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Countering Terrorism - How Not To Do It
June 19, 2007
MEMORANDUM
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Countering Terrorism - How Not To Do It On June 6, 2002, former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and how the FBI could do a better job detecting and disrupting terrorism. Time magazine had acquired (not from Rowley) a long letter she wrote to FBI Director Mueller listing a string of lapses in the month before 9/11 that helped account for the failure to prevent the attacks. As painful and embarrassing as it was after such tragedy to unravel the mistakes, Rowley insisted that the unraveling was necessary in order to address effectively the threat of further terrorist attacks. Her VIPS colleagues asked Rowley to review what has happened in the five years since her testimony, and we have contributed to this memorandum. In what follows, Rowley outlines how the primacy given to PR and other political factors has encumbered still further the FBI's ability to deal in reasonable and effective ways with the challenge of terrorism.
Given the effort that many of us have put into suggestions for reform, how satisfying it would be, were we able to report that appropriate correctives have been introduced to make us safer. But the bottom line is that the PR bromide to the effect that we are "safer" is incorrect. We are not safer. What follows will help explain why.
Wrong-headed actions and ideas had already taken root before that Senate hearing on June 6, 2002. Post 9/11 dragnet-detentions of innocents, official tolerance of torture (including abuse of U.S. citizens like John Walker Lindh), and panic-boosting color codes, had already been spawned from the mother of all slogans-"The Global War on Terror"-rhetorically useful, substantively inane. GWOT was about to spawn much worse.
Within a few hours of the Senate hearing five years ago, President George W. Bush reversed himself and made a surprise public announcement saying he would, after all, create a new Department of Homeland Security. The announcement seemed timed to relegate to the "in-other-news" category the disturbing things reported to the Senate earlier that day about the mistakes made during the weeks prior to 9/11. More important, the president's decision itself was one of the most egregious examples of the doing-something-for-the-sake-of-appearing-to-be-doing-something-against-terrorism syndrome.
As anyone who has worked in the federal bureaucracy could immediately recognize, the creation of DHS was clearly a gross misstep on a purely pragmatic level. It created chaos by throwing together 22 agencies with 180,000 workers-many of them in jobs vital to our nation's security, both at home and abroad. It also enabled functionaries like the two Michaels-Brown and Chertoff-to immobilize key agencies like the previously well-run Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), leading to its feckless response to Hurricane Katrina.
Radical, Reckless Departures From the Law
There were so many other missteps, so much playing fast and loose with the law, that it is hard to know where to begin in critiquing the results. One transcendent error was the eagerness of senior political appointees to exploit the "9/11-Changed-Everything" chestnut to prime people into believing that effective detection and disruption of terrorism required radical departures from rules governing our criminal justice and intelligence collection systems. Departures from established law and policies were introduced quickly. Many of the worst of these came to light only later-extraordinary rendition, "black-site" imprisonment, torture, and eavesdropping without a warrant. (We now know that senior Justice Department officials strongly objected to the eavesdropping program.)
The first protests came from those most concerned with human rights and constitutional law. But, by and large, the fear-laden populace "didn't get it." The prevailing attitude seemed to be, "Who cares? I want to be safe." Everyone wants security. But all too few recognize that security and liberty are basically flip sides of the same coin. Just as there can be no meaningful liberty in a situation devoid of security, there can be no real security in a situation devoid of liberty. It took a bit longer for pragmatists to observe and explain how the draconian steps departing from established law and policy-not to mention the knee-jerk collection and storing of virtually all available information on everyone- are not, for the most part, helping to improve the country's security.
The parallel with the introduction of officially sanctioned torture is instructive. TV programs aside, many if not most Americans instinctively know there is something basically wrong with torture-that it is immoral as well as illegal and a violation of human rights. Pragmatists (experienced intelligence and law enforcement professionals, in particular) oppose torture because it does not work and often is counterproductive. Nevertheless, the president grabbed the headlines when he argued on Sept. 6, 2006 that "an alternative set of procedures" (already outlawed by the U.S. Army) for interrogation is required to extract information from terrorists. He then went on to intimidate a supine Congress into approving such procedures.
Virtually omitted from media coverage were the same-day remarks of the pragmatist chief of Army intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, who conceded past "transgressions and mistakes" and made the Army's view quite clear: "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that."
Who should enjoy more credibility in this area, Bush or Kimmons?
The War on [fill in the blank]
"War! Huh... What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" This 1969 song lyric turns out to be even more applicable to Bush's "global war on terror" than to the Vietnam War. As for "The War on Drugs," that one was readily recognized as little more than a catchy metaphor helpful in arguing for budget increases. But the use of our armed forces for war in Iraq was guaranteed to be self-defeating and to increase the terrorist threat.
