Tag Archives: military-industrial complex

The American Terror State

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By Donald Monaco

Source: Global Research

On February 26, 2021, imperial President Joe Biden ordered the bombing of “Iranian backed militias” in Syria. Biden’s action was rationalized as “retaliation” for rocket attacks on American troops in Iraq that killed a mercenary contractor and injured a U.S. soldier.  

Missing from coverage in the corporate media was any mention of the illegal U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Syria.  The occupation was simply airbrushed from discussion.  By so doing, reality is inverted.  Victim is portrayed as aggressor and aggressor as victim.

From the standpoint of international law, aggressive military action taken by occupation forces cannot be termed self-defense.  Yet political elites and media propagandists finesse basic truths by detaching U.S. forces from the context of illegal invasion and occupation.  They assume the military has a ‘right’ to be deployed anywhere in the world.

Paradoxically, the militias assaulted by the United States have been fighting ISIS, once again exposing the ‘war on terror’ as a massive lie.  The same militia forces Biden attacked were once led by Iranian General Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump, further demonstrating the genuine purpose of military deployment which is to destabilize regimes targeted as unfriendly, meaning not subservient to the Washington.

Almost simultaneously, the Biden administration signaled that there would be no punishment of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was identified by the CIA as having given the order to assassinate Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Also, unsurprisingly, the Biden administration announced that it would appeal a British magistrate’s decision not to extradite Julian Assange to the United States for prosecution under the espionage act.  Assange languishes in a British prison pending the appeal.  His transgression? Exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

The pattern is clear.  Any action that supports U.S. global hegemony is justified, while any opposition is criminalized and repressed.

The core mission of the American terror state is to make the world safe for U.S. corporate profiteering.  A corollary imperative is to prevent any challenge to U.S. global domination.

First, the United States is a permanent warfare state that fights perpetual wars for perpetual profits.  The profits accrue to the “merchants of death” who sell their wares within the iron triangle of a military-industrial-complex that guarantees a massive return on capital investments.  The process is known as “military Keynesianism.”  Corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing provide the arms for a global military empire to defend the global corporate empire.  Profits also flow to members of congress who own stock in the defense industry.

The permanent warfare state also allows profits to accumulate for corporations that exploit the world’s land, labor, and resources by protecting their access to foreign markets.  Corporations such as World Mineral Inc, Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto, General Motors, Lithium Americas, AES, and Blackberry Ltd in the mineral extraction industry, Exxon Mobile, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron in the energy industry, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft in the technology industry, General Motors, Ford, and Tesla in the automotive industry, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer in the pharmaceutical industry, and Walmart, Amazon, and Costco in the retail industry all operate in the global market.

Commercial banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America in the banking industry, Wall Street investment firms led by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley in the financial industry, and private equity firms such as The Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Co, and TPG Capital in the investment management industry finance global corporate transactions.

U.S. Fortune 500 companies made $14.2 trillion in revenues during 2020 and held an estimated $2.6 trillion offshore to avoid paying taxes.  The largest American corporations made billions of dollars in profits while laying off thousands of workers during the coronavirus lockdown.  Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and their cohorts increased their net worth by half a trillion dollars during a pandemic that saw 8 million people join the ranks of 38.1 million poor Americans.  Another 93.6 million live close to the poverty level in the richest nation on earth.

Second, any country that wants to control its own land, labor, and resources by implementing an agenda of economic nationalism becomes a barrier to free trade, globalization, and the neoliberal economic paradigm that emphasizes privatization and deregulation of economies for the benefit of private capital.  Countries that do not throw themselves open to foreign investment are punished by crippling economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Third, the neoliberal economic agenda of free market privatization drives the neoconservative political agenda of American global hegemony as justified by Bush Jr.’s “Preemptive War on Terror,” Obama’s “Humanitarian Intervention,” Trump’s “America First,” and Biden’s “Advancement of Democracy” ideologies.

Neoconservatives dominate the foreign policy establishment.  Besides protecting U.S. empire, they are rabidly pro-Israel.  The neocons conflate the interests of the United States with the interests of Israel, ignoring George Washington’s admonition to avoid “foreign entanglements.”  They want the United States to go to war with Iran, as they understand that the destruction of resistance to Zionist colonization in Palestine can only be accomplished by defeating Tehran.

Other Middle Eastern and North African countries that supported the Palestinian cause and had large reserves of oil coveted by empire, were decimated by implementation of a neoconservative plan to attack seven Muslim countries in five years, beginning with Iraq and ending with Iran.

George W. Bush, the Texas oil man, Dick Cheney, former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton, and a rat’s nest of neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and I. Lewis Libby decimated Iraq.

Barack Obama, the University of Chicago law professor and Nobel Peace Prize winner and neoconservative Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, destroyed Syria and turned Libya into a failed state that resulted in the enslavement of Black Africans.

Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and celebrity show host and Mike Pompeo, neoconservative war hawk and Secretary of State, continued the occupations of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, moved the U.S. embassy to the occupied city of Jerusalem and offered the Palestinians the “Deal of the Century” that was promptly rejected.

Despite his rhetoric, Trump failed to stand-up to the military-industrial-complex by ending ongoing U.S. wars.

Finally, Joe Biden, a self-professed Zionist, supported every U.S. war to come down the pike during his tenure as U.S. senator and vice-president, making him a warmonger.

The policies of empire are planned in the corridors of the Council on Foreign Relations, Heritage Foundation, Rand Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, American Enterprise Institute and a myriad array of pro-war institutes that function within the policy formulation network financed by the corporate rich.

The matrix of power in the United States is strikingly transparent.  The corporate rich own the country.  The political class protects their property and their empire by pursuing the interests of oligarchic masters as defined by ‘experts’ in the policy formulation network.  Academic and media elites rationalize the need for an empire that is never called by its proper name.

The costs of empire paid by the American people are staggering.

A study conducted by the Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs at Brown University concluded that the United States has spent $6.4 trillion on war since 9/11.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 allocated $740 Billion for the military and prohibited President Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.  Joseph Biden works within in the same institutional framework that enmeshed his predecessor.  The Biden administration is considering troop re-deployment to confront Russia and China.  But no return of troops to the United States is contemplated.

The United States currently has over 1.3 million active-duty troops, with 450,000 stationed on over 800 military bases in 70 countries around the world. Special military operations are being conducted in 141 countries.  U.S. global military presence escalated under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

As U.S. military presence increases around the world, so do the crimes of empire.  Obama prosecuted drone warfare that killed approximately 5,000 innocent civilians.  Trump escalated drone strikes.   Obama launched 1,878 attacks during his eight years in office.  Trump ordered 2,243 strikes during his four-year tenure in the White House while concealing deaths that occurred as the result of attacks.

Since 9/11 the U.S. has killed an estimated 6 million people in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.  At least 37 million people have been displaced by U.S. wars.  The U.S. has bombed 9 countries since 9/11 adding to the list of 24 other nations it bombed after World War II.  Exactly 80 countries have been subjected to U.S. counter-terrorism operations during the “war on terror.”  Behind the statistics lies an ocean of human suffering.

The monumental questions of peace and war in the United States will not be decided by an election.  They will ultimately be decided by a revolt.  The shell-game of American politics wherein populist rhetoric is used to conceal plutocratic governance is bankrupt.

