At 9:30 a.m. on a gray winter Monday, the State Department officials began certifying the names at a rate of one every two minutes and 23 seconds.
In rapid succession, they confirmed that 204 police officers, soldiers, sailors, and airmen from 11 countries had committed no gross human rights violations and cleared them to attend one of more than 50 training efforts sponsored by the U.S. government. The programs were taking place at a wide variety of locations, from Italy, Albania, and Jordan to the states of Louisiana and Minnesota.
Thirty-two Egyptians were approved for instruction in, among other things, Apache helicopter gunship maintenance and flight simulators for the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk. Azerbaijanis were cleared for a U.S. Army course on identifying bio-warfare agents in Maryland and underwater demolition training with Navy SEALs in San Diego. Thirty-three Iraqis were certified to attend a State Department training session for bodyguards, held in Jordan. Bosnians were bound for Macedonia to prepare for deployment to Afghanistan. Ukrainian police were selected for peacekeeping training in Italy. Romanians would study naval operations in Rhode Island and counterterrorism in Skopje.
This was only the beginning of one day’s work of vetting security personnel for U.S. training. A joint investigation by The Intercept and 100Reporters reveals the chaotic and largely unknown details of a vast constellation of global training exercises, operations, facilities, and schools — a shadowy network of U.S. programs that every year provides instruction and assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other personnel. The investigation exposes the geographic and political contours of a U.S. training system that has, until now, largely defied thorough description.
Visualization shows partial data where training locations were available. Source: WikiLeaks Cablegate, 2003-2010.
The data show training at no fewer than 471 locations in 120 countries — on every continent but Antarctica — involving, on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies, civilian agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military units, private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of five states. Despite the fact that the Department of Defense alone has poured some $122 billion into such programs since 9/11, the breadth and content of this training network remain virtually unknown to most Americans.
The contours of this sprawling system were discovered by analyzing 6,176 diplomatic cables that were released by WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011. While the scope of the training network may come as a surprise, the most astounding fact may be that it is even larger than the available data show, because the WikiLeaks cables are not comprehensive. They contain, for example, little information on training efforts in Colombia, the single-largest recipient of U.S. training covered by the human rights vetting process that produced these records. Other large recipients of U.S. security assistance, such as Pakistan, are vastly underrepresented in the cables for reasons that remain unclear.
“What you have stumbled across is a systematic lack of strategic thinking, a systematic lack of evaluation, but a massive commitment of people and money and time in a growing number of countries,” said Gordon Adams, formerly a senior White House official for national security and foreign policy budgets. “I think the word ‘system’ is a misnomer. This is a headless system,” he said.
The investigation raises serious questions about U.S. government oversight, safeguards, and accountability. The investigation found:
• A global training network without any coherent strategy, carried out by scores of agencies and offices with no effective oversight, centralized planning, or a clear statement of objectives.
• The lack of any means of testing and evaluation, let alone a comprehensive way to count or track foreign trainees.
• Vetting procedures designed to weed out human rights abusers that examine trainees so rapidly that experts question their worth.
U.S. Special Forces members advise and assist soldiers assigned to the Belize Special Assignment Group during a marksmanship range exercise near Belize City, Belize, April 12, 2010.
Photo: U.S. Department of Defense
A Rand Corp. analysis from 2013 found that the Pentagon alone has 71 different authorities under which it provides foreign aid as a means of “building partner capacity,” or BPC — part of a system that the report criticized as akin to “a tangled web, with holes, overlaps, and confusions.” The Pentagon, for example, maintains no master list of the people it trains nor does it keep aggregate figures.
“The way we do security cooperation has been a patchwork that we’ve added to over and over,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former member of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. “There are more than 180 authorities and scores of agencies working in these areas, and the way it has evolved over time has made it absolutely impossible for anyone to know what’s going on. … There really is no oversight.”
Details on the U.S. government’s training programs have long been lacking. In 2012, the Obama administration submitted a one-time report to Congress on foreign police training that covered just two fiscal years — and it was never made public. Annual disclosures by the State Department about foreign military training programs cover many volumes but are often vague and difficult to analyze, with information frequently missing or reported inconsistently.
