The conjured corporate narratives of the countries largest stories has become a farce of parody. Jon Stewart has done a great job of displaying the echo chamber that passes for news reporting on some of the major stories from the last few years - think about the Obama "Madrasah" before CNN actually cracked a book and looked up what the word meant.
Anyway, below is another in an increasingly long list of the price of the loss of "freedom of the press" that came along with the media consolidation of the 80's and 90's and the rise of "Corporate News" (there has gotta be a Dilbert on this one somewhere...)
Was the 'Credit Crunch' a Myth Used to Sell a Trillion-Dollar Scam?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 29, 2008.
There is something approaching a consensus that the Paulson Plan -- also known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP -- was a boondoggle of an intervention that's flailed from one approach to the next, with little oversight and less effect on the financial meltdown.
But perhaps even more troubling than the ad hoc nature of its implementation is the suspicion that has recently emerged that TARP -- hundreds of billions of dollars worth so far -- was sold to Congress and the public based on a Big Lie.
President George W. Bush, fabulist-in-chief, articulated the rationale for the program in that trademark way of his -- as if addressing a nation of slow-witted 12-year-olds -- on Sept. 24: "Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse ... [and] began holding onto their money, and lending dried up, and the gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt." Bush said that if Congress didn't give Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson the trillion dollars (give or take) for which he was asking, the results would be disastrous: "Even if you have good credit history, it would be more difficult for you to get the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college. And ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession."
For the most part, the press has continued to echo Bush's central assertion that there's a "credit crunch" preventing even qualified borrowers -- that's the key point -- from getting loans, and it's now part of the conventional wisdom.
But a number of economists are questionioning the factual basis of the credit crunch narrative. Columnist David Sirota recently looked at those claims and concluded that Americans "had been punk'd" -- that "the major claims about a credit crisis that justified Congress cutting a trillion-dollar blank check to Wall Street were demonstrably false," and the threat of a systemic banking crash was used by the Bush administration to overcome popular resistance to the "bailout."
It's a reasonable conclusion; this is an administration that used the threat of thousands of al-Qaida sleeper cells in the United States to sell Congress on the Patriot Act, the specter of mushroom clouds rising over American cities to push through the Iraq war resolution and the supposedly imminent crash of the Social Security system to push for privatizing Americans' retirement savings.
But the question comes down to what they knew and when they knew it. The analyses that suggest the whole credit crunch narrative is false are based on data that lagged behind the numbers that policymakers had available, in real time, back in September. So the question -- probably unanswerable at this point -- comes down to whether or not they looked at the situation and in good faith believed that pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking system would contain the damage and save an economy teetering on the brink of collapse.
What Else Could Be Happening?
Of course, no one disputes the fact that as the economy has tanked, the number of new loans being issued to American families and businesses has plummeted. But is because credit has dried up for qualified borrowers?
Economist Dean Baker doesn't think so. He explains the situation in simple terms: The media, he argues, "are blaming the economic collapse on a 'credit crunch' instead of the more obvious problem that consumers just lost $6 trillion of housing wealth and another $8 trillion of stock wealth." It's a commonsense argument: much of the economic growth of the Bush era existed on paper only, built on the rise of a massive bubble in real estate values rather than growth in productive industries. When all that ephemeral wealth vaporized -- and with the economy shedding jobs like a dog with dermatitis -- consumers stopped buying, and businesses, anticipating a long slowdown, stopped seeking the loans that they might have otherwise tapped to expand their operations.
Whether good borrowers can't get credit from banks because the latter are hoarding cash or lending has stopped because of a drop-off in demand for new loans is not some wonky academic debate; it's of crucial significance. Because if lending to qualified parties has truly frozen, then even if the specific implementation of the Paulson Plan was deeply flawed, its broad approach -- "recapitalizing" banks in various ways, buying up some of their crappy paper and guaranteeing some of their transactions -- is fundamentally sound.
If, on the other hand, the primary problem is that people are broke and maxed out on debt, and firms aren't looking for money to expand, then the kind of massive stimulus package being considered by the Obama transition team and congressional Dems -- largely designed to stimulate demand from the bottom up, with public works projects, tax cuts for working families, aid to tapped-out state and municipal governments and new money for unemployment and food stamps -- is obviously the best approach to take.
Broadly speaking, these are the parameters of the debate in Washington, and that means that properly diagnosing the underlying problem is crucially important.
Is the Credit Crunch a Big Lie?
There's plenty of evidence that Baker's right. He points out that even though mortgage rates have plummeted, the number of applications for new loans has dropped to very low levels and argues it's "the most glaring refutation of the claim that people are unable to get credit." If creditworthy applicants were being denied loans by banks unable or unwilling to lend, Baker explains, "then the ratio of mortgage applications to home sales should be soaring" as qualified homebuyers apply to multiple banks for a loan. "Since there is no notable increase in this ratio, access to credit is obviously not an issue."
Again, this is common sense. Consumer spending drives about 70 percent of the U.S. economy, and in recent years, much of that spending was financed by people taking chunks of home equity out of their properties -- people might have been eating in fancy restaurants, but they were essentially eating their living rooms to do so.
That the American people don't have the appetite to go deeper into debt than they already are in order to make new purchases is hard to dispute. In November, consumer prices across the board fell at a record rate for the second month in a row. And even with mortgage rates plummeting, so many homeowners are "underwater" -- owing more on their homes than they're worth -- that they're unable to refinance because the equity isn't there. Paul Schuster, a vice president at Marketplace Home Mortgage, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, "What I'm really concerned about is the job picture ... If (people) don't feel good about their jobs, rates aren't going to matter."
The National Federal of Independent Business' November survey of small-business owners found no evidence of a credit crunch to date, concluding that if "credit is going untapped, it's largely because company operators are not choosing to pursue the credit. It's not that companies can't get the extra money, it's that they don't want or need it because of the broader slowdown in economic activity."
