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How a Washington Global Torture Gulag Was Turned Into the Only Gulag-Free Zone on Earth February 18, 2013

Posted by rogerhollander in Brazil, Chile, Latin America, Torture, War on Terror.
Tags: 9/11, bagram, cia prisons, counterterrorism, donald rumsfeld, globalizing torture, greg grandin, Guantanamo, Hugo Chavez, Latin America, mahar arar, operation condor, pinochet, rendition, roger hollander, torture, war on terror, wikileaks
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Published on Monday, February 18, 2013 by TomDispatch.com

The Latin American Exception

by Greg Grandin

(Max Fisher — The Washington Post)

The map tells the story. To illustrate a damning new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,” recently published by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post put together an equally damning graphic: it’s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago.

Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set. It seems that, between 9/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.

All told, of the 190-odd countries on this planet, a staggering 54 participated in various ways in this American torture system, hosting CIA “black site” prisons, allowing their airspace and airports to be used for secret flights, providing intelligence, kidnapping foreign nationals or their own citizens and handing them over to U.S. agents to be “rendered” to third-party countries like Egypt and Syria. The hallmark of this network, Open Society writes, has been torture. Its report documents the names of 136 individuals swept up in what it says is an ongoing operation, though its authors make clear that the total number, implicitly far higher, “will remain unknown” because of the “extraordinary level of government secrecy associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition.”

No region escapes the stain. Not North America, home to the global gulag’s command center. Not Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. Not even social-democratic Scandinavia. Sweden turned over at least two people to the CIA, who were then rendered to Egypt, where they were subject to electric shocks, among other abuses. No region, that is, except Latin America.

What’s most striking about the Post’s map is that no part of its wine-dark horror touches Latin America; that is, not one country in what used to be called Washington’s “backyard” participated in rendition or Washington-directed or supported torture and abuse of “terror suspects.” Not even Colombia, which throughout the last two decades was as close to a U.S.-client state as existed in the area. It’s true that a fleck of red should show up on Cuba, but that would only underscore the point: Teddy Roosevelt took Guantánamo Bay Naval Base for the U.S. in 1903 “in perpetuity.”

Two, Three, Many CIAs

How did Latin America come to be territorio libre in this new dystopian world of black sites and midnight flights, the Zion of this militarist matrix (as fans of the Wachowskis’ movies might put it)? After all, it was in Latin America that an earlier generation of U.S. and U.S.-backed counterinsurgents put into place a prototype of Washington’s twenty-first century Global War on Terror.

Even before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, before Che Guevara urged revolutionaries to create “two, three, many Vietnams,” Washington had already set about establishing two, three, many centralized intelligence agencies in Latin America. As Michael McClintock shows in his indispensable book Instruments of Statecraft, in late 1954, a few months after the CIA’s infamous coup in Guatemala that overthrew a democratically elected government, the National Security Council first recommended strengthening “the internal security forces of friendly foreign countries.”

In the region, this meant three things. First, CIA agents and other U.S. officials set to work “professionalizing” the security forces of individual countries like Guatemala, Colombia, and Uruguay; that is, turning brutal but often clumsy and corrupt local intelligence apparatuses into efficient, “centralized,” still brutal agencies, capable of gathering information, analyzing it, and storing it. Most importantly, they were to coordinate different branches of each country’s security forces — the police, military, and paramilitary squads — to act on that information, often lethally and always ruthlessly.

Second, the U.S. greatly expanded the writ of these far more efficient and effective agencies, making it clear that their portfolio included not just national defense but international offense. They were to be the vanguard of a global war for “freedom” and of an anticommunist reign of terror in the hemisphere. Third, our men in Montevideo, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Asunción, La Paz, Lima, Quito, San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Managua were to help synchronize the workings of individual national security forces.

The result was state terror on a nearly continent-wide scale. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s Operation Condor, which linked together the intelligence services of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile, was the most infamous of Latin America’s transnational terror consortiums, reaching out to commit mayhem as far away as Washington D.C., Paris, and Rome. The U.S. had earlier helped put in place similar operations elsewhere in the Southern hemisphere, especially in Central America in the 1960s.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans had been tortured, killed, disappeared, or imprisoned without trial, thanks in significant part to U.S. organizational skills and support. Latin America was, by then, Washington’s backyard gulag. Three of the region’s current presidents — Uruguay’s José Mujica, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega — were victims of this reign of terror.

When the Cold War ended, human rights groups began the herculean task of dismantling the deeply embedded, continent-wide network of intelligence operatives, secret prisons, and torture techniques — and of pushing militaries throughout the region out of governments and back into their barracks. In the 1990s, Washington not only didn’t stand in the way of this process, but actually lent a hand in depoliticizing Latin America’s armed forces. Many believed that, with the Soviet Union dispatched, Washington could now project its power in its own “backyard” through softer means like international trade agreements and other forms of economic leverage. Then 9/11 happened.

“Oh My Goodness”

In late November 2002, just as the basic outlines of the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition programs were coming into shape elsewhere in the world, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flew 5,000 miles to Santiago, Chile, to attend a hemispheric meeting of defense ministers. “Needless to say,” Rumsfeld nonetheless said, “I would not be going all this distance if I did not think this was extremely important.” Indeed.

This was after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the invasion of Iraq and Rumsfeld was riding high, as well as dropping the phrase “September 11th” every chance he got. Maybe he didn’t know of the special significance that date had in Latin America, but 29 years earlier on the first 9/11, a CIA-backed coup by General Pinochet and his military led to the death of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Or did he, in fact, know just what it meant and was that the point? After all, a new global fight for freedom, a proclaimed Global War on Terror, was underway and Rumsfeld had arrived to round up recruits.

There, in Santiago, the city out of which Pinochet had run Operation Condor, Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials tried to sell what they were now terming the “integration” of “various specialized capabilities into larger regional capabilities” — an insipid way of describing the kidnapping, torturing, and death-dealing already underway elsewhere. “Events around the world before and after September 11th suggest the advantages,” Rumsfeld said, of nations working together to confront the terror threat.

“Oh my goodness,” Rumsfeld told a Chilean reporter, “the kinds of threats we face are global.” Latin America was at peace, he admitted, but he had a warning for its leaders: they shouldn’t lull themselves into believing that the continent was safe from the clouds gathering elsewhere. Dangers exist, “old threats, such as drugs, organized crime, illegal arms trafficking, hostage taking, piracy, and money laundering; new threats, such as cyber-crime; and unknown threats, which can emerge without warning.”

“These new threats,” he added ominously, “must be countered with new capabilities.” Thanks to the Open Society report, we can see exactly what Rumsfeld meant by those “new capabilities.”

A few weeks prior to Rumsfeld’s arrival in Santiago, for example, the U.S., acting on false information supplied by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, detained Maher Arar, who holds dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship, at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport and then handed him over to a “Special Removal Unit.” He was flown first to Jordan, where he was beaten, and then to Syria, a country in a time zone five hours ahead of Chile, where he was turned over to local torturers. On November 18th, when Rumsfeld was giving his noon speech in Santiago, it was five in the afternoon in Arar’s “grave-like” cell in a Syrian prison, where he would spend the next year being abused.

Ghairat Baheer was captured in Pakistan about three weeks before Rumsfeld’s Chile trip, and thrown into a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan called the Salt Pit. As the secretary of defense praised Latin America’s return to the rule of law after the dark days of the Cold War, Baheer may well have been in the middle of one of his torture sessions, “hung naked for hours on end.”

Taken a month before Rumsfeld’s visit to Santiago, the Saudi national Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was transported to the Salt Pit, after which he was transferred “to another black site in Bangkok, Thailand, where he was waterboarded.” After that, he was passed on to Poland, Morocco, Guantánamo, Romania, and back to Guantánamo, where he remains. Along the way, he was subjected to a “mock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded,” had U.S. interrogators rack a “semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them.” His interrogators also “threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.”

Likewise a month before the Santiago meeting, the Yemini Bashi Nasir Ali Al Marwalah was flown to Camp X-Ray in Cuba, where he remains to this day.

Less than two weeks after Rumsfeld swore that the U.S. and Latin America shared “common values,” Mullah Habibullah, an Afghan national, died “after severe mistreatment” in CIA custody at something called the “Bagram Collection Point.” A U.S. military investigation “concluded that the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment… caused, or were direct contributing factors in, his death.”

Two days after the secretary’s Santiago speech, a CIA case officer in the Salt Pit had Gul Rahma stripped naked and chained to a concrete floor without blankets. Rahma froze to death.

And so the Open Society report goes… on and on and on.

Territorio Libre

Rumsfeld left Santiago without firm commitments. Some of the region’s militaries were tempted by the supposed opportunities offered by the secretary’s vision of fusing crime fighting into an ideological campaign against radical Islam, a unified war in which all was to be subordinated to U.S. command. As political scientist Brian Loveman has noted, around the time of Rumsfeld’s Santiago visit, the head of the Argentine army picked up Washington’s latest set of themes, insisting that “defense must be treated as an integral matter,” without a false divide separating internal and external security.

But history was not on Rumsfeld’s side. His trip to Santiago coincided with Argentina’s epic financial meltdown, among the worst in recorded history. It signaled a broader collapse of the economic model — think of it as Reaganism on steroids — that Washington had been promoting in Latin America since the late Cold War years. Soon, a new generation of leftists would be in power across much of the continent, committed to the idea of national sovereignty and limiting Washington’s influence in the region in a way that their predecessors hadn’t been.

Hugo Chávez was already president of Venezuela. Just a month before Rumsfeld’s Santiago trip, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the presidency of Brazil. A few months later, in early 2003, Argentines elected Néstor Kirchner, who shortly thereafter ended his country’s joint military exercises with the U.S. In the years that followed, the U.S. experienced one setback after another. In 2008, for instance, Ecuador evicted the U.S. military from Manta Air Base.

In that same period, the Bush administration’s rush to invade Iraq, an act most Latin American countries opposed, helped squander whatever was left of the post-9/11 goodwill the U.S. had in the region. Iraq seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of the continent’s new leaders: that what Rumsfeld was trying to peddle as an international “peacekeeping” force would be little more than a bid to use Latin American soldiers as Gurkhas in a revived unilateral imperial war.

Brazil’s “Smokescreen”

Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show the degree to which Brazil rebuffed efforts to paint the region red on Washington’s new global gulag map.

A May 2005 U.S. State Department cable, for instance, reveals that Lula’s government refused “multiple requests” by Washington to take in released Guantánamo prisoners, particularly a group of about 15 Uighurs the U.S. had been holding since 2002, who could not be sent back to China.

“[Brazil’s] position regarding this issue has not changed since 2003 and will likely not change in the foreseeable future,” the cable said. It went on to report that Lula’s government considered the whole system Washington had set up at Guantánamo (and around the world) to be a mockery of international law. “All attempts to discuss this issue” with Brazilian officials, the cable concluded, “were flatly refused or accepted begrudgingly.”

In addition, Brazil refused to cooperate with the Bush administration’s efforts to create a Western Hemisphere-wide version of the Patriot Act. It stonewalled, for example, about agreeing to revise its legal code in a way that would lower the standard of evidence needed to prove conspiracy, while widening the definition of what criminal conspiracy entailed.

Lula stalled for years on the initiative, but it seems that the State Department didn’t realize he was doing so until April 2008, when one of its diplomats wrote a memo calling Brazil’s supposed interest in reforming its legal code to suit Washington a “smokescreen.” The Brazilian government, another Wikileaked cable complained, was afraid that a more expansive definition of terrorism would be used to target “members of what they consider to be legitimate social movements fighting for a more just society.” Apparently, there was no way to “write an anti-terrorism legislation that excludes the actions” of Lula’s left-wing social base.

One U.S. diplomat complained that this “mindset” — that is, a mindset that actually valued civil liberties – “presents serious challenges to our efforts to enhance counterterrorism cooperation or promote passage of anti-terrorism legislation.” In addition, the Brazilian government worried that the legislation would be used to go after Arab-Brazilians, of which there are many. One can imagine that if Brazil and the rest of Latin America had signed up to participate in Washington’s rendition program, Open Society would have a lot more Middle Eastern-sounding names to add to its list.

Finally, cable after Wikileaked cable revealed that Brazil repeatedly brushed off efforts by Washington to isolate Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, which would have been a necessary step if the U.S. was going to marshal South America into its counterterrorism posse.

In February 2008, for example, U.S. ambassador to Brazil Clifford Sobell met with Lula’s Minister of Defense Nelson Jobin to complain about Chávez. Jobim told Sobell that Brazil shared his “concern about the possibility of Venezuela exporting instability.” But instead of “isolating Venezuela,” which might only “lead to further posturing,” Jobim instead indicated that his government “supports [the] creation of a ‘South American Defense Council’ to bring Chavez into the mainstream.”

