Manning, Bales, Hasan: Victims of America’s Wars

Dear Mr. President,

To read the newspapers lately you’d never know there’s a war in Afghanistan; that we still have 60,000 troops there. Not one article in the NYT for weeks; only those little Names of the Dead boxes that appear occasionally, evidence that people are still fighting and dying there. Today a Polish soldier died; yesterday, 3 NATO troops were killed by a roadside bomb; Wednesday, the NYT listed First Lt. Tim Santos as the 2,246^th American casualty of the Afghan war; but the only news is about our exit by the end of 2014, how the war is winding down, how many troops we’ll leave for “training and support.” The evidence of war appears in other ways however, like collateral damage, not from abroad but here on the home front. This week Pfc. Manning was sentenced to 35 years for exposing war crimes in Iraq, Sgt. Bales received a life sentence for killing 16 unarmed Afghan civilians and Maj. Hasan was found guilty of killing 13 and wounding 32 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. All 3 are as much victims of the war as if they were battlefield casualties. The war is coming home in more subtle and ominous ways too, ways that threaten both individual citizens and democracy itself: the morphing from a democracy to a security state. The line between military and civilian is blurred and the differences are hard to distinguish. Police forces across the land are up-armored with high tech weapons and military tactics, riot police and SWAT teams are indistinguishable from soldiers on a battlefield and there are so many overlapping and intertwined “security forces”—DHS, TSA, FBI, NSA, DEA, ATF, etc. that it’s impossible to tell one from the other. In NYC and other places it is now policy to “shoot-to-stop”—meaning kill—rather than disable and the tactics of Guantanamo have come to our prisons; in California it is now legal to force feed hunger-strikers. Technology that tracks terrorists is also used to spy on Americans, mock trials and secret laws are accepted as the new normal; the right to dissent is being systematically squelched, the right to assemble criminalized, the Constitution trampled, the government more opaque and the American people seem to accept all this with astounding passivity. There are a few pockets of resistance but they are isolated, ignored by the press, and it is almost too late, for the security forces are now so pervasive and powerful that any protest can be quickly suppressed. This is your legacy, Mr. President, the end of democracy.