Category: War On Terror

December 25, 2021

Guantánamo Film Ignores the War on Terror’s Ongoing Tangible Harms

“There is no them, there is only us,” says filmmaker Alex Gibney reflecting on the story of Abu Zubaydah, a torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner who is the focus of his HBO documentary, The Forever Prisoner. Expanding on this, he poses a challenge: “If we believe in that idea, how can we imprison a man without charge for the remainder of his life — not for what he did to us, but for what we did to him?” In this statement made at the conclusion of the documentary, Gibney explicitly notes that the empirical measure of which values the United States truly upholds is its own behavior, alone — without justifications rooted in the concept of a real or imagined “them.” This truth is powerfully evident when we look at the U.S.’s use of torture. However, The Forever Prisoner deeply buries this powerful and necessary point. The film, ostensibly focused on Zubaydah, ultimately seems to use him as a narrative tool, while ignoring the ongoing brutal harms against him and all victims of the “war on terror.”

Who’s Eating the Popcorn?

As a longtime researcher, writer and organizer focused on closing Guantánamo Bay and ending torture, I was anticipating a film that would provide new insight and perspectives on Zubaydah’s case in the context of the 20-year anniversary of 9/11 and the resulting war on terror. While The Forever Prisoner did reveal some new and lesser-known details surrounding the case, nothing in it fundamentally altered the known contours of Zubaydah’s story. Similarly, the film’s details offered no truly new perspectives on the “enhanced interrogation program,” in premise or implementation, nor the underlying fact that there has not been (nor is there ever likely to be, without a truly dramatic shift) genuine accountability for its abuses.

Zubaydah himself is absent from the film — as the title suggests, he remains in custody and incommunicado — and little new information is provided about his case. Instead, the film’s main emphasis is Gibney’s reflection on how the United States could have engaged in this conduct, a reflection that has been aired many times over the years. Even before the war on terror and its particular abuses, the United States has consistently retreated to empty assertions of its unique values in order to whitewash state violence, and documentary explorations of the tension between how the U.S. sees itself and its actual actions abound. Instead of exceptionalizing Zubaydah’s case in order to retread this well-worn path, Gibney might have done better exploring the trajectory of the violence Zubaydah and other war on terror prisoners have experienced in the context of how, if it is even possible, to chart a way forward. Instead, he remains fixated on who the U.S. is, its identity and values, rather than reckoning with what it does, the costs of its actions and the possibility of a different future. For viewers like me, this documentary offered little hope of that possibility.

In fact, it is unclear who constitutes Gibney’s intended audience. For those with a prior interest in and engagement with these issues, the information it provides will be mostly basic and familiar; for the uninitiated, it will be chock-full of complex and confusing details. More fundamentally, given the public’s highly polarized opinions about the U.S.’s conduct in the war on terror and detention and torture, this documentary faced a high bar if it aims to disrupt existing perceptions held by militaristic conservatives. Unfortunately, nothing in The Forever Prisoner feels urgent enough to pose a real challenge to the viewer’s existing moral compass, even in the unlikely event that those who firmly believe the U.S. is justified in taking any extreme measures in fighting terrorism, end up somehow watching it.

If You Don’t Shine by Merit, Shine by Comparison: Abu Zubaydah’s Story

Abu Zubaydah was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. At the time, the U.S. claimed he was the number three person in al-Qaeda, but the government has since acknowledged that he was not in fact part of the organization at all, but instead operated independently. After his capture, Zubaydah was flown to a series of CIA “black sites” around the world and subjected to a systematic program of brutal torture, which would come to be euphemized as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The documentary focuses on the time Zubaydah spent at the site where he was initially taken into CIA custody, in Thailand.

The beginning of the documentary is structured around interagency tensions as the FBI and the CIA wrangled over who would conduct the interrogation of Zubaydah and the parameters of allowable techniques. Much of the testimony offered comes from former FBI agent Ali Soufan, whose experience interrogating Zubaydah is presented as a humane contrast to the CIA’s tactics and the recommendations of two privately contracted psychologists. By giving Soufan such a large platform, the film contributes to the bizarre construction of the FBI as the moral force in the war on terror, but this is far from the only pitfall.

While the documentary centers the wonky details of FBI-CIA power struggles, the specific abuses that Zubaydah endured — which included being chained to a chair naked, subjected to loud music, denied clothing while in his freezing old cell, long periods of sleep deprivation followed by long interrogations, and confinement within a small enclosed box — form a visual backdrop. Because Zubaydah cannot speak for himself, we hear from him via excerpts from his journal and drawings he has done documenting his suffering. While the visuals are striking, the film rarely pauses to allow the viewer to absorb the sheer inhumanity of the torture Zubaydah endured. Instead, these visuals often seem to be used merely to highlight points of conflict between the various government actors who appear in person. In this way, his suffering is reduced to a narrative tool, his physical being more an exhibit than a human body.

The film contributes to the bizarre construction of the FBI as the moral force in the war on terror.

Despite the title, The Forever Prisoner, the film rarely calls attention to Zubaydah’s continuing plight, focusing heavily on his first few years in U.S. custody and not on the horrible limbo of indefinite detention in which he remains. This, too, seems to be a symptom of Gibney’s centering of the intelligence community and its internal conflicts. The bigger question of just how deeply the U.S. could dehumanize and brutalize the “other,” including through the use of Zubaydah’s torture as a blueprint for the abuse of other war on terror prisoners, plays a much smaller role in a film that views these issues primarily through the lens of legality, politics, and, ultimately what all of this says about “American values.” Gibney appears to be exploring Zubaydah’s story as a way of workshopping the conceptual discrepancy between U.S. conduct and U.S. values — specifically in service of restoring the identity claimed by the U.S.

In contrasting the early behavior of FBI interrogators with the CIA-promoted tactics that were eventually adopted, Gibney returns often to the question of whether the enhanced interrogation techniques actually yielded valuable intelligence. The answer, of course, is that torture rarely results in anything other than the victim saying whatever the interrogator wants them to say. It is striking, however, that in all of the discussion about the relative worth of the intelligence gathered versus the human cost, the film glosses almost completely over the fact this particular “high-value detainee” was not remotely a top-connected terrorist mastermind. Somewhat shockingly, the fact that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all, much less in the top three of its leadership, is not even mentioned until minute 1:26 of the two-hour film.

Zubaydah’s story is not about unequal justice, but the absence of justice altogether.

White Tears Mitchell

Another major voice in the documentary is CIA-contracted psychologist James Mitchell, who is largely considered the primary scapegoat offered by the government in the fallout when the torture program became public knowledge. The portrait offered of Mitchell, while not especially sympathetic, is that of a fully fleshed-out human being, who tears up at one point when reflecting on how his work has been used to systematize and normalize torture — which from his perspective is treatment that is far worse than the tactics he designed. Here again, the viewer is struck by the dissonance between the absent or essentialized Zubaydah, and the platform provided for someone who played such an instrumental role in his torture, and, despite the tears, fails to demonstrate true remorse. Not only is he unapologetic, he also outright refuses to call the tactics utilized in enhanced interrogation program “torture,” after more than a decade and an entire report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA torture in 2014. This reflects a fundamental way in which The Forever Prisoner falls short — the lack of genuine compassion directed toward Zubaydah, and the complete erasure of the way in which his ordeal set the framework for the torture of countless Muslims stands in stark contrast to the nuanced exploration of the interactions between and feelings of government actors.

At the end of the film, Gibney reflects, “Twenty years after 9/11, I’m stirred to remember the innocents that died on that day. But I’m also stirred to remember the purpose of that vicious attack. It wasn’t to win a war. It was to provoke us to abandon the principles of democracy we claim to live by. The Forever Prisoner is a living reminder of one of the ideals we abandoned: equal justice under the law.” This statement circles back to Gibney’s central goal — using Abu Zubaydah’s story to illustrate the disparity between the U.S.’s purported values and its lived ones. After everything we have seen about Zubaydah’s torture, however, equal justice under the law hardly seems to be an appropriate starting point for analysis. Differential treatment under the law is an entirely different category — Zubaydah’s story is not about unequal justice, but the absence of justice altogether. What happened to Zubaydah is what happens when the naive belief that the U.S. operates with any integrity persists in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

As Zubaydah continues to be detained at Guantánamo with no progress whatsoever toward the resolution of his case, the shortcomings of the documentary The Forever Prisoner stand as a reminder that justice delayed is justice denied. After 20 years of the war on terror, there is little reason to believe that the U.S. can be redeemed, but honestly acknowledging harm should be a goal worth pursuing in and of itself. Unfortunately, Gibney’s film falls far short of this goal, by ignoring the tangible harms of the war on terror in favor of repairing the identity of the state.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
November 16, 2021

Millions of Afghans Face Starvation as US and the West Freeze Government Funds

Humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan, where the U.N. estimates that more than half of the population suffers from acute hunger. The country has fallen into an economic crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government following the Taliban takeover in August. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves that are held in banks overseas. “Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently visited Afghanistan and with refugees in Iran, where as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing everyday. “They told me very clearly, ‘We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through.’”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now! co-host Juan González in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today in Afghanistan where humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating. On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a video call with members of the AfghanEvac Coalition who said they need more help evacuating tens of thousands of people who could be targeted under the Taliban government and noted, “Winter is coming. There is a famine already.” The United Nations estimates 60% — that’s more than half of Afghanistan’s population — now suffer from acute hunger and the country faces a financial crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves held in banks overseas. The World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told the BBC Afghanistan is now the worst humanitarian crisis on earth.

DAVID BEASLEY: It is as bad as you can possibly imagine. In fact, we are now looking at the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth. Ninety-five percent of the people don’t have enough food and now we are looking at 23 million people marching toward starvation. Out of that, almost nine million are knocking on famine’s door. The winter months are coming. We’re coming out of a drought. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.N. estimates half a million people could flee Afghanistan by the end of the year. Thousands of Afghan refugees are now crossing the border into neighboring Iran. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing into Iran every day. This could set up another crisis in Europe, where the European Union agreed Monday to new sanctions against Belarus for bringing some 4,000 migrants to the border with Poland and leaving them stranded in freezing forests.

For more, we are joined by the NRC’s Secretary General Jan Egeland, who is in Oslo, Norway. He has just returned from a trip to Iran where he met with Afghan refugees in a refugee camp. He recently tweeted “Iran alone hosts more displaced Afghans than 30 European countries combined. Despite this, nations in the ‘European Championship In Erecting Barbed Wire against Refugees’ give negligible funds for displaced Afghans elsewhere.” His recent New York Times op-ed is headlined Afghanistan Is Facing a Total Economic Meltdown.

Jan Egeland, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe the scope of the catastrophe in Afghanistan right now and what you think needs to happen.

JAN EGELAND: I was myself recently also in Afghanistan and I sat down with the mothers in these displacement camps around Kabul. I asked them, “What about the future? What do you think of the future?” They told me very clearly, “We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through and unless there is a public sector again that is able to provide services.” It is as acute as that. Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, the NATO countries not only went for the door, they took all of Afghanistan’s financial reserves with them as they left. They froze the assets of the Afghan government. Could you talk about the role of this issue of all of the money in Afghanistan essentially being held hostage by the Western nations that left?

JAN EGELAND: Yes. There is a lot of issues over these last 20 years, and one of them is that there was an enormous aid dependency. Seventy percent of teachers, nurses, doctors, water engineers, garbage collectors, public workers were on the payroll of Western development donors. That was cut overnight. I met teachers who were eager to restart girls’ education and boys’ education. They hadn’t been paid since May. The banks are paralyzed because of the freezing of assets, so we, NRC, Norwegian Refugee Council, cannot transfer money to our colleagues in Kabul through the local bank system, not even extract money there to pay salaries for our 2,000 aid workers that did not go for the door, who are there to stay and deliver, because of this freezing of the economy. The Taliban has an enormous responsibility for good governance in the place that they took over, but I sincerely believe that NATO countries mustn’t forget they left behind 40 million people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about the role of Iran and Pakistan, which have basically shouldered an enormous refugee population, estimates of three million Afghans in Iran alone, and the failure of again the West to assist these countries in their efforts to assist the refugees?

JAN EGELAND: Yes, indeed. Ninety percent of Afghan refugees — and there are many millions of them — accumulated over 40 years of fighting since the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan 40 years ago. The 90% of these refugees are in two countries, Iran and in Pakistan. They are not in Europe. They are not in North America. They are not in the rich countries. They are in these two neighboring countries. In Iran where I was, refugees are getting education and healthcare and so on, but the Iranian host communities are not getting much international assistance at all. Now that 4,000 or 5,000 come over the border every single day, 320,000 since the Taliban took over, it means that the Afghan refugees in Iran are very afraid of the future because they think that the little they have has to be divided in even smaller portions for all of those coming over the border. There has to be an investment in hope inside Afghanistan but also in the two neighboring countries.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask about the conditions in the health centers in Afghanistan. This is an excerpt from a France 24 program which features Hasseebullah Barakzai, an administrator at a hospital in Kabul, where patients have to buy their own medicine, gloves and syringes. The clip begins with Masood, a nurse in the hospital.

MASOOD: [translated] You see, we don’t have any medicine here. We used to have antibiotics, painkillers and vitamins here but it is empty now. In this cupboard we had medicine for heart patients. Now we don’t even have a tablet left. This water cooler doesn’t work anymore. Look, we don’t even have water to wash our hands.

HASSEEBULLAH BARAKZAI: [translated] We don’t have enough food for the patients. Winter is here and we don’t have enough fuel for the heating system.

AMY GOODMAN: Afghanistan was already suffering from decades of war, drought and economic collapse prior to the Taliban takeover, but now U.N. officials have been warning of a much worse humanitarian crisis in the country with 23 million people facing hunger and nine million on the brink of starvation. Children are bearing the brunt of the crisis. The U.N. warned that if urgent humanitarian assistance is not provided, more than a million children will die from malnutrition. The BBC spoke to a mother whose two severely malnourished children were hospitalized.

MOTHER: [translated] The pain that he is suffering, I also feel it. Only God knows what I go through when I look at him. Two of my children are facing death because we don’t have any money. I want the world to help Afghan people. I don’t want any other mother to see their children suffering like this.

AMY GOODMAN: Just some of the voices of Afghanistan. Jan Egeland, as Juan just pointed out, when the Taliban toppled Afghanistan’s government, the country suddenly lost access to $9 billion in Central Bank reserves, frozen by the Biden administration. For those countries that are saying, “We will not support the Taliban so we will not give money,” what do you say to them?

JAN EGELAND: I say “Correct.” Money should not go to the military political group called the Taliban that took power by force. The money should go to the people, and it is possible. Number one, there has to be trust funds, as we call it, that is held by UN agencies, that funnel money directly to the hospitals that you just showed where people are dying at the moment. It can go straight to the teachers that were on the payroll of the World Bank previously. It can go straight to them. The money can go through us, international organizations, straight to the people. Secondly, unfreeze those funds that will enable banks to function again. At the moment, we cannot even buy relief items in Afghanistan. We have to ship them over, take them over from Pakistan and Iran which means that employment is dying in Afghanistan. Thirdly, donors, come down from the fence. See that we are there. We are reliable channels for funding. The money will go to the people. Transmit funding, not just come with pledges. This will not become Switzerland in a long time. You have to share the risk with us to save lives this winter.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, isn’t it in the interest of NATO and the Western nations that were in Afghanistan to assure some kind of an orderly government in Afghanistan? Because if the Taliban are not able to deliver basic services to their people, doesn’t that give the possibility for the rise of even more extremist groups within the country, like ISIS?

JAN EGELAND: That could well be. But anyhow, I would argue that nobody wants an implosion in Afghanistan where 40 million people see “I have no hope here. I need to leave.” People would then use the neighboring countries as a segue, a channel to go elsewhere, including to Europe where we have worked ourselves up in a hysteria for a very few thousand migrants on the Polish-EU border. Hundreds of thousands have now assembled at the Iranian-Afghan border on the Afghan side with the intent to get over. Iranian refugees I spoke to said, “All our relatives have started to wander.” They want to come to Iran and they want to wander towards Europe. So it is in everybody’s interest to stabilize things in Afghanistan, and I just listed the three things that can be done. It is not rocket science. It has to happen tomorrow. We have no time really before the massive death starts.

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to turn to Hassan Esfandiar of the Iranian Red Crescent, who spoke to Al Jazeera about the difficulties of providing assistance to the thousands of Afghans you just described arriving at the border every day.

HASSAN ESFANDIAR: Due to the current situation of sanctions to the country, unfortunately we are not able or we were not able to receive the international donations assistance because the banking channels are blocked and then we are not able to receive the humanitarian donations. So far, the Iran Red Crescent has tried to provide its own resources for the Afghan displaced populations who are approaching the border. As it is mentioned by your colleagues in the report, the average number of the populations who are approaching the Iranian borders are between 2,000 to 7,000 per day, so it’s a huge number.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, of course the U.S. has sanctions against Iran, so how can Iran be helped in dealing with this number of refugees that are crossing the border, 4,000 or 5000 every day? What is getting the West’s attention is what is happening in Eastern Europe. Earlier today, Polish border guards firing tear gas, water cannons at hundreds of asylum-seekers trying to push their way through a razor-wire barrier erected along the Poland-Belarus border. That’s 4,000 to 5,000 refugees there altogether. What’s happening in Iran is every day. If you could address both, from Iran to Poland-Belarus border?

JAN EGELAND: As a European, I’m ashamed at what is happening in our part of the world. What Belarus is doing by using vulnerable migrants like chess pawns in some kind of a power play, and then Europe basically saying, “We’re not going to hear any asylum applications at all” in violation of international law. “We’re going to throw everybody out.” Then migrants in some kind of a stalemate with the Army on either side, wanting them to go in opposing directions. That is Europe with a few thousand. In Iran, we are having between three and a half and four million Afghans at the moment. Three and a half to four million. I think that has to be sunk in — 4,000 or 5,000 more per day, and a very small international aid program.

Again, the United Nations is there with UNHCR. They’re a refugee agency. NRC is there. We can do more. We need more funding. We also ask for more freedom of operation from the Iranian authorities so we can win this race against the winter on both sides of the border, inside Afghanistan but also in Iran and in Pakistan. It has to be understood that a lot is at stake. It is not a small catastrophe. It is 23 million people who have no more food. They will wander. I would go if I was in that situation. I would also wander to where I could get food for my children.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, the particular role of the United States in all of this as being the primary power that led the war in Afghanistan for so many years and then the Biden administration suddenly pulling out — what would you urge the Biden administration to do now?

JAN EGELAND: The U.S. should lead, really, as it has in the military political project of the last 20 years, should lead in the humanitarian relief operation. Unfreeze the assets that is necessary to get the public sector going. The World Bank sits on funds. When I wrote to the World Bank president, the answer back was, “Well, we’re willing to do things if the member states on our board, the U.S. and others, tell us to release money. We can’t release money.” It is sitting there for teachers and nurses and hospitals and whatnot in Afghanistan.

Also, enable us as organizations to really work effectively and efficiently on both sides of the border. Iran sanction is making it difficult for us to work to some extent. The Norwegian Refugee Council couldn’t even transfer money for a full year after the Trump administration started these sanctions because there was no bank with a backbone strong enough to transfer aid money to our people because they were so afraid of one day coming in court in New York because of the potential break of these sanctions. It is paralyzing for us who are on the front lines of humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, the U.N. Climate Summit just wrapped up in Glasgow with a significantly weakened pact that activists, scientists, many governments say falls far short of what is needed to avert a climate catastrophe. You tweeted, “This deal is better than no deal, but far from achieving climate justice and avert disaster displacements. There are too many carbon spewing spoilers among the negotiators. The fight must now be taken to each and every big polluter.” Name names. Talk specifically about what has to be done and how the climate catastrophe generates climate refugees.

JAN EGELAND: I would start actually by going to those who intend to burn a lot of coal now that will lead to — and Afghanistan and Iran, that we are talking about, have both massive droughts at the moment. It is climate change-fueled. Really it is the major industrialized nations that has to do most, including China and now India, that are carbon-spewing and plan to spew out much more carbon in the coming years. We have to call a spade a spade. Look at where the emissions come from and it all has to come dramatically down. Afghans, they emit nothing really, and they are the first to starve because of this. The economic chaos and the droughts have created chaos in Afghanistan. Same in the Sahel belt. I was in places like Burkina Faso and Negev [sp] and so on, and you see how vulnerable they are. They have not emitted anything, really, in recent decades and they are first and hardest hit.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, we want to thank you for being with us, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council. We will link to your piece in The New York Times, “Afghanistan Is Facing a Total Economic Meltdown.” Speaking to us from Oslo, Norway.

