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General Tommy Franks, who led the military operation in Iraq, recently expressed doubts about whether our Constitutional government would survive a major WMD attack. Here is his quote, as reported in a Newsmax article:
Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml “It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a
terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the
Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that
causes our population to question our own Constitution and to
begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of
another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then
begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps,
very, very important.”It is important to realize that such an attack might come from *within* the U.S. as well as from the outside. It might come from certain treasonous elements who create it as a pretext to destroy our liberties and to implement martial law. Such a group might not even need to be especially large, but just have the means and the unscrupulousness to carry out such attacks. This is not a far-fetched or unrealistic scenario at all -- though the idea itself is repugnant. Recall that Operation Northwoods from 1962 was set to launch a domestic terror campaign in the U.S. and to blame it on Cuba. It had the approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, but was apparently rejected by civilian leaders.
Friendly Fire
Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S.
Cities to Provoke War With Cuba
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/The warning from Franks sounds a lot like some of the warnings by Steven Metz and James Kievit, at the U.S. Army War College, in their 1994 article "The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflict Short of War." That article describes a "future history," set in 2010, where a military takeover has occurred in the United States. Prominent in this takeover is the use of covert psychotechnologies (which, BTW, have already been developed and tested in secret, partly on nonconsensual citizen-victims).
Below I have included the entire "future history" section of the paper. It is a little long, but is worth reading. (Other sections of the paper are worth looking at too, especially those discussing the ethics of the new psychotechnologies and nonlethal weapons.) Remember that this excerpt is supposedly a history of the recent past, written in 2010. (The mention of "spiritual insurgents attempting to forge new systems of identity and personal meaning in their nations" in the mid-90s is also curious...)
The first question is: What led American leaders and national
security professionals to apply the revolution in military affairs to
conflict short of war? Most often, a revolution in military affairs
occurs in response to defeat or a perception of rising
threat. Napoleon led an undrilled army stripped of most veteran
officers against a host of enemies; the architects of blitzkrieg all
had first-hand experience with bitter military defeat. Likewise, the
RMA of the 2000s was sparked by a series of fiascos in the
mid-1990s. First was the emergence of what became known as "third wave
terrorism." Recognizing the strategic bankruptcy of old-fashioned
hijacking, kidnapping, assassination, and bombing, terrorists rapidly
adopted state-of-the art technology to their sinister ends. Within
Third World countries, they developed the means to identify and kill
American businessmen, diplomats and military advisors at will, and to
disrupt international air traffic and electronic communications in and
out of their countries. Even more damaging was their ability to "carry
the war to its source" in the United States. Biotechnology and
information warfare, especially sabotage of communications and
computer networks using mobile high power microwave sources, replaced
AK-47s and SEMTEX as the preferred tools of terrorism. The new
post-Mafia generation of silicon criminals provided models and even
mentors for third wave terrorists. About the same time, the U.S. military became embroiled in several
horrific ethnic struggles. Our involvement usually began as part of a
multinational peacekeeping or peace enforcement operation, but rapidly
turned violent when American forces were killed or held hostage. The
usual response to the first few attacks on Americans was to send
reinforcements, thus placing U.S. prestige on the line. Since our
strategy was contingent on global leadership, we were aware of the
political damage which would result from being forcibly expelled from
a Third World country, and thus doggedly "stayed the course" until
domestic pressure forced withdrawal. On the ground, enemies would not
directly fight our magnificent military forces, but relied instead on
mines, assassination, and terror bombings. The costs of these imbroglios were immense. A bitter dispute broke
out in the United States between supporters of multinational peace
operations and isolationists. And domestic political acrimony was not
the only long-term cost of these operations: many of our troops
assigned to operations in tropical areas brought back new resilient
diseases which then gained a foothold in the United States. Debate was
fierce over the new law requiring long-term quarantine of troops
returning from Third World operations. American efforts at counterinsurgency during the mid-1990s were no
more successful. Whether facing commercial insurgents such as
narcotraffickers or spiritual insurgents attempting to forge new
systems of identity and personal meaning in their nations, we found
that our allies were penetrated with enemy agents, corrupt, and unable
to ameliorate the severe political, economic, and social problems that
had given rise to insurgency. When a number of these allied
governments collapsed, we were privately relieved but publicly aware
of the precipitous decline in our prestige. At times, the United
States tottered dangerously close to being the "poor, pitiful giant"
