The Globalist Conquest of Egypt & The Middle East is Almost Complete

Webster Griffin Tarpley
TheAlexJonesChannel
February 16, 2011

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

By Alfred W. McCoy

December 11, 2010 "The Nation" - - A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to US global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength—even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the US would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in US global power was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional US military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge US, Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, US global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the US was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the US hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one US expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the US education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the US are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the US knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in US Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the US dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the US dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls US forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge US dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the US had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise—and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the US to 66%.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of US oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the US Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which US military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region—logistics, exchange rates, and naval power—evaporate. At this point, the US can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the US is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the US occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the US military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down US garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while US aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at US garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, US helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the US to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the US and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the US to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the US Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The US-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [US] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyberwarfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones—reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, US Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the US CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered US “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate US supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of US ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the US Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the US and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As US power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the US.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region—Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded UN Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)

Copyright © 2010 The Nation

The Greatest Covert Operation Ever

The Politics of Terror as the Business of Terror

By Douglas Valentine
Global Research
August 30, 2010

The politics of terror are the greatest covert operation ever.

In explaining why, I’ll begin by defining some terms, because, when discussing the covert op called “the politics of terror,” words and their management are all important.

How are politics and terror actually defined: how are these meanings manipulated; for what purposes, and by whom?

Terrorism is defined as "violence against civilians intended to obtain a political purpose." This is an ambiguous phrase, which begs the questions: what are politics and violence?

Politics is defined as “the process by which groups of people make collective decisions.” And violence is the use of force to compel a person or group to do or think something against their will. That includes the violence of words – of threatening to hurt - and of social structures, as well as the violence of deeds.

So, by definition, terrorism is political violence – hurting people, or threatening to hurt them, in order to make them govern themselves against their will.

In America, terrorism is always condemned by the government, and, accordingly, America is never a perpetrator of terrorism, but always the victims of it. The US war on terror is the ultimate expression of this principle: it is a military response to terrorism; violence is self-defense, not (ostensibly) violence for a political purpose.

That’s the official story – the assumption. But I’m going to show that America does engage in terrorism – violence against civilians for political purposes. This “state” terrorism, however, is covert, in so far as it is equated with national security, and thanks to that built-in ambiguity, it has both stated and unstated purpose.

The State and Unstated Policy in America

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. But who really makes the overarching political decisions in America? Who governs us?

The two political parties represent the people and they compete for control of the government. Republicans generally favor business and Democrats favor labor. The political division is, generally, class based.

Now, the government can be controlled by either political party; but the state endures – “the state” being the nation’s indispensable industries and infrastructure (banking, auto industry, insurance, Microsoft), and the institutions which defend the nation’s enduring interests: the military, law enforcement, the intelligence & security services.

In Europe they often, cynically, refer to the state as “industry” or Big Business. In America we tend to call “the state” the Establishment – an ambiguous word that needs to be defined.

The dictionary defines Establishment as, “An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.” I would venture to say that the interests of the state and the Establishment are the same, and that the definition of Establishment with a capital E is the pivotal phrase in discussing “state” terrorism.

Consider this: there is the politics of the two parties vying for control of the government, and there is the Establishment, the state, making the covert (ostensibly non-political) decisions that effectively govern America.

Many of those covert decisions concern national security: they are unstated policy.

Moreover, these covert policy decisions about national security are made by people who control the military, law enforcement, and intelligence & security services. These guardians of “the state” are collectively called the National Security Establishment.

Like the Establishment that secretly rules the “state,” the National Security Establishment is an exclusive group that is not accountable to the political whims of the people.

These professional guardians of the state – the Establishment - are assumed to be above partisan politics. Their loyalty is assumed to be to the law or national security. And that assumption is the Big Lie upon which state terrorism is based.

Yes, it is true that the National Security Establishment is not accountable to the people: and, in fact, it has built a series of ever-larger, concentric moats around itself called the National Security State, precisely to keep the people out of its business.

The National Security Establishment rules the National Security State with an iron fist, but it is pure propaganda that the National Security Establishment and State are not political.

In order to get inside the National Security Establishment, and rise to a position of authority within it, one must be born there (like Bush – make a billion like Gates), or submit to years of right-wing political indoctrination calibrated to a series of increasingly restrictive security clearances.

Political indoctrination – adopting the correct right-wing ideology – and security clearances represent the drawbridge across the moats.

The National Security State is the covert social structure of the Establishment, and it has as its job not just defending the Establishment from foreign enemies, but also expanding the Establishment’s economic and military influence abroad, while preserving its class prerogatives at home.

By “class prerogatives,” I mean the National Security State is designed to keep the lower class from exerting any political control over the state; especially, redistributing the Establishment’s private wealth.

To these unstated ends – imperialism abroad and repression at home - the National Security State engages in terrorism - political violence - on behalf of the Establishment.

Indeed, the National Security State is political violence, terrorism, in its purest form.

The Establishment and its National Security State as Terrorism

The lower classes in America have little voice in making government or state policy. Some are hopeless, others content: but in either case, voter turnout is a mere 54%.

Whether hopeless or content, they know they cannot fight conventional thinking. For example, when the Establishment exerts its influence, it is not considered politics; it is simply the status quo. The rich create jobs and must be accommodated with trillion dollar bailouts, paid for by workers taking furloughs.

That’s just the way it is. Politicians in the service of the Establishment, for over-arching reasons of national security, have to keep the capitalist financial system afloat.

