This lifestyle out is of stock

SUBHEAD: Dear Imperial America, the lifestyle you ordered is unavailable and permanently out of stock.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 15 February 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb17/elites-empire2-17.html)


Image above: Mashup of lifestyle announcment on side of building. From original article.

Dear Imperial America: Sorry, the lifestyle you ordered is unavailable and permanently out of stock.

Our extraordinary misallocation of national treasure and political power has set a banquet of consequences that few are willing to face, much less address head-on. If we had to sum up this vast misallocation, we might start by characterizing it as the result of a multitude of elites playing Empire with money borrowed from future generations.

We can start the list of extraordinary misallocations of national treasure with the Neocon's endless wars of choice. Ten years ago, estimates of the total cost of the Iraq misadventure were $3 trillion: Cost of Iraq War: $3 Trillion; Cost of Solar Plants to Power all 105 million U.S Households: $500 Billion (April 10, 2008)

(Yes, I know solar energy is not "the solution" due to intermittency, lack of storage, fossil fuels are needed to build and maintain the solar infrastructure, etc.--but the point is: would we be better off if we'd invested 20% of the money squandered on the Iraq misadventure on alternative energy, even with all its limitations?)

But this does not exhaust the list of extraordinary misallocations of treasure. Universities have found the funds to build grand edifices on campus (never mind the trillion dollars in student loan debt that funded the delusions of grandeur) while much of the rest of our educational infrastructure crumbles as deferred maintenance takes its inevitable toll.

Public transit systems such as the San Francisco Bay Area's BART always find the funds to pay for hefty raises and gold-plated benefits for employees and managers, meanwhile the system's core has crumbled due to--you guessed it--hundreds of millions of dollars in long-deferred maintenance.

While employee wages, benefits and pensions dominate local government outlays, maintenance is funded by selling bonds, which cost twice as much over the long run due to interest and other costs.

Where cities and counties once funded school maintenance and filling potholes out of tax receipts, now many locales demand taxpayers approve tens of millions of dollars in new bonds to pay for these basic infrastructure maintenance projects.

It has reached the point that even maintaining city parks requires borrowing millions.

Political elites have found that promising the impossible--lower taxes and increased benefits/entitlements--keeps them in power, and as long as the credit spigot of new government borrowing is wide open, there are no limits on how many more trillions of dollars in future interest payments can be promised to win re-election today.

The fact that this sets a toxic banquet of consequences for future taxpayers and beneficiaries--no worries, some future politico will have to sit down at that banquet.

Political and financial elites have lined their own pockets and insured the continuity of their own power by deferring boring, unsexy, you-get-no-votes-for-this maintenance. Want to be "popular" and win re-election?

Ram through sexy new projects such as "affordable" housing (i.e. costly housing subsidized by taxpayers), extensions in mass transit lines, fancy new stadiums and student-services buildings--and pay for it all with borrowed money and by slashing boring, unsexy maintenance work.

The drama of the Oroville Dam is tied directly to the deferral of rountine maintenance: What You Need To Know About The Oroville Dam Crisis (interview with a civil engineering expert and Chris Martenson)

While we must ask cui bono (to whose benefit?) of scare-mongering estimates of deferred maintenance (one person's "required infrastructure" could be another person's pork-barrel project awarded as payback for political contributions), many of us can see a crumbling empire of deferred maintenance with our own eyes.

I can personally attest to city streets that were potholed 20 years ago that finally got repaved--but only after taxpayers agreed to pay double by borrowing millions for routine street maintenance that was previously paid out of tax revenues.

I see spalling concrete (concrete falling off due to rusting rebar) at major international airports, university buildings that are flooded due to poor drainage that should have been addressed decades ago, water mains that burst, sewer lines that are decades past their replacement date--the list is truly endless.

Dear Imperial America: the lifestyle you ordered is permanently out of stock. The banquet of consequences has already been served, and will only become more distasteful the longer we put off facing our skyrocketing debt, runaway elites and delusions of grandeur head-on.

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Deplorables 1, Empire 0

SUBHEAD: Trump and Clinton stripped away the last shreds of camouflage that disguised our zombie body politic.

By Paul Edwards on 11 November 2016 for Counter Punch -
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/deplorables-1-empire-0/)


Image above: The man behind the curtain creating the illusion of the Emeral City. No, we're not in Kansas anymore.  From (http://bereanresearch.org/prophetic-prayer-claims-god-has-given-donald-trump-anointing-for-mantle-of-government/).

It’s done.  The foolish, arrogant propaganda excreted by the captive press of the Imperial Establishment is flushed, and they and their owners are eating their hubris, choking down the bitter, toxic medicine they inflicted on themselves. The nightmare they swore could never win is the Chosen One.

What this may mean to them, to all of us, and to The Empire, no one can guess.  The origin, though, of what Michael Moore called the greatest “Fuck You” in our political history, is clear behind the shock and awe of the elite.

Between them, Trump and Clinton diligently stripped away the last shreds of the torn and ragged camouflage that disguised our zombie body politic.

Behind the mantra of Exceptionalism, the American Empire has behaved with exactly the same solipsistic arrogance all empires have embraced.

Internationally it has raged, as imperial China did, as if with a “Mandate of Heaven”, flaunting self-interest with no regard for other nations or the laws of war.  It has inflicted misery, chaos, and death on many millions of the poor and helpless for a Full Spectrum Dominance it could never impose.

America’s Capitalist War Machine has raped and destroyed many countries for its profit, and destabilized the entire world in its megalomania.

Schumpeter said it best, of Imperial Germany’s military industry:  “Created by the wars that required it, the Machine now creates the wars it requires.”

America has been transformed over time from a civil democracy with imperial economics to a militarist empire with vaudeville democracy.  This was accomplished by binding both wings of the duopoly to the exclusive interest of Predatory Capitalism with corrupting money.

A corporate state imposed via political and military power is the essence of Fascism.

