After terrorists retaliated for the U.S. government’s interventionist antics in the Middle East, the “terrorists” (or the Muslims) became the new official enemy. The “war on terrorism” became as lucrative as the 45-year “war on the Reds.”
I entered Virginia Military Institute as a freshman in 1968. By that time, the Vietnam War was in full swing. During the four years that I was at the school, VMI graduates were among the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers who were being killed or injured for nothing.
Everyone at VMI was required to be in the corps. Naturally, as a military school, we would periodically have field training exercises, which usually were supervised and run by military officers in the military-science department.
Since I was going into army infantry, my field training exercises were based on hypothetical situations entirely involving Vietcong or North Vietnamese forces.
For example, we would be told that a North Vietnamese unit was known to use a particular path through the jungle. Our mission, as platoon leaders, was to prepare an ambush of the unit employing our three squads. (We were trained to align all three squads on the same side so that they wouldn’t be firing at each other.)
This went on for four years. All of the field training exercises — without exception — were based on hypothetical situations involving Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces.
During the year I graduated — 1972 — President Nixon began withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. I was offered the option of trading a two-year active-duty commitment for an 8-year commitment in the Reserves, which included 3 months of active duty attending infantry school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. I readily accepted the offer.
In 1974, I temporarily dropped out of law school to fulfill my 3-month commitment. By this time, it was clear that the U.S. government was completely leaving the Vietnam War behind.
Of course, I was wondering what they were going to do with those field-training exercises. They didn’t skip a beat. From Day 1 of infantry school, they had a brand new official enemy that became the subject of infantry training. That new official enemy was the Russians.
…Just what is the military’s image and reputation? Since Rubin never tells us, I guess I will have to:
Pretending to defend our freedoms
Fighting wars that are not constitutionally declared
Obeying immoral orders
Serving as the president’s personal attack force
Engaging in offense while calling it defense
Going where they have no business going
Fighting unjust and unnecessary wars
Carrying out a reckless, belligerent, and meddling foreign policy
Making widows and orphans
Policing the world
Blindly following orders
Invading and occupying other countries
Bombing, maiming, and killing for the state
Doing the government’s dirty work
Destroying property and infrastructure
Supporting a network of brothels around the world
Helping to create terrorists, insurgents, and militants
This is the image and reputation of the military that we never hear about. Soldiers are not heroes, role models, defenders of freedom, or public servants. They do not protect and defend the Constitution. They are at best pawns in the hands of Uncle Sam, drops of oil in the gears of the war machine, dupes, and cannon fodder.
For a long time; I along with countless others who are better informed than me have wondered at the strange nature of our governments actions upon the citizens they are supposed to represent and protect. If one didn’t know any better, it would seem that rather than being constituted to fight for the rights of their fellow countrymen, there has been an increasing shift at all levels of government that puts the needs, concerns and priorities of it citizens beneath government’s own – almost to the point of outright animosity. Rather than providing for “the common defense”, it increasingly feels to me like our government at all levels views us citizens as their enemy.
If this is true in any measure, why would that be the case? What purpose would driving public opinion down and fostering anger serve a government that ostensibly is only in power or control at the will of the people? There are a million theories I have heard espoused in prepper blogs and on the comments of survival forums, but the only thing that makes sense to me is that this is not accidental. This is not just the offshoots of our decaying culture where respect is a victim thrown in the gutter long ago. This is not a generational shift that speaks to our increasing lack of values. I believe the rising conflict and confrontation is all being done with a specific goal in mind. The goal of government agency abuses and apparent lack of remorse or responsibility to their citizens is to drive an agenda that foresees a world much differently than what we have now. I believe that on some level, our government is willingly complicit. Could it be that it is the people we elected, who say they are protecting us are, who we actually have most to fear from? Is our government building the terrorists they need in order to enact the changes they want in our country.
