Keene’s “Thanks But No Tanks” gets some very positive coverage from the Daily Mail:

‘We’re going to have our own ‘TANK”: Town officials battle with residents over $300,000 armoured vehicle (even though there’s only been two murders since 1999)

Keene in New Hampshire is a quaint little town of just 23,000 and the scene of just two murders since 1999. Yet, the town has just accepted a $285,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for an eight-ton armoured personnel vehicle. Mayor Kendall Lane told councilman Mitch Greenwald during a December city council meeting that; ‘We’re going to have our own tank’, reports the Huffington Post.

But plans for the Bearca, which is not technically a tank, made by Lenco Industries Inc. are now on hold because of an angry backlash from the town’s residents.

Terry Clark on the Keene City Council is the only council member to publicly oppose the Bearcat and has collected more than 500 signatures in a petition.

More than 100 people packed into the latest meeting of a city council committee, to oppose equipping the police department, of 45 officers with the amoured truck.

One speaker quoted in the Keene Sentinel, Roberta Mastrogiovanni, said: ‘It promotes violence, We should promote more human interaction rather than militarize.

‘I refuse to use money for something this unnecessary when so many people in our community are in need.’

Since the 1990s, the Pentagon has made military equipment available to local police departments for free or at steep discounts. Most towns have obtained the grants and implemented them with little resistance.

Jim Massery, the government sales manager for Pittsfield based Lenco, dismissed critics who wonder why a town with almost no crime would need such a vehicle, reports the Huffington Post.

”I don’t think there’s any place in the country where you can say, ‘That isn’t a likely terrorist target,’ he told the Post.

‘If a group of terrorists decide to shoot up a shopping mall in a town like Keene, wouldn’t you rather be prepared?’

‘This is a big topic in this small town, and I haven’t met a single person who in favour of the Bearcat,’ local businesswomen Dorrie O’Meara told the Post.

‘Keene is a beautiful place. It’s gorgeous, and it’s safe, and we love it here. We just don’t want to live in the kind of  place where there’s an armored personnel carrier parked outside of City Hall. I mean, it’s completely unnecessary. But it’s more than that. It’s just not who we are.’

Officials have said that because the vehicle will be paid for by a federal grant, the town should take it.

‘They try to say it’s ‘free.’ Well it isn’t free. Taxpayers are still paying to put this militaristic thing in our town. And it isn’t about the money, anyway. It’s about what kind of town we want to be.’

The council will next discuss the issue in March. Mayor Lane and police Chief Kenneth Meola failed to return requests from the Post for a comment.

Satellite image provider DigitalGlobe Inc. released photos Friday that appear to show Syrian army tanks and other armored vehicles in the city of Homs.

DigitalGlobe said the images were taken late Friday morning Syrian time by the company’s WorldView 2 satellite from about 480 miles above the Earth.

Stephen Wood, director of DigitalGlobe’s analysis center, said the photos show tanks, armored personnel carriers and other armored vehicles in the southern part of the city, some of them near apartment buildings.

The satellite images show an increase in the level of army activity in and around Homs from the previous 24 hours, Wood said.

Fighting in Homs has reportedly killed hundreds of people over the past week from bombardments followed by soldiers’ advances. The battle there is part of the Syrian government’s attempts to suppress an 11-month-old uprising against the rule of President Bashar Assad. Continue Reading →