In the Fifties, Americans had the great General Dwight D. Eisenhower complete his term and step away from government, delivering his now famous speech warning the American people against the dangers of an unchecked and rampant military-industrial complex. His concerns weren’t unfounded.
To understand how vast the MIC is, we have to look at the ideas and concepts on which it was founded and shaped. By the time Kennedy had taken office, even he tried to speak to the American public about secret forces at work against them, to embolden themselves and be prepared to face this evil. This “evil”, so to speak, is rooted in undeniable, plain greed. And like any greedy person or business mogul you may have met or studied, they are willing to go to any length necessary to achieve their endgame. To propose what that endgame is would be errant and entirely supposition, so instead, I want to focus on a few pieces of history, with particular interest paid to the public relations campaigns, supporting legislation, and a handful of historical events for impacted proof of intent and capability.
When we speak of the “military-industrial complex”, the MIC hereafter, the phrase is comprised of two very telling words- implying at the outset that the profits of this business endeavor will have been derived in their entirety from the spoils of war, be it by military contract through the respective warring nations or by, literally, the spoils of war- decades of repayment in resources, trade, or outright money (don’t look up extortion yet.) The companies capable of creating a product that will take the most lives while expending the least will profit the most, every time. But, in war, the win doesn’t always come in outright body count, and the MIC knows this. It pumps an equally ridiculous amount of money into every aspect of warfare, from electronic surveillance to psychological operations and further.
In May of 1961, recognizing a need for a special operations group capable of identifying insurgent activity in light of the French war of attrition in Vietnam, President Kennedy dedicated the initial funding to create the first dedicated special operations teams under United States command. By 1962, Admiral Arleigh Burke had secured the majority of those funds for the US Navy and the SeAL program was born. In initial concept, the US Navy SeALs were supposed to be a guerrilla/counter-guerrilla warfare unit tasked to fight an increasingly unconventional methodology of warfare. With this line of thinking came a very critical change in the school of thought amidst the leaders of the US military: incredibly rapid, swarming movement resulting in extraordinary violence accomplishes every desired task in war- the enemy is defeated at hand, and anyone left to hear about it is psychologically impaired, if only by innate fear.
This is evident in the pervasive legends that surrounded them in combat in the Mekong Delta region of South Vietnam. South Vietnam was a “friendly” area, home to both Armed Republic of Viet Nam fighters and US forces, as well as Hmong fighters from the mountains of north and northwest Viet Nam. Many of the ARVN and Hmong fighters had family, friends, and distant relatives in neighboring Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, and all of them knew that the riverine boat operators were the same shadowy people known as “the Men with Green Faces.” The Navy liked this legend so much that they made a training/propaganda video about it in the mid-eighties.
When the United States committed American troops to Vietnam in 1964, the first wave of soldiers were special operators with the United States Army’s Special Forces, or the Green Berets. The Green Berets had long specialized in a form of psychological warfare critical to their objective- “winning the hearts and minds” of the local populations while maintaining operational capacity. This was achieved through purposeful planning and careful budgeting to allow for gifts of money or goods to the indigenous people near or within the unit’s area of operations.
These units were primarily for reconnaissance, providing vital hands on intelligence data and physical monitoring of mission-critical sites or personnel.
After its creation in 1947, the CIA wasted no time analyzing after-action reports from various actions in every conflict for which records had been kept. When the quality of intelligence collected was found to be exponentially increased by having physical reconnaissance teams on the ground, the partnership between the CIA’s operations department and the US military’s special operations units was forged inseparably. The first notable incarnation of this marriage was the Military Assistance Command- Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group, or MACV-SOG. MACV-SOG, as far as military units go, was comprised of the absolute baddest motherfuckers on the planet, for lack of a better term. From their corpsman to their support crews and pilots, these operators were peerless. From these units came the Air America units, the famed SEaL Dick Marcinko (of Seal Team 6 fame), and a fat stack of the war hero stories told by guys that probably aren’t really SeALs.
All of this hands-on intel was great to the CIA, but they found that it was impossible to know the inner workings of the Viet Cong guerrilla forces without having an insider to relay the conversations had in underground tunnels and bunkers, behind closed doors, or on the north side of the demilitarized zone. It was quickly decided that getting a turncoat would be next to impossible, and it would take too long to train and set a plant to be actionable. In July 1967, MACV-SOG devised the answer to that plan. Originally titled “Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation for Attack on VC Infrastructure”, the operational plan was soon called just Operation Phoenix, the Phoenix Project, or simply; Phoenix.