For generations, Americans have been dosed with the ultra-nationalist poison of Exceptionalism, with its implicit racist subtext, and its sexism buried in a hoo-rah masculinity cult, but it has always been flavored with the sweetening agent that We, The People, were both masters and  beneficiaries of our benign, paternalistic system.

The last several decades have painfully taught any conscious observer that this is a cynical fiction.

In this election, the threadbare mythology of the duopoly was ripped away in a manner that left no doubt, in even the least informed, most credulous minds, that the American political system was a dead, stinking fraud.  Each party, with its purblind lack of understanding of, and connection with, the mass of American people, suffered uniquely humiliating public pantsings.

Having stealthily, assiduously cultivated and nurtured the most regressive, dim, and hateful elements in its Redneck Wing for decades, the CEO Wing gaped impotently as Dogpatch was appropriated by a vulgarian who spoke to peckerwoods directly, not in code.

He jettisoned the few Silverspooners and Coupon Clipper Bosses, stole their ground troops and mobilized their outrage.

He only succeeded then due to the universal rage of the working class that has been dealt out and bankrupted, its jobs and prospects stolen and its lives sunk, for the benefit of a tiny clique of professional criminals.

The Republican Party is done, killed because Trump grabbed its posse.

Democrats, confident of being lesser evils, opted for selbstmord.  After Occupy’s warning, exposes of record financial inequality and the rapid unravelling of democracy, one might have thought a show of fight against those evils would be mandatory, but no: they pre-selected the candidate who embodied them instead.

As the long, impassioned cry went up across the country, from the young, working people, the ill and poor, disabled and elderly, for an old man who would be their champion, Party commissars chose to freeze out Bernie’s burn and go geriatrically into that good night.  Then, when caught out in their shoddy chicanery, they Hitlered Putin.

The Democratic Party is done, dead of peritonitis from undigested hubris.

The failure of faction, the implosion of coherent parties, means more, not less division and acrimony.  America faces now the same degree of crisis that has blown the senile Parties in pieces.  The time ahead is fraught with tremendous and unknown perils and challenges with no precedent.  Our Republic stands a good chance of becoming ungovernable.

Franklin said, with the tough days in Philadelphia over and the Constitution signed, that we had a Republic, if we could keep it.

We’re about to find out.

• Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

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War over Olympic National Forest

SUBHEAD: Did the US Navy break federal laws to push war games over our Olympic National Forest?

By Dahr Jamail on 26 October 2015 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33387-us-navy-allegedly-broke-federal-laws-to-push-forward-electromagnetic-war-training-over-national-forests)


Image above: Shoreline of Olympic National Forest. From (http://www.stateparks.com/olympic_national_forest_in_washington.html).

The US Navy aims to begin conducting electromagnetic warfare training across much of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula soon.

Meanwhile, it is being accused of breaking federal laws in order to secure the permits necessary to move forward with its training operations.

Karen Sullivan worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service for 15 and a half years, and is an expert in the bureaucratic procedures the Navy is supposed to be following.

She is now part of the West Coast Action Alliance, one of two large multistate and international citizen groups who have tasked themselves with watchdogging the Navy, due to what they believe are ongoing violations of the law, blatant acts of disrespect toward human and environmental health, and ongoing bellicose behavior by the military branch in their areas.

"Ethical and legal questions about the Navy's conduct abound: hidden notices, comment periods that have been shortened or wholly eliminated, and last-minute publication of key documents coupled with total disregard for NEPA's [National Environmental Policy Act] prohibitions on segmentation present a clear and present danger that the Navy is hastily proceeding with plans regardless and in defiance of federally mandated processes," Sullivan's organization wrote recently in a memorandum to the Navy.

Some of the points of concern about the Navy's actions include: failure to provide reasonable notice to the public about their planned war games, failure to provide adequate comment process, failure to address functionally connected activities and their cumulative impacts, and failure to adequately consider impacts to Olympic National Park's World Heritage designation, among others.

Sullivan, who worked for over 15 years in the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Division of Endangered Species and External Affairs, told Truthout she believes the Navy's final environmental impact statement (EIS) about their upcoming warfare training is "unlawful and fatally flawed."

"The Navy has an astonishing sense of entitlement to public lands and waters," Sullivan said about how the Navy has approached the public's concerns over its operations. "Northwest Training and testing range manager Kent Mathes told me last year after a public meeting, 'We own the airspace and there's nothing anyone can do about it.'"

As Truthout previously reported, if it gets its way, the Navy would be flying Growler jets - electronic attack aircraft that specialize in radar jamming - in 2,900 training exercises over wilderness, communities and cities across the Olympic Peninsula for 260 days per year, with exercises lasting up to 16 hours per day. Naval surface fleet ships will also be participating by homing in on ground-based emitters - a topic that was never discussed in the Navy's environmental assessment.

Dozens of naval EA-18G Growler supersonic jet warplanes will fly as low as 1,200 feet above the ground in some areas in order to conduct war games with 14 mobile towers on the ground in national forests.

Medical doctors, scientific reports and even the Navy's own documents show that enough electromagnetic radiation will be emitted to be capable of damaging human eye tissue, causing breast cancer, causing childhood leukemia and damaging human fetuses, let alone impacting wildlife in the area. The Navy has denied that these impacts will occur.

Medical doctors also told Truthout that noise from the Navy's jets is a major health risk.

Nevertheless, the Navy appears to be rapidly moving forward with its plans to war game over the Olympic Peninsula. In doing so, Sullivan believes it is opening itself up to major lawsuits - because it is taking blatantly illegal actions.

Fatal Flaws
John Mosher, the Navy's northwest environmental manager for the US Pacific Fleet, has stated that its planes will be flying as low as 1,200 feet above the ground.

Yet the Navy's environmental impact assessment does not even mention jet noise pollution or the sound of the Navy's jets, and states that there are "no significant impacts" on public health and safety, biological resources, noise, air quality or visual resources.