It is the same thing with the National Security Establishment: America invaded Iraq, and there was nothing the people could do about it. The decision was made for them. Peace activists, least of all, had no voice in the decision, because they are assumed to have no stake in national security. You will not find peace activists in the National Security Establishment; and that political repression is covert state terrorism.

Likewise, if labor seeks to exercise influence, its efforts are described as exploiting the state for more than it deserves, because it does not have an enduring stake in the state.

It is a fact: only Establishment wealth – ownership - is equated with national security.

Consider the immortal words of Leona Helmsley: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

That injustice in the tax code is political repression and, in so far as it makes the people fearful, it is state terrorism. The Establishment fears losing its loopholes, while workers and the poor fear losing their homes: two types of terror, one for each class, one stated, one unstated.

The Establishment engages imperialism and political repression through propaganda (word management violence) and social structures. This state terrorism is unstated, covert.

Only when the people rebel and challenge the Establishment is the word terrorism applied.

Likewise, the military, police or intelligence causes of rebellion, or responses to it, are never called terrorism: they are national security.

And that’s how the management of words helps to repress the lower classes.

Language and the Psychology of State Terror

America’s industrial sized war machine was never said to terrorize Iraq; the invasion was not political - because the war machine is owned by the Establishment. The Establishment profiting from war is not politics; it is ideological neutral “profits.”

In fact, America exerts its unwanted political influence overseas, through the state terror of aircraft carrier fleets, bombers, nuclear subs, shock and awe invasions, pacification programs, the overthrow of governments, and support of repressive puppet regimes.

This state terrorism, which you never hear about, is the biggest covert psychological warfare operation of all time. This psywar operation depends on narrowly defining terrorism as a suicide bomber, a hijacked plane, the decapitated body of a collaborator: the “selective terrorism” of rebels and nationalists who, outgunned, and outlawed in their own country, have no other options, other than submission.

The purpose of selective terror is psychological: to isolate collaborators, while demonstrating to the people the ability of the rebels to strike at their oppressors. Shock and Awe, and brutal pacification cam­paigns – state terrorism - prevent people from making a living - selective terrorism does not. That’s a big, meaningful “class” difference.

The National Security Establishment understands that selective terror achieves political and psychological goals that state terror does not – that it rallies people to revolutionary ideals. So the National Security Establishment engages in selective terror too, by targeting the rebel, his family and friends in their homes.

This is the selective terror con­ducted by counter-terrorists. But don’t be confused: it is terrorism. All terror is psychological and political; state terror by immobilizing people and making them responsive, submissive, apathetic, and/or ostensibly “content.”

The National Security Establishment fully understands that once people have been terrorized, they have been politically defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.

As former Director of Central Intelligence William Colby once said: “The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply."

This principle of the psychological use of “the implication or latent threat of terror” is what brings us back to America and the business of terror.

The Business of Terror

State terror – colonization abroad and political repression at home - is a key means of extracting profits and maintaining ownership of property. Ask the American Indian.

In its colonies, the US engages in state terrorism by removing all legal protections for rebels; detention, torture, and summary execution are the price for rebellion against US policy.

State terrorism overseas, imperialism, is never acknowledged by the media, because the media is a big business; indeed, two of the major networks are owned by defense contractors.

And state terrorism applied domestically to ensure “internal” security is never acknowledged - America says it has no political prisoners. But the National Security State is well thought out, by professionals in language management, and political and psychological warfare, aimed at you.

"Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance," says two-time Nobel Prize winner Johan Galtung, but "structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality of the social system and its institutions, of government... is tacit violence. Structural violence is a structure of exploitation and social injustice."

As Colby said: “The implication or latent threat is enough to insure people will comply."

The war on terror and its domestic version “homeland security” are the law of the land – America 's new legally criminal social structure based on administrative detention, enshrined in The Patriot Act and a number of executive orders, some secret.

This lack of due process comes on top of a justice system already skewed to protect the propertied elite and pack the prisons with the poor, through "structural violence," mainly the drug wars.

The Establishment’s new anti-terror and anti-drug laws make the National Security State the most fearsome covert political and psywar machine the world has ever seen. And the National Security State is growing: the “Top Secret America” series in the Washington Post put it at 750,000 cadres.

This secret state within a state extends into the homeland’s critical infrastructure and beyond. For example, the arms industry provides good jobs, making American imperial aggression seem a positive value.

And this is how the psyched-out people become one of the moats.

As it is modeled on the totalitarian corporate paradigm, the National Security State in all its manifestations fits the classic definition of a fascist dictatorship. And we know what its intentions are. They have been stated.

In the days after 9-11, right wing Republican stalwart Kenneth W. Starr, the Clinton inquisitor, said the danger of terrorism requires "deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security."

But is there an on-going emergency that requires deference to the political branches, meaning the right-wing ideologues who rule the National Security State ? And what does it mean for Establishment opponents if due process is completely abandoned at home, and subjected to politics?

Michael Ledeen, a former counter-terror expert on Reagan's National Security Council, blamed 9-11 on Clinton "for failing to properly organize our nation's security apparatus." Ledeen's solution to the problem of those who sneered at security was "to stamp out" the "corrupt habits of mind." By which he means Liberalism.

In other words, the reactionary right wing that owns the National Security State wants to impose its total rule on the people in order to create a security conscious, uniform citizenry - marching in lock step, flags waving - that is necessary to win the war on terror. This is how the National Security professionals are incrementally creating the requisite fascist social structure - through terror, the best organizing principle ever. "This is time for the old motto, 'kill them all, let God sort 'em out.' New times require new people with new standards," Ledeen asserted. "The entire political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will give us a chance to prevail."