The Phoenix Project consisted of two simple facets of operation, the intelligence side and the operations side. Operators would go into the field, to a suspected hotspot for Communist, NVA sympathizer, or VietCong support (and in some cases, just a random village. Who knows, that guy might know something.) Initially, teams of operators were to go into the suspected areas and detain a preselected person of interest for questioning. After the Tet Offensive of 1968, these efforts were ramped exponentially. Stories among ARVN soldiers reflected tales of village leaders being abducted in broad daylight, of people leaving their home briefly for an errand and never returning; families spoke of having loved ones answer the door to be greeted by American voices behind gloved hands moments before a fatal gunshot.
The stories that came out of Operation Phoenix go much further than that. I, personally, was told a story by a Vietnamese refugee named Bang Tran in 1996. His uncle had been picked up during the day for questioning. According to Mr. Tran’s account, after eight days of beatings and simulated hangings, he was released- from a helicopter high enough over a rice paddy to break both of his legs and hips. I had the pleasure of growing up near Mr. Tran, and although he treated me well and with respect, he never looked at my father in the same light after having learned that he was a US veteran. When my father had flashbacks, I told his son Jeff about them, and Jeff told me that his dad, too, had nightmares of the war. After Jeff had talked with his father, he came back the next day to tell me something that I think of often. “My father said when he has bad dreams of the war, every one he has is of men like your father destroying his town. He has those dreams every night that they speak.” Even knowing that he felt that way, he never avoided conversation. Remarkable strength.
I point out the significance of his resolve due to the following figures. Even conservative estimates are staggering. Wikipedia alleges that over 81,000 people were neutralized through the Operation Phoenix program. From the US Congress’s own report, the Phoenix Program took over 20,000 lives. (1965-72 U.S. Congress,Church Committee Report. (1976) B 1 27.) While the disparity between the figures is notable, the simple math- seven years, conservatively speaking, twenty-thousand people… 2800 or so a year, or a little over 7 AND A HALF PEOPLE A DAY. Operation Phoenix became, literally, the infantry version of the Air Force’s Linebacker bombing campaign. A target would be selected, and it would be taken. If he had no information, the team would return under the cover of darkness.
It’s not a matter of American pride, or achievement in military might; it’s a simple truth: if a special operations team is sent for an objective, their methodology is relatively simple. Attack incredibly fast, with extraordinary violence. And that’s what they did on those return trips. The myths of ears on necklaces, villages burned to the ground, people answering their doors to receive a bullet in the head? They aren’t myth. They’re absolute fact, discussed in a VAST number of “literary” works by some of the men that conducted those operations. The United States had officially sanctioned an intelligence organization with the ability to kill. And they used it. Not since the scathing sweeps of the German SS police in World War Two had the planet seen such a rapid, efficient kidnapping and killing machine.
I say all of this with the burden of shame in my heart and fear in my head. I am an American by birth, and I cling to the principles on which this country was founded, the same principles I was taught as a child, to which I’ve sworn allegiance every time I’ve seen the flag. And it’s with that love of this country that I take this piece to its completion. I thank you for having read this far, and I ask that you please, just finish. Do it for the families of those that disappeared during the Vietnam conflict. Do it for the Vietnamese men that sent money across the DMZ to their families in North Vietnam, that were then selected for “aiding the enemy” and assassinated by the world’s finest trained, most highly motivated force.
Last year, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont released the Government Accountability Office’s finding of their audit of the Federal Reserve. While I won’t delve into the specifics of the findings, I will point out that there have been a high number of alleged conflicts of interest discovered (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/federal-reserve-audit-highlights-possible-conflicts-of-interest/2011/07/21/gIQAJbbnSI_story.html), and that the mathematical figures coming from that audit indicate that the Federal Reserve has been lending more than the entirety of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (http://www.unelected.org/audit-of-the-federal-reserve-reveals-16-trillion-in-secret-bailouts). These conflicts of interest are important not just in substance, but in highlighting a very, very real and important parallel.
Alex Jones and company have, for years, railed on about conspiracies of places like Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg Group, to name a couple. While the entire mystique of secret societies, social clubs, et cetera tend to drive away most people, the mixing companies of people that attend these meetings, heads of state, foreign dignitaries, domestic intelligence officials, generals; essentially, the movers and shakers of the military’s top brass in the decision-making department, the richest men in the world, and the elected leaders of sovereign nations discussing their trades, respectively, over drinks. If that wasn’t a bad enough concept, and problematic enough in its own right, we now have the richest corporations in the world employing the services of companies founded, run, and staffed by the same men that conduct operations like Phoenix.