There was only one catch here: that South American Defense Council was Chávez’s idea in the first place! It was part of his effort, in partnership with Lula, to create independent institutions parallel to those controlled by Washington. The memo concluded with the U.S. ambassador noting how curious it was that Brazil would use Chavez’s “idea for defense cooperation” as part of a “supposed containment strategy” of Chávez.

Monkey-Wrenching the Perfect Machine of Perpetual War

Unable to put in place its post-9/11 counterterrorism framework in all of Latin America, the Bush administration retrenched. It attempted instead to build a “perfect machine of perpetual war” in a corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. The process of militarizing that more limited region, often under the guise of fighting “the drug wars,” has, if anything, escalated in the Obama years. Central America has, in fact, become the only place Southcom — the Pentagon command that covers Central and South America — can operate more or less at will. A look at this other map, put together by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, makes the region look like one big landing strip for U.S. drones and drug-interdiction flights.

Washington does continue to push and probe further south, trying yet again to establish a firmer military foothold in the region and rope it into what is now a less ideological and more technocratic crusade, but one still global in its aspirations. U.S. military strategists, for instance, would very much like to have an airstrip in French Guyana or the part of Brazil that bulges out into the Atlantic. The Pentagon would use it as a stepping stone to its increasing presence in Africa, coordinating the work of Southcom with the newest global command, Africom.

But for now, South America has thrown a monkey wrench into the machine. Returning to that Washington Post map, it’s worth memorializing the simple fact that, in one part of the world, in this century at least, the sun never rose on US-choreographed torture.

Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book, Fordlandia, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

‘Tipping Point’: Obama Lawyer Talks About Ending ‘Endless’ US War December 1, 2012

Posted by rogerhollander in War on Terror.
Tags: 9/11, al-Qaeda, civilian deaths, dronemissiles, indefinite detention, jeh johnson, permanent war, roger hollander, terrorism, tom engelhardt, war on terror
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Roger’s note: Tom Engelhardt’s quote of the war on terror at the end of this article is an excellent summary of the bogus justification for the so-called global war on terror. Note that I have appended readers’ comments to the article, which for the most part add greatly to an understanding of US foreign policy. My own opinion is that the US is too heavily invested in military warfare to take the sane and reasonable approach to acts of terror, which is to treat them as a law enforcement issue. Simply put, war is too profitable to those who weild the power behind the scenes (i.e. Obama’s puppet masters). Just one example: drone missiles are a billion dollar industry, and the owners and producers of drone missiles are the same people who are the de facto owners of the president and the congress. It will take either a catastrophic event or popular citizen uprising to put a halt to this madness.

Published on Friday, November 30, 2012 by Common Dreams

Though he defends its worst worst practices and won’t declare when ‘tipping point’ might be reached, comments by Pentagon attorney could spark renewed debate about timeframe of war against al Qaeda

– Common Dreams staff

If a global war declared by the world’s sole military and economic superpower against a shadowy, fragmented, franchisable, and loosely-grouped band of erstwhile ‘dangerous’ but also ‘ravaged’ and ‘largely dismantled’ terror group was over, how would you know it?

US defense department general counsel, Jeh Johnson, says responsibility for tackling al-Qaida should pass to the police and other law enforcement agencies when the ‘tipping point’ in pursuit of group is reached. (Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

You wouldn’t, of course, which is the reason that few ask and almost none, especially members of the US government or military, talk about anything that resembles the “official” end of what has long become known as the “global war on terrorism,” or GWOT.

Today, however, at a speech given at Oxford University, Jeh Johnson, a Pentagon lawyer and one of President Obama’s top legal advisors, spoke openly about what it might mean for the US government to declare an end to its seemingly endless war against—what critics have sharply pointed out is a “tactic”—”terrorism”.

In his presentation at Oxford, Johnson asked, “Now that efforts by the U.S. military against al Qaeda are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves: how will this conflict end?”

Though Johnson is an official spokesperson for the Defense Department and an aggressive defender of the controversial policies ensconced within the US war against al Qaeda, he also said that these policies would not, and should not, continue indefinitely. He said:

I do believe that on the present course, there will come a tipping point – a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.

At that point, we must be able to say to ourselves that our efforts should no longer be considered an “armed conflict” against al Qaeda and its associated forces; rather, a counterterrorism effort against individuals who are the scattered remnants of al Qaeda, or are parts of groups unaffiliated with al Qaeda, for which the law enforcement and intelligence resources of our government are principally responsible, in cooperation with the international community – with our military assets available in reserve to address continuing and imminent terrorist threats.

At that point we will also need to face the question of what to do with any members of al Qaeda who still remain in U.S. military detention without a criminal conviction and sentence. In general, the military’s authority to detain ends with the “cessation of active hostilities.” For this particular conflict, all I can say today is that we should look to conventional legal principles to supply the answer, and that both our Nations faced similar challenging questions after the cessation of hostilities in World War II, and our governments delayed the release of some Nazi German prisoners of war.

As Reuters reports:

The U.S. government points to the existence of an armed conflict as the legal underpinning of practices such as indefinite detention of the global militant group’s members and allies.

Johnson’s remarks could ignite a global political debate with arguments from both the left and the right.

The speech to the Oxford Union did not forecast when such a moment would arrive because, it said, al Qaeda and its affiliates in Yemen and elsewhere remain a danger.

But Johnson tried to frame the discussion with what he called conventional legal principles rather than a new legal structure emerging from the September 11 attacks.

And The Guardian adds:

Washington’s pursuit of suspected al-Qaida terrorists has been controversial, such as the use of UAVs – or drones – to launch attacks in countries such as Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

The administration has been criticised by human rights groups and US academics who say the tactic enrages local populations and causes civilian deaths. It is also legally dubious, they argue.

A fortnight ago the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, claimed America had “decimated core al-Qaida” and that the group was “widely distributed, loosely knit and geographically dispersed”.

His remarks echoed those of Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, who is Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

She has been pilloried by Republicans for suggesting the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that led to the death of US ambassador Christopher Stephen was spontaneous rather than planned.

Such characterisations will put Washington under greater pressure to review and justify the military campaign against al-Qaida, which has been virtually wiped out in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and now exists only in small, disorganised regional splinter groups.

Critics of the so-called ‘global war on terror’ have long held that the impulsive decision by the US government to respond to the crimes that took place on September 11th, 2011 with military force—as opposed to treating it as a law enforcement issue—was the original sin of the post-9/11 era. As Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch, wrote on the tenth anniversary of 9/11:

It was not a nuclear attack. It was not apocalyptic. The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud. It was not potentially civilization ending. It did not endanger the existence of our country — or even of New York City. Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.

A second irreality went with the first. Almost immediately, key Republicans like Senator John McCain, followed by George W. Bush, top figures in his administration, and soon after, in a drumbeat of agreement, the mainstream media declared that we were “at war.” This was, Bush would say only three days after the attacks, “the first war of the twenty-first century.” Only problem: it wasn’t. Despite the screaming headlines, Ground Zero wasn’t Pearl Harbor. Al-Qaeda wasn’t Japan, nor was it Nazi Germany. It wasn’t the Soviet Union. It had no army, nor finances to speak of, and possessed no state (though it had the minimalist protection of a hapless government in Afghanistan, one of the most backward, poverty-stricken lands on the planet).

And yet — another sign of where we were heading — anyone who suggested that this wasn’t war, that it was a criminal act and some sort of international police action was in order, was simply laughed (or derided or insulted) out of the American room. And so the empire prepared to strike back (just as Osama bin Laden hoped it would) in an apocalyptic, planet-wide “war” for domination that masqueraded as a war for survival.

In the meantime, the populace was mustered through repetitive, nationwide 9/11 rites emphasizing that we Americans were the greatest victims, greatest survivors, and greatest dominators on planet Earth. It was in this cause that the dead of 9/11 were turned into potent recruiting agents for a revitalized American way of war.

Read Jeh Johnson’s full prepared remarks here.

38 comments 26 reactions

Dem. Socialism

OUT NOW! Enough posturing, lying, concealing, and spinning. There is absolutely NO REASON except supporting Big Oil and the MIC to still be over there pissing off dollars that are needed at home.

Our “leaders” have no idea why they are in D.C. None! Taking care of America’s people FIRST is their damned jobs. Where is the outrage?! Where are the crowds, like the Egyptians and Greeks, assaulting the capitol?! WHERE IS OUR COURAGE?!
itsthethird

Remember real power in Washington is not at the white house but at Fed. Reserve and beyond the game is rigged. Now at all times the US economy is at risk by capital manipulation minor or major ie fiscal mess and in turn the Presidency and the world. The situation of too much in too few hands is in fact a security risk as great as WMD. Thus, we are going over the same old fiscal bs. The president needs to protect usa from financial sabatage both dimestic and foregn but can’t his risk to great.
Tom Carberry

Remarkable words from someone in the Pentagon. Will he keep his job? Will it have any effect? Will anyone but academics in England listen to him? Will he have any influence on Obama, who seems to love war and killing and has personally directed killing of Muslims?
LocalHero

Oh, that’s right. We’re supposed to all believe that some guy in a cave (who, incidentally, died in late 2001) engineered an ingenious plan to hijack several airliners with box-cutters and, in doing so, managed to outwit the planet’s most all-encompassing intelligence and policing agencies. Yeah, let’s all pretend we believe that.
Paul Fretheim

I agree. What rubbish!

The worst act of terrorism in history was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japanese cities. The world has been intimidated by terror ever since and the U.S. is and has been the greatest purveyor of that terror. So terror continues to rule until the nukes are disarmed.

Here is a brief live news report (32 seconds) from ABC 7 New York from the foot of the World Trade Center Towers. What is seen here directly contradicts the entire fantasy of planes crashing into the buildings caused them to fall down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?f…

Think about it. The entire course of history has been altered by an obviously false story.
Shantiananda

Jet fuel is kerosene and kerosene cannot melt steel, let alone pulverize a 110 story building into fine dust particles. And of course, no one can explain WTC #7 that was not hit by a plane! 3000 of our fellow and innocent citizens were murdered in cold blood on 911, plus who knows how many, have died and will die in the future from the toxic dust. I do not know who was behind 911, but the entire governments con- conspiracy theory is a bogus lie.
Laurence Schechtman

The obvious truth that the buildings were brought down by internal explosions can not be stated often enough. No steel frame skyscraper has ever collapsed completely because of fire alone. There is plenty of other evidence, but that should be enough.
beaglebailey

Please explain what you mean. I watched it but don’t understand what you mean. Thanks. Watched again. The guy said explosions and I could see them. Is that what you meant? Great vid.
Memory_Hole

Yes, it was the “huge explosion(s)” that brought those towers down. Not jet impacts and jet fuel fires. This is physics 101.
beaglebailey

Yeah, I have seen the vids where the supposed plane stops in mid air after blowing thru the buildings.It is just so amazing how so many people cannot see thru the bs of the false flag. And why no one ever questions the facts that the US military’s jets never scrambled even with 4 jets in the air for over an hour.
Memory_Hole

I don’t know what vids you’re talking about. The planes hit the buildings. And yes, they were planes. As far as the jets, they *did* scramble, but they scrambled way too slowly and then went at about half speed.
Bill_from_Saginaw1

Jeh Johnson’s spech at Oxford Union is worth reading in its entirety by clicking on the link. I particularly valued his remark to the effect that “War reverses the natural order of things, in which children bury their parents; in war, parents bury their children.” Johnson concludes that the concept of “endless war” should not be permitted to become the “new normal” for the United States nor the international community.
It will be interesting to see what coverage or reaction in commentary there is in the mainstream US media in the near future. There are several intriguing possible developments to watch. Maybe only websites like CD, European-oriented media outlets like Reuters, and leftist British papers like the Guardian think there’s something newsworthy going on here. But we shall see.

First, in terms of the opaque, glacially slow bureaucratic shifts at the pinnacle of the Washington DC beltway power structure, it may be noteworthy that this is the Pentagon’s chief lawyer – the civilian legal counsel to the post-Robert Gates/Donald Rumsfeld Department of Defense – who is speaking. He’s not speaking at West Point. He’s not even speaking on American soil. He’s delivering well-vetted remarks before a receptive assembly of academically minded listeners far away from the crosshairs of the partisan American political scene.

But very much in the tradition of President Barack Obama’s style of dealing with national security-related issues, we have (miraculously) the military establishment taking the lead, talking openly about bringing the global war on terror to a finite end, and restoring the concept that “lone wolf” or other scattered “terrorist groups” should be treated as criminals or as criminal conspiracies in the future – a law enforcement priority, not automatically enemy combatants. On behalf of the troops, Jeh Johnson is cautiously voicing thoughts that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the rest of the so-called responsible, reality-based political community back stateside have not dared to utter publicly for over a decade.