Richard Nixon warned against. In areas where the United States was not militarily involved, the
major trends of the 1990s were the disintegration of nations,
ungovernability, ecological decay, and persistent conflict. Much of
this had a direct impact on the United States whether by generating
waves of desperate immigrants, inspiring terrorists frustrated by our
failure to solve their nations' problems, creating health and
ecological problems which infiltrated the continental United States,
or increasing divisiveness in the robustly multicultural American
polity. This series of fiascos led a small number of American political
leaders, senior military officers, and national security experts to
conclude that a revolution was needed in the way we approached
conflict short of war. They held the Vietnam-inspired doctrine of the
1980s and 1990s directly responsible for these disasters. Only radical
innovation, they concluded, could renew U.S. strategy and avoid a
slide into the global irrelevance. Nearly everyone agreed the old
strategic framework which coalesced in the 1960s was bankrupt. This
thinking, derived from the Marshall Plan, sought to use American aid
and advice to ameliorate the "root causes" of conflict in the Third
World and build effective, legitimate governments. By the 1990s this
was impossible or, at least, not worth the costs. Few, if any, Third
World governments had the inherent capability of becoming stable and
legitimate even with outside assistance. The revolutionaries' first task was to recruit proselytes
throughout the government and national security community. Initially
the revolutionaries, who called their new strategic concept "Dynamic
Defense," were opposed by isolationists who felt that new technology
should be used simply to build an impenetrable electronic and physical
barrier around the United States. Eventually the revolutionaries
convinced the president-elect following the campaign of 2000 that
Dynamic Defense was both feasible and effective--a task made easier by
his background as a pioneering entrepreneur in the computer-generated
and controlled "perception-molding" systems developed by the
advertising industry. The President was thus amenable to the use of
the sort of psychotechnology which formed the core of the RMA in
conflict short of war. The first step in implementing Dynamic Defense was reshaping the
national security organization and its underlying attitudes and
values. Technology provided opportunity; only intellectual change
could consolidate it. With the full and active support of the
President, the revolutionaries reorganized the American national
security system to make maximum use of emerging technology and new
ideas. This loosely reflected the earlier revolution in the world of
business, and sought to make the U.S. national security organization
more flexible and quicker to react to shifts in the global security
environment. The old Cold War structures--the Department of Defense,
Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security
Council, and others--were replaced by two organizations. One
controlled all U.S. actions designed to prevent conflict, including
economic assistance programs and peacetime diplomacy. The second was
responsible for containing conflict by orchestrating sanctions,
quarantines, embargoes, the building of multinational coalitions, and
conflict short of war. This integrated the military, civilian law
enforcement, the diplomatic corps, and organizations responsible for
gathering and analyzing intelligence. Since so many of the conflicts
faced by the United States were "gray area" threats falling somewhere
in between traditional military problems and traditional law
enforcement problems, the organizational division between the two was
abolished. Moreover, many aspects of national security were
civilianized or sub-contracted to save costs.42 One of the most difficult dimensions of the reorganization was
altering the dominant ethos of the armed forces. As technology changed
the way force was applied, things such as personal courage,
face-to-face leadership, and the "warfighter" mentality became
irrelevant. Technological proficiency became the prime criterion for
advancement within the military while the officer corps came to
consider research universities such as Cal Tech and MIT its breeding
ground rather than increasingly archaic institutions like West Point
and Annapolis. For the military, the most common career track
alternated assignments in national security with ones in business and
science. Since physical endurance was not particularly important,
military careers no longer ended after 20 or 30 years. In fact,
soldiers and officers were given few responsibilities until the
twentieth year of their careers. As proposed by Carl Builder, the Army
was organized into highly specialized units permanently associated
with a territorial franchise.43 Careers were within one of these
units, thus allowing all soldiers and officers to develop the sort of
language and cultural abilities previously limited to Special Forces
and Foreign Area Officers. One of the turning points of the revolution came when its leaders
convinced the President and key members of Congress that traditional
American ethics were a major hinderance to the RMA. This was crucial:
the revolutionaries and their allies then crafted the appropriate
attitudinal vessel for the RMA. Through persistent efforts and very
sophisticated domestic "consciousness-raising," old-fashioned notions
of personal privacy and national sovereignty changed. This was
relatively easy since frustration with domestic crime had already
begun to alter attitudes and values. In fact, the RMA in conflict
short of war was, in many ways, a spin-off of the domestic "war on
drugs and crime" of the late 1990s when the military, as predicted by
William Mendel in 1994, became heavily involved in support to domestic
law enforcement.44 The changes in American values that accompanied
that struggle were easily translated to the national security
arena. Once the norms concerning personal privacy changed, law soon