Coming up, we look at the U.S.-China summit that took place last night and look more broadly at U.S.-China relations. We will speak to Alfred McCoy, his new book out today, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Stay with us.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
November 14, 2021

US Politics: We need a Transformation

As if we needed any more evidence of the sorry state of our political system, the long-running battle over the ‘Build Back Better’ bill has provided it. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, an early version of this bill included many proposals that would help Americans live with a sense of security. In addition, these proposals were strongly supported by the US population.

Among these many items were negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the obscenely high drug prices, universal Preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds, support for paid family and medical leave, and the expansion of Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids and glasses. Particularly popular with the public, the funding for this bill would come from taxes and legislative changes affecting the super wealthy who have benefited enormously from previous legislation (including gigantic bailouts) from Congress and the White House.

The corporate media reported this version of the bill had a price tag of $3.5 trillion, but failed to emphasize that this cost was spread over a 10-year period, or $350 billion per year. Many politicians opposed this bill, claiming that the cost was too high.

However, these same politicians didn’t bat an eye at giving about $715 billion a year or, assuming the same funding level, over $7 trillion for 10 years to the US military. It didn’t matter that the military has not passed an annual independent audit since Congress first mandated the audit for federal agencies in 1990. In addition, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the US spending on its military is greater than the sum of the next 11 nations combined and most of these countries are our allies.

In 1957, General Douglas MacArthur, a leading US military figure during the 20th century and hardly a peacenik, explained the support for increasing military budgets:

Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear … with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

The situation is worse today than the one President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address when he pointed out the dangers of the military-industrial complex. The media, universities and think tanks now are also part of this complex and provide even more lobbying clout.

An investigation by Brown University researchers estimated that the cost of US global war on terror since 9/11 at $8 trillion with direct responsibility for about 900,000 deaths. Clearly this war has been counterproductive for the US image around the world. In addition, its illegal attacks have also caused enormous unnecessary devastation and loss of lives particularly in the Middle East. Making matters worse, these illegal interventions, particularly the war crimes committed against Iraq, had very little to do with direct US interests. What a waste of resources! The financial cost to the US would be even far higher if the US were required to pay reparations for the devastation its war crimes caused.

Yet Congress continues to generously fund the Pentagon and to enrich the merchants of death while it is a miser to agencies that actually help the American public achieve the necessities of life. These necessities include housing, education, health care, food, etc. People living in much of Western Europe live much more secure lives having had these necessities for decades. Clearly our system of legalized bribery of politicians enriches the wealthy at the public’s expense.

It is terrible that two recalcitrant Democratic senators have been able to eliminate many of the important items included in the previous version of the Act such that it now costs about $185 billion/year. It is possible that the bill’s costs will be further reduced as other provisions are stripped away. What is even worse is the role of partisan politics where not even one Republican senator will stand up for the security of their fellow Americans and support the Act. What happened to the idea of standing up for the public interest? Do they prefer to see the public continue to suffer rather than to allow the other party to claim success? This system of legalized bribery and intense partisanship is a system that dooms us to disaster.
The post US Politics: We need a Transformation first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
November 12, 2021

Armistice Day Turned into Love-a-killer-Navy-SEAL Day

I’m rushing this since it is officially, November 11, the dreaded day of dishonor we call Veterans Day. Parades, ceremonies, and a fake day off—Veterans Day, observed on November 11 each year, is one of the country’s 12 Congressionally designated federal holidays. Make now bones about it — this holiday is distinct from Memorial Day: more nonsense with roots from a Civil War-era tradition of decorating the graves of deceased soldiers.

Veterans Day didn’t always celebrate all military veterans. Once tagged as Armistice Day, November 11 has roots in one of the most perverted and destructive rich man’s conflicts in history.

Go back to 1918, when a world of direct and collateral damaged souls wanted an end of what was commonly called the “Great War.” World War I had slashed and burned European landscapes, but it was the beginning of that use of deadly new scientifically-approved technology — poison gas — which got things going from thereon out, war-wise. Ecocide, genocide, and entire industries on exploding things and projectiles from space. More than 30 nations were dragged into this ugly great war of planes, tanks, bombs hitting all fronts with trenches and clouds of chlorine gas against galloping horse Cavalries. Revolutions had upended the governments of many of the combatant countries, and an influenza pandemic was sweeping the world.

On November 11, 1918 at 11:00 a.m. Paris time, an armistice came into effect.

World War I was over, but wars implanted in other countries were just beginning. 10 million men were killed in action, and another 20 million were wounded worldwide. The U.S. threw into the conflict in 1917, but it alone had lost over 116,000 lives and seen about 320,000 other casualties. These are just the ledger counts, because capitalists do not count the epigenetic trauma, the death by slow PTSD, the collective horror, guilt, shame and disease of war’s multiple fronts, victims and tragedies.

The bell tolled and silence rang at 11 a.m. Armistice day was nationwide. Multiple governors declared legal holidays. All those rah-rah veterans’ associations and groups made plans to commemorate the occasion with ceremonies, religious ceremonies, and fundraising for the American Red Cross. On November 11, 1919, the New York Times noted that people around the world would hold moments of silence at 11:00 a.m.

No great speeches on peace, no great conferences on structural violence, or why blockades are deadly, or how the financial felons of war keep on taking, or what sort of torture would be befitting of the war profiteers, or no great treatises on Wall Street’s hand in things. No War is a Racket intimations, that is, in the public at large, until, well, until 1935!

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket

Personal History Does Not Determine Outcomes

I’m named after a grandfather, Paul Haeder, who was a lieutenant in the German Navy during World War. He was one of seven brothers, and his life in Dortmund changed when he was recruited at age 17 into the Navy, as he lived on a German tall ship, where he would spend a year learning the trade of militarism, German style. Many ports that ship went to, and alas he ended up in a tri-plane, fighting the British and French. They carried hunting rifles with them to shoot at the pilots and engines. They carried round rocks to drop on the cloth wings. They had grenades to toss on trucks and soldiers below. There was no synchronized propellers for front mounted machine guns, hence the hunting rifles.

I did grow up on the Azores (USAF father) and then in France (same father, but officer, US Army). I spent time with aunts and uncles and cousins in Scotland, England and Germany. For a child — I was precocious and always around smart people who had at least THAT history under their belts. I was in the middle of old wise adults, war survivors, and young adults with education under their belts. It was an international upbringing. I was anti-military even though I was forced to be a military brat. My father was shot twice in Vietnam, and he was wounded in Korea as a 19 year old. He was a socialist, but he was also so tied to the military — cryptography — that I blasted his philosophy out of my life. He was always supportive of my education, and he threw in bucks when I needed things to survive in college. He was not a hard-ass like myself, and alas, I did the ROTC thing with my long hair while working as a journalist for the college daily rag. I wanted to learn the insights of war makers to be a revolutionary. Look where that got me, now age 64, aging out of all relevance in this by hook or by crook country.

So, that grandfather’s brothers had all emigrated to the US, Iowa and South Dakota, and Minnesota. My grandfather was in post-WWI German, trying to survive, trying his hand at anything, including Pinkerton guard on the trains (bread trains they called them) in order to shoot to kill Germans who were starving. He didn’t last long doing that, nor did he last long in the coal mines.

Ironically, he was on the Rostock, in the Battle of Jutland.

It was a huge battle off Denmark. My grandfather was on the ship being transported to another front to fly. The ship was hit, he broke his jaw, and he held up a seaman with a broken arm and shoulder and watched that war theater between the Germans and British.

The point is that war is more than just messy. You can read about the Rostock and Jutland in Wikipedia. Whoever wrote the entry loves naval war.

Rostock also participated in the Battle of Jutland, on 31 May 1916. She served as the leader of the torpedo boat flotillas, flying the flag of Kommodore Andreas Michelsen. The flotilla was tasked with screening for the battle squadrons of the High Seas Fleet. As the German fleet reached the engagement between the British and German battlecruiser squadrons at 17:30, a pair of destroyers, HMS Nestor and Nicator attempted to attack the German battle line. Rostock and a number of the battleships engaged the destroyers, which were both disabled by the heavy German fire.[5] The battleships destroyed Nestor and Nicator and their crews were picked up by German torpedo boats.[6]

At 19:32, Rostock and several torpedo boats crossed through the German line and began to lay a smoke screen to cover the withdrawal of the German fleet. Some twenty minutes later, Michelsen detached several torpedo boats to assist the badly damaged battlecruiser Lützow. By the time the German fleet had assumed its night cruising formation, Rostock fell in with the light cruisers of IV Scouting Group on the port side of the fleet. Shortly before midnight, Rostock and IV Scouting Group came into contact with the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron. Shortly after midnight, the British 4th Destroyer Flotilla attacked the German line, where Rostock was positioned. She joined the cannonade directed against the destroyers as they pressed home their attack. The destroyers launched several torpedoes at the Germans, forcing Rostock and the other cruisers to turn away to avoid them; this pointed the ships directly at the battleships in I Battle Squadron. Rostock successfully passed through the formation, but the cruiser Elbing was rammed by one of the battleships and disabled.[7]

In the chaos of the night engagement, Rostock’s search lights illuminated the destroyer Broke. Gunfire from Rostock and the battleships Westfalen and Rheinland smothered the British destroyer; although heavily damaged, she managed to limp back to port.[8] The ship was attacked by the destroyers Ambuscade and Contest; the two ships each fired a single torpedo at high-speed settings at a range of about 1,000 yd (910 m). One torpedo struck Rostock at 1:30, though it is unknown which destroyer launched it. Rostock was also hit by three 4 in (100 mm) shells, probably from the destroyer Broke. The disabled Rostock called the destroyer S54 to join her; S54 took Rostock in tow, at times making up to 10 kn (19 km/h; 12 mph). The pair was subsequently joined by the destroyers V71 and V73, which had been detached from the flotilla to escort Rostock back to port.[9][10]

At around 03:55 on 1 June, the four German ships encountered the British cruiser Dublin. The three destroyers went alongside the crippled cruiser and evacuated her crew, while flashing the first two letters of the British signal challenge. Smoke screens were laid to obscure the identity of the German warships. After about ten minutes, S54 departed with Rostock’s crew aboard, while V71 and V73 remained. Scuttling charges had been set in the cruiser, but to ensure Rostock sank faster, the two destroyers fired a total of three torpedoes into the ship. Rostock sank bow-first at approximately 04:25, after which V71 and V73 made for Horns Reef at high speed. Of Rostock’s crew, 14 men were killed and 6 were wounded during the battle.[11] In the course of the battle, Rostock fired some 500 rounds of 10.5 cm ammunition, more than any other German ship.[10] A second Rostock, of the Cöln class, was launched in April 1918, but was not completed before the end of the war.[12]

So, back in the USA, the Haeders — all those brothers and their families — believed that the eldest brother, Paul, had perished in the Battle of Jutland. They even held a memorial for him in Waterloo, Iowa. News back then did not travel fast.

This legacy of war is in a box. Iron Cross and other German awards. The two purple hearts and one slug dug out of my old man’s chest when his helicopter was shot down in Vietnam. Bronze star, all sorts of medals, and the tri-folded American Flag given to his wife (divorced, my mom) at his graveside service at Fort Huachuca where his ashes are in a cemetery near where I used to go javelina hunting when I was still a meat eater (age 17).

Ironically, everything in my life has been anti-war, anti-imperialism, and yet, I was a college teacher in Texas, New Mexico and Washington, working on military bases teaching college composition and literature. Before that, I was a reporter for newspaper in Southern Arizona, with one of my many beats being the US military, Fort Huachuca and the aerostat balloons in the first part of militarizing the border around drugs and immigrants.

I even taught college courses at Biggs Field, Texas, at the Sergeants Major Academy. My entire life has been pulling the scales off the eyes of my students, whose vision is infused with propaganda and false history of this country, from sea to shining sea. Many of my students agreed with Butler’s short book on the racket of war. I did get some off-the-record detailed accounts of many of those soldiers’ dealings in Vietnam, the Middle East, Central America, Africa.

What this country is all about is this smoke and mirrors gambit, facades, a disjointed fake right-left divide. What this country does around the military is more than criminal. Right from the playbook of the Roman Empire. But on steroids. So much more entangled in everything, now that the world runs on finance, trillions held in BlackRock and Blackstone and 100 banks. A world where media — books, history texts, TV, film, radio, Internet — are controlled by a dozen outfits. Who owns the world are those who need public and private armies to keep us, the 80 percent, in line. It’s keeping us in line with chaos of information, with disjointed fears, with people at each other’s throats.

Here, William Blum, in a 2014 interview on a book dealing with Obama, et al — William Blum Discusses his book, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy

That’s the same task faced by every agency of the government which has a connection to foreign policy. The same task faced by the mainstream media. They want to make it look good. They never use the word imperialism. They never say this is a big lie or it’s totally immoral, so they’re all on the same side. They all have to find ways of putting it in the best light. That’s the joint task of all these institutions. It’s as bad as World War I. These young people, they have little idea of the extreme acts of terrorism carried out by our Al Qaeda types. I’m sure the average American shares this view that suicide bombings are inhuman, but one can raise the same questions about the average American soldier. What’s been done to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan is as horrible as anything done by Al Qaeda. So, we don’t have to look for Islamic brainwashing, we have American brainwashing.

We know about Blum’s writing tied to the number of interventions (wars, killings) the US had engaged in from 1945 to 1999, when Blum’s book concludes: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Portions of the book can be read at: this site:

Here, his words in an article, “A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present” Z Magazine, June 1999

The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:

* making the world safe for American corporations;

* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;

* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;

* extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a “great power.”

This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.

The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

That war debt for Germany was so crushing it took 92 years after the defeat in WWI to pay off. That is the racket of the slimy ones — the bankers, the psychologists, the propagandists, the marketers, the offence weaponry corporations, the entire system propped up by royalty of all brands, as well as the elite, the money hoarders, the purveyors of death who use soldiers, civilians, crops, rivers, hospitals, schools, industries as weapons, as the casualties of war. Don’t forget about the inept media (but really stealth and capable tools for oligarchs and militarists). The Military Industrial Complex is so much more than rivets, TNT, missile parts, bombers, napalm.

Again, back to Rusty Nelson, who was asked to speak at a commencement, and he was part of the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane, and he worked hard at anti-war activism, and activism tied to environmental and educational justice. He said a few words in that address which got him promptly scolded by the superintendent and banned from ever stepping foot on a Spokane campus (K12) again.

This is from 2005 — Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander, my old rag:

This issue led to an insurrection in Seattle last spring. Parents at Garfield High School didn’t want recruiters targeting kids just because they are low-income or black, and the parent-teacher-student association voted to keep recruiters out.

“One piece of research I did was to find out how many times recruiters go to Lakeside, which is our (Seattle School District’s) prep school,” says Amy Hagopian, president of the Garfield PTSA. “And recruiters don’t go there. The guy I talked to, in 10 years as a career counselor, said he’s never seen Lakeside kids join the regular military. They go to the academies, like West Point. They don’t just join the Marines.”

There appears to be a similar dynamic in Spokane. Military recruiters visit Lewis and Clark High School as little as once a year, even though they are allowed in the building as many as four times a year.

At Rogers High, the recruiters come once a month. Rogers is also the only Spokane high school with an ROTC program.

There isn’t the same sense of outrage, however, that the district isn’t sticking up for more options for the kids at Rogers.

“The Peace and Justice Action League has a campaign to educate high school students about the pitfalls of recruiting. But it hasn’t taken off. We are not seeing the interest we expected from students or parents,” says Rusty Nelson of PJALS.

“Each school is different. Some schools say come anytime you want. Others say come once a quarter,” says Capt. John Richardson, an Army recruiter in Spokane.

In Spokane, a more conservative and more low-income city than Seattle, military careers have long been an honorable choice for high school grads. The military has seen little falloff in enlistments here, Richardson says: “Our enlistments have not changed over historic numbers.”

The continuing war in Iraq and the stepped-up search for recruits “has not been a concern for the school district,” says Emmett Arndt, director of teaching and learning for Spokane Public Schools. “We perceive that a military career is a viable and high-interest career for students.”

But parents and groups such as Spokane’s Peace and Justice Action League say the pressure to get recruits has increased in recent years, and students need to be shielded from high-pressure sales.

The nation’s 7,500 recruiters had a “stand-down” day on May 20 for retraining and refocus in the wake of embarrassing, and widely publicized, ethical lapses. There were no such lapses in the Spokane office, Richardson says.

Rusty and Nancy Nelson retired from the PJALS in 2009. Both people I considered friends during my 10 year stint in Spokane. Things in the MIC and the embedded encircling business and finance realm are so so much worse in 2021. An explosion of perversity and crime in the entire offence weapon game, and the tethered industries of oppression. All those collateral casualties are worth it not just in the mind of Albright, but in the minds of all those bankers and hedge fund and politicians, et al. All of them, every single one of them. who supports and defends this country.

This image is what the robber barons and the money changers and the depopulation gurus want in every country: “During a period of hyperinflation in 1920s Germany, 100,000 marks was the equivalent one U.S. dollar.”

This story of war, this history of lies, this ramping up of rah-rah rot, oh, I could go on and on, but I am on my own deadlines, hoping Dissident Voice runs this through today on the United States of Armaments’ holy day, Veterans Day, a mental place where there are no peace colleges, no peace studies (mandatory) in K12. Yes, without that version of humanity — peace, ending cold and hot wars, stopping the deadly sanctions and blockades and financial dirty dealings — our youth are handcuffed by lie after lie after lie.

Armistice — “an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting for a certain time; a truce.”

Ahh, 16 years ago — “War and Peace In Vietnam” by Paul Haeder, The Inlander.

Oh, do the Google gulag thing, and try and find any robust, true, four year or graduate program on “peace studies.” You know, antiwar studies, teaching teachers or thinkers to pursue the antiwar ethos, the entire complicated message of getting war out of everything. There is no antiwar movement, and you will not find Peace Colleges, but you will find War Colleges, and you will find ROTC units on Jesuit campuses. Crocodile tears for mercenaries, and SEAL teams with knives and C4 explosives. This is our guy, our book seller, our celebrity, our pardoned fellow, our hero. Chief Petty Office Gallagher, US Navy:

Not in the brig for long, for murdering prisoners — see him wrist-cuffed?

And, it wouldn’t be Disneyland, La-La Land, America, without a murderer blessed by a wannabe murderer, Trump:

Other heroes —

Our boys in uniform —

Our girls, too —

Our women in civilian clothes running amok, running the racket — “How women took over the military-industrial complex: For the first time, the nation’s defense hierarchy is no longer dominated by men” !! Below — Donald Trump shakes hands with Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson as Chief Test Pilot Alan B. Norman watches during an event in July at the White House. Hewson is one of four women to serve atop four of the nation’s five largest defense contractors. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Kathy Warden
President and CEO, Northrop Grumman
Effective Jan. 1, 2019

Marillyn Hewson
President and CEO, Lockheed Martin
Effective Jan. 1, 2013

Phebe Novakovic
Chairman and CEO, General Dynamics
Effective January 2013

Leanne Caret
President and CEO, Boeing Defense, Space & Security
Effective February 2016

Ellen Lord
Undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment
Effective August 2017

Heather Wilson
Secretary of the Air Force
Effective May 16, 2017

Lisa Gordon-Hagerty
Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration
Effective Feb. 22, 2018

Andrea Thompson
Undersecretary of state for arms control and international security
Effective June 19, 2018

Amen! May they all go the way of the Dodo, and I mean that figuratively. Because we know what harsh minds they have, what machinations are brewing in their violent brains, and how their violent tendencies are washed away with Georgetown and Harvard university MBA’s/JD’s and inside their rich lives and with their jet-setting ways, all part of the War is a Racket formula, updated AI and Drone and Pathogens and Satellite style, 2021.

This General,

Turned into this, thank goodness —

Ahh, Butler, stopping a coup against Roosevelt, against the elected (sic) president, and, of course, a Bush in Hand is involved:

In 1934, a colossal claim reached the American news media: There had been a plot to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in favor of a fascist government. Supposedly in the works since 1933, the claims of the conspiracy came from a very conspicuous and reliable source: Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated war heroes of his time. Even more unbelievable were his claims of who was involved in the plot – respected names like Robert Sterling Clark, Grayson M.P. Murphy, and Prescott Bush. While news media at the time mocked Butler’s story, recently discovered archives have revealed the truth behind Major General Butler’s claims. (light reading source)

U.S. BUDGETARY COSTS: $8 TRILLION

The vast economic impact of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is poorly understood by the U.S. public and policymakers. This paper estimates the budgetary costs of war, including past expenditures and future obligations to care for veterans of these wars.

