The Scoota Zone

Tag: editorial

  • The Beast Systems and the Disease of Empire

    The history of the empire does not begin with the imperialism of the nineteenth century or with the 16th-century colonies of European nations. No, across the nearly 5,000 years of recorded human history, the Akkadian Empire of ancient Mesopotamia was truly the first multinational political entity on Earth, the first political entity to dominate independent city-states militarily and maintain consolidated, unified control through repeated military campaigns.

    Conquest has been a recurring theme in human history in much the same way imperialism, the systematic process of establishing and maintaining an empire, has reemerged across various civilizations. Certainly, the rise and fall of empires have led in many ways to the proliferation of progress. By establishing infrastructure, guarding trade routes, and enforcing uniform systems, empires frequently promote trade and economic expansion within their borders.

    The Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Athenians, and most empires throughout history have been primarily driven by trade, political ambition, resource control, and the desire for prestige and power. This bestial desire for power has, in many instances, contributed to the inevitable decline of many empires throughout human history. The view that the United States is an empire in decline has developed significantly in recent years, but to call the U.S. an empire is simply an understatement of its sheer global dominance. It was Sargon of Akkad, the king of the Akkadian Empire, who once wrote that he had conquered “the four corners of the universe.” However, there has never been a political state within recorded human history with a more prominent global surveillance apparatus, economic influence, and international military might than the U.S. Empire.

    From a technological capacity alone, virtually nothing prevents the US state from establishing absolute surveillance where all American citizens’ communications, movements, and activities are tracked. With origins in wartime monitoring and censorship, the U.S. government has been conducting state surveillance for more than a century. Federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations gradually institutionalized early forms of surveillance, such as keeping an eye on international communications. It has used various strategies and programs to carry out these extensive monitoring operations at the state and federal levels. This includes focusing on foreign and domestic targets, with PRISM and Section 702 programs providing a significant portion of the data. In addition to permitting “backdoor searches” of communications belonging to U.S. persons that are part of this gathered data, Section 702 allows the warrantless acquisition of communications from foreign targets. The FBI alone conducted more than 200,000 of these searches as recently as 2022.

    PRISM was publicly revealed on 6 June 2013, after Edward Snowden leaked classified documents about the program to The Washington Post and The Guardian. The Protect America Act of 2007 under President Bush and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that voluntarily assisted with US intelligence collection and was extended by Congress under President Obama in 2012, made it possible for the PRISM special source operation system to collect the private data of millions of Americans without warrants or criminal arraignments. 

    The US has a long and extensive history of mass surveillance, going as far back as the early 20th century. This practice began with wartime monitoring and censorship, especially during and after World Wars I and II. Programs like Project SHAMROCK and COINTELPRO continued this mass surveillance into the Cold War era, and the expansion of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies further institutionalized it. Following 9/11, the practice became much more widespread, with the PATRIOT Act of 2001 giving the government more power to monitor email and phone communications.

    While much has been said about alleged fraud and waste within the US administrative state, scarce contention has been brought against America’s massive military budget. On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a farewell address on live television from the Oval Office in the White House. Given that he had previously served the country as the military commander of the Allied forces during World War II, his remarks during the farewell address to the American people were especially noteworthy. American industry successfully converted into defense production as the demand became more critical. However, Eisenhower warned that a permanent armaments industry of colossal proportions was beginning to emerge.

    The federal government has spent over half of its tax revenue on past, present, and future military actions since the conclusion of World War II. It is the federal government’s most significant public investment, with the Pentagon budget nearly reaching $1 trillion alone. Prior to production, military equipment is sold with the assurance that considerable cost overruns will, hopefully, eventually be addressed. With the biggest increases linked to ongoing conflicts, such as a 40% increase in revenues for Russian companies supplying Moscow’s war on Ukraine and record sales for Israeli firms producing weapons used in the country’s ruthless war on Gaza, the world’s top 100 companies that produce arms and military services saw their revenues total $632 billion in 2023, a 4.2% increase over the previous year.

    To protect its commercial and geopolitical interests, the US has utilized its military might and clandestine activities to topple or support regimes across the world throughout its history. Attacks against and evictions from independent tribal communities in North America marked the beginning of US meddling in foreign governance. When the United States destroyed the Hawaiian Kingdom and seized its islands in the 1890s, this brand of imperialist activity, driven by the notion of Manifest Destiny, expanded abroad.

