Americans Have Spent Enough Money On A Broken Plane To Buy Every Homeless Person A Mansion

‘Just days before its international debut at an airshow in the United Kingdom, the entire fleet of the Pentagon’s next generation fighter plane — known as the F-35 II Lightning, or the Joint Strike Fighter — has been grounded, highlighting just what a boondoggle the project has been. With the vast amounts spent so far on the aircraft, the United States could have worked wonders, including providing every homeless person in the U.S. a $600,000 home.’

Read more: Americans Have Spent Enough Money On A Broken Plane To Buy Every Homeless Person A Mansion

UK terror alert: body searches at British airports

‘Holidaymakers face invasive physical checks and lengthy delays at Britain’s airports amid fears that jihadists returning from Iraq and Syria plan to target transatlantic flights with laptop explosives and “body bombs”.

A tough new security regime was imposed on passengers after American intelligence suggested that al-Qaeda was plotting to use Western fanatics to bring down a US-bound plane.’

Read more: UK terror alert: body searches at British airports

The Pseudo-War on Terror: How the US Has Protected Some of Its Enemies

Before World War Two American government, for all of its glaring faults, also served as a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.

All that changed with America’s emergence as a dominant world power, and further after the Vietnam War. Since 9/11, above all, constitutional American government has been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism.

The latter have mushroomed in size and budget, while traditional government has been shrunk. As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and its entirety…visible only to God.

1 More and more, it is becoming common to say that America, like Turkey before it, now has what Marc Ambinder and John Tirman have called a deep state behind the public one.

2 And this parallel government is guided in surveillance matters by its own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, which according to the New York Times “has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court.”

3 Thanks largely to Edward Snowden, it is now clear that the FISA Court has permitted this deep state to expand surveillance beyond the tiny number of known and suspected Islamic terrorists, to any incipient protest movement that might challenge the policies of the American war machine.

Most Americans have by and large not questioned this parallel government, accepting that sacrifices of traditional rights and traditional transparency are necessary to keep us safe from al-Qaeda attacks. However secret power is unchecked power, and experience of the last century has only reinforced the truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that unchecked power always corrupts.

It is time to consider the extent to which American secret agencies have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forces they are supposed to be fighting – and have even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots. For indeed it is certain that on various occasions U.S. agencies have intervened, letting al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots.

This alarming statement will be dismissed by some as “conspiracy theory.” Yet I will show that this claim does not arise from theory, but from facts, about incidents that are true even though they have been systematically suppressed or under-reported in the American mainstream media. -

See more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pseudo-war-on-terror-how-the-us-has-protected-some-of-its-enemies/5353197?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-pseudo-war-on-terror-how-the-us-has-protected-some-of-its-enemies#sthash.UZh83EGV.dpuf

THE POWER OF FREEDOM : Silence Truth and Lies in the War on Terror

Because the actions involved in the "war on terrorism" are diffuse, and the criteria for inclusion are unclear, political theorists have argued that "the 'war on terrorism' therefore, is simultaneously a set of actual practices—wars, covert operations, agencies, and institutions—and an accompanying series of assumptions, beliefs, justifications, and narratives—making it an entire language of double speak.

AUMF Never-Ending War and America’s Instruments of Tyranny

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” -James Madison

As previously discussed in these spaces by Kelley Vlahos, Lucy Steigerwald, and myself, a group of senators are mulling a revision to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force against those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. In Senate testimony today, several Pentagon officials tried to dissuade making any changes to the law, which has been notoriously beneficial to the expansion of the warfare state and terribly detrimental to the rule of law, government transparency, and human liberty in general.

Indeed, “the AUMF opened the doors to the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; attacks on Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Mali; the new drone bases in Niger and Djibouti; and the killing of American citizens, notably Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old noncombatant son,” write Michael Shank and Matt Southworth in the Guardian.

“It is what now emboldens the hawks on the warpath to Syria, Iran and North Korea,” they add.

One of the witnesses today, Assistant Secretary for Special Operations Michael Sheehan, said keeping the 2001 AUMF in place is important to facilitate the ongoing “war on terrorism,” which, he said, will last “at least ten to twenty [more] years.” And thanks to the terse wording of the law, that war has no geographic limit. Any individual or group unilaterally deemed an “associated force” by top officials can be targeted by the U.S. war machine anywhere in the world. And this extraordinary power cannot be rescinded until the overlords in the White House and the Pentagon say so.

It’s ironic that Sheehan made such a dramatic prediction of continuing to fight this “war,” if you can call it that, for another ten to twenty years when top national security officials have been noting publicly al-Qaeda’s growing irrelevance. Danger Room:


It was just two months ago the top U.S. intelligence official testified that al-Qaida had been battered by the U.S. into a state of disarray. A year ago, the current CIA director, John Brennan, said that “For the first time since this fight began, we can look ahead and envision a world in which the al Qaeda core is simply no longer relevant.” Just this week, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, told a Florida conference that he was looking at missions beyond the counterterrorism manhunt.

So why insist on keeping the blank-check-for-war AUMF intact?

First, the 2001 AUMF was a wet dream for the Masters of War in Washington who yearn for the day when any and all constraints on their actions in the realm of “national security” would evaporate. It carries with it immense, unchecked power that they are wont to preserve.

Second, in order to continue to carry out their Imperial Grand Strategy, they need to perpetuate a bogeyman. Without a monster to destroy, the public is much less apt to grant the state carte blanche to make war at will and keep it secret.

In an interview last year, former Secretary of State Colin Powell lamented, in a moment of candor, the fall of the Soviet Union. He described, admittedly with some irony, how apparently remorseful he and others in the military establishment were that America “lost our best enemy.” He said it was “one of the biggest challenges” he “ever faced” when the Cold War ended. That is, when we became much safer as opposed to when we might have faced a new enemy.

Absent the pretext of the Soviet threat, the thinking goes, how will we justify the expanding military and national security state? Powell says of the trumped up Soviet “threat” in no uncertain terms, “we’ve got a good thing going here.” The system – the “whole structure,” as he calls it, far from aiming to eliminate threats, “depended on there being a Soviet Union that might attack us.”


Al-Qaeda’s unlikely success on 9/11 helped change all that, and ever since, Washington has had a bogeyman to help justify expanding the warfare state.

In the March/April 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen argue that we have a system that fuels unnecessary alarm and paranoia. “Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests,” they write. “The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government — defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments.”

With any luck, the pleadings of the highest Pentagon officials won’t be heeded and AUMF can, as it should, be repealed. Unfortunately, that is not at all likely.

 

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