Chilling memo from Obama DOJ justifies killing US citizens

Obama assumes Hitlerian powers

The president’s partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize

guardian.co.uk | Feb 5, 2013

by Glenn Greenwald

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama’s top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president’s power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title “disposition matrix”.

When the New York Times back in April, 2010 first confirmed the existence of Obama’s hit list, it made clear just what an extremist power this is, noting: “It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.” The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying “he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president”. When the existence of Obama’s hit list was first reported several months earlier by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, she wrote that the “list includes three Americans”.

What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch – with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards” and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.

In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power. During the Bush years, when Bush refused to disclose the memoranda from his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that legally authorized torture, rendition, warrantless eavesdropping and the like, leading Democratic lawyers such as Dawn Johnsen (Obama’s first choice to lead the OLC) vehemently denounced this practice as a grave threat, warning that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”

But when it comes to Obama’s assassination power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly refused to disclose the principal legal memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum, Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for this power are to be concealed. He’s maintaining secret law on the most extremist power he can assert.

Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page “white paper” prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process (the memo is embedded in full below). This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list – that is still concealed – but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011.

This new memo is entitled: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force”. It claims its conclusion is “reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a US citizen”. Yet it is every bit as chilling as the Bush OLC torture memos in how its clinical, legalistic tone completely sanitizes the radical and dangerous power it purports to authorize.

I’ve written many times at length about why the Obama assassination program is such an extreme and radical threat – see here for one of the most comprehensive discussions, with documentation of how completely all of this violates Obama and Holder’s statements before obtaining power – and won’t repeat those arguments here. Instead, there are numerous points that should be emphasized about the fundamentally misleading nature of this new memo:

1. Equating government accusations with guilt

The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears US government defenders referring to “terrorists” when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. This entire memo is grounded in this deceit.

Time and again, it emphasizes that the authorized assassinations are carried out “against a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or its associated forces who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Undoubtedly fearing that this document would one day be public, Obama lawyers made certain to incorporate this deceit into the title itself: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida or An Associated Force.”

This ensures that huge numbers of citizens – those who spend little time thinking about such things and/or authoritarians who assume all government claims are true – will instinctively justify what is being done here on the ground that we must kill the Terrorists or joining al-Qaida means you should be killed. That’s the “reasoning” process that has driven the War on Terror since it commenced: if the US government simply asserts without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such – with indefinite imprisonment or death.

But of course, when this memo refers to “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida”, what it actually means is this: someone whom the President – in total secrecy and with no due process – has accused of being that. Indeed, the memo itself makes this clear, as it baldly states that presidential assassinations are justified when “an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US”.

This is the crucial point: the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo – and those who defend Obama’s assassination power – willfully ignore it.

Those who justify all of this by arguing that Obama can and should kill al-Qaida leaders who are trying to kill Americans are engaged in supreme question-begging. Without any due process, transparency or oversight, there is no way to know who is a “senior al-Qaida leader” and who is posing an “imminent threat” to Americans. All that can be known is who Obama, in total secrecy, accuses of this.

(Indeed, membership in al-Qaida is not even required to be assassinated, as one can be a member of a group deemed to be an “associated force” of al-Qaida, whatever that might mean: a formulation so broad and ill-defined that, as Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller argues, it means the memo “authorizes the use of lethal force against individuals whose targeting is, without more, prohibited by international law”.)

The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations. This memo – and the entire theory justifying Obama’s kill list – centrally relies on this authoritarian conflation of government accusations and valid proof of guilt.

They are not the same and never have been. Political leaders who decree guilt in secret and with no oversight inevitably succumb to error and/or abuse of power. Such unchecked accusatory decrees are inherently untrustworthy (indeed, Yemen experts have vehemently contested the claim that Awlaki himself was a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat to the US). That’s why due process is guaranteed in the Constitution and why judicial review of government accusations has been a staple of western justice since the Magna Carta: because leaders can’t be trusted to decree guilt and punish citizens without evidence and an adversarial process. That is the age-old basic right on which this memo, and the Obama presidency, is waging war.

2. Creating a ceiling, not a floor

The most vital fact to note about this memorandum is that it is not purporting to impose requirements on the president’s power to assassinate US citizens. When it concludes that the president has the authority to assassinate “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida” who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US” where capture is “infeasible”, it is not concluding that assassinations are permissible only in those circumstances.

To the contrary, the memo expressly makes clear that presidential assassinations may be permitted even when none of those circumstances prevail: “This paper does not attempt to determine the minimum requirements necessary to render such an operation lawful.” Instead, as the last line of the memo states: “it concludes only that the stated conditions would be sufficient to make lawful a lethal operation” – not that such conditions are necessary to find these assassinations legal. The memo explicitly leaves open the possibility that presidential assassinations of US citizens may be permissible even when the target is not a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat and/or when capture is feasible.

Critically, the rationale of the memo – that the US is engaged in a global war against al-Qaida and “associated forces” – can be easily used to justify presidential assassinations of US citizens in circumstances far beyond the ones described in this memo. If you believe the president has the power to execute US citizens based on the accusation that the citizen has joined al-Qaida, what possible limiting principle can you cite as to why that shouldn’t apply to a low-level al-Qaida member, including ones found in places where capture may be feasible (including US soil)? The purported limitations on this power set forth in this memo, aside from being incredibly vague, can be easily discarded once the central theory of presidential power is embraced.

3. Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield

The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the “battlefield” is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited “battlefield”. That theory is both radical and dangerous because a president’s powers are basically omnipotent on a “battlefield”. There, state power is shielded from law, from courts, from constitutional guarantees, from all forms of accountability: anyone on a battlefield can be killed or imprisoned without charges. Thus, to posit the world as a battlefield is, by definition, to create an imperial, omnipotent presidency. That is the radical theory that unleashed all the rest of the controversial and lawless Bush/Cheney policies.

This “world-is-a-battlefield” theory was once highly controversial among Democrats. John Kerry famously denounced it when running for president, arguing instead that the effort against terrorism is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world”.

But this global-war theory is exactly what lies at heart of the Obama approach to Terrorism generally and this memo specifically. It is impossible to defend Obama’s assassination powers without embracing it (which is why key Obama officials have consistently done so). That’s because these assassinations are taking place in countries far from any war zone, such as Yemen and Somalia. You can’t defend the application of “war powers” in these countries without embracing the once-very-controversial Bush/Cheney view that the whole is now a “battlefield” and the president’s war powers thus exist without geographic limits.

