State Terrorism

Hideous Kinky by Chris Floyd: "And so it was again this week when The Washington Post outlined the Pentagon's plan to put dirty war – by death squad, snatch squad, secret armies, subversion, torture and terrorism – at the very heart of America's military philosophy. Not defense against declared enemies, not deterrence of potential foes, but conducting "continuous" covert military operations in countries "where the United States is not at war" is now the Pentagon's "highest priority," according to the new "campaign plan for the global war on terror" issued by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

What's more, the plan makes it clear that Rumsfeld, far from being politically vulnerable, has in fact been exalted above every other institution and official of the U.S. government, with the exception of the twin tyrants in the White House, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The Pentagon warlord has been given carte blanche to send the 53,000 secret soldiers of the Special Operations Command into any nation he pleases, to undertake any mission he pleases, without congressional approval, legal restraint or the authority of the target nation's U.S. ambassador. Thus America's diplomats, the ostensible representatives of the nation abroad, have been reduced to mere frontmen, pathetic beards for black ops savaging the laws, sovereignty and citizens of their hosts.

The plan is the culmination and codification of an ad hoc array of programs and powers that Bush has doled out to Rumsfeld over the years, including a series of executive orders signed after the 2004 election that essentially turned the world into a "global free-fire zone" for the Pentagon's secret armies and proxy foreign militias, as a top Pentagon official told The New Yorker. "We're going to be riding with the bad boys," another Bush insider said. Yet another courtier compared it to the glory days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." The overriding ethos of the plan is brutally simple: "The rules are, 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want,'" an intelligence official told The New Yorker.

Perhaps most ominously, the plan makes copious preparations for expanding the range of the war on terror even further. The trigger for these new actions is another terrorist strike on U.S. soil. Oddly enough, the Bush faction views such an unspeakable horror as an "opportunity," Pentagon officials told the Post; it would provide a "justification," they said, for hitting already-targeted individuals, groups and states that for various political reasons have not yet been subjected to what Bush likes to call, in his bloodthirsty parlance, "the path of action."

Rumsfeld's 'campaign plan' is itself a blueprint for state terrorism, an open license to break any and every law on earth and inflict human suffering on a global scale. Yet the only controversial aspect of this sinister program noted by the Post was the potential turf battles it might spark within the national security bureaucracy. Not a single question was raised about the morality or legality of the undertaking; the Pentagon's assertion that only 'bad guys' would be hit was simply swallowed whole – despite the glaring fact that tens of thousands of innocent people have already been killed or falsely imprisoned in the so-called 'war on terror.'"