Global Research
Joachim Hagopian
Psychopaths dominate the halls of power in both the United States and throughout the world. The current economic, political, military and legal system breeds psychopaths, rewarding psychopathic behavior and punishing those with conscience and integrity. Psychopaths will naturally be drawn to and converge at the apex of the power pyramid as much from their own drive for ambitious power as the hierarchical system that both requires and reinforces those who can comfortably operate without conscience, guilt or any genuine level of empathy toward others.
Psychopaths are in love with power and risk taking, masters of manipulation, self-serving opportunism and self-aggrandizement, and hold doctorates in deceit and deception. Psychopaths are super intelligent charmers who are highly skilled at playing others in order to get what they want. They are keenly perceptive at reading people, understanding their motives and values, brilliant at learning their weaknesses and blind spots, and highly effective at inducing both sympathy and guilt in others.
Instinctively knowing what others want to hear, psychopaths are gifted at winning over others, making them feel special and wanted. They are adept at making positive and lasting first impressions and initially demonstrating that they appear to be caring and considerate, but only on the most superficial, disingenuous level. Their innately keen intelligence, social charisma and charm, extroverted energies, over-the-top confidence are all weapons they utilize in their powerful arsenal to win over, defeat and control others, especially to win over those imbued with power and position that they yearn for themselves.
Psychopaths have an uncanny ability to pick brains, soliciting information, knowledge, creative ideas and even secrets from others, yet opportunistically utilize them to their own advantage as living proof that information is power, parading them as their own ideas and knowledge, and craftily taking and receiving undeserving credit and accolades from bosses and those in power. They are gifted actors, able to take on chameleon-like colors according to their particular social setting and company. Though they lack a capacity to feel emotions with any depth or intensity, as actors and manipulators they are able to manufacture crocodile tears for effect whenever it suits and benefits them.
The part of the brain that regulates emotions, the amygdala, is less active in psychopaths. Thus, they do not feel fear, sadness, regret or disgust that the rest of us experience. Only when it is self-serving will psychopaths act scared, sorry, indignant or surprised, and the key operable word here is act because that is all they can do when it comes to showing real emotion. They have no trouble putting on the act of emotions when they are determined to manipulate others most often into feeling guilty or sympathetic toward them. The only genuine emotion psychopaths express is anger whenever their manipulations are thwarted or rebuffed. They frequently use intimidation tactics and can behave impulsively and even violently when angered, especially in response to a perceived personal insult or perceived betrayal of trust or perceived lack of respect for their authority. But most often their emotional tirades are to manipulate, gain power and control over others.
Psychopaths are extremely confident, bold, outgoing and superficially friendly. Along with their air of assured confidence comes a bombastic arrogance, maverick eccentricity and Machiavellian grandiosity. Their gamey nature lusts for the competition of battle, an insatiable desire to win at all costs, and a gloating, short lived gratification that brings victor’s spoils. They also make formidable enemies, poker-faced while tactically holding their cards close to their chest, yet instinctively aware of when to strategically assert themselves to initiate decisive action, launch aggressive attacks and predatorily move in for their strategic kill. They are perennial predators bloodthirstily lusting for more power.
Psychopaths are masters of impression management and the art of ingratiation, crucial skills fully utilized in impressing those in positions of power while ruthlessly navigating up the treacherous and slippery if not slimy ladder to success. In addition to their characteristic lack of conscience and empathy, perhaps their signature trademark is their penchant for spewing out never ending pathological lies. Not surprisingly, psychopaths flourish in cultures that value competition and winning, boldness and risk taking, success and materialism, ambition and power, social namedropping and social climbing, status and prestige, style and appearance over substance and depth, and suave, witty charm and game-playing artificiality over sincerity, honesty and moral integrity. In short, they especially thrive in Western cultures based on competition and exploitation of fellow man and nature.
Psychopaths see others in terms of how they can be conveniently and cunningly used and manipulated to assist them in achieving their selfish goals and ambitions. Superficial friendships, transitory alliances and even partnerships (including marital) manifest as psychopaths perceive others in terms of their utilitarian value as tools, steppingstones or springboards toward achieving their success. As soon as psychopaths believe others have served their purpose, they are deemed no longer of any real value and quickly disposed of, discarded and/or betrayed. Loyalty is a foreign and abstract construct to psychopaths.