This new memo makes clear that this Bush/Cheney worldview is at the heart of the Obama presidency. The president, it claims, “retains authority to use force against al-Qaida and associated forces outside the area of active hostilities“. In other words: there are, subject to the entirely optional “feasibility of capture” element, no geographic limits to the president’s authority to kill anyone he wants. This power applies not only to war zones, but everywhere in the world that he claims a member of al-Qaida is found. This memo embraces and institutionalizes the core Bush/Cheney theory that justified the entire panoply of policies Democrats back then pretended to find so objectionable.

4. Expanding the concept of “imminence” beyond recognition

The memo claims that the president’s assassination power applies to a senior al-Qaida member who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States”. That is designed to convince citizens to accept this power by leading them to believe it’s similar to common and familiar domestic uses of lethal force on US soil: if, for instance, an armed criminal is in the process of robbing a bank or is about to shoot hostages, then the “imminence” of the threat he poses justifies the use of lethal force against him by the police.

But this rhetorical tactic is totally misleading. The memo is authorizing assassinations against citizens in circumstances far beyond this understanding of “imminence”. Indeed, the memo expressly states that it is inventing “a broader concept of imminence” than is typically used in domestic law. Specifically, the president’s assassination power “does not require that the US have clear evidence that a specific attack . . . will take place in the immediate future“. The US routinely assassinates its targets not when they are engaged in or plotting attacks but when they are at home, with family members, riding in a car, at work, at funerals, rescuing other drone victims, etc.

Many of the early objections to this new memo have focused on this warped and incredibly broad definition of “imminence”. The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer told Isikoff that the memo “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning”. Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller called Jaffer’s objection “an understatement”, noting that the memo’s understanding of “imminence” is “wildly overbroad” under international law.

Crucially, Heller points out what I noted above: once you accept the memo’s reasoning – that the US is engaged in a global war, that the world is a battlefield, and the president has the power to assassinate any member of al-Qaida or associated forces – then there is no way coherent way to limit this power to places where capture is infeasible or to persons posing an “imminent” threat. The legal framework adopted by the memo means the president can kill anyone he claims is a member of al-Qaida regardless of where they are found or what they are doing.

The only reason to add these limitations of “imminence” and “feasibility of capture” is, as Heller said, purely political: to make the theories more politically palatable. But the definitions for these terms are so vague and broad that they provide no real limits on the president’s assassination power. As the ACLU’s Jaffer says: “This is a chilling document” because “it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen” and the purported limits “are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”

5. Converting Obama underlings into objective courts

This memo is not a judicial opinion. It was not written by anyone independent of the president. To the contrary, it was written by life-long partisan lackeys: lawyers whose careerist interests depend upon staying in the good graces of Obama and the Democrats, almost certainly Marty Lederman and David Barron. Treating this document as though it confers any authority on Obama is like treating the statements of one’s lawyer as a judicial finding or jury verdict.

Indeed, recall the primary excuse used to shield Bush officials from prosecution for their crimes of torture and illegal eavesdropping: namely, they got Bush-appointed lawyers in the DOJ to say that their conduct was legal, and therefore, it should be treated as such. This tactic – getting partisan lawyers and underlings of the president to say that the president’s conduct is legal – was appropriately treated with scorn when invoked by Bush officials to justify their radical programs. As Digby wrote about Bush officials who pointed to the OLC memos it got its lawyers to issue about torture and eavesdropping, such a practice amounts to:

“validating the idea that obscure Justice Department officials can be granted the authority to essentially immunize officials at all levels of the government, from the president down to the lowest field officer, by issuing a secret memo. This is a very important new development in western jurisprudence and one that surely requires more study and consideration. If Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had known about this, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.”

Life-long Democratic Party lawyers are not going to oppose the terrorism policies of the president who appointed them. A president can always find underlings and political appointees to endorse whatever he wants to do. That’s all this memo is: the by-product of obsequious lawyers telling their Party’s leader that he is (of course) free to do exactly that which he wants to do, in exactly the same way that Bush got John Yoo to tell him that torture was not torture, and that even it if were, it was legal.

That’s why courts, not the president’s partisan lawyers, should be making these determinations. But when the ACLU tried to obtain a judicial determination as to whether Obama is actually authorized to assassinate US citizens, the Obama DOJ went to extreme lengths to block the court from ruling on that question. They didn’t want independent judges to determine the law. They wanted their own lawyers to do so.

That’s all this memo is: Obama-loyal appointees telling their leader that he has the authority to do what he wants. But in the warped world of US politics, this – secret memos from partisan lackeys – has replaced judicial review as the means to determine the legality of the president’s conduct.

6. Making a mockery of “due process”

The core freedom most under attack by the War on Terror is the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. It provides that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life . . . without due process of law”. Like putting people in cages for life on island prisons with no trial, claiming that the president has the right to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield without any charges or trial is the supreme evisceration of this right.

The memo pays lip service to the right it is destroying: “Under the traditional due process balancing analysis . . . . we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person’s interest in his life.” But it nonetheless argues that a “balancing test” is necessary to determine the extent of the process that is due before the president can deprive someone of their life, and further argues that, as the New York Times put it when this theory was first unveiled: “while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

Stephen Colbert perfectly mocked this theory when Eric Holder first unveiled it to defend the president’s assassination program. At the time, Holder actually said: “due process and judicial process are not one and the same.” Colbert interpreted that claim as follows:

“Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do. The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them.”

It is fitting indeed that the memo expressly embraces two core Bush/Cheney theories to justify this view of what “due process” requires. First, it cites the Bush DOJ’s core view, as enunciated by John Yoo, that courts have no role to play in what the president does in the War on Terror because judicial review constitutes “judicial encroachment” on the “judgments by the President and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force”. And then it cites the Bush DOJ’s mostly successful arguments in the 2004 Hamdi case that the president has the authority even to imprison US citizens without trial provided that he accuses them of being a terrorist.

The reason this is so fitting is because, as I’ve detailed many times, it was these same early Bush/Cheney theories that made me want to begin writing about politics, all driven by my perception that the US government was becoming extremist and dangerous. During the early Bush years, the very idea that the US government asserted the power to imprison US citizens without charges and due process (or to eavesdrop on them) was so radical that, at the time, I could hardly believe they were being asserted out in the open.