    The US has often meddled in other nations’ administrations as it expanded its empire, none more prominently than those in Latin America, which has long been utilized as the government’s backyard playground. During the Guatemalan Genocide, the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people had been carried out by the successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power after the CIA-instigated 1954 coup d’état, utilizing training obtained via the CIA Study of Assassination. This 19-page manual offered detailed descriptions regarding the art of political killing, including procedures, instruments, and implementation of assassination.

    Page 19 of “A Study of Assassination,” CONFERENCE ROOM TECHNIQUE


    During the Cold War, the extent and breadth of covert operations, notably those conducted by the CIA, increased significantly. These activities included everything from psychological warfare to insurgency and counter-insurgency efforts. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the CIA established a system of undisclosed black site prisons throughout the world in which it secretly detained at least 119 Muslim men and tortured at least 39. Of the at least 780 Muslim men and boys the US has detained in Guantánamo since January 11, 2002, the US military continues to hold 39 of them, 27 of whom are not facing criminal charges. Waterboarding, sexual humiliation and assault, physical abuse, and sleep deprivation were among the torture these prisoners suffered. Former inmates continue to suffer from physical and psychological trauma as a result of their treatment at Guantánamo Bay, and a 2014 U.S. Senate intelligence investigation concluded that the torture program failed to achieve its purported objective of gathering military intelligence.

    Many people believed that the path of human history had changed irrevocably after September 11th. It was impossible to predict how different our world would become, but 24 years later, the most enduring impact may have been the irreversible damage to the national psyche, which, in many ways, has led us to the reactionary expansion of the state. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a relatively new federal agency, as it was established along with the TSA as a direct response to 9/11. The scale of ICE’s law enforcement capabilities has been dramatically increased recently by collaborating with local law enforcement organizations nationwide. This arrangement has enabled local officers to perform specific immigration enforcement tasks under ICE’s strict supervision and guidance.

    Reports of noncitizens unexpectedly being detained by ICE have dominated headlines, especially those concerning noncitizens living in the country on lawful permanent residency status. Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and lawful permanent citizen, was arrested on March 8, 2025, after being first held in New Jersey and then sent to a migrant detainment facility in Louisiana. He remains there as he contests his detention and the immigration judge’s ruling on April 11 that permits his deportation. In response to questions regarding the reasons behind activist Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by immigration officials, the Department of Homeland Security released a two-page memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio accusing the graduate student from Columbia University of participating in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities.” According to his attorneys, that memo is at the heart of the government’s case against Khalil.

    While the memo makes no criminal accusations against Khalil, Rubio writes that his prolonged stay in the United States would have “potentially serious adverse foreign consequences and compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.” One might wonder how a federal government agency can legally abduct and indefinitely detain a lawful permanent resident of the United States based solely on preserving its own geopolitical interests. Still, one can look no further than the legacy of the Cold War. In 1952, the US Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which permits ICE officers to legally detain and interrogate any individual they believe to be a non-citizen regarding their right to live or remain in the US. The Immigration and Nationality Act also states that noncitizens may be deported if the Secretary of State believes their actions “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

    The US has the world’s highest immigrant incarceration rate, with over 35,000 people imprisoned daily for administrative hearings to decide deportation. Louisiana, the second-largest state for immigrant detention behind Texas, currently detains over 6,000 people, including asylum seekers and long-term residents. The late 2010s saw a surge in immigrant detention in Louisiana, primarily benefiting private prison companies who operate eight of the state’s immigration jails, profiting from abuses.

    ICE and DHS hold tens of thousands of people daily in private prisons, local jails, and federal facilities, mostly in rural America. Individuals are detained in immigration to allow the federal government to process them for admission or removal through the civil immigration system, rather than as punishment for a crime. Immigration jails’ harsh conditions isolate immigrants from legal assistance, serving the government’s goal of discouraging further immigration. The US government currently holds over 6,000 immigrants in nine jails in Louisiana’s northern region. Immigration detention is considered civil confinement under US law. Civil detention, unlike criminal confinement, cannot include punitive conditions. In reality, NOLA ICE officials use immigration detention centers as punitive prisons to break the will and spirit of detained individuals.

