Burn Frankenstein

Artist: Obsessive Gardeners

Lies Lies Lies

Gentlemen we have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government
Do you still think that jet fuel brought down the World Trade Center?

Does anybody else see a problem here?
If the government has nothing to hide why are they so afraid to answer a few questions?
This story does not add up

I'm on a mission to never forget
3,000 people that I've never met
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat

I'm on a mission to dig up the truth
You think we're stupid and there's no proof
Well let me tell you that the time has come
To pull the trigger on the smoking gun

America has been hijacked
Not by Al Qaeda, not by Bin Laden
But by a group of tyrants
That should be of great concern to all Americans

I'm on a mission to bring out the facts
You got your stories but they all have cracks
Misinformation, lies and deceit
What made you think that we were all asleep

Don't listen to me listen to your head
Don't listen to anything, they've said

Artist: Ministry

Constructing The Muslim Enemy From The Crusades To 9 11

Dr. Deepa Kumar is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. Her work is driven by an active engagement with the key issues that characterize our era -- neoliberalism and imperialism. She has been active in various social movements for peace and justice and has written numerous articles in both scholarly journals and alternative media.

Kumar's first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike, is about the power of collective struggle in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism. Her second book titled Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, looks at how the "Muslim enemy" has historically been mobilized to suit the goals of empire.

Kumar began her research into the politics of empire shortly after the tumultuous events of 9/11. She is currently working on a third book on the discourses of terrorism within the mainstream media and in the political sphere in the US. 

Hosted by the Center for Asian American Studies with generous support from the Office of the President, the Department of English, Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Middle Eastern Studies and the South Asia Institute.

