Raise your hands if you think this guy was pro-capital punishment or pro-torture...--jef
Showing posts with label Torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Torture. Show all posts
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Obama's America
Tyranny and Permanent War
December 31, 2011 will be remembered as a day of infamy. More on it below. October 17, 2006 was an earlier one under Bush.
In a White House ceremony, he signed the infamous Military Commissions Act (MCA). It authorized torture as official policy.
It also enacted sweeping unconstitutional powers to arrest, interrogate, and prosecute alleged terrorist suspects and collaborators (including US citizens), detain them (without evidence) indefinitely in military prisons, and deny them habeas and other constitutional protections.
It lets presidents call anyone anywhere an "unlawful enemy combatant," order them arrested, detained and denied all rights.
On the same day, Bush quietly signed the FY 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Included were hidden Sections 1076 and 333. Major media scoundrels ignored them.
They amended the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. They prohibited using federal and National Guard troops for law domestic enforcement except as constitutionally allowed or expressly authorized by Congress in times of insurrection or other national emergency.
Henceforth, the executive, by diktat, can claim emergency powers, declare martial law, suspend the Constitution on "national security" grounds, and deploy federal and/or National Guard troops on US streets to suppress whatever's called disorder - including lawful peaceful protests.
At issue is abolishing fundamental First Amendment freedoms without which all others are at risk. They include free expression, assembly, religion, and right to petition government for redress. No longer.
In 2009, Obama assured military commission continuity by signing the FY 2010 Defense Authorization Act. Its hidden Section 1031 contained the 2009 Military Commissions Act (MCA). The phrase "unprivileged enemy belligerent" replaced "unlawful enemy combatant."
Language changed but not intent or lawlessness. Obama exceeds Bush extremism.
Guantanamo and other torture prisons remain open. US citizens are treated as lawlessly as foreign nationals. Ahead things got worse.
On December 31, he signed the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It gives presidents unchecked power to order military force arrests and indefinite detentions of US citizens, based solely on uncorroborated accusations of terrorist group associations.
Constitutional, statute and international law protections don't apply.
America's military may snatch and grab anyone, throw them in torture prisons, and hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, based solely on suspicions, spurious allegations or none at all.
Earlier by Executive Order, Obama authorized indefinite detentions of anyone designated national security threats. Specifically intended for Guantanamo detainees, it's now for everyone, including US citizens at home or abroad.
Moreover, CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads got presidential authorization to kill targeted US citizens abroad. As a result, they can be hunted down and murdered in cold blood for any reason or none at all.
As of December 31, anyone anywhere, including US citizens, can be called national security threats and judged guilty by accusation. Activists opposing America's imperium risk arrest, permanent detention or assassination.
So do social justice protesters. Military dungeons or FEMA camps await them. Martial law may authorize it, claiming "catastrophic emergency" powers. The original Senate bill excluded US citizens. Obama demanded their inclusion.
Inviolable rights no longer apply. Protesting imperial lawlessness, social injustice, corporate crime, government corruption, or political Washington run of, by and for rich elites can be criminalized. So can free speech, assembly, religion, or anything challenging America's right to kill, destroy and pillage with impunity.
It's official. Tyranny arrived in America. The nation's unsafe to live in. There's no place to hide. They're coming for anyone challenging injustice.
Lawlessness At Home and Abroad
They also target independent states. At issue is making them client ones. Tactics include threats, destabilization, violence, sanctions and war if other methods fail.
In 2011, Libya became NATO's latest charnel house. It was ravaged and destroyed for profit. For months, Syria's been ruthlessly targeted. Pressure's building for more. Anything ahead is possible, including replicating the barbarism inflicted on Libya.
Iran's next. Washington's pushing the envelope aggressively.
Tactics include provocations, subversion, fake accusations, isolation, covert or direct confrontation, cyberwar, and punishing sanctions, coming perilously close to acts or war.
In the past five years, four harsh rounds were imposed. In mid-December, Congress enacted another. They're included in the FY 2012 NDAA. They're aimed at penalizing foreign financial institutions doing business with Tehran's central bank. It's the main oil revenue conduit. US corporations, including banks, already can't deal with Iran.
Additional measures expanded sanctions on companies doing oil related business, including investments, selling Iran refinery goods and services, as well as providing Tehran with refined products worth $5 million or more annually.
On December 31, Obama signed the new law. He has 180 days to implement it. He calls it the stiffest measure yet, saying:
"Our intent is to implement this law in a timed and phased approach so that we avoid repercussions to the oil market and ensure that this damages Iran and not the rest of the world."
He has discretionary power to grant waivers, provided they're in America's national interest. Energy analysts fear enactment means disruptively higher oil prices. Others worry that confrontation may follow rogue bullying.
Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said Iran's naval forces can readily block the Strait of Hormuz in response to hostile Western actions.
He spoke a day after Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned not a drop of oil would pass through the Strait if Iran's oil exports are sanctioned. If so, expect energy prices to skyrocket until normal flows resume. Also expect retaliation, perhaps including direct US-Iranian confrontation.
Targeting Iran's nuclear program is a ruse. Tehran insists it's peaceful. Nothing proves otherwise. The most recent March 2011 US intelligence consensus agrees. It found no evidence of weapons development. At issue is regime change. Reasons are invented as pretext.
As a result, anything ahead is possible, including potentially devastating general war with nuclear weapons targeting underground Iranian facilities.
No matter the risk, Obama seems headed for the unthinkable.
January 6th, 2012
by Stephen LendmanIn a White House ceremony, he signed the infamous Military Commissions Act (MCA). It authorized torture as official policy.
It also enacted sweeping unconstitutional powers to arrest, interrogate, and prosecute alleged terrorist suspects and collaborators (including US citizens), detain them (without evidence) indefinitely in military prisons, and deny them habeas and other constitutional protections.
It lets presidents call anyone anywhere an "unlawful enemy combatant," order them arrested, detained and denied all rights.
On the same day, Bush quietly signed the FY 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Included were hidden Sections 1076 and 333. Major media scoundrels ignored them.
They amended the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. They prohibited using federal and National Guard troops for law domestic enforcement except as constitutionally allowed or expressly authorized by Congress in times of insurrection or other national emergency.
Henceforth, the executive, by diktat, can claim emergency powers, declare martial law, suspend the Constitution on "national security" grounds, and deploy federal and/or National Guard troops on US streets to suppress whatever's called disorder - including lawful peaceful protests.
At issue is abolishing fundamental First Amendment freedoms without which all others are at risk. They include free expression, assembly, religion, and right to petition government for redress. No longer.
In 2009, Obama assured military commission continuity by signing the FY 2010 Defense Authorization Act. Its hidden Section 1031 contained the 2009 Military Commissions Act (MCA). The phrase "unprivileged enemy belligerent" replaced "unlawful enemy combatant."
Language changed but not intent or lawlessness. Obama exceeds Bush extremism.
Guantanamo and other torture prisons remain open. US citizens are treated as lawlessly as foreign nationals. Ahead things got worse.
On December 31, he signed the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It gives presidents unchecked power to order military force arrests and indefinite detentions of US citizens, based solely on uncorroborated accusations of terrorist group associations.
Constitutional, statute and international law protections don't apply.
America's military may snatch and grab anyone, throw them in torture prisons, and hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, based solely on suspicions, spurious allegations or none at all.
Earlier by Executive Order, Obama authorized indefinite detentions of anyone designated national security threats. Specifically intended for Guantanamo detainees, it's now for everyone, including US citizens at home or abroad.
Moreover, CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads got presidential authorization to kill targeted US citizens abroad. As a result, they can be hunted down and murdered in cold blood for any reason or none at all.
As of December 31, anyone anywhere, including US citizens, can be called national security threats and judged guilty by accusation. Activists opposing America's imperium risk arrest, permanent detention or assassination.
So do social justice protesters. Military dungeons or FEMA camps await them. Martial law may authorize it, claiming "catastrophic emergency" powers. The original Senate bill excluded US citizens. Obama demanded their inclusion.
Inviolable rights no longer apply. Protesting imperial lawlessness, social injustice, corporate crime, government corruption, or political Washington run of, by and for rich elites can be criminalized. So can free speech, assembly, religion, or anything challenging America's right to kill, destroy and pillage with impunity.
It's official. Tyranny arrived in America. The nation's unsafe to live in. There's no place to hide. They're coming for anyone challenging injustice.
Lawlessness At Home and Abroad
They also target independent states. At issue is making them client ones. Tactics include threats, destabilization, violence, sanctions and war if other methods fail.
In 2011, Libya became NATO's latest charnel house. It was ravaged and destroyed for profit. For months, Syria's been ruthlessly targeted. Pressure's building for more. Anything ahead is possible, including replicating the barbarism inflicted on Libya.
Iran's next. Washington's pushing the envelope aggressively.
Tactics include provocations, subversion, fake accusations, isolation, covert or direct confrontation, cyberwar, and punishing sanctions, coming perilously close to acts or war.
In the past five years, four harsh rounds were imposed. In mid-December, Congress enacted another. They're included in the FY 2012 NDAA. They're aimed at penalizing foreign financial institutions doing business with Tehran's central bank. It's the main oil revenue conduit. US corporations, including banks, already can't deal with Iran.
Additional measures expanded sanctions on companies doing oil related business, including investments, selling Iran refinery goods and services, as well as providing Tehran with refined products worth $5 million or more annually.
On December 31, Obama signed the new law. He has 180 days to implement it. He calls it the stiffest measure yet, saying:
"Our intent is to implement this law in a timed and phased approach so that we avoid repercussions to the oil market and ensure that this damages Iran and not the rest of the world."
He has discretionary power to grant waivers, provided they're in America's national interest. Energy analysts fear enactment means disruptively higher oil prices. Others worry that confrontation may follow rogue bullying.
Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said Iran's naval forces can readily block the Strait of Hormuz in response to hostile Western actions.
He spoke a day after Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned not a drop of oil would pass through the Strait if Iran's oil exports are sanctioned. If so, expect energy prices to skyrocket until normal flows resume. Also expect retaliation, perhaps including direct US-Iranian confrontation.
Targeting Iran's nuclear program is a ruse. Tehran insists it's peaceful. Nothing proves otherwise. The most recent March 2011 US intelligence consensus agrees. It found no evidence of weapons development. At issue is regime change. Reasons are invented as pretext.
As a result, anything ahead is possible, including potentially devastating general war with nuclear weapons targeting underground Iranian facilities.
No matter the risk, Obama seems headed for the unthinkable.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Ominous Phrase
Here's a phrase that will sum up life in the US, under 2011 NDAA...guilty--regardless if proven innocent.
Gone are the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th amendments -- 2/3 of the Bill of Rights.
Even if Obama doesn't execute the 2011 NDAA to its fullest extent, he has allowed all future presidents to wield that tyrannical power.
Understand that if you think I and those like me are making too big a deal of this issue.
Gone are the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th amendments -- 2/3 of the Bill of Rights.
Even if Obama doesn't execute the 2011 NDAA to its fullest extent, he has allowed all future presidents to wield that tyrannical power.
Understand that if you think I and those like me are making too big a deal of this issue.
Monday, January 2, 2012
The NDAA's Historic Assault on American Liberty
Monday, January 2, 2012 by Jonathan Turley's Blog
By signing into law the NDAA, the president has awarded the military extraordinary powers to detain US citizens without trial
by Jonathan Turley
By signing into law the NDAA, the president has awarded the military extraordinary powers to detain US citizens without trial
by Jonathan Turley
President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law
with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a
symbolic moment, to say the least. With Americans distracted with
drinking and celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of
civil liberties in the history of our country … and citizens partied in
unwitting bliss into the New Year.
Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the law, Obama broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that he really does not want to detain citizens indefinitely (see the text of the statement here).
Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. As discussed earlier, the White House told citizens that the president would not sign the NDAA because of the provision. That spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House and insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision.
The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not "support our troops" by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The "American way of life" is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.
The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush administration. Even today, reporters refuse to call waterboarding torture despite the long line of cases and experts defining waterboarding as torture for decades.
On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution.
There are also those who continue the longstanding effort to excuse Obama's horrific record on civil liberties by blaming either others or the times.
One successful myth is that there is an exception for citizens. The White House is saying that changes to the law made it unnecessary to veto the legislation. That spin is ridiculous. The changes were the inclusion of some meaningless rhetoric after key amendments protecting citizens were defeated. The provision merely states that nothing in the provisions could be construed to alter Americans' legal rights. Since the Senate clearly views citizens as not just subject to indefinite detention but even to execution without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the harsh reality.
The Obama administration and Democratic members are in full spin mode – using language designed to obscure the authority given to the military. The exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement (section 1032) is the screening language for the next section, 1031, which offers no exemption for American citizens from the authorisation to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial.
Obama could have refused to sign the bill and the Congress would have rushed to fund the troops. Instead, as confirmed by Senator Levin, the White House conducted a misinformation campaign to secure this power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant absolute ruler, or, as Obama maintains, a reluctant president with dictatorial powers.
Most Democratic members joined their Republican colleagues in voting for this un-American measure. Some Montana citizens are moving to force the removal of these members who, they insist, betrayed their oaths of office and their constituents. Most citizens, however, are continuing to treat the matter as a distraction from the holiday cheer.
For civil libertarians, the NDAA is our Mayan moment: 2012 is when the nation embraced authoritarian powers with little more than a pause between rounds of drinks.
Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the law, Obama broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that he really does not want to detain citizens indefinitely (see the text of the statement here).
Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. As discussed earlier, the White House told citizens that the president would not sign the NDAA because of the provision. That spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House and insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision.
The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not "support our troops" by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The "American way of life" is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.
The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush administration. Even today, reporters refuse to call waterboarding torture despite the long line of cases and experts defining waterboarding as torture for decades.
On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution.
There are also those who continue the longstanding effort to excuse Obama's horrific record on civil liberties by blaming either others or the times.
One successful myth is that there is an exception for citizens. The White House is saying that changes to the law made it unnecessary to veto the legislation. That spin is ridiculous. The changes were the inclusion of some meaningless rhetoric after key amendments protecting citizens were defeated. The provision merely states that nothing in the provisions could be construed to alter Americans' legal rights. Since the Senate clearly views citizens as not just subject to indefinite detention but even to execution without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the harsh reality.
The Obama administration and Democratic members are in full spin mode – using language designed to obscure the authority given to the military. The exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement (section 1032) is the screening language for the next section, 1031, which offers no exemption for American citizens from the authorisation to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial.
Obama could have refused to sign the bill and the Congress would have rushed to fund the troops. Instead, as confirmed by Senator Levin, the White House conducted a misinformation campaign to secure this power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant absolute ruler, or, as Obama maintains, a reluctant president with dictatorial powers.
Most Democratic members joined their Republican colleagues in voting for this un-American measure. Some Montana citizens are moving to force the removal of these members who, they insist, betrayed their oaths of office and their constituents. Most citizens, however, are continuing to treat the matter as a distraction from the holiday cheer.
For civil libertarians, the NDAA is our Mayan moment: 2012 is when the nation embraced authoritarian powers with little more than a pause between rounds of drinks.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Combating the Distortions Over NDAA Military Detentions
Does This Mean You? You'd Better Believe It
By Ralph Lopez - opednews.com
Perhaps the only thing more worrisome than the recently passed NDAA
provisions for the indefinite military detention of American citizens is
the extent and sophistication of the efforts to distort their true
meaning in order to lead people to believe that American citizens are
excluded. Rep. Justin Amash took a rare bare-knuckled swipe in this
most collegial of institutions to say that the NDAA was "carefully crafted to mislead the public."
That's the equivalent of calling some pretty powerful people whom you work with liars, on whose good graces passing your legislation may depend. It's not done in this place unless it is something you feel very strongly about.
The deceptions in the language of the NDAA, intended to allow defenders to argue that the provisions do not apply to American citizens, center around Sections 1021 and 1022.
Section 1021 says in substance:
Tarek Mehanna, a young Muslim-American who is looking at life in prison just for talking bad about America, and surfing Jihadi websites in a soul search in which he consistently rejected attacking civilians, rejected an entrapment attempt by the FBI, and was finally kicked of the Jihadi website because he was talking young men away from violence. If anyone was ever not a threat to America, it's him. The government made many allegations, but these are the only ones it can prove.
This is what "substantially supporting Al Qaeda or associated forces" can mean now that this precedent has been set. The next precedent will be sitting on the road blocking the deployment of wounded soldiers as Iraq Veterans Against the War did at Ft. Hood. And the precedent after that will require even less, a "thought crime." A boycott called for by Occupy Wall Street becomes "economic terrorism."
