I have never been overly troubled by the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. To the degree it bothered me at all, it was based on the lack of transparency over how it was legally justified and how the government viewed its constraints in taking out an American citizen in a foreign land. I’m still not satisfied that the federal government has come up with an adequate process for such uncommon situations.
However, the bigger scandal was always the targeted killing of al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, two weeks later. The president may have been surprised and upset when he found out about Abdulrahman’s death, but that doesn’t mean that anyone was ever held accountable for his death. And Robert Gibbs didn’t cover himself in glory with his spin:
“I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children,” Gibbs told reporters after a 2012 presidential debate. “I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”
That was a garbled way of saying something true but still obnoxiously dismissive. None of us have any control over how responsible our fathers are. However, if you know your father is on America’s Most Wanted list, you might want to keep your distance from him.
The lack of public contrition from the White House made it painful to read Abdulrahman’s grandfather’s piece in the New York Times:
Abdulrahman was born in Denver. He lived in America until he was 7, then came to live with me in Yemen. He was a typical teenager — he watched “The Simpsons,” listened to Snoop Dogg, read “Harry Potter” and had a Facebook page with many friends. He had a mop of curly hair, glasses like me and a wide, goofy smile.
His death may have been a simple mistake. It may have been the result of a rogue operator. But proper amends were never made. His killing and how the administration reacted to his killing remain one of the darkest blots on this president’s record.
Drone Warfare = Terrorism.
I’m fairly sure if a government in the Middle East was operating Drones over American airspace and killing Americans associated with the US Military, we’d label it terrorism. But, I’m an unserious radical who is safely ignored by most.
That said, I’ve read that it wasn’t a targeted killing of the son.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-killed-my-grandson.html?_r=0
I never really got the outrage of an American citizen being killed by the government since technically speaking we offer Constitutional protections to anyone the government considers a criminal, and we clearly don’t do that with the rest of the human beings we disappear with our flying death robots.
That’s a lazy conflation.
While it is obviously frightening to have robotic killing machines flying over your country, the tactic of terrorism is aimed at killing indiscriminately in order to discredit a governmental system that cannot protect its citizenry and force it to change policies.
Drone strikes could serve that purpose, but they don’t. Drone strikes serve in the stead of 500 lbs bombs which really are indiscriminate.
When people set off car bombs outside mosques or in marketplaces in Baghdad, they don’t give a shit who they kill beyond a vague expectation that the victims will be of one sect or another. Their purpose is either to discredit the government or to exact revenge. That’s terrorism, or the cycle of violence that terrorism begets.
Drone strikes, on the other hand, are deliberately intended to give a shit about who they kill, and to limit to the greatest extent possible the killing of unintended targets.
You can argue that drone strikes instill terror in people who don’t in any way deserve to feel that emotion, and you can argue that they still kill a lot of innocent people, but you can’t fail to distinguish between the intent of a car bomber and a drone pilot.
That sounds defensible, but in reality wedding parties and first responders are often the victims of drone strikes.
I think Obama decided early on to ratchet up drone strikes because it was less costly in terms of lives (American) and resources and less risky overall. The administration is comfortable with the level of collateral damage from drone strikes. I wish they would do a deeper analysis of the impact of drones strikes rather than focusing on increasing the kill count.
According to the “insider” tales in several books during the first term, the military presented him with these options: special ops capture and render to Guantanamo, drone killing even over home country objection legitimized by the Bush Doctrine, diplomacy with home country, doing nothing. The neo-cons were out to get him to share complicity in war crimes from the beginning. Now, he still has Guantanamo, is expanding drone strikes, has a flimsy legal argument based on a highly redacted memo to justify the actions publicly, the home countries have increased political problems because of it, and the neo-con “we make history, the rest of you respond” attitude has created a 13-year-old clusterf*ck in the Middle East.
Less costly in terms of lives often means less intelligent because there is not a sane human being there to say, wait a minute that bunch are not the enemy.
And over and over again, the war game obscures the fact that war is politics by other means and killing your friends makes more enemies. (The very trap asymmetric tactics intend to create, and the US rushes into the sucker moves in the politics with its bravado, bluster and veneer of toughness.)