The United States is a militarized terror state.  The magnitude of violence perpetrated by the U.S. government has become so routine that perpetual war is normalized.  The question remains, how long will the American people continue to be slaves of a terror state?

When America Became The Roman Empire: Wars, Social turmoil and Economic Decline

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America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused – preferring greatness to power and justice to glory

George W. Bush

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

America is the modern-day Rome.  There are many lessons from the collapse of the Roman empire that America can learn from.  The fiasco of Trump supporters and various agitators from the Democratic Party who charged into the US capital building to prevent Joe Biden’s stolen election win from getting certified is the latest sign of America’s societal collapse.  The comparisons between the Roman Republic that became an empire, to America’s rise as a global super power is uncanny.  On various levels from its endless wars for world domination to the creation of a domestic police state, in many ways, America fits the criteria of being an empire.  Historical research suggests that Rome’s rise and their eventual downfall is the most accurate scenario that America is following.

Rome’s downfall was caused by a long chain of events.  It had severe financial problems that was caused by their ongoing wars so they overtaxed its citizenry causing inflation, thus allowing many to escape tax authorities into the countryside.  Then in the second century, there was a labor deficit when Rome’s expansion slowed down due to a shortage of imported slave labor they usually brought back from the lands they conquered resulting in the decline of agriculture and essential commercial production which had an impact on trade.  Rome had rampant corruption and political instability with internal coups of sitting emperors carried out by the Praetorian Guard who were the bodyguards to the sitting emperor as they used their power to decide who would be emperor and who would be removed and sometimes even murdered for political reasons.  All sounds similar to the Military-Industrial Complex and its power it holds within the American establishment.  There was even a civil war within Rome around the third century when the emperor at the time, Alexander Severus had been assassinated by his own troops while at a meeting with his military cabinet so that Maximus Thrax can become the next Roman emperor.  On a global scale, Rome had launched many wars  against Britannia (England/Wales), Gaul (France), Hispania (Spain), Achaea (Greece), Judea (Middle East) and others as its army eventually faltered in the face of its perceived enemies which were many.  Rome eventually collapsed under its own weight.  After the fall of Rome, several major empires throughout history were born including Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Ottomans and others that followed the same path and all of them eventually collapsed.

Wars for Empire

Washington has committed numerous actions around the world to spread it’s form of democracy through wars of aggression, regime change, covert operations to interfere in foreign elections and economic warfare by using its dollar reserve status to impose sanctions on nations to maintain its global empire.  The US military has troops stationed in more than 80 countries with proactive wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.  Now they have their sights on the oil-rich country of Venezuela and Iran.  For sure, Washington is getting ready to re-adjust its sights on Syria and Russia if Biden is successfully inaugurated on January 20th.  Today, the American empire has one of the largest military budgets in the world that has surpassed the next 10 countries combined.  Trump’s signed a defense bill worth more than $738 billion for 2020.  Rome also had an expensive military budget where emperors raised taxes that lead to inflation which put a strain on its economy.

Since World War II, the American citizenry became more patriotic especially during the Cold War against communism.  Like America, Rome’s citizenry was also patriotic but it came with a price of high-taxation to fund Rome’s military adventures around the world.  An interesting article from Smithsonian magazine ‘Lessons in the Decline of Democracy From the Ruined Roman Republic’ by Jason Daley explained how Rome became a hegemonic power, but it came with their share of consequences.  Daley said that “the Roman people’s strong sense of patriotism was unique in the Mediterranean world. Like the United States after World War II, Rome, after winning the Second Punic War in 201 B.C. (the one with Hannibal and the elephants), became the world’s hegemon” and that “it lead to a massive increase in their military spending, a baby boom, and gave rise to a class of super-wealthy elites that were able to use their money to influence politics and push their own agendas”  which sounds like what’s happening in Washington D.C. today.  Wars of conquest and maintaining an army to defend its borders due to barbarian attacks put pressure on the Roman bureaucracy so it increased taxes on the people.

Washington always manages to find enough funds to support its Military-Industrial Complex and its continuous wars of destruction.  They manage to bail out the billionaires, its American corporations and institutions through the Federal Reserve bank’s printing press who basically creates money out of thin air.  The Federal Reserve and the government then puts the burden on the American people by raising taxes and creating inflation to support America’s wars abroad while poverty is increasing at home.  Military spending was a priority for Rome who disregarded public housing for its citizens or abandoned the maintenance and upkeep of its crumbling roads and aqueducts as the ‘super-wealthy elites’ became more influential in politics. In America, there is crumbling infrastructure problem where airports, bridges, roads and subways such as the New York City mass transit system is practically falling apart.

As time went by, the citizens of Rome had lost faith in their government as the social and economic impact of being a hegemonic power became problematic so many chose not to defend the empire due to government mismanagement of resources.  What is interesting is that Rome recruited solders from what was called “unemployed city mobs” or even foreigners who were looking for ways to earn money even if it meant going to war and risking their lives.  Similarly, in America, there has been a “poverty draft”,  meaning the military either drafted people up to the time of the Vietnam war or they recruited people from mostly impoverished neighborhoods while promising them a world of benefits and bonuses which most never do receive.  The wealthy elites almost never join the US military as they recruit men from poor or middle class backgrounds and newly arrived immigrants with promises of citizenship and other benefits for them and their families if of course they come back home in one piece.  There have been cases of immigrants who fought in U.S. wars abroad were still deported back to their countries of origin.

The Economics of Empire

During Rome’s last days, farming was literally done with forced slave labor on large estates called latifundia’s owned by ultra rich landowners.  The average farmer in Rome had to pay workers, so they could not compete.  Farmers could not produce the goods as cheaply and more efficiently as the rich landowners so they had to sell their farms and lay-off their workers creating massive unemployment levels because there were no jobs left.  High levels of crime and corruption also took hold in Rome.  Rome had depended on humans and animals for labor intensive purposes, but failed to find or even create new technologies to produce new goods efficiently.

In America, the automotive industry was once competitive, but today they cannot compete with Germany, Japan, South Korea and others who produce better quality cars.  The closure of manufacturing companies that produced goods and services have been shipped to other countries including China, Indonesia and others has impacted the middle class who depended on those jobs have joined the ranks of the unemployed.  With Washington’s thirst for war, high levels of unemployment and poverty are increasing across the nation where cities and towns are going bankrupt and breadlines are becoming the norm.  Investments in crucial industries and reducing government taxes on small businesses and manufacturers will give American companies an opportunity to produce better products, to create jobs and to compete economically.  But like Rome, America is interested in war and conquest, not in producing quality products such as televisions, appliances and cars it needs to compete internationally with the exception of its high tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft and others.

As the Federal Reserve Bank continues to print money to support the powers that be and give peanuts to the masses, they will cause inflation.  The dollar will lose its value.  Rome famously clipped coins adding less value to its purchasing power for its population causing inflationary prices in food and other necessities.

History Is Repeating Itself

Past empires usually destroyed themselves from within followed by fighting endless wars and imposing economic policies that impoverished its people leading to social and moral decay.  In Rome, alcoholism was a major problem, America has an opioid problem killing tens of thousands of people annually since the problem began.  Before the opioids crisis, they (America) had a heroin and crack epidemics that destroyed many communities.