Yet here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed – and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight. If you believe the president has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable.

 

One-Child policy enforcers crush baby to death with their vehicle

For many in China, the story brings back uncomfortable memories of Feng Jiemei, who last June posted gruesome photographs of her lying in a hospital bed next to her 7-month-old force-aborted fetus.

NBC News | Feb 5, 2013

By Ed Flanagan

BEIJING – A 13-month-old child was fatally crushed by a car containing Chinese officials after they went to collect a fine from the parents for breaching the country’s one-child policy, according to Chinese state media.

The incident reportedly occurred Monday in Dongshantou village near Wenzhou city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, after a delegation of 11 officials from the Ruian Town birth control office drove out to get the unspecified fine.

This did not go down well with the father, Chen Liandi, 39, and the conversation got heated.

According to a briefing given by the Ruian Municipal Propaganda Department and reported by state media, the officials convinced Chen’s wife, Li Yuhong, to accompany them back to Ruian to talk over the couple’s options.

The baby was reportedly left in the hands of his father and the group got back into their cars to leave.

What happened next remains unclear – perhaps due to the politically sensitive nature of this story – but the boy was then found crushed underneath a car.

He was rushed to the Third People’s Hospital in Ruian, but could not be saved.

‘You were too careless’
On China’s Twitter-like service, Weibo, users expressed frustration over the vague account given by Ruian officials and demanded more information, but no other Chinese press have printed much beyond the official government account.

For many in China, the story brings back uncomfortable memories of Feng Jiemei, who last June posted gruesome photographs of her lying in a hospital bed next to her 7-month-old aborted fetus.

Feng’s story created a social firestorm for Beijing when word got out that the 22-year-old mother had been forced to have the abortion because she did not have enough money to pay the $6,400 fine for having a second child.

“I told you, $6,400, not even a penny less. I told your dad that and he said he has no money,” a family planning official wrote to Deng in a blunt text message that quickly went viral. “You were too careless, you didn’t think this was a big deal.”

Feng was grabbed from her home and taken to a local hospital in her native Shaanxi province where she was blindfolded, thrown on a bed and forced to a sign a document she couldn’t read. Thirty hours later, her baby girl was aborted.

China has long defended its one-child policy as a way to prevent overpopulation and to help raise living standards across the country.

However, some experts in China and abroad argue that the policy has outlived its usefulness and may instead be a detriment to future growth.

Others in China have pointed out the abuses meted out in cases like Feng Jiemei’s show that it causes more social harm and have called on Beijing to remove it.

Obama now ‘Judge, jury and executioner’: Legal experts fear implications of White House drone memo, dangerously expands definition of national defense

NBCNews.com | Feb 5, 2013

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

Legal experts expressed grave reservations Tuesday about an Obama administration memo concluding that the United States can order the killing of American citizens believed to be affiliated with al-Qaida — with one saying the White House was acting as “judge, jury and executioner.”

The experts said that the memo, first obtained by NBC News, threatened constitutional rights and dangerously expanded the definition of national self-defense and of what constitutes an imminent attack.

“Anyone should be concerned when the president and his lawyers make up their own interpretation of the law or their own rules,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and an authority on international law and the use of force.

Memo justifies drone kills even with patchy intelligence

“This is a very, very dangerous thing that the president has done,” she added.

The memo, made public Monday, provides detail about the administration’s controversial expansion of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens.

Among them were Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed by an American strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Both men were U.S. citizens who had not been charged with a crime.

Attorney General Eric Holder, in a talk at Northwestern University Law School in March, endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans provided that the government determines such an individual poses “an imminent threat of violent attack.”

But the memo obtained by NBC News refers to a broader definition of imminence and specifically says the government is not required to have “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

RELATED: Read the memo on drone strikes against Americans

Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer who writes about security and liberty for the British newspaper The Guardian, described the memo as “fundamentally misleading,” with a clinical tone that disguises “the radical and dangerous power it purports to authorize.”

“If you believe the president has the power to order U.S. citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable,” he wrote.

The attorney general told reporters Tuesday that the administration’s primary concern is to keep Americans safe, and to do it in a way consistent with American values. He said the administration was confident it was following federal and international law.

“We will have to look at this and see what it is we want to do with these memos,” he said. “But you have to understand that we are talking about things that are, that go into how we conduct our offensive operations against a clear and present danger.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney said that while the government must take the Constitution into account, U.S. citizenship does not make a leader of an enemy force immune from being targeted.

The drone strikes, and now the Justice Department memo, are expected to figure prominently Thursday when the Senate takes up the nomination of John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser and architect of the drone campaign, to lead the CIA.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and 10 other senators wrote to President Barack Obama on Monday asking him to release all Justice Department memos on the subject.

The senators said that Congress and the public need a full understanding of how the White House views its authority so they can decide “whether the president’s power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards.”

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, described the memo as reckless. He wrote that assuming that the target of a strike is an al-Qaida leader, without court oversight, was like assuming a defendant is guilty and then asking whether a trial would be useful.

But John O. McGinnis, a professor of constitutional law at Northwestern University who worked for the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, said he was persuaded by the arguments in the memo, which he described as “very cautious.”

“If this is someone who has taken up affiliation with an organization attacking the United States, I don’t think it matters whether they’re a citizen — they seem to me an enemy combatant whom the president can respond to,” he said. “I think this is not a hard case.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement Tuesday saying that her committee received the memo last year and wants to see other administration memos further explaining the legal framework for carrying out strikes.

At the same time, she appeared to defend the killing of al-Awlaki. She said that al-Awlaki was external operations leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and directed the failed attempt to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

The memo lays out a three-part test for making targeted killings of Americans lawful. The suspect must be deemed an imminent threat, capturing the target must not be feasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.”

Naureen Shah, a lecturer at Columbia Law School and associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at the school’s Human Rights Institute, said that she was deeply troubled by the contents of the memo.

“We should be concerned when the White House is acting as judge, jury and executioner,” she said. “And there’s no one outside of the White House who has real oversight over that process. What’s put forward here is there’s no role for the courts, not even after the fact.”

The Illuminati Symbolism of Ke$ha’s “Die Young” and How it Ridicules the Indoctrinated Masses

As the car door opens, a Skull and Bones symbols flashes, representing the cult of death emanating from this car.