HUMAN COST: OVER 929,000

The number of people killed directly in the violence of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere are approximated here. Several times as many civilians have died due to the reverberating effects of these wars. The methods of accounting are described in this paper.

GEOGRAPHIC REACH: OVER 85 COUNTRIES

From 2018 to 2020, the U.S. government undertook what it labeled “counterterrorism” activities in at least 85 countries, in an outgrowth of President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror.” This map displays air/drone strikes, on-the-ground combat, “Section 127e” programs, military exercises, and operations to train and/or assist foreign forces.

PEOPLE DISPLACED: 38 MILLION

38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.

The post Armistice Day Turned into Love-a-killer-Navy-SEAL Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
October 9, 2021

Biden Tells Supreme Court That Publicly Documented Torture Is a State Secret

When Abu Zubaydah was apprehended in Pakistan in 2002, the George W. Bush administration falsely characterized him as chief of operations for al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s number three man. For the next four years, the CIA sent Zubaydah to its “black sites” in Thailand and Poland where he was viciously tortured. In 2006, Zubaydah was taken to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. He has never been charged with a crime.

The torture of Abu Zubaydah is thoroughly documented in the 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In fact, several of the justices at the October 6 Supreme Court oral argument in United States v. Zubaydah referred to his treatment as “torture.”

Zubaydah’s lawyers detailed the torture he suffered in their brief (which referenced the Senate torture report) as follows:

On 83 different occasions in a single month of 2002, he was strapped to an inclined board with his head lower than his feet while CIA contractors poured water up his nose and down his throat, bringing him within sight of death. He was handcuffed and repeatedly slammed into walls, and suspended naked from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time. He was forced to remain awake for eleven consecutive days, and doused again and again with cold water when he collapsed into sleep. He was forced into a tall, narrow box the size of a coffin, and crammed into another box that would nearly fit under a chair, where he was left for hours. He was subjected to a particularly grotesque humiliation described by the CIA as “rectal rehydration.”

Nevertheless, the Biden administration told the high court that Zubaydah’s well-known torture is a “state secret” because former CIA Director Mike Pompeo said publicizing it would harm national security. Thus, Solicitor General Brian Fletcher argued, the two contractors who orchestrated Zubaydah’s torture in Poland should not be permitted to testify in a Polish court’s criminal investigation into the treatment of Zubaydah.

But as Justice Elena Kagan said, “At a certain point, it becomes a little farcical, this idea of the assertion of a privilege, doesn’t it? I mean, if everybody knows what you’re asserting privilege on, like, what exactly does this privilege.… It’s not a state secrets privilege anymore.”

“Ultimately, the question in this case is whether torture can be kept secret. In a democracy, the answer to that question has to be no,” attorney Joseph Margulies, who represents Zubaydah, told Truthout. “The state secrets doctrine must never be used to prevent an accounting for torture done in our name. If ‘state secrets’ means ‘protect torture,’ before long we won’t have a state to protect.”

Biden Asks Court to Prevent Testimony of Psychologists Who Tortured Zubaydah in Poland

The Biden administration seeks to prevent testimony of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who have already testified in a prior case and in the military commission at Guantánamo. Mitchell and Jessen were the chief architects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the U.S. government’s euphemism for torture. They were paid more than $80 million for their vile work.

Continuing Donald Trump’s attempts to thwart the psychologists’ testimony, the Biden administration claims that if Mitchell and Jessen admit Zubaydah was tortured at a CIA black site in Poland, it will create a “breach of trust” with the Polish government.

“The Polish prosecutor already has information [that it happened in Poland] and doesn’t need U.S. discovery on the topic,” David Klein, Zubaydah’s attorney, told the justices. “What he does need to know is what happened inside Abu Zubaydah’s cell between December 2002 and September 2003. So I want to ask simple questions like, how was Abu Zubaydah fed? What was his medical condition? What was his cell like? And, yes, was he tortured?”

Zubaydah’s Testimony Would Be an “Off Ramp” From the Litigation, Gorsuch Says

After the Supreme Court engaged in an extensive back-and-forth exchange about the parameters of the state secrets privilege, Justices Stephen Breyer, Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor all insisted that Zubaydah himself, who was an eyewitness to his torture, should be allowed to testify instead of the psychologists at the Polish proceeding. That would circumvent the state secrets issue, they noted. Gorsuch called it an “off ramp” to avoid additional litigation.

“… the question in this case is whether torture can be kept secret. In a democracy, the answer to that question has to be no.”

Solicitor General Fletcher responded, “Abu Zubaydah cannot testify because he is being held incommunicado. He has been held in Guantánamo incommunicado.”

“Why, Why?” Breyer asked, astounded that Zubaydah is still being held in Guantánamo after 15 years. “In Hamdi [v. Rumsfeld], we said you could hold people in Guantánamo. The words were: Active combat operations against Taliban fighters apparently are going on in Afghanistan. Well, they’re not anymore.”

Brett Kavanaugh asked Fletcher, “Is the United States still engaged in hostilities for purposes of the AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force] against Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations?” Fletcher replied, “That is the government’s position, that notwithstanding the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, we continue to be engaged in hostilities with Al Qaeda and, therefore, the detention under law of war remains proper.”

Kavanaugh and Fletcher apparently overlooked the fact that “the C.I.A. later concluded that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Al Qaeda,” according to the Senate torture report. And the AUMF that Congress gave Bush after 9/11 only authorized the president to use military force against those groups and individuals responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Four U.S. Presidents Used State Secrets Privilege in “War on Terror”

Joe Biden is not the first president to invoke the state secrets privilege in the war on terror. The Bush administration used the privilege to evade accountability for torture, to silence whistleblowers and prevent disclosure of its extraordinary rendition program (where the CIA sent people including Zubaydah to other countries to be tortured). Bush’s assertion of the privilege did not, however, succeed in keeping the publicly acknowledged National Security Agency surveillance program secret. The Obama administration invoked the privilege to block judicial inquiry into extraordinary rendition. It also used the privilege to hide Barack Obama’s “kill list” that authorized the CIA and the Defense Department to kill civilians with no showing of imminent threat. And the Trump administration utilized the privilege in Zubaydah’s case and another torture case, as well as to preclude release of an FBI report about Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Will the Supreme Court accept Biden’s assertion of the state secrets privilege to prevent testimony of Mitchell and Jessen in the Polish court? Will the Court suggest that the executive branch reconsider the indefinite detention of Zubaydah in light of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? Will the Court urge the executive to allow Zubaydah to testify about his torture at the CIA’s black site in Poland? We will know by June 2022.

This case is a pivotal test of the willingness of the Supreme Court to check and balance the executive when it perpetrates torture and other war crimes in its war on terror. In 2016, Margulies said that Abu Zubaydah is “the poster child for the torture program, and that’s why they never want him to be heard from again.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
October 4, 2021

The New Black Internationalism

The Movement for Black Lives has developed an incipient internationalist language and vision, with the potential to remap America’s place in the world.

This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
October 1, 2021

Scheer Intelligence: War Is A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Racket

Twenty years since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the human and financial cost of the United States’ failed “War on Terror” is plain to see: as one headline put it, “20 years, $6 trillion, 900,000 lives.” The estimates of lives lost and trillions spent vary throughout media sources, but even the most conservative estimates speak for themselves. Yet, while the Pentagon billed America’s latest imperial endeavors as an imperative series of operations aimed at protecting U.S. national security, there is a simpler, far more cynical and obscene motivation behind these forever wars, according to the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, Andrew Cockburn: money.

On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Cockburn joins host Robert Scheer to discuss his most recent book, “Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine,” released by Verso Books on September 21.

The post Scheer Intelligence: War Is A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Racket appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
September 22, 2021

So You Go Deaf at a Protest: *MIC/MICC* at the Helm

*Military Industrial Complex, or Lawrence Wilkerson’s, Military Industrial Congressional Complex*

You get a story on the supposed Havana Syndrome, and then you also get the concept of mass psychogenic illness (you know, it’s all in your head, buster, those heart palpitations, the sweats, the throbbing veins, after getting mRNA “vaccinated”) explained, and, well, no huge outrage on these weapons of mass destruction created by USA, Israel, UK, France other shit-holes. None. Yes, of course, China and Russia, they have their directed energy weapons, their lasers, their rail guns.

As a collective, we just take it up the rear end daily, a thousand times, with these illustrations of the perversion of the inventors (scientists) and the CEOs and their armies of Eichmanns and then their armies of wrench turners and computer motherboard makers to help build these tools of oppression and murder. .

Get this one here:

The United Kingdom deployed an American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), in essence, a sound cannon, during the London 2012 Olympics. Products like LRAD represent a shift from military to domestic usage of directed energy weapons, Dawson noted, explaining:

DEW manufacturers seem to be developing more hand-held versions of what was industrial-scale military weaponry. So they are transitioning from something that was the size of a truck used in Afghanistan or Iraq and turning it into something more like a taser that can be held by a police officer. In fact, the Taser Corporation, as well as other manufacturers of crowd-control weaponry, are listed in the WikiLeaks files as being manufacturers of directed energy weapons.”

LRADs are used at airports to deter wildlife from runways. But they are also commonly used by law enforcement against protestors, such as at Occupy Oakland, the George Floyd protests, and at the 2017 Women’s March.

[An EU police officer deploys an LRAD near a popular refugee crossing point on the Greek – Turkish border, May 21, 2021. Giannis Papanikos | AP]

LRAD focuses a piercing and unbearable noise at those at whom it is pointed, leaving targets dizzy and suffering headaches. It is undoubtedly effective, but also poses a risk to human health. The National Institutes of Health advises that permanent hearing loss can begin when exposed to sounds of more than 85 dB. Yet police LRADs are capable of producing sounds of higher than 150 dB. There are serious concerns that the LRAD will be used liberally and illegally to disperse peaceful demonstrations. This is already happening: in 2017, the city of New York was forced to pay $748,000 to Black Lives Matter protestors targeted with LRAD. The NYPD suspended its use.

So, look at the thug, with earplugs and fake mask on, while using a weapon turned on refugees. Now if this is not a picture of the Great White Sadistic Race, then, I can’t begin to help you, kind reader.

Our tax dollars at this murderous work —

Read Alan MacLeod’s piece here — Havana Syndrome, Directed Energy Weapons, and the New Cold War

It’s the supplements, stupid!

So, from illegal and unethical and monstrous weapons against we the people, to the power of the Food and Drug Administration’s prostitutes in the employ of Big Pharma and Big Med:

Yep, emergency use authorization to approve the universal jabbing of hundreds of bottles of boosters on the wall, that FDA is something else —

Resveratrol, a plant-derived polyphenol found in grapes, could be eliminated in supplement form like pyridoxamine (B6) was a number of years ago due to an FDA back-channel that lets Big Pharma turn supplements into drugs. If Big Pharma asks the FDA to remove resveratrol, the agency’s job of eliminating these supplements is made much easier if it gets the “mandatory filing” requirement that it wants. We need to fight for major changes in the law and to block this “mandatory list” from ever passing to protect our access to important supplements.

Resveratrol has been available as a supplement for years. But we know from FDA documents that the agency rejected a “new supplement” notification for resveratrol, stating that resveratrol doesn’t meet the legal definition of a supplement because a drug company started investigating it as a drug in 2001, and the agency has no evidence that resveratrol was sold as a supplement before that date. This means that the drug company could, at any time, petition the FDA to remove resveratrol supplements from the market. This is what happened to pyridoxamine, a form of B6, and it still isn’t available as a supplement even though no drug ever came to market; it could also happen to CBD and l-glutamine.

So, imagine, all those supplements, all those proven natural elements to keep us out of the medical system. Out of the death chambers of doctors’ offices and mass murder hospitals. You know, this FDA and CDC and NIH group of liars, or in some camps, poison delivery villains:

Rumble — Expert Testimony provided by Dr. Christina Parks, Ph.D, to the Michigan House of Representatives in hearing on HB 4471. This is an unedited screen recording. This science of viruses, what they can and cannot do, and that is a huge discussion point, though I see this doctor talking to glazed eyes in the Michigan House — Eight minutes to get illuminated so please, watch. This absurdity, using boosters of those mRNA jabs to stop the Delta Variant? Makes zero sense. Listen, watch, and enlighten yourself.

If there are no national leaders, folks with bully pulpits, with media stages, to really drill down on the absurdity of this country, these trillions lost/stolen of our tax dollars, then the cascading number of stories will continue to come out with no umph, no fanfare, no repercussions.

The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.

“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.

It’s the CIA (and assassinations) Stupid!

And so, we get back to the USA, CIA, all those nefarious mutants from the UK, Israel, et al. I was almost five when Dag Hammarskjoild was murdered (1961). This documentary goes around the evidence, gets into the ugly reality of MI6 and CIA and apartheid whites wanting to eradicate the Blacks in, well, Black Africa. Lo and behold, the documentary that looks into the UN chief’s murder exposes another reality — a clandestine group using fake medical doctors and fake clinics to inoculate Blacks (poor, of course) with HIV, to help spread the deadly virus.

Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”

The mystery of the second U.N. secretary-general’s death festered until the 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by British researcher Susan Williams, who uncovered new evidence that pointed to the likelihood that U.S., British and South African intelligence had a hand in his death in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia. He was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga’s separatist war from the Congo.

Williams’ findings led to an independent commission that called on the U.N. to reopen its 1962 probe in the killing, which ended with an open verdict. “The possibility … the plane was … forced into descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the commission concluded.

All roads lead to hell, when it comes to USA, Israel, UK, EU and Canada. Exterminate all the Brutes!

“I wanted to push the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking and find a freedom to tell this story by any means necessary.” Director Raoul Peck sits down to discuss the creative intentions behind documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes.

Check out more on Dag over at Consortium News —

Oh, the truths of the day, around 6 million people dead because of the War on Terror. Six million!

New Byline Times report which found that

“at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”

The post So You Go Deaf at a Protest: *MIC/MICC* at the Helm first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 21, 2021

Corporate America Cashed in on the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge

The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received far less attention.

Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion-plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.

“The Purse Is Now Open”: The Post-9/11 Flood of Military Contracts

The political climate created by the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as Bush administration officials quickly dubbed it, set the stage for humongous increases in the Pentagon budget. In the first year after the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, defense spending rose by more than 10% and that was just the beginning. It would, in fact, increase annually for the next decade, which was unprecedented in American history. The Pentagon budget peaked in 2010 at the highest level since World War II — over $800 billion, substantially more than the country spent on its forces at the height of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or during President Ronald Reagan’s vaunted military buildup of the 1980s.

And in the new political climate sparked by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, those increases reached well beyond expenditures specifically tied to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Harry Stonecipher, then vice president of Boeing, told the Wall Street Journal in an October 2001 interview, “The purse is now open… [A]ny member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.”

Stonecipher’s prophesy of rapidly rising Pentagon budgets proved correct. And it’s never ended. The Biden administration is anything but an exception. Its latest proposal for spending on the Pentagon and related defense work like nuclear warhead development at the Department of Energy topped $753 billion for FY2022. And not to be outdone, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have already voted to add roughly $24 billion to that staggering sum.

Who Benefited?

The benefits of the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending have been distributed in a highly concentrated fashion. More than one-third of all contracts now go to just five major weapons companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Those five received more than $166 billion in such contracts in fiscal year 2020 alone. To put such a figure in perspective, the $75 billion in Pentagon contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin that year was significantly more than one and one-half times the entire 2020 budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, which together totaled $44 billion.

While it’s true that the biggest financial beneficiaries of the post-9/11 military spending surge were those five weapons contractors, they were anything but the only ones to cash in. Companies benefiting from the buildup of the past 20 years also included logistics and construction firms like Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and Bechtel, as well as armed private security contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp. The Congressional Research Service estimates that in FY2020 the spending for contractors of all kinds had grown to $420 billion, or well over half of the total Pentagon budget. Companies in all three categories noted above took advantage of “wartime” conditions — in which both speed of delivery and less rigorous oversight came to be considered the norms — to overcharge the government or even engage in outright fraud.

The best-known reconstruction and logistics contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan was Halliburton, through its KBR subsidiary. At the start of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Halliburton was the recipient of the Pentagon’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program contracts. Those open-ended arrangements involved coordinating support functions for troops in the field, including setting up military bases, maintaining equipment, and providing food and laundry services. By 2008, the company had received more than $30 billion for such work.

Halliburton’s role would prove controversial indeed, reeking as it did of self-dealing and blatant corruption. The notion of privatizing military-support services was first initiated in the early 1990s by Dick Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and Halliburton got the contract to figure out how to do it. I suspect you won’t be surprised to learn that Cheney then went on to serve as the CEO of Halliburton until he became vice president under George W. Bush in 2001. His journey was a (if not the) classic case of that revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry, now used by so many government officials and generals or admirals, with all the obvious conflicts-of-interest it entails.

Once it secured its billions for work in Iraq, Halliburton proceeded to vastly overcharge the Pentagon for basic services, even while doing shoddy work that put U.S. troops at risk — and it would prove to be anything but alone in such activities.

Starting in 2004, a year into the Iraq War, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a congressionally mandated body designed to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, along with Congressional watchdogs like Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), exposed scores of examples of overcharging, faulty construction, and outright theft by contractors engaged in the “rebuilding” of that country. Again, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to find out that relatively few companies suffered significant financial or criminal consequences for what can only be described as striking war profiteering. The congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that, as of 2011, waste, fraud, and abuse in the two war zones had already totaled $31 billion to $60 billion.

A case in point was the International Oil Trading Company, which received contracts worth $2.7 billion from the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency to provide fuel for U.S. operations in Iraq. An investigation by Congressman Waxman, chair of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, found that the firm had routinely overcharged the Pentagon for the fuel it shipped into Iraq, making more than $200 million in profits on oil sales of $1.4 billion during the period from 2004 to 2008. More than a third of those funds went to its owner, Harry Sargeant III, who also served as the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Waxman summarized the situation this way: “The documents show that Mr. Sargeant’s company took advantage of U.S. taxpayers. His company had the only license to transport fuel through Jordan, so he could get away with charging exorbitant prices. I’ve never seen another situation like this.”

A particularly egregious case of shoddy work with tragic human consequences involved the electrocution of at least 18 military personnel at several bases in Iraq from 2004 on. This happened thanks to faulty electrical installations, some done by KBR and its subcontractors. An investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found that commanders in the field had “failed to ensure that renovations… had been properly done, the Army did not set standards for jobs or contractors, and KBR did not ground electrical equipment it installed at the facility.”

The Afghan “reconstruction” process was similarly replete with examples of fraud, waste, and abuse. These included a U.S.-appointed economic task force that spent $43 million constructing a gas station essentially in the middle of nowhere that would never be used, another $150 million on lavish living quarters for U.S. economic advisors, and $3 million for Afghan police patrol boats that would prove similarly useless.

Perhaps most disturbingly, a congressional investigation found that a significant portion of $2 billion worth of transportation contracts issued to U.S. and Afghan firms ended up as kickbacks to warlords and police officials or as payments to the Taliban to allow large convoys of trucks to pass through areas they controlled, sometimes as much as $1,500 per truck, or up to half a million dollars for each 300-truck convoy. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that “one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money” paid from just such transportation contracts.

A Two-Decade Explosion of Corporate Profits

A second stream of revenue for corporations tied to those wars went to private security contractors, some of which guarded U.S. facilities or critical infrastructure like Iraqi oil pipelines.

The most notorious of them was, of course, Blackwater, a number of whose employees were involved in a 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. They opened fire on civilians at a crowded intersection while guarding a U.S. Embassy convoy. The attack prompted ongoing legal and civil cases that continued into the Trump era, when several perpetrators of the massacre were pardoned by the president.

In the wake of those killings, Blackwater was rebranded several times, first as XE Services and then as Academii, before eventually merging with Triple Canopy, another private contracting firm. Blackwater founder Erik Prince then separated from the company, but he has since recruited private mercenaries on behalf of the United Arab Emirates for deployment to the civil war in Libya in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Prince also unsuccessfully proposed to the Trump administration that he recruit a force of private contractors meant to be the backbone of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

Another task taken up by private firms Titan and CACI International was the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. Both companies had interrogators and translators on the ground at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a site where such prisoners were brutally tortured.

