The Final Edition

Corporate Media Smear Mayor Who Vetoed Military Urban Warfare Drill In His Town
Troops barred from “playing war in Toledo”

Steve Watson
Feb 14, 2008

The Mayor of Toledo, Ohio has been castigated by the mainstream media for making the decision to order 200 Michigan-based Marines out of his town just before the unit was supposed to start a weekend of urban warfare training downtown.

Mayor Carty Finkbeiner expelled the members of Company A, 1st Battalion, 24th Marines from Grand Rapids, Michigan last Friday because he did not think it a good idea to have uniformed soldiers drilling in a highly-visible area as it may have disrupted and frightened residents.

In addition, despite police knowledge of the scheduled exercises, the mayor told media he was not informed of the exercises until the night before they were due to begin.

NBC reports:

Police issued a press release the night before the scheduled drill saying that Marines would be wearing camouflage uniforms, operating military vehicles, carrying assault rifles, performing foot patrols and fire blank ammunition throughout the exercise.

NBC also spoke to Police Chief Jack Smith who recalled that after the Marines last visit, he and the mayor had a heated exchange about the training, during which the mayor told him he did not want Marines “playing war in Toledo.”

Mayor Finkbeiner said downtown, particularly on a weekday afternoon, was not suitable for military staging operations since up to 14,000 people would have been departing their office buildings at the same time. He also pointed out that thousands of schoolchildren would have been transferring buses downtown Friday just as the exercise would have begun, reported the Toledo Blade.

However, since the story broke, the mainstream media has enacted a sustained smear campaign against Finkbeiner. Check out the following one-sided reports from CNN and Fox:

Note how the two networks use the same hand-picked clips of the same few residents who said they thought the decision to expel the Marines was wrong, without providing any counter-examples. Some of the residents interviewed believed it was right for the military to be war-gaming for martial law in their own cities because it was for their own “protection”, clearly unaware that any such use of the military, especially for civilian law enforcement, violates the Posse Comitatus Act.

In further developments, the Mayor’s spokesman, Brian Schwartz, has since been suspended for three weeks for allegedly using a vulgarity while speaking off air during a radio interview concerning the controversy. It appears that Schwartz was angry at the one-sided coverage the story has received.

The military has purpose-built facilities for such training, and it is unacceptable to have armed military troops on the streets of towns and cities in America. Nevertheless, the media castigates the idea of preventing it from occuring.

Reporting on this saga, Jim Kouri of NewsWithViews.com interviewed former and current police chiefs who believe the motive for training US troops within American cities is more sinister:

“The police power has traditionally been reserved for the states. The fact that we’re allowing military troops to train in US cities is a violation of that tradition,” one former detective states.

“The increasing use of Urban Warfare Training Exercises, I believe, desensitizes both the public to the deployment of military forces in their own neighborhoods,” warns a police chief.

We have previously reported on the coordinated program of urban warfare drilling in America and how such activity has increased in tandem with the growing effort to erode the ancient law of Posse Comitatus.