Disagree. What are drone strikes except a means to get the citizens of those countries to get their leaders to change policies, or even themselves support other means to accomplish their goals. While drone strikes are not as indiscriminate as boning campaigns, or even randomly suicide bombing a town square, methodologically they are hoping for the same result: changes in policy, through fear, murder, and intimidation.
Nelson Mandela was by all means a terrorist. He planned attacks, and planned them with as few civilian casualties as possible (attacking only at night for example). I believe his actions were moral, but by the US’s standard (at the time) he was an immoral terrorist who should be opposed.
Although even if I believe his struggle and refusal to renounce violence to be moral, I myself would be incapable of doing the same things myself. As time goes on, the more pacifist I become.
I think Mandela was much closer in spirit to satyagraha than is commonly understood. “Terrorist” operations under his control before he went to prison were conducted so as not to harm anybody. He made a very serious study of Gandhi and suspended the armed struggle just months after his release.
you are just being argumentative. I just said that drone strikes are not intended to influence policy but to eliminate bad guys with as little cost and collateral damage as possible. Pakistan and Yemen have sanctioned our drone strikes and ever offered us drone bases in their countries. You must admit these facts before you can be taken seriously on this subject.
Really? Voluntarily? Publicly? Because their public statements seek to limit US drone strikes, especially after strikes with poor intelligence information result in large numbers of civilian casualties.
To my knowledge, the only country that actually as a US drone base is Saudi Arabia. It is assumed that all of the drone missions in Yemen are launched from there with piloting from the US.
Before the widespread use of drones, aircraft launched cruise missiles were used for assassinations of targets in Pakistan.
The actual policy positions on drones of Pakistan and Yemen actually are not known to the US or local public. The US military claims that our partners have authorized their use. The US military also is not sensitive to how destabilizing their use can be to those partners.
Please don’t use the infantile term “bad guys” that Bush and Cheney popularized. We are talking about reality, not a Saturday morning cartoon. If you substitute “terrorists” or “enemies” in that sentence it reads much better.
Pakistan and Yemen, such bulwarks of Democracy.
Yes!!! Drones contradict our sentimental beliefs about how war ought to be conducted, according to which you shouldn’t shoot unless you are at direct physical risk yourself and your bullet should only hit some random person unrelated to your intentions; they are ugly and unromantic, but they are designed to reduce casualties and collateral casualties in particular. General Grant would have loved them.
And General Sherman would have used them widely.
Booman…please. Take this personally.
So…imagine that in your nice, apparently semi-rural area in Pennsylvania there was some kind of war going on. Say a war of attrition between a local guerrilla force and something from far away that doesn’t much like indigenous military forces that oppose their strategic goals…say Washington DC, for example. It could happen. Bet on it. Like most civilians, you and your family simply want to survive this war. There hasn’t been much shooting in your area because it is under the protection of the indigenous forces and the outsiders are so involved in trying to keep the propped-up government in power…themselves, in this case… while under broad attack that they have not penetrated your area to any great degree with troops on the ground. An occasional skirmish or assassination team is all you’ve seen. And life goes on.
But suddenly things change. Drone strikes begin, supposedly “surgical” in nature, strikes meant to take out indigenous leaders and cadres. Only…sometimes you hear about mistakes. “Collateral damage,” they say. “Too bad. We didn’t mean to kill that family of twelve.”
You hear about this a number of times over the span of a few months. And…one of the main indigenous leaders lives in the town right next to yours. In the woods, just like you. And his house has a similar looking roof, too.
UH oh!!!
Is that terror that you are feeling? Terror for your family’s safety and survival? Terror that you do not have the resources to move to a safer place? You bet your mortal ass it is.
Are you parsing “intent” here? Hell no!!! Would it make any difference whatsoever to you whether a drone hit took out your child on purpose or by “accident?” Of course not. And this is exactly what the so-called mistakes of occupying forces are meant to do. It’s built right into the war program. At the highest levels of war planning, “collateral damage” is just tech-speak for “Scare the local wogs half to death and they’ll turn against their local forces.” “Grab ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow” was a Vietnam-era version of the same thing. They didn’t have drones, so they had to use carpet bombing and people like Lt. Calley. Messier, but the same tactical approach.
