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Military Industrial Complex (30)
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Views: 7,004
State Terrorism directed against the American People and Democracy Itself
By Frank Morales
Global Editor’s Note
The Department of Defense now authorizes the domestic deployment of US troops in “the conduct of operations other than war” including law enforcement activities and the quelling of “civil disturbances”: “Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances…“
These developments –which are currently the object of heated debate– are the result of more than ten years of “repressive legislation” which increasingly points to the “fusion of the police and military functions both within the US and abroad”.
In a path breaking article published by Global Research in 2003, award winning author Frank Morales shows how the post 911 “Patriot Act” which he describes as a “repressive coordination” had set the stage for the militarization of America, namely “a form of state terrorism directed against the American people and democracy itself.”
The “domestic war on terrorism” hinges upon the Pentagon’s doctrine of homeland defense. Mountains of repressive legislation are being enacted in the name of internal security. So called “homeland security”, originally set within the Pentagon’s “operations other than war”, is actually a case in which the Pentagon has declared war on America.
Shaping up as the new battleground, this proliferating military “doctrine” seeks to justify new roles and missions for the Pentagon within America. Vast “legal” authority and funds to spy on the dissenting public, reconfigured as terrorist threats, is being lavished upon the defense, intelligence and law enforcement “community.”
We bring to the attention of our readers this path-breaking analysis by Frank Morales
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Views: 982
By Prof. James Petras
Global Research
June 24, 2014
Introduction
There are two major beneficiaries of the two major wars launched by the US government: one domestic and one foreign. The three major domestic arms manufacturers, Lockheed Martin (LMT), Northrop Grumman (NOG) and Raytheon (RTN) have delivered record-shattering returns to their investors, CEOs and investment banks during the past decade and a half. The Israeli regime is the overwhelming foreign beneficiary of the war, expanding its territory through its dispossession of Palestinians and positioning itself as the regional hegemon. Israel benefited from the US invasion which destroyed Iraq, a major ally of the Palestinians; the invasion provided cover for massive Israel’s settler expansion in the Occupied Palestinian territories. In the course of its invasion and occupation Washington systematically destroyed Iraq’s armed forces and civil infrastructure, shredding its complex modern society and state. By doing so, the US occupation removed one of Israel’s major regional rivals.
In terms of cost to the United States, hundreds of thousands of soldiers who had served in the war zones have sustained severe physical and mental injuries, while thousands have died directly or indirectly through an epidemic of soldier suicides. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has cost the United States trillions of dollars and counting. Despite the immense costs to the American people, the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel power configuration continue to keep the US government on a wartime economy – undermining the domestic social safety net and standard of living of many millions.
No peaceful economic activity can match the immense profits enjoyed by the military-industrial complex in war. This powerful lobby continues to press for new wars to sustain the Pentagon’s huge budget. As for the pro-Israel power configuration, any substantive diplomatic peace negotiations in the Middle East would end their naked land grabs, reduce or curtail new weapons transfers and undermine pretexts to sanction or attack countries, like Iran, that stand in the way of Tel Aviv’s vision of “Greater Israel”, unrivaled in the region.
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Views: 6,308
Disaster Capitalism on the battlefield and in the boardroom
By William Astore
October 23, 2013
CommonDreams.org
A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Afghanistan. (Photo: REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis)
There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground (as in the late nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” but with the U.S. and China doing the scrambling this time around), and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.
In the halls of Congress and the Pentagon, it’s business as usual, if your definition of “business” is the power and profits you get from constantly preparing for and prosecuting wars around the world. “War is a racket,” General Smedley Butler famously declared in 1935, and even now it’s hard to disagree with a man who had two Congressional Medals of Honor to his credit and was intimately familiar with American imperialism.
War is Political right?
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Views: 2,688
By Eric Blair
Activist Post
August 15, 2013
The revolving door of useful idiots swapping positions from the U.S. government to private industry is pandemic. It permeates every single industry; but especially banking, energy, war, food, medicine, prisons, and now surveillance. It's fascism, pure and simple, and it's time we start admitting it.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
We're already well aware of the revolving door at the Pentagon to keep the war machine going:
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Views: 1,313
The ultimate privacy killer
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
March 4, 2013
DARPA is working on an embryonic project that would store your every verbal conversation on an Internet server, creating a searchable chat database that would represent the ultimate privacy killer.
Having failed to establish its infamous Total Information Awareness system, although the project was continued under numerous different guises, DARPA is attempting to create a world in which your every utterance is stored in perpetuity.
But don’t worry, the servers on which your conversations are stored will be owned by the individual or their employer, and the government promises to never access the information using their vast new $2 billion dollar spying hub in the middle of the Utah desert. Honest.
“University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease has studied crowdsourcing for years, including for an earlier Darpa project called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, which sought to boost the accuracy of automated transcription machines. His work has also attracted enough attention for Darpa to award him a $300,000 award over two years to study the new project, called “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.” The project envisions a world that is both radically transparent and a little freaky,” reports Wired’s Robert Beckhusen.
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Views: 2,216
CBSDC
October 1, 2012
WASHINGTON (CBSDC) — Drones could soon operate without the help of humans.
Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Pentagon wants its drones to be more autonomous, so that they can run with little to no assistance from people.