    ICE jails in northern Louisiana are repurposed prisons that previously housed individuals awaiting trial or serving sentences. The area is still surrounded by barbed wire fencing and gated access. Detainees in NOLA ICE jails who have not been charged or convicted of a crime share cells, jumpsuits, and freedom restrictions with criminals. However, detained immigrants do not have the same protections as those in criminal custody, including the right to counsel under the Constitution.

    NOLA ICE officials restrict detainees’ movements, detaining them in tight places and holding them in chains for extended hours. Detained individuals are not allowed to access medical services or the law library without the presence of a guard. Access to outdoor activities may be limited to one hour per day or denied for up to ten days. Guards handcuff individuals during transfers between NOLA ICE facilities, transportation outside the jail, and to solitary detention. Officials utilize “five-point restraints,” which are shackles connected by metal chains to the wrists, waist, and ankles.

    These carceral conditions of imprisonment have caused considerable bodily and psychological injury to detainees, with one such case being at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. CLIPC authorities used five-point shackles to cover open wounds on the ankles of a man with Type II diabetes. The patient was referred to an endocrinologist for off-site treatment, and officials were instructed not to cuff his ankles. ICE canceled the man’s appointment, denying him daily wound debridement and care for five days. Detainees at Pine Prairie, transferred from the US-Mexico border to Louisiana, were shackled in five-point shackles for 26 hours, prohibiting them from using the restroom, eating, or drinking, which resulted in several infected slashes on their wrists and legs.

    The US government has various oversight mechanisms to monitor and report abusive conditions in NOLA ICE jails. These include internal inspections by ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, executive agency watchdogs, and congressional investigations. However, these processes have repeatedly failed to address and prevent systemic abuse and deplorable conditions in NOLA ICE jails, and several agencies under the Department of Homeland Security lack the necessary independence to hold abusers accountable.

    Women and children confined to an immigration holding cell in Douglas, Arizona, September 2015.

    The question we should ask ourselves, dear reader, is whether or not we should allow the US Federal Government to operate with absolute impunity. If they are willing to violate the constitutional rights of non-citizens, whether they are lawful residents or undocumented immigrants, what truly legitimate self-correcting mechanism would be in place to protect American citizens? These infernal beast systems – mass surveillance and incarceration, covert state operations, and the ever-growing influence of the military-industrial complex- all have proven themselves to be everlasting symptoms of the disease of empire. But what drives an empire? The acquisition of centralized power, dominance over weaker states, resource extraction, and the pursuit of enforcing peace by establishing a multinational hegemony. By engaging in a vast transgression against the sovereignty of humanity, the empire expands its reach through the armed hands of cultural disintegration and assimilation, from the colonial projects of the Spanish conquistadors to the very first genocides of the 20th century in Namibia and Armenia. The empire cannot function without the beast systems.

  • Song of the Flight (Counterinsurgency, military intervention and U.S. immigration)

    The Song of the Flight, or the Song of Exile as it is alternatively known, was a poem that was written by Nezahualcoyotl or Fasting Coyote, an architect, scholar, philosopher, poet, artist, warrior, and governing ruler of the pre-Columbian city-state of Texcoco, located in the present-day Valley of Mexico. In it, he writes:

    In vain I was born.

    I wish I’d never been born, truly that I’d never come to earth. That’s what I say. But what is there to do? Do I have to live among the people? What then? Princes, tell me! 

    Do I have to stand on earth? What is my destiny? My heart suffers. I am unfortunate. You were hardly my friend here on earth, Life-Giver.

    How to live among the people? Does He who sustains and lifts men have no discretion? Go, friends, live in peace, pass your life in calm! While I have to live stooped, with my head bent down when I am among the people.

    For this I cry, feeling desolate, abandoned among men on the earth. How do you decide your heart, Life Giver? Already your anger is vanishing, your compassion welling! I am at your side, God. Do you plan my death?

    Is it true we take pleasure, we who live on earth? Is it certain that we live to enjoy ourselves on earth? But we are all so filled with grief. Are bitterness and anguish the destiny of the people of earth?

    The poem chronicles Nezahualcoyotl’s early adolescent life, which the then-young prince had spent in exile after his kingdom was overthrown in a rival governor’s coup. Despite being born heir to the kingdom, his father had pitted Texcoco against the mighty city of Azcapotzalco, much to the dismay of the ruling rival tribe, the Tepaneca. After being pursued by enemy forces into the wilderness, Nezahualcoyotl’s father, Ixtlilxochitl, decided to surrender himself and instructed his son to hide underneath a nearby fallen tree. It was on this night in the year 1418 when Nezahualcoyotl was forced to watch helplessly in horror as his father was stripped of his regalia and brutally executed. He was but a mere 15 years old at the time.

