The U.S. reprises Iraq, inventing a WMD threat from Syria.
The FBI concocts home-grown terror through stings, while the NSA claims
it has secretly saved many lives. “Why this steady stream of
government-invented terror, if the real thing is so abundant?” And,
isn’t the U.S. arming and funding the same jihadists they are supposed
to be listening for on our telephones?
The rulers would have you believe that the world is becoming more
complex and dangerous all the time, compelling the United States to
abandon previous (and largely fictional) norms of domestic and
international legality in order to preserve civilization. In truth, what
they are desperately seeking to maintain is the global dominance of
U.S. and European finance capital and the racist world order from which
it sprang.
The contradictions of centuries have ripened, overwhelming the
capacity of the “West” to contain the new forces abroad in the world.
Therefore, there must be endless, unconstrained war – endless, in the
sense that it is a last ditch battle to fend off the end of imperialism,
and unconstrained, in that the imperialists recognize no legal or moral
boundaries to their use of military force, their only remaining
advantage.
To mask these simple truths, the U.S. and its corporate propaganda
services invent counter-realities, scenarios of impending doomsdays
filled with super-villains and more armies of darkness than J.R.R.
Tolkien could ever imagine. Indeed, nothing is left to the imagination,
lest the people’s minds wander into the realm of truth or stumble upon a
realization of their own self-interest, which is quite different than
the destinies of Wall Street or the Project for a New American Century
(updated, Obama “humanitarian” version). It is a war of caricatures.
Saddam “must go” – and so he went, along with a million other Iraqis.
Gaddafi “must go” – and he soon departed (“We came, we saw, he died,”
quipped Hillary), along with tens of thousands of Black Libyans marked
for extermination. “Assad must go” – but he hasn’t left yet, requiring
the U.S. and its allies to increase the arms flow to jihadist armies
whose mottos translate roughly as “the western infidels must also
go…next.” Afghanistan’s Soviet-aligned government was the first on the
U.S. “must go” list to be toppled by the jihadist international network
created as a joint venture of the Americans, Saudis and Pakistanis, in
the early Eighties – a network whose very existence now requires that
Constitutional law “must go” in the American homeland.
Naturally, in order to facilitate all these exits of governments of
sovereign states, international law, as we have known it “must go.” In
its place is substituted the doctrine of “humanitarian” military
intervention or “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), a rehash of the
“White Man’s Burden” designed to nullify smaller powers’ rights to
national sovereignty at the whim of the superpower.
The entire continent of Africa has fallen under the R2P umbrella
(without ever having fully emerged from the colonial sphere – but,
that’s the whole point, isn’t it?). Somalia achieved a brief period of
peace, in 2006, under a broadly based Islamic Courts regime that had
defeated an array of warlords backed by the U.S. Washington struck back
late that year through its client state, Ethiopia. The Americans invoked
both the Islamist enemy and “Responsibility to Protect” to justify an
invasion that plunged Somalia into what UN observers called “the worst
humanitarian crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur.” Eventually, the U.S.
enlisted the African Union, itself, as the nominal authority in a
CIA-led Somalia mission that has militarized the whole Horn of Africa.
U.S. proxies set off inter-communal bloodletting in Rwanda in 1994, a
conflagration that served as pretext for Rwandan and Ugandan invasion
of the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo and the loss of six
million lives – all under the protection, funding and guidance of a
succession of U.S. administrations in mock atonement for the much
smaller “genocide” in Rwanda. President Obama sent Special Forces on
permanent duty to the region in search of another caricature, Joseph
Kony, whose only central casting defect is his rabid Christianity but
whose convenient presence in the bush justifies stationing Green Berets
in Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
Muammar Gaddafi’s exorcism in Libya energized jihadists all across
the northern tier of Africa, as far as northern Nigeria, giving a green
light to a French colonial renaissance and further expansion of AFRICOM,
the U.S. Africa Command. Only five years after its official inception,
AFRICOM reigns supreme on the continent, with ties to the militaries of
all but two African countries: the nemesis states Eritrea and Zimbabwe.
(They “must go,” eventually.)
New age Euro-American law holds sway over Africa in the form of the
International Criminal Court. The Court’s dockets are reserved for
Africans, whose supposed civilizational deficits monopolize the global
judiciary’s resources. This, too, is R2P, in robes.
