Peak wingnut was a lie.
This story of how three Americans were yanked off a plane, taken into custody, strip-searched and humiliated, all for the crime of flying while brown on 9/11 is a must read.
And people want to argue that bin Laden didn’t win.
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
We should never forget those in our government who used the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history as an excuse to launch completely unrelated wars, to do unprecedented damage to Americans’ historic liberties, to run roughshod over the Constitution, and to betray the Founders’ vision by savaging some of our most deeply held values.The last decade has been a tragic one in countless ways. Few if any Americans would like to see it repeated.
I don’t read Sullivan anymore, but I assume the first is a Moore Award nominee and the second is up for a Yglesias Award.
So, ten years after 9/11, have we come to our senses and stopped spending a trillion on defense and “national security” and surveillance? No. Will we gtfo of Afghanistan and Iraq? No. Will we stop using the Patriot Act for hings like the drug war? Of course not. But we do have this:
Air travelers will eventually be able to keep their shoes on to pass through security, but the restrictions on carrying liquids on board are likely to remain in place for some time, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a POLITICO Playbook breakfast Tuesday.“We are moving towards an intelligence and risk-based approach to how we screen,” Napolitano told Mike Allen during a morning forum at the Newseum. “I think one of the first things you will see over time is the ability to keep your shoes on. One of the last things you will [see] is the reduction or limitation on liquids.”
The Onion staff wept.
Watch the full episode. See more POV.
... Through the eyes of Bradley Crowder and David McKay, who were accused of a firebombing plot at the [2008 RNC] convention, “Better This World” examines the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s controversial use of informants, an issue that receives far less attention than initial reports of suspected terrorism. Through interviews, telephone recordings and text-message transcripts the film leaves viewers with the impression that Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay were philosophically seduced by an informant. The two men admitted to making Molotov cocktails on their own, but the cocktails were not used.
The film had an Oscar-qualifying theatrical release here last week, but it will reach many more people when it has its television premiere on Tuesday night on “POV,” the PBS documentary series. Simon Kilmurry, the executive director of “POV,” said it was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. [...]
Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay, angsty young men from Austin, Tex., say in the film that they looked up to Brandon Darby, an activist who co-founded a relief group in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Together, Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay say in the film, they made plans to protest the Republican convention in Minneapolis. Because the convention was treated as a possible target for terrorists, the F.B.I. was aggressive in its monitoring of protest groups; Mr. Darby was made an informant…
Ms. Galloway noted that defendants in many cases like this one have accused informants of trapping them. “That’s a common situation,” she said. “You have the flashbulb headlines about a domestic terrorist case, and then, not long after, a counter allegation by the defendant about misconduct by a government agent or informant.”
The film also poses thorny questions about government prosecutions of cases like the one involving Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay, who were called terrorists but who were convicted of lesser charges. The filmmakers said that audiences on the festival circuit this year were “surprised by how far the government is allowed to go” in such prosecutions. When they screened the film for international audiences, Ms. Galloway said, “people were stunned by the amount of resources devoted to terrorism.”
Mr. McKay suggests in the film that the government “didn’t want two kids who made a mistake; they wanted two terrorists who were going to hurt people” because “it legitimizes everything that they’ve done.”
Via Glennzilla, this:
“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
I bet if you compared how much we spend on terrorism per yer per death and calculated how much we would need to spend to have the same per capita ration for cancer deaths, it would be hundreds of trillions. But then again, with us all afraid, we don’t notice the erosion of our rights and liberties. So we got that going for us.
We just killed another terrorist you and I have never heard of, and presumably this time we win:
A drone operated by the Central Intelligence Agency killed Al Qaeda’s second-ranking figure in the mountains of Pakistan on Monday, American and Pakistani officials said Saturday, further damaging a terrorism network that appears significantly weakened since the death of Osama bin Laden in May.An American official said that the drone strike killed Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who in the last year had taken over as Al Qaeda’s top operational planner. Mr. Rahman was in frequent contact with Bin Laden in the months before the terrorist leader was killed on May 2 by a Navy Seals team, intelligence officials have said.
American officials described Mr. Rahman’s death as particularly significant as compared with other high-ranking Qaeda operatives who have been killed, because he was one of a new generation of leaders that the network hoped would assume greater control after Bin Laden’s death.
Thousands of electronic files recovered at Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, revealed that Bin Laden communicated frequently with Mr. Rahman. They also showed that Bin Laden relied on Mr. Rahman to get messages to other Qaeda leaders and to ensure that Bin Laden’s recorded communications were broadcast widely.
After Bin Laden was killed, Mr. Rahman became Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader under Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Bin Laden.