The credit crunch narrative -- and the justification for creating Paulson's $700 billion TARP honeypot -- is built on three related assertions: 1) banks, fearing that they'll be unable to meet their own financial obligations, aren't lending money to one another; 2) they're also not lending to the public at large -- neither to firms nor individuals; and 3) businesses are further unable to raise money through ordinary channels because investors aren't eager to buy up corporate debt, including commercial paper issued by companies with decent balance sheets.
Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota's research department -- V.V. Chari and Patrick Kehoe of the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern University's Lawrence Christiano -- crunched the Fed's numbers in an examination of these bits of conventional wisdom (PDF), and concluded that all three claims are myths.
The researchers found that "interbank lending is healthy" and "bank credit has not declined during the financial crisis"; that they've seen "no evidence that the financial crisis has affected lending to non-financial businesses" and that "while commercial paper issued by financial institutions has declined, commercial paper issued by non-financial institutions is essentially unchanged during the financial crisis." The researchers called on lawmakers to "articulate the precise nature of the market failure they see, [and] to present hard evidence that differentiates their view of the data from other views."
That finding was backed up by a study issued by Celent Financial Services, a consulting firm, again using the Treasury Department's own data. According to a story on the report by Reuters, Celent's researchers concluded that the "data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well." Rather than a widespread banking problem, Celent found that the rot was limited to "a few big, vocal banks and industries such as car manufacturing, which would be in difficulty anyway."
There are also some important caveats. Economists at the Boston Federal Reserve responded to the Minnesota Fed's research (PDF), arguing that the use of aggregate data doesn't fully reflect the dysfunction in specific subsectors of the economy, nor does it adequately reflect the decline in new loans.
It's also the case that single-cause explanations for complex crises usually fail to hit the mark. Banks, having fueled the housing bubble (and similar bubbles before that) with the creation of ever-shadier "exotic" securities, are probably erring on the side of caution in writing new loans. They're looking at their balance sheets as quarterly reports approach, and the number of foreign investment dollars coming into the U.S. has declined, meaning that some qualified firms may, indeed, have trouble raising cash in the near future.
Dean Baker, while arguing that "the main story is that people don't have money and therefore want to spend," acknowledged that "some banks are undoubtedly anticipating more write-offs from other loans going bad, so they will hang on to their capital now rather than make new loans." And, as Sirota notes, some of the institutions that are relatively healthy are reportedly holding cash in anticipation of picking up weaker banks on the cheap.
But one thing is clear: the economic crisis may have woken up Washington's political class when it hit the banks, but it remains a product of long-term imbalances in the economy, and the idea that it's primarily a pathology of the banking system in isolation is a misdiagnosis that, if uncorrected, can only result in a longer, deeper and more painful recession than might otherwise be the case.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Post-partisan - what would it look like?
I've been caught up in the popular response to the selection of Rick Warren by the P-E to deliver the inaugural invocation. It seems both the far left and the far right feel betrayed, which is, in my view, a good sign that this was a good choice.
The time of single issue, take no prisoner approach to issue resolution was not very fruitful and succeeded only in increasing the polarization we now have in excess. I'm starting to think that both ends of the spectrum are really going to be uncomfortable over the next several years and that their self-righteousness is going to serve to only distance themselves from the larger majority of Americans.
We can either learn to live together with people that we have fundamental differences or we can't. If we are to model what the world now needs, it is an important step to demonstrate what it means to be civil. I don't agree with the pastor's position on social issues like gay marriage, but the work he has done for the poor and AIDS work in Africa are highly commendable. Shall we burn him at the proverbial stake over what we disagree over or idolize him because of his positoin on gay marriage. Or shall we accept him as the flawed human being we all are?
Three Cups of Tea for Rick Warren
By Thom Hartmann
Created Dec 19 2008 - 11:10am
Rick Warren is providing the invocation for the presidential inauguration. As a pastor whose books have been read by tens of millions of Americans and whose voice is respected by an equal or larger number, he has tremendous influence and power. And as an open homophobe who aggressively works to wound gay people in this country (as well as pretty much anybody else who doesn't believe with his own particular and peculiar recently-invented version of Christian theology) he should be the guy with the bull's-eye on his back for the progressive movement.
But consider that metaphor for a moment. In Pakistan there are entire regions filled with people who not only hate gays but hate Americans as well, regardless of religion. We've tried bombing them (as the Soviets did, and the British before them). Three consecutive Western empires have tried threatening them, starving them, poisoning them, infiltrating them, and overpowering them - all without success.
And then Greg Mortenson came to one of their villages, had three cups of tea [1] with them (a metaphor for hospitality - they nursed him back to health after a mountain climbing injury - and the title of his best-selling book [2]), and now in dozens of these formerly Taliban-controlled villages the people are rejecting the Taliban, embracing modernity, and openly proclaiming themselves as our friends.
His "weapon" for this conversion? He built schools for their children, particularly their previously-banned-from-school girls.
We pushed the Palestinians on the West Bank to have open and democratic elections, assuming that because they were using the tool of our culture (the secret ballot) they'd vote in people reflecting the values of our culture. Instead, they voted in Hamas, a group that is openly hostile to us and our allies. Hamas' "weapon" for winning the hearts and minds of the Palestinians? They supported schools, hospitals, and fed and clothed people.
You'd think that we'd have learned from these experiences - particularly those of us who call ourselves "progressives" - that you get your desired results faster when you embrace, engage, and nurture your "enemies" than when you physically or rhetorically bomb them.
Barack Obama has learned that lesson, and is applying it in inviting Rick Warren to perform the invocation for his inauguration. In doing so, he is reaching out a hand to those who today are - out of fear and ignorance - pushing away gays the same way their intellectual ancestors pushed away African Americans when anti-miscegenation laws were supported by most of these same "fundamentalist" Christian churches in the 1950s and 1960s.
Joseph Lowry, who is providing the other bookend to the inauguration with the benediction, is the other side of the balance Obama is bringing to this inauguration. Lowry has said, for example, "The same folks who are against progress for black folks are the folks who are against progress for women and gays and farmers and young people and peace activists. We have to understand it's one struggle. This is ONE AMERICA, and the sooner we learn that the more effective our world will be."
