Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years in Wikileaks case

Bradley Manning (Photo credit: Truthout.org)

The US soldier convicted of handing a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website Wikileaks has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Pte First Class Bradley Manning, 25, was convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. Last week, he apologised for hurting the US and for "the unexpected results" of his actions.

Prosecutors had asked for a 60-year sentence in order to send a message to future potential leakers. Pte Manning will receive credit for time he has already served in jail, plus 112 days' credit in recompense for the harsh conditions of his confinement immediately after his arrest.

Military prisoners can earn time off their sentences for good behaviour but must serve at least one-third of any prison sentence before they can become eligible for parole. Read more >>

US Army Chief Suggests Military Intervention in Syria Before End of Summer

The U.S. Army’s top officer has said that the window of opportunity for a military assault on Syria is within the next three to four months and that budget cuts would render intervention after the end of summer unlikely.

Speaking with reporters yesterday Gen. Ray Odierno, Army chief of staff, warned that planned training cutbacks due to the sequester meant that if the Obama administration wanted to give the green light for intervention it would have to act quickly.

“Readiness is OK right now, but it’s degrading significantly because our training is reducing. So, the next three, four months, we probably have the capability to do it,” he said, adding, “Next year, it becomes a little bit more risky.”

Odierno made it clear that the longer it took to make the decision, the less likely the US is to intervene. Read more >>

Army Suicides This Year Exceed 2012 Combat Deaths in Afghanistan

The number of suicides among U.S. Army active duty and reserve personnel in 2012 is higher than the total combined military fatalities from Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan over the same timeframe.

Even without Army data for October, the number of deaths believed to be suicides among U.S. Army personnel from January through September still surpass the combined military combat deaths in Afghanistan from January up to October 22.

In 2012, there have been a total of 247 suspected suicides among Army active and reserve duty personnel. Of those, 158 have been confirmed as suicides and 89 remain under investigation. Read more >>

RAND Corporation Blueprint for US Gestapo Force

Image via Wikipedia

William Grigg
RAND Corporation Blueprint for Militarized “Stability Police Force”

The RAND Corporation, one of the most fecund research arms of the Military-Industrial-Homeland Security Complex, has released a study entitled A Stability Police Force for the United States: Justification and Creating U.S. Capabilities.

The SPFOR (to use the inevitable acronym) would be a “hybrid” military/law enforcement unit created within the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) for use “in a range of tasks such as crowd and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT), and investigations of organized criminal groups” — both abroad, in UN-directed multilateral military operations, and at home, as dictated by the needs of the Regime.

Initially as small as 2–6,000 personnel, the SPFOR’s size “could be increased by augmenting it with additional federal, state, or local police from the United States” as necessary.

The RAND study, which was conducted for the U.S. Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, recommended using the Marshals Service rather than the US Army’s Military Police as host for the SPFOR in order to avoid conflicts with the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids (albeit in principle more than in practice) the domestic use of the military as a law enforcement body.

“The USMS hybrid option … provides an important nondeployed mission for the force: augmenting state and local agencies, many of which currently suffer from severe personnel shortages,” states the report without explaining how the SPFOR could at once “augment” those under-manned agencies while at the same time being “augmented” by them if necessary.

That little lapse in logic is one of several indications that the report’s authors weren’t so much addressing a “problem” as making a case for a preordained “solution” — in this case, creating the vanguard of a militarized internal security force.

Building the SPFOR within the Marshals Service “would place it where its members can develop the needed skills under the hybrid staffing option,” summarizes the document. “Furthermore, the USMS has the broadest law enforcement mandate of any U.S. law enforcement agency…. [This model] provides significant domestic policing and homeland security benefits by providing thousands of additional police officers across the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

Back in 1961, the U.S. Government produced a document entitled “Freedom From War” that envisioned the creation of a globe-spanning United Nations “Peace Force” that would work in collaboration with a militarized “internal security” force in each country. Since that time, critics of the UN have anticipated the day when foreign “peacekeepers” would be assigned to police American streets and, if necessary, confiscate privately owned firearms.

