MSNBC-TV showed video today about the New Mexico State Police terrorizing a family over an alleged speeding violation. The family consisted of a woman and several children. The police broke windows, fired shots, bullied, threatened, screamed at, and forced the woman and her kids to the ground, but naturally it is the family that is under charges instead of the police that acted unlawfully. In a different case, in Washington D.C. several weeks ago, police officers fired shots at and killed a woman because her car rammed a barricade and she tried to get away, but they had no idea whether the ramming was intentional or accidental, nor did they care. They used brute force against her rather than to simply capture and arrest her. This is barbarism, and these are hardly isolated cases in the U.S. Not only are top officers and officials of the defense establishment, which systematically brutalizes civilians in foreign adventures, and top officials of the N.S.A., which spies on law-abiding American citizens, out of control, but many police forces around the nation as well.
The war, already the longest in American history, has spread to different theaters in different nations besides Afghanistan, most notably Iraq, and most Americans, unfortunately, pay little attention to it. It is something that's just there in the national conscious, but day-by-day or week-by-week coverage in the media is hardly noticeable. Though, we weren't around at the time, you get the feeling that World Wars I & II were covered comprehensively by the media of that time, and every citizen on the home front was paying attention to the reports of the battles. The problem with these amorphous wars of the 21st century that are being waged in several countries around the world is that the U.S. political and military elite have decided on warring against a broader enemy as opposed to focusing on a narrower enemy as in the aforementioned world wars. In other words, going to war against practically any militant who detests the U.S. rather than focusing on actual 9/11-type
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