Oh what tangled webs…
Well — we’re on the other side of the Five Year 9/11 Anniversary Hurrah … but we will continue to talk about it because it clearly illustrates what’s wrong in this country — on September 11, 2001, we received a body blow that demanded honest appraisal and courageous response, an opportunity for our Higher Angels to convene; for the last five years, day in and day out, we’ve endured a coup de’tat in doublespeak and hijack that has led us down a dark path toward vengeance, non-stop warring, mean-spirited partisanship and growing fascism … all the worst that our human lower nature can produce.
One of the piece’s below poses an interesting question — was 9/11 “good for America?” I’d say 9/11 was inevitable for America … we’d reached a place of decision; we’re still making that decision today. Who will we be in the world … who we’ve been? Or who we might become.
9/11 is First Cause … all of our conversations on this list spring from it; all political paths lead back to it. It cannot be forgotten BECAUSE IT HAS NEVER ENDED … citizens of this nation are still in freefall, holding hands. It’s up to us to end it; to bring honor to it. To begin again.
I trust … with all my heart … that The Is has responded to the powerful desire of this nation and the world to allow their Higher Angels to hold sway, now. We see the cracks in the wall of public opinion breaking wide — we note the slip-up’s and mistakes that the Administration cannot help but make in their largely fictional narrative … we applaud the daring Voices that speak truth to power.
As the woman from Colorado said, last post, “It’s almost like Bush is frantic.” Yes. He. Is. He’s tangled in his own sticky web, now, and there’s no escape. And in such a state, mistakes cannot help but occur. We will count them … every one … and pass them around … because until the Emperor’s nakedness is apparent to every citizen, his delusions still hold power with those who resonate to fear.
This administration is destined to collapse from within … and the louder it gets, the more it reveals itself as frightened and desperate. So get as angry as you want with their increasing bluster and blow, dearhearts — but when discussing this with those that don’t understand this as we do, speak calmly … point out disparities … note what hasn’t worked, since nothing has … and the downright lies are easy pickin’s. Your neighbor, your co-worker, your still-Red friends are as disturbed and terrified by all this as Bush wants them to be … but chaos offers no solutions; NOBODY in this nation wants George’s “generational war.”
The “terrified” will still argue for their “terror,” like christocrats argue for their sinfulness — but some part of their humanity will be relieved to hear anything else put forth; so arm yourselves with facts to counter their wail that “WE HAVE TO…” follow Dub and Uncle Dick into the jaws of destruction. I think “WHY?” is a good first response in such a conversation. Their own spluttering answer might be very informative. Let them gaze into that mirror for a bit … they’ll find no Higher Angels to wink back at them; it’s often a wake-up to hear the note of hysteria in one’s own voice. This collection gives us some calm, rational possibilities that we can discuss when the mirror cracks, as it must!
Helpful hint: all conversations of this sort must be accompanied with a smile and a sure confidence about what Love and Respect and Reason can accomplish. We are not at war with those who are afraid … they are at war with themselves; they need to notice the difference. And — oh, yes — sugar, never underestimate sugar! Spoonful … medicine … yadda. Always have cookies on hand … or keep the candy dish on your desk full. The basic joys of life must be attended at all times. [If you're groaning about my promoting the horrors of sugar, substitute if you must ... but please consider the horrors of more unsweetened years just like THESE last six ... and suck it up!]
We change all this one mind at a time.
Jude
Must. Bang. Head. On. Wall.
Susan Madrak
09.12.2006
Another day, another piece of information about how the Bush administration makes a cynical mockery of integrity and justice. (Oh, and while you’re at it, contrast this with the fabricated information the right-wing cabal behind “Path to 9/11″ used to justify their cinematic attack on Bill Clinton):
Gen. John M. Keane, the Army’s vice chief of staff at the time, told the Wall Street Journal that Zarqawi represented “one of the best targets we ever had” [subscription required].
According to reporting by NBC News back in March 2004, the question of taking out Zarqawi was instead “debated to death” in the White House’s National Security Council. Why? As NBC put it, “the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.”
