“What kind of a human being kicks a pregnant woman? I mean, forget whether or not it is a police officer that is supposedly protecting people,” Dozier’s attorney Mark Bullman said. Dozier filed a complaint with the DeKalb police department’s internal affairs unit, but it was never investigated. Instead, four supervisors and an internal affairs detective signed off that Wheeler’s use of force met policy. … Fleischer filed an open records request and found two more use-of-force complaints against Wheeler within the last nine months. In all three cases, the victims were not the focus of the original police incident.

Wheeler was accused of twisting a 53 year-old woman’s arm in 2011. This January, he shot a family’s chained dog after showing up at the wrong home on a call.

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts 

KINGSTON, NY, 08 MAY 2012 — An emerging foreign policy trend is Cold War II.  The US military/security complex, with help from Obama and Hillary Clinton, is working overtime to revive the profitable long-term stalemate of the Cold War that lasted four decades from the Berlin airlift to the Reagan-Gorbachev accord. During this long period Congress and the public supported an endless array of weapons systems to deter the “Soviet threat,” which, until President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in the early 1970s, comprised together with China the “Communist threat.”

This threat was not all spin.  It had an element of real potential, but the threat was hyped to the limit. In the 1950s in Atlanta, Georgia, and elsewhere school children were issued military dog tags, just like the ones GIs would yank off the necks of their dead colleagues in the war movies, with their blood type in event of a nuclear attack. Some Americans built bomb shelters on their home properties. Senator Joseph McCarthy led a witch hunt for communists, and although there were some communists and communist sympathizers in sensitive positions, McCarthyism had many innocent victims, just like “the war on terror.”

Anyone with a social conscience was suspect.  The Hollywood blacklist or equivalent suspicion fell upon the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, and Lena Horne. Even Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay for High Noon, the Gary Cooper Western, was blacklisted, and the stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, was investigated by the House Committee on un-American Activities.  Even Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project and the “father of the atomic bomb” was under investigation for “left-wing associations” while he developed the first nuclear weapon for the US government. Oppenheimer was on the FBI’s Custodial Detention Index for arrest in case of national emergency.

Whether serious or not, the “Soviet threat” was more real than the “Muslim threat.” The Red Army had defeated Hitler’s previously undefeated armies. In the aftermath of World War II many believed that only nuclear weapons could stop the Red Army from overrunning Western Europe. When the Soviet Union acquired the hydrogen bomb, the public was willing to support the amounts of military spending and security measures necessary to protect the West from the Soviet threat.

China is being constructed into America’s new bogyman, with Putin in reserve. Once the military-security complex discovered that China was no longer needed as a creditor, because the Federal Reserve was willing to assume the role of all creditors and purchase the entirety of the debt issued to cover Washington’s huge annual operating deficit, every provocation possible has been thrown at China.

The insults heaved at China go beyond hypocritical human rights accusations or asylum for Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. A year ago Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that Washington has a “national interest” in the South China Sea. This interest showed itself last month in joint US-Philippines military exercises. China’s response was  a warning that the joint military exercises raise the risks of armed confrontation over the disputed South China Sea. The Liberation Army Daily put the warning bluntly: “Anyone with clear eyes saw long ago that behind these drills is reflected a mentality that will lead the South China Sea issue down a fork in the road to military confrontation and resolution through armed force.”

Despite such warnings, Washington continues to stick its nose into China’s disputes with Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia, revealing, in the words of the Liberation Army Daily “the United States’ intention of trying to draw more countries into stirring up the situation in the South China Sea.”

To increase its military presence in the Asia-Pacific, Washington intends to construct a naval base on South Korea’s Jeju Island. Washington has sent US Marines to Australia and is reassigning US Marines from Japan to other Asia-Pacific locations. Pentagon spokesman George Little said the reassignment “signals our commitment to Asia Pacific and it is a reflection of our emphasis on Asia Pacific.”  A deal is being cut for the US Navy to return to Subic Bay, and according to some reports Washington is working to get the Philippine government’s agreement for Japanese Self-Defense Forces to be stationed alongside US troops on Philippine bases.

