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An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.
Obama isn’t straddling a line between hawk and dove. He is a hawk.
It’s terrifying that isn’t clear to everyone, because it suggests the neoconservative desire for even more foreign wars is skewing the way that Americans conceive of hawkishness and dovishness. It suggests we’re defining “warmonger” down.
Here are the facts:
- Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars.
- He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security.
- He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan.
- He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.
- He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad.
- He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist.
- He expanded drone attacks into Somalia.
- He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia.
- He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America.
- He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism.
- He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.
In summary, President Obama escalated a major war and sent tens of thousands more troops to fight it, even as he joined in regime change in a different country, ordered drone strikes in at least three others, and sent commandos into Pakistan, a list of aggressive actions that isn’t even exhaustive.
We should be scared too.
The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.
New text to an old graph, but still as powerful as ever.
(via carpelibertatem)
Soldiers tend to see Paul as understanding the pressures they face better than the other candidates because he’s the only one in the group who served in uniform, as a flight surgeon in the Air Force and Air National Guard during the Vietnam era. The libertarian’s service gives him “street cred,” Kwiatkowski noted. ”We often in the military have no idea what the foreign policy or the military policy is. All we know is we get told to do things, and often these things are costly, dangerous, and unproductive, and create more insecurity for us and for the country.”
Literally now, apparently…
In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where, for the first time, security officials from both countries work side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations. Officials are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit.
Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced American surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption.
“A sea change has occurred over the past years in how effective Mexico and U.S. intelligence exchanges have become,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. “It is underpinned by the understanding that transnational organized crime can only be successfully confronted by working hand in hand, and that the outcome is as simple as it is compelling: we will together succeed or together fail.”
This is only the beginning. And it doesn’t end well.
Why Defense Cuts Are Nothing to Fear
The United States could substantially cut its defense budget and still spend more money on our military than every country that even plausibly threatens us combined. Can someone explain why that isn’t enough?
Read more at The Atlantic
It is in Washington.