Empires past and present should be thrown into the dustbins of history.  Peace and prosperity with respect to cultural and political differences should be the norm between all nations, but the global elites or the world order is the problem.  Rome collapsed due to its foreign and domestic wars that eventually lead to its social and moral decline while it slowly destroyed its own economy are the same policies that are pursued by Washington today.

The social turmoil between Democrat and Republican cultists in America will lead to some form of civil war coupled with a fragile economy followed by the consequences of the of Covid-19 lockdowns that will have a guaranteed policy of endless money printing no matter who sits at the White House.  All will have a devastating impact on the American people for decades to come.  There will also be a coming war on any of the following countries including Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah) that will set the stage for a possible devastating wider war with Iran, Russia and China reflects on the reality that America resembles the Roman empire who chose the same path of self-destruction.

Americans Are Being Divided As The War On Domestic Terror Expands

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Americans appear too divided and distracted to recognize that the architects of the Patriot Act and the failed War on Terror now have their sights set on the American homeland.

By Derrick Broze

Source: The Last American Vagabond

The first week of 2021 kicked off with chaos at the Capitol in Washington D.C. Was it a protest, a riot or an insurrection? Were there provocateurs, and if so, were they Antifa, the cops, and/or the Feds? As usual, everyone on the internet thinks they know the answer within ten minutes. Unfortunately, this genuinely leads to the spreading of unfounded theories – many based on nothing but speculation and emotion. But while the public is debating over theories and arguing amongst themselves, the newly emboldened Military Industrial Complex is eagerly anticipating the incoming Biden Administration as an opportunity to expand the War on Domestic Terror.

In the immediate aftermath of the “storming of the Capitol”, the media pundits, intelligence community, and politicians began foaming at the mouth in excitement over the chance to push through Domestic Terror legislation. Michigan representative Elissa Slotkin, also former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense and CIA analyst, said, “the post 9/11 era is over. The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism.” Slotkin went on to say that she urges the Biden administration to “understand that the greatest threat now is internal.”

TLAV writer Whitney Webb responded to Slotkin’s comment by reminding the audience that, “before Congress, Elissa worked for the CIA and the Pentagon and helped destabilize the Middle East during the Bush and Obama admins. What she says here is essentially an open announcement that the US has moved from the “War on [foreign] terror” to the “War on domestic terror”.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) also reportedly released a bulletin warning that “domestic extremists” are planning a nationwide protest to stop Joe Biden from being sworn in as President. According to ABC News, “The FBI has also received information in recent days on a group calling for “storming” state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event President Donald Trump is removed from office prior to Inauguration Day. The group is also planning to “storm” government offices in every state the day President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump.”

Since the bulletin has not been publicly released the report should be viewed skeptically. However, it’s only one of many emerging reports and articles stoking the flames of civil war and internal chaos. The fact of the matter is that this is not a new attempt to demonize the American people. This current effort is simply a continuation of the effort to label Americans as terrorists that has been taking place since at least the mid-1990’s following the Oklahoma City bombing false flag. These efforts were expanded further after the attacks of 9/11. In fact, as most readers know by now, it was Joe Biden who wrote the anti-terror legislation in the 90’s which became the basis for the Patriot ACT after 9/11.

While the “War on Terror” launched by the George W. Bush administration was focused on imaginary enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, there has also been a steady push to focus on the American public. In the first years of the Obama administration we saw the rise of the “Tea Party” movement, the American Libertarian movement, and Liberal Progressives who opposed the war machine, the surveillance state, and the militarization of the police. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) did their best to label activists “extremists” for constitutionally protected activism and organizing. In 2010, the SPLC even came up with a “Patriot Hit List” of so-called extremists.

The post-9/11 era saw the creation of Fusion Centers; centralized systems that pool and analyze intelligence from federal, state, local, and private sector entities. The National Network of Fusion Centers was created after the 9/11 attacks to provide for more streamlined communication between federal and local agencies. The Fusion Centers have been criticized as violations of civil liberties and a danger to separation of federal and local governments. They have been exposed for targeting of protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline and most infamously, in 2009 it was revealed that the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) was targeting supporters of third party candidates, Ron Paul supporters, anti-abortion activists, and “conspiracy theorists” as potential domestic extremists.

The 2010’s also saw the passing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act which included provisions allowing for indefinitely detaining Americans who have been labeled potential terrorists. Under these provisions, Americans lose the ability to have access to a lawyer and the right to a speedy trial. The measures were approved every year during the Obama and Trump administrations.

The truth is that the United States has long been pushing for a focus on Domestic Terror and Extremism, and regardless of what really happened at the Capitol on January 6, the event is being used as a way to justify the push for strengthening domestic terror legislation.

Another organization that is helping propel the “rise of domestic terror” narrative is the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), an organization with deep ties to the intelligence community and Western Military Industrial Complex. In October, the CSIS released a study claiming that two-thirds of the terrorist plots and attacks in the United States in the first eight months of 2020 were carried out by white supremacists and like-minded extremists. Coincidentally, journalist John Vibes recently reported that, “the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is listed as the “most recent employment” for three selections on Biden’s Department of Defense agency review team: Kathleen Hicks, who is a former defense official under President Barack Obama, as well as Melissa Dalton, and Andrew Hunter.”

The most likely candidate for new domestic terror legislation is the “The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act”, originally passed by the House in 2020, would create “dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism.”

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin has already promised to reintroduce the bill in the coming days. “Senate Democrats, along with the Biden administration, will work together to investigate, expose, and hold accountable domestic terrorism threats in our country,” Durbin and Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement. The bill also has support from the Anti-Defamation League and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Another domestic terror bill that has previously been considered is the “Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terror Act”. The bill was introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff, who claimed that “the legislation is narrowly crafted and includes protections to ensure it is not misused.” However, the American Civil Liberties Union warned, “people of color and other marginalized communities have long been targeted under domestic terrorism authorities for unfair and discriminatory surveillance, investigations, and prosecutions. Law enforcement agencies’ use of these authorities undermines and has violated equal protection, due process, and First Amendment rights.”

This is a crucial time for the American experiment. Will the American people allow themselves to be divided to the point of calling for domestic terror legislation to be used on their neighbors, co-workers, friends and family? With the public inundated with fears of civil war, stolen elections, rampant disinformation, and general exhaustion with COVID-19 measures, it appears to be a very critical moment which may decide whether America is destined for a renewed desire for liberty, truth, and free speech, or an accelerated push towards tyranny.

Imperial Overstretch Arrives: Americans Do Not Need the American Empire

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

This piece is being written as voters are going to the polls on election day in the United States. While it has been useful to consider how things might change, possibly for the worse, one must also recognize that much of what happens in the U.S. and in its far-flung empire operates by virtue of its own internal dynamics and rules, something that is often referred to as the “Deep State” or perhaps more accurately as the Establishment.

Witness for example the occasional possibly sincere but unsuccessful White House attempts over the past four years to withdraw or reduce the numbers of U.S. troops embroiled in various armed conflicts worldwide. All of those initiatives have been frustrated or redirected in one way or another and it is not simply a question of bungling by a politically insensitive Donald Trump versus the result that might have been obtained by a more experienced and responsible Democrat. What drives the empire’s engine is essentially bipartisan, even in its own way, apolitical, existing as it does as a form of leaderless shadow government that functions as a community-of-interest rather than a bureaucracy. It is inclusive and reflective of the real centers of power in the country, namely the national security state and Wall Street.

