National shame shuffles along expensively

The outgoing Biden administration has managed to make a tiny bit of progress on cleansing the national shame which is the US gulag at Guantanamo.

Andy Worthington, who has stayed on top of our criminal travesty of justice, explains: 

In what will forever be remembered as a truly significant day in Guantánamo’s long and sordid history, the Biden administration has freed eleven Yemeni prisoners, flying them from Guantánamo to Oman to resume their lives after more than two decades without charge or trial in US custody; mostly at Guantánamo, but in some cases for several years previously in CIA “black sites.”

All eleven men had been held for between two and four years since they were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, and, in one outlying case, for 15 years.

A deal to release them in Oman had been arranged in October 2023, but had been cancelled at the last minute, when a plane was already on the runway, because of what was described, when the story broke last May, as the “political optics” of freeing them when the attacks in southern Israel had just taken place — although Carol Rosenberg, writing for the New York Times about the releases yesterday, suggested that “congressional objections led the Biden administration to abort the mission.”

Nobody who paid attention claims these guys had done anything except be brown Islamic men from a no-count country who got swept up in the national US spasm of vengeance after 9/11. 

Rosenberg describes the back story of our Cuban prison:

Guantánamo’s detention zone today is an emptier, quieter place than it once was.

The remaining 15 detainees are held in two prison buildings with cell space for about 250 prisoners.

The prison opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with the arrival of the first 20 detainees from Afghanistan. At its peak, in 2003, the operation had about 660 prisoners and more than 2,000 troops and civilians commanded by a two-star general. The detainees were mostly held in open-air-style cells on a bluff overlooking the water while the prisons were built.

The operation now has 800 troops and civilian contractors — 53 guards and other staff members for every detainee — and is run by a more junior officer, Col. Steven Kane.

It was always madness; at this point, the insanity is all that is left. And a few remaining prisoners who are tied up in legal proceedings that never advance because American civilian lawyers continued to argue, accurately, that their charges, even if justified, depend on information extracted by illegal torture.

No heroes, some villains

I already posted my retrospective on the evils of our Iraq war. Lots of writing about this 20th anniversary is floating around; my short item felt like more than enough for me -- knowing there will never be enough to make amends. 

John Ganz writes the substack Unpopular Front. His subjects are fascism, nationalism, history, and whatever catches his first-rate mind and heart.

His denunciation of the U.S. adventure in imperial war in Iraq is so searing that I'm moved to add some bits to the noise:

No one today can supply a simple reason for the invasion of Iraq that stands up to the slightest moral or factual scrutiny. Every attempt to provide a rationale for the war is patent sophistry or self-justification.

This groundlessness, this inability to situate the war in anything tangible or concrete, is simply because it was based on a lie. More than a single lie, it was based on thoroughgoing hostility towards reality itself. It was based on an absurdly oversimplified ideological picture of the world. It was based on the willful ignorance and manipulation of intelligence. It was based on the fictitious and fanciful idea that Saddam was somehow connected to Osama bin Laden, a falsehood that played on the fears and anger of a wounded and humiliated nation, ready to lash out. It was based on indifference to the actual history and culture of Iraq, as if we could just easily shape another nation to our will.

And, perhaps most disturbingly, it was based on the belief that projecting the image of power, of a tough and vengeful nation, was of paramount concern. The planners clearly thought about the war as it would play out on T.V.: in spectacular scenes that would impress audiences at home and abroad. “There are no good targets in Afghanistan; let's bomb Iraq,” Donald Rumsfeld remarked to Richard Clarke — There was just more to blow up.

... There is a tendency to try to portray the Iraq War as a “tragedy,” as a mistake, brought on by hubris or zeal. One should reject this framing, for the reason that it is intrinsically ennobling. Aristotle wrote that tragedy aims at making its subjects appear better than in actual life. Hegel thought tragedy did not result from the conflict of good and bad, but of two equally valid claims on conscience. The world of tragedy is a world of heroes, fate, ascents to towering heights and falls into the dark abyss; It is a world of high seriousness and profundity; of noble men with great flaws.

 ... All this is improper in the case of the war in Iraq. It is an attempt to use heady incense to cover up a noxious stench.

Do read it all.

Before the U.S. invaded in 2023, millions of people around the world took to the streets to denounce the American intentions. We knew better. But we couldn't stop the determined mandarins and fools that Ganz denounces. The peace movement did chip away at the legitimacy of the Bush/GOPer project, making significant opinion inroads, though too slowly. And Obama's muted opposition to the Iraq war certainly helped his presidential campaign in 2008, if not his subsequent policy priorities once in power.

My generation lived and fostered two society-shaking peace movements -- against the horror that was Vietnam and against this second Iraq war; some of us also thought better of GHW Bush's Iraq-1, and even of Afghanistan, but never achieved much traction against those.

And some of us now support the Ukrainian national struggle for survival as I do. But war is always evil and full of bluster and lies.

It's still going on ...

U.S. law is still being perverted to protect the Bush administration's torture regimen. And the result is the stuff of Alice-in-Wonderland.

