Exclusive: In the Orwellian world of Official Washington, the U.S. government is now wedded to the theory of “information warfare,” meaning that Americans who challenge national security policy may be treated as “unprivileged belligerents” under the new Law of War doctrine, retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce writes.
By Todd E. Pierce
When the U.S. Department of Defense published a new Law of War Manual (LOW) this past summer, editorialists at the New York Times sat up and took notice. Their concern was that the manual stated that journalists could be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” The editorial explained that as a legal term “that applies to fighters that are afforded fewer protections than the declared combatants in a war.” In fact, it is far more insidious than that innocuous description.
Here is the manual’s definition: “‘Unlawful combatants’ or ‘unprivileged belligerents’ are persons who, by engaging in hostilities, have incurred one or more of the corresponding liabilities of combatant status (e.g., being made the object of attack and subject to detention), but who are not entitled to any of the distinct privileges of combatant status (e.g., combatant immunity and POW status).”
Some of the original detainees jailed at the Guantanamo Bay prison, as put on display by the U.S. military.
The key phrase here is “being made the object of attack.” For slow-witted New York Times editorialists, that means journalists can be killed as can any enemy soldier in wartime. “Subject to detention” means a journalist deemed an unprivileged belligerent will be put into military detention if captured. As with any enemy belligerent, however, if “capture is not feasible,” they would be killed if possible, by drone perhaps if in a foreign country.
Currently, most U.S. captives deemed “unprivileged belligerents” are imprisoned in Guantanamo although some may be held in Afghanistan. It must be noted that the United States deems as an “unprivileged belligerent” anyone they target for capture or choose to kill.
That the New York Times’ concern only arose with publication of the new LOW manual suggests they may have been in a deep sleep since 9/11 as the Department of Defense (DOD) has openly worked to impose limitations on information sharing and news gathering since that event gave them a pretext. It is now a well-established pattern of the U.S. government to suppress rights guaranteed by the First Amendment whenever they can get by with it, as was seen with the New York Times own James Risen.
But the New York Times colluded with the CIA in censoring Risen’s reporting. Furthermore, they seemed to have ignored the U.S. government’s momentous argument of the unlimited power of the President to target journalists and activists for “expressive activities,” as the Department of Justice stated in the case of Hedges v. Obama, as described below.
It has frequently been noted there’s been an ongoing “war” against journalists since 9/11. The new DOD Law of War manual makes that official and potentially takes it to the highest level of conflict. While expressing concern, the Times’ editorialist does not seem to realize or care how ominous it is that the DOD now openly declares that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” unlawful combatants, as the DOD manual provides, instead of hiding the fact in coded language as done since 2001. Inherent to those classifications is that they represent the “enemy” and can be killed by U.S. officials.
That will come as no surprise to those acquainted with the foreign journalists who have been targeted and killed by drones in places such as Pakistan. Nor will it surprise Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was held in Guantanamo for years. But now it is clear that the same fate could be in store for U.S. journalists.
That coded language is embedded in the claim by Military Commissions prosecutors and the Justice Department that there is a “U.S. domestic common law of war.” What they claim is entirely based upon martial law orders of the Civil War and the military’s orders to remove Japanese-Americans from the their homes on the West Coast in World War II. All the cases they rely on for a “domestic law of war” today were judicially condemned during or almost immediately after the wars in which they were a part of.
U.S. Domestic Common Law of War
U.S. Military Commissions Chief Prosecutor Brig. General Mark Martins and his staff invented what they call the “U.S. domestic common law of war” in filings to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That invention consists only of the martial law precedents of the U.S. Civil War and the removal of the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast at the direction of General DeWitt. Both were later seen as examples of military despotism.
The American people have been inured by a deliberate effort of the U.S. military to accept invocation of the law of war as a talisman to permit any act by officials which would have been known as illegal before 9/11. But as the manual states: “Although the law of war is generally viewed as ‘prohibitive law,’ in some respects, especially in the context of domestic law, the law of war may be viewed as permissive or even as a source of authority. For example, the principle of military necessity in the customary law of war may be viewed as justifying or permitting certain acts.” (Emphasis added.)
“Military necessity” was the law of war basis for removal of the Japanese-Americans. Military necessity though indisputably a part of the law of war is a totalitarian precept when applied to a civilian population.
The LOW manual explains the object of war by quoting George H. Aldrich, Deputy Legal Adviser to the U.S. Department of State during the Vietnam War. He wrote of “a general acceptance of the view that modern war is aimed not merely at the enemy’s military forces but at the enemy’s willingness and ability to pursue its war aims. . . . In Viet-Nam political, rather than military, objectives were even more dominant. Both sides had as their goal not the destruction of the other’s military forces but the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
The “destruction of the will” of the adversary is always the object of war, according to Clausewitz and adopted by the U.S. military. But this has a totalitarian element to it; the adversary’s reciprocal object is to destroy our will. Consequently, “our” will must be protected by suppressing any dissent which could harm morale and the population’s willingness to “continue the struggle.”
That was the foundational belief underlying martial law during the Civil War. The Constitution was an obstacle again to suppressing dissent to a degree after the Civil War, but with the invention of a U.S. domestic common law of war and legalistic word play, this obstacle has once again been removed as the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama.
The claim of being at war with internal and external enemies is always made by totalitarian states to justify their suppression of speech and a free press through repression. For a brief period in U.S. history, the Civil War, the U.S. military adopted military repression through martial law to suppress any dissent to its war practices.
Martial law was declared throughout the Union States, the North, on Aug. 8, 1862, by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, at the request of President Abraham Lincoln. Orders were published to “arrest and imprison” any persons “discouraging volunteer enlistments” or “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” or for “any other disloyal practice.” A military commission would try the prisoners, and a second order “suspended” the writ of habeas corpus in their cases.
Martial law was more formally declared on Sept. 24, 1862, by President Lincoln himself in addition to suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Lieber’s Code was then prepared as the order giving effect to martial law. Contrary to how it is presented by the U.S. Army and credulous human rights commentators, Lieber’s Code was primarily a harsh martial law order with Prussian militarist law of war concepts introduced to the U.S. to criminalize any expressions of dissent as “war treason.”
Thus, Col. William Winthrop explained that among the greater number of individuals who were brought to trial before the military commissions during the Civil War, the offenses included “hostile or disloyal acts, or publications or declarations calculated to excite opposition to the federal government or sympathy with the enemy, etc.”
