War and Secrecy — Secrets Here, Secrets There, Everywhere Secrets!!!! [Update!]

(10PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

I am very glad to know that Seymour Hersh is shedding/exposing some light to the military dominance in all matters of war!   See Ministry of Truth’s Sy Hersh: “Battlefield Executions”. . . .

We’ve had “secret death squad executions” going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan for quite some time now, which were unbeknownst not only to our military, but, supposedly, even to Obama.  But, whether it’s secret or otherwise, we’ve just been killing people right down the line, Iraq, etc.  See Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan Revealed (Operated by the JSOC, US Joint Special Operations Command, which was Cheney’s original execution squad, if I’m not mistaken) and Death Squads in Afghanistan.  Just a couple of other examples of our secretive behavior.   Wonder if there’s any count on those activities?

Valtin speaks of a second secret prison site in Bagram Secret Bagram Prison Under Obama, BBC Reports Torture and confirmed by The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

But we don’t know how many are in the other, “the Black Hole.” We don’t know because the U.S. still insists that no second prison exists. Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, . . .[emphasis mine]

OMG!  Just learned and not so secret – beheadings of our allies?  h/t David Swanson

How can we stand to live in a country where this exchange is

shown live on tv and nobody comments?

REPORTER: [I]n Marja there are reports — credible reports — of intimidation and even beheading of local people who work with your forces. Is that your intelligence? And if so, does it worry you?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah. It absolutely is things that we see. But it’s absolutely predictable.

[scroll down about half way]

I think it’s pretty clear that the Military Industrial Complex has and is getting away with pretty much whatever it damn well pleases — and why not?  Has anything ever been done to arrest any of our aggressions of national and international war crime behaviors?   **

Who is the Commander in Chief?

As to the military, Defense Secretary, Robert M. Gates, apparently, is a hugely powerful human being.

From Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, at the University of Champaign, Illinois,* notes:

According to today’s New York Times, flying home on his way back from Pakistan, Secretary of “Defense” Gates “relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching ‘Seven Days in May,’ the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.” Gosh, that’s really relaxing! All of a sudden out of nowhere Gates resurrects this ancient film and ostentatiously lets the New York Times and the other media know that he is watching it on his Pentagon plane home.

Obviously, Gates is sending a threat to Obama and the civilian “leadership” in America: You risk a military coup if you do not do exactly what we in the Pentagon tell you to do. This is no idle threat. And it can happen here in America. . . . .  emphasis mine

And, yet, another extremely interesting article by Michael Prysner, “Meet Your Boss:  Robert Gates”  Reading this article gives you a “gasp” at the phenomenal power of Gates.

But who is really in the chain of command? Who are these great and wise leaders who have, in the past eight years, ordered over 5,300 of us to our deaths?

But . . . . . Obama chose (or so we’re led to believe) to have him remain — so what does that say about Obama?

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More and related is an excerpt (of a Preface) from Michel Chossudousky (and Andrew Gavin Marshall), Editors, of interest.  The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the XXI Century.  h/t dharmysyd

War is inextricably linked to the impoverishment of people at home and around the world. Militarization and the economic crisis are intimately related. The provision of essential goods and services to meet basic human needs has been replaced by a profit-driven “killing machine” in support of America’s “Global War on Terror”. The poor are made to fight the poor. Yet war enriches the upper class, which controls industry, the military, oil and banking. In a war economy, death is good for business, poverty is good for society, and power is good for politics. Western nations, particularly the United States, spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to murder innocent people in far-away impoverished nations, while the people at home suffer the disparities of poverty, class, gender and racial divides.

*Francis A. Boyle, submitted the ICC Complaint Filed Against Bush, Cheney, et. al. by UIUC Prof. Francis Boyle and Lawyers Against the War, which was accepted by the ICC.

**Note:  The Obama Administration is now complicit with the war crimes of the Bush Administration, according to all national and International laws, in that this current Administration has not sought to investigate and prosecute the war crimes of the Bush Administration.  As the military/Military Industrial Complex proceeds with its agenda, it’s not too surprising that everything is being done to cover up the war crimes “footsteps” of the past and the present.

UPDATE:  This update is simply because I neglected a link to Francis A. Boyle’s article above.