The Supremes have decided, on a 7-2 vote, that, although the world has known without question since at least 2012 that the government tortured a Saudi citizen picked up in Pakistan while holding him in secret prisons in Thailand and Poland, somehow these crimes are covered by a "state secrets privilege." Therefore a Polish prosecutor cannot demand testimony from the rogue contractor-psychologists James Mitchell and John Jessen. Mitchell is so proud of what he did to Abu Zubaydah he wrote a book about it.

Only two Justices dissented from the absurd coverup. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing in a dissent joined by Justice Sotomayor, explained what U.S. agents did to Abu Zubaydah:

They waterboarded Zubaydah at least 80 times, simulated live burials in coffins for hundreds of hours, and performed rectal exams designed to establish “total control over the detainee.” Six days into his ordeal, Zubaydah was sobbing, twitching, and hyperventilating. During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” He became so compliant that he would prepare for waterboarding at the snap of a finger.

He continued:

... as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here. This Court’s duty is to the rule of law and the search for truth. We should not let shame obscure our vision.

The majority did not agree.

Oh, and it has further become clear that Abu Zubaydah was an inconsequential bit player in al-Qaeda. His torture was an experiment -- a test of what can we do to an enemy over whom we have absolute power. 

He will remain a permanent prisoner of the United States, convicted of nothing and charged with nothing, because we don't want to 'fess up to what we did to him.

Friday cat blogging: meet Noosa

She sure looks like a close cousin to Janeway, doesn't she?

According to the Washington Post:

Hisham Bin Ali Bin Amor Sliti often struggles with headaches and bouts of loneliness. At Guantánamo, he took comfort in the stray animals that wandered into the camp, and in Slovakia he keeps a cat that he named Noosa. “I like animals,” he said. “Animals are like small children. Innocent.”

Mr. Sliti, originally from Tunisia, was dumped into George W. Bush's law-free prison at Guantanamo in 2002. By 2014, U.S.jailers had realized he was just some loser they'd been sold by crooks in Afghanistan. They dropped him off in Slovakia. He has understandable PTSD and no reliable means of support. And not much life. And, having crushed a working class guy who wanted to be a mechanic, the United States takes no further responsibility for him.

At least he has Noosa.

In which Erudite Partner raises up Cassandras for our time

As the late, and unlamented, War on Terror drifts out of memory, Congresswoman Barbara Lee has finally been rendered some props for standing up on the floor of Congress in 2001 and warning that our rush to vengeance was simply wrong. She urged that we should not “become the evil we deplore.” We didn't listen.

For this stance, she can be compared to the mythical daughter of the king of Troy in Homer's Odyssey, the princess Cassandra, who warned that fighting the Greeks would end in destruction of the kingdom. She saw horror ahead. Nobody listened.

In 2003, nobody who mattered listened to the literal millions of people around the world who warned against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush crashed ahead into ignominy and failure.

Erudite Partner praises Barbara Lee -- and asks us to look around and listen to the Cassandras of our time -- in her latest essay for TomDispatch.

Some scary soldiers

There's been a lot of noise over the last week about whether the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, had violated the rules and traditions of civilian control of the military and breached political neutrality during the last days of the Trump administration. Milley apparently did assure the Chinese that his Commander in Chief was not about to launch an attack; dozens of officials were aware of this call and, except for Trump loyalists, consider Milley to have been doing his duty.

I'll take the judgment on this subject of former Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman. the officer who blew the whistle on Trump's Ukraine shenanigans and lost his career, over a bunch of Republican hacks. He thinks Milley did right, mostly.

But as a leftish-inclined observer of the U.S. military, there are some soldiers who are scaring the shit out of me. In a moment when the white supremacist right is openly plotting with "the former guy" to overthrow American democracy (such as it is), these are the guys who give me the willies. They have been been broadcasting their grievances. Jeff Schogol has the story:

Click to enlarge.

Since May, a Space Force lieutenant colonel has claimed that the military’s diversity and anti-extremism training are rooted in Marxism; a Marine lieutenant colonel became a lightning rod for openly critiquing military leadership over the Afghanistan withdrawal while in uniform; an Army lieutenant colonel has tried to resign just short of retirement because he believes that requiring troops to be vaccinated for COVID-19 is an “unlawful, unethical, immoral, and tyrannical order”; and a Navy commander has gone on Fox News to promote conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines.

It's not so much disaffected generals who might decide to go full fascist that worry me. It's mid-career officers like these. Many a fascist coup has counted on junior officers.

These soldiers have spent nearly twenty years fighting wars for which their civilian political leadership has never been able to define an attainable mission. They have watched people they know die -- for what? Then the pols have pulled them back -- and sometimes sent them right back into the crucible again. And when they come home, they are not treated as heroes. The country is oblivious to their efforts and wants to forget their wars. No wonder they are pissed -- and from the point of view of their superiors they present a discipline problem.