Most often missed in the discussion, of course, is that all accusations of who is "Al Qaeda" rest solely on the word of the government, with no witnesses, evidence, or any other form of due process available when the government is either wrong or lying.
Section 1021 also reads: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law." But "existing law," in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham a key mover of the bill, refers to Padilla v. Rumsfeld in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the government's claim of authority to hold Americans arrested on American soil indefinitely.
Finally Section 1022 "(b) APPLICABILITY TO UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS" states:
You clearly see the words "does not extend to citizens of the United States." You can see that, Buford, can't you see that? What you don't clearly see is the word "requires," which is not to say "does not allow." It's the fine print. To put it bluntly, it's a goddamned lawyer's trick.
Never think this does not apply to you. It does. If you want to do something about it go here:
"Montanans Launch Recall of Senators Who Approved NDAA Military Detention. Merry Christmas, US Senate,"
here, "Oath Keepers Launches National Effort to Recall and/or Remove Members of Congress Who Voted for NDAA Military Detention. Merry Christmas, U.S. Congress!"
or here, "Facebook: "Recall Every Congressman Who Voted for the NDAA."
By Ralph Lopez - opednews.com
That's the equivalent of calling some pretty powerful people whom you work with liars, on whose good graces passing your legislation may depend. It's not done in this place unless it is something you feel very strongly about.
The deceptions in the language of the NDAA, intended to allow defenders to argue that the provisions do not apply to American citizens, center around Sections 1021 and 1022.
Section 1021 says in substance:
"Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force ...to detain...A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda...or associated forces...including any person who has...directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces...The disposition of a person...may include...Detention under the law of war...without trial until the end of the hostilities..."This is how a court must read it when the words are parred down to their true meaning, without inoperative subordinate clauses. You can see the full text below. This is taken straight from the final House-Senate Conference Committee report (HR 1540 Conference), which is the language that was passed by the Senate after being passed by the House, on Dec. 15, Bill of Rights Day in an 86 - 14 vote of the Senate which sent it to the president's desk.
20 SEC. 1021. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMEDRep. Tom McClintock opposed the bill on the House floor saying it:
21 FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN
22 COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AU-
23 THORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.
24 (a) IN GENERAL.--Congress affirms that the author-
25 ity of the President to use all necessary and appropriate
1 force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military
2 Force (Public Law 107--40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes
3 the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States
4 to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b))
5 pending disposition under the law of war.
6 (b) COVERED PERSONS.--A covered person under
7 this section is any person as follows:
8 (1) A person who planned, authorized, com-
9 mitted, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred
10 on September 11, 2001, or harbored those respon-
11 sible for those attacks.
12 (2) A person who was a part of or substantially
13 supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces
14 that are engaged in hostilities against the United
15 States or its coalition partners, including any person
16 who has committed a belligerent act or has directly
17 supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy
18 forces.
19 (c) DISPOSITION UNDER LAW OF WAR.--The dis-
20 position of a person under the law of war as described
21 in subsection (a) may include the following:
22 (1) Detention under the law of war without
23 trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the
24 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
specifically affirms that the President has the authority to deny due process to any American it charges with "substantially supporting al Qaeda, the Taliban or any "associated forces'" -- whatever that means.
Would "substantial support" of an "associated force," mean linking a web-site to a web-site that links to a web-site affiliated with al-Qaeda? We don't know."Substantial support" of an "associated force" may imply citizens engaged in innocuous, First Amendment activities. Direct support of such hostilities in aid of enemy forces may be construed as free speech opposition to U.S. government policies, aid to civilians, or acts of civil disobedience.
Tarek Mehanna, a young Muslim-American who is looking at life in prison just for talking bad about America, and surfing Jihadi websites in a soul search in which he consistently rejected attacking civilians, rejected an entrapment attempt by the FBI, and was finally kicked of the Jihadi website because he was talking young men away from violence. If anyone was ever not a threat to America, it's him. The government made many allegations, but these are the only ones it can prove.
This is what "substantially supporting Al Qaeda or associated forces" can mean now that this precedent has been set. The next precedent will be sitting on the road blocking the deployment of wounded soldiers as Iraq Veterans Against the War did at Ft. Hood. And the precedent after that will require even less, a "thought crime." A boycott called for by Occupy Wall Street becomes "economic terrorism."
Most often missed in the discussion, of course, is that all accusations of who is "Al Qaeda" rest solely on the word of the government, with no witnesses, evidence, or any other form of due process available when the government is either wrong or lying.
Section 1021 also reads: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law." But "existing law," in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham a key mover of the bill, refers to Padilla v. Rumsfeld in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the government's claim of authority to hold Americans arrested on American soil indefinitely.
Finally Section 1022 "(b) APPLICABILITY TO UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS" states:
(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS.--The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.However, although the section says it is not "required" that US citizens be held in military detention, it is nevertheless "allowed." This is a key spin of the disinformation on NDAA.
You clearly see the words "does not extend to citizens of the United States." You can see that, Buford, can't you see that? What you don't clearly see is the word "requires," which is not to say "does not allow." It's the fine print. To put it bluntly, it's a goddamned lawyer's trick.
Never think this does not apply to you. It does. If you want to do something about it go here:
"Montanans Launch Recall of Senators Who Approved NDAA Military Detention. Merry Christmas, US Senate,"
here, "Oath Keepers Launches National Effort to Recall and/or Remove Members of Congress Who Voted for NDAA Military Detention. Merry Christmas, U.S. Congress!"
or here, "Facebook: "Recall Every Congressman Who Voted for the NDAA."
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Man Pepper Sprayed to Death by Police while Tied to Chair
By John C Dvorak - December 26, 2011
TAMPA – No doubt you’ve heard the adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture of 62-year-old Nick Christie could be worth thousands of dollars when a jury sees it.
The photo shows the Ohio man restrained inside the Lee County Jail with his body covered in pepper spray.
“This photo is a picture of a man who is strapped to a chair naked inside a jail for hours with a hood over his face. That evokes thoughts of being tortured,” says Cleveland-based lawyer Nick DiCello who represents the Christie family.
The photo, which was obtained by FOX 13′s investigative unit, was taken in the final hours of Christie’s life.
The District 21 Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide because he had been restrained and sprayed with pepper sprayed by law enforcement officers. But to this day, nobody has ever been charged with a crime, and the Lee County State Attorney cleared the sheriff’s office of any wrong doing.
and speaking of police brutality...
TAMPA – No doubt you’ve heard the adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture of 62-year-old Nick Christie could be worth thousands of dollars when a jury sees it.
The photo shows the Ohio man restrained inside the Lee County Jail with his body covered in pepper spray.
“This photo is a picture of a man who is strapped to a chair naked inside a jail for hours with a hood over his face. That evokes thoughts of being tortured,” says Cleveland-based lawyer Nick DiCello who represents the Christie family.
The photo, which was obtained by FOX 13′s investigative unit, was taken in the final hours of Christie’s life.
The District 21 Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide because he had been restrained and sprayed with pepper sprayed by law enforcement officers. But to this day, nobody has ever been charged with a crime, and the Lee County State Attorney cleared the sheriff’s office of any wrong doing.
and speaking of police brutality...
Friday, December 23, 2011
The National Defense Authorization Act Explained
The Indefinite Detention of American Citizens
by JOANNE MARINER
Passed by the House and Senate last week, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) now awaits the president’s signature. Because of its controversial provisions on indefinite detention, President Obama had threatened to veto the bill back in May, when the House passed one version of it, and again in November, when the Senate passed another, somewhat different version of it.
But last week, after the House and Senate reconciled their two versions of the bill, the president lifted his veto threat. His press secretary explained in a written statement that the revised bill was considered acceptable because problematic provisions had been removed, and because “the most recent changes give the President additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law.”
Numerous human rights advocates, civil libertarians, and members of Congress disagree. Human Rights Watch said that President Obama’s decision not to veto the bill “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad.” The ACLU said, “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage both his legacy and American’s reputation for upholding the rule of law.” Representative Jerrold Nadler, who voted against the bill, said that it presents a “momentous challenge to one of the founding principles of the United States—that no person may be deprived of his liberty without due process of law.”
The bill’s congressional supporters reacted with outrage to such criticism, calling it false and misleading. “Rarely in my time have I seen legislation so consistently misunderstood and misrepresented as these detainee provisions,” complained Senator John McCain, one of the bill’s main drafters.
So what do the detention provisions of the NDAA actually say, and who, in particular, do they affect?
Background to the NDAA
To fully understand the NDAA’s provisions on detention, a brief review of recent history is needed.
During the Bush years, despite massive public and press attention to the administration’s detention policies, Congress remained largely out of the picture. While the USA PATRIOT Act contained some provisions on detention, they were never put to use; the Bush administration preferred to create a detention system that was, it assumed, largely free of legal constraints and judicial oversight.
The military prison at Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prison system were therefore created by executive fiat, without congressional input or restriction. When cases challenging Guantanamo and the military detention of US citizens on US soil got to court, however, the administration claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a joint resolution passed by Congress in September 2001, gave congressional approval for those detentions.
The AUMF, which authorizes the president to use “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored such persons or groups, is silent on the issue of detention. A plurality of the US Supreme Court agreed with the administration, nonetheless, that the power to detain is necessarily implied by the power to use military force.
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the 2004 ruling that upheld the US government’s detention power, left many questions unanswered. Because it involved a prisoner who was captured during the armed conflict in Afghanistan, it did not raise the Bush administration’s broad claims of a “global war on terror,” in which terrorism suspects far from any battlefield were treated like enemy soldiers. It did not even give much guidance regarding the scope of the armed conflict, geographic or temporal, although it included, in dicta, a skeptical reference to the administration’s broadest claims.
Congress maintained its hands-off approach to detention during the entirety of President Bush’s two terms in office, even as it legislated on closely related issues like minimum standards of humane treatment and the rules for military commission proceedings. When Obama took office in January 2009, however, Congress’s attitude changed. Many members of Congress reacted negatively to Obama’s stated goal of closing Guantanamo, and, since that time, Congress has imposed various ever tighter restrictions on the release and transfer of detainees.
One last historical fact that is important to remember, when considering the scope of the NDAA, is that the Bush administration held two American citizens in indefinite military detention, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. While Hamdi was picked up as a combatant in Afghanistan in 2002, Padilla was arrested in a civilian setting in Chicago that same year.
The Padilla case was never definitively adjudicated—Padilla was finally moved to the civilian justice system in 2006 — but it underscores the Bush administration’s claim of power to hold even American citizens picked up in the United States indefinitely without trial.
Subtitle D of the NDAA
What is now known as Subtitle D of the NDAA—the section on detention—made its first appearance in March of this year. Called the Detainee Security Act in the House, and the Military Detainee Procedures Improvement Act in the Senate, the bills, introduced by Representative Buck McKeon and Senator John McCain, respectively, were meant to shift counterterrorism responsibilities from law enforcement to the military. The clear goal of the two bills was to require that suspected terrorists either be tried before military commissions or be held in indefinite detention without charge.
By May, the House version of the bill had been added to the NDAA, a $662 billion spending bill that finances the military’s annual operations. It passed by a vote of 322-96, even as President Obama issued a veto "threat," complaining that the bill improperly limited the government’s ability to fight terrorism effectively.
The Senate version of the bill, which also became part of the NDAA, passed in November on an overwhelming 93-7 vote. Prior to the Senate’s passage of the bill, nearly every government official with responsibility over counterterrorism, from FBI head Robert Mueller to CIA director David Petraeus, had voiced concerns that the bill would have a negative impact on US counterterrorism efforts.
President Obama again issued a veto threat after the Senate vote, but as soon as the bill was modified slightly during the process of reconciling its House and Senate versions, the threat was dropped. The final version of the bill passed both houses of Congress last week with large majorities.
Substance and Procedure in the NDAA
Subtitle D of the NDAA consists of twelve sections, covering issues that range from the military’s power over detention to technical amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2009. Overall, the thrust of its provisions is to create a presumption of military jurisdiction over terrorism suspects, expand post-hoc congressional scrutiny of decisions over the detention and prosecution of such suspects, and effectively prevent Guantanamo from being closed.
Rather than establishing categorical rules to achieve these ends, however, the bill mostly relies on an array of procedural techniques like reporting, briefing and certification requirements. The substantive rules that it does establish are, in large part, qualified by waiver options and other potential loopholes.
Nonetheless, nearly every provision in subtitle D is objectionable from the standpoint of human rights and civil liberties. Among the controversial provisions are sections 1026, 1027 and 1028 of the bill, which restrict detainee transfers and releases from Guantanamo. But while human rights organizations are worried about these limitations, their gravest concerns pertain to sections 1021 and 1022.
Sections 1021 and 1022
It is sections 1021 and 1022 that human rights organizations have in mind when they say that the NDAA enshrines indefinite detention without charge into US law.
Section 1021 purports to “affirm” the military’s authority to hold people in indefinite detention without charge pursuant to the AUMF. Although the original House version of the bill would have stated explicitly that the US continues to be in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated groups, the final version of the bill is somewhat more circumspect.
Section 1022 takes a subset of the persons possibly subject to military detention under section 1021—focusing essentially on persons with a stronger connection to terrorism—and creates a presumption that they will be held in military detention.
The bad news is that, as passed, sections 1021 and 1022 represent clear congressional approval of what, up to now, has been solely the executive branch’s decision to hold people in indefinite detention without charge. (Remember that the AUMF itself was silent on detention questions.) Giving the practice a firm and explicit statutory grounding not only makes it less vulnerable to legal challenge, it may well make the practice more permanent.
The good news, to the extent there is any, is that neither section 1021 nor section 1022 defines the “war” or the “hostilities” at issue. They do not, in other words, explicitly embrace the “global war on terror” paradigm that equates terrorism with armed conflict and suspected terrorists with enemy soldiers. By failing to address that question, they leave open the theoretical (if unlikely) possibility that a court could give the statute a narrow reading consistent with international law understandings of armed conflict.
Yet even this qualified success should be further qualified. First, some of the people explicitly covered by section 1021—who, for example, harbored persons responsible for the September 11 attacks—might have no meaningful link to armed conflict. More importantly, the focus of section 1022 is clearly terrorism, not armed conflict: it covers Al Qaeda members and members of groups that act in coordination with or under the direction of Al Qaeda. Although the people subject to presumptive military detention under section 1022 are supposed to be a subset of the larger group of people covered by section 1021, which includes a requirement of a nexus to armed conflict under its subsection (b)(2), the thrust of the provision is still to equate armed conflict with terrorism.
Finally, it should also be noted that the set of “covered persons” subject to possible military detention, as defined in section 1021(b) of the NDAA, is far broader than the set of persons mentioned in the AUMF. While section 1021(b)(1) relies on the wording of the AUMF, section 1021(b)(2), which defines an additional category of potential detainees, is based on the Obama administration’s definition of “unprivileged enemy belligerent” (which, itself, is just a slight tweaking of the Bush administration’s definition of “unlawful enemy combatant”).
This provision covers not only persons who are members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces (all broad and possibly inchoate categories in themselves), but also persons who “substantially supported” those groups. The concept of “substantial support” is potentially quite broad (what kind of support is covered, and might opinion or expression count?). Also, support is an extremely controversial basis for law of war detention, even in traditional wars, and the issue has sparked enormous litigation at Guantanamo.
The Indefinite Detention of American Citizens
In my next column, I will address the most vexed and contested question about the scope of the NDAA’s detention provisions: the extent to which they authorize the detention of American citizens, including citizens picked up in the United States.
For the moment, I’ll just note some recent remarks of one of the NDAA’s key drafters. In applauding the bill’s passage last week, Senator McCain spoke of its “strong, unambiguous language that recognizes that the war on terror extends to us at home.”
by JOANNE MARINER
Passed by the House and Senate last week, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) now awaits the president’s signature. Because of its controversial provisions on indefinite detention, President Obama had threatened to veto the bill back in May, when the House passed one version of it, and again in November, when the Senate passed another, somewhat different version of it.
But last week, after the House and Senate reconciled their two versions of the bill, the president lifted his veto threat. His press secretary explained in a written statement that the revised bill was considered acceptable because problematic provisions had been removed, and because “the most recent changes give the President additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law.”
Numerous human rights advocates, civil libertarians, and members of Congress disagree. Human Rights Watch said that President Obama’s decision not to veto the bill “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad.” The ACLU said, “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage both his legacy and American’s reputation for upholding the rule of law.” Representative Jerrold Nadler, who voted against the bill, said that it presents a “momentous challenge to one of the founding principles of the United States—that no person may be deprived of his liberty without due process of law.”
