Signs of an America in Collapse

JohnAllen, NATO commander in Afghanistan, issues a statement on the latestdesecration of Afghan corpses by his soldiers

ByRichard Edmondson

In roughlythe past week we’ve seen reports of deformed marine life, including eyeless shrimp, being found in the Gulf ofMexico; military Blackhawk helicopters frightening citizens in Chicago by conducting low-altitudedrills in formation; members of the president’s Secret Service detail dallyingwith prostitutes; released photos of US soldiers posing with corpses; and avideo showing Coast Guard personnel severing the legs of live goats as part of a “training” exercise.

We alsohave a lawsuit filed by two women alleging theywere raped while attending, respectively, the United States Military Academy atWest Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Sexual assault ofwomen in the military is of course nothing new, but in this case one of the plaintiffs,Leah Marquet, 20, says that after reporting the incident to school authorities(at West Point), she was humiliated by being forced to take out her attacker’strash.

Keep inmind all of these incidents occurred or were made public in the space of about oneweek. Looked at separately or individually, they could each be dismissed ascurious, slightly bizarre episodes, news items one might perhaps remark uponwhile chatting around the office water cooler. But examined as a group, and asdistinctive nibbles of a relatively brief news cycle, they are symptomatic of anation in collapse, a society in a state of moral rot and exuding afoul-smelling breath detectable by anyone who may be unfortunate enough to bestanding nearby.

Inresponse to the latest revelations about desecration of corpses in Afghanistan,U.S. officials, predictably, rushed to dismiss it as nothing more than themisconduct of a few bad apples in the military.

“Theactions of the individuals photographed do not represent the policies ofInternational Security Assistance Force or the U.S. Army,” said U.S. GeneralJohn Allen, NATO commander in Afghanistan—while Defense Secretary Leon Panettaclaimed the behavior “absolutely violates both our regulations and, moreimportantly, our core values.” Similar statements were issued by U.S.Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker and White House Press Secretary JayCarney.

American soldiers (center) pose with a pair of dismembered legs. Notice the Afghan on the right isn’t smiling. Is it any wonder the U.S. now has a problem with “green on blue” attacks, i.e. Afghan forces turning their guns on their NATO handlers?

What hasthese officials so concerned is an April 18 report in the L.A. Times about a series of photosdepicting U.S. soldiers posing with corpses and, in one case, displaying thesevered legs of what is alleged to have been a suicide bomber. The smiling soldiershave been identified as members of the 82^nd Airborne based out ofFort Bragg, North Carolina, and the photos reportedly were furnished to the newspaperby a fellow 82^nd member said to be “concerned about a lack ofdiscipline, leadership and security that he said compromised soldiers’safety”—not the safety of Afghan civilians, mind you, just the soldiers.

Onewonders why officials like Panetta any longer bother issuing statements aboutAmerican “values” when such comments by now are almost certainly regarded assuspect by a huge portion of the world’s population and probably even by a goodmany Americans.

For ofcourse the April 18 revelations come hot on the heels of a shooting rampage by an Army sergeant in Marchthat left 17 Afghan civilians dead…andthe burning of Korans in February…and the urinating upon Afghan corpses by U.S. Marines as shown in avideo which surfaced in January…and yet more photos, first published in Marchof last year, of a kill team within the 5^th StrykerBrigade, a group of soldiers who murdered Afghan civilians for fun, reportedly takingmementos of their atrocities such as bones and severed fingers. All of this ofcourse being vaguely reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib photos that first outragedthe Muslim world way, way back in2004.

Ofcourse it isn’t only nations in the Middle East which must keep an apprehensiveeye on the behavior of U.S. military forces. Police state repression is cominghome to America big time, and like in Afghanistan, NATO once again figures intothe picture. On May 20-21 a NATO summit will be held in Chicago, and on Monday,April 16, residents of that city looked up to see a sky full of helicopters, somehovering at times in close-order formation, in what appeared to be a militaryexercise in preparation for the summit.

Accordingto the local Fox News affiliate, the aerial vehicles circled“low through downtown Chicago skies,” making for “a scary scene along theChicago River, as they rattled windows flying among the city’s skyscrapers.”

