[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Mail]  [Sign-in]  [Setup]  [Help]  [Register] 

Utopian Visionaries Who Won’t Leave People Alone

No - no - no Ain'T going To get away with iT

Pete Buttplug's Butt Plugger Trying to Turn Kids into Faggots

Mark Levin: I'm sick and tired of these attacks

Questioning the Big Bang

James Webb Data Contradicts the Big Bang

Pssst! Don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue how life began

A fine romance: how humans and chimps just couldn't let go

Early humans had sex with chimps

O’Keefe dons bulletproof vest to extract undercover journalist from NGO camp.

Biblical Contradictions (Alleged)

Catholic Church Praising Lucifer

Raising the Knife

One Of The HARDEST Videos I Had To Make..

Houthi rebels' attack severely damages a Belize-flagged ship in key strait leading to the Red Sea (British Ship)

Chinese Illegal Alien. I'm here for the moneuy

Red Tides Plague Gulf Beaches

Tucker Carlson calls out Nikki Haley, Ben Shapiro, and every other person calling for war:

{Are there 7 Deadly Sins?} I’ve heard people refer to the “7 Deadly Sins,” but I haven’t been able to find that sort of list in Scripture.

Abomination of Desolation | THEORY, BIBLE STUDY

Bible Help

Libertysflame Database Updated

Crush EVERYONE with the Alien Gambit!

Vladimir Putin tells Tucker Carlson US should stop arming Ukraine to end war

Putin hints Moscow and Washington in back-channel talks in revealing Tucker Carlson interview

Trump accuses Fulton County DA Fani Willis of lying in court response to Roman's motion

Mandatory anti-white racism at Disney.

Iceland Volcano Erupts For Third Time In 2 Months, State Of Emergency Declared

Tucker Carlson Interview with Vladamir Putin

How will Ar Mageddon / WW III End?

What on EARTH is going on in Acts 16:11? New Discovery!

2023 Hottest in over 120 Million Years

2024 and beyond in prophecy

Questions

This Speech Just Broke the Internet

This AMAZING Math Formula Will Teach You About God!

The GOSPEL of the ALIENS | Fallen Angels | Giants | Anunnaki

The IMAGE of the BEAST Revealed (REV 13) - WARNING: Not for Everyone

WEF Calls for AI to Replace Voters: ‘Why Do We Need Elections?’

The OCCULT Burger king EXPOSED

PANERA BREAD Antichrist message EXPOSED

The OCCULT Cheesecake Factory EXPOSED

Satanist And Witches Encounter The Cross

History and Beliefs of the Waldensians

Rome’s Persecution of the Bible

Evolutionists, You’ve Been Caught Lying About Fossils

Raw Streets of NYC Migrant Crisis that they don't show on Tv

Meet DarkBERT - AI Model Trained On DARK WEB

[NEW!] Jaw-dropping 666 Discovery Utterly Proves the King James Bible is God's Preserved Word

ALERT!!! THE MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION WILL SOON BE POSTED HERE


Status: Not Logged In; Sign In

politics and politicians
See other politics and politicians Articles

Title: The Counterinsurgency Paradigm: How U.S. Politics Have Become Paramilitarized
Source: The Intercept
URL Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/11/25 ... erinsurgency-us-drone-strikes/
Published: Nov 25, 2018
Author: Jeremy Scahill
Post Date: 2018-11-28 11:20:11 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 487

Donald Trump ran a campaign promising to refill the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” to “take out” the families of suspected terrorists, to ban Muslims from entering this country, and to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet these policies didn’t start with Trump: Torture, indefinite detention, extraordinary renditions, record numbers of deportations, anti-Muslim sentiment, mass foreign and domestic surveillance, and even the killing of innocent family members of suspected terrorists all have a recent historical precedent.

