(updated below - Update II - Update III)
A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign.
The Washington Post has a crucial and disturbing story this morning by Greg Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration to fully institutionalize – to make officially permanent – the most extremist powers it has exercised in the name of the war on terror.
Based on interviews with "current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies", Miller reports that as "the United States' conventional wars are winding down", the Obama administration "expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years" (the "capture" part of that list is little more than symbolic, as the US focus is overwhelmingly on the "kill" part). Specifically, "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."
In pursuit of this goal, "White House counterterrorism adviser John O Brennan is seeking to codify the administration's approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced." All of this, writes Miller, demonstrates "the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war."
The Post article cites numerous recent developments reflecting this Obama effort, including the fact that "CIA Director David H Petraeus is pushing for an expansion of the agency's fleet of armed drones", which "reflects the agency's transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-September 11 focus on gathering intelligence." The article also describes rapid expansion of commando operations by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and, perhaps most disturbingly, the creation of a permanent bureaucratic infrastructure to allow the president to assassinate at will:
"JSOC also has established a secret targeting center across the Potomac River from Washington, current and former U.S. officials said. The elite command's targeting cells have traditionally been located near the front lines of its missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. But JSOC created a 'national capital region' task force that is a 15-minute commute from the White House so it could be more directly involved in deliberations about al-Qaeda lists."
The creepiest aspect of this development is the christening of a new Orwellian euphemism for due-process-free presidential assassinations: "disposition matrix". Writes Miller:
"Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'.
"The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. US officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones."
The "disposition matrix" has been developed and will be overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is "to augment" the "separate but overlapping kill lists" maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as the centralized clearinghouse for determining who will be executed without due process based upon how one fits into the executive branch's "matrix". As Miller describes it, it is "a single, continually evolving database" which includes "biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations" as well as "strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols". This analytical system that determines people's "disposition" will undoubtedly be kept completely secret; Marcy Wheeler sardonically said that she was "looking forward to the government's arguments explaining why it won't release the disposition matrix to ACLU under FOIA".
This was all motivated by Obama's refusal to arrest or detain terrorist suspects, and his resulting commitment simply to killing them at will (his will). Miller quotes "a former US counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix" as explaining the impetus behind the program this way: "We had a disposition problem."
The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed – "It is the keeper of the criteria," says one official to the Post – is, by itself, rather odious. As Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts noted in response to this story, the ACLU has long warned that the real purpose of the NCTC – despite its nominal focus on terrorism - is the "massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States".
In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records" – "literally anything the government collects would be fair game". In other words, the NCTC - now vested with the power to determine the proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects - is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.
Worse still, as the ACLU's legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days – a limit which "meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans" – it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC "to collect and 'continually assess' information on innocent Americans for up to five years".
And, as usual, this agency engages in these incredibly powerful and invasive processes with virtually no democratic accountability:
"All of this is happening with very little oversight. Controls over the NCTC are mostly internal to the DNI's office, and important oversight bodies such as Congress and the President's Intelligence Oversight Board aren't notified even of 'significant' failures to comply with the Guidelines. Fundamental legal protections are being sidestepped. For example, under the new guidelines, Privacy Act notices (legal requirements to describe how databases are used) must be completed by the agency that collected the information. This is in spite of the fact that those agencies have no idea what NCTC is actually doing with the information once it collects it.
"All of this amounts to a reboot of the Total Information Awareness Program that Americans rejected so vigorously right after 9/11."
It doesn't require any conspiracy theorizing to see what's happening here. Indeed, it takes extreme naiveté, or wilful blindness, not to see it.
What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight. It is simultaneously a surveillance state and a secretive, unaccountable judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what should be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond the reach of any minimal accountability or transparency.
The Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic." As he explains, extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so extremist that very extensive deliberations were required before Bill Clinton could target even Osama bin Laden for death by lobbing cruise missiles in East Africa. But:
Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.