Psychopaths instinctively know how to lie their way out of trouble. It comes natural to them and over time they become experts at it. Skilled in logic and debate, they can readily rattle off an explanatory excuse using double talk for virtually anything. Many end up utilizing their innate skills as lawyers who in turn end up as politicians. In fact most of the politicians in the US Senate are attorneys. Just as effective as they are at absolving themselves of any and all responsibility and culpability of being completely blameless, they are equally skilled at pointing the finger at others and throwing them under the bus. In order to get elected and stay elected, psychopathic politicians must be extremely convincing in their powers of persuasion. And of course using their cunning charm and capacity to fabricate seamlessly at will, their power to manipulate and persuade is among their chief assets. They are experts in bullshitting and playing the fake pretense game.
Another strength is their capacity to keep their cool under fire. While the rest of us are reacting to normally stressful and dangerous situations with fear and anxiety, they manage to not sweat it and operate with relative calm. This skill of course places them at a distinct advantage in professions where constraint and self-control are required under pressure. Thus typically they fare well in the fast paced world of politics, the military and finances.
As anyone can readily see from the preceding prototype description of the psychopath, the high powered arena of politics, the dog-eat-dog corporate world and the strong arm tactics of the military domain are all ideal and ripe fields of endeavor for those imbued with psychopathic traits.
A study out of Great Britain last year using a psychopathic survey to assess the presence of psychopathic traits within the national workforce showed that CEO’s, politicians, media honchos, lawyers, surgeons, military generals, police officers and the clergy all scored highest. Generally any line of work characterized by a hierarchical infrastructure that places those in positions of power ruling over others with relative impunity proves to be the most fertile ground attracting those with a psychopathic personality.
By design the morally bankrupt oligarchic system is structured in such a way as to identify, groom and regularly promote up the power pole ladder slick psychopaths who play their cards right. They inherently know how to say the right words to the right persons at the strategic moment to calculatingly scheme and coldheartedly plot their rise to the highest echelons of power. As mere policymaking stewards for their puppet master oligarchs who are not just the shadowy, full fledged members of an elitist club of psychopaths, but like everything else, they are in fact bona fide role models and outright owners of this exclusive club of psychopaths. Without any conscience, remorse, guilt or even second thought, they wield increasingly absolute power and control over the earth’s dominions, causing unconscionable amounts of suffering and pain to billions of fellow human beings in this world. For all the theft, death and destruction they perpetrate, if oligarchs are not psychopaths, than they are simply not human.
A politician spends more time, energy and money trying to get elected/reelected to public office than any other single pursuit or pastime. In this pragmatic way, the psychopathic description that they are mere public cons and hustlers selling themselves on the highest, competitively demanding stage is neither too simplistic nor an exaggeration. Robert Hare, the leading expert on psychopathy as a mental disorder who devised a psychopathic checklist, observed that psychopaths representing just one percent of the general population possess an especially heightened need for both power and prestige, seemingly prerequisite essentials for every aspiring politician. Moreover, psychopaths score low on measures of stress reactivity, anxiety and depression while scoring high on measures of competitive achievement, positive impressions with first encounters and fearlessness. Substitute the word politician for the word psychopath and you will find the two interchangeable and synonymous because they pretty much actually are one and the same.
To test and confirm this hypothesis, simply go back to every previous reference to the word psychopath and substitute either politician, general or CEO and you will realize that in every sense of the word, the present system as it currently exists produces leadership in every sector and realm that is well endowed with an abundance of psychopathic traits. While these particular professions may attract psychopaths, as a disclaimer it is important to mention that psychopathic traits and tendencies are on a continuum, and a specific politician or general may possess certain traits and tendencies but may not exhibit severe or enough symptoms to qualify with an official diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy.
When renowned Harvard clinical psychologist and author of The Sociopath Next Door Dr. Martha Stout (who uses sociopath and psychopath interchangeably) was asked if politicians are more likely to be psychopaths, she answered:
“Yes, politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/ psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow – but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”
Even a cursory examination of the most powerful leaders who reach the very top in America – President Barrack Obama and the most famous living US general ex-CIA Director David Patraeus – both illustrate as psychopathic poster boys what has gone most wrong in America. The psychopathic traits and tendencies of their actions, misdeeds and public records will be examined next.