You have to have a bad guy
Many of you will read that paragraph above and naturally go with the conspiracy theory angle. I understand how simple that conclusion would be, but I don’t have grand answers, blueprints or reasons. I only have observations that I will list below. I don’t know the specifics, but I do think I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that when viewed together paints a picture. Answering the question of who painted that picture or why they painted it in the first place isn’t the purpose of this article, but I do hope to outline a trend. For many of you this is nothing new, but for some I hope that I can phrase this argument in a way that will at a minimum make you consider the changes our country has undergone and to question if possibly there isn’t something more worth investigating.
Everyone who has ever seen a movie or read a book knows that you must have a bad guy. There has to be some conflict that your hero can rise above. This bad guy can come from anywhere, have any motivation and they simply just need to be the person your hero struggles against. In this struggle, if the author has done a good job of developing the story and making your hero loveable, you will cheer on the hero and start to hate the bad guy. Maybe hate is too strong in all cases, but you have a clear allegiance to the hero and willingly believe all manner of situations as long as those eventually put your hero in the winning spot.
I maintain that national politics behave in a similar fashion, at least in our country even if I am making this overly simplistic. Our government is the hero to our country, national pride is easy to come by and chants of “USA, USA” are almost comical now. But like any good story, our hero needs a bad guy to fight against in order for this to work. This bad guy has taken on many forms in the past. The Indians, British, The Southern States, Germany, Japan and Russia, Cuba, Drugs, Russia again, Poverty, Iran, Iraq, Sugar, Al Qaeda, ISIS and more recently returning veterans and gun owners. At various times we have always had someone we needed to fight but have you ever questioned why that is?
It seems logical in war-time situations that when an aggressor comes to your land they must be fought off. This has morphed via treaties into extending our military to protect the interests of our friends and some would say our own national interests in the form of natural resources. I can understand almost all of those situations even when I don’t agree with them.
What I can never understand, absent some ulterior motive, and this is the thought that prompted me to write this article, is when the enemy becomes the citizens of our country. Don’t you have to wonder what the goal is when our government with its national security apparatus and all of the other forces a nation of our size can mobilize, is identifying its own citizens as targets for scrutiny? The following are just a few examples of this trend.
Labeling returning veterans as domestic terrorists – In 2009 a report from DHS was leaked via the Washington times, which you can read here naming returning veterans, gun owners and people who are opposed to abortion or illegal immigration as right-wing extremists – essentially equating them with terrorists. Police and government agencies are now often war gaming scenarios where the disturbance is caused by “sovereign citizens” or people opposed to the government and to make things interesting, gun confiscations are practiced.
Military exercises in Civilian areas – Operation Jade Helm is a multi-state training exercise that has a lot of implications that can be viewed as being war-gamed for potential use in the U.S. 1200 military special operations forces will be working to operate undetected among civilian populations. There are some reports that these exercises are preparations for martial law, which isn’t completely ridiculous when you consider that Texas and Utah, both large populations of gun owners and veterans are listed as “Hostile” in the exercise materials.
Denying Veterans medical treatment – What better way to both ensure that your veterans are simultaneously angry and less able to resist you than by denying their prompt medical treatment after they return wounded from serving the same country who now labels them as a potential threat.
Stifling of protests and dissent – Our Constitution guarantees our freedom of speech and the right to lawfully assemble, but these rights are increasingly under attack and marginalized. From high-profile cases like the Bundy ranch standoff where a cordoned area was set aside for protests (free speech as long as you do it where we say) to the FCC controlling the internet. Our freedoms are being taken away and you must ask why.
Ignoring the wishes of voters – This is probably the most in your face example of how our government is directly working in ways contradictory to our wishes and it begs the question why anyone would do something so seemingly counter intuitive to a politician’s survival instincts. From Immigration Amnesty that is overwhelmingly opposed by Americans to NSA spying and legislation that increases debts to continuing risky practices that got us into massive debt in the first place. Our government has shown repeatedly that they do not care what you want. The only logical conclusion is they do not care if you are happy with what they are doing – they want you angry.