Whiting’s Guidance
Solicitor of the Department of War during the Civil War, William Whiting, gave legal guidance to the Union Commanders for enforcement of martial law. The “guidebook” was his own War Powers of the President. This book could have been used by any militaristic and totalitarian regime, which in fact it was as it was derived from authoritarian principles of martial law from Prussia. Those authoritarian principles remained in force under Prussia’s successor state, Germany, during two world wars, and were the legal basis of the infamous People’s Court which tried “war treason” cases; cases of “disloyal” expressive acts in most cases without more.
The guidance of Whiting was: “No person in loyal States can rightfully be captured or detained unless he has engaged, or there is reasonable cause to believe he intends to engage, in acts of hostility to the United States, that is to say, in acts which may tend to impede or embarrass the United States in such military proceedings as the commander-in-chief may see fit to institute.” This is the same argument that the U.S. government made in Hedges v. Obama.
What constituted an act of hostility? Whiting defines that to include a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.”
An example of how martial law was to be carried out was in an order to a subordinate commander by the Army Department of the Pacific Commander in response to complaints from the Citizens of Solano County, California, of disloyal “utterances” they were hearing from fellow citizens.
The order read: “The department commander desires you to let the people understand generally that the order of the President suspending the writ of habeas corpus and directing the arrest of all persons guilty of disloyal practices will be rigidly enforced. . . . Practices injurious to the government or offensive to the loyal sentiment of the people will under no circumstances be permitted.”
Immediately after the Civil War, when it was freshest in their minds, the Supreme Court had this to say about martial law in Ex Parte Milligan: “What is ordinarily called martial law is no law at all. Wellington, in one of his despatches from Portugal, in 1810, in his speech on the Ceylon affair, so describes it. Let us call the thing by its right name; it is not martial law, but martial rule. And when we speak of it, let us speak of it as abolishing all law, and substituting the will of the military commander, and we shall give a true idea of the thing, and be able to reason about it with a clear sense of what we are doing.”
Martial law is a subpart of the Law of War and since it is for application to a domestic population as with the Northern States during the Civil War by the Union Army, it is “moderated” ordinarily from the even harsher provisions of the Law of War which are now invoked in the Law of War manual. Yet precepts of both are being introduced domestically with Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act and domestically and globally by the “U.S. domestic common law of war” precedents trumpeted by Chief Military Commissions Prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins.
It must be noted that this is not to compare the Union unfavorably with the Confederacy. The Confederacy had the highest form of martial law: slavery. But the Defense Department only uses one legal precedent from the Confederacy today, which is “outlawry.”
Lieber’s Code addressed “outlawry” in Art. 148, which provided, in pertinent part: “The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, . . . on the contrary, it abhors such outrage.”
This was adopted in the Hague Regulations and as interpreted in earlier Army Law of Land Warfare manuals, prohibited assassinations as well as any declarations that an individual or group is outside the protection of the law of war, which is what designation as an unprivileged belligerent does. The prohibition of assassination has also been put aside with the routine practice of assassination with drones today by the U.S. military.
The Confederacy committed the offense of outlawry when its leaders declared all captured African-Americans fighting for the Union were outside the protection of the law of war (which did preexist Lieber’s Code) and would be placed into the indefinite detention of slavery. After 9/11, the U.S. government did the same with the invention of the unlawful combatant/unprivileged belligerent category and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay and any other location U.S. officials chose to place “unprivileged belligerents.”
Treason of the Professors and the Media
Ironically, shortly after the New York Times expressed its concern for journalists in early August, the Guardian reported in an article written by William C. Bradford, a recently hired assistant professor in the law department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The article, entitled “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column,” was published in the National Security Law Journal of George Mason University Law School.
Bradford argued that the U.S. should be more aggressive in attacking Muslims to include attacks which are war crimes under the law of war. But it was his advocacy that the U.S. military attack other “lawful targets” in its war on terrorism, which include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” that caught the most attention. These civilian areas were all places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist, according to Bradford.
Furthermore, Bradford wrote, “Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are at least in theory targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.” In other words, dissenting scholars are unprivileged belligerents and subject to attack, just as journalists are according to the Law of War manual.
Not to defend him but Bradford was articulating the underlying logic of the new Law of War manual’s position that dissenting journalists can be targeted as unprivileged belligerents. This, as stated above, is consistent with oppressive extra-constitutional martial law practices which Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins boasts of as “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
One has to ask: where are the supposed watchdogs of the press when military officers can so easily slide historical falsehoods past them in destroying freedom of the press? Further, Bradford argued that law professors who criticized the failure of the U.S. to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War represented a “treasonous” fifth column that could be attacked as enemy combatants.
If there is treason being committed in the United States, it must be seen in the acts of those reconstituting the extra-constitutional martial law cases of the Civil War period. That is, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins and associated government attorneys who, in effect, are engaged in an indirect coup d’etat of the U.S. Constitutional order. In fact, Bradford was alleged to have written in favor of a direct military coup d’etat as well.
As it turned out, Bradford had other ethical issues than just his incitement to commit war crimes and target law professors. A combination of factors led to his resigning his position at the Military Academy and this individual crisis would seem to have passed.
The home page of the National Security Law Journal in which his essay had been published carried a repudiation of it by the incoming editorial board. They summarized his article as follows: “Mr. Bradford’s contention that some scholars in legal academia could be considered as constituting a fifth column in the war against terror; his interpretation is that those scholars could be targeted as unlawful combatants.”
But substitute “journalists” for “scholars” and you have the position on journalists of the DOD’s new Law of War manual.
An insightful article in The Atlantic asks “how a scholar pushing these ideas seems not to have raised red flags any earlier.” That’s an excellent question. The article was entitled “The Unusual Opinions of William C. Bradford.” But here’s the point; these opinions are not unusual among some members of the military and right-wing law professors such as Adrian Vermeule of Harvard and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago.
Posner and Vermeule have carved out a niche in American legal discourse in advocating that the U.S. needs to turn to the legal “wisdom” of the German Nazi lawyer, Carl Schmitt. In Terror in the Balance, they suggest that the U.S. may need to adopt censorship for, among other reasons, “antigovernment speech may demoralize soldiers and civilians.” For precedent, they point out that “Martial law during the Civil War permitted the military to try and punish people who criticized the Lincoln administration’s conduct of the war.”
The Attack on ‘Lawfare’
Other prominent advocates of authoritarian legal practices present themselves as protecting against disloyal attorney who practice “lawfare,” which is defined as a form of “asymmetric warfare” that misuses domestic or international law to damage an opponent through legal actions in a courtroom. For instance, Ben Wittes of lawfareblog.com would seem to espouse this type of animosity toward public-interest lawyers who use the courts to defend First Amendment liberties.