Schogol adds: 

Officers at that rank are above the company commander level, but not at the point where they have a star on their collar. Getting there is no small feat either, but it’s also an odd position in that field-grade officers aren’t quite “high ranking” but they have just enough rank so that people notice when they act out in public.

... The unanswered question remains: Why is the Defense Department facing an epidemic of O-5s who are embracing the “YOLO” philosophy in their careers.

One reason could be that officers at that paygrade are at a point in their careers where they may have “buyer’s remorse” about some of the decisions they’ve made along the way, said retired Army Col. Bob Wilson, who served on the National Security Council in 2016 and 2017.

“You’re at 17, 18 years; you’ve kind of chosen your lot in life, and you may not be super happy with it – a kind of middle-age kind of thing, mid-life thing,” said Wilson, a fellow with the New America think tank’s International Security program.

... However, one of the things that makes these recent incidents significant is that so many senior(ish) officers have so publicly ignored the military’s sacred commitment to maintain good order and discipline. 

“You just have to ask yourself: What is going on?” Wilson said. “Are we picking the right people for leadership positions? Are we educating people enough? That’s my concern. We have to be adaptive as a force. We have to be able to absorb information and uncertainty and make the best decisions possible for the mission and the people we’re responsible for. And you’re watching arguably senior people with a lot of training and experience invested in them, and they’re just being idiots on social media, on old school media...."

The U.S. military is Schogol's beat. He's not looking for it to go rogue. 

But I almost wonder whether Joe Biden took the out-of-the-ordinary step of putting a retired general, Lloyd Austin, in charge of the Defense (War) Department because such a leader might have a better handle on reining in this sort of politicized insubordination. Civilians need that.

I do think among the symptoms of a gathering right wing storm, military indiscipline is one of the more ominous ones.

Let's wave goodbye to some history ...

On Saturday, September 11, 2021, I could almost glimpse the phantom wraiths of 9/11 past (the American trauma, not the Chilean coup against democracy) gliding away, lost in the mists of history. After two decades -- dumb wars, hubris, ignorant Islamophobia. defensive xenophobia, disdain for civilized values and the constraining rule of law, and too much death -- perhaps we're moving on. 

The median age in this country was 38 last year. For an awful lot of us, 9/11 is either a childhood memory or no memory at all. I was 14 years old when it became 20 years out from the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Though that surprise assault reshaped my parents' lives and the country around them, I don't remember the commemoration. That trauma was their ancient history and I had my own battles to fight -- for civil rights for all of us and against another stupid war. 

All pundits are duly producing their retrospectives. I only want to recommend two:

• At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick shared a weary podcast interview with Baher Azmy from the Center for Constitutional  Rights, The Legal Repercussions of the War on Terror.

•  Garrett M. Graff spells out what many of us never doubted: After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong.

On to the next adventures in the never-finished cause of justice, humanity, and decency ...

A 9/11 wars after-action assessment and more

In the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada, the highly regarded non-fiction book reviewer, has written an insightful survey of some of the literature of the War on Terror: 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

Some telling excerpts; I highly recommend the whole:

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. ... 

...  In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized. It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism. 

... The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/11 world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kicking.

Lozada has chosen a valuable catalogue of horrors to highlight -- but I can't help mourning what's missing from it. In addition to these book-length journalistic critiques -- "just the facts" deeply reported if morally informed -- the "War on Terror" has left us with a vast literature in a number of genres.

• There was the deeply disillusioned, essentially conservative, military take from retired colonel Andrew Bacevich in America's War for the Greater Middle East. 

• The grunts on the ground have tried to explain what the war meant in their lives. In What It's Like to Go to War,  Karl Marlantes compares his war -- Vietnam -- with the experiences of another generation of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

• Joshua E.S. Phillips tells the story of U.S. soldiers and torture in a painful, caring little volume, None of Us Were Like This Before. This one deserved more visibility than it seemed to get. 

• National Book Award judges did take notice of a truly successful fictional portrait an enlisted man's mindset: Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk. Highly recommended, especially for football fans. 

Union Square, New York City, September 22, 2001.

I don't think we have yet a broad, thoughtful, book-length account of the citizen peace movement in this country against the War on Terror and its permutations. There were always nay-sayers from the first moments after 9/11, while the Towers site still smoldered. Those masks date from 2001.

In early 2008, I assembled a five part series on the peace movement for a conference of Historians Against the War. Looking these posts over more than 10 years later, they still provide a decent survey in what turned out to be still early days.

Part One: Trying to find the ground under our feet: 2001-2002  

Part Two: Afghanistan and the Iraq invasion; the antiwar movement builds some infrastructure and tries some initiatives: 2002-2003  

Part Three: Liberal elites get the bad news: U.S. has "lost" Iraq war; Presidential election subsumes activism: 2004-2005  

Part Four: Peace movement finds causes to support; Insurgent new Democrats and a counterculture emerge: 2005-2008  

Part Five: Lessons: 2001-2008

The grouplet that called itself Historians against the War now calls itself Historians for Peace and Democracy. This seems on point twenty years after 9/11.