Only…this tactical approach simply doesn’t work, Booman!!!
The V2 rockets didn’t work for Hitler, S.E. Asia terror didn’t work for the U.S. and this shit isn’t going to work either. For every terror-stricken civilian this approach produces multiple determined enemies, and eventually the sheer mass of enmity turns the tide against the terrorists. “Blowback,” they call it. That is what we are seeing in the Islamic world, Booman, and we are going to see more and more of it until we take our nasty, murderous asses out of the killing fields and try to civilize ourselves at home.
I’ve got some more news for you, sir.
The American people are beginning to see the light. This time around? In 2016? It is quite possible that the full force of the media may not be able to stem the rising tide of opposition to economic imperialist, blood for oil/blood for power war.
You recently posted an apology for the awful Supreme Court decision in 2000 that put Bush II in the Puppet Seat and anointed Cheney as his chief puppeteer.
I call bullshit!!! It wasn’t “respect for the Supreme Court” that led the American people down that poison ivy-infested path, it was the weight of the media hustle, a hustle that came down hard on the side of PermaGov fix that was in place. Fat, mealy-mouthed, faux-tech intellechul Al Gore vs. Hud.
Hud wuz s’pose to win outright. You know…like them movie heroes in the westerns? The polls started to say that he might not, so some vote-jiggering was put into effect in Ohio and Florida. It damned near didn’t work, so the Supremes were trotted out in their best stage gear and instructed to quell the masses, just like a cooler in the Las Vegas movies. They did…with the help of the PermaGov media of course…and here we jolly well are now, aren’t we? A broken system. Nice work, guys. Maybe we all shoulda marched on Washington, although I can’t imagine Gore would have been much better that Butch II when you get right down to it. Just another road to the same .01%-owned hell.
Better luck next time, America.
Better luck next time.
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
you endlessly complicate things.
There are two issues.
First, the fact that U.S. engages in any kind of combat at all, whether it be in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen or elsewhere.
Second, the use of drones vs. conventional weaponry.
When you conflate the two issues, you can’t talk intelligently about drones.
In your example, I would be frightened if drones were operating where I live and I would be especially frightened if I had good cause to believe I might be mistaken for a bad guy.
But that pales in comparison to how I would feel if I had lived in Dresden or Tokyo or London during the war.
If you want to make the case that we ought not be in Pakistan or Yemen or Afghanistan, that will get a sympathetic ear from me. If you want to argue that the blowback is worse than the threat, we can debate that.
But to treat drones as the instrument of terror is just wrong. Drones are much less terrifying than carpet bombing or invasions of ground troops. Their use is intended specifically to limit the damage to innocent people and their property. It’s the fact that we are engaged at all that incites terror, not the drones. Any alternative to drones would be immeasurably worse.
But you have ignored the law because you didn’t give a shit about al-Awalaki. (The method of the killing/murder is irrelevant.) You have accepted that the POTUS can secretly and informally indict, convict, impose the death penalty, and execute an American.
Law is foundational and to ignore it when it’s inconvenient to an outcome that the public and/or government officials prefer is barbaric.
I’ve accepted that being in a leadership role in an organization that is actively trying to bring down civilian aircraft places you squarely in the the Authorization to Use Military Force against the people who brought down civilian aircraft.
I have written more than once about my dissatisfaction with the process the administration went through to arrive at this decision, but the decision itself I have no problem with.
Let me remind you of the context:
These were very sophisticated bombs that would have killed a couple of planeloads of civilians if we had not gotten intelligence that they existed and known where to look for them.
The people responsible for this plot urgently needed to be disrupted.
A “belief” isn’t proof and isn’t good enough. So That’s Why They Kept the Drone Kill Memo Secret. That a huge number of Americans believed that Saddam possessed WMD didn’t make it so.
There were highly suggestive and possibly damning evidence of al-Awalki’s contacts with 9/11 terrorists. That was investigated thoroughly by US officials and they couldn’t find any there there. By the standards you support today, he should have been assassinated back then because he could have been involved even if there’s insufficient evidence to indict him in a US court that can when it wants to indict a ham sandwich.
