Friedman's 2009 piece on U.S. torture still correct (Stratfor)

Here's the practical part of George Friedman's 2009 op-ed on U.S. torture for intelligence gathering, and it's still on-target:

The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator's tool kit.

At a certain point, the emergency was over. U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda. The war had become routinized, and extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to unprecedented dangers became part of the process. Bush had an opportunity to move beyond the emergency. He didn't.

If you know that an individual is loaded with information, torture can be a useful tool. But if you have so much intelligence that you already know enough to identify the individual is loaded with information, then you have come pretty close to winning the intelligence war. That's not when you use torture. That's when you simply point out to the prisoner that, "for you the war is over." You lay out all you already know and how much you know about him. That is as demoralizing as freezing in a cell — and helps your interrogators keep their balance.

And here's the philosophical part:

And this raises the moral question. The United States is a moral project: its Declaration of Independence and Constitution state that. The president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. The Constitution does not speak to the question of torture of non-citizens, but it implies an abhorrence of rights violations (at least for citizens). But the Declaration of Independence contains the phrase, "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." This indicates that world opinion matters.

At the same time, the president is sworn to protect the Constitution. In practical terms, this means protecting the physical security of the United States "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Protecting the principles of the declaration and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation.

Let me repeat something: The U.S. is a moral project on display for the whole world.  It's not just another country defending its people and borders. U.S. conservatives and liberals alike believe in "the American way," whatever they take that to mean. So if we allow harm to that moral project, we allow harm to the essence of who we are. We become something else. That's why myself and others have argued since 9/11 that if we allow the terrorists to change who we are, then they've already won. They've convinced us to abandon our moral project.

Now to Friedman's qualifier on that: "Protecting the principles of the declaration [of Independence] and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation."

But the U.S. regime has never been threatened; and the defense of the nation was never in question -- perhaps only the defense of a few thousand potential citizens of that nation. No threat that we know about has risen to the level of a gun to the head of America, or an existential threat.

Furthermore, it's clearly not worth taking every possible precaution possible against any imaginable threat. Those threats have to be real and of sufficient magnitude and likelihood. And the costs mustn't exceed the benefits.

To put it in everyday terms, as my conservative friends like to do, think about the safety of your home. If you're honest, you would probably admit there are several measures you could take to make your home safer against intruders, accidental injury, fires and natural disasters. But there are costs and trade-offs to all these measures; and at a certain point each one of us says, "I've done enough," knowing full well we could be safer if we were willing to spend more, endure more inconvenience, etc. And these are only the material costs and trade-offs -- not moral costs and trade-offs involved in torturing people!

I say this to ward off oft-heard arguments, mostly from conservative politicians and pundits, that the U.S. Government exists primarily to protect us from every military or terrorist threat, both real and imaginable. No, it doesn't. Because the costs of doing that wouldn't be worth it. Indeed, trying to do "everything possible" could even make life in the U.S. not worth living, and make abandoning our "moral project" seem like a more appealing option. That's the danger. 

Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure

By George Friedman

April 20, 2009 | Stratfor

URL: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090420_torture_and_u_s_intelligence_failure#axzz3LQKKLpE1

Begala: Cheney can't seem to lie enough on national TV

It's scary to think that Cheney, who is obviously a deeply disturbed and narcissistic liar, was practically running the country for eight years.

Begala's list of Cheney's lies and the proof of them is must-read stuff, for the historical record, but also because Cheney is out on every TV show now as some kind of voice for a conservative U.S. foreign policy. It's insane.

Does Dick Cheney believe his lies?

By Paul Begala

July 18, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/17/opinion/begala-dick-cheney-lies/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Engelhardt: U.S. National Security State is an insane religious order

Right on!  Tom Engelhardt is a lone voice of sanity. Our National Security State (NSS), as he dubs it, has indeed grown out of control. Its reason for being has become self-perpetuation and -aggrandizement.

As I posted back in March, the Department of Homeland Security, which didn't even exist prior to 9/11, has spent about $800 billion since then in order to prevent any more such attacks.  Never mind that that plot could have been thwarted if the FBI had simply listened to its field agents.  No, we had to go an make a "monstrosity" (in Ron Paul's words), a real "Department of Defense" to rival the Pentagon -- the "Department of Offense."  

This is not to forget the outrageous $700 billion Pentagon budget that is bigger than the next 13 biggest military budgets in the world combined; and let's ponder in awe and disgust that the Pentagon employs, directly and via contractors, about 3.3 million Americans, making it the single largest U.S. employer. Finally, let's remember Pentagon's network of hundreds of military bases worldwide. (For comparison, by one estimate, the Roman Empire had about 37 major bases at its height, while the British Empire had 36. So what does that make the United States, Rotary International?!)