Tens of thousands of outraged residents from around the Olympic Peninsula have expressed their opposition via letters to the US Forest Service, public meetings, letters to the editor in newspapers across the peninsula, flooding article comment sections and via social media.

"Olympic Forest Coalition is extremely concerned with all aspects of the Navy's proposal, but of primary concern is for the disruption to wildlife activities in both the national park, the forest and our coast.

Endangered species such as the marbled murrelet are at a 5 percent population decline due to loss of habitat and other disruptions," Connie Gallant, president of the Olympic Forest Coalition, which co-authored the recent memorandum to the Navy, told Truthout. "The Olympic Coast Marine Sanctuary area is also in peril due to the many 'takes' the Navy plans. It is as if our entire ecosystem has been targeted for destruction and, so far, the Navy is showing very little concern for it."

But apparently the Navy is not having any of it: It has simply ignored or neglected to address residents' outcries about its actions.

The October 13 memorandum sent to the Navy by the West Coast Action Alliance states, "Reasonable concerns and objections presented by the public and allied organizations continue to be utterly disregarded, and this controversy intensifies by the day."

Even some politicians have become concerned about the Navy's negligence; in fact, Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Washington State) requested that the Navy undertake a sound study under the auspices of the Federal Interagency Committee on Aviation Noise (FICAN).

But according to Sullivan's group, "The Navy failed to do so. Instead it reconstituted an older study using data from Prowler jets, which are no longer being flown, to justify no significant impacts on the soundscapes of Olympic National Park."

Sullivan explained to Truthout that the Navy's EIS is "fatally flawed" for a number of reasons. One of the requirements of the law is for the Navy to give the public reasonable time to read and comment on their proposed operations, before the review period ends.

"Notices in local papers did not appear until five to seven days into the 30-day 'review' period, and as of October 10 only one individual we knew of had received the copy as requested, with more than one-third of the allotted 30 days already past," Sullivan explained. "Libraries in northern California have still not received their copies as of October 20. The public review period ends November 2, and the documents are more than 4,000 pages long."

This was just one of several examples of how, according to West Coast Action Alliance, the Navy has been in violation of the law.

"The bottom line is the Navy doesn't care how we feel about it and they don't want to hear from us," Sullivan said. "If they did, there'd be a real person manning the jet noise complaint hotline, and there'd be a way to get information from them in a timely manner, and there'd be a way for the public to be heard on the record. Their message to communities on the Olympic Peninsula is: Go away. Your comments don't count."

Sullivan is far from alone in feeling this way. Even naval veterans are troubled by the Navy's current behavior.

"I'm one of them, and always will be," Navy and Vietnam veteran Patrick Noonan told Truthout. "I'm deeply committed to what it is the Navy has to do. Given that, they need to learn to be better neighbors rather than worse neighbors to the surrounds and the cities they fly over."

Noonan, who was also a naval test pilot, added, "They are going in the wrong direction. They are becoming worse neighbors and becoming more belligerent. These people just want the Navy to be more considerate."

Other "fatal flaws" in the Navy's final EIS, Sullivan told Truthout, include "segmenting connected actions into smaller pieces that get evaluated separately. What this means is nobody gets to evaluate the totality of effects, or what agencies would call cumulative impacts."

Another issue she takes with the Navy's EIS is that it fails to consider the impacts to the soundscape of Olympic National Park, which is a World Heritage site.

"They did not conduct a 'neutral' study on the effects of jet noise after being specifically requested to do so last May by Congressman Derek Kilmer," Sullivan said. "The Navy ignored Congressman Kilmer's request and reconstituted an old study using data from aircraft that are no longer being flown."

She went on to point out how the Growlers are notably more powerful and far louder than the Prowlers, the aforementioned aircraft the Navy used in the reconstituted study. Her data came from calculations performed by Noonan, the former Navy test pilot.

"The new airplane is dramatically louder than even that monster F4 I used to fly," Noonan said.
As Truthout has previously reported, doctors have shown that the intense jet noise from the Navy's warplanes causes our bodies to go into functions that cause hypertension, increased triglycerides, lack of sleep, anxiety, lack of enough REM and other negative impacts. Several medical studies also show that the higher the decibels and the longer the hours, the higher potential for increased myocardial infarction, hypertension, anxiety and other issues.

Possible Lawsuits
The Navy has left itself open to being sued on many fronts. Sullivan said the Navy failed to provide adequate public notice nor provide libraries the Navy listed with their EIS in hard copy or CD format for the public to read.

"They also violated NEPA by pre-selecting an alternative long before making anything public," Sullivan said. "The Navy applied for an incidental take permit [permit allowing the Navy to kill certain numbers of wildlife] from NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] last April, long before this EIS was finalized, yet they still have not announced their preferred alternative, so what this means is they have already selected it, applied for the permit and the public's comments don't matter a bit with regard to their final choice. That's illegal."

This leaves the Navy potentially vulnerable to Endangered Species Act and National Historic Preservation Act violations. The types of violations in which the Navy has engaged, according to Sullivan, are not simply routine blunders.

"The release of the EIS before consultation is complete is unprecedented," Sullivan said. "To sign a record of decision before consultations are complete, while not strictly illegal, is unethical. Basically, it would amount to making up one's mind before knowing what the impacts are."

The US Forest Service has to grant the Navy the permit it needs to use national forest roads for driving its mobile emitters for the war games. The Forest Service has said it will issue its decision in November, but many activists involved in the situation believe the Forest Service is poised to rubber-stamp the Navy's permit, despite thousands of formal public comments made in opposition to naval plans.

Consequently, Sullivan said, the Forest Service has also now left itself open to lawsuits.
"This could leave them [Forest Service] vulnerable on many fronts," she said. "For example, they did not conduct their own scientific investigations to validate the Navy's claims of no significant impacts."

She believes there are "egregious" factual errors in the Navy's environmental assessment, yet the Forest Service has nonetheless indicated it may adopt it wholesale anyhow.