The diplomatic cables that were mined for this investigation were written between December 1999 and February 2010 and were among a far larger batch of documents leaked by Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning; a military court subsequently sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison. The cables provide the identities of nearly 60,000 trainees and units from 129 countries (today, the number stands at more than 150 countries) who were selected by U.S. government entities as varied as the FBI, the Defense Department Fire Academy, the Patent and Trademark Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Park Service. Only some of the cables contained enough information to appear on the accompanying map, which depicts the planned movements of just under 39,300 people and units between 2003 and 2010.
The cables also reveal that more than two-thirds of the State Department’s vetting approvals were granted for training programs carried out overseas rather than in the United States. Domestically, training was conducted in 39 U.S. states as well as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the District of Columbia. At least 57 domestic Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps bases were involved in these domestic training efforts. Additional research by The Intercept and 100Reporters indicates that little has changed in the years since the cables were released; the global U.S. training system remains sprawling, opaque, and in disarray.
William Hartung, a senior adviser to the Security Assistance Monitor, which tracks American military aid around the globe, said the scale of the training efforts was “just mind boggling.”
“It’s sort of a question of, ‘Where aren’t we training people?’” he said. “It’s hard to imagine any other country in the world being in a position to do all this and to do it with so little scrutiny.”
A soldier of the Iraqi army’s 16th Division kicks in a door during a training exercise at Besmaya Range Complex, Iraq, March 21, 2015.
Photo: U.S. Army Central
The WikiLeaks cables examined in this investigation were written to comply with the so-called Leahy Law — a vetting process meant to weed out foreign trainees or units implicated in “gross human rights violations.” While the Leahy Law has prevented some aid from reaching units in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia, it has been routinely criticized as ineffective and filled with loopholes that are used to circumvent the law’s intent. Its implementation has also been hobbled by a lack of funding. As Lora Lumpe, a senior policy analyst at the Open Society Foundations, has observed, the State Department office that controls the Leahy vetting operated on a budget of just $2.75 million in 2014, while the security projects it oversaw were worth as much as $15 billion. The number of cases it vetted in 2015 was astounding — 191,899. The total number of individuals trained is certainly higher: According to the State Department, a single case can comprise thousands of individuals.
“When you say we have to look at every individual and every unit and you actually have to do the vetting, you get far too many people who are technically vetted, but who we actually know very little about,” said Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment. “So you build a haystack where you’re looking for a needle. And as you build that haystack, the vetting necessarily becomes worse.”
Questions about the vetting process are accompanied by concerns about the effectiveness of the training programs. Last year, a $500 million Pentagon effort to train and equip Syrian rebels, slated to produce 15,000 fighters over three years, yielded just a few dozen before being scrapped by the Obama administration. A 13-year effort in Afghanistan has resulted in an army filled with “ghost” soldiers, wracked by desertions and continuing to suffer setbacks and lose territory to a relatively unpopular insurgency. And then there was the spectacular collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014 to the much smaller forces of the Islamic State (though the territory lost at the time is beginning to be won back).
These failures call into question whether these far-flung programs “can ever achieve their desired effects,” according to a 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service. “Despite the increasing emphasis on, and centrality of, BPC in national security strategy and military operations, the assumption that building foreign security forces will have tangible U.S. national security benefits remains a relatively untested proposition.”
A 2015 report by the Center for a New American Security similarly concluded that many “security assistance and cooperation interventions fail to accomplish U.S. objectives as a result of both strategic and structural deficiencies.” It found that training goals are often poorly articulated and sometimes in conflict with each other. In 2013, a State Department advisory panel also found that American security aid had no coherent system of planning or evaluation and no overall strategy. It compared the “baffling” array of federal funding sources to “a philanthropic grant-making process by an assemblage of different foundations with different agendas.”
That year, the Obama administration attempted to bring order to foreign security assistance through a directive that, according to the Congressional Research Service, calls on national security agencies “to improve, streamline, and better organize” all American international security assistance and cooperation. According to the National Security Council, the administration directed the State Department to “synchronize” foreign security aid programs. The State Department, in response, has said it “continues to play a leadership role” in carrying out the still-unpublished 2013 directive, but the results have been murky and basic information from various agencies is still lacking. The Department of Justice, for example, said it does not track foreign training at the department-wide level.
