Tag: police

Military Police and Drones

When asked the question ‘how on earth could you do that?’ is asked. Their answers are all the same; ‘I was just doing my job’ or ‘I’ve got bills to pay’. They were just doing their ‘duty’. The problem with collectivism, is that it is so rampant, and so widespread, that it affects everyone’s lives. It is easy to hide behind, and is the cause of millions of deaths and suffering in the world.

Portrait of a Drone Killer: ‘I Have a Duty, and I Execute My Duty’

One wonders if drone pilot Col. D. Scott Brenton listens to Louis Armstrong in the suburban Air National Guard Base in Syracuse from which he murders people 7,000 miles away.

“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Brenton tells the New York Times. Drone operators see their intended targets “wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,” explains Dave, another high-tech murderer who killed from an office cockpit at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base and who now trains new recruits to the cyber-killer corps at New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base.

When instructed to kill someone he has stalked from the air for a prolonged period, “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” Brenton insists. I have a duty, and I execute my duty.” When the deed is done, he points out, nobody “in my immediate environment is aware of anything that has occurred.”

“There was a good reason for killing the people that I did, and I go through it in my head over and over and over,” insists another drone operator named Will, who — like Dave — served a deskbound “combat” tour at Creech and now trains others to do likewise at Holloman Air Base.

 

Like the soldier Bates in Henry V, it’s sufficient for Will — and others of his ilk — to render obedience to their Leader, confident that “if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.” The more concise and notorious formula, of course, is: We are only obeying orders. Besides, drone operators (who insist on being called “combat pilots”) are carrying out an indispensable function by picking off Afghan “militants” — or at least those “suspected” of such tendencies — who unreasonably resent the presence of foreign military personnel in their country.

The New York Times profile is part of a campaign by the state-aligned media to “humanize” the state functionaries who murder by remote control — and to normalize this mode of mass murder as drones become part of the domestic apparatus of surveillance, regimentation, and repression. Readers are invited to share the anguish of these conflicted people, who for reasons of duty have to do terrible but necessary things.

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt offered a glimpse into the mindset of SS personnel who were given a somewhat similar assignment. To carry out their killing errand, she explained, something had to be done “to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.”

“The trick used by Himmler … was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self,” Arendt recounted. “So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”

Not everybody attached to the Regime’s Cyber-Killing Corps is haunted by the horrors he has inflicted on defenseless people halfway around the world. In a 2009 U.S. Naval Academy lecture, Dr. P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institution made reference to what he called “predator porn” — footage of drone attacks proudly circulated by the people who committed those acts. In a typical offering, Dr. Singer relates, “A Hellfire missile drops, goes in, and hits the target, followed by an explosion and bodies tossed into the air.” Singer described one clip of that kind, sent to him by a joystick-wielding assassin, that “was set to music, the pop song ‘I Just Want to Fly’ by the band Sugar Ray.”

“It’s like a videogame,” one deskbound drone jockey told Singer. “It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s f****g cool.”

Singer describes asking a drone pilot “what it was like to fight insurgents in Iraq while based in Nevada. He said, ‘You are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car and you drive home. And within 20 minutes, you’re sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.” Meanwhile, somewhere in Iraq (or Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, or another country yet to be identified), other families are desperately looking through the rubble of their own homes in search of survivors.

Although drone strikes occur daily, most Americans pay little heed to them — beyond occasionally taking inconsolable offense when a dissident publicly describes them as acts of murder, and insults the Dear Leader by daring to compare him to less prolific killers.

This may change soon: As the Times points out, the Pentagon — driven by “a near insatiable demand for drones” — is training hundreds of operators to join the corps of more than 1,300 currently stationed at more than a dozen bases across the country. Surveillance drones operated by domestic police agencies are already plying the skies above us. Those robot aircraft can be upgraded to airborne weapons platforms, and they soon will. The people being trained to feel “no emotional attachment” to foreigners designated enemies of the state will feel no particular burden when ordered to kill fellow Americans on that list. I’m sure that the “combat pilots” who murdered U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman would testify to that fact — that is, if the “heroes” who committed those acts were man enough to acknowledge their deeds in public.

Evil men and their puppets are able to hide behind technology now, but it is harder for the police ‘on the street’. The evidence of militarized build up of police forces is now rampant. The problems arise when innocent people get shot by cops who cross the line, like the events in Anaheim a few days ago.

The people who protest against police brutality and the militarization of police forces are heroes. Now how exactly is this young man threatening anyone?

‘Tempers continued to flare in Anaheim on Sunday afternoon as a group of about 250 protesters stood directly in front of the Police Department, the latest demonstration the city has seen after two fatal police shootings last weekend. Heavily armed and militarized forces were patrolling the streets and nine people were arrested including this man.’