"This violates the National Forest Management Act, among other laws, which basically prohibits them from accepting scientific conclusions from other agencies without verifying them," Sullivan explained. "The fact that they received 4,000 comments from the public, all but 31 opposed, and that they are prepared to ignore that as well as the laws they've violated, makes them vulnerable."

Resistance
Gene Marx is a former Navy pilot who flew as an airborne electronic warfare officer in Vietnam. Nowadays, he lives in Bellingham, and is publicly critical of the Navy's plans for the Olympic Peninsula.

"They will be flying over the Olympic Peninsula without restriction to altitude or speed; this will without a doubt have major negative consequences on the environment," Marx told Truthout. "The Navy isn't telling you a thing about what the overflights will be doing to the environment - so if we look at the noise impact, that alone will have a major impact on the peninsula."

Marx called the Growler aircraft the Navy is using "a killing machine and a jamming machine," and does not believe the Navy is doing anything in the best interests of the environment. "They are being disingenuous telling us they will be stewards of the environment and that they will not impact the peninsula with their training," he added. "That is just crazy."
Sullivan agrees.

"We have the right and the duty to oversee the actions of federal agencies, including the military, and to insist that they follow the law and their own policies," she said. "We have the right to be heard on the official record, a right that is currently being denied. It is not unpatriotic to insist on these rights, and to demand that our government follow the law and its own policies."

And similar to Marx, she is extremely disappointed by the Navy's actions, on a personal level.
"Not that many years ago I used to feel a sense of pride whenever a Navy ship would pass by," she said. "Being a mariner, I used to dip the ensign, or lower my boat's American flag, to them in salute, and they always returned the salute. I used to be proud when they'd pass by."

But her experience today has changed her sentiment.

"Now it feels like they have nothing but contempt for their neighbors," she said. "The public is being left out of too many major decisions by our government, and that's wrong."

Noonan believes one immediate solution would be for the Navy to use already existing training ranges, instead of "going to pristine lands and imposing their noise on them."

"They have the Yakima range, which gets very little air use," he explained. "That range is vast and totally available to them, and it's eight minutes [flying] from Whidbey. I'm frustrated by the Navy's method and how inconsiderate they are being of the environment when they don't have to be. I don't understand that."

Sullivan is acutely aware of how the deck is stacked against the public when it come to standing up against any arm of the US military.

"The Navy has teams of lawyers, and we citizens have only our powers of observation and freedom of speech," she said. "However, we have the right and the obligation to speak out as informed citizens, across the country, wherever unwarranted encroachment into public and private land is happening, and it's happening in a lot of places."

In other words, she intends to fight.

"We are not giving up," Sullivan said. "We will make them follow the law."

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ISIS made in USA

SUBHEAD: Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US "Created" ISIS As A "Tool" To Overthrow Syria's President Assad.

By Nafeez Ahmed on 24 May 2015 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-23/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad)


Image above: The unknown man was photographed being killed by a masked executioner in a village just outside ISIS' stronghold and de facto capital Raqqa while a large crowd looked on in February 2015. From (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2945684/Beheaded-WITCHCRAFT-Latest-ISIS-execution-Syria-echoes-Dark-Ages-man-killed-invoking-magic.html).

From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world's stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world's terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the "straight to beheading YouTube clip" purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one:

Use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria's president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which could dethrone Russia as Europe's dominant - and belligerent - source of energy, reaching an interim climax with the unsuccessful Mediterranean Sea military build up of 2013, which nearly resulted in quasi-world war.

The narrative and the plotline were so transparent, even Russia saw right through them. Recall from September of last year:

If the West bombs Islamic State militants in Syria without consulting Damascus, LiveLeak reports that the anti-ISIS alliance may use the occasion to launch airstrikes against President Bashar Assad’s forces, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Clearly comprehending that Obama's new strategy against ISIS in Syria is all about pushing the Qatar pipeline through (as was the impetus behind the 2013 intervention push), Russia is pushing back noting that the it is using ISIS as a pretext for bombing Syrian government forces and warning that "such a development would lead to a huge escalation of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa."

But it's one thing to speculate; it's something entirely different to have hard proof.

And while speculation was rife that just like the CIA-funded al Qaeda had been used as a facade by the US to achieve its own geopolitical and national interests over the past two decades, so ISIS was nothing more than al Qaeda 2.0, there was no actual evidence of just this.

That may all have changed now when a declassified secret US government document obtained by the public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.

According to investigative reporter Nafeez Ahmed in Medium, the "leaked document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, despite anticipating that doing so could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

According to the newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the ‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of the strategy, but described this outcome as a strategic opportunity to “isolate the Syrian regime.” 

And not just that: as we reported last week, now that ISIS is running around the middle east, cutting people's heads of in 1080p quality and Hollywood-quality (perhaps literally) video, the US has a credible justification to sell billions worth of modern, sophisticated weapons in the region in order to "modernize" and "replenish" the weapons of such US allies as Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iraq.

But that the US military-industrial complex is a winner every time war breaks out anywhere in the world (usually with the assistance of the CIA) is clear to everyone by now. What wasn't clear is just how the US predetermined the current course of events in the middle east.

Now, thanks to the following declassified report, we have a far better understanding of not only how current events in the middle east came to be, but what America's puppermaster role leading up to it all, was.

From Nafeez Ahmed: Secret Pentagon report reveals West saw ISIS as strategic asset Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to ‘isolate’ Assad, rollback ‘Shia expansion', originally posted in Medium.

Hypocrisy

The revelations contradict the official line of Western government on their policies in Syria, and raise disturbing questions about secret Western support for violent extremists abroad, while using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.

Among the batch of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, released earlier this week, is a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document then classified as “secret,” dated 12th August 2012.

The DIA provides military intelligence in support of planners, policymakers and operations for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community.

So far, media reporting has focused on the evidence that the Obama administration knew of arms supplies from a Libyan terrorist stronghold to rebels in Syria.