“Before they were blind, deaf and dumb,” Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force, told AFP. “Now we’re beginning to make them to see, hear and sense.”
Ronald Arkin, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that drones will soon be able to kill enemies on their own independently.
“It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of,” Arkin told AFP.
Arkin added that robotic weapons should be designed as “ethical” warriors and that these type of robots could wage war in a more “humane” way.
The U.S. military says people will be on the ground to control the drones despite the unmanned robots gaining more independence.
Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at The Brookings Institution, believes there could be legal hurdles in regards to using robot-controlled drones.
“These responses that are driven by science, politics and battlefield necessity get you into areas where the lawyers just aren’t ready for it yet,” Singer told AFP.
Earlier this year, Singer wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times about the use of drones. In the piece, entitled “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?” he says the use of drones is “short-circuiting the decision-making process.”
“Without any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it,” Singer wrote. “Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.”
AFP reports that new military drones will most likely be implemented with more powerful jet engines and have longer range in combat.
There are currently more than 7,000 drones being used in combat.
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Views: 1,637
By Michael Snyder
The American Dream
Aug 30, 2012
The way that the U.S. government treats military veterans is absolutely disgraceful. Men and women that have given everything for this nation are literally being treated like human garbage by their own government. After watching how vets are treated, it is absolutely amazing that anyone is still volunteering to be a part of the military. We pay those in the military like crap, we keep sending our best soldiers back to Afghanistan and Iraq again and again, we don’t equip them properly, military suicides are at a record pace, hundreds of thousands of applications for veteran benefits are hopelessly backlogged, homelessness and unemployment among vets is much higher than for the general population, the condition of most VA hospitals is an absolute disgrace, and to top everything off now the Obama administration has started labeling military veterans as “potential terrorists”. What you are about to read should make you very angry. The abuse, neglect and outright disrespect that military vets receive from their own government is absolutely shocking. We owe these men and women a great debt for the service that they have performed for our nation, but instead the federal government kicks them to the curb and treats them with no honor whatsoever. The way a nation treats military vets says a lot about the character of that nation, and right now the way that America treats veterans says that we have the character of a steaming pile of manure.
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Views: 1,636
By Elliott Freeman
Digital Journal
May 1, 2012
 Pentagon officials recently disclosed to the Associated Press (AP) that they could not find any photo or video evidence to confirm that Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed in the Navy Seal raid in Pakistan a year ago.
AP has submitted more than 20 requests for information surrounding the raid on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound to the U.S. Government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
In response to the request for visual evidence of Bin Laden’s death, the Pentagon stated that it could not find any pictures or video footage of the raid itself or of Bin Laden’s dead body. It also told AP it could not locate any images of Bin Laden’s body that were taken on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, the Navy aircraft carrier that reportedly lowered him into the sea after his death.
In addition, the Pentagon admitted that it could not find an autopsy report, death certificate or results of a DNA identification test for Bin Laden, in spite of claims made by President Obama and reported by CBC News that a DNA test was performed. These admissions follow a related FOIA response by the Department of Defense in February, in which it stated that it had no emails concerning the Bin Laden raid that were sent prior to its execution.
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Views: 1,632
The Military-Entertainment Complex (or) Taxpayer Funded Propaganda
By David Sirota
Washington Post
August 26, 2011
 Americans are souring on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military budget is under siege as Congress looks for spending to cut. And the Army is reporting record suicide rates among soldiers. So who does the Pentagon enlist for help in such painful circumstances?
Hollywood.
In June, the Army negotiated a first-of-its-kind sponsorship deal with the producers of “X-Men: First Class,” backing it up with ads telling potential recruits that they could live out superhero fantasies on real-life battlefields. Then, in recent days, word leaked that the White House has been working with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow on an election-year film chronicling the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
A country questioning its overall military posture, and a military establishment engaging in a counter-campaign for hearts and minds — if this feels like deja vu, that’s because it’s taking place on the 25th anniversary of the release of “Top Gun.”
That Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, made in collaboration with the Pentagon, came out in the mid-1980s, when polls showed many Americans expressing doubts about the post-Vietnam military and about the constant saber rattling from the White House. But the movie’s celebration of sweat-shined martial machismo generated $344 million at the box office and proved to be a major force in resuscitating the military’s image.
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Views: 2,213
PrisonPlanet.com
“We threatened to shut down Washington over nothing, because we’re not cutting spending in any serious way…” that was just one part of Senator Rand Paul’s fiery floor speech blasting both sides of the isle for failing to make a sober effort to operate from a balanced budget.
Paul lashed out at those who’ve bashed the Tea Party over spending issues, claiming that its aims are only ‘good government.’ “You know it’s amazing to me to be lectured to, and hear about how awful the Tea Party is, what the Tea Party represents, from folks who’ve never been to a Tea Party. You know, come on down to a Tea Party, bring your Huey Long rhetoric- a chicken in every pot, a windmill in every… backyard. Bring it on down to the Tea Party; let’s have a discussion. Let’s bring it to the American public. The Tea Party’s been lectured about spending; who among you has voted against an appropriations bill? We haven’t even seen an appropriations bill in this body in over a year; we haven’t seen a budget. We’re spending $2 trillion dollars a year we don’t have, and they’re hear blaming it on the Tea Party. Who’s in charge here? It’s not the Tea Party…”
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