{"id":3692,"date":"2015-02-20T13:50:58","date_gmt":"2015-02-20T19:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3692"},"modified":"2015-02-20T13:50:58","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T19:50:58","slug":"in-whose-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/in-whose-america\/","title":{"rendered":"In Whose America?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Machine Guns, MRAPs, Surveillance, Drones, Permanent War, and a Permanent Election Campaign\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n

by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt<\/a>, Tom Dispatch
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

I never fail to be amazed — and that\u2019s undoubtedly my failing.\u00a0 I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the west? Maybe not.<\/p>\n

The occasion for such reflections: machine guns in my hometown. To be specific, several weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced the formation of a new 350-officer Special Response Group (SRG). Keep in mind that New York City already has a police force of more than\u00a034,000<\/a>\u00a0— bigger, that is, than the\u00a0active militaries<\/a>\u00a0of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, Laos, Switzerland, or Zimbabwe — as well as its own \u201cnavy,\u201d including\u00a0six submersible drones<\/a>.\u00a0 Just another drop in an ocean of blue, the SRG will nonetheless be a squad for our times, trained in what Bratton\u00a0referred to<\/a>as \u201cadvanced disorder control and counterterror.\u201d\u00a0 It will also, he\u00a0announced<\/a>, be\u00a0equipped with<\/a>\u00a0\u201cextra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns — unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.\u201d And here\u2019s where he created a little controversy in my hometown.\u00a0 The squad would, Bratton added, be \u201cdesigned for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, that was an embarrassment in liberal New York.\u00a0 By mixing the recent\u00a0demonstrations<\/a>over the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others into the same sentence with the assault on\u00a0Mumbai<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/em>\u00a0affair in France, he seemed to be equating civil protest in the Big Apple with acts of terrorism.\u00a0 Perhaps you won\u2019t be surprised then that the very next day the police department started\u00a0walking back<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0idea<\/a>\u00a0that the unit would be toting its machine guns not just to possible terror incidents but to local protests.\u00a0 A day later, Bratton himself walked his comments back even\u00a0further<\/a>. (\u201cI may have in my remarks or in your interpretation of my remarks confused you or confused the issue.\u201d)\u00a0 Now, it seems there will be two separate units, the SRG for counterterror patrols and a different, assumedly machine-gun-less crew for protests.<\/p>\n

Here was what, like the sun going down in the west, shouldn\u2019t have shocked me but did: no one thought there was any need to walk back the arming of the New York Police Department with machine guns for whatever reasons.\u00a0 The retention of such weaponry should, of course, have been the last thing to shock any American in 2015.\u00a0 After all, the up-armoring andmilitarization<\/a>\u00a0of the police has been an ongoing phenomenon since 9\/11, even if it only received real media attention after the police,\u00a0looking like<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>an army of occupation, rolled onto the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in response to protests over the killing of Michael Brown.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Pentagon (and the Department of Homeland Security) had already shunted\u00a0$5.1 billion<\/a>\u00a0worth of military equipment, much of it directly from the country\u2019s distant battlefields — assault rifles, land-mine detectors, grenade launchers, and\u00a094,000<\/a>\u00a0of those machine guns — to local police departments around the country.\u00a0 Take, for example, the various tank-like, heavily armored vehicles that have now become commonplace for police departments to possess.\u00a0 (Ferguson, for instance, had a \u201cBearcat<\/a>,\u201d widely featured in coverage of protests there.)<\/p>\n

Since 2013, the Pentagon has\u00a0transferred<\/a>\u00a0for free more than 600 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, worth at least half a million dollars each and previously used in U.S. war zones, to various \u201cqualified law enforcement agencies.\u201d Police departments in rural areas like\u00a0Walsh County<\/a>, North Dakota (pop. 11,000) now have their own MRAPs, as does the\u00a0campus police department<\/a>\u00a0at Ohio State University.\u00a0 It hardly matters that these monster vehicles have few uses in a country where neither ambushes nor roadside bombs are a part of everyday life.<\/p>\n

Post-Ferguson, a few scattered departments have actually moved to turn these useless vehicles\u00a0back in<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s clear, however, that\u00a0police forces<\/a>\u00a0\u201ckitted out with Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles\u201d — that is, almost indistinguishable from soldiers — are now the future of American policing and there\u2019s no walking that back.\u00a0 Since Ferguson, President Obama has\u00a0essentially refused<\/a>\u00a0to do so and Congress certainly won\u2019t.\u00a0 Despite a small uproar over the pile of military equipment being transferred to the police, there is\u00a0no indication<\/a>\u00a0that the flow will be stanched.<\/p>\n