In a recent article Pepe Escobar dispels any expectation that a kinder, gentler foreign policy might emerge from the election. He describes with some alarm how victory by Biden will mean that the national security “Blob” team that wrecked Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya while also assassinating Americans overseas under President Barack Obama will be back. He cites former CIA presidential briefer Ray McGovern who persuasively describes the “Blob” as the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex). One might well add the Federal Reserve Bank to that list.

So, the engine keeps chugging on, driven my its own self-interests and completely oblivious to what is going on around it. The irony is that the crisis in confidence that simultaneously is besetting the United States in part reflects a very real, largely self-inflicted decline in America’s place in the world due to insistence that it maintain global hegemony. It comes at a time when the empire is entering into a phase of increasing irrelevancy which many of the key players involved are either unable or unwilling to recognize, no matter what their political affiliation might be. That means that the United States is locked into a pattern of behavior that it is incapable of changing. It is a nation that has become addicted to war for no good reason, and that addiction has brought neither security nor prosperity.

The signs are everywhere. The costs of empire continue to rise while real benefits to be derived from it are elusive. The United States government spends far more on a bloated defense budget than it can afford, adding to an unsustainable national debt that currently exceeds $27 trillion, which is 128% of the country’s entire gross domestic product. The debt will likely increase dramatically if there are any more coronavirus stimulus packages. The nation is becoming hollowed out as a result.

America’s “allies” have inevitably rightly become increasingly disengaged from Washington, reluctant to comply with Washington’s directions and demands, while the developing transition from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is proceeding and will have catastrophic consequences. When the U.S. Treasury stops being able to print money at will, there will be national insolvency.

In terms of the United States’ interaction with the world, a country that not so long ago was widely respected is now regarded as the principal source of international instability, disliked everywhere but Israel, another rogue nation. And the internal damage inside the U.S. to core values and expectations is also evident, to include increasingly dysfunctional schools that focus on political correctness rather than education, crumbling infrastructure, a broken health care system, and a dying industrial and manufacturing base. Unique among all developed countries, life expectancy among working class Americans is declining.

At the root of it all is what Yale professor Paul Kennedy once described as “imperial overstretch,” which means projection of power in support of global commitments that are not essential to national well-being and bankrupting oneself in the process. The reality is that unless an “imperial” acquisition is done purely for exploitative reasons, as Belgium did in the Congo, having an empire operates at a considerable loss. Napoleon “overstretched” when he invaded Russia and both Russia and Austria-Hungary collapsed as a result of the First World War because the stress of external conflict made their obligations far exceed their resources. Great Britain’s Empire likewise became expendable after World War Two when the costs of maintaining outposts “east of Suez” became much larger than the benefits.

So, there are many good reasons for the United States to retrench and again become a “normal” nation, if that is at all possible, but the fact that no candidate but Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders even suggested that America’s global interventionism might be reconsidered or even reversed is telling. Both were eliminated by the Democratic party establishment. In the case of Gabbard, the executioner was no less than Hillary Clinton. Whoever is the new president, he will inherit the awful conceit that he is the “leader of the free world.” It is past time for a serious discussion of America’s proper place in the world, but that will require completely overturning the country’s Establishment and challenging the “exceptionalism” view that the U.S. must dominate as a “force for good.” Unfortunately, there is no politician anywhere on the horizon who is able and willing to take the lead on such an endeavor.

Slavery of Fear

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

Flee, fight or freeze

In the natural world, there are two kinds of responses to imminent threats: either flee or fight. Most of the time, in order to maximize chances of survival, the decision has to be made by individuals or groups in less than a split second. On one hand, the option to flee is motivated by this immediate assessment. It has, of course, an important fear factor. On the other hand, the option to fight seems brave on the surface, but intense momentary fear perhaps had to be overcome by a massive adrenaline rush. Fear is a primal and powerful emotion that is essential for survival, but it can also be used as a tool to control people through mental, emotional and even physical paralysis.

There is a third behavioral option when fear completely paralyzes the individual or a group: it is the freeze option, similar to the imaginary sense of the impossibility to act or react for someone going through a deep clinical depression. As a collective or a nation, this freeze or depressed state when facing danger is also possible. Eighty years ago, with the exception of General Charles de Gaulle and a few men who decided to flee to carry on the fight, France capitulated to the German enemy. France froze and became trapped in the ignominy of a collective depression that was the collaboration by the Vichy government.

In human society, during the barbaric lunacy that has been called the art of war, many substances have been used in history to make soldiers less fearful before combat. Drinking alcohol is an obvious one in Europe; chewing coca leaves for South American native tribes; smoking or eating hashish in the Middle-East and Asia — this concentrated form of cannabis is the etymological origin of the word assassin; more recently, during World War II’s spectacular German Blietzkrieg 1940 attack on France, German troops were given the powerful methamphetamine Pervitin. Naturally, the notion of the fearless master-race Nazi soldiers was nothing but a mythology! The intrepid soldiers of the Reich and their beloved Furher, Adolf Hitler, had the fearlessness of crystal-meth addicts. Pervitin kept Nazi troops awake and fighting for days and nights, and increased their aggressive behavior.

Of course, one cannot reduce the apparent fearless madness of the entire German nation during World War II to the massive consumption of Pervitin. What was probably the most sophisticated propaganda machine of the time had been put together by the Nazis; it had been brainwashing the minds of Germans, young and old, for almost a decade. Hitler and co. spent about 10 years molding a sophisticated and cultured society into their ideological monstrosity with the mythology of the purity of blood, master race, and crucially the invention of Jews as evil, depraved and subhuman personified. If this was possible in an advanced society like Germany circa 1930, one must consider that such a gruesome turn of events is possible anywhere at any time, as madness can be a contagious disease.

Fear of other cultures is a crucial component of racial hatred. Once a group of people like the Jews in Nazi Germany or the Africans during the slave trade to the Americas have been thoroughly dehumanized, it becomes easy, almost trivial, to torture and kill them. All propagandists are psychologists. Therefore they understand that their manipulation of fear gives birth to powerful dark impulses. A fear of abandonment as a child can later bring about morbid jealousy and various sociopathic behaviors. A fear of destitution drives the compulsion to greed. Collectively, fear can be a giant web of invisible chains that enslave a society in a psychological straight jacket. In this regard, September 11, 2001 and its aftermath was a turning point, and to some extent the Western world has been conditioned to live in fear ever since.

The war of terror

Putting aside the inside-job narrative, what matters is how crises are used. The net benefit of 9/11 for some was to create a constant sense of uncertainty for the population, and cynically a jackpot for the military-industrial complex. It was the notion that the enemy could be lurking anywhere. The war on terror was, and still is, a conceptual war: an absurd Orwellian war without end because it is supposed to fight diffuse groups of people called terrorists whose only common ground is the use of fear as a weapon. Because fear breeds more fear, the 20-year conceptual war made people, almost worldwide, believe security was more important than personal liberty. The war on terror made people slaves of fear, and they were told it was for their own good.