Barrack Hussein Obama is a Machiavellian pathological liar of the first order. His mounting pile of shattered and broken promises to the American people used during his meteoric rise to power from relative obscurity as a largely unknown junior senator from Illinois a dozen years ago to becoming the most powerful leader (albeit as elected figurehead front man to the true power of the oligarchy that owns him) in the most powerful nation on earth is the stuff of urban psychopathic legends. We all remember the man who captured the hopeful, yearning hearts of so many Americans who were so exhausted and demoralized by the psychopaths Bush and Cheney and their brutal evil psychopathic agenda. Obama campaigning on his mantra of hope appeared on the national scene like a desperately needed breath of fresh air. The first African American president rode in on his white horse wave of hope that weary America had finally found its first populist champion of the people since FDR and Lincoln’s four score and seven years ago days.
Of course Obama is but one man in a morally bankrupted, highly dysfunctional political system with two corrosive and corrupt parties representing the same oligarch interests whose political agenda was and remains simply to play partisan politics and cancel each other out as the most lame and ineffective Congressional body in US history. So our fantasy of wonder boy riding his white horse into the White House on America’s hopes and dreams realistically was but a set-up for failure from the get-go (from the populists’ point of view, obviously not from the oligarchs’ POV who were carefully grooming him years prior to his meteoric rise).
After all, Barrack Obama was a man who felt destined for historic greatness and as such would do anything to become arguably the most powerful man on earth. His lust for power even as the thoroughly compromised, sold out, half black front man to his puppet slave masters was certainly unquenchable from the start. That particular criteria on his psychopathic checklist has clearly been met in aces.
Returning to Obama as pathological liar, Americans were hoping that he would keep his most important promise of all, that he would be honest in contrast with the ultra-secretive, yet not-so-hidden war crime agenda that became an in-our-face, anything but a skeleton in the Bush-Cheney closet, not even their inside 9/11 job. With those neocons we all knew what we were up against with their oppressive fascist regime. But Obama was the great black hope and champion of the little people. So his betrayal of our trust was taken personally. We believed his promise that he would be different in his vow to maintain ultra-transparency and the commitment of always being open and honest with the American people who elected him. This was his biggest, far-from-white lie. As the most secretive, aggressively reactionary, pathological lying president in US history, it is his most sinister and unforgivably darkest sin of them all. He has blocked more requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act than any prior president in history. He has also declared war on the truth in general and on honest journalists and whistleblowers in particular, harassing, indicting and imprisoning more of them on espionage act charges than all previous administrations combined.
Like all of our public servants from Congress to the Supreme Court, Obama swore to uphold the US Constitution. Yet they have all failed us miserably, constantly violating and running roughshod over US citizens’ rights to privacy, search and seizure and due process protection. That is his second most egregious lie. Under his regime, Obama has not only run with the fascist torch handed off to him by his predecessors, but he has rammed tyranny and oppression down America’s throat, now left gasping for air with our long lost and stolen liberties and fast dying freedoms laying in ashes amidst the Orwellian nightmare come true of an oligarchic militarized police state.
Another of Obama’s burn in hell lies is that he was supposed to be the prudent, thoughtful, calm and cool man of reason who was to supposed to restore America’s good will standing with the rest of the world and finally stop the forever war agenda and Empire aggression once and for all. Instead, Mr. Psychopathic Cool under pressure Obama again has only accelerated the megalomaniacal war policies of his predassessor.
He has our nation still mired in another costly counterinsurgency war defeat in Afghanistan that has lasted longer than any previous US war in history. He has polarized the world causing the next cold war after causing a coup in another sovereign nation Ukraine deposing another democratically elected president. He has only continued on steroids the disastrous imperialistic neocon policy of destabilizing targeted nations for more regime changes around the world. Obama has gone after any independent country after independent country that happens to refuse to be subjugated and exploited by the world’s only superpower bully.
And Obama has only continued the psychopathic policy of using onetime allies (like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Kaddafi, Hosni Mubarak and Vladimir Putin just to name a few) and then turning on them one by one whenever they have been used up.
