The cost in American lives has also been high. More than 400,000 American lives have been adversely affected by 11 years of pointless war. The deaths of 6,656 US troops, the 50,000 wounded, the 1,700 life-changing limb amputations, and the suicides are just the tip of the iceberg. Since the Bush-Obama wars began, 129,731 US troops have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. And now we learn from a new Congressional Research Service report that more than a quarter million of US troops have experienced Traumatic Brain Injury. Based on current diagnostic capability, three-fourths of the cases are classified as mild.
These lost, ruined and impaired lives affect also the lives of many others -- spouses, children, parents, siblings, and those disheartened by their government's pointless wars who have to care for the damaged. There are many Americans who have been collaterally damaged by Washington's pointless wars.
Will Americans wake up in time? I wish I could answer, "yes," but I regret that Americans are an insouciant people. They are unaware. Americans are more concerned with sports events, sales, and which celebrities are sleeping together than they are with their liberty. Washington can create a police state, because there are insufficient citizens with the intelligence, education, and awareness to stop Washington.
Congress has accepted the police state and has given up too much of its power to the executive branch and is too beholden to the special interests that benefit from the police state to do anything about it. Congress is even content for the CIA or the Pentagon, perhaps both, to murder by robot innocent people on the Benthamite presumption that at some future time they might commit a terrorist act. Some US Senators want a cloak of legality for the murders and suggest a secret court to rubber-stamp Obama's Kill List. CIA nominee director John Brennan reportedly objected to a secret court on the grounds that not all drone murders are retaliation; some victims are murdered for what some executive branch official thinks they might do at some future time, and without evidence the court would have nothing objective to go by.
The federal judiciary has proven to be almost as impotent. Federal judges did not ask federal prosecutors why, in violation of the whistleblower protection laws, they were prosecuting National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake for blowing the whistle on the NSA's illegal spying on US citizens instead of the officials who broke the law and committed felonies. Judges did not ask why CIA agent John Kiriakou was prosecuted for blowing the whistle on the torture program instead of those who committed crimes by authorizing and committing torture.
The innocent and the truth-tellers were prosecuted. The criminals and the liars were not. The federal judges went along with the Justice (sic) Department's prosecutions of those who obeyed the law and did their duty and non-prosecution of criminals who clearly without any doubt violated the law, trampled upon the US Constitution, and committed felonies.
In a police state it is always the innocent who are the most heavily punished. In his history, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn explains that in the prison camps, the Soviet equivalent to Guantanamo and the CIA's secret torture prisons, common criminals such as murderers, rapists, and robbers had a privileged position compared to the political prisoners who mistakenly thought that the Soviet Constitution meant something. It will be the same in Amerika.
The destruction of truth and the law in the US is the legacy of 9/11. Both conservatives and the left-wing have bought into the government's preposterous story that a few Saudi Arabians, unsupported by any government or intelligence agency, outwitted every institution of the National Security State and inflicted the most humiliating blow against a superpower in human history. They buy into this story despite unequivocal evidence that WTC building 7 came down at free fall speed, an event that can only occur as a result of controlled demolition.
But evidence and expert testimony no longer have authority in the US, which now has its own form of Lysenkoism.
Lysenko was a quack Soviet scientist, a charlatan who successfully persecuted Soviet geneticists for "setting themselves against Marxism" by not having a Marxist theory of genetics. Soviet geneticists were arrested and executed for being "against the people." Even the world famous Soviet geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested and died in prison.
Americans don't know any more about physics and structural architecture and engineering than the Soviet population and Stalin knew about genetics. Today "Lysenkoism" is used as a metaphor to denote the corruption of science in behalf of a social, political, or ideological purpose.
Lysenko used lies to gain power, just as Ponzi scheme operators use lies to gain wealth. Power is an Aphrodisiac, and everyone in Washington wants it. All indications are that they have it.
Liberty is disappearing before our eyes.
Expect no help from "progressives," who believe in Obama more than they believe in liberty.
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