That is to say, the administration, in the height of cynicism, preferred to keep Zarqawi — the real terrorist, a man who would go on to take the lives of thousand of Iraqis and Jordanians and Americans in wanton acts of violence — alive because his presence in Iraq bolstered the case for toppling Saddam.
What we didn’t know until the Republican-controlled Senate Intel Committee delivered its report last week is that while Bush was dithering, Saddam was actually trying to off Zarqawi himself. According to page 109:
Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zaraqwi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi.
As a haunting postscript, rather than acknowledge reality, administration figures took to the Sunday talk shows yesterday to continue to peddle the myth of what Colin Powell famously dubbed the “sinister nexus” between Saddam and Osama.Said Condi Rice: “There were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.”
Added Dick Cheney:
“Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq… You had the fact that Saddam Hussein, for example, provided payments to the families of suicide bombers of $25,000 on a regular basis. This was a state sponsor of terror. He had a relationship with terror groups. No question about it. Nobody denies that.”
A War of Words
Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
There was a time, not so long ago, when no one ever spoke of an American “homeland.” During World War II there was a home front, and of course there has always been a heartland between the two heartless coasts, but no one thought of our big-shouldered cities, traffic-choked suburbs, purple mountains’ majesties and amber waves of grain as anything called a homeland.
The United States was always a place for people who had left their homelands behind, a polyglot, rainbow-colored nation whose defining characteristics were vitality, mobility, dynamism and the restless urge to push toward the next frontier. But now we inhabit an official homeland, with an official Department of Homeland Security to protect it.
“Homeland” is one of the burdens left to us by the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001. Words are all we have to give shape to reality, and because we had no words for what happened five years ago — by definition, language falls short of the unimaginable — a new lexicon had to be developed. I am convinced that much of this new language, by accident or design, has the effect of clouding our view of our enemies and ourselves. We need to begin choosing our words more carefully, and we need to discard the ones that do not serve us well.
The word homeland is a vivid but relatively inconsequential example — less a distortion than an infelicitous choice that makes us sound as if we had quaint harvest rituals and a colorful national costume. It strikes an odd note, with its vague connotations of ethnic solidarity and ancient nationalism, and it gives off more than a whiff of us-vs.-them. This nation does have enemies from whom we need vigilant protection, but something more like “domestic security” would have done just fine, with less baggage.
At the other end of the scale, by far the most fateful post-Sept. 11 coinage is “war on terrorism.” The phrase that has come to define our era is entirely suspect, except perhaps the “on.”
President Bush wasted little time in declaring that the Sept. 11 attacks were acts of war that could be met only with a military response — a war on terrorism. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq certainly fit the rubric of “war,” but the most effective ongoing action against al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups has been a worldwide exercise in law enforcement — surveillance, arrests, detentions, interrogations, prosecutions.
Witness the recent arrests of would-be airline bombers in London, or the fact that so many of the high-value terror suspects held until recently in secret CIA prisons were captured in Pakistan, an ostensible ally. We should call this police work what it is, although that might make it harder to ignore such principles as habeas corpus and due process.
As for the rest of the phrase, terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. All terrorists are alike in only one regard — they practice terrorism. Stubbornly refusing to acknowledge important distinctions among them strikes me as insanely self-defeating.
George W. Bush certainly is no great orator, but the White House does understand how language can be used to shape reality. So when the National Security Agency’s unprecedented program of electronic eavesdropping was revealed, it was quickly dubbed a “terrorist surveillance program” — as if somehow, magically, the NSA’s computers could deduce who was unquestionably a terrorist without ever happening to overhear a single conversation involving someone who is innocent.
Then there’s the matter of what is and is not a “civil war.” By laying down this yardstick to judge the war in Iraq, the White House has focused its critics’ attention on an irrelevancy. What difference does it make whether unrelenting bloody chaos meets the dictionary definition of a civil war? No difference at all to the next Iraqi civilian killed, or the next American soldier.
People whom it’s inconvenient to call criminal suspects or prisoners of war are instead “detainees,” as if they’ve been forced to stay an hour after school. Torture, as spelled out in international agreements, is merely an “alternative” method of questioning. And the steady climb in the death toll in Iraq is “real progress.”
