Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 106

We refuse to live in fear!

President Obama, in his weekend radio address to the nation:

They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.

ABC News, yesterday:

Fighter planes were scrambled, bomb squads were called, FBI command centers went on alert and police teams raced to airports today, but in the end two separate airline incidents were caused by apparently innocent bathroom breaks and a little "making out," federal officials said.

Earlier this year, the Obama White House reversed the Attorney General's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for his alleged crimes in a federal court in New York, and Congress prohibited Guantanamo detainees generally from being tried on U.S. soil, due to fears that the Terrorists would use their heat-vision to melt their shackles and escape or would summon their Terrorist friends to attack the courthouse and free them into the community -- even though none of that has ever happened, and even though almost every other county on the planet that suffered similar Terrorist attacks (Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia) tried the perpetrators in their regular courts in the cities where the attacks occurred.  In 2009, President Obama demanded the power to abolish the most basic right -- not to be imprisoned without having been convicted of a crime  -- by "preventively detaining" people who, in his words, "cannot be prosecuted yet [] pose a clear danger."  During the Bush years, The Washington Post quoted a military official warning Americans that the most extreme security measures are needed against Guantanamo detainees because these are "people who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down."

Meanwhile, America continues to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to a private Security State industry -- for the most ludicrous security systems -- to turn itself into what Kevin Drum last week called "Fortress America."  Drum quoted from Bob Schieffer's book in which the CBS News host recounts how "the Pentagon, like most of official Washington, was still open to the public in the 1970s.…No one was required to show identification to enter the building, nor were security passes required."  But now, writes Drum:

Ordinary office buildings require IDs before they'll let you in. Taking pictures is a suspicious activity. Airplanes return to the gate because someone in seat 34A got scared of a guy in a turban a couple of rows in front of them. Small children are swabbed down for bomb residue. . . . .

Now compare Schieffer's recollection with this passage from Wednesday's New York Times feature, "Fortress D.C.":

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"Some things are obvious: the Capitol Hill police armed with assault rifles, standing on the Capitol steps; concrete barricades blocking the once-grand entrances to other federal buildings; the surface-to-air missile battery protecting the White House; the National Archives security guards, almost as old as the Declaration of Independence enshrined inside, slowly waving a magnetic wand over all who enter. But most of the post-9/11 security measures have simply been embedded in the landscape and culture of the nation's capital.

"From the reflecting pool at the foot of the Capitol to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, government cameras take pictures of citizens, who smile for Big Brother and snap their own pictures of the government cameras. In the $561 million underground Capitol visitors center, completed in 2008, people clutching gallery passes from a senator's or representative's office are funneled through magnetometers, to witness a secure Congress in its sealed chambers." . . . .

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The protective apparatus we've put in place, both the less visible surveillance state and the highly visible security state, will be with us forever. And they'll get worse and worse: If the past decade is any judge, Americans seem willing to put up with an almost unlimited amount of this stuff as long as it's done in the name of protecting us from terrorism. The only thing that's provoked any serious reaction at all has been backscatter scanners in airports -- and not because they represent any kind of real government overreach, but because people have a knee-jerk revulsion to the idea of having "nude" pictures of themselves taken.

That gets us upset. But hundreds of billions of dollars spent to relentlessly harden the routines of our daily lives? Our apparent attitude toward that, to paraphrase our former president, is "bring it on."

But remember: "as Americans" -- rugged, courageous individualists -- "we refuse to live in fear."  Courtesy of The Daily Mail, enjoy some images of 9/11 Day in the Home of the Brave, including some as the President who delivered that stalwart decree spoke to the nation:

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Obviously, reasonable security measures -- to protect the President and otherwise -- are perfectly appropriate.  But the very idea that America hasn't been converted into a paramilitarized Nation of Fear is absurd on its face.  Most foreign policy and domestic civil liberties erosions are grounded in little other than that.  Meanwhile, in a New York Times Op-Ed this weekend, Ahmed Rashid describes how rapidly (and predictably) anti-Americanism has grown in Pakistan and Afghanistan over the last several years even among those previously favorable to the United States; perhaps some day we'll make the connection between what we are doing over there and what we consequently do to ourselves at home.

Orwell, 9/11, Emmanuel Goldstein and WikiLeaks

A strikingly good piece of investigative journalism from Associated Press finds that accusations about the damage done by WikiLeaks' latest release are -- yet again -- wildly overstated and without any factual basis.  These most recent warnings have centered on WikiLeaks' exposure of diplomatic sources whom the released cables indicated should be "strictly protected."  While unable to examine all of the names in the cables, AP focused on the ones "the State Department seemed to categorize as most risky."  It found that many of them are "comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death." 

In particular, many of these super-secret sources were "already dead, their names cited as sensitive in the context of long-resolved conflicts or situations" while "some have publicly written or testified at hearings about the supposedly confidential information they provided the U.S. government."  Like the Pentagon before them, even the State Department  -- which has "been scouring the documents since last year to find examples where sources are exposed and inform them that they may be 'outed'" -- is unable to provide any substantiation for its shrill, public denunciations of WikiLeaks and its "dire" warnings about the "grave danger" caused by publication of these cables:  

The total damage appears limited and the State Department has steadfastly refused to describe any situation in which they've felt a source's life was in danger. They say a handful of people had to be relocated away from danger but won't provide any details on those few cases.

None of this is to say that all criticisms of WikiLeaks are unwarranted; I criticized the accidental release of sources' names as part of the Afghan War documents and assigned them some blame for failure to secure the cables.  Nor is it to say that it's implausible that, at some point, someone may be harmed by release of the unredated cables.  The point here is that, yet again, the fear-mongering frenzy issued by the U.S. Government against one of its Enemies Du Jour was blindly ingested and then disseminated by the standard cadre of government-loyal "journalists" and the authority-revering pundits who listen to them.  No matter how many times that happens, the lesson is never learned, because there is no desire to learn it.

For three reasons, AP's findings are anything but surprising.  First, that the U.S. Government declares something Very Secret hardly means it is; this is a secrecy-obsessed government that reflexively declares even the most banal matters to be "sensitive" and off-limits to the public, as proven by the release of hundreds of thousands of "secret" documents that reveal nothing.  Second, there is an established history of extremely exaggerated government and media claims about the harm done by WikiLeaks releases; that's why, when examining the events last week that prompted the release of the unredacted cables, I wrote: "Serious caution is warranted in making claims about the damage caused by publication of these cables." 