Second, again peering at what the Washington tea leaves may signify, reflect that (reportedly, according to the insiders) the current Attorney General, Secretary of State, and some other members of Obama’s cabinet are ready to exit out the revolving door to pursue other endeavors. Jeh Johnson? A distinguished jurist and Morehouse man, loyal to this president and none other (his words, during the course of this speech) may be toe testing some big waters from the other side of the Atlantic pond.

If the soldiers and sailors and spies can get institutionally herded on board to declare victory in the global war on terror first, then perhaps there may be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. The GOP Senate leadership and the right wing media megaphone will no doubt shriek and react vehemently. Let us see what we shall see.

Good luck, Jeh. This is a thoughtful first step on what may be a long and arduous trek back towards sanity from the bloody, dystopian post-9/11 quagmire. The whole world is not breathlessly watching, but what happens next is well worth a peek for those who consider themselves part of the American peace movement.

Bill from Saginaw
Memory_Hole

Well, permanent war *has* been permitted to become the new norm in the U.S., regardless of what this fellow says about it. Actually, I believe Dick Cheney said the GWOT would last generations, so he suggested at least 20 years or more. So technically, we could say we are not in a state of permanent war, but when you reflect that this particular war was based on false flag terrorism, and you look at all the dictatorial powers that have been granted to the presidency since then, it is pretty clear that the US has been permanently changed. It’s not as though there are any meaningful sunset provisions to the PATRIOT Act, or the NDAA.
dogpaddle

If you listen to his spiel: “A distinguished jurist and Morehouse man, loyal to this president” kind of says it all. He nauseated me.
Siouxrose

Thank you for that thorough, helpful analysis. You highlight the most significant possibilities.
Norton_Fort

Even so, the speech needs to be put in context. Earlier this year Johnson defended Obama’s drone strike policy in a speech at Yale Law School: “The Obama administration’s top Pentagon lawyer . . . said that courts have no business questioning executive branch decisions about whom to target for extra-judicial executions in the war on terror, even if that target is an American citizen.” http://news.antiwar.com/2012/0…. However, Johnson also said that the administration’s plans to continue airstrikes against Libya violated the War Powers Act. (So did the DOJ). Obama rejected that advice and instead followed that of a White House counsel and Secretary of State lawyer Howard Koh. Koh seems to be the Obama administration’s John Yoo, although he strongly denounced Bush’s Iraq policy. Guess it depends on who’s paying your salary.
rtdrury

9/11 exposed how very unintelligent and emotionally perverted das elites really are. They have spent the time since frantically escalating the petro-opiate bread/circus assault on the people in an attempt to stave off popular revolt against the catastrophic turbulence created by their war on humanity.
Thoughts_Into_Action

Well, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, is simply making up the law as they go. What’s this concept of breaking the law for just a short while, coming from Obama’s legal advisor? That idea makes the law utterly meaningless. Right now, the law is whatever Obama says it is, and there seems to be no check at all on his illegally presumed powers, including his assumption of the power to assassinate anyone at will.

Quite frankly, the United States under Bush/Bama has blatantly violated international and U.S. laws. They’ve invaded countries with troops to kill stateless individuals (50 al Quaida members), which is an act of war, rather than a police action. Guys with “plans” in Pakistan or Afghanistan do not represent an imminent threat to the United States.

Worst of all, this lawyer has the nerve to talk about World War II. He says, “For this particular conflict, all I can say today is that we should look to conventional legal principles to supply the answer, and that both our Nations faced similar challenging questions after the cessation of hostilities in World War II, and our governments delayed the release of some Nazi German prisoners of war.” Well, under those principles, the United States remains as a gross violator of the law.

I’m not sure why this guy is droning on about this issue. We know the Obama administration is continuing those illegal actions: torture, assassination, war without end.
Memory_Hole

I have to agree TIA. I don’t think there’s much new here. Whatever he may have *said* about it, the United States is *de facto* in a state of permanent war. It is unconstitutional, unlawful, illegal, and as you say, Bush & Obama, with the willful complicity of a corrupt Congress, just making up the law as they go along.
Kokr_Spanielesko

“The speech to the Oxford Union did not forecast when such a moment would arrive”

It probably won’t. What would the government, the military and the whole MICC do after all this time without war? I just don’t believe it. Chris Hedges wrote a book called ‘War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning’. That hasn’t changed. And General Patton’s words still ring true: “Americans traditionally love to fight.”
Hello

Well, it is clear to me that the world community is much more interconnected than it used to be. It is as if war has lost its purpose: It has lost its chivalry, in a sense. Nowadays, nations go to war for the sake of the few to make some serious money while most people in the society foot the bill for it! It no longer serves to benefit and preserve the national culture of a given people. Going to war and financially paying for it on credit? Borrowing money from foreign nations in order to finance a military excursion? How absurd! Of course, killing human beings simply for the sake of both commodities and currency that the majority of the society do not benefit from is just…wrong. Aforementioned, to me, are immoral reasons to go to war!
Doug Latimer

The “war” will never end

Because in the empire game

You can’t boogie without a boogeyman

And given Engelhardt’s undeniably accurate portrayal of the GWOT ™ as a “‘war’ for domination”

How can you call its launching “impulsive”?

Inquiring – and incredulous – minds want to know.
Memory_Hole

Hard to know how to take Johnson’s comments. The whole so-called “global war on terror” has been a big fraud from day one, and everything he says about Al Qaeda today could have been said about it in 2001. Somehow, I can draw no encouragement from them. If he is someone with perhaps some remnant of conscience left who is trying to speak out and bring this madness of permanent war to an end, well, god be with him.

My guess is we’ll hear nothing about his comments on CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, Fox et al, nor will we read about them in the pages of the big city newspapers. The comments will be discussed for a few days on remote corners of the Internet like this site, and then be forgotten about.
tutan_khamun

It’ll never happen, there’s no profit in peace. And war has been the bread and butter of the American economy for 100 years. 50% of our budget goes to “defense” (war) so why is this counsel even considering the possibility of peace? Throwing crumbs to Obama’s base, perhaps.
frigate

Lets cut the BS and prosecute the Bushites responsible for it all.
Anton van der Baan

“the crimes that took place on September 11th, 2011″

2011??? oops
GeorgeA

Could this be a tiny pinprick of light at the end of the long tunnel?

Couple things that are noteworthy:

1. It is very important that the ‘war’ on terror is going to be held to ‘conventional legal standards’. It is important that the war has been acknowledged to even have an ‘end’, as much of what came out of the Bush Admin indicated that it would be a war ‘without end’.

2. This could signal the long-term thinking of the Obama admin. Having a pentagon lawyer sort of float the idea in a bit of a wonky backwater could be a good way to test the reaction to the idea that the GWOT might actually end. Obama is cautious, and he should proceed with caution. While ending wars quickly is certainly preferable to extending them, ending wars must be done carefully lest a ‘stab in the back’ type myth emerge a generation later and get us right back into the mess.

3. Of course, there are those who will simply say Obama loves war/is a MIC puppet/doesn’t care/gets off on killing kids. But then that raises the question, why send this guy out to say these things at all? It’s not like he was talking off the record, these were prepared remarks. If Obama wanted to keep blowing people up, he could simply have maintained the old line about ‘the long war’.

4. It is very interesting that we first saw that Obama was trying to limit the ability of future presidents to use drones. Now he’s tentatively putting out the idea that once the GWOT is declared over, many of these operations will no longer have justification. If Obama is clever (and I think that he is), he is trying to wind this war down in a way that will appear to the hawks as legitimate. Again, trying to avoid the ‘stab-in-the-back’ problem.
Memory_Hole

Your take on it is interesting. It’s always good to try to be clear-eyed about these things, neither cynical nor credulous. I didn’t know Obama had tried to limit the ability of future presidents to use drones? Source? You know, even though the man’s remarks were “prepared,” we can’t say for sure that they represent Obama. They are *supposed* to represent his administration. But it’s possible he included some unauthorized views as well, for reasons of conscience.

I believe there are still some good people in govt., at all levels, including the Dept. of Defense, who know damn well the fraudulent basis of the “war on terror”–and it’s possible this Jeh Johnson is one of them. There are others, who remain nameless, yet work to expose the lies. I’m thinking of whoever it was in the Dept. of Justice who finally exposed the fact that the calls to Ted Olsen from his wife on Flight 77 never happened. Clearly, that little leak was not part of the officially sanctioned script. Unfortunately, almost no one knows about it, because the corporate media doesn’t report it, or reports it so briefly it’s as though it doesn’t register.
GeorgeA

I was referring to the ‘guidelines’ that the Obama administration is working on. These would set up a framework under which drones strikes would be taken. They were given priority status when it seemed possible for Romney to win, but are now not being rushed. http://www.commondreams.org/he…

Still, it shows that Obama is thinking long-term. Most important, it seems that Mr. Johnson is indicating that if the GWOT is declared over, the kill list becomes completely inoperative. Obama, who has seemed like such a hawkish president thus far, may end up surprising everyone.
Memory_Hole

I read the article you linked. It says that Obama claims to want to “put a legal architecture in place…to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making” (vis a vis drone strikes).

At the same time, the article doesn’t mention the fact that Obama has increased drone strikes several hundred fold over the prior administration. Moreover, In court, fighting lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on targeted killings, the administration has refused even to acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.

I find it bizarre that a president who claims to want a lawful process re: drones has in fact expanded what is a de facto process of extrajudicial assassination several hundredfold beyond that of George W. Bush. I find it bizarre that his seeming democratic sensibilities are contradicted by his arguments in court, which refuse to even acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.

So yes, I agree Obama is thinking long-term. Long term, he wants to institutionalize the use of drones for these extrajudicial assassinations, which again, he has drastically increased over Bush. And if we put that together with the NDAA which he signed, his war on whistleblowers and his continued signing on to the country being in a “state of emergency,” I don’t find anything to be reassured about here.

As far as the GWOT being declared over, I can find nothing in Obama’s *actions* to indicate that he personally is looking toward that day at any time in the foreseeable future, notwithstanding Mr. Johnson’s remarks.
Norton_Fort

Please see my response to Bill from Saginaw, above, about some of Jeh Johnson’s history with the Obama administration. And Obama is not trying to “limit the ability of future presidents to use drones.” He’s trying to institutionalize his policy to bind future presidents. Check out a series of articles on Obama’s attempts to extend these strikes into the future (for a minimum of 10 years, but probably longer) in the Washington Post. I don’t have the link, because I read the articles in the paper version, but the author of the series is Greg Miller and it was published in the Post on October 24-26. The caption of the Oct. 24 story (on p. 1) is “U.S. set to keep kill lists for years; ‘Disposition Matrix’ Secretly Crafted; Blueprint would guide hunt for terrorists.” “A senior White House official” gave the following quote: “One of the things we are looking at very hard is how to institutionalize a process that will outlive this administration.” I recommend the series. It is among the best reporting I have seen in the Post, which, although it has lousy editorial policy, occasionally has excellent reporting. But don’t take my word for it — read the series. I’d be interested in what you think.
New Afrikan ImageMakers

its a dangerous position, for Prez Obama and the rest of us, too, isn’t it…its eazy to level heavy criticism at presidents in general…but Obama’s behind is literally on the line–especially if he goes against the war machine.
jimbojamesiv

While I disagree with a lot of what you say the thing about Obama “trying to limit the ability of future presidents to use drones,” is unequivocally false.

The reason Obama rushed to codify the rules on drones was to cover his ass.
lucitanian

What absolute Hollywood virtual reality nonsense ; a terrorist state declares the end of a war against a myth they invented. What broody next, “aliens”? How gullible do the people who think this crap up believe their audience is?

He guys, more people are killed by their household furniture than by terrorism and that is not because Ikea is doing a bad job while DHS is doing a good one. But, certainly a Global War on Falling Kitchen Cabinets would be a lot cheaper than DHS Annual budget, US$60.4 billion (FY 2012).

You know what really is a security risk? Climate change, but for that they would actually have to “do” something rather than shovel money between friends and lobbies.
timebiter

While they are at it why not end the drug war, overturn the patriot act revamp and disperse./end DHS. Oops! I forgot. To many corporations getting welfare from these programs and laws.
Laurence Schechtman

You get about 3 times as many jobs hiring teachers as you do supporting the military. Obama and many capitalists know that an economic collapse is coming, and that converting “Defense” spending to the civilian economy MAY be the only way to head it off, without pre-Reagan taxes on the rich, which they are not going to do. So MAYBE, ending “permanent war” is the only way Obama can see to avoid a 30′s style depression, which would wreck his “legacy” forever. MAYBE. We can only hope.
Paul_Klinkman_two

American: Hi, we’ve come to give you democracy.