THE REAL GRAND CHESSBOARD AND THE PROFITEERS OF WAR

By Peter Dale Scott, 

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”  Dwight David Eisenhower,  “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1961, [1] “My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington.”  Former SAIC manager,  quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele,  “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007[2] “We make American military doctrine”  Ed Soyster, MPRI[3] In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence. The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing “the Great Game,” and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan. Expanded by Karl Haushofer and other Germans into the alleged “science” of geopolitics, this doctrine helped to inspire Hitler’s disastrous Drang nach Osten, which in short order terminated the millenary hopes of the Nazi Third Reich. One might have thought that by now the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler would have subdued all illusions that any single power could command the “World Island,” let alone the world. Kissinger for one appears to have learned this lesson, when he wrote that: “By geopolitical, I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium.”[6] But (largely because of his commitment to equilibrium in world order) Kissinger was swept aside by events in the mid-1970s, leading to the triumph of the global dominance mindset, as expressed by thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski.[7] Brzezinski himself has recognized how his gratuitous machinations in Afghanistan in 1978-79 produced the responses of al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism. Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism, Brzezinski replied: “Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’” Nouvel Observateur: “And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” When he was asked whether Islamic fundamentalism represented a world menace, Brzezinski replied, “Nonsense!”[8] In some ways, the post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power: he notably warned against the Gulf War in 1990 and also Vice-President Cheney’s agitations when in office for some kind of preemptive strike against Iran. But he has never retracted the Mackinderite rhetoric of his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which revives the illusion of “controlling” the Eurasian heartland: For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.” (p. xiii) “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” (p.30) “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” (p.40)[9] This kind of brash talk is not unique to Brzezinski. Its call for unilateral dominance echoed the 1992 draft DPG (Defense Planning Guidance) prepared for Defense Secretary Cheney by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis “Scooter” Libby: “We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”[10] It is echoed both in the 2000 PNAC Study, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” and the Bush-Cheney National Security Strategy of September 2002 (NSS 2002).[11] And it is epitomized by the megalomanic JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020, “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.”[12] Such overblown rhetoric is out of touch with reality, dangerously delusional, and even arguably insane. It is however useful, even vital, to those corporations who have become accustomed to profiting from the Cold War, and who faced deep cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are joined by other groups (discussed below) that also have a stake in preserving the dominance mindset in Washington. These include the new purveyors of privatized military services, or what can be called entrepreneurial violence, in response to defense budget cuts. The Real Grand Chessboard: Those Profiting from Enduring Violence The delusional grandiosity of Brzezinski’s rhetoric is inherent above all in the false metaphor of his book title. “Vassals” are not chess pieces to be moved effortlessly by a single hand. They are human beings with minds of their own; and among humans an unjust excess of power is certain to provoke not only resentment but ultimately successful resistance. One can see this easily in Asia, from the evolution of anti-Americanism in Iran to the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) in Central Asia: although still ostensibly nonviolent, HT’s rhetoric is now more and more aggressively anti-American.[13] The notion of a single chess player is equally false, especially in Central Asia, where dominant states (the U.S., Russia, and China) and local states are all alike weak. Here major multinational corporations like BP and Exxon are major players. In countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan they dwarf both local state power and also the U.S. governmental presence, whether official or covert. The true local powers are apt to be two which governments are notoriously inept at controlling: first, the “agitated Muslims” which Brzezinski insanely derided, and second, illicit trafficking, above all drug trafficking.[14] Ultimately however Brzezinski is not constrained by his chess metaphor. The goal of a chess game is to win. Brzezinski’s goal is quite different: to exert permanent restraints on the power of China and above all Russia. He has thus sensibly opposed destabilizing moves like a western strike on Iran, while supporting the permanent containment of Russia with a ring of western bases and pipelines. (In 1995 Brzezinski flew to Azerbaijan and helped negotiate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijan to Turkey.)[15] As I have argued elsewhere, Brzezinski (though he no doubt thinks to himself in terms of strategy) thus promotes a policy that very much suits the needs of the oil industry and its backers. These last include his patrons the Rockefellers, who first launched him into national prominence.[16] In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration’s energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney’s Energy Task Force.[17] The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq’s oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine “Exploration Blocks.” One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney’s Task force would consider “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”[18]Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for “an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.”[19] Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon’s neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon “rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda.”[20] Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called “faith-based intelligence,” became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted. Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam’s WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.