The Ebola hysteria hasn’t amounted to all that many patients inside the United States, but it’s still being used as a pretext for the deployment of US military forces on American soil.
The Pentagon today announced that Northern Command is creating a “Ebola Response Team” that will be ready at a moment’s notice to deploy anywhere in the US to “fight” the virus.
The program is going to start with 30 troops at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, where they are conducting “high-level preparations” for operations in case anyone other than the existing three Ebola cases become confirmed.
In and of itself, the program appears fairly innocuous, but the precedent it sets, allowing the Pentagon to start preparing domestic deployments every time a scare story reaches critical mass, could have boots on the ground constantly, as if there is one constant in American life, it’s that there’s always something we’re being told is about to become a crisis.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz
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Is the USG basically reading paranoid manuals of conspiracy theorists from the 90s? They sure seem to be trying to realize everything those guys used to say. Step by step. Vindication I say. Conspiracy theories–the prophecies of our time?
"…there’s always something we’re being told is about to become a crisis."
That would be because the people we've put in charge are incompetent.
As for fighting the virus, what are the skills of these military personnel they're putting in this Response Team? Are they medical people or environment control people? Are they meant to control the spread of the virus or to control the movement of people, both infected or panicked?
I view it as mostly a clever PR campaign to boost the military's image. "We can save you from anything. And by the way, don't worry about all those atrocities. Just keep worshiping the war machine. (That's an order!)"