And the more effective we will be at changing the hearts and minds of people like Rich Warren and his followers. This is a tremendous first step, and I congratulation Barack Obama on his wisdom, walking metaphorically in Greg Mortenson's shoes to eventually bring the enemies of America's true values of love and tolerance over to our side.
The time of single issue, take no prisoner approach to issue resolution was not very fruitful and succeeded only in increasing the polarization we now have in excess. I'm starting to think that both ends of the spectrum are really going to be uncomfortable over the next several years and that their self-righteousness is going to serve to only distance themselves from the larger majority of Americans.
We can either learn to live together with people that we have fundamental differences or we can't. If we are to model what the world now needs, it is an important step to demonstrate what it means to be civil. I don't agree with the pastor's position on social issues like gay marriage, but the work he has done for the poor and AIDS work in Africa are highly commendable. Shall we burn him at the proverbial stake over what we disagree over or idolize him because of his positoin on gay marriage. Or shall we accept him as the flawed human being we all are?
Three Cups of Tea for Rick Warren
By Thom Hartmann
Created Dec 19 2008 - 11:10am
Rick Warren is providing the invocation for the presidential inauguration. As a pastor whose books have been read by tens of millions of Americans and whose voice is respected by an equal or larger number, he has tremendous influence and power. And as an open homophobe who aggressively works to wound gay people in this country (as well as pretty much anybody else who doesn't believe with his own particular and peculiar recently-invented version of Christian theology) he should be the guy with the bull's-eye on his back for the progressive movement.
But consider that metaphor for a moment. In Pakistan there are entire regions filled with people who not only hate gays but hate Americans as well, regardless of religion. We've tried bombing them (as the Soviets did, and the British before them). Three consecutive Western empires have tried threatening them, starving them, poisoning them, infiltrating them, and overpowering them - all without success.
And then Greg Mortenson came to one of their villages, had three cups of tea [1] with them (a metaphor for hospitality - they nursed him back to health after a mountain climbing injury - and the title of his best-selling book [2]), and now in dozens of these formerly Taliban-controlled villages the people are rejecting the Taliban, embracing modernity, and openly proclaiming themselves as our friends.
His "weapon" for this conversion? He built schools for their children, particularly their previously-banned-from-school girls.
We pushed the Palestinians on the West Bank to have open and democratic elections, assuming that because they were using the tool of our culture (the secret ballot) they'd vote in people reflecting the values of our culture. Instead, they voted in Hamas, a group that is openly hostile to us and our allies. Hamas' "weapon" for winning the hearts and minds of the Palestinians? They supported schools, hospitals, and fed and clothed people.
You'd think that we'd have learned from these experiences - particularly those of us who call ourselves "progressives" - that you get your desired results faster when you embrace, engage, and nurture your "enemies" than when you physically or rhetorically bomb them.
Barack Obama has learned that lesson, and is applying it in inviting Rick Warren to perform the invocation for his inauguration. In doing so, he is reaching out a hand to those who today are - out of fear and ignorance - pushing away gays the same way their intellectual ancestors pushed away African Americans when anti-miscegenation laws were supported by most of these same "fundamentalist" Christian churches in the 1950s and 1960s.
Joseph Lowry, who is providing the other bookend to the inauguration with the benediction, is the other side of the balance Obama is bringing to this inauguration. Lowry has said, for example, "The same folks who are against progress for black folks are the folks who are against progress for women and gays and farmers and young people and peace activists. We have to understand it's one struggle. This is ONE AMERICA, and the sooner we learn that the more effective our world will be."
And the more effective we will be at changing the hearts and minds of people like Rich Warren and his followers. This is a tremendous first step, and I congratulation Barack Obama on his wisdom, walking metaphorically in Greg Mortenson's shoes to eventually bring the enemies of America's true values of love and tolerance over to our side.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Boy with a coin
A good song and a good video... why the hell not. The dancers really get me on this one, especially the one with the magic birds :)
Ideas worth spreading
I was recently hooked up to Twitter from an old (not as in aged, but rather long standing) friend, which is a "micro-blog" communication medium. Paul is one of those people that I can spend endless hours talking with, particularly if no topic is chosen. If I were picking someone to drive across the country with, Paul would be at the top of my list (immediate family excluded, as in not coming on this hypothetical journey).
Anyway, Paul twitters away throughout the day on a series of largely unrelated but fascinating topics. He recently shared the following - (money quote: "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth within 50 years, all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth within 50 years, all forms of life on earth would flourish."):
Anyway, Paul twitters away throughout the day on a series of largely unrelated but fascinating topics. He recently shared the following - (money quote: "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth within 50 years, all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth within 50 years, all forms of life on earth would flourish."):
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Moment of pause...
I'm never quite comfortable with these, as they are not annotated. But there can be no doubt about the rate of change the world experiences today...
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Illustration of the fight against poor reporting
The elimination of John Brennan from consideration for a senior intelligence position within the new administration ended up providing a pretty fair shit-storm concerning facts and spin. Glenn Greenwald has a nice time-line and the narratives that have driven this story, along with those pesky facts that some reports still know how to find (when they decide to look...)
The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash
The coordinated, successful effort to implant false story lines about John Brennan illustrates the power the intelligence community wields over political debates.Glenn Greenwald
Dec. 08, 2008 |
The backlash from the "intelligence community" over John Brennan's withdrawal -- which pro-Brennan sources are now claiming was actually forced on Brennan by the Obama team -- continues to intensify. Just marvel at how coordinated (and patently inaccurate) their messaging is, and -- more significantly -- how easily they can implant their message into establishment media outlets far and wide, which uncritically publish what they're told from their cherished "intelligence sources" and without even the pretense of verifying whether any of it is true and/or hearing any divergent views:
Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly, 12/5/2008:
Anyone connected to post-Sept. 11 “enhanced interrogation measures,” no matter at arm’s length, is apparently disqualified to run Barack Obama ’s spy agency.
Hence the immolation of former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan, the president-elect’s closest intelligence adviser, as the lead candidate to run the spy agency.