-- Military weapons are inherently rough, crude tools. Our rhetoric makes bombs and missiles out to be capable of "surgical strikes," but such weapons also injure and kill innocent men, women, and children, taking us down to the same low level inhabited by terrorists who rationalize the killing or injuring of civilians for their cause. Civilian casualties also serve to radicalize people and swell the terrorist ranks to the point where it becomes impossible for us to kill more terrorists than U.S. policy and actions create. (In one of his leaked memos, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked about that; he should have paused long enough to listen to the answer.) This inherent "squaring of the error" problem in applying military force in this context has been a boon to terrorist recruitment, and has spurred activity to the point of having actually quadrupled significant terrorist incidents worldwide.
-- Declaring "war" on the tactic of terrorism elevates to statehood what actually may be scattered, disorganized individuals, sympathizers, and small groups. It empowers the terrorists as they add to their numbers and provides the status of statehood to what often should be regarded and treated as a rag-tag group of criminals.
-- There is, of course, political advantage for a "war president" to rally Americans around the flag, but the negatives of the axioms "truth is the first casualty of war" and "all's fair in love and war" far outweigh any positives. Ultimately, the recklessness and cover-up mid-wived by the "fog of war" (everything from the friendly fire that killed Pat Tillman to the torture at Abu Ghraib and other atrocities) just magnify the "squaring the error" effect. Judiciousness-and just plain smarts-tend to be sacrificed for quick action.
-- Perhaps the most insidious blowback from war is that it weakens freedom and the rule of law inside the country waging it. James Madison was typically prescient in warning of this: "No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare;" and "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
From Fire Hose to Niagara to Tsunami
Administration pressure on intelligence collection agencies, together with an extraordinary lack of professionalism and courage in the senior ranks of such agencies, have resulted in not only over-reaching the law, but over-collecting information. Those on the front lines striving to prevent future attacks face the kind of pressure a soccer goalie would feel trying to keep the other team from scoring when his own team's offense is off playing in an adjacent field-as when President George W. Bush sent our offense to invade Iraq, the wrong country with negligible ties to terrorism. Facing that kind of pressure, and lacking strong professional coaching, the defense can feel hopelessly outmatched, leading to still further mishap.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the difficulty of getting a sip from the fire hose of intelligence being collected and flowing through the system. The stream of intelligence before 9/11 was also described by others as gushing from a fire hose, rendering it hard to find the dots, much less connect them-making it impossible, for example, to find, translate, and disseminate until 9/12 a key 9/11-related intercept acquired shortly before the attacks. Compounding the problem is the FBI's unenviable record in acquiring computer technology to facilitate its work-witness the junking of a computerized records system two years ago after wasting $170 million on defense contractors hired to create the system.
But the fire hose soon became Niagara Falls. FBI Director Robert Mueller set the tone early on as he kept telling Congress, "The greatest threat is from al-Qaeda cells in the US that we have not yet identified." (sic) Blindly following Mueller's White House-induced fixation with the "greatest" (though not yet "identified") threat, the FBI diverted about half its agents and other resources from areas like violent crime to work on terrorism.
Small wonder, then, that tons of additional data have been collected as a result, for example, of the "No-Tip-Will-Go-Uncovered" policy and the hundreds of thousands of National Security Letter requests. And who is surprised that most of that tonnage will never be evaluated? There is no denying that the threat from Al Qaeda has grown over the past five years, and today probably better fits the earlier inflated warnings of multiple terrorist cells already in place in the U.S. Hard questions must be asked, however, when it appears as though collectors are being paid by the ream, while the drowning analysts go down for the third time.
Extraneous, irrelevant data clutter the system, making it even harder for analysts to make meaningful future connections. A needle is hard enough to find in the proverbial haystack, without adding still more hay. And once the extra hay is piled onto the stack-by adding still more names to the 40,000-plus already on the "no-fly list," for example-there doesn't seem to be any way of reducing it. Ask Northfield (Minnesota) Police Chief Gary Smith and other law enforcement officers whose very common names have gotten onto this seemingly indelible list and who get stopped every time they try to fly.
The Ghost of Poindexter: "Total Information Awareness" Revisited
Just when it appears this insanity cannot get any worse, here come still more dots. Recent news reports indicate that the FBI-presumably having hired different contractors this time around-is compiling a massive computer database that will hold 6 billion records by 2012. This equals 20 separate "records" for each man, woman and child in the United States. "The universe of subjects will expand exponentially" is the proud spin being put on this recycled version of the Pentagon's discredited "Total Information Awareness" program.
