The Most Dangerous Man Alive

As I write, scores of police and federal officers are conducting house-to-house searches in Big Bear, California. Since police officers are being targeted, the police are rallying around each other and placing the finger near the trigger. Should Chris Dorner successfully continue to wage, as he described, "asymmetrical" warfare against the LAPD, America will descend to tyranny and martial law. 

It is uncertain whether Dorner is working alone or has recruited disgruntled individuals to wage his war. Given the nature of his writing, it is likely that he will attract many people who have suffered at the hands of the police. Further, the very dangerous possibility exists that attacks will be attributed to Dorner when in fact no ballistics or DNA analysis have been conducted. 

The DHS has just recently purchased 23 million bullets, adding to its already billion plus arsenal. Further, the DHS has purchased 7,000 bullet-proof checkpoint booths with "stop-and-go" lights. Internal memos circulated and drills conducted have warned employees to prepare for potential unrest in the event of an Obama reelection and continued economic uncertainty. The agency has particularly highlighted the danger of ex-military.

Make no mistake about it, Dorner is a terrorist! This is, of course, if the manifesto that is attributed to him was truly written by him. According to current United States law as it is written, Dorner is liable to be indefinitely detained without trial under the National Defense Authorization Act. Furthermore, he might be the first American to be taken out with a drone within US soil. The fate of the United States is now in the hands of one man. Should Dorner evade capture and wage a prolonged campaign, the full descent to tyranny will be complete. Don't fear, the government has prepared for a long time, and they have our best interests at heart. 

The Missing Trillions

It was a casually-delivered announcement on a typical September 10 when the Pentagon revealed it had lost 2.3 trillion dollars. It was a staggering sum and the public outrage promised to be high. However, 9/11 happened the next day and the missing trillions were forgotten. 

No one has ever been held accountable or made to withstand scrutiny when it comes to the lost of those 2.3 trillion dollars. Evidence, unfortunately for the American public, was destroyed when that massive 767 was crashed into the Pentagon by Islamic maniacs. 

One would consider that the start of the two decade war against Al-Qaeda and associated forces would force the government to tighten its financial belt; but that is very far from the case, however. The Pentagon delivered plane-fulls of money to Afghan officials. Over 60 billion dollars cannot be accounted for in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The story is very disturbing in Iraq, where the government cannot account for over 12 billion dollars. In what represented the biggest cash airlift in history, Iraq's money was stolen from its people. It seems that the Pentagon has a problem with keeping track of cash, and also black money. 

The Pentagon's black budget of 51 billion dollars -- combined with the Military Intelligence Program of 19 billion, and the National Intelligence Program of around 50 billion -- means that the government will dish out more than 120 billion dollars in black money. The US government black budget is 50 billion dollars higher than Russia's military budget and just lower than the Chinese. That 120 billion dollar figure, I should add, is only an estimation since the Pentagon has another classified program where the budgets don't add up with the programs. 

It was Eisenhower who warned about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address. The very last thing he did as president was to warn the nation of what was to come. And indeed, if the government can mismanage so much money and receive almost no public scrutiny, one can only wonder how much little we know about other classified projects. 

From One Nightmare to Another

I woke up at 5am this morning. I'm not sure how long I was tossing around in bed before that. My sleeping schedule is erratic to say the least. So, I rolled out of bed at 5am and decided to finish watching Zero Dark Thirty, or the Glorification of America's Brave Men and Women Fighting Terror. The snuff scenes had put me to sleep during my first viewing attempt, so I was hoping that the second viewing attempt would also put me to sleep.

 

Instead, I sat through the whole thing. To be honest, I had already read many reviews about the film -- something I almost never do -- most of them casting the film as an attempt to glorify the War on Terror and justify America's human rights abuses. As I watched the movie, I found myself disagreeing with most of the reviews.

 

Without going into detail about the fact that the only man who has been prosecuted and gone to prison is the guy who's spoken about torture, I simply could not believe that most reviewers consider Zero Dark Thirty to be torture-apologist, American propaganda. Quite the contrary, I found that the lead male character resembled a typical psychopath: worried about the fate of little animals just minutes before starting a torture session.

 

The lead female character struck me as a brainwashed career opportunist who only seemed happy and content after boarding a cargo plane all by herself and being told by the pilot that she must be important to have such a privilege. Further, the character is shown coldly pressing for violations of international law and pre-meditated murder based simply on the probability that someone could be an Al-Qaeda operative. The powers that the movie depicts the lead female character as possessing are reminiscent of the KGB's extrajudicial imperatives: no one citizen should have as much covert power.

 

Indeed, I asked some of my Dutch friends how they felt after watching the movie: "I now have a worse opinion of the US," was the general type of answer I got. The movie only serves to reinforce and defend something that to the average person in a civilized democracy seems appalling. Zero Dark Thirty might be a movie that influences the opinions of someone incapable of sympathizing with "the enemy," but the average Dutch person I speak to is shocked that the US tortured as it did and that such barbaric acts are celebrated and justified in a movie drafted with assistance from Pentagon associated-forces.