Instead of bringing war to an end as promised, Obama has chosen to expand Special Operations with unlimited deep taxpayer funded pockets fighting dirty little secret wars around the world in at least 134 nations. Then when it comes to our supposed al Qaeda enemy, he has betrayed the American people once again by misusing their hard earned tax dollars to finance and support lowlife al Qaeda mercenaries in another disastrous losing cause in Syria. Obama never fails to use his personal favorite brand of modern warfare the drone as his excuse to kill not only innocent civilians around the world but even threatens to use them to kill Americans on American soil in the probable near future. That is how boldface his Machiavellian, arrogant, self-righteous, God-like, in-our-face abusive power of betrayal toward his own citizenry has exponentially grown.
Then there are all those not-so-hidden, out of the closet, scandalous cover-ups that just keep proliferating before our very eyes during his lame duck term. The Benghazi tragedy where he and his
partners-in-crime, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and his then CIA Director General Petraeus, were responsible for the murder of the Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Their lies to suppress the truth have manifested as death threats to any of the CIA-Special Ops personnel who were witnesses that also came under attack that fateful 9/11/12 night while their leaders ignored their desperate calls for help. While Americans were dying, Obama flew westward off to another fancy fundraising dinner to make sure he got reelected less than two months later, not losing a wink of sleep, another sure sign of his psychopathic nature.
Then came the IRS scandal targeting anti-Obama conservative right wing groups, Christian fundamentalists, tea party groups for undue scrutiny and harassment. The subsequent cover-up includes the Obama administration’s continued denial of any and all responsibility. Then there was Obama’s Justice Department’s cover-up of the debacle where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was caught purposely selling guns to the Mexican drug cartel that were soon used in the murder of a US Drug Enforcement Administration officer and US Border agents.
In a growing litany of scandal after scandal, Obama is defensively on the run with the latest story of another Pandora’s box currently breaking as Veterans Administration hospitals across the country have apparently been cooking the books to cover-up unlawful lag times to treating US veterans and hordes of them dying while waiting to receive care. It turns out that the Phoenix VA hospital may be responsible for at least 40 deaths of veterans waiting for appointments that never came in time and this appears to be just the tip of the iceberg as the broken VA healthcare system is just one more institution trying to conceal the ugly truth from getting out to the public. The cracks in the VA’s stonewalling dam are breaking and opening up the floodgate to the hundreds if not thousands of veterans this Memorial Day weekend who have become fatal victims in the overburdened, mismanaged VA health system.
The US is learning the hard way that the horror of sending young men and women in uniform to fight and die in multiple Empire wars has created an out of control Frankenstein monster of an epidemic unable to properly care for the growing numbers of severely damaged veterans. The year or more spent on a waiting list backlog just to receive services for our returning war veterans is killing 22 of them a day through suicide alone. The VA has come under increasing heat by using Big Pharma to snow under the veterans’ severe PTSD symptoms by treating them only with excessive use of drugs rather than real care involving intensive therapy and long term support groups. The onetime senator on the veterans affairs committee made bold promises to ensure that a grateful nation will always take care of those who bravely serve their country. Looks like yet another broken promise by a president who fails to put his money where his glib mouth is.
The problem goes far beyond either President Obama or VA director General Shinseki. The problem has everything to do with an overextended, corrupt and vicious US Empire murdering millions around the world (including our own) in a last gasp, geopolitical chessboard power grab of a dying and decaying superpower – not unlike the Roman Empire a millennium ago. As much of a psychopath as Obama is as the despotic war criminal terrorist, it is the evil psychopathic system that groomed and produced him that is the underlying root cause. And just as drugs are bandaids, blaming a psychopath president overlooks the underlying systemic cause. Until the power structure of the global oligarchy changes, the monumental, unprecedented theft, death and destruction of our only planet will merely continue until its tragic bitter end.
There are simply too many CEO’s in the psychopathic corporate world to even go into on an individual basis. Suffice it to say that psychopathic birds of a feather flock together as Obama has ensured that not even one white collar Wall Street-bankster criminal has gone to prison over the scandalous home loan mortgage-housing bubble burst fiasco of 2009 that plunged America into a deep recession where millions were defrauded and lost their homes. Yet no sooner does that travesty unfold, the swindled American public still freshly reeling financially were then forced by Obama et al to bail out the largest US corporations and banks. Then adding insult to injury, the CEO’s were touting huge multimillion dollar yearend bonuses off the sacrificial backs of the struggling, disappearing middle class. Those Obama-nation bail outs were as obscene and sinister as any coldhearted psychopathic behavior can get for so many hurting Americans struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table for their families.