Palestinian mourners attend the funeral of Jana Assaf, 15, after she was shot and killed in the West Bank city of Jenin, 12 December. Ahmed Ibrahim APA images
Leave it to innovative Israel to sink to ever-new lows.
It isn’t anything new for the state to smear Palestinians killed by its police and military as terrorists. But it seems to be a fresh twist for Israel to try to convince the UN that most of the Palestinian children slain by its forces had “terror” ties.
According to media reports, Israeli officials planned to tell Virginia Gamba, the UN special reporter on children and armed conflict, that Palestinians are exploiting children who are then killed by its forces.
Gamba was visiting Israel, the West Bank and Gaza ahead of her annual report on the conflict’s impact on children.
“Regarding the Palestinian casualties, Israel will present data indicating that most teenagers were operatives of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, or engaged in military activity or military-linked activity,” an unnamed diplomatic source told Israel’s Channel 13.
The gambit is part of Israel’s overall strategy of deflecting its responsibility for Palestinians slain by its forces.
More than 50 Palestinian children have been killed in 2022, according for Defense for Children International-Palestine.
Last year, Israeli forces and armed civilians killed 78 boys and girls in the West Bank and Gaza, making it the deadliest year for Palestinian children since 2014.
Israel’s most recent Palestinian child victim is Jana Majdi Issam Assaf, 15, who was shot while on the roof of her family’s home in the northern West Bank city of Jenin on Sunday night.
Defense for Children International-Palestine said that the girl “sustained two gunshot wounds to her upper chest and one to the right side of her head.”
The rights group added that doctors who examined the child’s body “alleged the bullet fragments and wounds were consistent with the use of expanding bullets by the Israeli military.”
Jana was the second Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year.
Last month, Israeli soldiers shot and killed Fulla Rasmi Abdulaziz Mallouh, 14, in the town of Beitunia near Ramallah. The girl was in the passenger seat of a car that was fired upon by soldiers, hitting Fulla in the head and chest.
Chief salutes killers
In the case of Jana, the girl killed in Jenin on Sunday, Amir Cohen, the chief of Israel’s Border Police, saluted the officers who shot her.
During a military ceremony on Wednesday, Cohen said “our fighters acted morally, with values, with courage, with determination and saved lives.”
The Israeli military has said that it was likely that one of its snipers “accidentally” shot the girl.
Israel has made the same claim that a soldier “unintentionally” killed Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin during May, despite all evidence and witness testimony suggesting that she was intentionally targeted.
But for Israel, the facts surrounding the death of a Palestinian at the hands of its forces do not matter. Ultimately, Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli military are “mistakes” to be dealt with as a public relations problem and nothing more.
ROANOKE, VA — The FBI has dispatched surveillance teams after several reports surfaced of Christian Nationalists planning to spend a day thanking God for His blessings and praying for America.
“Looks like the turkey’s hit the table, boys,” reported Agent Schwartz to the tactical team. “That means the praying will be inbound shortly if I know these sickos like I think I do.”
The FBI has reported a massive increase in Christian Nationalist activity as of late, with many in the Bureau expecting a widespread show of force on Thanksgiving. “The entire Thanksgiving holiday is basically a dog whistle for Christian Nationalists,” explained FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Here we have a holiday declared by Abraham Lincoln, one of the most famous Christian Nationalists ever, meant to be entirely dedicated to thanking God for our country and praying God’s guidance for her future. If that’s not domestic terrorism, I don’t know what is.”
After a bit of shuffling, Agent Schwartz reported that the Graham family had, in fact, said a prayer and started eating turkey. “We’ve got three generations of terrorists present – maybe four, that old terrorist on the walker is moving slow,” said Agent Schwartz. “Sure is sad to see the little ones getting indoctrinated like this. Next thing you know, that baby will be storming the Capitol, mark my words.”
At publishing time, Grandma Graham has reportedly gone outside to ask the weirdo with the binoculars if he would like to come in for some pie.