A fallacious argument, made by Wittes in a paper which calls for “balancing” liberty and security, is his idiosyncratic belief that “in American constitutional law, for example, free speech does not exist as a general right of the public to communicate as much or as widely as it desires but as an individual right not to have government restrict one’s speech.”
This is contrary to the understanding of the Supreme Court which held in First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, that: “[T]he First Amendment goes beyond protection of the press and the self-expression of individuals to prohibit government from limiting the stock of information from which members of the public may draw.” In other words, the First Amendment guarantees the public’s “right to know.”
Why does this matter? The Constitution’s Framers understood that an informed population was crucial for a Republic. As James Madison put it: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
This understanding of the criticality of the free flow of information for wise democratic decision-making is particularly important for national security where ignorance comes with the highest cost. This understanding formed Clausewitz’s belief in a broad-based civilian decision-making process in matters of national security strategic policy, and not one driven by military leaders with their one-dimensional thinking process.
The Vietnam War is Exhibit A as proof of this. If it had been left to the Generals to decide, the war would have continued “perpetually” even though wiser heads realized from the beginning that it was unwinnable by U.S. terms of maintaining an unpopular government in South Vietnam. The antiwar movement, whatever the motives of some, proved to be more strategically astute than General William Westmoreland who would have continued the war until the U.S. bankrupted itself in the manner that the Soviet Union would years later in Afghanistan. It was the American antiwar movement which gave effect to Clausewitz’s strategy that when a war’s costs exceed its “benefits,” a way must be found to end it.
Curiously, Wittes accurately notes in Law and the Long War that to claim “the President has all the powers of a normal war yet few of its restraints, that the whole world is his battlefield, and that this state of affairs goes on in perpetuity is really akin to claiming a kind of worldwide martial law.” In fact, that’s exactly what the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama without the admission as to martial law.
Dissent as Treason
Since the Vietnam War, the belief that the media and other critics of government policies act as fifth columnists has become commonplace in military-oriented journals and with the American authoritarian-oriented political class, expressed in articles such as William Bradford’s attack on “treasonous professors.”
To the question “how a scholar pushing these ideas” did not raise a red flag, that might best be asked of the National Security Law Journal’s previous editorial board. It is worth noting however that the editors who chose to publish Bradford’s article are not neophytes in national security issues or strangers to the military or government.
As described on the NSLJ website, the Editor-in-Chief from 2014-2015 has broad experience in homeland and national security programs from work at both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and currently serves (at the time of publication of Bradford’s article) as the Deputy Director for the Office of Preparedness Integration and Coordination at FEMA. A U.S. government official in other words.
The “Articles Selection Editor” is described as “a family physician with thirty years of experience in the foreign affairs and intelligence communities.” Websites online suggest his experience may have been acquired as a CIA employee. The executive editor appears to be a serving Marine Corps officer who attended law school as a military-funded student.
Significantly; Bradford was articulating precepts of the “U.S. common law of war” promoted by Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins because nothing Bradford advocated was inconsistent with William Whiting’s guidance to Union Generals. Except Whiting went even further and advised that judges in the Union states who “impeded” the military in any way by challenging their detentions were even greater “public enemies” than Confederate soldiers were.
This “U.S. common law of war” is a prosecution fabrication created by legal expediency in the absence of legitimate legal precedent for what the United States was doing with prisoners captured globally after 9/11. This legal invention came about when military commission prosecutors failed to prove that the offense of Material Support for Terrorism was an international law of war crime. So prosecutors dreamed up a “domestic common law of war.” This in fact is simply following the pattern of totalitarian states of the Twentieth Century.
Government-Media-Academic-Complex
The logic of Bradford’s argument is the same as that of the Defense Department in declaring that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” As quoted above, George H. Aldrich had observed that in Vietnam, both sides had as their goal “the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
Bradford argued that Islamists must overcome Americans’ support for the current war to prevail, and “it is the ‘informational dimension’ which is their main combat effort because it is U.S. political will which must be destroyed for them to win.” But he says Islamists lack skill “to navigate the information battlespace, employ PSYOPs, and beguile Americans into hostile judgments regarding the legitimacy of their cause.”
Therefore, according to Bradford, Islamists have identified “force multipliers with cultural knowledge of, social proximity to, and institutional capacity to attrit American political will. These critical nodes form an interconnected ‘government-media-academic complex’ (‘GMAC’) of public officials, media, and academics who mould mass opinion on legal and security issues . . . .”
Consequently, Bradford argues, within this triumvirate, “it is the wielders of combat power within these nodes, journalists, officials, and law professors, who possess the ideological power to defend or destroy American political will.”
While Bradford reserves special vituperation for his one-time fellow law professors, he states the “most transparent example of this power to shape popular opinion as to the legitimacy of U.S. participation in wars is the media.”
As proof, Bradford explained how this “disloyalty” of the media worked during the Vietnam War. He wrote: “During the Vietnam War, despite an unbroken series of U.S. battlefield victories, the media first surrendered itself over to a foreign enemy for use as a psychological weapon against Americans, not only expressing criticism of U.S. purpose and conduct but adopting an ‘antagonistic attitude toward everything America was and represented’ and ‘spinning’ U.S. military success to convince Americans that they were losing, and should quit, the war. Journalistic alchemists converted victory into defeat simply by pronouncing it.”
Space does not permit showing in how many ways this “stab in the back” myth is false. But this belief in the disloyalty of the media in Bradford’s view remains today. He wrote: “Defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and empathy for American adversaries persist within media.”
Targeting Journalists
The right-wing militarist Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), with mostly retired U.S. military officers serving as advisers, has advocated targeting journalists with military attacks. Writing in The Journal of International Security Affairs in 2009, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters wrote:
“Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media . . . . Future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.” (Emphasis in original.)
The rationale for that deranged thinking was first propounded by Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp and other authoritarian-minded officers after the Vietnam War. Sharp explained, our “will” was eroded because “we were subjected to a skillfully waged subversive propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by the media’s bombardment of sensationalism, rumors and half-truths about the Vietnam affair — a campaign that destroyed our national unity.” William C. Bradford apparently adopted and internalized this belief, as have many other military officers.
That “stab in the back” myth was propagated by a number of U.S. military officers as well as President Richard Nixon (as explained here). It was more comfortable to believe that than that the military architects of the war did not understand what they were doing. So they shifted blame onto members of the media who were astute enough to recognize and report on the military’s failure and war crimes, such as My Lai.
But those “critical” journalists, along with critics at home, were only recognizing what smarter Generals such as General Frederick Weyand recognized from the beginning. That is, the war was unwinnable by the U.S. because it was maintaining in power its despotic corrupt ally, the South Vietnamese government, against its own people. Whether or not what came later was worse for the Vietnamese people was unforeseeable by the majority of the people. What was in front of their eyes was the military oppression of American and South Vietnamese forces and secret police.