 

Just days ago, an Italian court convicted in absentia 3 CIA agents of kidnapping a man in Milan who was later renditioned to Egypt and tortured. This makes the second European court in under two months that found the CIA guilty of violating international law. After watching the movie, did I feel better at the fact that governments around me are slowly convicting my homeland of crimes usually reserved for third world dictatorships?

 

There are too many threads in Zero Dark Thirty and many years are haphazardly compressed for chronology's sake to truly convince the viewer that torture was necessary because of urgent national security needs. Though the charming lead female character remains ageless throughout her travails and certainly will appeal to many, the movie is likely to be more useful as anti-American Jihadist propaganda. In one dry scene, two female characters discuss their sex lives, almost as if to convince us that they are loving, liberated women. Kathryn Bigelow should be prosecuted for aiding America's enemies and portraying feminist progress as succeeding in the same capacity for brutality that has traditionally been attributed to males.

 

I believe that if an American citizen were waterboarded by an unpopular government simply based on suspicion of wrong-doing by a "high-level administration official," there would be no one to defend him or her. We are all more at risk now; If a foreign government decides to use enhanced interrogation methods on one of us for a possibly indefinite period of time, which moral American voice will come out and unhypocritically demand that those foreign officials be held accountable?

 

Obama will not even entertain the idea of following international law, and a result American citizens are more likely to be targeted for mistreatment. Brazil, for example, is a country that enjoys laws of reciprocity. American citizens are required to pay $100 dollars for a visa and must be fingerprinted upon entry to the South American nation, simply because the US requires the same of Brazilian nationals.

 

Perhaps not a Brazilian official, but a Russian, will introduce a law called: "The Enhanced Interrogation Reciprocity Act." I certainly would want to spend many cold months in a Brazilian or Russian prison suffering sleep deprivation and enduring stress positions simply for suspicion of connection to an international crime cartel: it's necessary to preserve everyone else's freedoms.

We've Crossed the Cyberarms Rubicon

No one knows exactly where the Rubicon was flowing through when Julius Ceasar commanded his troops to cross its waters, thereby passing the point of no return. The flow of the river has changed in the many centuries since: many things have. War in Ancient Roman times was a much more technologically simpler affair, but now war is a technologically easier affair to wage.

 

And with that ease, the Pentagon has declared that a cyberattack is tantamount to an act of war. If Iran were to, for example, design a computer virus that disrupts US air traffic or the electrical grid, the US would be justified in launching missiles and sending in the boots. If we operate along the same lines of Pentagon thought as to what constitutes a declaration of war, hasn't the United States by its own definition already declared war on Iran?

 

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon developed a virus that caused Iranian nuclear centrifuges to spin out of control and self-destruct. The virus, Stuxnet, was developed jointly by the NSA and Israel's Unit 8200. However, the Israelis inserted extra code that resulted in the virus escaping its original parameters and attacking computers around the world. Vice-president Joe Biden angrily quipped: "It's got to be the Israelis. They went too far!"

 

And, yes, I agree that the Israelis went too far, but they are a small state working with the superpower's National Security Agency. Before Obama took office, he met with then president Bush who asked him to continue two classified programs: the drone program and the cyberweapons program. Obama not only complied, he expanded exponentially. Obama has gone too far; he has forced other states to launch their own cyberweapons programs.

 

The recent attacks against the New York Times are just the beginning. The next American war could very well come because Iran or China feel justified in developing a computer virus that disrupts America's air traffic or brings down its power grid. President Ahmajinehad himself stated on Iranian television that "the enemy" had already declared economic war. What Ahmajinehad failed to mention, however, was that "the enemy" has already declared a cyberwar, and that Iran has started its own cyberweapons unit in retaliation. There is no shortage of computer talent in Iran, I can guarantee you that.

France's "Mission Accomplished"

Saddam Hussein's forces fell like a house of cards when American forces invaded in 2003. Saddam's Soviet-era equipment was no match for the world's most powerful military force and its 21st century technological ruthlessness. However, it was the great military strategist Dick Cheney who so wisely observed in 1994 that (transcript):

The man was a military prophet, it's like he could see 20 years into the future. Cheney knew that a conventional military attack would  be quickly successful, but the ensuing guerrilla war would embroil the US in the same way that Vietnam did. And, let's not forget that Vietnam was French Indochina, a post-colonial problem that the US military-industrial complex was more than willing to get embroiled in due to the potential for mass profit and untold weapons test on the field.

 

The US has already set into motion the construction of a drone base in Niger, to make operations in North Africa more tenable. The Pentagon strategists can see what is obvious: the Islamist forces withdrew strategically to the more inhospitable north of Mali, where they are well-entrenched and have more base of support. The French know that too, and that is why they are reluctant to proceed. What Hollande has done is: provide training to the rebels, and give them time to analyze and prepare for the second wave of attack.

 

Nonetheless, president Hollande has taken one of the most expensive photo-ops for a European head of state in recent memory. He has traveled to a warzone, at grave taxpayer expense, to be photographed as the victorious savior of a jubilant people.

 

Some years down the line, we will look back at president Hollande smiling as he walked amidst the crowds in Mali, and remember Bush's arrival on the USS Lincoln by jet, and cheering to a jubilant crowd as the words "Mission Accomplished" were splashed behind him. Don't expect that French forces will actually be able to withdraw soon; the quagmire has just begun.