The left-wing hit job on Brennan showed that liberals may have a taste for covert action after all, the spooks chuckle. . . .
Can anybody who could do the job, get the job?
“Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.”
A former national security official and friend of Brennan, who asked not to be identified, is disgusted by what happened.
“Ninety-nine percent of” what the CIA has been doing since Sept. 11 “is not related to torture, but now everybody is tarred with this brush,” he said.
Diane Rehm Show, NPR, 12/5/2008:
Tom Gjelten, NPR: I understand that it was the Obama team who pulled the plug on John Brennan.
Diane Rehm: Why?
Gjelten: I don't know why. But Brennan had become a real target of criticisms of all those sectors -- largely on the left -- who were very concerned about interrogation and rendition and other such --
Rehm: And it was lots of bloggers who apparently pointed out that he had somehow been involved in the decisions --
Michael Hirsh, Newsweek: Without any direct evidence, of course -- as is so often the case in the blogging world (chuckles). . . .
The people with the most experience in the intelligence world, like Brennan -- Brennan was a first-class professional -- are getting sidelined because of these controversial issues surrounding detention, interrogation, Guantanamo Bay and so forth -- and the risk remains that you have someone there who really isn't the best candidate.
Shane Harris, National Journal, 12/6/2008 (sub. req.):
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, 12/2/2008:
Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.
Mr. Obama’s search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.
Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obama’s decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that “if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted,” and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service.
Brennan's withdrawal, offered in a Nov. 25 letter to Obama, came after liberal bloggers mounted an opposition campaign against his possible appointment. They said he was tainted by his service in the CIA at a time when the agency was employing coercive interrogation methods, including "waterboarding," on detainees.
Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times, 11/25/2008:
The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.
This is why I went through that long, arduous exercise with NPR's Gjelten the other day -- culminating in his admission that he should have reported the Brennan story more accurately ("Okay. That would be fair. That's how I should have said it. You're absolutely right. I should have said it that way"): it's because these inaccurate themes, along with the coordinated planting of these storylines and the shoddy reporting which enables them, are everywhere. And this matters for reasons far beyond the specific controversy over John Brennan.
* * * * *
All of this illustrates the unparalleled power which the "intelligence community" exerts over our political debates, how easy it is for them to manipulate intelligence reporters who depend on cooperation with their intelligence sources and who thus identify with them and happily amplify whatever they are fed, and -- most of all -- how profoundly unrealistic is the expectation that, now that Democrats are "in control," they're just going to blithely proceed to impose all sorts of new restrictions on the CIA and the rest of the Surveillance State -- let alone launch probing investigations and impose accountability for past crimes -- without much of a major fight.
Just consider what all of this "reporting" has in common:
(1) All of these reports rely exclusively on pro-Brennan sources, allies and friends of his in the CIA who have fanned out to plant their storyline with their favorite reporters. This truly excellent and amply documented critique by Columbia Journalism Review's Charles Kaiser of The New York Times' reporting on these matters is applicable to all of these reports, not just the ones in the NYT:
If you’ve only been reading The New York Times, you’re probably aware of these battles — but almost everyone you have seen quoted about them has similar points of view. Most of the Times’s sources don’t think that anyone who formulated or acquiesced in the current administration’s torture policies should be excluded as a candidate for CIA director, or prosecuted for possible violations of criminal law.
The story, by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, noted that John O. Brennan had withdrawn his name from consideration for CIA director after liberal critics attacked his role in the agency’s interrogation program, even though Brennan characterized himself as a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation techniques. Brennan’s characterization was not disputed by anyone else in the story, even though most experts on this subject agree that Brennan acquiesced in everything that the CIA did in this area while he served there.
“I was aghast reading this,” said Scott Horton, a professor of human rights law at Hofstra and a contributing editor at Harper’s, whose blog was instrumental in framing the opposition to Brennan’s appointment. “The Times doesn’t even do a reasonable job of presenting the conflicts — their principal source today was John O. Brennan. They have not reached out to the other side. It looks like Mark and Scott have decided that it’s payback time for a couple of their sources at the agency.”
In all of these accounts, Brennan's false claims of unfair persecution -- that he was attacked simply because he happened to be at the CIA -- are fully amplified in detail through his CIA allies, most of whom are quoted at length (though typically behind a generous wall of anonymity). But Brennan's critics are almost never quoted or named (of all of the above-cited reports, only the National Journal article includes a quote from a named Brennan critic: a couple vague snippets from one of the pieces I wrote about Brennan). The "reporting" is all from the perspective of Brennan and his CIA supporters. None of these journalists even entertain the idea of disputing or challenging the pro-Brennan version.
(2) None of this reporting even alludes to, let alone conveys, the central arguments against Brennan and the evidence for those arguments. Unmentioned are his emphatic advocacy for rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics." None of the lengthy Brennan quotes defending these programs are acknowledged, despite the fact that not only bloggers, but also the much-cited psychologists' letter, emphasized those defenses (that letter complained that Brennan "supported Tenet's policies, including 'enhanced interrogations' as well as 'renditions' to torturing countries"). The seminal article on these CIA programs by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer -- who interviewed Brennan and identified him as a "supporter" of these programs despite "the moral, ethical, and legal issues" -- does not exist in the journalists' world.
What instead pervades these stories is the patently deceitful claim typified by Newsweek's Michael Hirsh, who asserted that the case against Brennan was made "with no direct evidence" and then chuckled that this is "common for the blogging world" -- an ironic observation given that Hirsh himself is either completely ignorant of the ample evidence that was offered or is purposely pretending it doesn't exist in order to defend the CIA official Hirsh lauded as "the first-class professional." That's how the persecution tale against Brennan is built -- by relying on mindless reporters to distort (when they weren't actively suppressing) the evidence against him.
(3) In these accounts, Brennan is described in reverent terms ("first-class professional"; a "natural candidate"; "the guy who's most qualified for the job") while his critics remain unnamed and unseen though dismissed with derogatory, demonizing terms ("some ill-informed bloggers"; "ill-informed but powerful activists"; "a few obscure blogs"; "bloggers" who don't "have that familiarity").