Third, and most important for present purposes, this is what the U.S. government and its media-servants do; it's their modus operandi.  Whomever the government wants to demonize at any given moment is subjected to this same process.  On a moment's notice, the full propaganda system is activated against the New Enemy, indiscriminate accusations are unleashed, personal foibles are exposed, collective hatred among all Decent People is mandated, and it then instantly becomes heretical to question the caricature of evil that has been manufactured. 

That's how dictators and other assorted miscreants with whom the U.S. was tightly allied for years or even decades are overnight converted into The Root of All Evil, The Supreme Villain who Must be Vanquished (Saddam, Osama bin Laden, Gadaffi, Mubarak).  Americans who were perfectly content to have their government in bed with these individuals suddenly stand up and demand, on cue, that no expense be spared to eradicate them.  Often, the demonization campaign contains some truth -- the nation's long-time-friends-converted-overnight-into-Enemies really have committed atrocious acts or, as a new innovation of Nixonian tactics aimed at Daniel Ellsberg, even harbored some creepy porn (!) -- but the ritual of collective hatred renders any facts a mere accident.  Once everyone's contempt is successfully directed toward the Chosen Enemy, it matters little what they actually did or did not do: such a profound menace are they to all that is Good that exaggerations or even lies about their bad acts are ennobled, in service of a Good Cause; conversely, to question the demonization or object to what is done to them is, by definition, to side with Evil.

Directing all this passionate hatred toward the state's identified Enemy and their Evil Acts has an added benefit: the resulting mass contempt, by design, distracts all attention away from of the evil committed by those stirring that passion.  Thus do we all stomp our feet in righteous fury over the potential, speculative harm caused by WikiLeaks while steadfastly ignoring the actual, massive death and destruction on the part of our own leaders which WikiLeaks reveals (just as dramatic tales and anniversary rituals about bin Laden's act a full decade ago still cause us to overlook and acquiesce to the massive amount of violence, aggression and bloodshed our own leaders continue to bring to the world).  Just yell Saddam's rape rooms or display the iconic photograph of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or claim that WikiLeaks has endangered hundreds of innocents and made "diplomacy" impossible or suddenly feign outrage over Mubarak's internal repression and everything -- the past, our own actions, facts -- all fade away in a cloud of righteous collective hatred, directed outward, away from ourselves and our government.

This is nothing more than a slightly less raucous rendition of Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein/Two-Minute-Hate ritual.  In Orwell's 1984, Goldstein is the shadowy, possibly-fictitious-but-possibly-real former Party official whose betrayals of the State, ongoing treason, and array of other incomprehensibly evil acts make him, in the lore of State propaganda, the Prime Villain, the Root of all Evil, whom Good Citizens blame for all societal evils and on whom they exclusively focus their rage.  His image is regularly paraded before the citizenry during a Two Minute Hate Session, accompanied by an authoritative narration of his evil, and mass, inebriating rage results (see the video version here).  The ultimate benefit of this ritual is it enables the citizenry to ignore their own plight and the violence and oppression of their own government (political parties use a similar process -- endless focus on marginal, hated figures in the other party -- to keep fear levels high and party loyalty strong).  Thus can the debate over whether Julian Assange should be executed or merely imprisoned for life resume among all good people.

Speaking of Emmanuel Goldstein, he was the putative "author" of the Party manual published at length in 1984 that describes the Party's means of control and manipulation, entitled "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism."  In the chapter entitled "War Is Peace," one finds what is easily the best essay for the 10-year-anniversary religious observance of 9/11 upon which we are about to embark:

In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. . . .

This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.

But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. . . .

To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. . . . The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world. . . .

War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. . .

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. . . .

In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

There are certainly people with genuine power who understand exactly how this process works and are conscious of the propaganda it entails, and there are many ordinary citizens, paying only casual attention to political matters, who blindly ingest it.  But it is the high-ranking Inner Party members -- the D.C. cadre of think tank "scholars," government and academic functionaries, and journalists and pundits who fancy themselves sophisticated political junkies and insiders -- who are the True Believers.  They cling to institutions of political power and officialdom, plant their careers, self-esteem, self-importance and social circles in its belly, and are thus the most incentivized to believe in its Rightness and Goodness and the least able to critically assess it.  Intoxicated with supreme loyalty to the organs of political power and societal institutions which support it, they become its most ardent, faithful evangelizers.  The more they gather together in their insular royal court realm, the more they reinforce each other's trite convictions.

These pseudo-sophisticated, pseudo-intellectual nationalists may "know that this or that item of war news is untruthful" or may even know that the entire "war is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones."  But no matter: they are Washington's most loyal denizens and thus "never waver for an instant in their mystical belief that the war is real" or in the propaganda that sustains it.  At the heart of this propaganda -- and of their worldview -- is the unquestioning conviction about the unmitigated evil of the State's designated Enemies, and of their own Good.  Observe how WikiLekas is now discussed, and especially observe the waves of self-praising moralizing over this next several days, to see this dynamic in all its glory.

Public opinion surprises

The most common claim to justify endless civil liberties erosions in the name of security -- and to defend politicians who endorse those erosions -- is that Americans don't care about those rights and are happy to sacrifice them.  The principal problem with this claim is that it is false, as a new Pew Research poll demonstrates:

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It was only in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that a majority of Americans was prepared to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of Terrorism.  But this game-playing with public opinion -- falsely claiming that the public is indifferent to civil liberties in order to justify assaults on them -- is common.  To this day, if you criticize President Obama for shielding Bush officials from investigations, you'll be met with the claim that doing so was politically necessary, even though poll after poll found in the wake of Obama's inauguration that large majorities wanted those inquiries.  Similarly, when The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration was illegally spying on the communications of Americans without the warrants required by law, Beltway pundits such as Joe Klein in unison "warned" Democrats that Americans were in favor of such measures and it would be politically suicidal to object, even though polls repeatedly showed the opposite.  The same happened when Beltway pundits repeatedly insisted that Americans opposed Congressional investigations into the U.S. Attorneys scandal even when polls showed huge majorities wanting them.

What's striking about this latest Pew finding is that mainstream political discourse barely includes anyone making a pro-civil-liberties case.  The GOP never pretended to care, while Democrats under Obama no longer do.  Still, so engrained are these political values in Americans that a clear majority believes it is unnecessary to sacrifice them in the name of Terrorism.  That's contrary to what one typically hears both from opponents and supporters of civil liberties alike, who often assume that Americans beileve in the need to relinquish them.