Data-mining experts are not convinced this program is worth the effort. Since there are so few known terrorist patterns of behavior, one specialist has written that this kind of search would not only needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, but also waste taxpayer dollars and misdirect still more time and energy by "flood[ing] the national security system with false positives-suspects who are truly innocent." If this were not enough, we learn that the terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center is out of control, having apparently swelled to include more than half a million names. So instead of trying to get a sip from a fire hose, or from Niagara Falls, the data-mining challenge is going to be more like sipping from a tsunami.
The good news is that this predicament is creating unusual consensus among people concerned with human rights and those dealing with pragmatic law enforcement. As one specialist on civil liberties observed recently, "There's a reason the FBI has a 'Ten Most Wanted' list, right? We need to focus the government's efforts on the greatest threats. When the watch list grows to this level, it's useless as an anti-terror tool."
Quantity cannot substitute for quality. Higher quality data collection depends not only on better guidance with respect to relevance, but also on judiciousness applied from the beginning and throughout the collection process. Unfortunately, case and statutory law has come to be regarded as some kind of nicety-or a barrier that needs to be overcome. Not so. That law sets standards of relevancy for collection that used to hold down data clutter. One might view the process of investigation, intelligence collection, increased intrusiveness, and erosion of liberties as a pyramid with the least intrusive actions and methods on the bottom of the pyramid entailing little or no interference with one's civil liberties. As a suspect proceeds up the pyramid from being the target of an investigation, to temporary detention, interview, search, arrest, and finally subject to criminal charges and long-term incarceration, each higher level of intrusiveness should correspond to a greater amount of evidence. What the "war on terrorism" has done, however, to a large extent, is simply invert this pyramid on its head, allowing long-term incarceration with little or no corresponding evidence.
In the past, general awareness that collected data could either become publicly known through criminal processes (criminal discovery), or through a plain Freedom of Information/Privacy Act request, built an extra degree of judiciousness into data collection. Classifying all information about international terrorism secret, perpetually secret, which is the current practice, removes this natural safeguard.
Former FBI agent Mike German, whose life depended on government secrecy when he was working under cover in domestic terrorism investigations, has an acute understanding of the need for operational secrecy in undercover work. At the same time, German has pointed to the pitfalls of secrecy where it is not essential, and has emphasized the importance of transparency within the government, even when conducting sensitive operations:
"While my activities were covert during the operational phase of my undercover work, I knew from day one that I would have to be able to defend in court my actions. This gave me extra incentive to do everything by the book, so as to avoid the kind of mistakes or over-reaching that could prejudice efforts to bring domestic terrorists to justice. Operations designed with the understanding that they can remain forever secret do not require this kind of diligence and this can easily lead to abuse."
But What About Emergencies?
J. Edgar Hoover's vision during the early part of his 48-year control of the FBI not only led to creating the fingerprint identification system, but also brought in highly professional agents who could then be trained and trusted to conduct their own investigations and law enforcement actions without unnecessary interference from superiors. The FBI became the role model for law enforcement due to its insistence on high educational standards and continuing legal and professional training. Thus, before the "Miranda Rule" became law as the protocol for conducting interrogations, the FBI had already voluntarily adopted and implemented such a procedure as part of its professional approach to interrogation.
At the same time, the law of criminal procedure, including search and seizure, interrogation, and the right to an attorney need not be a barrier to effective investigation (or to the prevention of crime or terrorist acts), because "emergency exceptions" have already been carved into that law. So, for example, if an FBI agent finds him/herself outside a home with probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime exists inside and is being destroyed, that agent can legally conduct a search pursuant to the "exigent circumstances" exception in the law, without having to wait for a court warrant. Similar emergency exceptions exist under the statutes for monitoring of wire and/or electronic communications. This is one reason why it was difficult for us to understand why President Bush decided simply to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in ordering warrantless surveillance that included U.S. citizens. There is in that law an explicit exception allowing emergency monitoring up to 72 hours if, for example, a cell phone of an al-Qaeda operative were suddenly discovered.
For some reason the media have not done a good job of informing the American people about this exception. Those of us who are aware of it have difficulty avoiding the conclusion that the president's decision to violate FISA means the surveillance program is so intrusive and all-encompassing that it could not bear scrutiny. The program has already been ruled both unconstitutional and illegal by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor but, despite that, continues in operation.