    Whenever I’ve taken the time to reflect upon Latin America’s tumultuous past, I frequently recall this poem and the Hamlet-like story behind it as a broad symbolic evocation of its formative history. Children whose innocence is pilfered from them by vast political machinations beyond their control or comprehension and whose chances for a life beyond the chains of despotism. It is Latin America, a continental region teetering within the peripheral limbo of Western Civilization and the Global South that, despite its vast material resources, is often condemned to abject poverty and desocialization. Over the last three decades, Latin America has become the world’s most extensive exporter of agricultural commodities. Its GDP growth has been rapidly outpaced by the U.S., and this gap will likely continue to expand over time. Much like its position in global trade, Latin America’s inequality has fluctuated aggressively over time.

    Latin America is widely considered the most unequal region in the world, with the top 10% earning 12 times more than the bottom 10%, compared to an average ratio of 4 in industrialized nations. At the same time, one in every five Latin American citizens is impoverished and crippled by persistent food insecurity. While the role of conquest and colonial institutions such as slavery have played an early determining factor, conquest and slavery are as old as Methuselah and have long since faded from history along with the region’s copious Indigenous roots. However, there is no country in Latin America and the Caribbean where the legacy of slavery is more prevalent than the island nation of Haiti.

    Haiti, rich in raw resources, bauxite, gold, and copper deposits, is simultaneously the poorest sovereign nation in the Western Hemisphere and among the poorest globally. It is a relatively young country, the second oldest in the West after the U.S. Formally known as Saint-Domingue, Haiti shares a strong commonality with the U.S. and a tightly intertwined history, as Haiti was born out of the smoke and fire of revolution. In 1791, the first successful large-scale insurrection by enslaved people in modern history shook the Western colonial world. The cost of Revolution had already devastated the economic infrastructure of Haiti. During their first century as a nation, the French King, Charles X, sent a fleet of armed warships to Haiti, demanding that Haiti pay 150 million francs as compensation to slaveowners.

    This debt would not be fully paid until over 100 years later, in 1947, after the developing Haiti had paid France 560 million in modern US dollars. If Haiti had been able to invest that 150 million, it would be worth 115 billion today.  

    The U.S. Government pursued an interventionist policy to isolate Haiti diplomatically and restrain it economically, fearing that its success would inspire similar slave rebellions in the U.S. Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. Government refused to recognize Haiti diplomatically and continued to import Haitian agricultural goods while exporting its goods, with unfavorable trade policies.

    Haiti’s troubles continued early into the 20th century with the military occupation under President Woodrow Wilson. Shortly after the assassination of Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the US Marine Corps was deployed to establish order and stability in Haiti. However, this ended up having the opposite effect. The U.S. military occupation of Haiti would eventually lead to the erosion of local governance, economic destabilization, and the deaths of over 11,000 Haitians.

    The presence of U.S. military operations doesn’t end with Haiti, between 1898 and 1994, the United States interfered effectively to alter governments in Latin America at least 41 times. This equates to once every 28 months for the whole century. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of Central Americans born in the United States has increased more than tenfold since 1980 and by 25% since 2010. During the Great Export Boom of the mid-19th century, rural oligarchies continued to dominate Central America until the 1970s, despite efforts from urban workers and the middle class to reduce their dominance.

    Towards the end of the 20th Century, Central America was embroiled in several civil wars that lasted for decades. Most of these armed conflicts were instigated by foreign intervention during the Cold War. The US and USSR would continuously provide funding, equipment, and training to Central American troops. According to investigative journalist, national security advisor, and former chief of the United International Press Bureau, Douglas Farah, the U.S. played a critical role by training and supplying weapons to Guatemalan security forces that slaughtered thousands of civilians during the 1960s. 

    Based on Farah’s investigation and declassified intelligence records, we also know that when the Guatemalan army and its paramilitary allies massacred hundreds of thousands of people, the CIA maintained firm contact with the military, and U.S. authorities were fully aware of the numerous human rights abuses and atrocities that had been taking place. Throughout Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, more than 200,000 people were killed, over 600 villages were destroyed, 1.5 million were displaced, and more than 150,000 were forced into Mexico by the military.

