Coronavirus vs. the Mass Surveillance State: Which Poses the Greater Threat?

…by Jonas E. Alexis and John W. Whitehead

Jonas E. Alexis: During the 1950s and 60s, the CIA covertly and diabolically directed scientists to dose unsuspecting human guinea pigs with LSD and other drugs. The eminent journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer has recently written a meticulously detailed book on this issue entitled, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.[1]

One of those individuals who was dosed by the CIA was none other than the late Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. Bulger was dosed over 50 times! As the leader of the Winter Hill Gang, Bulger would go on to antagonize much of the South Boston area. In other words, the CIA essentially created the Winter Hill Gang.

The LSD program which the CIA set in motion was known as MK-Ultra, and the scientist behind of all this was a Jewish chemist by the name of Sidney Gottlieb, who, according to Kinzer, had “a license to kill.” This “license to kill” allowed Gottlieb to run dangerous experiments with LSD on unsuspecting Americans. The goal of Gottlieb’s entire project? Manipulation, mind control, assassination plots, and murder if necessary.

In Gottlieb’s world, nothing was forbidden, and every crime you could possibly imagine was a fair game. Morality to him was simply a relic of the past. Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who eventually became the drug guru of the 60s, was a product of MK-Ultra; Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was also a victim of MK-Ultra; the poet Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, all had mystical experiences after taking LSD which the CIA had surreptitiously provided. John Lennon, the founder of the Beatles, was a vehicle for the CIA and indeed MK-Ultra. Lennon once said: “We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget…[The CIA] invented LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom.”[2]

Well, only dope heads like Lennon actually thought that LSD was equivalent to freedom. The seven blacks who were given triple doses of LSD every day for seventy-seven days at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, under the supervision of Gottlieb himself, would certainly disagree with Lennon.

LSD doesn’t and can never bring freedom. LSD has always been a form of political control. That was why the CIA promoted it.[3] As we all know, this LSD program turned America upside down, and largely brought about the sexual revolution, which in itself is a form of political control[4] and which deliberately excluded morality as a guiding principle. As Wilhelm Reich, one of the fathers of the sexual revolution, put it way back in 1971:

“The first prerequisite for healthier human and sexual relationships is the elimination of those moral concepts which base their demands on allegedly supernatural commands, on arbitrary human regulations, or simply on tradition…We do not want to see natural sexual attraction stamped as ‘sin,’ ‘sensuality’ fought as something low and beastly, and the ‘conquering of the flesh’ made the guiding principle of morality!”[5]

The logic here is pretty straightforward: the CIA and the US government have been involved in covert activities since the beginning of time. We did not know about MK-Ultra until years later. But the US government is just the tip of the iceberg. As George Orwell puts it in 1984, we are living in a time where the government of any country wants to control and manipulate its citizens via covert means. Aldous Huxley, another dope head, was very cognizant of this as well. He wrote in the 1958 preface of A Brave New World:

“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”

James Dacre of the Guardian writes that Huxley wrote his dystopian novel “in the shadow of the first world war, the Wall Street Crash and a devastating flu virus that had claimed millions of lives.”[6] We are currently in the middle of another devastating virus.

Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, has said that the coronavirus is biological warfare.[7] He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention. Former CIA intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi and others have also argued the same thing. Giraldi wrote in a recent article:

“There has been some speculation that as the Trump Administration has been constantly raising the issue of growing Chinese global competitiveness as a direct threat to American national security and economic dominance, it might be possible that Washington has created and unleashed the virus in a bid to bring Beijing’s growing economy and military might down a few notches. It is, to be sure, hard to believe that even the Trump White House would do something so reckless, but there are precedents for that type of behavior.

“In 2005-9 the American and Israeli governments secretly developed a computer virus called Stuxnet, which was intended to damage the control and operating systems of Iranian computers being used in that country’s nuclear research program. Admittedly Stuxnet was intended to damage computers, not to infect or kill human beings, but concerns that it would propagate and move to infect computers outside Iran proved to be accurate as it spread to thousands of PCs outside Iran, in countries as far flung as China, Germany, Kazakhstan and Indonesia.

“Inevitably there is an Israeli story that just might shed some light on what has been going on in China. Scientists at Israel’s Galilee Research Institute are now claiming that they will have a vaccine against coronavirus in a few weeks which will be ready for distribution and use within 90 days. The institute is claiming that it has been engaged in four years of research on avian coronavirus funded by Israel’s Ministries of Science & Technology and Agriculture.

“They are claiming that the virus is similar to the version that has infected humans, which has led to breakthroughs in development through genetic manipulation, but some scientists are skeptical that a new vaccine could be produced so quickly to prevent a virus that existed only recently. They also have warned that even if a vaccine is developed it would normally have to be tested for side effects, a process that normally takes over a year and includes using it on infected humans.

