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Originally Posted by LawJik
Ok I watched this for the first time the other day and found it fairly interesting. I happened to be eating dinner with my uncle last night so I brought it up.
He was career Army, started as a Ranger and did a stint with Delta Force including Blackhawk Down in Mogadishu before moving on up and becoming a Lt. Gen. (he spent his last 15 years at the top of the COC for special ops). He is the silliest, most good-natured person I know but he can survive in the wilderness for a week eating bugs and kill people with his bare hands. He retired in 2000 and began contracting with the Government to do anti-terrorism training for ludicrous sums of money, so he seemed like the perfect person to ask about this.
He says he's going to watch it on his flight to Vegas tomorrow and let me know what is legit and what is sensationalism. Here's the interesting part:
He told me unsolicited that the military-industrial complex does indeed hold the single largest influence over the U.S., including (according to him) congress, the entire White house, etc (he told me a ton of stuff but I won't get into here). As we had a few more beers, he started to loosen up and told me that there was a group of 3 high-ranking officers groomed and picked by Eisenhower to prevent an outright coup after the war. Those officers hand-picked replacements, who hand-picked replacements etc. etc. He told me that he would need 2 hands to count the number of times that handful of people has prevented the U.S. from actively trying to take over world (not like Pinky and the Brain but think WWIII but at the end we dont even pretend to give the countries back). Apparently there has been a list of countries we need to occupy at the first opportunity, and this list is modified as different threats emerge
but no country is ever taken off that list. That is, all of the countries that we wanted to occupy to stop the spread of communism are still on the same list of the countries where extremist Islam is a problem. He is going to go deeper into it supposedly when he's back in town, but he did say that in 50 years it is likely that we will stop just leaving bases in countries and return to outright colonialism.
Sorry to ramble on and on my mind is just blown right now.