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, continued some of the worst policies of the George W. Bush administration. He expanded the global battlefield post-9/11 into at least seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. At the end of Obama’s second term, a report by Council of Foreign Relations found that in 2016, Obama dropped an average of 72 bombs a day. He used drone strikes as a liberal panacea for fighting those “terrorists” while keeping boots off the ground. But he also expanded the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan. Immigrants were deported in such record numbers under Obama that immigration activists called him the “deporter-in-chief.” And then there were the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, where Obama national security officials would order pizza and drink Coke and review the list of potential targets on their secret assassination list.

For his liberal base, Obama sanitized a morally bankrupt expansion of war, and used Predator and Reaper drones strapped with Hellfire missiles to kill suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens stripped of their due process. The Obama administration harshly prosecuted whistleblowers in a shocking attack on press freedoms. By the end of his presidency, official numbers on civilian deaths by drone were underreported; we may never know the true cost of these wars, which continue today.

Bush, before him, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, took a hatchet to civil liberties: He expanded National Security Agency surveillance on overseas communications and created a system for unprecedented levels of surveilled communications of U.S. citizens. Much of this happened with the support of leading Democrats. Mosques across the country and in New York City were spied on. The authorization for the use of military force was passed in 2001 with the full backing of every lawmaker except for Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. The bill created the justification for the forever wars that still rage on 17 years later.

And steadily, all of the counterinsurgency tactics of these foreign wars have crept back home, Bernard Harcourt argues in a recent book. Called “The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens” and it makes the argument that through NSA spying; Trump’s constant, daily distractions; and paramilitarized police forces or private security companies, the same counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare used against post-9/11 enemies has now come to U.S. soil as the effective governing strategy.

We are in the middle of an unprecedented paramilitarization of state and local law enforcement agencies in this country. Police at protests and demonstrations often look like they’re SEAL Team 6 getting ready to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound. Many agencies have received military equipment through a Defense Department program that allows police to obtain military equipment after it’s been used in foreign war zones.

In “The Counterrevolution,” America’s post-9/11 domestic reality is placed within the deeper history of modern warfare and counterinsurgency doctrine. Harcourt traces the evolution of modern warfare, or counterinsurgency, as it developed in the 1950s and ’60s to fight small rebellions, including the colonial struggles for freedom in Algeria and Indochina against France and the Viet Cong fighting against the United States in Vietnam. The lessons learned by France in fighting colonial uprisings were distilled into French war strategist David Galula’s “Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,” which many decades later became an influential text for Gen. David Patraeus as he worked on writing the document that would come to define U.S. war strategy in the Middle East. The 2006 counterinsurgency field manual shaped the counterinsurgency strategy across Iraq and Afghanistan.

Insurgents, or the “active minority,” were aggressively sought out — often targeted for elimination via drone strike. In fact, at the center of Harcourt’s argument for how the domestication of the counterinsurgency warfare paradigm occurred is the drone strike. Heralded as “precise” or “surgical,” the drone strike won the public’s favor under Obama. Any public debate surrounding the use of drones as a legitimate replacement for boots-on-the-ground arguably ended in 2011, with the drone assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and, subsequently, the strike that killed his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman. Instead of an arrest, trial, and verdict for these U.S. citizens, an execution by strike from the sky was authorized. A Gallup poll reported in 2013 that 65 percent of the American public supported drone strikes against overseas targets even after the killing of its own citizens. Harcourt writes, “[Drones] make killing even U.S. citizens abroad far more tolerable. And this tolerance is precisely what ends up eroding the boundaries between foreign policy and domestic governance.”

We spoke to Harcourt about his latest book, what makes the Trump presidency unique, and why we aren’t talking about drones anymore on the Intercepted podcast. What follows is the audio of the edited conversation as aired - the full transcript of the unedited interview can be found at the link.

The interview begins at 45:32.

(Transcript at the link)

Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread  


[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Mail]  [Sign-in]  [Setup]  [Help]  [Register] 

Please report web page problems, questions and comments to webmaster@libertysflame.com