“If one even considers it possible that the United States had a hand in creating the coronavirus at what remains of its once extensive biological weapons research center in Ft Detrick Maryland, it is very likely that Israel was a partner in the project. Helping to develop the virus would also explain how Israeli scientists have been able to claim success at creating a vaccine so quickly, possibly because the virus and a treatment for it were developed simultaneously.”

Is this theory entirely farfetched? I don’t know. Perhaps we won’t know all that is to know about the virus until ten to twenty years later. But the media has almost certainly hyped up the coronavirus outbreak. My oldest brother, Chris, has raised a point which deserves a fair hearing:

“This is the twenty-first century, and not one son or daughter has gone online or on YouTube to explain that one of his/her family members, even himself/herself has contracted the virus to explain what it feels like and maybe express concerns that this might be it. We’re living in an age where people voluntarily share information for the sakes of others. Has anyone met anyone or heard from anyone? So many deaths being reported everywhere in the news, I would think there would be first-hand and second-hand accounts?”

This is certainly a genuine concern, and the inquiring mind would like to know the answers. We are certainly not saying that the entire coronavirus incident is all bunk. We are also not saying that people ought not to take precautions in order to prevent deadly contagions. What we are saying is that there is a bigger picture that people have to see: perhaps, just perhaps, much of this coronavirus stuff is another suggestion that we are living in a brave new world—a world in which the population is forced to accept virtually everything that the government has jammed down their throat. If you down this statement, then listen to this:

“Mark Dubowitz, Executive Director of the Washington-based but Israeli government connected Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) boasted on twitter Tuesday that ‘Coronavirus has done what American economic sanctions could not: shut down non-oil exports.’”

One last point is simply this. Which is a bigger threat: Coronavirus or perpetual wars in the Middle East? Keep in mind that the world hasn’t done a damn thing about the very people who brought one disaster after another upon the world. As the late Vincent Bugliosi convincingly argued, George W. Bush should certainly be put on trial for destroying Iraq.[8]

As we have said elsewhere, the war in Iraq will cost Americans at least 6 trillion dollars.[9] How many people died in the Iraq war? In 2018, the Washington Post itself reported that nearly 5,000 servicemen died[10] in a war that was based on colossal hoaxes, complete fabrications, and just plain lies.[11] That doesn’t even count the Iraqi civilians who were literally obliterated by the disaster.

The estimate of lives lost in the war in Iraq alone is between 100,000 to 600,000, including thousands of civilians. In 2003, at least 12,000 civilians lost their lives.[12] The first three years of the war produced between 104,000 and 223,000 civilian deaths.

When it was over, 2.3 million Iraqis had been forced to flee their homes and towns; by 2008, another 2.7 million Iraqis were displaced, and nearly half a million civilians ended up losing their lives.[13] Thousands upon thousands of other people went missing by 2008.[14]

This is out of a total Iraqi population of about 30 million people![15] The Iraq war, says Kukis, shook the entire nation and created havoc even by 2006.[16] Factions of society that once coexisted were dismantled.

In a nutshell, Iraq was in exponential decay. Buildings and farmlands were destroyed.[17] And the fringe benefits of the war? Between 300,000 and 360,000 veterans returned home with brain injuries,[18] some of which went untreated.[19] Listen to USA Today:

“Pentagon officials estimated…that up to 360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may have suffered brain injuries. Among them are 45,000 to 90,000 veterans whose symptoms persist and warrant specialized care.”[20]

In 2005, more than 6,000 suicides took place among our soldiers serving in Iraq.[21] By 2012, more soldiers committed suicide than died in combat,[22] making it the year with the highest suicide rate since 2001.[23]

Homelessness among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has more than doubled over the past two years, and by the fall of 2012, it was reported that at least “26,531 were living on the streets, at risk of losing their homes, staying in temporary housing or receiving federal vouchers to pay rent.” In addition, about 307,000 soldiers want to leave the military.[24]

Once again, why haven’t we prosecuted the perpetrators? Why did Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the very people who lied about the war end up writing New York Times best-selling books? Why are they still enjoying their lavish lifestyle? If coronavirus is dangerous—and I’m taking the position here that it is—then the US government and the Deep State are poisonous with respect to foreign policy.

John W. Whitehead: Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

Now we find ourselves on the brink of a possible coronavirus contagion.

I’ll leave the media and the medical community to speculate about the impact the coronavirus will have on the nation’s health, but how will the government’s War on the Coronavirus impact our freedoms?

For a hint of what’s in store, you can look to China—our role model for all things dystopian—where the contagion started.