Thus has Washington positioned itself on the side of the Philippines in the dispute with China over the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal, and on the side of Japan in the dispute with China over the Diaoyu Islands. Washington has intentionally militarized the area as its means of instigating a profitable long-term cold war with China.

Unlike Cold War I when the US economy was growing and the incomes of Americans were rising, today the US economy remains mired in years of recession. Much of the US industrial and manufacturing base has been lost. For a decade or longer the economy has been unable to create high-productivity, high-wage jobs.  Both citizens and government are deeply in debt. The unemployment rate declines because discouraged Americans unable to find jobs drop out of the work force and cease to be counted as unemployed.

Washington might imagine that the Federal Reserve can continue to finance $1 trillion annual military/security budgets by monetizing the government’s debt. However, printing money with which to buy things eventually means high inflation.

There are only two ways to finance Cold War II.  One is to continue to collect the payroll tax but cease to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits. The other is to seize the remaining wealth in private pensions and IRAs.

Cold War II is going to be a bad experience for Americans.

The Chinese economy is dynamic and vibrant. It has been growing at unprecedented rates for 30 years. China has trade surpluses, large reserves of foreign exchange, and has raised 600 million people out of poverty. The US is broke, and its citizens are sinking into poverty.

In other words, the US has lost Cold War II before it begins.

Publisher’s Note:  Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week, and professor of economics, Dr. Roberts served on personal and committee staffs in the House and Senate and as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration.

By Spencer Ackerman, May 7, 2012, Wired

The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The Avengers because the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.

Moviegoers and comic fans know that S.H.I.E.L.D., led by Samuel L. Jackson’s super-spy Nick Fury, is an international peacekeeping/global surveillance/crisis response/quasi-military organization. But its relationship with the United States is murky. And that basically stopped the U.S. military, which is normally eager to cooperate with the film industry on blockbuster movies, from teaming up with the Avengers.

“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it,” Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room. “To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D. answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.? We hit that roadblock and decided we couldn’t do anything” with the film.

Well, almost anything. In the movie’s climactic Manhattan fight scene, New York National Guardsmen show up to try to help police and firemen contain — spoiler alert — the damage wrought by a cosmic invasion. The Defense Department allowed Marvel to film Humvees for the scene.

But attentive moviegoers may have noticed the U.S. military’s latest stealth jets, the F-22 Raptors and what looked like F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, aboard S.H.I.E.L.D.’s airborne helicarrier, an awe-inspiring, tilt-rotor aircraft carrier. (One assumes that thing has the runway space necessary for a Raptor take-off — and S.H.I.E.L.D. super-scientists fixed the jet’s oxygen woes.) The fighters were “digitally inserted” by the studio, Strub explains, not actual planes provided by the U.S. military.

Normally, the military loves to help Hollywood make mega-blockbusters. Iron Man got into a dogfight with F-22 Raptors in his first eponymous movie. The Navy provided the producers of the recent Act of Valorwith unprecedented access to SEAL training missions and even let its secretive elite warriors act on camera. And the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, even has a cameo in the forthcoming Battleship. (“I had a great time, although the director would probably recommend that I keep my day job,” Mabus told Politico.)

But the ambiguity around what exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. is provides a vexing complication. If it’s an American governmental agency, what kind of constitutional authority does it exercise over the military? If it’s an international body, as the movie text suggests and Strub determined, are U.S. military personnel and equipment on loan to it through some kind of United Nations Security Council resolution? The questions may seem picayune, but they’re precisely the stuff that can cause an image-conscious military to yank its cooperation from a movie.

The comics have fudged the issue for decades. Marvel now describes it as an “extra-government” body, although many takes on the organization have clearly emphasized its international character. Yet U.S. presidents have fired S.H.I.E.L.D. directors (Fury, Tony Stark/Iron Man) and appointed others (Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin, incumbent Steve Rogers/Captain America) — although that might operate by an informal international understanding, much like the U.S. appoints the director of the World Bank.

Either way, the ambiguity prevented the Avengers from assembling beside the U.S. military. “It just got to the point where it didn’t make any sense,” Strub laments. And now comic nerds have another data point to bring up during continuity debates about what exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. is.