Some outlets have reported the US intelligence community’s internal prediction of the rise of ISIS. Yet none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in Syria.

Charles Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer, said:

“Given the political leanings of the organisation that obtained these documents, it’s unsurprising that the main emphasis given to them thus far has been an attempt to embarrass Hilary Clinton regarding what was known about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012. However, the documents also contain far less publicized revelations that raise vitally important questions of the West’s governments and media in their support of Syria’s rebellion.”

The West’s Islamists

The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies.

Noting that “the Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”

The 7-page DIA document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic State in Iraq,’ (ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’ “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media.”

The formerly secret Pentagon report notes that the “rise of the insurgency in Syria” has increasingly taken a “sectarian direction,” attracting diverse support from Sunni “religious and tribal powers” across the region.

In a section titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the DIA report predicts that while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate “into proxy war.”

The document also recommends the creation of “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for the temporary government.”

In Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO ‘safe havens’ (aka ‘no fly zones’).

‘Supporting powers want’ ISIS entity

In a strikingly prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable declaration of “an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

Nevertheless, “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts” by Syrian “opposition forces” fighting to “control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)”:

“… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

The secret Pentagon document thus provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion.”

The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts, is “exactly” what the “supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want.” Earlier on, the document repeatedly describes those “supporting powers” as “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”

Further on, the document reveals that Pentagon analysts were acutely aware of the dire risks of this strategy, yet ploughed ahead anyway.

The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, it says, would create “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi.” Last summer, ISIS conquered Mosul in Iraq, and just this month has also taken control of Ramadi.

Such a quasi-state entity will provide:

“… a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory.”

The 2012 DIA document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), not a “finally evaluated intelligence” assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The report was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI, among other agencies.

In response to my questions about the strategy, the British government simply denied the Pentagon report’s startling revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent extremists in Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:

“AQ and ISIL are proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ, ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK’s national security. We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the brutality of the extremists.”

The DIA did not respond to request for comment.

Strategic asset for regime-change Security analyst Shoebridge, however, who has tracked Western support for Islamist terrorists in Syria since the beginning of the war, pointed out that the secret Pentagon intelligence report exposes fatal contradictions at the heart of official pronunciations:

“Throughout the early years of the Syria crisis, the US and UK governments, and almost universally the West’s mainstream media, promoted Syria’s rebels as moderate, liberal, secular, democratic, and therefore deserving of the West’s support. Given that these documents wholly undermine this assessment, it’s significant that the West’s media has now, despite their immense significance, almost entirely ignored them.”

According to Brad Hoff, a former US Marine who served during the early years of the Iraq War and as a 9/11 first responder at the Marine Corps Headquarters in Battalion Quantico from 2000 to 2004, the just released Pentagon report for the first time provides stunning affirmation that:

“US intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a US strategic asset.”

Hoff, who is managing editor of Levant Report — ?an online publication run by Texas-based educators who have direct experience of the Middle East?—?points out that the DIA document “matter-of-factly” states that the rise of such an extremist Salafist political entity in the region offers a “tool for regime change in Syria.”

The DIA intelligence report shows, he said, that the rise of ISIS only became possible in the context of the Syrian insurgency?—?“there is no mention of US troop withdrawal from Iraq as a catalyst for Islamic State’s rise, which is the contention of innumerable politicians and pundits.” The report demonstrates that:

“The establishment of a ‘Salafist Principality’ in Eastern Syria is ‘exactly’ what the external powers supporting the opposition want (identified as ‘the West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey’) in order to weaken the Assad government.”

The rise of a Salafist quasi-state entity that might expand into Iraq, and fracture that country, was therefore clearly foreseen by US intelligence as likely?—?but nevertheless strategically useful?—?blowback from the West’s commitment to “isolating Syria.”


Complicity

Critics of the US-led strategy in the region have repeatedly raised questions about the role of coalition allies in intentionally providing extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups in the drive to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.

The conventional wisdom is that the US government did not retain sufficient oversight on the funding to anti-Assad rebel groups, which was supposed to be monitored and vetted to ensure that only ‘moderate’ groups were supported.

However, the newly declassified Pentagon report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS launched its concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community was fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria’s sectarian insurgency.

Despite that, the Pentagon continued to support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating the probability that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in Syria and Iraq.

As Shoebridge told me, “The documents show that not only did the US government at the latest by August 2012 know the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria’s rebellion”?—?namely, the emergence of ISIS?—?“but that this was considered an advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a decision to spend years in an effort to deliberately mislead the West’s public, via a compliant media, into believing that Syria’s rebellion was overwhelmingly ‘moderate.’”

Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle in the 1990s on MI6 funding of al-Qaeda to assassinate Libya’s former leader Colonel Gaddafi, similarly said of the revelations:

“This is no surprise to me. Within individual countries there are always multiple intelligence agencies with competing agendas.”

She explained that MI6’s Libya operation in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of innocent people, “happened at precisely the time when MI5 was setting up a new section to investigate al-Qaeda.”

This strategy was repeated on a grand scale in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, said Machon, where the CIA and MI6 were:

“… supporting the very same Libyan groups, resulting in a failed state, mass murder, displacement and anarchy. So the idea that elements of the American military-security complex have enabled the development of ISIS after their failed attempt to get NATO to once again ‘intervene’ is part of an established pattern. And they remain indifferent to the sheer scale of human suffering that is unleashed as a result of such game-playing.”

Divide and rule  

Several US government officials have conceded that their closest allies in the anti-ISIS coalition were funding violent extremist Islamist groups that became integral to ISIS.

US Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, admitted last year that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Turkey had funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamist rebels in Syria that metamorphosed into ISIS.

But he did not admit what this internal Pentagon document demonstrates?—?that the entire covert strategy was sanctioned and supervised by the US, Britain, France, Israel and other Western powers.

The strategy appears to fit a policy scenario identified by a recent US Army-commissioned RAND Corp report.