(4) Concerns over torture and rendition -- despite being widespread among countless military officials and intelligence professionals -- are uniformly depicted as nothing more than ideological idiosyncrasies from the dreaded Left ("left-wing hit job on Brennan"; "largely on the left"; "left-leaning bloggers and columnists"; "Obama's liberal base"; Obama's "most ardent supporters on the left"; "liberal critics"; "liberal bloggers"; "confined to liberal blogs"; "the Democratic base").
Thus: non-ideological, pragmatic, Serious centrists (which, as everyone knows, is what we need now) are free of this nattering fixation on all this "torture" talk. Serious adults know that it's time to move on and not hold grudges. It's only the shrill ideologues on the Left who care about such things and want to hold it against those who defended these programs. Depicting one's critics as confined to "the Left" is a time-honored Beltway method for rendering the criticisms unserious, and it's in full force here (and, as Digby ironically notes, it is the Right, far more than the Left, that has waged war against the CIA in recent years; the Left has largely defended the CIA against manipulation and abuse by the Bush White House).
(5) What all of this is -- more than anything else -- is a clear warning to Obama from the CIA about the dangers of paying heed to anti-torture and pro-civil-liberties factions, and they're not really even hiding that. They're explicitly expressing the message as a warning: "the President-elect risks sending a troubling signal to the intelligence community." As Mazzetti and Shane put it after speaking with their favorite sources: Obama risks "alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda."
Those warnings are issued with an eye towards the events they know full well are imminent: debates over how legally restrained the CIA should be in its interrogation and detention powers; demands that light be shined on what the CIA spent the last eight years doing at the behest of Dick Cheney and with the legal imprimatur of David Addington's cabal; and, most of all, efforts to hold those who committed war crimes accountable (efforts which would and should be directed at high-level Bush policy makers and legal advisers who enabled those crimes, not lower-level intelligence agents, but which the CIA nonetheless fears).
* * * * *
What happened with John Brennan is very straightforward and ought not be particularly controversial. This is someone who explicitly defended some of the most controversial Bush interrogation and detention policies. Everything that Obama said about such policies, and everything his supporters believe about them, should, for that reason alone, preclude Brennan from being named to any top intelligence post, let alone CIA Director. It's just as simple as that.
But, as has been historically true, many in "the intelligence community" are outraged by what they perceive as outside "interference" -- as though the CIA shouldn't be subjected to the same set of oversight, limitations, and democratic accountability, debate and restrictions as every other part of government. That something as straightforward as the John Brennan controversy can produce this level of backlash from the intelligence community is a very potent sign of the formidable barriers to real reform of our interrogation and detention framework and, especially, to the prospects for meaningful disclosure of, and accountability for, past crimes.
-- Glenn Greenwald
Monday, December 08, 2008
Excerpts from Bill Moyers interview with Russ Feingold
I couldn't agree more with Russ than on this one. The greatest crime of the Bush administration, and of Congress for allowing it to continue unquestioned, is the usurpation of powers by the executive in the name of "war powers" under the "unitary power of the executive" theory forwarded by . This thin excuse has been used by this administration as justification for everything. So aside from legislation related to "signing statement" powers (actually part of the UPE), returning the executive branch powers to those approximating an equal partner with the legislative and judicial branches is something I too am looking forward to.
(In it's entirety here)
BILL MOYERS: What do you want from the Obama administration?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, I would like the new president to do exactly what he said he's going to do, first of all. He wants to bring the country together as much as he can. And that doesn't mean, I think, giving up your principles. But I think it does mean saying even though the Democrats have the House and the Senate and the presidency, that we should engage Republicans who are willing to work with us as much as possible. Because the public is so turned off by the fighting and by the sniping that goes on. Those of us who really believe in progressive government have got to portray a government that can work together with as many people as possible.
At the same time, I would like to new president, of course, to stick to the kind of things he campaigned on, such as making sure that we close down Guantanamo, making sure that we do end the war in Iraq in an orderly manner. He should not go away from this to simply look like he's in the middle. And I don't think he's going to do that
BILL MOYERS: I had dinner the other night with Ted Sorensen, who's 80 years old now. He was John F. Kennedy's alter ego, soul mate, the author of so many, with Kennedy, of those great speeches. And I said to him, "Ted, you know, the one thing people remember from Kennedy's inaugural address was I'm — you know it, as you were a young man listening at the time — 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.'" And I said, "What's the one thing that you think Barack Obama could say that would be the most memorable, the most riveting, and the most compelling, and the most urgent? And he said, echoing Russ Feingold, "Restore the rule of law." You've been talking about this for some time now. Why is that so important for Obama to put it on the marquee early on?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, of course, the new president, minutes after he's sworn in, in this wonderful moment — it will be cold out there. It will be short speech. But included in the speech, I would hope, would be some attempt by this new, wonderful president to renounce the extreme claims of executive power. To simply renounce these claims that were made by the Bush administration. If he does not say it in some way, at least there, or soon thereafter-
BILL MOYERS: Such as? What do you mean? What claims do you think are most abusive?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: The most important thing — there are many examples, such as torture issue, Guantanamo, detainees, many other things — the fundamental thing is to get away from this argument that under Article Two of the Constitution, the president can basically look at a clear statute, such as the wiretapping statue, and say, "You know, actually, I can do whatever I want in this. I don't have to follow the clear laws of the Constitution, because under the Commander-in-Chief powers, I can basically do whatever I want." That is essentially the argument, the extreme and dangerous argument that the Bush administration has advanced.
So I would like to see this new president say, "You know, that goes too far. I believe in presidential power. I will protect the prerogatives of the president." But at some point — and I think this is where the Bush administration went too far — they've actually undone the basic balance that our founders believed in.