Is it just me, or does Al Qaeda go through No. 2’s quicker than Dr. Evil? But don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere, and in a few months we will have another joyous announcement after we kill the new No. 2.
Imagine it is 6 o’clock in the morning. You just woke up, brewed yourself a cup of coffee, and are sitting on the porch having a smoke, enjoying the morning air, thinking about what you have to accomplish today. Maybe your dog is with you, maybe you are chatting with your next door neighbor, who is also going through his morning ritual. You don’t live in the best neighborhood, in fact, there are some downright awful people living around you. But this is your house, you have mouths to feed and this is where you grew up, this is where your friends and family and job are, and this is what you call home. Sure, you’d like to move to some beautiful suburb where everyone is an upstanding citizen, but this is what you have, and you are making the best of it. And so you sit there, thinking about the day ahead of you, sipping your coffee, scratching the parts that always need the most attention in the morning after a good sleep, and…
WHAMMO. Out of nowhere, a crushing explosion vaporizes the house next to you, your house, and all the houses around you. The explosion throws you to the ground and pins you there, and the compression knocks the wind out of you and bursts your eardrums. All you hear is a loud buzzing. Debris is falling all over you, and you feel pain in multiple places on your body, but you can’t see through the dust and smoke to know if you are seriously injured. You smell smoke, burning flesh, and a mixture of toxic burning fumes from the smoldering wreckage of your former neighborhood. You hear your neighbor scream in pain. You gag on the cordite, and as you slowly start to regain your senses, a chill goes down your spine- “MY WIFE AND KIDS ARE IN THE HOUSE.”
Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? But this is the face of American policy in the Middle East. I know, I know, I’m an asshole and I hate Obama for pointing this out. This “hypothetical” and stories like it are happening every single day all over the Middle East in our forever war on terror. Maybe it wasn’t some poor sap on his porch having coffee. Maybe it was a wedding party. Maybe it was people on a convoy to a city. Maybe it was just some poor bastard “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” That statement always pisses me off- if someone drops a fucking bomb on me while I am in my house, how dare you tell me I am in the “wrong place?” Fuck you.
Maybe it was a 500lb bomb that went off the mark. Maybe it was a “precision” weapon that was a couple hundred yards off. Maybe the clowns at the CIA translated the address wrong or didn’t understand subtle nuances in the language (and we are short on translators because we hate gays as much as terrorists) and this was supposed to hit another side of town. Maybe someone was fed bad intel from a “trusted” source. Or maybe someone did something to the US somewhere and we just had to tell people to “SUCK ON THIS.”
And instead of being outraged by this, instead of being infuriated that the military was caught once again lying to us, we continue on. I’m sure very serious commenters will explain to me the necessity of our actions, and how there are bad people out there, and we do the best we can because WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS and PEOPLE HATE US FOR OUR FREEDOM and because HITLER/SADDAM/GADDAFI IS EVIL. We have to win the War on Terror!
This insanity has to stop.
Obviously, Boehner is a hypocrite, but I am still very uncomfortable with whatever we think we are doing in Libya:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) warned President Barack Obama on Tuesday that he’ll be in violation of the War Powers Act if he doesn’t seek authorization for the Libya mission this week, but Boehner has questioned the law’s constitutionality in the past and even voted to repeal the law back in 1995.“The president of the United States is, and should remain, the chief architect of America’s foreign policy and the commander-in-chief of our armed forces,” Boehner said in a 1999 press release when Congress was debating U.S. involvement in the Balkans. “Invoking the constitutionally-suspect War Powers Act may halt our nation s snowballing involvement in the Kosovo quagmire. But it’s also likely to tie the hands of future presidents … A strong presidency is a key pillar of the American system of government — the same system of government our military men and women are prepared to give their lives to defend. Just as good intentions alone are not enough to justify sending American troops into harm’s way, good intentions alone are not enough to justify tampering with the underpinnings of American democracy.”
In addition to his pretty clear remarks, Boehner voted in 1995 to repeal the War Powers Act and replace it with a weaker mandate for Congress to have a role in the war-making process.
And then there is Yemen:
Both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post report today that the Obama administration is planning to exploit the disorder from the civil war in Yemen by dramatically escalating a CIA-led drone bombing campaign. In one sense, this is nothing new. Contrary to false denials, the U.S., under the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been bombing Yemen for the last two years, including one attack using cluster bombs that killed dozens of civilians. But what’s new is that this will be a CIA drone attack program that is a massive escalation over prior bombing campaigns; as the Post put it: “The new tasking for the agency marks a major escalation of the clandestine American war in Yemen, as well as a substantial expansion of the CIA’s drone war.”