Why is it, in a civilized nation, that we need the police force to become militarized? Is it because we are heading straight toward total anarchy? Or a total police state? I would say we already have a police state. There are security cameras being put up at new intersections all over the country. The police have become militarized, and the TSA has become an ever increasing parasite, including not only airports now, but bus services, and road checkpoints. This country truly is becoming the spitting image of Nazi Germany of the 1930’s.

When you hear news pundits talk about the ‘greatness of America’ and of patriotism and ‘serving your nation’. They are talking of serving the state, for the sake of the state, and not for the responsibility of liberty. Freedom comes at a cost, but not in wars over seas. We have lost more freedoms since our armed forces have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, than any other point in our nation’s history.

Take a look around you, what do you see? Is this still the home of the brave and the land of the free? Or do you notice the 450 million rounds of ammunition going to homeland security, an agency that didn’t exist a few years ago. And do you see all the horrible constitution denying documents that are being passed by congress?

Nazi Germany came about slowly over the course of a decade, in a similar way to this country over this previous decade.

What is your definition of patriotism? Do you support and defend the Constitution and your own individual liberties, or do you support the nation state and the collective?

At what point should the police and military stop taking horrific orders? Will they stop at the sight of Americans themselves being killed? Or is their training so ingrained that they will go along with whatever their masters tell them to?

And what will you do? How far will you go? Will you stand up and stop this from happening? Or will you go along with the nation, for the greatness of the nation state?

As Yoda said in star wars; “you must unlearn, what you have learned”

Welcome back to the USSA

It is with great sadness that I write this. The USA is no longer a free country. Any illusions that you may have that this is the symbol of hope and freedom in the world are false. It is a sad day indeed when you feel more free in the old world than you do in ‘the land of the free’.

When I walked through the immigration line upon entering the country; what I saw reminded me about what I had learned about Nazi Germany during the late 1930’s in the buildup to the second world war. As you walk through the cattle lines toward the immigration officers, you are made to feel like a prisoner, like you did something wrong for traveling abroad. When the stony faced immigration officer calls out ‘next!’ resembling that of a Nazi officer, he very bluntly asks you why you traveled outside of the country, as if it is a sin to do so. After he stamps your passport, as if you are visiting the country instead of returning home, you walk through customs, where the looters have a chance to go through your bags and personal belongings. After all, how dare you bring back anything of value without paying taxes on it. Once you make it through customs, you drop your bag off for your connecting flight, and are then sheep-herded over to the Nazi SS in blue uniforms under the guise of being called the TSA. The bright blue dressed morons then march you single file, like the prisoner you are, through the cancer giving x-ray machine, in a complete violation of the constitution and your basic human rights and self dignity. If you have any metal of any kind on you, you will then receive a liberty stripping pat down. By the time I had gone through the X-ray machine and watched my wife do the same, only to have her head and hair felt by the rubber gloves because of her berets, my blood was boiling. My arms were crossed, and I bit my lip as I trembled with anger, while it took everything in me to not cause a scene. I very promptly picked up my bag, my jacket, put my shoes back on, and helped my wife retrieve her personal belongings. We then made our way to our departure gate in silence as my anger at all the fat, stupid, lazy people that call themselves Americans allowed themselves to be herded like sheep without any recollection of what the founding fathers had gone through to give them freedom, which has now been completely and utterly stripped away.

I was glad that our connection flight took a while, it took me a very long time to calm down. Had my wife not been traveling with me, I would have refused the body scanner, and gotten myself into trouble the same way Rand Paul did earlier in the year. But, it being the last leg of our vacation, I did not want to spoil it for her.

This is no longer a free country, the sad realization I had after calming down from the Nazi TSA pat downs, was that it was not only at the airports that the blue dressed morons now operate at. They are beginning to set up checkpoints just like Communist Russia did in its heyday. They are now infiltrating public transportation, and busing. And what’s worse is that its not only the TSA, or homeland security, which oversees all departments, going against the checks and balances of the constitution. It’s the police force. ‘To serve and protect’ does not register in your mind when you see cars being pulled over left and right on a daily basis for silly little infractions. It is not much comfort to know that the USA has a larger prison population than any other country on earth. It is not much comfort to know that many of these prisoners are there because of non-crimes. Why should you go to jail when you have not harmed anyone else?

This really is the United States of Soviet America, and if you think otherwise; you are sadly mistaken. This country certainly needs new leadership, but it will not come in the form of Mitt Romney.

We do not need another Barack Obama or George W Bush. We need a George Washington. We need a man who will stand up and defend the Constitution. Better yet, we need men, women and children to learn and understand the Constitution, and to realize just how many liberties have been stripped away from us, and are willing to put their principles first.