When it comes to all this militarized equipment, as the president has\u00a0emphasized<\/a>\u00a0(and the task force he appointed to look into these matters will undoubtedly reemphasize), \u201creform\u201d is mainly going to be focused on \u201cbetter training\u201d in how to use it.\u00a0 In other words, reform will prove to be a code word for further militarization.\u00a0 And don\u2019t count on anyone returning those 94,000 machine guns either in a country that seems to be in some\u00a0kind<\/a>\u00a0of domestic<\/strong>arms race<\/a>\u00a0and in which\u00a0toddlers<\/a>\u00a0now\u00a0regularly<\/a>\u00a0find their parents\u2019\u00a0loaded guns<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0wound or kill them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How the National Security State Outlasted Its Critics<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not so long ago, that 9\/11 \u201cchanged everything\u201d seemed like the hyperbolic clich\u00e9 of a past era.\u00a0 From the present moment, however, it looks ever more like a sober description of what actually happened. Congratulations, that is, are due to\u00a0Osama bin Laden<\/a>.\u00a0 Even dead andburied at sea<\/a>, he deserves some credit.\u00a0 He proved to be midwife to the exceedingly violent birth of a new American world.\u00a0 Today, 13 years after the attacks he launched, an exceptionally healthy, well-armed teenage America is growing fast.\u00a0 Under the banner of Fear and Terror that bin Laden inspired, this country has been transformed in myriad ways, even if we only half notice because we\u2019re part of it.\u00a0 And it isn\u2019t a world much interested in walking anything back.<\/p>\n

Consider the National Security Agency.\u00a0 In June 2013, it was faced with the beginning of a devastating rollout of a\u00a0trove<\/a>\u00a0of top-secret documents exposing its inner workings.\u00a0 Thanks to Edward Snowden, Americans (and Germans and Brazilians and Mexicans and Afghans) came to know that the agency had, in the post-9\/11 years, set up a surveillance state\u00a0for the ages<\/a>, one for which the phrase Orwellian might be distinctly inadequate.\u00a0 The NSA was listening in on or intercepting the communications of\u00a035<\/a>\u00a0chancellors<\/a>,\u00a0presidents<\/a>, and other world leaders, the\u00a0secretary-general<\/a>\u00a0of the U.N., the offices of the European Union,\u00a0foreign corporations<\/a>, peasants in the\u00a0backlands<\/a>\u00a0of the planet, and oh yes, American citizens galore (and that\u2019s just to start down a far longer list).\u00a0 All of this effort has — from the point of view of \u201cintelligence\u201d — been remarkably expensive but (as far as anyone can tell) relatively useless.\u00a0 Few terrorists have been\u00a0found<\/a>, next to no plots broken up, and\u00a0little useful<\/a>, actionable intelligence provided to the government, despite the\u00a0yottabytes<\/a>\u00a0of data collected.\u00a0 The whole effort should have been written off as a bust and scaled back radically.\u00a0 The agency\u2019s methods arguably\u00a0violated<\/a>\u00a0the Constitution, made a mockery of the idea of privacy, and tore up sovereignties of every sort.\u00a0 Instead, that global surveillance system remains embedded in our world and growing, its actions sanctified.<\/p>\n

Clearly, in the new post-9\/11 American rulebook, no one was to have the right to keep a secret — except the national security state itself, which was\u00a0madly classifying<\/a>\u00a0anything in sight, while the Obama Justice Department went after anyone who leaked anything about it or blew a whistle on it with a\u00a0fierceness<\/a>\u00a0never before experienced in our history. \u00a0Hence, thetowering anger<\/a>\u00a0of top NSA officials (and their\u00a0retired colleagues<\/a>) at Edward Snowden when he exposed their \u201cprivacy\u201d to scrutiny, too.<\/p>\n