And this Newly Released Assassination Memo Reveals Unsound Legal Reasoning to Kill an American.
John Yoo type OLC opinions are not more acceptable under a Democratic administration than a Republican administration for those not blinded by partisanship.
Not to be overlooked or minimized, like Jay Bybee, Yoo’s boss, under the GWB administration who was rewarded with a lifetime judicial appointment, David Barron is now a federal judge.
“Conflate?”
More bullshit.
You have no “drone problem”…or collateral damage problem of any kind…if the U.S. is not engaged in combat. And “Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen or elsewhere?”
How about the other 130+ countries?
Y’see…it’s not some nitpicking little “drones are bad” thing that I am saying here.
It is murder that is wrong, whether done by a sniper, a drone, up close and wet or however else these forces do their dirty work. And it is wrong on a very high moral plane, the plane of efficiency and effectiveness. If all of this killing simply leads to more blowback aimed at the killers, why do it?
And then you follow up with the grand bombast:
Look, Booman…terror is terror. The idea that the use of drones “is intended specifically to limit the damage to innocent people and their property” doers not l.
essen the terror for those under siege. “Any alternative to drones would be immeasurably worse.” <
Any alternative?
Lift the damned seige!!! Then they can use the drones to deliver pizzas.
Duh!!!
You can parse until the cows come home about kinder, gentler wars.
For the dead, the wounded, the displaced and their families?
The terror maintains.
As
whoeverOsama bin Ladenreally waswrote:Over and out.
AG
See 6/23/14 Empty Wheel post: The CIA’s [redacted] Operations
18 USC 1119 is the operative law. And under it the killing of an American by an American on foreign soil is murder.
Should note that if the GOP and RWNJ were serious about impeaching Obama, this is where they’d go. While anything is possible, doubt they will.
If they were interested in getting more than the small rump of what’s left of their party behind them, you’re right. No one can justify the summary execution of a 16 year old. Perhaps it was a mistake. That’s what I suspect. But we should know a lot more about what happened and why.
So it’s not murder if you kill a foreigner on foreign soil? I’ve never understood why anybody not a lawyer would want to make such a fetish of this statute. Morally, it doesn’t make any sense. The only reason for appealing to it (for attorneys Greenwald or Wheeler) is to suggest that Obama is significantly worse than other presidents, which is absurd.
War is immoral. War against people who are not directly threatening you but menacing your armies in a place where they should’t have been in the first place is worse. It doesn’t seem that Obama can understand this, but then nobody who understands it could be president. But the question of what passport the victim is holding is just not relevant.
This this this. This “lawyer” bullshit is just that: bullshit. I’ve said so many times on this blog. This obsession with what is legal and what is not, as if that makes a damn difference to those in power.
It’s still murder. But that situation would fall within the legal jurisdiction of the foreign soil and be adjudicated there. Sets a clear line for the limits/protections of the long arm of US law for US perps and victims when abroad. IOW, for American on American killing it’s as if the crime were committed in the US. For the victim, the perp doesn’t get away because of disinterest, etc. of the foreign legal system. For the perp, the trial will be held in English in a US court and gets all the rights afforded suspects under US law. It also likely facilitates extradition of the suspect.
No protection for Americans abroad that kill foreigners as Raymond Allen Davis learned. Davis is not subject to any murder charge in the US and therefore, is free.
Also no US legal protection for Americans abroad that are the victims of a foreign national.
Additional notation, Obama’s efforts to negotiate an extension for US troops in Iraq broke down on the issue of jurisdiction for crimes against Iraqi citizens committed by US military personnel in Iraq. Maliki’s position was if the US stays, Iraq has legal jurisdiction for criminal acts. Obama said, no way.
But his father was already dead. Anwar al-Awlaki was killed September 30th, 2011. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed October 14th, 2011.
I’m not really sure what his father has to do with anything. From what I gather of what Gibbs was saying is that other people were targeted, and he happened to be there at the time. Really, I don’t understand why it was so hard to say that than what Gibbs actually ended up saying.
It seems to be about “attainder of the blood”. When you start ripping up the Constitution why stop with one clause? Witness Bush’s playing card “hit list” targeting all of the Hussein family.