There are tons of videos with the same message and symbolism as Die Young – all promoting the same Agenda. Brainwashed by thousands of hours of music videos, young people become like the cult followers in Ke$ha’s video, pushed to live pointless, self-destructive lives based on the gratification of their lowest impulses. Indulging in one’s animalistic instincts has always been considered to be the opposite of reaching spiritual enlightenment – and that’s exactly what the elite wants. If the masses were to gain enough awareness to avoid the traps and pitfalls set up by the system, the virtual enslavement caused by debt and mass-media mind control would crumble.

vigilantcitizen.com | Nov 15, 2012

By VC

Ke$ha’s “Die Young” is probably one of the most blatant Illuminati videos ever released. While the symbolism is so overt that it is almost ridiculous, there’s an underlying message to the video: Even if you’re dumb enough to embrace all of that Illuminati brainwash, you’re still not part of the elite and therefore, still subject to “Die Young”.

Ke-dollarsign-ha has never been the most inspirational singer around. She started her career as an alcoholic party girl that’s not too strict about personal hygiene (see the Tik Tok line “Before I leave brush ma teeth with a bottle of Jack”) and, for her new album, she turned into some kind of Illuminati witch-type deal. She is far from the only pop star that has gone through this kind of metamorphosis and it was probably pre-planned by her record label. How many singers have gone from an “around-the-way” girl to an Illuminati figurehead? That’s what the industry does.

To the untrained eye this kind of transformation is usually somewhat subtle … Ke$ha’s Die Young is anything but. In fact, it is one giant clusterfreak of Illuminati symbols. It is so obvious and in-your-face that it forced mainstream music sources such as Billboard.com to “admit” that the video was all about Illuminati symbols (see their article entitled Ke$ha Shouts-Out Illuminati in ‘Die Young’ Video). Interestingly enough, not too long ago, these same sites were calling sites like Vigilant Citizen “batshit crazy” for even alluding to the existence of these symbols and describing their meaning. Now these sites say “Yeah, there are Illuminati symbols” in a matter-of-fact way. What happened to the batshit crazy part? However, the mainstream sites still only refer to this concept in an extremely superficial way, not giving any insight on their true meaning and the real Agenda behind it all.

Some might rationalize what is happening by saying: “Ke$ha did it for the LOLs and to make fun of the conspiracies”. This is plausible, but this argument is now surfacing every time a video contains Illuminati symbolism. Are all videos now making fun of conspiracies? In reality, Ke$ha didn’t do anything for any LOLs. She did not write the song (it was written by Lukasz Gottwald, Benjamin Levin, Henry Walter and Nate Ruess) and she did not direct the video. She is just performing what she is told to perform, like most pop stars. The fact of the matter is: Illuminati symbols are becoming more prevalent because that was the plan all along: To gradually make them part of popular culture. The occult elite is revealing itself and the masses are dancing to their tunes.

The real issue at stake is however not the symbols that are flashed on screen, but the underlying messages that are communicated to the viewers. It is about the Agenda – about making specific values and attitudes cool and desirable to young people. It is about promoting the culture of death (i.e. Die Young), about sexualizing everything, about materialism, about a corrupted and debased brand of spirituality and so forth.

As I watch Ke$ha and her gang fondling themselves, I can’t help but wonder: Is the video making fun of the masses that have been brainwashed by the lifestyle promoted by the elite?  Let’s look at the video.

Full Story

Related

Massive use of Illuminati occult imagery in Ke$ha ‘Die Young’ cult orgy video

Massive use of Illuminati occult imagery in Ke$ha ‘Die Young’ death cult orgy video

Latest: Ke$ha Claims She Was Forced to Sing “Die Young”

Final message: die young at the hands of the police…

Ke$ha – Die Young (Official)

Video Length: 3:33 !!

Priestess before the pentagram

Pyramids and inverted cross symbols

All-Seeing Eye in the pyramid

Final scene, masonic eye-in-the-pyramid on her rear

Just like Madonna, grand Illuminati dame of pop

And more in a live version:

Masonic checkerboards, pentagrams, a flood of triangles, and of course the omni-present all-seeing eye…

Ke$ha: ‘Die Young’ – The X Factor Australia 2012 – Live

The Illuminati Symbolism of Ke$ha’s “Die Young” and How it Ridicules the Indoctrinated Masses

Prodigy Says Jay-Z Sides With The ‘Evil Illuminati’

7 Technologies That Will Make It Easier for the Next President to Hunt and Kill You

wired | Nov 6, 2012

by Noah Shachtman

Robotic assassination campaigns directed from the Oval Office. Cyber espionage programs launched at the president’s behest. Surveillance on an industrial scale. The White House already has an incredible amount of power to monitor and take out individuals around the globe. But a new wave of technologies, just coming online, could give those powers a substantial upgrade. No matter who wins the election on Tuesday, the next president could have an unprecedented ability to monitor and end lives from the Oval Office.

The current crop of sensors, munitions, control algorithms, and data storage facilities have helped make the targeted killing of American adversaries an almost routine affair. Nearly 3,000 people have been slain in the past decade by American drones, for instance. The process will only get easier, as these tools of war become more compact, more powerful, and more precise. And they will: Moore’s Law applies in the military and intelligence realms almost as much as it does in the commercial sphere.

For decades, political scientists have wrung their hands about an “Imperial Presidency,” an executive branch with powers far beyond its original, Constitutional limits. This new hardware and software could make the old concerns look more outdated than horses and bayonets, to coin a phrase. Here are seven examples.

Photo: François Proulx/Flickr

Drone Autonomy

There’s a standard response to skeptics of the killer flying robots known as drones that goes something like this: Every time a drone fires its weapon, a human being within a chain of command (of other human beings) made that call. The robot never decides for itself who lives and who dies. All of that is true. It’s just that some technical advances, both current and on the horizon, are going to make it less true.

On one end of the spectrum is the Switchblade, AeroVironment’s mashup of drone and missile. Weighing under 6 pounds and transportable in a soldier’s backpack, the drone carries a function whereby an operator can pre-program its trajectory using GPS; When it reaches the target, it explodes, without its operator commanding it to. On the other end is the Navy’s experimental UCLASS, which by 2019 ought to yield an armed drone with a 62-foot wingspan that can take off and land from an aircraft carrier at the click of a mouse, its flight path selected earlier while Naval aviators go get a snack. The Navy has no plans to let the UCLASS release its weapons except at a human’s direction, but its autonomy goes beyond anything the military currently possesses.

