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The American Empire: Murder Inc.
The American Empire: Murder Inc.
As Indonesia’s former President Suharto lay ill in 2008, a supporter displayed a portrait of him outside the Jakarta hospital where the military dictator died two weeks later. It was in Suharto’s brutal three-decade reign that Indonesia invaded East Timor, where investigative journalist Allan Nairn covered atrocities the general’s troops committed. (Vincent Thian / AP)
Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together. Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes, targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands, death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars.
Countries we seek to dominate, from Indonesia and Guatemala to Iraq and Afghanistan, are intimately familiar with these brutal mechanisms of control. But the reality of empire rarely reaches the American public. The few atrocities that come to light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The public is assured what has been uncovered will be investigated and will not take place again. The goals of empire, we are told by a subservient media and our ruling elites, are virtuous and noble. And the vast killing machine grinds forward, feeding, as it has always done, the swollen bank accounts of defense contractors and corporations that exploit natural resources and cheap labor around the globe.
There are very few journalists who have covered empire with more courage, tenacity and integrity than Allan Nairn. For more than three decades, he has reported from Central America, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti and Indonesia—where Indonesian soldiers fractured his skull and arrested him. His reporting on the Indonesian government massacres in East Timor saw him branded a “threat to national security” and officially banned from occupied East Timor.
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How Will The Government Control The Enforcers?
How Will The Government Control The Enforcers?
The talk of FEMA camps and martial law has been almost nonstop for the past few years. The actions by the government have led us to the current predicament where the surreal has become the new norm. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago to imagine we would actually be talking about the subversion and downfall of the United States with little outcry from the population in general.
Many articles have made the case that at least some of the military and police would follow orders to put the population into submission by force if necessary. This would include the forced detention and possible execution of many antigovernment protestors.
If even a small percentage of the enforcers revolted against the government orders it would provide a very large armed component that would add to the armed civilian population and would provide a serious impediment to government operations even if external forces were brought in.
In a serious event it has been noted that many enforcers would simply abandon their posts and go home to protect their families. This is an ever present problem for the government pundits giving the orders. They will want to maintain control over the enforcers at all times and must have sufficient controls in place to do so in a chaotic situation.
One way to maintain that control is to move the family members of those enforcers to “safe” locations where they can be protected while the enforcers do their job. These locations could be FEMA camps or secure military bases that could prevent persons from leaving once inside. This would not only provide safe harbor for those family members but would act as a control mechanism as well.
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The Limits of Propaganda
The Limits of Propaganda
As Paul Craig Roberts has recently reported, the US government is in the process of launching an all-out war on truth. Those who express views contrary to the party line out of Washington will be labeled a threat. Eventually they may find themselves carted to one of the concentration camps which Halliberton (Dick Cheney’s old company) has constructed for $385 million. But that may take a while. In the meantime, we can expect lots of other, less dramatic developments. Indeed, some of these are already happening. Here they are, listed in order of severity.
1. Self-censorship. Those who have previously tried to get the truth out no matter what become more reticent and prone to equivocation when reporting on “hot” issues.
2. Topic-avoidance. They start avoiding certain “hot” issues that they feel are most likely to get them into trouble.
3. Response to harassment. A few incidents of mild official harassment cause certain blogs to start watering down their content, or pulling down content in response to harassment.
4. Blacklisting. The officials start censoring content on a case-by-case basis, blocking or shutting down certain internet sites that they consider seditious.
5. Blocking communications. The officials start dealing with the “hard cases” of uncooperative individuals who remain, shutting down their communications by disabling their cell phones, shutting down internet access, and by imposing travel restrictions so that the “hard cases” are forced to remain in places where they can be watched.
6. Detention. Those found to be truly uncooperative, who try to circumvent the restrictions, are rounded up and shipped off to the above-mentioned camps.
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