Afghani: The local warlord has ordered me to grow opium for him. I’ll be shot if I don’t follow his directions. When will I get this democracy and be free?

American: The heck I know. Maybe we’re really here to give ourselves the democracy.

Afghani: But when will you get this democracy?

American: The heck I know.
MidaFo

Yet more Dubyaspeak.

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Dem. Socialism•16 hours ago
OUT NOW! Enough posturing, lying, concealing, and spinning. There is absolutely NO REASON except supporting Big Oil and the MIC to still be over there pissing off dollars that are needed at home.

Our “leaders” have no idea why they are in D.C. None! Taking care of America’s people FIRST is their damned jobs. Where is the outrage?! Where are the crowds, like the Egyptians and Greeks, assaulting the capitol?! WHERE IS OUR COURAGE?!
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- itsthethird Dem. Socialism•13 hours ago
  
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  Remember real power in Washington is not at the white house but at Fed. Reserve and beyond the game is rigged. Now at all times the US economy is at risk by capital manipulation minor or major ie fiscal mess and in turn the Presidency and the world. The situation of too much in too few hands is in fact a security risk as great as WMD. Thus, we are going over the same old fiscal bs. The president needs to protect usa from financial sabatage both dimestic and foregn but can’t his risk to great.
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Tom Carberry•15 hours ago
Remarkable words from someone in the Pentagon. Will he keep his job? Will it have any effect? Will anyone but academics in England listen to him? Will he have any influence on Obama, who seems to love war and killing and has personally directed killing of Muslims?
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LocalHero•14 hours ago
Oh, that’s right. We’re supposed to all believe that some guy in a cave (who, incidentally, died in late 2001) engineered an ingenious plan to hijack several airliners with box-cutters and, in doing so, managed to outwit the planet’s most all-encompassing intelligence and policing agencies. Yeah, let’s all pretend we believe that.
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- Paul Fretheim LocalHero•13 hours ago
  
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  I agree. What rubbish!
  
  The worst act of terrorism in history was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japanese cities. The world has been intimidated by terror ever since and the U.S. is and has been the greatest purveyor of that terror. So terror continues to rule until the nukes are disarmed.
  
  Here is a brief live news report (32 seconds) from ABC 7 New York from the foot of the World Trade Center Towers. What is seen here directly contradicts the entire fantasy of planes crashing into the buildings caused them to fall down.
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?f…
  
  Think about it. The entire course of history has been altered by an obviously false story.
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  - Shantiananda Paul Fretheim•9 hours ago
    
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    Jet fuel is kerosene and kerosene cannot melt steel, let alone pulverize a 110 story building into fine dust particles. And of course, no one can explain WTC #7 that was not hit by a plane! 3000 of our fellow and innocent citizens were murdered in cold blood on 911, plus who knows how many, have died and will die in the future from the toxic dust. I do not know who was behind 911, but the entire governments con- conspiracy theory is a bogus lie.
    
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    - Laurence Schechtman Shantiananda•7 hours ago
      
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      The obvious truth that the buildings were brought down by internal explosions can not be stated often enough. No steel frame skyscraper has ever collapsed completely because of fire alone. There is plenty of other evidence, but that should be enough.
      
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  - beaglebailey Paul Fretheim•12 hours ago
    
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    Please explain what you mean. I watched it but don’t understand what you mean. Thanks. Watched again. The guy said explosions and I could see them. Is that what you meant? Great vid.
    
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    - Memory_Hole beaglebailey•12 hours ago
      
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      Yes, it was the “huge explosion(s)” that brought those towers down. Not jet impacts and jet fuel fires. This is physics 101.
      
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      - beaglebailey Memory_Hole•12 hours ago
        
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        Yeah, I have seen the vids where the supposed plane stops in mid air after blowing thru the buildings.It is just so amazing how so many people cannot see thru the bs of the false flag. And why no one ever questions the facts that the US military’s jets never scrambled even with 4 jets in the air for over an hour.
        
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        Memory_Hole beaglebailey•11 hours ago
        
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        I don’t know what vids you’re talking about. The planes hit the buildings. And yes, they were planes. As far as the jets, they *did* scramble, but they scrambled way too slowly and then went at about half speed.
        
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Bill_from_Saginaw1•15 hours ago
Jeh Johnson’s spech at Oxford Union is worth reading in its entirety by clicking on the link. I particularly valued his remark to the effect that “War reverses the natural order of things, in which children bury their parents; in war, parents bury their children.” Johnson concludes that the concept of “endless war” should not be permitted to become the “new normal” for the United States nor the international community.
It will be interesting to see what coverage or reaction in commentary there is in the mainstream US media in the near future. There are several intriguing possible developments to watch. Maybe only websites like CD, European-oriented media outlets like Reuters, and leftist British papers like the Guardian think there’s something newsworthy going on here. But we shall see.

First, in terms of the opaque, glacially slow bureaucratic shifts at the pinnacle of the Washington DC beltway power structure, it may be noteworthy that this is the Pentagon’s chief lawyer – the civilian legal counsel to the post-Robert Gates/Donald Rumsfeld Department of Defense – who is speaking. He’s not speaking at West Point. He’s not even speaking on American soil. He’s delivering well-vetted remarks before a receptive assembly of academically minded listeners far away from the crosshairs of the partisan American political scene.

But very much in the tradition of President Barack Obama’s style of dealing with national security-related issues, we have (miraculously) the military establishment taking the lead, talking openly about bringing the global war on terror to a finite end, and restoring the concept that “lone wolf” or other scattered “terrorist groups” should be treated as criminals or as criminal conspiracies in the future – a law enforcement priority, not automatically enemy combatants. On behalf of the troops, Jeh Johnson is cautiously voicing thoughts that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the rest of the so-called responsible, reality-based political community back stateside have not dared to utter publicly for over a decade.

Second, again peering at what the Washington tea leaves may signify, reflect that (reportedly, according to the insiders) the current Attorney General, Secretary of State, and some other members of Obama’s cabinet are ready to exit out the revolving door to pursue other endeavors. Jeh Johnson? A distinguished jurist and Morehouse man, loyal to this president and none other (his words, during the course of this speech) may be toe testing some big waters from the other side of the Atlantic pond.

If the soldiers and sailors and spies can get institutionally herded on board to declare victory in the global war on terror first, then perhaps there may be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. The GOP Senate leadership and the right wing media megaphone will no doubt shriek and react vehemently. Let us see what we shall see.

Good luck, Jeh. This is a thoughtful first step on what may be a long and arduous trek back towards sanity from the bloody, dystopian post-9/11 quagmire. The whole world is not breathlessly watching, but what happens next is well worth a peek for those who consider themselves part of the American peace movement.

Bill from Saginaw
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- Memory_Hole Bill_from_Saginaw1•12 hours ago
  
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  Well, permanent war *has* been permitted to become the new norm in the U.S., regardless of what this fellow says about it. Actually, I believe Dick Cheney said the GWOT would last generations, so he suggested at least 20 years or more. So technically, we could say we are not in a state of permanent war, but when you reflect that this particular war was based on false flag terrorism, and you look at all the dictatorial powers that have been granted to the presidency since then, it is pretty clear that the US has been permanently changed. It’s not as though there are any meaningful sunset provisions to the PATRIOT Act, or the NDAA.
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- dogpaddle Bill_from_Saginaw1•15 hours ago
  
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  If you listen to his spiel: “A distinguished jurist and Morehouse man, loyal to this president” kind of says it all. He nauseated me.
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- Siouxrose Bill_from_Saginaw1•14 hours ago
  
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  Thank you for that thorough, helpful analysis. You highlight the most significant possibilities.
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- Norton_Fort Bill_from_Saginaw1•8 hours ago
  
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  Even so, the speech needs to be put in context. Earlier this year Johnson defended Obama’s drone strike policy in a speech at Yale Law School: “The Obama administration’s top Pentagon lawyer . . . said that courts have no business questioning executive branch decisions about whom to target for extra-judicial executions in the war on terror, even if that target is an American citizen.” http://news.antiwar.com/2012/0…. However, Johnson also said that the administration’s plans to continue airstrikes against Libya violated the War Powers Act. (So did the DOJ). Obama rejected that advice and instead followed that of a White House counsel and Secretary of State lawyer Howard Koh. Koh seems to be the Obama administration’s John Yoo, although he strongly denounced Bush’s Iraq policy. Guess it depends on who’s paying your salary.
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rtdrury•14 hours ago
9/11 exposed how very unintelligent and emotionally perverted das elites really are. They have spent the time since frantically escalating the petro-opiate bread/circus assault on the people in an attempt to stave off popular revolt against the catastrophic turbulence created by their war on humanity.
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Thoughts_Into_Action•12 hours ago
Well, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, is simply making up the law as they go. What’s this concept of breaking the law for just a short while, coming from Obama’s legal advisor? That idea makes the law utterly meaningless. Right now, the law is whatever Obama says it is, and there seems to be no check at all on his illegally presumed powers, including his assumption of the power to assassinate anyone at will.

Quite frankly, the United States under Bush/Bama has blatantly violated international and U.S. laws. They’ve invaded countries with troops to kill stateless individuals (50 al Quaida members), which is an act of war, rather than a police action. Guys with “plans” in Pakistan or Afghanistan do not represent an imminent threat to the United States.

Worst of all, this lawyer has the nerve to talk about World War II. He says, “For this particular conflict, all I can say today is that we should look to conventional legal principles to supply the answer, and that both our Nations faced similar challenging questions after the cessation of hostilities in World War II, and our governments delayed the release of some Nazi German prisoners of war.” Well, under those principles, the United States remains as a gross violator of the law.

I’m not sure why this guy is droning on about this issue. We know the Obama administration is continuing those illegal actions: torture, assassination, war without end.
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- Memory_Hole Thoughts_Into_Action•12 hours ago
  
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  I have to agree TIA. I don’t think there’s much new here. Whatever he may have *said* about it, the United States is *de facto* in a state of permanent war. It is unconstitutional, unlawful, illegal, and as you say, Bush & Obama, with the willful complicity of a corrupt Congress, just making up the law as they go along.
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Kokr_Spanielesko•14 hours ago
“The speech to the Oxford Union did not forecast when such a moment would arrive”

It probably won’t. What would the government, the military and the whole MICC do after all this time without war? I just don’t believe it. Chris Hedges wrote a book called ‘War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning’. That hasn’t changed. And General Patton’s words still ring true: “Americans traditionally love to fight.”
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Hello•15 hours ago
Well, it is clear to me that the world community is much more interconnected than it used to be. It is as if war has lost its purpose: It has lost its chivalry, in a sense. Nowadays, nations go to war for the sake of the few to make some serious money while most people in the society foot the bill for it! It no longer serves to benefit and preserve the national culture of a given people. Going to war and financially paying for it on credit? Borrowing money from foreign nations in order to finance a military excursion? How absurd! Of course, killing human beings simply for the sake of both commodities and currency that the majority of the society do not benefit from is just…wrong. Aforementioned, to me, are immoral reasons to go to war!
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Doug Latimer•8 hours ago
The “war” will never end

Because in the empire game

You can’t boogie without a boogeyman

And given Engelhardt’s undeniably accurate portrayal of the GWOT ™ as a “‘war’ for domination”

How can you call its launching “impulsive”?

Inquiring – and incredulous – minds want to know.
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Memory_Hole•12 hours ago
Hard to know how to take Johnson’s comments. The whole so-called “global war on terror” has been a big fraud from day one, and everything he says about Al Qaeda today could have been said about it in 2001. Somehow, I can draw no encouragement from them. If he is someone with perhaps some remnant of conscience left who is trying to speak out and bring this madness of permanent war to an end, well, god be with him.

My guess is we’ll hear nothing about his comments on CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, Fox et al, nor will we read about them in the pages of the big city newspapers. The comments will be discussed for a few days on remote corners of the Internet like this site, and then be forgotten about.
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tutan_khamun•13 hours ago
It’ll never happen, there’s no profit in peace. And war has been the bread and butter of the American economy for 100 years. 50% of our budget goes to “defense” (war) so why is this counsel even considering the possibility of peace? Throwing crumbs to Obama’s base, perhaps.
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frigate•10 hours ago
Lets cut the BS and prosecute the Bushites responsible for it all.
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Anton van der Baan•16 hours ago
“the crimes that took place on September 11th, 2011″

2011??? oops
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GeorgeA•12 hours ago
Could this be a tiny pinprick of light at the end of the long tunnel?

Couple things that are noteworthy:

1. It is very important that the ‘war’ on terror is going to be held to ‘conventional legal standards’. It is important that the war has been acknowledged to even have an ‘end’, as much of what came out of the Bush Admin indicated that it would be a war ‘without end’.

