Hideous Kinky, by Chris Floyd

[The2ndWheel]

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/04/28/120.html

Imagine growing up in a family where every day, father raped daughter, mother tortured son, brother abused brother, sister stole from sister and the whole family murdered neighbors, friends and passing strangers. Imagine the underlying assumptions about life that you would adopt without question in such an atmosphere, how normal the most hideous depravity would seem. If some outsider chanced to ask you about your family's latest activities, you would spew out perversions as calmly and unthinkingly as a man giving directions to the post office.

This state of unwitting confession to monstrous crime has been the default mode of the U.S. establishment for many years now. Government officials routinely detail policies that in a healthy atmosphere would shake the nation to its core, stand out like a gaping wound, a rank betrayal of every hope, ideal and sacrifice of generations past. Yet in the degraded sensibility of these times, such confessions go unnoticed, their evil unrecognized -- or even lauded as savvy ploys or noble endeavors. Inured to moral horror by half a century of outrages committed by the "National Security" complex, the establishment, along with the media and vast swathes of the population, can no longer discern the poison in the air they breathe. It just seems normal.

And so it was again this week when The Washington Post outlined the Pentagon's plan to put dirty war -- by death squad, snatch squad, secret armies, subversion, torture and terrorism -- at the very heart of America's military philosophy. Not defense against declared enemies, not deterrence of potential foes, but conducting "continuous" covert military operations in countries "where the United States is not at war" is now the Pentagon's "highest priority," according to the new "campaign plan for the global war on terror" issued by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

[Mnemosyne]

1. kick

[Demeter]

2. Here's a Bit More of This Scary Article

What's more, the plan makes it clear that Rumsfeld, far from being politically vulnerable, has in fact been exalted above every other institution and official of the U.S. government, with the exception of the twin tyrants in the White House, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The Pentagon warlord has been given carte blanche to send the 53,000 secret soldiers of the Special Operations Command into any nation he pleases, to undertake any mission he pleases, without congressional approval, legal restraint or the authority of the target nation's U.S. ambassador. Thus America's diplomats, the ostensible representatives of the nation abroad, have been reduced to mere frontmen, pathetic beards for black ops savaging the laws, sovereignty and citizens of their hosts.

The plan is the culmination and codification of an ad hoc array of progams and powers that Bush has doled out to Rumsfeld over the years, including a series of executive orders signed after the 2004 election that essentially turned the world into a "global free-fire zone" for the Pentagon's secret armies and proxy foreign militias, as a top Pentagon official told The New Yorker. "We're going to be riding with the bad boys," another Bush insider said. Yet another courtier compared it to the glory days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." The overriding ethos of the plan is brutally simple: "The rules are, 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want,'" an intelligence official told The New Yorker.

Perhaps most ominously, the plan makes copious preparations for expanding the range of the war on terror even further. The trigger for these new actions is another terrorist strike on U.S. soil. Oddly enough, the Bush faction views such an unspeakable horror as an "opportunity," Pentagon officials told the Post; it would provide a "justification," they said, for hitting already-targeted individuals, groups and states that for various political reasons have not yet been subjected to what Bush likes to call, in his bloodthirsty parlance, "the path of action."

But perhaps this is not so odd. In November 2002, we wrote here of another "opportunistic" endeavor: the Pentagon's plan to foment terrorism by infiltrating terrorist groups and militias and goading them into action -- i.e., committing acts of murder and destruction -- in order to "flush them out" for counterattacks or use them to advance U.S. policy in targeted states, including "justification" for military intervention or occupation. Perhaps some of Rumsfeld's infiltrators were "riding with the bad boys" who struck in Dahab, Egypt, this week. With unrestricted black ops now ascendant, we can never know for sure. But we do know that each act of terror only enhances the power of the ever-expanding national security complex, entwining it in a mutually beneficial embrace with violent extremists everywhere.

[formercia]

3. Gangster Nation...n/t

[Dora]

4. THIS is what makes me consider leaving the U.S.

I do not want to live ruled by a government that will cast its hungry eye on my son as cannon fodder.

Knowing what our military policy has devolved into gives me chills and casts a pall in my heart.

[skids]

5. I would think you'd want to stay...

...so as not to be victimized by above policies...

[Dora]

6. The potential to be a victim of the above policy

is the same whether I'm here or abroad.

[Briar]

7. People have been desensitised to such depravity

not only by the actions of their government over decades (which most might plead ignorance to since few pay attention to serious news coverage) but by other means as well. Seductive, constant, insistent, US tv and film and other entertainment outlets have all normalised war crimes and other monstrous abuses. When people can watch the "hero" of 24 torture so-called bad guys, murder them, saw off their heads and think such behaviour necessary and patriotic, they will not be revolted when equally revolting deeds are committed in reality by people acting in their name.

[teryang]

8. These activities abroad presage totalitarianism at home

The descecration of human rights and the rule of law by the adoption of policies of torture, murder and terror abroad, is the domain of colonial rule.

Once accepted it is merely a matter of time before its proponents adopt the practice domestically.