Do not blame only Donald Trump for the current authoritarian police state in the US. The Department of Homeland Security was a fascist invention of George W. Bush, using 9/11 as a pretext, and it was maintained by Barack Obama, every time with the complicity of Congress. On one hand, the war on terror wrecked several countries: killed or displaced millions at a cost of several trillion dollars. Everyone knew it was not winnable. On the other hand, what worked for the US and its Western allies was the almost 20-year old war of terror that slowly victimized their own populations with the jackboot of a police-military apparatus constantly on their throats. When fear overcomes an entire society it can be beaten to submission. Where fear rules, servitude becomes acceptable.

Strategy of fear and the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has given an entirely new dimension to the slavery of fear initiated on 9/11. There have been almost two decades, which is one generation, of a war of terror on the collective psyche. There could not have been a better introduction to the global fear of a pandemic. A diffuse Muslim fundamentalist enemy who could be anywhere has morphed to an invisible virus that is everywhere. The quantum leap was easily made, because it is intrinsically the same mechanism. It went a lot further than 9/11, because governments managed to convince their populations to submit themselves to various level of lockdown. Imagine this! Almost all complied worldwide, with little resistance and absolutely no organized rebellion.

Just like the post 9/11 world infringed on human rights and privacy with various invasive policies, the post COVID-19 world has adopted its own arbitrary rules. They have in common that they fuel a fear of everyone and everything and engender agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, Stockholm syndrome, and depression. The panoply of mandatory social distancing measures and mask wearing decrees have made people hostile, fearful, and paranoid. Authorities worldwide have been on a joy killing mission. Populations have been successfully infantilized and traumatized by forbidding the most essential human behaviors: the joy to see a smile or the surprise of a flaring nostril; the smell of a ripe fruit at a market; the fortitude of what seems to be a time gone when you could dance with a stranger and perhaps steal a kiss.

More than two hundred years ago, Haitian slaves managed to free themselves, and in the process they defeated the world’s three largest empires: respectively, the French, British, and Spanish. Have we all become such pathetic shadows of our former selves? Are we so weak and cowardly today that we cannot free ourselves from the billionaire class and the fear it is imposing on us?

Killing Democracy in America

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By William J. Astore

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The phrase “thinking about the unthinkable” has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I’ve been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one that’s been rolling out in far slower motion: that America’s war on terror never ends because it’s far more convenient for America’s leaders to keep it going — until, that is, it tears apart anything we ever imagined as democracy.

I fear that it either can’t or won’t end because, as Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed out in 1967 during the Vietnam War, the United States remains the world’s greatest purveyor of violence — and nothing in this century, the one he didn’t live to see, has faintly proved him wrong. Considered another way, Washington should be classified as the planet’s most committed arsonist, regularly setting or fanning the flames of fires globally from Libya to Iraq, Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria to — dare I say it — in some quite imaginable future Iran, even as our leaders invariably boast of having the world’s greatest firefighters (also known as the U.S. military).

Scenarios of perpetual war haunt my thoughts. For a healthy democracy, there should be few things more unthinkable than never-ending conflict, that steady drip-drip of death and destruction that drives militarism, reinforces authoritarianism, and facilitates disaster capitalism. In 1795, James Madison warned Americans that war of that sort would presage the slow death of freedom and representative government. His prediction seems all too relevant in a world in which, year after year, this country continues to engage in needless wars that have nothing to do with national defense.

You Wage War Long, You Wage It Wrong

To cite one example of needless war from the last century, consider America’s horrendous years of fighting in Vietnam and a critical lesson drawn firsthand from that conflict by reporter Jonathan Schell. “In Vietnam,” he noted, “I learned about the capacity of the human mind to build a model of experience that screens out even very dramatic and obvious realities.” As a young journalist covering the war, Schell saw that the U.S. was losing, even as its military was destroying startlingly large areas of South Vietnam in the name of saving it from communism. Yet America’s leaders, the “best and brightest” of the era, almost to a man refused to see that all of what passed for realism in their world, when it came to that war, was nothing short of a first-class lie.

Why? Because believing is seeing and they desperately wanted to believe that they were the good guys, as well as the most powerful guys on the planet. America was winning, it practically went without saying, because it had to be. They were infected by their own version of an all-American victory culture, blinded by a sense of this country’s obvious destiny: to be the most exceptional and exceptionally triumphant nation on this planet.

As it happened, it was far more difficult for grunts on the ground to deny the reality of what was happening — that they were fighting and dying in a senseless war. As a result, especially after the shock of the enemy’s Tet Offensive early in 1968, escalating protests within the military (and among veterans at home) together with massive antiwar demonstrations finally helped put the brakes on that war. Not before, however, more than 58,000 American troops died, along with millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.

In the end, the war in Indochina was arguably too costly, messy, and futile to continue. But never underestimate the military-industrial complex, especially when it comes to editing or denying reality, while being eternally over-funded for that very reality. It’s a trait the complex has shared with politicians of both parties. Don’t forget, for instance, the way President Ronald Reagan reedited that disastrous conflict into a “noble cause” in the 1980s. And give him credit! That was no small thing to sell to an American public that had already lived through such a war. By the way, tell me something about that Reaganesque moment doesn’t sound vaguely familiar almost four decades later when our very own “wartime president” long ago declared victory in the “war” on Covid-19, even as the death toll from that virus approaches 150,000 in the homeland.

In the meantime, the military-industrial complex has mastered the long con of the no-win forever war in a genuinely impressive fashion. Consider the war in Afghanistan. In 2021 it will enter its third decade without an end in sight. Even when President Trump makes noises about withdrawing troops from that country, Congress approves an amendment to another massive, record-setting military budget with broad bipartisan support that effectively obstructs any efforts to do so (while the Pentagon continues to bargain Trump down on the subject).

The Vietnam War, which was destroying the U.S. military, finally ended in an ignominious withdrawal. Almost two decades later, after the 2001 invasion, the war in Afghanistan can now be — the dream of the Vietnam era — fought in a “limited” fashion, at least from the point of view of Congress, the Pentagon, and most Americans (who ignore it), even if not the Afghans. The number of American troops being killed is, at this point, acceptably low, almost imperceptible in fact (even if not to Americans who have lost loved ones over there).

More and more, the U.S. military is relying on air power, unmanned drones, mercenaries, local militias, paramilitaries, and private contractors. Minimizing American casualties is an effective way of minimizing negative media coverage here; so, too, are efforts by the Trump administration to classify nearly everything related to that war while denying or downplaying “collateral damage” — that is, dead civilians — from it.

Their efforts boil down to a harsh truth: America just plain lies about its forever wars, so that it can keep on killing in lands far from home.

When we as Americans refuse to take in the destruction we cause, we come to passively accept the belief system of the ruling class that what’s still bizarrely called “defense” is a “must have” and that we collectively must spend significantly more than a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and a sprawling network of intelligence agencies, all justified as necessary defenders of America’s freedom. Rarely does the public put much thought into the dangers inherent in a sprawling “defense” network that increasingly invades and dominates our lives.

Meanwhile, it’s clear that low-cost wars, at least in terms of U.S. troops killed and wounded in action, can essentially be prolonged indefinitely, even when they never result in anything faintly like victory or fulfill any faintly useful American goal. The Afghan War remains the case in point. “Progress” is a concept that only ever fits the enemy — the Taliban continues to gain ground — yet, in these years, figures like retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus have continued to call for a “generational” commitment of troops and resources there, akin to U.S. support for South Korea.

