Signed in Blood: How Congress Codifies Colonial Violence

Paper Shields over Scorched Earth

Natanz, pre-dawn. In the radioactive hush after the B‑2s have gone, Iranian technicians dig through splintered concrete and pulverized centrifuge casings. A sovereign nation has just been mauled, yet the first U.S. headline does not name the craters or the workers: it asks whether the paperwork was filed correctly. NBC News leads with a querulous “Is it legal?”—the moral equivalent of debating the font size on a death warrant while the condemned still bleed.

The by-line belongs to Sahil Kapur, a Capitol-Hill stenographer whose copy flows as smoothly as the fibre-optic cables owned by Comcast Business, the $102.8 million Pentagon contractor that signs his pay-stub. Kapur’s prose is what happens when a reporter is marinated too long in the House press gallery: every quote trimmed to bipartisan symmetry, every verb dunked in Pentagon passive voice. NBC, the flagship of a telecom leviathan, thus personifies the Imperialist Media Apparatus under twenty-first-century technofascism: Big Tech, state violence, and algorithmic choke-points that track dissent welded into one reality-manufacturing machine. The network sells cognitive tranquilizers disguised as “news”; the Pentagon invoices the public for the service.

Into this echo chamber stride Democrats Tim Kaine and Chuck Schumer—joined by the progressive veneers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who decry “process” while voting to fund the bombs—and their Republican dance partners John Thune, Mike Johnson, Thomas Massie, Warren Davidson. They exchange solemn barbs about “consultation” and “authority,” never about incinerated Iranians. Like feuding shareholders squabbling over board procedure, they accept the business model—permanent war—while bickering over who initialed the invoice. Kapur dutifully records each tut-tut, presenting an intra-ruling-class turf fight as the pinnacle of democratic oversight.

Off-stage, the cash registers sing. Comcast monopolizes the narrative bandwidth while Raytheon, Lockheed, and their financiers rake in windfalls big enough to buy a small archipelago. A single “limited strike” can goose defense-stock valuations by six percent before lunch; every sound bite about “measured response” is a coupon clipped from the bodies beneath Natanz.

Notice the linguistic sleight of hand: the attack is “targeted,” the bombs “precision,” casualties “unconfirmed.” Gone is any reference to sanctions that already throttle medicines, or to the UN Charter that still—on paper—outlaws such aggression. This is Procedural Sedation: outrage redacted into footnote, sovereignty muzzled by legal Latin. Add a dose of Media Amnesia—no reminder that Democrats cheered the 2011 Libya charnel house (WI: “They Buried the Bodies”) or applauded Trump’s 2017 Tomahawks—and the imperial record is scrubbed clean for its next entry. The entire performance is a Lawfare Cloak: aggression rendered “debatable,” genocide transformed into a scheduling conflict.

Thus NBC’s column completes its circuit: the bombs fall, the pundits parse chapter 12 of the War Powers Resolution, and the blood dries unmentioned. In the pages that follow we will exhume this legal theatre, trace its lineage through two decades of bipartisan belligerence, and arm ourselves with the memory that empire works hardest when it claims to be merely keeping minutes.

The Empire’s Legal Engine and the Bipartisan Kill‑Switch

On the night of June 21st, 2025, the American empire fired its latest flare. U.S. B‑2 bombers and submarine‑launched cruise missiles hit three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. President Trump claimed the sites were “obliterated.” Within hours, the IAEA contradicted him—no radiation leaks, no containment breaches, no meltdown—and confirmed no increase in off‑site radiation levels at Fordow, Natanz, or Isfahan. Yet reports also noted dead technicians at Natanz alone. The real target wasn’t uranium; it was sovereignty. And the real blast zone was not Iran’s nuclear program but the crumbling edifice of international law.

The bipartisan response inside Washington was neither horror nor humility—it was legislative peacocking. Lawmakers invoked the War Powers Resolution, a half‑century–old legal fig leaf crafted during the last imperial quagmire, Vietnam. But this invocation was purely symbolic, like reading a fire code over the ashes of a house already torched. No senator called the strike an act of aggression. No Democrat invoked the UN Charter. No Republican questioned the targeting of civilian infrastructure. Instead, the debate was over “notification timelines” and “consultation protocols.” Even in dissent, the empire clung to its script—as Raytheon stock surged 6.2 % (a $4.3 billion windfall).

