of flames, killing the pilot. If not for the fatal mishap, the incident might not have even made local headlines.

In another Oklahoma marijuana raid just the previous month, state and federal agents rappelled from a military helicopter into thickets along the banks of the Red River. Scores of uprooted plants were taken to the Idabel National Guard Armory to be destroyed.

Such military participation in drug raids, legally questionable under the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from participating in domestic law enforcement, is becoming routine. The Defense Department will spend more than $720 million on domestic counter-narcotics operations this year, and millions more on other assistance to civilian law enforcement. The Pentagon says federal law allows the military to aid civilian police as long as troops do not perform arrests, searches, seizures or other direct constabulary duties. But it appears that in the post-Cold War order, as the vast US military machine begins to pull back its overseas tentacles, the war is coming home.

The chief military anti-drug unit, Joint Task Force 6, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, includes 50 Special Forces troops who train civilian law enforcement agents from around the nation. Just before the Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas, in April 1993, ten of these troops gave federal agents urban combat training at nearby Fort Hood, TX.

The Army National Guard's marijuana control program has been providing military helicopters, usually black and sometimes unmarked, to local law enforcement coast-to-coast since the big 1988 federal anti-drug legislation. Up to 90 percent of state National Guard anti-drug budgets come from the Pentagon.

Most of the US casualties in Operation Desert Storm came from friendly fire and military accidents, and such snafus are also taking their toll as the domestic Drug War is militarized. Last August, a New York National Guard UH1 chopper on a training mission crashed into the Hudson River just off the Bronx. The pilot managed to swim to safety.

In December, a marijuana charge against Michigan farmer Joseph Astro was dismissed by Judge Terrence Bronson, who found that authorities raided his house to cover for a helicopter mishap which had destroyed Astro's greenhouse. After their rotor blades got entangled in the greenhouse's plastic roof, the joint federal-county drug task force searched Astro's residence, and found a small quantity of marijuana in a room he rented to a tenant. Astro is still seeking $500,000 in compensation, one buck for each of his tomato and pepper plants destroyed in the accident.

California's Placer County has just unveiled a new all-volunteer air squadron armed with a 35-foot turbine Bell helicopter donated by the US military for marijuana eradication, perhaps an effort to co-opt local weekend warrior types into law enforcement instead of outlaw militia activities.

Whose side will the militias ultimately be on? Last year, Northern California militia leader Dean Compton put out a national call for the militias to shut down the Mexican border and turn back the migrants in February. But the White House took the wind out of his sails by ordering the National Guard to do essentially the same thing, and military maneuvers along the Rio Grande continue as The SHADOW goes to press. Violent vigilante attacks on Mexican migrants, including killings and kidnappings, are escalating along the southern border, and the government is capitulating to these elements in order to keep them under control. So, to an extent, even under the demonized liberal Bill Clinton, the far right is already calling the shots in this country.

Anti-drug efforts are also part of the border militarization, and even the liberals are going along. "The Mexican border has become a sieve," says California Democrat Sen. Diane Feinstein, applauding beefed-up helicopter surveillance between Tijuana and San Diego. "It's going to take a lot more money, inspectors, equipment and review. We can't just try to patch things."

And the same enemy, the US Drug War, is also facing Mexicans south of the Rio Grande. In 1994's counterinsurgency war on the Zapatista rebels in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, the government used DEA-supplied helicopters earmarked for anti-drug operations.

Militant (not to say militaristic) citizen vigilance is indeed needed to protect our Constitutional rights, as well as the human rights of immigrants (legal or not). The use of unmarked black helicopters and military troops and tactics in domestic law enforcement is absolutely inimical to the democratic values the USA was ostensibly founded on. The question is whether the grassroots resistance will ultimately be bought off by the very police state it is ostensibly opposing, and manipulated into an orgy of divide-and-conquer racism while the real political criminals laugh all the way to the bank.

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