Information Warfare Today
In 1999, the Rand Corporation published a collection of articles in Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare. The volume was edited by Zalmay Khalilzad, the alleged author of the Defense Department’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which was drafted when Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary and Paul Wolfowitz was Under Secretary of Defense and promulgated a theory of permanent U.S. global dominance.
One chapter of Rand’s Strategic Appraisal was written by Jeremy Shapiro, now a special adviser at the U.S. State Department, according to Wikipedia. Shapiro wrote that the inability to control information flows was widely cited as playing an essential role in the downfall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
He stated that perception management was “the vogue term for psychological operations or propaganda directed at the public.” As he expressed it, many observers worried that potential foes could use techniques of perception management with asymmetric strategies with their effect on public opinion to “destroy the will of the United States to wage war.”
Consequently, “Warfare in this new political environment consists largely of the battle to shape the political context of the war and the meaning of victory.”
Another chapter on Ethics and Information Warfare by John Arquilla makes clear that information warfare must be understood as “a true form of war.” The range of information warfare operations, according to Arquilla, extends “from the battlefield to the enemy home front.” Information warfare is designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.”
This notion of information warfare, that it can be pursued without a need to defeat an adversary’s armed forces, is an area of particular interest, according to Arquilla. What he means is that it necessitates counter measures when it is seen as directed at the U.S. as now provided for in the new LOW Manual.
Important to note, according to Arquilla, is that there is an inherent blurriness with defining “combatants” and “acts of war.” Equating information warfare to guerrilla warfare in which civilians often engage in the fighting, Arquilla states “in information warfare, almost anyone can engage in the fighting.”
Consequently, the ability to engage in this form of conflict is now in the hands of small groups and individuals, offering up “the prospect of potentially quite large numbers of information warfare-capable combatants emerging, often pursuing their own, as opposed to some state’s policies,” Arquilla wrote.
Therefore, a “concern” for information warfare at the time of the Rand study in 1999 was the problem of maintaining “noncombatant immunity.” That’s because the “civilian-oriented target set is huge and likely to be more vulnerable than the related set of military infrastructures . . . . Since a significant aspect of information warfare is aimed at civilian and civilian-oriented targets, despite its negligible lethality, it nonetheless violates the principle of noncombatant immunity, given that civilian economic or other assets are deliberately targeted.”
What Arquillo is saying is that civilians who are alleged to engage in information warfare, such as professors and journalists, lose their “noncombatant immunity” and can be attacked. The “blurriness” of defining “combatants” and “acts of war” was removed after 9/11 with the invention of the “unlawful combatant” designation, later renamed “unprivileged belligerent” to mimic language in the Geneva Conventions.
Then it was just a matter of adding the similarly invented “U.S. domestic common law of war” with its martial law precedents and a framework has been built for seeing critical journalists and law professors as “unprivileged belligerents,” as Bradford indiscreetly wrote.
Arquilla claims that information warfare operations extend to the “home front” and are designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.” That is to equate what is deemed information warfare to sabotage of the population’s psychological will to fight a war, and dissidents to saboteurs.
Perpetual War
But this is a perpetual war driven by U.S. operations, according to a chapter written by Stephen T. Hosmer on psychological effects of information warfare. Here, it is stated that “the expanding options for reaching audiences in countries and groups that could become future U.S. adversaries make it important that the United States begin its psychological conditioning in peacetime.” Thus, it is necessary “to begin to soften the fighting will of the potential adversary’s armed forces in the event conflict does occur.”
As information warfare is held to be “true war,” this means that the U.S. is perpetually committing acts of war against those deemed “potential” adversaries. Little wonder that Vladimir Putin sees Russia as under assault by the United States and attempts to counter U.S. information warfare.
This same logic is applied to counter-insurgency. The 2014 COIN Manual, FM 3-24, defines “Information Operations” as information-related capabilities “to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decisionmaking of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”
Those we “protect ourselves from” can logically be seen as the internal enemy, as William Bradford saw it, such as critical law professors and journalists, just as Augusto Pinochet did in Chile with dissidents.
With the totalitarian logic of information-warfare theorists, internalized now throughout much of the U.S. government counter-terrorism community, it should be apparent to all but the most obtuse why the DOD deems a journalist who writes critically of U.S. government war policy an “unprivileged belligerent,” an enemy, as in the Law of War manual. William C. Bradford obviously absorbed this doctrine but was indiscreet enough to articulate it fully.
It Has Happened Here!
That’s the only conclusion one can draw from reading the transcript of the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit. In that lawsuit, plaintiffs, including journalists and political activists, challenged the authority provided under Sec. 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization for removal out from under the protection of the Constitution of those deemed unprivileged belligerents. That is, civilians suspected of lending any “support” to anyone whom the U.S. government might deem as having something to do with terrorism.
“Support” can be as William Whiting described it in 1862 and as what is seen as “information warfare” by the U.S. military today: a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.”
Reminiscent of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here where those accused of crimes against the government are tried by military judges as in the U.S. Military Commissions, a Justice Department attorney arguing on behalf of the United States epitomized the legal reasoning that one would see in a totalitarian state in arguing why the draconian “Law of War” is a substitute for the Constitution.
The Court asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Torrance if he would agree, “as a principled matter, that the President can’t, in the name of the national security of the United States, just decide to detain whomever he believes it is important to detain or necessary to detain to prevent a terrorist act within the United States?”
Rather than giving a straight affirmative answer to a fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution, Torrance dissembled, only agreeing that that description would seem “quite broad,” especially if citizens. But he added disingenuously that it was the practice of the government “not to keep people apprehended in the U.S.”
Which is true, it is known that people detained by the U.S. military and CIA have been placed everywhere but in the U.S. so that Constitutional rights could not attach. Under Section 1021, that “inconvenience” to the government would not be necessary.
When asked by the Court if he, the Justice Department attorney, would agree that a different administration could change its mind with respect to whether or not Sec. 1021 would be applied in any way to American citizens, he dissembled again, answering: “Is that possible? Yes, but it is speculative and conjecture and that cannot be the basis for an injury in fact.”
So U.S. citizens or anyone else are left to understand that they have no rights remaining under the Constitution. If a supposed “right” is contingent upon who is President, it is not a right and the U.S. is no longer under the rule of law.