The FISA emergency exception is not hard to obtain; it simply requires that the Attorney General approve. That approval is what my colleagues in the Minneapolis field office desperately sought in mid-August 2001 so that they could search the personal effects and computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was already in the custody of our immigration service. The approval was denied for reasons that make little sense. Suffice it to point out a supreme irony here: because FBI headquarters personnel were reluctant, for whatever reason, to seek this emergency case-specific authority from the Attorney General and because the attacks of 9/11 were not thwarted, the net result was a presidential decision to ignore FISA altogether and institute a surveillance program in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment as well as FISA, as Judge Taylor has ruled.
A similar exception covering life-and-death situations allows law enforcement officers to dispense with the protection ordinarily afforded by Miranda warnings. The way the so-called "ticking-bomb scenario" has been disingenuously used to justify torture makes one reluctant to mention a scenario in which something like it might apply. However, unlike TV-glorified "ticking-bomb torture," there have in fact been cases in which a kidnap victim's life was in serious, time-sensitive jeopardy. One such kidnap victim was buried alive with limited oxygen supply.
In such cases, the normally required Miranda warning-protection can legally give way to the need to protect the life or lives hanging in the balance. What often gets blurred here, sometimes deliberately by advocates of torture, is the significant difference between the issue of truly involuntary confession-one produced by torture, for example, and thus with no guarantee of reliability-and the much larger area that is protected by the prophylactic Miranda Rule.
Delegate Down
Judicious application of any emergency exception, of course, must obtain in order to prevent such exceptions from swallowing the rule. In the past, individual law enforcement officers have been trained and trusted to behave in such a way as to prevent that. Some of us VIPS were trained to use deadly force under narrow "emergency" circumstances when an imminent threat existed to our lives or to other innocent victims and there was no reasonable alternative to stopping the imminent threat. This delegation-down, this investing of trust in junior officers to exercise the enormous power of using lethal force under limited circumstances and after sufficient training, is necessary in order to protect their own and others' lives. So, too, it can be argued that investigators and intelligence gatherers should be trained to spot the type of life-and-death circumstances that might allow them to conduct an emergency search without a warrant or to dispense with Miranda protections.
Pendulum Swing
The existence under current law of these "emergency exceptions" means there is no need to paint over civil liberties with a broad brush from on high, in order to effectively detect and disrupt terrorism. Despite the intense political and PR pressures, it is extremely unwise to allow the pendulum to swing in the reckless way it did post 9/11:
-- From ranking terrorism as the Justice Department's lowest priority in August 2001 to establishing it as the FBI's only real priority now. (Despite the word games, anything that consumes half of the FBI's resources is its only real priority).
-- From ignoring specific instances where emergency action under the law (FISA, for example) was warranted to now simply ignoring long-standing law.
-- From the failure to follow up promptly on specific, well predicated tips pre-9/11 to the "No-Tip-Will-Go-Uncovered" tsunami post 9/11.
-- From training interrogators on the finer points of the Miranda Rule to training on torture techniques.
The bottom-line result of this pronounced pendulum swing is not only that our own constitutional and legal protections are jeopardized as seldom before, but also that-far from bringing any real benefit-these practices impede efforts to find and stop actual terrorists, and they lengthen the waiting lines at al-Qaeda recruiting centers.
s/
Steering Group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Coleen Rowley former FBI special agent
Tom Maertens former NSC Director for Nonproliferation; former Deputy Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Dept. of State
Larry Johnson former CIA analyst; former counterterrorism manager, Dept. of State
Ray McGovern former CIA analyst
25 Comments so far
Show AllJames Madison was typically prescient in warning of this: "No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare;" and "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
I don't think we Americans even fear this enough to do anything about it. Sure we see other countries and how they are run. How they have no rights and are ruled and punished with an Iron Fist.
But if it got that bad here; not everyone would suffer. The wealthiest of the wealthy would some how become exempt from the "New Age Marshall Law".
This is the real reason the wealth gap will never be addressed. Because in the back of the minds of the poor and the rich, they know the revolution is coming. And believe me when I say the rich are not going to want to make any sacrifices to their comfort for any cause. They can afford to pay $10+ for gas if it came to that. They can afford to pay off officials to fly them out of the country. Money can buy almost anything in this country. And the 1% will have most of that money (And power). It may sound like crazy bull, hippie talk to you all. But I know that it's going to get real bad in the US over the next 10-20 years. And I want to be prepared when it does.
So if you haven't started saving money for unforeseen circumstances(of any kind ) and if you haven't learned how to fire a gun now is the time. Learn basic survival techniques. Learn to distill water and learn basic first aid.