Here are some of the highlights from today’s video:
• The records obtained by Project Veritas confirm numerous suspected terrorists are currently living throughout the country, many of whom have work visas despite being flagged by the Terrorist Watchlist for violent offenses like murder and using explosive devices and arms.
• Project Veritas published redacted government records of suspected terrorists who fall under the “Tier 1” threat level which is labelled as “Armed and Dangerous.” Most of these individuals flagged by the Department of Homeland Security were admitted because of an initiative to shelter fleeing refugees called Operation Allies Welcome.
• The whistleblower inside the Federal Government has identified numerous cases. The suspected terrorists verified by Project Veritas appear to only be a small sample size. These threats live throughout the country including the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
Efforts to restore American and Iranian compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal—formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—are at an impasse.
President Biden has declared there will be no relaxing of smothering economic sanctions on Iran unless the country first returns to full compliance with the deal. Iran, which began exceeding nuclear enrichment thresholds in response to America’s total withdrawal from the deal under President Trump, wants the United States to begin easing sanctions first.
As that chess game continues, there’s something missing from op-ed pages, network news studios and the House and Senate chambers: a fundamental debate about the morality of economic sanctions.
If we reduce economic sanctions to a general characterization that encompasses both ends and means, we arrive at a truth that is as damning as it is incontrovertible:
Economic sanctions intentionally inflict suffering on civilian populations to force a change in their governments’ policies
If that has a familiar ring, perhaps it’s because “the intentional use of violence against civilians in order to obtain political aims” is one definition of terrorism.
Sanction Architect Bob Menendez, Terrorism Architect Osama bin Laden
That’s not to say “sanctions” and “terrorism” are interchangeable terms. However, both practices center on willfully harming civilians to accomplish political goals.
Like Sanctioning Governments, Terrorists Have Political Objectives
Some resist the fact that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are principally motivated by political goals. That’s understandable, given establishment media grossly underreports terrorist motivations.
The resulting vacuum is filled with reflexive and false assumptions—for example, that Muslim terrorists are principally motivated by religion—or deliberately misleading government claims, like President George W. Bush’s baseless assertion that al Qaeda terrorists “hate our freedoms.”
Through various written and recorded pronouncements, Osama bin Laden made al Qaeda’s political motivations clear. His aims included the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East, and termination of U.S. support of the region’s dictators and the government of Israel.
The political nature of terrorism was particularly apparent in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The attacks came three days before Spain’s general election, and a video received by Spanish authorities said the attacks were punishment for the country’s participation in the occupation of Iraq.
On election day, the shaken Spanish population gave an upset victory to the Socialist party, and the newly elected prime minister immediately pledged to withdrawal Spanish troops from Iraq.
Those examples focus on al Qaeda and its kin, but terrorists of all religions, ethnicities and nationalities have political aims. An exhaustive study of worldwide suicide bombing by University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape found nearly all such attacks seek “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.”
Like Terrorists, Sanctioning Governments Intentionally Harm Civilians
In a hearing earlier this month, Senate foreign relations committee chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who has been one of Capitol Hill’s most prolific authors of Iran sanction legislation, praised sanctions as part of “our arsenal of peaceful diplomacy.”
Perhaps it was a Freudian slip that led him to oxymoronically place his supposedly “peaceful” sanctions inside an “arsenal”—in their effect, there’s little difference between imposing economic sanctions and mining Iranian harbors.
Officials assure us that sanctions are meant to cripple governments, but any honest observer understands that’s achieved by first crippling the country’s economy.
Since the concept of economic harm is somewhat abstract, it’s easy for Americans to limit their visualization of that harm to a downward slope on a gross domestic product chart, failing to appreciate what economic warfare means to the everyday lives of individual humans.
Occasionally, though, American media provides a window on the harms being visited upon the Iranian people.