BILL MOYERS: But he must be heading to the White House concerned that there could be a 9/11 on his watch.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: And that he can't be as prudent or as prudish as a constitutional lawyer, as he might have been before 9/11. What would you say to him if he asks you about that? "Russ, I don't want 9/11 to happen on my watch." Bush didn't want it to happen again. He turned to John Ashcroft and said, "John, don't let this happen again." So what would you say to Obama about the balance between the fear he has that Mumbai could happen here, and your concerns, all of our concerns, for the Constitution?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, he would be absolutely right to have that concern. And I'm on the Foreign Relations Committee-
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: -and the Intelligence Committee. There's-
BILL MOYERS: And the Judiciary Committee.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: And judiciary.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: And these are all — the three committees that really relate to this issue. My top priority is to stop us from being attacked again, is to protect the physical safety of the American people. That's my top priority. That's going to be President Obama's top priority. Though he will do nothing — and I will support nothing — that will undo the ability of us to go after those that we have a reasonable reason to believe are going after us, that are going to harm us. What he will do as president, and what he understands, is you can do that without going after people's library records, where there's absolutely no evidence they've done anything wrong. Or, for example, allowing, as the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does, the bulk collection of every single international conversation that anyone does, even though there may be no proof at all that anybody's done anything wrong.
Our system of government is based on the belief that we have a rule of law. And although, as Justice Goldberg once said, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact," it is our faith. That doing things under our system of government is not only the right thing to do, but is also the efficacious thing to do, the thing that will actually produce the most result and cause people to feel free. For example, in a minority community in the United States, where they might know somebody in their midst who is potentially a problem. They're going to be a lot more likely to talk to us about that if they believe that their fundamental rights as innocent Americans are being protected. That's the balance we need to have.
(In it's entirety here)
BILL MOYERS: What do you want from the Obama administration?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, I would like the new president to do exactly what he said he's going to do, first of all. He wants to bring the country together as much as he can. And that doesn't mean, I think, giving up your principles. But I think it does mean saying even though the Democrats have the House and the Senate and the presidency, that we should engage Republicans who are willing to work with us as much as possible. Because the public is so turned off by the fighting and by the sniping that goes on. Those of us who really believe in progressive government have got to portray a government that can work together with as many people as possible.
At the same time, I would like to new president, of course, to stick to the kind of things he campaigned on, such as making sure that we close down Guantanamo, making sure that we do end the war in Iraq in an orderly manner. He should not go away from this to simply look like he's in the middle. And I don't think he's going to do that
BILL MOYERS: I had dinner the other night with Ted Sorensen, who's 80 years old now. He was John F. Kennedy's alter ego, soul mate, the author of so many, with Kennedy, of those great speeches. And I said to him, "Ted, you know, the one thing people remember from Kennedy's inaugural address was I'm — you know it, as you were a young man listening at the time — 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.'" And I said, "What's the one thing that you think Barack Obama could say that would be the most memorable, the most riveting, and the most compelling, and the most urgent? And he said, echoing Russ Feingold, "Restore the rule of law." You've been talking about this for some time now. Why is that so important for Obama to put it on the marquee early on?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, of course, the new president, minutes after he's sworn in, in this wonderful moment — it will be cold out there. It will be short speech. But included in the speech, I would hope, would be some attempt by this new, wonderful president to renounce the extreme claims of executive power. To simply renounce these claims that were made by the Bush administration. If he does not say it in some way, at least there, or soon thereafter-
BILL MOYERS: Such as? What do you mean? What claims do you think are most abusive?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: The most important thing — there are many examples, such as torture issue, Guantanamo, detainees, many other things — the fundamental thing is to get away from this argument that under Article Two of the Constitution, the president can basically look at a clear statute, such as the wiretapping statue, and say, "You know, actually, I can do whatever I want in this. I don't have to follow the clear laws of the Constitution, because under the Commander-in-Chief powers, I can basically do whatever I want." That is essentially the argument, the extreme and dangerous argument that the Bush administration has advanced.
So I would like to see this new president say, "You know, that goes too far. I believe in presidential power. I will protect the prerogatives of the president." But at some point — and I think this is where the Bush administration went too far — they've actually undone the basic balance that our founders believed in.
BILL MOYERS: But he must be heading to the White House concerned that there could be a 9/11 on his watch.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: And that he can't be as prudent or as prudish as a constitutional lawyer, as he might have been before 9/11. What would you say to him if he asks you about that? "Russ, I don't want 9/11 to happen on my watch." Bush didn't want it to happen again. He turned to John Ashcroft and said, "John, don't let this happen again." So what would you say to Obama about the balance between the fear he has that Mumbai could happen here, and your concerns, all of our concerns, for the Constitution?
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, he would be absolutely right to have that concern. And I'm on the Foreign Relations Committee-
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: -and the Intelligence Committee. There's-
BILL MOYERS: And the Judiciary Committee.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: And judiciary.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah.
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD: And these are all — the three committees that really relate to this issue. My top priority is to stop us from being attacked again, is to protect the physical safety of the American people. That's my top priority. That's going to be President Obama's top priority. Though he will do nothing — and I will support nothing — that will undo the ability of us to go after those that we have a reasonable reason to believe are going after us, that are going to harm us. What he will do as president, and what he understands, is you can do that without going after people's library records, where there's absolutely no evidence they've done anything wrong. Or, for example, allowing, as the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does, the bulk collection of every single international conversation that anyone does, even though there may be no proof at all that anybody's done anything wrong.
Our system of government is based on the belief that we have a rule of law. And although, as Justice Goldberg once said, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact," it is our faith. That doing things under our system of government is not only the right thing to do, but is also the efficacious thing to do, the thing that will actually produce the most result and cause people to feel free. For example, in a minority community in the United States, where they might know somebody in their midst who is potentially a problem. They're going to be a lot more likely to talk to us about that if they believe that their fundamental rights as innocent Americans are being protected. That's the balance we need to have.
Friday, December 05, 2008
Unbelievably cute
We watched most of Grosse Pointe Blank last night... one of my favorite Cusack movies (War, Inc. still unseen at this time). Anyway, this is, without a doubt, the cutest baby in movie history.
Tell me, who tops that kid?
Tell me, who tops that kid?
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
"The fantasy of an enlightened West..."