On Sunday, Dick Cheney said the reason there have been no attacks in five years is that the administration has done a good job on “homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking we put in place, and because of our detainee policy.”
There was a time, not so long ago, when people would have scratched their heads and wondered what on earth the vice president was talking about.
Five Years After 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor
George Lakoff, Evan Frisch
Language matters, because it can determine how we think and act.
For a few hours after the towers fell on 9/11, administration spokesmen referred to the event as a “crime.” Indeed, Colin Powell argued within the administration that it be treated as a crime.
This would have involved international crime-fighting techniques: checking banks accounts, wire-tapping, recruiting spies and informants, engaging in diplomacy, cooperating with intelligence agencies in other governments, and if necessary, engaging in limited “police actions” with military force. Indeed, such methods have been the most successful so far in dealing with terrorism.
But the crime frame did not prevail in the Bush administration. Instead, a war metaphor was chosen: the “War on Terror.” Literal — not metaphorical — wars are conducted against armies of other nations. They end when the armies are defeated militarily and a peace treaty is signed. Terror is an emotional state. It is in us. It is not an army. And you can’t defeat it militarily and you can’t sign a peace treaty with it.
The war metaphor was chosen for political reasons. First and foremost, it was chosen for the domestic political reasons. The war metaphor defined war as the only way to defend the nation. From within the war metaphor, being against war as a response was to be unpatriotic, to be against defending the nation. The war metaphor put progressives on the defensive. Once the war metaphor took hold, any refusal to grant the president full authority to conduct the war would open progressives in Congress to the charge of being unpatriotic, unwilling to defend America, defeatist. And once the military went into battle, the war metaphor created a new reality that reinforced the metaphor.
Once adopted, the war metaphor allowed the president to assume war powers, which made him politically immune from serious criticism and gave him extraordinary domestic power to carry the agenda of the radical right: Power to shift money and resources away from social needs and to the military and related industries. Power to override environmental safeguards on the grounds of military need. Power to set up a domestic surveillance system to spy on our citizens and to intimidate political enemies. Power over political discussion, since war trumps all other topics. In short, power to reshape America to the vision of the radical right — with no end date.
In addition, the war metaphor was used as justification for the invasion of Iraq, which Bush had planned for since his first week in office. Frank Luntz, the right-wing language expert, recommended referring to the Iraq war as part of the “War on Terror” — even when it was known that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and indeed saw Osama bin Laden as an enemy. Fox News used “War on Terror” as a headline when showing film clips from Iraq.
Remember “Weapons of Mass Destruction?” They were invented by the Bush administration to strike terror into the hearts of Americans and to justify the invasion. Remember that the Iraq War was advocated before 9/11 and promoted as early as 1997 by the members of the Project for the New American Century, who later came to dominate in the Bush administration. Why?
The right-wing strategy was to use the American military to achieve economic and strategic goals in the Middle East: to gain control of the second largest oil reserve in the world; to place military bases right in the heart of the Middle East for the sake of economic and political intimidation; to open up Middle East markets and economic opportunities for American corporations; and to place American culture and a controllable government in the heart of the Middle East. The justification was 9/11 — to identify the Iraq invasion as part of the “War on Terror” and claim that it is necessary in order to protect America and spread democracy.
What has been the result?
Domestically, the “War on Terror” has been a major success for the radical right. Bush has been returned to office and the radical right controls all branches of our government. They are realizing their goals. Social programs are being gutted. Deregulation and privatization are thriving. Even highways are being privatized. Taxpayers’ money is being transferred to the ultra-rich making them richer. Two right-wing justices have been appointed to the Supreme Court and right-wing judges are taking over courts all over America. The environment continues to be plundered. Domestic surveillance is in place. Corporate profits have doubled while wage levels have declined. Oil profits are astronomical. And the radical rights social agenda is taking hold.
The “culture war” is being won on many fronts. And it is still widely accepted that we are fighting a “War on Terror.” The metaphor is still in place. We are still taking off our shoes at the airports, and now we cannot take bottled water on the planes. Terror is being propped up.
But while the radical right has done well on the domestic front, America and Americans have fared less well both at home and abroad.
What was the moral of 9/11?