Women at the wars

It's hard to imagine a more appropriate book to be reading while the U.S. war in Afghanistan staggered to its conclusion. Elizabeth Becker, a war correspondent in 1970s Cambodia and later with NPR and the NY Times, provided You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War. Her subjects are French photojournalist, Catherine Leroy; the inquisitive Frances Fitzgerald, a privileged daughter of an American diplomatic muckety-muck who cut loose from the expectations of her surroundings; and the Australian reporter Kate Webb who endured capture by enemy fighters. Their war was the sprawling conflict that spread across Indochina between 1955 and 1975. Here in the U.S., we usually call it just "Vietnam." And, as women journalists, they weren't supposed to be there at all -- reporting a war was exclusively a man's job and they were interlopers.

Because they weren't supposed to be there at all, they all arrived pretty much the same way: they paid for their own one-way tickets to Saigon and started working at whatever presented itself. Civilians could simply fly into South Vietnam and try to make a way, a notion that seems quaint today. (Though there was a moment in Afghanistan, say 2005 or so, when that might have been possible if you were bold enough.) Against long odds, they found outlets that would pay for what they saw, enough to get by on. And they followed their instincts, inventing new ways to escape military media handlers and cover a war.

Catherine Leroy spent most of her time on the battlefield taking striking photographs of war in the moment, stripped of patriotic poses. Frances Fitzgerald, the American magazine writer, filled a huge void by showing the war from the Vietnamese point of view [Fire in the Lake, 1972] and winning more honors than any other author of a book about the war. Kate Webb, the Australian combat reporter, burrowed inside the Vietnamese and Cambodian armies and society with such determination that a top journalism prize for Asian journalists is named in her honor.

These women were professionals, of necessity also adventurers, sometimes fragile, and usually remarkably courageous. Becker is a lively story teller and their stories make good tales.

But I value this book almost as much for Becker's accompanying account of the complicated, multifaceted course of the long Vietnam war. I grew to adulthood consuming reportage of this war, trying to keep track of self-immolating Buddhists and corrupt Catholics; of Communists who were building a nation and other Vietnamese who were dependents of or revolting against French and then U.S. imperialists. The boys of my generation might be drafted into the maelstrom and thousands were. Along with at least 3 million Vietnamese, 50,000 of those American boys died; many who came home were broken in body and spirit. And somehow the war spread into Cambodia and Laos. Sentient members of my generation knew it was wrong somehow, but keeping track of exactly how in real time was very confusing. On the home front, the war broke trust in the U.S. government and in both political parties.

Becker weaves the stories of these three women into a simple and readable narrative of the "Vietnam War." That's a huge accomplishment.

These women changed what was possible for women journalists in war zones. Sarah Chayes in Kandahar and Carlotta Gall from Kabul and Pakistan; Anne Garrels from Baghdad; and Lynsey Addario in Libya built upon their legacy during our unlamented "War on Terror."

That entire project has been irredeemable, but I'm grateful for its women chroniclers. Every one makes the human cost more imaginable.

Last U.S. plane flies away ...

It seems only right that we should get our news report of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan by way of a Pakistani English language channel, broadcasting from Kabul. Celebratory gunfire can be heard behind the reporter.

I'm glad the U.S. occupation -- that insult to Afghan humanity and sovereignty -- is over. I can say I never thought this was a right war; as I've argued many times, the right response to the attacks of 9/11 was to apprehend the intellectual authors of the crime and turn them over to the International Criminal Court. But empires don't do that ... instead we tried to remake the world according to U.S. druthers.

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, only Congresswoman Barbara Lee and about 7 percent of us objected. But by 2004, many had forgotten the U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan -- and stopped much caring so long as we didn't have family members serving there. Obama used disgust with the Iraq war to get elected in 2008 -- and boxed himself in to be run over by eager generals because he had labeled Afghanistan, in contrast to Iraq, "the good war." Nothing came of that except more dead people, mostly Afghans.

Foreign policy establishment war hawks, FoxNews personalities, and most Republicans have crawled out of their hidey holes to bash Biden for ending this moral and military abomination. Aside from some security wonks, they'd be cheering if their guy had done the deed -- if you think our exit was a mess, think what Trump would have made of it.

Against the media grain, there has lately been a great deal of interesting punditry arising from the U.S. imperial disasters in Afghanistan and beyond. Ezra Klein, who like most up-and-coming journalists of his generation once thought well of the Afghanistan adventure, is reflective. The best of this cohort have learned ...

“Look at the countries in which the war on terror has been waged,” Ben Rhodes, who served as a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, told me. “Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Somalia. Libya. Every one of those countries is worse off today in some fashion. The evidentiary basis for the idea that American military intervention leads inexorably to improved material circumstances is simply not there.” 

... This is the deep lacuna in America’s foreign policy conversation: The American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do. 