The number of personnel deployed and the revenues received by security and reconstruction contractors grew dramatically as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on. The Congressional Research Service estimated that by March 2011 there were more contractor employees in Iraq and Afghanistan (155,000) than American uniformed military personnel (145,000). In its August 2011 final report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan put the figure even higher, stating that “contractors represent more than half of the U.S. presence in the contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times employing more than a quarter-million people.”

While an armed contractor who had served in the Marines could earn as much as $200,000 annually in Iraq, about three-quarters of the contractor work force there was made up of people from countries like Nepal or the Philippines, or Iraqi citizens. Poorly paid, at times they received as little as $3,000 per year. A 2017 analysis by the Costs of War project documented “abysmal labor conditions” and major human rights abuses inflicted on foreign nationals working on U.S.-funded projects in Afghanistan, including false imprisonment, theft of wages, and deaths and injuries in areas of conflict.

With the U.S. military in Iraq reduced to a relatively modest number of armed “advisors” and no American forces left in Afghanistan, such contractors are now seeking foreign clients. For example, a U.S. firm — Tier 1 Group, which was founded by a former employee of Blackwater — trained four of the Saudi operatives involved in the murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, an effort funded by the Saudi government. As the New York Times noted when it broke that story, “Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.”

Add in one more factor to the two-decade “war on terror” explosion of corporate profits. Overseas arms sales also rose sharply in this era. The biggest and most controversial market for U.S. weaponry in recent years has been the Middle East, particularly sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have been involved in a devastating war in Yemen, as well as fueling conflicts elsewhere in the region.

Donald Trump made the most noise about Middle East arms sales and their benefits to the U.S. economy. However, the giant weapons-producing corporations actually sold more weaponry to Saudi Arabia, on average, during the Obama administration, including three major offers in 2010 that totaled more than $60 billion for combat aircraft, attack helicopters, armored vehicles, bombs, missiles, and guns — virtually an entire arsenal. Many of those systems were used by the Saudis in their intervention in Yemen, which has involved the killing of thousands of civilians in indiscriminate air strikes and the imposition of a blockade that has contributed substantially to the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people to date.

Forever War Profiteering?

Reining in the excess profits of weapons contractors and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse by private firms involved in supporting U.S. military operations will ultimately require reduced spending on war and on preparations for war. So far, unfortunately, Pentagon budgets only continue to rise and yet more money flows to the big five weapons firms.

To alter this remarkably unvarying pattern, a new strategy is needed, one that increases the role of American diplomacy, while focusing on emerging and persistent non-military security challenges. “National security” needs to be redefined not in terms of a new “cold war” with China, but to forefront crucial issues like pandemics and climate change.

It’s time to put a halt to the direct and indirect foreign military interventions the United States has carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and so many other places in this century. Otherwise, we’re in for decades of more war profiteering by weapons contractors reaping massive profits with impunity.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
September 19, 2021

The mainstream media’s demonisation of Muslims has parallels in anti-Irish sentiment

The International Witness Campaign (IWC) remembers the last 20 years of illegal wars and “mass displacement in the Muslim world”. This period also saw an increase in Islamophobia in Britain. And as so clearly outlined by The Canary’s Maryam Jameela, the mainstream media (MSM) played no small part in spreading such hate.

But this comes as no surprise to me. I’m Irish, and just as the MSM aided and abetted a war on Muslims, it did something similar to us. That war on the Irish raged for well over a century. And while it may not be as obvious today as it once was, it’s not completely done. Because just as ‘needs must when the devil drives’, the media renews its attacks whenever the Irish aren’t behaving the way the MSM believes we should.

This in part is what makes the IWC so important. And it’s important we stand together to ensure the MSM can no longer victimise at will. Or if it does, it can expect one hell of a response from all of us.

A personal account

I’m not Muslim, so I can’t personally write about how the MSM’s support of the war on terror affected Muslims. At The Canary we have others who articulate that so elegantly. But there are parallels between Islamophobia and anti-Irish sentiment. And as an Irish person, I can explain a bit about how the war on the Irish affects us. Some English people reading this may well be thinking – “What are you on about? War on the Irish? No such thing!” Well I’m afraid there was. And quite possibly there still is. Let me explain.

This last 20 years of an illegal war on Islam was preceded by a 30-year war in Ireland. As the British never publicly admitted they were at war, the international community couldn’t declare it ‘illegal’. But to me it was. And while some may not agree that the MSM cheer-led the British into it, it certainly supported Britain’s role in Ireland.

That war was mainly fought in the six north eastern counties of Ireland. Some of you may call this ‘Northern Ireland’. That’s up to you, and I’ve no particular qualms with that. But since I was a child, with no political significance attached, I’ve always and most simply called it ‘the north’. Sometimes ‘the six counties’. Similarly, I’ve always and only ever said ‘Derry’. It’s easiest. And it’s understood by pretty much every Irish person.

And therein begins one tiny part of the MSM’s war on the Irish. Because it likes to amplify criticism of those who use language Irish people are most comfortable with. Why should it matter what people chose to call any place? It always struck me as a form of imperialist conditioning and thought control. Side note, neither me nor the Irish government ever say the ‘British Isles’. I consider this to be imperialist conditioning also!

What’s in a name?

But the MSM is also fond of a much more dangerous form of conditioning. And this is through its biased use of the word ‘terrorist’. This was a term the media used predominantly for Irish republican paramilitaries but not for British loyalists. And it’s a war of words that continues to this day. Those loyalists are still predominantly referred to as ‘paramilitaries’ whereas republicans are ‘terrorists’. As a child, I remember clearly how the media talked about Irish terrorists murdering while British loyalists simply killed. No doubt, that must have affected the public’s perception of the war.

And I also remember the omission of words terrorism or murder when reporting the crimes of the British state. Even as it colluded with loyalist terrorists or used its own official agents, such as the cowardly Military Reaction Force (MRF), to terrorise and murder innocent Catholics. Or even when its own soldiers gunned down peaceful protesters and murdered other innocent people.

Britain fought a ‘Dirty War’ in Ireland using criminal and terrorist tactics against its enemy and against those who had no involvement in the conflict whatsoever. So tuning in to the MSM during that war always left me frustrated and enraged. Because to me its Orwellian narrative read as:

While the British may have done some ‘wrong’, they did it ‘defending’ democracy. Whereas Irish republicans were completely wrong and everything they and the community they came from did was and always will be wrong. And the only reason we find them (Sinn Féin) somewhat tolerable today, is because they’ve finally agreed to implement British law.

Such ignorance is racist

Many years ago when I was living abroad, I remember clear as day a conversation between myself and a couple of friends. One of them was English. For some reason, I’m not sure why, someone made reference to the famine in Ireland (No! It’s not the ‘Irish famine’. We didn’t want it!). It wasn’t even a political discussion – just a few friends ‘shooting the breeze’, you might say. And it appeared as if, without giving the matter any thought at all, my English friend responded:

serves you right for eating so many potatoes!

I’ll never forget it. I was enraged. The absolute wretched ignorance of someone living so close, from a nation with so much blood on its hands in Ireland (and beyond), to be so feckless and clueless about the effect that famine had, and still has, on Irish people. The effect it had on her friend! Blood boiling! Disgusting! Racist!

Like I said, it wasn’t even a political discussion, just a chat among friends. But for some reason this was her immediate response to a catastrophe that took at least one million lives and forced at least another million to emigrate. A catastrophe from which Ireland’s population still hasn’t numerically recovered. And all of this under the watchful eye of an occupying British government and army. All the while that government’s soldiers protected the boat loads of food that left Ireland as Irish people starved. Like I said, I was enraged. But not completely surprised. Because it’s an attitude I’ve encountered far too often from White English people.

The MSM’s racist depiction of Irish people

So I wonder, were these attitudes in any way formed by mainstream media? Because Britain’s war of words had been going on for some time. The mid-19th century saw publications like Punch depict the Irish as “ape-like” and indeed much worse. The Economist and the Times blamed us for the famine and believed us unworthy of assistance. Of course you could say that was a long time ago. So it had no influence on these attitudes. And yes, it may have been a long time ago, but unfortunately it wasn’t the end of it.

Fast forward about 100 years and the media was at it again. The infamous ‘No Irish, no Blacks, no dogs’ signs displayed in guest houses in England up until the 1960s. Yet in October 2015, the Guardian published an unsubstantiated letter claiming these signs never existed. Total nonsense. One week later, it eventually published a rebuttal of that ridiculous claim.

Again I hear you say “the 60s is a long time ago…move on”. And I’d love to. But what about the comments of ‘Mr. Uber Brit’ himself, the Reverend Ian Paisley? Upon his death in 2014, the BBC published a list of his most disgusting quotes. But the way it was written felt as if the BBC was eulogising him. Among such quotes was his disgustingly racist comment in 1969 about Irish Catholics, where he bellowed:

They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin

One year prior, when Catholics had been burned out of their homes by loyalist gangs, Paisley blamed the Catholics for the fires, saying:

Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners

And it wasn’t confined to British MSM. Because one CBS News article‘s condemnation of Paisley could only stretch as far as calling him a “divisive Protestant firebrand”. It went on to say he was the person Catholics “loved to hate” because of his “unflagging energy”. Indeed, it claimed Paisley’s antics were actually good for the Catholic cause! So ‘our persecution made us stronger’ eh? Where have we heard that racist trope before? But no outrage from either publication. No cries of ‘racism’.

Yet no amount of MSM airbrushing nor comedic spin of that man will undo the carnage he inflicted with his “energy”.

And it’s not over yet…

In 2014, a well-known BBC TV show host in the north of Ireland openly mocked the Irish language in a face to face interview with an Irish language speaker. He did so when discussing comments of the DUP’s Gregory Campbell in the north’s parliament. Campbell had previously mocked the Irish language in parliament in what some described as borderline racism. The TV host later apologised, but it’s hard to understand how he’d have thought his outburst could ever be acceptable.

In recent days, the Irish president Michael D Higgins declined an invitation to attend a political event in the north of Ireland ‘celebrating’ 100 years of partition on the island. Both historians and constitutional experts found he was correct to have rejected the invitation. Several online polls would appear to show an overwhelming majority of Irish people support his decision not to attend. And from the conversations I’ve had since this controversy broke, absolutely no one seems to be screaming for Higgins to change his mind.

However, the MSM has attacked the Irish president for not attending. The British unionist position that president Higgins ‘snubbed’ them has appeared regularly in MSM headlines. Other articles gave a lot of word count to him ‘defending’ his decision or ‘encouraging’ him to reconsider. But they could have just as easily given that space to facing down his detractors. Is he just another Irish person that doesn’t know their place?

Stand together

So this is my experience of the MSM’s depiction of the Irish through the years. It may or may not resonate with Muslims, but it at least highlights the lengths the mainstream media goes to to demonise an already victimised community, when this ire should instead be directed at the perpetrators.

Guns and bombs typically fall silent quicker than words. And given the worldwide online nature of media, those words last an eternity. I believe that’s the intention of the attacks. Ours must be a united resistance.

Featured image via – Flickr – Peter K. Levy

By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

This post was originally published on The Canary.
September 18, 2021

Drone strikes prove that Muslim lives hold no value for Western imperial powers

The US recently admitted that its drone attack in Kabul, perpetrated on 29 August, killed 10 civilians. Seven of them were children. The youngest victim, a toddler named Sumaya, was only two years old.

With this development has come a fresh wave of outrage against US military aggression. But the outrage means little without an outright rejection of the neoliberal system of which these strikes are a feature. It also means little if it comes from people who won’t acknowledge the Islamophobia inherent in the war on terror – and the dehumanisation of Muslim lives that it’s enabled and legitimised.

The US only helps itself

At the start of the 1987 Hollywood film Predator, American soldiers charge into an unidentified forest in Central America and indiscriminately gun down an entire encampment. Their aim was to save hostages, but their policy was to shoot first and ask questions later. More recently, The Suicide Squad similarly depicted US agents accidently gunning down a camp that later turned out to be ‘the good guys’.

The drone attack in question is a real-life example of this approach. The attack has turned on its head the notion that the US is, or ever has been, a benevolent protector of Afghan people. But moreover, this incident is symbolic of US foreign policy for at least half a century. Acts of military aggression instigated on claims of freedom, democracy, and justice are anything but. Whether the bogeyman is communism or terrorism, the objective remains the same: protecting US interests.

And in service of this aim, human life is reduced to collateral damage. Of secondary importance. Its loss is regrettable but necessary. The US attack on 29 August killed 10 people, none of whom were IS agents. Sorry about that, but oh well.

The non-value of Muslim lives

Moreover, a defining feature of drone strikes carried out over nearly two decades is that the targets have been Muslim countries. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya – all attacked in service of US interests. Although the justifications have been varied, they fall broadly under the ‘war on terror’ umbrella. And nothing exemplifies the concept of structural Islamophobia quite like the war on terror.

These strikes have killed as many as 16,901 people so far. And as many as 2,200 are recorded as being “civilians”. These are high estimates – but even if we were to take the lower estimates of these figures, what would that prove? The lives of 910 civilians are as valuable as the lives of 2,200 civilians. 8,858 extra-judicial killings is no better than 16,901.

And even if we consider confirmed non-civilian killings to be ‘justified’ targets, the killing of innocent civilians in pursuit of those targets is never justifiable. These people were not collateral. They were not mere statistics. They were human beings with names, and families, and aspirations. Hundreds of them were children. And regardless of the extent to which the media and Western superpowers may have dehumanised them, their lives mattered.

We need more than outrage

It won’t be long before the news cycle moves on to discuss something else. Drone strikes in Muslim countries, meanwhile, will continue. Nation states will keep chasing their tails, trying to fight ‘Islamist’ groups and radicalisation while refusing to look to their own disastrous policies. Yet the 7/7 bombers had said in no uncertain terms that military aggression against Muslim nations played a role in motivating them. For decades, the wars that benefit our governments have only put the rest of us at risk.

The war on terror killed those 10 civilians in Kabul on 29 August, seven of whom were children. Outrage is no longer enough. Anyone who continues to give credence to the war on terror – and moreover the counter-terror ideology that spawned in its wake – is complicit. Anyone that continues to support politicians who have presided over these drone strikes is complicit. And anyone who supports a neoliberal status quo that tut-tuts at civilian deaths in one breath while celebrating war heroes in the next is complicit.

Reject the system that created the war on terror, and all the senseless wars that may yet be fought in its name. The system that continues to dehumanise Muslims and render their lives worthless. Otherwise, your sympathies are meaningless.

Featured image via YouTube – Sky News

By Afroze Fatima Zaidi

This post was originally published on The Canary.
September 15, 2021

The War on Terror has made populations more vulnerable to the climate crisis

The International Witness Campaign is remembering the last 20 years of the “failed War on Terror”. This decades-long war has seen its fair share of illegality and incompetence by those who’ve waged it. As with all wars, it’s hawks also paid no regard to the huge environmental costs involved.

Now, after these decades of war, the Middle East is facing another security threat: the climate crisis. Indeed, authorities around the world are increasingly recognising the environmental emergency as the greatest security threat we face.

As In These Times recently contemplated, imagine if those who waged the War on Terror had spent the last 20 years fighting the climate crisis instead. The populations targeted in the failed war, and the global community as a whole, would undoubtedly be better equipped to deal with the crisis if they had.

Indeed, there might not be a crisis to speak of if the vast amounts of money spent on the war had been directed to tackling the climate crisis from the start of the millennium onwards.

Perfect storm

A number of countries in the Middle East have faced intense temperatures this summer. In July, for example, Iraq saw temperatures of over 51C. In 2016, the country faced heat of more than 53C. As Foreign Policy recently reported, global warming in the region is double the global average. So 2C of global warming by 2050 would mean a 4C increase in the Middle East.

It’s not just intense heat affecting the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region either. The climate crisis is impacting rainfall and water availability. This means that some areas are experiencing increased drought, while others are flooding.

As the International Committee of the Red Cross has pointed out, the War on Terror and previous conflicts have played a role in this environmental situation. It’s regional water and habitat advisor Igor Malgrati said:

In southern Iraq, you have an environment that has been damaged by years of conflict, poor environmental management and weak governance. When you add climate change into the mix, you have the perfect storm.

The Costs of War Project has also asserted that the enduring military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have resulted in “the degradation of the natural resources in these countries and a radical destruction of forest cover”. It said “the animal and bird populations have also been adversely affected”.

Security threat

The Max Plank Institute has warned that the climate crisis could make some areas of the MENA region uninhabitable in the coming years. A study by researchers from Princeton University earlier this year made similar claims about countries in the tropics. The study’s authors asserted that the world’s temperature increase needs to stay below 1.5C for the tropics to avoid the risk of exceeding a particular heat threshold, known as wet bulb temperature (TW). Because the human body is unable to regulate its own temperature past the TW threshold of 35C, it’s considered, as the Guardian put it, the “limits of human livability”.

As the UN secretary-general António Guterres said in August, greenhouse gas emissions are “choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk”. Meanwhile, the biodiversity crisis, whereby species are disappearing at a rate not seen in history, is devastating the ecosystems on which people depend on for food, water, and much more. These two interconnecting crises are converging too, with horrifying consequences.

Righting wrongs

Of course, climate change is not news. The oil and gas industry have known about it for decades. Governments involved in waging the War on Terror have long been aware of it too. As In These Times‘ Sarah Lazare wrote, in light of this understanding:

We should have been putting every resource toward stopping climate disaster, rather than pouring public goods into the war effort

Instead, the US ploughed $21tn into “foreign and domestic militarization” over the last 20 years. The UK government, meanwhile, recently revealed that it spent £22.2bn of taxpayers’ money on the 20-year-long invasion and occupation of Afghanistan alone.

In short, rather than investing in averting climate disaster, US and UK politicians chose to wage a climate-destroying war that made targeted populations even more vulnerable to the environmental crises.

The actions of rich nations in general, largely the elite among them, have brought the world to this environmental juncture. And the warmongering decisions these elites have made are a part of the litany of failures that got us here.

Officials from these countries need to address these injustices, and provide reparations for them, as they gather at climate and biodiversity conferences over the coming months.

Featured image via Channel 4 News / YouTube

By Tracy Keeling

This post was originally published on The Canary.
September 14, 2021

9/11 Collapsed Towers… And Empire

AFP 2021 / Seth McAllister

The United States’ 245-year history as a political entity has been one long trail of wars and more wars. It is estimated that nearly 95 percent of that historical span has seen the nation involved in either all-out wars, proxy conflicts, or other military subterfuges.

But since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, the US has gone into hyper-war mode. Twenty years ago, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan ushered in multiple other American wars and covert operations from Asia to Africa, from the Middle East to the Americas.

At one point, the former Obama administration was bombing seven countries simultaneously all in the name of “fighting terrorism”. Hundreds of US bombs rain down somewhere on the planet every day.

What is rather sickening is how the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 event this weekend is marked with solemn speeches by US president Joe Biden and his British counterpart Boris Johnson – the two countries that spearheaded the “War on Terror” era.

Biden claims that 9/11 demonstrates the “unity and resilience” of the American people, while Johnson blusters with platitudes about 9/11 showing that “terrorists did not defeat Western democracy and freedoms”. This self-indulgent piffle is contemptible and nauseating.

Two decades after the US and Britain launched their criminal blitzkrieg on Afghanistan and the rest of the world, those two nations are more financially broke than ever. Internally, they are more bitterly divided than ever. More evidently, their so-called democracies are in reality oligarchies where a tiny rich elite rule over a mass of impoverished people who are spied on and treated like serfs by unaccountable secret agencies and a mass media in hock with oligarchic masters.

If there was a genuine commemoration of 9/11 it would entail a mass uprising by the people to overthrow the war-mongering class system that Biden and Johnson serve as frontmen.

Just this week – of all weeks – the American and British states are in effect admitting that their societies are collapsing from vast economic inequality and crumbling infrastructure. The Biden administration is trying to release a budget of up to $4.5 trillion to alleviate poverty and repair decrepit roads, bridges, buildings and other public utilities.

The Johnson regime in Britain is forced to admit that the National Health Service is overwhelmed by a chronic lack of funding. Taxes are being hiked that will hit low-income workers in order to pay for the £12 billion ($16bn) needed to prop up the enfeebled health service.