To understand the Obama legacy, please re-read that sentence. As Murtaza Hussain put it when reacting to the Post story: "The US agonized over the targeted killing Bin Laden at Tarnak Farms in 1998; now it kills people it barely suspects of anything on a regular basis."
The pragmatic inanity of the mentality driving this is self-evident: as I discussed yesterday (and many other times), continuous killing does not eliminate violence aimed at the US but rather guarantees its permanent expansion. As a result, wrote Miller, "officials said no clear end is in sight" when it comes to the war against "terrorists" because, said one official, "we can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us" but trying is "a necessary part of what we do". Of course, the more the US kills and kills and kills, the more people there are who "want to harm us". That's the logic that has resulted in a permanent war on terror.
But even more significant is the truly radical vision of government in which this is all grounded. The core guarantee of western justice since the Magna Carta was codified in the US by the fifth amendment to the constitution: "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." You simply cannot have a free society, a worthwhile political system, without that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate abusive state power, being honored.
And yet what the Post is describing, what we have had for years, is a system of government that – without hyperbole – is the very antithesis of that liberty. It is literally impossible to imagine a more violent repudiation of the basic blueprint of the republic than the development of a secretive, totally unaccountable executive branch agency that simultaneously collects information about all citizens and then applies a "disposition matrix" to determine what punishment should be meted out. This is classic political dystopia brought to reality (despite how compelled such a conclusion is by these indisputable facts, many Americans will view such a claim as an exaggeration, paranoia, or worse because of this psychological dynamic I described here which leads many good passive westerners to believe that true oppression, by definition, is something that happens only elsewhere).
In response to the Post story, Chris Hayes asked: "If you have a 'kill list', but the list keeps growing, are you succeeding?" The answer all depends upon what the objective is.
As the Founders all recognized, nothing vests elites with power – and profit – more than a state of war. That is why there were supposed to be substantial barriers to having them start and continue - the need for a Congressional declaration, the constitutional bar on funding the military for more than two years at a time, the prohibition on standing armies, etc. Here is how John Jay put it in Federalist No 4:
"It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people."
In sum, there are factions in many governments that crave a state of endless war because that is when power is least constrained and profit most abundant. What the Post is reporting is yet another significant step toward that state, and it is undoubtedly driven, at least on the part of some, by a self-interested desire to ensure the continuation of endless war and the powers and benefits it vests. So to answer Hayes' question: the endless expansion of a kill list and the unaccountable, always-expanding powers needed to implement it does indeed represent a great success for many. Read what John Jay wrote in the above passage to see why that is, and why few, if any, political developments should be regarded as more pernicious.
Detention policies
Assuming the Post's estimates are correct – that "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade" – this means that the war on terror will last for more than 20 years, far longer than any other American war. This is what has always made the rationale for indefinite detention – that it is permissible to detain people without due process until the "end of hostilities" – so warped in this context. Those who are advocating that are endorsing nothing less than life imprisonment - permanent incarceration – without any charges or opportunities to contest the accusations.
That people are now dying at Guantanamo after almost a decade in a cage with no charges highlights just how repressive that power is. Extend that mentality to secret, due-process-free assassinations – something the US government clearly intends to convert into a permanent fixture of American political life – and it is not difficult to see just how truly extremist and anti-democratic "war on terror" proponents in both political parties have become.
UPDATE
As I noted yesterday, Afghan officials reported that three Afghan children were killed on Saturday by NATO operations. Today, reports CNN, "missiles blew up part of a compound Wednesday in northwest Pakistan, killing three people - including one woman" and added: "the latest suspected U.S. drone strike also injured two children." Meanwhile, former Obama press secretary and current campaign adviser Robert Gibbs this week justified the US killing of 16-year-old American Abdulrahaman Awlaki, killed by a US drone in Yemen two weeks after his father was, on the ground that he "should have a far more responsible father".