My heart breaks for the suffering we will leave behind in Afghanistan. But we do not know how to fix Afghanistan. We failed in that effort so completely that we ended up strengthening the Taliban. We should do all we can to bring American citizens and allies home. But if we truly care about educating girls worldwide, we know how to build schools and finance education. If we truly care about protecting those who fear tyranny, we know how to issue visas and admit refugees. If we truly care about the suffering of others, there is so much we could do. 

Only 1 percent of the residents of poor countries are vaccinated against the coronavirus. We could change that. More than 400,000 people die from malaria each year. We could change that, too.

Paul Waldman pleads for historical perspective. Broadly speaking, U.S. citizens are blithely oblivious to the harm we inflict on other peoples. We are mostly ignorant of war's horrors, unless we or our families have recently escaped one.

But millions of us think that we’ve really helped the people of Cuba, and if we just keep that embargo on for another few decades everything will work out. They think that Iraqis and Afghans appreciate all we’ve done for them. They think that anywhere there’s a dictatorship, people are saying, “What we need is an American invasion.” They think that if a drone strike killed their child, they’d say, “That was regrettable, but they were trying to do the right thing.” 

In many ways, we’re still in thrall to the (simplified) story of World War II, that we saved the world and helped it rebuild. But that war ended 76 years ago, and what has happened since shouldn’t give us any faith that tomorrow we can repeat what we did in 1945. The sooner we come to terms with that, the better off we — and the rest of the world — will be. 

David Rothkopf, a former Clinton-era official gone rogue on the foreign policy front, has been taking a lot of heat for arguing against the consensus that Afghanistan is a policy disaster.

Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan
If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame. Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement. 

... The very last chapter of America’s benighted stay in Afghanistan should be seen as one of accomplishment on the part of the military and its civilian leadership. Once again the courage and unique capabilities of the U.S. armed services have been made clear.  And, in a stark change from recent years, an American leader has done the hard thing, the right thing: set aside politics and put both America’s interests and values first.

I will continue to chalk Afghanistan up on the positive side of Joe Biden's ledger.

That's over -- for now

 

Joe Biden did the right thing in Afghanistan.

“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

This morning I got into it on an open thread and wrote this:

Afghanistan has been a shit show from day one. Now we're seeing some of it. We were wrong (practically, morally, and legally) to respond to 9/11 by failing to apply international criminal law to evil actors and thinking we had to use our hammer (the military).

Biden is having to carry the burden of making visible what has been implicit since 2002 at the latest. We had no business trying to remake that country. Ugly scenes -- but remember that the people of the US long ago gave up caring so long as their kids weren't among the casualties. 

Like Joe Biden, I'm sticking to my stance on this one. Since the beginning of this blog in 2005, I've probably written 50 posts about this aimless, fruitless campaign. I've reported on dozens of reporters' books. I've written about opium; I've written about women and education; and I've written about apparently boundless stupidity in Washington and a succession of military commands. This never worked and it was never going anywhere good.

Many more Afghans will suffer. Many already have. That reality comes as a physical injury to the Afghans and a moral injury to those of our forces who tried. 

But it's over.

Paul Waldman warns we can't be expected to have learned our lesson.

Just as before, there will be an effort to unlearn Afghanistan’s lessons so its mistakes can be repeated.

... We’re so convinced of our own benevolent intentions that we can’t wrap our heads around the idea that people in the rest of the world see us not as a force of altruism and liberation but as a global hegemon imposing its will and maintaining its control, so often indifferent to the death and dislocation it causes. They do not trust our motives, they do not share our confidence, and they often view our own history with a clearer eye than we do.

... One day — and it won’t be too long — another president will come along and tell us that morality and national security demand that we launch yet another invasion to add to our long list.

“By god,” he’ll say, “we’ve kicked the Afghanistan syndrome once and for all.”

The photo is from a protest in Pakistan in 2001.

Updates: refugees and security panics

So President Biden has quickly listened to the howls of his constituents and turned around since last Friday, promising to increase the cap on refugee admissions. That little democratic pressure exercise went well; let's keep the pressure on to assist refugees and add pressure for humane solutions to what will be an ever-swelling migration crisis.

Meanwhile, perhaps we need to create another immigration allotment for persons -- outside the refugee and asylum categories -- who should be entitled to relatively easy entry to the U.S.: people who can no longer live in their own societies and countries because of U.S. military adventures.

Cycling rally in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2018, Wikipedia

Michael Walzer  offers a suggestion prompted by our impending departure from Afghanistan:

When we leave, we must bring with us to the U.S. all the men and women, and their families, who are vulnerable to persecution, imprisonment, or death because of our invasion—directly, because they collaborated with us, but also indirectly, because they agitated for democracy, organized unions, or established schools for girls under our cover. It doesn’t matter whether or not we intended to provide this cover, though I think many Americans who went to Afghanistan wanted to do exactly that. This is an absolute moral obligation.

Probably a large number of the men and women at risk will want to stay where they are and continue their political struggle; we should make sure they have the resources we can provide. But any people who want to leave, whatever their numbers, should be taken along with our troops and diplomats. We should be preparing to welcome them when they arrive and help them settle in the U.S.