“It wasfrightening,” said Jessica Hill. “I was definitely alarmed.”

“I waspretty amazed,” Felise Llano said, “because they were definitely military.”

Thereport also makes mention of armed men spotted hanging out of some of thehelicopters.

At leastthree of the helicopters were large, Blackhawk helicopters, though these wereaccompanied by a number of smaller helicopters of the MH-6 variety, or possiblythe MH-6’s attack version, the AH-6. The MH-6/AH-6 helicopters are sometimesreferred to as the “Little Bird” or the “Killer Egg,” according to Wikipedia.

 

The Intelhub website also posted an articleon the Chicago episode, calling it a “shocking display of the police state andthe creeping push towards actual martial law,” additionally noting the drill’ssimilarity to recent urban warfare exercises in both Los Angeles and Miami.

Theapproaching NATO summit is affecting Chicago residents in other ways as well. Residentsof downtown apartment buildings have been notified they will most likely needidentification to get into their own apartments, while Chicago school childrenare “being brainwashed into literally worshipping NATO and the militaryindustrial complex.”

Interestingly,the Intelhub site, on the same page as the helicopter story, also featuresseveral ads targeting what might be described as a “survivalist” audience. Oneof the products advertised is a “survival seed vault” marketed by aMyPatriotSupply.com. Journeying out onto the Internet, we can also find aconsiderable number of survival oriented websites— here, here, here, here, and here, to cite but a few—all warning ofa coming American catastrophe—plus an Off Grid Surival portal, with links to roughly a hundred differentsurvival sites and blogs!

And atleast one organization, a Florida-based group called Biospharms, is even encouraging Americansto relocate to an ARC (agricultural retreat community) set up in Belize. Thesite offers instructional videos on sustainable agriculture, including how tobuild a “tilapia pond” (tilapia fish with a duck hutch suspended in the airabove the water. The duck droppings fall through the mesh floor into the pond,fertilizing algae and fern grass, which the fish then eat.). What is clear fromall this is that at least a small, but probably growing, percentage ofAmericans are considering a number of options—including getting out of thecountry.

The rothas even spread into the Secret Service, the elite government agency chargedwith protecting the president and his family. Not only did agents solicitprostitutes in Cartagena, Columbia, but then, having spent the night with them,apparently, at least in some cases, also refused to pay the girls the amountagreed upon.

One ofthe women told the New York Times that the American who sat besideher at the Hotel Caribe bar, and eventually invited her back to his room,agreed to pay her $800. At 6:30 the next morning, however, he refused thishigher amount, handing her instead a measly 50,000 pesos (approximately $30).As one might expect, an argument ensued. Things escalated to the point where hotelsecurity, and eventually local police, became involved. The American men at thehotel, by this time eager to resolve the matter discreetly, gave the youngwoman a combination of dollars and pesos worth about $225—still about $575short of her normal fee.

In herinitial interview with the media, the girl refused to give her name, however,more recently she has beenidentified as one “Dania,” the single mother of a nine-year-old son.

Thoughthe empire may be in a state of decline, don’t get the idea that it isn’t stilldeadly. And don’t get the idea, either, that bipeds are its only victims. Itwas Gandhi who said, “You can judge the morality ofa nation by the way the society treats its animals,” and if we go by thatstandard, the U.S. Coast Guard would have to be judged pretty bereft of moralsalso these days. A video released April 18 by People for the Ethical Treatmentof Animals (PETA) shows a Coast Guard training exercise in Virginia Beach,Virginia in which instructors with a company hired by the military are seen usinga tree-branch trimmer to cut off the legs of goats. Though sedated, the animalsare alive—and later in the day they were reportedly shot in the face withpistols and hacked apart with an ax. Some of the participants in the exerciseare heard on the video whistling and making jokes. PETA’s report on the matterand its video can be accessed here. (Hat tip to Kenny at Kenny’s Sideshow for the link.)