When Ledeen says “political” world he means the "owners of the business" of state terror, the right wing ideologues who pack the National Security State and the capitalist Establishment they serve.

And they have won the propaganda war, folks.

The Guns of August: Lowering the Flag on the American Century

By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com
9:29am, August 17, 2010.

In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war.

So where are we this August of 2010, with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq? Where are we, as we impose sanctions on Iran and North Korea (and threaten worse), while sending our latest wonder weapons, pilotless drones armed with bombs and missiles, into Pakistan's tribal borderlands, Yemen, and who knows where else, tasked with endless "targeted killings" which, in blunter times, used to be called assassinations? Where exactly are we, as we continue to garrison much of the globe even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services?

I wish I had a crystal ball to peer into and see what historians will make of our own guns of August in 2060. The fog of war, after all, is just a stand-in for what might be called "the fog of the future," the inability of humans to peer with any accuracy far into the world to come. Let me nonetheless try to offer a few glimpses of what that foggy landscape some years ahead might reveal, and even hazard a few predictions about what possibilities await still-imperial America.

Let me begin by asking: What harm would befall the United States if we actually decided, against all odds, to close those hundreds and hundreds of bases, large and small, that we garrison around the world? What if we actually dismantled our empire, and came home? Would Genghis Khan-like hordes descend on us? Not likely. Neither a land nor a sea invasion of the U.S. is even conceivable.

Would 9/11-type attacks accelerate? It seems far likelier to me that, as our overseas profile shrank, the possibility of such attacks would shrink with it.

Would various countries we've invaded, sometimes occupied, and tried to set on the path of righteousness and democracy decline into "failed states?" Probably some would, and preventing or controlling this should be the function of the United Nations or of neighboring states. (It is well to remember that the murderous Cambodian regime of Pol Pot was finally brought to an end not by us, but by neighboring Vietnam.)

Sagging Empire

In other words, the main fears you might hear in Washington -- if anyone even bothered to wonder what would happen, should we begin to dismantle our empire -- would prove but chimeras. They would, in fact, be remarkably similar to Washington's dire predictions in the 1970s about states all over Asia, then Africa, and beyond falling, like so many dominoes, to communist domination if we did not win the war in Vietnam.

What, then, would the world be like if the U.S. lost control globally -- Washington's greatest fear and deepest reflection of its own overblown sense of self-worth -- as is in fact happening now despite our best efforts? What would that world be like if the U.S. just gave it all up? What would happen to us if we were no longer the "sole superpower" or the world's self-appointed policeman?

In fact, we would still be a large and powerful nation-state with a host of internal and external problems. An immigration and drug crisis on our southern border, soaring health-care costs, a weakening education system, an aging population, an aging infrastructure, an unending recession -- none of these are likely to go away soon, nor are any of them likely to be tackled in a serious or successful way as long as we continue to spend our wealth on armies, weapons, wars, global garrisons, and bribes for petty dictators.

Even without our interference, the Middle East would continue to export oil, and if China has been buying up an ever larger share of what remains underground in those lands, perhaps that should spur us into conserving more and moving more rapidly into the field of alternative energies.

Rising Power

Meanwhile, whether we dismantle our empire or not, China will become (if it isn't already) the world's next superpower. It, too, faces a host of internal problems, including many of the same ones we have. However, it has a booming economy, a favorable balance of payments vis-à-vis much of the rest of the world (particularly the U.S., which is currently running an annual trade deficit with China of $227 billion), and a government and population determined to develop the country into a powerful, economically dominant nation-state.

Fifty years ago, when I began my academic career as a scholar of China and Japan, I was fascinated by the modern history of both countries. My first book dealt with the way the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s spurred Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party he headed on a trajectory to power, thanks to its nationalist resistance to that foreign invader. Incidentally, it is not difficult to find many examples of this process in which a domestic political group gains power because it champions resistance to foreign troops. In the immediate post-WWII period, it occurred in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia; with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, all over Eastern Europe; and today, it is surely occurring in Afghanistan and probably in Iraq as well.

Once the Cultural Revolution began in China in 1966, I temporarily lost interest in studying the country. I thought I knew where that disastrous internal upheaval was taking China and so turned back to Japan, which by then was well launched on its amazing recovery from World War II, thanks to state-guided, but not state-owned, economic growth.

This pattern of economic development, sometimes called the "developmental state," differed fundamentally from both Soviet-type control of the economy and the laissez-faire approach of the U.S. Despite Japan's success, by the 1990s its increasingly sclerotic bureaucracy had led the country into a prolonged period of deflation and stagnation. Meanwhile, post-U.S.S.R. Russia, briefly in thrall to U.S. economic advice, fell captive to rapacious oligarchs who dismantled the command economy only to enrich themselves.

In China, Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping and his successors were able to watch developments in Japan and Russia, learning from them both. They have clearly adopted effective aspects of both systems for their economy and society. With a modicum of luck, economic and otherwise, and a continuation of its present well-informed, rational leadership, China should continue to prosper without either threatening its neighbors or the United States.

To imagine that China might want to start a war with the U.S. -- even over an issue as deeply emotional as the ultimate political status of Taiwan -- would mean projecting a very different path for that country than the one it is currently embarked on. (Editor's NOTE: As Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons has argued in his latest book it appears that Taiwan is gradually and peacfully being completely subsumed into the main-land Chinese orbit without US opposition)

Lowering the Flag on the American Century

Thirty-five years from now, America's official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face-to-face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy. It may, for all we know, still be Hollywood's century decades from now, and so we may still make waves on the cultural scene, just as Britain did in the 1960s with the Beatles and Twiggy. Tourists will undoubtedly still visit some of our natural wonders and perhaps a few of our less scruffy cities, partly because the dollar-exchange rate is likely to be in their favor.