We will need the basics sooner than we think.
I am disappointed that the United States foregone its law of the land in order to somehow achieve victory over "The War on Terrorism." I agree with this article that this is very similar to the War on Drugs they have in that both are unwinnable. Why couldn't The United States Government, after 9/11, opt to make amends to nations it has terrorized in the last Century? There are many examples of nations The United States has destroyed as we all should know pre 9/11. My second question is why has the United States refused to take heed of Osama bin Laden's warnings? I mean...does the United States want another terrorist attack from Al-Qaeda?
One would think that, judging from the unbelievable methods of how bin laden was able to execute 9/11, that he means business. The United States wants to be safe for foreign aggression, yet does not invest in its security. After all, 10 billion spent on Israel last year but only about 4 billion on its port security and half-trillion or more on invading Iraq since 2003 (Iraq - terrorized by the United states since 1991!) illustrates this point sufficiently. What an absolute waste of money!
After 9/11, The United States, a so-called Christian nation, chose to CONTINUE terrorizing nations, rather than secure itself and at the same time divert its resources to use another nation as a scapegoat for 9/11 - namely Iraq and maybe Iran eventually rather than be a peacemaker and make amends. I personally do not understand this. All U.S. military overseas should have been re-deployed back to the U.S. for securing their nation. Their Department of Offense - oh excuse me I mean Defense -should have re-deployed instead of wage war. One would think that the 9/11 experience would humble the United States - understanding that terorizing nations and cultures for economic reasons is immoral. Some Christian Americans may disagree with me on this point. Aren't they ashamed of themselves?
What can I say now except to reiterate that The United Staets should have apologized to nations it has destroyed and cultures they have drove to near extinction after 9/11 instead of opting for misguided revenge and domestic abuse against its citizens in the name of its security. Pity...
After we have been looted you might fool your neighbors into thinking the dollar has value.
My copy of "Edible Plants of the Rocky Mountains" is priceless.
Think! The more data collected the more people are needed to make sense of it. Pile on the hay; we need to find that needle.
It seems what is at the crux of the public's tacit acceptance of police agencies' running roughshod over civil liberties is the whole "ticking time-bomb" scenario. This article is a good complement to VIPS member Ray McGovern's article at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121405I.shtml
Here McGovern goes into more depth using torture as the prime example.
Sir Melvin asks: "I mean…does the United States want another terrorist attack from Al-Qaeda?"
The answer, at least that from the governing administration of the United States, may be yes. Bin Laden and al Qaeda were annoited as the perpetrators of 9/11 immediately after the fact - no investigation, no examination of evidence, not even an immediate claim of responsibility from al Qaeda. We were just told bin Laden did it - we so love the single assassin theory, it focusses our hatred so well.
Having annointed bin Laden the poster boy of his never-ending state of "Global War on Terror", Cheney realized that doing away with him could hamper the future of his administration's war. Thus Bush essentially turned him over to Taliban protection in Tora Bora and Cheney quick-started his oil war in Iraq. Bush soon admitted he didn't think about bin Laden much, because he didn't want us to, either...the GWOT had moved on, and there was money to be made. Coming up with bin Laden now will only gum up the works - everyday rightwing 'mericans might start asking why we are still losing troops in Iraq with the evil bin Laden, Prince of 9/11, vanquished.
Further, Cheney will need bin Laden to be his patsy when he stages another attack on our soil so he can declare himself marshall-law dictator of these United States. What about Georgie boy? Bush will have to be martyed in the attack our homeland to allow Cheney, whom Americans view as somewhere between an irritant and the Anti-Christ, to become sympathetic enough for his coup to occur without interference.
The article notes that the new intelligence systems may create a great many false positives. I think that may be the intention. We all know that anyone well-connected in the political world or the corporate world will have a "Get out of Jail Free card," and so that leaves the commoners stuck in some Guantanamo somewhere, instilling even more fear into the population.
We need to recognize that the worst of the predators have noticed that our political system has been entirely co-opted by corporate power, and ordinary citizens are completely powerless and their votes are meaningless and there is nothing to protect them. So those predators are giddy with excitement thinking of all the ways they can increase their position at our expense.
If they believe we cannot protect ourselves, and it looks like we cannot through political means, those wolves will see us as a sick moose with a broken leg and they are going to come in for the kill. And soon.