Consider a 2019 Los Angeles Times story, “Middle-Class Iranians Resort to Buying Rotting Produce as U.S. Sanctions Take Toll.” Reading the title alone would give most Americans a far better appreciation of sanctions’ real-world impact. The article provides other examples, such as a single mother forced by skyrocketing prices into abandoning her apartment and moving into her mother’s one-bedroom dwelling.
While the U.S. sanctions regime provides exceptions for Iran’s import of food and medicine, other limitations on the flow of Iranian money—and vendors’ and bankers’ fears of accidentally running afoul of U.S. restrictions—often render those exceptions meaningless.
As a result, sanctions can have profound consequences for Iran’s sick. Among other observations, a 2019 report by Human Rights Watch found:
Iranian patients with rare diseases were finding it increasingly difficult to access essential, imported medicines
A pediatric cancer treatment center was unable to acquire medications deemed essential by the World Health Organization
Patients with epidermolysis bullosa—a rare disease that causes blistering— had their supply of a special kind of foam dressing cut off when a European producer ceased business in Iran due to U.S. sanctions. The domestic alternative dressing “often gets attached to the blisters, causing excruciating pain for the patients,” according to an attorney representing a health NGO.
The report also noted Iranians were finding it harder to acquire imported eye drops, “causing suffering for the large number of patients affected by chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.”
Exasperatingly, many of those eye patients are being victimized by the U.S. government for a second time: During the Iran-Iraq War, American intelligence officials provided targeting information to the Iraqi military, fully aware Saddam Hussein’s forces would attack with chemical weapons.
University of Chicago’s Robert A. Pape found that terrorists almost always confronted foreign occupation. After studying more than 2,100 suicide attacks, he concluded that “overall, foreign military occupation accounts for 98.5 percent—and the deployment of American combat forces for 92 percent—of all the 1,833 suicide terrorist attacks around the world” between 2004 and 2009.
The U.S. military is training Saudi Arabian pilots here in States, who later leave to slaughter Yemeni civilians thousands of miles away. Unfortunately, some of that violence was turned against us, when a Saudi trainee killed three American sailors at Pensacola Air Station on December 6.
In fact, a half dozen Saudis were arrested in the incident. Three of them apparently filmed the murders, presumably to post online. Yet afterward President Donald Trump spent more time justifying the Saudi royals than supporting the victims’ families.
Every time a terrorist commits murder and mayhem, Americans ask why? U.S. officials usually insist that it is because we are so “good.” If only.
Why terrorists kill should not be a mystery since they themselves tell us why. And none of them has said it is because the U.S. has the First Amendment, holds democratic elections, or leads the world in charitable giving.
Consider Mohammed Saeed al-Shamrani, the Saudi pilot-in-training at Pensacola. On Twitter he declared: “I’m against evil, and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil.”…
Almost a decade ago Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen, attempted to set off a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square. Thankfully, he failed to set the timer properly. Then he waited two days to flee the country, giving authorities the time to identify and arrest him.
Ajani Marwat, the intelligence officer with the New York Police Department who investigated Shahzad, explained: “It’s simple. It’s American policies in his country. That’s it. Americans are so closed-minded. They have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. And he did know. Every time you turn on al-Jazeera, they show our people being killed.” A terrorist organizer in Pakistan told Marwat: “We don’t have to do anything to attract them. The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live [here], the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us.”
At his September 2010 sentencing Shahzad declared himself to be “part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations. I’m avenging the attacks because the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.” He vowed that “until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S.”
Federal judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum made the obvious point that he targeted civilians. Shahzad responded that in a democracy it was civilians who “select the government.” How about children, asked Cedarbaum? Shahzad answered: “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.” …
Polls found that large majorities of Arabs and Muslims shared these criticisms of U.S. policy despite expressing admiration for American values and products. University of Chicago’s Robert A. Pape found that terrorists almost always confronted foreign occupation. After studying more than 2,100 suicide attacks, he concluded that “overall, foreign military occupation accounts for 98.5 percent—and the deployment of American combat forces for 92 percent—of all the 1,833 suicide terrorist attacks around the world” between 2004 and 2009. The solution? Said Pape: “By ending the perception that the United States and its allies are occupiers, we can cut the fuse to the suicide terrorism threat.”