Who says the Pentagon leadership learned nothing from Vietnam? They learned how to wage open-ended wars basically forever, which has proved useful indeed when it comes to justifying and sustaining epic military budgets and the political authority that goes with them. But here’s the thing: in a democracy, if you wage war long, you wage it wrong. Athens and the historian Thucydides learned this the hard way in the struggle against Sparta more than two millennia ago. Why do we insist on forgetting such an obvious lesson?

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”

World War II was arguably the last war Americans truly had to fight. My Uncle Freddie was in the Army and stationed at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked on December 7, 1941. The country then came together and won a global conflict (with lots of help) in 44 months, emerging as the planetary superpower to boot. Now, that superpower is very much on the wane, as Donald Trump recognized in running successfully as a declinist candidate for president in 2016. (Make America Great Again!) And yet, though he ran against this country’s forever wars and is now president, we’re approaching the third decade of a war on terror that has yielded little, spread radical Islamic terror outfits across an expanse of the planet, and still seemingly has no end.

“Great nations do not fight endless wars,” Trump himself claimed only last year. Yet that’s exactly what this country has been doing, regardless of which party ruled the roost in Washington. And here’s where, to give him credit, Trump actually had a certain insight. America is no longer great precisely because of the endless wars we wage and all the largely hidden but associated costs that go with them, including the recently much publicized militarization of the police here at home. Yet, in promising to make America great again, President Trump has failed to end those wars, even as he’s fed the military-industrial complex with even greater piles of cash.

There’s a twisted logic to all this. As the leading purveyor of violence and terror, with its leaders committed to fighting Islamic terrorism across the planet until the phenomenon is vanquished, the U.S. inevitably becomes its own opponent, conducting a perpetual war on itself. Of course, in the process, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Somalis, and Yemenis, among other peoples on this embattled planet of ours, pay big time, but Americans pay, too. (Have you even noticed that high-speed railroad that’s unbuilt, that dam in increasing disrepair, those bridges that need fixing, while money continues to pour into the national security state?) As the cartoon possum Pogo once so classically said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Early in the Iraq War, General Petraeus asked a question that was relevant indeed: “Tell me how this [war] ends.” The answer, obvious to so many who had protested in the global streets over the invasion to come in 2003, was “not well.” Today, another answer should be obvious: never, if the Pentagon and America’s political and national security elite have anything to do with it. In thermodynamics class, I learned that a perpetual motion machine is impossible to create due to entropy. The Pentagon never took that in and has instead been hard at work proving that a perpetual military machine is possible… until, that is, the empire it feeds off of collapses and takes us with it.

America’s Military Complex as a Cytokine Storm

In the era of Covid-19, as cases and deaths from the pandemic continue to soar in America, it’s astonishing that military spending is also soaring to record levels despite a medical emergency and a major recession.

The reality is that, in the summer of 2020, America faces two deadly viruses. The first is Covid-19. With hard work and some luck, scientists may be able to mass-produce an effective vaccine for it, perhaps by as early as next spring. In the meantime, scientists do have a sense of how to control it, contain it, even neutralize it, as countries from South Korea and New Zealand to Denmark have shown, even if some Americans, encouraged by our president, insist on throwing all caution to the winds in the name of living free. The second virus, however, could prove even more difficult to control, contain, and neutralize: forever war, a pandemic that U.S. military forces, with their global strike missions, continue to spread across the globe.

Sadly, it’s a reasonable bet that in the long run, even with Donald Trump as president, America has a better chance of defeating Covid-19 than the virus of forever war. At least, the first is generally seen as a serious threat (even if not by a president blind to anything but his chances for reelection); the second is, however, still largely seen as evidence of our strength and exceptionalism. Indeed, Americans tend to imagine “our” military not as a dangerous virus but as a set of benevolent antibodies, defending us from global evildoers.

When it comes to America’s many wars, perhaps there’s something to be learned from the way certain people’s immune systems respond to Covid-19. In some cases, the virus sparks an exaggerated immune response that drives the body into a severe inflammatory state known as a cytokine storm. That “storm” can lead to multiple organ failure followed by death, yet it occurs in the cause of defending the body from a viral attack.

In a similar fashion, America’s exaggerated response to 19 hijackers on 9/11 and then to perceived threats around the globe, especially the nebulous threat of terror, has led to an analogous (if little noticed) cytokine storm in the American system. Military (and militarized police) antibodies have been sapping our resources, inflaming our body politic, and slowly strangling the vital organs of democracy. Left unchecked, this “storm” of inflammatory militarism will be the death of democracy in America.

To put this country right, what’s needed is not only an effective vaccine for Covid-19 but a way to control the “antibodies” produced by America’s forever wars abroad and, as the years have gone by, at home — and the ways they’ve attacked and inflamed the collective U.S. political, social, and economic body. Only when we find ways to vaccinate ourselves against the destructive violence of those wars, whether on foreign streets or our own, can we begin to heal as a democratic society.

To survive, the human body needs a healthy immune system, so when it goes haywire, becomes wildly inflamed, and ends up attacking and degrading our vital organs, we’re in trouble deep. It’s a reasonable guess that, in analogous terms, American democracy is already on a ventilator and beginning to feel the effects of multiple organ failure.

Unlike a human patient, doctors can’t put our democracy into a medically induced coma. But collectively we should be working to suppress our overactive immune system before it kills us. In other words, it’s truly time to defund that military machine of ours, as well as the militarized version of the police, and rethink how actual threats can be neutralized without turning every response into an endless war.

So many years later, it’s time to think the unthinkable. For the U.S. government that means — gasp! — peace. Such a peace would start with imperial retrenchment (bring our troops home!), much reduced military (and police) budgets, and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and any other place associated with that “generational” war on terror. The alternative is a cytokine storm that will, in the end, tear us apart from within.

 

COVID-19 and the CIA’s Biological Warfare on Cuba

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Maybe it was a plan that went horribly wrong, something they could no longer control. Was the Corona virus or COVID-19 spread intentionally? What if this virus was used against China as a weapon of choice to destabilize China’s economy and push back against China’s growing influence? We don’t know for sure, but it is possible. Investigations are ongoing. Nothing has not been confirmed. But what has been confirmed is what history has taught us given the facts on how the use of biological warfare for various purposes, against many peoples and nations has been happening for some time. One of the most well-known incidents of biological warfare occurred in 1763, the British Empire had planned and successfully managed to spread smallpox virus to the Native Americans during the Pontiac Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Chief Pontiac of the Ottowa launched an attack on Fort Detroit, a British military base. Other nations joined the rebellion including the Senecas, the Hurons, Delawares, and Miamis. As the war raged, an Indian delegation asked the British to surrender, but they refused, however, the British offered gifts including food, alcohol and material items that included two blankets and a handkerchief from people who had smallpox. Although the American Indians had experienced the disease in the past, the idea was to spread the disease among the Native American populations in an attempt to push back the rebellion or to defeat it once and for all. Another example of biological warfare was when Imperial Japan before and during World War II had a bio-weapons program that managed to drop numerous bombs on a number of Chinese cities from airplanes killing an estimated 580,000 Chinese people with bombs that were made of infected fleas, some even contained cholera and shigella during the Sino-Japanese war between the 1930′s and 1940′s.