All of the cost for trying to repair the US and Britain to make these countries a modicum of decency for its citizens to live in could have been covered by the expenditure on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere that the US and Britain have directly or indirectly been involved in.

A new estimate of the cost for the “war on terror” by the United States alone is put at $8 trillion. This is roughly double the infrastructure bill that Biden is trying to get passed by Congress. American politicians are objecting to the extravagance of that “rescue budget”, yet they had no qualms about spending $8 trillion on wars. It is also estimated that for Britain its military adventurism in Afghanistan alone cost a total of $30 billion. Again, just imagine how British society might be better off if that money had been spent instead on attending to the health needs of its citizens.

But 9/11 also ushered in wanton warmongering regimes in Washington and London that have bled the American and British public of finances and democratic rights. In 2001, the US national debt was about $6 trillion. This year that debt burden on future American generations has escalated to $28 trillion – a crushing, unsustainable burden largely driven by criminal wars.

The healthcare costs for American military veterans wounded and maimed from the wars on terror are projected at $2 trillion. Over 30,000 US service members and veterans are reckoned to have committed suicide over the past 20 years. That’s 10 times the number of American people who died on the day of 9/11.

Untold millions of innocent civilians were killed by the wars that the US and British launched after 9/11. Such suffering and destruction all for nothing except for the enrichment of war-profiteering corporations and the oligarchic elite.

fThe United States and Britain have been so deformed by criminal wars they have become dysfunctional and dystopian. They have inflicted failed states around the world, but none more so than on their own people. The towers that fell on 9/11 were a premonition of much bigger collapse.
The post 9/11 Collapsed Towers… And Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 12, 2021

Jason Brown: 9/11 and a mango dawn – and here’s to the end of being Pacific pawns
COMMENTARY: By Jason Brown in Auckland

Twenty years ago, I was on a plane from Rarotonga to Auckland. Lovely flight, with a path at the end I had never experienced before.

Almost from the tip of the North Island, down to Tamaki Makaurau — the rising sun bathing the hills and coastline in rich, almost mango, orange. So rich and orange that for a second I wondered if I had mistakenly got on a flight to Aussie, not Aotearoa.

It was the most stunningly beautiful sight.
Half asleep from the then usual awake-all-night, early morning departure, dawn arrival, I floated through duty free and customs, not noticing anything really different — until our old Cook Islands Press photographer Dean Treml who was on the same flight came up looking alarmed.

“There’s been an attack in New York – two planes have flown into the World Trade Towers,” or words to that effect. I was like, “..whaaat? No …Really??”

He nodded, hurried off.

I blinked a bit, shook off my disbelief, and forgot about it as we moved through the lines, looking forward to seeing my younger son, Mikaera.

He was there in arrivals. Rushed to give my three-year-old a kneeling hug. Smiled up at his grandparents.

‘Stay calm’
“Stay calm,” the grandfather told me, “and don’t get upset, but terrorists have attacked the Twin Towers in America,” or words to that effect. “It’s on the screen behind you.”

In those days, news was still played on the big multiscreens over the arrival doors. I turned, looked, and caught sight of a jet slicing into one of the towers. Over the rest of the day, that scene, and its twin, were replayed over and again, as a stunned world witnessed an unthinkably cinematic display of destruction.

And then, hours later, one by one, the towers dropped.

Like billions of others, I watched, in my case in between playing with my young son, alone at his mum’s home, looking over his shoulder at the television.

A few times it got too much. Made sure Mikaera was okay with toys and/or food, then stepped outside to the garage to cry, the replay sight of people jumping from the smoking towers to their deaths; hiding my tears and low moans of stunned despair.

Big breaths, wipe away the tears, back inside to play with blocks and trucks, and … planes. One eye on the TV.

Nearly 3000 people died that day. Almost all Americans, with a few hundred other nationalities.

Since then?

Tragedy of so-called ‘War on Terror’
Millions of non-Americans have died in the Middle East, mostly from economic blockades resulting in deaths from starvation and treatable diseases. Hundreds of thousands dying in a so-called “War on Terror” that served to produce tens of thousands more “terrorists”, vowing to avenge the deaths of their children, siblings, parents, aunties, cousins and uncles.

Western states have spent trillions of dollars, weapons dealers making obscenely fat profits on the back of jingoistic propaganda from news media which, to this day, counts Western deaths to the last man and woman, but barely mentions any civilian deaths from their bullets, bombs and drones.

Profits that have been used to bribe officials at home and abroad, via a network of secrecy havens such as New Zealand and the Cook Islands, but mostly via American states like Delaware, or financial centres like London in the UK, flushing trillions more through millions of secret companies for the benefit of a few.

9/11, they said, changed everything.

Twenty years later, with the war on terror a complete and utter failure, everything certainly has changed.

For the worse.

Western financial hypocrisy
Trillions continue to be hidden, including with our help, legally or otherwise. Legality being a very moveable feast. Western states pick on tiny offshore banking centres like the Niue, Samoa and the Cook Islands, while ignoring the gaping holes in their own banks and finance centres.

Governments like New Zealand and Australia fund corruption studies in the Pacific, as one regional example, but not their own.

And, like little children, we are still over-awed when famous people come to visit our homelands, happily posing and smiling in delight whenever big country people deign to visit our shores.

Unlike when then Tahitian president Gaston Flosse came to Rarotonga in 1996, and Cook Islanders protested nuclear testing, for example, the Cook Islands happily welcomed then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012.

Even media people and supposed journalists lined up to grin, to grip the hand of a leader reported as once asking about using a drone to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

In fact, in 1996, I was one of those people, “meeting” Clinton on a rope line at the Atlanta Olympics when I was “Press Attache” for our Olympics team.

“Greetings from the South Pacific!” I said cheerily when she offered her hand to me, among a hundred or so others who had suddenly gathered.

“Outstanding!”, she replied, equally delighted.

Of course, none of us knew then what was coming.

But we know now.

Cook Islands in lockstep
And still the Cook Islands walks in lockstep with our powerful neighbours, a “dear friend” of Australia’s ruling party and its unbelievably corrupt mining, military and media networks.

Two decades later, the Homeland seems yet to learn any lessons from 9/11, yet to admit any responsibility for its part in enabling #corruption, money laundering and terrorism which breeds extremism, hate, and death, on all sides.

Instead, our government works against the interests of our own region, a Pacific pawn used and abused in age-old colonial tactics of divide et empera – divide and conquer – a phrase going back over two millennia.

Today our peoples are further misled by a tsunami of fake news – misinformation and disinformation – from mysteriously well-resourced sources. Distracted from real responses to the #covid19 pandemic, which distracts further from even bigger threats from global warming — or “climate change” as it was known for so long, before leaders started only recently admitting we face a “climate crisis” — but still locked to “market mechanisms” as a supposed solution.

So, what are the solutions?

Fight fake news. Fight corruption. Fight the hateful, extremist, death cults hiding behind religion, especially within the largest, most powerful faith in the world — Christianity.

Fight for a world where shorelines are bathed in mango dawns, and our children don’t grow up watching death replayed every single day of their lives.

Jason Brown is founder of Journalism Agenda 2025 and writes about Pacific and world journalism and ethically globalised Fourth Estate issues. He is a former co-editor of Cook Islands Press. This article is republished with permission.

This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
September 12, 2021

To Counter Terror, Abolish War

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.

Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center, U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.

I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.

The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the U.S. now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes, and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.

I visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend whom I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account, shortly before I arrived, about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.

My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.

In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”

For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.

When the U.S. was winding down its troop surge in 2014, but not its occupation, military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant, a step which could prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment, would be 5 cents per child per year.

Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?

One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.

The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.

In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.

It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.

Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.

In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and three million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?

On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.

We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the U.S. helped create.

Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.

My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.

Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage which says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”

Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need U.S. people to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today.

Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war.

• This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence
The post To Counter Terror, Abolish War first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 11, 2021

After 9/11, I was kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, then ‘released’ – but I have hope

The first time I heard about 9/11 was on the radio at a restaurant in Afghanistan, where I was working as a research assistant. I wasn’t following any news, and at that time in Afghanistan there was no TV or internet. People used radios to listen to the outside world.

I’m from Yemen, and I couldn’t imagine a skyscraper 110 floors tall. In fact, it was the first time I heard that such buildings even existed. The tallest building in Sana’a was 25 floors — that was a skyscraper by Yemeni standards.

At that time, Afghanistan was a mix of a lot of the past and a little of the present, mostly represented by cars. The land, damaged buildings, scraps of war machines that harvested countless lives, and general destruction and casualties already told a brutal and sad tale of Afghanistan’s past and what would shape its future.

Attack

When I heard on the radio that airplanes had flown into buildings in the United States, I couldn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the attack, what it meant, or how many victims there would be. The United States was all the way around the world and didn’t have anything to do with me.

Most Afghan people, along with the foreigners who lived in Afghanistan, had no idea what had happened either. Life continued as usual, until suddenly word got out that a Saudi charity organisation that worked in Afghanistan had received instructions to immediately liquidate and distribute everything it had then leave.

My friend was working for the organisation so I agreed to help him and take some aid, logistics, and medicine to a nearby hospital. We then planned to leave Afghanistan in the organisation’s car.

It never once crossed my mind that 9/11 would impact me. I was 18 years old and traveling outside of Yemen for the first time. I knew very little about the West. I didn’t really know the difference between the United States and the United Nations.

My dream was simply to finish my mission, get back to Yemen, and leave to one of the Gulf countries to finish my education and work there.

Classified by the government

Instead, I was kidnapped in Afghanistan and sold to the Americans. They said I was an “Al Qaeda general”, and the United States government classified me as an “Al Qaeda commander” and a “9/11 insider”.

I don’t consider myself any different from the many Muslims around the world who must live under the war on terror. But I do consider myself fortunate compared to those who have lost their lives, lost their families, or lost their limbs as collateral damage in ground wars, air strikes, and drone strikes.

I was tortured and imprisoned for almost half of my life at Guantanamo and my life changed forever. I still live with the stigma of Guantanamo. And this past hinders my daily life in Serbia, where I have been placed in the detainee “resettlement” programme, and where I am still treated as a terrorist even though I have been cleared of any crime.

But I appreciate that I’m alive.

Turning point in history

9/11 was a turning point in history. It accelerated the war on Islam and Muslims and on those who understand or sympathise with us. For the last two decades, we have faced state-sponsored crimes against us in the name of the war on terror.

9/11 was also presented as the beginning of history. But people forget that the United States was deeply involved in what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s. There it paid Muslims to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union which helped lead to its downfall.

The current US policy towards Muslims and Islam leaves an especially bitter taste if you realise that, thanks to Muslims, the US won against the Soviets in Afghanistan without a single American life being lost.

9/11 was a product of United States foreign policy and a long-standing conflict between the US and al-Qaeda. But it has been employed and misused against Muslims more broadly all over the world.

It served as a framework which has enabled countless senseless deaths, and US and NATO invasion and aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East and Asia, as well as across Africa.

It has also been waged against Muslims who live in the United States, UK, and Europe. This has been done through counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies that profile people based on their religion and undermine justice.

Justice

But despite what I see, and what I’ve been through as a result of 9/11, I still believe in justice.

The innocent people whose lives were lost on 9/11, and their families, deserve justice. I don’t think that the 9/11 victims or their families would approve of the killing, kidnapping, and torture of people around the world that has followed from an already terrible event.

In fact, I don’t think any member of the 9/11 families would want other innocent people to suffer and to experience the pain they felt from having a loved one taken from them in such an unjust way. I imagine the first responders, the firefighters, the police officers, the medics, and all the others who were lost on 9/11 would not support the distortion of justice, the sacrificing of values, and the taking of innocent lives to be done in their names.

Let us remember that those who lost their lives on 9/11 and their families are not the only victims of 9/11. Over a period of twenty years, there are now victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Guantanamo, and many countries around the world. Countless people have suffered silently at the loss of innocent lives. They experience untold 9/11s every single day, with no country to defend them or media to cover their stories. They deserve justice too.

To that end, I’ve recently joined CAGE in its global campaign to do exactly that. The International Witness Campaign, which I’m proud to support, will aim to ask the questions that we must answer: how do we truly arrive at justice?

Every single life is sacred. I pray every day for justice and peace for all humanity.

Featured image via Mansoor Adayfi

By Mansoor Adayfi

This post was originally published on The Canary.
September 11, 2021

9/11 killed it, but 20 years on global justice movement is poised for revival
ANALYSIS: By Kalinga Seneviratne in Sydney

Since the attacks on the United States by 15 Saudi Arabian Islamic fanatics on 11 September 2001 — now known as 9/11 — the world has been divided by a “war on terror” with any protest group defined as “terrorists”.

New anti-terror laws have been introduced both in the West and elsewhere in the past 20 years and used extensively to suppress such movements in the name of “national security”.

It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attacks came at a time when a huge “global justice” movement was building up across the world against the injustices of globalisation.
Using the internet as the medium of mobilisation, they gathered in Seattle in 1999 and were successful in closing down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting.

They opposed what they saw as large multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets, facilitated by governments.

Their main targets were the WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, World Bank, and international trade agreements.

The movement brought “civil society” people from the North and the South together under common goals.

Poorest country debts
In parallel, the “Jubilee 2000” international movement led by liberal Christian and Catholic churches called for the cancellation of US$90 billion of debts owed by the world’s poorest nations to banks and governments in the West.

Along with the churches, youth groups, music, and entertainment industry groups were involved. The 9/11 attacks killed these movements as “national security” took precedence over “freedom to dissent”.

Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a former vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council and a Sri Lankan political scientist, notes that when “capitalism turned neoliberal and went on the rampage” after the demise of the Soviet Union, resistance started to develop with the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests using a term coined by Cuban leader Fidel Castro “another world is possible”.

“All that came crashing down with the Twin Towers,” he notes. “With 9/11 the Islamic Jihadist opposition to the USA (and the war on terror) cut across and buried the progressive resistance we saw emerging in Chiapas and Seattle.”

Geoffrey Robertson QC, a British human rights campaigner and TV personality, warns: “9/11 panicked us into the ‘war on terror’ using lethal weapons of questionable legality which inspired more terrorists.

“Twenty years on, those same adversaries are back and we now have a fear of US perfidy—over Taiwan or ANZUS or whatever. There will be many consequences.”

But, he sees some silver lining that has come out of this “war on terror”.

Targeted sanctions
“One reasonably successful tactic developed in the war on terror was to use targeted sanctions on its sponsors. This has been developed by so-called ‘Magnitsky acts’, enabling the targeting of human rights abusers—31 democracies now have them and Australia will shortly be the 32nd.

“I foresee their coordination as part of the fightback—a war not on terror but state cruelty,” he told In-Depth News.

When asked about the US’s humiliation in Afghanistan, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, founder of the International Movement for a Just World told IDN that the West needed to understand that they too needed to stop funding terror to achieve their own agendas.

“The ‘war on terror’ was doomed to failure from the outset because those who initiated the war were not prepared to admit that it was their occupation and oppression that compelled others to retaliate through acts of terror.” he argues.

“Popular antagonism towards the occupiers was one of the main reasons for the humiliating defeat of the US and NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.

Looking at Western attempts to introduce democracy under the pretext of “war on terror” and the chaos created by the “Arab Spring”, a youth movement driven by Western-funded NGOs, Iranian-born Australian Farzin Yekta, who worked in Lebanon for 15 years as a community multimedia worker, argues that the Arab region needs a different democracy.

“In the Middle East, the nations should aspire to a system based on social justice rather than the Western democratic model. Corrupt political and economic apparatus, external interference and dysfunctional infrastructure are the main obstacles for moving towards establishing a system based on social justice,” he says, adding that there are signs of growing social movements being revived in the region while “resisting all kinds of attacks”.

Palestinian refugee lessons
Yekta told IDN that while working with Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon he had seen how peoples’ movements could be undermined by so-called “civil society” NGOs.

“Alternative social movements are infested by ‘civil society’ institutions comprising primarily NGO institutions.

“‘Civil society’ is effective leverage for the establishment and foreign (Western) interference to pacify radical social movements. Social movements find themselves in a web of funded entities which push for ‘agendas’ drawn by funding buddies,” noted Yekta.

Looking at the failure of Western forces in Afghanistan, he argues that what they did by building up “civil society” was encouraging corruption and cronyism that is entangled in ethnic and tribal structures of society.

“The Western nation-building plan was limited to setting up a glasshouse pseudo-democratic space in the green zone part of Kabul.

“One just needed to go to the countryside to confront the utter poverty and lack of infrastructure,” Yekta notes.

”We need to understand that people’s struggle is occurring at places with poor or no infrastructure.”

Social movements reviving
Dr Jayatilleka also sees positive signs of social movements beginning to raise their heads after two decades of repression.

“Black Lives Matter drew in perhaps more young whites than blacks and constituted the largest ever protest movement in history. The globalised solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, including large demonstrations in US cities, is further evidence.

“In Latin America, the left-populist Pink Tide 2.0 began with the victory of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and has produced the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.

“The slogan of justice, both individual and social, is more globalised, more universalised today, than ever before in my lifetime,” he told IDN.

There may be ample issues for peoples’ movements to take up with TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) trade agreements coming into force in Asia where companies would be able to sue governments if their social policies infringe on company profits.

But Dr Jayatilleka is less optimistic of social movements rising in Asia.

Asian social inequities
“Sadly, the social justice movement is considerably more complicated in Asia than elsewhere, though one would have assumed that given the social inequities in Asian societies, the struggle for social justice would be a torrent. It is not,” he argues.

“The brightest recent spark in Asia, according to Dr Jayatilleka, was the rise of the Nepali Communist Party to power through the ballot box after a protracted peoples’ war, but ‘sectarianism’ has led to the subsiding of what was the brightest hope for the social justice movement in Asia.”

Robertson feels that the time is ripe for the social movements suppressed by post 9/11 anti-terror laws to be reincarnated in a different life.

“The broader demand for social justice will revive, initially behind the imperative of dealing with climate change but then with tax havens, the power of multinationals, and the obscene inequalities in the world’s wealth.

“So, I do not despair of social justice momentum in the future,” he says.

Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.

This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
September 11, 2021

Messianic Failure: Pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock

Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration. Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective. Mature reflections may be permitted. But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record.

The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoes. For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of its aims were achieved.

The central feature to the war, which deserves its place of failure alongside such disastrously misguided concepts as the war on drugs, was its school boy incoherence. It remained, and to an extent remains, a war against tactics, a misguided search reminiscent of the hunt for Lewis Carroll’s nonsense beast, the Jabberwock. As with any such wars, it demands mendacity, flimsy evidence if, in fact, it needs any evidence at all.

This perception was critical in placing the US, and its allies, upon a military footing that demanded false connections (a fictitious link of cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda), false capabilities (Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) and an exaggeration of the threat to US security (all of the above).

With such evaluations of terroristic potential, a secular, domestic murderer such as Saddam could be transformed into a global threat armed with weapons of mass destruction, neither proposition being true as the attacks on 9/11 were executed. In this hot house fantasy, the Iraqi leader was merely another pilot willing to steer a plane into an American target.

This narrative was sold, and consumed, by a vast number of press houses and media outlets, who proved indispensable in promoting the GWOT-Jabberwock crusade. Calculated amnesia and hand washing has taken place since then, pinning blame on the standard crew of neoconservatives, various Republicans and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. “It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus,” Matt Taibbi points out, “which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia.”

War sceptics such as Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura were removed from MSNBC while war cheerleaders thickened the airwaves with ghoulish delight. The New York Times ran sympathetic columns and reviews for the war case, praising such absurd works as Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. “The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States,” wrote the grave Pollack, “is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.”

The New Yorker also joined in the pro-war festivities. David Remnick made his case in “Making a Case” by praising Pollack and dismissing containment as “a hollow pursuit” that would be “the most dangerous option of all.” Jeffrey Goldberg, now at The Atlantic, was even more unequivocal in a staggeringly inexpert contribution headlined, “The Great Terror.” On his own hunt for the Jabberwock, Goldberg interviewed alleged terrorist detainees in a prison operated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Saddam Kurdish group in Iraq’s northern Kurdish area. Having been permitted to interview the prisoners by the Union’s intelligence service (no conflict of interest there), Goldberg was informed that Saddam Hussein’s own spooks had “joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam [a local jihadist group]”; that the Iraqi leader “hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992”; that members of Al Qaeda escaping Afghanistan had “been secretly brought into the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam” and that Iraq’s intelligence service had “smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.” And so rests the case for the prosecution.