In discussing whether activist and journalist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a citizen of Iceland, could be subject to U.S. military detention or trial by military commission, Assistant U.S. Attorney Torrance would only disingenuously answer that “her activities as she alleges them, do not implicate this.” Disingenuous because he knew based upon the answer he previously gave that the law of war is arbitrary and its interpretation contingent upon a military commander, whoever that may be, at present or in the future.
What could happen to Ms. Jónsdóttir would be completely out of her control should the U.S. government decide to deem her an “unprivileged belligerent,” regardless of whether her expressive activities changed positively or negatively, or remained the same. Her risk of detention per the Justice Department is entirely at the sufferance of whatever administration may be in place at any given moment.
Any doubt that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, along with Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, is believed by the U.S. Executive Branch to give it the untrammeled power that Article 48 of the Weimar Germany constitution gave to the German President in 1933 was settled by the arguments made by the Justice Department attorney in Hedges v. Obama.
Setting First Amendment Aside
One does not need to speculate that the U.S. government no longer sees First Amendment activities as protected. Government arguments, which were made in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit, revealed that the Justice Department, speaking for the Executive Branch, considers protection of the Bill of Rights subordinate to the claim of “war powers” by the Executive. One can only be willfully blind to fail to see this.
By the Justice Department’s court arguments and filings, the protections afforded by the U.S. Bill of Rights are no more secure today than they were to Japanese-Americans when Western District military commander General DeWitt decided to remove them from their homes on the West Coast and intern them in what were initially called, “concentration camps.”
The American Bar Association Journal reported in 2014 that Justice Antonin Scalia told students in Hawaii that “the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision upholding the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong, but it could happen again in war time.” But contrary to Scalia stating that Korematsu had been repudiated, Korematsu has never been overruled.
The court could get a chance to do so, the ABA article stated, in the Hedges v. Obama case “involving the military detention without trial of people accused of aiding terrorism.” But that opportunity has passed.
A U.S. District Court issued a permanent injunction blocking the law’s indefinite detention powers but that ruling was overturned by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. A petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asked the justices to overturn Sec. 1021, the federal law authorizing such detentions and stated the justices should consider overruling Korematsu. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2014, leaving the Appeals Court’s ruling intact.
The Supreme Court’s decision to not overturn Korematsu allows General DeWitt’s World War II decision to intern Japanese-Americans in concentration camps to stand as a shining example of what Brig. General Marks Martins proudly holds up to the world as the “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Thanks for the link, Bill. I think the moderator misses the point though. The backers of a coup are ONLY thinking of the destruction of government, which they hate. They think the military dictatorship would be better than the government. Astonishing!! If they could read, the book for them would be Erich Fromm’s, “Escape from Freedom”.
Apparently it isn’t only authoritarian-types in the military that we have to consider with concern:
“Nearly Half of Republicans Could imagine backing Military Coup” – http://www.juancole.com/2015/09/republicans-backing-military.html
A point missing from this discussion is civilian oversight of the military or, more specifically, lack thereof. In particular, the armed services committees in Congress have been reduced to rubber stamps, a trend that has ominous prospects.
“It has frequently been noted there’s been an ongoing “war†against journalists since 9/11. The new DOD Law of War manual makes that official and potentially takes it to the highest level of conflict. While expressing concern, the Times’ editorialist does not seem to realize or care how ominous it is that the DOD now openly declares that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,†unlawful combatants, as the DOD manual provides, instead of hiding the fact in coded language as done since 2001.” The Times’s editorialist is protecting his or her narrative, namely the establishment narrative. It’s a free universe. Yes, You’re free to imagine that the truck barreling down the road which you’re standing in the middle of isn’t a truck, but a butterfly, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a truck. I seek to protect my narrative. The gangster corporatocracy and it’s nation state members, is fascist, and those who are supportive of imperialism and mafia capitalism are fascists. (Fascism isn’t lovely.) It doesn’t matter that lots of us aren’t.
Other parts of my narrative I’m willing to reconsider. Although I don’t like the term neo-conservative, I’ve learned a few things about neo-conservatism lately that has me re-evaluating the term.
If Americans pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands and that republic is a democratic republic would that not make advocates for a military dictatorship guilty of treason?
The military officials want the ability to piss on the backs of the US Taxpayers and tell tell them its just rainwater.
William Whiting:
“What constituted an act of hostility? Whiting defines that to include a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.†“
[ Having failed famously in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, can’t we conclude that no ’enemy’ ‘undermines confidence in its capacity or its integrity’ more than the it itself – the government, the military and the surveillance / security state. We have met the enemy and… ]
Again
“the President has all the powers of a normal war yet few of its restraints, that the whole world is his battlefield, and that this state of affairs goes on in perpetuity is really akin to claiming a kind of worldwide martial law.â€
[ This statement is US, here and now. The norm. Who is surprised that a design to rule the world should not include a thorough lock-down, first and foremost, in the good old homeland?
THE “HEROES” OF 9/11
If there was anything at all “heroic” in the thousands who died in
9/11, I hope that in their inner selves they would never have
supported a “land of the free” such as has been
developed according to Major in JAG (ret) Todd E Pierce(above).
Unfortunately, I believe this kind of belief of Americans murdering
abroad to protect “our freedoms” is precisely what millions who
consider themselves “patriotic” do believe. “Give me another beer!”
To this writer, it means more simply that the current President and
other politicians have indeed embraced this fabricated “diplomacy”.
Let me at this point add my thanks to the Robert Parrys, Gareth
Porters and others who slog through the hell in which we have
wittingly or unwittingly been trapped. “Come into my web said
the spider to the fly”….
Senator (SC) Lindsay Graham as well as Presidential candidate has
said, “It will be holy hell!” It will be a hell of his own making and others
that share his views and influence.
—-Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
It’s not The Hague where US politicians and soldiers should be tried for their war crimes. It’s Nuremberg.
Based on this doctrine many — if not all — Vietnam era reporters would be categorized as “unprivileged belligerentsâ€.
The notion that the Department of Defense, formerly the War Department, can now create law by writing a manual ins indeed curious, especially since there has not been a legal war since WWII.
Could it be that the “Deep State” government that has been operating outside the Constitution since 9/11 with the “Continuity of Government” emergency powers doctrine has made this possible?
Even members of Congress are not allowed to see any details of the COG.
Even the 9/11 Commission director Zelikow refused to discuss the COG when being questioned by a Senate committee.