    During the 1980s, El Salvador became the site of some of the greatest atrocities in Latin American history, funded by the U.S Government through organized regime changes facilitated by dictators and death squads. El Mozote, a small rural village in El Salvador’s Morozán department, was attacked by the Salvadoran military on December 10, 1981. Salvadoran military forces would burn houses and animals, they would separate men from women and children, and systematically execute each group.  According to the Center for Justice and International Law, nearly one thousand people would be tortured, raped, and massacred, with almost half of the victims being minors.

    According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of Central Americans residing in the U.S. more than tripled during the 1980s, primarily due to civil wars and political instability. From 1980 to 2015, the size of the Central American immigrant population rose tenfold. As a response to this rapid influx, the U.S. Government has exponentially increased the size and scope of military operations at the southern border.

    Beginning in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration began to broaden the “War on Drugs” and inserted the armed forces into federal law enforcement’s counter-drug operations at the border, the military’s law enforcement responsibilities began to carry over, first informally and then officially, into the field of immigration enforcement. Since then, presidential administrations from both of the 2 major political parties began deploying thousands of troops to the border in the 21st century as anti-immigrant sentiment has increased among significant segments of the American populace. With Operation Jump Start in 2006, President George W. Bush started the trend of large-scale deployments, which has expanded throughout the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.

    The US immigration system has been the subject of criticism and contention for some time. Many have argued that if people want to emigrate to the US, they should do so legally. Of course, with any country, if you were to enter it unlawfully, you would be subject to deportation. This is true for most countries around the world, but our immigration system is unique in that it is highly restrictive and unable to meet the current demands of immigration.  According to the CATO Institute, Congress has not modified lawful immigration quotas since 1990. Since then, the United States population has expanded by 30%, while the GDP has doubled. As a result of these low immigration quotas, many people have to wait in long lines to immigrate, some for several decades. 

    A key area of public contempt surrounding the US southern border is the conditions of migrant detainment facilities, which saw a rapid rise in media attention during the Trump administration amid the advent of the Zero Tolerance Policy in 2018. The reality is that the issues surrounding the border have been prevalent for quite some time, and the living conditions of these detainment facilities have drawn disdain from various human rights organizations.

    In 2021, Human Rights Watch obtained documents detailing at least 160 cases of abuse by US Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents, and ICE officials against migrants at the border, including physical abuse, unlawful coercion, molestation, and sexual assault on migrant detainees. In 2019, CBP agents withheld meals from a detainee in freezing cold temperatures until he consented to sign a document that he could not read or understand. In 2017, A teenager was coerced into taking off her clothes by a Customs and Border Protection official, after which she was sexually assaulted. And since 2015, employees of Southwest Key, a private facility for unaccompanied minors, have sexually abused and solicited nude images of children, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in July of 2024. The lawsuit was eventually dropped in March of 2025 under the Trump administration.

    I ask then, dear reader, to what end do we maintain our position as the most militarily and economically dominant empire on the global stage? My intention with this piece was never to condemn American identity as an expression of patriotism. We should all be reminded that it was Benjamin Franklin, the man who vehemently opposed the use of land ownership as a prerequisite to voting, refused to grant unlimited veto power to the president, recommended impeachment as a remedy for improper conduct, and wrote the words, “It is the responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”

    America as a state is not alone in its sins; we have decimated small developing nations and waged war across the globe while our fellow countrymen have marched for our civil rights, cured disease, explored the cosmos, and upended the tyranny of fascism. When my father first became a naturalized citizen, he embraced it with a sense of awe and pride that, at times, I looked upon with confusion and envy. As a native-born citizen, I’ve never had to bear the weight of leaving behind a home, a family, a language, or a culture to rapidly adapt to living in an unfamiliar place. I’ve spent my life enveloped within the comfort and security of an empire that has exalted itself above the thousands of lost souls, pining to be free. The naked knowledge of the contrast between the conditions of Latin America and the U.S. has informed the ethos of my writing. The violations of dignity and human rights, the systematic mechanized murder of countless human beings, globalized exploitation through trade and resource extraction, and the implementation of military might on our southern border.

    My only hope is that I’ve potentially opened the door to a new understanding of our place in the world and the consequences of our government’s reckless clamor for power and control, not out of disdain or contempt for the homeland of my fellow countrymen, but as a proud American citizen, one willing to stake their life in the struggle for justice and freedom.