If ever there was a system in need of \u201creform,\u201d this was it.\u00a0 And yet the NSA has successfully outlasted the long Snowden moment without a single thing being walked back, not even the most shocking revelation for Americans: that the agency was gathering and storing their bulk phone \u201cmetadata.\u201d\u00a0 A year ago, a presidential advisory board on privacy concluded that the bulk data collection was \u201cillegal and unproductive\u201d and recommended changes.\u00a0\u00a0None<\/a>\u00a0have yet taken place.\u00a0 \u201cReform\u201d efforts on the NSA\u00a0collapsed<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Congress<\/a>\u00a0even before the Republicans took the Senate.\u00a0 As with the police, so the president has announced minor \u201ctweaks<\/a>\u201d to the system of data collection and it\u2019s marching right on.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the CIA outlasted Senator Dianne Feinstein.\u00a0 After years of effort, a truncated, redacted version of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s Torture Report that she oversaw was\u00a0finally released<\/a>, filled with American horrors and barbarities.\u00a0 The result, as with Snowden\u2019s revelations, was\u00a0nada<\/em>.\u00a0 For torture, no one at the CIA is to be held responsible or accountable; nor did the CIA\u00a0pay any price<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0hacking into<\/a>\u00a0the computer systems of the committee\u2019s staff or turning on the woman once known as the senator from the national security state.\u00a0 The whole process seemed to signal that congressional\u00a0oversight<\/a>\u00a0of the U.S. intelligence community was now more fiction than fact.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, when President Obama came into office, in what may be the single exception to the rule of the era, he walked back one crucial set of Bush administration policies,\u00a0ending torture<\/a>\u00a0and closing the \u201cblack sites\u201d at which much of it occurred.\u00a0 Since then, however, the CIA has\u00a0expanded<\/a>, while its power, like the national security state within which it is lodged, has only grown.<\/p>\n

The process of expanding that\u00a0shadow government<\/a>\u00a0and freeing it from supervision has, in fact, been unending.\u00a0 Only last week, for instance, the Obama administration announced that the 17 intelligence outfits that make up the\u00a0U.S. Intelligence Community<\/a>\u00a0were about to get a new baby.\u00a0 Amid a thicket of outfits now devoted to cyberintelligence, including \u201ccyber-operations centers\u201d at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, the new\u00a0Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center<\/a>, which will be housed in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will \u201canalyze cyberthreats and coordinate strategy to counter them.\u201d\u00a0 It will assumedly be the civilian equivalent of the military\u2019s 2009 creation, the\u00a0U.S. Cyber Command<\/a>.\u00a0 And keep in mind that all this is happening in the country that is responsible for\u00a0launching<\/a>\u00a0the planet\u2019s first cyberwar.<\/p>\n

Or consider another growth industry: drones and their progeny.\u00a0 They are spinning off into domestic air space at a startling rate and can now be\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0America\u2019s borderlands<\/a>\u00a0tothousands of feet<\/a>\u00a0up in the skies above commercial jetliners to the White House grounds (reportedly thanks to the\u00a0recreational activities<\/a>\u00a0of a drunken employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency).\u00a0 Abroad, Washington\u2019s drones have been this country’s true \u201clone wolf<\/a>\u201d hunters, inflicting\u00a0terror<\/a>\u00a0from the skies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya in 2011, and most recently Syria.\u00a0 In five of those seven countries they have been at it for years, in the case of Pakistan flying\u00a0hundreds<\/a>\u00a0of strikes in its tribal borderlands.<\/p>\n

Washington\u2019s grimly named Predator and Reaper drones have been hunting their prey in the backlands of the planet 24 hours a day for more than a decade now.\u00a0\u00a0Thousands<\/a>\u00a0of people have been wiped out, including women,\u00a0children<\/a>, and\u00a0wedding parties<\/a>, as well as numerous significant and insignificant figures in terror outfits of every sort.\u00a0 And yet in not one of those countries has the situation improved in any significant way in terms of U.S. policy goals.\u00a0 In most of them it has grown worse and the drones have been a factor in such developments, alienating whole populations on the ground below.\u00a0 This has been\u00a0obvious for years<\/a>\u00a0to counterinsurgency experts.\u00a0 But a reconsideration of these drone wars is beyond the pale in Washington.\u00a0 Drone assassination is now a sacrosanct act of the American state, part of a \u201cglobal\u201d war 13 years old and ongoing.\u00a0 No one in any position of power, now or in the immediate future, is going to consider flying them back.<\/p>\n

The CIA has sometimes been\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0the president\u2019s private army.\u00a0 Today, it’s running most (but not all) of Washington\u2019s drone campaigns and so those robotic lone wolves could be considered the president\u2019s private air force.\u00a0 In the process, the twenty-first-century White House has been officially and proudly turned into an\u00a0assassin\u2019s lair<\/a>\u00a0and don\u2019t expect that to change in 2016 or 2020 either.<\/p>\n