In March 2003, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting examined 393 on-camera sources who featured in nightly news stories on Iraq across a range of programs – ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Of those 267 were from the United States; of the US official sources, only Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, registered his doubts. Even then, he could hardly be said to be a firebrand contrarian, telling NBC Nightly News that he worried about exit plans, the extent of US troop losses and “how long we’re going to be stationed there”.

Many of these outlets would be the same who obsessed about President Donald Trump’s attacks upon them as peddlers of “fake news” during his time in office. Trump, drip-fed on conspiracy theories and fictions, knew who he was talking to.

The security propagandists have not done much better. With pious conviction, the vast security apparatus put in place to monitor threats, the warrantless surveillance regime exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the persistent interventions in the Middle East, have all been seen as beneficial. “Terrorism of many sots continues domestically and internationally,” claims Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, “but the data is unmistakable that in most cases – and especially in the United States – it is both manageable and not nearly of the scale feared in 2001.”

A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner advance a rather different proposition. “Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”

The issue of what is marginal is a point of contention. Former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security, a monster created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, are guarded in their assessments. Bush’s Secretary Michael Chertoff admits to being “hesitant” in saying “we are safer, or less”. He prefers focusing on scale. “We haven’t had an attack of that scale since 9/11, and we’ve also been very good about keeping dangerous people out of the country.” Alas, domestic threats had emerged, notably on the Right, while jihadi sympathisers lurk.

Janet Napolitano, who occupied the office under the Obama administration, waffles in her reading. “Are there some things that we’re safer on now than we were on 9/11? Absolutely. Are there new risks that have evolved or multiplied or grown since 9/11? Absolutely. To put it shortly, on some things, we’re definitely safer.” Napolitano is up with a jargon that says nothing at all: “risks are not static”; the environment is “constantly changing”. “DHS needs to continue to be agile and to adapt.”

The smorgasbord of modern terrorism, a good deal of it nourished by cataclysmic US-led interventions, is richer than ever. “We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11,” Elizabeth Neumann, DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel last month. “That’s very sobering, as a counterterrorism person.” Preparing the grounds for the imminent exit from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden reasoned that keeping US troops in the country as a permanent counter-terrorist force was no longer a tenable proposition. Terrorism as a threat had “become more dispersed, metastasising around the globe”. The folly of pursuing the GWOT jabberwock shows no sign of abating.
The post Messianic Failure: Pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 11, 2021

Fallujah: My Lost Hometown

This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.

It was the first day of summer vacation in France, and I was unusually melancholic for an 8-year-old. I lived in a little town outside Paris and all my friends had left to visit their families in the provinces. The morning was blue, unusually cold and felt decidedly lonesome. I decided to approach my sullen father with a question about Iraq, the country he had fled in the ’70s as a dissident: “Baba, do we even have a family?”

Sensing my dismay, my father smiled, took out a piece of paper and began writing down names. He didn’t stop until he’d filled the page with nearly a hundred names of family members: Auday, Mazen, Riad, Nahla, Soad, Hasna. … I practiced saying them. One name in particular stood out to me: Fallujah. My father had circled the word and written right next to it, “our hometown.”

I carried the page with me, reading and rereading it until I had memorized as many names as I could. My father told me that every one of these people knew my name and had seen photographs of me. We hadn’t spoken to them because Iraq was at war with Iran and telephone calls were rare.

I was struck by the paradox of my situation: born in Paris when really, I belonged to Fallujah.

One summer day in 1988, we finally received that long-awaited phone call: The war was over! A year later, my mother, my sister and I found ourselves on an Iraqi Airways plane bound for Baghdad, then Fallujah.

Of course, it’s hard to say the name Fallujah today in Europe or the United States without instantly conjuring up images of war, destruction and battle-hardened anti-American jihadis. What does the world know of Fallujah besides its destruction by U.S. forces in 2004 and its 2014 conquest by the Islamic State group? From my experience, almost nothing. But that empty space is where my history and my family’s history reside.

Fallujah is the city where my parents were born, a clean, green city bordered by the Euphrates – or Al-Furat – River, after which I was named. It wasn’t as exciting as Baghdad, a much larger and wealthier city, but its greatest charm was the world of family it opened up. During my first visit, it was exhilarating to meet aunts and uncles and cousins in the flesh, people whose lives I’d only been able to imagine until then. After years of feeling isolated in France, as one of the only Iraqi families we knew, I was overwhelmed to discover that I belonged to a warm and loving community of more people than I could count.

Feurat Alani (second from right) and his sister on the banks of the Euphrates River in Fallujah with his uncles in 1989. Credit: Courtesy of Feurat Alani

1989 was a year of peace, sadly an anomaly in Iraq’s recent history. In the years that followed, the lightness and joy of my first visit began to fade. When I returned in 1992, an unstoppable United Nations Security Council-imposed embargo had just begun to set in, and by 1995, the weight of the sanctions hung heavy over Iraq. Fallujah began to fold in on itself. Everyone was hungry. More and more of my cousins were dropping out of school to work in the local markets. When I left Iraq at the end of that visit, I didn’t know if or when I would return. I wanted to just be a teenager and focus on my life in France.

The turning point came on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember the shock and grief watching the news on that fateful Tuesday. I remember phone calls of disbelief and tears from my cousins in Iraq. But as Bush administration officials wasted no time in building their case for invading Iraq, a slow horror set in about what this emerging narrative – however fraudulent – could mean for my hometown. It was this narrative, coming out of 9/11 and daily conversations with my father, that pushed me back to Iraq and into journalism.

My father had fled Iraq after being imprisoned by Saddam Hussein for spreading Communist ideas and building an opposition to his authoritarian rule. During the lead-up to the war, we talked about his activism in Iraq and his fears and hopes for the future every day. I knew I had to go back myself and tell stories about what Iraqis were going through.

And so for a decade, I made Baghdad my base and reported across the country for a range of French and international outlets on everything from the fallout of the U.S. invasion to the rise of the Islamic State group. But my most powerful stories – and life lessons – came from Fallujah and my family.

The horror of reporting on bodies buried in the local football stadium after the deadly battles of Fallujah in April and November 2004 was surpassed only by recognizing some of the names on the makeshift tombstones. Three of my cousins died during the fighting and are buried there.

The Martyrs’ Cemetery was previously a football stadium in Fallujah. Credit: Yvon Le Gall

A fourth cousin had joined the insurgency but was caught and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. When he was released a year later, he decided to enroll in the newly created Iraqi police force. He was killed a week later by al-Qaida in Iraq, which called him a traitor for joining any part of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government.

As I was trying to make sense of the senseless violence and the sectarian nightmare that was unfolding in Iraq, I learned that my uncles, all of whom had been in the Iraqi military, had joined different sections of the anti-American insurgency: Salafi, Sufi, nationalist, independent. I was initially surprised by the diversity of ideology in a city that had always seemed homogenous on its face, essentially an army town, which in Saddam’s time also meant a Sunni town. But mostly, I was uncomfortable with how the fighting had changed my uncles. One of them, a decorated veteran of the war with Iran, reminded me that resistance to an occupying force was legitimate under international law. But I also saw the rage that swept across his face each time an American military convoy passed through the rubble of our hometown. It terrified me.

This is when my father planned his first visit to post-invasion Iraq. A few days after he arrived, he ran into an old friend he hadn’t seen in 30 years at a cafe they both used to love in Baghdad. Minutes after the encounter, two young men walked in and shot his friend, killing him on the spot. We later learned that the friend had been suspected of working with the Americans. My father left Iraq soon after and, after three decades of holding out hope of returning and playing a role in his country, applied for French citizenship.

By 2007, I could no longer ignore the stories I’d been hearing about an uptick in the number of birth defects among babies born in Fallujah. My friend Abu Yunis, a former football player who became my fixer and guide in the city, told me about babies dying soon after birth and deformed children growing up in hiding. His descriptions were so fantastical that I had struggled to believe him. But after he started sending me photographs, I started investigating the phenomenon for French television. I interviewed Iraqi families, medical researchers, doctors, scientists, weapons experts, as well as Marines who had fought in Fallujah. Doctors reported a sharp uptick in birth defects after the invasion. No one knew exactly what had caused it, but one theory was that toxic contamination caused by the war might be responsible. One doctor in Fallujah told me she was so overwhelmed by seeing 1 in 5 babies being born with deformities that her only advice to people in the city was to stop having children.

Even after most American troops left the country, policies the United States put in place – like the disbanding of the army, the de-Baathification of government institutions, and the imposition of a sectarian political system – continue to haunt Iraq. There’s no other way of putting it: The war has left Iraqis a legacy of death. Each year, the Fallujah I knew and loved slips further away. But this history, as bloody and painful as it is, matters and should not be forgotten. There’s no official count of how many Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began. There’s no memorial for all the Iraqis who’ve died terrible, violent deaths. Or for those who’ve died of hunger or disease as a result of the war.

As a French Iraqi, I’m used to translating Iraq for a French audience, right from when I returned from my first visit in 1989 and tried explaining what life in Iraq was like to my school friends. But I also think of my role as an archivist, a keeper of memories, both joyful and hard – my own and my family’s and of the people in Fallujah and across Iraq. It’s why I became a journalist, to insist on recording the history of our present moment, however imperfect and incomplete it is. It’s the only way I can piece together the full picture of what happened to Fallujah, my lost hometown.

This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Feurat Alani can be reached at feurat@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Feurat.

Fallujah: My Lost Hometown is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

This post was originally published on Reveal.
September 11, 2021

The Writing Was on the Wall in Afghanistan Years Ago

This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.

I was 9 years old, living in a small Austrian town on the day of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Even as my Afghan refugee parents were glued to the news, I was impatient to watch my favorite Japanese anime show, “Dragon Ball Z,” a classic tale about good conquering evil. It was only when that was canceled and replaced by footage of smoldering towers that I was introduced to a man named Osama bin Laden, who was said to be hiding in my family’s home country. His name didn’t sound Afghan, but I overheard my father lamenting that the presence of this man meant the United States was surely going to attack Afghanistan.

The next morning and for days on end, as the only Afghan child in my school, I was met with a barrage of questions that quickly turned aggressive. Starting with my teacher’s query, “Emran, you’re from Afghanistan, do you know why they did it?” to taunts from my classmates about how my “terrorist” and “Taliban” relatives were going to be nuked.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan was so popular in the United States that it might have felt inevitable. A Gallup poll from October 2001 found that 88% of Americans supported it. But watching the airstrikes on television, it felt like World War III was coming to my country. Many of our close relatives still lived in Kabul and the northern countryside. It was the era before smartphones and widespread instant messaging, and we went days, sometimes weeks, without hearing from them.

As my parents and I watched an elderly Afghan man telling a television reporter in his native Pashto how he’d been arrested and sexually abused by U.S. soldiers, my mother wept in fear of what was to come.

I decided then that I wanted to bear witness to this war. I wanted to examine what others wanted to keep secret. It was another 13 years before I would begin traveling regularly to my home country as an independent journalist, absorbing and documenting everything I could. My early stories, published in the Austrian and German press, focused on the political intrigue and backroom deals around the Afghan presidential elections. But when I traveled to the countryside, where nearly three-quarters of the population lives, what I found was far, far darker.

This is where the “war on terror” was being waged, not in the capital, Kabul. In villages across large parts of the country, stories of torture and night raids by U.S. and U.S.-trained forces were legion and airstrikes were almost daily occurrences. Almost every family I met when I was traveling through rural provinces in the north, south and east between 2014 and 2021 had stories of how the war they called the “American war” had turned them against the Americans and, ultimately, toward the Taliban.

This is not what Americans were hearing on the nightly news. In the United States, the longest war dragged on for 20 years, largely forgotten by most of the public. They were not hearing about the ravages of the war in the countryside and how it was radicalizing Afghans in village after village, bloating the ranks of the Taliban. That might be why so many Americans were surprised by how quickly the Taliban were able to make advances and ultimately take control of Kabul and the seat of the Afghan government.

But the writing was on the wall for anyone who wanted to see it. For well over a decade now, if you drove a short distance from the provincial capitals of Jalalabad, Asadabad, Khost or Kunduz, you’d find yourself deep inside Taliban country. In my experience reporting there, almost every family has a story about how U.S. and Afghan special forces have killed civilians with impunity.

Paktia province, Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, nearly three-quarters of the population lives in rural areas. Credit: Emran Feroz

Noor ul-Hadi, from a village near Jalalabad, told me about repeated night raids by U.S. forces in 2012 and 2013. Even though his father worked for the local election complaints commission and was close to the government, his uncle and cousin were killed in one of the raids. When the family requested an investigation, insisting they were not Taliban members, they were ignored.

“One result of such massacres is that even Afghans who support the government turn away from it,” he told me.

And of course, it wasn’t just the night raids. Afghanistan has the unfortunate distinction of being the most drone-bombed country in the world. When I realized that no authorities, neither American nor Afghan, were keeping track of the deaths from these attacks, I started a virtual drone memorial to account for as many civilian victims as I could.

Khost, a province bordering Pakistan’s North Waziristan, was the heart of the U.S. drone war under President Barack Obama. Pasta Khan, a 55-year-old nomad from the Kuchi tribe, lost six members of his family, including his father and all of his brothers, in a 2015 drone strike. He told me that the men had been returning from a funeral for a relative just across the border in Pakistan when a drone hit their trucks, killing 14 civilians.

Pasta Khan, a Kuchi nomad from Afghanistan’s Khost province, lost six family members in a 2015 U.S. drone strike. He said they were returning from a funeral for a relative across the border in Pakistan. Credit: Emran Feroz

Yet after airstrikes or military operations killed civilians, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul offered little in the way of support or redress. “They never come, they never help,” Khan told me. “Is being killed by a suicide attack worse than being killed by a drone?” It was often members of the Taliban who showed up to offer support. (The U.S. maintained that the 14 were insurgents; an investigation was inconclusive.)

The more time I spent in Afghanistan, the more clear it was that the benefits of the American occupation were visible only in the big cities and Kabul in particular. There, Afghans could enjoy fancy coffee shops with $1 cappuccinos, but in the rest of the country, most Afghans lived on less than a dollar a day. Even as investigative journalists and U.S. oversight authorities uncovered how Afghanistan was awash in corruption and how billions of tax dollars spent by Washington contributed to the graft, the Afghan government continued to ally with brutal warlords and drug barons and senior Afghan officials and their families siphoned money into luxury homes in Dubai, crippling any promise of building a functioning society.

Inside Afghanistan, however, there was little appetite for exposing this kind of open corruption. While critics of the Taliban were killed with car bombs, critics of the Afghan government and the U.S. war on terror were also not safe. Last year, I received death threats on social media and a warning that I could meet the same fate as my uncle, a prominent public intellectual and government critic who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 2019.

On each of my visits to Afghanistan, I saw and wrote about how the American war had made it relatively easy for the Taliban to recruit rural Afghans, despite the grim memories of their previous rule. Instead of wiping out terrorism and ushering in a new era of democracy, the staggering corruption, the terror of airstrikes and the horrific abuses by U.S. and Afghan soldiers were radicalizing tens of thousands of Afghans.

With the dramatic return to power of the Taliban in August, I don’t have a lot of hope at this moment. Like so many other Afghans around the world, I’ve spent weeks trying to help my friends and family members who are stuck in Kabul and other parts of the country. Some of them are desperately trying to leave with their families; others, perhaps daunted by the obstacles to leaving, face an uncertain future under Taliban rule. They all feel abandoned by President Ashraf Ghani and his coterie of political elites who fled the country after looting it for years. While they have found safe havens in the United Arab Emirates, millions of ordinary Afghans who don’t want to live under the Taliban are stranded.

Since the last American warplane left Kabul, I’ve been thinking of all the rural Afghans I’ve met. If the withdrawal of U.S. troops brings an end to the daily terror the war has inflicted on them, I know they will be relieved. Of course, with groups like ISIS-K on the rise, it’s ironic to see the United States coordinating with the Taliban, the very enemy it spent over $1.5 trillion fighting for the last 20 years. But with the recent drone strikes after the deadly ISIS-K attack on the Kabul airport, it’s a reminder that the era of terror from the skies might not be over yet. And that’s a reminder to plan my next trip to Afghanistan.

This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Emran Feroz can be reached at emran_feroz@hotmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @emran_feroz.

The Writing Was on the Wall in Afghanistan Years Ago is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

This post was originally published on Reveal.
September 11, 2021

How Yemen Used the ‘War on Terror’ to Suit Its Needs

This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was between jobs and living in Washington, D.C. I woke up a few minutes before 9 a.m. and, as I always did, I turned on the television to watch the news. Still drowsy, I stared at the looping videos from New York on my screen, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. When the third plane struck the Pentagon half an hour later, I was jolted out of my state of shock and frantically tried to call my brother, who worked at a bank inside the Pentagon complex. He’d left his cellphone at home that day, which, of course, added to the general sense of panic I was feeling until I spoke to him that evening. And slowly, we digested the news that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from our home country, Saudi Arabia.

In the hours after the attacks, it was apparent that war was coming, but who would be the target? President George W. Bush made it clear to leaders across the world: Either you were with the United States or with the terrorists. And with that, governments in the Middle East and North Africa saw the opportunity for billions of dollars to fund counterterrorism operations. I didn’t know it then, but I would end up spending much of the next two decades reporting on how many of them would expand and adapt the framing of the so-called “war on terror” to suit their own needs.

Nowhere was this more obvious and devastating to me than in Yemen, a country I fell in love with on my first visit in the late 2000s. Sanaa, the capital city, was everything I had wished Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital, could be. Women in Sanaa were an integrated part of society, visible, active and vocal. While women in Saudi Arabia were still banned from driving, here, women drove everywhere. I found the vibrant journalism and media scene exhilarating and was inspired by how well it represented the full spectrum of political parties and opinions in the country. Most of all, I loved the ease with which I could wander the streets of old Sanaa, buying books from Hadda Street and drinking Adeni tea while talking openly with friends about politics, religion and history.

Of course, Yemen was no paradise. Yemenis had endured political repression, corruption and the legendary kleptocracy of President Ali Abdullah Saleh since 1990. But the more time I spent in Yemen, the more stories I heard about how much worse the repression had gotten after 9/11, after Saleh became an important ally in America’s war on terror.

But Yemen had been caught up in American counterterrorism priorities even before that. Almost a full year before the 9/11 attacks, two al-Qaida members on a dingy loaded with explosives carried out a suicide bombing attack on the USS Cole, an American warship docked in Aden, in southern Yemen. They killed 17 U.S. sailors, making it unavoidable in some ways that Yemen would have to align with the United States.

Saleh visited the White House in November 2001 and in exchange for millions of dollars, he promised to crack down on suspected terrorists and al-Qaida activity. But over the next several years, Saleh would use the war on terror to fight his own battles, regardless of whether they had any connection to al-Qaida. This included waging six brutal wars against an insurgency by the Houthis, a militia in northern Yemen, as well as repressing al-Hirak al-Janoubi, a nonviolent movement calling for southern independence.

Since at least late 2009, Washington was aware of how Saleh was using American weapons and U.S.-trained counterterrorism units to fight the Houthis, according to leaked diplomatic cables. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report in early 2010 expressed “serious concerns” that Saleh had “diverted” American counterterrorism assistance to fight the Houthis rather than al-Qaida. Indeed, while Yemen’s security forces were focused on defeating the Houthis and shutting down protests in the big cities, al-Qaida expanded its presence in more isolated parts of the country. This Yemeni offshoot came to be known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.

And yet, throughout this period, U.S. support for Saleh never waned.

In 2011, a massive popular uprising sprang up against Saleh, part of the so-called Arab Spring protests. After 33 years in power, he was ousted in 2012. In the chaos that followed, the country was fractured between multiple warring factions, and AQAP seized large parts of the south.

That’s when I went to southern Yemen to film a FRONTLINE documentary about the AQAP takeover. At one of the AQAP checkpoints, I met a young man whose life choices I still think about today. He used to be an activist with al-Hirak but told me the repression he witnessed left him completely disillusioned with nonviolence as a political strategy. He said he was tired of every protest march ending in a funeral.

I immediately thought of the icon of the al-Hirak movement, a 25-year-old activist named Ahmed Darwish, who had been tortured to death by Yemeni security forces in 2010. His family refused to bury him until there was an impartial investigation into his death, and when thousands of people gathered for his funeral a year later, security forces opened fire on them.

