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| Greater St. Mark's Church has seen a lot of cops lately and they haven't come by to pray. |
As evidenced by the following video, Clergy Response Teams were deployed by Homeland Security to quell public unrest during the declared "state of emergency"in Ferguson Missouri this week.
For the third time since the police slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, St. Louis County police raided the Greater St. Mark Church property Wednesday. Church leaders have allowed community activists to use the gymnasium of an abandoned private school on church property as a first aid station for treatment of people injured by tear gas in protests against the shooting of Brown. People could also get food and water there, and community activists used it to plan protest strategy.
But all that apparently made it a special target for the cops whom one would think have enough on their plates in Ferguson not to be harassing a humanitarian operation.
As reported by the Huffington Post:
Greater St. Mark Family Church in St. Louis, Missouri was a safe haven for wounded protestors from nearby Ferguson demanding justice in the Michael Brown shooting.
Reports from about 12:45pm on Twitter and Instagram stated that it had been raided by St. Louis County Police.
Storman Academy, a school on church property, was being used as a first-aid shelter for protestors injured by tear gas as well as a place for organizers to plan strategy, but its charitable efforts apparently caused it to face unwanted attention from the police.
In a video taken by Elon James White, a church organizer said,"County police came out today to this humanitarian shelter, and they've effectively shut it down on a false charge that there were people sleeping in the building, and they're citing occupancy permits, but their information was incorrect. It's been used solely as a humanitarian shelter."
The most thorough account of the raid currently seems to come from the Twitter account of William Jelani Cobb, a contributor to the New Yorker and the director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut.
In a May 2006 story, Paul Joseph Watson first broke the shocking news that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which now operates under the department of Homeland Security, was training pastors and other religious representatives to become secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to “obey the government” in preparation for a declaration of martial law, property and firearm seizures, and forced relocation.
Despite debunkers and urban myth websites claiming the story was a hoax, it was confirmed in triplicate by mainstream news outlets over a year later.
A KSLA news report confirmed that Clergy Response Teams are being trained by the federal government to “quell dissent” and pacify citizens to obey the government in the event of a declaration of martial law.
Could martial law ever become a reality in America? Some fear any nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. soil might trigger just that. KSLA News 12 has discovered that the clergy would help the government with potentially their biggest problem: Us.
Charleton Heston's now-famous speech before the National Rifle Association at a convention back in 2000 will forever be remembered as a stirring moment for all 2nd Amendment advocates. At the end of his remarks, Heston held up his antique rifle and told the crowd in his Moses-like voice, "over my cold, dead hands."
While Heston, then serving as the NRA President, made those remarks in response to calls for more gun control laws at the time, those words live on. Heston's declaration captured a truly American value: An over-arching desire to protect our freedoms.
But gun confiscation is exactly what happened during the state of emergency following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, along with forced relocation. U.S. Troops also arrived, something far easier to do now, thanks to last year's elimination of the 1878 Posse Comitatus act, which had forbid regular U.S. Army troops from policing on American soil.
If martial law were enacted here at home, like depicted in the movie "The Siege", easing public fears and quelling dissent would be critical. And that's exactly what the 'Clergy Response Team' helped accomplish in the wake of Katrina.
Dr. Durell Tuberville serves as chaplain for the Shreveport Fire Department and the Caddo Sheriff's Office. Tuberville said of the clergy team's mission, "the primary thing that we say to anybody is, 'let's cooperate and get this thing over with and then we'll settle the differences once the crisis is over.'"
Such clergy response teams would walk a tight-rope during martial law between the demands of the government on the one side, versus the wishes of the public on the other. "In a lot of cases, these clergy would already be known in the neighborhoods in which they're helping to diffuse that situation," assured Sandy Davis. He serves as the director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
For the clergy team, one of the biggest tools that they will have in helping calm the public down or to obey the law is the bible itself, specifically Romans 13. Dr. Tuberville elaborated, "because the government's established by the Lord, you know. And, that's what we believe in the Christian faith. That's what's stated in the scripture."
Civil rights advocates believe the amount of public cooperation during such a time of unrest may ultimately depend on how long they expect a suspension of rights might last.
Concerned about such developments, a member of the California-based Worldwide Church of God, an organization that boasts 64,000 members in 860 congregations in about 90 countries, asked if any of the church’s pastors were involved in the FEMA program.
“The head office quickly replied hastily within an hour by telling me, “Sorry, that is privileged information”, the man states. “The reply was in big bold script like I’ve never seen before in emails. I was also a bit put off by the word “privileged.”
“I responded to the stated email and reworded my request slightly by demanding, “are there ANY of our pastors on the payroll of FEMA , YES or NO.” Their first response came after about an hour. But, it has been almost 24 hours and I am still waiting for my church’s second response to my second request,” he adds.
It seems that church groups are reticent to let slip any information concerning the issue of pastors being trained to help manage a state of martial law following the controversy stirred up by the exposure of the program in 2006.
Indeed, the pastors that took a risk by first divulging the information to us were later threatened by Homeland Security and told to keep their mouths shut.
In 2009, legislation was introduced by Congress which mandated the set-up of a network of FEMA camp facilities to be used to house U.S. citizens in the event of a national emergency, along with the announcement that tens of thousands of active military personnel are to be placed inside the United States under Northcom, partly for purposes of dealing with “civil unrest” and “crowd control”, fears about a state of martial law being prepared are no longer the fantasies of paranoid conspiracy theorists, but an all too real possibility as we witness what is happening in Ferguson Missouri right now.
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