followed. Old-fashioned ideas about information control and scientific
inquiry also changed. Preventing enemies (or potential enemies) from
responding to our technological advantages became a prime objective of
U.S. national security strategy. The government closely controlled and
monitored foreign students attending American universities and
exchanges of information within the global scientific and business
communities. When necessary, the government protected valuable
information through outright deception. And the national security
community cooperated closely with business on counterespionage,
providing training, advice, and equipment. With values changed, technology then opened the door to profound
innovation. Vast improvements in surveillance systems and information
processing made it possible to monitor a large number of enemies (and
potential enemies). In the pre-RMA days, psychological operations and
psychological warfare were primitive. As they advanced into the
electronic and bioelectronic era, it was necessary to rethink our
ethical prohibitions on manipulating the minds of enemies (and
potential enemies) both international and domestic. Cutting-edge
pharmaceutical technology also provided tools for national security
strategists. Sometimes the revolutionaries found it necessary to stoke the
development of technology designed specifically for conflict short of
war. Whenever possible, profitability was used to encourage private
and quasi-private enterprises to develop appropriate technology. For
example, much of the lucrative technology of surveillance,
intelligence collection, and attitude manipulation used to solve the
domestic crime problem was easily adapted to conflict short of
war. The same held for new weapons, especially nonlethal biological
ones and advanced psychotechnology. Only when there was absolutely no
expectation of profit did the government directly sponsor research of
cutting-edge technology, often with funds freed by disbanding what
were seen as increasingly irrelevant conventional military forces. All of this reorganization and technological development was
simply preface for the full flowering of the revolution in military
affairs. American leaders popularized a new, more inclusive concept of
national security. No distinction--legal or otherwise--was drawn
between internal and external threats. In the interdependent 21st
century world, such a differentiation was dangerously nostalgic. The
new concept of security also included ecological, public health,
electronic, psychological, and economic threats. Illegal immigrants
carrying resistant strains of disease were considered every bit as
dangerous as enemy soldiers. Actions which damaged the global ecology,
even if they occurred outside the nominal borders of the United
States, were seen as security threats which should be stopped by force
if necessary. Computer hackers were enemies. Finally, external
manipulation of the American public psychology was defined as a
security threat. The actual strategy built on the RMA was divided into three
tracks. The first sought to perpetuate the revolution. Its internal
dimension institutionalized the organizational and attitudinal changes
that made the revolution possible, and pursued future breakthroughs in
close conjunction with business, the scientific community, and local
law enforcement agencies--the core troika of 21st century
security. The external dimension actively sought to delay or prevent
counterresponses by controlling information and through
well-orchestrated deception. The second track consisted of offensive action. Our preference was
preemption. In a dangerous world, it was preferable to kill terrorists
before they could damage the ecology or strike at the United
States. While Americans had long supported this in theory, the RMA
allowed us to actually do it with minimal risk just as the Industrial
Revolution allowed 19th century strategists to build the massive
militaries they had long desired. If regional conflicts--whether
ethnic, racial, religious, or economic--did not damage the global
ecology or appear likely to bring disease or violence to the United
States, they were ignored. When conflicts seemed likely to generate
direct challenges, the United States did not attempt ultimate
resolution, but only to preempt and disrupt whatever aspect of the
conflict seemed likely to endanger us. In the quest for strategic
economy, preemption was the byword. Since the RMA made preemption
quick, covert, usually successful, and politically acceptable, the
United States gradually abandoned collective efforts. Nearly all
allies, with their old-fashioned, pre-RMA militaries, proved more an
encumbrance than a help. When preemption failed, the United States
sought either passive containment which included isolation and
quarantines, or active containment where strikes (electronic,
psychological, or physical) were used to limit the spread of the
deleterious effects of a conflict. For opponents with the ability to
harm the United States, the military preemptively destroyed their
capabilities. The third track of the strategy was defensive, and included
missile defense, cyberspace defense, and rigid immigration control. By 2010, the RMA accomplished its desired objectives. Most of the
time, we prevented Third World conflict from directly touching our
shores. Probably the finest hour of the new warriors was the Cuba
preemption of 2005--Operation Ceberus. This was so smooth, so
effective that it warrants explanation. Following the overthrow of
Fidel Castro in 1995 by a popular revolt, an elected government of
national unity quickly proved unable to engineer massive economic and
ecological reconstruction of the country or build a stable
democracy. Frequent seizures of emergency powers and fraudulent
elections were the rule. Within a few years, nostalgia for the
stability of the old regime gave rise to an armed insurgency; most of
the front-line rebels were former members of Castro's security forces
and military. The United States refused to directly support the