If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. Peering into that foggy future, I simply can't imagine the U.S. dismantling its empire voluntarily, which doesn't mean that, like all sets of imperial garrisons, our bases won't go someday (Editor--sadly I agree).

Instead, I foresee the U.S. drifting along, much as the Obama administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade. Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T.S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

I have always been a political analyst rather than an activist. That is one reason why I briefly became a consultant to the CIA's top analytical branch, and why I now favor disbanding the Agency. Not only has the CIA lost its raison d'être by allowing its intelligence gathering to become politically tainted, but its clandestine operations have created a climate of impunity in which the U.S. can assassinate, torture, and imprison people at will worldwide. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)

Just as I lost interest in China when that country's leadership headed so blindly down the wrong path during the Cultural Revolution, so I'm afraid I'm losing interest in continuing to analyze and dissect the prospects for the U.S. over the next few years. I applaud the efforts of young journalists to tell it like it is, and of scholars to assemble the data that will one day enable historians to describe where and when we went astray. I especially admire insights from the inside, such as those of ex-military men like Andrew Bacevich and Chuck Spinney. And I am filled with awe by men and women who are willing to risk their careers, incomes, freedom, and even lives to protest -- such as the priests and nuns of SOA Watch, who regularly picket the School of the Americas and call attention to the presence of American military bases and misbehavior in South America.

I'm impressed as well with Pfc. Bradley Manning, if he is indeed the person responsible for potentially making public 92,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan. Daniel Ellsberg has long been calling for someone to do what he himself did when he released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He must be surprised that his call has now been answered -- and in such an unlikely way.

My own role these past 20 years has been that of Cassandra, whom the gods gave the gift of foreseeing the future, but also cursed because no one believed her. I wish I could be more optimistic about what's in store for the U.S. Instead, there isn't a day that our own guns of August don't continue to haunt me.

The Road to Armageddon: The Insane Drive for American Hegemony Threatens Life on Earth

By Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research,
February 26, 2010

The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the papers website for the past three days was the Inside the Beltway report, Explosive News, about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.

I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously.

How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7, reports the Washington Times.

The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers destruction and are calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.

The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: Government officials will be notified that Misprision of Treason, U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial.

There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Eric Lawyer,the head of that organization, announced the firefighters support for the architects and engineers demands. He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.

Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed. He also reported that there are more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.

Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of nano-thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit. Nano-thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.

Before we yell conspiracy theory, we should be aware that the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists offer no theory. They provide evidence that challenges the official theory. This evidence is not going to go away.

If expressing doubts or reservations about the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report makes a person a conspiracy theory kook, then we have to include both co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the Commissions legal counsel, all of whom have written books in which they clearly state that they were lied to by government officials when they conducted their investigation, or, rather, when they presided over the investigation conducted by executive director Philip Zelikow, a member of President George W. Bush's transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-author of Bush Secretary of State Condi Mushroom Cloud Rice.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them. Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nukes that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.

Moreover, it doesn't matter to these Americans how often the government changes its story. For example, Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him. Over the years video after video was served up to the gullible American public of bin Laden's pronouncements. Experts dismissed the videos as fakes, but Americans remained their gullible selves. Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 mastermind emerged to take bin Laden's place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to mastermining the 9/11 attack.

In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.

If a person considers the feats attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they are simply unbelievable. Sheik Mohammed is a more brilliant, capable superhero than V in the fantasy movie, V for Vendetta. Sheik Mohammed outwitted all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies along with those of all U.S. allies or puppets, including Israels Mossad. No intelligence service on earth or all of them combined was a match for Sheik Mohammed.

Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control.

He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft intercepter aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.

Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.

Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the FBI from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Pentagon.

How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?

If Sheik Mohammed has these superhuman capabilities, how did the incompetent Americans catch him? This guy is a patsy tortured into confession in order to keep the American naifs believing the governments conspiracy theory.

What is going on here is that the U.S. government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.

The U.S. government has responded to the evidence being arrayed against its outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theory by redefining the war on terror from external to internal enemies. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on February 21 that American extremists are now as big a concern as international terrorists. Extremists, of course, are people who get in the way of the governments agenda, such as the 1,000 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The group used to be 100, now it is 1,000. What if it becomes 10,000?

Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.

Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?

Instead, why doesn't the U.S. government simply confront the evidence that is presented and answer it?

If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it. Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?

Many Americans would reply that their government would never even dream of killing Americans by hijacking airliners and destroying buildings in order to advance a government agenda. But on February 3, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. government can assassinate its own citizens when they are overseas. No arrest, trial, or conviction of a capital crime is necessary. Just straight out murder.

Obviously, if the U.S. government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.

Americans who think their government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the U.S. could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. It is available online in the National Security Archive. There are numerous online accounts available, including Wikipedia. James Bamford's book, Body of Secrets, also summarizes the plot:

Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman [Gen. Lemnitzer] and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

Prior to 9/11 the American neoconservatives were explicit that the wars of aggression that they intended to launch in the Middle East required a new Pearl Harbor.

For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the governments account of 9/11 fails their investigation. 9/11 launched the neoconservative plan for U.S. world hegemony. As I write the U.S. government is purchasing the agreement of foreign governments that border Russia to accept U.S. missile interceptor bases. The U.S. intends to ring Russia with U.S. missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia. [see www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17709 ] U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 that al Qaida is moving into former central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting U.S. bases in these former Soviet republics under the guise of the ever-expanding war on terror.