Far more surprising is this finding from Pew:

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I confess to being amazed that 43% of Americans -- close to a plurality -- believe that "U.S. wrongdoing might have motivated attacks" by Terrorists.  I'm not amazed because it's untrue -- it plainly is true -- but because that is a view almost never heard in establishment media discourse.  To the contrary, the notion that American "wrongdoing" is a cause of anti-U.S. Terrorism is one of the most rigidly enforced taboos.  Nothing provokes allegations of "unpatrotism" or "anti-Americanism" -- or intellectually dishonest claims that one is "justifying" Terrorism  -- more than pointing out this obvious causation.  Despite that, and despite the natural jingoistic bias of believing that one's own country does not engage in truly bad acts (certainly not sufficiently bad to provoke Terrorism), a very sizable portion of the citizenry has come to that conclusion on its own.  That's a very encouraging finding.

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A few related points:

(1) The NPR segment I did yesterday with Dana Priest on Top Secret America and civil liberties can be heard here.

(2) James Bamford, the nation's leading expert on the National Security Agency, has a must-read article on the Bush/Obama legacy of the Surveillance State.

(3) Kevin Drum has interesting observations about how those who came of age in the post-9/11 era likely believe that all sorts of radical, extreme societal attributes -- including "Fortress America" -- are actually normal.

Cheering for state-imposed death

(updated below)

At last night's GOP debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was asked by Brian Williams about the 234 executions of death row inmates over which Perry has presided -- "more than any Governor in modern times"-- and the mere mention by Williams of this morose record triggered an outburst of cheering and applause from the audience:

This episode is creepy and disgusting, though as both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Dahlia Lithwick point out, it's hardly surprising for a country which long considered public hangings a form of entertainment and in which support for the death penalty is mandated orthodoxy for national politicians in both parties.  Still, even for those who believe in the death penalty, it should be a very somber and sober affair for the state, with regimented premeditation, to end the life of a human being no matter the crimes committed.  Wildly cheering the execution of human beings as though one's favorite football team just scored a touchdown is primitive, twisted and base.   

All of that would be true even if the death penalty were perfectly applied and only clearly guilty people were killed.  But in the U.S., the exact opposite is true; see here to read about (and act to stop) a horrific though typical example of a very likely innocent person about to be executed by the State of Georgia.  That Perry in particular likely enabled the execution of an innocent man -- as well as numerous other highly disturbing killings, of the young and mentally infirm -- makes the cheering all the more repellent.  That the death penalty in America has long been plagued by a serious racial bias makes it worse still.  That this death-cheering comes from a party that relentlessly touts itself as "pro-life" and derides It was bloodlust, pure and simple, and it was repulsive."  That's because "the cheering of executions is the hallmark of a sick society -- one that's incapable of tackling its real demons and looking for vengeance on whomever happens to be available."

I agree with all of that, and that's why this morning's orgy of progressive condemnation made me think of very similar death-celebrations that erupted at the news that the U.S. military had pumped bullets into Osama bin Laden's skull and then dumped his corpse into the ocean.  Those of us back then who expressed serious reservations about the boisterous public chanting and celebratory cheering of executions were accused by Good Democrats of all manner of deficiencies.

Yes, the 9/11 attack was an atrocious act of slaughter; so were many of the violent, horrendous crimes which executed convicts unquestionably (sometimes by their own confession) committed.  In all cases, performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.

Now that this issue has been vested with a partisan angle, and many Good Progressives are marching forward to condemn the act of ecstatically cheering for executions, perhaps the reservations many of us had over the joyous, chest-beating street celebrations over bin Laden's corpse can be better understood.  Like drenching a citizenry with fear and keeping them in a state of Endless War for more than a decade, training them to publicly rejoice when the Government puts bullets into people's heads or injects poison into their veins -- even if that act is justifiable -- inevitably degrades the citizenry and the character of their nation.

 

UPDATE: Does anyone doubt that many of the same Democrats expressing disgust this morning at the Republican cheerleading for Rick Perry's executions (of people convicted of crimes after at least a pretense of due process) will be the first in line raucously celebrating the Democratic President when he finally succeeds in assassinating U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with no due process at all?

The ACLU on Obama and core liberties

(updated below - Update II)

The ACLU decided to use the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack to comprehensively survey the severe erosion of civil liberties justified in the name of that event, an erosion that -- as it documents -- continues unabated, indeed often in accelerated form, under the Obama administration.  The group today is issuing a report entitled A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11; that title is intended to underscore the irony that political leaders who prance around as courageous warriors against Terrorism in fact rely on one primary weapon -- fear-mongering: the absence of courage -- to vest the government with ever-more power and the citizenry with ever-fewer rights.  Domestically, the "War on Terror" has been, and continues to be, a war on basic political liberties more than it is anything else.  The particulars identified in this new ACLU report will not be even remotely new to any readers here, but given the organization's status among progressives as the preeminent rights-defending group in the country, and given the bird's-eye-view the report takes of these issues, it is well worth highlighting some of its key findings.

Let's begin with the ACLU's summary assessment of what President Obama has done with regard to these matters:

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Last week, the top lawyer and 34-year-veteran of the CIA, John Rizzo, explained to PBS' Frontline that Obama has "changed virtually nothing" from Bush policies in these areas, and this week, the ACLU explains that "most [Bush] policies remain core elements of our national security strategy today."  At some point very soon, this basic truth will be impossible to deny with a straight face even for the most hardened loyalists of both parties, each of whom have been eager, for their own reasons, to deny it (and even the two differences cited there, though positive, are wildly exaggerated by Obama defenders: the torture techniques authorized by Bush were no longer in use and the CIA black sites were empty by the time Obama was inaugurated; by contrast, there is ample evidence that the Obama administration continues to use torture by proxy and rendition/CIA-black-sites by proxy as well).

The ACLU then highlights one of the most perverse though revealing ironies of Democratic Party opinion on civil liberties in the Obama age: the way in which Bush's attempt merely to imprison a U.S. citizen without due process (or merely to eavesdrop on citizens) prompted such outrage, while Obama's claimed right to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process provokes virtually no protest:

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Critically, the ACLU emphasizes that this Obama fixation -- wildly expanded programs of targeted killings even of U.S. citizens far from any battlefield -- is as threatening to the rule of law, and at least as dangerous, as any policy implemented by Bush/Cheney:

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For all the talk about how Bush and Cheney turned the U.S. into a rogue state, here is the escalating result of this Obama policy:

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The ACLU then devotes an entire chapter to the way in which immunity for America's torturers -- bestowed jointly by President Obama and a judicial branch meekly deferential to his and Bush's claims of state secrecy -- has contaminated and degraded the entire justice system and made the future reintroduction of torture a virtual inevitability:

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Then there's the ongoing targeting of American Muslims for some of the most invasive and unconstitutional rights-abridging actions in decades.  Explains the ACLU: "No area of American Muslim civil society was left untouched by discriminatory and illegitimate government action during the Bush years . . . In short, the Bush administration used religious, racial, and national-origin profiling as one of this nation's primary domestic counter-terrorism tools."  And now?