This is no anomaly. It is the latest chapter in a dialectic of bipartisan war‑making that began with near‑unanimous consent for global slaughter. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed the House 420–1 and the Senate 98–0—Barbara Lee the sole dissent. The 2002 AUMF gave George W. Bush a blank check to invade Iraq, with 81 House Democrats on board, including Joe Biden. When Obama bypassed Congress to destroy Libya in 2011, his party called it “humanitarian.” When Trump launched his 2017 missile strike on Syria, Nancy Pelosi applauded his “presidential leadership.” And now, as Trump 2.0 rains missiles again, this time on Iran, Congress offers only paperwork complaints while the blood seeps into sand.

This timeline is not just a history of executive excess—it is a diagram of imperial decay. As legitimacy crumbles, the ruling class leans harder on unilateral force. Consultation becomes optional. Multilateralism is discarded. Violence is streamlined. We call this moment what it is: hyper‑imperialism, where spasmodic militarism (a 43 % increase in unilateral strikes since 2020), sanctions warfare, and digital propaganda fuse into a permanent kill‑switch that can be flipped without parliamentary approval or public consent.

And make no mistake: this strike wasn’t just an outburst—it was a signal fire against BRICS‑plus energy corridors, targeting Fordow to sabotage Iran’s role in pan‑Eurasian infrastructure that threatens $1.7 trillion in annual energy transactions outside petrodollar control. Its destruction signals to Global‑South nations: build outside the West, and you will be cratered. This is the logic of Imperialist Recalibration—desperate spasms of brute force used to preserve the dying heartbeat of empire.

But empire cannot recalibrate indefinitely. As more nations pivot toward multipolar partnerships—from the North‑South Transport Corridor to yuan‑clearing pipelines—the U.S. finds itself playing whack‑a‑mole with reality itself. It sends warplanes to disrupt what its own markets can no longer control (amid a 17 % decline in global dollar reserves) (IMF April 2025). NBC packages it as “limited engagement.” Lawmakers call for “oversight.” But the strike’s true message was not procedural. It was strategic. It told the world: Washington will burn the bridge before it lets you cross it.

As WI’s “No Kings” essay documents, it was the liberals who paved this imperial road—fortifying the executive branch, legalizing targeted assassinations, and building the drone architecture that now operates on autopilot. They handed the sword to a madman, then clutched their pearls when he used it. And now, once again, they cry foul—not over incinerated lives, but over who signed the launch order.

This is not dissent. This is imperial crisis management. And the cost, as always, is paid in the lives of workers thousands of miles from Washington—scientists vaporized in underground bunkers, families displaced by rubble, futures buried under ash. The missiles may have missed radiation targets, but they struck a deeper core: the illusion that empire ever needed permission to kill.

Cloaks, Contracts, and the Colonial Guillotine

The first thing Congress murdered was meaning. While Iranian medics tagged the charred remains of night-shift technicians, Senator Schumer wept for a wounded committee prerogative and Tim Kaine filed an amendment to remind the White House that proper paperwork is still very important. This is Murder by Procedure: if an atrocity is stamped “classified” and referenced in the footnotes of the WPR, the killing is not condemned but credentialed. As long as the chair gavels on time, spasmodic militarism can vaporize a reactor hall and still pass for constitutional decorum.

Kapur’s NBC dispatch drapes the carnage in a Lawfare shawl—aggression rendered “debatable,” genocide rewritten as a jurisdictional hiccup. Here the two party brands lock arms in a single corporate logo: the Unified Ruling Class. Red or Blue, each faction is a rotating shift in the same control room. Pelosi’s applause for Tomahawks, Sanders’s silence on sanctions, AOC’s anguished tweets about “process” while the appropriation bill sails through—these are not contradictions; they are complementary gears in the technofascist gearbox, lubricated by Comcast’s algorithmic governance and Raytheon’s AI kill-chains.

Strip away the civic theater and the Colonial Contradiction is plain. On one side of the ledger sit Raytheon shareholders, Big-Oil futures traders, Comcast executives parsing click-through rates. On the other side lie Iranian machinists like Ahmad Rezaei (32, father of two) incinerated at Natanz, Venezuelan cancer patients denied chemo by banking blockades, and an entire Global South whose development is throttled by Sanctions Architecture and the slow bleed of Necro-Extractivism. Where NBC speaks of “instability,” we recognise a counter-insurgent business model; where it frets over “authorization,” we indict an integrated supply chain of death.