And of course we have the NSA.  What can I say that hasn't already been said?  The NSA assures us that they have foiled some 54 "9/11"-type attacks (but only 13 in the U.S.... maybe we should start charging Europe a fee?) with their ceaseless spying on innocent Americans, but they can't tell us anything about these so-called plots because they're so secret.  But the NSA did tell a Presidential task force, which responded, essentially with, "Phooey." So that's more money and liberty down the drain.

Folks, this is all done in our name, ostensibly to protect us. We're not innocent bystanders in all this.  We're enablers.  We must stop enabling.  We must tell our Congressmen -- I'm talking to you, "fiscally responsible" Tea Partiers -- that the NSS has grown out of our control and must be chopped down. This monster now exists to feed itself and make babies, not to protect us. 

Read on!...

American Jihad 2014: The New Fundamentalists 

By Tom Engelhardt

January 5, 2014 | Tom Dispatch

URL: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175789/

NSA's phone spying began under Bush

Whether you agree or not with the NSA's massive, indiscriminate collection of telephone "metadata" on terrorist suspects and innocent Americans alike, this op-ed by the Bush Administration lawyer who got initial court approval to collect such data highlights that the NSA's domestic spying program was started under Dubya.

As a good Democratic soldier, I just wanted to point that out to all my outraged, I say outraged, Republican friends who suddenly rediscovered the 4th Amendment once a Democrat with a Muslim name became POTUS.

Enjoy.

Don’t limit the NSA’s effectiveness

By Steven G. Bradbury

January 3, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1av09yd

Tea Parties, 9/11 and 'American exceptionalism'

What an insightful and refreshing meditation on 200 years of American history, and meanwhile, Americans' psychological relation to their history!  

To give you an example: Smith's fascinating recognition of the unlikely affinity of two American "losers" who could have re-shaped America's relation to the world: Republican Wendell Wilkie post-WWII; and Democrat Jimmy Carter post-Vietnam.

Now to summarize....

First, Smith argues, as I have, that the Tea Parties are about perpetuating a certain myth about American history, but he goes even further [emphasis and italics mine]:

Whatever the Tea Party’s unconscious motivations and meanings—and I count these significant to an understanding of the group—we can no longer make light of its political influence; it has shifted the entire national conversation rightward—and to an extent backward, indeed. But more fundamentally than this, the movement reveals the strong grip of myth on many Americans—the grip of myth and the fear of change and history. In this, it seems to me, the Tea Party speaks for something more than itself. It is the culmination of the rise in conservatism we can easily trace to the 1980s. What of this conservatism, then? Ever since Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign slogan in 1984 it has purported to express a new optimism about America. But in the Tea Party we discover the true topic to be the absence of optimism and the conviction that new ideas are impossible. Its object is simply to maintain a belief in belief and an optimism about optimism. These are desperate endeavors. They amount to more expressions of America’s terror in the face of history. To take our country back: Back to its mythological understanding of itself before the birth of its own history is the plainest answer of all.

The Tea Parties' constant harking back to a mythical point in time that never existed is a mark of fear of the future, Smith believes, a fear that all Americans share to some extent, and yet to "win the future" (to stupidly quote Newt Gingrich) we must face this fear:

I do not see that America has any choice now but to face this long terror. America’s founding was unfortunate in the fear and apprehension it engendered, and unfortunate habits and impulses have arisen from it. These are now in need of change—a project of historical proportion. Can we live without our culture of representation, our images and symbols and allusions and references, so casting our gaze forward, not behind us? Can we look ahead expectantly and seek greatness instead of assuming it always lies behind us and must be quoted? Can we learn to see and judge things as they are? Can we understand events and others (and ourselves most of all) in a useful, authentic context? Can we learn, perhaps most of all, to act not out of fear or apprehension but out of confidence and clear vision? In one way or another, the dead end of American politics as I write reminds us that all of these questions now urgently require answers. This is the nature of our moment.

Smith thinks we Americans must face our psychological defeat suffered on 9/11/2001, the realization that they did not like us, and did not want to be like us:

What was it Americans reiterated through all the decades leading to 2001—and, somewhat desperately, beyond that year? It was to remake the world, as Condoleezza Rice so plainly put it. It was to make the world resemble us, such that all of it would have to change and we would not. This dream, this utopia, the prospect of the global society whose imagining made us American, is what perished in 2001. America’s fundamentalist idea of itself was defeated on September 11. To put the point another way, America lost its long war against time. This is as real a defeat as any other on a battlefield or at sea. Osama bin Laden and those who gave their lives for his cause spoke for no one but themselves, surely. But they nonetheless gave substantial, dreadful form to a truth that had been a long time coming:The world does not require America to release it into freedom. Often the world does not even mean the same things when it speaks of “freedom,” “liberty,” and “democracy.” And the world is as aware as some Americans are of the dialectic of promise and self-betrayal that runs as a prominent thread through the long fabric of the American past.