The U.S. has already encircled Iran with military bases. The U.S. government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.

This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by U.S. anti-missile defenses and acquiesce to U.S. hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.

The U.S. government is delusional. Russian military and political leaders have responded to the obvious threat by declaring NATO a direct threat to the security of Russia and by announcing a change in Russian war doctrine to the pre-emptive launch of nuclear weapons. The Chinese are too confident to be bullied by a washed up American superpower.

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelop of nuclear war. The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of their government, are facilitating this outcome.

America's Praetorian Guard Is Slowly Crumbling

By Jack D. Douglas

July 03, 2009 "Lewrockwell" -- Professional armies have traditionally been far more disciplined, especially under the stress of longer-run warfare.

BUT that does not mean they have no turning points or breaking points. In Rome the professional, imperial guard, The Praetorian Guard, was highly disciplined and bore casualties well in the early years. But over the decades of imperial struggles and military in-breeding common to such armies largely cut off from the civil population, they became bored with routine, self-centered, arrogant, puffed up with their own importance, and started deposing and imposing emperors, forcing them to put more and more of the national wealth into the military and so on. The professional military became a tyrannical force no civilians could control, so it controlled them through their imposed emperors.

That was one of the crucial reasons the American Constitutionalists were so desperate to prevent the rise of a professional army in the U.S. The professional army and navy elites of West Point and Annapolis and their minor league schools for officers grew slowly with the growth of America's imperial wars, but America relied on conscripts for mass armies, thus maintaining the civilian dilution of the professionals, until Nixon et al. moved to the professional army in the midst of rebellion by the conscripts and the conscripts to be.

There are always turning points and breaking points in military forces under the stresses of protracted warfare. Pros are better at hiding that, until it becomes so pervasive and most men feel so desperate that they quickly turn against wars and their elite officers who have failed them. When that happens, they feel far fewer restraints about rebelling than conscripts, especially when so many of them are from other nations and can escape to those if the rebellion fails.

I suspect from all the bits and pieces we can see that the U.S. imperial, professional army has turned against the war in Iraq very strongly and that is a crucial reason why the U.S. has retreated from the cities to the lonely 340 bases outside of them where they cannot be attacked easily and the men will have more time to booze and snooze and dream of girls back home. These are lonely bases and depression sets in. They will insist quietly on leaving those bases soon. The situation in Afpak is getting worse and worse and will likely follow the same pattern. The depressed professionals will insist on getting out, quietly unless their more insistent demands are not met. The growing financial crisis will also force the U.S. to curtail these trillion dollar a year military losses.

The Romans finally built a defensive wall across Britain and drew a line along the German rivers and other natural defense positions and declared an end to the long advance into Europe. They went over to the defensive and slowly but relentlessly retreated back toward Rome itself, then fled pall mall as the ever stronger "barbarians" broke through their defenses and finally sacked Rome itself.

The professionalization of an army is a clear signal that the civilian population has turned away from the imperial wars and is no longer willing to suffer to advance the imperial cause. The U.S. did it as an act of desperation as the army fell apart in Vietnam and the conscripts-to-be rioted in the streets and universities and fled to other nations not at war.

Today only a tiny fraction of America's elite young people would be willing to go into the military to fight imperial wars around the world. Almost all of them who do insist on being highly rewarded officers who move up the line fast and retire in twenty years with mucho loot. The ranks are filled with people who have few prospects in civilian society. They look ferocious in their armor with vastly superior fire power, but they are crumbling from inside because, aside from the sociopathic killers who love the gore and narcissistic sense of glory and power it gives them, most of them have weaker and weaker motivation to really "serve." They want to be paid more and more for less and less, like America's professional doctors, politicians, teachers, police, firemen, bankers, and all the other bureaucratic slackers whose hearts are not in the bureaucratic life. The same people who risk death and total exhaustion on the weekend to do impossible things with joy and no pay become depressed androids when Monday morning comes around.

The American Empire is crumbling inside the professionalized, android armies living in lonely and hellish quagmires in the deserts of the world. The American professionals are also crumbling from the inside in America. The whole Imperial System is crumbling from the inside out, as everyone insists on doing less and less for the society – the SYSTEM – for more and more money and power. The Empire is crumbling away from the inside out. The whole society will do the same unless this deadening Bureaucratic System is scrapped and the androids are allowed to become human beings once again.

The American plutocrats and top bureaucrats built the Empire. The American people have always loathed empires and, once they become aware they are spear carriers for this ghastly Empire that is losing its soul in every way, they quit, first inside and then more and more in open flight or rebellion.

The Psych problems of the American professional armies in these imperial wars is horrific. They will not put up with much more of this terrible

America's "Bases of Empire"

by Stephen Lendman

Global Research, June 27, 2009

Besides waging perpetual wars, nothing better reveals America's imperial agenda than its hundreds of global bases - for offense, not defense at a time the US hasn't had an enemy since the Japanese surrendered in August 1945.

So when they don't exist, they're invented as former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles W. Freeman, Jr., suggested in a May 24, 2007 speech to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs:

"When our descendants look back on the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, they will be puzzled. The end of the Cold War relieved Americans of almost all international anxieties." As the world's sole remaining superpower, "We did not rise to the occasion."

"We are engaged in a war, a global war on terror, a long war, we are told....How can a war with no defined ends beyond the avoidance of retreat ever reach a convenient stopping point? How can we win (any war let alone the hearts and minds of millions) with an enemy so ill-understood that we must invent a nonexistent ideology" for justification.