Fifth Amendment:
We are in a state of endless “war on terror”, so all of the mumbo-jumbo exception about militia, land or naval forces, and war gets invoked publicly to exclude large classes of people from the protection of the Fifth Amendment.
Apparently this did not apply because Awlaki Sr. was killed for a pre-crime, not a crime. Or at least that is what “imminent danger to the US” communicates. But the government has never said specifically what that imminent danger was or how imminent it was. In a democracy, when the government kills someone, it has to show its work; otherwise it is very easy to begin arbitrary killings based on things other than criminality or imminent danger.
The word “imminent” is being used in these opinions as a generalized “get out of jail free” card without actual transparency or public information.
The fact of the matter is that the evidence against Awlaki other than he contributed to or published Inspire magazine has not been made public. Nor has the criteria for the assassination of American citizens on the orders of the President been made public and subject to legal scrutiny.
And in the memo released today there was too much reliance and citation of the Cambodian bombing campaign, Iran-Contra and other constitutionally questionable precedents to figure out what exactly the Executive’s case was.
And it is deeply troubling that too many Democrats and progressives make excuses and are just fine with this assumption of arbitrary and unchecked executive power. Precedents linger and become the basis for seizure of additional executive power (the message of citing the precedents of Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia and Reagan’s Iran-Contra subversion of a Congressional prohibition). When the powers of the commander-in-chief become absolute and when the state of war becomes endless, democracy is dead and we are in deep trouble.
We are very close to that point today. Or maybe we passed that point when the anthrax-laced letters to Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle contaminated the Congressional postal office.
The argument presented in the unredacted part of the memo about al-Awlaki in principle could justify the assassination of someone like Wayne LaPierre. Why the Republicans are silent on this issue is amazing. Their fetish for toughness and their bigotry of Moslems overwhelms their sense of Constitutional law, I guess.
We could have revoked the AUMF, but now with the “ISIS threat” raise your hands if you think that’s got even a whiff of a chance of happening…
Anyone? Anyone?
Maybe I’m being too naive, but I thought there was a chance at its repeal; granted I didn’t think it would happen when I saw Rand “Don’t Drone a Starbucks customer” Paul with his nonsense bullshit of a “filibuster”. Always easier to do get up and play theater than propose legislation to revoke the authority, or even at the least redefining the AUMF to be narrow.
That chance has obviously been shot to shit.
At the very least, you should acknowledge the threat that we responded to.
I could address the threat we responded to if the administration would unredact that information that documents that threat in the case of Awlaki.
Where is the evidence that merits capital punishment. The administration steadfastly refuses to disclose it under the tired old cover-up of “sources and methods”. It’s rigged information and it sets the precedent for future administrations to arbitrarily murder people for undisclosed reasons.
It is a consequence of our failure to revisit the national security authorities from the Truman administration when the Cold War ended.
If Democrats are unwilling to return us from a garrison state to democracy, what worth are they? Continuing to use the label “Democrat” becomes a massive fraud.
Most of the threats that we face are the result of the ham-handed foreign policy we have pursued since the end of the Cold War, a foreign policy designed to maintain and enrich military contractors. US policy is to continue to stir the pot in Libya, to avoid a temporary tilt back to the Assad regime, to support Sisi and Netanyahu no matter what they do, and to allow Saudi Arabia to continue to export terrorism. That policy is what we are facing. Pulling all of that foreign military aid would be the first step in calming things down because it takes billions of dollars of arms sales out of the arms market.
The threat in Yemen has to do with regional issues that have not been settled from the integration of North Yemen and South Yemen (old British Aden.
The first step in this is to stop digging the hole in foreign policy and stop undermining civil liberties domestically.
And for the administration to hang out all of the dirty laundry of its predecessor administration and identify the chain of participants and authorizations of the continuation of those policies in the Obama administration.
Like with NSA and Guantanamo, the failure of this administration to come clean is a huge leadership failure and is rapidly sending Obama’s historical reputation into Nixon territory. John Kerry is looking like he never met a war he didn’t like until it started going badly for the US.
