WEAPONIZED TO KILL . . . AMERICANS*
I was reminded of the photograph above when I saw the weapons stash of United States Coast Guard lieutenant and self-described white nationalist, Christopher Paul Hasson, below. Mr. Hasson, who is alleged to have planned to murder civilians “on a scale rarely seen in this country,” had a hit list of prominent Democratic politicians and CNN and MSNBC journalists. He wasn’t just planning to start a race war on American soil to establish a “white homeland.” He was thinking of murder and destruction on a massive scale. “Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch. . . . They will die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise.” Hasson’s stash of pristine, fully functional killing machines, displayed below, was, of course, legal for him to possess and own.
In response to a question about Mr. Hasson, Mr. Trump said only, “I think it’s a shame.” Two things have made it difficult for Mr. Trump to verbalize Mr. Hasson a terrorist: his base’s religious fervor for unrestrained access to guns and his own and many in his base’s belief in the superiority of whites.
Maybe three things: Hasson isn’t Muslim.
Maybe four things: Mr. Hasson’s targets included people Mr. Trump has designated “enemy of the people.”
Both photographs above show weapons that share the same purpose. To kill Americans.
Yesterday’s Washington Post published an interesting piece suggesting the military has a “white-power” problem.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-military-has-a-white-power-problem/2019/03/08/e5ba3f92-41a7-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82story.html?utmterm=.f303d6165b94
We spend upwards of a trillion dollars a year on national defense and fighting terrorism. We send soldiers to distant theatres presumably to keep us safe from hostile foreign intervention at home in order, among others, to preserve the right to own and possess the weapons we use to kill each other and ourselves. In the United States we kill at rates that outstrip American deaths by foreign terrorism on orders of magnitude.
As for the photograph above, a lot of us have no personal investment in the foreign campaigns or their destructive aftermath, other than taxes. My son-in-law Nick took the photograph during his deployment to Afghanistan on a day he almost died. On many of the days during his tour there, I suspect, he almost died. He was acutely aware of his near death on this day, however, for reasons that become clear. Nick was a medic. Army. He’s now discharged from the military. Medically. PTSD, other.
From time to time, Nick sent me emails. I have his permission to post this, including the photograph and the email it accompanied.
“Hey Rick its Nick; you seemed interested in what I do over here and yesterday I got this pic so I thought I’d share. We ran into this ghetto ghetto home and found 2 males, one old lady, and a 12 year old boy. The oldest male was a mullah so our LT told us to hurry cause every other time we have hit a mullah we run into lots of problems with the community. So we kind of half search while I try to document all of what we find (I’m the troop photographer so I always use my camera to try to A) show our evidence and B) make it look like the Afghans that work with us did all the damage). Our fast search turned into a complete teardown of this place as soon as we found a burn pile of old IED components. So I tear apart a motorcycle trying to find a vin and discover it has no battery but is full of HME (home-made explosives) and wired to blow; luckily for me it didn’t cause I was all up in it (We found the switch later with the number sequence written on the back; he was planning to hit something within the next few days). They hide it so well it looked completely normal until I broke off the side panels. Then we hit the mother-load, we tore down a wall that was full of AK47, pistols, HME, wire, det cord, grenades and switches. It was a good find but also the kind that piss us off cause the man we are dealing with has blown up and wants to blow up many more Americans. But we got him off the street and he is probably gonna get executed. His wife and young son are left alone and without a home because we detonated the motorcycle in their compound. That’s the hardest part of my job, tearing apart a family of young kids that this is all they know and we don’t help them; we walk away with them sobbing behind us. At least this time I saw why I knew this guy was a bad guy. Usually we don’t catch them red handed; we have to go off what someone else tells us.
“Our job team has been so successful last week we took down an entire Haquani network and had the President briefed on our results. Some commanding General gave us a letter, which I guess is supposed to make us feel better about being in a pointless war, but I digress. This mission took about 5 hours. We sometime do 2–3 a day and then we run to KAF to drop off our detainees. It’s a crazy life for sure.
“Anyways hopefully that makes sense. If not I can try to answer questions.”
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner and https://lastamendment.com