Paranoid Warfare

Published in Neues Deutschland
(Germany) on 12 August 2015
by René Heilig (link to originallink to original)
Translated from by Ron Argentati. Edited by Danielle Tezcan.
How the US Military Sees Journalists

The “Law of War Manual” contains 1,176 pages and is intended to be a sort of handbook for the conduct of war. The publisher of the manual is the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Eighty-one pages are dedicated to defining and classifying groups of people that the average soldier is likely to encounter on the battlefield. Everyone should read this before they are likely to come into contact with these average soldiers, especially journalists, who are – according to the handbook – “unprivileged belligerents.” That is to say, they are participants in the fighting who deserve no special rights. Again, that is to say that a journalist is deserving of no greater special protections than those accorded to a member of the Taliban or other so-called “irregular” combatants.

In that respect, any prosecution for alleged treason here in Germany is almost harmless, even if it arises from the same motives. The viewpoint of the American military is in agreement with the intelligence prosecutor in Cologne: The public is just an aberration in the kind of democracy they want. Demands for transparency are nothing less than the devil's doing. Every member of the public who doesn't swallow the “official” (or better said, the prefabricated version of events as presented in the media) and doesn't just silently concur and pass it on is suspected of being a spy.

The forward to the manual states that martial law is part of what they are. That's true – and it can be described in a single word: paranoid.


Paranoide Kriegsführung
Von René Heilig: über die Einordnung von Journalisten durch das US-Militär
12.08.2015

Das »Law of War Manual« ist 1176 Seiten dick und soll so etwas wie ein Handbuch für Kriegsvölkerrecht sein. Herausgeber ist das Pentagon in Washington. Auf 81 Seiten sind Personengruppen definiert, die der gemeine US-Soldat so treffen kann. Man sollte es lesen, bevor man einem derart geschulten Uniformierten begegnet. Gerade als Journalist. Das sind nämlich laut Handbuch »unprivileged belligerents«, also Kriegsteilnehmer, denen man keine besonderen Rechte zugestehen muss. Was einen Medienmenschen aus US-Sicht nicht schützenswerter macht als einen Taliban oder einen sonstigen sogenannten irregulären Kämpfer.

So gesehen ist jede Verfolgung wegen angeblichen Landesverrats hierzulande geradezu harmlos - wenngleich von den gleichen Motiven gesteuert. Aus Sicht der US-Militärs wie der geheimdienstlichen Anzeigenerstatter in Köln ist Öffentlichkeit nur eine Fehlfunktion im System der erwünschten Demokratie. Forderungen nach Transparenz sind Teufelswerk. Jeder Vertreter der Öffentlichkeit, der nicht die gewünschten (oder noch besser: die vorgefertigten) Medienberichte ungeprüft weitergibt, ist verdächtig, ein Spion zu sein.

Im Vorwort heißt es: Das Kriegsrecht ist ein Teil dessen, was wir sind. Das ist wahr - und mit einem Wort zu erklären: paranoid.
This post appeared on the front page as a direct link to the original article with the above link .

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