The bill’s congressional supporters reacted with outrage to such criticism, calling it false and misleading. “Rarely in my time have I seen legislation so consistently misunderstood and misrepresented as these detainee provisions,” complained Senator John McCain, one of the bill’s main drafters.
So what do the detention provisions of the NDAA actually say, and who, in particular, do they affect?
Background to the NDAA
To fully understand the NDAA’s provisions on detention, a brief review of recent history is needed.
During the Bush years, despite massive public and press attention to the administration’s detention policies, Congress remained largely out of the picture. While the USA PATRIOT Act contained some provisions on detention, they were never put to use; the Bush administration preferred to create a detention system that was, it assumed, largely free of legal constraints and judicial oversight.
The military prison at Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prison system were therefore created by executive fiat, without congressional input or restriction. When cases challenging Guantanamo and the military detention of US citizens on US soil got to court, however, the administration claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a joint resolution passed by Congress in September 2001, gave congressional approval for those detentions.
The AUMF, which authorizes the president to use “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored such persons or groups, is silent on the issue of detention. A plurality of the US Supreme Court agreed with the administration, nonetheless, that the power to detain is necessarily implied by the power to use military force.
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the 2004 ruling that upheld the US government’s detention power, left many questions unanswered. Because it involved a prisoner who was captured during the armed conflict in Afghanistan, it did not raise the Bush administration’s broad claims of a “global war on terror,” in which terrorism suspects far from any battlefield were treated like enemy soldiers. It did not even give much guidance regarding the scope of the armed conflict, geographic or temporal, although it included, in dicta, a skeptical reference to the administration’s broadest claims.
Congress maintained its hands-off approach to detention during the entirety of President Bush’s two terms in office, even as it legislated on closely related issues like minimum standards of humane treatment and the rules for military commission proceedings. When Obama took office in January 2009, however, Congress’s attitude changed. Many members of Congress reacted negatively to Obama’s stated goal of closing Guantanamo, and, since that time, Congress has imposed various ever tighter restrictions on the release and transfer of detainees.
One last historical fact that is important to remember, when considering the scope of the NDAA, is that the Bush administration held two American citizens in indefinite military detention, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. While Hamdi was picked up as a combatant in Afghanistan in 2002, Padilla was arrested in a civilian setting in Chicago that same year.
The Padilla case was never definitively adjudicated—Padilla was finally moved to the civilian justice system in 2006 — but it underscores the Bush administration’s claim of power to hold even American citizens picked up in the United States indefinitely without trial.
Subtitle D of the NDAA
What is now known as Subtitle D of the NDAA—the section on detention—made its first appearance in March of this year. Called the Detainee Security Act in the House, and the Military Detainee Procedures Improvement Act in the Senate, the bills, introduced by Representative Buck McKeon and Senator John McCain, respectively, were meant to shift counterterrorism responsibilities from law enforcement to the military. The clear goal of the two bills was to require that suspected terrorists either be tried before military commissions or be held in indefinite detention without charge.
By May, the House version of the bill had been added to the NDAA, a $662 billion spending bill that finances the military’s annual operations. It passed by a vote of 322-96, even as President Obama issued a veto "threat," complaining that the bill improperly limited the government’s ability to fight terrorism effectively.
The Senate version of the bill, which also became part of the NDAA, passed in November on an overwhelming 93-7 vote. Prior to the Senate’s passage of the bill, nearly every government official with responsibility over counterterrorism, from FBI head Robert Mueller to CIA director David Petraeus, had voiced concerns that the bill would have a negative impact on US counterterrorism efforts.
President Obama again issued a veto threat after the Senate vote, but as soon as the bill was modified slightly during the process of reconciling its House and Senate versions, the threat was dropped. The final version of the bill passed both houses of Congress last week with large majorities.
Substance and Procedure in the NDAA
Subtitle D of the NDAA consists of twelve sections, covering issues that range from the military’s power over detention to technical amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2009. Overall, the thrust of its provisions is to create a presumption of military jurisdiction over terrorism suspects, expand post-hoc congressional scrutiny of decisions over the detention and prosecution of such suspects, and effectively prevent Guantanamo from being closed.
Rather than establishing categorical rules to achieve these ends, however, the bill mostly relies on an array of procedural techniques like reporting, briefing and certification requirements. The substantive rules that it does establish are, in large part, qualified by waiver options and other potential loopholes.
Nonetheless, nearly every provision in subtitle D is objectionable from the standpoint of human rights and civil liberties. Among the controversial provisions are sections 1026, 1027 and 1028 of the bill, which restrict detainee transfers and releases from Guantanamo. But while human rights organizations are worried about these limitations, their gravest concerns pertain to sections 1021 and 1022.
Sections 1021 and 1022
It is sections 1021 and 1022 that human rights organizations have in mind when they say that the NDAA enshrines indefinite detention without charge into US law.
Section 1021 purports to “affirm” the military’s authority to hold people in indefinite detention without charge pursuant to the AUMF. Although the original House version of the bill would have stated explicitly that the US continues to be in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated groups, the final version of the bill is somewhat more circumspect.
Section 1022 takes a subset of the persons possibly subject to military detention under section 1021—focusing essentially on persons with a stronger connection to terrorism—and creates a presumption that they will be held in military detention.
The bad news is that, as passed, sections 1021 and 1022 represent clear congressional approval of what, up to now, has been solely the executive branch’s decision to hold people in indefinite detention without charge. (Remember that the AUMF itself was silent on detention questions.) Giving the practice a firm and explicit statutory grounding not only makes it less vulnerable to legal challenge, it may well make the practice more permanent.
The good news, to the extent there is any, is that neither section 1021 nor section 1022 defines the “war” or the “hostilities” at issue. They do not, in other words, explicitly embrace the “global war on terror” paradigm that equates terrorism with armed conflict and suspected terrorists with enemy soldiers. By failing to address that question, they leave open the theoretical (if unlikely) possibility that a court could give the statute a narrow reading consistent with international law understandings of armed conflict.
Yet even this qualified success should be further qualified. First, some of the people explicitly covered by section 1021—who, for example, harbored persons responsible for the September 11 attacks—might have no meaningful link to armed conflict. More importantly, the focus of section 1022 is clearly terrorism, not armed conflict: it covers Al Qaeda members and members of groups that act in coordination with or under the direction of Al Qaeda. Although the people subject to presumptive military detention under section 1022 are supposed to be a subset of the larger group of people covered by section 1021, which includes a requirement of a nexus to armed conflict under its subsection (b)(2), the thrust of the provision is still to equate armed conflict with terrorism.
Finally, it should also be noted that the set of “covered persons” subject to possible military detention, as defined in section 1021(b) of the NDAA, is far broader than the set of persons mentioned in the AUMF. While section 1021(b)(1) relies on the wording of the AUMF, section 1021(b)(2), which defines an additional category of potential detainees, is based on the Obama administration’s definition of “unprivileged enemy belligerent” (which, itself, is just a slight tweaking of the Bush administration’s definition of “unlawful enemy combatant”).
This provision covers not only persons who are members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces (all broad and possibly inchoate categories in themselves), but also persons who “substantially supported” those groups. The concept of “substantial support” is potentially quite broad (what kind of support is covered, and might opinion or expression count?). Also, support is an extremely controversial basis for law of war detention, even in traditional wars, and the issue has sparked enormous litigation at Guantanamo.
The Indefinite Detention of American Citizens
In my next column, I will address the most vexed and contested question about the scope of the NDAA’s detention provisions: the extent to which they authorize the detention of American citizens, including citizens picked up in the United States.
For the moment, I’ll just note some recent remarks of one of the NDAA’s key drafters. In applauding the bill’s passage last week, Senator McCain spoke of its “strong, unambiguous language that recognizes that the war on terror extends to us at home.”
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Making Citizens Enemy Combatants:
Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning and the NDAA
Constitutional lawyer and blogger Glenn Greenwald speaks to Amy Goodman about the Manning hearings and the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens.
By Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Constitutional lawyer and blogger Glenn Greenwald speaks to Amy Goodman about the Manning hearings and the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens.
By Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on December 19, 2011
AMY GOODMAN: We go right now to Rio, Brazil, where we’re joined by the Salon.com writer, blogger, attorney, Glenn Greenwald, who has expressed criticism of Adrian Lamo for revealing the contents of his correspondence with Manning to the military.
Glenn, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about what’s happening right now at Fort Meade.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, what’s happening at Fort Meade is that the individual who is most responsible for having informed the world of more journalistic scoops than every single media outlet combined, who even Bill Keller, the very anti-WikiLeaks executive editor of the New York Times, said was responsible substantially for helping to trigger the Arab Spring—this is, of course, if he’s actually has done what the U.S. government has accused him of—and, as well, has helped to bring about the end of the Iraq War, not just by showing that Apache helicopter attack video, but also by publishing documents about a U.S. air strike on a home that killed six children—or actually, they did a night raid that killed six children, and the U.S. then air-bombed that house to destroy the evidence so that they could lie about what took place, which is what the Iraqi people learned about with the release of these cables, that caused the Maliki government to refuse the release of immunity—has done more to inform the world about so many things that we ought to have known than any single person alive.
If he’s alleged to have done what he’s doing, he now faces possibly the death penalty. Although the government is not seeking it, he could still have it imposed on him if he’s convicted, as well as a lifetime in prison at the age of 23, all as a result of one of the most shameful acts of deceit and treachery we’ve seen in the last several decades, which is this individual, who he had the misfortune of befriending, assuring him on multiple occasions—go look at the chat—that nothing he was saying would ever see the light of day, that as a journalist and a minister, he could offer him complete secrecy, and then even assured him later on in the conversation, quote, "Remember, nothing—none of this is for print," and then turned over everything Bradley Manning allegedly said to the United States government. It’s an extraordinary tragedy, what has happened to Bradley Manning. The criminals whom he’s exposed have suffered no consequences. The only one who’s suffering consequences is the person who exposed these grave crimes to the world.
AMY GOODMAN: And Adrian Lamo saying you don’t have any proof that he didn’t hurt people and that he did commit a crime?
GLENN GREENWALD: Think about how incredibly insultingly stupid that is. The United States government has been trying for the last year to justify why it is that they’ve been putting Bradley Manning into conditions so severe that Amnesty and the U.N. are investigating and condemning it. Their own State Department spokesman resigned in protest over it. They’re trying to justify why these leaks that WikiLeaks helped facilitate, that they’re now trying to prosecute them for, are so harmful. And even, they came out at first and said that WikiLeaks has blood on their hands, and then when media outlets like McClatchy started investigating, they were forced to admit that not a single person has been attacked or lost their lives as a result of the Afghanistan war documents that they originally claimed had blood on their hands. The benefits that these leaks have generated for the world are so enormous that we wouldn’t have time to discuss even a fraction of them. And there’s been virtually no harm. And the idea that there might have been harm, but the U.S. government is just too shy or modest about pointing to it, is really too absurd for words.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, the issue of the sexuality of Bradley Manning being raised in this hearing and what that means?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that we, as journalists, or people who have an interest in this story, are looking at Bradley Manning as a hero and as somebody who has done important things for the world—at least that’s how I see him. But at the same time, he is a 23—he just turned 24. His birthday was yesterday. He’s a 24-year-old, young kid, essentially, who really does face a lifetime in prison. So he is—and I don’t blame him at all—trying to do whatever he can to avoid having his life destroyed, either being killed by the state or locked up in a cage for the rest of his life. And presumably, his attorney—and a lot of—all the Manning hearings have been shrouded in secrecy. Politico reported that there’s actually more transparency in Guantánamo hearings than there has been for the Manning tribunal, so it’s hard to know exactly what the evidence is or what’s taking place. But presumably, his lawyer believes that one of the best ways that they have to keep him out of prison for the next six decades is to argue that he had diminished capacity by virtue of emotional distress over the gender struggles that he had over his sexual orientation being in a military that had a policy of banning those who were openly gay. And so, part of this emotional distress that they’re raising is designed to say that he should be excused from his actions because they were not the byproduct of full choice.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Glenn, I wanted to ask you about a not wholly unrelated issue, and that is the issue of the military authorization bill that President Obama threatened to veto if it continued to contain the provisions about the treatment of terrorism prisoners, people who could be picked up, Americans in the United States, without trial, without hearing, and held indefinitely. President Obama has dropped the veto threat, saying the changes have satisfied him. Your thoughts?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, let’s remember that under the status quo, because of the way that the Bush and Obama administrations have interpreted their own powers in the original 2001 authorization to use military force, they already claim, the executive branch does, the power to indefinitely detain people. That’s what’s happening right now at Guantánamo. It’s what’s happening at Bagram and several other facilities. And the Obama administration has vehemently defended this power to put people into prison without any trial or charges for as long as they want to keep them there. Additionally, they—the Obama administration claims the power to target even American citizens as enemy combatants, and not just to detain them indefinitely, but to kill them, as well. That’s what they did with Anwar al-Awlaki, far from any battlefield, based on this theory that they already have this power, even before this bill is passed.
But what this bill will do, and it will be signed into law now by President Obama, as you indicated, is that it will be the first time that the United States Congress has codified the power of indefinite detention into the law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s. The 1950 Congress passed a bill saying that communists and subversives could be imprisoned without a trial, without full due process, based on the allegation that they presented a national threat, an emergency, a threat to the national security of the United States.
President Truman, knowing that the bill would—the veto would be overridden, nonetheless vetoed it and said that it made a mockery of the Bill of Rights. That law was repealed in 1971 with the Non-Detention Act, that said you cannot hold people in prison without charging them with a crime. The war on terror has eroded that principle, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, but Congress is now, with the Democrats in control of the Senate and a Democratic president, is about to enact into law the first bill that will say that the military and the United States government do have this power. It’s muddled whether it applies to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, but it’s clearly indefinite detention, and there’s a very strong case to make that it includes U.S. citizens, as well, which, as we know, the Obama administration already claims anyway, and that’s what makes it so dangerous.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Obama's "Mission Accomplished"?
Friday, December 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Troops and Prisons Move, Wars and Torture Never Ends
Most Americans--68 percent--oppose the war against Iraq, according to a November 2011 CNN poll. So it's smart politics for President Obama to take credit for withdrawing U.S. troops.
As it often is, the Associated Press' coverage was slyly subversive: "This, in essence, is Obama's mission accomplished: Getting out of Iraq as promised under solid enough circumstances and making sure to remind voters that he did what he said."
Obama's 2008 campaign began by speaking out against the war in Iraq. (Aggression in Afghanistan, on the other hand, was not only desirable but ought to be expanded.) However, actions never matched his words. On vote after vote in the U.S. Senate Obama supported the war. Every time.
As president, Obama has claimed credit for a December 2011 withdrawal deadline negotiated by his predecessor George W. Bush--a timeline he wanted to protract. If the Iraqi government hadn't refused to extend immunity from prosecution to U.S. forces, this month's withdrawal would not have happened.
"Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," Obama bragged reporters on October 24th.
The UK Guardian noted: "But he had already announced this earlier this year, and the real significance today was in the failure of Obama, in spite of the cost to the U.S. in dollars and deaths, to persuade the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow one or more American bases to be kept in the country."
Obama's talk-no-walk approach to foreign policy is also on display on Guantánamo, the torture camp set up by the Bush Administration where thousands of Afghans and other Muslim men, including children, were imprisoned and tormented without evidence of wrongdoing. Only 171 prisoners remain there today, held under appalling conditions.
Yet the "war on terror" mentality remains in full force.
Obama ordered the construction and expansion of a new concentration camp at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan to house thousands of new and current inmates in the U.S. torture system. Now The New York Times has discovered that the Obama Administration has developed "the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads" inside the United States. Hundreds of Muslim men have been imprisoned by means of the thinnest veneer of legality.
"An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare," announced the paper.
Aware that "his" war against Afghanistan isn't much more popular among voters than the occupation of Iraq, Obama set a 2014 for withdrawal from the Central Asian state several years ago.
Dexter Filkins called it "the forever war": a post-9/11 syndrome that drives the United States to shoot and bomb the citizens of Muslim nations without end. You can't end a forever war. What if you had to sit down and get serious about taking care of the problems faced by regular, boring, American people?
And so Obama is having his ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, release trial balloons about staying past 2014…forever, in so many words.
Talking to reporters, Crocker said that the U.S. would stay longer if the Karzai regime--its handpicked puppet--asked them to. "They [the Afghans] would have to ask for it," he said. "I could certainly see us saying, 'Yeah, makes sense.'"
Vampires can't come inside unless they're invited.
The Iraq War, at least, seems to be coming to an end. According to the Pentagon, there will only be 150 U.S. troops in Iraq next year--those who guard the embassy in Baghdad.