Also yesterday, CNN profiled Abu Sufyan Said al-Shihri, alleged to be a top al-Qaida official in Yemen. He pointed out "that U.S. drone strikes are helping al-Qaida in Yemen because of the number of civilian deaths they cause." Ample evidence supports his observation.
To summarize all this: the US does not interfere in the Muslim world and maintain an endless war on terror because of the terrorist threat. It has a terrorist threat because of its interference in the Muslim world and its endless war on terror.
UPDATE II
The Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko, writing today about the Post article, reports:
"Recently, I spoke to a military official with extensive and wide-ranging experience in the special operations world, and who has had direct exposure to the targeted killing program. To emphasize how easy targeted killings by special operations forces or drones has become, this official flicked his hand back over and over, stating: 'It really is like swatting flies. We can do it forever easily and you feel nothing. But how often do you really think about killing a fly?'"
That is disturbingly consistent with prior reports that the military's term for drone victims is "bug splat". This - this warped power and the accompanying dehumanizing mindset - is what is being institutionalized as a permanent fixture in American political life by the current president.
UPDATE III
At Wired, Spencer Ackerman reacts to the Post article with an analysis entitled "President Romney Can Thank Obama for His Permanent Robotic Death List". Here is his concluding paragraph:
"Obama did not run for president to preside over the codification of a global war fought in secret. But that's his legacy. . . . Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations writes that Obama's predecessors in the Bush administration 'were actually much more conscious and thoughtful about the long-term implications of targeted killings', because they feared the political consequences that might come when the U.S. embraces something at least superficially similar to assassination. Whoever follows Obama in the Oval Office can thank him for proving those consequences don't meaningfully exist — as he or she reviews the backlog of names on the Disposition Matrix."
It's worth devoting a moment to letting that sink in.
Comments
24 October 2012 1:27PM
The War on Terror terrifies me and did from its inception.
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Share24 October 2012 1:33PM
In another decade, an entire generation of voters will come of age who've only known this post 9/11 state of lawlessness. With all the talk about the way Obama has normalized and worsened the most repulsive Bush power grabs, I can't help but think this is the worst part of the trend.
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Share24 October 2012 1:35PM
If Obama cannot understand that to wage terror is to invite terror then I for one can no longer believe in him. (This doesn't mean I believe in Romney.)
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Share24 October 2012 1:35PM
The columnist seems to be under the impression that the American military-industrial complex is under civilian control.
It doesn't matter who is in the Oval Office. The generals only consult him to ensure he goes along with their plans.
People should be less worried that Obama agreed to the extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden and more worried about the fact that had he disagreed then it wouldn't have made any difference anyway.
Do people actually believe Obama sits there flying unmanned drones using his X-Box?
As for civil liberties, people only care about their own. The Guardian was rife with people championing the use of an authoritarian 2003 law against BNP leader Nick Griffin the other day.
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Share24 October 2012 1:37PM
Is it really so impossible for the usual hand wringers to imagine a world in which AQ would have been given a free rein?
Does it really have to be spelt out what their intentions and beliefs are? Genocide for instance?
Do we have to spell out what would have occured had their intention to obtain and use chemical and biological weapons come to pass?
Why is this stuff difficult?
Until someone comes up with an alternative, then the war on terror remains. And thank god for that
In ten years plus, no one., no one at all has provided an alternative
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Share24 October 2012 1:38PM
This is another worrying development from within the Obama administration. I've always felt a strong affinity with Obama and much of his policies, and I really want to support him, but things like this just make me think that he's trying desperately to get me not to like him!
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Share24 October 2012 1:38PM
It seems likely to be only a matter of time until discussions like this are determined to give aid to terrorists. The columnist who writes about the apparatus of the war on terror and all of the others who exercise free speech to comment on the columnist's revelations will eventually be added to the disposition matrix.
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Share24 October 2012 1:38PM
I think you're right; Obama is, sad to say, turning into the lesser of two evils.