The failure of the State and Justice departments to meaningfully manage and track their training programs is mirrored by similar deficiencies at the Department of Defense. Despite its claims that programs are “closely overseen,” the Pentagon can’t even say how many foreign troops it mentors. According to Lt. Col. Joe Sowers, a Department of Defense spokesperson, “Because training is provided through multiple authorities, appropriations accounts, and geographic combatant commands, there is currently no single database that provides a total figure for the number of foreign security forces trained.”
Kleinfeld, from the Carnegie Endowment, describes the situation as a strategic failure. “No one knows how many people are being trained because of the lack of centralization — because State does some training, National Guard does some, the FBI, the DOD,” she said. “No one has any idea what’s going on.”
This story was co-published with 100Reporters as part of its series investigating chronic failures in the U.S. training of foreign police and military personnel.
Story by Douglas Gillison and Nick Turse. Data visualization by Moiz Syed.
Research: Lewam Dejen, Aishvarya Kavi, Chloee Weiner, and Drew Williams of 100Reporters.
In January, 2014, after a two-month battle against Iraqi troops, the black flags of Daesh flew over the rooftops of Fallujah. That historical battle marked the turning point in the Iraq civil war. But the MSM was still in its collective slumber except for a prescient article published soon after in The Washington Post on its the front page in its online digital edition. A news reporter did a survey of opinions from former grunts who had fought in the second battle of for that city, the bloodiest battle during the American occupation . ( There now have been four battles for the control of that contested city – so far and that fourth one maybe not the last. ) An ex-army captain in one of the interviews observed that those black flags recalled for him the fall of Saigon in April 30, 1975. I thought it was an very interesting observation having served in Vietnam as a medical corpsman during the Tet Offensive of 1968. But I also thought he was a bit off on his timeline. To me, the fall of Fallujah reminded me more of the Battle for Hue, that is, if NVA soldiers could have held onto the city against the Marines and then used it as a base of operations until the fall of Saigon in 1975. But we were in the small ballpark and we were watching the same game being played between the opposing teams. And though Daesh has lost territory in Iraq and Syria, it has gained a foothold and a front line in Libya. So I don’t really view its loss of territory in Iraq or Syria as that significant, this war with it will be fought over decades, and the only reason Daesh lost its territory was because the Iraqi troops were supported by a massive air campaign by our forces. Take away air superiority and I doubt that Iraqi troops have the resolve on the ground against it. Again, the Vietnam analogy comes to mind. If we had not supported the soldiers in the South Vietnamese Army with our massive air superiority and American troops fighting and dying for the Republic of South Vietnam, the war would have been over a lot sooner than in 1975. And I must state that this new phrase in the long war on terror will come back to bite us on our collective arses because as it is described in this article, the vetting process and accounting of its training programs is woefully incompetent. As Andrew Cockburn has pointed in articles in The London Review of Books and in The Independent the intelligence estimates of the actual strength of Daesh before Mosul fell in June, 2014, I think he quoted a figure of about 20,000 to 30,000, was way off the mark. Given his anonymous sources in Iraq, they put its total strength at near 100,000. Many of the former officers and troops in the Iraqi army which Paul Bremer disbanded during his tenure accounted for this higher estimate. I assume some if not many of these soldiers and agents reported this article being trained by us throughout the world will defect and become fighters and trainers themselves for Daesh or some other jihadist splinter group. And, I hate to bring Vietnam up again, but General Westmoreland estimated the NVA and VC had about 250,000 fighters before the Tet Offensive. Yet Samuel Adams, an analyst with the CIA, put the total at least 450,000. He knew Westmoreland’s estimate was fraudulent. He proved to be correct, and before the Tet Offensive, he threatened to leak his figures to the press but deferred since it would be a violation of the contract he signed to not violate a secrecy agreement on national security.. Then after Tet, someone in the intelligence community did leak it, and it was published in around March, 1968 in The New York Times. But the Tet Offensive had already shown that there was no light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam, the war was lost, and these army estimates were just part of a coordinated propaganda campaign by Westmoreland on orders by LBJ, his commander in chief, to convince the American people back in the world that we were winning the war. We weren’t: and Sam Adams was right. By the way in yet another backward glance to painful lessons forgotten in the debacle of the Vietnam War, in 2002 there was a professional organization formed by retired CIA agents, the Sam Adams for Integrity in Intelligence, and each year they give the Sam Adams award to whistleblowers. Guess what? Two of its recipients have been Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
I am a member of a major local law enforcement agency in the US and have worked extensively with both the DoD and the Dept of State and other federal agencies overseas training both police and the military of countries in SE Asia. I have also been trained by federal and state agencies as a certified trainer in a variety of critical subjects, and have then trained the non US police in overseas venues. There is nothing sinister about these programs. In fact, the police officers I have trained in SE Asia are very appreciative of the training and experience US police officers provide. They lack the training resources, tactics and professionalism that we in large metropolitan police departments take for granted and seek to better themselves.