Look upon 2001 in this way, and we begin to understand what it was that truly took its toll on the American consciousness. Those alive then had witnessed the end of a long experiment—a hundred years old if one counts from the Spanish war, two hundred to go back to the revolutionary era, nearly four hundred to count from Winthrop and the Arbella. I know of no one who spoke of 2001 in these terms at the time: It was unspeakable. 

9/11 wasn't about killing, or even creating terror; it was their way of screaming, "We reject you!"

Does America have a democratic mission?  Was it meant to be a shining City on a Hill?  It never did; it never was, argues Smith, convincingly. Which seems obvious to most non-Americans, but a bit frightening for us born-and-bred Amuricans to mull over.  If we were not chosen, if we are not special, if we do not have any special mission -- and with it, special prerogatives -- then what about all that "bad stuff" in our history?  Didn't it mean anything?  Wasn't it all for a greater purpose?.... No, it was just about Power.

And here's what Smith has to say about U.S. power:

Power is a material capability. It is a possession with no intrinsic vitality of its own. It has to do with method as opposed to purpose or ideals—techne as against telos. It is sheer means, deployment. Power tends to discourage authentic reflection and considered thought, and, paradoxically, produces a certain weakness in those who have it. This is the weakness that is born of distance from others. In the simplest terms, it is an inability to see and understand others and to tolerate difference. It also induces a crisis of belief. Over time a powerful democracy’s faith in itself quivers, while its faith in power and prerogative accumulates. 

Power and strength are not the same; we should resolve to possess the latter, Smith avers:

To reflect upon those final years before 2001, it is not difficult to understand in our contemporary terms the distinction between a powerful nation and a strong one. Strength derives from who one is—it is what one has made of oneself by way of vision, desire, and dedication. It has nothing to do with power as we customarily use this term. Paradoxically, it is a form of power greatly more powerful than the possession of power alone. Strength is a way of being, not a possession. Another paradox: Power renders one vulnerable to defeat or failure, and therefore to fear. Strength renders one not invulnerable—no one ever is—but able to recover from defeats and failures. The history of the past century bears out these distinctions very clearly. Most of all, a strong nation is capable of self-examination and of change. It understands where it is in history—its own and humankind’s.

And here's Smith's call to action at the end of his remarkable essay:

I propose the taking of an immense risk. It is the risk of living without things that are linked in the American psyche: the protection of our exceptionalism, the armor of our triumphalist nationalism, our fantastical idea of the individual and his or her subjectivity. For Americans to surrender this universe of belief, emotion, and thought may seem the utmost folly. A century ago Americans flinched at the prospect. What followed was often called heroic, but in many cases it was just the opposite, for the American century was so often an exercise in avoidance of genuinely defined responsibility. True enough, it ended as it began, with uncertainty and choices. But the outcome need not be the same now, for there is too much more to be gained than lost this time.

Are we brave enough to change, or do we prefer to revert to a mythical childhood of ourselves that never was?

American exceptionalism is a dangerous myth

By Patrick Smith

May 26, 2013 | Salon

URL: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/26/american_exceptionalism_is_a_dangerous_myth/

Greenwald: Elites debate, Is AUMF awesome or totally awesome?

Here's how Greenwald sums up the "Dr. Strangelove" absurdity of the AUMF hearings in Congress, and the thinktank-media-judicial-political elite that wants to keep and expand it:

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

In response to that, the only real movement in Congress is to think about how to enact a new law to expand the authorization even further. But it's a worthless and illusory debate, affecting nothing other than the pretexts and symbols used to justify what will, in all cases, be a permanent and limitless war. The Washington AUMF debate is about nothing other than whether more fig leafs are needed to make it all pretty and legal.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they're paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Like I said, Congress ought to have thought twice before it handed the Executive branch carte blanche and an undated, blank check to wage war on anybody all over the globe...including at home.  And we citizens should have been screaming at our Congress for years now.

Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent

By Glenn Greenwald

May 17, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3fqqb

Greenwald: 434 wrongs don't make a right

Glenn Greenwald implores us to remember Rep. Barbara Lee's lonely "no" vote in Congress in 2001, just three days after 9/11, when cooler heads unfortunately did not prevail.  

Here's her speech on 9/14 explaining her vote; you can clearly hear her holding back her tears in the beginning:

All too predictably, she suffered for being right in a time when everybody wanted to be wrong.  

A Washington Times op-ed said she was "a long-practicing supporter of America's enemies - from Fidel Castro on down." 

Conservative activist David Horowitz said, "Barbara Lee is not an anti-war activist, she is an anti-American communist who supports America's enemies and has actively collaborated with them in their war against America."

Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin called her "treacherous."

Glenn Greenwald notes that Lee "was deluged with so many death threats that she was given around-the-clock police protection."

Let's learn from Barbara Lee's profile in courage and not repeat past mistakes. We mustn't get involved militarily in Syria!

Barbara Lee and Dick Durbin's 'nobody-could-have-known' defense

By Glenn Greenwald

May 7, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3fk37

Bergen: Missed warning signs of terror attacks?

CNN's Peter Bergen analyzed why the Boston bombings -- and 9/11, for that matter -- weren't prevented, but it's the very end of his story that caught my eye:

The problem is that, as Roberta Wohlstetter pointed out half a century ago in her study of Pearl Harbor, separating out the really important signals from all the "noise" in the system is only easy to do after the fact, particularly when the U.S. government has now assembled a database of an astonishing number of 700,000 individuals it suspects of ties to terrorism.

Bergen is trying to compare the Pearl Harbor surprise attack to terrorist attacks. But there's a big difference: there weren't 700,000 Japans to keep track of in 1941. Presumably, any one of these suspects could carry out an terror attack today... or somebody who is not on the list at all.

Still, it's hard to believe there are 700,000 people in the world with ties to terrorism. Shouldn't there be way more terrorist attacks if there are so many of them?

More likely, this data base of suspects is another out-of-control government program.  Maybe we missed the Boston bombers because we were too busy following around 700,000 other people, many of whom didn't deserve to be on that list?

UPDATE (05.06.2013): Here's another article about America's bloated terrorist data bases: "Terror database too unwieldy to flag Boston suspect, critics say." The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list, with 875,000 records, is the big daddy from which all other government data bases draw, such as the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database, which in turn feeds the State Department's watch list, which is supposed to prevent terrorist suspects from getting U.S. visas.

Agencies often miss warning signs of attacks

By Peter Bergen

April 27, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/27/opinion/bergen-warning-signs-terrorism/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Dying Iraq vet's letter to Bush-Cheney

Tomas Young's letter deserves to be posted in full.  Read it and support our troops.

P.S. -- My opposition to the Iraq occupation was the main reason I started this blog over six years ago. One of my first posts was a revenge fantasy written in sickened response to a brief, barely noticed AP article about how Dubya was "moved" during his annual pre-Christmas visit to wounded soldiers. When it dawned on me that this had already become a kind of holiday tradition for him and his wife, I knew the occupation was too old and institutionalized.  I don't know if Dubya still visits wounded Iraq vets; but he will certainly have the opportunity to continue visiting them until his dying day, even if he lives another 80 years, the smug fucker.

The Last Letter

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

March 18, 2013 | Truthdig

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness. 

How fast we forget 'lessons learned' in Iraq!

Now here we have the "liberal" Washington Post's foreign affairs commentator Richard Cohen repeating his past mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq -- mistakes he admitted to and regretted on the 10th anniversary of 9/11!

Once again he is urging the U.S. to get involved in a Middle Eastern war.  (The original title of his op-ed was, "Deadly delay on Syria.")

What skin does the U.S. have in this game?  Why should we take sides in a civil war, when the eventual victors, whoever they may be, are going to be pretty unsavory and undemocratic by our standards?  Haven't we learned anything?

Conservative MSM haters, take note, this is the real media bias when it comes to U.S. foreign policy: only "fools" talk about peace and non-interference, while the "realists" and grownups in Washington talk about how fast we can get our hands bloody.

UPDATE (03.21.2013):  Here's a look at the unsavory characters whom we'd be arming in Syria, if John McCain, et al, got their way.

Does Obama have a plan for Syria?

By Richard Cohen

March 19, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/WzSJWS

Teabaggers, turn your knives on the DHS!

If budget-cutting Tea Partyers could only harness their negative energy for good, then they would surely be protesting in Washington and raising a ruckus at town hall meetings in order to abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

Think about it. They are deathly afraid of Big Government tyranny. They routinely make up non-existent threats like Obama's private army and FEMA concentration camps. Meanwhile, right in front of their faces is this enormous, amorphous DHS and they ignore it. Why? Because it was Dubya's monster?

Kramer and Hellman are right to point out the DHS's' similarities with the Department of Defense -- verily, the Department of Offense. They call the DHS another rabbit hole down which billions of taxpayer dollars disappear with scant oversight.

Teabaggers, get your act together and do something useful for a change!  P.S. -- Here's a 2002 op-ed by proto-teabagger Ron Paul entitled "The Homeland Security Monstrosity."  Enjoy.