Andfinally, the cancerous rot of the BP oil spill has pretty much metastasizedthroughout the entire ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico. April 20 marked thetwo-year anniversary of the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, andon April 18 journalist Dahr Jamail filed a report documenting a host ofdeformities now being found in Gulf marine life. These include crabs lackingeyes and claws, eyeless shrimp, and fish oozing with sores and lesions. “Disturbingly,not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets,” one of thepeople quoted in the story says. Reportedly some 400 pounds of such mutatedshrimp have been found in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay.

As Iremarked in an article posted for the anniversary of the disaster, “The oilspill released at least 4.9 million barrels of oil—a disaster bad enough in andof itself. But then in an effort to hide the oil from public view by sinking itto the bottom of the ocean, BP compounded the problem exponentially by sprayingsome 1.9 million gallons of a toxic dispersant known as Corexit over theaffected area.” The post, which includes an embedded video featuring Jamail asa guest on an Aljazeera talk show, is entitled, ‘What’s for dinner, honey?’ ‘Eyelessshrimp.’—fittingenough, I suppose, given that U.S. government agencies continue to insist Gulfseafood is “safe” to eat. In fact, as Jamail has reported, “they don’t evenacknowledge there’s a problem.”

Asdocumented in an article here, BP has a lengthy track recordof placing profits above safety, yet so far none of its executives have everbeen held criminally liable. In the last two years the company has paid outsome $30 billion in claims settlements and cleanup costs. There have been timesin the past, prior to the Gulf disaster, when it would occasionally also gethit with government fines. But all these expenses—fines, cleanup costs, etc.— aresimply factored in as the cost of doing business, and the giant corporationremains very profitable. Last year alone it collected more than $375 billion inrevenue, pocketing roughly $26 billion in profits. In my “What’s for dinner”post, I wrote the following:

Nowhere’s something you might want to think about between now and election day inNovember. Why did the Obama administration allow the poisoning of the foodchain? If you go here, you can read about how the EPAknew full well how toxic Corexit is. So why did the president sit back and letit go on? In asking this question, I’m certainly not suggesting Mitt Romneywould have done anything any differently. He most likely would have allowed thespraying too. That’s simply how the government functions, whether there’s aDemocrat or a Republican in office. Bankers, corporations, and powerful lobbygroups write their own rules, and the rest of us—and the planet itself—pay theprice when the inevitable disaster strikes.

Certainwriters have observed recently that every 500 years or so the geopoliticalpower balance in the world undergoes a shift between east and west, with one risingand the other falling, and speculations are now rife all over the Internet, herefor instance, that such a shift is imminent. The religions of the world(perhaps optimistically) tell us that good in the end triumphs over evil. Ifthat is so, and if the theory of the 500-year cycle is correct, we could wellbegin to see this realignment process begin to accelerate. And what of humanityin the meantime? Those grounded in morality and spiritual awareness willnaturally begin to gravitate toward the east (either physically, or, at very least,in how they think, relate, or self-identify), while those of a more worldly anddecadent bent will embrace the increasingly corrupt west. This actually hasalready begun to happen. Consider westerners such as LaurenBooth, decent, principled people who, finding much lacking in their ownculture, have converted to Islam.

Wouldthat we could all go our own ways, flitter off in our own preferred directions,and leave it at that. But as we all know, the west has a bloodlust and a thirstfor war and conquest. And therein lies the problem—and it’s not hard, in factit’s quite easy, to imagine all this playing out in some sort of Armageddon-likescenario. But of course isn’t that what virtually every prophet from virtuallyevery faith and religion virtually the world over predicted?

Yes,America is in decline. All the signs are there. And that, in fact, makes thesituation even more dangerous. The country has been bankrupted by wars, greed,political corruption, and plain-out ignorance. The question arises, of course, asto how much of a role Jewish power and Zionism have played in America’sdownfall. Doubtless they have been major factors. But we should also rememberthat Americans were busy building an empire long before the Zionists climbed onboard and took over the ship of state. That a “special relationship” would cometo exist between these two countries was perhaps inevitable.

It was certainlya match made in heaven, or hell as the case may be.


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!