All of this stands to change drone warfare — ironically, by changing human behavior. As humans get used to incremental expansions in drone autonomy, they’ll expect more functionality to come pre-baked. That might erode the currently-rigid edict that people must conduct the strikes; at a minimum, it will free human operators to focus more of their attention on conducting attacks. The first phase of that challenge has arrived: the Army confirmed this week that a unit in eastern Afghanistan is now using the Switchblade.

— Spencer Ackerman

Photo: Jared Soares/Wired

‘City-Sized’ Surveillance

Predator-class drones are today’s spy tools of choice; the military and CIA have hundreds of them keeping watch over Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Mexico, and elsewhere. But the Predators and the larger Reapers are imperfect eyes in the sky. They rely on cameras that offer, as the military cliche goes, a “soda straw” view of the battlefield — maybe a square kilometer, depending on how high the drone flies.

Tomorrow’s sensors, on the other hand, will be able to monitor an area 10 times larger with twice the resolution. The Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (“Argus, for short) is a collection of 92 five-megapixel cameras. In a single day, it collects six petabytes of video — the equivalent of 79.8 years’ worth of HD video.

Argus and other “Wide Area Airborne Surveillance” systems have their limitations. Right now, the military doesn’t have the bandwidth to pull all that video off a drone in real time. Nor it does it have the analysts to watch all the footage; they’re barely keeping up with the soda straws. Plus, the camera bundles have had some problems sharing data with some of the military’s other spy systems.

But interest in the Wide Area Airborne Surveillance systems is growing — and not just among those looking to spy overseas. The Department of Homeland Security recently put out a call for a camera array that could keep tabs on 10 square kilometers at once, and tested out another WAAS sensor along the border. Meanwhile, Sierra Nevada Corporation, a well-traveled intelligence contractor, is marketing its so-called “Vigilant Stare” sensor (.pdf), which it says will watch “city-sized fields of regard” for domestic “counter-narcotics” and “civil unrest” missions. Keep your eyes peeled.

— Noah Shachtman

Photo: Darpa

Massive Data Storage

The idea of the government watching your every move is frightening. But not as frightening as the government recording your every move in digital database that never gets full.

This nightmare data storage scenario is closer than you think. A study from the Brookings Institute says that it will soon be within the reach of the government — and other organizations — to keep a digital record everything that everyone in the country says or does, and the NSA is clearly on the cutting edge of large-scale data storage.

The agency is building a massive $2 billion data center in Utah — due to go live in September of next year — and taking a cue from Google, agency engineers have built a massive database platform specifically designed to juggle massive amounts of information.

According to a senior intelligence official cited in Wired’s recent feature story on the Utah data center, it will play an important role in new efforts within the agency to break the encryption used by governments, businesses, and individuals to mask their communications.

“This is more than just a data center,” said the official, who once worked on the Utah project. Another official cited in the story said that several years ago, the agency made an enormous breakthrough in its ability to crack modern encryption methods.

But equally important is the agency’s ability to rapidly process all the information collected in this and other data centers. In recent years, Google has developed new ways of overseeing petabytes of data — aka millions of gigabytes — using tens of thousands of ordinary computer servers. A platform called BigTable, for instance, underpins the index that lets you instantly search the entire web, which now more than 644 million active sites. WIth Accumulo, the NSA has mimicked BigTable’s ability to instantly make sense of such enormous amounts of data. The good news is that the NSA’s platform is also designed to provide separate security controls from each individual piece of data, but those controls aren’t in your hands. They’re in the hands of the NSA.

— Cade Metz

Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired.com

Tiny Bombs and Missiles

Unless you’re super strong or don’t mind back pain, you can’t carry a Hellfire missile. The weapon of choice for drone attacks weighs over 100 pounds, and that’s why it takes a 27-foot-long Predator to pack one. But that’s all about to change. Raytheon’s experimental Small Tactical Munition weighs nearly a tenth of a Hellfire. In May, rival Textron debuted a weapon that loiters in mid-air, BattleHawk, that weighs a mere 5 pounds.

Normally, a smaller bomb or missile just means a smaller smoking crater. But as the weapons get smaller, the number of robots that can carry them increases. The U.S. military has under 200 armed Predators and Reapers. It has thousands of smaller, unarmed spy drones like Pumas and Ravens. Those smaller drones get used by smaller units down on the military’s food chain, like battalions and companies; if they get armed, then drone strikes can become as routine as artillery barrages. That’s heavy.

— Spencer Ackerman

Photo: Raytheon

‘Tagging and Tracking’ Tech

Right before the Taliban executed him for allegedly spying for the Americans in April 2009, 19-year-old Pakistani Habibur Rehman said in a videotaped “confession” that he had been paid to plant tracking devices wrapped in cigarette paper inside Taliban and Al-Qaida safehouses. The devices emitted barely detectable radio signals that allegedly guided U.S. drone strikes.

The CIA has never copped to using such trackers, but U.S. Special Operations Command openly touts its relationship with manufacturers of “tagging, tracking and locating devices.” One of these firms, Herndon, Virginia-based Blackbird Technologies, has supplied tens of thousands of these trackers as part of a $450 million contract. The company’s 2-inch-wide devices hop between satellite, radio frequencies, CDMA and GSM cellular networks to report the locations of whatever they’re attached to.

If SOCOM has its way, these trackers will only be the start. The command has spent millions developing networks of tiny “unattended ground sensors” that can be scattered across a battlefield and spot targets for decades, if its makers are to be believed. SOCOM is also on the hunt for tiny, plantable audio and video recorders and optical and chemical “taggants” that can mark a person without him knowing it. The idea is for spies like Rehman (if that’s what he was) to more accurately track militants … and get away with it.

— David Axe and Noah Shachtman

Photo: Lockheed Martin

Global Strike

Take the military’s current inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can scream toward their targets at speeds of more than 500 miles per hour. Not too shabby. But also positively slow compared to a new generation of experimental hypersonic weapons that may soon travel many times that speed — and which the Pentagon and the Obama administration dreams about one day lobbing at their enemies anywhere on the globe in less than an hour. And don’t count on the current president, or perhaps even the next one, on abandoning the project any time soon.