'Homeland security': The trillion-dollar concept that no one can define

By Matte Kramer and Chris Hellman

March 14, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013313132824288582.html

Legal WMD that we love and die to keep

Focusing on mental health or our "culture" in an attempt to stop more shooting rampages is a red herring meant to distract us. (And if you want to give all America's mentally ill proper medical care -- support Obamacare or shut up about it.)  Writes WaPo's Caputo:

Since the Newtown, Conn., massacre, there has been a good deal of vague chatter suggesting that people like Purdy or Lanza or Jared Loughner can be identified before they act on their monstrous fantasies and can be prohibited from purchasing firearms. A kind of early-warning radar will detect a disturbed personality on a trajectory toward slaughter.

How would this be accomplished? Are disgruntled workers, loners or anyone who says or does bizarre things going to be examined by psychiatric boards? If it’s determined that they are potential dangers to themselves or others, would they be placed on some sort of national watch list? Compelled to undergo treatment? Locked up?

Even if such a system had been in place, it would not have stopped Lanza, who, as we all know, obtained his weapons by stealing them from the collection of his gun-enthusiast mother.

Again, it comes back to the guns themselves. And no, more guns or armed security guards in our 100,000 schools (as the NRA lamely suggests) are not the answer: recall that an armed security guard traded shots with Klebold and Harris before they shot and killed 13 people and shot and wounded 24 others at Columbine High School in 1999. The school security guard's main safety contribution that day was calling in local police. 

But what’s more wrong are the guns themselves. A 9 mm semiautomatic handgun with a 30-round clip isn’t a pistol; it’s a weapon of mass destruction. Jared Loughner proved that by killing six people and wounding 13 others in not much more time than it took you to read this sentence.

Today, tens of millions of such firearms are in circulation in the United States. If it were up to me, they would be regulated as strictly as fully automatic weapons, such as machine guns, have been for decades. All citizens, except those with federal firearms licenses, would be required to surrender them to law enforcement authorities (with fair compensation). And then I’d destroy them.

But sensible gun buy-back like what happened in Australia won't ever be attempted in the U.S. Why? It's our dirty little open secret. We all know that the backwards Red States would be in uproar, especially the South. There would be individual and organized acts of terrorism. Officially, some states might seek to secede.  And all this to defend the right of Americans to commit the equivalent of three September 11th attacks against each other every year!

Blame the killing machines: guns

By Philip Caputo

December 21, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/WCkP5r

DC snipers: How easy terrorism can be

I remember this time in DC very well.  It was after 9/11 and everybody was sure it was Islamic terrorists.  It ended up being a disturbed vet and his wayward nephew with some guns. 

Imagine: a man and a boy with guns paralyzed the Metro area for almost a month.

That's when I understood al Qaeda wasn't mainly about killing Americans, because if that's what they wanted to do, it was too easy. I realized they were about the big show, the big bang -- airplanes, skyscrapers -- to make a psychic impression around the world.  That's when I realized al Qaeda was engaged, primarily, in a PR and propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Muslims outside America.

I hesitate to even write this (after all, this blog is surely monitored by the NSA and Major League Baseball), but the truth is that if Islamic terrorists really wanted to terrorize Americans, then they would strike at our soft underbelly.  Which is just about everywhere.  They would attack shopping malls, grocery stores, gas stations, etc.... Basically what the DC snipers did.  All it took back then was two guys with guns.  And nothing -- absolutely nothing -- has changed since then.  

Lee Boyd Malvo, 10 years after D.C. area sniper shootings: ‘I was a monster’

By Josh White
September 30, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/SrLk9H

U.S. Senators swear to Saudi gov't's role in 9/11

The lib'rul NYT deliberately released this story before Breitbart's murder to distract us from the real conspiracy!

Anyway, for what it's worth to those of you so easily distracted from Obama's crimes by the lamestream media, two former U.S. Senators submitted sworn affadavits about the Saudi government's possible involvement in 9/11. (YAAAAWN! 9/11, that was like, so 10 years ago.)

Saudi Arabia May Be Tied to 9/11, 2 Ex-Senators Say

By Eric Lichtblau

February 29, 2012 | New York Times

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/us/graham-and-kerrey-see-possible-saudi-9-11-link.html?_r=4

Ames: Jaded Russians hardly shaken by terror act

Compared to most of Russia's bloody and brutal 20th century, the last decade of so of Chechen terrorism in Russia has been a relatively peaceful period! Meanwhile, 10 years on, 9/11 still has us Americans frightened and on edge. Everything is relative, sure.

Nevertheless, a revival of our old-fashioned Western frontier stoicism might not be a bad thing.

Dead Souls: How Russians React to Terror

By Mark Ames
January 24, 2011 | Vanity Fair

It takes a lot to terrorize a Russian. Compared to the truly spectacular acts of terrorism and violence that Russians have suffered over the past two decades, today's suicide bombing at Moscow's busiest airport, Domodedovo, is too small-time to have much of an effect besides pissing off an already-pissed-off population.

