I just saw Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars, an expose on the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), America's worldwide black ops terror campaign directed out of the White House. Described as a "hell of a hammer" that will always be "in search of a nail" by one former operative, JSOC reveals America's true face and motives: what she does when no one is looking.
Let's make one thing clear, when it comes to the Middle East, America is the bad guy (fracturing our own troops in the process). Thousands of night raids straight out of the Nazi handbook leave Afghan homes attacked without warning by what they call the "American Taliban". Even if we put aside the issue of justification, there is by the sheer weight of numbers a certain percentage of killings and kidnappings being committed upon completely innocent households. So even if 90% of the raids are accurate, it still leaves hundreds if not thousands of slain (sometimes pregnant) women, children and men.
You know, if we'd been truly outraged by 9/11 we'd be far more sensitive to the taking of civilian life.
Would we not have outrage were the state to inflict the death penalty on an innocent man here in the states? So why is it lethal force is shrugged off when it comes to foreign families? Is it because we look upon them as inferior? This is a war of choice, these are attacks of choice, not reactions of self-defense. Of course, when you invade a home in the middle of the night people tend to protect their home and then wallah, you have your justification for shooting!
But then, if one felt so justified in one's shoot one wouldn't bother to dig one's bullets out of the bodies as the American shooters did.
Somalian warlord who was our enemy until we bribed him. MLK, eat your heart your heart out at our 21st century warrior for justice!
Scahill paints a portrait of a program escalating out of control. JSOC respects no national borders with operations in as many as 75 countries. Nothing is off the table, funding is in the billions. Nobody wants to know what they do, preferring to keep plausible deniability for the inevitable day when the undeniable can no longer be hidden. One can't help but wonder how much better the fate would have been for the German people had they been made to walk through the concentration camps before the war instead of after. They too didn't want to know. Just makes us safe, der Fuehrer.
Stalin is perhaps the best known case of unrestrained power and paranoia gone mad. Near his death when he needed a doctor's care, he ordered a purge of the doctors, seeing treason in his soup. What he saw in reality was his own face reflected back. Decisions based on fear are a self-fulfilling prophesy of baseless attacks creating the very enemies they are meant to stamp out. A nation without principle knows nothing but blind fear and when things inevitably fail to go its way the reaction is to continuously double down until one day it has no one left to turn on but itself.
"Where will it end?" Scahill asks over and over. For Stalin, it never did. The enemies list is an end unto itself, the definition ever expanding. And it has to expand - until we admit we are in the wrong our guilt will only grow. Who will next be declared the Great Enemy of the state? Whose opinions will be deemed too dangerous to live with? How many more people do we "need" to kill to ever be safe? Truth is, we have no intention of stopping. Stopping means admitting we've been openly lying, acting the bad guy all along.
"Americans will say anything."
- Afghan survivor
There are those who believe our President is a war criminal while some claim he is blamelessly making the world safe. Some call JSOC a weapon that saves us and some a destroyer of us. The legalities and moralities are discussed endlessly, signifying nothing. But one thing is clear: no matter what any of us believe or say or even know, there is one person who's fully convinced, without any doubt whatsoever, our President is in the wrong - and that is the covering-up President himself. I'd say, "God help us all" but it is only we who betray us.
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