Sort of.
Just shy of 10,000 "contractors"--the heavily-armed mercenaries who became known for randomly shooting civilians from attack helicopters--will remain in Iraq as "support personnel" for the State Department.
As they say, war is an addiction. If we wanted to, we could quit any time.
Any time. Really.
Troops and Prisons Move, Wars and Torture Never Ends
Most Americans--68 percent--oppose the war against Iraq, according to a November 2011 CNN poll. So it's smart politics for President Obama to take credit for withdrawing U.S. troops.
As it often is, the Associated Press' coverage was slyly subversive: "This, in essence, is Obama's mission accomplished: Getting out of Iraq as promised under solid enough circumstances and making sure to remind voters that he did what he said."
Obama's 2008 campaign began by speaking out against the war in Iraq. (Aggression in Afghanistan, on the other hand, was not only desirable but ought to be expanded.) However, actions never matched his words. On vote after vote in the U.S. Senate Obama supported the war. Every time.
As president, Obama has claimed credit for a December 2011 withdrawal deadline negotiated by his predecessor George W. Bush--a timeline he wanted to protract. If the Iraqi government hadn't refused to extend immunity from prosecution to U.S. forces, this month's withdrawal would not have happened.
"Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," Obama bragged reporters on October 24th.
The UK Guardian noted: "But he had already announced this earlier this year, and the real significance today was in the failure of Obama, in spite of the cost to the U.S. in dollars and deaths, to persuade the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow one or more American bases to be kept in the country."
Obama's talk-no-walk approach to foreign policy is also on display on Guantánamo, the torture camp set up by the Bush Administration where thousands of Afghans and other Muslim men, including children, were imprisoned and tormented without evidence of wrongdoing. Only 171 prisoners remain there today, held under appalling conditions.
Yet the "war on terror" mentality remains in full force.
Obama ordered the construction and expansion of a new concentration camp at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan to house thousands of new and current inmates in the U.S. torture system. Now The New York Times has discovered that the Obama Administration has developed "the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads" inside the United States. Hundreds of Muslim men have been imprisoned by means of the thinnest veneer of legality.
"An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare," announced the paper.
Aware that "his" war against Afghanistan isn't much more popular among voters than the occupation of Iraq, Obama set a 2014 for withdrawal from the Central Asian state several years ago.
Dexter Filkins called it "the forever war": a post-9/11 syndrome that drives the United States to shoot and bomb the citizens of Muslim nations without end. You can't end a forever war. What if you had to sit down and get serious about taking care of the problems faced by regular, boring, American people?
And so Obama is having his ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, release trial balloons about staying past 2014…forever, in so many words.
Talking to reporters, Crocker said that the U.S. would stay longer if the Karzai regime--its handpicked puppet--asked them to. "They [the Afghans] would have to ask for it," he said. "I could certainly see us saying, 'Yeah, makes sense.'"
Vampires can't come inside unless they're invited.
The Iraq War, at least, seems to be coming to an end. According to the Pentagon, there will only be 150 U.S. troops in Iraq next year--those who guard the embassy in Baghdad.
Sort of.
Just shy of 10,000 "contractors"--the heavily-armed mercenaries who became known for randomly shooting civilians from attack helicopters--will remain in Iraq as "support personnel" for the State Department.
As they say, war is an addiction. If we wanted to, we could quit any time.
Any time. Really.
Monday, December 5, 2011
The Corporate Military Industrial Complex Fights Back
Soon Congress is
expected to vote on a bill advanced by John McCain and Carl Levin, a
Republican and Democrat who preciously united to bring the foundation
needed to propel our nation into a fully militarized nightmare state-
similar to what we have been exporting these last few years. It is
the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act.
The Senate already discarded milquetoast efforts to tone it down a bit
earlier this week. It’s all but over at this point.
In case you haven’t heard the details (which is likely if you have spent much time watching traditional news), the bill essentially labels every spot on this earth as a battlefield, including the United States. It’s a telling moment when they concede, or in fact advance, a never ending war. And that same war is present under each and every rock, according to these lawmakers. It’s certainly the stuff of 1984 (we’ve always been at war with Eastasia). From this notion springs the advancement of military tribunals dealing with all citizens of the globe (once again, Americans included) without the bother of transparency. Detention and disappearance could be the order of the day.
The secretive nature and broad sweeps have already been used on those they deem enemy combatants around the world. As if by fascist playbook, this sort of thing is trial ballooned on “the other” and then brought home for the enjoyment of those who didn’t complain the first time around.
An enormous issue with the militarization and deviation from open aired civilian courts is the very secretive nature of it all. If an individual has truly done a harm that merits societal intervention, then the light of day should shine on the accusations and stand on their own merits. That tired excuse that the information in these trials needs to be hidden is simply a ploy to avoid oversight and scrutiny. The stories have circulated about local warlords turning in neighbors (who get sent to Gitmo) often for decidedly illegitimate reasons. And then just enough scary terror bogymen really are in residence at that blight in Cuba to allow the average citizen to go back to sleep, avoiding the uncomfortable realization that some there did nothing wrong, except perhaps be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or have enemies with the ear of Uncle Sam. It would be mindless to think it would go down in any other manner here. We aren’t that exceptional, I’m sorry to say.
Not to mention that this further advancement of the Corporate Military Industrial Complex must be making those entities who profit off of all of this salivate. As resources dwindle, the decision seems to have been made by the few to loot all that is available, consequences be damned.
At a time when Walmarts around the country have to add extra staff to handle the huge influx at midnight when food stamp cards get recharged….is this really the largest threat to the average American right now? Of course not. Who is really destroying our nation?
I’d say the lumbering corporate facilitators in Congress who let our people languish as they advance Corporate Military Industrial Complex hardcore porn legislation such as this, but that’s just me.
I have trouble believing that all of the legislators are truly evil. Rancid little snowflakes, all of them, to be sure, some evil, but some merely venal and ignorant- all hideous in their own unique manner. We will find no assistance from this pool of infamy, even as they play good cop/bad cop and taunt us with “less awful” amendments that don’t materialize.
This bill is flying under the radar; few seem to know about it in the general public. But of course that’s understandable; a new woman has popped up to talk about an inappropriate affair with Herman Cain. And if she hadn’t materialized, some damn baby would have to go missing or a hooker’s ipad with Congressional fetish requests would have to be unearthed at a booth in Chili’s- As they debate legislation that would allow the foundations for a new class of “disappeared” to occur in this nation.
If you still have any lingering thoughts that a Democrat (Crip) or a Republican (Blood) might save you, then this should serve as the final wake up call. If the teams truly believed their own rhetoric, an abomination like this would have never been advanced- the fear of the other party occupying the Commander in Chief throne would be too frightening to ponder for the opposing pols. Who would want to cede that kind of power to an enemy? Sure, they say this is for Al-Queda, but that’s what they always say. It only morphs into the others, such as political dissidents down the road. And the Republicrats know they won’t be using this on each other.
McCain joked about his daughter going “to the dark side”, presumably for taking a job at MSNBC (it’s astounding the talent pool in these children of politicians-isn’t it). But if McCain believed the bread and circus nonsense he is peddling, would he ever want to advance this kind of bill during a “dark side of the force” presidency? It’s not a real issue since they work together for corporate interests, anyway- never us. When a clown like Newt Gingrich says “child labor laws are dumb”, it inflames and occupies the national discourse. It’s meant to be that way, and hey…. if he can score one for kids going back to 1827 and get soot to cover their little faces, so much the better. Callista the wife looks good amongst that squalor. Her Tiffany diamonds shine all the brighter in comparison.
It can be a soul crushing moment when it is realized that there are no politicians advancing a core decency for the average American life (and heaven forbid for foreign lives). I’m sure it’s not a new realization for most of the readers of the legitimate free press still operating in the internet hinterland, but for the bulk of Americans, it’s a painful leap they have yet to make. A bill like this is inflammatory to most- when they truly realize what it means- ironically, a bridge between those who still think of themselves with political labels.
It’s all evolving, what this information means. Occupy movements are nebulous, but they seem to have this basic understanding mastered- that the current system is flawed beyond repair. The consent of the governed is being eroded slowly. We still have many decent people who don’t understand, though. Where they use fear and manipulation, we need to use reason, love, and inclusiveness to advance the notion of an equitable society based on mutual respect. We may lose, but what choice do we have? Odd that they decided this bill is necessary after the long-awaited awakening of the populace, that of the OWS movement.
But time is running out. I’m impressed that Occupy hasn’t turned to a violence that places them in the meat grinder. What they’ve been experiencing is bad enough. You just know that groups out to quash this movement are salivating for that. The look at Kent State as a missed opportunity as in a few students weren’t hit. The powerful probably fully expected it to go that manner after beating those kids-prompt some counter-violence and then get out more toys. How funny to disappoint them so. I see a quite asymmetrical situation- I think it will call for something more nuanced- that of turning the opinion of the masses. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it certainly has been done to great effect by the manipulators of our time. One would hope that truth would have an advantage, but base emotions often rule.
I don’t pretend to know the answers, and I’d be suspicious of anyone presenting a view for the future with complete assurance at this point. Who saw OWS coming…. or sadly this bill? So much is in play at this point; it’s a strange, scary time to be alive. But I do know that it’s necessary for the broader populace to understand the coup that is underway. That’s a foundation we need. Attempts at localization will likely be necessary as well. A government that seems to care little for any of us, and simply expects us to behave as cogs in machinery of big commerce will continue to run amok when met with resounding silence. But finally, the silence is waning.
But we are on a path that could lead to our own version of “disappeareds” and that is no exaggeration. We have no choice but to resist.
In case you haven’t heard the details (which is likely if you have spent much time watching traditional news), the bill essentially labels every spot on this earth as a battlefield, including the United States. It’s a telling moment when they concede, or in fact advance, a never ending war. And that same war is present under each and every rock, according to these lawmakers. It’s certainly the stuff of 1984 (we’ve always been at war with Eastasia). From this notion springs the advancement of military tribunals dealing with all citizens of the globe (once again, Americans included) without the bother of transparency. Detention and disappearance could be the order of the day.
The secretive nature and broad sweeps have already been used on those they deem enemy combatants around the world. As if by fascist playbook, this sort of thing is trial ballooned on “the other” and then brought home for the enjoyment of those who didn’t complain the first time around.
An enormous issue with the militarization and deviation from open aired civilian courts is the very secretive nature of it all. If an individual has truly done a harm that merits societal intervention, then the light of day should shine on the accusations and stand on their own merits. That tired excuse that the information in these trials needs to be hidden is simply a ploy to avoid oversight and scrutiny. The stories have circulated about local warlords turning in neighbors (who get sent to Gitmo) often for decidedly illegitimate reasons. And then just enough scary terror bogymen really are in residence at that blight in Cuba to allow the average citizen to go back to sleep, avoiding the uncomfortable realization that some there did nothing wrong, except perhaps be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or have enemies with the ear of Uncle Sam. It would be mindless to think it would go down in any other manner here. We aren’t that exceptional, I’m sorry to say.
Not to mention that this further advancement of the Corporate Military Industrial Complex must be making those entities who profit off of all of this salivate. As resources dwindle, the decision seems to have been made by the few to loot all that is available, consequences be damned.
At a time when Walmarts around the country have to add extra staff to handle the huge influx at midnight when food stamp cards get recharged….is this really the largest threat to the average American right now? Of course not. Who is really destroying our nation?
I’d say the lumbering corporate facilitators in Congress who let our people languish as they advance Corporate Military Industrial Complex hardcore porn legislation such as this, but that’s just me.
I have trouble believing that all of the legislators are truly evil. Rancid little snowflakes, all of them, to be sure, some evil, but some merely venal and ignorant- all hideous in their own unique manner. We will find no assistance from this pool of infamy, even as they play good cop/bad cop and taunt us with “less awful” amendments that don’t materialize.
This bill is flying under the radar; few seem to know about it in the general public. But of course that’s understandable; a new woman has popped up to talk about an inappropriate affair with Herman Cain. And if she hadn’t materialized, some damn baby would have to go missing or a hooker’s ipad with Congressional fetish requests would have to be unearthed at a booth in Chili’s- As they debate legislation that would allow the foundations for a new class of “disappeared” to occur in this nation.
If you still have any lingering thoughts that a Democrat (Crip) or a Republican (Blood) might save you, then this should serve as the final wake up call. If the teams truly believed their own rhetoric, an abomination like this would have never been advanced- the fear of the other party occupying the Commander in Chief throne would be too frightening to ponder for the opposing pols. Who would want to cede that kind of power to an enemy? Sure, they say this is for Al-Queda, but that’s what they always say. It only morphs into the others, such as political dissidents down the road. And the Republicrats know they won’t be using this on each other.
McCain joked about his daughter going “to the dark side”, presumably for taking a job at MSNBC (it’s astounding the talent pool in these children of politicians-isn’t it). But if McCain believed the bread and circus nonsense he is peddling, would he ever want to advance this kind of bill during a “dark side of the force” presidency? It’s not a real issue since they work together for corporate interests, anyway- never us. When a clown like Newt Gingrich says “child labor laws are dumb”, it inflames and occupies the national discourse. It’s meant to be that way, and hey…. if he can score one for kids going back to 1827 and get soot to cover their little faces, so much the better. Callista the wife looks good amongst that squalor. Her Tiffany diamonds shine all the brighter in comparison.
It can be a soul crushing moment when it is realized that there are no politicians advancing a core decency for the average American life (and heaven forbid for foreign lives). I’m sure it’s not a new realization for most of the readers of the legitimate free press still operating in the internet hinterland, but for the bulk of Americans, it’s a painful leap they have yet to make. A bill like this is inflammatory to most- when they truly realize what it means- ironically, a bridge between those who still think of themselves with political labels.
It’s all evolving, what this information means. Occupy movements are nebulous, but they seem to have this basic understanding mastered- that the current system is flawed beyond repair. The consent of the governed is being eroded slowly. We still have many decent people who don’t understand, though. Where they use fear and manipulation, we need to use reason, love, and inclusiveness to advance the notion of an equitable society based on mutual respect. We may lose, but what choice do we have? Odd that they decided this bill is necessary after the long-awaited awakening of the populace, that of the OWS movement.
But time is running out. I’m impressed that Occupy hasn’t turned to a violence that places them in the meat grinder. What they’ve been experiencing is bad enough. You just know that groups out to quash this movement are salivating for that. The look at Kent State as a missed opportunity as in a few students weren’t hit. The powerful probably fully expected it to go that manner after beating those kids-prompt some counter-violence and then get out more toys. How funny to disappoint them so. I see a quite asymmetrical situation- I think it will call for something more nuanced- that of turning the opinion of the masses. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it certainly has been done to great effect by the manipulators of our time. One would hope that truth would have an advantage, but base emotions often rule.
I don’t pretend to know the answers, and I’d be suspicious of anyone presenting a view for the future with complete assurance at this point. Who saw OWS coming…. or sadly this bill? So much is in play at this point; it’s a strange, scary time to be alive. But I do know that it’s necessary for the broader populace to understand the coup that is underway. That’s a foundation we need. Attempts at localization will likely be necessary as well. A government that seems to care little for any of us, and simply expects us to behave as cogs in machinery of big commerce will continue to run amok when met with resounding silence. But finally, the silence is waning.
But we are on a path that could lead to our own version of “disappeareds” and that is no exaggeration. We have no choice but to resist.
Monday, October 24, 2011
President Obama’s “Unforced Errors”
Saturday, October 22, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
On January 27, 2010, Rachel Maddow said, “Republicans have been as
unanimous as they can be in opposition to every major thing this
president has tried to do and they expect to continue to be as best as I
can tell, calculating that the political benefit of stopping a
president from accomplishing anything is worth a lot more than any risk
of being seen as obstructionist.”
Are the Republicans to blame for Obama’s apparent deviation from his campaign promises, as many now claim, or does plain evidence demonstrate that the problem is much deeper, residing within President Obama himself? From economic policy to drug policy to foreign policy and human rights to his policies on the environment, President Obama has repeatedly made unilateral decisions that call this conventional storyline into question.
It has been thoroughly documented that the President is a Constitutional scholar. Yet, President Obama has declared the innocence of those responsible for the national and global financial collapse, despite ongoing investigations, stating, “One of the biggest problems…is that a lot of this stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless.” In an attempt to comfort those who suffered the consequences of the perfectly legal misrepresentation and fraud perpetrated by the financial sector, the President reminds us that the members of the financial sector were simply doing their job.
