If only they could get access to this keyboard inside the Fed and start punching the zero keys:
Wow… There’s quite a lot of people online at the moment…
Epic.
Even if you did see this on the mainstream news, they would spin it into something like “he never really loved his kid.”
American Citizens Split On DOJ Memo Authorizing Government To Kill Them
WASHINGTON—Following the release of a secret Department of Justice memo this week that outlines the administration’s legal justification for killing U.S. citizens, a new Pew Research Center poll has revealed that a majority of Americans are torn over whether they support the government’s right to kill them anywhere at any time without due process. “On the one hand, I get it—it’s important for the government to be able to murder me and any of my friends or family members whenever they please for reputed national security reasons. But on the other hand, it would kind of be nice to stay alive and have, maybe, a trial, actual evidence—stuff like that,” said visibly conflicted 39-year-old Nashua, NH resident Rebecca Sawyer, who, like millions of other Americans, is split over whether secret federal agents should be allowed to target and assassinate her anywhere on U.S. soil. “I wouldn’t mind if federal officials blew up other citizens and claimed it was in the name of my safety. But it’s just that when it comes to me, I guess I’d rather not be slaughtered by my own elected officials on charges that never have to be validated by any accountable authority. This is tough.” While most Americans expressed conflicted feelings regarding the memo, the poll also found that 28 percent of citizens were unequivocally in favor of being obliterated at any point, for any reason, in a massive airstrike.
lol how to embed?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/camover-targets-cctvs/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/camover-targets-cctvs/
embed with a left bracket
“[”
a space
the word “view:”
then the link
then closed bracket “]”
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Albert Stubblebine is not high-ranking
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Stubblebine is the guy who ran the unit that the movie “The Men Who Stare At Goats” was made to spoof
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Stubblebine offers no actual inside info on 9/11 and he starts his questioning of the official story where all disinfo agents do: at the most difficult places, such as the Pentagon strike and the Twin Tower strikes and collapses.
If you want to understand why you should question the official 9/11 narrative, start here:
and here:
Clayton -
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you can say that when youre a lieutenant general
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imo its significant when a retired imagery analyst analyzes imagery. his other arguments are standard fare, but if he says that hole wasnt made by an airplane its significant.
Be that as it may, the entire 9/11 thing is infected with so much disinfo that it is very difficult for someone who has never taken a serious look at the topic to even find a good starting-place… that’s why I posted the above two videos. Any lurkers who would like to dig into this topic for themselves should also check out David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and 9/11 Ten Years Later.
The WTC7 collapse and the lack of any air defense response for an hour and a half in the heart of US airspace over the government’s primary headquarters on the Eastern seaboard while four hijacked, commercial passenger jets roamed the skies willy-nilly… these are the two biggest lies, most riddled with gaping holes. If you are a skeptic regarding 9/11 “conspiracy theories”, the best place to start is with the most obvious errors in the official account… if you can quickly and easily convince yourself that a person would have to be crazy to doubt the official narrative on these two points - WTC7 and the air-defense non-response from 8:46am when the first plane finally hit the WTC (after having been off-course and not responding to FAA and ATC since 8:14am) to 10:03am when Flight 93 eventually “crashed” in Pennsylvania - then you can safely dismiss everything else that 9/11 skeptics have to say. These are the two most obvious problems in the official story. There are many, many other problems in the official story but these two don’t require a lot of complex explanations. The contradictions between the official story and the known facts are simple and direct.
If you do see that a person wouldn’t have to be insane to doubt the official story on the basis of the WTC7 collapse and the air-defense non-response (really, a stand-down), then you have prima facie evidence on which to proceed with the concept of a “vast conspiracy within the government”. The objection that “they could never keep it a secret” is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how or why the official story is false, all that matters is that it is false and the truth must be something else. Perhaps it was a foreign intelligence operation - maybe Mossad did it. After pulling it off, USG was so embarrassed at its own security failures that it participated in covering it all up. Or perhaps it was the work of a secret element within the US government - a “government within the government”. Or perhaps it was something else that escapes our limited imagination on such matters of treachery, murder and intrigue. It doesn’t really matter what the alternative hypothesis is… if we establish that the facts falsify the null hypothesis - that is, the official story - then we must discard that hypothesis and look for another which is at least consistent with the facts, even if it is not “provable”.