Whether the recent Wikileaks findings are taken as damning against the corporations that retained Stratfor remains a mystery this early on, but an interesting and outright frightening aside MUST be noticed. We live in a country that was founded on the principles of rights granted by the Creator to ALL human beings, equally, regardless of race, nationality, or citizenship and that country has denigrated to become a nation that has openly adopted the exact tactics employed by the armed insurgents it now hunts actively in over 100 nations. While there are, undoubtedly, people that would seek to harm this nation, the time to cast a harsh introspective glance is long due.
We live in a country whose top corporations are willing to retain the services of, literally, corporate espionage agencies to conduct insurgent/counter-insurgent, surveillance/counter-surveillance tactics against their opposition, whomever it may be, from rival companies to activist groups of differing opinion. The same men that have conducted all of those operations run these companies, all of which were funded by banks run by men with whom they may have a fraternal relationship. Whether it be an old college friend, a fellow alum, a military buddy or the friend of a friend, those referrals all came on word of mouth in the early days, and it isn’t much different now. The proverbial “good old boy” system is undeniably present, both in this country’s colorful past, and right now in the top ranks of the military industrial complex.
With the great desire for more intelligence, the military strove for more money in research and development of intelligence and data gathering equipment. Any intel is good intel, so research contracts went out for cameras, microphones, communications equipment, cryptography, satellite communications/transmission, you name it- all data collected is intel. With the invention and quick spread of the internet, all data became something different: It became digital. It became binary. It became nothing more than code, which is text. And text can be intercepted. All digital data, at its root, is nothing more than a series of 1s and 0s arranged to form whatever the message/image is that is being transmitted, so the interception of ALL of the intel, not just bits and pieces from multiple sources (many of which were bad, see Stratfor’s HUMINT) became not just plausible but POSSIBLE.
The passing of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 made it largely legal for everyone that wasn’t a US citizen. However, with the burgeoning data on the FBI’s Carnivore program, that may not be the case. What’s more, whether all of the data collected during that period was archived or not, there are laws in place to protect your privacy with regards to searches of your property. Those laws, however, do not extend to your data transmitted, in most cases, on the Internet. I won’t discuss privacy legalities, as I’m not well versed there, but understand that, to your government, if it’s in the cloud it’s not private unless otherwise marked. Recent legislation that has been attempted would tie your physical location to all internet activity, which would provide an address for any user. On the surface, again, that isn’t a frightening proposal, if measures are taken to protect that information.
The newest bill to hit the wire and immediately cause flareup among the politically minded youth is the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, HR 347, which makes it a Federal, felonious offense to protest in presence of a Secret Service covered person or event, whether they are there or will be, whether they know or don’t know. This bill has come just in time for several major planned actions, all of which are widely known about by the Secret Service due to open source intelligence gathering conducted by the various government and corporate intelligence firms now known to be monitoring all social networks.
Still with me? Probably not. Here’s the end, and it’s happy and rainbows and unicorns.
Whether or not there really are FEMA camps, I don’t know. Whether or not the secure communities that have been built, and are being built, will be used to house inmates that aren’t involved with citizenship issues, I don’t know. But I would like to project a very real scenario. Please, read this, and understand that it’s real, and it’s my plight.
People that have, say, taken part in a denial of service (DDoS) protest against a company or website have, according to US cyberterrorism laws, committed an act of terrorism. Under the provisions of the NDAA, the same kind of men that conduct operations like Phoenix have been authorized to come to your home and detain your family members. Your friends. Your loved ones. Because of taking action in an act of protest that has no lasting effect on anything; not the company, not the computer, server, connection: nothing. If you have spoken out in support of those actions, you stand risk of being identified as a sympathizer.
I would like to imagine that, at no point, no American citizen will be confronted with an incredibly rapid assault force, employing explosive violence to confuse and destroy their ability to react. I would like to imagine that no American citizen would ever be arrested for supporting actions that express dissent, for expressing their First Amendment right to express that dissent. I would like to think that Americans have a right to discuss where they will meet to express that dissent, and to do so without fear of being beaten by the armed mass force awaiting their arrival (because the intel’s good, you know.) I’d like to think that there’s no way that anyone that ever expressed dissent online with their banks, the Federal Reserve, or the police would ever be identified as a target and abducted in plain daylight by uniformed men.
I’d like to think all of this, but while I do, let me tell you the rest of the story. I just have to go answer the door real quick.
keyserxsoze 