Can we really blame them for “looking for ways to make money”? Meanwhile, President Obama has been pressuring U.S. attorneys general to accept a settlement that includes blanket immunity from future prosecution, which is confusing considering the lack of illegal behavior. But the confusion lifts once one sees the revolving door at the White House.
President Obama promised change. Yet, he reserved many of the most important and influential positions for former Clinton officials, the same officials candidate Obama criticized for their role in creating the conditions that would be exploited by all those innocent bankers.
The appointment of Larry Summers as Director of the National Economic Council, a position free of the need for Senate confirmation, is incomprehensible. It was Summers, along with Robert Rubin, who encouraged Congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, effectively overturning Glass-Steagall. Lawrence Summers, as published in the Wall Street Journal in April 2009, “received about $5.2 million over the past year in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major financial institutions.” Those major financial institutions included J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. Nothing to see here; no conflict of interests.
Destroy the national and global economy, leading to massive unemployment and home foreclosures and you are declared innocent by our president before the conclusion of an investigation, grow and distribute medical marijuana to those who benefit from it, including cancer patients, and to whom it is prescribed by licensed doctors and face the wrath of President Obama. In 2007, Senator Obama stated, “The Justice Department going after sick individuals using this as a palliative instead of going after serious criminals makes no sense.” Apparently, the President has changed his mind. In Rhode Island, Governor Chafee has decided not to move forward with the licensing of three medical marijuana dispensaries or, as Chafee refers to them, “medical marijuana compassion centers.” Why? Because Chafee has received communications from Obama’s Department of Justice that dispensaries “will be potential targets of ‘vigorous’ criminal and civil enforcement efforts by the federal government.”
In April, the President made another foray into the judiciary, announcing his verdict in the case of Bradley Manning, whistleblower and alleged Wikileaks source, claiming that Manning “broke the law.” Manning spent ten months in solitary confinement and was forced to undergo degrading treatment such as forced nudity. The UN Human Rights Committee and the Committee Against Torture believe solitary confinement alone could amount to violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, both of which the U.S. has ratified. Yet, President Obama stated that Manning’s confinement met “our basic standards.” The President doubled-down on this assessment, forcing PJ Crowley, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, to resign because of his honest assessment that Manning’s conditions of confinement were “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
Despite Manning’s obvious guilt and the just conditions in which he was imprisoned, Obama has refused repeated requests from the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, for private access to Manning. This led Mendez to say, “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr. Manning.” That might not sound like much, but in diplomatic-speak that’s a serious tongue-lashing.
Though President Obama chose “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” when it comes to members of the Bush Administration, who have openly admitted to authorizing torture, and the activities of many on Wall Street, his Department of Justice has waged an unprecedented assault on whistleblowers. Notwithstanding the President’s 2009 expression of esteem for whistleblowers who are “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government,” the Obama administration has charged five individuals with violating the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. Take for example Thomas Drake, former senior official with the NSA and decorated veteran of the U.S. military. Drake was accused of espionage, the charge being motivated by his blowing the whistle on illegal NSA activities and mismanagement of billions of dollars.
The Bush administration executed a search warrant of Drake’s home in 2007. By the time President Bush left office, no indictment was forthcoming. Yet, 2 ½ years later, Obama’s DOJ decided to move forward with the case. Judge Richard Bennett lambasted the DOJ, stating, “That’s four years of hell that a citizen goes through. It was not proper. It doesn’t pass the smell test…I don’t think that deterrence should include an American citizen waiting two and a half years after their home is searched to find out if they’re going to be indicted or not. I find that unconscionable. Unconscionable.” This case was dead until President Obama decided to resuscitate it. Fortunately, Judge Bennett had the wisdom to put it back down.
Perhaps President Obama’s record on human rights is stronger abroad. If we were to judge him on his words alone, the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’. In May, the President threw his support behind the Arab Spring’s demand for the fulfillment of their rights, stating that “every man and woman is endowed with certain inalienable rights.” He continued, “And now we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable, and more just.” Obama’s support for human rights, of course, all depends on whether we need the cooperation of an oppressive government in allowing the U.S. to assassinate its own citizens, including teenagers, within the oppressive regime’s territory. Remember, indefinite detention bad, targeted assassinations and summary executions good.
And let us not forget all of the innocent victims of our human-guided robot warfare. In a 2010 speech, Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman stated, “We also support the fight against terror. However, we do not accept that this fight against terror be carried out at the expense of innocent civilians….This is what happened exactly in 2009 in December, when tens of women and children were killed in Majalah, in Abyan. They were killed by U.S. drone airplanes, with a shameful coordination with the Yemeni government.” Karman provides just one example of an ever growing list of deaths that continue to soak this country’s hands in blood.
As witnessed in Yemen, as well as Bahrain, President Obama wasn’t actually talking about all movements for more responsive government and more rights. In Bahrain, dozens have been killed, many more injured, and even more arrested and fired from their jobs for participating in the Arab Spring, not to mention the arrest of medics who provided care for injured protesters, but their movement happens to be in the wrong country. Instead of Security Council resolutions condemning Bahrain, the government awaits a $53 million weapons contract with the U.S. Republicans had nothing to do with this, President Obama could have chosen a different path, but didn’t.
It could be that Obama’s policies on Yemen and Bahrain are but bad apples. It could be, but isn’t. The President is currently pressuring Congress to waive restrictions on military aid to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan was designated by Freedom House as one of the nine “Worst of the Worst” countries in the world in terms of political rights and civil liberties. In the report it states, “Having silenced nearly all critics and perceived opponents of the regime—including independent journalists, rights activists, and political opponents—in 2010, the state went after individuals who spoke about or showed aspects of the country that the government felt damaged Uzbekistan’s image both domestically and abroad.” To the people of Uzbekistan, I am sorry that President Obama sees our war in Afghanistan as more important than supporting your inalienable rights.
I would be remiss if I omitted the very real dangers faced by union leaders and labor activists in Colombia, the lucky recipient of a free trade agreement facilitated by, you guessed it, President Obama. In 2008, according to Amnesty International, “Year after year, Colombia has symbolised the most serious and consistent abuses of this human right [to form and join trade unions]…So far this year, some 22 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia, a significant increase on the number killed in the same period last year.”
Thank goodness for the President’s record on the environment. Otherwise, this would all be bad news. President Obama, he who was going to facilitate “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” stated in North Carolina on Monday that the Republican plan for this country means “dirtier air, dirtier water.” Yet the President, from his own volition, continued use of BP’s low estimates of the rate of the spill in the Gulf, despite both the Wikileaks revelation that the administration was fully aware of similar manipulation by BP in Azerbaijan and the findings by research scientists that the flow was significantly higher than official estimates. In May 2010, NPR conducted an analysis of the flow rate. Steven Wereley, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, concluded the rate of the spill was 70,000 barrels a day, while the President continued to propagate the rate being 5,000 barrels a day. There is also the President’s unilateral decision not to change the smog standards, as recommended by the EPA, from 75 parts per billion measured over eight hours to 70 parts per billion. In other words, it is the President’s plan that means dirtier air.
Blaming the Republicans for all of President Obama’s failed policies and weak compromises is a failure to understand reality. That the Republicans have not bargained in good faith is something I fully recognize, but I also recognize the need to objectively assess the policies of this president. Failure to do so leads to the partisan trap, one in which members of both sides of the partisan divide vehemently defend the indefensible and use terms like ‘pragmatic’ to do so. Lucky for us, the only thing that stands in the way of the indefensible Keystone XL pipeline is President Barack Obama. As stated by James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the President’s next unforced error, approval of the pipeline, would mean “game over” for the long-term health of this planet.
Are the Republicans to blame for Obama’s apparent deviation from his campaign promises, as many now claim, or does plain evidence demonstrate that the problem is much deeper, residing within President Obama himself? From economic policy to drug policy to foreign policy and human rights to his policies on the environment, President Obama has repeatedly made unilateral decisions that call this conventional storyline into question.
It has been thoroughly documented that the President is a Constitutional scholar. Yet, President Obama has declared the innocence of those responsible for the national and global financial collapse, despite ongoing investigations, stating, “One of the biggest problems…is that a lot of this stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless.” In an attempt to comfort those who suffered the consequences of the perfectly legal misrepresentation and fraud perpetrated by the financial sector, the President reminds us that the members of the financial sector were simply doing their job.
Can we really blame them for “looking for ways to make money”? Meanwhile, President Obama has been pressuring U.S. attorneys general to accept a settlement that includes blanket immunity from future prosecution, which is confusing considering the lack of illegal behavior. But the confusion lifts once one sees the revolving door at the White House.
President Obama promised change. Yet, he reserved many of the most important and influential positions for former Clinton officials, the same officials candidate Obama criticized for their role in creating the conditions that would be exploited by all those innocent bankers.
The appointment of Larry Summers as Director of the National Economic Council, a position free of the need for Senate confirmation, is incomprehensible. It was Summers, along with Robert Rubin, who encouraged Congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, effectively overturning Glass-Steagall. Lawrence Summers, as published in the Wall Street Journal in April 2009, “received about $5.2 million over the past year in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major financial institutions.” Those major financial institutions included J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. Nothing to see here; no conflict of interests.
Destroy the national and global economy, leading to massive unemployment and home foreclosures and you are declared innocent by our president before the conclusion of an investigation, grow and distribute medical marijuana to those who benefit from it, including cancer patients, and to whom it is prescribed by licensed doctors and face the wrath of President Obama. In 2007, Senator Obama stated, “The Justice Department going after sick individuals using this as a palliative instead of going after serious criminals makes no sense.” Apparently, the President has changed his mind. In Rhode Island, Governor Chafee has decided not to move forward with the licensing of three medical marijuana dispensaries or, as Chafee refers to them, “medical marijuana compassion centers.” Why? Because Chafee has received communications from Obama’s Department of Justice that dispensaries “will be potential targets of ‘vigorous’ criminal and civil enforcement efforts by the federal government.”
In April, the President made another foray into the judiciary, announcing his verdict in the case of Bradley Manning, whistleblower and alleged Wikileaks source, claiming that Manning “broke the law.” Manning spent ten months in solitary confinement and was forced to undergo degrading treatment such as forced nudity. The UN Human Rights Committee and the Committee Against Torture believe solitary confinement alone could amount to violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, both of which the U.S. has ratified. Yet, President Obama stated that Manning’s confinement met “our basic standards.” The President doubled-down on this assessment, forcing PJ Crowley, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, to resign because of his honest assessment that Manning’s conditions of confinement were “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
Despite Manning’s obvious guilt and the just conditions in which he was imprisoned, Obama has refused repeated requests from the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, for private access to Manning. This led Mendez to say, “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr. Manning.” That might not sound like much, but in diplomatic-speak that’s a serious tongue-lashing.
Though President Obama chose “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” when it comes to members of the Bush Administration, who have openly admitted to authorizing torture, and the activities of many on Wall Street, his Department of Justice has waged an unprecedented assault on whistleblowers. Notwithstanding the President’s 2009 expression of esteem for whistleblowers who are “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government,” the Obama administration has charged five individuals with violating the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. Take for example Thomas Drake, former senior official with the NSA and decorated veteran of the U.S. military. Drake was accused of espionage, the charge being motivated by his blowing the whistle on illegal NSA activities and mismanagement of billions of dollars.
The Bush administration executed a search warrant of Drake’s home in 2007. By the time President Bush left office, no indictment was forthcoming. Yet, 2 ½ years later, Obama’s DOJ decided to move forward with the case. Judge Richard Bennett lambasted the DOJ, stating, “That’s four years of hell that a citizen goes through. It was not proper. It doesn’t pass the smell test…I don’t think that deterrence should include an American citizen waiting two and a half years after their home is searched to find out if they’re going to be indicted or not. I find that unconscionable. Unconscionable.” This case was dead until President Obama decided to resuscitate it. Fortunately, Judge Bennett had the wisdom to put it back down.
Perhaps President Obama’s record on human rights is stronger abroad. If we were to judge him on his words alone, the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’. In May, the President threw his support behind the Arab Spring’s demand for the fulfillment of their rights, stating that “every man and woman is endowed with certain inalienable rights.” He continued, “And now we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable, and more just.” Obama’s support for human rights, of course, all depends on whether we need the cooperation of an oppressive government in allowing the U.S. to assassinate its own citizens, including teenagers, within the oppressive regime’s territory. Remember, indefinite detention bad, targeted assassinations and summary executions good.
And let us not forget all of the innocent victims of our human-guided robot warfare. In a 2010 speech, Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman stated, “We also support the fight against terror. However, we do not accept that this fight against terror be carried out at the expense of innocent civilians….This is what happened exactly in 2009 in December, when tens of women and children were killed in Majalah, in Abyan. They were killed by U.S. drone airplanes, with a shameful coordination with the Yemeni government.” Karman provides just one example of an ever growing list of deaths that continue to soak this country’s hands in blood.
As witnessed in Yemen, as well as Bahrain, President Obama wasn’t actually talking about all movements for more responsive government and more rights. In Bahrain, dozens have been killed, many more injured, and even more arrested and fired from their jobs for participating in the Arab Spring, not to mention the arrest of medics who provided care for injured protesters, but their movement happens to be in the wrong country. Instead of Security Council resolutions condemning Bahrain, the government awaits a $53 million weapons contract with the U.S. Republicans had nothing to do with this, President Obama could have chosen a different path, but didn’t.
It could be that Obama’s policies on Yemen and Bahrain are but bad apples. It could be, but isn’t. The President is currently pressuring Congress to waive restrictions on military aid to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan was designated by Freedom House as one of the nine “Worst of the Worst” countries in the world in terms of political rights and civil liberties. In the report it states, “Having silenced nearly all critics and perceived opponents of the regime—including independent journalists, rights activists, and political opponents—in 2010, the state went after individuals who spoke about or showed aspects of the country that the government felt damaged Uzbekistan’s image both domestically and abroad.” To the people of Uzbekistan, I am sorry that President Obama sees our war in Afghanistan as more important than supporting your inalienable rights.
I would be remiss if I omitted the very real dangers faced by union leaders and labor activists in Colombia, the lucky recipient of a free trade agreement facilitated by, you guessed it, President Obama. In 2008, according to Amnesty International, “Year after year, Colombia has symbolised the most serious and consistent abuses of this human right [to form and join trade unions]…So far this year, some 22 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia, a significant increase on the number killed in the same period last year.”
Thank goodness for the President’s record on the environment. Otherwise, this would all be bad news. President Obama, he who was going to facilitate “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” stated in North Carolina on Monday that the Republican plan for this country means “dirtier air, dirtier water.” Yet the President, from his own volition, continued use of BP’s low estimates of the rate of the spill in the Gulf, despite both the Wikileaks revelation that the administration was fully aware of similar manipulation by BP in Azerbaijan and the findings by research scientists that the flow was significantly higher than official estimates. In May 2010, NPR conducted an analysis of the flow rate. Steven Wereley, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, concluded the rate of the spill was 70,000 barrels a day, while the President continued to propagate the rate being 5,000 barrels a day. There is also the President’s unilateral decision not to change the smog standards, as recommended by the EPA, from 75 parts per billion measured over eight hours to 70 parts per billion. In other words, it is the President’s plan that means dirtier air.
Blaming the Republicans for all of President Obama’s failed policies and weak compromises is a failure to understand reality. That the Republicans have not bargained in good faith is something I fully recognize, but I also recognize the need to objectively assess the policies of this president. Failure to do so leads to the partisan trap, one in which members of both sides of the partisan divide vehemently defend the indefensible and use terms like ‘pragmatic’ to do so. Lucky for us, the only thing that stands in the way of the indefensible Keystone XL pipeline is President Barack Obama. As stated by James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the President’s next unforced error, approval of the pipeline, would mean “game over” for the long-term health of this planet.
Monday, September 12, 2011
9-11: Ten Years After (7 articles)
Friday, September 9, 2011 by the Inter Press Service
9/11: Al Qaeda's Project for Ending the American Century Succeeded
by Jim Lobe
Friday, September 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Imperial Delusions: Ignoring the Lessons of 9/11
by Robert Jensen
Saturday, September 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The Legacy of 9/11: An Institutionalization of Terror at Home and Abroad
by Chip Pitts
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Millennial Math: 9+11=1984
by Randall Amster
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Endless War, Lies and Terror: The Decade Since 9/11
by Mark Weisbrot
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by the Independent/UK
Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism
The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate
by Patrick Cockburn
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by TruthDig
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
by Chris Hedges
9/11: Al Qaeda's Project for Ending the American Century Succeeded
by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - A decade after its spectacular Sept. 11, 2001
attacks on New York City's twin World Trade Center towers and the
Pentagon and despite the killing earlier this year of its charismatic
leader, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda appears to have largely succeeded in
its hopes of accelerating the decline of U.S. global power, if not
bringing it to the brink of collapse.