[21] Miller’s book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that “Saddam was not only behind the ’93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself.”[22] Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.[23] Private Military Contractors (PMCs), Whose Business is Violence for Profit The inappropriateness of a military response to the threat of terrorism has been noted by a number of counterterrorism experts, such as retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich: the concept of global war as the response to violent Islamic radicalism is flawed. We ought not be in the business of invading and occupying other countries. That’s not going to address the threat. It is, on the other hand, going to bankrupt the country and break the military.[24] Because of budgetary constraints, America has resorted to uncontrollable subordinates to represent its public power in these remote places. I shall focus chiefly in this essay on one group of these, the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25] With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was “to buy reprieve by offering bribes.”[27]) To offset the pressure on limited armed forces assets, Donald Rumsfeld escalated the increasing use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in the Iraq War. At one point as many as 100,000 personnel were employed by PMCs in the US Iraq occupation. Some of them were involved in controversial events there, such as the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the killing and burning of four contract employees in Fallujah. The license of the most controversial firm, Blackwater, was terminated by the Iraqi government in 2007, after eight Iraqi civilians were gratuitously killed in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion.[28] (After much negative publicity, Blackwater renamed itself in 2009 as Xe Worldwide.) Insufficiently noticed in the public furor over PMCs like Blackwater was the difference in motivation between them and the Pentagon. Whereas the stated goal of Rumsfeld and the armed forces in Iraq was to end violence there, the PMCs clearly had a financial stake in its continuation. Hence it is no surprise that some of the largest PMCs were also political supporters for pursuing the ill-conceived “War on Terror.” Blackwater was the most notorious example; Erik Prince, its founder and sole owner, is part of a family that figures among the major contributors to the Republican Party and other right-wing causes, such as the Council for National Policy. His sister once told the press that “my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party.”[29] Private Intelligence Companies and the Provision of Violence Blackwater has attracted the critical attention of the American Mainstream Media. But it was a mere knight on the grand chessboard, albeit one with the ability to influence the moves of the game. Far less noticed has been given to Diligence LLC. Diligence, a more powerful company, that unlike Blackwater interfaced heavily with Wall Street, “set up shop in Baghdad [in July 2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients.”[30] Certainly the political clout of Diligence outshone and outlasted Blackwater’s. Two of its founding directors (Lanny Griffiths and Ed Rogers) were also founders of the influential Republican lobbying team Barbour Griffiths and Rogers (later renamed BGR). Haley Barbour, the senior founder of BGR, also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off: Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31] Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose purpose has been described by the New York Times as “a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects.”[32] Its political clout was outlined in the Financial Times: New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.[33] The firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers was the initial funder of Diligence, which shares an office floor with BGR and New Bridge in a building four blocks from the White House. The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother.[34] When Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, resigned, he became a director of Diligence, and also joined Henry Kissinger to head, until 2008, Kissinger McLarty Associates. Another Private Intelligence Contractor or PIC is Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), an $8 billion corporation involved in defense, intelligence community, and homeland security contracting. In the words of veteran journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele, SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word “terrorism.” SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government….[SAIC] epitomizes something beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare—the “military-industrial-counterterrorism complex.”[35] (Later their article made it clear that SAIC is not a unified bureaucracy, but more like a platform for individual entrepreneurship in obtaining contracts: “at SAIC your job fundamentally was to sell your high-tech ideas and blue-chip expertise to [any] government agency with money to spend and an impulse to buy.”)[36] Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates was a member of SAIC’s board of directors. SAIC personnel have also been recruited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA. Scores of influential members of the national-security establishment clambered onto SAIC’s payroll, among them John M. Deutch, undersecretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; Rear Admiral William F. Raborn, who headed development of the Polaris submarine; and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served variously as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the C.I.A., and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[37] SAIC helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam’s WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq. SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission’s deputy director for review, a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC’s sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA. David Kay, who later chaired the Iraq Survey Group (which showed that Hussein didn’t possess WMD, thereby proving that the war was launched under false pretenses), is also an SAIC shareholder and former director of SAIC’s Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.[38] Needless to say, this SAIC-stuffed commission did not report that SAIC itself had been a big part of the problem. But according to Barlett and Steele, the same David Kay in 1998 told the Senate Armed Services Committee: that Saddam Hussein “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction” and that “military action is needed.” He warns that unless America acts now “we’re going to find the world’s greatest military with its hands tied.” Over the next four years, Kay and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a “military analyst.” It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC’s board of directors and a company stockholder…. 