Permanent War and the Permanent Election Campaign<\/strong><\/p>\n

Similar points<\/a>\u00a0could be made about the 13-year-old \u201cglobal war\u201d the Bush administration launched and the specific wars, raids, conflicts, invasions, and occupations that have been carried out under its aegis.\u00a0 President Obama has been fighting Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0 for six months, claiming that Congressional post-9\/11 authorizations allow him to do so.\u00a0 Now, he wants a three-year extension on something he claims he doesn’t need and has delivered a text to Congress filled with enough\u00a0loopholes<\/a>\u00a0to send an army (and air force) through — and not just in Iraq and Syria either. \u00a0Not getting this authorization wouldn\u2019t, however, significantly affect the administration\u2019s plans in the Middle East. \u00a0So much for the “power” of Congress to declare war.\u00a0 That body is nonetheless evidently going to spend months holding hearings and \u201cdebating\u201d a new authorization, even as fighting goes on without it, based on informal agreements\u00a0pounded out<\/a>\u00a0by the White House and the Pentagon. \u00a0(Alice would have found Wonderland sane by comparison.)<\/p>\n

In this way, the White House has in our time become a war-making and assassination-producing machine.\u00a0 In the same period, terror groups and membership in them have\u00a0leapt<\/a>across the Greater Middle East and Africa; no terror organization has been destroyed (though the original al-Qaeda, a modest enough outfit to begin with, has been weakened); most have expanded; the Islamic State, the first mini-terror state in history, has taken over significant parts of Iraq and Syria and is\u00a0expanding elsewhere<\/a>; Libya is a\u00a0chaos<\/a>\u00a0of competing militias, some of an\u00a0extreme<\/a>\u00a0Islamic nature; Yemen is believed to be in a\u00a0state of collapse<\/a>\u00a0with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula\u00a0on the rise<\/a>; Afghanistan remains a war disaster area; Pakistan is significantly destabilized; and so on.\u00a0 And yet, as the president\u2019s authorization request indicates, there is no walking any of this back.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, on the domestic front in this \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d century, the country that eternally sallies forth under the banner of democracy has been working on a new political system which, as yet, has no name.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what we do know about our latest version of \u201cdemocracy\u201d: in a period when plenty of American citizens weren\u2019t too small to fail, the inequality gap has grown to\u00a0yawning proportions<\/a>.\u00a0 On the principle that what goes up must come down, some part of the vast infusion of money flowing to the .01% or even the .001% has, with a\u00a0helping hand<\/a>\u00a0from the Supreme Court, been raining down on the electoral system.<\/p>\n

In the same way that the national security state was funded to the tune of almost a\u00a0trillion dollars<\/a>\u00a0a year and war became perpetual, the new political system, focused on TV advertising, has created a perpetual campaign season.\u00a0 (It is now estimated that the 2016 presidential campaign alone could cost\u00a0$5 billion<\/a>, essentially doubling the $2.6 billion spent in 2012.)\u00a0 And here\u2019s the most recent news from that round-the-clock campaign, whose\u00a0focus<\/a>is increasingly on\u00a0donors<\/a>, not voters: the Koch brothers and their allied donor networks have pledged\u00a0nearly one billion dollars<\/a>\u00a0for election season 2016 (more than double the amount they contributed in 2012).\u00a0 And they already have pledges for\u00a0$249 million<\/a>, which suggests that they may even exceed their present guesstimate.<\/p>\n

Despite\u00a0comments<\/a>\u00a0from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg about her personal desire to roll back the Supreme Court\u2019s\u00a0Citizens United<\/em>\u00a0decision that opened the floodgates of money, it\u2019s clear that this court won\u2019t be walking its election-financing positions back anytime soon.\u00a0 In donor terms, think of what that court did as the equivalent of the Pentagon putting all those machine guns and MRAPs in the hands of the police.<\/p>\n

And keep in mind that, as the U.S. changes, the world does, too.\u00a0 Consider it a form of reverse blowback, as from drones to surveillance to\u00a0cyberwar<\/a>, Washington helps lay the groundwork for a new more extreme century in which, from sovereignty to privacy, boundaries are there to be broken, new kinds of\u00a0weaponry<\/a>\u00a0to be tested out in the real world, and new kinds of conflicts to be launched.<\/p>\n

In sum, we, the people, are ever less in control of anything.\u00a0 The police are increasingly not \u201cours,\u201d nor are the NSA and its colleague outfits \u201cour\u201d intelligence agencies, nor are the wars we are fighting \u201cour\u201d wars, nor the elections in which we vote \u201cour\u201d elections.\u00a0 This is a country walking back nothing as it heads into a heavily militarized future.\u00a0 In the process, an everyday American world is being brought into existence that, by past standards, will seem extreme indeed.\u00a0 In other words, in the years to come an ever-less recognizable American way of life will quite expectably be setting in the west.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be shocked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Machine Guns, MRAPs, Surveillance, Drones, Permanent War, and a Permanent Election Campaign\u00a0 by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch click here for original article I never fail to be amazed — and that\u2019s undoubtedly my failing.\u00a0 I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3694,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692\/revisions\/3694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}