Listen to this interview with Peter Dale Scott on the COG:
http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/09/12/peter-dale-scott-explains-the-secret-cheney-operation-on-911/
Carl Schmitt, known affectionately as “The Crown Jewel of Nazi Jurisprudence” and alternately as “Hitler’s Lawyer”, was widely referenced in the construction of our own NDAA laws specified herein by MAJ Pierce. Yes, that’s right – a Nazi lawyer’s notoriously spurious circular logic was used to justify portions of these laws. Sophie Scholl, along with her college professor and several other students, were prosecuted under statutes based on the Weimar Constitution’s Article 48. That provision permitted implementation of the notorious “Enabling Act”, which brought Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of “Sovereignty” to the fore. According to Schmitt, the “Sovereign” is he who makes the “friend-enemy distinction” in order to insure political stability. Anything that rises to “the political”, in Schmitt’s jargon, may disrupt national security. It is within the Sovereign’s prerogative to decide what constitutes “the political”, entitling him to act as he sees fit to preserve “sovereignty”. That includes killing civilians. This was the moral justification used for the “extrajudicial” murder of Ernst Roehm and many others in the “Night of the Long Knives” purge. Sophie and her compatriots objected to Nazi repression, were tried in “The Peoples’ Court”, and went to the guillotine. Head chopping was the official state method of judicial execution in Nazi Germany. “Evil triumphs when the good remain silent”, but there comes a point when it is too late. After the war, the Nuremberg trials were famous for prosecution of the “Major War Criminals”. As I recall, there were 22: Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia, Goering and Ley committed suicide, and ten others hanged. But there were less famous trials later in which about 800 war criminals received the death penalty. In the American and British sectors, they were hanged. The Soviets were partial to firing squads. But the French, in keeping with their tradition and because it was handy, used the guillotine. If I were a lawyer, I would not advise a client to write a book about his experience in a detention facility during a war of aggression. Alfred Rosenberg learned the hard way. But if we elect a “left wing authoritarian” in the next cycle…say, Hillary, a likely Supreme Court nominee could be Cass Sunstein. He helped create the current “Information Policy”. Anybody listening?…chirp…chirp…folks, pay attention. I ain’t makin’ this stuff up.
I am listening and I appreciate the enlightenment.
This is an excellent article, showing clearly how the corrupt courts and lawyers are struggling constantly to overthrow the Constitution with fearmongering and security pretenses. A study of cases of constitutional law shows the absolute corruption of the federal judiciary, appointed by the same politicians whose elections are bought, and influenced by the mass media owned by the oligarchy.
In the US, power is only available to bad people: selfishness and hypocrisy, bullying and collusion are the sole means to corporate power, and thence political power and media power. So the worst have the power. They don’t have to be corrupted, they get there only if they are already corrupt. The truth is to them a hazard to navigation; the Constitution and the people are their enemies. They believe in winning, that is what they were taught, and it is what they teach their children. No win and you don’t count or deserve anything. There are no rules or values, just winning. They tell themselves that rule of the people is mob rule, that rule of the rich winners is just by definition. There is no education of such people, no point in reasoning with them. They believe that reasoning is for losers, justice is for wimps; their rationales are nothing but are propaganda lines; if you are not competent at deception you are not a winner and deserve nothing.
Thanks Joe B, those were the guys (and they were all guys) in the business school when I was in college. We thought they were weird, but we didn’t appreciate how dangerous they were.
That’s a sleazy trick, legally conflating the ‘war on terror’ with a legally declared war and then essentially classifying speech as a war tactic. I expect as much from right-wingers and military authoritarian types (i.e.; like M.Granger above, searching for rationalization for his actions), but I was hoping that our Supreme Court MIGHT have some pangs of conscience. However, it appears the current lineup of 5 conservatives on the SC is corrupt beyond redemption. I just hope these conservatives are happy when a left-wing authoritarian eventually comes to power and perhaps uses these same draconian measures against them (i.e.; drone attacks on Sean Hannity/Bill O Reilly? Bombing Fox News headquarters? ).
Very true. The facts have been replaced with lies in the controlled mainstream media. See “War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror” at
http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
Eugene Debs – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs – and Edmund D. Morel – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Morel – and others were persecuted for their dissent during the First World War. In hindsight, other than members of the warrior caste there must be very few people in civilized societies who know of this war and the persecution of pacifists and who would deny they were right.
Brilliant and frightening essay.
America’s part in the ME began with Iran and the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossedegh. The Brits sold us on his being a communist when he was a nationalist that wanted more of the profits to go to his people than the Brits. That led Iran to takeover of the US embassy. We sicked Iraq on Iran. On and on. Our insatiable need for oil led us to military action. Just paying a fair price for it would have been a lot less expensive than than a multi-trillion military action. We were lied into Iraq like we were lied into Viet Nam. Our full support of Israel no matter what is another problem. If those short sighted Republicans had sabotaged the Iran deal, the other nations would still abide by the agreement. Russia, China, Europe would trade with Iran and they probably would abandon the dollar. And when that happens, and it will some day, we implode, and God help us. We think we are in the place of God with our exceptionalism, and we can take whatever we want any way we want. No, we have wasted trillions on credit card wars of our own making, which will eventually run the America in the ground.
it would not be so bad if this was only going to be a global economic recession … we could dust ourselves off and start anew. what I see is a nuclear winter, following the zionist’ release of their nuclear arsenal. the zionist has a stockpile of nuclear arms as extensive as the washington’s own. the zionist state of israel is funded, armed, and protected by washington. now consider what will happen when the Washington can no longer give them the help they need to stay afloat? the Arabian people, not al-sisi, or the oil kings, and princes, turkey’s elites, but the Arab on the street hears the u.s. dollar has collapsed and zionists will no longer be supported by washington. REVENGE! the zionist will burn the globe, before it will allow Palestine to revert to Palestinian people.
There is no such thing as indefinite detention. It is an invented urban myth perpetrated by those who sympathize with unlawful combatants and demonize our protectors. Furthermore, habeas corpus may be suspended in times of insurrection or invasion. We have been invaded by unlawful combatant Islamists who want us all dead. Since the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and then subsequently on 9/11/01 and thereafter additional attempts, some successful (Ft. Hood), some not (Manhattan car bomb), the enemy is here. Detaining them at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, makes sense, and is moral, ethical and legal, and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare. Both of those documents specifically give no extra legal privileges to unlawful combatants. In fact, those documents were written to PROTECT innocent civilians in war, NOT to protect those who PRETEND to be civilians in order to murder them. Even lawful combatant POW’s may be held, without charge, until the end of hostilities. During WWII eight dry foot German saboteurs were captured in the United States. Two of the eight flipped on the others, who were all denied hebeas corpus and then convicted in legal military commissions. Six of the eight were subsequently executed by electric chair. The remarkable part of this piece of history is not that the whole process took about six weeks, from capture to execution, but that none of the eight saboteurs destroyed anything or hurt anyone. They were found to be in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War. We do not control when or how the enemy strikes, or if he strikes at all, but strike he does, repeatedly and viciously. Until all Islamists are dead or no longer have the means or will to kill us we must defend ourselves. Self-defense includes doing everything in our power to survive and to defeat the enemy, up to and including total war. No legal document prevents us from defending ourselves and surviving. Sincerely, Montgomery J. Granger, Major (Ret.), U.S. Army. Former ranking U.S. Army Medical Department officer with the Joint Detainee Operations Group, Joint Task Force 160, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 2002. Author: “Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior.”
