Lucid prophecy on Afghanistan

Targeted killings (like Israel) to keep the resistance at bay....

Already the longest war in US history... thanks to 9/11 and Bush!  

Winning by failing?

The military-industrial-banking-intelligence komplex is firmer in the driving seat than ever.

TOP SECRET AMERICA  (I trust you have studied the WashPost report in detail, VERY illuminating)
... is on the march.

Will the SAMSUN COMPLEX be the only last option for the USA?  Or can the people overcome the cabal of
Top Secret - military - industrial - banking - intelligence deep-state?

Br J Med Psychol. 1989 Jun;62 ( Pt 2):123-34.

Samson's complex: the compulsion to re-enact betrayal and rage.

Kutz I  - Meir General Hospital, Shalvatah Psychiatric Center, Hod Hasharon, Israel.

Abstract

A comparison of the life story of a psychotherapy patient to that of biblical Samson reveals that both men suffer from a behavioural disturbance, manifested in the compulsion to re-enact the experience of betrayal by women, followed by destructive attacks of rage against others, and ultimately against their own tormented selves. The author tracks the origin of repetition compulsion to its proposed psychobiological foundations of attachment-formation and its development. Samson's complex is viewed as a deep-seated, characterological defect, stemming from faulty object relations and leading to existential despair and suicidal longing. The existence of a detailed psychopathological phenomenology embedded in timeless biblical lore denotes once more the alliance between myth and psychology.

U.S. plans to use terror in Afghanistan



The troop increase has led to nothing, so now to targeted killings break the power of the insurgents
First, the White House had thought that one could, as in Iraq provide a short-term troop increase in Afghanistan for peace. But this has not yet produced results. The Taliban are spreading widley, and the U.S. and ISAF troops, more losses than ever. So the US  seem now to switch to the strategy of targeted killings, a kind of military attack, which has been practiced for some time but only with special forces and drones.

The troop increase in Iraq was hardly the recipe for success, instead the idea of establishing local militias, with money and weapons provided some success. In countries like Iraq or Afghanistan in the face of high unemployment the promise of a regular income alone is enticing. Many become insurgents, because they pay money. Added to this was that the Iraqi militias, mainly Sunnis, as armed forces, which are covered by the U.S. military, who also got power in their sphere of influence. And finally prevailed in this period, the ethnic cleansing, ie Shiites and Sunnis drove out the other groups.



The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government did not want the many Sunni militias, in fact, they also prevented a democratically elected central government which could really control all the regions. Some of the militias have been integrated, in police and military  while others received no money and went promptly back to the resistance, which has since increased again in strength. The seemingly successful strategy in Iraq, was only short term. One may expect civil war after withdrawal of most U.S. troopsand a partitioning of Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite areas. The  invasion and occupation have not really solved anything.

A similar strategy was planned with the establishment of militias paid and in Afghanistan. But, the situation is yet more complicated, as in Iraq, because there are more ethnic groups  involved in addition to the many Taliban warlords in constant power poker, while the Karzai government is not enthusiastic to lose even more influence. Moreover, lasting security through money does not instill confidence in the rule of a democratically legitimate law, it is undermined by militias.



Meanwhile, the U.S. government seems bet primarily on  targeted killings, the dirty war, a kind of final solution promise, namely the possibility to withdraw from Afghanistan. So we spread terror through terror. Targeted killings are executing people that have not been convicted by any law or international law. This is indistinguishable from a whatever motivated terrorist attacks.

Gabriella Blum and Philip Heymann on Targeted Killing

by Kenneth Anderson

Harvard professors Gabriella Blum and Philip Heymann have a new, short article online at the Harvard National Security Law Journal (which, by the way, is doing many interesting things), Law and Policy of Targeted Killing (June 27, 2010).  A version of it will appear as a chapter in their forthcoming book on terrorism and counterterrorism.  It is a fine essay, not over-long, and well worth reading if you at all take an interest in these topics.  Here is a little bit from the introduction (continued below the fold):

More than any other counterterrorism tactic, targeted killing operations display the tension between addressing terrorism as a crime and addressing it as war.  The right of a government to use deadly force against a citizen is constrained by both domestic criminal law and international human rights norms that seek to protect the individual's right to life and liberty.  In law enforcement, individuals are punished for their individual guilt.  Guilt must be proven in a court of law, with the individual facing trial enjoying the protections of due process guarantees. Killing an individual without trial is allowed only in very limited circumstances, such as self- defense (where the person poses an immediate threat) or the immediate necessity of saving more lives.  In almost any other case, it would be clearly unlawful, tantamount to extrajudicial execution or murder.

When agents of a state seek to engage in enforcement operations outside their own territory without consent of the foreign government, they are further constrained by international norms of peaceful relations and the respect for territorial boundaries among states.  Ordinarily, when a criminal suspect finds refuge in another country, the United States would ask the other country for extradition to gain jurisdiction over him.  Even interviewing a person outside of U.S. territory would be unlawful; executing him would be an extremely egregious offense.  Violations of these norms run the risk of replacing law with force and spiraling international violence.

In wartime, governments may use deadly force against combatants of an enemy party, in which case the peacetime constraints are relaxed.  But in war, the enemy combatants belong to another identifiable party and are killed not because they are guilty, but because they are potentially lethal agents of that hostile party.  Moreover, soldiers are easily identified by the uniform they wear.  Once in the uniform of an enemy state, any soldier, by commitment and allegiance, is a potential threat and thus a legitimate target, regardless of the degree of threat the soldier is actually posing at any particular moment: the relaxing, unarmed soldier, the sleeping soldier, the retreating soldier—all are legitimate military targets and subject to intentional targeting.  No advance warning is necessary, no attempt to arrest or capture is required, and no effort to minimize casualties among enemy forces is demanded by law.

The identity and culpability of an individual not wearing a uniform but suspected of involvement in terrorism is far less easily ascertained.  While combatants should not benefit from defying the obligation to distinguish themselves from civilians (wearing civilian clothes does not give a soldier legal immunity from direct attack), the lack of uniform does raise concerns about the ability to identify individuals as belonging to a hostile force. Moreover, joining a military follows a distinct procedure that allows for a bright-line rule distinguishing between those in the military and those outside it (although it hides the dangerous responsibility of civilians who take part in hostile activity without being members of the armed forces).  Joining a terrorist organization does not necessarily have a similar on/off switch; individuals might join the organization or support it in some ways or for some time, but then go back to their ordinary business without any ritual marking their joining or departing.  Identifying individuals as terrorists grows more difficult as organizations, such as Al-Qaeda, become a network of small dispersed cells, or even individuals, making the association with a hostile armed group even more tenuous.

Despite these difficulties, both the United States and Israel (as well as several other countries) have made targeted killing—the deliberate assassination of a known terrorist outside the country's territory (even in a friendly nation's territory), usually (but not exclusively) by an airstrike—an essential part of their counterterrorism strategy.  Both have found targeted killing an inevitable means of frustrating the activities of terrorists who are directly involved in plotting and instigating attacks from outside their territory.

Monthly US Troop Deaths in and Around Afghanistan