In the aftermath of the bombings in Mumbai, it is difficult to know or understand the forces that drove the assault. The news is full of conflicting stories about the attackers, their origins or their motivations. I don't trust the media to expose the story outside of the context of the bloodshed of the innocents caught by the tides of history. But you are starting to hear a narrative about the attack that reminds me of the US after the September 11th, 2001 attacks. And this I find disturbing.
If you listen to the president in the wake of 9/11, you hear a frame that suggests that this event occurred as a result of "evil" that attacked because of the terrorists "hatred for our freedoms." The idea that the attackers had grievances, legitimate or no, is heretical to the message of this president.
Confronting the Terrorist Within
Posted on Dec 1, 2008
By Chris Hedges
The Hindu-Muslim communal violence that led to the attacks in Mumbai, as well as the warnings that the New York City transit system may have been targeted by al-Qaida, are one form of terrorism. There are other forms.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism. These wars defy every ethical and legal code that seek to determine when a nation can wage war, from Just War Theory to the statutes of international law largely put into place by the United States after World War II. These wars are criminal wars of aggression. They have left hundreds of thousands of people, who never took up arms against us, dead and seen millions driven from their homes. We have no right as a nation to debate the terms of these occupations. And an Afghan villager, burying members of his family’s wedding party after an American airstrike, understands in a way we often do not that terrorist attacks can also be unleashed from the arsenals of an imperial power.
Barack Obama’s decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan and leave behind tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines in Iraq—he promises only to withdraw combat brigades—is a failure to rescue us from the status of a rogue nation. It codifies Bush’s “war on terror.” And the continuation of these wars will corrupt and degrade our nation just as the long and brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has corrupted and degraded Israel. George W. Bush has handed Barack Obama a poisoned apple. Obama has bitten it.
The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were our response to feelings of vulnerability and collective humiliation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They were a way to exorcise through reciprocal violence what had been done to us.
Collective humiliation is also the driving force behind al-Qaida and most terrorist groups. Osama bin Laden cites the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which led to the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, as the beginning of Arab humiliation. He attacks the agreement for dividing the Muslim world into “fragments.” He rails against the presence of American troops on the soil of his native Saudi Arabia. The dark motivations of Islamic extremists mirror our own.
Robert Pape in “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” found that most suicide bombers are members of communities that feel humiliated by genuine or perceived occupation. Almost every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent—carried out attacks to drive out an occupying power. This was true in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Kashmir, as well as Israel and the Palestinian territories. The large number of Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers appears to support this finding.
A militant who phoned an Indian TV station from the Jewish center in Mumbai during the recent siege offered to talk with the government for the release of hostages. He complained about army abuses in Kashmir, where ruthless violence has been used to crush a Muslim insurgency. “Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages,” he said, speaking in Urdu with what sounded like a Kashmiri accent.
“Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims? Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?” he asked.
Terrorists, many of whom come from the middle class, support acts of indiscriminate violence not because of direct, personal affronts to their dignity, but more often for lofty, abstract ideas of national, ethnic or religious pride and the establishment of a utopian, harmonious world purged of evil. The longer the United States occupies Afghanistan and Iraq, the more these feelings of collective humiliation are aggravated and the greater the number of jihadists willing to attack American targets.
We have had tens of thousands of troops stationed in the Middle East since 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The presence of these troops is the main appeal, along with the abuse meted out to the Palestinians by Israel, of bin Laden and al-Qaida. Terrorism, as Pape wrote, “is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.”
The decision by the incoming Obama administration to embrace an undefined, amorphous “war on terror” will keep us locked in a war without end. This war has no clear definition of victory, unless victory means the death or capture of every terrorist on earth—an impossibility. It is a frightening death spiral. It feeds on itself. The concept of a “war on terror” is no less apocalyptic or world-purifying than the dreams and fantasies of terrorist groups like al-Qaida.
The vain effort to purify the world through force is always self-defeating. Those who insist that the world can be molded into their vision are the most susceptible to violence as antidote. The more uncertainty, fear and reality impinge on this utopian vision, the more strident, absolutist and aggressive are those who call for the eradication of “the enemy.” Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts “a radical evil.” He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception. It provided a moral façade for terror and murder. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a “radical evil.”
The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many in the United States with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. It had its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, who invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi.
Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb—a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on Sept. 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200.
Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaida and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon, during the attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Christians were responsible for three.
The dehumanization of Muslims and the willful ignorance of the traditions and culture of the Islamic world reflect our nation’s disdain for self-reflection and self-examination. It allows us to exalt in the illusion of our own moral and cultural superiority. The world is far more complex than our childish vision of good and evil. We as a nation and a culture have no monopoly on virtue. We carry within us the same propensities for terror as those we oppose.
The Muslim Indian Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century filled his court with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and belief. Akbar was one of the great champions of religious dialogue and tolerance. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief. He declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. His enlightened rule took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and in Rome the philosopher Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori for heresy.
Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our concept of the rule of law and freedom of expression, the invention of printing, paper, the book, as well as the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. The first law code was invented by the ancient Iraqi ruler Hammurabi. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka. And, unlike Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves.
The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle. There are aged survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who can tell us something about our high moral values and passionate concern for innocent human life, about our own acts of terrorism. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by historical and cultural illiteracy.
The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. The remains of villages destroyed by our bombs, the dead killed from our munitions, leave us too with bloody hands. We can build a new ethic only when we face our complicity in the cycle of violence and terror.
The fantasy of an enlightened West that spreads civilization to a savage world of religious fanatics is not supported by history. The worst genocides and slaughters of the last century were perpetrated by highly industrialized nations. Muslims, including Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, have a long way to go before they reach the body count of the secular regimes of the Nazis, the Soviet Union or the Chinese communists. It was, in fact, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia that protected minorities during the war while the Serbian Orthodox Christians carried out mass executions, campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing that left 250,000 dead.
Those who externalize evil and seek to eradicate that evil through violence lose touch with their own humanity and the humanity of others. They cannot make moral distinctions. They are blind to their own moral corruption. In the name of civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, they become monsters. We will never free ourselves from the self-delusion of the “war on terror” until we first vanquish the terrorist within.