One recent study found that 10% of Wall Street traders in the financial services industry are financial psychopaths that can present as “a perfect well-rounded job candidate, CEO, manager, co-worker, and team member because their destructive characteristics are practically invisible.” These individuals thrive in fast-paced, competitive industries, are experts at taking full advantage of company systems and exploiting communication weaknesses in others. They have a propensity for instigating interpersonal conflicts designed to make themselves look good and peer competitors look bad to their bosses. Like all psychopaths, corporate psychopaths lack empathy and interest in what others think or feel. They exhibit loads of charisma and charm as well as intelligence and credentials, a remarkable capacity for lying, fabrication, cutthroat manipulation, and a compulsive drive for thrill seeking, taking high risks and gambling.
As a West Point graduate and former Army officer, I encountered a sizeable percentage of military psychopaths posing as officers as well. Common characteristics shared with their political and corporate counterparts are a “win at all cost” drive, an unquenchable thirst for power and control over others, a constant concern for appearance and looking good in front of superiors, and a nauseating display of ass kissing ingratiation to gain favors from higher ranking superior officers. Though West Point cadets have an honor code that prohibits them from lying, cheating or stealing, or tolerating those who do, I observed firsthand how too many officers regularly lie through their teeth knowing that higher rank simply permits them to get away with it with impunity – that is until I came along.
I was a West Point dissident who did not believe in the inhumane and unjust system that for way too long has been churning out mindless robots as toxic psychopathic leaders who repeatedly lose costly, protracted and unjustified imperialistic wars from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. I single handedly forced the less than honorable institution after 170 years to no longer operate above the law by becoming the first cadet to ever challenge and beat the West Point system in a court of law. My landmark 1972 law case brought the constitutional right to due process into the previously impenetrable massive gray stone granite walls. Because I battled psychopaths at West Point who attempted to play God by committing command conspiracy and running up my demerits on a series of false charges to railroad me out of the Academy, I know firsthand what lurks behind the psychopathic military mind. As one individual I am proud of my accomplishment, standing up to their lies and injustice to fight and defeat the psychopaths of West Point.
One of my plebe year roommates was the longest running commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars from 2003 to 2007 General John Abizaid. The reprehensible Abu Ghraib prison scandal occurred while under Abizaid’s command. Fresh off that scandal, former NFL star Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death and subsequent cover-up also happened on my old roommate’s watch. When asked by Congress when he knew Tillman was killed by his own troops, Abizaid said not until several weeks later after the tragedy. Yet General Stanley McChrystal wired General Abizaid at his Central Command headquarters in Qatar right after the accidental death. But the high achieving West Point graduate sitting next to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a couple years later both lied about when they first learned of the circumstances and it was proven that Abizaid was not where he claimed to be in Iraq because the day McChrystal notified him Abizaid was on record having given a press conference in Qatar. Unlike many US generals, I know that my onetime roommate John Abizaid is not a full blown psychopath. In the end he became both scandal- and war-weary himself but nonetheless he still lied before Congress to save his own ass. CYA is the standard norm in both higher echelons of power on down.
While I was rooming with the future war commander Abizaid, my other roommate at the time was to later become General Karl Eikenberry who the day after he retired Obama swore in as the Ambassador to Afghanistan. My two freshman roommates are both currently active members on the Council on Foreign Relations.
Other notables who went on to prominence from the graduating West Point class directly behind me are the infamous General David Patraeus, until last month the equally infamous National Security Administration (NSA) Director General Keith Alexander and the highest ranking general in the land the Pentagon’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. Having received the exact same higher education and leadership training as these most powerful military men in America, as a West Point insider and whistleblower, I am dedicated to exposing the truth behind the hypocrisy, corruption and inhumane and thoroughly broken system that brainwashes, molds and launches psychopaths into becoming American Empire’s future leaders, the same ones busily pushing humanity off the current doomsday cliff.