I am an avid reader of The Intercept – I have a background in both law as a lawyer and in law enforcement as a police officer, and I appreciate the in depth investigative jounalism usually found in The Interecept Articles. I believe that, for example, Glenn Greenwald, has done amazing work in the area of data priacy and security. However, you really missed the mark on this one! American police officers, and particularly, local American police officers are really the best teachers for police officers in developing countries because we work the streets, we develop sources, we know our tactics and we can relate to the issues and challenges of officers in developing nations.
We need more training of foreign police – not less – and while there is a lack of centralization, the work is worthwhile and the demand for the instruction far exceeds that which can be provided. Nothing sinister here – suggest that The Intercept just move on to something much more substantive to report.
I couldn’t agree more. However, at 40k per trainee, I question the value of these efforts regardless of the many questionable details, meritorious or otherwise.
It’s centralized in the sense that there’s tremendous overlap in training, tactics, logistics, equipment etc. American Empire is exporting a more or less homogeneous war fighting/counter insurgency template. If everyone is playing with your tool box, that’s a tremendous strategic advantage. It’s the imperialism, stupid.
“No one has any idea”. Uh, sure they do.
Intercept’s critique of empire consistently frames America as a bumbling hegemon, making ‘mistake’ after ‘mistake’. It’s oddly sentimental. At best.
Are you saying that Iraq wasn’t a mistake? Half a million dead, trillions wasted, neither military, social nor economic goals achieved?
Or Libya? You think that worked out OK? Syria, home of ISIS, that was a success for you? Afghanistan? The Honduras? Which “non-mistakes” are you thinking of, again?
Consider that the US “Defense” Department is the most expensive project ever undertaken by human beings. And yet when it was tested on September 11, it got a resounding 0 out of 4.
The reason you get such pathetic performance from your massive investments in foreign policy and the military is because you never complain this massive rip-off, and indeed you can’t imagine not being ripped off – in other words, because Americans are basically suckers.
I’ve seen and taken pictures of NYPD staff wearing official NYPD polo shirts enmass going through the Jakarta airport about 2 years ago. They were all carrying luggage and duffle bags. Indonesia, that bastion of an unoppressive police state.
….the substance of these articles seem to be old news….
…..this has been going on for years, years….
In the old days, to conquer another you did battle and all manner of evil stuff and then you policed the place and for what, tax money? After all that it boils down to collecting tax? Today, if you want to conquer another, just infiltrate, occupy, and merge. Then move your corporations in and you get ALL THE MONEY. And if you have a problem with the little pesky competition or ill mannered unco-operative politicians in your host country, you call the Host Busters – the TPP. And if the natives get out of line, who do you call? The well trained and outfitted Folks Busters. Yes, conquering countries aint what it used to be, it’s all sophisticated and legal now.
Here we have the locus of the “gang-stalking” program that I can tell you from first-hand experience is happening right around where Philando Castile was shot. There are so many people that are engaged in full blown social engineering. Stalking and harassment crimes against not only black people, but white people as well. When this all finally comes out into the light the truth will truly “set us free.”
Domestically COINTELPRO and MKULTRA continue.
No oversight, no accountability.
Covert military grade RF weaponry used on innocent civilians.
No touch torture.