This is the colonial contradiction in real time: surplus value siphoned North through armaments and algorithms, while surplus death is exported South by bunker-buster and sanction. The entire spectacle—Kapur’s neutral verbs, Schumer’s procedural sobs, Sanders’s budget vote—works to obscure that basic truth. The victims are never “Iranian workers” but “potential nuclear assets”; the beneficiaries are never Lockheed lobbyists but “security stakeholders.” The ruling class manufactures euphemism the way Raytheon manufactures warheads: at scale, on contract, and always ahead of schedule.

Our task is to refuse the cloak. To call the missile a missile—not a message; to name the corpse a comrade—like Ahmad Rezaei, union member and football coach—not collateral; to expose, at every turn, that the empire’s legal dial turns only one way: towards the gallows of the colonised. Where they see a procedural question, we see a class verdict. Where they debate the president’s signature, we indict the system that forges it in blood. And we do so not as spectators but as guerrilla intellectuals, chiselling the record before it can be sealed in the archives of imperial amnesia.

Mobilization: From Diagnosis to Direct Action

The contradictions laid bare in Parts I–III leave only two choices: submission to the bipartisan kill-switch or organized refusal. History shows that when Congress notarizes massacre, liberation forces emerge from the ground up. Below are concrete fronts where revolutionaries, anti-imperialists, and anti-war organizers in the United States can intervene now—turning analysis into power, and resistance into structure.

1. Defund the War Machine — Divest, Disrupt, Blockade. Join CODEPINK’s Divest from War campaign to strip city budgets, campuses, and pension funds from Raytheon, Lockheed, and RTX. Coordinate local actions—like the Tucson and Dallas blockades that halted Raytheon facilities—using CODEPINK’s divest-toolkits and rapid-response alerts. Every dollar pried from a bombmaker is a blow to the algorithmic kill-chain.

2. Build an Anti-Imperialist Front Led by the Colonized Working Class. Support formations like the Black Alliance for Peace, Unión del Barrio, African People’s Socialist Party, and Indigenous-led movements like The Red Nation. These organizations are building revolutionary dual power from within the internal colonies of the U.S. Empire. Their leadership is not symbolic—it is strategic, forged through struggle and sustained under siege. Our job is to follow and fortify it.

3. Organize for Reparations and White Defection from Empire. The Uhuru Solidarity Movement offers white comrades a concrete path out of passive privilege and into material solidarity. That means redistributing stolen wealth, defending colonized leadership, and repurposing our skills and networks to break the supply lines of empire—economically, politically, and ideologically.

4. Defend the Barrio, Fight the Border War. Unión del Barrio’s Barrio Defense Committees and anti-migra mobilizations offer a blueprint for revolutionary self-defense under settler occupation. Their resistance to ICE, police, and carceral violence is inseparable from the broader fight against imperialism abroad. Support their work, replicate their structures, and link anti-border organizing to anti-war struggle.

5. Reclaim the Land — Disarm the Empire. Support Indigenous sovereignty through the LANDBACK campaign and projects like The Red Nation, which organize to return land, resist extraction, and block Pentagon infrastructure. The U.S. cannot sustain permanent war abroad without occupying stolen land at home. Land return is disarmament by another name.

6. Converge Struggles — Forge Revolutionary Unity. Support Euro-American formations that subordinate themselves to this leadership and act in true solidarity. These include the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Solidarity, and U.S. chapters of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS). Their role is not to lead, but to integrate and amplify the movements emerging from the frontlines of colonized resistance.

7. Arm the Battle of Ideas — Support Revolutionary Media. The ruling class wages war not only with missiles, but with narratives. Countering that requires building and funding independent media rooted in anti-imperialism and revolutionary analysis. Support Weaponized Information, Revolutionary Blackout Network, Danny Haiphong, Geopolitical Economy Report, Black Liberation Media, Garland Nixon, BreakThrough News, Black Agenda Report, and The Grayzone. These outlets expose empire’s lies, uplift movement voices, and train consciousness toward liberation.

To confront hyper-imperialism, we must do more than protest it—we must interrupt its circuits, follow the leadership of the colonized working class, and build revolutionary unity from below. From divestment clinics to reparations infrastructure, barrio defense to land defense, the path to dismantling empire is being mapped—and every action wires a fuse toward liberation.