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Share24 October 2012 1:39PM
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24 October 2012 1:40PM
The 'War on Drugs' has the War of Terror beat.
Sheldon Wolin:
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Share24 October 2012 1:41PM
[from the article]
It's a comparatively minor quibble, but the notion that the CIA was just a nice intelligence-gathering agency prior to 9/11 should induce laughter on any sentient being. The CIA has always been the agency responsible for all sorts of less-than-legal American policies. MKUltra anyone?
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Share24 October 2012 1:42PM
Perhaps most disturbing WaPo article I've ever read. Give that man a Pulitzer! Was struck by this
and this
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Share24 October 2012 1:42PM
Question: Why are they spending our taxes to make enemies and then fight them?
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Share24 October 2012 1:43PM
Shorter Greenwald - violence begets violence.
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Share24 October 2012 1:43PM
I have read Mr Greenwald's writings avidly over the last few months, and I applaud him for being clear and factual, as well as coruscating in his condemnation of such radical revolting abuses of power. I strongly suspect that what he implies - but fails to state - is that there is a deliberate and well-understood objective to the accruing of such limitless powers. That is - to perpetuate the ''war on terror'' specifically for the purpose of enriching elites and imposing what was fading American hegemony upon the world for decades or even centuries to come. How else could America maintain its position ?? The fact that it is Obama implementing these despicable changes is frightening. He was after all an Assistant Professor of constitutional Law !! And we wonder why America is referred to as ''The Great Satan'' by Iran, why there is so much antipathy to the nation ?? Well folks, Thats exactly what America wants, in order to justify its ignoring of its own constitution and international law, and to provide an excuse to continue. The sooner Yellowstone erupts, or La Palma slides into the sea, the better.
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Share24 October 2012 1:44PM
Exactly what used to annoy me about New Labour justifying their erosions of civil liberties with "oh don't worry we would only ever use them against terrorists!"
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Share24 October 2012 1:45PM
I've never really understood how you can make war on abstract nouns.
It makes almost as much sense as bombing intransitive verbs into submission.
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Share24 October 2012 1:46PM
gerryzekali
Please re-read the last 3 or 4 paragraphs, the point of which is pretty much what you describe here.
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Share24 October 2012 1:48PM
No...
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Share24 October 2012 1:48PM
Possibly the real story here is that it is becoming easier with each passing year for the state to keep tabs on everyone.
Governments are becoming more authoritarian because they can.
What is going to be interesting is what happens when a generation which has always known state surveillance comes of age.
They will possibly have no problem with cameras in their homes.
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Share24 October 2012 1:49PM
There has always been an alternative to the war on terror. That is, sitting down and talking, with whomsoever may be necessary to talk to, including all shades of extremists. After all, America insists that the only way to slove the issues in Palestine is for the 2 sides to talk their way to a negotiated agreement. Why then is the usa so reluctant to talk elsewhere?? Two-faced doesnt even begin to describe it.......
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Share24 October 2012 1:51PM
That's about it. What today men like Obama and Cameron call "democracy" is the entitlement to vote for the lesser of two (or possibly more) evils.
I don't really believe Obama is unable to understand that by waging terror he invites terror. I'm sure he knows perfectly well. Something else is going on. I suspect we're heading for a feudal world (when petroleum goes fully into decline) in which there will be agreement among the corporate establishment as to who should be quickly, and without ceremony, eliminated.
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Share24 October 2012 1:51PM
Whoever was behind Bin laden, snookered you. The Muddle East is loving your freedom now.
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Share24 October 2012 1:52PM
ok fair play - I just wanted to make it crystal clear. BTW - does it concern you that you are most certainly within that matrix, and also most certainly creeping ever-closer to the kill list ?? You can pretty much bet that given a few years, the current criminalisation of dissent will extend to the press - just like it has done here in Turkey.