corrupt and inept regime, but recognized that the conflict required
our attention. The operation officially began when the President transferred the
Cuban portfolio from the Conflict Preemption Agency to the Conflict
Containment Agency. An existing contingency plan with implementing
software provided the framework for quick action. Immediately, all
electronic communication in and out of Cuba was surreptitiously
transferred to the national security filter at Fort Meade. This
allowed full monitoring, control, and, when necessary, manipulation of
private, commercial, and government signals. Potential or possible
supporters of the insurgency around the world were identified using
the Comprehensive Interagency Integrated Database. These were
categorized as "potential" or "active," with sophisticated
computerized personality simulations used to develop, tailor, and
focus psychological campaigns for each. Individuals and organizations with active predilections to support
the insurgency were targets of an elaborate global ruse using computer
communications networks and appeals by a computer-generated insurgent
leader. Real insurgent leaders who were identified were left in place
so that sophisticated computer analysis of their contacts could be
developed. Internecine conflict within the insurgent elite was
engineered using psychotechnology. Psychological operations included
traditional propaganda as well as more aggressive steps such as drug-
assisted subliminal conditioning. At the same time, Cubans within the
United States and around the world were assigned maximum surveillance
status to monitor their physical presence and communications
webs. This thwarted several attempts to establish terrorist cells in
the United States. Within Cuba itself, fighting was widespread. Several acts of
industrial and ecological terrorism led to the outbreak of
disease. U.S. forces under the command of the Conflict Containment
Agency helped control these while limiting the chance of their own
infection by "stand-off" and robotic medical and humanitarian
relief. Naturally all food supplies contained a super long-lasting
sedative. This calmed local passions and led to an immediate decline
in anti-regime activity. Where there were no direct U.S. relief
efforts, sedatives were dispersed using cruise missiles. In areas
thought to have high areas of insurgent activity, the dosage was
increased. Since all Americans in Cuba had been bioelectrically tagged and
monitored during the initial stages of the conflict, the NEO went
smoothly, including the mandatory health screening of all those
returning to the United States. Coast Guard aircraft and hovercraft
stanched illegal refugees. The attitude-shaping campaigns aimed at the
American public, the global public, and the Cuban people went quite
well, including those parts using computer-generated broadcasts by
insurgent leaders--"morphing"-- in which they were shown as
disoriented and psychotic. Subliminal messages surreptitiously
integrated with Cuban television transmissions were also helpful.45 In
fact, all of this was so successful that there were only a few
instances of covert, stand-off military strikes when insurgent targets
arose and government forces seemed on the verge of defeat. U.S. strike
forces also attacked neutral targets to support the psychological
campaign as computer-generated insurgent leaders claimed credit for
the raids. At times, even the raids themselves were computer-invented
"recreations." (These were a specialty of the Army's elite Sun Tzu
Battalion.) Eventually it all worked: the insurgents were discredited and
their war faded to simmering conflict unlikely to directly threaten
the United States. Even the relatively unimportant criticism from
domestic political groups was stilled when the President temporarily
raised the quota of Cuban orphans eligible for adoption in the United
States. Unfortunately, there are growing signs in 2010 that the great
advantages brought by the RMA might be eroding. With a decade to
adapt, many opponents of the United States both state and non-state
actors are themselves bending technology to their ends. While none can
match the prowess of American forces across the board, indications are
that by concentrating on one potential weakness of U.S. forces,
enemies might be able to increase the human costs of intervention and,
if not defeat the United States, at least deny us success. The RMA has
amplified our distaste for death, a liability our enemies initially
disdained and are now learning to manipulate in simple, low-tech ways. In 2010, a decade of constant success in counterterrorism was
marred by several dramatic failures. The post-attack environmental
clean-up and reconstruction of St. Louis will take decades. Many of
the difficult-to-detect drugs and psychotechnology developed for use
in conflict short of war have appeared on the domestic black market
and, increasingly, in American schools and workplaces. Perhaps most
important, Americans are beginning to question the economic, human,
and ethical costs of our new strategy. A political movement called the
"New Humanitarianism" is growing, especially among Americans of
non-European descent, and seems likely to play a major role in the
presidential election of 2012. There are even rumblings of discontent
within the national security community as the full meaning of the
revolution becomes clear. Since the distinction between the military
and non-military components of our national security community has
eroded, many of those notionally in the military service have to come
to feel unbound by traditional notions of civil-military
relations. This group has founded a new political party The Eagle
Movement which is beginning to exert great pressure on the traditional
political parties for inclusion in national policymaking. The
traditional parties are, to put it lightly, intimidated by the Eagle
Movement, and seem likely to accept its demands.
-- Mind Control: TT&P ==> http://www.datafilter.com/mc Home page: http://www.datafilter.com/alb Allen Barker
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