In his 2006 book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," Chalmers Johnson discussed the known number of foreign US bases by size and branch of service. According to the Department of Defense's Base Structure Report (BSR) through 2005, it totaled 737 but likely exceeds 1000 today with so many new ones built since then - some known, others secret and always others planned.

Johnson also highlighted the fallout - unacceptable noise, pollution, environmental destruction, expropriation of valuable public and private land, and drunken, disorderly, and abusive soldiers committing crimes that include rape and murder that often go unpunished under provisions in US-imposed Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs).

An excerpt from his book reads:

"Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial footprint and the militarism that grows with it....even more than in past empires, a well-entrenched militarism (lies) at the heart of our imperial adventures." To such an extreme that "each year we spend more on our armed forces than all others nations on Earth combined" to garrison troops "in more than 130 countries."

The Pentagon lists them in its annual Base Structure Report, but "its official count of between 737 and 860 overseas installations is incomplete" because excluded are numerous secret ones - for espionage, unofficially shared with host countries, or other reasons not disclosed.

The bases reflect "force projection" for global dominance and are positioned to strike any nation that might challenge it, friend or foe. But they come at a great cost - well over $1 trillion annually with all homeland, foreign, and other budget categories included. According to Johnson, a far greater one as well, the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change - "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy" as well as the end of democracy, loss of personal freedoms, and tyranny.

During WW II, Brits complained that GIs were "overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here." Despite the war, some called it the US "occupation," and UK historian David Reynolds discussed it in his book, "Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-1945." He borrowed the word from George Orwell's December 1943 comment that "It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory."

Today, millions in countries globally feel the same, and with good reason. Even at peace, America's presence is intrusive, hostile, and at the expense of the host country populations.

A new book is now out titled "The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts," a collection of important articles on America's worldwide empire and military presence that enforces it.

It's edited by Catherine Lutz, Brown University Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Watson Institute for International Studies with a forward by Cynthia Enloe, Clark University Research Professor, Department of International Development, Community and Environment and Women's Studies.

Enloe dispels some common myths in her forward:

-- about Americans believing that foreign bases benefit the host country populations;

-- the notion that other countries request our presence;

-- that the US military is the most "civilized" in the world, and

-- their presence is for other nations' security "in an age of an allegedly diffuse (and ill-defined) 'global terror,' (that) trumps any other 'lesser' concerns."

Contributors to "The Bases of Empire" reflect a powerfully opposite point of view as well as Enloe in her forward and Lutz in her detailed introduction, discussed below.

Introduction - Bases, Empire, and Global Response

Lutz cites the "unprecedented....global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the US military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world." Its presence shows that America stands "able and willing to control events in other regions militarily" and proves it through numerous foreign wars and other hostile interventions, directly or through proxies.

Citing data from DOD's 2007 Base Structure Report (BSR), she states:

"Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion."

However, the numbers are misleading as they exclude the massive base and troop presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, former Soviet republics, and Warsaw Pact countries as well as unknown numbers of secret facilities in numerous other nations. They consist of three types:

-- Main Operating Bases (MOBs) like the Iraq Balad Air Base housing 30,000 troops, 10,000 contractors, and covering 16 square miles plus another 12-square mile "security perimeter." MOBs are large and permanent, have extensive infrastructure, command and control headquarters, accommodations for families in non-war zones, hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and nearly anything available in a typical US city.

-- Forward Operation Sites (FOSs) that are also major installations but are smaller than MOBs, and

-- Cooperative Security Locations (CLSs) that are small, austere, called 'lily pads," - to preposition weapons, munitions, and modest numbers of troops.

Lutz highlights the fallout:

"The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world's people feel (not at all) reassured by (their) global reach," and with good reason.

Farm and public land is expropriated for their use. Toxic pollution is enormous as well as extensive environmental damage. Noise levels from round-the-clock aircraft are intolerable, and around numerous bases America is at war. It also imprisons and tortures thousands, props up despotic rulers for its own advantage, and virtually holds the entire planet hostage to its extremist agenda.

Lutz says this book describes US militarism globally and campaigns to hold America accountable for the "damage and to reorient (host) countries' security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions."

For its part, America occupies the world, reflects a hostile presence, trains about 100,000 local forces in 180 countries as partners, and turns a blind eye to human rights abuses, by its own troops and those of host nations.

Besides its presence in fixed bases, the Pentagon is involved in "jungle, urban, desert, maritime, and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape" - always intrusive and often provocative as in the Philippines. After it was forced to give up its bases in 1992, US troops remained in the country despite strong popular opposition and the Philippine constitution prohibiting the basing of foreign forces. No matter, US military and civilian personnel lobby to change local laws to accommodate America's access.

Laws are there for legitimate reasons, one of which is the focus of this book - the impact and costs that a foreign presence has on host countries' people. Lutz explores why it's there, how it's configured, popular myths, and "the global movement to push back or expel (it) altogether."

The Purpose of US Bases

They reflect empire, an aim to dominate everywhere, a sense of "racial, cultural, or social superiority," and a success when "wealth is extracted from peripheral areas and redistributed to the imperial center."

The Pentagon claims they're in place to:

-- defend the homeland with a forward or global presence; and

-- provide other nations with security.

In fact, they're to control trade, resources, local supplies of cheap labor, and political, economic, and social life of host countries. They also force them to support American imperialism, including foreign wars despite harmful fallout to local populations.