Since 9/11, the United States' global standing has plunged dramatically -- a decline largely fueled by its alienating and costly "war on terror". (A. Golden/eyewash design) That appears to be the strong consensus of the foreign-policy elite which, with only a few exceptions, believes that the administration of President George W. Bush badly "over-reacted" to the attacks and that that over-reaction continues to this day.
That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush's foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington's dominance of the Greater Middle East and "shock and awe" any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a "unipolar" world.
Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organization was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War "hegemony as far into the future as possible."
In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and "regime change" for rogue states, beginning with Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
On the eve of 9/11, PNAC's notion that Washington could extend its "benevolent global hegemony" indefinitely did not appear unreasonable. With more than 30 percent of the global economy, the strongest fiscal position in a generation, and a defence budget greater than the 20 next-most-powerful militaries combined, Washington looked unchallengeable, a perception soon enhanced by the show of national unity that followed the attacks and the speed and apparent ease with which Washington orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan later that year.
"I've gone back in world history and never seen anything like it," exclaimed Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, a leading exponent of the "declinist" school of U.S. power 15 years before, about Washington's dominance, which he compared favorably to the British Empire in its day.
PNAC's associates were similarly impressed. "People are now coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'," exulted the Washington Post's neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a Cheney favorite and long-time advocate of a U.S.-led "unipolar" world. "The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire."
Such exuberance (or hubris) naturally fueled the next phase in PNAC's quest – originally laid out in an open letter to Bush published by the group just nine days after 9/11 – for victory in what was now called the "global war on terror": regime change in Iraq.
"Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism," PNAC had warned, arguing that Washington must expand its target list to include states -- particularly those hostile to Israel -- that support terrorist groups, as well as the terrorist groups themselves.
So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention -- and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources -- to preparing for war against Iraq.
That decision is now seen universally -- with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters -- as perhaps the single-most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.
Not only did it effectively set the stage for an eventual Taliban comeback in Afghanistan (which is now costing the U.S. some 10 billion dollars a month), but it also destroyed the international support and solidarity Washington had enjoyed immediately after the 9/11 attacks -- a fact made excruciatingly clear by Bush's failure to gain U.N. Security Council backing for his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It also helped persuade tens of millions of Muslims that the U.S. was waging war on Islam, according to dozens of public-opinion surveys.
Indeed, by invading Iraq, the U.S. fell into a trap set by bin Laden who, convinced that Moscow's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan contributed critically to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse, clearly believed that the U.S. was susceptible to the same kind of over-extension.
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a "war of attrition."
"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he added. "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," he went on.
Of course, by the time bin Laden recorded those remarks, the U.S. forces in Iraq were battling a growing insurgency, one that not only would result in hugely costly abuses by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib that inflicted serious damage to Washington's already-tattered moral image, but that would also push Iraq to the very brink of civil war and lead to an even deeper and more expensive intervention by the U.S. military.
True to bin Laden's prediction, Washington, goaded by PNAC associates and alumni, also deployed forces -- or drone missiles at the very least -- to virtually wherever Al Qaeda or its alleged affiliates raised its flag, often at the cost of weakening local governments and incurring the wrath of local populations, particularly in Somalia and Yemen.
More importantly, the same held true in nuclear-armed Pakistan, not to mention Afghanistan, where Bush's successor, Barack Obama, more than doubled U.S. troop strength to 100,000 in his first two years in office, even as he withdrew an equivalent number from Iraq.
The costs have been staggering in almost every respect. The estimated three to 4.4 trillion dollars Washington has incurred either directly or indirectly in conducting the "global war on terror" account for a substantial portion of the fiscal crisis that transformed the country's politics and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy last month.
And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been "a steady erosion of America's position in the world," which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.
And leading the charge were precisely those hawks whose fondest wish
was to extend, rather than cut short, Washington's global hegemony.
Since 9/11, the United States' global standing has plunged dramatically -- a decline largely fueled by its alienating and costly "war on terror". (A. Golden/eyewash design) That appears to be the strong consensus of the foreign-policy elite which, with only a few exceptions, believes that the administration of President George W. Bush badly "over-reacted" to the attacks and that that over-reaction continues to this day.
That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush's foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington's dominance of the Greater Middle East and "shock and awe" any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a "unipolar" world.
Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organization was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War "hegemony as far into the future as possible."
In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and "regime change" for rogue states, beginning with Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
On the eve of 9/11, PNAC's notion that Washington could extend its "benevolent global hegemony" indefinitely did not appear unreasonable. With more than 30 percent of the global economy, the strongest fiscal position in a generation, and a defence budget greater than the 20 next-most-powerful militaries combined, Washington looked unchallengeable, a perception soon enhanced by the show of national unity that followed the attacks and the speed and apparent ease with which Washington orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan later that year.
"I've gone back in world history and never seen anything like it," exclaimed Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, a leading exponent of the "declinist" school of U.S. power 15 years before, about Washington's dominance, which he compared favorably to the British Empire in its day.
PNAC's associates were similarly impressed. "People are now coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'," exulted the Washington Post's neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a Cheney favorite and long-time advocate of a U.S.-led "unipolar" world. "The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire."
Such exuberance (or hubris) naturally fueled the next phase in PNAC's quest – originally laid out in an open letter to Bush published by the group just nine days after 9/11 – for victory in what was now called the "global war on terror": regime change in Iraq.
"Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism," PNAC had warned, arguing that Washington must expand its target list to include states -- particularly those hostile to Israel -- that support terrorist groups, as well as the terrorist groups themselves.
So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention -- and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources -- to preparing for war against Iraq.
That decision is now seen universally -- with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters -- as perhaps the single-most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.
Not only did it effectively set the stage for an eventual Taliban comeback in Afghanistan (which is now costing the U.S. some 10 billion dollars a month), but it also destroyed the international support and solidarity Washington had enjoyed immediately after the 9/11 attacks -- a fact made excruciatingly clear by Bush's failure to gain U.N. Security Council backing for his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It also helped persuade tens of millions of Muslims that the U.S. was waging war on Islam, according to dozens of public-opinion surveys.
Indeed, by invading Iraq, the U.S. fell into a trap set by bin Laden who, convinced that Moscow's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan contributed critically to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse, clearly believed that the U.S. was susceptible to the same kind of over-extension.
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a "war of attrition."
"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he added. "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," he went on.
Of course, by the time bin Laden recorded those remarks, the U.S. forces in Iraq were battling a growing insurgency, one that not only would result in hugely costly abuses by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib that inflicted serious damage to Washington's already-tattered moral image, but that would also push Iraq to the very brink of civil war and lead to an even deeper and more expensive intervention by the U.S. military.
True to bin Laden's prediction, Washington, goaded by PNAC associates and alumni, also deployed forces -- or drone missiles at the very least -- to virtually wherever Al Qaeda or its alleged affiliates raised its flag, often at the cost of weakening local governments and incurring the wrath of local populations, particularly in Somalia and Yemen.
More importantly, the same held true in nuclear-armed Pakistan, not to mention Afghanistan, where Bush's successor, Barack Obama, more than doubled U.S. troop strength to 100,000 in his first two years in office, even as he withdrew an equivalent number from Iraq.
The costs have been staggering in almost every respect. The estimated three to 4.4 trillion dollars Washington has incurred either directly or indirectly in conducting the "global war on terror" account for a substantial portion of the fiscal crisis that transformed the country's politics and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy last month.
And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been "a steady erosion of America's position in the world," which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.
"…(F)or a long time," wrote Richard Clarke, a top national-security official under Bush who warned the White House several months before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning a major operation against the U.S. homeland, in the dailybeast.com, "we actually played into the hands of our opponents, doing precisely what they had wanted us to do, responding in the ways that they had sought to provoke, damaging our economy and alienating much of the Middle East."
+++++
Friday, September 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Imperial Delusions: Ignoring the Lessons of 9/11
by Robert Jensen
Ten years ago, critics of America’s mad rush to war were right, but it didn’t matter.
Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes.
It didn’t matter because neither the public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments. People wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized the opportunity to use U.S. military power. Critical thinking became a mark not of conscientious citizenship but of dangerous disloyalty.
We were right, but the wars came.
The destructive capacity of the U.S. military meant quick “victories” that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, it became clearer that the position staked out by early opponents was correct -- the wars not only were illegal (conforming to neither international nor constitutional law) and immoral (fought in ways that guaranteed large-scale civilian casualties and displacement), but a failure on any pragmatic criteria. The U.S. military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organization, but a decade later we are weaker and our sense of safety more fragile. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as predicted.
Ten years later, we are still right and it still doesn’t matter.
There’s a simple reason for this: Empires rarely learn in time, because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection. While ascending to power, empires believe themselves to be invincible. While declining in power, they cling desperately to old myths of remembered glory.
Today the United States is morally bankrupt and spiritually broken. The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles -- delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world’s resources by whatever means necessary. As the United States grew in wealth and power, bounty for the chosen came at the cost of misery for the many.
After World War II, as the United States became the dominant power not just in the Americas but on the world stage, the principles didn’t change. U.S. foreign policy sought to deepen and extend U.S. power around the world, especially in the energy-rich and strategically crucial Middle East; always with an eye on derailing any Third World societies’ attempts to pursue a course of independent development outside the U.S. sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to U.S. dominance from other powerful states.
Does that summary sound like radical hysteria? Recall this statement from President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Democrats and Republicans, before and after, followed the same policy.
The George W. Bush administration offered a particularly intense ideological fanaticism, but the course charted by the Obama administration is much the same. Consider this 2006 statement by Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both administrations:
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.”
Will our autopsy report read “global war on terror”?
That sounds harsh, and it’s tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honor those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the U.S. empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11. But given the events of the past decade, there is no way to take the politics out of the anniversary.
We should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day, but as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality: While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.
That’s why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti-war/anti-empire movement. Being right means nothing if we failed to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation.
Ten years later, I feel the same thing that I felt on 9/11 -- an indescribable grief over the senseless death of that day and of days to come.
Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes.
It didn’t matter because neither the public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments. People wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized the opportunity to use U.S. military power. Critical thinking became a mark not of conscientious citizenship but of dangerous disloyalty.
We were right, but the wars came.
The destructive capacity of the U.S. military meant quick “victories” that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, it became clearer that the position staked out by early opponents was correct -- the wars not only were illegal (conforming to neither international nor constitutional law) and immoral (fought in ways that guaranteed large-scale civilian casualties and displacement), but a failure on any pragmatic criteria. The U.S. military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organization, but a decade later we are weaker and our sense of safety more fragile. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as predicted.
Ten years later, we are still right and it still doesn’t matter.
There’s a simple reason for this: Empires rarely learn in time, because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection. While ascending to power, empires believe themselves to be invincible. While declining in power, they cling desperately to old myths of remembered glory.
Today the United States is morally bankrupt and spiritually broken. The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles -- delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world’s resources by whatever means necessary. As the United States grew in wealth and power, bounty for the chosen came at the cost of misery for the many.
After World War II, as the United States became the dominant power not just in the Americas but on the world stage, the principles didn’t change. U.S. foreign policy sought to deepen and extend U.S. power around the world, especially in the energy-rich and strategically crucial Middle East; always with an eye on derailing any Third World societies’ attempts to pursue a course of independent development outside the U.S. sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to U.S. dominance from other powerful states.
Does that summary sound like radical hysteria? Recall this statement from President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Democrats and Republicans, before and after, followed the same policy.
The George W. Bush administration offered a particularly intense ideological fanaticism, but the course charted by the Obama administration is much the same. Consider this 2006 statement by Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both administrations:
“I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that -- both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries.”If the new boss sounds a lot like the old boss, it’s because the problem isn’t just bad leaders but a bad system. That’s why a critique of today’s wars sounds a lot like critiques of wars past. Here’s Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assessment of the imperial war of his time: “[N]o one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.”
Will our autopsy report read “global war on terror”?
That sounds harsh, and it’s tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honor those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the U.S. empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11. But given the events of the past decade, there is no way to take the politics out of the anniversary.
We should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day, but as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality: While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.
That’s why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti-war/anti-empire movement. Being right means nothing if we failed to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation.
Ten years later, I feel the same thing that I felt on 9/11 -- an indescribable grief over the senseless death of that day and of days to come.
++++
Saturday, September 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The Legacy of 9/11: An Institutionalization of Terror at Home and Abroad
by Chip Pitts
Responding to terror perpetrated by 19 men with box-cutters a decade ago, the US government has now put hundreds of millions
of innocent Americans into countless military, intelligence, and law
enforcement databases without suspecting them of any crime. The National
Security Agency eavesdrops on over 1.7 billion pieces of our email, phone, and other communications each day. And the government has spent trillions
of dollars on often worthless “homeland” security bureaucrats and
technologies—not to mention the additional trillions spent on the
various declared and undeclared wars associated with the ongoing “war on
terror.”
In the name of fighting terrorism, the government has institutionalized a massive response based on fear more than anything else. In the name of defending our freedoms, our government has fractured them as thoroughly as the WTC towers and Pentagon. In the name of enhancing security, it has damaged the authentic security and future of the nation.
Propagandistically “selling” the new security institutions and technologies to Americans has served the selfish interests of demagogic politicians, a conflict-loving mainstream media, and the wealthy contractors from the military-industrial-surveillance complex. But this has come at the expense of everyone else in the nation, now and in the future. Terrorists and criminals can easily evade most of these technologies; ordinary citizens won’t.
As carefully documented by Dana Priest and William Arkin in their new book, Top Secret America (based on the Washington Post series of the same name), no one—not even the government itself—has any real idea how much money’s being spent or who’s doing what in these new agencies; and worse, they are so secretive, duplicative, and inefficient that they simply don’t work.
As with the PATRIOT Act itself, mission creep and the rarity of actual terror events means that these new Keystone Cops are increasingly using these awesome new powers and technologies for petty crime (like ensuring that proceeds from neighborhood magazine subscription sales aren’t pocketed) or, worse yet, for active repression of peaceful dissenters, environmental and anti-war activists, animal rights and pro- and anti-abortion rights activists, Tea Party members and libertarians.
The FBI, CIA, the military’s new Northern Command, and the top-secret Joint Special Operational Command, in partnership with local police, corporations, and the 72 duplicative and ineffective “fusion centers,” use the powerful new technologies and surveillance authorities to secretly access our bank records, emails, airline and other travel information. Muslims, immigrants, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities are particular targets. Ironically, again, the military and law enforcement authorities supposedly protecting our freedoms and democracy are jeopardizing those rights and that democracy.
This new us-versus-them, jingoistic militarism has even crept into our politics (just look at debate over drones and troops at the border), TV shows (from 24 to NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service), music (from Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” to Toby Keith’s “The Angry American”), and movies (from Captain America to Cowboys and Aliens).
Our national character seems to have morphed into national caricature – an extreme, almost cartoon version of characteristics our nation possesses at its worst rather than its best: violence, racism, discrimination, arrogance, stupidity.
Respect for rights is indeed the only source of true security in our nation -- the most diverse in the world – especially in a world that contains both newly empowered diversity and diversified power.
President Obama has compounded the errors of Bush and Cheney by cynically continuing essentially the same flawed approaches. Most egregiously, he has dramatically escalated some of the most morally and legally indefensible and counterproductive techniques, including the global drone attacks now condemned even by Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and increased reliance upon extra-judicial killings or assassinations that completely sidestep fair trials and due process by targeting even US citizens.
These may produce some short-term “successes,” but they yield long-term catastrophe as revenge kicks in, those killed are quickly replaced, further offshoots of al Qaeda are created, both non-nuclear nations like Yemen and the Philippines and nuclear nations like Pakistan are destabilized, and, in short, the US creates more terrorists.
What Abraham Lincoln noted about the ironic vulnerability of our freedoms could just as readily be applied to our authentic national security: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
In the name of fighting terrorism, the government has institutionalized a massive response based on fear more than anything else. In the name of defending our freedoms, our government has fractured them as thoroughly as the WTC towers and Pentagon. In the name of enhancing security, it has damaged the authentic security and future of the nation.
Propagandistically “selling” the new security institutions and technologies to Americans has served the selfish interests of demagogic politicians, a conflict-loving mainstream media, and the wealthy contractors from the military-industrial-surveillance complex. But this has come at the expense of everyone else in the nation, now and in the future. Terrorists and criminals can easily evade most of these technologies; ordinary citizens won’t.