Slow kill.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) a group of neoliberals pulled the trigger on this Pax Americana shite in the late 90’s folks, and everyone with an objective and functional mind knows it.
Both Hillary and Obama are true believers in their globalist cause, and apparently Bernie Sanders too.
We are so screwed.
This caught my eye a year ago. Reno police training in Ukraine.
http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2015/02/25/reno-council-bring-home-officers-ukraine/24027959/
This has several issues:
– It puts military and policing firmly in the commercial arena, allowing private sector interests to wash these public sector activities with vast sums of money, creating conflicting interests and a tangled mess of who is giving what to where and for why.
– This is just another example of the private sector hijacking and benefiting from something paid for by the public sector. Why is an American’s tax money paying for a soldier or policeman that should be either doing their duty in America, or not be hired at all? If there is no real threat, there should be no major military or police presence – yet as crime and war drops, the militaries and police grow larger to fight off imaginary foes and play Steal the Taxpayers’ Dollars both at home and overseas.
The very individuals who are supposed to Protect & Serve are robbing the people that pay their wages and buy their equipment and train them and provide their pensions and health care. Why don’t they just come round and we can wipe their fucking arses for them too?
The Intercept should invite some leading economists and social planners to do an article on Alternative Tax Expenditures based on a world without America’s phony terrorists and phony war on drugs and phony Research & Development expenditure in the universities and phony farm subsidies propping up Walmart’s profit margins.
That would turn some fucking Heads and Hearts better than any bombed Afghani hospital, sad though that is. We are being systematically robbed at our own behest by arseholes we armed and sanctioned and empowered and financed. What a bunch of stupid cunts we are.
Just because it wasnt documented in the leaked cables or acknowledged by any of the interviewed sources, doesnt mean that, for example, the CIA didnt deliberately design the system this way to hide funding for (part of) its black-ops programs. What better way to insert agents into every country’s police/army? Oops, releasing their names could contravene some US law…
Security aid designated to train people overseas in military tactics leading to unforeseen violent outcomes. Good thing those tax dollars weren’t used to train Americans in civics, math, engineering, medicine, agriculture, ect. Who knows what horrible outcomes we would have to deal with then. That knowledge could be used for horrible things like building dams, bridges, solar panels, desalinations plants, ect. More ominously educating Americans could lead to unforeseen developments and outcomes altering technology in America and ultimately humanity forever.
“These failures call into question whether these far-flung programs “can ever achieve their desired effects,” according to a 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service.”
That depends on what the desired effects actually are, as compared to the officially-stated goals.
The desired effects seem to be the creation of better-trained enemies to keep the GWT a generational conflict and to make some people an insane amount of blood money.
How to sow chaos in a region: train a bunch of armed thugs and let them loose with no oversight.
great report. throughout reading it i thought of the “school of the americas” and its role as a training ground for various counter-revolution types in south america. also of the strange use of israeli police and military (not much difference) to train cops in the US – sometimes including departments that end up on the wrong side of “black lives matter” incidents.
The most outrageous feature of this program is probably the support it gave to radical Islamist terrorism in Syria (CIA training camps in Turkey, and other training centers in Gulf Arab dictatorships) as part of the joint American-Saudi-Qatar-Turkey-Israel effort to overthrow Assad and establish a regime in Syria that would not be allied with Iran. This program persisted for several years before finally being shut down in Oct 2015:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-scraps-500-million-training-scheme-syrian-rebels-1523293
For more details on this scheme, see The Levant Report:
The fact is that money and weapons and trained fighters that entered the Free Syrian Army more often than not migrated along to Al Qaeda and ISIS forces. However, the notion was that ISIS was supposed to stay put in Syria under the control of Saudi and Qatari intelligence agencies, not engage in international terrorism and online propaganda efforts. There’s no doubt that Obama and his team were up to their neck in this effort, particularly on the CIA side:
In the past, during the Reagan era for example, such efforts were justified using the anti-communist Cold War approach (as in the the CIA assisting the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras via cocaine sales in poor black inner-city zones in the United States); now that justification has vanished, it has become clear that the real agenda is simply neocolonial empire-building, more often than not focused on control of natural resources in foreign countries via the establishment of puppet dictatorships that take orders from Washington.
