© NBCAntonio Zombrano-Montes shot by police for 'throwing rocks".
Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old Mexican national, was shot to death by police in Pasco, Washington last Tuesday as he was backing away from officers with his hands up. A video of the shooting clearly corroborates claims by Zambrano-Montes's family that he was killed "execution style."
Police claimed that Zambrano-Montes, who had lived in the city for ten years and worked as an orchard picker, may have been "armed with a rock" before he was shot multiple times. Protests erupted over the weekend, with more than a thousand demonstrating in Washington state on Saturday against the killing.
The United States has invaded, bombed and destabilized dozens of countries on the grounds that their regimes perpetrated human rights abuses. In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama declared that America leads the world "with the example of our values." He added, "That's what makes us exceptional."
Not only is this sanctimonious drivel completely at odds with the reality of American imperialist foreign policy, which employs mass murder, support for extreme right forces, subversion and provocation as its stock-in-trade, it is belied by the reality of life within the United States itself.The wave of police violence in the US is one aspect of an escalating assault on the democratic rights of the working class that makes a mockery of the official human rights rhetoric. Were these events occurring in a country targeted for conquest or regime change by the CIA and the Pentagon, that country would be declared a human rights disaster area.
According to a web site that keeps track of police shootings, Zambrano-Montes was the
122nd person to be killed by police in the United States since the start of the year. In the five days since the shooting, another ten people have been killed by police: two black, two white, one Latino. The names and identities of five others have not been released.
In virtually all of these fatal police shootings, the victims have been blasted by a fusillade of bullets, their bodies riddled by ten, fifteen, twenty or more rounds fired off by the killer cops.
The recent incidents of wanton police violence include:
The beating of an elderly Indian man in Alabama as he walked in the street, leaving him partially paralyzed.
Comment: The War on Terror has turned our police force into a profitable militarized extension of the U.S. government. Historically, whenever the people try to rise up, they have to be smashed down by brute force. Police are essentially occupying armies and the enemy is you. It is a system designed to impose fear and curtail dissent, while lining the pockets of corporations.
See also: Oligarchic, corporate elites have created a society of captives