It’s called “Prompt Global Strike,” and the Defense Department has worked for a decade on how to field such radical weapons with a mix of trial and error. Among them include the shorter-range X-51A Waverider, a scramjet-powered cruise missile hurtled at up to six times the speed of sound. Even more radical is Darpa’s pizza-shaped glider named the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, and the Army’s pointy-shaped Advanced Hypersonic Weapon — designed to travel at Mach 20 and Mach 8, respectively. If any of these weapons or a variant is ever fielded, they could be used to assassinate a terrorist while on the move or blast a nuclear silo in the opening minutes of a war. Or inadvertently start World War III.

While the Waverider is launched from a plane and resembles a cruise missile (albeit one traveling intensely fast), the HTV-2 is launched using an intercontinental ballistic missile before separating and crashing back down to Earth. But as far as Russian and Chinese radars are concerned, the HTV-2 could very well be an ICBM potentially armed with a nuke and headed for Beijing or Moscow. The Pentagon has apparently considered this doomsday scenario, and has walked back the non-nuke ICBM plan — sort of — while touting a potential future strike weapon launched at the intermediate range from a submarine. But there’s also still plenty of testing to do, and a spotty record of failures for the Waverider and the HTV-2. Meanwhile, the Russians are freaked out enough to have started work on a hypersonic weapon of their own.

— Robert Beckhusen

Photo: Air Force

Sensor Fusion

The military can listen in on your phone calls, and can watch you from above. But it doesn’t have one thing — one intelligence-collection platform, as the jargon goes — that can do both at once. Instead, the various “ints” are collected and processed separately — and only brought together at the final moment by a team of analysts. It’s a gangly, bureaucratic process that often allows prey to slip through the nets of military hunters.

The exception to this is the Blue Devil program. It outfits a single Beechcraft King Air A90 turboprop plane with a wide area sensor, a traditional camera, and eavesdropping gear — all passing information from one to the other. The electronic ear might pick up a phone call, and tell the camera where to point. Or the wide area sensor might see a truck moving, and ask the eavesdropper to take a listen. Flying in Afghanistan since late 2010, the system has been “instrumental in identifying a number of high-value individuals and improvised explosive device emplacements,” according to the Air Force, which just handed out another $85 million contract to operate and upgrade the fleet of four Blue Devil planes.

There’s a second, more ambitious phase of the Blue Devil program, one that involved putting a lot more sensors onto an airship the size of a football field. But that mega-blimp upgrade never made it to the flight-testing phase, owing to a series of bureaucratic, financial and technical hurdles. But the idea of sensor fusion is not going anywhere. And, let’s be honest: If one of these surveillance arrays catches you in their web, neither are you.

Photo: David Axe

Zombie apocalypse? CDC says not to worry, despite strange string of incidents

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says we shouldn’t worry about zombies prowling around and gnawing at your flesh, like these characters from the AMC zombie drama “The Walking Dead.” Greg Nicotero/AMC

Star-Ledger | Jun 1, 2012

By Brent Johnson

If the news has you worried lately that a zombie apocalypse may soon be under way, don’t panic.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you’re not likely to find the dead walking around, gnawing at your flesh.

“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” agency spokesman David Daigle said in an e-mail to The Huffington Post today.

Yes, you read that right: The federal agency aimed to protect the United States from disease outbreaks has officially weighed in on the possibility of actual zombies.

Feds vs. Zombies: CDC officially denies ‘Zombie Apocalypse”

The comment comes after a string of strange incidents involving seemingly non-human behavior over the last week.

• In Miami, a naked man was shot by police after eating the face of another man on the side of a highway.

• In Maryland, a college student told investigators he ate the heart and brain of a dismembered body found in his home.

• In Hackensack, a man stabbed himself and threw pieces of his intestines at police.

• And in Canada, police are searching for a porn actor who allegedly killed a young man with an ice pick, dismembered the body and then raped and ate flesh from the corpse.

Apparently, people feared this might all be connected: The phrase “Zombie apocalypse” trended on both Twitter and Google in recent days.

Zombie Apocalypse Not Caused by Virus, CDC Claims

Rudy Eugene, 31, shot and killed after attacking homeless man and eating his face. (PHOTO:Twitter/Diario DiaaDia ‏)

christianpost.com | Jun 1, 2012

By Christine Thomasos

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denies that there is any existence of zombies, despite public speculation stemming from various cases of cannibalism this week.

Last Saturday, a Miami man was shot dead by police after he was seen naked, growling and consuming the flesh of a homeless man’s face. On Sunday, a man in New Jersey reportedly stabbed himself 50 times before throwing his flesh and intestines at police officers. On Tuesday, a Maryland man told authorities that he had eaten the heart and brain of his roommates.

While many have been speculating about the events, “Zombie Apocalypse” became a trending term on search engines this week. Still, the CDC denies that zombies exist.

A zombie, by defition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is: “A person held to resemble the so-called walking dead.”

When reports surfaced that many of the assailants involved in the recent crimes had consumed human flesh, news outlets began to refer to them as zombies.

“The CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” CDC spokesman David Daigle told The Huffington Post.

However, Gawker reported about a “mysterious rash” in a Hollywood, Fla., school earlier this month along with an unknown chemical that sent five people to the hospital at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. While the HazMat investigation crew was unable to provide conclusive data concerning the two incidents, some believed they were related to zombie activity.

However, Daigle said there are many factors that could cause a “Zombie Apocalypse” outside of exposure to chemicals and viruses.

“Films have included radiation as well as mutations of existing conditions such as prions, mad-cow disease, measles, and rabies,” the CDC spokesman said.

While authorities have stated that 31-year-old Rudy Eugene, known as the “Miami Zombie,” may have eaten the flesh of a homeless man’s face after ingesting a cocktail of drugs called “bath salt,” his friends do not believe this could have been possible.

“It had to be some sort of drug that somebody must have slipped on him, because Rudy wouldn’t so much as pop a Tylenol pill,” Eugene’s friend Bobby Chery told CBS.

The results of toxicology tests have yet to be determined in the cases of the men engaging in zombie-like behavior. Although the CDC has not acknowledged that any of the cases involved actual zombies, the agency still has available a zombie preparedness section on its website that features books and kits.

