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CounterPunch
January
13, 2003
Monsters, Inc.
The Pentagon
Plan to Create Mutant "Super-Soldiers"
by CHRIS FLOYD
The great wizard, leader of the Wise, once known
to all the world as a force for good, has turned bitter, fearful--and
ambitious. Aping the ways of the evil he once fought--brutality,
dominance, greed, terror--he descends to his secret laboratory,
where, with black arts of alchemy and fiendish technology, he
breeds a race of mutant warriors, "iron bodied and iron
willed": fierce fighters who can attack day and night, without
rest, their combat spirit kept soaring by spikes of lightning
from the wizard's wand.
A scene from Tolkein's Lord of the Rings,
where the corrupted wizard Saruman fashions his monstrous Uruk-Hai
to wage a relentless, remorseless war for dominion? No; unfortunately
it's a very real scheme now being pursued by the Pentagon, whose
dope wizards and gene splicers are working on the creation of
the "Extended Performance War Fighter," the Daily Telegraph
and Christian Science Monitor report.
Pentagon dark lord Donald Rumsfeld is
shoveling billions of tax dollars into the research furnaces
of federal laboratories and private universities across the land
in the wide-ranging effort to spawn "super soldiers,"
fired by drugs and electromagnetic "brain zaps" to
fight without ceasing for days on end. The work is being directed
by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)--yes,
the same outfit now laboring under convicted terrorist-conspirator
John Poindexter to build the "Total Information Awareness"
network that will allow the government to monitor the electronic
records and communications of every citizen.
The DARPA "war fighter enhancement"
programs--an acceleration of bipartisan biotinkering that's been
going on for years--will involve injecting young men and women
with hormonal, neurological and genetic concoctions; implanting
microchips and electrodes in their bodies to control their internal
organs and brain functions; and plying them with drugs that deaden
some of their normal human tendencies: the need for sleep, the
fear of death, the reluctance to kill their fellow human beings.
The research is "very aggressive
and wide open," says Admiral Stephen Baker of the Center
for Defense Information. Indeed, the U.S. Special Operations
Command envisions the creation of "iron bodied and iron
willed personnel" who can "resist the mental and physiological
effects of sleep deprivation" while relying on "ergogenic
substances" to "manage" the "environmental
and mentally induced stress" of the battlefield. Their bodies
juiced, their brains swaddled in Prozacian haze, the enhanced
warfighters can churn relentlessly, remorselessly toward dominion.
And the term "creation" is
not just fanciful rhetoric: some of the research now underway
involves actually altering the genetic code of soldiers, modifying
bits of DNA to fashion a new type of human specimen, one that
functions like a machine, killing tirelessly for days and nights
on end. These mutations will "revolutionize the contemporary
order of battle" and guarantee "operational dominance
across the whole range of potential U.S. military employments,"
the DARPA wizards enthuse.
Of course, the Pentagon is not waiting
on sci-fi technology to enhance the physical abilities of its
warfighters; old-fashioned off-the-shelf "additives"
have long been shoved down soldiers' throats. For example, the
use of amphetamines for pilots has been widespread for decades;
during the first Bush-Saddam War, whole squadrons were cranked
up on the stuff. Not only is the gobbling of speed officially
sanctioned, it's actively encouraged, even implicitly mandated--careers
can be derailed for pilots who refuse to drug themselves.
The results of this dope-peddling were
clearly seen on the new imperial frontier of Afghanistan last
spring, when two U.S. pilots--hopped up on speed--killed four
Canadian allies in a "friendly fire" bombing raid.
The pilots, now facing legal charges, say Air Force brass pressured
them into taking the mind-altering drug before the fatal flight.
But such glitches are inevitable in any
grand scientific undertaking, and DARPA remains undeterred in
its bold quest to "push the limits of human input/output,"
advance the "symbiotic relationship between man and machine,"
and customize "pharmaceutical technology" to "embolden
the warfighter and his superiors," as military scientists
declared at a Pentagon-sponsored conference on "future warfare."
What happens to the burnt-out husks of
these "iron" soldiers after their minds and bodies
have been eaten way by relentless modification and ceaseless
toil is, of course, of no concern to the Bush Regime. Even now,
the White House is cutting back on health benefits to military
veterans--even going so far as to order veterans hospitals not
to advertise their available services, lest broken soldiers actually
seek to claim the promise of support their government once gave
them. For men like Bush--protected scions of privilege who sit
out wars in safety, in booze-addled luxury--such promises are
just cynical sucker ploys, aimed at coaxing decent soldiers into
acting as the hitmen of empire, then discarding them when they're
no longer needed.
How very strange it is: those who want
to turn American soldiers into mindless, drug-addled mutants
and send them off to kill and die in far-flung wars of imperial
conquest are seen as patriots, noble leaders, doing the will
of God; while those who would rather see these good men and women
called home, treated with honor and respect--their talents and
dedication applied solely to the defense of their own great country,
not pressed into the service of a greedy, rapacious elite--are
denounced as "traitors," "anti-American agitators,"
"allies of terrorism."
But such is the inversion of values--the
wisdom gone astray and turned to fell practice--that now rules
in Bush's Washington, and in the Pentagon's fiery crucibles of
war.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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January
4, 2003
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Read
Whiteout and Find Out
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