What do the incidents cited above have to do with journalists reporting on events they have witnessed? Or others protesting illegal and immoral wars or other crimes against humanity?
Until all Islamists are dead or no longer have the means or will to kill us we must defend ourselves.
ISIS/ISIL/Daesh only numbers in the tens of thousands. Given that there are billions of Islamists in the world, that will presumably take a lot longer and cost much more than our quagmire in Afghanistan. Any idea how much that will cost and how to pay for it?
“Total War” explained in under three minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVP3KU-qOzc
You, and the administration, are operating under a fundamental legal error. People who take up arms against “our” forces come in two classes. First, there are uniformed military personnel of a declared enemy; second, there are criminals. There is no legitimate third category.
The law of war applies to uniformed enemies; they can be attacked without warning but, if captured must be given the legal protections applying to prisoners of war. Regular civilian law applies to criminals. They may be killed in self-defence if necessary, but the aim must always be to capture if possible; suspects who are armed but not actually shooting when detected must be called upon to surrender and fired on only if they refuse, by word or deed, to surrender. Once captured, alleged criminals are entitled to the protection of regular criminal law; they must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, they must not be denied reasonable bail, or access to counsel; they must not be compelled to be witnesses against themselves; and they are entitled to a fair, speedy and public trial by a jury.
The inmates at Guantanamo are clearly not soldiers; very few of them were actually captured in combat operations. They are entitled to the same legal protections as any other accused criminal.They have gone far beyond any reasonable time for trial. They are, simply, kidnap victims and the government of the US is the kidnapper.
the major (ret), is a product of the education allowed the children of north americans. input(lesson), followed by output confirmation (exam) of successful programing. if the output is not consistent with the input, a failing grade will prevent the subject from progressing onto any posts of influence. monty was successfully programed. I have no doubt that monty might have been capable of analysing the input, and put forth some new, or original idea … but it is necessary to teach and develop this skill from youth.
teach your children to consider what they hear, analyse it, and synthesize their own thoughts …
what monty will never perceive, is that washington does not defend against the ‘invasive hordes of islam’ … washington defends against the u.s. dollars loss of ‘global reserve currency’ status.
it would be better said that the u.s. dollar is using washington to fight for it’s status as ‘global reserve currency.’
this because washington belongs to the currency …
Jets causing 9/11 diaster were the first actual testing of American drones.
and the formative implementation of Pax Americana. Damn war criminals.
Having read you comment I must say you are crazy. You are so swept up with your GI Joe personae about crazy Muslims coming to “kill us all”, and your shameful denial of the moral bankruptcy of holding prisoners at Gitmo for years on end without being charged or a right to a fair trial. You are the product of an out of control military establishment: one which creates enemies, creates wars if there is not enough war to justify your miserable existence. Truth: if the US military closed all of its bases in the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan and came home and called it quits, you know what would happen? Peace would happen. While there may be sporadic conflicts among the remaining factions, the vast majority of hostilities would end. The USA is the main instigator of the conflicts it finds itself in. All of you military people think alike, because you have all been indoctrinated to pray for war, hope for war, kill all (fill in the blank with your favorite enemy: islamists, east ukrainians, chinese, etc). The US military is the main cause of most military conflict in the world today because it wrongly considers itself ‘exceptional’, ‘the world’s leader’, ‘the world’s biggest military’, ‘world’s biggest weapon manufacturer and exporter, etc. Your arguments are shrill and most unconvincing.
Major Granger is not just fear mongering about the danger to the mainland. Extremist that want us ALL dead is not a reality for most Americans even though we have had attacks on our military stateside, on innocent marathon runners( civilians)and there are many other lone wolf attacks with little or no media coverage . Many people are completely ignorant on defense; how information is gathered or the value of it or even why the Twin Towers were targeted. Iran hates our guts and we took much from them. Freeing up their money to increase terrorism is ignorant and treasonous. The comments here are a good example of how people in the military and civilians differ in their knowledge of military operations. Stamping out Guantanamo will not eliminate military detention and assure fair trial procedures. Only a naïve idiot would think such a thing. The prison operates legally and treats detainees far better than any other country that is trying to get information. Do you think detainees are going to be treated more humanely else where as it will surely happen that way once Guantanamo is closed? say Libya or Syria? Just because the mall parking lot is full and plenty of groceries are in the super market doesn’t mean our govt has everything under control. I know it is hard to imagine anything past your own daily needs. Frankly I am afraid of who is here now due to mass immigration.
The “islamist terrorists” are recruited, trained and funded by the United States/UK/Israeli Corporatios with funds that are defrauded from the sovereign men and women inhabiting the continental soil of America. Why do you think US, Inc. is so freaked out about Russia actually going to fight Isis in Syria? Russia is one of the competing corporations. All under the Pope of course. HUMANITY has been duped for thousands of years. However, lucky for humanity, these a holes document their crimes. The ENTIRE world and EVERY action these entities take is all about commerce. Especially war and genocide. It is a real money maker for them.
> There is no such thing as indefinite detention.
Tell that to the prisoners in Guantanamo.
> …some not (Manhattan car bomb)…
Really? That’s a pretty pathetic example. Your lack of any other examples is telling.
Besides, the FBI & CIA were following the 9/11 terrorists long before 9/11 — and they were doing so without the Patriot Act. But they backed off & let 9/11 happen.
> Until all Islamists are dead or no longer have the means or will to kill us we must defend ourselves.
Maybe if we stop bombing & invading & occupying them, and if we apologize, they wouldn’t feel the need (or have the will) to attack us. Remember – *our* armed forces are in *their* countries. Are you saying that anyone who resists U.S. occupation is a Terrorist? If so, then I’d say that our “Defense” is much closer to “Offense,” and that we’re creating far more enemies than we’re eliminating.
If the Mission of our Armed Forces is to defend the U.S. and its residents, then having 800 bases outside the U.S., and occupying & invading & “regime change” make us less safe. We, the people who pay for all this, deserve a say in how you do your job. A good bodyguard stays in the background, discretely, and makes sure that his client is safe. But if your bodyguard leaves his client to go & pick fights, you’d fire him. If you’re a bodyguard, you *don’t* leave your client! If you do, you expose your intention — which is some purpose other than protecting your client.