To Osama bin Laden, the moral was simple: American power can be used against America itself. This moral has defined the post 9/11 world: the more America uses military force in the Middle East, the more damage is done to America and Americans.
The more Americans kill and terrorize Muslims, the more we recruit Muslims to become terrorists and fight against us.
The war in Iraq was over in 2003 when the US forces defeated Saddam’s army. Then the American occupation began — an occupation by insufficient troops ill-suited to be occupiers, especially in a country on the brink of a civil war, where neither side wants us there.
The number of lives lost on 9/11 is currently listed as 2973. As of this writing 2662 Americans have been sent to their deaths in Iraq, a Muslim country that did not attack us. At the current rate, within months more Americans will have been sent to their deaths by Bush than were murdered at the hands of bin Laden.
9/11 was a crime — a crime against humanity — and terrorism is best dealt with as crime on an international level.
It is time to toss the war metaphor into the garbage can.
The war metaphor is still intimidating progressives. To come out against “staying the course” is to be called unpatriotic, weak, and defeatist. To say, “no, we’re just as strong, but we’re smarter” is to keep and reinforce the war metaphor, which the conservatives have a patent on.
It is time for progressives to jettison the war metaphor itself. It is time to tell some truths that progressives have been holding back on. What has worked in stopping terrorism is just what has worked in stopping international crime — like the recent police work in England. What has failed is the war approach, which just recruits more terrorists. In Iraq, the war was over when we defeated Saddam’s army. Then the occupation began. Our troops are dying because they are not trained be occupiers in hostile territory on the cusp of a civil war.
Bush is an occupation president, not a war president, and his war powers should be immediately rescinded. Rep. Lynn Woolsey’s resolution to do just that (H.R. 5875) should be taken seriously and made the subject of national debate.
I am suggesting a conscious discussion of the war metaphor as a metaphor. The very discussion would require the nation to think of it as a metaphor, and allow the nation to take seriously the truth of our presence in Iraq as an occupation that must be ended. You don’t win or lose an occupation; you just exit as gracefully as possible.
Openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would allow the case to be made that terrorism is most effectively treated as a crime — like wiping out a crime syndicate — not as an occasion for sending over a hundred thousand troops and doing massive bombing that only recruits more terrorists.
Finally, openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would raise the question of the domestic effect of giving the president war powers, and the fact that the Bush administration has shamelessly exploited 9/11 to achieve the political goals of the radical right — with all the disasters that has brought to our country. It would allow us to name right-wing ideology, to spell it out, look at its effects, and to see what awful things it has done, is doing, and threatens to keep on doing. The blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq, in New Orleans, in our economy, and throughout the country at large should be placed squarely where it belongs — on right-wing ideology that calls itself “conservative” but mocks real American values.
Metaphors cannot be seen or touched, but they create massive effects, and political intimidation is one such effect. It is time for political courage and political realism. It is time to end the political intimidation of the war metaphor and the terror it has loosed on America.
“Projecting Fascism”
by tristero
9/12/06
Dave Neiwert has, as he has so often, an extremely intelligent post entitled, you guessed it, “Projecting Fascism:”
[John] Dean has hit on exactly what we’ve been observing about movement conservatives and their increasingly ugly tone in recent: it is part of a sometimes conscious strategy to project their own ambitions onto their opponents:
In other words, for a number of the right’s leading rhetoricians, the projection appears to be perfectly conscious: it is a strategy, designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.
And it is extraordinarily successful precisely because projection, as a trait, is so deeply woven into the right-wing psyche. Those who engage in it consciously set off waves of sympathetic response from their audiences because it hits their buttons in exactly the right spot.
The deep-seatedness of this trait can make it diffidcult, at times, to discern whether the behavior is conscious or not. But it also lends to a certain predictability: One of the best indicators of where the right is heading, I’ve noted previously, can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.