The report, published four years before the DIA document, called for the US “to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”

The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.” Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.

The RAND report confirmed that the “divide and rule” strategy was already being deployed “to create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at the tactical level.”

The report observed that the US was forming “temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated “nationalist insurgent groups” that have fought the US for four years in the form of “weapons and cash.” Although these nationalists “have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces,” they are now being supported to exploit “the common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”

The 2012 DIA document, however, further shows that while sponsoring purportedly former al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq to counter al-Qaeda, Western governments were simultaneously arming al-Qaeda insurgents in Syria.

The revelation from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting ‘Islamic State’ today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify the expansion of state anti-terror powers.

In the wake of the rise of ISIS, intrusive new measures to combat extremism including mass surveillance, the Orwellian ‘prevent duty’ and even plans to enable government censorship of broadcasters, are being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, much of which disproportionately targets activists, journalists and ethnic minorities, especially Muslims.

Yet the new Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided policies of secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious geopolitical purposes.

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• Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally influential Londoners.

Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

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Signs of US Empire Passing

SUBHEAD: We can create a better future. It won’t come without serious challenges. Indeed, it may only come through them.

By Aaron lehmer-Chang on 20 July 2014 for World Shift Vision -
(http://aglehmer.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/top-10-signs-of-u-s-empires-passing/)


Image above: "Lady Liberty" about to drown. From original article.

t’s not fashionable to talk about American empire these days, much less our empire’s coming demise. Our status as the world’s preeminent superpower remains largely unquestioned (at least domestically). Politicians and media pundits still portray our military as the world’s last great hope against tyranny and global terrorism.

And yet, despite the U.S. military’s clear planetary dominance — its hundreds of thousands of troops deployed in more than 150 countries, its growing interventions in Africa and the Middle East, and its vast network of bases and installations across the globe — our empire’s days are indeed numbered. Like other past empires, the unraveling of our empire is shrouded in denial, masking the fraying foundations of our once-prosperous nation.

Ironically, the seeds of America’s decline were planted with its founding, marred as it was by the brutal conquest of the native population, the rapacious destruction of the natural environment, the shameful enslavement of African peoples, and the hypocritical disenfranchisement of women and non-property-holding immigrants.

These traumatic beginnings have echoed through the centuries that followed, in the form of aggressive military interventions, deepening social divisions, and ecologically ruinous relations to the country’s land, air, and water. Together, these festering dynamics now threaten to upend the great American experiment.

Of course, they’ve also provided the backdrop against which most Americans have struggled to secure their place in the social order, their human rights and dignity, and the protection of their precious lands and watersheds. America’s central animating ideal of “liberty and justice for all” may have been poorly instituted in practice, but the hopeful movements it inspired have gone a long way toward creating a more equitable and democratic union.

Today, as compound stresses and fractures undermine the foundation of U.S. empire, the central question remains: will the forces of hate and domination prevail, hijacking today’s crises to justify an authoritarian state and continued aggression? Or will enough people and communities willingly abandon the vision of empire, and reassert America’s cherished values of freedom and democracy?

The answer to that will depend on how we respond to the multiple signs of empire’s passing that are increasingly coming to a head. Here are ten (in no particular order) that are especially worth noting:

1. SKYROCKETING INEQUALITY:
It’s now a popular truism that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. President Obama often derides the fact that the middle class is shrinking, that average wages are barely keeping up with inflation, and that more and more American children are going to bed hungry. But neither he nor his allies in Congress have been able to halt these trends, much less slow them.

According to a 2014 report by the Economic Policy Institute, most recent economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent, who took home more than half (53.9 percent) of the total increase in U.S. income over the past several decades. “Over this period, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by [only] 18.9 percent. Simultaneously, the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much — by 200.5 percent,” stated the authors.

And that’s just income. Distribution of total wealth when one includes stocks, property, and other assets has also widened to levels now resembling a new gilded age. Indeed, the wealth gap has become so obscene that billionaires themselves are starting to sound the alarms about the stability of American society.

One tech billionaire recently wrote a scathing article in Politico arguing that unless something is done to redistribute wealth more equitably, we can expect everyday people falling between the cracks to foment a pitchfork rebellion.

2. DETERIORATING INFRASTRUCTURE:
Decades of neglect and underinvestment have left America’s roads and bridges, its waterways and sanitation systems, its power plants and electrical grids (most of which are hopelessly outmoded and geared mostly to run on diminishing fossil fuels), and its harbors and transport hubs in severe disrepair.

According to a report by The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), our nation faces an infrastructure investment shortfall of $1.1 trillion by 2020, possibly increasing to $4.7 trillion by 2040. If sufficient investments fail to materialize, Americans can expect increasing risks associated with using deteriorating infrastructure, lower standards of living due to rising costs, and a less and less hospitable climate for commerce, given that businesses also rely heavily on smoothly functioning infrastructure. Shifting even a fraction of the $500+ billion spent annually on the military would be a wise investment in our future.

3. HOLLOWED-OUT DOMESTIC INDUSTRY:
It’s little surprise that high-wage U.S. manufacturing would suffer in a race-to-the-bottom, über-competitive global economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. manufacturing employment fell from 19.6 million in 1979 to 13.7 million in 2007. The decade of 2000-2010 was particularly devastating, according to a recent report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation:

 “Not only did America lose 5.7 million manufacturing jobs, but the decline as a share of total manufacturing jobs (33 percent) exceeded the rate of loss in the Great Depression.” 

 A misplaced faith in so-called “free trade” agreements that favor corporate offshoring of jobs while sacrificing much-needed tariff revenue has contributed mightily to this decline, along with a reluctance to boost training and skills-building among our nation’s growing underemployed and unemployed.

The consequences of this “hollowing out” of domestic manufacturing are already being keenly felt in terms of wage stagnation, a shrinking middle class, and diminished consumer spending capacity.