In an attempt to fight the epidemic, the government has given its surveillance state apparatus—which boasts the most expansive and sophisticated surveillance system in the world—free rein. Thermal scanners using artificial intelligence (AI) have been installed at train stations in major cities to assess body temperatures and identify anyone with a fever. Facial recognition cameras and cell phone carriers track people’s movements constantly, reporting in real time to data centers that can be accessed by government agents and employers alike. And coded color alerts (red, yellow and green) sort people into health categories that correspond to the amount of freedom of movement they’re allowed: “Green code, travel freely. Red or yellow, report immediately.”

Mind you, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese surveillance state had already been hard at work tracking its citizens through the use of some 200 million security cameras installed nationwide. Equipped with facial recognition technology, the cameras allow authorities to track so-called criminal acts, such as jaywalking, which factor into a person’s social credit score.

Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese individuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are “good” citizens. A real-name system—which requires people to use government-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a train, board a plane, or even buy groceries—coupled with social media credit scores ensures that those blacklisted as “unworthy” are banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

That same social credit score technology used to identify, track and segregate citizens is now one of China’s chief weapons in its fight to contain the coronavirus from spreading. However, it is far from infallible and a prime example of the difficulties involved in navigating an autonomous system where disembodied AI systems call the shots. For instance, one woman, who has no symptoms of the virus but was assigned a red code based on a visit to her hometown, has been blocked from returning to her home and job until her color code changes. She has been stuck in this state of limbo for weeks with no means of challenging the color code or knowing exactly why she’s been assigned a red code.

Fighting the coronavirus epidemic has given China the perfect excuse for unleashing the full force of its surveillance and data collection powers. The problem, as Eamon Barrett acknowledges in Fortune magazine, is what happens after: “Once the outbreak is controlled, it’s unclear whether the government will retract its new powers.”

The lesson for the ages: once any government is allowed to expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to pull back.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the government thus far has limited its coronavirus preparations to missives advising the public to stay calm, wash their hands, and cover their mouths when they cough and sneeze.

Don’t go underestimating the government’s ability to lock the nation down if the coronavirus turns into a pandemic, however. After all, the government has been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now.

The building blocks are already in place for such an eventuality: the surveillance networks, fusion centers and government contractors that already share information in real time; the government’s massive biometric databases that can identify individuals based on genetic and biological markers; the militarized police, working in conjunction with federal agencies, ready and able to coordinate with the federal government when it’s time to round up the targeted individuals; the courts that will sanction the government’s methods, no matter how unlawful, as long as it’s done in the name of national security; and the detention facilities, whether private prisons or FEMA internment camps, that have been built and are waiting to be filled.

Now all of this may sound far-fetched to you now, but we’ve already arrived at the dystopian futures prophesied by George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report.

It won’t take much more to push us over the edge into Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, in which the majority of humanity is relegated to an overpopulated, diseased, warring planet where the government employs technologies such as drones, tasers and biometric scanners to track, target and control the populace.

Mind you, while these technologies are already in use today and being hailed for their potentially life-saving, cost-saving, time-saving benefits, it won’t be long before the drawbacks to having a government equipped with technology that makes it all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful——helped along by the citizenry—far outdistance the benefits.

On a daily basis, Americans are relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—their biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

Consider all the ways you continue to be tracked, hunted, hounded, and stalked by the government and its dubious agents:

By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write. By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do.

By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. By mapping your biometrics—your “face-print”—and storing the information in a massive, shared government database available to bureaucratic agencies, police and the military, the government’s goal is to use facial recognition software to identify you (and every other person in the country) and track your movements, wherever you go. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

Of course, none of these technologies are foolproof.

Nor are they immune from tampering, hacking or user bias.

Nevertheless, they have become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to render null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is rapidly moving in that direction.

We’ve made it so easy for the government to watch us.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you’re most likely already flagged in a government database somewhere.

The government has the know-how.

Indeed, for years now, the FBI and Justice Department have conspired to acquire near-limitless power and control over biometric information collected on law-abiding individuals, millions of whom have never been accused of a crime.

Going far beyond the scope of those with criminal backgrounds, the FBI’s Next Generation Identification database (NGID), a billion dollar boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government’s ID database from a fingerprint system to a vast data storehouse of iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos.

Launched in 2008, the NGID is a massive biometric database that contains more than 100 million fingerprints and 45 million facial photos gathered from a variety of sources ranging from criminal suspects and convicts to daycare workers and visa applicants, including millions of people who have never committed or even been accused of a crime.

In other words, innocent American citizens are now automatically placed in a suspect database.

For a long time, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s biometrics and DNA and use it against them.