Putting aside the fact that I doubt we have any clear idea what we are accomplishing or any guidelines for ending this next new adventure, what troubles me the most is that politically, this is great news for the Obama re-election campaign. It’s kind of hard to be portrayed as “soft on terror” after you killed bin Laden, are leading four wars (that we know of), and the GOP is using the War Powers Act to claim you are overstepping your authority in waging war on brown people. I’ll tell you this much, David Axelrod and the folks at the 2012 campaign popped a champagne bottle when Boehner and members of the House invoked the War Powers argument.
A couple of days ago John wrote about the seemingly new doctrine of armed response to acts of cyber sabotage. I’m broadly with him on the badness of expanding without limit the range of events that we would treat as an act of war. But I think there is much less new here than it seems—and perhaps that lack of novel insight is more of the problem than the risks inherent in treating cyber attacks as a potential casus belli.
First of all, there is a significant trail behind this latest Pentagon statement. A major milestone came with the publication of Presidential Decision Directive 63 in 1998—a document coming from the Clinton White House/National Security Council. The directive calls for a series of measures aimed at minimizing our vulnerability and enhancing our ability to respond to cyber attacks—response in this case meaning fixing the damage to critical systems to minimize pain, suffering, and economic and/or military damage. But the notion that a digital attack is a form of warfare is already present, part of US official doctrine all the way back in the last century:
Because of our military strength, future enemies, whether nations, groups or individuals, may seek to harm us in non- traditional ways including attacks within the United States. Because our economy is increasingly reliant upon interdependent and cyber-supported infrastructures, non-traditional attacks on our infrastructure and information systems may be capable of significantly harming both our military power and our economy.
Had the authors of Stuxnet managed to set off a bomb in the centrifuge room, that would have been obviously an act of violence, one of war. That the cyber path permitted the same damage to be done less messily does not alter its tactical significance, at least not in any obvious way. If the Pentagon is moving to formalize the logic implied by Clinton-era perceptions of cyber threat—well, there are changes here, but I’m not sure they are as groundbreaking as the WSJ article made it seem.
That is: the reality behind the digital metaphor of infection is one of the facts of life in a networked world. The realms of the virtual and the physical are now deeply interconnected, and disruption of the cyber networks can (and has) produced real consequences in our material circumstances. I don’t see it as a huge stretch to suggest that a cyber attack could cause the deaths of people, and that a response using other weapons that also kill people might be appropriate, if (and only if) you can reliably connect the original attack to the folks you want to target.
I honestly have no idea what we are doing in Afghanistan any more other than pissing people off, losing troops to a lost cause, wasting billions, and creating more terrorists. We’re not bringing freedom to anyone, we’re not making ourselves any safer, and I have yet to see any long term plan articulated (mind you- we’re ten years in and still wondering what we are doing. Whack-a-mole is not a plan). Hell, we aren’t even honest enough with ourselves to demand that the Pentagon give us a possible plan for withdrawal, and I guarantee no one can tell me what we are trying to accomplish without the response turning into “blah blah Taliban blah blah they hit us first blah blah Pakistan nukes.” No one knows what the fuck we are doing, no one knows what a “win” in Afghanistan looks like, and sure as shit no one can gauge whether we are “winning.”
There’s this odd institutional paralysis where we have convinced ourselves that leaving will be worse than the disastrous status quo, but no one can really explain why, yet anyone who suggests we unass the area of operations and go home is castigated as wanting to “lose” or hating America. We’re just sort of there, meandering around, clueless and breaking shit and pissing people off, like a 60 year old burnout on acid at the Dead show campground three days after the concert. Ask them what they are doing and it will resemble our plan in Afghanistan with less bloodshed and fewer visions of rainbows. The smell will be about the same.
GTFO.
Fresh off a disgraceful display regarding Obama’s Israel speech, Reid ratchets up the scare tactics to coerce Rand Paul into relenting on his opposition to the Patriot Act:
“If the senator from Kentucky refuses to relent,” Reid said earlier Wednesday, “that would increase the risk of a retaliatory terrorist strike against the homeland and hamper our ability to deal a truly fatal blow to al-Qaida.”Paul objected to the “scurrilous accusation. I’ve been accused of wanting to allow terrorists to have weapons to attack America. ... Can we not have a debate … over whether or not there should be some constitutional protections?”
Paul had support from several Democrats who want to see more congressional oversight of how the Patriot Act operations are carried out. Sen. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in a proposed amendment co-sponsored by Paul, would have required audits on the use of surveillance authorities and required the government to provide more proof of a link to a foreign group or power to obtain sensitive library circulation records and bookseller records.