The section was launched earlier this year as part of a campaign to educate the public about preparedness for certain hazards.

“If you are generally well equipped to deal with a ‘zombie apocalypse’ you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack,” CDC director director Dr. Ali Khan said in a statement on the website.

Is the U.S. covering for additional troops involved in Afghan massacre?

End the Lie | Mar 18, 2012

By Madison Ruppert

Rumors and eyewitness accounts have been circulating since the news first broke of the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, which left 16 dead.

Most of these focus on casting doubt on the American account of a lone wolf gunman acting completely on his own without the involvement of any other soldiers.

However, it is not pure rumor; indeed a probe conducted by the Afghan parliament determined that up to 20 American troops were involved in the killing.

According to Pajhwok Afghan News, the nine-member parliamentary probe spent two days in the southern Kandahar province conducting interviews with the families of the victims, tribal elders, as well as survivors while collecting evidence at the site of the brutal slayings in the Panjwai district.

Hamidzai Lali, a lawmaker representing the Kandahar province at the Wolesi Jirga, told Pajhwok Afghan News, that their probe concluded that there were anywhere between 15 to 20 American soldiers involved in the murders.

“We closely examined the site of the incident, talked to the families who lost their beloved ones, the injured people and tribal elders,” he said.

Lali stated that the attack lasted an entire hour and involved two different groups of American soldiers.

“The villages are one and a half kilometer[s] from the American military base. We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups,” he said.

Lali has called for the Afghan government along with the United Nations and the rest of the international community to make sure that those who were responsible for the killings are brought to justice in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, that looks almost entirely unlikely due to the fact that the soldier allegedly responsible for the killing spree has already been returned to Kansas, far out of the reach of the Afghan government.

Lali expressed anger with the fact that the soldier was flown out of Afghanistan, although at the time of his comments he was in Kuwait, whereas now he is all the way back in the United States.

He issued a somewhat grave warning from the people that they had met with concerning the massacre.

Lali stated that if those troops who were responsible were not punished, they would launch a movement in opposition to the Afghans who had agreed to the presence of foreign soldiers during the first Bonn conference back in 2001.

According to Lali, the Wolesi Jirga – Afghanistan’s “Assembly of the People,” the lower house of the Afghan parliament – will not stop their quest for justice until the killers were prosecuted in Afghanistan.

Of course, the United States is wholly opposed to subjecting American troops to the laws of the countries in which they operate, as this would open many soldiers up to criminal prosecution for their activities.

“If the international community does not play its role in punishing the perpetrators, the Wolesi Jirga would declare foreign troops as occupying forces, like the Russians,” Lali warned.

As I reported last year, polls have shown that the majority of the people in Afghanistan already see the foreign troops as occupying forces, and I bet that if I lived there I would feel exactly the same.

Even as an outsider, I find our sustained presence and the murder of Afghans that comes with it wholly deplorable, unnecessary and unacceptable.

The American military seeks to keep their soldiers as immune as possible when it comes to prosecution in foreign lands, in order to enable brutal activities which are likely illegal under the domestic law of the nations they are operating in.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been making some heated statements and demands, although it now appears that these may be nothing more than an attempt to pacify the rightfully angered people of Afghanistan.

Read More

Afghan Massacre: Is Lewis-McChord really ‘most troubled base in the military’?

McClatchy Newspapers | Mar 18, 2012

by Christian Hill and Adam Ashton

TACOMA, Wash. — Is there something wrong with Joint Base Lewis-McChord?

The question attracted wide media attention last week after a soldier stationed there for the last decade, 38-year-old Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 38, allegedly killed 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, in a March 11 rampage. Reports have surfaced that trauma and stress from multiple combat tours, possibly mixed with alcohol, might have sent the married father of two over the edge.

Some connected the massacre to other problems at the base south of Tacoma, Wash.: a record number of suicides, several investigations into the treatment of soldiers diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a “kill team” convicted of murdering civilians for sport in Afghanistan and a string of other crimes involving present and past soldiers.

They resurrected a label given by the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in 2010: the “most troubled base in the military.”

Gen. David Rodriguez, the head of U.S. Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., called the headlines “unfortunate” and said the entire Army faces challenges sending soldiers on multiple combat deployments.

“There is nothing different here than at most places,” he said. “Again, those things happen. Everybody knows (the rampage) doesn’t reflect our standards and our values.”

Others aren’t so sure that the base should get a free pass. Army veteran Jorge Gonzalez, who runs a Lakewood, Wash., coffee shop that assists soldiers, faulted Lewis-McChord’s leadership and wondered why it “keeps happening over and over here.”

McClatchy Newspapers answered some of the most pressing questions about the base:

Q: Does Lewis-McChord have a problem with soldier suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder?

A: Nobody would say “no.” The base in 2011 had its worst year for soldier suicides. Twelve took their own lives, up from nine in each of the previous two years.

But the increase is in line with an Army-wide trend. Active-duty Army suicides increased from 80 in 2003 to 164 in 2011.

In 2010, 22 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, took their own lives. Fort Bragg is investigating its unit for injured and wounded soldiers because of a sudden rise in suicides early this year.

The Army has poured resources into halting soldier suicides, providing hotlines, confidential counseling and training for peers to recognize depression in colleagues. Still, the numbers haven’t begun to decline across the service.

“The question you have to ask yourself, and this is the number that no one can prove, what would it have been if we had not focused the efforts that we focused on it?” former Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said in January.

Lewis-McChord has one of the largest staffs of behavioral health professionals in the Army, with 227 specialists. Still, soldiers fall through the gaps.

Spc. Derrick Kirkland killed himself at Lewis-McChord in March 2010 even though his colleagues in Iraq took pains to send him home because of his suicide attempts while deployed, according to a Tacoma News Tribune report last year. He appeared stable when he spoke to a psychiatrist at Madigan Army Medical Center, an Army investigation showed.

While acknowledging it’s not perfect, Rodriguez expressed confidence in the system used to screen soldiers for brain trauma and PTSD before they deploy.

He acknowledged that the crush of 18,000 soldiers who returned to Lewis-McChord from combat in the summer of 2010 delayed the delivery of some care to soldiers.

Q: Do records show a disproportionate number of crimes committed by Lewis-McChord soldiers?

A: Not if you compare it to the Army-wide rate.