–So when it starts to accuse its opponents of coddling fascism, you can rest assured that the American right is embarking on precisely that path itself. And considering what we know about fascism historically, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
Yep. In the jargon of psychotherapy, projection is a primitive defense mechanism for eliminating anxiety about one’s own self-worth. Let me try to illustrate with an example.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that you are President of the United States. Picking a name out of a hat, I’ll call you George W. Bush. All your life you’ve avoided serious danger, both physically (going AWOL, perhaps from a National Guard Unit) and psychologically (maybe you are a one-time heavy boozer who has replaced cocktails with sycophants instructed to keep all criticism away from you). You have started a war in a Middle Eastern country - any one, but let’s just say it was Iraq - and it’s going badly. You’re afraid to withdraw the troops because you think everyone will learn that you are what you know yourself to be: a deeply terrified coward.
The thought is unbearable and you must get rid of it. But how? You simply “project” those thoughts onto a hated enemy. You deny them in yourself by accusing your political enemies of the failure to commit and focus that, you fear, you yourself, for your entire life, are guilty of.
You may also try to project some of your overwhelming guilt into very revealing jokes. Suppose, for example, you can’t abide people doing things you don’t like. But you know that those who seek to control others are often given the most odious labels your culture can bestow. It makes you uncomfortable because you’re afraid you’re one of those people. So, to relieve the psychic tension, you quip, “It’s a heck of a lot easier being a dictator, as long as I’m the dictator,” just a good natured chuckle that hopefully makes you look like a powerful, responsible person that can laugh at the burdens of power, rather than covet more. Never mind that the grammatical lapses (the tenses) might expose more lust for power than you might like; no one listens that closely anyway to off the cuff laffs, so you’re safe.
Now all this is hypothetically speaking, of course. No one, not even Charles Krauthammer, should try to psychoanalyze anyone by long distance. But while my little crude example may be inapt, it is quite appropriate to note the conscious use of projection as part of the rhetorical strategy of the right. And it is, as Neiwert implies, quite conscious.
The right knows exactly who are behaving like fascists - who are, in fact, fascists: themselves.
September 12th America
Was 9/11 Good for the Nation?
NATE MEZMER
September 12, 2006
September 11th, 2001, I remember waking up to the sobering fact that two planes had just crashed into the twin towers. To be honest, I cannot recall if I was actually hung over, although it is not out of the realm of possibility. You see, at the time of the attacks I was living in a small college town, in a house full of guys and school was still out for the summer.
When I shoved open the double doors from my kitchen-converted bedroom, my roommate Walker was sitting on the living room floor, staring at the television. He immediately informed me that planes had crashed into the world trade center and without speaking much more than a few sentences we spent the next hour or so, flipping through the channels in attempts to figure out what was going on. As the fateful morning played out live on our TV screen we would not only be witness to greater tragedy, but we would also begin to speak to each other.
Once the rumors of terrorist involvement began to swirl, I remember insinuating that this horrible event was the perfect thing for Bush and his illegitimate presidency. Walker, who was an All-American rugby player, a championed drinker and a gentlemen of few words, countered with the argument that I was basically a crazy conspiracy nut! Of course, in the coming months I did begin to question if 9/11 was indeed an inside job, however at the time I simply meant that it was a great opportunity for the United States government to do whatever they wanted with foreign and domestic policy.
Maybe, it was my disposition as a history major to immediately view the government in a devious light, or the fact that I had recently read extensively the writings of muck-racking journalist Greg Palast, who covered the fraudulent 2000 US presidential election, or maybe it was simply the fact that ever since anyone can remember I’ve always been in constant question of authority? No matter what the reason, my quick synopsis of the situation was clearly viewed as ludicrous by my roommate.
For several months after the 11th of September, I began to scour the internet and almost simultaneously remained glued to free-speech radio stations in search of information regarding what our government knew about 9/11 before the attacks and what its ultimate intentions would be in the aftermath. With my bullsh*t filter on high alert I found that I was even watching cable channels and the evening news! It seems that CNN, MSNBC, and FOX had replaced my addiction to ESPN as phrases like “Axis of Evil” and “Homicide Bomber” haunted me in my sleep!
