With the USA re-inserting itself centerstage with the
sanctions against Russia, you could almost think the drama has shifted
elsewhere. Did you hear Edward Snowden sliding out of the news, obfuscated in
the noise and confusion of the Ukraine/Crimea moment?
These distractions are useful. They make us think the
richest country in the world is still the one with the trillions to do whatever
it wants, wherever--whether it is unprovoked attacks on Iraq and Afganisthan;
or torture of its own and other countries ‘ citizens; or worldwide surveillance
of phones, computers and other shady downloads of personal information that is
still to be revealed ; or stealing/hacking
of worldwide data with the absolute assurance that it is completely above the
law in doing this. Not to mention what appears to be an increasingly blanket
check it has given itself to install and operate technologies of torture (which
include sleep deprivation targeted towards minorities) in not just in own, but
also other countries. And of course, the widespread use of drones in murder of
civilians.
The European Union, which consists of a group of nations
whose histories include Nazism, Italian
Fascism, Spanish Fascism, French collaboration, Dutch collaboration and others,
are of course completely behind the United States. Expecting them somehow to control
the USA is obviously an overrated hope that the world should not place any more
in Europe.
With the Europeans and the USA controlling all mechanisms of
finance--the wild fluctuation of currency in the last year has made it
abundantly clear that people are just pushing the prices up and down to make
giant profits, and that this by itself
can make or break entire nation states (Witness George Soros and his little
meddling in 1998 that completely crashed Thailand, for one)—it is clear that
finance and its associated apparatuses (money, money, money) should come under careful
scrutiny when any business transaction
is held.
This state of affairs
can continue indefinitely. In fact, there is no reason why the military-industrial
complex and its torture business shouldn’t grow and prosper from shore to shore
in the coming decades, since almost all international mechanism of control and
regulation are in the pockets of the EU and the USA.
The end of the Third Reich did not come about easily. Hitler
ruled and flourished for twelve years, killing 11 million people (6 million Jews,
and 5 million Romanis, homosexuals, the disabled, and mentally retarded people)
before the Allies and Russia finally
came together to defeat them. And while people
may take offense at the analogy, saying that America could never be compared to
the Third Reich, it is becoming increasingly clear that the elected leaders of
the US Congress may themselves not be aware of the total scope of activities of
the US’s secret national security state themselves. What are they doing,
besides hacking into computers? What is the scope and scale of their torture
and killings? In fact, if you ask the US Congress, they don’t really know.
It is clear America’s death count has been as high as
Hitler, Stalin or Mao, if you add up causalities from all its wars. In both the
Second World War, when the excessive use of force against a civilian population
in Japan was clearly motivated by racism and racial superiority, to the many
other wars that followed, the USA has not been moral, or ethical, about its
usage of force.
It is clear an accounting of some sort has to happen,
coincidentally, 12 years after the set up of the homeland security state in the USA. But to expect the
US Congress to regulate and account for the activities of the CIA and the NSA and all the
associated agencies may be naive. It is
clear there is deep complicity between the Congress and these agencies-witness
Diane Feinstein and her years of support for the NSA’s surveillance. The big attention and calls of the “bring the torture report out in the open” may end with the
disappointment of what the world already knows-namely, that the USA was
torturing inmates in Guantanamo.
This doesn’t take into account all the secret ways in which
the USA is torturing people all over the world NOW, with the authorization of the Obama
administration. While the torture may
have started with Bush, it clearly hasn’t ended with Obama. And then there’s
all the secret research, like the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies, also referred to as the Brain Activity Map Project, which
the White House itself announced and endorsed. The partners include DARPA. What
usages do you think this research has, knowing the US’s history of aggression
against its perceived enemies and its punitive regime against minorities?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAIN_Initiative
It is clear that the scope and scale of “Torture”-and the
definition of torture itself—has to be revised and expanded to include new ways
in which nation states may be acting against their critics and opponents. The USA,
with its extensive and well documented history of scientific experimentation on
people without consent, along with its
deep rooted historical script of slavery, is perfectly capable of coming up
with a secret program of torture which includes brain hacking for the purpose
of stealing data, drones in all shapes and sizes, secret torture during sleep, and
concentration camps that don’t fit the 1940s model. Concentration camps these
days have moved onto the brain and digital realm.
Is the world ready to come to an accounting? Or will they end
this at: “The Bush administration waterboarded people in Guantanamo” level of
accountability?
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