2. This could signal the long-term thinking of the Obama admin. Having a pentagon lawyer sort of float the idea in a bit of a wonky backwater could be a good way to test the reaction to the idea that the GWOT might actually end. Obama is cautious, and he should proceed with caution. While ending wars quickly is certainly preferable to extending them, ending wars must be done carefully lest a ‘stab in the back’ type myth emerge a generation later and get us right back into the mess.

3. Of course, there are those who will simply say Obama loves war/is a MIC puppet/doesn’t care/gets off on killing kids. But then that raises the question, why send this guy out to say these things at all? It’s not like he was talking off the record, these were prepared remarks. If Obama wanted to keep blowing people up, he could simply have maintained the old line about ‘the long war’.

4. It is very interesting that we first saw that Obama was trying to limit the ability of future presidents to use drones. Now he’s tentatively putting out the idea that once the GWOT is declared over, many of these operations will no longer have justification. If Obama is clever (and I think that he is), he is trying to wind this war down in a way that will appear to the hawks as legitimate. Again, trying to avoid the ‘stab-in-the-back’ problem.
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- Memory_Hole GeorgeA•11 hours ago
  
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  Your take on it is interesting. It’s always good to try to be clear-eyed about these things, neither cynical nor credulous. I didn’t know Obama had tried to limit the ability of future presidents to use drones? Source? You know, even though the man’s remarks were “prepared,” we can’t say for sure that they represent Obama. They are *supposed* to represent his administration. But it’s possible he included some unauthorized views as well, for reasons of conscience.
  
  I believe there are still some good people in govt., at all levels, including the Dept. of Defense, who know damn well the fraudulent basis of the “war on terror”–and it’s possible this Jeh Johnson is one of them. There are others, who remain nameless, yet work to expose the lies. I’m thinking of whoever it was in the Dept. of Justice who finally exposed the fact that the calls to Ted Olsen from his wife on Flight 77 never happened. Clearly, that little leak was not part of the officially sanctioned script. Unfortunately, almost no one knows about it, because the corporate media doesn’t report it, or reports it so briefly it’s as though it doesn’t register.
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  - GeorgeA Memory_Hole•10 hours ago
    
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    I was referring to the ‘guidelines’ that the Obama administration is working on. These would set up a framework under which drones strikes would be taken. They were given priority status when it seemed possible for Romney to win, but are now not being rushed. http://www.commondreams.org/he…
    
    Still, it shows that Obama is thinking long-term. Most important, it seems that Mr. Johnson is indicating that if the GWOT is declared over, the kill list becomes completely inoperative. Obama, who has seemed like such a hawkish president thus far, may end up surprising everyone.
    
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    - Memory_Hole GeorgeA•9 hours ago
      
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      I read the article you linked. It says that Obama claims to want to “put a legal architecture in place…to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making” (vis a vis drone strikes).
      
      At the same time, the article doesn’t mention the fact that Obama has increased drone strikes several hundred fold over the prior administration. Moreover, In court, fighting lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on targeted killings, the administration has refused even to acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.
      
      I find it bizarre that a president who claims to want a lawful process re: drones has in fact expanded what is a de facto process of extrajudicial assassination several hundredfold beyond that of George W. Bush. I find it bizarre that his seeming democratic sensibilities are contradicted by his arguments in court, which refuse to even acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.
      
      So yes, I agree Obama is thinking long-term. Long term, he wants to institutionalize the use of drones for these extrajudicial assassinations, which again, he has drastically increased over Bush. And if we put that together with the NDAA which he signed, his war on whistleblowers and his continued signing on to the country being in a “state of emergency,” I don’t find anything to be reassured about here.
      
      As far as the GWOT being declared over, I can find nothing in Obama’s *actions* to indicate that he personally is looking toward that day at any time in the foreseeable future, notwithstanding Mr. Johnson’s remarks.
      
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  - Norton_Fort Memory_Hole•7 hours ago
    
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    Please see my response to Bill from Saginaw, above, about some of Jeh Johnson’s history with the Obama administration. And Obama is not trying to “limit the ability of future presidents to use drones.” He’s trying to institutionalize his policy to bind future presidents. Check out a series of articles on Obama’s attempts to extend these strikes into the future (for a minimum of 10 years, but probably longer) in the Washington Post. I don’t have the link, because I read the articles in the paper version, but the author of the series is Greg Miller and it was published in the Post on October 24-26. The caption of the Oct. 24 story (on p. 1) is “U.S. set to keep kill lists for years; ‘Disposition Matrix’ Secretly Crafted; Blueprint would guide hunt for terrorists.” “A senior White House official” gave the following quote: “One of the things we are looking at very hard is how to institutionalize a process that will outlive this administration.” I recommend the series. It is among the best reporting I have seen in the Post, which, although it has lousy editorial policy, occasionally has excellent reporting. But don’t take my word for it — read the series. I’d be interested in what you think.
    
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- New Afrikan ImageMakers GeorgeA•9 hours ago
  
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  its a dangerous position, for Prez Obama and the rest of us, too, isn’t it…its eazy to level heavy criticism at presidents in general…but Obama’s behind is literally on the line–especially if he goes against the war machine.
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- jimbojamesiv GeorgeA•6 hours ago
  
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  While I disagree with a lot of what you say the thing about Obama “trying to limit the ability of future presidents to use drones,” is unequivocally false.
  
  The reason Obama rushed to codify the rules on drones was to cover his ass.
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lucitanian•an hour ago
What absolute Hollywood virtual reality nonsense ; a terrorist state declares the end of a war against a myth they invented. What broody next, “aliens”? How gullible do the people who think this crap up believe their audience is?

He guys, more people are killed by their household furniture than by terrorism and that is not because Ikea is doing a bad job while DHS is doing a good one. But, certainly a Global War on Falling Kitchen Cabinets would be a lot cheaper than DHS Annual budget, US$60.4 billion (FY 2012).

You know what really is a security risk? Climate change, but for that they would actually have to “do” something rather than shovel money between friends and lobbies.
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timebiter•3 hours ago
While they are at it why not end the drug war, overturn the patriot act revamp and disperse./end DHS. Oops! I forgot. To many corporations getting welfare from these programs and laws.
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Laurence Schechtman•6 hours ago
You get about 3 times as many jobs hiring teachers as you do supporting the military. Obama and many capitalists know that an economic collapse is coming, and that converting “Defense” spending to the civilian economy MAY be the only way to head it off, without pre-Reagan taxes on the rich, which they are not going to do. So MAYBE, ending “permanent war” is the only way Obama can see to avoid a 30′s style depression, which would wreck his “legacy” forever. MAYBE. We can only hope.
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Paul_Klinkman_two•11 hours ago
American: Hi, we’ve come to give you democracy.

Afghani: The local warlord has ordered me to grow opium for him. I’ll be shot if I don’t follow his directions. When will I get this democracy and be free?

American: The heck I know. Maybe we’re really here to give ourselves the democracy.

Afghani: But when will you get this democracy?

American: The heck I know.
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MidaFo•12 hours ago
Yet more Dubyaspeak.
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Lies We Still Tell Ourselves about 9/11 September 3, 2011

Posted by rogerhollander in 9/11.
Tags: 9/11, 9/11 commission, 9/11 motive, 9/11 report, 9/ll saddam, arab-israeli conflict, Iraq invasion, israeli occupation, israeli-palestinian, kenneth pollack, leon panetta, Middle East, mohamed atta, Muslims, netanyahu, Palestinians, robert fisk, roger hollander, wmds
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Published on Saturday, September 3, 2011 by The Independent/UK

Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears?

by Robert Fisk

By their books, ye shall know them.

I’m talking about the volumes, the libraries – nay, the very halls of literature – which the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 have spawned. Many are spavined with pseudo-patriotism and self-regard, others rotten with the hopeless mythology of CIA/Mossad culprits, a few (from the Muslim world, alas) even referring to the killers as “boys”, almost all avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.

Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?

American publishers first went to war in 2001 with massive photo-memorial volumes. Their titles spoke for themselves: Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of Swords… Seeing this stuff piled on newsstands across America, who could doubt that the US was going to go to war? And long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, another pile of tomes arrived to justify the war after the war. Most prominent among them was ex-CIA spook Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm – and didn’t we all remember Churchill’s The Gathering Storm? – which, needless to say, compared the forthcoming battle against Saddam with the crisis faced by Britain and France in 1938.

There were two themes to this work by Pollack – “one of the world’s leading experts on Iraq,” the blurb told readers, among whom was Fareed Zakaria (“one of the most important books on American foreign policy in years,” he drivelled) – the first of which was a detailed account of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction; none of which, as we know, actually existed. The second theme was the opportunity to sever the “linkage” between “the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict”.

The Palestinians, deprived of the support of powerful Iraq, went the narrative, would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians’ “vicious terrorist campaign” – but without any criticism of Israel. He wrote of “weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses (sic)”, the standard Israeli version of events. America’s bias towards Israel was no more than an Arab “belief”. Well, at least the egregious Pollack had worked out, in however slovenly a fashion, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had something to do with 9/11, even if Saddam had not.

In the years since, of course, we’ve been deluged with a rich literature of post-9/11 trauma, from the eloquent The Looming Tower of Lawrence Wright to the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, whose supporters have told us that the plane wreckage outside the Pentagon was dropped by a C-130, that the jets that hit the World Trade Centre were remotely guided, that United 93 was shot down by a US missile, etc. Given the secretive, obtuse and sometimes dishonest account presented by the White House – not to mention the initial hoodwinking of the official 9/11 commission staff – I am not surprised that millions of Americans believe some of this, let alone the biggest government lie: that Saddam was behind 9/11. Leon Panetta, the CIA’s newly appointed autocrat, repeated this same lie in Baghdad only this year.

There have been movies, too. Flight 93 re-imagined what may (or may not) have happened aboard the plane which fell into a Pennsylvania wood. Another told a highly romanticised story, in which the New York authorities oddly managed to prevent almost all filming on the actual streets of the city. And now we’re being deluged with TV specials, all of which have accepted the lie that 9/11 did actually change the world – it was the Bush/Blair repetition of this dangerous notion that allowed their thugs to indulge in murderous invasions and torture – without for a moment asking why the press and television went along with the idea. So far, not one of these programmes has mentioned the word “Israel” – and Brian Lapping’s Thursday night ITV offering mentioned “Iraq” once, without explaining the degree to which 11 September 2001 provided the excuse for this 2003 war crime. How many died on 9/11? Almost 3,000. How many died in the Iraq war? Who cares?

Publication of the official 9/11 report – in 2004, but read the new edition of 2011 – is indeed worth study, if only for the realities it does present, although its opening sentences read more like those of a novel than of a government inquiry. “Tuesday … dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States… For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travellers were Mohamed Atta…” Were these guys, I ask myself, interns at Time magazine?

But I’m drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. “All the evidence … indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level,” they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel”. Palestine, the authors state, “was certainly the principal political grievance … driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg”.

The motivation for the attacks was “ducked” even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors. The commissioners had disagreed on this “issue” – cliché code word for “problem” – and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: “This was sensitive ground …Commissioners who argued that al-Qa’ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict… In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa’ida’s opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.” And there you have it.

So what happened? The commissioners, Summers and Swan state, “settled on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive”. There’s a hint in the official report – but only in a footnote which, of course, few read. In other words, we still haven’t told the truth about the crime which – we are supposed to believe – “changed the world for ever”. Mind you, after watching Obama on his knees before Netanyahu last May, I’m really not surprised.

When the Israeli Prime Minister gets even the US Congress to grovel to him, the American people are not going to be told the answer to the most important and “sensitive” question of 9/11: why?

<!–

–>

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

more Robert Fisk

Would You Fight for the Life of a Man Who Shot You and Left You for Dead? July 24, 2011

Posted by rogerhollander in 9/11, Criminal Justice, Texas.
Tags: 9/11, capital punishment, chong mah, death penalty, forgiveness, hate crime, johnnie baston, leroy white, liliana segura, mark stroman, Rais Bhuiyan, roger hollander, ruby white, state murder, texas, texas death, texas execution, texas justice, timothy adams
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Roger’s note: the United States is one of the few nations in the world that allows for the barbarism of state execution. I read a few years ago that the thee jurisdictions in the world with the most state executions were China, Texas and Florida. By pure coincidence Texas and Florida for many years were governed by a couple of renowned statesmen who go by the names of George W. and Jeb Bush. A proud heritage.

LilianaSegura.com / By Liliana Segura

Capital punishment is supposed to bring closure to victims’
families, but ignores the wishes of those who prefer forgiveness.