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A separate chapter is devoted to what the ACLU calls "A Massive and Unchecked Surveillance Society."  It explains: "Using Patriot Act  authority, the Bush Administration started -- and the Obama Administration has continued -- to conduct wholesale 'preventive' surveillance of innocent Americans without judicial review."  And "the result is a national surveillance society in which Americans' right to privacy is under unprecedented siege."  But little is known about exactly what is being done by this purely unaccountable hidden government -- what The Washington Post calls "Top Secret America" -- because of this:

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This Surveillance State, like most other Bush/Obama Terrorism policies, is justified by a never-ending orgy of fear-mongering.  But other than the enrichment of the private Security State industry (see here and here), its real purpose -- as I documented last week -- is this:

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But the primary cause of this Bush-Obama continuity is the vigorous embrace by both Presidents of the same theory of war and Terrorism -- the unlimited global battlefield and the President's resulting unconstrained power to act anywhere in the world without limits -- which was once so controversial during the Bush presidency but has now become mainstream, bipartisan consensus: 

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Pointing to that core theory of both presidencies, the ACLU dispatches one of the most misleading claims of Obama defenders: that the President's failure to close Guantanamo is due exclusively to Congressional obstructionism; in fact, long before Congress acted at all with regard to that camp, the President announced his intention to continue its core injustice -- indefinite detention -- albeit in a different locale:

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During the Bush era, the actions and condemnations of the ACLU received ample positive attention from progressives. That, of course, is no longer true, and this damning report will likely be ignored in most of those circles, just as this truly remarkable comment from the ACLU's Executive Director has been.  And, as usual, anyone urging that attention be paid to these facts will be met with demands that eyes be diverted instead to how scary Sarah Palin Christine O'Donnell Michele Bachmann Rick Perry is, and then this will all blissfully fade away in a cloud of partisan electioneering even with the election more than a year away.

Either way, this creeping unchecked authoritarianism marches forward unabated, and is now -- rather than the province of the right-wing GOP -- fully bipartisan consensus.  I really don't understand how progressives think they'll be taken seriously the next time there is a GOP President and they try to resurrect their feigned concern for these matters; they'll be every bit as credible as conservatives who pretend to be deficit-warriors and defenders of restrained government only when the other party is in power.  

But even that ultimately matters little: so entrenched is this institutional militarism, secrecy, surveillance and authoritarianism that even if there were greater public debate over it like there was during the Bush presidency, this system would hardly be affected, let alone threatened.  Governments and other power factions -- especially ones threatened by the prospect of social unrest and upheaval -- do not relinquish this sort of authority unless compelled to do so. 

 

UPDATE:  Tomorrow morning beginning at roughly 11:20 am EST, I'll be on NPR's On Point, discussing 9/11 and civil liberties, along with The Washington Post's Dana Priest, who will be on from the start of the show at 11:00 am discussing Top Secret America.

 

UPDATE II: Donald Rumsfeld becomes the latest right-wing figure -- of many -- to heap praise on President Obama's Terrorism and civil liberties policies (h/t flellis):

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says President Barack Obama has come to accept much of the Bush Doctrine out of necessity, despite what he campaigned on in 2008. . . .

"They ended up keeping Guantanamo open not because they like it — we didn't like it either — but they couldn't think of a better solution," Rumsfeld told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday. . . .

"The same is true with the Patriot Act, and military commissions, and indefinite detention. All of those things were criticized but today are still in place two-and-a-half years later because they are the best alternative to the other choices -- and they are in fact successful in keeping America safer," he says.

Just as nobody could have strengthened the Bush/Cheney Terrorism template the way Obama has, so, too could nobody have provided vindication for those policies the way he has.

Endless War and the culture of unrestrained power

The Washington Post woke up a few days ago and realized that despite everything that has happened since 9/11 -- no successful Terrorist attacks on the Homeland in 10 years, a country mired in debt and imposing "austerity" on ordinary Americans, and the election of a wonderfully sophisticated, urbane, progressive multinationalist from the storied anti-war Democratic Party -- we are still smack in the middle of "the American era of endless war" with no end in sight.  Citing the Pentagon's most recent assessment of global threats, the Post notes that in contrast to prior decades -- when "the military and the American public viewed war as an aberration and peace as the norm" (a dubious perception) -- it is now clear, pursuant to official doctrine, that "America's wars are unending and any talk of peace is quixotic or naive," all as part of "America's embrace of endless war in the 10 years since Sept. 11, 2001." 

We are now enduring a parade of wistful, contemplative, self-regarding pundit-meditations on The Meaning of 9/11 Ten Years Later or, far worse, self-righteous moralizing screeds about the nature of "evil" from war zealots with oceans of blood on their unrepentant hands (if I could impose one media rule, it would be that following every column or TV segment featuring American political commentators dramatically unloading their Where-I-Was-on-9/11-and-how-I-felt tales, there would be similar recollections offered from parents in the Muslim world talking about how their children died from the pre-9/11 acts of the U.S. and its client states or from post-9/11 American bombs, drones, checkpoint shootings and night raids:  just for the sake of "balance," which media outlets claim to crave).  Notwithstanding this somber, collective 9/11 anniversary ritual descending upon us, the reality is that the nation's political and media elite learned no lessons from that attack. 

The mere utterance of the word Terrorism (which now means little more than: violence or extremism by Muslims in opposition to American or Israeli actions and interests) is -- at least for America's political and media class -- as potent in justifying wars, civil liberties assaults, and massive military spending as it was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  And worship of the American military and all that it does -- and a corresponding taboo on speaking ill of it except for tactical critiques (it would be better if they purchased this other weapon system or fought this war a bit differently) -- is the closest thing America has to a national religion.