If you think the Mission of our Armed Forces should be to kill all Islamists, as a patriotic American and a Christian, I’m appalled. I really don’t have the words to express my horror and disgust… Speechless…
I can only suggest that you read the Gospels, and read about how Jesus treated his enemies. (Hint: He didn’t kill them.)
> We do not control when or how the enemy strikes…
I assert that we do control *whether* they strike, but not “when or how”.
You should recognize by now that our enemies are of our own creation. And the supply of potential enemies is limitless. For every “enemy” you kill, their family and friends will rise up in anger. And when you kill them, their families and friends rise up to fight — in the hope that we (the U.S.) will go home and leave them alone. Did we learn *nothing* from our horrific experience in Vietnam?
Major Granger, I hope you realize that the support for your point of view among U.S. taxpayers and voters is very small — limited to the ignorant, those who are easily misled, and the sociopaths.
I can only hope that your sentiments are unique in our Armed Forces, and not the norm.
Major Granger, by any chance, do you resemble Henry Fonda? Just asking.
Major Granger, why didn’t you write here about how you treated the GTMO detainees with ‘Saving Grace’? Instead, you sound like a warmonger. I’m not calling you a warmonger, but you seem to justify America’s wars with what you wrote in your comment. I find it hard to justify supporting an unending war policy based on combating what otherwise might be called ‘blowback’. The best example of blowback maybe the Iran Hostage event that took place in 1979. This hostage crisis America experienced was a direct result of our supporting an overthrow of a democratically elected government, and the insulation of an American puppet leader the Shah. While I am not approving in anyway what the Iranian’s did at that time, this hostage development, was as a result of America’s meddling in Iranian affairs. When the U.S. invaded Iraq over suspicions that Iraq had WMD, this invasion was without a doubt an unaccountable war crime. Afghanistan should have been the war of revenge for 9/11, but it has lasted so long that everyone seems to have forgotten what the original mission was. Now, it just so happens that America’s addiction to heroine corresponds identically with the triple increase in Afgan poppy growth. I am not accusing America of supporting a drug cartel, but tell me why is this drug business thriving so well? These wars are costing America dearly. I feel for our military, who must do so many tours of duty, that PTSD has now become a common affliction. When all is said, and done, America won’t be able to support it’s elderly when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. Is this also the price we pay for American hegemony? I appreciate your solid support of our U.S. Military’s efforts to defend our beloved country, but where does defense end and aggression begin, is my big question. I salute what you did in GTMO by caring for the detainees. You may have contributed to not having a terrible blowback aimed at retribution for any abusive torture these detainees may have encountered. We Americans must find a middle ground and reel in these Neocon warmongers, and as the Donald may say, ‘Make America Great Again’!
Lewis Lapham: “Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.” To which I would add: More often than not, those closed doors are in a building we call The Pentagon.
“Well” (to quote Raygun), Whadya JADE Helm!
“In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either”.
– Mark Twain
(He wasn’t joking).
“Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media . . . . Future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.†(Emphasis in original.)
As in the rocket attack on Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, host to the majority of press members in Baghdad, on April 8, 2003?
I recall Phil Donahue was just about the only television host who was arguing against the U..S. invasion of Iraq and they shut him down.
It seems the only criticizing of U.S. government policy on television are the “comedy” shows like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher.
Ha. Ha.
When I graduated high school in 1956, having absorbed the glowing post WW II history of the US, I could never have thought it would come to this. But “It Has Happened Here”! I view history theologically—not as do the religious right and the Zionists. I see the Tower of Babel erected on a quaking marsh. For those familiar with Biblical imagery, we know what happened to that tower. All empires fall, and no one sheds a tear for them.
I ,wrongly now, I think, dropped out after RFK, thinking that the country was just bad. It was a huge mistake, in retrospect, and like Hillary, “I’m sorryâ€. In the last many years I have studied the assassinations of the sixties and find similar threads in ALL of them. It is apparent that a coup d’état has taken place, but the scariest part for me, is the deep penetration of the print media. The NY Times editorial this morning is again suggesting that Russia is at blame for the situation in Syria. Ha—-it’s us! They are touting Michael Gordon’s reporting which sounds to me like Judith Miller all over again.
This depth of deception is stunning to me and unacceptable. I can only thank people like Robert Parry, Todd E. Pierce, and the other columnists that post here for some sense of sanity, and the commentary has become essential…
Peter Dale Scott interview on Cheney and the “Continuity of Government” that was started on 9/11:
http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/09/12/peter-dale-scott-explains-the-secret-cheney-operation-on-911/
Thank you for the link Abbybwood. I imagine Cheney and Rummy in Nixon’s Whitehouse basement congratulating them selves on their intellectualism, never to be challenged by any kind of reality…
I sympathize with you, and it seems we are of similar age. Like you, I’d “dropped out” from dropping out, and, learned good things by doing that. But I came back to find things are, if anything, worse. Having survived 8 years of religion and come out the better for it, I don’t take easily to fantasy. So things look bleak. I’ve always been a news junkie, and shortly after high school I realized that the mainstream reporting I encountered was not complete; it didn’t come close to explaining the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, friends were being drafted. But luckily I met anti-draft activists. So now, everything’s the same, if not worse. However, I am sure that these electronic comm’s that we are enabled to do are real, and I think that is what has enabled Bernie Sanders. I’m very aware of all the left crit of him, but I think he’s a small step forward. And I want to echo, in bold italics, those reporters, like the ones you cited, who’ve been true. We owe a huge debt to them, may it be repaid!
I don’t know if my email address will be visible to you here, but I’d like to keep in touch. If you would, my email address is: [email protected]. Let’s change this country.
The Constitutionality of that so-called “law” should be challenged in US Federal Courts as soon as possible!
An other way to look at this…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior
History[edit]
Passive-aggressive behavior was first defined clinically by Colonel William Menninger during World War II in the context of men’s reaction to military compliance. Menninger described soldiers who were not openly defiant but expressed their aggressiveness “by passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism†due to what Menninger saw as an “immaturity” and a reaction to “routine military stress”.[13]
I wrote a detailed rebuttal of the “stab in the back” theory for the Vietnam War. It’s twenty-five years old but is still being cited today. Here’s the cite. William M. Hammond, “The Press in Vietnam as Agent of Defeat: a Critical Examination,” REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jun., 1989), pp. 312-323
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
DOI: 10.2307/2702936
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2702936
Page Count: 12