A Short History of US Bases

-- they go back to colonial America, then grew to a "frontier project" to remove Native Indians for a new nation with European settlers;

-- in 1938, 14 foreign bases existed; post-WW II "an astounding 30,000 (large and small) installations" were in about 100 countries; by 1948, it was 2000;

-- besides creating America coast-to-coast and the 1846 - 48 Mexican war, US history reflects three imperial periods:

(1) the 1898 Spanish-American war conquest and occupation of foreign territory and acquisition of bases in them;

(2) World War II and its Cold War aftermath established the "bulk of the US basing system;" even so, from 1947 - 1990, America was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela; in the 1990s and later, the Pentagon was forced out of the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico's island-municipality Vieques, Uzbekistan, and Ecuador, and decided voluntarily to leave elsewhere;

(3) post-9/11 militarism under George Bush neocons advanced the goal of "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

Common Myths about US Foreign Bases

Why do sovereign nations and the US public tolerate them? One explanation is that "the bases are naturalized or normalized, meaning that they are thought of as unremarkable, inevitable, and legitimate," and militarism supports these notions as the way to bring order to a dangerous world.

The Pentagon argues their legitimacy on these grounds:

-- "utilitarianism and realism" as follows:

(1) to secure America by deterring attacks and preventing or removing military challenges;

(2) overseas forces represent America's first line of defense; and

(3) "potential security challenges in Asia" require American intervention to prevent or intervene to "restore order."

Strategic language justifies them to project power anywhere in the world and "contend with (any) uncertainty (regarding America's) security challenges."

Bases also "serve the national economic interests of the United States, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain the American standard of living...." Also to react to any threat, maintain trade, keep commerce routes open, and assure the dollar remains the world's dominant reserve currency. In a word, to have America's footprint everywhere with a military presence for enforcement.

US forces are a "visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower" and its goal to keep it that way unchallenged. It suggests that more bases are better and a way to project a visible presence everywhere or close by.

A second argument "sees them as positive expressions of American character, and particularly its humanitarian ethos." The Pentagon portrays itself as a benefactor, a liberator, and helper on the scene at times of natural or other disasters. We claim bases are "gifts to other nations, both as defense sites and as wealth generators. They represent American altruism and sacrifice" when, in fact, they're for hardline dominance intolerant of opposition, national sovereignty, democratic freedoms, and social justice.

They also fail on their own terms. Instead of providing safety and security, they incite antagonism, opposition and blowback against an American occupier and enemy. Yet they proliferate on the notion that "humans are naturally violent and that war can be a glorious and good venture." It's also hugely profitable for the defense establishment and related industries, energy and technology to name two.

The World Responds

"Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases." For some, just their presence is an affront to national sovereignty and pride. Others reject their purpose - aggressive wars, continued violence, and all the other above-cited fallout wherever they're located. Globally, these bases "represent a massive injustice" to host nations and communities where they're located.

Despite providing jobs for local workers, wages are poor, benefits few if any, and most Pentagon dollars flow to large military contractors, other major US corporations, and selected local business elites. Ordinary people are exploited and entirely left out, especially in developing countries, hence their opposition to militarism and foreign occupation.

"With the end of the Cold War, the central pretext for most US bases evaporated, and calls for their return were renewed." In 1991, a successful Philippine movement ousted them with a post-Ferdinand Marcos constitution declaring:

"foreign military bases, troops or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and, when the Congress so requires, ratified by a majority of the votes cast by the people in a national referendum held for that purpose."

In 2003, sustained direct action campaigns and political lobbying also succeeded in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in part because naval activities caused environmental and health damage - a core issue wherever US bases are located.

"The Bases of Empire includes 10 articles by different writers, divided in two parts: Mapping US Power and Global Resistance.

Part I includes:

-- Joseph Gerson's "US Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives;"

-- John Lindsay-Poland's "US Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean;"

-- David Heller and Hans Lammerant's "US Nuclear Weapons Bases in Europe;" and

-- Tom Englehardt's "Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site."

Part II includes:

-- Roland Simbulan's "People's Movement Response to Evolving US Military Activities in the Philippines;"

-- Katherine McCaffrey's "Environmental Struggle after the Cold War: New Forms of Resistance to the US Military in Vieques, Puerto Rico;"

-- Ayse Gil Altinay and Amy Holmes "Opposition to the US Military Presence in Turkey in the Context of the Iraq War;"

-- Kyle Kajihiro's "Resisting Militarism in Hawaii;" and two other articles discussed below.

David Vine and Laura Jeffrey's "Give Us Back Diego Garcia: Unity and Division among Activists in the Indian Ocean."

Diego Garcia is an 84-square mile British-controlled Indian Ocean island in the Chagos archipelago, lying strategically half way between Asia and Africa, and the reason the Pentagon wants it.

It was home to indigenous Chagossians, British citizens, before being expelled between 1967 - 1973 to let America have their island-state as a military base. In flagrant denial of their human rights, they were mass-exiled to Mauritius and Seychelles, 1300 miles away, where they remain in abject poverty and despair. The population had no say, and those who objected were lied to and told they had no choice because their removal was "legal" under colonial rule.

In their new home, life was hellish. They were consigned to a society foreign to their simple ways and weren't able to adjust. On Diego Garcia, they had their own home, grew their own food, fished, and worked on plantations. In exile, they needed jobs to survive but couldn't get them. By the mid-1970s, most were unemployed, impoverished and began to die, but the British Foreign Office and High Commission told them to let the Mauritius and Seychelles governments handle it.