Both Democrats and Republicans are implicated in these schemes, which ultimately benefit the Wall Street interests that finance their political campaigns; it points to a serious anti-democracy agenda among the U.S. political class as they struggle to prop up their faltering global empire. Similarly, the U.S. corporate media remains silent on the fact that without this covert U.S. support, ISIS and Al Qaeda would never have risen to such prominence in Iraq and Syria.
It’s the last “Evil Empire” on the planet, run out of Washington in partnership with countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia. The sooner it collapses, the better.
I think the Chinese folks are manipulating us in a way that will lead us to surrender all power to them very soon. Old Confusious Policy – Win Without Fighting.
I believe you meant Confucius.
Old Confusious would, however, be an apt nickname for yourself should you choose to elect one.
…..ditto……
No surprises here but its nice to have the facts. Reminds me of Chilcot.
Training Tomorrows Terrorists? Disagree her: there may not be one centalized database on all these individuals, but they are in the system for life, probably even their dna forever. This is part of gaining control as goal of Global Power.
They better be careful or we will wind up training someone like Osama Bin Laden.
Oh thats right, we already did that…….
Great reporting, “No one has any idea what’s going on.” Want could go wrong? Someone has an agenda some are making a buck but no one is contemplating the real result.
“The school of the Americas” got such a bad name for training right wing militaries and militias how to murder civilians and rebels they had to change the name. American Universities are full of the children of the elites from all over the world learning the American mindset among other things; it’s not just war people, the US wants the civilian leadership too. With the globalization and the ability to build or crush a country and change it’s government by doing so; this is the new military; the bombs are only sent in if necessary as banksters work better. Nothing new here; the Bundesbank got rid of Chancellor Erhard, the guy who built up Germany after the war by turning the economy down causing dissatisfaction among the population. This is happening a lot and it’s not well reported. Personally, I think banking/financial has too much power around the world and needs to be nationalized around the world. With the exception of Canada; all the Central banks of the major nations; The Fed, Bank of England, Bundesbank etc. are all private banksters and Canada does what it’s told since 1974 when it stopped financing Canadian infrastructure interest free.
Then there is this headline from LA Times: “In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA — Unintended conflict, CIA-armed Syrian rebels clash with Pentagon-backed militias along Turkish border.”
Is it intentional or unintentional? Seems to me it is intentional. We know these folks are going to use the equipment and training, otherwise they wouldn’t spend money on it. I mean hey it’s like getting a college degree then not using that degree; who the fuck does that!?
P.S. is it any surprise the world has groups that hate Americans. This is your tax dollars at work. The U.S. has to stop that crap forthwith
Has to be intentional, inspired by M&M Enterprises (Joseph Heller: Catch-22). You see, if we arm both sides, we potentially sell twice as many arms. Also, whoever wins can thank us for our support. What could possibly go wrong?
Yes, what could go wrong is perhaps in part a welcome outcome.. more turmoil, violence or terror, etc. It’s vertical integration. Or has one commander put it a “self-licking ice cream cone” Perhaps all of the mil/intel/LE alphabet agencies are justified in this way.
I think Washington, in Farewell, mentioned that other nations would choose democracy themselves by looking at the U.S. as an example; it seems to me that you can’t use the sword to bring democracy to other nations (make the world safe for democracy) or train and eqp them on how to get it. In fact it might be an oxymoron.
“Unintended conflict, CIA-armed Syrian rebels clash with Pentagon-backed militias along Turkish border.”
The question I have is how much of this is truly unintended?
We used to live in a world where it was sufficient to have proxy wars between great powers such as the US and USSR. Now we live in a world where two great powers within one country are waging proxy wars against one another. Is that really due to the confusion inherent to bureaucracies that have grown like metastatic cancers? Or is it the natural extension of the unchecked power of a single, unstoppable nation-state, that contains two extremely powerful organizations competing for control over its resources and, by extrapolation, the rest of the world?
I don’t think it would be wise to assume that these kinds of clashes are unintentional at all.
