Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

July 18, 2011

Before retiring, former Lt. Col. John Nagle collaborated with Gen. David Petraeus, the incoming CIA Director, in creating the U.S. Army?s current counter-insurgency doctrine. That doctrine, as the London Sunday Times reported last year, includes deployment of tens of thousands of special operations troops ? including 7,000 assigned to hit teams ? as well as the use of remote controlled drones to carry out targeted assassination in at least six countries.

Nagle has proudly described his handiwork as ?an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.? As national security affairs commentator Fred Branfman observes, this campaign has actually led to expanded violence and terrorism, and planted seeds from which a new crop of anti-American terrorism will sprout.

The immediate impact, Branfman continues, is the institutionalization of ?extrajudicial state killing formerly associated ? only with the Gestapo and KGB.? It is also cultivating a generation of state-licensed assassins who kill distant, anonymous people through drone strikes. ?It?s like a video game,? one drone pilot told a reporter. ?It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it?s so [blanking] cool.?

America can survive the threat of foreign terrorism ? but the home-grown ?industrial killing machine? may very well destroy us.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.