The Cost of Imperial War

Bent on controlling the world without letting up, the United States empire seeks to control the natural resources of the world and no amount of human suffering will stop the maniacal leaders who are in power in the White House. Drones patrol the skies in various cities across America as souped up police departments get ready with anticipation for the go ahead to add rubber bullet or tear gas projectile rounds to their newly federally funded government tools of oppression. Meanwhile soldiers with blown off legs who are on their seventh or eighth tour to Afghanistan are recycled into an unjust occupation of brutality with their new prosthetic limbs. Joint Special operations command, known for its murder of civilians in night-raids carried out in conjunction with the Pakistani military in Pakistan and the Afghan National Army in Afghanistan, is a subunit of U.S. Special Operations Command. Special Operations Command personnel have grown from 37,000 in the 1990's to 60,000 soldiers One third of these are "career members," according to journalist Nick Turse. The rest have other military occupational specialties but are sent through the command on a routine intermittent basis. Increasing in it's budget from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion since the blowback event that occurred on 911, and adding in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8 billion in these years--a tremendous waste of taxpayer money on a ruthless special operations murder machine. The U.S. military and the C.I.A., have murdered thousands of people with drones in Pakistan and has recently stepped up such reckless attacks in Yemen, including the use of "signature strikes," where the individual whose movements are watched by satellite from an airbase in the United States do not even have to be identified before being ruthlessly assassinated by murder squads who kill from a distance and deny their victims a trial as they wield power over a strangers life. With cowardice they hide, thousands of miles away from the occupation and bomb a country that lacks air power of any kind. The idea that the wars are "winding down," as many claim is patently false. Special operations units are deployed in 70 nations throughout the world and the United States doesn't ever fully leave Middle Eastern nations which it occupies as evidenced by the continued occupation of Iraq with private military contractors, special operations forces, overhead drones and the Vatican Sized State Department embassy. Rather than being sent home, movements of soldiers are typically shifted to other bases in the region such as Qatar, Kuwait, Oman to prepare for yet another war on a small, third-world nation, such as Iran, or to bases strategically located near a world power nation such as China. The recent move to send thousands of marines to bases in Australia is an example of such attempts to revive artificially constructed cold war hostilities through the U.S. Empire's declaration that it is "pivoting" to the Pacific, or becoming a "Pacific Power." It's time that the 911 imperial mindset of rationalized murder be exposed for what it truly is--an excuse to take innocent civilian life so as to augment arms industry sales and stimulate massive arms production into congressional districts across the United States. The hijackers who struck the twin towers on 911, 15 of which were Saudis, two Yemeni and two United Arab Emirate citizens, are clearly not the same individuals as the women and children who the U.S. military/CIA and NATO slaughters day-to-day with drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. This warped state of false consciousness, in which innocent civilians are murdered by aircraft without even a hint of the subject being guilty of any crime, is what Glen Greenwald calls "the authoritarian mind." Recent indications that most Americans have no idea why the Afghan war is even being fought include the committal of green on blue violence in which Afghans who are trained by the U.S. military kill the officers that train them by shooting them in the head when nobody is looking. This is clear evidence of where this ugly and brutal occupation of Afghanistan is going and taking the American people down with it. (C) Bill Lewis