Ripheus23

Could the USAF be an "inherently criminal organization"?

I will admit, my initial reaction to the "Storm Area 51" meme included a peculiar ambivalence. I had become accustomed to thinking of America's nuclear/"national-security" administrations as the major criminal organizations in the government due to e.g. Bomb Power by Gary Wills. So if I was going to think of a particular branch of the military as contaminated by those criminal forces, at this point I would have pointed at the US Navy on the grounds that (a) the Trident submarines are the most demonic weapons the US has (as far as I know) and (b) I live about 45 minutes from the town where the major Trident base is located (the Poulsbo/Bangor area, near the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton)---so the image of the Trident submarines is called to my mind on a regular basis as such. (Unfortunately, also, my dad was a nuclear submariner back in the 80s and one of my two main managers at work is also a former nuclear submariner.)

Now this is actually a little peculiar, otherwise, since my obsession with the Vietnam War USED to prompt me to fixate on the USAF as especially symbolic of what is worst about the US military government. In fact, I had a theory that because the separation of the USAF from the US Army was mediated in part by America's role in the corruption of the Geneva Conventions (the pre-70s exclusion of air-war regulations therein), and because the USAF had so meticulously carried out the holocaust of Vietnam, then by the Nuremberg standards there seemed to be grounds for believing that the USAF is an inherently criminal organization, one where even just joining is a crime, then.

Now, we don't know what kind of higher-end physics weapons-system development is actually going on at Area 51. It could be reverse-engineering of alien technology, I suppose, although until there is a strong working model of FTL (besides the Alcubierre hypothesis, say) I will remain exactly skeptical of the idea. But we know that they are working on higher-end physics-based weapons of some kind there, because that's just what the government does, after all. And since it is a sin to try to use the powers of creation to create these means of destruction as such, we know that some of the people at Area 51 are sinning, and indeed it appears that people there who are exposed to dangerous materials are treated badly (I remember hearing about this years ago, though the details escape me), for example.

It's also worth noting that the Dugway Proving Ground, another (international law-wise) criminal setup (because they work on chemical and biological weapons there), is not terribly far from the Area 51 region. Apparently DPG is administered by the Army, though, but anyway the point is there's a little constellation of darkness in this area of the US, so...

... it would not be unfitting...