* * *
During this time I embarked on somewhat of a bombing campaign of my own, as I bombarded friends, family and of course roommates with my ideas and theories but was more than often met with skepticism, fear and indifference. The funny thing is, many of these people who initially thought my 9/11 politics to be annoying or insane, as time went on began to develop their own interest in the subject. Sure enough, I soon found that I was engaging in political conversation with people who had previously expressed no desire to do so. Whether it was arguing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Jewish friends or discussing the ominous ties between Haliburton and Dick Cheney, or George Bush and Enron, a new dialogue had been created amongst my friends. These young people who’s typical conversations usually varied little between the opposite sex and their favorite television show, had branched out into areas of reality that they had previously not thought to question. In many cases, certain conversations or revelations, may have only been momentary but they occurred non the less.
There was my neighbor Samantha, whom had always assumed that Palestinian people voluntarily left there land in order to make room for Israel. Of course, was this her fault? The only information she had ever received on the subject had been passed down from her Jewish grandmother to her mother and then to her. Between the matriarchal filtering and the Zionist lobby which articulates much of the news in America, she had every right to believe such assertions to be true. One day, Samantha and I began to discuss the plight of Palestinians and the conflict in the West Bank after our conversation about 9/11 and American foreign policy spilled over into the holy land.
At first she was resistant to any ideas that disproved Israel’s right to the land and always resorted back to the terrorism defense. Very similar to a general in the IDF or a member of the United States congress. However, when I began to explain to her the death tolls, the road blocks, the bulldozing, and the American funding involved I could tell that she had never been privileged to such insights. Sam, whom is a very compassionate person began to riffle questions at me concerning the Palestinians in hopes that my answers would not reaffirm her fears. Once she began to realize that everything she had thought to be true wasn’t necessarily so, she became visibly shaken and teary eyed. I reassured her that it was a positive thing she new the truth as most people did not and that supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestine had nothing to do with being faithful to Judaism. She agreed, but it was obvious that her world and been shaken to the point that she wasn’t exactly sure what to believe.
Then there was the day that my roommate Walker whom to my knowledge at the time, was an apolitical patriot, came to me and pointed out that Bush was basically full of it! If I can recall correctly, I believe he had been watching a presidential speech on TV and must have decided that the language George was using was not believable. Indeed when I returned home from school that day, Walker, for the first time engaged me in a conversation on the subject and let me know basically what the president had said. He did so in a manner that not only confirmed his disbelief in our nations leader but simultaneously let me know that he and I had reached some sort of common ground. Although Walker was not quite ready to march in protest or stencil ‘BUSH’ on stop signs, he was beginning to pay attention and the dividends were obvious to us both. This soft spoken, beast of a man, had decided to end his silence and speak his mind!
* * *
Since the vietnam era, a collaborative campaign has been waged to pacify the minds of our nation’s youth. Whether, it be the fact that the corporate controlled media does not allow the horrors of globalization and war to be broadcast on television, or that the baby-boomer generation has allowed there children to be lulled asleep by the likes of Viacom and Clear Channel, the masses of young people have remained virtually disengaged from intellectual thought for the past 20 years. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent actions by our government has began to change all that.
While it is true that many young people continue to parade around without much concern as to what their tax dollars are paying for (as do older folks), a large portion of ‘kids’ who were once indifferent or perhaps even blindly patriotic, are now getting involved politically. Between grass-roots movements on the local level, in the streets and on college campuses, to large scale promotions such as Sean “Puffy” Combs’ ‘Vote or Die’ campaign, young people are at the very least more aware than they have been in years. The ironic thing is that the Bush administration continues to be the number one force behind this mobilization.
From the giant lies that spiraled from the 9/11 tragedies, ranging from false reasons for war in Iraq to dubious assaults on civil rights, and more recently with the events of Hurricane Katrina that clearly revealed it’s ineptitude and indifference, the Bush administration has been largely exposed to be nothing more than a fraud. With disapproval ratings at an all time high, the common agreement among many young people is that George Bush doesn’t care about anybody but his rich friends, let alone black people!
Although thousands of innocent lives were lost on 9/11 and sadly multiple thousands more have been killed since then, it is this tragic event which should be validated as the greatest catalyst for positive social and political change thus far into the 21st century. The climate which allowed Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and their ominous cohorts to manipulate public opinion and make a case for not only a pseudo ‘war on terror’ but furthermore a war on our civil rights, is the same atmosphere that has created the greatest number of dissidents in America since women burned their bra’s and Muhammad Ali refused to kill the Vietcong!