• • •

In the early days of the post 9/11 panic, federal spooks and law enforcement, having been caught with their pants down by the jihadi attacks on New York and the Pentagon, ran wild and dangerous. In addition to instituting security theater at airports, they went on an entrapment binge, rounding up barely assimilated, often half-witted, young immigrant Muslims in what they called terror plots. The feds got credit for protecting us; the pathetic terrorists went to jail for long terms.

It's time to re-examine that binge. Rozina Ali offers a piercing, sympathetic account of the characters and imaginary terror "plots" that came out of that time.

... sweeping legislation and policy changes cleared the way for the authorities to surveil whole communities, monitoring even those who had no connection to terrorism. Prosecutors were now able to build cases from invasive intelligence-gathering tactics that would have been restricted earlier. The U.S. attorney general allowed law enforcement to deploy informants from the earliest stages of a terrorism investigation, contravening the established practice of waiting until there was reasonable indication of criminal activity; the Justice Department further relaxed restrictions in later years, permitting such use of informants even when assessing a potential case. In trials, the government presented evidence gathered by paid civilian informants who latched onto low-income, vulnerable and mentally challenged individuals, urged them toward a plot and, in several cases, even offered money and supplies to carry out bombings. 

... Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government has imprisoned some 800 people on charges related to international terrorism, according to the Intercept database. But these numbers obscure a complicated reality. Many of these people were not found to have committed any acts of violence. Still, the government managed to achieve a high rate of conviction. Those accused of terrorism often pleaded guilty, usually because they were offered leniency in exchange for information, or because they knew they would almost certainly receive a longer sentence if they went to trial and were convicted. ...

Very much worth reading the whole story ...

In California, one federal judge has already tossed the case against Hamid Hayat of Lodi, a particularly egregious example of law enforcement inventing a threat that wasn't there. 

But hundreds of people remain locked up in federal prisons for thinly sourced accusations. Okay -- we were scared stupid for a season. But can we take a deep breath and look at freeing these people?

Graveyard of empires indeed ...

And so, finally, President Joe says U.S. troops are to leave Afghanistan, our long war that never found an achievable purpose. 

The easy, obvious and probably inevitable legacy of America’s two-decade-long war in Afghanistan is the recognition that there are limits to U.S. military power, especially when it comes to altering the culture and internal politics of other countries.

... On Wednesday, Biden is expected to announce that he will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11. The decision will also bring to a close U.S. involvement in a conflict that has spanned four presidents.

... the rise of China, the danger posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the threat posed by global warming and the collapse of the Islamic State have all made terrorism seem like less of a pressing threat.  (Washington Post, April 14, 2021)

Biden seems to have held, and still adhere to, what was the closest to a sane view among our imperial leaders after 9/11: focus on giving organized international Islamist terrorism a bloody nose, and then disengage. That would have saved a lot of lives, especially among people in the unfortunate places where George W and Dick the Snarling Veep saw a chance to play faux heroic cowboy.

Of course, it would have been better to catch and offer up the perps of the 9/11 atrocity to international courts. In 2001, the world would have cooperated and cheered. But empires which have not felt their foundations leach away aren't law abiding.

• • •

U.S. foreign policy elites still don't get it.

Just yesterday on Deep State Radio, I heard the often sharp historian of international relations Kori Schake explain that we shouldn't be disturbed that the US spends 12 times as much on the military as any other nation because: 

"in using military force, you never want to cut close to the margin, because you want to win by a lot because that's how you prevent people from challenging you ..."

What shooting war does Schake think the U.S. empire has won in the last seventy-five years?

I wish we didn't have to have this insanity beat out of us -- and so do the peoples of the world. In the end, we get tired of the bleeding.

After September 11 2001: the victims became the perpetrators

 

At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

[Brown University’s Costs of War project] report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

“This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”

While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing role in these conflicts. ...

It was both wrong and stupid to respond to a criminal atrocity by making wars without end. We have a national responsibility, however little we want to take it up. Some of us know that.

Challenging memorial observations

Andrew Bacevich visited the Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial in the sad, hollowed-out, town of Marseilles, Illinois.

Those whose names are engraved on the wall in Marseilles died in service to their country. Of that there is no doubt. Whether they died to advance the cause of freedom or even the well-being of the United States is another matter entirely. Terms that might more accurately convey why these wars began and why they have persisted include oil, dominion, hubris, the refusal among policymakers to own up to their own stupendous folly, and the collective negligence of oblivious citizens. Some might add to the list an inability to distinguish between our own interests and those of putative allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.

L.A. Times

The name of the retired colonel and historian's son is among those on the wall, but that is probably not the first thing he'd want you to think about him. He'd rather you ponder his observation of what his country has become on this Memorial Day.

Watch out for those camels; they take over

Erudite Partner's latest article for Tom Dispatch is available on Salon.

They are like the camel’s nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don’t be fooled, though. It won’t take long until the whole animal is sitting inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. ...