Clayton -
Well a big part of the reason why what special forces do may be likened to “shooting fish in a barrel” has to with their choice of mission. Just by definition of what is they do, it is they who decide when, where and against whom it is they seek battle. Most of the time they are training and resting behind the battlelines, only crossing them at the time of their choosing to go on extremely well-rehearsed raids with the element of surprise on their side and therefore against ill-suspecting targets. It’s not their fault, but from the perspective of the regulars it is convenient and a kind of cherry picking.
They do not dig in and hold the frontline — and come what may (such as a Nazi armored division or two, or the proverbial two hundred thousand screaming Chinamen). They are in and out. And effectively most times they are hiding behind the backs of regulars who hold the fort and do not get to choose their engagements.
But you put special forces in a trench on the Western Front and they are just as liable to get massacred as anybody else. Nor would they in such a scenario prove any more efficient than veteran regulars either.
Addendum: Viktor Suvorov in his classic introduction of the spetsnaz: “These soldiers never dig trenches; in fact they never take up defensive positions. They either launch a sudden attack on an enemy or, if they meet with resistance or superior enemy forces, they disappear as quickly as they appeared and attack the enemy again where and when the enemy least expects them to appear.”
To your larger point regarding why special forces types are so dangerous, I would contribute the following. It isn’t so much their bodycounts, but really the manner in which they kill.
I think it is different to kill from afar and to kill people whom you do not see — such as in launching a SCUD missile or a V2 rocket — which is relatively easy for people to do. (Because in effect there is no felt emotional compulsion against it, only a rational argument.) This as deeply troubling in a sense, but (perhaps unfortunately) it is a fact of the human condition.
It is also different to kill in a conventional high-intensity engagement — such as in your typical WWII movie with high-calibre artillery rounds going off all around you and what not — which is such an abnormal situation beyond anything the human was designed for and where the danger to your life and the life or your comrades is so acutely present and overwhelming to the senses. I think killing in such a case is again not difficult for otherwise ordinary people.
The manner in which special forces kill is much more often than for regulars distinct from both these cases. It involves killing that is close and personal like in the WWII battle example, but that is like in the SCUD example without the immediate kill-or-be-killed dynamic to it. For example it involves killing people who are asleep. In a normal human being the thought of extinguishing the life of a person who is asleep causes revulsion. A special forces type however is trained to approach this as a technical problem. The most he is allowed to ask himself is if he should strangle the sleeping enemy, or cut its throat. These are people who are capable of, for example, silently descending on a trench of sleeping soldiers and methodically cutting the throats of 10-15 people. You are right it isn’t mainly a matter of skill or daring, most regulars just aren’t capable of that psychologically. Ordinary human mind has a strong compulsion against that kind of crap.
Of course when what you have on hand isn’t a gigantic high-intensity conventional war, but instead an occupation things change. Things change in the respect that now it is also expected of regular troops, much more often so than in a conventional war, to kill people who aren’t engaging in combat themselves and to do it up close. For example in Iraq the occupying troops were told to shoot and kill any Iraqis carrying a spade.
Regulars, veterans of conventional wars were stil for the greatest part normal people. Even those who were technically killers, for having extinguished a life, did so in a scenario where I believe it is relatively easy for people to kill, and where either the distance from the victim, or the immediate danger to oneself, precludes compulsion against killing from kicking in even in ordinary people.