“Without any coherent strategy” Bullshit…All of this garbage is orchestrated by the conservative ruling power elite to control the world on behalf of hoard the wealth conservatives while sabotaging, undermining or destroying share the wealth liberals. Every inch of this is designed, implemented and controlled by members of the one percent wealthiest conservatives to stay in control of resources and wealth of the world while denying rudimentary health, security and a share of the pie to the vast majority of earths inhabitants. Save your false narrative of “whocouldofknowed” or this this is a “headless monster”.
Liberals are just as guilty. Bill and Hillary are perfect examples. If you are trying to blame conservatives over liberals then you need to take the bag off your head and stop drinking the kool-aid.
This agenda was/is being pushed just as hard by Carter, Clinton and Obama as it was/is pushed by Reagan, Bushs and neo-cons.
That is how they stay in power. They tell us that there is a difference between the Dems and Repubs but when the rubber meets the road there is no difference. You are blaming the “hoard the wealth conservatives” when you need to look in the mirror. If you have voted for either of the two parties then you have supported the corruptions that is in our government.
You would be hard pressed to find a conservative government official who has pushed this agenda harder than Hillary Clinton. Last I checked she is the champion of blind liberals.
This is a great report which obviously required a considerable effort to produce. I truly appreciate the effort.
I would just like to ask what the editorial position of The Intercept is on using words such as “empire” and “Martial law” when referring to US domestic conditions and to the Global Empire the US represents.
For it is long past time to refer to the US as a democracy and long past time to recognize the unannounced Martial Law which is fully implemented. As well, it is long past time to recognize the global empire fronted by the US.
Somewhere there needs to be a comprehensive understanding and reporting on the connections between TPP/TTIP/TSA as they transfer economic sovereignty to the empire and the training all over the world and the massive buildup of US arms surrounding Russia and China the spider web of “Lillie pads” and personnel and forward stationed supplies which covers the entire African continent. And all the rest.
How do people protect themselves or fight for a better life if the press refuses to call a duck a duck?
It should be presented to the public for what it is not by continuing to portray the US as a single sovereign nation – which it is not. The US (the “sovereign” country has not only led the “trade” deals it has surrendered economic sovereignty along with the rest to this vast global empire.
The public needs to understand clearly exactly who the enemy is not more pretending that if we just change this or that law or tweak the existing system progress can be made.
Someone far more capable than I am needs to make clear that the US represents an empire (I call it the Empire of the Exceptionals) and that that Empire has hegemonic control of our entire planet except for Russia and China, and they are completely encircled with TRILLIONS of dollars of weapons including hundreds of nuclear weapon, full control if the internet and the global financial system as well as near outer space as far as the moon.
People running around supporting Warren and Sanders two Neoliberal hacks helps no one. The US political system is far beyond repair and has no power left anyway, the military and police ultimately answer to the oligarchs.
And look to the near future, climate change is starting to cause catastrophe people are dying and not a single government in the world is talking about employing all those useless unemployed people in making preparations to deal with the coming disasters.
Perhaps just as important is Artificial Intelligence which will take tens of millions of jobs in that near future we consider, nothing what-so-ever is being even contemplated as how those people and their children will survive.
Unless something is done unless there is real revolution real fightback it is over for society and civilization as we know it. In this near future, there will be maybe 15 million lords and the rest of us.
If The Intercept is not up to the job or unwilling to call a Duck a Duck where can we go? (I do believe that the Intercept is a valuable news and information outlet, I do not question their integrate, it is because I believe the Intercept with its deep well of talent could and must start recognizing the reality and calling it by its name.)
The other issue I left out is that power, the power controlling and oppressing almost everyone on earth is no longer seated in one chair or multiple chairs it is not in DC or London or New York it is diffuse throughout the globe, it is in every computer, server and in digital equipment scattered around the world taking over the US government would would have little effect on real power.
Martial law is here now, Artificial Intelligence is here now they must be considered and they must be dealt with if the Empire of the Exceptionals is to be neutralized.
> In this near future, there will be maybe 15 million lords and the rest of us.
that’s ok, just give us food, drugs and entertainment and the lords can have all the wealth and power they want. democracy is inefficient. too many decision makers
No mention soa/whinsec?
i was at http://www.indianterritorialarmy.com and somehow i came here. It was a in depth article with lot of insights.