{"id":40935,"date":"2018-11-26T07:28:23","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T12:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40935"},"modified":"2018-11-26T07:28:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-26T12:28:23","slug":"the-counterinsurgency-paradigm-how-u-s-politics-have-become-paramilitarized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40935","title":{"rendered":"The Counterinsurgency Paradigm: How U.S. Politics Have Become Paramilitarized"},"content":{"rendered":"
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THE COUNTERINSURGENCY PARADIGM: HOW U.S. POLITICS HAVE BECOME PARAMILITARIZED<\/a><\/h3>\n
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DONALD TRUMP RAN<\/u> a campaign promising to refill the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, to \u201cbring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,\u201d to \u201ctake out\u201d the families of suspected terrorists, to ban Muslims from entering this country, and to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet these policies didn\u2019t start with Trump: Torture, indefinite detention, extraordinary renditions, record numbers of deportations, anti-Muslim sentiment, mass foreign and domestic surveillance, and even the killing of innocent family members of suspected terrorists all have a recent historical precedent.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s predecessor, Barack Obama, continued some of the worst policies of the George W. Bush administration. He expanded the global battlefield post-9\/11 into at least seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. At the end of Obama\u2019s second term, a report<\/a>by\u00a0Council of Foreign Relations found that in 2016, Obama dropped an average of 72 bombs a day. He used drone strikes as a liberal panacea for fighting those \u201cterrorists\u201d while keeping boots off the ground. But he also expanded the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan. Immigrants were deported in such record numbers under Obama that immigration activists called him the \u201cdeporter-in-chief.\u201d And then there were the \u201cTerror Tuesday\u201d meetings, where Obama national security officials would order pizza and drink Coke and review the list of potential targets on their secret assassination list.<\/p>\n

For his liberal base, Obama sanitized a morally bankrupt expansion of war, and used Predator and Reaper drones strapped with Hellfire missiles to kill suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens stripped of their due process. The Obama administration harshly prosecuted whistleblowers in a shocking attack on press freedoms. By the end of his presidency, official numbers on civilian deaths by drone were underreported<\/a>;\u00a0we may never know<\/a> the true cost of these wars, which continue today.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE COUNTERINSURGENCY PARADIGM: HOW U.S. POLITICS HAVE BECOME PARAMILITARIZED DONALD TRUMP RAN a campaign promising to refill the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, to \u201cbring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,\u201d to \u201ctake out\u201d the families of suspected terrorists, to ban Muslims from entering this country, and to build a wall along the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[3306,23208,23126,7844,3250,9909,12701,5567,1174,978],"class_list":["post-40935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-barack-obama","tag-council-on-foreign-relatioins","tag-counterinsurgency","tag-donald-trump","tag-george-w-bush","tag-jeremy-scahill","tag-paramilitary","tag-the-intercept","tag-us-foreign-policy","tag-us-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40935"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40936,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40935\/revisions\/40936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}