That is no longer the case.

The information is being amassed through a variety of routine procedures, with the police leading the way as prime collectors of biometrics for something as non-threatening as a simple moving violation. The nation’s courts are also doing their part to “build” the database, requiring biometric information as a precursor to more lenient sentences. And of course Corporate America (including Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) has made it so easy to use one’s biometrics to access everything from bank accounts to cell phones.

We’ve made it so easy for the government to target, identify and track us.

Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare.

This is the kind of oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick.

Remember, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

In the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

Oh, how right he was.

Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted, and go where we wanted without those thoughts, words and movements being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

We’re not quite there yet. But that moment of reckoning is getting closer by the minute.

In the meantime, we’ve got an epidemic to survive, so go ahead and wash your hands. Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. And stock up on whatever you might need to survive this virus if it spreads to your community.

We are indeed at our most vulnerable right now, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s the American Surveillance State—not the coronavirus—that poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.

About John W. Whitehead:  John is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead’s concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him, in 1982, to establish The Rutherford Institute, nonprofit civil liberties, and human rights organization whose international headquarters are located in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Deeply committed to protecting the constitutional freedoms of every American and the integral human rights of all people, The Rutherford Institute has emerged as a prominent leader in the national dialogue on civil liberties and human rights and a formidable champion of the Constitution. Whitehead serves as the Institute’s president and spokesperson. Widely recognized as one of the nation’s most vocal and involved civil liberties attorneys, Whitehead’s approach to civil liberties issues has earned him numerous accolades and accomplishments, including the Hungarian Medal of Freedom and the 2010 Milner S. Ball Lifetime Achievement Award for “[his] decades of difficult and important work, as well as [his] impeccable integrity in defending civil liberties for all.”

Whitehead earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Arkansas in 1969 and a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1974. He served as an officer in the United States Army from 1969 to 1971.

• [1] Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry & Holt, 2019).
• [2] Ibid.
• [3] See for example Maia Szalavitz, “The Legacy of the CIA’s Secret LSD Experiments on America,” Time, March 23, 2012.
• [4] For a cultural history on this, see E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000).
• [5] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure (New York: Doubleday, 1971) 53.
• [6] James Dacre, “Are we living Brave New World’s nightmare future?,” Guardian, September 18, 2015.
• [7] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/53001.htm.
• [8] Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (New York: Vanguard Press, 2008).
• [9] Ernesto Londono, “Study: Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion,” Washington Post, March 28, 2013; Bob Dreyfuss, The $6 Trillion Wars,” The Nation, March 29, 2013; “Iraq War Cost U.S. More Than $2 Trillion, Could Grow to $6 Trillion, Says Watson Institute Study,” Huffington Post, May 14, 2013; Mark Thompson, “The $5 Trillion War on Terror,” Time, June 29, 2011; “Iraq war cost: $6 trillion. What else could have been done?,” LA Times, March 18, 2013.
• [10] Philip Bump, “15 years after the Iraq War began, the death toll is still murky,” Washington Post, March 21, 2018.
• [11] For scholarly studies on these issues, see Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); John M. Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015); Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• [12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War.
• [13] Mark Kukis, Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),xvii.
• [14] Ibid.
• [15] Ibid., xiii.
• [16] Ibid., xiv.
• [17] Ibid.
• [18] Gregg Zoroya, “360,000 Veterans May Have Brain Injuries,” USA Today, March 5, 3009; Denise Grady, “Brain Injuries Are Seen in New Scans of Veterans,” NY Times, June 1, 2011; “Mental Health Injuries Scar 300,000 U.S. Troops,” MSNBC, April 17, 2008.
• [19] Lizette Alvarez, “War Veterans’ Concussions Are Often Overlooked,” NY Times, August 25, 2008.
• [20] “360,000 veterans may have brain injuries,” USA Today, March 4, 2009.
• [21] Armen Keteyian, “VA Hid Suicide Risk, Internal Emails Show,” CBC News, July 30, 2010.
• [22] Allison Churchill, “The Military Is Losing More Troops to Suicide than Combat,” Business Insider, October 25, 2012; Helen Pow, “More U.S. Troops Committing Suicide Than Being Killed Fighting in Afghanistan in ‘Tough Year’ for Armed Services,” Daily Mail, October 24, 2012.
• [23] Kelley Vlahos, “Surviving War, Falling to Suicide,” American Conservative, January 1, 2012; for other similar stories, see also James Dao and Andrew W. Lehren, “Baffling Rise in Suicides Plagues the U.S. Military,” NY Times, May 15, 2013.
• [24] Gregg Zoroya, “Homeless, At-Risk Veterans Double,” USA Today, December 27, 2012.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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