Chagossians are UK citizens entitled to the same rights as other Brits, but all they got was 1000 pounds (around $1600 today) in exchange for renouncing their right to return, agreed to on a document they couldn't read.

The history of this episode was hidden until the 1990s when declassified documents were found in the National Archives at Kew in London. They proved a conspiracy between Britain and America that the International Criminal Court's (ICC) Article 7 calls a "deportation or forcible transfer of a population (and) and crime against humanity."

Britain's action also violated the UN Charter's Article 73 that obliges a colonial government to obey its "sacred trust" to protect the human rights of its people. Instead, America and the UK engaged in cover-up and deception that continued for a decade and went to the highest levels of both governments. Involved were prime minister Harold Wilson and Queen Elizabeth along with presidents Johnson, Nixon and others.

Everything was hidden, including financial kickbacks Washington made that were concealed from Congress and Parliament. That changed once the truth came out. On November 3, 2000, the British High Court stunned the government, cited the Magna Carta, annulled the original deportation order, and effectively ruled that British subjects were entitled to go home. However, the victory was short-lived as a year later Chagossians were back in the High Court seeking compensation for their ordeal.

This time a hostile judge called their case "unmeritorious" and denied their claim. Three months later, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Chagos sent an "order-in-council" to the Queen for her automatic approval that overturned the High Court 2000 victory, banning Chagossians from ever returning home.

Nonetheless, they pursued their case, again before the High Court. On May 11, 2006, a damning verdict condemned the expulsion order as "repugnant" and overturned the Blair government's "order-in-council." Thus far to no avail, yet Chagossians still fight for their right of return and an end to their decades-long plight.

They held an April 18, 2009 meeting, met with the Royal Commonwealth Society in late May, made their case, but it remains unresolved. The UK Chagos Support Association said at the time:

"the original people of Chagos are dying of broken hearts and spirit. They are still waiting for justice to be done and it seems like this is dragging until all the people who really have the right to fight for the cause no longer have a voice. It has been 45 years and we believe it is time that justice is done and peace is found." Thus far, Britain and Washington won't agree. Imperial considerations take precedence over all else.

Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato's "Okinawa; Women's Struggle for Demilitarization."

Okinawa is Japan's southern-most and poorest prefecture. It's also home to dozens of US military bases since 1945. In his book "Nemesis," Chalmers Johnson cited a history of abuse - from 1998 - 2004 alone, 2024 reported crimes and accidents in which US forces were involved. Only one led to a court-martial, 318 others to administrative discipline, and the rest were absolved, yet they involved robberies, assaults, rapes and reckless homicides. Okinawa's women and girls suffered most.

Akibayashi is a researcher at the Institute for Gender Studies at Toyko's Ochanomizu University. Takazato is an activist fighter for women's rights, especially against the threat of US military personnel-committed rape and sexual assaults. She's also a City Council member of Okinawa's capital, Naha, and helped found Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and the Rape Emergency Intervention Counseling Center of Okinawa, established after three US Marines gang-raped a 12-year old girl on September 4, 1995.

After Japan surrendered in 1945, America wrote its constitution, and occupied the country ever since, now with 88 bases in a nation smaller than California. Thirty-seven are on Okinawa, a tiny sliver of land about the size of a large US city, so it's easy to understand why its people are long-suffering and justifiably angry.

They've been practically pushed into the Pacific to accommodate America's occupation, forced to relinquish their most valued real estate, and put up with over six decades of all the above-cited abuses. Their greatest outrage is over the SOFA's article 17 covering criminal justice. It states:

"The custody of an accused member of the United States armed forces or the civilian component (shall) remain with the United States until he is charged."

It means when US personnel commit crimes, including rape and murder, Japanese investigative authorities have no exclusive access to suspects until they're indicted in court. That alone hamstrings investigations enough to make prosecutors reluctant to press charges because they can't get enough evidence for trials. Further, the longer things drag out, the easier it is for the Pentagon to whitewash crimes and transfer guilty parties to new locations, far removed from Okinawa.

The most serious incident was the above-cited 1995 rape. The 12-year old girl involved was also beaten, then left on a beach after which the three Marines returned to their base in a rented car. In October, 85,000 Okinawans protested. They demanded Japanese and American authorities address the issue after the Pentagon initially refused to hand over suspects to Japanese police. Usually they never do anywhere, but this case was an exception. Because of political pressure, the Marines were arrested, tried in a Japanese court, convicted and sentenced to prison terms for their crime - seven years for two of them and six and a half for the other.

This case highlights what Okinawans and other people have endured for decades. SOFAs let the Pentagon run its affairs unaccountable to host country laws, including on Okinawa. The result everywhere is that US personnel get away with rapes, drunken brawling, muggings, drug violations, reckless driving and related accidents, arson, and criminal homicide, especially in host countries with non-white populations - abuses unchanged for decades on Okinawa.

As a result, Akibayashi and Takazato concluded:

-- "Integral elements of misogyny infect military training....The military is a violence-producing institution to which sexual and gender violence are intrinsic....The essence of military forces is their pervasive, deep-rooted contempt for women, which can be seen in military training that completely denies femininity and praises hegemonic masculinity," and

-- "The OWAAMV (Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence) movement illustrates from a gender perspective that 'the protected,' who are structurally deprived of political power, are in fact not protected by the militarized security policies; rather their livelihoods are made insecure by these very policies." Gated bases don't deter violence outside them and result in local populations being oppressed and denied their rights when it happens.

America's "Bases of Empire" menace world societies. Okinawan women and young girls bear testimony to how grievously.