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Share24 October 2012 1:56PM
Of Course, Al Qaeda have replaced the Soviets as the dark, menacing, evil 'other' in the grand narrative of US foreign policy. I'm sure in another 20 years, the US will find another enemy to keep the military-industrial complex rolling.
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Share24 October 2012 1:57PM
Its certainly occurred to me.
"Spreading disunity at a time of national emergency" or something like that I imagine.
Not that they'd need to give a reason at all if there's no due process.
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Share24 October 2012 2:01PM
In November 2001 a CIA operative located Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. He wanted to call in Marine Six to kill or capture him but that required approval from the National Military Command Centre which in effect meant President Bush.
Bush's decision was "Let the Pakistanis deal with him".
That was from a book Operation Hotel California by Mike Tucker. I had the privilege of meeting Mr Tucker and talking to him at length about his book back in 2007.
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Share24 October 2012 2:02PM
I hope you apologize to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for your article a few days back. Of course it was stupid for the journalist to ask about a 'kill list'. Had he said 'disposition matrix', she would have totally understood him.
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Share24 October 2012 2:02PM
I posted elsewhere this morning that "the agency's transformation into a paramilitary force" is reminiscent of the KGB which maintained its own military assets, too. And the "Disposition Matrix" - an omniscient, evolving database - is reminiscent of Andropov's Operation "Рян".
As the author says, "it can't happen here" is a very dangerous trap. Likewise "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
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Share24 October 2012 2:05PM
I also particularly enjoyed this bit...
"Take THAT, Greenwald! It is SO legal!! We do have proof. We're just not ever going to show it to YOU."
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Share24 October 2012 2:05PM
There doesn't appear to be anything to stop political activists, whistle blowers, academics and journalists ending up in this database if they piss off the wrong people.
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Share24 October 2012 2:06PM
The press can't attend a rally or protest now, without being singled out by the police, though there is no statute saying they can do so.
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Share24 October 2012 2:07PM
Aside from those who argued that it might not be the smartest move to go round invading predominantly Muslim countries.
Lets face it, both AQ and the US need to have a 'great Satan' to justify their attacks.
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Share24 October 2012 2:07PM
could well be such a description. Why then, has no-one bothered to found a brand-new political party in either USA or UK ?? Look at what the AKP has managed to do in Turkey................It didnt exist b4 2000, and hasnt been out of power since 2001 - granted by appealing to religious belief, but in a pretty much religion-free country(uk) - surely it could be done ??
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Share24 October 2012 2:09PM
UK police are simply the Tory party's stormtroopers - corrupt, hugely right-wing, violent and act with impunity.
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Share24 October 2012 2:11PM
The CPS has been given the role of deciding who gets prosecuted merely to attempt to give the impression that the police ''dont and cant victimize people'' the CPS is a political tool and knows which side its bread is buttered on
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Share24 October 2012 2:13PM
I agree with a lot of that except that they are the government's stormtroopers and that I no longer refer to them as the police.
They are the militia.
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Share24 October 2012 2:18PM
But Romney is worse....I guess.
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Share24 October 2012 2:23PM
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24 October 2012 2:23PM
Last one from me today, and a bit O/T, but I can't wait until THIS gets widely deployed.
http://www.businessinsider.com/beoings-counter-electronics-high-power-microwave-advanced-missile-project-2012-10?0=defense
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Share24 October 2012 2:24PM
"You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea."
To quote, Medgar Wiley Evers. The white supremacists that killed him probably had a kill list too. But killing him made his cause stronger. There was not less protest but more protest, the civil rights movement did not stop because it's leaders were murdered, and they were murdered, one by one... and now America has got a black president.
You can't kill an idea. This is also true of bad ideas, and ideas we don't agree with... but no kill list will get rid of those ideas. Indeed the very existence of a kill list will help to perpetuate and give strength to those ideas. And as each proponent of those ideas is assassinated or disappeared so their cause gains a new martyr... and another propaganda coup. The idea is spread further.
