Shortly after the attacks of September the 11th, the amazingly-prescient Hunter S. Thompson published an article on ESPN -- Fear & Loathing in America -- in which he foresaw: "The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives."
We are now at in the13th year of our military involvement in Afghanistan. The number of troops still fighting in that mountainous country is higher than during the first seven years of the war; Bush's war was truly Iraq, and Afghanistan is truly Obama's war. Though the number of troops will wind down from its current level of 50 thousand to under 15 thousand, those 15 thousand will be fighting well past 2024. Even if an anti-war president were elected in 2016, the current agreement would force him/her to remain in the fight for at least two years.
The end of the Afghan war may just be 2026, when St. Elizabeth's -- DHS' answer to the Pentagon -- is slated to be completed. Since veterans are given preference in DHS hiring, we can expect that many of the pre-kindergarten kids on September the 11th -- who are now in their early teens -- will be at St. Elizabeth's celebrating the completion of DHS headquarters, and remembering their time in Afghanistan. If the Pentagon and the complacent White House have their way, an entire generation of Americans will be trained in counter-insurgency, counter-intelligence, and guerrilla warfare; and that generation will take the helm at the Department of Homeland Security.
Though the Department of Homeland Security was primarily created to "coordinate" security in order to prevent terrorist attacks, the department has over the past few years begun to intrude in every aspect of a regular citizen's life. Transportation Security Administration VIPR teams can be spotted beyond airports, conducting checks at trains stations, subways, and ferries to the tune of almost 10,000 per year. None of those by-now dozens of thousands of checkpoints have apprehended any terrorists, succeeding only in harassing and intimidating regular Americans while they go about their daily business.
As the Transportation Security Administration VIPR teams expand their operations in America's streets, there's call to arm more than 45,000 TSA agents. The Senate's immigration amnesty bill will add 20,000 armed agents to the Border Patrol -- who by the way have the power to break the 4th amendment anywhere 100 miles from the border, stripping almost 200 million Americans of the right to be secure in their papers and possessions. If the White House has its way, the next couple of years will see more than 60,000 armed employees added to different DHS sub-battalions.
Jeh Johnson, the incoming chief of DHS, was during his time as a Pentagon lawyer a critical player in Obama's escalation of drone warfare in Afghanistan. Johnson is destined to oversee the most drastic immigration overhaul in a generation, and he will also oversee a massive expansion in drone use. Further, almost 2 billion bullets have been purchased, with the aim of further expanding the militarization of America's police and domestic security forces. The elections of 2016 will truly determine whether America has irreversibly become a police state.