As carefully documented by Dana Priest and William Arkin in their new book, Top Secret America (based on the Washington Post series of the same name), no one—not even the government itself—has any real idea how much money’s being spent or who’s doing what in these new agencies; and worse, they are so secretive, duplicative, and inefficient that they simply don’t work.
As with the PATRIOT Act itself, mission creep and the rarity of actual terror events means that these new Keystone Cops are increasingly using these awesome new powers and technologies for petty crime (like ensuring that proceeds from neighborhood magazine subscription sales aren’t pocketed) or, worse yet, for active repression of peaceful dissenters, environmental and anti-war activists, animal rights and pro- and anti-abortion rights activists, Tea Party members and libertarians.
The FBI, CIA, the military’s new Northern Command, and the top-secret Joint Special Operational Command, in partnership with local police, corporations, and the 72 duplicative and ineffective “fusion centers,” use the powerful new technologies and surveillance authorities to secretly access our bank records, emails, airline and other travel information. Muslims, immigrants, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities are particular targets. Ironically, again, the military and law enforcement authorities supposedly protecting our freedoms and democracy are jeopardizing those rights and that democracy.
This new us-versus-them, jingoistic militarism has even crept into our politics (just look at debate over drones and troops at the border), TV shows (from 24 to NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service), music (from Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” to Toby Keith’s “The Angry American”), and movies (from Captain America to Cowboys and Aliens).
Our national character seems to have morphed into national caricature – an extreme, almost cartoon version of characteristics our nation possesses at its worst rather than its best: violence, racism, discrimination, arrogance, stupidity.
Respect for rights is indeed the only source of true security in our nation -- the most diverse in the world – especially in a world that contains both newly empowered diversity and diversified power.
President Obama has compounded the errors of Bush and Cheney by cynically continuing essentially the same flawed approaches. Most egregiously, he has dramatically escalated some of the most morally and legally indefensible and counterproductive techniques, including the global drone attacks now condemned even by Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and increased reliance upon extra-judicial killings or assassinations that completely sidestep fair trials and due process by targeting even US citizens.
These may produce some short-term “successes,” but they yield long-term catastrophe as revenge kicks in, those killed are quickly replaced, further offshoots of al Qaeda are created, both non-nuclear nations like Yemen and the Philippines and nuclear nations like Pakistan are destabilized, and, in short, the US creates more terrorists.
What Abraham Lincoln noted about the ironic vulnerability of our freedoms could just as readily be applied to our authentic national security: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Millennial Math: 9+11=1984
by Randall Amster
It’s been a decade since the day that changed everything -- or at
least, the one that finally laid it all bare. Over the years, I’ve tried
to confront it, rewrite it, debunk it, historicize it, mock it, and
ultimately ignore it, all to no avail. It’s not going anywhere, this
Trojan Horse of the new millennium, this farce that launched a thousand
ships. We’re stuck with it, even though no matter how we crunch the
numbers it still doesn’t really add up. Or does it?
As it turned out, homeland insecurity was the perfect foil for the hegemony of Homeland Security. Now the architects of Total Information Awareness can legally be in our phone calls, our emails, our bank accounts, our library cards, our internet browsers, our peace groups, our medical records, our gonads, our heads, and our hearts. We’ve been hornswoggled, hoodwinked, and hijacked into accepting pervasive incursions into every vestige of individual liberty and political democracy -- all done quite ingeniously in the name of protecting liberty and preserving democracy.
The mathematics are Machiavellian and their logic is inescapable. For the mere price of 3000 souls, the return on investment has been exponential: tens of thousands tortured, hundreds of thousands killed, millions relentlessly survived, billions frightened lest they be next. It is the dream of real numbers, the holy grail of realpolitik, a down payment on the permanent war economy, a blank check for purchasing the dreams of future generations. It is, in short, the emperor’s handcrafted new clothes in full regalia.
Surely this design was carefully vetted before the course was locked in and the data disseminated. Someone clearly calculated the risks and rewards, deciding that vulnerability and invincibility could not only coexist but were necessarily conjoined. The technicians of empire crassly concluded that, in the final analysis, our grief would be exactly the thing to be turned into a constant cry for war.
George W. Bush will never be remembered for his brainpower, although in retrospect he may actually have been a lot smarter than he appeared. In fact, he helped to invent a whole new system of millennial math in which you start with a surplus, then subtract a trillion or so for bailouts and another trillion or two for war, add in a few million lost jobs, and then claim to be a uniter while actually dividing up the spoils -- yielding a sub-prime figure that represents the difference between real and imaginary numbers.
Perhaps the most impressive feat, of course, was turning the tragedy of 9/11 into a permanent Orwellian architecture of repression and surveillance. Yes, theories still abound about the true origins of this seminal episode in American history, just as some misguided revisionists have concocted confabulations around similar “trigger events” like the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, and more. Suggesting that any or all of these could have involved massive cover-ups or gross political distortions flies in the face of common sense and good manners alike. Plus it can give you a serious headache.
No, it’s much better to accept the official conspiracy theory rather than the unofficial ones skulking around the web. So what if a 2004 Zogby poll found that half of New York City believed that our leaders had foreknowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, yet “consciously failed to act.” Does it really make a damn bit of difference that a 2006 Scripps Howard poll concluded that a third of all Americans suspected that 9/11 was “an inside job” by our own government? Are we supposed to start trusting Americans to know what’s going on in the world? I think not.
We need to use Occam’s Razor in situations like this, which simply states: “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” In other words, we should find the simplest explanation for events and not add greater complexity through needless extrapolation. Americans may love a good conspiracy tale, but in this case the facts don’t lie: we were attacked on a day whose numbers mean “emergency” by fundamentalist militants intent on destroying our economy, undermining our values and principles, and causing us to untenably extend our military forces in a misguided response to their terrorist aggression.
Luckily, we saw right through this sinister plot and prevented all of this from happening. Okay, so the economy has tanked. Sure, we’ve shredded the Constitution and ushered in a complete surveillance state. Fine, the quagmire in Iraq has been framed on both ends by a quagmire in Afghanistan. But we are going to win this thing and defeat evil in the end! We’re Americans, dammit, and even if a whole bunch of us stupidly believe that our own government blew up our own buildings and killed our own people -- by god, we are still going to kick some ass and show the world what we’re made of. False flag or not, the stars and stripes will forever fly wherever freedom rings, even if it’s getting harder to hear its peal.
So to all of you conspiratorial holdouts, so-called “truthers,” nutty New Yorkers, paranoiac physicists, screwball stock-optioners, cerebrally-challenged celebrities, and the rest of you 100 million or so wingnuts, let me just say that it’s time to wake up, grow up, and move on.
Stop playing X-Files with this stuff and start playing X-Box instead. The truth isn’t out there -- it’s right in front of your face, and it will set you free. Whatever you think you see is illusory; the tides of history are by now all water under the bridge; the cold hard facts are undeniable even as you fumble for the still-warm “smoking gun.”
Drone strikes, smart bombs, airport scans, renditions, Abu Ghraibs, Guatanamos -- all wrapped in reams of red, white, and blue bunting -- are truer than your “truths.” As Orwell himself once said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever.” Or, like the bumper sticker casually confirms, “It’s God’s job to judge the terrorists; it’s the Marine’s job to arrange the meeting.” History will vindicate our resolve, the terrorists will be completely eradicated, and the next decade will finally show the world that no one can bring down the United States except ourselves, by golly.
To sum up on this auspicious anniversary, it comes down to the sheer force of numbers. All these years we were taught that nine plus eleven equals twenty, but that was a lie … it adds up to 1984. I know this now. Victory at last! And in the end, I really do love the new millennial math after all.
As it turned out, homeland insecurity was the perfect foil for the hegemony of Homeland Security. Now the architects of Total Information Awareness can legally be in our phone calls, our emails, our bank accounts, our library cards, our internet browsers, our peace groups, our medical records, our gonads, our heads, and our hearts. We’ve been hornswoggled, hoodwinked, and hijacked into accepting pervasive incursions into every vestige of individual liberty and political democracy -- all done quite ingeniously in the name of protecting liberty and preserving democracy.
The mathematics are Machiavellian and their logic is inescapable. For the mere price of 3000 souls, the return on investment has been exponential: tens of thousands tortured, hundreds of thousands killed, millions relentlessly survived, billions frightened lest they be next. It is the dream of real numbers, the holy grail of realpolitik, a down payment on the permanent war economy, a blank check for purchasing the dreams of future generations. It is, in short, the emperor’s handcrafted new clothes in full regalia.
Surely this design was carefully vetted before the course was locked in and the data disseminated. Someone clearly calculated the risks and rewards, deciding that vulnerability and invincibility could not only coexist but were necessarily conjoined. The technicians of empire crassly concluded that, in the final analysis, our grief would be exactly the thing to be turned into a constant cry for war.
George W. Bush will never be remembered for his brainpower, although in retrospect he may actually have been a lot smarter than he appeared. In fact, he helped to invent a whole new system of millennial math in which you start with a surplus, then subtract a trillion or so for bailouts and another trillion or two for war, add in a few million lost jobs, and then claim to be a uniter while actually dividing up the spoils -- yielding a sub-prime figure that represents the difference between real and imaginary numbers.
Perhaps the most impressive feat, of course, was turning the tragedy of 9/11 into a permanent Orwellian architecture of repression and surveillance. Yes, theories still abound about the true origins of this seminal episode in American history, just as some misguided revisionists have concocted confabulations around similar “trigger events” like the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, and more. Suggesting that any or all of these could have involved massive cover-ups or gross political distortions flies in the face of common sense and good manners alike. Plus it can give you a serious headache.
No, it’s much better to accept the official conspiracy theory rather than the unofficial ones skulking around the web. So what if a 2004 Zogby poll found that half of New York City believed that our leaders had foreknowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, yet “consciously failed to act.” Does it really make a damn bit of difference that a 2006 Scripps Howard poll concluded that a third of all Americans suspected that 9/11 was “an inside job” by our own government? Are we supposed to start trusting Americans to know what’s going on in the world? I think not.
We need to use Occam’s Razor in situations like this, which simply states: “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” In other words, we should find the simplest explanation for events and not add greater complexity through needless extrapolation. Americans may love a good conspiracy tale, but in this case the facts don’t lie: we were attacked on a day whose numbers mean “emergency” by fundamentalist militants intent on destroying our economy, undermining our values and principles, and causing us to untenably extend our military forces in a misguided response to their terrorist aggression.
Luckily, we saw right through this sinister plot and prevented all of this from happening. Okay, so the economy has tanked. Sure, we’ve shredded the Constitution and ushered in a complete surveillance state. Fine, the quagmire in Iraq has been framed on both ends by a quagmire in Afghanistan. But we are going to win this thing and defeat evil in the end! We’re Americans, dammit, and even if a whole bunch of us stupidly believe that our own government blew up our own buildings and killed our own people -- by god, we are still going to kick some ass and show the world what we’re made of. False flag or not, the stars and stripes will forever fly wherever freedom rings, even if it’s getting harder to hear its peal.
So to all of you conspiratorial holdouts, so-called “truthers,” nutty New Yorkers, paranoiac physicists, screwball stock-optioners, cerebrally-challenged celebrities, and the rest of you 100 million or so wingnuts, let me just say that it’s time to wake up, grow up, and move on.
Stop playing X-Files with this stuff and start playing X-Box instead. The truth isn’t out there -- it’s right in front of your face, and it will set you free. Whatever you think you see is illusory; the tides of history are by now all water under the bridge; the cold hard facts are undeniable even as you fumble for the still-warm “smoking gun.”
Drone strikes, smart bombs, airport scans, renditions, Abu Ghraibs, Guatanamos -- all wrapped in reams of red, white, and blue bunting -- are truer than your “truths.” As Orwell himself once said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever.” Or, like the bumper sticker casually confirms, “It’s God’s job to judge the terrorists; it’s the Marine’s job to arrange the meeting.” History will vindicate our resolve, the terrorists will be completely eradicated, and the next decade will finally show the world that no one can bring down the United States except ourselves, by golly.
To sum up on this auspicious anniversary, it comes down to the sheer force of numbers. All these years we were taught that nine plus eleven equals twenty, but that was a lie … it adds up to 1984. I know this now. Victory at last! And in the end, I really do love the new millennial math after all.
+++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Endless War, Lies and Terror: The Decade Since 9/11
by Mark Weisbrot
"We support your war of terror," proclaims Borat to a cheering
crowd of Americans in a stadium, in the popular Sacha Baron Cohen film.
The crowd apparently thinks he got the preposition wrong, but what makes
the line darkly humorous is that he didn't.
Most of the victims of America's wars that are supposedly "against terror" have been civilians, and torture has also been deployed as a weapon. Civilians in Pakistan are killed on average every week in drone strikes, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and also regularly in Afghanistan in "night raids."
And sometimes they are just shot point blank, as in March 2006 when US soldiers reportedly executed at least 10 civilians, including a 70-year old woman and a 5-month old baby, and then called in an airstrike to bomb the house and cover it up. Arecently discovered US diplomatic cable from Wikileaks provides evidence of this crime. Iraq veteranEthan McCord says that killings of civilians by US forces was "standard operating procedure" while he was deployed there.
I grew up during the Cold War, and my elementary school teachers told me that the difference between us and the Communists was that they thought the end justifies the means, but we didn't. It wasn't true then, of course – American armed forces in Vietnam bombed villages, slaughtered civilians, and threw people out of helicopters. But at least our leaders had to pretend that they had some moral superiority to their enemies.
Now we have seen torture and assassination institutionalized and justified at the highest levels. New crimes are continually uncovered: Documents recentlycaptured by Libyan rebels indicate that Washington was sending prisoners to Gadaffi's government for interrogation, i.e. torture.
So that is one of the casualties of 9-11, in addition to the 3000 people brutally murdered on that fateful day in 2001: a moral degeneration among our political leaders who, it must be acknowledged, were already at a low level when it came to respect for human life in the rest of the world. But the world should know that the views presented by our major media and politicians do not necessarily reflect the consent of the governed. In arecent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center , the public was evenly divided on the question of whether the 9/11 attacks may have been the result of our foreign policy.
This is especially impressive because it means that nearly half the country came up with this idea on their own, as it has been scrupulously avoided in ten years of media blather about "how 9/11 changed the world." If we had anything approaching a reality-based media, that number would probably be upwards of eighty per cent. Only a quarter of those surveyed by Pew thought that the wars had made Americans safer; the majority thought the wars increased the chance of terrorist attacks or made no difference.
According to recent polls, a majority of Americans think that the US should not be fighting in Afghanistan; a majority thinks that the US should withdraw its troops as soon as possible, and two-thirds say the threat of terrorism will stay the same when the US withdraws its troops.
Winds of change
The most important way that 9/11 changed the world, as tens of millions of Americans understand, is that it provided an over-arching theme and a rationale for the kinds of military adventures, invasions, bombings, interventions and atrocities that our government had previously carried out under other pretexts. For half a century the "war against Communism" served this purpose.
It didn't matter that governments overthrown in Iran, Chile, Guatemala or elsewhere had no connection to the Soviet Union; or that the Vietnamese were fighting for their own independence. It was an excuse, with a whole world view that shaped the country's most important institutions, and it provided a justification for empire.
Then came that awkward decade after the Berlin wall fell and Washington had to rely on ad hoc excuses, as in the invasion of Panama or the first Iraq War. People like Vice President Dick Cheneyknew immediately after the towers went down that this was not just a tragedy but an opportunity that would serve their interests for years to come, beginning with the unnecessary wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But it was the more liberal "enablers," especially in the media, that made everything possible. Bill Keller was executive editor of the New York Times until returning to writing for the paper this month. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the paper printed such journalistic gems as theinfamous "aluminum tubes" report - fake evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program - and other stories that, as the newspaper's ownpublic editor would write, "pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors." Kellerreminisces this week about "the I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might."
"It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations," he writes, "including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack [now at the Brookings Institution]."
Keller poses the question: "[K]nowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the [Iraq] war?" After reviewing the costs of the war, in money and lives [he says "at least 100,000 Iraqis" were killed but the best estimates are closer to a million], he concludes that "Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder." But "Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call."
It's not a hard call for most of America, or the world for that matter. Keller is asking the wrong question. The more important question is how the executive editor of the New York Times can be so confused between right and wrong, when tens of millions of Americans, including many intelligent children, can see right through the crap that we are bombarded with every day.
I'm only picking on the Times because it represents the liberal wing of our establishment media. Most of the rest is much worse. This is one of the great structural problems that must be confronted every day by Americans who would like their country to become a civilized member of the community of nations.
The military-industrial-complex is of course another enormous obstacle. General James L. Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor, explained to journalist and author Bob Woodward, in his book Obama's Wars, why "the United States could not lose the war [in Afghanistan] or be seen as losing the war."