Back in Syria, the reluctant domino, blood samples taken from alleged
victims of chemical weapons are sent to the Americans by jihadists in
their employ to prove that Assad really, really, must go. Obama
announces that he is going to do what he has actually been doing for a
very long time: send weapons to the “rebels.” The Washington Post,
forgetting its duty to follow the administration’s scripted timelines,
reports that the decision to go public about arms transfers to jihadists
was made two weeks before the “proof” arrived.
The lies become jumbled and are quickly superseded by new fictions to
justify no-fly, but the targeted caricatures remain front and center,
to be hooted and hollered over, once dead. It is only the lies that make
these situations seem complex: the lies that cover up multiple U.S.
genocides in Africa, to paint a canvas of humanitarian concern, when the
simple truth is that the Americans and Europeans have established
military dominion over the continent for their own greedy purposes. The
lies that have attempted to camouflage a succession of brazen
aggressions against unoffending secular Arab governments in order to
remove any obstacles to U.S. domination of North Africa and the Near
East. And, the lie that has become central to the U.S. global offensive
since 9/11: that the U.S. is engaged in a global war against armed
jihadists. In fact, the jihadists are American-contracted foot soldiers
in an Arab world in which the U.S. is hated by the people at-large.
Washington was the Godfather of international jihadism, its sugar daddy
since at least the early Eighties in Afghanistan – and now, once again
quite openly so in Syria as in Libya, at least for the time being.
The simple truth is, the U.S. is at war for continued hegemony over
the planet, for the preservation of the imperial system and its finance
capitalist rulers. In such a war, everyone, everywhere is a potential
enemy, including the home population.
That’s why Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and, now, Edward
Snowden are considered so dangerous; because they undermine popular
consent for the government’s lies-based policies. The administration has
sent its operatives to Capital Hill and all the corporate
pseudo-journalistic outlets to explain how its mega-data mining of
phones and the Internet has prevented “potential terrorist events over
50 times since 9/11,” including at least 10 “homeland-based threats,” as
mouthed by National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander. The
details are, of course, secret.
However, what we do know about U.S. domestic “terror” spying is
enough to dismiss the whole premise for the NSA’s vast algorithmic
enterprises. The actual “terrorist” threat on U.S. soil is clearly
relatively slight. Otherwise, why would the FBI have to manufacture
homegrown jihadists by staging elaborate stings of homeless Black men in
Miami who couldn’t put together bus fare to Chicago, much less bomb the
Sears tower? Why must they entice and entrap marginal people with no
capacity for clandestine warfare, and no previous inclination, into
schemes to bomb synagogues and shoot down military aircraft, as in
Newburgh, New York? Why this steady stream of government-invented
terror, if the real thing is so abundant? If the FBI, with NSA
assistance, is discovering significant numbers of real terrorists,
wouldn’t we be watching a corresponding number of triumphal perp-walks?
Of course we would. The only logical conclusion is that terror is a
near-negligible domestic threat, wholly unsuited to the NSA’s
full-spectrum spying on virtually every American.
So, what are they looking for? Patterns. Patterns of thought and
behavior thatalgorithmically reveal the existence of cohorts of people
that might, as a group, or a living network, create problems for the
State in the future. People who do not necessarily know each other, but
whose patterns of life make them potentially problematic to the rulers,
possibly in some future crisis, or some future manufactured crisis. A
propensity to dissent, for example. The size of these suspect cohorts,
these pattern-based groups, can be as large or small as the defining
criteria inputted by the programmer. So, what kind of Americans would
the programmers be interested in?
Ask Edward Snowden. He’s the only one talking.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
1.
There is no impact damage to this car. The only damage there is in the
back, not smashed in the front and it obviously missed the tree as it
rolled to a stop. The front bumper is obscured by the tree, all the way
to the tire, OOPS! . 
The answer is obvious. THEY SWITCHED CARS AND LOCATIONS FOR THE
DAY TIME PHOTO OP. Look at both of these pictures, you can clearly see
the car is not the same. The location is not the same. On top of that,
why is the car still there the NEXT DAY, 10 hours after the crash, when
wrecks always get towed away within a couple hours, as soon as the
flames are out? Why is the front end not mangled in the original photo,
or even the tree for that matter?
This is so far out there
that I had to double and triple confirm I did not screw this up, and
indeed I did not, ALL of the photos are frame captures from the exact
same news video. They TOTALLY blew it with this one.
This is as messed up as Woolwich. 