The fact is counter-terrorism is not a priority for this government. It never has and never will be. It wasn't from the beginning, which is why 9/11 happened. There is an enormous conflict of interest here: if another 9/11 happens, the Republicans win the next election, because people always vote for so-called "strength" at such times, which they mistakenly associate with conservative policy. So there is no incentive, and in fact a disincentive, to protect the country from terrorism. And the bogeyman bin Laden? He's been dead since late 2005 but this government and terrorists both find him more useful alive.
How to do it, according to Chomsky: "The best way to fight terrorism is to stop being terrorists ourselves".
http://www.crooksandliars.com/Media/Play/16677/2/DemDebate-Gravel-Frightene.mov/
"Squaring of the error" is a colorful and useful term. This commentary is devastatingly correct in applying it to the Bush administration's wholesale misuse of hi tech military tactics after 9/11, as a response to counter what was fundamentally the act of a nonmilitary, nongovernmental criminal conspiracy.
The cure unfortunately metastasized the disease, once again proving you can't fight anarchism with a tank. The more you try to do so, the more the crowd of onlookers will invariably root against the tank, and cheer on the underdog.
Donald Rumsfeld's ruminations about the law of diminishing returns when it comes to body count dynamics is reminiscent of Robert McNamara's macabre cost/benefit calculations during the Vietnam War escalation. Saturation bombing and creation of free fire zones indeed squared the error to the point where it became impossible to kill enough Viet Cong to offset the influx of new VC recruits from the surviving refugee population.
Once you posit that "the enemy" is comingled within an innocent civilian population engaging in asymetrical guerilla warfare, what the Pentagon labels "collateral damage" becomes an inevitable daily occurrence. The infantry grunts' axiom "Shoot first and let God sort it out afterwords" dictates what the end result will be.
Reportedly half the Iraqi Shia and over 70% of Iraqi Sunni Muslims consider it moral to shoot American soldiers on sight. Small wonder US occupation forces use the rules of engagement that they do. Small wonder those tactics generate more new terrorists than it kills. The only way to "win" militarily in such a demographic match up is to resort to deliberate genocide.
As VIPS' memo notes, the non-military road to fighting terrorism is similarly laden with evil potential. Operation Phoenix in Vietnam failed to "root out the Vietcong infrastructure" using torture, indefinite detentions and targeted assassinations the same way similar techniques gave the French only a brief, superficial "victory" in the Battle of Algiers.
Talk about chosing the lesser of two evils. Genocide or torture regime? You make the call.
The best single thing that VIPS brings to the debate is recognition that guns versus Gitmo presents a false choice. A lot of law enforcement professionalism with a dash of military professionalism added in when absolutely needed is what the challenge calls for.
Bill from Saginaw
My intuition tells me if I'm smart, I'll get a passport and open a Swiss bank account.
My son refuses to sign the national initiative because he says we will never get 50 million signatures (I checked, there are 6,000 right now). He told me Americans are too ruined by TV to stir themselves unless there is a major catastrophe. He said we need a revolution, but it won't happen unless this country collapses on itself. People aren't concerned about freedom, they don't need or care about it. I think about how hard people fought for it, and how many died for a five day work week and a minimum wage, and Americans are throwing all that away. This 2 1/2 year raise to 7.40 an hour or whatever is no way comparable to what the minimum wage was in 1970. It just throwing crumbs off the table to the suckers on the floor.
I told him all the things we once had, jobs that supported a large middle class on one income, affordable college for everyone without loans, community health clinics, infrastructure support. He said "It's a different world, it will never be like that again. You can't take back the power the corporations have taken. They will never give it up".
It's tragic that our young people are cynical, disillusioned, and have no hope for the future. My mother foresaw this in 1981 and she was right. So where do we go from here?
Sir Melvin, you write,
" One would think that the 9/11 experience would humble the United States - understanding that terorizing nations and cultures for economic reasons is immoral." You don't understand why the US didn't apologize for this behavior and change its ways in order to prevent more terrorism coming our way. The reason is that most people in the US have no idea that their government has done these things in their names. Truly. We are taught in school that the actions of the US on the world stage are all benevolent, compassionate and moral. Most people continue believing that through their adulthoods. Certainly the truth is out there, but one has to be paying attention and most US citizens are not--they are more occupied with mindless consumption and the latest celebrity doings.
You are absolutely right--it IS a pity. And dangerous.
I'd like to see the VIPS group talk more about probabilities directly. That's what intelligence is all about, gaining more accurate probability models of significant societal events. Long winded, I know, but the concept is almost a no-brainer.
