Today, a NORAD surveillance blimp anchored over Maryland broke free and drifted over Pennsylvania, with U.S.A.F. jets in hot pursuit, leading to some inevitable humour.
It also brought some focus to a short video on another surveillance blimp anchored over Kabul since 2009, its purpose secret. And the role of the blimp over Maryland? To detect long range missile attacks is the official reason. Does anyone believe that?
Apart from other things, the video shows the state of Kabul today.
This photo shows Afghanistan in 1970 and in more recent times.
But it could be Iraq or Libya or now Syria. Or Palestine. Or Yemen.
Democracy at work.
And this video documents one of the core reasons for the war in Afghanistan – opium production. It’s skyrocketed since the American occupation and continues to grow. It’s big business; a business of the global elite, whose interests the military serve, as Smedley Butler, a highly decorated US Marine Brigadier told us in the 1930s.
But enough people believe the rhetoric that it continues, and there are plenty of poor Americans for whom the military represents a path out of poverty – or so they think when they’re young and impressionable, before they’ve been tossed on the scrap heap a few years later with PTSD or missing limbs or worse, and find themselves not glorified but placed on the list of potential terrorists because they know too much. I watch the patriotic fervour at American airports as the military leave or return and it almost makes me sick. Such incredible brainwashing on so many levels.
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