Defending Against The Enemy Within

Met Police Dept Narc officer Michael Fanone  ABC News

"It looked like a medieval battle scene. Some of the most brutal combat I've ever encountered."

"There’s no longer any police lines. There's just chaos. Rioters running rampant across the Capitol grounds, fatigued, you know, injured officers everywhere."

"[Officers who were in the tunnel defending the Capitol were] fighting like lions."

"Some guys pulled me out into the crowd and some were yelling something ... they were beating me."  "At one point, I got tased, people were yelling out, 'We got one. We got one'."

"Individuals in the crowd tried to get my gun. At one point, people started chanting, 'Kill him with his own gun'. I remember at one point, you know, some of the people in the crowd while I was getting tasered, they were stripping my gear off of my vest, my badge off my radio. They started grabbing ammunition magazines from my belt."

"I remember yelling out, not to anybody in specific, 'I have kids' and it seemed to work."

Michael Fanone, 20-year narcotics officer, Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department

 

Met Police Dept Officer Daniel Hodges ABC News

"Some of them were absolutely crazed -- I would  call them zealous true believers. They would let nothing stop them from getting inside. And it didn't matter, what they had to do to get inside."

"I thought, 'this could be the end,' or 'I could not get out of this completely intact'."

"The guy in front of me, that guy, he was  practically foaming at the mouth. He was screaming and just grabbed my arm, grabbed my filter on my masks, started beating my head against the door frame and ripping it off as best he could."

"Once he got my mask off, he also was able to rip away my night baton from me and started beating me in the head with it."

"Once they ripped my mask off, I was sucking in pepper spray, OC spray and tear gas the entire time. Obviously, that many people yelling in the tunnel is extremely loud. It was just a sensory overload. But all I know is that no one was getting by me."

“They were waving the 'thin-blue-line flag' while they were assaulting us."

"It’s not an exaggeration to say that we defended a democracy, that everyone's duly-elected representatives were in that building and the mob outside was not." 

Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges

Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they push barricades to storm the Capitol  
Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

 

Washington, federal District of Columbia is preparing to inaugurate a new president, the 46th President of the United States of America. The inauguration will take place during a time of great internal division, the polarization of America between left and right, Democrat and Republican. Bipartisan reconciliation at this time in the history of the United States appears exceedingly remote. Americans failed to see any measure of agreement, only dissonance and hostility between those they elected to the House of Representatives and in the Senate in the past four years, and what they saw instructed them on how to react.

 

The United States Congress is so fundamentally at odds it seems to have disintegrated into a heckling, jeering high-school chorus of juvenile delinquents at times. The Democrats turned sharp left, their junior members calling for a version of America that would reflect their social values and they would accept nothing less. The Republicans remained wedded to their version of America the Great, the showpiece of world order and Democracy in Action. And their choice for president of that great country astonished the world. And the world watched as the United States retreated from its position of eminent leadership.

 

When Donald Trump was elected president, Democrats refused to accept that this was their new democratically elected president, that a majority of Americans saw promise in this man and opted to bring him to office. Rallies were organized post inauguration, conspiracy theories were given prominent and official status, and for the length of his stay in office until he was thwarted for a second term, he was considered by Democrats to be an illegal resident of the White House. Now, with the ascension of Joe Biden it is the Republicans' turn to refuse acknowledgment of his legitimacy -- with a vengeance, rude and violent.

There are now more troops stationed in Washington and around the 50 states than the collective of U.S. servicemen in Europe, Iraq or Afghanistan. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the federal body that serves as the internal monitor of criminal investigation in the United States, along with the Department of Homeland Security has warned lawmakers of the presence of radicalized followers of President Trump in dangerous insurrection mode, planning ongoing violent attacks against the nation in their zeal to promote overturning of the election results that rejected Mr.Trump and won the presidency for Mr.Biden.

 

Protesters climbed the bleachers that were erected for Biden's inauguration   Getty Images

Countrywide, armed attacks by radicalized militants for whom the prospect of President Trump leaving the White House for a Biden/Democratic occupancy motivates them to threaten the stability and security of the nation by an armed insurrection of hostile far-right and nationalist elements, among the 76 million loyal Americans who voted for a man who promised that their working-class rights would be upheld against the elites and the capitalists entrenched in Washington who look after their own well-being, disinterested in the needs of the greater population. They believed him then, and believe him still.

With the president's second impeachment, and his loyal followers' display of hostile, derogatory and violent reactions -- with the current of viral disaffection still on display as Internet communications continue to recruit and build on the violent disruption that took place on 6 January, the country is on virtual lockdown, not because of the coronavirus sweeping maliciously through the country, but martial law resulting from the malevolent violence of mob action in support of a disgraced president.

"Lacking designations for initiating a nationwide case for pursuing connected violence, federal law enforcement largely pursues cases reactively after an attack."

"Individual cases are pursued across dozens or even hundreds of jurisdictions even though subjects congregate, communicate, and collaborate with each other in online environments. Domestic terrorism's lack of designation also results in no effective measure for understanding the size, shape, and scale of each violent extremist threat."

Clint Watts, cybersecurity and counterterrorism expert

 

The FBI appears to believe that the riot in Washington was an "inside job" aided and abetted by a few members of Congress or their aides, along with some police. Last year a report emerged stating that supremacists and neo-Nazis had infiltrated security, military and police forces nationwide. Two known radical members of Congress appear to be under investigation. Unless these claims too, are part of a wider web of conspiracy theories. As though the entire nation has become the victim of fallacious demagoguery, suffering from a mass psychosis. 

That President Donald Trump in his dwindling days in power, incited thousands of his faithful followers to embark on a trajectory of violent dissent, disrupting the transition between administrations, casting aspersions on the kind of democracy they see playing out no longer favouring their version of events is beyond question. His speech furthermore -- hours before the mob's descent on the Capitol -- primed the mob to action, urged them to flood the Capitol, to leave no doubt that he and he alone is fit to govern the United States of America.

 

Michael Fanone, a DC detective, was dragged into the crowd and beaten   Reuters