Targeting and killing thousands of people including so called “collateral damage” that are innocent civilian families, mothers and children perceived as the sub-human enemy cause no sleepless nights or a tinge of guilt for the hardened, cold blooded psychopathic generals in charge. The brutal savagery of war atrocities and crimes against humanity are simply the way war has always been waged. The risk taking, the thrill and adrenalin rush of combat, the exhilaration that comes with ultimate and absolute life and death power and control over millions of other human beings all in the name of national security and Empire breeds psychopaths to long lasting careers of warmongering and perpetual war on terror. Only the terrorists on this grandest scale are not the Islamic extremists but the US psychopaths that continue leading us to war in a destabilizing agenda for nonstop regime changes around the world by any means necessary, and that invariably means war after war after more war in a never ending curse against all of humanity. The latest frenetic pace of war drum beating and saber rattling accompanied by the old familiar propaganda blitz demonizing other nations and people that happen to resist the already overextended US Empire aggressor is their psychopathic swan song ultimately bent on bringing us all to destruction.
For more detailed information than provided in this brief presentation, an entire chapter of my West Point manuscript is devoted to the poster boy for toxic leadership himself General David Petraeus. There exists no other West Pointer more qualified and illustrative an example of the embodiment of a military psychopath than Betray-us-Petraeus. I went to school with him in the same First Regiment my final three years at the Academy. In fact the loser of my court case, General Knowlton who was the sitting Superintendent, happened to be General Petraeus’ father-in-law. Psychopaths are known for using others for self-gain and as a cadet what better way out of the gate to launch his golden parachute of a career than by marrying the Supe’s daughter Holly Knowlton straight out of West Point.
Like my two high profile “star man” roommates, Petraeus also ranked academically within the top 5% of his West Point class and also earned postgraduate degrees from Ivy League institutions (my roommates graduated from Harvard while Petraeus is a PhD Princeton grad). Petraeus’ dissertation was a treatise on lessons learned from the Vietnam War that he failed to put into practice as commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. What is clear from his writing is an imperialistic ethnocentric disregard for the suffering and damage afflicted on the native inhabitants of US occupied nations. He has no understanding or compassion for what his brand of counterinsurgency warfare has on the people whose “hearts and minds” he claims to wanted to win over.
Having literally written the US Army manual on counterinsurgency warfare (called the COIN manual), his war crime aggression murdering thousands upon thousands of people (the US killed a million and a half Iraqis during its decade long occupation) failed completely in winning any hearts and minds other than his neocon bosses in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Desperate to distort the truth in order to save face in Iraq, both Washington DC and the sycophantic mainstream press crowned their golden boy the Iraq War savior for his 2008 surge allegedly bringing much needed security to Iraq (which reality fails to confirm). In any war America wages, it is impossible to anoint a war hero in a war defeat, thus convenient twisting of truth to fit a war hero status falsely elevated Petraeus to being touted as the next Republican president after Bush.
General Petraeus was responsible in 2004-2005 for training Iraqi death squad commandos to round up for torture and murder many Iraqi citizens detaining them in hundreds of secret prisons similar to Abu Ghraib. The Guardian last year released its investigation exposing Petraeus’ direct role in violating international law with unlawful detainment, torture and murder. Yet this is how counterinsurgency warfare according to General Petraeus is properly waged. And for all its damage and destruction, next to no intelligence information was ever gathered through such war crime atrocity methods. When the story broke a year ago, a Petraeus spokesman stated that Petraeus kept both the Iraqi leaders as well as his bosses Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld fully informed of all the covert operations. Petraeus’ response shows more psychopathic tendencies typical when caught in any wrongdoing by a feeble attempt to absolve guilt by blaming others.
In December 2009 General Petraeus ordered a Tomahawk cruise missile strike from a nuclear naval submarine off the Yemen coast that murdered forty-one people in a small rural village, all women and children except three. After fellow psychopath Obama pressured the Yemen puppet president to falsely claim the missile was from Yemen, then later exposed to be an American missile, Petraeus lied claiming “only one wife and two children” were among the casualties and that the rest were all al Qaeda operatives. So much for his West Point honor code. But then psychopaths go to unlimited lengths to lie and avoid blame in order to save their own powerful careers. When the Yemen reporter that uncovered the truth about the US missile was about to be released from prison by the Yemen president, the vindictive psychopath devoid of any conscience Obama recontacted his Yemen puppet to ensure the journalist was falsely imprisoned longer for simply telling the truth. After three years of false imprisonment the journalist was finally released last July.
After Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings’ article that resulted in Afghanistan war commander General McChrystal’s forced resignation, once again the next US President Obama called upon the Iraq War savior to work his surge magic as McChrystal’s replacement in Afghanistan. Except this time the surge man clearly failed as the US military found itself in another unwinnable quagmire in the face of a resurging Taliban enemy. More psychopathic behavior was observed in Petraeus when the pathological liar went before Congress falsely claiming that “significant progress” was being made. The general also lied about the heroin crop being sizably reduced when in fact it was the biggest bumper crop since the war began. But too much US money was being made in the international heroin drug smuggling trade to tell the truth. Prior to his probable assassination nearly a year ago for knowing too much about the wrongdoing of US intelligence agencies, a haven for psychopaths, Michael Hastings wrote another unflattering article this time on General Petraeus’ failed surge in Afghanistan at the same time that a career officer in Lt. Colonel Davis went public disclosing the dismal truth that America was in fact losing yet another prolonged war half a world away.
Rather than hold psychopaths accountable for gross incompetence and failure, in a psychopathic system one psychopath Obama will only promote another psychopath Petraeus to CIA director. The defeated war commander jumped at the chance of abandoning both his failing military mission and over-rated career after 36 years while involved in an extramarital affair with another West Point grad Major Paula Broadwell who was doing double duty as both his mistress and his All In biographer.
More than any other military leader, Petraeus had been responsible for outsourcing the US military in Middle Eastern wars with the overnight proliferation of corrupt private civilian defense contractors like Blackwater and DynCorp. In fact, by the latter half of those wars, the US had more civilian Americans serving on the warfronts than actual military personnel.
As CIA director, Petraeus was already seen as an outsider busily replicating the same outsourcing process of the CIA legions. However, his arrogant disregard stepping on the powerful toes of longtime CIA lifers ended up doing him in more than his adultery.
The psychopathic general was used to being the dictator-boss, fully in control wielding unlimited regal-like power over his subordinate armies. Taking thrill seeking risks while surrounded by sycophantic enablers over many decades produced a grandiose sense of inflated omnipotence, entitlement and impunity that in Petraeus’ case eventually came to bite him in his arrogant ass. Disgruntled CIA operatives turned his affair over to the FBI and the day after Obama was reelected in 2012 the psychopathic CIA director was forced to resign in disgrace just in time to conveniently be out of sight for the Benghazi inquest.
As commander-in-chief Obama travels to the US Military Academy to deliver his graduation commencement speech on Wednesday, it gives Americans pause on the heels of this Memorial Day weekend to reflect on the global destruction and war against humanity currently being waged by the psychopathic killing machine of the US Empire. It is both unsettling and tragic that the oligarchic system produces leadership so rampant with psychopaths. But it also becomes incumbent upon us citizens of the world to call a spade a spade and realize that the status quo power structure limits access to the theft and destruction game only to players who are also fellow psychopaths.
Any individuals within this morally decayed and broken system who are honest and possess a conscience, empathy and compassion for fellow human beings is steeped in inner conflict and have to suffer daily from cognitive dissonance. And as such, they cannot relish playing their part in this sinister game. They will either eventually opt out or be screened out by those less principled insiders that are part of the psychopathic club. Throughout my time in the military I struggled for the exact same reason.
Psychopaths at the very top of this power pyramid will only allow like minded psychopaths into their inner club sanctum. This moral betrayal by those wielding the most power and control on earth must be stopped. Since they are too sick in their deviant pathology to ever change their evil ways on their own, it is left up to us who are guided by a common moral compass to courageously step up and hold these psychopaths accountable for their crimes against humanity. This can only be achieved with the distinct advantage that as just 1% of the total population, the psychopaths and oligarchs are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those of us 99% who are committed to doing what is right in making a positive difference on this earth plane before all is lost.
Joachim Hagopian's background in both the military and mental health fields make him uniquely qualified to address psychopaths as a clinician and psychopaths in the military as a West Point graduate and former Army officer. His written manuscript based on his military experience examines leadership and national security issues and can be consulted at: http://www.redredsea.net/westpointhagopian/. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in psychology and became a licensed therapist working in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now focuses on writing.