* * *
To brood over the tragedies of 9/11 and to continue to sell the idea that each and every innocent death be somehow avenged seven-fold, is as irresponsible as it is pointless. If, these nearly 3,000 innocent lives are to live on through our memory in a respectful and productive manner, then they must not be allowed to die in vain. That is, the reason we were attacked on 9/11 has little to do with religious fanaticism and terrorists ‘hating our freedom’ and much more to do with the United States of America’s deeply flawed foreign policy in the middle east and abroad over the past quarter century.
Indeed, conspiracy was not necessary to create the events of 9/11, as the reckless governmental policies that existed prior to ‘September 12th America’ created quite simply the perfect environment for such attacks to occur. The CIA, the Oil companies, and the military industrial complex had been involved in underhanded proceedings in the middle east long before George W. Bush ever took office. Whether supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land or having tea with the House of Saud, America has been in bed with evil in the middle east for decades. Don’t forget that the US supported Saddam’s regime during the 80’s, many years before they found him in a hole!
Thus in the wake of the memory of September 11th, 2001, progressive minds must continue to remind themselves and others that political dissidence is not only an important aspect to our freedom as Americans but furthermore it is the essential element that validates the democratic process. The lives lost in 9/11 should never be allowed to bolster the political careers of power-hungry politicians nor fatten the wallets of corporate conglomerates. Indeed, the lives lost in 9/11 belong to not only the family members they left behind, but the millions of Americans and human beings around the world who deserve to live in peace.
This simple yet tremendous fact is why 9/11 will ultimately prove to be good for America. As historically, it has been proven that things must get worse before the people united decide to make them better. And we’re not out of the woods yet.
Thinking Beyond Violence
Aziz Huq
September 11, 2006
On September 17, 2001, American foreign policy entered a dark age. On that day, President George W. Bush signed a classified presidential directive expanding CIA authority to kill, capture and detain terrorism suspects around the world. The CIA forged new connections with intelligence services in Syria and Egypt, allies all too eager to use the kind of brutal physical interrogation tactics that U.S. law formally forbade. It was the first of a series of presidential decisions to treat the world as battlefield without limits in time or space, to disregard the rule of law globally—and to replace it with the tide of war.
The practice ofextraordinary rendition has left a trail of broken lives in its wake. The Canadian citizen Mahar Arar and the German citizen Khaled Masri are but the two most well-known examples. Worse, extraordinary rendition inflicts incalculable harm on countries that cooperate with the United States. It strengthens undemocratic, brutal Middle Eastern dictatorships, including, ironically, some of the regimes that first spawned the cancer of transnational jihadism. Islamists such as Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, precursors to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were reactions to those regimes’ repressive policies. America’s continued support of undemocratic regimes, and its failure to support real democracies, is today tilling the soil once more for a new crop of jihadists.
In other regards, the Bush administration assumes violence is the sole tool against terrorism. In so doing, it illustrates the tactical limits to violence. The evidence shows that we need a thorough rethink of the administration’s “counter-terrorism as global war” strategy. Instead, we must be thinking of counter-terrorism as an effort to establish the Global Rule of Law.
Both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions illustrate the problems with the present approach. Widely seen as a success, Afghanistan in fact has been a strategic failure. Our first post-9/11 intervention failed to net either of al-Qaida’s ringleaders. It failed to establish a working state (largely because the administration didn’t believe in providing needed security for state-building). It also left in place the world’s largest supplier of opium. So the next time terrorists hide out in the valleys of Uruzgan or Paktia, they will have a ready source of cash—and connections to transnational Russian mafias to boot.
Behind the blustering about whether we should “stay or go,” Iraq is already a massive global counter-terrorism failure. Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds point out that Iraq is recruiting poster, training ground and networking hotspot for tomorrow’s terrorists. Difficult strategic decisions today, now the United States is knee-deep in quagmire, should not obscure the fact that the Iraq invasion was an unmitigated strategic disaster: It has enflamed the Middle East against us. It gave unwarranted flesh to the bones of bin Laden’s raving, paranoid fantasies. And it has trained a new generation of jihadi leaders. President Bush’s facile rhetoric that “we will fight the terrorists overseas so we do not have to face them here at home,” has things precisely backwards: By fighting terrorists in Iraq, we have multiplied their legions around the world.
