DEAD SOULS:The Pentagon Plan To Create Remorseless "Warfighters"

*Excerpted~ so please read articles linked in full or 'Bookmark' this post for later reading! Thankyou.

Dead Souls: The Pentagon Plan To Create Remorseless "Warfighters"
by Chris Floyd (2008)

Penny Coleman at Alternet.com gives us a look at a new program designed to dull the moral sensibilities of American soldiers in combat on the imperial frontiers: Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War.

But as we'll see below, this attempt to peddle magic pills to chase away the horrors of war is just one front in a long-term, wide-ranging "warfighter enhancement program" -- including the neurological and genetic re-engineering of soldiers' minds and bodies to create what the Pentagon calls "iron bodied and iron willed personnel": tireless, relentless, remorseless, unstoppable.

Coleman takes specific aim at the "Psychological Kevlar Act," aimed at reducing the alarming spread of soldier suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder spawned by the illegal invasion of Iraq. The program relies heavily on dosing soldiers with Propranalol, which, "if taken immediately following a traumatic event, can subdue a victim's stress response and so soften his or her perception of the memory," as Coleman notes. "That does not mean the memory has been erased, but proponents claim that the drug can render it emotionally toothless." She continues:

But is it moral to weaken memories of horrendous acts a person has committed? Some would say that there is no difference between offering injured soldiers penicillin to prevent an infection and giving a drug that prevents them from suffering from a posttraumatic stress injury for the rest of their lives. Others, like Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, object to propranolol's use on the grounds that it medicates away one's conscience...Barry Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, is even more blunt. "That's the devil pill," he says. "That's the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That's the pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if it doesn't work, what's scary is that a young soldier could believe it will."

It is "a kind of moral lobotomy," says Coleman, whose husband killed himself after coming home from the Vietnam War.

Killing the soul is the ultimate aim of those who seek to create tools for empire, instead of recruiting citizens to defend the Republic from attack.

..."warfighter enhancement" is being taken to whole new levels of technological advancement – and moral depravity. I'm doing further research on the current state of the "enhancement" programs, but they are still going full-bore since the time the excerpts below were written:

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).

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.

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."

PLEASE READ IN FULL
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3-artic...

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also see:
Penny Colemans article (referenced in above article)
Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War
http://www.alternet.org/health/72956
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Recent Related threads:
The Drugged Wars~Soldiers Drugged to Keep Fighting Wars
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/129958

Sharp Rise in U. S. Military Psychiatric Drug Use and Suicides
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/129958#comment-1397572

The Deceivers Bitter Laugh
http://dailypaul.com/node/130521