July 22, 2011 |

A death penalty case in Texas received a lot of media attention in the past several
weeks, as state prison authorities prepared to execute Mark Stroman, a man who
shot and killed two people in a vengeful rampage after September
11^th. His victims, who he targeted because he thought they were Arab,
were a Pakistani man named Waqar Hasan and an Indian man named Vasudev Patel. A
third man survived. His name is Rais Bhuiyan. He is Muslim, from Bangladesh. He
has told his story to news outlets across the country; how he was approached at
the gas station where he worked, how Stroman, a tattooed white man, demanded,
“where are you from?” as he brandished a gun. How he had not yet answered when
he felt “the sensation of a million bees stinging my face, and then heard an
explosion” as Stroman shot him. Bhuiyan survived, somehow, and was
left blinded in one eye.

To the surprise of many, Bhuiyan devoted himself in the past several months
to fighting for Stroman’s life, pleading with Texas not to kill the man who
brutally shot him and left him for dead. After discussing it with Hasan’s and
Patel’s families, he started a petition on Stroman’s behalf asking the Texas
Board of Pardons and Parole to spare his life, and posting it on a
website in which he preached forgiveness: “In order to live in a better and
peaceful world, we need to break the cycle of hate and violence,” he wrote. “…I
forgave Mark Stroman many years ago. I believe he was ignorant and not capable
of distinguishing between right and wrong. Otherwise he wouldn’t have done what
he did.” Despite Bhuiyan’s efforts, Stroman was executed by lethal injection on July 20^th.

Bhuiyan’s story is extraordinary in many ways, heavy with the symbolic weight
of 9/11. His willingness to forgive and even fight for the life of a man who
tried to murder him has moved many people, with good reason. But it’s worth
remembering that victims of violent crime oppose the death penalty more often
than we may realize, and, like Bhuiyan so far, they are often disregarded. As
much as prosecutors and politicians love to insist that the toughest penalties
are meted out on behalf of victims and their grieving family members, the
reality is that deference to the mantle of “victim” often relies on a
full-throated embrace of the harshest sentence for the people whose job it is
for them to punish. Anything less is liable to be ignored.

Take another Texas case from a few months back. An Army veteran named Timothy
Adams was put to death in the killing of his 19-month-old son during a standoff
with police. Adams was suicidal at the time; he immediately turned himself in
and expressed remorse for his crime. As Texas prepared to put him to death, his
family members begged for clemency. “Our family lost one child,” his father said. “We don’t deserve to lose another. After my grandson’s
death, we lived through pain worse than anyone could imagine. Nothing good will
come from executing my son Tim and causing us more anguish.” Adams was executed by lethal injection on February 23^rd.

That same month, in Ohio, a man named Johnnie Baston faced execution for the
killing of a South Korean store clerk in Toledo. The man’s family members fought
for clemency, but were ignored by the state parole board, which voted
unanimously to put him to death. “While many members of Mr. Mah’s family favor a
commutation to life without parole, Mr. Baston’s lack of accepting
responsibility, criminal history, and the severity of the execution-style
killing of Mr. Chong Mah outweigh their personal opinions regarding the death
penalty and their wishes as to the sentence imposed in this case,” the parole
board concluded.

“The death of Johnnie Baston isn’t going to do anything that’s going to bring
back our father, give us any closure or gratification,” his son, Peter Mah
argued to no avail. Baston was executed on March 10^th.

The same thing happened in Alabama in January. Leroy White was executed over the wishes of his victim’s family members,
who, as in the case of Timothy Adams, included family members of his own. White
was sentenced to death for the killing of his wife, Ruby, with whom he had a
young daughter, Latonya. In a signed affidavit, she described how despite years
of anger at her father for taking her mother away, she was now very close to him
and “have grown to love him just as much as any child would love their parent…I
know that he did a terrible thing by taking my mother’s life, but I have
forgiven him completely.”

I am deeply opposed to my father’s
execution. He is the only thing that I have left that’s a part of me. Taking
away my only remaining biological parent will hurt me more than I can say.
Executing my father will do nothing to bring my mother back. I would do anything
in my power to stop this execution from taking place.

Leroy White was executed on January 13^th.

Some would argue that cases like White’s and Adams’s are different, that
of course family members of murderers will argue to spare the life of a
relative, even if they have taken one of their own. To do so sets up a strange
hierarchy of victimization—who are the “good” victims?—but one that is all too
real. The family members of death row prisoners are rarely included under the
banner of “victim’s family,” but when the state has killed your loved one, what
are you then?

As we were so aggressively reminded after the death of Osama bin Laden, the
killing of killers is celebrated as a way to bring “closure” to people who have
suffered terrible losses at their hands. There are many reasons to question this notion, but whether this is ever
true can only depend on individual experiences. What is clear is that, when
those in a position to carry out the death penalty stand upon the moral pedestal
bestowed to them as a defender of victims’ rights, such “rights” have limits.
As Jeff Gamso, a criminal defense attorney in Ohio who has worked on capital
cases, wrote a few days before Stroman’s
execution: “Texas, of course, like Ohio, like other states, like the feds, is
deeply committed to ensuring the rights of crime victims. Their voices will be
heard. Their needs will be met. They will be offered support and comfort and
help. As long as they seek vengeance. The rights of victims don’t extend to
seeking mercy. At least, not so far.”

Liliana Segura is an independent journalist and
editor with a focus on social justice, prisons & harsh sentencing

Five Eye-Opening Facts About Our Bloated Post-9/11 ‘Defense’ May 30, 2011

Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, War.
Tags: 9/11, Afghanistan, Afghanistan War, canceled weapons, defense budget, dod, Iraq, Iraq war, joshua holland, Pentagon, post 9/11, roger hollander, war, war spending
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AlterNet /
By Joshua Holland

A dollar spent on guns is one less buck available for butter.

May 28, 2011 |

This week, the National
Priorities Project (NPP) released a snapshot of U.S. “defense” spending
since September 11, 2001. The eye-popping figures lend credence to the theory
that al Qaeda’s attacks were a form of economic warfare – that they hoped for a
massive overreaction that would entangle us in costly foreign wars that would
ultimately drain away our national wealth.

They didn’t bankrupt us the same way the
Mujahadeen helped bring down the Soviet Union
decades before, because our economy was much stronger. But they did succeed in
putting us deep into the red – with an assist, of course, from Bush’s
ideologically driven tax cuts for the wealthy.

The topline
number is this: we have spent $7.6 trillion on the military and homeland
security since 9/11. The Pentagon’s base budget – which doesn’t include the
costs of fighting our wars – has increased by 81 percent during that time (43
percent when adjusted for inflation). The costs of the conflicts in Afghanistan
and Iraq have now reached $1.26 trillion. But that only scratches the surface;
it doesn’t include the long-term costs of caring for badly wounded soldiers, for
example.

One line-item
suggests that 9/11 has been used to justify greater military spending across the
board; the nuclear weapons budget has shot up by more than a fifth after
adjusting for inflation. How intercontinental ballistic missiles that can
vaporize whole cities are useful in a “war on terror” is anybody’s
guess.

The Pentagon
itself acknowledges these dollars haven’t all been spent effectively – there is
certainly plenty of waste. According to the Washington
Post, the DoD has blown $32 billion
(enough to offer free, universal college tuition for a year) on canceled weapons
programs since 1997. According to the Post story, which is based on an unreleased Pentagon
report, “For almost a decade, the Defense Department saw its budgets boom
— but didn’t make the kind of technological strides that seemed possible.”

“Since 9/11, a near doubling of the Pentagon’s
modernization accounts — more than $700 billion over 10 years in new spending on
procurement, research and development — has resulted in relatively modest gains
in actual military capability,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an
address last week.

He called that outcome both “vexing and
disturbing.” Some might find the relentless focus on cutting benefits for
vulnerable Americans “vexing and disturbing” in light of this profligate
spending. Budgets, after all, are a reflection of our priorities.

Toward that end, let’s put these numbers in
perspective by looking at some of the other things we might be doing with those
dollars. Because a buck spent on guns is one less for butter.

1. Post-9/11 Defense Hikes Equal Five Times the
“Medicare Gap”

Economist Dean Baker notes
that “the projections in the Medicare Trustees report, as well as the CBO
baseline budget, show that the program faces a relatively modest long-term
shortfall.” The amount of money needed to balance the program’s finances over
its 75-year horizon, he adds, “is less than 0.3 percent of GDP, approximately
one-fifth of the increase in the rate annual defense spending between 2000 and
2011.”

2. Afghanistan Costs Alone Could Pay for 15.6
Years of Head Start

Head Start provides education, health, nutrition,
and parenting services to low-income children and their families. It’s an
incredibly successful, effective and popular program, but there are only 900,000
places in the program for more than 2.5 million eligible kids. According to the
National Priorities Project, what we’ve spent on the Afghanistan war so far
could fund Head Start for all eligible children for the next 15.6 years.

3. Covering the Uninsured

A 2007
study conducted by researchers at Harvard University estimated that 45,000
people die every year in the United States from problems associated with lack of
coverage. The study found that “uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40
percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts,” even
“after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors, and baseline
health.”

According to NPP’s
analysis, the costs of the Afghanistan conflict alone could cover every
uninsured American for 1.7 years.

4. Closing State Budget
Gaps

Forty-six states face budget
shortfalls in this fiscal year, totaling $130 billion nationwide. The
supplemental requests for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan this year add up to
$170 billion – that doesn’t include the Pentagon’s base budget, nukes or
Homeland Security.

5. Iraq, Just in 2011

Iraq is still a bloody mess, with
an insurgency still underway. But our politicians have declared vistory and
the media have largely moved on. That doesn’t mean we won’t spend almost $50
billion on those “non-combat troops” which remain, however. What else could we
do with that kind of scratch if we just brought them home? NPP tells us it would
buy:

24.3 million children receiving low-income health care for one year, OR
726,044 elementary school teachers for one year,
OR
829,946 firefighters for one year, OR
6.2 million Head Start slots for children for one
year, OR
10.7 million households with renewable electricity
– solar photovoltaic for one year, OR
28.6 million households with renewable
electricity-wind power for one year, OR
6.1 million military veterans receiving VA medical
care for one year, OR
9.8 million people receiving low-income health
care for one year, OR
718,208 police or sheriff’s patrol officers for
one year, OR
6.0 million scholarships for university students
for one year, OR
8.5 million students receiving Pell grants of
$5,550

The Big Picture

It’s a tragic irony that so much of the discussion
surrounding the public debt centers on “entitlements” like Social Security
(which hasn’t added a penny to the national debt) when we’re still paying for
Korea and Vietnam and Grenada and Panama and the first Gulf War and Somalia and
the Balkans and on and on.

Estimates of just how much of our national
debt payments are from past military spending vary wildly. In 2007, economist
Robert Higgs calculated it
like this:

I added up all past deficits (minus
surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to
each year’s ratio of narrowly defined national security spending–military,
veterans, and international affairs–to total federal spending, expressing
everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 91.2
percent of the value of the national debt held by the public at the end of 2006.
Therefore, I attribute that same percentage of the government’s net interest
outlays in that year to past debt-financed defense spending.

When Higgs did that analysis four years
ago, he came up with a figure of $206.7 billion just in interest payments on our
past military adventures.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at
AlterNet. He is the author of The
15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want
You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Bin Laden’s death doesn’t end his fear-mongering value May 9, 2011

Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, War on Terror.
Tags: 9/11, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, civil liberties, glenn greenwald, government power, roger hollander, schumer, war on terror
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Monday, May 9, 2011 07:35 ET

By Glenn Greenwald

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Bin Laden's death doesn't end his fear-mongering value

AP Photo/File

(updated below)

On Friday, government officials anonymously claimed that “a rushed examination” of the “trove” of documents and computer files taken from the bin Laden home prove — contrary to the widely held view that he “had been relegated to an inspirational figure with little role in current and future Qaeda operations” — that in fact “the chief of Al Qaeda played a direct role for years in plotting terror attacks.” Specifically, the Government possesses “a handwritten notebook from February 2010 that discusses tampering with tracks to derail a train on a bridge,” and that led “Obama administration officials on Thursday to issue a warning that Al Qaeda last year had considered attacks on American railroads.” That, in turn, led to headlines around the country like this one, from The Chicago Sun-Times:

The reality, as The New York Times noted deep in its article, was that “the information was both dated and vague,” and the official called it merely “aspirational,” acknowledging that “there was no evidence the discussion of rail attacks had moved beyond the conceptual stage“ In other words, these documents contain little more than a vague expression on the part of Al Qaeda to target railroads in major American cities (“focused on striking Washington, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago,” said the Sun-Times): hardly a surprise and — despite the scary headlines — hardly constituting any sort of substantial, tangible threat.

But no matter. Even in death, bin Laden continues to serve the valuable role of justifying always-increasing curtailments of liberty and expansions of government power. From Reuters (h/t Atrios):

Sen. Schumer proposes “no-ride list” for Amtrak trains

A senator on Sunday called for a “no-ride list” for Amtrak trains after intelligence gleaned from the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound pointed to potential attacks on the nation’s train system.