"'If we're not successful here', Jones said, "you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' "
Before he took the job as Obama's National Security Advisor, Jones was hauling down $2m a year, paid for serving on the boards of corporations, lobby groups, and military contractors including Boeing and Exxon-Mobil. This is a form of corruption more costly to the United States than anything that our elites regularly denounce in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan.
If all this sounds pessimistic, with President Obama having escalated the war in Afghanistan, and mostly continuing the foreign policy of George W. Bush's second term, things are not nearly as hopeless as they may seem. First, some of what we are seeing is not structural, but situational. The United States is facing its worst economic failure since the Great Depression. This has drawn attention away from our wars, and given the foreign policy establishment more leeway than they normally would have to proceed without regard to public opinion.
President Obama decided early on that he was not going to expend or risk any political capital trying to change US foreign policy, since his re-election would depend on domestic issues. And many other political actors have made similar decisions, not always for purely opportunistic reasons.
Second, the fact that Obama, a perceived liberal and the country's first African-American president, is in the White House, has kept protest to a minimum. If a Republican president were doing the same things, there would be people in the streets and a lot more of the kind of grass-roots organizing that we saw in Wisconsin. And Washington would be paying a bigger political price in the rest of the world for its crimes, as it did when George W. Bush was president.
Nonetheless, the peace movement remains quite strong and is exerting pressure every day in ways that generally go unreported. This summer, 96 per cent of Democrats in the US House of Representatives went against their president and voted to establish a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was a result of the organized efforts of the peace movement.
Americans will end these wars and change the foreign policy that got us into them, the same way we got out of Vietnam or cut off congressional funding to right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s: through persistent organizing, educational work, and pressure on their government – especially the Congress. That is how we will eventually become a republic, as most Americans want, instead of an empire.
Most of the victims of America's wars that are supposedly "against terror" have been civilians, and torture has also been deployed as a weapon. Civilians in Pakistan are killed on average every week in drone strikes, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and also regularly in Afghanistan in "night raids."
And sometimes they are just shot point blank, as in March 2006 when US soldiers reportedly executed at least 10 civilians, including a 70-year old woman and a 5-month old baby, and then called in an airstrike to bomb the house and cover it up. Arecently discovered US diplomatic cable from Wikileaks provides evidence of this crime. Iraq veteranEthan McCord says that killings of civilians by US forces was "standard operating procedure" while he was deployed there.
I grew up during the Cold War, and my elementary school teachers told me that the difference between us and the Communists was that they thought the end justifies the means, but we didn't. It wasn't true then, of course – American armed forces in Vietnam bombed villages, slaughtered civilians, and threw people out of helicopters. But at least our leaders had to pretend that they had some moral superiority to their enemies.
Now we have seen torture and assassination institutionalized and justified at the highest levels. New crimes are continually uncovered: Documents recentlycaptured by Libyan rebels indicate that Washington was sending prisoners to Gadaffi's government for interrogation, i.e. torture.
So that is one of the casualties of 9-11, in addition to the 3000 people brutally murdered on that fateful day in 2001: a moral degeneration among our political leaders who, it must be acknowledged, were already at a low level when it came to respect for human life in the rest of the world. But the world should know that the views presented by our major media and politicians do not necessarily reflect the consent of the governed. In arecent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center , the public was evenly divided on the question of whether the 9/11 attacks may have been the result of our foreign policy.
This is especially impressive because it means that nearly half the country came up with this idea on their own, as it has been scrupulously avoided in ten years of media blather about "how 9/11 changed the world." If we had anything approaching a reality-based media, that number would probably be upwards of eighty per cent. Only a quarter of those surveyed by Pew thought that the wars had made Americans safer; the majority thought the wars increased the chance of terrorist attacks or made no difference.
According to recent polls, a majority of Americans think that the US should not be fighting in Afghanistan; a majority thinks that the US should withdraw its troops as soon as possible, and two-thirds say the threat of terrorism will stay the same when the US withdraws its troops.
Winds of change
The most important way that 9/11 changed the world, as tens of millions of Americans understand, is that it provided an over-arching theme and a rationale for the kinds of military adventures, invasions, bombings, interventions and atrocities that our government had previously carried out under other pretexts. For half a century the "war against Communism" served this purpose.
It didn't matter that governments overthrown in Iran, Chile, Guatemala or elsewhere had no connection to the Soviet Union; or that the Vietnamese were fighting for their own independence. It was an excuse, with a whole world view that shaped the country's most important institutions, and it provided a justification for empire.
Then came that awkward decade after the Berlin wall fell and Washington had to rely on ad hoc excuses, as in the invasion of Panama or the first Iraq War. People like Vice President Dick Cheneyknew immediately after the towers went down that this was not just a tragedy but an opportunity that would serve their interests for years to come, beginning with the unnecessary wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But it was the more liberal "enablers," especially in the media, that made everything possible. Bill Keller was executive editor of the New York Times until returning to writing for the paper this month. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the paper printed such journalistic gems as theinfamous "aluminum tubes" report - fake evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program - and other stories that, as the newspaper's ownpublic editor would write, "pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors." Kellerreminisces this week about "the I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might."
"It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations," he writes, "including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack [now at the Brookings Institution]."
Keller poses the question: "[K]nowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the [Iraq] war?" After reviewing the costs of the war, in money and lives [he says "at least 100,000 Iraqis" were killed but the best estimates are closer to a million], he concludes that "Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder." But "Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call."
It's not a hard call for most of America, or the world for that matter. Keller is asking the wrong question. The more important question is how the executive editor of the New York Times can be so confused between right and wrong, when tens of millions of Americans, including many intelligent children, can see right through the crap that we are bombarded with every day.
I'm only picking on the Times because it represents the liberal wing of our establishment media. Most of the rest is much worse. This is one of the great structural problems that must be confronted every day by Americans who would like their country to become a civilized member of the community of nations.
The military-industrial-complex is of course another enormous obstacle. General James L. Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor, explained to journalist and author Bob Woodward, in his book Obama's Wars, why "the United States could not lose the war [in Afghanistan] or be seen as losing the war."
"'If we're not successful here', Jones said, "you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' "
Before he took the job as Obama's National Security Advisor, Jones was hauling down $2m a year, paid for serving on the boards of corporations, lobby groups, and military contractors including Boeing and Exxon-Mobil. This is a form of corruption more costly to the United States than anything that our elites regularly denounce in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan.
If all this sounds pessimistic, with President Obama having escalated the war in Afghanistan, and mostly continuing the foreign policy of George W. Bush's second term, things are not nearly as hopeless as they may seem. First, some of what we are seeing is not structural, but situational. The United States is facing its worst economic failure since the Great Depression. This has drawn attention away from our wars, and given the foreign policy establishment more leeway than they normally would have to proceed without regard to public opinion.
President Obama decided early on that he was not going to expend or risk any political capital trying to change US foreign policy, since his re-election would depend on domestic issues. And many other political actors have made similar decisions, not always for purely opportunistic reasons.
Second, the fact that Obama, a perceived liberal and the country's first African-American president, is in the White House, has kept protest to a minimum. If a Republican president were doing the same things, there would be people in the streets and a lot more of the kind of grass-roots organizing that we saw in Wisconsin. And Washington would be paying a bigger political price in the rest of the world for its crimes, as it did when George W. Bush was president.
Nonetheless, the peace movement remains quite strong and is exerting pressure every day in ways that generally go unreported. This summer, 96 per cent of Democrats in the US House of Representatives went against their president and voted to establish a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was a result of the organized efforts of the peace movement.
Americans will end these wars and change the foreign policy that got us into them, the same way we got out of Vietnam or cut off congressional funding to right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s: through persistent organizing, educational work, and pressure on their government – especially the Congress. That is how we will eventually become a republic, as most Americans want, instead of an empire.
+++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by the Independent/UK
Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism
The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate
by Patrick Cockburn
What was the most devastating attack by al-Qa'ida in the past few
months? Despite all the pious talk this weekend about combating
"terrorism", few will have heard of it. It happened on August 15th when
bombers killed 63 people in 17 cities up and down Iraq in the space of a
few hours.
Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilizations.
As the arch-exponent of "terrorism", al-Qa'ida is both less and more than the picture of it presented by governments, intelligence agencies, journalists and commentators. As an organization, it has always been small and ramshackle, but, if it appears larger, it is because it has the ability to tap into fierce local disputes. Osama bin Laden may have wanted to launch global jihad, but the majority of those who claimed to be al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have had a different and more immediate agenda.
In Iraq, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, the local franchisee, though never under the control of Bin Laden, was always more interested in butchering Iraqi Shia than in killing American soldiers. The Pakistani Taliban, closely linked to al-Qa'ida, still devotes part of its energies to sending suicide bombers to blow up Shia villagers and city laborers, even when it is facing offensives by the Pakistan army.
Al-Qa'ida's sectarianism is fortunate for the West. Many of the attacks attributed to al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have failed because those carrying them out could not build the simplest explosive device. Why this has happened is something of a mystery since such expertise is all too widespread in areas of al-Qa'ida strength, in central Iraq, north-west Pakistan and even parts of southern Yemen. But the knowledge is not passed on because the bomb-makers in these areas fortunately remain absorbed in seeking to murder their Muslim neighbors and show limited interest in spreading mayhem to Chicago or New York.
Al-Qa'ida as a global organization has always been something of a fiction. Bin Laden may have wanted international reach but, aside from 9/11, seldom achieved it. His propaganda has been accepted as reality by self-interested governments and intelligence agencies with an interest in exaggerating the al-Qa'ida threat to enhance their own authority. Even the most botched and amateur bombing attempt has been portrayed as if it were the Gunpowder Plot revisited. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula commented derisively that it did not matter if its plots failed or succeeded, because even failures disrupted world air traffic and created chaos.
Al-Qa'ida appears to have tentacles all over the world because groups, often with different agendas but using similar tactics, became its franchisees. This notion has also taken hold because autocracies everywhere have an interest in pretending that their opponents are all Islamic fundamentalists, hand-in-glove with al-Qa'ida. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi did this with great success in his relations with the CIA and MI6, partly because the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was led by veterans of the Afghan war, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj. India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, battling what were essentially widely supported separatist movements, could claim to be fearless fighters against Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.
On 9/11, al-Qa'ida's great success was to publicize its own existence and to spark an American overreaction that played straight into its hands. It provoked the US to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and become entrapped in civil wars of great complexity. It has become easy in retrospect to blame George W Bush and his lieutenants in Washington and on the ground for such errors as dissolving the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But at the time – though they have remained very quiet about it since – the Shia and Kurdish leaders were all in favor of eliminating these two main instruments of Sunni power and letting America take the blame.
The Iraq war relaunched al-Qa'ida in another way. From the beginning, US military spokesmen thought it was a smart idea to claim that insurgent attacks, whoever had made them, were the work of al-Qa'ida. The aim was to win support for the war in the US, but in Iraq, where the US occupation was increasingly unpopular, it gave the false impression that al-Qa'ida was leading the guerrilla attacks on the US army. Local children started waving black al-Qa'ida flags at US soldiers. Sunni Arabs thought they might be a useful ally and the movement found it easier to raise money across the Arab world.
Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organization, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.
Could any US government have reacted differently after 9/11? Was not the popular desire for retaliation so strong that Washington could not avoid walking into the al-Qa'ida trap?
There is something in this, but the reason this form of "terrorism" is so effective is that political leaders are tempted to use the opportunity to expand their power by highlighting the threat. They can portray critics who do not go along with this as naive or unpatriotic. Necessary reforms can be dumped amid a general call to rally around the flag.
This overreaction to "terrorist" attacks is not quite inevitable. In Northern Ireland after the start of the troubles in 1968, the Provisional IRA became expert at provoking the British Army and government into overreacting. When a British soldier was killed, the collective punishment of a Roman Catholic district would follow and young men rushed to join the Provisionals. It took a dozen years before the British Army realized that it was reacting as the IRA hoped it would react.
Has the US learned a similar lesson? It looks doubtful because no US president can admit that he has fought unnecessary wars in pursuit of an enemy that barely exists.
Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilizations.
As the arch-exponent of "terrorism", al-Qa'ida is both less and more than the picture of it presented by governments, intelligence agencies, journalists and commentators. As an organization, it has always been small and ramshackle, but, if it appears larger, it is because it has the ability to tap into fierce local disputes. Osama bin Laden may have wanted to launch global jihad, but the majority of those who claimed to be al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have had a different and more immediate agenda.
In Iraq, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, the local franchisee, though never under the control of Bin Laden, was always more interested in butchering Iraqi Shia than in killing American soldiers. The Pakistani Taliban, closely linked to al-Qa'ida, still devotes part of its energies to sending suicide bombers to blow up Shia villagers and city laborers, even when it is facing offensives by the Pakistan army.
Al-Qa'ida's sectarianism is fortunate for the West. Many of the attacks attributed to al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have failed because those carrying them out could not build the simplest explosive device. Why this has happened is something of a mystery since such expertise is all too widespread in areas of al-Qa'ida strength, in central Iraq, north-west Pakistan and even parts of southern Yemen. But the knowledge is not passed on because the bomb-makers in these areas fortunately remain absorbed in seeking to murder their Muslim neighbors and show limited interest in spreading mayhem to Chicago or New York.
Al-Qa'ida as a global organization has always been something of a fiction. Bin Laden may have wanted international reach but, aside from 9/11, seldom achieved it. His propaganda has been accepted as reality by self-interested governments and intelligence agencies with an interest in exaggerating the al-Qa'ida threat to enhance their own authority. Even the most botched and amateur bombing attempt has been portrayed as if it were the Gunpowder Plot revisited. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula commented derisively that it did not matter if its plots failed or succeeded, because even failures disrupted world air traffic and created chaos.
Al-Qa'ida appears to have tentacles all over the world because groups, often with different agendas but using similar tactics, became its franchisees. This notion has also taken hold because autocracies everywhere have an interest in pretending that their opponents are all Islamic fundamentalists, hand-in-glove with al-Qa'ida. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi did this with great success in his relations with the CIA and MI6, partly because the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was led by veterans of the Afghan war, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj. India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, battling what were essentially widely supported separatist movements, could claim to be fearless fighters against Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.
On 9/11, al-Qa'ida's great success was to publicize its own existence and to spark an American overreaction that played straight into its hands. It provoked the US to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and become entrapped in civil wars of great complexity. It has become easy in retrospect to blame George W Bush and his lieutenants in Washington and on the ground for such errors as dissolving the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But at the time – though they have remained very quiet about it since – the Shia and Kurdish leaders were all in favor of eliminating these two main instruments of Sunni power and letting America take the blame.
The Iraq war relaunched al-Qa'ida in another way. From the beginning, US military spokesmen thought it was a smart idea to claim that insurgent attacks, whoever had made them, were the work of al-Qa'ida. The aim was to win support for the war in the US, but in Iraq, where the US occupation was increasingly unpopular, it gave the false impression that al-Qa'ida was leading the guerrilla attacks on the US army. Local children started waving black al-Qa'ida flags at US soldiers. Sunni Arabs thought they might be a useful ally and the movement found it easier to raise money across the Arab world.
Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organization, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.
Could any US government have reacted differently after 9/11? Was not the popular desire for retaliation so strong that Washington could not avoid walking into the al-Qa'ida trap?
There is something in this, but the reason this form of "terrorism" is so effective is that political leaders are tempted to use the opportunity to expand their power by highlighting the threat. They can portray critics who do not go along with this as naive or unpatriotic. Necessary reforms can be dumped amid a general call to rally around the flag.
This overreaction to "terrorist" attacks is not quite inevitable. In Northern Ireland after the start of the troubles in 1968, the Provisional IRA became expert at provoking the British Army and government into overreacting. When a British soldier was killed, the collective punishment of a Roman Catholic district would follow and young men rushed to join the Provisionals. It took a dozen years before the British Army realized that it was reacting as the IRA hoped it would react.
Has the US learned a similar lesson? It looks doubtful because no US president can admit that he has fought unnecessary wars in pursuit of an enemy that barely exists.
++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by TruthDig
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
by Chris Hedges
I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11,
2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens.
Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of
the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the
crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York
Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s
notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police
roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to
the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked
through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks,
emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on
the asphalt.
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.
Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.
The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.
The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since.
We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.”
I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.
There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.
“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs.
Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic.
The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti. “It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”
We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
As Wordsworth wrote:
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.
Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.
The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.
The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since.
We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.”
I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.
There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.
“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs.
Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic.
The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti. “It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”
We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
As Wordsworth wrote:
Action is transitory—a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle—this way or that—
’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
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