The global reach of war has not preserved the safety or improved the security of the United States. Violence has bred insecurity, which in turn brings new violence. Worse, this cycle compromises the safety of our children and their children by inciting new violence.
Yet with stubborn monomania, the administration’s hews to its reckless course. Last week, its hubristic vision of total war came home (again) in a proposed counter-terrorism bill. Despite being presented as a response to the Supreme Court’s decision on military commissions, the proposal is largely a grab-bag of loosely connected horrors. It would permit the president to designate any one who has ever aided any group that has ever “engaged in hostilities” against the United States as an “unlawful enemy combatant”—for endless and process-free detention. Perhaps Donald Rumsfeld’s famous handshake with Saddam Hussein is grounds for his indefinite lock-up. And since the definition sweeps in all “international terrorist organizations,” if you ever marched for Nelson Mandela’s freedom, watch out: The African National Congress was once a terrorist group too.
This startling provision on “unlawful enemy combatants” is unlikely to become law—but it is a sign of this administration’s overweening ambitions. It is also a sign these ambitions are impervious to rebuke from either Congress or the Supreme Court. Moreover, other provisions in the proposal may very well be passed. Additional provisions suspend the right to habeas corpus for Guantánamo detainees, confining tens or perhaps hundreds of detainees to hopeless limbo. Some provisions authorize “torture lite”—a description of the CIA’s “alternative set of procedures,” which include water-boarding, sleep deprivation for 40 hours plus and stress positions. Yet others look back to grant retroactive immunity for the host of past crimes—all while disclosed number of tortured innocents grows ever higher.
This bill, which would be a de facto open license for the holding facility at Guantánamo, is a mark of failure. It shows the administration has no strategy beyond force. It has no way of sorting the real terrorists from the innocent, and then it has no way of dealing fairly with those caught in the crossfire.
Take the 450 Guantánamo detainees. It seems likely that many of them are in fact innocent of any culpable conduct. But many of their home countries, such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, are deeply undemocratic and deeply unjust. They are failures of the rule of law; fear and violence grow in place of stable, orderly, and predictable rules. Sending back some of these detainees may very well put them at risk of torture.
A solution to the terrible and tragic Guantánamo conundrum means stabilizing and building the rule of law worldwide. It means building a global rule of law—a key to a broader counter-terrorism strategy that might work instead of yielding repeated disasters.
This entails encouraging not merely democracy, but orderly and stable states that rule by consent and not sheer violence. It involves ceasing to support brutal and anti-democratic dictators and their ruthless secret services. It demands the creation of democratic channels of expression in countries that originally produced transnational jihadists, taking the sting out of al-Qaida’s critiques.
In practice, it also requires wholesale reform of the manner in which intelligence cooperation is conducted. It means the strengthening of above-board police cooperation on shared intelligence and evidence. And it means ceasing to ignore the malfeasance of so-called allies, in favor of rigorous attention to the rule of law.
By promoting stable, strong states that can provide true human security, rather than leaving its citizens literally stranded in the face of crisis, we make the world safer and short-circuit the cycle of violence and counter-violence from which terrorists draw succor.
Utopian? Of course. But much of the administration’s power comes from the breathtaking sweep of its ambitions. Progressives—and everyone else who cares about a safer, better world—must respond to the challenge and think in equally grand terms. And while the goal may be distant, it’s without doubt worth setting as an ideal: A world in which every state operates with stable, predictable, and generally just rules. A world in which terrorists find few takers for their fanciful condemnations and inhumane violence. And a world in which the sickness that is al-Qaida is but a terrible but increasingly distant memory.
Aziz Huq directs the Liberty and National Project at the Brennan Center for Justice. He is co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in Times of Terror (New Press, 2007), and recipient of a 2006 Carnegie Scholars Fellowship.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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1 comment September 20th, 2006