Sen. Charles Schumer said he would push as well for added funding for rail security and commuter and passenger train track inspections and more monitoring of stations nationwide.

“Circumstances demand we make adjustments by increasing funding to enhance rail safety and monitoring on commuter rail transit and screening who gets on Amtrak passenger trains, so that we can provide a greater level of security to the public,” the New York Democrat said at a news conference.

So Al Qaeda breathes the word “trains” and Schumer jumps and demands the creation of a massive, expensive and oppressive new Security State program to keep thousands and thousands of people off trains. The “no-fly” list has been nothing short of a Kafkaesque disaster: with thousands of people secretly placed on it without any explanation or real recourse, oftentimes causing them to be stranded in faraway places and unable to return home.

To replicate that for trains — all because some documents mentioned them among thousands of other ideas Al Qaeda has undoubtedly considered over the years — is hysteria and ludicrous over-reaction of the highest order. Trains can obviously be attacked without boarding them (indeed, these documents apparently discussed tampering with the rails, which wouldn’t require boarding the trains at all). And if there’s a “no-ride” list for Amtrak, why not for subways and buses, too? If Al Qaeda is found to have discussed targeting restaurants, will we have a no-eat list? If Al Qaeda is found to have discussed targeting large intersections or landmarks, will we have a no-walk list? How about a no-shop list in response to the targeting of malls?

But this, more or less, encapsulates the U.S. response to Terrorism since 9/11: the minute Al Qaeda utters a peep about anything, the political class collectively jumps to restrict our freedoms, empower the Government, and bankrupt ourselves in self-destructive pursuit of the ultimate illusion: Absolute Security. Al Qaeda has caused us to do more harm to ourselves than it could have ever dreamed of imposing on its own. And even in death, Osama bin Laden continues to serve as the pretext for all of this.

Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory

I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: “How Would a Patriot Act?” (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, and “A Tragic Legacy” (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, “Great American Hypocrites”, examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown.

Twitter: @ggreenwald
E-mail: GGreenwald@salon.com

WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if? December 14, 2010

Posted by rogerhollander in 9/11, Media.
Tags: 9/11, bogdan dzakovic, coleen rowley, fbi, journalism, roger hollander, sept. 11, terrorism, whitstle-blowers, wikileaks, wtc, zacarias moussaoui
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Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks.

October 15, 2010|By Coleen Rowley and Bogdan Dzakovic

If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, could the events of 9/11 have been prevented? The idea is worth considering.

The organization has drawn both high praise and searing criticism for its mission of publishing leaked documents without revealing their source, but we suspect the world hasn’t yet fully seen its potential. Let us explain.

There were a lot of us in the run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages. But we worked for ossified bureaucracies incapable of acting quickly and decisively. Lately, the two of us have been wondering how things might have been different if there had been a quick, confidential way to get information out.

One of us, Coleen Rowley, was a special agent/legal counsel at the FBI’s Minneapolis division and worked closely with those who arrested would-be terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui on an immigration violation less than a month before the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Following up on a tip from flight school instructors who had become suspicious of the French Moroccan who claimed to want to fly a jet as an “ego boost,” Special Agent Harry Samit and an INS colleague had detained Moussaoui. A foreign intelligence service promptly reported that he had connections with a foreign terrorist group, but FBI officials in Washington inexplicably turned down Samit’s request for authority to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer and personal effects.

Those same officials stonewalled Samit’s supervisor, who pleaded with them in late August 2001 that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” (Yes, he was that explicit.) Later, testifying at Moussaoui’s trial, Samit testified that he believed the behavior of his FBI superiors in Washington constituted “criminal negligence.”

The 9/11 Commission ultimately concluded that Moussaoui was most likely being primed as a Sept. 11 replacement pilot and that the hijackers probably would have postponed their strike if information about his arrest had been announced.

WikiLeaks might have provided a pressure valve for those agents who were terribly worried about what might happen and frustrated by their superiors’ seeming indifference. They were indeed stuck in a perplexing, no-win ethical dilemma as time ticked away. Their bosses issued continual warnings against “talking to the media” and frowned on whistle-blowing, yet the agents felt a strong need to protect the public.

The other one of us writing this piece, Federal Air Marshal Bogdan Dzakovic, once co-led the Federal Aviation Administration’s Red Team to probe for vulnerabilities in airport security. He also has a story of how warnings were ignored in the run-up to Sept. 11. In repeated tests of security, his team found weaknesses nine out of 10 times that would make it possible for hijackers to smuggle weapons aboard and seize control of airplanes. But the team’s reports were ignored and suppressed, and the team was shut down entirely after 9/11.

In testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Dzakovic summed up his experience this way: “The Red Team was extraordinarily successful in killing large numbers of innocent people in the simulated attacks …[and yet] we were ordered not to write up our reports and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities…. Finally, the FAA started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our ‘undercover’ tests and what we would be checking.

The commission included none of Dzakovic’s testimony in its report.

Looking back, Dzakovic believes that if WikiLeaks had existed at the time, he would have gone to it as a last resort to highlight what he knew were serious vulnerabilities that were being ignored.

The 9/11 Commission concluded, correctly in our opinion, that the failure to share information within and between government agencies — and with the media and the public — led to an overall failure to “connect the dots.”

Many government careerists are risk-averse. They avoid making waves and, when calamity strikes, are more concerned with protecting themselves than with figuring out what went wrong and correcting it.

Decisions to speak out inside or outside one’s chain of command — let alone to be seen as a whistle-blower or leaker of information — is fraught with ethical and legal questions and can never be undertaken lightly. But there are times when it must be considered. Official channels for whistle-blower protections have long proved illusory. In the past, some government employees have gone to the media, but that can’t be done fully anonymously, and it also puts reporters at risk of being sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources. For all of these reasons, WikiLeaks provides a crucial safety valve.

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for more than 20 years, was legal counsel to the FBI field office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. Bogdan Dzakovic was a special agent for the FAA’s security division. He filed a formal whistle-blower disclosure against the FAA for ignoring the vulnerabilities documented by the Red Team. For the past nine years he has been relegated to entry-level staff work for the Transportation Security Administration.

Why I’m Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange December 14, 2010

Posted by rogerhollander in 9/11, Media.
Tags: 9/11, espionage act, journalism, julian assange, leaks, Media, michael moore, roger hollander, terrorism, whistle blower, wikileaks
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Published on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 by MichaelMoore.comby Michael Moore

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:

**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks “has violated the Espionage Act.”

**The New Yorker‘s George Packer calls Assange “super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal.”

**Sarah Palin claims he’s “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” whom we should pursue “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”

**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: “A dead man can’t leak stuff … there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

**Republican Mary Matalin says “he’s a psychopath, a sociopath … He’s a terrorist.”

**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization.”

And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won’t be so easy because the tables have been turned — and now it’s Big Brother who’s being watched … by us!

WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks (“they’ve released little that’s new!”) or have painted them as simple anarchists (“WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!”). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There’s no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don’t want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept … as secrets.

I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That’s Mr. Bush about to be handed a “secret” document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.

But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden’s impending attack using hijacked planes?

But back then only a few people had access to that document. Because the secret was kept, a flight school instructor in San Diego who noticed that two Saudi students took no interest in takeoffs or landings, did nothing. Had he read about the bin Laden threat in the paper, might he have called the FBI? (Please read this essay by former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, Time’s 2002 co-Person of the Year, about her belief that had WikiLeaks been around in 2001, 9/11 might have been prevented.)

Or what if the public in 2003 had been able to read “secret” memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the “facts” he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched — or rather, wouldn’t there have been calls for Cheney’s arrest?

Openness, transparency — these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 — after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin — there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.

Instead, secrets killed them.

For those of you who think it’s wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he’s being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please — never, ever believe the “official story.” And regardless of Assange’s guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself. I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money — and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.

Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that’s the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you’re up to. You simply can’t be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.

And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.

I stand today in absentia with Julian Assange in London and I ask the judge to grant him his release. I am willing to guarantee his return to court with the bail money I have wired to said court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.

P.S. You can read the statement I filed today in the London court here.

P.P.S. If you’re reading this in London, please go support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at a demonstration at 1 PM today, Tuesday the 14th, in front of the Westminster court.

Michael Moore is an activist, author, and filmmaker. See more of his work at his website MichaelMoore.com

Sullivan’s defense of presidential assassinations October 3, 2010

Posted by rogerhollander in 9/11, Africa, Barack Obama, Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Democracy, Human Rights, Kenya, War on Terror.
Tags: 9/11, al-Qaeda, andrew sullivan, anti-terrorism, assassination, awlaki, civil liberties, constitution, Criminal Justice, due process, executive power, glenn greenwald, human rights, kenya, nairobi bombing, Obama, presidency, roger hollander, rule of law, state secrets, terrorism, treason, war on terror
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Saturday, Oct 2, 2010 09:03 ET

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

During the Bush-era torture debates, I was never able to get past my initial incredulity that we were even having a “debate” over whether the President has the authority to torture people. Andrew Sullivan has responded to some of the questions I posed about his defense of Obama’s assassination program, and I realize now that throughout this whole assassination debate, specific legal and factual issues aside, my overarching reaction is quite similar: I actually can’t believe that there is even a “debate” over whether an American President — without a shred of due process or oversight — has the power to compile hit lists of American citizens whom he orders the CIA to kill far away from any battlefield. The notion that the President has such an unconstrained, unchecked power is such a blatant distortion of everything our political system is supposed to be — such a pure embodiment of the very definition of tyrannical power — that, no matter how many times I see it, it’s still hard for me to believe there are people willing to expressly defend it.

Moreover, it’s almost impossible to ignore how similar are the rhetoric and rationale between (a) Bush supporters who justified presidential torture and (b) Obama supporters who now justify presidential due-process-free assassinations. Please read Daniel Larison’s argument about that, responding to Sullivan’s post. He’s exactly right.

The central rhetorical premise of Bush defenders was that if they just scream “Terrorist!!’ and ”we’re at war!!!!” enough times, and loudly enough, then it would make basic precepts of due process, Constitutional safeguards and the rule of law disappear. If they demonized their targets enough (this is a really bad Terrorist who wants to kill Americans, with nukes if he can!!) — or manipulatively invoked 9/11 enough times (note Andrew’s prominent display of a smoldering WTC photo strategically placed at the top of his argument) — then it would mean that anything goes, that no compliance with law is or should be required to do anything to them (a claim that always led to the unanswerable question: if it’s really so obvious that this is a really bad Terrorist, then why not prove it in court?).

And if you just toss enough insult-strawmen at those who insist upon basic rights even when “we’re at war!!,” then you can marginalize them to the point of invisibility (I wasn’t around in 2003 and thus never got to be accused by Andrew of being a Far-Leftist-pacifist-unwilling-to-fight-the-menace-of-Islamic-Evil, so I guess it’s nice that I’m making up for that now. I always thought a “pacifist” was one who opposes the use of force under all circumstances, even self-defense [a view to which I do not subscribe]; I never knew that one becomes a “pacifist” by believing that the President lacks the power to order his own citizens assassinated far from any battlefield without due process). Just read Andrew’s post to see how reliant he is on these same tactics to justify Obama’s program: quite ironic, given how often he has had these same tactics used against him during his steadfast, eloquent opposition to torture.

In any event, I was going to address a few of Andrew’s specific claims, because some of them are factually inaccurate (I don’t believe that’s intentional, but merely the by-product of the fact that Andrew doesn’t write about the legal issues raised here very often). And I still will do that below, but before I do: as I was writing this, I received an email from a Kenyan lawyer, David Majanja, that so perfectly illustrates how far America has fallen on these issues of basic liberty as compared to much of the rest of the world, and what authoritarian extremists many Americans have become on these questions, that I want to feature it first.

As Majanja noted in his email to me, Kenya faces a massive threat from terrorism. Radicals bombed the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998 and attacked an Israeli-owned tourist resort and Israeli airliner in Mombasa in 2002, and that country has repeatedly been under Terrorist threats for the last decade. Nonetheless, consider this court decision that was just issued in Nairobi on Thursday. A Kenyan Muslim, Mohamed Sulemein, was detained in August — without any charges or due process — by Kenyan anti-terrorism agents (the ATPU), accused of having participated in the horrific June World Cup bombings in Kampala, Uganda, which killed 74 innocent people. He had his passport seized and was told he would be sent to Uganda without any opportunity to contest the accusations against him. His wife filed a habeas corpus petition in a Kenyan court, demanding that “he be treated in accordance with the laws and Constitution of Kenya,” which, among other things, guarantees the right to be charged with a crime within 24 hours of arrest and not to be shipped outside the country without a hearing.

