The former chief of US Capitol Police said that he called the Pentagon for assistance half a dozen times as his officers lost control of the deadly insurrection outside…
In the lead up to the deadly January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, which saw five people killed, including a police officer, the Pentagon severely restricted the authority of the commander of the District of Columbia National Guard, the latter told the Washington Post on Tuesday. The revelation sheds further light on how the senior political military command hamstrung the ability of law enforcement to defend the nation’s capitol against the riot. Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, told the Post that he was deprived of the ability to deploy even small numbers of troops on his own by Trump-appointed political higher-ups who feared a repeat of the June 2020 White House public relations disaster. When the national guard was called in to suppress massive antiracist and anti-police-brutality protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by white police, their heavy-handed tactics aroused fury across the nation. No incident better captured the guard’s excesses than their use of a “buzzing” tactic against protesters by hovering several helicopters just feet over their heads. Orders to perform the so-called ‚persistent presence‘ maneuver, which is commonly used by US forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, came from the Pentagon, not the DC Guard, the New York Times reported.