Lose the kill list, or lose the war.
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Share24 October 2012 2:26PM
Is it really so impossible for the usual military defenders to not understand AQ is not being killed in drone attacks, they're being created?
If your entire family was wiped out - murdered by brutally savage attacks from above - would you be a terrorist if you set out to destroy those who did that?
Would innocent Iraqis responding to the savagery of "Shock n' Awe" (by whatever means possible), as the US responded to 9.11, be terrorists?
What part of that don't you get?
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Share24 October 2012 2:31PM
Then he'll be able to honour the election promise of closing down Guantanamo.
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Share24 October 2012 2:32PM
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety' Benjamin Franklin.
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Share24 October 2012 2:36PM
But this presupposes that terrorism is some whimsical make believe. It's not.
I don't doubt that our involvement in Iraq has stiffened the resolve of Islamist terrorists to fight the American infidel, but in a deeper sense - the sense that matters - these terrorists are motivated by an anti-Americanism that cannot be assuaged; whether the US fights them in Iraq or in Afghanistan (or indeed, in the US itself) is almost irrelevant.
But it is a fight that must be fought and won, whether Mr Greenwald likes it or not.
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Share24 October 2012 2:37PM
I've always had a problem with that quote. It's not that you don't deserve security if you do so, it's that you can't give up liberty to achieve security. The instant you surrender your rights to the police state apparatus, you are now as insecure--arguably more so--against them and their tyranny as you were against a much more distant and weaker threat. It is literally impossible to achieve security by making yourself less secure against your own government.
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Share24 October 2012 2:38PM
We just have some really bad, really poor, military leaders.
Reading the analysis of the debate from the Guardian, the reporter mentioned Obama lectured Romney, patronizingly, about US military capabilities. I couldn't help but wonder if Obama had been lectured the same way by his military bosses.
Anyway, what I I took away from the debate was that Obama, militarily (and otherwise) had no idea what he was talking about, much less doing, and I figure the same is true of those agents/advisers he relies on -- it is where he gets his information. I can't help but wonder if Obama's/US military enemies think the same thing and I wonder how it affects their planning against them, ie, those guys may have a lot of guns, but they are really, really dumb, so how best to exploit their stupidity while minimizing US military violence against our own country? That is the nature of asymmetric war against Washington, right?
And along the same lines, I just finished reading the article about Joe Klein -- how sick in the head, how far removed from reality, how stupid do you have to be to put forth those types of arguments as intelligent and well reasoned? They can't understand there are real life consequences to their decisions. That violence against the US is organic, the people have righteousness on their side and nothing to lose.
You will never stabilize (much less control -- if that is your true goal) the Middle East with these tactics.
It is almost like they are not real intelligence or military -- they just pretend, kill indiscriminately, and get paid a lot of money to do it. A violent rap culture of intelligence/military -- kill anything that threatens you.
How easy is it to play a contemptible coward, one crippled intellectually by his own fears?
Pretty darn easy.
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Share24 October 2012 2:45PM
You seem to be missing the point. The USA knows full well of the futility of its actions in terms of reducing terrorism against the US or its allies. It is deliberately fomenting hatred to justify its use of fprce, and its political acquisition of powers, in order to enrich elites within america and maintain its global hegemony by force.
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Share24 October 2012 2:45PM
"..be all you can be"
.. what are you waiting for, 'sweet cheeks'??
#gotrambo?
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Share24 October 2012 2:49PM
"I think you're right; Obama is, sad to say, turning into the lesser of two evils."
Unfortunately, this is usually the choice. Just today we have this story, the other one on the front page about Obama suppressing the impact on wildlife of the BP spill, his admin going after whistleblowers, Gitmo, the Patriot Act alive and well, and on and on... people are waking up to the fact that Obama's just another politician. I already voted for him, only because Romney is the greater evil. My fingers will be crossed for the next 4 yrs, which will get very uncomfortable.
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