In six months, the administration has blown serious opportunities for peace to the point that disarming Syria of its chemical weapons is now anti-climactic. In my view, the reason for this is the persistence Republican neo-conservatives in positions of foreign policy influence and the echo chamber of the Clinton era neo-liberal aggressive internationalists. Neither can seize opportunities that arise that are outside of their particular plan of grand military strategies. What is absent is a sober assessment of where the world is in fact not a threat, where there are possibilities for moving to build trust, end to hostiilities and peaceful relationships that benefit ordinary people and not corporations.
Look around. Exactly how have all those drone strikes, including the one that killed Awlaki, made us safer? How have they resolved the conflicts in the the territories that we were “assisting”. The clusterfuck is metastasizing even as the administration doggedly pursues an exclusively military approach to issues because it is afraid of John McCain and Lindsay Graham’s TV appearances.
In the political rope-a-dope, this is the year that the knockout punch has to be landed if there is to actually be change. I don’t see it coming. I see cluelessness.
We might be at the tipping point in which the Sunni jihadists have their revolution like the one in Iran and there is now nothing to do about it in the short term because of the massive hole Bush-Cheney blew in US interests. What should our policy be then? At some point we have to have normal diplomatic relationships with any new regime. Are we going to be stupid like we have been with Cuba and Iran and perpetuate a 30-50-year inability to diplomatically negotiate issues? Are we going to have the persistent delusion that we can military remove them from power without understanding the political settlement that replaces them?
We lost of lot of Constitutional liberties after World War II because of McCarthyist fear and allegations of “not recognizing the threat of Communism”. Post Cold War histories show that this fearmongering was a tool of domestic politics for conservatives who wanted to undo the New Deal and for Wall Street internationalist Democrats and Republicans who wanted a strong way to control an empire. We squandered $12 trillion over 46 years on this nonsense and almost brought a strategic nuclear war in 1962. That is the threat that is out there with a world awash in arms, of which the US is one of the larger manufacturers.
The US continuing to thrash around trying to preserve a world empire that Bush-Cheney exposed as a hollow and stupid power is in fact the largest threat we face right now.
Continued Republican and Neo-Con Democratic power in Congress is our biggest risk going forward. Their power prevents sound foreign policy from happening. Their arrogance and grandstanding echoed through the Wall Street and right-wing media create an arrogant people who are intolerable to ordinary people in other countries.
The Constitution does not have a clause that suspends it in case of threat. Presidents have arrogated that power themselves–and now more and more frequently.
Like you, TarheelDem, I have been trying (some might say “heroically”) to get over this unnatural attachment I have to some quaint language in an old document. I’ve tried trimming my principles to fit the fashion in all the most stylish salons. I so desperately want to fit in with all the kewl kidz.
But those goddamn four words, “due process of law” keep sticking in my craw, blunting my pinking shears, and issuing forth like a bad fart that stinks up the joint for everyone. I think I need professional help, so I can get with the program and enjoy the summary execution of citizens as long as someone in a position of authority (granted or arrogated) assures me that the victim was very, very bad.
coverage by emptywheel
You can get your answer very easily and clearly, if you will only ask the right question.
The question you need to ask is: what percentage of the American people believe that police, in order to do their jobs, must be above the law?
It seems to me that if someone is killed in the course of a war then it doesn’t matter whether or not he is an American citizen. If an American is targeted and killed during something less than war, then it’s officially sanctioned murder, like the FBI and the Black Panthers in Chicago.
Seems pretty simple. The arguments about this are merely a reflection of the fascification of our country.
+++++++++
“What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity.
“But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.
“Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.
“I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make.
“But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.” – Jim Garrison, 1967
Every Empire in the history of history has become an Empire because of National Security.
Ours is particularly fascist, on its face.
After building up a massive military for WWII, what was the justification for keeping that military? The Cold War against…an economic system that we didn’t want to adopt.
No, a Cold War against a dictatorship that had already killed more of its own citizens than the Nazi invaders and was engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution of the United States and replace its government with a puppet government such as in Poland and Hungary.
Ok, even if we accept that, the Soviet threat was always overestimated, which the CIA later admitted. And second, the Cold War is over. Why do we still have more weapons now than we had then? That tells me the military build up really wasn’t about the Soviet menace.