The young man who had joined AQAP told me he didn’t agree with al-Qaida’s ideology, nor did he hate the Americans. He said he joined al-Qaida only because they seemed better equipped to fight their common adversary, the Yemeni government.

This was the landscape in which President Barack Obama increased military aid to Yemen and escalated drone strikes against alleged al-Qaida targets. Some of these were strikes against known AQAP leaders like the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But some others targeted unidentified groups of men and boys over 16 simply because their behavior bore the “signature” of military activity. Nearly 1,800 Yemenis are estimated to have died from U.S. drone strikes and other counterterrorism operations in Yemen. Yet there’s no accounting for how many of them might be civilians. That’s because of the persistent lack of transparency around drone strikes, as well as a controversial method of counting “military-age males” as combatants.

After successfully stopping two young men who we believed to be fighters from the Yemeni affiliate of the Islamic State group, a woman from a village that has been repeatedly drone-bombed in Yemen takes out an orange lollipop in February 2018. Credit: Safa Al Ahmad

In a country torn apart by multiple warring factions and where allegiances have been shifting at a dizzying pace, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint who exactly is AQAP or the Islamic State group. By 2014, the Houthis had taken over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and al-Hirak had turned into a fully armed movement fighting the Houthis. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates labeled the Houthis a terrorist group backed by Iran, but the Houthis are also sworn enemies of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. And since the Obama administration started backing a Saudi-led coalition in its war against the Houthis in 2015 – a war that has turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – the battle lines have gotten even more blurred.

To get a sense of how this all played out on the ground, I visited parts of southern Yemen that had been pounded by drone attacks in 2017 and 2018, when President Donald Trump further expanded the war on terror in Yemen. The highways were littered with the remnants of cars that had been struck by drones. But it wasn’t just the drone attacks that left people traumatized.

A car bombed in a drone strike sits along the highway between Shabwa and Marib, Yemen, in 2018. Credit: Safa Al Ahmad

In a small village called Adhlan in Marib province, 50 Navy SEALs had landed on the hilltops around the village in May 2017. It was the largest known ground raid on Yemen. The goal was to capture al-Qaida leaders. Ultimately, the Pentagon said seven militants had been killed. But there were also five civilian casualties, among them a 15-year-old boy and a man in his 70s. When I got there in early 2018 to interview villagers for another FRONTLINE documentary, it was several months after the raid, but the families were still traumatized, struggling to understand what had happened to them.

Mujahid, a boy of 7 at the time, was clearly affected by the raid. He had lost his brother and his uncle, as well as his hearing in one ear. I was filming on the hilltop where the Navy SEALs had landed, and Mujahid’s father was gently teasing his son, “Look, it’s an American!” The boy looked panic-stricken, his eyes darting across the landscape, searching for the American. When his father pointed at me, Mujahid grabbed the closest stone to throw at me. His father stopped him just in time, telling him there was nothing to fear.

Twenty years, $850 million in military aid and nearly 400 drone strikes later, when I think of the legacy of the war on terror in Yemen, I am still haunted by the look of terror that swept across Mujahid’s face.

This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Follow Safa Al Ahmad on Twitter: @ghariba33.

How Yemen Used the ‘War on Terror’ to Suit Its Needs is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

This post was originally published on Reveal.
September 10, 2021

‘Fortress USA’: How 9/11 produced a military industrial juggernaut
ANALYSIS: By Clare Corbould, Deakin University

Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.

This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.

This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.
The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.

The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.

When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.

The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.

Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.

The military industrial juggernaut
Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.

This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.

Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.

More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.

Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Image: The Conversation/Ross D. Franklin/AP

The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.

These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.

Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.

Normalisation of the security state
Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.

This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.

Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.

And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.

Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.

Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Image: The Conversation/Curtis Compton/AP

Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.

The heavy cost of the war on terror
The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.

Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.

The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.

These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.

Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.

Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.

Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Image: The Conversation/Hasan Jamali/AP

Life must be precious
Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.

In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,

We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.

In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.

As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.

The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.

As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.

Dr Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
September 10, 2021

The ‘war on terror’ couldn’t have happened without mainstream media

As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, The Canary has partnered with advocacy organisation CAGE. The organisation’s International Witness Campaign is commemorating 20 years of the war on terror.

Along with over 50 other partners, we’ll be rolling out coverage and events over the next 5 months. They’ll look to critique and analyse the role of media outlets in enabling the war on terror to continue. Whilst recent months have seen the US withdrawal from Afghanistan (and the almost immediate takeover of the Taliban), this by no means signals the end of the war on terror.

Infamous

War criminal George Bush famously declared a “war on terror” when a number of mostly Saudi nationals bombed the twin towers in 2001. This declaration of war on a concept has characterised the domestic and foreign policies of Western governments over the past two decades.

There’s plenty to focus on in this area – weapons of mass destruction that never existed; CIA torture and rendition; the continued operation of Guantánamo Bay; illegal wars. It’s unmistakeable that the war on terror has not been fought on battlefields alone. It’s also been played out in workplaces, schools, hospitals, and prisons. In other words, it’s been a war that’s about domination and control of Muslims in every possible arena.

As we look back over the past 20 years, one element that’s been instrumental in the course of the war on terror has been mainstream media. Public opinion has swayed over the years, and appetite for war has been sporadic. Many protestors came together to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much work has, and is, done to protest and resist Islamophobia. But much of this work has had to focus on repeated racism from the media.

Manufacturing consent

A functioning news media industry should question power, not work in service of power. Unfortunately, that generally isn’t the case in British media, and it certainly isn’t the case when it comes to coverage of Muslims. Outlets across the political spectrum are guilty of fanning the flames of Islamophobia and racism. It’s no accident that the phrase “manufacturing consent” often pops up in these discussions. Domestic and foreign policy decisions don’t happen in isolation. They happen within the context of a range of media outlets that prop them up.

A 2018 report from the Centre for Media Monitoring found:

Almost 1 in 4 online articles (23%) misrepresent an aspect of Muslim behaviour or belief

The Muslim Council of Britain has a running tally of misrepresentation and outright hostility towards Muslims. The need for such reports and initiatives has come from domination of the media landscape by the same, few wealthy voices. Their wealth has brought them their connections. This, in turn, equips them to dominate propaganda about Muslims.

In 2019, the outgoing chairperson of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) Alan Moses said:

The portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the British press has been the most difficult issue facing the press watchdog in the past five years.

Warmongers

I don’t quote these reports and statistics to give legitimacy to the problem I’m describing. The fact that even white-dominated organisations like IPSO are noticing these trends tells us the scale of the issue. Muslims have intimate knowledge of how the media has used fear to whip up a public frenzy against them. And governments have instrumentalised this frenzy to push through their actions in the war on terror.

At this stage it’s almost pointless to offer up headlines and front pages to describe the media’s complicity. It’s become so ingrained in British culture that it’s now part of the fabric of this country. Governments may well have declared the war on terror, but it’s been the media that has kept the war drum beating.

Fear and ignorance

In his 1981 book Covering Islam, scholar Edward Said writes:

Far from challenging the vulgar stereotypes circulated in the media, the academic experts on Islam are… status symbols of relevant authority on Islam, and also dependent on the whole system constituting and legitimating their function within it: and it is this system which the media, in their reliance upon stereotypes based on fear and ignorance, reflect.

Whilst Said was discussing academics, the pattern of thinking he describes is also relevant for journalists. Mainstream media is full of white people who have no experience, relevance, or expertise to speak on Islamophobia or racism. And yet, they have the loudest voices and largest platforms. They peddle ill-disguised support for government policies which seek to make all Muslims the target of increased securitisation and suspicion.

Some journalists have neutralised their own capacity for critique in order to serve as cogs in the machinery of war that they uphold. They rely on stereotypes that keep the wheels of fear and ignorance turning. It’s not in their interests to question power, no matter how many Muslims are scapegoated, tortured, surveilled, or abused.

Power

Even in the 80s, well before 9/11, Said warned about the dangers of media outlets misrepresenting and obscuring power:

Underlying every interpretation of other cultures–especially of Islam–is the choice facing the individual scholar or intellectual: whether to put intellect at the service of power or at the service of criticism, community, and moral sense.

What Said is describing here is the choice that commentators face when they report on the ‘war on terror.’ Are you going to work in the service of power? Or are you going to work in the spirit of critical thinking, community ties, and with a sense of morality?

What we’ve seen over the past 20 years from mainstream media outlets is a consistent commitment to racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia. Indeed, it’s a choice which allies itself to the racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia of any British government over the past 20 years.

Featured image via The Canary

By Maryam Jameela

This post was originally published on The Canary.
September 10, 2021

Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty

It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces. After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed.

With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion. Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that. In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.

The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction”.

When those elusive WMDs proved stubbornly elusive, PW shifted his emphasis from security rationales to one of liberation. Along the way he blamed the “consensus judgment of the intelligence community” for not getting it right in the first place, an assessment verging on the mendacious.

While Saddam Hussein was a high grade butcher and villain to many of his people, it is hard to credit him with the Bond villain, pulp view Wolfowitz gives him. Evidence chasers such as Ben Bonk at the Central Intelligence Agency were frustrated in being thrown at the fruitless effort to link Saddam to al-Qaeda. Intelligence operatives were effectively being leaned upon to confect the record and find justifications.

In 2013, Wolfowitz was still insisting on uncertainty as a principle. “We still don’t know how all of this is going to end.” He accepted that the decapitation of the Iraqi leadership without an immediate substitute might have been unwise. The “idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them” was erroneous.

That did not matter. The threat was there and present, growing like a stimulated bacillus. Depraved and disoriented, he takes the argument that invading Iraq at the time was appropriate because it would have had to happen in any case. Saddam was street store vendor, sponsor and patron of terrorism (he never defines the dimension of this, nor adduces evidence) and needed to be dealt with. The sword would eventually have to be unsheathed. “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”

In 2003, the aptly named Jeffrey Record reflected his surname’s worth by taking a hatchet to the Wolfowitz view in a scathing assessment for the Strategic Studies Institute. In declaring a global war on terrorism (GWOT), the Bush administration had identified a range of states, weapons of danger, terrorists and terrorism while conflating “them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.” Not sloppy, is Record.

He goes on to note, relevantly, the conflation premise: that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were seen, amateurishly, “as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.” This “strategic error of the first order” ignored “critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to US deterrence and military action” led to “an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq. The result: “a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism” and the diversion of “attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda.”

The 9/11 Commission Report, despite noting “friendly contacts” between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi officials at various points, similarly found “no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative personal relationship.” Nor was there “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Critics suggest incompetence and bungling in the invasion of Iraq. They exclude venality and calculation. Wolfowitz, as if anticipating a prosecution in some faraway court, has been busy covering his tracks and pointing the finger at other decision makers further up the greased pole. The top suspect: current retiree amateur painter President George W. Bush. “I don’t think I ever met the president alone. I didn’t meet him very often. [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it. And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?” What a merry band they make.

Wolfowitz, for the defence, always has to play some useful (or useless) idiot card, proffered from the surrounds of the tired lecture circuit or the American Enterprise Institute. He is ideologically inclined, evidentially challenged, and keen to accept material that confirms his prejudice rather than contradicts it. When found wanting about his decisions on accepting, for instance, the bargain basement material of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, he returned to common cultural themes. “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us.”

Perhaps, after two decades, it is time to sort the books, order the records and call forth those architects of war who, dismally deluded and acting with criminal intent and incompetence, plunged a good part of the globe into conflict, leaving a legacy that continues to pollute with tenacious determination. Along the way, we can mourn the dead of 9/11 and all the dead that followed.
The post Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 9, 2021

How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.

We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.

That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.

Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy.

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”

“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”

Even the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.

By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place.

In Libya and Syria, only ten years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11th by recruiting and arming Al Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican Senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.

Trump and Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the September 11th attack. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.

Barbara Lee, the only Member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’s war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000, one would think that Rep. Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for healthcare, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people; and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.

But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.

The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, ”when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.

The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.

America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.

But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard.

— We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. CODEPINK is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future” — please join us!

— We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

— We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others — never to the United States.

— And we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.

Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

The post How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 9, 2021

United States: The racist War on Terror after 9/11

After the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, United States president George W Bush gained unlimited powers to fight “forever wars”, writes Malik Miah. Meanwhile, Arabs and those who “looked Muslim” — especially Iranians and South Asians — became domestic targets at home.

This post was originally published on Green Left.
September 8, 2021

Noam Chomsky: The US-Led “War on Terror” Has Devastated Much of the World

Twenty years ago this week, the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, whose origins date back to 1979 when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the administration of George W. Bush embarked on a “global war on terror”: It invaded Afghanistan and, a year later, after having toppled the Taliban government, raised the specter of an “Axis of Evil” comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, thereby preparing the stage for more invasions. Interestingly enough, Saudi Arabia, whose royal family, according to certain intelligence reports, had been financing al-Qaeda, was not included on the list. Instead, it was Iraq that the U.S. invaded in 2003, toppling a brutal dictator (Saddam Hussein) who had committed most of his crimes as a U.S. ally and was a sworn enemy of al-Qaeda and of other Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations because of the threat they posed to his secular regime.

The outcome of the 20-year war on terror, which ended with the Taliban’s return to power, has been disastrous on multiple fronts, as Noam Chomsky pointedly elaborates in a breathtaking interview, which also reveals the massive level of hypocrisy that belies the actions of the global empire.

C.J. Polychroniou: Nearly 20 years have passed since the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. With nearly 3,000 dead, this was the deadliest attack on U.S. soil in history and produced dramatic ramifications for global affairs, as well as startling impacts on domestic society. I want to start by asking you to reflect on the alleged revamping of U.S. foreign policy under George W. Bush as part of his administration’s reaction to the rise of Osama bin Laden and the jihadist phenomenon. First, was there anything new to the Bush Doctrine, or was it simply a codification of what we had already seen take place in the 1990s in Iraq, Panama, Bosnia and Kosovo? Second, was the U.S.-NATO led invasion of Afghanistan legal under international law? And third, was the U.S. ever committed to nation-building in Afghanistan?

Noam Chomsky: Washington’s immediate reaction to 9/11/2001 was to invade Afghanistan. The withdrawal of U.S. ground forces was timed to (virtually) coincide with the 20th anniversary of the invasion. There has been a flood of commentary on the 9/11 anniversary and the termination of the ground war. It is highly illuminating, and consequential. It reveals how the course of events is perceived by the political class, and provides useful background for considering the substantive questions about the Bush Doctrine. It also yields some indication of what is likely to ensue.

Of utmost importance at this historic moment would be the reflections of “the decider,” as he called himself. And indeed, there was an interview with George W. Bush as the withdrawal reached its final stage, in the Washington Post.

In the Style section.

The article and interview introduce us to a lovable, goofy grandpa, enjoying banter with his children, admiring the portraits he had painted of Great Men that he had known in his days of glory. There was an incidental comment on his exploits in Afghanistan and the follow-up episode in Iraq:

Bush may have started the Iraq War on false pretenses, but at least he hadn’t inspired an insurrection that turned the U.S. Capitol into a combat zone. At least he had made efforts to distance himself from the racists and xenophobes in his party rather than cultivate their support. At least he hadn’t gone so far as to call his domestic adversaries “evil.”

“He looks like the Babe Ruth of presidents when you compare him to Trump,” former Senate Majority Leader and one-time Bush nemesis Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) said in an interview. “Now, I look back on Bush with a degree of nostalgia, with some affection, which I never thought I would do.”

Way down on the list, meriting only incidental allusion, is the slaughter of hundreds of thousands; many millions of refugees; vast destruction; a regime of hideous torture; incitement of ethnic conflicts that have torn the whole region apart; and as a direct legacy, two of the most miserable countries on Earth.

First things first. He didn’t bad-mouth fellow Americans.

The sole interview with Bush captures well the essence of the flood of commentary. What matters is us. There are many laments about the cost of these ventures: the cost to us, that is, which “have exceeded $8 trillion, according to new estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University,” along with American lives lost and disruption of our fragile society.

Next time we should assess the costs to us more carefully, and do better.

There are also well-justified laments about the fate of women under Taliban rule. The laments sometimes are no doubt sincere, though a natural question arises: Why weren’t they voiced 30 years ago when U.S. favorites, armed and enthusiastically supported by Washington, were terrorizing young women in Kabul who were wearing the “wrong” clothes, throwing acid in their faces and other abuses? Particularly vicious were the forces of the arch-terrorist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, recently on the U.S. negotiating team.

The achievements in women’s rights in Russian-controlled cities in the late ‘80s, and the threats they faced from the CIA-mobilized radical Islamist forces, were reported at the time by a highly credible source, Rasil Basu, a distinguished international feminist activist who was UN representative in Afghanistan in those years, with special concern for women’s rights.

Basu reports:

During the [Russian] occupation, in fact, women made enormous strides: illiteracy declined from 98% to 75%, and they were granted equal rights with men in civil law, and in the Constitution. This is not to say that there was complete gender equality. Unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family with women occupying lower level sex-type jobs. But the strides they took in education and employment were very impressive.

Basu submitted articles on these matters to the major U.S. journals, along with the feminist journal Ms. Magazine. No takers, wrong story. She was, however, able to publish her report in Asia: Asian Age, on December 3, 2001.

We can learn more about how Afghans in Kabul perceive the late years of the Russian occupation, and what followed, from another expert source, Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Moscow from 1988 to 1992, and then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, also author of the major scholarly work on the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Braithwaite visited Kabul in 2008, and reported his findings in the London Financial Times:

In Afghanistan today new myths are building up. They bode ill for current western policy. On a recent visit I spoke to Afghan journalists, former Mujahideen, professionals, people working for the ‘coalition’ — natural supporters for its claims to bring peace and reconstruction. They were contemptuous of [US-imposed] President Hamid Karzai, whom they compared to Shah Shujah, the British puppet installed during the first Afghan war. Most preferred Mohammad Najibullah, the last communist president, who attempted to reconcile the nation within an Islamic state, and was butchered by the Taliban in 1996: DVDs of his speeches are being sold on the streets. Things were, they said, better under the Soviets. Kabul was secure, women were employed, the Soviets built factories, roads, schools and hospitals, Russian children played safely in the streets. The Russian soldiers fought bravely on the ground like real warriors, instead of killing women and children from the air. Even the Taliban were not so bad: they were good Muslims, kept order, and respected women in their own way. These myths may not reflect historical reality, but they do measure a deep disillusionment with the ‘coalition’ and its policies.

The policies of the “coalition” were brought to the public in New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA. The goal was to “kill Soviet Soldiers,” the CIA station chief in Islamabad declared, making it clear that “the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan.”

His understanding of the policies he was ordered to execute under President Ronald Reagan is fully in accord with the boasts of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski about their decision to support radical Islamist jihadis in 1979 in order to draw the Russians into Afghanistan, and his pleasure in the outcome after hundreds of thousands of Afghans were killed and much of the country wrecked: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

It was recognized early on by informed observers that the Russian invaders were eager to withdraw without delay. The study of Russian archives by historian David Gibbs resolves any doubts on the matter. But it was much more useful for Washington to issue rousing proclamations about Russia’s terrifying expansionist goals, compelling the U.S., in defense, to greatly expand its own domination of the region, with violence when needed (the Carter Doctrine, a precursor of the Bush Doctrine).

The Russian withdrawal left a relatively popular government in place under Najibullah, with a functioning army that was able to hold its own for several years until the U.S.-backed radical Islamists took over and instituted a reign of terror so extreme that the Taliban were widely welcomed when they invaded, instituting their own harsh regime. They kept on fairly good terms with Washington until 9/11.

Returning to the present, we should indeed be concerned with the fate of women, and others, as the Taliban return to power. For those sincerely concerned to design policies that might benefit them, a little historical memory doesn’t hurt.

The same is true in other respects as well. The Taliban have promised not to harbor terrorists, but how can we believe them, commentators warn, when this promise is coupled with the outrageous claim by their spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid that there is “no proof” that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attack?

There is one problem with the general ridicule of this shocking statement. What Mujahid actually said was both accurate and very much worth hearing. In his words, “When Osama bin Laden became an issue for the Americans, he was in Afghanistan. Although there was no proof he was involved” in 9/11.

Let’s check. In June 2002, eight months after 9/11, FBI Director Robert Mueller made his most extensive presentation to the national press about the results of what was probably the most intensive investigation in history. In his words, “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan,” though the plotting and financing apparently trace to Germany and the United Arab Emirates. “We think the masterminds of it were in Afghanistan, high in the al Qaeda leadership.”