Back in 2004, two passenger jets that took off from this same airport were blown out of the sky by Chechen "black widows"—Chechen women widowed by the brutal war with Russia, and turned into suicide bombers. Shortly after that double-Lockerbie airplane bombing, opposition leader Eduard Limonov explained to me what he thought was behind the logic: "They understood that Russians wouldn't be moved if only one plane was blown up, so they blew up two planes simultaneously, just to get our attention," he said. Limonov used to write about Russian hard-heartedness, the result of their brutal experience with Communism, followed by the nihilistic Yeltsin Era, when the average male's life expectancy plunged from 68 years to just 56, in a free-market Babylon of corruption, plunder, and violence.

At a Moscow rock festival in 2003, two Chechen suicide bombers blew themselves up at the gated entrance, killing more than a dozen people and wounding scores more. Nevertheless, the 40,000 concert-goers were neither frightened nor particularly bothered; the festival went on for another six hours of vodka-and-beer-soaked revelry. Previous bombings of the Moscow metro, buses, and airlines have had no effect on public transport usage or travel. When suicide bombers attacked the popular Egyptian resort at Sharm-el-Sheikh in the summer of 2005, killing 88, most Europeans panicked and canceled their trips to the resort area—but not Russians.

Several years ago, Limonov—Russia's most famous living writer and leader of the anti-Putin opposition with Garry Kasparov—wrote a column for my defunct Moscow newspaper, The eXile, about how desensitized Russians have become:

Russians have a healthy attitude towards literature. As barbarians they expect it to shake them, to shock them, to thrill them. As Lolita didn't shock them, they throw it away with a deep contempt. The fact is that Russians are very insensitive people, with a low level of sensitivity. In order to move, to touch them, one must hurt their sensitivity, to wound their stone-made Russian souls. That is the task not for literature, but for mass-murderers, for the rapists of children, for the civil war, for the Hitler's invasion. Russians were not moved by "White House" massacre of 1993, they were not touched by [Chechen guerrilla leader] Basayev's assault on Budyonnovsk in 1995. Mass-murderer Andrei Chikatilo have winned their interest, yes, indeed Russian punk band call itself "Chikatilo Blues." But Russians were not moved at all by old-fashioned seduction of intellectual Humbert Humbert by teenager Lolita, as it is no shock for them, no big deal.

Russian news sites are already reporting stories about how the notorious taxi mafia at Domodedovo is taking advantage of the chaos by charging as much as 20,000 rubles, or nearly $700, for the ride into the city center. In the immediate aftermath, the airport's incoming passengers weren't told about the bombing, and were led to another part of the airport to get their bags, unaware that they were walking through the scene of a gruesome terror act. Online bloggers and commentators are already complaining about airport corruption and lack of security, how the suicide bomber was allowed to walk into the "green zone" in the baggage claim area to maximize his kill count.

In 2004 at the same airport, it took only $200 in bribes to get the two Chechen suicide bombers onto the two airlines which they destroyed in mid-air.

As appalling as it might seem, let's remember what America's far more sentimental reaction to 9/11 got us: two disastrous wars, tens of thousands of deaths, and the sorts of police-state measures once thought unimaginable. The difference may be more in our sentimentality than in our brutality.

Mark Ames is a founding editor at eXiled Online, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan's Workplace to Clinton's Columbine, and a co-author of The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia.

Zakaria: U.S. overreacted to 9/11

It's always nice when Fareed Zakaria decides to agree with me, albeit late. However I'm very late in posting this, so it kind of evens out.

What America Has Lost

By Fareed Zakaria

September 4, 2010 | Newsweek

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden's terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda's best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda's intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted. In a crucially important Washington Post reporting project, "Top Secret America," Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years gathering information on how 9/11 has really changed America.

Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that's the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That's more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, "Many could be produced in an hour using Google." Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.

Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian "Christmas bomber" reported his son's radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber's own incompetence and some alert passengers.

Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government's powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers's heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government's fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?

Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germs of every other … In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended?.?.?.?and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war," Madison concluded.

Re: Obama's failure to lead

What hypocrisy! Obama reacted almost identically to how Bush did after Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber": 6 days of silence, preceded by casual statements from his press sec. that Bush was monitoring the situation. Only, with Dubya it happened 4 months after 9/11, not 8 years after.

Gimme a break! "Leadership"?! Your side wanted "leadership" from Obama after the attempted Detroit bombing?! Don't tell me that you were cowering in fear in your home, just waiting for Pres. Obama to reassure you and the nation that everything was gonna be OK. You think he's a crypto-Marxist who hates America and wants to destroy it; and yet you wanted him to go on TV and reassure you?! Makes no sense! This is just a partisan swipe at Obama. It shows that politics trump national security, contrary to Republicans' assertions.