But it's not merely the existence of ongoing Endless War that is so destructive -- both to the nation perpetrating it on the world and to its victims.  Far worse is what is being done to prosecute that war, the transformation of government institutions and their relationship to the citizenry to sustain it, and, most enduringly of all, the mentality that it has spawned and entrenched.  Yesterday, The New Yorker's Amy Davidson examined recently emerged evidence that the U.S. and Britain purposely sent detainees to be tortured by their good friend (now known as The New Hitler) Moammar Gadaffi, but it is her last paragraph that really captures the true State of Things -- now more than ever -- in post-9/11 America:

Its dealings in Libya are not the C.I.A.'s only problem; nor is the C.I.A. the only problem. The Washington Post has two new pieces in its "Top Secret America" series that one should read. The first, by Julie Tate and Greg Miller, is on the C.I.A.'s shift away from learning things and toward killing people considered dangerous (and who makes that call?), with analysts becoming "targeters." The other, by Dana Priest and William Arkin, is about the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, which has held some thousand prisoners "in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan." ("We're the dark matter. We're the force that orders the universe but can't be seen," a SEAL told the Post.) The "C.I.A." binder in Tripoli included "a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect," the Times said. We should have at least that many -- many more -- for our own government.

That bolded quote from the Navy SEAL (a member of the most sacred and revered religious order) is quite redolent of this infamous Bush-era proclamation, conveyed by Ron Suskind, that became the symbol of the warped neoconservative mind:

The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Those who wield true political authority as part of an empire are vested with immense power over other people, but those who exercise that authority as part of wars are more powerful still.  That kind of power not only attracts warped authoritarians and sociopaths like moths to light, but it also converts -- degrades -- otherwise normal people who come to possess it.  That's not a new development, but rather as old as political power itself.  Those bolded quotes are a pure expression of a demented, amoral God complex.  That's the mentality that produces Endless War, and Endless War, in turn, breeds that mentality. 

This is why there is nothing more dangerous -- nothing -- than allowing this type of power to be exercised without accountability: no oversight, no transparency, no consequences for serious wrongdoing: exactly the state of affairs that prevails in the United States.  It's also why there are few things more deeply irresponsible, vapid and destructive than demanding that citizens, activists, and journalists retreat into Permanent Election Mode: transform themselves into partisan cheerleaders who refrain from aggressively criticizing the party that is slightly less awful out of fear that the other party might win an election 14 months away, even when their own party is the one in power.  Renouncing the duty of holding accountable political leaders who exercise vast power makes one directly responsible for the abuses they commit.  To see the results of that mindset, re-read that paragraph from Davidson about what the U.S. is doing not in 2004, but now more than ever, in the name of Endless War.

* * * * *

In May, I gave a speech to the annual Bill of Rights dinner of the ACLU in Massachusetts about many of these matters; for those interested, the audio as well as a (very imperfect) transcript of that speech is online here.

The DOJ's escalating criminalization of speech

Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening.  The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with "providing material support" to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).

What is the "material support" he allegedly gave?  He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about "jihad" from LeT's leader, and -- according to the FBI's Affidavit -- "a number of terrorist logos."  That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that "based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video . . . is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT."  The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan.  For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.

Let's be very clear about the key point: the Constitution -- specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment -- prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders.  One can dislike this legal fact.  One can wish it were different.  But it is the clear and unambiguous law, and has been since the Supreme Court's unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had publicly threatened violence against political officials in a speech.

In doing so, the Brandenberg Court struck down as unconstitutional an Ohio statute (under which the KKK leader was prosecuted) that made it a crime to "advocate . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform."  Such advocacy -- please read the part in bold -- cannot be a crime because it is protected by the First Amendment.  The crux of the Court's holding: "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force" (emphasis added; for more on the First Amendment law protecting this right to advocate violence, see my discussion here).

To put this less abstractly, and as I've noted before, a person has -- and should and must have -- the absolute free speech right to advocate ideas such as this:

For decades, the U.S. Government has been engaging in violence and otherwise interfering in the Muslim world. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim men, women and children have died as a result. There is no end in sight to this American assault on the Muslim world and those of its client states. Therefore, it is not only the right, but the duty, of Muslims to engage in violence against Americans as a means of self-defense and to deter further violence against Muslims. That is the only available means for fighting back against the world's greatest military superpower. The only alternative is continuing passive submission to this onslaught of violence aimed at Muslims. 

One may find that idea objectionable or even repellent, but does anyone believe that someone should be prosecuted for writing that paragraph?  Anyone who would favor prosecution for that doesn't understand or believe in the Constitution, as those ideas are pure political speech protected by the First Amendment, every bit as much as: the climate crisis now justifies violent attacks on polluting corporations; or capitalism is so destructive that the use of force in service of a Communist Revolution is compelled; or "if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken" (Brandenberg); or such is the tyranny of the Crown that taking up arms against it is not merely a right but the duty of all American patriots (The American Revolution).  The Jerusalem Post just fired one of its columnists, a Jewish leftist who wrote that Palestinian violence against Israel is "justified" because they have the "right to resist" the occupation; is he guilty of a crime of materially supporting Terrorism?  Should Ward Churchill, widely accused of having justified the 9/11 attack (or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who did the same) have been indicted?

Judging from the description of Ahmad's video in the FBI Affidavit (Ahmad's YouTube account has been removed), the video in question does not go nearly as far as the clearly protected views referenced in the prior paragraph, as it does not explicitly advocate violence at all; indeed, it appears not to advocate that anyone do anything.  Rather, the FBI believes it is evocative of such advocacy ("designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT"), which makes this prosecution even more troubling.  Apparently, if you string together video and photographs (or words) in a certain way as to make the DOJ think that you're implicitly trying to "develop support" for a Terrorist group -- based on the political ideas you're expressing -- you risk decades of imprisonment.  Is it possible to render the ostensible right of "free speech" more illusory than this?

This case is not an aberration; as indicated, prosecuting Muslims for pure political speech is an increasing weapon of the DOJ.  In July, former Obama OLC official Marty Lederman analyzed the indictment of a 22-year-old former Penn State student for -- in the FBI's words -- "repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans" by posting comments on a "jihadist" Internet forum including "a comment online that praised the [October, 2010] shootings" at the Pentagon and Marine Corps Museum and "a number of postings encouraging attacks within the United States."  He also posted links to a bomb-making manual. 