Regulars, veterans of dirty wars are in a much greater proportion not so. Many of them had, just like special forces types, killed in a manner that requires what you aptly call the “acquired willingness to kill”. Willingness to kill that is not normally present in people (including those who are killers from afar who do not have to face their victims, and veterans who have killed in heat of battle). I agree people with this acquired willingness to kill are potentialy dangerous even of themselves, but much more seriously they are potentially extremely useful to the authorities. I am reminded the worst regime in the history, the Nationalsocialists in Germany, were a veritable factory for the making of people with this extreme willingness to kill.
@Marko: +1
Have you read On Killing? Great book.
One note is that I think the modern view that regulars are, well, normal is flawed. Until the time of Napoleon, the concept of regular troops - who were nothing more than conscripts - as real troops had never existed. It was unprecedented and was the omen that signified the arrival of the two centuries of total warfare we have seen since that time.
But this is an illusion, in my opinion. The pre-Napoleonic soldier was much more like a modern special forces soldier. He generally did not “hold the lines” unless he was in some kind of virtually impregnable fortification. He killed up close and personal, he always strove to have the element of surprise, he (or at least, his commander to which he often owed only volunteer allegiance) chose his targets on the basis of his calculated ability to surprise and overwhelm them.
Of course, the rules of seige warfare were entirely different and I would argue that the logic of modern warfare is, in large part, the logic of seige warfare applied to the battlefield itself. What is a trench but a “improvised castle wall”?? Of course, artillery, rifles and rapid-fire machine-guns really and permanently altered the logic of warfare, as well. The entire concept of “holding your ground” became an exercise in suicide. A well-armed and determined enemy making a blitz push through a pin-point along “the battle-lines” with benefit of armor will always prevail… this is simply the physical law of force applied to strategy… the pin always bursts the balloon… and to pierce a much thicker balloon you need only a slightly thicker pin.
The real logic underlying total warfare and mass conscription creating “citizen soldiers” was the relatively novel idea that the individual’s “love of country” could be harnessed to make him willing to die for his country. And really, that’s all there is to it. As you point out, the job of the regulars is to make the real soldiers safe, so they have a permanent base from which to plan their strikes and a safely-held area of the battlefied in which to maneuver into position.
Following the 90/10 rule that we see everywhere in commerce - which I believe applies equally to war - we can safely say that 10% of the armed forces easily do 90% of the real work (not necessarily 90% of the killing… but 90% of the killing that matters) that brings about the desired strategic goal. For example, you can think of the forward operators that were deployed to Baghdad to call in the JDAM coordinates for dynamic strikes on Iraqi tragets of opportunity during the 2nd Gulf War invasion. Doubtless, more than a few high-ranking Iraqi generals and politicians were killed during these strikes. These deaths were far more consequential than the deaths of the goatherds-coerced-into-driving-tank whose tanks were turned into flaming canisters by Apaches along the invasion routes into Baghdad.
In summary, my theory of the emergence of modern total warfare is that it is partly the result of growing pains in the strategic understanding of the war elites of the true consequences of the gunpowder projectile weapons - artillery, rifle, machine-gun - as well as explosive devices, mechanization and air power to the character of warfare. It was also partly the result of very shrewd innovations (originating in Prussia, I believe) in the social technology of militarizing an entire population. First, you inculcate love of country from youth. Then, you leverage this love of country to turn otherwise “ordinary” folks who never wielded anything more dangerous than a pitchfork or an ox-cart into soldiers by the application of a “pre-molded” soldier persona onto them. You give them a standard gun, standard boots, a standard uniform and standard provisions and you roll them off an assembly line of military training and then send them out into the field to “hold the line” or some other ill-defined strategic objective whose true purpose is merely to relieve the core combat soldiers - the real professionals who do it because they love it - of intermediate strategic objectives, freeing them up to be used for capital strategic objectives, like assaulting the enemy’s field headquarters or assassinating his generals, and so on.
Clayton -
Why You Should Quit Politics (by Kaleb Matson)
Article here: http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/matson-k1.1.1.html