People would understand if you said, for example, 'The administration chose to attack Iraq, when we knew that there was a less than a 2% chance of damaging Al Qaeda operations by doing so. Furthermore we knew that hostile actions against an innocent Arabic country would increase hostilities globaly by an average of at least 250% per year for the first 3 years, that rate increasing with prolonged engagement...'
BTW, I pulled those numbers from my ass, so don't bash me for lying... But my point stands. I know the VIPS people are capable of working with at least BASIC statistics, and Average Joe can understand them when explained. Numbers make ideas more concrete.
My $0.02
It's funny...create a whole new dept. (Homeland security), a new set of laws, and jails and so on to help 'protect' us.. Yet it is not often mentioned how if the Air Force did their job correctly, things would have turned out much different. The A.F. has THOUSANDS of fighters in their inventory (not even mentioning all the planes the Navy/Marines has), yet there were more fighters at the last Superbowl than there were in the air on 9/11. What a freakin' joke. What scares me most is the intelligence and integrity of the scrubs (please re-elect me and I'll do me best to shit on your future) in D.C. and the flabby brains of most Americans. By the way, what time is American Idol on?
This article covers what many of us "liberal" minded people have known all along. The question becomes; how do we get this information to the tens of millions of Americans who depend on corporate controlled media for their information and never get this kind of information?
RE: USING WAR TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY - FOUNDING FATHERS WARNED OF IT; FASCISTS AND NEOCONS EXPLOIT IT
Future.me June 19th, 2007 1:05 pm
James Madison was typically prescient in warning of this: "No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare;" and "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
A "lesson" Fascists learned well -
"Of course the people don't want war. But...people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
At long last, more and more people are starting to understand what many of us have been taking about for the past decade.
The slick manipulation of the media started long before 9/11... just one example was the steady stream of allegations "leaked" by Ken Starr and Company. Over $55 million and the ONLY allegation ever proven about the Clintons was that Bill lied about Monica... who wouldn't!
Many so-called "think tanks" popped up around government, and most of the new ones seemed to be concerned with the acquisition of more wealth for the ultra-wealthy, the well-being of Israel, or both.
Americans have justifiably fought long and hard for privacy laws and the rights due us under the Constitution... it is foolish to the point of moronic to let Bush and Gonzales trample those rights in the name of "protecting us".
Since Daddy Bush was elected, fewer than 5% of the most wealthy Americans have tripled their assets to the point where they now own more than the bottom 90% of Americans... and they have taken control of the media to the point where that information is being effectively held from the general populace.
Fewer and fewer people have jobs... fewer and fewer people can go to college... fewer and fewer people have decent medical care... fewer and fewer people can make their mortgage payments... fewer and fewer people have any opportunity to improve their lives or those of their children.
Our country is in it's deepest danger now than it has been in over 230 years... but more from INSIDE than from any terrorist group or nation outside.
The people at the top will eventually learn that you cannot back people into a corner without negative consequences... I seriously fear what those consequences might become.
provoice,
What really disturbed me is that Clinton gave the corporate elite 80 percent or more of what they wanted and they still tried to get rid of him. Now their boy Bush, who does 99 percent of what they want, has made quite a mess of things, and they are anxious to find out whether the public is so apathetic and ignorant that it will accept such malfeasance without putting up a fuss. If they find the answer to be "yes," then we can expect even worse, and it is looking more and more that the answer is in the affirmative for now.
My brother used to say many years ago "The worse the better". My youngest son believes that only a revolution can turn this situation around. Provoice may have a point, but people do not feel backed into a corner, bad as things are. And young people today think the present situation is normal. It's all they know. They don't have faith that Social Security will be there for their old age, because they have been hearing all their lives it won't be. Ever since 1980 there has been a drumbeat of right wing propaganda with no countervailing voice. So what are they to think? I told my son we need the Fairness Doctrine back. He said "What's that?". I told him and he said we will never get it back, things are different now.
I know one thing. Whatever history is being taught in our schools, it isn't including the reality of the twentieth century. My son is aware of the shortcomings of that time, but not the impact of income distribution that made a large well-off middle class. Supporting a family comfortably on one income is a pipe dream for most of America. Young people today never heard of a free college education. Sad.
Sir Melvin,
In all do respect, I find your idea of us acting like a b*tch slapped ho when attacked a little troubling.
From my earliest memories, Americans were inculcated with FEAR of the OTHER.