Regarding the part of the indictment based on "encouraging violent attacks," Lederman -- who, remember, was an Obama DOJ lawyer until very recently -- wrote: it "does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial First Amendment protection under the Brandenburg line of cases."  As for linking to bomb-making materials, Lederman wrote: "the First Amendment generally protects the publication of publicly available information, even where there is a chance or a likelihood that one or more readers may put such information to dangerous, unlawful use."  Lederman's discussion of the law and its applicability to that prosecution contains some caveats (and also raises some other barriers to these kinds of prosecutions), but he is clear that the aspect of the indictment based on the alleged advocacy and encouragement of violence in the name of jihad "would appear to be very vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge."  That's government-lawyer-ese for: this prosecution is attempting to criminalize free political speech.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this trend is the fact that a Pakistani man in New York was prosecuted and then sentenced to almost six years in prison for doing nothing more than including a Hezbollah news channel in the package of cable channels he offered for sale to consumers in Brooklyn.  On some perverse level, though, all of these individuals are lucky that they are being merely prosecuted rather than targeted with due-process-free assassination.  As I documented last month, that is what is being done to U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki due -- overwhelmingly if not exclusively -- to the U.S. Government's fear of his purely political views. 

If the First Amendment was designed to do anything, it was designed to prevent the government from imprisoning people -- or killing them -- because of the political ideas they promote.  Yet that is clearly what the Obama administration is doing with increasing frequency and aggression.

There is one last point that bears emphasis here.  Numerous prominent politicians from both political parties -- Michael Mukasey, Howard Dean, Wes Clark, Tom Ridge, Ed Rendell, Fran Townsend, Rudy Giuliani, and many others -- have not only been enthusiasticaly promoting and advocating on behalf of a designated terrorist organization (MEK of Iran), but they have been receiving substantial amounts of cash from that Terrorist group as they do so.  There is only one list of "designated Terrorist organizations" under the law, and MEK is every bit as much on that list as LeT or Al Qaeda are.  Yet you will never, ever see those individuals being indicted by the Obama DOJ for their far more extensive -- and paid -- involvement with MEK than, for instance, Ahmad has with LeT.  That's because: (1) the criminal law does not apply to politically powerful elites, only to ordinary citizens and residents (indeed, many of those MEK-shilling politicians cheer on broad and harsh application of the "material support" statute when applied to others), and (2) MEK is now devoted to fighting against a government disliked by the U.S. (Iran), so they've become (like Saddam Hussein when fighting Iran and bin Laden when fighting the Soviet Union) the Good Terrorists whom the U.S. likes and supports.

Nonetheless, MEK remains on the list of the designated Terrorist groups, and lending them material support -- which certainly includes paid shilling for them -- is every bit as criminal (at least) as the behavior in the above-discussed indictments.  As usual, though, "Terrorism" means nothing other than what the U.S. Government wants it to mean at any given moment.  The evisceration of the rule of law evidenced by this disparate treatment is as odious as the First Amendment assault itself.

Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga

A series of unintentional though negligent acts by multiple parties -- WikiLeaks, The Guardian's investigative reporter David Leigh, and Open Leaks' Daniel Domscheit-Berg -- has resulted in the publication of all 251,287 diplomatic cables, in unredacted form, leaked last year to WikiLeaks (allegedly by Bradley Manning).  Der Spiegel (in English) has the best and most comprehensive step-by-step account of how this occurred. 

This incident is unfortunate in the extreme for multiple reasons: it's possible that diplomatic sources identified in the cables (including whistleblowers and human rights activists) will be harmed; this will be used by enemies of transparency and WikiLeaks to disparage both and even fuel efforts to prosecute the group; it implicates a newspaper, The Guardian, that generally produces very good and responsible journalism; it likely increases political pressure to impose more severe punishment on Bradley Manning if he's found guilty of having leaked these cables; and it will completely obscure the already-ignored, important revelations of serious wrongdoing from these documents.  It's a disaster from every angle.  But as usual with any controversy involving WikiLeaks, there are numerous important points being willfully distorted that need clarification.

Let's begin with the revelations that are being ignored and obscured by this controversy.  Several days ago, WikiLeaks compiled a list of 30 significant revelations from the newly released cables, and that was when only a fraction of them had been published; there are surely many more now, including ones still undiscovered in the trove of documents (here's just one example).  The cable receiving the most attention thus far -- first reported by John Glaser of Antiwar.com -- details a "heinous war crime [by U.S forces] during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed" and their house thereafter blown up by a U.S. airstrike in order to destroy the evidence.  Back in 2006, the incident was discussed in American papers as a mere unproven "allegation" ("Regardless of which account is correct . . "), and the U.S. military (as usual) cleared itself of any and all wrongdoing.  But the cable contains evidence vesting the allegations of Iraqis with substantial credibility, and that, in turn, has now prompted this:

Iraqi government officials say they will investigate newly surfaced allegations that U.S. soldiers shot women and children, then tried to cover it up with an airstrike, during a 2006 hunt for insurgents.

An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ali Al-Moussawi, said Friday the government will revive its stalled probe now that new information about the March 15, 2006, raid has come to light.

As usual, many of those running around righteously condemning WikiLeaks for the potential, prospective, unintentional harm to innocents caused by this leak will have nothing to say about these actual, deliberate acts of wanton slaughter by the U.S.  The accidental release of these unredacted cables will receive far more attention and more outrage than the extreme, deliberate wrongdoing these cables expose.  That's because many of those condemning WikiLeaks care nothing about harm to civilians as long as it's done by the U.S. government and military; indeed, such acts are endemic to the American wars they routinely cheer on.  What they actually hate is transparency and exposure of wrongdoing by their government; "risk to civilians" is just the pretext for attacking those, such as WikiLeaks, who bring that about. 

That said, and as many well-intentioned transparency supporters correctly point out, WikiLeaks deserves some of the blame for what happened here; any group that devotes itself to enabling leaks has the responsibility to safeguard what it receives and to do everything possible to avoid harm to innocent people.  Regardless of who is at fault -- more on that in a minute -- WikiLeaks, due to insufficient security measures, failed to fulfill that duty here.  There's just no getting around that (although ultimate responsibility for safeguarding the identity of America's diplomatic sources rests with the U.S. Government, which is at least as guilty as WikiLeaks in failing to exerise due care to safeguard these cables; if this information is really so sensitive and one wants to blame someone for inadequate security measures, start with the U.S. Government, which gave full access to these documents to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, at least).

Despite the fault fairly assigned to WikiLeaks, one point should be absolutely clear: there was nothing intentional about WikiLeaks' publication of the cables in unredacted form.  They ultimately had no choice.  Ever since WikiLekas was widely criticized (including by me) for publishing Afghan War documents without redacting the names of some sources (though much blame also lay with the U.S. Government for rebuffing its request for redaction advice), the group has been meticulous about protecting the identity of innocents.  The New York Times' Scott Shane today describes "efforts by WikiLeaks and journalists to remove the names of vulnerable people in repressive countries" in subsequent releases; indeed, WikiLeaks "used software to remove proper names from Iraq war documents and worked with news organizations to redact the cables."  After that Afghan release, the group has demonstrated a serious, diligent commitment to avoiding pointless exposure of innocent people -- certainly far more care than the U.S. Government took in safeguarding these documents.