One of the most fashionable manifestations of Trump derangement syndrome—the assumption that Walls Never Work—is crushingly debunked in historian David Frye’s eye-opening history of 4,000 years of barrier-building, from the Fertile Crescent to the Malibu Colony, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick.
In a brilliant epilogue entitled “Love Your Neighbor, But Don’t Pull Down Your Hedges,” Frye points out that, ironically, shortly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall made anti-wall triumphalism the unchallenged conventional wisdom, the world quietly entered its Second Age of Walls. (The first ran from prehistory up to the proliferation of cannons in the 1400s.)
Years before Donald Trump pointed out the utility of border barriers, governments around the world and private landowners (especially in “sanctuary cities”) had already embarked on a new spate of wall-building to keep out terrorists, immigrants, and criminals.
Worldwide, some seventy barriers of various sorts currently stand guard over borders.
(Frye dismisses as a “largely meaningless semantic distinction” the recent shibboleth that “walls” are intrinsically evil while “fences” are not to be noticed.)
India, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, for example, have recently enclosed much of their perimeters. Frye observes that although Barack Obama dismissed border walls as “wacky” in 2016, his administration subsidized Jordan and Tunisia to construct their own strategic lines to protect themselves from the chaos of the uprisings Obama had supported in Syria and Libya.
Frye pithily sums up:
[Where] there are no border walls, there will be city walls, and where there are no city walls, there will be neighborhood walls….
Thus, Walls concludes with a quick history of the gated communities favored by Hollywood celebrities, such as the Malibu Colony, Hidden Hills, and Beverly Park.
Of course, where there are no neighborhood walls, there will tend to be walls around yards, often with broken bottles on top…
Walls ends with a brief meditation on why anti-boundary prejudice remains so appealing in the current year, despite its manifest failures to make real life less poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Why are critics of walls constantly denouncing them as cowardly?
Are we forever building “monuments to fear”? It strikes me as an ironic testimony to the lingering influence of our primitive warrior past that cowardice remains the harshest and most stigmatizing opprobrium that can be cast on another human being. Those are fighting words, or would be if we weren’t so afraid to fight.
…It is not just American-made weapons vanishing into the Syrian quagmire. All of the regional and world powers that tossed weapons into the fighting pits of the Syrian civil war have reason to worry about those weapons coming back to haunt them:
A U.S. program begun in mid-2013 provided weapons including ATGM missiles to rebels fighting the Assad regime in Syria. President Trump later canceled the program, saying in a 2017 interview with The Wall Street Journal that it allowed weapons to fall into al Qaeda hands.
“There is absolutely the possibility that the U.S. may face some of the same ATGMs it has delivered in the past to the Middle East,” said Omar Lamrani, a senior military analyst with the Austin, Texas-based defense-intelligence firm Stratfor. Islamic State and al Qaeda offshoots, among others, now possess American-made missiles, he added.
Those and other nonstate actors in the Middle East also have antitank missiles—some of them based on U.S. designs—manufactured in Bulgaria, China, France, Iran and Russia, according to analysts who track weapons proliferation.
As the article explained, guided anti-tank missiles are far more dangerous than the ubiquitous rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs. Reports suggest the Islamic State, the Taliban, and Hezbollah possess missiles they can launch from over a mile away and that can punch through a thousand millimeters of armor. Enterprising militia fighters have found ways to use the missiles against targets other than tanks, such as taking out grounded military helicopters and attacking entrenched infantry positions.
Defending against these weapons is difficult because fighting vehicles cannot be armored enough to withstand them or made agile enough to evade them. The WSJ reported that the U.S. is developing active defense systems (in other words, shooting down incoming missiles) but has fallen behind, in part due to “the Army’s complex acquisition system.” The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, has indicated streamlining these systems will be a high priority… Read the rest of this entry »
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