While the monstrosity headquartered on the East River is a proper target of our scorn and hostility, the new RAND study underscores the fact that if “peacekeepers” end up patrolling American streets, they probably won’t be foreigners in blue berets, but homegrown jackboots commanded by Washington.

High-level officials warn economic crisis could lead to world-wide unrest

washingtonsblog.com

Numerous high-level officials and experts warn that the economic crisis could lead to unrest world-wide - even in developed countries:

• Today, Moody's warned that future tax rises and spending cuts could trigger social unrest in a range of countries from the developing to the developed world, that in the coming years, evidence of social unrest and public tension may become just as important signs of whether a country will be able to adapt as traditional economic metrics, that a fiscal crisis remains a possibility for a leading economy, and that 2010 would be a “tumultuous year for sovereign debt issuers”.

• The U.S. Army War College warned in 2008 November warned in a monograph [click on Policypointers’ pdf link to see the report] titled “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development” of crash-induced unrest:

  The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” The “widespread civil violence,” the document said, “would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” “An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home,” it went on. “Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance,” the document read.

• Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said:

  "The global economic crisis ... already looms as the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries ... Economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they are prolonged for a one- or two-year period," said Blair. "And instability can loosen the fragile hold that many developing countries have on law and order, which can spill out in dangerous ways into the international community."***
  
  "Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one-to-two-year period."***
  
  “The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.”
  
  Blair made it clear that - while unrest was currently only happening in Europe - he was worried this could happen within the United States.
  
  [See also this].
  

• Former national security director Zbigniew Brzezinski warned "there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots."
  

• The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned the the financial crisis is the highest national security concern for the U.S., and warned that the fallout from the crisis could lead to of "greater instability".

Others warning of crash-induced unrest include:

• The head of the World Trade Organization

• The head of the International Monetary Fund (and see this)

• The head of the World Bank

• Senator Christopher Dodd

• Congressman Ron Paul (radio interview on March 6, 2009)
  

• Britian's MI5 security agency

• Leading economic historian Niall Ferguson

• Leading economist Marc Faber and billionaire investor Jim Rogers

• Leading economist Nouriel Roubini

• Leading economist John Williams

• Top trend researcher Gerald Calente

• European think tank Leap2020

Oath Keepers Ready to Revolt

ALAN MAIMON
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.

More specifically, the group's members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming "giant concentration camps," a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years.

It's a Cold War-era nightmare vision with a major twist: The occupying forces in this imagined future are American, not Soviet.

"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer, said in an interview with the Review-Journal. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.

"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."

That type of rhetoric has caught the attention of groups that track extremist activity in the United States.

In a July report titled "Return of the Militias," the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center singled out Oath Keepers as "a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival."

The Patriot movement, so named because its adherents believe the federal government has stepped on the constitutional ideals of the American Revolution, gained traction in the 1990s and has been closely linked to anti-government militia and white supremacist movements. More...

Faith in the U.S. was sold by Congress to J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller

Image via Wikipedia

An excellent perspective by James Leroy Wilson:

The Coming Anarchy

Is secession ever justified?

Mainstream conservatives and progressives often encourage it in other countries - remember Kosovo - even as they deify Abraham Lincoln for preventing it in the U.S.

But consider what the federal government has done to us over the past century:

1. Fractional-reserve banking backed up by the Federal Reserve Board - creating a culture based on credit rather than saving
2. Relentless meddling in other countries - through war or coercion (forced "cooperation") - in order to expand markets for American corporations.
3. Prohibition or regulation of inexpensive or superior alternatives to corporate products - resulting in everything from the War on Drugs to the War on Hemp to the decline of small farms and small business.

More could be added to this list. My point is that, for anyone not blinded by nationalism, any of the three provide solid grounds for peaceful secession of the states from the Union. Together, they make a compelling case.