What happened here was that their hand was forced by the reckless acts of The Guardian's Leigh and Domscheit-Berg.  One key reason access to these unredacted cables was so widely distributed is that Leigh -- in his December, 2010, book about the work he did with WikiLeaks -- published the password to these files, which was given to him by Julian Assange to enable his reporting on the cables.  Leigh claims -- and there's no reason to doubt him -- that he believed the password was only valid for a few days and would have expired by the time his book was published. 

That belief turned out to be false because the files had been disseminated on the BitTorrent file sharing network, with that password embedded in them; Leigh's publication of the WikiLeaks password in his book thus enabled widespread access to the full set of cables.  But the key point is this: even if Leigh believed that that particular password would no longer be valid, what possible point is there in publishing to the world the specific password used by WikiLeaks or divulging the types of passwords it uses to safeguard its data?  It is reckless for an investigative reporter to gratuitously publish that type of information, and he absolutely deserves a large chunk of the blame for what happened here; read this superb analysis by Nigel Parry to see the full scope of Leigh's culpability.

Then there is Domscheit-Berg and "Open Leaks." Last year, Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks and started a new group to great media fanfare, even though his group has not produced a single disclosure.  Instead, he and his thus-far-inaccurately-named group seem devoted to only two goals: (1) cashing in on a vindictive, petty, personality-based vendetta against Assange and WikiLeaks; and (2) bolstering secrecy and destroying transparency, as Domscheit-Berg did when he permanently deleted thousands of files previously leaked to WikiLeaks, including documents relating to the Bank of America.  It was Domscheit-Berg who removed the files from the WikiLeaks server, including (apparently unbeknownst to him) the full set of diplomatic cables.

That act by Domscheit-Berg, combined with the publication of its password by Leigh and the dissemination of the files to "mirror sites" by well-intentioned WikiLeaks supporters after cyber-attacks on the group, all combined to enable widespread, unfettered access to these diplomatic cables.  Once WikiLeaks realized what had happened, they notified the State Department, but faced a quandary: virtually every government's intelligence agencies would have had access to these documents as a result of these events, but the rest of the world -- including journalists, whistleblowers and activists identified in the documents -- did not.  At that point, WikiLeaks decided -- quite reasonably -- that the best and safest course was to release all the cables in full, so that not only the world's intelligence agencies but everyone had them, so that steps could be taken to protect the sources and so that the information in them was equally available.

Serious caution is warranted in making claims about the damage caused by publication of these cables.  Recall that Adm. Michael Mullen and others accused WikiLeaks of having "blood on its hands" as a result of publication of the Afghan War documents, but that turned out to be totally false; as Shane noted today in the NYT: "no consequence more serious than dismissal from a job has been reported."  Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates mocked claims about the damage done by WikiLeaks as "significantly overwrought."

That said, there's little doubt that release of all these documents in unredacted form poses real risk to some of the individuals identified in them, and that is truly lamentable.  But it is just as true that WikiLeaks easily remains an important force for good.  The acts of deliberate evil committed by the world's most powerful factions which it has exposed vastly outweigh the mistakes which this still-young and pioneering organization has made.  And the harm caused by corrupt, excessive secrecy easily outweighs the harm caused by unauthorized, inadvisable leaks.

Top CIA official: Obama "changed virtually nothing"

PBS's Frontline is airing an examination of "Top Secret America" on September 6.  The show includes a rare and lengthy interview with 34-year-CIA-veteran John Rizzo, who is described as "the most influential lawyer in CIA history."  PBS is promoting that interview this way:

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Here is one quote they include from Rizzo:

With a notable exception of the enhanced interrogation program, the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations. Things continued. Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.

Frontline adds that while candidate Obama "promised a sweeping overhaul of the Bush administration's war on terror" and "a top to bottom review of the threats we face and our abilities to confront them," Rizzo explains that, in fact, Obama officials during the transition made clear to the CIA that they intended almost complete continuity.  And Rizzo was joined in this assessment today by Dick Cheney, who -- as recounted by his long-time faithful stenographer, Politico's Mike Allen -- cites this continuity to (once again) claim "vindication"; said the former Vice President, "[Obama] ultimately had to adopt many of the same policies that we had been pursuing because that was the most effective way to defend the nation."

Obviously -- other than the important added detail that this was all planned even before the inauguration -- none of this is new to anyone paying even minimal attention (see Update II).  Not only civil libertarians but even right-wing ideologues eager to depict Obama as "Soft on Terror" have been forced repeatedly to acknowledge this continuity and to praise Obama for it.  Indeed, Charlie Savage observed this trend in the very first month of the Obama presidency (in response to which I objected -- erroneously as it turns out -- that Savage's Bush/Obama comparisons were premature). Jack Goldsmith in The New Republic in May, 2009, made the insightful point that not only was Obama continuing these core Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, but was actually strengthening them by, among other things, converting them from right-wing dogma into bipartisan consensus.  So none of this is new, to put it mildly.  Still -- given how much Democrats once opportunistically pretended to find these policies so deeply offensive and intolerable -- the more this realization spreads, the better.  Rizzo's comments and Frontline's program ought to accomplish that.

Celebrating the fall of a dictator

(updated below - Update II)

Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times today:

CNN, April 9, 2003:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Revelers in Saddam City in eastern Baghdad took to the streets Wednesday -- just days ago under the grip of Saddam Hussein's regime -- looting government buildings and cheering American forces.

Video from the scene showed jubilant Iraqis chanting, "There is only one God, and the enemy of God is Saddam Hussein." . . . That's why they are on the streets, cheering his fall, cheering the fall of the ruling Baath Party, welcoming U.S. troops and saying "thank you" to President Bush.

CNN Newsnight with Aaron Brown, April 9, 2003 (via NEXIS):

NEIL CONNERY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: What's it like being in the middle of Baghdad?

UNIDENTIFIED [U.S. SOLDIER]: It's kind of crazy. Pretty good warm welcome from everybody kind of. . . .

CONNERY (voice-over): The welcome was definitely warm.

UNIDENTIFIED [IRAQI] MALE: Welcome to Baghdad. I say to the American people. And thank you for all things in Iraq.

UNIDENTIFIED [IRAQI] MALE: Thank you. Thank you. . . .