The Kenyan Court agreed, and ruled that the due-process-free extradition of this accused Terrorist to Uganda was illegal and unconstitutional. Just read what the court said to see what’s so profoundly absent from American political thought; this, to me, is the crux of all of these debates, including the one over presidential assassinations:

The person whose rights were denied there is accused of Terrorist acts every bit as reprehensible and dangerous as the accusations aimed at Anwar Awlaki. His rights were denied to a far less extreme degree than what is being done to Awlaki (rendition to Uganda for trial v. being targeted for due-process-free assassination). Kenya faces a Terrorism threat at least equal to what the U.S. faces, and several times has suffered atrocious attacks on its soil. But they are nonetheless able to recognize that citizens “are not exempted from the ordinary protections of law” by virtue of being a Terrorism suspect, and that “the preservation of liberties [even for Terrorist suspects] is the only way to reinforce this country’s commitment to the rule of law and human rights.” If only that recognition were equally widespread in the U.S., which still holds itself out as “the leader of the free world.”

* * * * *

As for Andrew’s specific claims: I realize that it’s not possible for him to address every point I made and that he made a good faith effort to answer the questions I asked, but I was still disappointed to see him ignore these questions, because these are the same ones I could never get Bush supporters to answer either: (1) would you also be comfortable with having a GOP President — such as Sarah Palin — vested with the unchecked power to order American citizens killed far from any battlefield, with no due process and no obligation to prove the accusations?; (2) Andrew says that the President does not have the right to kill American citizens on U.S. soil, but what rationale can justify that limitation once you endorse the view that the President can order citizens killed anywhere they are found via the mere accusation of Terrorism?; (3) shouldn’t the long and disturbing record of serious error and/or abuse on the part of both the Bush and Obama administrations — whereby numerous individuals, a majority, have been falsely accused of Terrorism — lead a rational person to refuse to vest faith in the President’s ability to decide who is a Terrorist without due process or oversight?; and (4) how could Bush’s oversight-free detention or eavesdropping of citizens be so dangerous, whereas Obama’s oversight-free killing of them isn’t?

Then there are several factually inaccurate assertions. Andrew claims that Obama has “expanded judicial review of this kind of military action,” which is the only reason Awlaki’s case is in court. The claim that these assertions of power are being reviewed by courts due to Obama’s beneficence is absolutely false; they’re in court because Obama — like Bush — has been sued for acting illegally and unconstitutionally, and Obama — like Bush — has asserted that no courts can review his conduct due to secrecy and standing (see this article from the Obama-friendly TPM site — headlined: ”Expert consensus: Obama mimics Bush on state secrets” — to see how identical the conduct is). Obama’s argument is the exact opposite of what Andrew claims: it’s that courts have no right and no power to review his decisions about which citizens are assassinated.

Then Andrew cites Ex parte Quirin [1942] to claim that “it is utterly uncontroversial that the military can kill a US citizen abroad if he is waging a treasonous war against the United States,” but even that case — long considered quite radical and a favorite of the Yoo/Addington camp — came only after the defendants were charged in a military commission of being saboteurs, and the Supreme Court merely held that military commissions constitute sufficient due process for the offenses with which they were charged. Here’s what the Court actually said (emphasis added):

The President, as President and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, by Order of July 2, 1942, appointed a Military Commission and directed it to try petitioners for offenses against the law of war and the Articles of War . . . On July 3, 1942, the Judge Advocate General’s Department of the Army prepared and lodged with the Commission the following charges against petitioners, supported by specifications: . . . The Commission met on July 8, 1942, and proceeded with the trial, which continued in progress while the causes were pending in this Court . . .As announced in our per curiam opinion we have resolved those questions by our conclusion that the Commission has jurisdiction to try the charge preferred against petitioners. . . .

We are concerned only with the question whether it is within the constitutional power of the national government to place petitioners upon trial before a military commission for the offenses with which they are charged. . . . Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. . . . We hold only that those particular acts constitute an offense against the law of war which the Constitution authorizes to be tried by military commission.

Aside from the fact that these defendants were caught in the act of engaging in hostilities — not sleeping or driving in a car with their parents, as Awlaki might be doing when he’s killed — this case doesn’t remotely justify assassinating citizens without any due process, and I really hope Andrew would retract the suggestion that it does. The whole point of Ex parte Quirin — as anyone can see — is that these defendants were given due process: a military tribunal which the court found constitutionally adequate under the circumstances. That’s the opposite of Obama’s due-process-free assassinations.

Then Andrew says this:

I agree that the Obama administration’s decision to shut down inspection of the evidence behind the decision to regard Awlaki as someone waging an active war against the US under “state secrets” is a step way too far. I think the president has a duty to explain in court why he believes this person must be treated as an active enemy at war with the US, and therefore treated as all such enemies in wartime as someone to be killed.

But this is the crux of the whole dispute. Once one concedes this, what disagreement is left with critics of Obama’s conduct? What Andrew says Obama has a “duty” to do — “explain in court why he believes this person must be treated as an active enemy at war with the US” — is precisely that which Obama is steadfastly refusing to do. Rather than indict or charge Awlaki, or even respond to his lawsuit with evidence of his guilt, he’s simply asserting the right to kill him without any oversight. Indeed, before Awlaki’s father filed suit, that’s exactly what Obama has been trying to do: kill this American citizen without any due process whatsoever (along those lines, Andrew’s announcement that he’s “sick of the left treating Obama as if he has done nothing to change the dictatorial, illegal and indecent policies of his predecessor” is very odd, given that Andrew himself — in a post from several weeks ago which he entitled “The Untamed Prince” — called for the prosecution of Barack Obama as a war criminal, and wrote: ”Obama as executive quickly co-opted the kind of blanket secrecy and protection of the national security apparatus from the rule of law that plagued us in the Bush-Cheney administration“; those are Andrew’s words, not the words of “the left”).

But the most telling part of his response is where Andrew replies to my question about how he knows that Awlaki is actually an “Al Qaeda Terrorist” who deserves to die:

There is much public information about Awlaki, and I urge readers to go to Wiki and examine the public record and sources in detail to make their own minds up. . . . But seriously, is Glenn honestly saying that a man who has committed treason, has had multiple direct contacts with al Qaeda, including the 9/11 mass-murderers, has been directly connected with inciting American citizens to kill others in terror attacks is not, self-evidently, an al Qaeda terrorist who poses a direct and imminent threat to innocent human beings, motivated by a poisonous religious ideology that was responsible for the murder of 3,000 people on 9/11?

This is what we’re reduced to in America: trial by Wikipedia. Apparently, as long as there are enough links on your Wikipedia page to other accused Terrorists, then the President can wave his imperial wand and impose the death penalty on you. Aside from the fact that most of what is on “Wiki” comes from unproven government accusations, and aside from the fact that it’s almost all rank guilt by association (Andrew: “Witnesses report he was a spiritual adviser to and met with two 9/11 mass-murderers, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Almihdhar“), this claim raises the painfully obvious question: if the evidence is so clear and overwhelming that Awlaki is a Terrorist who deserves the death penalty, then why are Obama — and his supporters — so afraid to indict him and prove these claims in court? That was always the quandary posed by Bush’s assertion that he could eavesdrop or detain with no judicial oversight, but was doing so only on obvious Terrorists: if it’s so clear that they’re Terrorists, why won’t you go to court and convince a court that they’re Terrorists?

As for Andrew’s claim that Awlaki “has committed treason,” I’ll say this: he may or may not have. But we have this document called “the Constitution,” and it makes as clear as can be that no President has the power to simply decree that someone is guilty of that crime. Right in Article III, Section 3, it explicitly makes clear what must be done if one is to be punished as a traitor:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

What possible justification exists for ignoring that Constitutional provision? Even if we are at war, there is, manifestly, no “war exception” to the Constitution. ”War” is not, and never has been, a cognizable excuse for disregarding Constitutional guarantees — at least not in a republic that still adheres to the rule of law.

In general, the U.S. Constitution prohibits the deprivation of “life or liberty . . . without due process of law.” But because of how serious a crime Treason is, the Constitution imposes heightened requirements on proving it in court. It’s not something that is presidentially declared by anonymous press leaks or reading a Wikipedia page. If the rule of law means anything, it’s that explicit Constitutional protections like this one don’t get to be swatted away by yelling “War!!!” or “Terrorist!” or by putting emotionally powerful pictures of 9/11 on your blog. As the Kenyan judge put it: ”the preservation of liberties [even for Terrorist suspects] is the only way to reinforce this country’s commitment to the rule of law.” If you’re willing to vest the President with the power to order your fellow citizens murdered as a Traitor without a shred of due process, then, by definition, you simply do not believe in these core principles.

UPDATE: In response to numerous reader emails, Andrew posts a couple more brief thoughts on all of this here.

Also worth reading on this: (1) Harper‘s Scott Horton, who says he originally thought the objections of civil libertarians in the Awlaki case were overblown, but has now concluded — in light of the Obama DOJ’s brief — that the Obama program is the embodiment of “tyranny”: ”When the executive claims the power to take the life of a citizen without recourse to law and legal process, and seeks to sustain that under vague claims of commander-in-chief authority, that claim is in its essence tyrannical”; and (2) former CIA officer and current novelist Barry Eisler, who examines other dubious claims made by Sullivan in defense of Obama’s program.

A Memorial Poem: Not for the Feint of Heart September 17, 2010

Posted by rogerhollander in 9/11, Art, Literature and Culture, Genocide, Racism, War.
Tags: 9/11, africans, apartheid, attica, cambodia, chiapas, Chile, Colombia, disappeared, El Salvador, EMMANUEL ORTIZ, fallen timbers, genocide, guatemala, hiroshima, indigenous, iraq embargo, laos, moment of slience, nagasaki, nicaragua, Palestinians, pine ridge, poem, Poetry, political poem, roger hollander, sand creek, slavery, somalia, steve biko, torture, trail of tears, Vietnam War, wounded knee
1 comment so far

BEFORE I START THIS POEM
by Emmanuel Ortiz

Before I start this poem,
I’d like to ask you to join me in
a moment of silence
in honour of those who died
in the World Trade Centre
and the Pentagon
last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you
a moment of silence
for all of those who have been
harassed, imprisoned, disappeared,
tortured, raped, or killed
in retaliation for those strikes,
for the victims in both
Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
for the tens of thousands of Palestinians
who have died at the hands of
U.S.-backed Israeli forces
over decades of occupation.

Six months of silence
for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation
as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo
against the country.

Before I begin this poem:
two months of silence
for the Blacks under Apartheid
in South Africa,
where homeland security
made them aliens
in their own country.

Nine months of silence
for the dead in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, where death rained
down and peeled back
every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin
and the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence
for the millions of dead
in Vietnam–a people, not a war-
for those who know a thing or two
about the scent of burning fuel,
their relatives’ bones buried in it,
their babies born of it.

A year of silence
for the dead in Cambodia and Laos,
victims of a secret war … ssssshhhhh ….
Say nothing .. we don’t want them to
learn that they are dead.

Two months of silence
for the decades of dead
in Colombia, whose names,
like the corpses they once represented,
have piled up and slipped off
our tongues.

Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence
for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence
for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence
for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew
a moment of peace
45 seconds of silence
for the 45 dead
at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence
for the hundred million Africans
who found their graves
far deeper in the ocean
than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing
or dental records
to identify their remains.
And for those who were
strung and swung
from the heights of
sycamore trees
in the south, the north,
the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of
indigenous peoples
from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots
like Pine Ridge,
Wounded Knee,
Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers,
or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced
to innocuous magnetic poetry
on the refrigerator
of our consciousness …
So you want a moment of silence?

And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be
the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been

Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about
what causes poems like this
to be written

And if this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem
for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem
for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977

This is a September 13th poem
for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem
for Somalia, 1992.

This is a poem
for every date that falls
to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories
that were never told
The 110 stories that history
chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC,
The New York Times,
and Newsweek ignored
This is a poem
for interrupting this program.
And still you want
a moment of silence
for your dead?
We could give you
lifetimes of empty:

The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces
of nameless children
Before I start this poem
We could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit

If you want a moment of silence,
put a brick through
the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses,
the jailhouses, the Penthouses and
the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt
fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.

Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the
second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,

Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin
at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002

Emmanuel Ortiz (born 1974) is a Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American activist and spoken-word poet. He has worked with the Minnesota Alliance for the Indigenous Zapatistas (MAIZ) and Estación Libre and as a staff member of the Resource Centre of the Americas.^[1] Ortiz has performed his poetry at numerous readings, political rallies, activist conferences, and benefits. His works appeared in The Roots of Terror a reader published by Project South, as well as others. His readings of his poems have appeared on Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!. ^[2] His controversial poem, Moment of Silence, circulated the internet a year after September 11th, 2001. ^[3]^[4]

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roger hollander

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