Perhaps even more tragic is the growing dependence Americans now have on imported goods, and the fact that we’re rapidly losing our capacity to make tangible goods of real value.

4. THE U.S. DOLLAR’S DECLINE:
The status of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency is quickly eroding. Between 2002 and 2012, the dollar declined 54.7% against the euro, which coincided with a near tripling of the U.S. debt, from $5.9 trillion to $15 trillion.

Meanwhile, rising powers like Russia, China, Brazil and other emerging economies are separating themselves from the dollar-based global financial system, either by trading in other reserve currencies or actively proposing replacements. All told, foreign countries own more than $5 trillion in U.S. debt, with China alone owning more than $1 trillion.

If enough major debt holders started dumping their Treasury notes on the open market, this could cause a panic leading to a collapse of the dollar, and along with it a major decline in the standard of living for most Americans. At this point, the biggest holders of U.S. Treasury notes also rely on American markets for the sale of their products, minimizing the likelihood of any major dollar sell-offs.

But with consumer buying power declining, infrastructure deteriorating, and America’s ability to repay debt diminishing, the U.S. dollar’s future standing as the global currency of choice is in doubt.

5. DOMESTIC ENERGY SCARCITY:
As recently as 2012, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was predicting that the United States would overtake Saudia Arabia in oil production by 2020, and that North America would be a net oil exporter by 2030.

Now, the world’s leading energy agency has done a 180 degree about-face, predicting in its latest report that the United States will have to rely more heavily on Middle East oil in the years ahead, now that North American sources are starting to run dry.

Probably the most damaging news to the industry came earlier this year when the U.S. government’s own Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently downgraded its earlier assessment of the Montery Shale “tight oil” fields by a whopping 96%. Admittedly, U.S. energy production has had a “boomlet” recently, with much of it coming from oil and gas extracted from shale.

But the IEA now says U.S. production will start to lose steam around 2020, putting more bargaining power back in the hands of OPEC countries like Saudi Arabia and diminishing our influence abroad.

Sadly, the search for energy in ever-more remote and sensitive locations has also ravaged the environment, endangering sensitive waterways, gulf zones, the arctic, and even the stability of the global climate.

6. DIMINISHING U.S. INFLUENCE ABROAD:
From the end of World War II and throughout the Cold War, U.S. imperialism moved into overdrive. Following the devastating U.S. nuclear bombardment of Japan, American presidents began using the “fight against communism” to justify interventions throughout the globe, most notably in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Brazil, Cuba, Indonesia, Chile, Greece, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and Haiti, among others.

Almost always, the actual “threat” was the desire of the local populations in these countries to decide their own economic destinies, rather than submit to open exploitation of their markets by U.S. or Western-based corporations. In recent decades, however, as U.S. debt has grown and popular uprisings like the “Arab Spring” and new populist movements in Latin America have gained traction, American influence has diminished.

A resurgent Russia under President Putin has rebuffed U.S. attempts to encircle the country with new NATO members, bases, and pro-Western regimes — even brazenly annexing Crimea with only symbolic protest from a largely helpless United States. American empire is also waning in parts of the Middle East, especially in Iraq where previously deposed Sunni militants have taken control of much of the country’s northern cities and towns, and may even bring down the pro-Western government in Baghdad.

The most recent presidential election in Afghanistan has also revealed the growing limits of American influence, with the losing candidate threatening to set up his own parallel government rather than honor the much-lauded democratic process the U.S. military spent so much effort supposedly trying to establish.

But perhaps the most telling example is the growing instability in Israel, arguably the U.S. empire’s most beloved ally. In its grossly lopsided conflict with the occupied Palestinians, the Israeli government has increasingly defied attempts by Washington to sit down and hammer out a workable peace agreement, even though time and time again the terms are mainly in their favor.

Instead, they use any provocation by Palestinians as an excuse to launch merciless air strikes and invasions of their territories, ensuring a nightmarish future for all concerned. Once the lavish U.S. military subsidies begin to dry up, the state of Israel will have a very difficult time maintaining peaceful conditions, much less its own survival.

7. DEMOCRACY FOR SALE:
The high esteem that public officials once held in America seems little more than a quaint memory today, as democratic “contests” for seats from City Hall to the White House now appear more like auctions than elections.

Recent Supreme Court decisions, most notably Citizens United, have undone even the most basic restrictions on special interest contributions to political candidates, opening the floodgates to private donors seeking special favors and legislation from candidates once they’re elected to office. Sadly, the trends are only getting worse. In 2008, spending on the U.S. presidential election almost doubled compared with 2004.

In 2012, it nearly quadrupled compared with 2008. What’s worse is that as inequality worsens (see above), it’s largely the super-wealthy who are now providing the most donor power.

According to the Sunlight Foundation, a mere 0.01% of Americans in 2010 accounted for one-quarter of ALL money given to politicians, parties and political action committees. Little wonder most Americans think the system is rigged.

8. THE RISE OF CHINA:
Ever since it shook off its British and Japanese imperial chains and reunified under the banner of Communist revolution, China has been a resurgent global economic superpower. Under Communist Party rule, the country established universal education and health care, modernized its rural agrarian economy, and invested heavily in technology and infrastructure.

Decades of internal development and policies that protected domestic industry combined to provide the foundation of modern China’s world-class economy, which has been averaging unrivaled growth rates of 9% each year.

Of course, since the 1980s, China has also opened its economy to more direct foreign investment, privatized much of its industry, and slashed its social safety net, creating a new elite class of wealthy capitalists alongside an increasingly exploited class of landless rural peasants and urban poor.

As the U.S. has encircled China’s borders with pro-Western governments (Pakistan, South Korea, the Philippines, etc.), China has largely taken a non-aggressive approach, favoring a strategy of developing ever-greater economic relations with countries around the world. Initially, it pursued investment mostly in developing countries for resource purposes, but has recently ramped up investments in industrial regions like Europe and North America.