In 1981, the CIA with help from U.S. military had launched an operation against Cuba by unleashing a strain of Dengue Fever also known as “hemorrhagic fever’ effecting more than 273,000 people killing 158 including 101 children. On September 6, 1981, The New York Times reported on Fidel Castro’s comments regarding the U.S. government in particularly, blaming the CIA for the outbreak when he said that ”we urge the United States Government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the C.I.A. will or will not be authorized again- or has already been authorized – to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals and our people.” The report said that the “epidemic of dengue fever that has made 340,000 people ill and has killed about 150″ but the State Department under-then President Ronald Reagan stated that “Mr. Castro’s charges of possible United States involvement in the epidemic were ”totally without foundation.” The State department quickly blamed the Castro’s revolution as a failure:

The Cuban Government has always tried to blame the United States for its failures and its internal problems,” the department said. ”The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces like the United States than to admit those failures

Dr, Ronald St. John, chief of communicable diseases for the Pan American Health Organization was interviewed by the New York Times said that “for the first time, so-called dengue-2 spread to Cuba.” Dr. St. John claimed that it is common in Southeast Asia and that it produces “the same symptoms as the other three” and that ”if you get a wave of dengue-1, dengue-3 or dengue-4 and then another wave of type 2, this is a bad combination.” Dengue-2 causes you too loose body fluids causing shocks that can lead to eventually death. Convenient for the CIA who saw it as an opportunity to cause panic on Cuba which is located in one of the most hot and humid regions in the world. However, The New York Times managed to downplay Cuba’s accusation’s by ending the story by blaming the spread of the disease on returning Cuban troops from Africa and other people from other parts of the Caribbean who might have brought Dengue fever into Cuba:

Some State Department officials believe the introduction of dengue-2 into Cuba is a result of the return to Cuba of troops who had been stationed in Angola or elsewhere in Africa, where the strain is found. But Dr. St. John said dengue-2 had been found in other parts of the Caribbean and might have been carried to Cuba from there or elsewhere overseas

Reports suggested that Cuba had a very small number of cases in 1944, and again in 1977. The 1981 outbreak was blamed on covert flyover operations conducted by the CIA with military owned airplanes, you know, the same airplanes that were most probably used against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to transport weapons and other materials to the Contras around the same time. Since the 20th century, the U.S. has been the leader in developing various biological and chemical weapons through the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories based at Fort Detrick, Maryland since the late 1940′s, around the start of the Cold War. The U.S. biological warfare program that supposedly ended in 1969 developed a handful of biological weapons ready for use including anthrax, Q-fever and botulism and conducted research in hopes of weaponizing diseases including smallpox, Hantavirus, Lassa fever, yellow fever, typhus, dengue fever and the bird flu among them. An article from August 6, 2019 on Fort Detrick from the UK’s ‘The Independent’ titled ‘Research into deadly viruses and biological weapons at US army lab shut down over fears they could escape’ last August. Ironically, Secretary of State and Neocon Mike Pompeo called it the “Wuhan virus” since they blame China for the outbreak, but it seems that the U.S. had its own problems when it comes to their own labs who conduct research with the most deadly viruses:

America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility. Fort Detrick, in Maryland, has been the epicentre of the US Army’s bioweapons research since the beginning of the Cold War. But last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the government’s public health body – stripped the base of its license to handle highly restricted “select agents”, which includes Ebola, smallpox and anthrax

The story was basically about the CDC who inspected Fort Detrick and found problems with new procedures used to decontaminate waste water. The article says that Fort Detrick continued its research for defensive purposes to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” although the U.S. declared that it abandoned their biological weapons program since 1969:

Although the United States officially abandoned its biological weapons programme in 1969, Fort Detrick has continued defensive research into deadly pathogens on the list of “select agents”, including the Ebola virus, the organisms that cause the plague, and the highly toxic poison ricin. The army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, says its primary mission today is to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” but its scientists also investigate outbreaks of disease among civilians and other threats to public health. In recent years it has been involved in testing possible vaccines for Ebola, after several epidemics of the deadly virus in Africa 

Sooner or later, the truth will come out. I believe that the U.S. government knows how COVID-19 began and where it was going. The U.S. government and major corporate arms manufacturers and the rest of the Military-Industrial Complex is no stranger to biological weapons adding to their arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons at their disposal which makes them, much more dangerous. The truth about COVID-19 will eventually come out. In the meantime, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a war against Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela is in the works and a coming economic crisis with an election coming this November seems like 2020 will be the year of a perfect storm.

The War in Questions

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Making Sense of the Age of Carnage

By Tom Engelhardt

Source: TomDispatch.com

My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions?

Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part of the planet and I’d like to know, for instance, who’s been fired for them? Who’s been impeached? Who’s even paying attention?

I mean, if another great power had been so fruitlessly fighting a largely undeclared set of conflicts under the label of “the war on terror” for so long, if it had wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars with no end in sight and next to no one in that land was spending much time debating or discussing the matter, what would you think? If nothing else, you’d have a few questions about that, right?

Well, so many years later, I do have a few that continue to haunt me, even if I see them asked practically nowhere and, to my frustration, can’t really answer them myself, not to my satisfaction anyway. In fact, since 2001 — with the exception of the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq when America’s streets suddenly filled with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators asking a range of questions (“How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” was a typical protest sign of that moment) — our never-ending wars have seldom been questioned in this country. So think of what follows not as my thoughts on the war in question but on the war in questions.

The Age of Carnage

In October 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush launched a bombing campaign not just against al-Qaeda, a relatively small group partially holed up in Afghanistan, but the Taliban, an Islamist outfit that controlled much of the country. It was a radical decision not just to target the modest-sized organization whose 19 hijackers, most of them Saudis, had taken out almost 3,000 Americans with a borrowed “air force” of commercial jets, but in the phrase of the moment to “liberate” Afghanistan. These days, who even remembers that, by then, Washington had already fought a CIA-directed, Saudi-backed (and partially financed) war against the Soviet Union in that country for a full decade (1979-1989). To take on the Red Army then, Washington funded, armed, and supported extremist Islamist groups, some of which would still be fighting in Afghanistan (against us) in the twenty-first century.

In the context of that all-American war, a rich young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, would, of course, form al-Qaeda, or “the base.” In 1989, Washington watched as the mighty Red Army limped out of Afghanistan, the “bleeding wound” as its leader then called it. (Afghanistan wasn’t known as “the graveyard of empires” for nothing.) In less than two years, that second great power of the Cold War era would implode, an event that would be considered history’s ultimate victory by many in Washington. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who first committed the U.S. to its Afghan Wars, would, as last century ended, sum things up this way: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Afghanistan itself would be left in ruins as Washington turned its attention elsewhere, while various local warlords fought it out and, in response, the extremist Taliban rose to power.

Now, let me jump ahead a few years. In 2019, U.S. air power expended more munitions (bombs and missiles) on that country than at any time since figures began to be kept in 2006. Despite that, during the last months of 2019, the Taliban (and other militant groups) launched more attacks on U.S.-and-NATO-trained-and-financed Afghan security forces than at any time since 2010 when (again) records began to be kept. And it tells you something about our American world that, though you could have found both those stories in the news if you were looking carefully, neither was considered worthy of major coverage, front-page headlines, or real attention. All these years later, it won’t surprise you to know that such ho-hum reporting is just par for the course. And when it comes to either of those two on-the-record realities, you certainly would be hard-pressed to find a serious editorial expression of outrage or much of anything else about them in the media.