It could be asked if things would not be even worse after a formal break-up. The answer is that no one knows for sure. But some things are likely:

• The Federal Reserve would be put to an end. States that want to attract business and create jobs would have to figure out a better financial system for themselves.
• The wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq would end, as well as all of the overseas occupations, and no state would have the ability to wage non-defensive war. There'd be as much reason for terrorists to target American states as they do Norway or Luxembourg.
• There would be no more federal medical marijuana raids or BATFE sieges.
• Special interests and corporations would find it more difficult to bribe 50 state legislatures than just one Congress.

But nationalism makes neither peaceful nor violent secession likely. Over the past century the nationalists have effectively instilled their propaganda through public schools and in more subtle ways, such as placing the Flag of the United States in church sanctuaries. They have also effectively persuaded the people that a pro-secession argument is a pro-slavery argument. This is completely illogical, but it sticks. In any case, anyone who loses their faith in Washington DC is certainly not going to place it in Sacramento or Springfield or Albany.

But it is quite possible they'll lose their faith in DC. The American Empire is falling apart. Recall that in the last year of his Administration, Bush was unable to make war on Iran or stand up to Russia, as he desperately wanted to do. The country was simply too weak. And it is weaker now, diverting resources from the failed Iraq experiment into Afghanistan. Just as the USSR's empire imploded shortly after it ended its failed incursion in Afghanistan, the same might happen to the USA.

The USA is also weak financially. It doesn't have the money to pay for Medicare and Social Security. If Obama's domestic plans like Cap & Trade and Health Care "Reform" pass Congress, we will likely see a deepening recession alongside rampant inflation.

If the increasing numbers of jobless see the price of food and fuel soar, we could see civil unrest. If and when U.S. military troops are called in to suppress rioters - whether by this President or the next, whether in the inner city or at Tea Party-like protests - the end of the USA will be all but official.

There probably won't be any secession even at that time. Hard-line progressives and conservatives will still hold out hope that if the "right people" are in charge, things can get fixed.

But the foundation of the political system will be shaken forever. This foundation is the faith which the majority of the people have in the system. Their faith was actually sold by Congress to J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created. More and more of the people are realizing it now, but they're still in the minority.

If the unemployment rate and/or the inflation rate soars, and if the government becomes heavy-handed in controlling unrest, more and more Americans will lose their faith at an increasingly rapid rate.

When people lose their faith in a system they can not control, their only viable option is to drop out of it when possible and game it when necessary. They will seek allies with which to barter goods or services. They will reject Federal Reserve dollars when they can, or accept payments only in cash without reporting the income. A system of bribery based on special favors of "friends of friends" who work for the government will flourish. It might not be as brazen as in third-world countries, but could become equally rampant.

The "cheaters" and tax evaders would be so numerous that the government couldn't possibly catch them all.

Soon, people will form their own schools, as funding from DC will dry up. No longer will the USA threaten and coerce other countries. As soon as state and local police lose federal funding, they will stop providing SWAT back-ups of federal raids.

This future will be anarchy, not because there won't be a nominal government, but because the people will have lost faith in politics and thereby lose whatever trust they had in government. The people will treat it as an obstacle in their lives, to be worked around when possible and dealt with when necessary. But they'll stop voting and stop volunteering to put their lives at risk for the Flag.

This coming anarchy actually exists today. The world is the product of our beliefs, upon which we act. We let ourselves be governed only because we believe the government is more right than wrong, more good than bad. There is no "authority," there is only people with uniforms and guns, and you obey them either because you believe in what they do, or because you fear them. Either way, it's just your beliefs. But the less we admire or sacrifice for the government, and the more we comply out of fear and self-interest, the less the effective the State will be. Sooner or later, alternative institutions will spring up to provide security, legal adjudication, even money.

Even if the U.S. never faces a Berlin Wall moment, the people, by their beliefs and actions, can make the government increasingly irrelevant to their lives. And that doesn't have to begin at some future turning point, it can begin today.

About the Author:

James Leroy Wilson is author of Ron Paul Is A Nut (And So Am I). (Click here to get an autographed copy.) He blogs at Independent Country and writes for DownsizeDC.org. Opinions expressed here do not represent the views of DownsizeDC.org.