Chris Hedges’ Truthdig column appears on Mondays. Hedges was Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.
If you listen to the president in the wake of 9/11, you hear a frame that suggests that this event occurred as a result of "evil" that attacked because of the terrorists "hatred for our freedoms." The idea that the attackers had grievances, legitimate or no, is heretical to the message of this president.
Confronting the Terrorist Within
Posted on Dec 1, 2008
By Chris Hedges
The Hindu-Muslim communal violence that led to the attacks in Mumbai, as well as the warnings that the New York City transit system may have been targeted by al-Qaida, are one form of terrorism. There are other forms.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism. These wars defy every ethical and legal code that seek to determine when a nation can wage war, from Just War Theory to the statutes of international law largely put into place by the United States after World War II. These wars are criminal wars of aggression. They have left hundreds of thousands of people, who never took up arms against us, dead and seen millions driven from their homes. We have no right as a nation to debate the terms of these occupations. And an Afghan villager, burying members of his family’s wedding party after an American airstrike, understands in a way we often do not that terrorist attacks can also be unleashed from the arsenals of an imperial power.
Barack Obama’s decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan and leave behind tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines in Iraq—he promises only to withdraw combat brigades—is a failure to rescue us from the status of a rogue nation. It codifies Bush’s “war on terror.” And the continuation of these wars will corrupt and degrade our nation just as the long and brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has corrupted and degraded Israel. George W. Bush has handed Barack Obama a poisoned apple. Obama has bitten it.
The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were our response to feelings of vulnerability and collective humiliation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They were a way to exorcise through reciprocal violence what had been done to us.
Collective humiliation is also the driving force behind al-Qaida and most terrorist groups. Osama bin Laden cites the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which led to the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, as the beginning of Arab humiliation. He attacks the agreement for dividing the Muslim world into “fragments.” He rails against the presence of American troops on the soil of his native Saudi Arabia. The dark motivations of Islamic extremists mirror our own.
Robert Pape in “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” found that most suicide bombers are members of communities that feel humiliated by genuine or perceived occupation. Almost every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent—carried out attacks to drive out an occupying power. This was true in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Kashmir, as well as Israel and the Palestinian territories. The large number of Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers appears to support this finding.
A militant who phoned an Indian TV station from the Jewish center in Mumbai during the recent siege offered to talk with the government for the release of hostages. He complained about army abuses in Kashmir, where ruthless violence has been used to crush a Muslim insurgency. “Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages,” he said, speaking in Urdu with what sounded like a Kashmiri accent.
“Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims? Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?” he asked.
Terrorists, many of whom come from the middle class, support acts of indiscriminate violence not because of direct, personal affronts to their dignity, but more often for lofty, abstract ideas of national, ethnic or religious pride and the establishment of a utopian, harmonious world purged of evil. The longer the United States occupies Afghanistan and Iraq, the more these feelings of collective humiliation are aggravated and the greater the number of jihadists willing to attack American targets.
We have had tens of thousands of troops stationed in the Middle East since 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The presence of these troops is the main appeal, along with the abuse meted out to the Palestinians by Israel, of bin Laden and al-Qaida. Terrorism, as Pape wrote, “is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.”
The decision by the incoming Obama administration to embrace an undefined, amorphous “war on terror” will keep us locked in a war without end. This war has no clear definition of victory, unless victory means the death or capture of every terrorist on earth—an impossibility. It is a frightening death spiral. It feeds on itself. The concept of a “war on terror” is no less apocalyptic or world-purifying than the dreams and fantasies of terrorist groups like al-Qaida.
The vain effort to purify the world through force is always self-defeating. Those who insist that the world can be molded into their vision are the most susceptible to violence as antidote. The more uncertainty, fear and reality impinge on this utopian vision, the more strident, absolutist and aggressive are those who call for the eradication of “the enemy.” Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts “a radical evil.” He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception. It provided a moral façade for terror and murder. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a “radical evil.”
The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many in the United States with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. It had its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, who invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi.
Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb—a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on Sept. 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200.
Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaida and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon, during the attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Christians were responsible for three.
The dehumanization of Muslims and the willful ignorance of the traditions and culture of the Islamic world reflect our nation’s disdain for self-reflection and self-examination. It allows us to exalt in the illusion of our own moral and cultural superiority. The world is far more complex than our childish vision of good and evil. We as a nation and a culture have no monopoly on virtue. We carry within us the same propensities for terror as those we oppose.
The Muslim Indian Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century filled his court with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and belief. Akbar was one of the great champions of religious dialogue and tolerance. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief. He declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. His enlightened rule took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and in Rome the philosopher Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori for heresy.
Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our concept of the rule of law and freedom of expression, the invention of printing, paper, the book, as well as the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. The first law code was invented by the ancient Iraqi ruler Hammurabi. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka. And, unlike Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves.
The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle. There are aged survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who can tell us something about our high moral values and passionate concern for innocent human life, about our own acts of terrorism. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by historical and cultural illiteracy.
The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. The remains of villages destroyed by our bombs, the dead killed from our munitions, leave us too with bloody hands. We can build a new ethic only when we face our complicity in the cycle of violence and terror.
The fantasy of an enlightened West that spreads civilization to a savage world of religious fanatics is not supported by history. The worst genocides and slaughters of the last century were perpetrated by highly industrialized nations. Muslims, including Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, have a long way to go before they reach the body count of the secular regimes of the Nazis, the Soviet Union or the Chinese communists. It was, in fact, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia that protected minorities during the war while the Serbian Orthodox Christians carried out mass executions, campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing that left 250,000 dead.
Those who externalize evil and seek to eradicate that evil through violence lose touch with their own humanity and the humanity of others. They cannot make moral distinctions. They are blind to their own moral corruption. In the name of civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, they become monsters. We will never free ourselves from the self-delusion of the “war on terror” until we first vanquish the terrorist within.
Chris Hedges’ Truthdig column appears on Mondays. Hedges was Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.
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