She warns that U.S. killer drones are spreading, anchoring deadly operations without much public disclosure in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia, Africa, and even the Philippines. And that's not the half: under Trump just who they are targeting has become less clear and which government agencies are choosing those targets has become more obscure. And now the Marine Corps is trying to develop a drone that won't even need a human operator with a joystick to launch fire and fury from the skies. ...

Read all about it.

The good solider Haspel testified

Gina Haspel had her public confirmation hearing for the position of CIA Director before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday. She's a career professional officer who headed up a torture site in Thailand during the GW Bush era and later had a leading role in ordering the destruction of the videotapes that showed what her agency did to detainees.

One of the oddest things about her nomination to such a public role is that the CIA refuses to declassify most details of her career (claiming agents/assets might be outed). So we are left without any real information about what she's done/her qualifications. The CIA says she's great. It seems to me that in a democracy citizens who are not Senators deserve to know more than that her agency likes her -- a lot more.

Erudite Partner did commentary during the hearing for Pacifica station KPFA; after all, torture is her subject. Here's the audio.

The following reflections are mine, not the resident expert's.

• The Democratic Senators' questions seemed sharper than they often have been in such settings. New Mexico's Martin Heinrich nailed the key issue, to my way of thinking:

  “I know you believed it was legal... ... I want to trust that you have the moral compass you said you have. You're giving very legalistic answers to very moral questions.”

• Nothing I heard suggests Haspel has real qualms about the torture program. She's not prepared to say torture didn't serve the project of defeating terrorist enemies -- though the 6000 page classified Senate Intelligence Committee report apparently came to that conclusion.

  “We got valuable information from debriefing of al-Qaeda detainees,” she told Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.). “I don’t think it’s knowable whether interrogation techniques played a role in that.”

• She said she wouldn't restart the torture program. It was hard to tell whether she was promising to stand up to the bully in the White House. (Trump thinks we didn't torture enough.) She seemed to equivocate.

  “No one should get credit for simply agreeing to follow the law. That’s the least we should expect from any nominee and certainly the director of the CIA,” [Senator Mark] Warner told Haspel ...

• Perhaps inevitably since we're not allowed to know anything about her accomplishments, she heavily emphasized her identification with the Agency.

  Haspel cited her support from the rank and file in the agency, noting that “they know that I don’t need time to learn the business of what CIA does. ... I know CIA like the back of my hand,” she said. “I know them, I know the threats we face, and I know what we need to be successful in our mission.”

She's such an unfamiliar, opaque figure that I am allowing myself luxury of trying to form a picture of what sort of person she revealed herself to be. (Usually one has more to go on than one hearing, but that's the situation in which we find ourselves.)

I think she's one smart, tough woman who came up wanting to be a warrior, a hero. There's weren't a huge number of venues for a woman with such an ambition when she joined the CIA in 1985. In the Agency, she found her tribe, her vocation where she could fulfill her ambition. She was very good at whatever they threw at her. She seems to equate loyalty to the Agency with loyalty the people of the United States -- without any inkling that there might be any daylight between those two goods. Perhaps that's inevitable in someone whose life has cloistered her within a dangerous, secret, social niche. It hardly seems good preparation to be anything more than a good soldier. But the job of CIA Director necessarily requires some understanding of a messy civilian society -- a society whose preservation is ultimately the only reason that her warrior caste is privileged to exist.

I don't know if she'll be confirmed; the White House apparently had to persuade her not to back out of the confirmation process last week.

The hearing didn't win any trust from me (not that this was ever likely.) A good soldier is a dangerous weapon when the Commander in Chief cares not a fig for law, decency, or morals.

War criminal named to head the CIA

You don't have to take my word for label in the headline. The NY Times reports Gina Haspel

played a direct role in the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition program,” under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.

The C.I.A.’s first overseas detention site was in Thailand. It was run by Ms. Haspel, who oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Mr. Zubaydah alone was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide.

Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper says this record shouldn't worry us.

“I think Gina will be excellent as director, as long as she is ready to be fired at a moment’s notice,” Clapper said in remarks posted to the Cipher Brief news site.

I am not reassured. Haspel already showed she rolls over and plays dead when higher authorities want wrongdoing hidden:

Haspel later served as chief of staff to the head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, when he ordered the destruction of dozens of videotapes made at the Thailand site.

Rodriguez wrote in his memoir that Haspel “drafted a cable” ordering the tapes’ destruction in 2005 as the program came under mounting public scrutiny and that he then “took a deep breath of weary satisfaction and hit Send.”

Those wusses Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham have made clucking noises about appointing a known torturer. Will they voter to confirm one?

Meanwhile California Senator Diane Feinstein, who as the lead promoter of the Congressional Torture Report which the Obama administration and the CIA tried to kill, seems to have gone squishy on the perpetrators of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

On Tuesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., signaled that she might be open to supporting Haspel's confirmation, despite her work on the black sites.

"It's no secret I've had concerns in the past with her connection to the CIA torture program and have spent time with her discussing this," Feinstein said in a statement. "To the best of my knowledge she has been a good deputy director and I look forward to the opportunity to speak with her again."

