Violence Begets Violence: The Orlando Shootings And The War On Terror
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US… But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.” – Human Rights Watch
We can rail against ISIS, hate crimes, terror threats, Islamic radicalization, gun control and national security. We can blame Muslims, lax gun laws, a homophobic culture and a toxic politic environmental. We can even use the Orlando shooting as fodder for this year’s presidential campaigns.
But until we start addressing the U.S. government’s part in creating, cultivating and abetting domestic and global terrorism – and hold agencies such as the FBI and Defense Department accountable for importing and exporting violence, breeding extremism and generating blowback, which then gets turned loose on an unsuspecting American populace – we’ll be no closer to putting an end to the violence that claimed 50 lives at an Orlando nightclub on June 12, 2016, than we were 15 years ago when nearly 3,000 individuals were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
Here’s what I know:
The United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world for too long now. Controlling more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market, the U.S. has sold or donated weapons to at least 96 countries in the past five years, including the Middle East.
The U.S. also provide countries such as Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Iraq with grants and loans through the Foreign Military Financing program to purchase military weapons.
At the same time that the U.S. is equipping nearly half the world with deadly weapons, profiting to the tune of $36.2 billion, its leaders have also been lecturing American citizens on the dangers of gun violence and working to enact measures that would make it more difficult for Americans to acquire certain weapons.
Blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities, is a reality. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback. We failed to heed his warning.
The 9/11 attacks were blowback: the CIA provided Osama bin Laden with military training and equipment to fight the Soviet Union, only to have him turn his ire on the U.S. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback: the Tsarnaev brothers reportedly credited the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as the motives for their attacks.
The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback for America’s drone killings of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback for the horrors our enlisted men and women are being exposed to as part of this never-ending war on terror: the 39-year-old psychiatrist had been …read more
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