BTW, have all Americans turned into cowardly pu**ies, or just Republicans? Yeah, there are a few hundred nutjobs in the world who want to kill us and are willing to die trying. So what? We're the most powerful nation on Earth. We'll sweep up their charred remains and carry on. This is the price we pay for being the biggest guy on the block, and exerting our influence all over the globe, often clumsily so. Stop crying about it, stop cowering in fear, and reconcile with the fact that we're gonna take casualties at home, not just "over there." But those casualties will be relatively small and infrequent, hence there's no reason these one-off attacks should alter our way of life, as long as we don't collectively wet our pants and cry like hysterical little girls. Jeez.

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 3:38 AM, ____ wrote:

Message from ____ : Obama displays less leadership than Bush. He can't spend his entire term saying everything is Bush's fault

Failure to Lead

By Salena Zito

January 3, 2010 | Townhall.com

URL: http://townhall.com/content/0e78c22d-b26f-4d99-9d1f-95c740fc6726

FOX and the self-deputized 9/11 police

So FOX and FOX's Glenn Beck have made themselves the official enforcers of 9/11 grief.

I guess the question is: Should 9/11 be an official holiday? And if not, what is the politically correct way to observe 9/11, if at all?

Make no mistake: if 9/11 is not going to be an official holiday, then we're talking about political correctness -- only it's a form of PC that most PC-haters have no problem with.

I mean, look at FOX's silly story below, criticizing Google for not commemorating 9/11 on its search engine. Never mind that Google, a private business, markets itself to the entire world as quirky, fun, non-political, and global, not as solemnly patriotic and American. No, the 9/11 police are having none of it. Google must conform.

So let's take a poll, or have a referendum, or ask our Congress to vote yea/nay on making 9/11 an official holiday. Because I, for one, don't like unofficial, politically correct holidays. Nor do I like creating official holidays, like MLK's birthday, which most Americans do not care to observe. What's the point of forcing it on people? MLK was a great man, but too many Americans don't think his greatness merits a government holiday. Likewise, 9/11 was a great tragedy, but I don't see many Americans doing anything special to commemorate 9/11, so why should prominent businesses and public figures be held to a higher standard of "grief conformity"? These forced public displays remind me of the USSR and Red China.

It's not like we're going to forget 9/11 happened. Right?


Google Ignores 9/11 as Other Search Engines Commemorate Solemn Anniversary
September 11, 2009 | FOXNews

Taibbi: Who you callin' a traitor?

It's actually sad that Taibbi has to spend several hundred words explaining the obvious like this.  I hope you're one of the smart ones who already understands his thesis implicitly. 

Being anti-torture doesn't make you pro-terrorist
By Matt Taibbi
May 12, 2009  |  SmirkingChimp.com

"WASHINGTON — Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. We know we must act but have no idea where or how — and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding."

-- Charles Krauthammer, Townhall.com.

So I got pelted with emails from the usual lunatics this weekend after making the mistake of saying on television that I thought the lawyers who greenlighted the waterboarding program should be prosecuted. I'm not going to delve into this too deeply, because this is clearly one of those issues that few people are willing to change their minds about, but I feel like I've got to talk about one particular aspect of this debate, because it's just too crazy to let go.

Here's a snippet from one letter I got: "What really gets me about liberals like you is that when other countries torture and kill our people, and cut off their heads, [there's] not a peep from you. But you dunk some terrorist's head underwater for a few minutes and you go all weepy."

I saw the same kind of thing in a letter from a guy named Robert Reeg to the New York Post this morning:

My chest was crushed in the collapse of 2 WTC. If people think waterboarding is torture, they should try having their chest cracked while fully conscious. I haven't had a pain-free day since then, never mind the memories. What outrages me most is the "selective" outrage. No one complains when Americans are tortured and murdered.

Obviously Mr. Reeg suffered a terrible experience; I would never make light of that. What I do want to say is that there seems to be this idea that those of us who are against making torture an allowable practice in the U.S. are somehow condoning the behavior of those wacko/asshole religious extremists, that we're picking "their side" in the debate, like it's an either/or proposition or something. I don't think I could count the number of times I've had this argument on the campaign trail at Republican rallies:

ME: No, actually I'm not even talking about whether torture works or not, although incidentally it doesn't. I'm just saying that no civilized society does it, and we probably shouldn't either, so –

ANGRY WHITE PERSON: But what about what those monsters did to our boys in Fallujah? I suppose you're not outraged about that!

ME: (perplexed) Well, I — wait, what? Where the fuck do you get that from?

ANGRY WHITE PERSON: You're standing in front of me complaining about water-boarding! It just follows that you're not outraged about what they did to our boys in Fallujah!