We continue to be shamed by the legacy of the Bush Administration's embrace of what Dick Cheney called "the dark side."

UPDATE: Now Senator Feinstein has gone squishy on being squishy. It's hard to pin that one down.

They so want to do the right thing and they know so little

'Tis the day for teachers to speak out. What with the NRA and our inhumanly oblivious simulacrum of a president bleating that teachers ought to carry guns and be taught to use them, many educators have joined their students in talking back for civilization.

Meanwhile, Erudite Partner's latest on what it has been like to teach college ethics throughout the U.S. Forever Wars since 9/11 has hit the internet.

Recently, former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus admitted to Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour that the war on terror’s first battlefield, Afghanistan, has become the locus of a “generational struggle,” one that more than a decade and a half later is not “going to be won in a few years.”

I’ve watched that generational struggle as it developed in the classroom. ...

These days, my students live in a country that has been at war almost since they were born, and yet, as is true with most of their fellow citizens, the fighting could be happening on Mars for all the impact it has on them. ... Most of them haven’t yet realized that, if their government hadn’t spent $5.6 trillion and counting on those very wars, there might have been federal money available to relieve them of the school debt they will carry for decades.

... The good news is that they want to learn. ...

Involuntarly, Parkland students are showing how the next generation might lead. E.P. has offered a chronicle of how the coming generation is growing into taking on the mess adults have made for them.

Can law survive permanent wartime?

Rosa Brooks is not a "delighter."

Delighter is the label I affix on George W. Bush, and even more on Dick Cheney and his minions. The 9/11 attacks served their purposes by offering an excuse to escape U.S. and international constraints on projection of lethal U.S. force wherever they saw or imagined enemies. And, conveniently, their Global War on Terror also freed the President and his executive branch from domestic democratic (small "d") expectations of judicial and legislative oversight, all in the name of "homeland security." The falling Twin Towers were a bonanza for politicians aspiring to increase presidential power to the detriment of legal limits.

President Obama seemed as if he might scale back some of the Bush-era power grab. But he didn't get there. Discovering a president had available military snipers who could kill Somali pirates with just three shots... in the dark, from the deck of a rolling ship must have been a rush. And understanding that he'd be blamed if some more competent terrorist than the underwear bomber succeeded on his watch, Obama retained much of the Bush-era global war abroad and furthered erosion of privacy and transparency at home.

Rosa Brooks is a Georgetown law professor, an expert on national security, international law and human rights issues. She served at the Pentagon working on these issues for a couple of years at the beginning of Obama administration. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon recounts her evolution from skepticism about US imperial adventures, through approval of Bill Clinton's "humanitarian" bombing in the Balkans, to horror at Bush's unbounded permanent war. She wanted a role in inventing something different. This book is the record of her further developing understanding of security, the U.S. military, and what has survived as a "rule of law" framework after a decade and a half of the Forever War.

The attacks might have been defined as egregious acts of criminality -- mass murders, or massive crimes against humanity, for instance. The United States instead chose to define the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. response as an "armed conflict" ...

So who was "right"? Were the 9/11 attacks "crime," or "war," or something in between: Isolated attacks triggering a temporary U.S. right to use force in self-defense, but not a full-fledged armed conflict? ... If we think of law as being game-like, you could say that these positions posed entirely novel questions that the rules of the game simply didn't address. ... In the "real world" of law and war, new actors and new technologies present [new] challenges: sometimes the rules just don't offer a right and wrong answer.

This book is a serious attempt to bring together an informed humanitarian and legal description of where the U.S. had come to in 2016 in our military and imperial ambitions and how evolving international law might both constrain and justify those actions and postures. It is a very good book full of fact and humane intent. She wants us to get real: there's insight here into the implications of targeted killings in faraway lands, of the drone war, of cyberterrorism, and of the increasing primacy of the U.S. military in all aspects of the state.

It's an exploratory book. According to Brooks, we've come to exist in a "blurred" condition somewhere between a formerly relatively clearcut "wartime" and "peacetime". If we are to have rules at all, we will need to imagine new ones.

... we can create new rules and institutions for global decision making. We tend to forget this. Instead we defer to the lawyers [asking questions outrun by realities.] We should be asking a far more urgent question: What kind of world do we want to live in -- and how do we get from here to there?

These questions might have gotten a hearing in a Hillary Clinton administration -- maybe, if people of good will had applied constant pressure. Under the Trump regime, we face an administration whose notion of legitimate power seems to derive from the chest thumping displays of jungle apes. It's going to take everything we've got --and a lot of luck -- to impose any limits.

Nonetheless, though probably it's not immediately applicable, I still want to highly recommend Brooks' take on war and law. I'm not anywhere near as confident as she is that U.S. military supremacy can be a global force for good. And I written in the past about what good soldiers do when misused and abused.

But for all my distrust of some of Brooks observations, she is the sort of lapidary thinker who gives legal reasoning a good name. If we ever get the chance to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, we need this woman. She's another one who probably ought to run for office if we're serious about democracy.