9/11 was a personal tragedy for thousands of families and a national tragedy for all of America, but it served the interests of private intellience and military contractors including SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched its “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), whose chief consequence has been to channel money by the tens of billions into companies promising they could do something—anything—to help. SAIC was ready. Four years earlier, anticipating the next big source of government revenue, SAIC had established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. According to SAIC, the purpose of the new unit was to take “a comprehensive view of terrorist threats, including the full range of weapons of mass destruction, more traditional high explosives, and cyber-threats to the national infrastructure.” In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.[39] Barlett and Steele could have mentioned that SAIC senior analyst Fritz Ermarth, a long-time associate of Gates from his years in the CIA, is now an official of the Nixon Center. Commenting in 2003 on State Secretary Colin Powell’s briefing to the UN Security Council, Ermarth praised Powell for his charges (repeating one of Judith Miller’s false stories) about Saddam’s acquisition of aluminum tubing “for centrifuges and not rocketry.” Ermarth faulted Powell however for not mentioning two matters: Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (a charge by Laurie Mylroie now generally discredited), and that “During the 1970s and 1980s…the USSR and its allies supported terrorists in Western Europe and in Turkey,” (alluding to the false charges, promoted at the time by Robert Gates and Claire Sterling, about Mehmet Ali Agça’s attempted assassination of Pope Paul II).[40] I certainly do not wish to suggest that SAIC single-handedly created the will to fight in Iraq. The combined efforts of defense contractors, oil companies, PMCs and PICs created a mindset in which all those eager for power were caught up, including, I have to say, career-minded academics. In Iraq as in Afghanistan and Vietnam a generation earlier, a sure ticket to consultations in Washington was support for interventions that ordinary people could see would be disastrous. The yea-saying of academics has approved even the privatization of intelligence which we have just been describing. According to political scientist Anna Leander, Private firms not only provide, but also analyse intelligence. Private translators, analysts and ‘interrogators’ are hired, as illustrated by the involvement of Titan and CACI in Abu Ghraib. Even more directly, private firms are hired in to assess threats and risks and suggest what to do about them. This involves constructing a security picture as done for example, by Diligence LLC and SAIC, two firms specialised in intelligence gathering and analysis….. This privatisation of intelligence has direct consequences for the relation between PMCs and security discourses. It places the firms in a position where they are directly involved in producing these discourses. They provide a growing share of the information that forms the basis of decisions on whether or not something is a security concern. Leander concludes that this privatization is beneficial: it “empower[s] a more military understanding of security which, in turn, empowers PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts.”[41] Another political scientist, Chaim Kaufmann, has noted more critically that arguments for escalation and what he calls threat inflation against Iraq were not adequately disciplined by “the marketplace of ideas.” He gives five reasons for this failure, duly supported by other political scientists. But the obvious reason mentioned by Barlett and Steele – profit – is not mentioned.[42] What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war. The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors — domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out. “As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counterintelligence Field Activity office in 2002 and filled its staff with contractors from Booz Allen, BAE systems, SAIC, and other suppliers of cleared personnel. CIFA, as we’ve seen, was used against people suspected of harboring ill will against the Bush administration and its policies….At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts…. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers.”[43] These fusion centers, “which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.” [44] Responding to such criticisms, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated in March 2009 that the mandate of fusion centers was not to launch independent domestic surveillance operations but connect the dots between lawfully obtained information already in fragmented “siloed” databases.[45] She did not mention that some of this information was from private and even anonymous sources. One SAIC contractor, Neoma Syke, worked at such a fusion center, wearing two hats: During 2003-2004, she was “working for SAIC” as a force protection analyst with “SAIC’s” 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was “a contractor for SAIC”, specifically, “SAIC’s” 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC’s Crisis Action Center.[46] Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His latest prose books are The Road to 9/11 (2007) and his reissued and expanded War Conspiracy (2008). His new book of poems (including political poems) is Mosaic Orpheus, from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Notes: [1] Dwight David Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1961 [2] Former SAIC manager, in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007 [3] The Economist, July 8, 1999. [4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 7-9. [5] Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919). [6] Henry Kissinger, in Colin S Gray, G R Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography, and Strategy (Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999). [7] For the events leading to the displacement of Kissinger see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 50-54, etc. [8] Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Union, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Steerforth, 2007). Thus Brzezinski’s obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal. [9] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: basic Books), xiii, 30, 40. [10] Memorandum of February 18, 1992 [11] For specific parallels to The Grand Chessboard, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 191-2. [12] “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance,” DefenseLink [13] Zeyno Baran, “Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Islam’s Political Insurgency,” Nixon Center, December 2004 [14] Brzezinski was so unafraid of Islamic jihadism that when National Security Adviser he convened a working group to deliberately stir up Muslim dissatisfaction inside the Soviet Union (Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-71). [15] He has since taken credit for persuading President Aliyyev of Azerbaijan to commit to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Geopolitically Speaking: Russia’s `Sphere of Influence’ – Chechnya and Beyond,” Azerbaijan International, Spring 2000, p. 24 This pipeline, a favor to U.S. and British oil companies, makes geopolitical but not economic sense; and is further destabilizing an already tense region. See Pepe Escobar, “Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus [16] Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-79. [17] Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, “Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force,” Washington Post, November 16, 2005. This story noted that CEOs of three majors had falsely denied this: ” A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate `to my knowledge,’ and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know. Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that ‘gave detailed energy policy recommendations’ to the task force.” [18] Scott, Road to 9/11, 188-89; citing Linda McQuaig, Crude Dudes,” Toronto Star, September 20, 2004; Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport,” New Yorker, February 16-23, 2004. [19] Scott, Road to 9/11, 189; “Strategy Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century,” Report of the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy and Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 40, emphasis added. [20] Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?” New Yorker, May 6, 2003 [21] Michael Massing, “Now They Tell Us,” New York Review of Books, February 26, 2004 [22] Peter Bergen, “Armchair Provocateur — Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist,” Washington Monthly, December 2003 [23] For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York, Basic Books), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166, etc. (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68-70 (Mylroie). [24] Jon Wiener, “Obama’s Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich,” Nation, August 28, 2008, Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backwards when the U.S. invaded Iraq. “Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War,” MSNBC, July 9, 2005. Peter Bergen agrees: “Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11″ (Bergen, “The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages,” Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies, 246): “Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country.” [25] I am not the first to notice the analogy. See e.g. Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, “The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications,” U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002, 104. [26] Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 22. [27] Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds.), Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286. [28] “Iraq Reviewing Security Firms After Blackwater Shooting,” FoxNews.com, September 18, 2007 [29] “The former Betsy Prince — Edgar and Elsa’s daughter, Erik’s sister — married into the DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (`I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees” (Ben Van Heuvelen, “The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater,” Salon, October 2, 2007, Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006). [30] David Isenberg , “Corporate Mercenaries – Part 2: Myths and mystery,” AsiaTimes, May 19, 2004. [31] David Isenberg, “Myths and mystery,” Asia Times, 5/20/04. While in CIA, Bruner negotiated the deal for Ahmad Chalabi and the CIA to work together (Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War [New York: Nation Books, 2009], 76). Bruner later joined BGR and in 2007 became the full time chairman of BKI Strategic Intelligence. In 2004 Bruner participated with BGR and an Israeli PMC operative in a scheme to help re-elect George W. Bush. (Laura Rozen, “From Kurdistan to K Street,” Mother Jones, November 2008. [32] Douglas Jehl, “Washington Insiders’ New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq,” New York Times, September 30, 2003. [33] Financial Times, 12/11/03. Ed Rogers, Diligence’s vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush’s top assistants when he was US president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers used Adnan Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64). [34] Ibid. Cf. Mother Jones, March/April 2004: “More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.’s ex-campaign manager to “take advantage of business opportunities” in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week.” [35] “SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the “expertise” behind the Iraq war….[SAIC is] a “stealth company” with 9,000 government contracts, many of which involve secret intelligence work” (Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007. [36] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [37] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow: “Mark A. Boster left his job as a deputy assistant attorney general in 1999 to join SAIC, and was already calling Justice three months later on behalf of his new employers—a violation of federal law. Boster paid $30,000 in a civil settlement.” Yet another PIC for a while was Interop, combining former CIA director James Woolsey and former FBI director Louis Freeh with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom (Rozen, “From Kurdistan to K Street). [38] Charlie Cray, “Science Applications International Corporation,” CorpWatch, cf. Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [39] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [40] Fritz W. Ermarth, “Colin Powell’s Briefing to the Security Council: Brief Comments from an Ex-Intelligence Officer,” In the National Interest. Ermarth’s remarks were also posted by Laurie Mylroie, “Fritz Ermarth, Iraq & Al Qaeda, In The National Interest,” February 5, 2003. [41] Anna Leander, “The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 2005; 33; 803, emphasis added. At the time the Observer reported from ” sources in the Bush administration” an allegation that “members of the al-Qaeda network, detained and interrogated in Cairo, had obtained phials of anthrax in the Czech Republic” (“Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks,’” Observer, October 14, 2001. [42] Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas,” International Security (Summer 2004). Neither SAIC nor Diligence is mentioned in his essay. [43] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 344. [44] Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains phrases such as “It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards.” [45]  Phil Leggiere, “Napolitano Praises Fusion Centers.” HSToday, March 13, 2009. [46] Assange, “The spy who billed me twice.”

