Military
There is a consistent contradiction between the stated objectives of the War on Terrorism and the outcomes. Therefore we know the assumptions are wrong. Freedom has never been the goal. Continuous war is directly out of the Orwell dystopian novel: 1984. We are living that now.
A book entitled “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers” has recently brought to light the story of soldiers suffering from health conditions after being constantly exposed to smoke from burn pits. The US Government won’t admit the burn pits wee misused and the media remains silent about the issue.
A French judge has summoned the former chief of Guantánamo Bay, retired U.S. General Geoffrey Miller, to appear in court on March 1 to face allegations of torture against detainees. Former prisoners of the camp for years have urged international courts to subpoena Miller over his role in the torture and mistreatment of detainees during his time as Guantánamo commander.
In all of 2014, a total of 55 US troops, in both hostile and non-hostile situations, lost their lives in foreign occupations. The number of soldiers who killed themselves is nearly 5 times that amount.
Fourteen years ago, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the United States government initiated its “war on terror,” with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, which expanded into Pakistan, and of Iraq in 2003. While the corporate media has occasionally acknowledged the 6,800 American soldiers, and the 7,000 contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, they consistently ignore Iraqi and Afghani deaths, which exceed one million, giving the western public no context to understand the attacks lead by the Islamic State in Syria and Levant (ISIL).
Since President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, an estimated 2,464 people have been killed by drone strikes targeted outside of the United States’ declared war zones; this figure was posted in February 2015 by Jack Serle and the team at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who maintain a database of all known strikes—based on fieldwork, media reports, and leaked documents—which provides a clearer picture of the scale and impact of the US drone program than the episodic reporting provided by corporate media.
By September 2012, after almost a decade at the task, the U.S. had allocated and spent nearly $25 billion on “training, equipping, and sustaining” the Iraqi security forces, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. In the end, the U.S. claimed to have trained roughly 950,000 members of the “steady,” “solid,” and well-trained Iraqi security forces.
And yet just two and a half years after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, that same force collapsed in spectacular fashion to less than 31,000 ISIS militants (according to CIA estimates) and these forces reportedly were so frightened by 800 ISIS militants that they went running, leaving equipment and even their uniforms behind, thus handing over the second largest city in the country, Mosul.
We’ve all heard this one: if a politician wants to disarm the public, he should give up his own security protection. See how he likes it. What is it about politicians that gives them a special right to have armed professionals stalk their perimeter and mumble into their collars?
After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing ISIS, politicians and papers around him wrote it off as “bluster and bigotry,” “foolish”, and “…just silly.” By almost any standard, Cruz’s proposal was laughable [not to mention pathological & inhumane], and his rivals and the media called him on it. Yet, his poll numbers actually crept up, from 15 % to 18 percent, & one poll even had at 24 %.
Last year, under the auspices of a Nobel Peace Prize-Winning President, the U.S. dropped over 23,000 bombs on Muslim-majority countries.
Brutal mechanisms of control like, terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds the American empire together.
SIS is well-financed, and that money must be coming from somewhere. ISIS has advanced weaponry and sophisticated communications methods. They have tanks and Humvees. None of these can be obtained without significant funding. Though the source is illusive, but there is evidence that leads to a trail.
Former Marine Vincent Emanuele’s acknowledgement that he helped create ISIS comes in an article that was posted in which he hoped to answer the often raised question of “Where did ISIS come from?”
None of this trillion dollars taken from us is spent to keep us safe, despite what politicians say. In fact, this great rip-off actually makes us less safe and more vulnerable to a terrorist attack thanks to resentment overseas at our interventions and to the blowback it produces.
In service of corporate capital and with vested interests in the regions’ natural resources, the Pentagon and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been encircling Russia and China with military bases and missile defense systems, Bruce K. Gagnon reported