Drop drills, an exercise where the teacher in an elementary school class could quietly say, "Drop", were an immediate knee-jerk to all of us, to get our butts under our desks, head tucked down and fingers clasped over the backs of our necks. And keep your eyes closed tight, or else the brightness of the blast will blind you! I believe few of us actually believed we would live to be adults; the Communists would nuke us, we knew it. Could it be that many, many people find a thrill and a craving for fear? We are drawn to images of cold-blooded murder in our movies, our TV series, our Youtube videos. Mainstream news used to bring the Vietnam war horrors into our living rooms. Now we see talking heads in the war zones; maybe the blazing aftermath of an ied blast. But does your sensibility talk to you the way it does me? With a show and tell of children being murdered daily, women raped, beheadings, torture -- the full gamut of what you KNOW is happening every minute. And the worst part is knowing that it is all needless. What the F*** is wrong with Americans that they will put up with this??? With the facts readily available to them on progressive websites. And what will we do when we've lost that? Without a fight?
As long as people have money (i.e., credit) to buy their 50-inch TVs and gas-guzzling SUVs, there will be no revolution. Maybe when gasoline hits $5/gal., we might have a chance at changing the system. But changing the system requires an anti-capitalistic mindset, and Wall St. still and perhaps will always rule.
On the points of this article: the Bush Administration is the No. 1 terrorist organization in the world today.
There is much money to be made from killing,profits to run our economy is based inventing enemies, Corperation don't run on spreding good will. You fillup your suv that profits the Arab people to pay for the arms to kill our people and our tax pay for arms to kill thier people,it's a win, win deal for the evil leaders that call on your patroitism.
"Of course the people don't want war.But...people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trials (Thank you, Basca, for this quote and your comments.)
It appears to me that is a great "arm-wrestling contest" going on in this country, one that allows the neoconservatives to bash neoliberals with unabashed terror. There is this claim that Liberals and Anti-War Demonstrators are the cause of America's troubles, and nothing can be said in an exchange of remarks to change this rhetoric. 9/11 did change our perspective, but we have gone way beyond the cause and affect of this tremendous tragedy. Politicians create wars on the basis of military intelligence, whether is correct or not. A perfect example of that was the Weapons of Mass Destruction. They were never found, yet they were the foundation of the take down of Saddam Hussein's regime and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The reason? That Iraq was a direct threat to the United States. If this was true, then why did former President George H. W. Bush, allow the military to clear Sadaam Hussein out of Kuwait, yet not allow his military commanders to move northward to Baghdad? All that George H. W. Bush did was use our military to evacuate Saddam Hussein's army from oil-rich Kuwait and push him back into Iraq. As a veteran, I believe that the Senior George H. W. Bush, knew that Sadaam Hussein would invade Kuwait, and just waited for the right circumstances to chase him out. Afterwards, Saddam Hussein went right back to his country and continued his regime, and rebuilt his military. Why was this allowed? It is my belief, it was a show of force to remind Americans at home that the protection of American oil interests in the Middle East was to protect the "vital needs of America", and make it in a public way. Create a war to make a point. Oil is more important than politics. Patriotism was a vital link to the support of this war which reminded me, personally, of Vietnam and the military might brought to bear on North Vietnam. Yet the first Iraqi War was one that lasted four days and the United States accomplished its mission.
Then came our current President, George W. Bush, who was in the right place and the right time when 9/11 occurred. He made bold moves, voiced a sincere promise to protect Americans, both abroad and at home, from terrorism, and he kept his promise. Two years later, Congress authorized President George W. Bush to invade Iraq because of the belief there were WMD. The mission in Iraq changed. Sadaam Hussein was not a "direct threat" to American interests, here and overseas, so military force was used, and continues to be used, to maintain a presence in Iraq. Sadaam Hussein and his confederates were hanged. His sons were killed in combat, and a victory of sorts was declared by President George W. Bush. Now, going on into its fifth war, violence and death are greater that they were before the war was declared. Our American Generals are saying it could take decades to stabilize Iraq to its former state. President George W. Bush believes, "it is in the best interest of America to keep a military force in Iraq until victory is achieved". That victory, then, is decades away. American spent 16 years overall in Vietnam and lost close to 60,000 men and women in a war which did no more than enrich the companies that built the bombs, the aircraft, and armored vehicles. It created prosperity in America, yet the war was headed nowhere. Now we are losing, not only our troops in Iraq, but the troops from NATO are being killed as well. Al-Queda is a ghost who has no face. We continue to fight against that force that does not fear death and can muster its ultraviolent sectarianism with a greater zeal than we can express in our patriotism. Are we ready to expend the billions of dollars per month in a war that cannot be brought to victory for decades, or will we see another Great Depression when the trillions of dollars stacks up and the United States government becomes bankrupt. What lies ahead is unknown, but definitely fearful.