LOS ANGELES - After the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks 10 years ago, many US citizens accepted the government invasion of their civil liberties in exchange for securities, but now more are worried about the further loss of their liberties.

Local press reported that police authorities in Pima County, Arizona, fired 71 shots in seven seconds at 26-year-old Jose Guerena, a former Marine who served two tours in Iraq.

Guerena was killed while his terrified wife and 4-year old son hid in the closet. The SWAT team that killed him was there to serve a narcotics search warrant as part of a multi-house drugs crackdown. As Guerena lay dying with his wife pleading for help, the SWAT team barred paramedics from entering the home.

Guerena's wife asserted that her husband grabbed his gun because he thought his family was the victim of a home invasion, not a police raid. Deputies initially justified their actions by claiming that Guerena fired at officers but later said he kept the gun safety on and never pulled the trigger.

Rania Khalek wrote on www.alternet.org that as it turns out, Guerena's murder is just the most recent in a long line of botched paramilitary operations.

According to an investigation carried out by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in the United States, "America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement over the last 25 years, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work. In fact, the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home."

The Cato study found that some 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and "are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers".

Xinhua