But with the expiration date approaching and little likelihood of a compromise with the House, the Democrats acceded to letting the bill move forward. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said he was not happy they weren’t able to deal with the bill differently, but allowing the provisions to lapse was “unacceptable.”
Disgraceful. Why such a hurry? Maybe this:
Across the aisle, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) have offered their own amendment to the PATRIOT Act, in an effort to make the law less opaque. That’s because Wyden says the PATRIOT Act that Americans know about and the one that the government actually has in place are two very different beasts. There is a secret PATRIOT Act that American citizens don’t know about, Wyden claims, and it’s only getting worse.“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
Wyden and Udall want to close that gap. Their chances of actually doing so are depressingly slim.
You can’t handle the truth.
Harper’s Magazine and Scott Horton were not supposed to win the National Magazine Award for Reporting this year. Of the five finalists in the category, there were three real contenders, and most people working in the ever-shrinking category of serious magazine journalism were sure the award would go to Rolling Stone for the article by Michael Hastings that led to the downfall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal or The New Yorker for Jane Mayer’s profile of the billionaire Koch brothers.But Harper’s beat out the two big names, scoring a major upset with Horton’s piece about three detainees at Guantánamo Bay who died in 2006. The government said the men had hung themselves in
In fact, Horton’s story, which the judges for the award—administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) and regarded as the Pulitzer for magazines—found so compelling, was actually a well-shopped one, familiar to some of the most experienced investigative journalists in the business. These included The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh as well as teams from CBS News’ 60 Minutes and ABC News’ Brian Ross Investigative Unit that had looked into the alleged killings and the accounts provided by the men who became Horton’s key sources, and found more flight of fancy than fact. (Horton acknowledges in his story that his source had been in contact with ABC News.)
I’ve quoted Horton a lot, but I didn’t remember quoting this piece or getting all het up about it, which is a good thing, as it appears to be falling apart. A quick search of the archives turns up this:
Just finally finished reading this depressing piece by Scott Horton detailing how we tortured people to death at Gitmo and then lied for years, insisting they were suicides.Last year, I understood why, politically, the Obama administration chose to behave the way they did with the former administration, choosing to look forward rather than backwards. I didn’t like it at all, but I understood it.
I don’t know how that is a tenable position anymore (and it was always a bad moral compromise). This must be investigated, publicly and thoroughly, and people need to be brought to justice.
I suppose my wish was granted, and this was investigated thoroughly and has fallen apart. I suppose that is good news, although it depresses me that Horton will forever be haunted with this and one of the good guys in all these debates will be automatically ignored by many.
More depressing, though, is that the fact these men just committed suicide and were not murdered will be heralded as some sort of moral victory for America. “Neener neener- we didn’t kill them!” Lost will be the fact that we’ve locked up a bunch of people permanently, some of them guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, given them no chance to face their accusers, allowed no charges to come forward in many cases, and left many of them to rot or take their own lives in protest or in desperation. Another just killed himself recently. Ain’t we just saints!
Just click your heels, say “worst of the worst” a few times, and go get ready to watch American Idol. That will make the stink pass.
According to Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr., Ferhani was “committed to violent jihad, and his plan became bigger and more violent with each passing week.” Still, authorities believe they had no ties to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist network. And those who knew the men were skeptical that either man was capable of carrying out a major terrorist attack. “There’s no way they could be terrorists. They are too stupid,” said a neighbor. “Him and his brother are always out in the street smoking pot and fighting.” The pair face a maximum sentence of life without parole if convicted.
Does this mean we finally have a legal reason to lock up the cast of Jersey Shore?
Remember the FISA court, the one that rules on surveillance warrants for people suspected of being foreign agents? Back in 2005, there was a major controversy over this court because the Bush Administration decided that getting a warrant was too onerous, so they went ahead and did domestic wiretapping without warrants. Well, it turns out that, last year, the FISA court approved all of the 1,506 warrants brought before it. In 2009, they were far more stringent—they rejected 2 of the 1,329 warrants they reviewed.
And, do you remember National Security Letters? Those are the subpoenas that the FBI can issue without court oversight, to get phone records and email addresses. They used to come with a gag order so anyone getting one couldn’t even speak about it. Well, the gag order was ruled unconstitutional, but the Letters are still with us. The FBI issued 24,287 of them last year, affecting 14,212 people. Thats more than twice the number of people affected than in 2009.
I would love to find out how many of the wiretaps and National Security Letters issued last year targeted legitimate espionage or terrorism subjects, and how many were just regular old criminal suspects. Barring some sort of Wikileak, I doubt we’ll ever know the answer to that question.
Still a crime in the post-Osama world.
Yet people want to argue when you point out that Osama has won.
