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There is much to say about Monday’s Border Patrol audition in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park for Call of Duty 9: War Boner! (And Editrix did in this morning’s tabs and might expound on that later.) Oh, the big tough agents of CBP had it all: fully kitted out in desert camo and automatic weapons like they were storming a Taliban-held village in the Hindu Kush; a mounted machine gun on top of one vehicle like they were expecting a suicide charge by enemy soldiers; neck gaiters to hide their shame; even some dipshit wearing a cowboy hat instead of a helmet like the quirkiest character in a movie about the Vietnam War from the ‘80s.
All so they could bust up a — let’s see here — a kids’ summer day camp. That’ll teach those little snots to play outside in a park in warm sunny weather.
It was all a grotesque sight, watching these pretend soldiers marching through a park that on a given day (at least back when we would visit it during our wasted youth in the early part of the century) might host a wide range of LA’s social spectrum: kids playing, couples making out on blankets, families, people fishing the man-made lake, old Hispanic ladies running unlicensed fajita carts, drug addicts, the homeless, the mentally ill, Hollywood weirdos with film crews in tow, and Andy Dick, who somehow managed to be like six of those things at the same time.
The display was meant to be grotesque, but the sort of grotesque that authoritarians love. The sort of grotesque that is meant to intimidate and frighten and bully. The sort of grotesque that gets ghoulish death-head Stephen Miller’s nubbin to perk up like a cat hearing a can opener.
No, really. Journalist Ken Klippenstein got hold of some internal military planning documents revealing that the operation’s purpose was to “enable and protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions in a high-visibility urban environment, while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”
In other words, it was a big “fuck you and your protests, civilians, we’ll go where we want” to the people of LA, the local government, and anyone else watching who probably hasn’t seen a National Guard show of force on the city’s streets like that since the Rodney King riots in 1992.
Also it was a chance for some overzealous REMF colonel to show everyone that he once took an urban warfare class at the War College. The planning documents for Operation Excalibur — cool name, bro — are replete with all the military jargon you’d expect about the park’s terrain, forces maintaining an “outer cordon,” and the “high potential for collateral damage if threat activity requires use of lethal force in a kinetic engagement.”
The funniest part might be where the documents note that “civilian movement remains unrestricted,” as if civilians in a heavily Hispanic-populated area were just going to sit idly by while fully armed soldiers swept through the park — some of them on horseback for a real Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill vibe — and not run for the nearest shelter.
Look at this shit:
“NO FAST ROPE INSERTION.” These goddamn mall cops apparently thought they were invading a warlord stronghold in Somalia like they were recreating Black Hawk Down, and not doing what they were really doing, which was scaring some Salvadoran nannies who will now probably never go back outside.
The operation’s planners also seemed to anticipate massive MS-13 guerrilla warfare. There were warnings about gang members “maintaining access to multiple 8 – 10 story residential apartment building[s] immediately adjacent to the park,” from which they could rain sniper fire down on the troops.
Well, there’s your flaw right there, guys, you have to take over the apartment buildings first! Seize the high ground! Put spotters on the roofs! Scare some elderly retired people into coronaries!
It’s as if our military is watching the suffering and dying soldiers battling Russian troops in various Ukrainian cities and getting jealous.
Here, have some footage of this modern day Charge of the Light Brigade across an empty soccer field:
If there was any sort of concrete objective here besides swinging their dicks around, it was for federal law enforcement to seize fake IDs. We kid you not, the documents claim MacArthur Park is practically an open-air bazaar for selling fake IDs. Good news for bars in the vicinity of the near-ish USC campus, we guess, to have multiple federal agencies helping them keep their liquor licenses.
Anyway, the whole thing was botched, according to Klippenstein:
Because ICE and CBP apparently failed to communicate or coordinate effectively, the military showed up too late (and Los Angeles authorities weren’t notified until two hours prior.)
“We were on the objective for 24 minutes,” a National Guard member told me. “Many of the phase lines were not reported because they didn’t happen. So we parked and then left. Soldiers didn’t get out of trucks. [They] stayed in the back of the 5-tons [military trucks] sweating in the heat.”
Then LA Mayor Karen Bass came storming onto the scene and demanded the army men get the hell out of her city’s park, which they did, slowly caravaning away while people jeered them. You can imagine the radio chatter: Echo One, Echo Actual, we have multiple unfriendlies lined up on Wilshire Boulevard calling us names and being really mean.
Stephen Miller probably called up the commanding officer and bawled him out for retreating, but it really was the smart move. Who knows how much danger those soldiers could have been in? Somebody might have come by pushing an ice cream cart, only to tell them he was out of Creamsicles.
Help Wonkette continue producing all this military-grade snark.
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