At 18-plus years or, if you prefer to combine Washington’s two Afghan wars, 28-plus years, we’re talking about the longest American war in history. The Civil War lasted four years. The American part of World War II, another four. The Korean War less than four (though it never officially ended). The Vietnam War, from the moment the first significant contingent of U.S. advisors arrived, 14, and from the moment the first major U.S. troop contingents arrived, perhaps a decade. In the Trump era, as those air strikes rise, there has been a great deal of talk about possible “peace” and an American withdrawal from that country.  Peace, however, has now seemingly come to be defined in Washington as a reduction of American forces from approximately 12,000 to about 8,500 (and that’s without counting either private military contractors or CIA personnel there).

Meanwhile, of course, the war on terror that began in Afghanistan now stretches from the Philippines across the Greater Middle East and deep into the heart of Africa. Worse yet, it still threatens to expand into a war of some sort with Iran — and that, mind you, is under the ministrations of an officially “antiwar” president who has nonetheless upped American military personnel in the Middle East to record levels in recent years.

Of course, this is a story that you undoubtedly know fairly well. Who, in a sense, doesn’t? But it’s also a story that, so many years and so much — to use a word once-favored by our president — “carnage” later, should raise an endless series of disturbing and unnerving questions here. And that it doesn’t, should raise questions in itself, shouldn’t it?

Still, in a country where opposition to endless war seems constantly to falter or fade out amid a media universe in which Donald Trump’s latest tweet can top any war news, it seems potentially useful to raise some of those questions — at least the ones that occur to me — and perhaps for you to do the same. Isn’t it time, after all, for Americans to ask a few questions about war, American-style, in what might be thought of as the post-9/11 age of carnage?

In any case, here are six of mine to which, as I said, I don’t really have the answers. Maybe you do.

Here goes:

  1. When the Bush administration launched that invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 and followed it up with an invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, did we, in some curious fashion, really invade and occupy ourselves? Of course, in these years, across the Greater Middle East and Africa, the U.S. played a remarkable role in creating chaos in country after country, leading to failed states, displaced people in staggering numbers, economic disarray, and the spread of terror groups. But the question is: Did the self-proclaimed most exceptional and indispensable nation on the planet do a version of the same thing to itself in the process? After all, by 2016, the disarray in this country was striking enough and had spread far enough, amid historic economic inequality, social division, partisan divides, and growing anger, that Americans elected as president (if not quite by a majority) a man who had run not on American greatness but on American decline. He promised to make this country great again. (His declinist credentials were not much noted at the time, except among the heartland Americans who voted for him.) So, ask yourself: Would President Donald Trump have been possible if the Bush administration had simply gone after al-Qaeda on September 12, 2001, and left it at that? Since January 2017, under the tutelage of that “very stable genius,” the U.S. political (and possibly global economic) system has, of course, begun to crack open. Is there any connection to those forever wars?
  2. Has there ever been a truly great power in history, still at or near the height of its militarily prowess, that couldn’t win a war? Sure, great imperial powers from the Romans to the Chinese to the British sometimes didn’t win specific wars despite their seeming military dominance, but not a single one? Could that be historically unprecedented and, if so, what does it tell us about our moment? How has the country proclaimed by its leaders to have the finest fighting force the world has ever known won nothing in more than 18 years of unceasing global battle?
  3. How and why did the “hearts and minds” factor move from the nationalist left in the twentieth century to the Islamist right in the twenty-first? The anti-colonial struggles against imperial powers that culminated in America’s first great losing war in Vietnam (think of Korea as kind of a tie) were invariably fought by leftist and communist groups. And whatever the military force arrayed against them, they regularly captured — in that classic Vietnam-era phrase — “the hearts and minds” of what were then called “Third World” peoples and repeatedly outlasted far better armed powers, including, in the case of Vietnam, the United States. In a word, they had the moxie in such conflicts and it didn’t matter that, by the most obvious measures of military power, they were at a vast disadvantage. In the twenty-first century, similar wars are still being fought in a remarkably comparable fashion, Afghanistan being the most obvious.  Again, the weaponry, the money, everything that might seem to pass for the works has been the property of Washington and yet that ability to win local “hearts and minds” has remained in the hands of the rebels. But what I wonder about is how exactly that moxie passed from the nationalist left to the extremist religious right in this century and what exactly was our role, intended or not, in all this?
  4. When it comes to preparations for war, why can’t we ever stop? After all, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended in 1991, the United States essentially had no enemies left on the planet. Yet Washington continued essentially an arms race of one with a finish line so distant — the bomber of 2018, Earth-spanning weapons systems, and weaponry for the heavens of perhaps 2050 — as to imply eternity. The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex surrounding it, including mega-arms manufacturers, advanced weapons labs, university science centers, and the official or semi-official think tanks that churned out strategies for future military domination, went right on without an enemy in sight. In fact, in late 2002, preparing for his coming invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush had to cook up an “axis of evil” — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, two of which were mortal enemies and the third unrelated in any significant way to either of them — as a justification for what was to come, militarily speaking. Almost 20 years later, investing as much in its military as the next seven countries combined, updating and upgrading its nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion in the coming decades (and having just deployed a new “low-yield” nuclear weapon), and still investing staggering sums in its planes, tanks, aircraft carriers, and the like, the U.S. military now seems intent (without leaving its forever wars) on returning to the era of the Cold War as well. Face-offs against Russia and China are now the military order of the day in what seems like a déjà-vu-all-over-again situation. I’m just curious, but isn’t it ever all over?
  5.  How can Washington’s war system and the military-industrial complex across the country continue to turn failure in war into success and endless dollars at home? Honestly, the one thing in America that clearly works right now is the U.S. military (putting aside those wars abroad). We may no longer invest in domestic infrastructure, but in that military and the giant corporate weapons makers that go with it? You bet! They are the true success stories of the twenty-first century if you’re talking about dollars invested, weaponry bought, and revolving doors greased. On the face of it, failure is the new success and few in this country seem to blink when it comes to any of that. How come?
  6. Why doesn’t the reality of those wars of ours ever really seem to sink in here?  This, to my mind, is at least partially a question about media coverage. Yes, every now and then (as with the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers last December), America’s forever wars briefly break through and get some attention. And yes, if you’re a war-coverage news jockey, you can find plenty of daily reports on aspects of our wars in the media. But isn’t it surprising how much of that coverage is essentially a kind of background hum, like Muzak in an elevator? Unless the president personally decides to drone assassinate an Iranian major general and prospective future leader of that country, our wars simply drone on, barely attended to (unless, of course, you happen to be in the U.S. military or a military spouse or child). Eighteen years of failed wars and so many trillions of dollars later, wouldn’t you have expected something else?

So those are my six questions, the most obvious things that puzzle me about what may be the strangest aspect of this American world of ours, those never-ending wars and the system that goes with them. To begin to answer them, however, would mean beginning to think about ourselves and this country in a different way.

Perhaps much of this would only make sense if we were to start imagining ourselves or at least much of the leadership crew, that infamous “Blob,” in Washington, as so many war addicts. War — the failing variety — is evidently their drug of choice and not even our “antiwar” president can get off it. Think of forever war, then, as the opioid not of the masses but of the ruling classes.

 

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.