CONNERY: They are a people free at last to express what they really think. Saddam has gone. Neil Connery, Baghdad. . . .

JOHN KING, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Make no mistake about it. The president is quite pleased. But he's a bit concerned that those pictures might convince the American people mission accomplished. . . .

KING: Yet with the caution came a small dose of "we told you so."

CHENEY: In the early days of the war the plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios. But with every day and every advance by our coalition forces the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent. . . .

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN Correspondent (voice-over): It's hard not to love a winner, especially when the guy on your side looks like he's clobbering the neighborhood bully. It didn't take long for the news from Baghdad to reach the Kurdish stronghold of Erbil.

UNIDENTIFIED [IRAQI] MALE: USA! USA!

WEDEMAN: And send the people out here dancing in the streets.

UNIDENTIFIED [IRAQI] MALE: Down down Saddam! Yes yes America! Yes yes Bush! . . . .

WEDEMAN: A new face has joined Kurdistan's collection of old heroes.

UNIDENTIFIED [IRAQI} FEMALE: Mr. Bush, because the leader of the United States like freedom for Kurdish and anyone. . . .

JAMIE COLBY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, good to see you, too. That's where we are, in Dearborn. And like many of us, Iraqis living in the U.S. have been glued to their TVs since this war began, watching coverage and awaiting the news they say they got today: pictures that suggest the freedoms they've found in America will be restored in Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED [IRAQI] MALE [IN THE U.S.]: I want to thank again United States government for this helping, and also British soldiers, British government. I want to thanks them for this help. We are very happy.

COLBY: A procession to a rally of 2,000 Iraqis, as Dearborn thanks President Bush and coalition forces for a taste of freedom they've waited 35 years to savor. . . .

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SR. POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Photographers call this a money shot, a picture that captures a moment in time, a picture that makes you feel. And, at the Pentagon, it felt good.

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Certainly, anyone seeing the faces of the liberated Iraqis, the free Iraqis, has to say that this is a very good day.

CROWLEY: It is just what the Bush administration had hoped for: Saddam-hating, U.S.-loving, waving, very grateful Iraqis.

UNIDENTIFIED [IRAQI] MALE: Thank you, Mr. Bush. We very like Mr. Bush.

[after his giddy report, Colby -- in a sign of the times -- pointedly showed video of an Al Jazeera reporter being assaulted by the Iraqi crowd in Dearborn and announced: "there was a feeling among the Iraqis at the rally that Al-Jazeera has been unfair in its coverage of the war and a bit too pro-Saddam -- Aaron": none of them thought any such thing about CNN, and understandably so].

Leaving aside Kristof's use of the Tom-Friedmanesque method of going to a foriegn country, talking to your driver, and then passing off what he and a relatively small number of other individuals say as representative, I have no doubt that huge numbers of Libyans are ecstatic that Gadaffi is gone and have positive feelings toward the foreign powers who helped accomplish that -- just as huge numbers of Iraqis (notwithstanding the manfuctured statue-toppling scene) genuinely were ecstatic that Saddam was gone and had positive feelings toward the foreign powers who helped accomplish that (though, even in Kristof's telling, that is by no means unanimous: one wounded student "disputed that the intervention was primarily humanitarian: 'They didn't do it for us,' he said. 'They did it for oil'.").  Dictators spawn hatred among the people they oppress, and if a foreign nation wages a war to successfully remove them from power, many people in that country will be initially grateful.  That was true in Iraq and it is true in Libya.

There are, as I've said every time I've written about this topic, very significant differences between these two wars in terms of how they were marketed and prosecuted, as well as the fact that, as even those 2003 CNN reports made clear, there was looting and social disorder in Iraq on a level not currently seen in Libya.  But there are also some important similarities between the two, and lessons to learn from the invasion of Iraq, the last time the U.S. and various allies militarily removed a long-standing, formerly allied dictator from power in an oil-rich, predominantly Muslim fractured country (this is a concept many people seem to have difficulty accepting: one can compare various aspects of X and Y without positing that X = Y:  one can note, for instance, that strawberries and fire trucks are comparable in color while understanding that they are also different in important ways; the same is true when noting the similar aspects of these two wars).

One key applicable lesson from Iraq is that it's incredibly foolish and premature to declare victory upon the mere removal of the dictator; whether the war is a "victory" or was wisely fought depends upon the resolution of an array of unanswered questions, particularly what follows.  Indeed, disregarding this lesson due to the eagerness of war proponents to throw celebratory vindication parties for themselves is worse than foolish; it is downright destructive, as it causes the victory-drunk foreign power to think its job is done and thus ignore the vast destrution, chaos, serious uncertainties, ugliness and humanitarian suffering the war spawned, rapid resolution of which is necessary for the war to be something to celebrate. 

But the other lesson, one which Nick Kristof has apparently disregarded, is that the happiness that an oppressed people feel at the forced removal of their dictator with the help of foreign armies neither proves that the war was just nor that it was wise.  As I documented in the exchange I had with Jeffrey Goldberg when he used the same tactic to justify the attack on Iraq (go ask the Kurds if they're happy we removed Saddam!): every war that results in the removal of a regime produces citizens of that country who celebrate the result.  But seizing on those emotions to try to vindicate the pro-war argument and shame those who opposed it -- look at how happy and grateful they are that we did this; why would you want to deny them their Freedom and side with their dictator? -- is every bit as misguided and manipulative as it was when used in 2003.  There is a good chance that the war in Libya will result in a better outcome for Libyans and Americans than the Iraq war did for Iraqis and Americans; but we're far away from knowing if that is what will happen, and "arguments" of the type deployed today by Kristof do far more to distort and obscure the answers than illuminate them.

 

UPDATE: One point raised from the discussion in the comment section:  I'm not searching for ways each day to write about Libya, as I think the argments have been re-hashed and positions have ossified, but this ongoing war triumphalism from war proponents is increasing (as Kristof's column, and the one earlier this week by Roger Cohen, reflect), and it's not only misguided and premature, but also quite dangerous in terms of the war-spawning, war-glorifying mindset it creates, for the reasons SuperBowlXX aptly describes.  And, as David Mizner notes, these victory proclamations willfully obscure some very troubling developments in that country (see also here).  The search in some progressive circles for methods for fighting Good Wars is seemingly endless, and these ongoing celebrations ensure that many believe the template has been found, which in turn generates the desire to put it to use; as Madeleine Albright said to a war-skeptical Colin Powell in the 1990s: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

UPDATE II:  See also: The Onion on Libya.