ME: (scratching head, confused) Um…

The thing is, we've been listening to this stuff for so long that when we hear it, we don't recoil in confused disbelief anymore — we're so familiar with these arguments we've forgotten that they don't make any sense. It's similar to that other Bush-era standard: "We fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here."

I never understood what the hell that was all about. The best I could figure is that the people who were saying this think of the world like a big Stratego game, and they think that if we commit a big force to some place like Iraq, the "other side" will have to leave all his forces over there or something to keep us from moving through Eurasia. This might make sense in a real war, in a war-between-nations war, but it's completely absurd in a conflict where the "other side" is actually hundreds if not thousands of different/unrelated actors and can successfully attack a country like the U.S. using just a few people at a time. Sending 160,000 troops to Iraq does absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist group like al-Qaeda from sending over a couple of "exchange students" to dump botulinum toxin into the Akron reservoir.

Okay check that — it does nothing positive. Because it might prevent such attacks in the sense of giving foreign terrorists an array of more enticing targets to shoot at who are closer to home. But in real terms the idea "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" is just magical thinking, the kind of notion that feels like it makes sense because your brain is running amok in the unconscious making unsupervised connections between unrelated things, sort of like an OCD patient who believes that if he steps on every third sidewalk crack he won't get into a car accident. What's amazing about this sort of propaganda is that once it gets hammered into your head enough, the logic of it begins to feel self-evident, above the need for explanation. Over and over again on the campaign trail last year I had people explain this concept to me by simply repeating themselves. I once asked a guy in South Carolina who had laid that line on me if he thought our forces in Iraq were, simultaneous to their occupation mission, physically blocking the airports in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to keep potential terrorists from coming to the U.S.– if that was why fighting them over there kept "them" from committing terrorist acts here.

"You're not listening to me," he said. "The point is that if we weren't over there, we'd be fighting them here. Now that we're over there, they fight us there."

"But why can't they attack us here anyway?" I asked.

He stared at me for something like thirty seconds. I remember having enough time to check to make sure I had tape left on my recorder. "Because we're over there," he said finally.

It's the same thing with this torture business.  There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that torture opponents are "not upset" about things like 9/11 or the beheading of American hostages.  The idea that "no one complains when Americans are murdered" is crazy — of course we "complained," and of course we'd all like to round up those machete-wielding monsters and shoot them into space — but these people really believe this, they really believe that torture opponents are secretly unimpressed/untroubled by Islamic terrorism, at least as compared to American "enhanced interrogation." For them to believe that, they must really believe that such people are traitors, nursing a secret agenda (an agenda perhaps unknown even to themselves, their America-hatred being ingrained so deep) against their own country. Which is really an amazing thing for large numbers of Americans to believe about another large group of Americans, when you think about it.

The reason it's possible is that it's been drilled into their heads to instinctively perceive opposition to their point of view as support for their enemies. They've lost the ability to distinguish between real, honest-to-God enemies (al Qaeda, Kim Jong-Il) and people they simply disagree with or dislike (Boston liberals, the French, gays, the ACLU, etc).

If you give a Yankee fan shit about Joba Chamberlain's fist pumps, his first answer is going to be to wonder why you're not also complaining about Jonathan Papelbon's screaming — because he assumes everyone who disagrees with a Yankee is a Red Sox fan. The same sort of thing is at work here. You bring up the subject of torture as an American citizen, concerned about what allowing torture would do to us as a society, how it would change us, and these people answer the issue by wondering why we're not also complaining about the terrorists on 9/11 or in Fallujah. Because the thinking here is that everyone who disagrees with the torture position is in some degree or another in league with a real murderous enemy.

They don't understand that this is not a question of taking different sides in a war; this is two groups of Americans having a disagreement about how best to deal with a foreign enemy both of these groups of Americans despise, fear and revile equally. My group, the anti-torture group, believes that what should make us superior to terrorists is respect for law and due process and civilization, and that when we give in and use these tactics, we forfeit that superiority and actually confer a kind of victory to the al Qaedas of the world, people who should never be allowed any kind of victory in any arena. We furthermore think that the war on terror doesn't get won with force alone, that it's a conflict that ultimately has to be won politically, by winning a propaganda battle against these assholes, and we can't win that battle so easily if people in the Middle East see us openly embrace these tactics.

Whether or not you agree with that is up to you — we could be wrong, after all — but when you respond to these arguments by asserting that people like me didn't "complain" when Americans were tortured and murdered, what you're really doing is calling me a traitor. And while it may be more interesting and exciting for you to think like that, in reality it's just nuts. Seriously. Trust us on this one. So think it over and ask yourself again if it really makes sense to say that torture opponents like me didn't "complain" when Americans get their heads chopped off. Ask yourself if you really mean that, before you say it. And then get back to me.