What was only surmised in June 2002 could not have been known eight months earlier when the U.S. invaded. Mujahid’s outrageous comment was accurate. The ridicule is another example of convenient amnesia.

Keeping Mujahid’s accurate statement in mind, along with Mueller’s confirmation of it, we can move towards understanding the Bush Doctrine.

While doing so, we might listen to Afghan voices. One of the most respected was Abdul Haq, the leading figure in the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance and a former leader of the U.S.-backed Mujahideen resistance to the Russian invasion. A few weeks after the U.S. invasion, he had an interview with Asia scholar Anatol Lieven.

Haq bitterly condemned the U.S. invasion, which, he recognized, would kill many Afghans and undermine the efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within. He said that “the US is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.”

Haq was not alone in this view. A meeting of 1,000 tribal elders in October 2001 unanimously demanded an end to the bombing, which, they declared, is targeting “innocent people.” They urged that means other than slaughter and destruction be employed to overthrow the hated Taliban regime.

The leading Afghan women’s rights organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), issued a declaration on October 11, 2001, strongly opposing the “vast aggression on our country” by the U.S., which will shed the blood of innocent civilians. The declaration called for “eradication of the plague of the Taliban and al-Qaeda” by the “uprising of the Afghan nation,” not by a murderous assault of foreign aggressors.

All public at the time, all ignored as irrelevant, all forgotten. The opinions of Afghans are not our concern when we invade and occupy their country.

The perception of the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance was not far from the stance of President Bush and his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both dismissed Taliban initiatives to send bin Laden for trial abroad despite Washington’s refusal to provide evidence (which it didn’t have). Finally, they refused Taliban offers to surrender. As the president put it, “When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations.” Rumsfeld added, “We don’t negotiate surrenders.” E.g., we’re going to show our muscle and scare everyone in the world.

The imperial pronouncement at the time was that those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. The shocking audacity of that proclamation passed almost unnoticed. It was not accompanied by a call to bomb Washington, as it obviously implied. Even putting aside the world-class terrorists in high places, the U.S. harbors and abets retail terrorists who keep to such acts as blowing up Cuban commercial airliners, killing many people, part of the long U.S. terrorist war against Cuba.

Quite apart from that scandal, it is worth stating the unspeakable: The U.S. had no charge against the Taliban. No charge, before 9/11 or ever. Before 9/11, Washington was on fairly good terms with the Taliban. After 9/11, it demanded extradition (without even a pretense of providing required evidence), and when the Taliban agreed, Washington refused the offers: “We don’t negotiate surrenders.” The invasion was not only a violation of international law, as marginal a concern in Washington as the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance, but also had no credible pretext on any grounds.

Pure criminality.

Furthermore, ample evidence is now available showing that Afghanistan and al-Qaeda were not of much interest to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triumvirate. They had their eyes on much bigger game than Afghanistan. Iraq would be the first step, then the entire region. I won’t review the record here. It’s well-documented in Scott Horton’s book, Fool’s Errand.

That’s the Bush Doctrine. Rule the region, rule the world, show our muscle so that the world knows that “What we say goes,” as Bush I [George H.W. Bush] put it.

It’s hardly a new U.S. doctrine. It’s also easy to find precursors in imperial history. Simply consider our predecessor in world control, Britain, a grand master of war crimes, whose wealth and power derived from piracy, slavery and the world’s greatest narco-trafficking enterprise.

And in the last analysis, “Whatever happens, we have got, The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Hilaire Belloc’s rendition of Western civilization. And pretty much Abdul Haq’s insight into the imperial mindset.

Nothing reveals reigning values more clearly than the mode of withdrawal. The Afghan population was scarcely a consideration. The imperial “deciders” do not trouble to ask what people might want in the rural areas of this overwhelmingly rural society where the Taliban live and find their support, perhaps grudging support as the best of bad alternatives. Formerly a Pashtun movement, the “new Taliban” evidently have a much broader base. That was dramatically revealed by the quick collapse of their former enemies, the vicious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, along with Ismail Khan, bringing other ethnic groups within the Taliban network. There are also Afghan peace forces that should not be summarily dismissed. What would the Afghan population want if they had a choice? Could they, perhaps, reach local accommodations if given time before a precipitous withdrawal? Whatever the possibilities might have been, they do not seem to have been considered.

The depth of contempt for Afghans was, predictably, reached by Donald Trump. In his unilateral withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, he did not even bother to consult with the official Afghan government. Worse still, Bush administration foreign policy specialist Kori Schake reports, Trump forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters and relax economic sanctions. He agreed that the Taliban could continue to commit violence against the government we were there to support, against innocent people and against those who’d assisted our efforts to keep Americans safe. All the Taliban had to do was say they would stop targeting U.S. or coalition forces, not permit al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations to use Afghan territory to threaten U.S. security and subsequently hold negotiations with the Afghan government.

As usual, what matters is us, this time amplified by Trump’s signature cruelty. The fate of Afghans is of zero concern.

Trump timed the withdrawal for the onset of the summer fighting season, reducing the hope for some kind of preparation. President Joe Biden improved the terms of withdrawal a little, but not enough to prevent the anticipated debacle. Then came the predictable reaction of the increasingly shameless Republican leadership. They were barely able to remove their gushing tributes to Trump’s “historic peace agreement” from their web page in time to denounce Biden and call for his impeachment for pursuing an improved version of Trump’s ignominious betrayal.

Meanwhile, the Afghans are again hung out to dry.

Returning to the original question, the Bush Doctrine may have been formulated more crudely than the usual practice, but it is hardly new. The invasion violated international law (and Article VI of the U.S. Constitution), but Bush’s legal team had determined that such sentimentality was “quaint” and “obsolete,” again breaking little new ground except for brazen defiance. As to “nation building,” one way to measure the commitment to this goal is to ask what portion of the trillions of dollars expended went to the Afghan population, and what portion went to the U.S. military system and its mercenaries (“contractors”) along with the morass of corruption in Kabul and the warlords the U.S. established in power.

At the outset, I referred to 9/11/2001, not just 9/11. There’s a good reason. What we call 9/11 is the second 9/11. The first 9/11 was far more destructive and brutal by any reasonable measure: 9/11/73. To see why, consider per capita equivalents, the right measure. Suppose that on 9/11/2001, 30,000 people had been killed, 500,000 viciously tortured, the government overthrown and a brutal dictatorship installed. That would have been worse than what we call 9/11.

It happened. It wasn’t deplored by the U.S. government, or by private capital, or by the international financial institutions that the U.S. largely controls, or by the leading figures of “libertarianism.” Rather, it was lauded and granted enormous support. The perpetrators, like Henry Kissinger, are highly honored. I suppose bin Laden is lauded among jihadis.

All should recognize that I am referring to Chile, 9/11/1973.

Another topic that might inspire reflection is the notion of “forever wars,” finally put to rest with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. From the perspective of the victims, when did the forever wars begin? For the United States, they began in 1783. With the British yoke removed, the new nation was free to invade “Indian country,” to attack Indigenous nations with campaigns of slaughter, terror, ethnic cleansing, violation of treaties — all on a massive scale, meanwhile picking up half of Mexico, then onto much of the world. A longer view traces our forever wars back to 1492, as historian Walter Hixson argues.

From the viewpoint of the victims, history looks different from the stance of those with the maxim gun and their descendants.

In March 2003, the U.S. initiated a war against Iraq as part of the neoconservative vision of remaking the Middle East and removing leaders that posed a threat to the interests and “integrity” of the United States. Knowing that the regime of Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, possessed no weapons of mass destruction and subsequently posed no threat to the U.S., why did Bush invade Iraq, which left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and may have cost more than $3 trillion?

9/11 provided the occasion for the invasion of Iraq, which, unlike Afghanistan, is a real prize: a major petro-state right at the heart of the world’s prime oil-producing region. As the twin towers were still smoldering, Rumsfeld was telling his staff that it’s time to “go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not,” including Iraq. Goals quickly became far more expansive. Bush and associates made it quite clear that bin Laden was small potatoes, of little interest (see Horton for many details).

The Bush legal team determined that the UN Charter, which explicitly bars preemptive/preventive wars, actually authorizes them — formalizing what had long been operative doctrine. The official reason for war was the “single question”: Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. When the question received the wrong answer, the reason for aggression instantly switched to “democracy promotion,” a transparent fairy tale swallowed enthusiastically by the educated classes — though some demurred, including 99 percent of Iraqis, according to polls.

Some are now praised for having opposed the war from the start, notably Barack Obama, who criticized it as a strategic blunder. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall praise for Nazi generals who regarded Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa as a strategic blunder: They should have knocked out Britain first. A different judgment was rendered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. But the U.S. doesn’t commit crimes, by definition; only blunders.

The regime-change agenda that had defined U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration was apparently behind NATO’s decision to remove Muammar Qaddafi from power in Libya in the wake of the “Arab Spring” revolutions in late 2010 and early 2011. But as in the case of Iraq, what were the real reasons for dealing with the leader of an alleged “rogue state” that had long ceased being one?

The Libya intervention was initiated by France, partly in reaction to humanitarian posturing of some French intellectuals, partly I suppose (we don’t have much evidence) as part of France’s effort to sustain its imperial role in Francophone Africa. Britain joined in. Then Obama-Clinton joined, “leading from behind” as some White House official is supposed to have said. As Qaddafi’s forces were converging on Benghazi, there were loud cries of impending genocide, leading to a UN Security Council resolution imposing a no-fly zone and calling for negotiations. That was reasonable in my opinion; there were legitimate concerns. The African Union proposed a ceasefire with negotiations with the Benghazi rebel about reforms. Qaddafi accepted it; the rebels refused.

At that point, the France-Britain-U.S. coalition decided to violate the Security Council resolution they had introduced and to become, in effect, the air force of the rebels. That enabled the rebel forces to advance on ground, finally capturing and sadistically murdering Qaddafi. Hillary Clinton found that quite amusing, and joked with the press that, “We came, We saw, He died.”

The country then collapsed into total chaos, with sharp escalation in killings and other atrocities. It also led to a flow of jihadis and weapons to other parts of Africa, stirring up major disasters there. Intervention extended to Russia and Turkey, and the Arab dictatorships, supporting warring groups. The whole episode has been a catastrophe for Libya and much of West Africa. Clinton is not on record, as far as I know, as to whether this is also amusing.

Libya was a major oil producer. It’s hard to doubt that that was a factor in the various interventions, but lacking internal records, little can be said with confidence.

The debacle in Afghanistan has shown beyond any doubt the failure of U.S. strategy in the war on terror and of the regime-change operations. However, there is something more disturbing than these facts, which is that, after each intervention, the United States leaves behind “black holes” and even betrays those that fought on its side against terrorism. Two interrelated questions: First, do you think that the failed war on terror will produce any new lessons for future U.S. foreign policymakers? And second, does this failure reveal anything about U.S. supremacy in world affairs?

Failure is in the eyes of the beholder. Let’s first recall that Bush II didn’t declare the global war on terror. He re-declared it. It was Reagan and his Secretary of State George Shultz who came into office declaring the global war on terror, a campaign to destroy the “the evil scourge of terrorism,” particularly state-backed international terrorism, a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself [in a] return to barbarism in the modern age.”

The global war on terror quickly became a huge terrorist war directed or supported by Washington, concentrating on Central America but extending to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The global war on terror even led to a World Court judgment condemning the Reagan administration for “unlawful use of force” — aka, international terrorism — and ordering the U.S. to pay substantial reparations for its crimes.

The U.S. of course dismissed all of this and stepped up the “unlawful use of force.” That was quite proper, the editors of The New York Times explained. The World Court was a “hostile forum,” as proven by the fact that it condemned the blameless U.S. A few years earlier it had been a model of probity when it sided with the U.S. in a case against Iran.

The U.S. then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law, mentioning no one, although it was clear what was intended. I’m not sure whether it was even reported.

But we solemnly declare that states that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. So the invasion of Afghanistan was “right” and “just,” though ill-conceived and too costly. To us.

Was it a failure? For U.S. imperial goals? In some cases, yes. Reagan was the last supporter of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, but was unable to sustain it. In general, though, it extended Washington’s imperial reach.

Bush’s renewal of the global war on terror has not had similar success. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the base for radical Islamic fundamentalist terrorism was largely confined to a corner of Afghanistan. Now it is all over the world. The devastation of much of Central Asia and the Middle East has not enhanced U.S. power.

I doubt that it has much impact on U.S. global supremacy, which remains overwhelming. In the military dimension, the U.S. stands alone. Its military spending eclipses rivals — in 2020, $778 billion as compared to China’s $252 billion and Russia’s $62 billion. The U.S. military is also far more advanced technologically. U.S. security is unrivaled. The alleged threats are at the borders of enemies, which are ringed with nuclear-armed missiles in some of the 800 U.S. military bases around the world (China has one: Djibouti).

Power also has economic dimensions. At the peak of U.S. power after World War II, the U.S. had perhaps 40 percent of global wealth, a preponderance that inevitably declined. But as political economist Sean Starrs has observed, in the world of neoliberal globalization, national accounts are not the only measure of economic power. His research shows that U.S.-based multinationals control a staggering 50 percent of global wealth and are first (sometimes second) in just about every sector.

Another dimension is “soft power.” Here, America has seriously declined, well before Trump’s harsh blows to the country’s reputation. Even under Clinton, leading political scientists recognized that most of the world regarded America as the world’s “prime rogue state” and “the single greatest external threat to their societies” (to quote Samuel Huntington and Robert Jervis, respectively). In the Obama years, international polls found that the U.S. was considered the greatest threat to world peace, with no contender even close.

U.S. leaders can continue to undermine the country, if they choose, but its enormous power and unrivaled advantages make that a hard task, even for the Trump wrecking ball.

A look back at the 9/11 attacks also reveals that the war on terror had numerous consequences on domestic society in the U.S. Can you comment on the impact of the war on terror on American democracy and human rights?

In this regard, the topic has been well enough covered so that not much comment is necessary. Another illustration just appeared in The New York Times Review of the Week, the eloquent testimony by a courageous FBI agent who was so disillusioned by his task of “destroying people” (Muslims) in the war on terror that he decided to leak documents exposing the crimes and to go to prison. That fate is reserved to those who expose state crimes, not the perpetrators, who are respected, like the goofy grandpa, George W. Bush.

There has of course been a serious assault on civil liberties and human rights, in some cases utterly unspeakable, like Guantánamo, where tortured prisoners still languish after many years without charges or because the torture was so hideous that judges refuse to allow them to be brought to trial. It’s by now conceded that “the worst of the worst” (as they were called) were mostly innocent bystanders.

At home, the framework of a surveillance state with utterly illegitimate power has been established. The victims as usual are the most vulnerable, but others might want to reflect on Pastor Niemöller’s famous plea under Nazi rule.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
September 8, 2021

The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19

I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

— Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.

The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—has become the enemy of the people.

Consider that the government’s answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.

From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.

Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression.”

Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.

Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.

This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.

This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.

This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of the government.

This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

This is a government that has empowered police departments to make a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and red light cameras.

This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

This is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can be expanded.

This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

The post The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19 first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 5, 2021

‘I’m not afraid of terrorism. I’m afraid of being accused of being a terrorist’ – growing up Muslim after 9/11
ANALYSIS: By Randa Abdel Fattah, Macquarie University

Those born after 2001 have only known a world “at war on terror”.

This means a generation growing up under under fears and moral panics about Muslims and unparalleled security measures around their bodies and lives.

In my new book, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, I look at what this has meant for young Muslims in Australia as they navigate their political identities at school.
- READ MORE: These young Muslim Australians want to meet Islamophobes and change their minds. And it’s working
- Auckland terror attacker ‘brainwashed’ by neighbours, mother says
In 2018 and 2019, I interviewed and held writing workshops with more than 60 Muslim and non-Muslim high school students across Sydney who were born around the time of the September 11 terror attacks.

We explored their fears, their levels of trust with peers and teachers and political expression in a post 9/11 world.

No matter how many Muslim students spoke to me about their typically adolescent hobbies and interests, almost every student spoke about the impact of political and media discourse in their everyday lives.

Abdul-Rahman, a 17-year-old Muslim boy at an Islamic school in western Sydney, put it this way:

I’m not afraid of terrorism. I’m afraid of being accused of being a terrorist.

Another student, Laila, told me:

I’ve always had this almost preconceived guilt attached to me […] [It’s] the million messages in the media, politicians, popular culture, all these little things that add up and add up.

‘Countering violent extremism’
For teenagers to talk about themselves as potentially “accused” is devastating, but not particularly surprising.

Graphic: New South Books

For two decades, millions of federal and state dollars have been poured into “countering violent extremism” programmes targeting Muslim youth. There has been no subtlety here.

Counter-terrorism policies have been announced by politicians on the steps of mosques, with a focus on geographic and demographic populations deemed “at risk” (in other words, suburbs with large Muslim populations).

Consultations and round tables with government over “national security” have been highly publicised. Meanwhile, Islamophobic attacks have been condemned by politicians and the police because of how they might “undermine” relationships of cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement and the Muslim community.

The public has been routinely reassured the government is tackling the “problem” of young Muslim Australians, “with strong, deradicalisation programmes, working with Muslim communities”.

The figure of the vulnerable but also dangerous Muslim youth pops up time and time again, from moral panics around young “homegrown” terrorists, to attempts to introduce “jihadi watch” schemes in schools.

The pressure to self-censor
This landscape trickles down into young people’s everyday lives, including their schools.

The pressure to self-censor and manage your political and religious expression at school was a common theme among many students, resonating with what academics in the United Kingdom describe in their research.

Young Muslims spoke about how they had to ‘manage’ what they said in class. Image: www.shutterstock.com

Anticipating how their tone, words and emotion would be interpreted by teachers and peers restricted students’ political expression.

This included a young Palestinian girl who had to push back against teachers, who reprimanded her for wearing a “Free Palestine” t-shirt at school, to students who refrained from writing about Iraq or Afghanistan as part of assignments because they had been cautioned not to “bring overseas conflicts into the classroom”.

Other students talked of staying quiet if controversial topics came up in class, such as news of a terrorist attack involving Muslims, or media headlines about Islam.

I also met students who tried to appear as “good” or “moderate” Muslims (which inevitably meant apolitical) and erased all traces of their Muslimness to “fit in”.

Feeling targeted, isolated
In 2015, there was a media frenzy about youth radicalisation in prayer rooms in Sydney’s state schools. I interviewed students at a school in north-west Sydney three years later and they spoke about how that controversy had been felt in their school life.

Most of the students from suburbs and schools who came under media and political scrutiny as “problematic” had felt targeted and isolated. One student withdrew from his Muslim peers, abandoned his prayers at school, took different routes to school to avoid being hassled by the media, and “shut down” in class.

I got dragged into an argument with other kids in class about me following the same religion as these terrorists […] but my tone […] I came off very aggressive […] then I was scared, because that’s what people think of as radical extremists […] I felt like I’d be taken straight to the principal and you would have to deal with that. So I shut up.

We need a new approach
After two decades of seeing young Muslims as “problems” to be contained and managed, it is time we approached them in a different way.

Adolescence is a time to encourage critical thinking and support young people navigating their political identities and agency. Young people need to be empowered to work through their political and religious ideas and identities in safe, supportive environments. They need to be seen as individuals in their own right, not members of a demonised, racialised collective.

The vast majority of the young Muslims I spoke to were matter-of-fact about the global rise of Islamophobia and racism. They knew about certain jokes and assumptions in the popular vernacular (for example, “Allahu Akbar and bomb jokes” or “terrorist” equals “Muslim”).

Many were concerned about what this meant as they grew up and left school. They worried about facing discrimination at work and being able to practise their faith openly. They also knew how this suspicion and dehumanisation had been triggered by wider discourses and policies over which they had no power.

It is not up to the 9/11 generation to change this. We need teachers, politicians and the media to create a culture where young Muslims feel accepted and secure in their right to express their religious and political identities.
- This article was produced as part of Social Sciences Week, running 6-12 September. A full list of 70 events can be found here. Randa Abdel-Fattah will appear in a webinar on the “Implications of 9/11: 20 years” at 6pm on Thursday September 9.
Dr Randa Abdel Fattah is a DECRA research fellow, Macquarie University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
September 1, 2021

Make Afghanistan the war to end all imperialist invasions

The quick collapse of the puppet government in Afghanistan and its army should not come as a surprise given the imperialists’ criminal record. Sue Bolton argues that Australia’s war criminals need to be held accountable.

This post was originally published on Green Left.