To be sure, the number of crimes involving soldiers assigned to the base is higher than five years ago. There was a 27 percent increase in misdemeanors last year compared to 2010: 4,874 crimes compared to 3,812. There were nine more felonies, 319 to 310, during the same period. The previous high in that five-year period was in 2008, with 4,181 misdemeanors and 413 felonies.

But Lewis-McChord has also added several thousand more soldiers since then.

In 2010, Lewis-McChord’s rate of crimes against both people and property was lower than the Army-wide rate. There were 10.33 crimes for every 1,000 soldiers based at Lewis McChord, compared to the Army-wide rate of 12.81. Lewis-McChord’s property crime rate was 4.82 compared to 5.83 Army-wide.

Base officials says a growth in crime is a natural result of having more soldiers on post.

“We did not see any increase in crime that we do not normally attribute to the increase in population,” Col. Bob Taradash, Lewis-McChord’s top military police officer, said before he deployed in December.

But there’s no question that several high-profile crimes involving past and present soldiers from the base have occurred:

_ Former soldier Brandon Barnes gunned down a national park ranger at Mount Rainier in January.

_ Sgt. David Stewart, a medic assigned to Lewis-McChord, shot and killed his wife and 6-year-old son before turning the gun on himself in April on a freeway in Thurston County.

_ Lt. Col. Robert Underwood was charged last week with allegedly hiring a hit man to kill his wife and his superior officer and threatening to blow up the state capitol. He was assigned to a Lewis-McChord brigade tasked with training National Guard and Army Reserve units. He arrived on base in January.

Q: Are Lewis-McChord’s growth and deployment schedule to blame for its problems?

A: Lewis-McChord is the largest military base on the West Coast, with more than 40,000 active-duty soldiers and airmen. Its active-duty ranks have grown substantially since 2003, and thousands of soldiers have served multiple tours.

The number of troops has grown from 19,000 to 34,000 due to the demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Across the whole Army, about 100,000 active-duty soldiers were added to the ranks over the last decade.

The Army has 45 combat brigades, whose soldiers are most susceptible to stress and repeated deployments. Lewis-McChord has three of those brigades, totaling about 12,000 soldiers, all built around the eight-wheeled armored Stryker vehicles.

Rodriguez said the number of soldiers coming and going from Lewis-McChord is similar to other major Army bases.

The most-deployed front-line infantry unit at Lewis-McChord is the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Brigade, the Army’s original Stryker brigade. It is on its fourth tour of at least one year — the same as 14 other brigades across the Army. Bales served with the 3rd Brigade on all of its deployments — three to Iraq and one to Afghanistan.

Dr. Harry Croft, a former Army doctor and psychiatrist who says he’s evaluated more than 7,000 veterans for PTSD, says the rampage is “clearly a wakeup call for the military to take a closer look into the impact on soldiers who serve multiple tours in some of the same regions.”

But Christopher Pawloski, an Army prosecutor who worked at Fort Lewis from 2004 to 2007, before it became a joint base, questioned the idea that multiple deployments lead to violent crime. He pointed out that there were four murder cases during his time at the local base, and three involved soldiers who never deployed or only deployed for a short time.

Barnes, who shot and killed the Mount Rainier ranger and then drowned in a creek, is another case where multiple deployments were not a factor. Barnes did one tour of Iraq and it’s not clear if he saw much combat; he worked as a radio and communications equipment repairman.

Q: Is Lewis-McChord leadership to blame?

A: Suicide and behavioral health problems at Lewis-McChord indicate lapses in leadership, said James Dubik, a retired three-star general who commanded Fort Lewis from 2004-2007 and now works for a think tank, the Institute for the Study of War.

“These are major incidents and they are indicative of some kind of serious problem that exists on (base),” he said.

But he noted that the nation’s military leaders and politicians decided not to grow the nation’s ground forces enough to fight two protracted wars. The nation has asked “too much of too few Americans for too long” and the combat stress resulting from multiple tours is a “natural consequence of having to go to that well too often.”

Pinpointing these problems internally will be difficult because they are complex and distributed throughout the organization, Dubik said. He said the base’s leadership, from junior non-commissioned officers to generals, must come together with elected leaders, health professionals and family members to help Lewis-McChord find gaps and fix mistakes.

“It’s like a thunderstorm,” he said. “You can’t say one thing causes a thunderstorm. A set of things have to come together to create a thunderstorm.”

The base’s leadership is fragmented, however.

Most of its front-line units, including the three Stryker brigades, answer to I Corps, which is set up to command tens of thousands of soldiers in a war. Madigan Army Medical Center reports to Western Regional Medical Command. Green Berets and Rangers get their orders from Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla.

A Lewis-McChord spokesman said the diffuse organizational structure is not different from other major bases.

However, a major change in the last three years is that two successive commanding generals have spent significant time away from the base. Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby was tapped to oversee U.S. military operations in Iraq in 2009-2010; Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti was given the same assignment in Afghanistan in 2011-12. While Jacoby and Scaparrotti were gone, commanders with fewer stars on their shoulders stayed behind to run the base.

Q: Does the “kill team” case shed any light on problems at Lewis-McChord?

A: In that case, in which four soldiers received prison sentences for staging the deaths of three Afghan noncombatants, all the defendants were deemed fit for combat at Lewis-McChord. The same was true of Bales, who spent his whole career assigned to the base.

In both incidents, the soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan at small bases away from their usual leadership.

The “kill team” defendants belonged to the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, which spent two years preparing to fight in Iraq before learning just seven months before its departure that it would go to Afghanistan instead.

Around the same time, Bales went to Iraq with the 3rd Brigade. Both brigades deployed in 2009-10.

Among the three Lewis-McChord brigades that went to war that year, the 3rd Brigade had the least amount of time at home to recuperate. Its mission planning fluctuated throughout 2011 as the Pentagon prepared for a drawdown of forces in Afghanistan. At a May 2011 training exercise seven months before their next deployment, most 3rd Brigade soldiers weren’t sure whether they’d be on their way to Afghanistan that winter. The order came at the end of August.

Also, the 5th Brigade “kill team” soldiers served in a 30-man platoon that was splintered from its normal 120-man company. They were on a forward base reporting to leaders with whom they didn’t train, and who didn’t know them.

Likewies, Bales was serving at a Special Forces outpost, on a mission apart from the soldiers with whom he’d trained for his deployment.