This still leaves China vulnerable to imperial attacks on its investments by the U.S. and other powers (i.e., the U.S./NATO military strikes on Libya, which forced the evacuation of 35,000 of its oil workers and engineers). In response to this threat, Chinese military strategists successfully called for a 19% annual increase in military spending from 2010 through 2015.

And while this will still amount to a fraction of what the U.S. empire spends militarily, it foreshadows a new era in Chinese determination to back up its meteoric economic rise with increasing military muscle.

9. THE GROWING SURVEILLANCE STATE:
In recent decades, with the dramatic advances in computers, communications, and information technologies, U.S. intelligence and security agencies have developed intricate systems of monitoring and assessing “threats” to American assets both at home and abroad.

A shift is happening toward increasing surveillance of the U.S. domestic population, growing numbers of whom find themselves on the margins of society, whether through sudden unemployment, downsizing, or existential angst in a meaning-starved, conflict-ridden materialistic age.

Much of what the security apparatus was actually doing remained shrouded in secrecy until very recently, when the heroic actions of former National Security Agency specialist Edward Snowden helped reveal the full extent to which Americans’ civil liberties were being routinely violated.

Perhaps most disconcerting among these revelations was the indiscriminate, sweeping process by which virtually every citizens’ phone records, e-mails, purchases, and other important data were being collected, analyzed, and vetted – not solely to assess potential “terrorist” activity, but also to target those deemed “radical” by the NSA.

According to The Huffington Post, the NSA recently hatched a plan to discredit a group of “radicalizers” who merely held “extreme” views based on their Muslim faith, a tactic that FBI and NSA officials have employed over the decades against civil rights leaders, environmental activists, and labor organizers.

Clearly, the security state is getting nervous. The fact that increasing sums of taxpayer funds and expertise are being used to spy on U.S. citizens doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy.

10. APOCALYPTIC DREAMING:
Rarely does a summer blockbuster season now pass without several mega-budget motion pictures hitting theaters that feature catastrophic, apocalyptic, or wrenchingly dystopian themes. Almost all of the recent super hero flicks have seemingly required that major U.S. cities be bombarded, thrashed, or completely devastated, almost with a feeling of cathartic glee.

The zombie genre has also made a powerful comeback, with scores of films released in the last decade alone, including such widely popular flicks as 28 Weeks, I Am Legend, and World War Z.

Fantastical, supernatural themes have also been accompanied by increasingly realistic accounts of a world in chaos. Children of Men depicts a world experiencing a plummeting human population due to sudden universal infertility, Contagion tells of a merciless virus that kills millions upon millions in only a few days’ time, and Elysium portrays a world divided where the wealthy elite have fled the earth to live on a luxury satellite while the rest of the planet wallows in squalor and environmental devastation.

All of these signs of U.S. empire’s passing may, at face value, seem deeply disturbing. To be sure, most Americans will face increasingly hard times as the disproportionate wealth that now flows freely through military force to our shores finally begins to slip from our reach.

There will be demagogues (indeed, there already are) who will call for more campaigns to reclaim our imperial birthright. They will conjure tales of lost glory to enlist us in more futile wars to maintain our “rightful place” as the world’s greatest superpower. We must ignore their call.

The passing of empire affords us all with an incredible opportunity to reclaim those values that once inspired America to true greatness, and lifted the spirits of all who call this beautiful country our home. Virtues like self-reliance, democratic self-government, and conservation of our land.

Current and future generations deserve much better than being saddled with crushing debt, being conscripted into wars in the Middle East and beyond, or wasting away in meaningless jobs hawking more and more needless consumer products.

Our nation harbors a wellspring of talented, hardworking, and passionate souls who yearn for the chance to do right by their families and their communities.

Rather than bemoan empire’s loss, we can rebuild our cities and towns to work with nature’s cycles rather than against them; we can reforge lost arts, crafts, and industries that were so carelessly discarded in the rush to globalization; and we can revitalize our local democratic institutions and practices that were once the lifeblood of community life, ensuring that everyone has a voice in the great transformations ahead.

We can create a better future. It won’t come without serious challenges. Indeed, it may only come through them.

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See Dirty Wars

SUBHEAD: "Gripping, compelling, and totally convincing - John Le Carre

By Kip Goodwin on 7 March 2014 for Kauai Alliance for Peace -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/03/see-dirty-wars.html)


Image above: Detail of movie poster for Dirty Wars. From (http://youtu.be/gdDdaahMRuo).

WHAT:  
See Documentary Film: Jeremy Scahill's "Dirty Wars" FREE!

WHEN:
Friday, March 14th, at 6:30Ppm

WHERE:
Kapa`a Public Library4-1464 Kuhio Highway,
Kapa`a, Kauai, Hawaii

SPONSOR:
Kauai Alliance for Peace and Social Justice.

INFO:
Please call Kip at (808) 822-7646 or
email Ray at may11nineteen71@gmail.com.

Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill into the heart of America's covert wars in Afghanistan, Somalia and more than seventy other countries. The secretive and powerful Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a clandestine operation comprised of men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress. JSOC teams "find, fix and finish" targets selected from a secret kill list that includes U.S. citizens.

Drawn into the stories and lives of people he meets along the way, Scahill is forced to confront the painful consequences of a war spinning out of control, as well as his own role as a journalist.

In February Secretary of War Chuck Hagel announced the Obama administration's Pentagon budget for the coming year. He wants to pare back conventional troop size but add more than 3000 personnel to special ops teams that will be the new face of America's force projection for most of the world.

Dirty Wars is a glimpse into a possible future of endless war; targeted assassinations, destabilization, and training of right wing and terrorist forces used by our government in places like Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and beyond. The U.S. is portrayed in Dirty Wars as the "security exporter" for the corporate oligarchy that moves to consolidate global control.



Video above:  Trailer of "Dirty Wars" from movie website (http://dirtywars.org/). From (http://youtu.be/gdDdaahMRuo).

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