Duckworth demands answers on military response to protests
Senator says Trump, GOP stand in way of police reforms
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth addresses a crowd of supporters at the Thompson Center in Chicago a year ago. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
Illinois’s junior senator is demanding answers on the aggressive military response to peaceful protests in the nation’s capital.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth is calling for an investigation into the use of helicopters to intimidate protesters in Washington, D.C. Duckworth, herself a former U.S. Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopter pilot, pointed out in a Sunday TV appearance on MSNBC that helicopters buzzed protesters last week in the capital.
“Somebody gave those pilots permission to do that, and I want to know who,” Duckworth said. She pointed out that one of the choppers was a Lakota typically used in medical evacuations and bore the Red Cross insignia. “So what was it doing there performing a maneuver against protesters who are peacefully demonstrating?”
Duckworth said that as a pilot she’d never been trained to use a helicopter to intimidate people on the ground, and that Federal Aviation Administration rules prohibit a chopper from hovering within 400 feet of the ground. “So those aircraft broke all sorts of rules in terms of military policy as well as as FAA regulations,” she added.
Duckworth, a decorated chopper pilot who lost her legs in battle in the Iraq War, blistered the Trump administration for the “misuse” of the military in confronting protesters last week, and she repeated that criticism Sunday. She took issue with U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s defense of using “unmarked” military personnel in the response to protests. Calling it “absolutely inappropriate,” she charged that those troops belonged to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Transportation Safety Administration, along with other federal agencies. “I’m ashamed he’s our attorney general,” she said of Barr, adding that the use of unmarked prison guards in policing protesters constituted an attempt to “pervert the criminal-justice system for the benefit of a single person, Donald Trump.”
Duckworth said she was “appalled” by Defense Secretary Mark Esper for not only joining Trump in a publicity stunt last week in which protesters were routed from St. John’s Episcopal Church, but also his echoing Trump in a conference call with state governors in urging them to “dominate protesters” and that protests were “a battle space that needed to be dominated.”
Citing the recent public rebukes delivered to Trump by former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, Duckworth said, “It was good to see military leaders standing up and saying, ‘No, sir, this is not what you’re supposed to be doing.’
“As Gen. Mattis said about Donald Trump, he doesn’t even pretend to bring us together. All he’s about doing is dividing Americans and splitting us up into groups and tribes. That’s not what we need right now. We need to come back and unite under the flag, under the Constitution of the United States, and make sure that every single person in this country is treated equally.
“We have gaping wounds across the country right now,” she added. “Donald Trump is not the man to help us heal our wounds and bring us back together and bring real leadership. Donald Trump is spending all of his time in a bunker in the White House hunkered down worried about his reelection and not worried about fixing the problems in this country.”
Duckworth sided firmly with protesters against police brutality and institutionalized racism. “There is systematic racism and injustice against black Americans specifically because of the color of their skin,” she said. “There are many good police officers, but there is a bias and a racism in the system that has to be fixed.”
Duckworth, however, was despairing about the prospects for police reforms to pass in the current Congress, including her own proposal for a Police Training and Independent Review Act, which she said “still has not been given a chance to see the light of day,” with U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina standing in the way of it just last week.
“As long as Donald Trump is president and Mitch McConnell is the leader of the Senate, it has zero chance of passing,” Duckworth said. “So this is where we are. Until we get Mitch McConnell out of the Senate leadership role and Donald Trump out of the White House, none of this is going to pass.”