Truth & Lies In The War On Terror

John Pilger breaks the silence and investigates American foreign policy in the world

By John Pilger

American Anthrax

Media Roots presents American Anthrax, a documentary comprised of news footage that establishes, by history's own narration, how everything you've been told about the Anthrax Attacks is a lie. Conceptualized, edited and produced by Robbie Martin, co-host of Media Roots Radio.

September 11, 2001, shook the United States to the core, a country that had been nearly untouchable since its democratic inception. However, immediately following this horrific tragedy, another equally as impactful 'terrorist attack' occurred when weaponized anthrax was sent to multiple Congressman and journalists through the U.S. Postal Service.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were both one-time events that happened in two prominent cities. Unlike 9/11, the Anthrax Attacks localized terrorism and spread fear to every corner of American life, where the simple act of getting your mail could prove to be fatal. Five people died as a result of breathing in the deadly anthrax spores, including postal workers and one NY Post reporter. Countless others were infected.

The Bush administration initially tried to link this 'second wave of terrorism' to al-Qaeda with zero proof. Once that talking point out-lived its usefulness, the official narrative began leaning towards Saddam Hussein and his mythological biological weapons program.

Establishment propagandists like John McCaine and ABC news reporters intentionally spread disinformation to plant the seed in the public mind that the anthrax came from Iraq, which eventually lead to Colin Powell's infamous 2003 WMD speech at the UN. All the while, the U.S. government was fully aware that the anthrax did not come from an external source, because the strain showed tell-tale signs of being a specific anthrax strain that was weaponized and manufactured by the U.S. military.

Regardless, the idea of the Anthrax Attacks being executed by an external terrorist organization remained conventional wisdom the public was conditioned into believing in the aftermath of 9/11. Eventually, two men were accused of being the perpetrators behind the attacks, yet no charges were ever brought to either of them. The first accused individual, Steven Hatfill, ended up being rewarded a multimillion dollar settlement from the government for being wrongly accused before any evidence was presented against him. The subsequent accused individual, Bruce Ivins, allegedly committed suicide while the FBI was trying to break him into confessing.

Ultimately, the FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to verify its evidence pointing to Ivins as the main suspect. Instead, the NAS concluded that the DNA in the anthrax sent in the mail was in fact not a match to the anthrax Ivins worked with. Before the National Academy of Sciences finished their independent investigation, the FBI rushed its pre-established conclusions about Ivins's guilt to the press, and the case was closed. To this day, the FBI has never commented on the many glaring contradictions in the official government narrative about the Anthrax Attacks.

Follow Robbie at @fluorescentgrey

http://www.mediaroots.org

9/11 In The Academic Community

“9/11 in the Academic Community,” a Winner of the University of Toronto Film Festival, is a unique film that documents academia’s treatment of critical perspectives on 9/11 by exploring the taboo that shields the American government’s narrative from scholarly examination. Through a powerful reflection on intellectual courage and the purpose of academia, the film aims at changing intellectual discourse on 9/11 and the War on Terror.

As well as probing the repercussions several scholars have endured due to their investigation of 9/11, this documentary provides an analysis of impairments in professional inquiry, ranging from the failure to critically reflect on terms functioning as thought-stoppers (such as “conspiracy theory”) to the structural approach that restricts inquiry to the broad implications of 9/11 while shutting out enquiry into the events of the day itself. Morton Brussel, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has stated: “The main thesis of the film concerns the silence of the academic community on this vital issue. I think it is extremely important and very well produced.”

As 9/11 served as the rationale for the Global War on Terror, the expansion of the military and intelligence complex, the invasion of other countries in violation of international law, and the curtailing of civil liberties, the film provides an inspiring demonstration of intellectual courage that will cause many scholars to reflect on the academy’s role and strength to dismantle the war system. As Alvin A. Lee, President Emeritus of McMaster University, has stated in his endorsement of the film: academics should “stand sufficiently outside society intellectually to see, understand, and interpret what is going on.”

Adnan Zuberi
Director and Producer

Now Available for Purchase – “9/11 in the Academic Community” (Documentary) -  - http://911inacademia.com/

Breaking Bad: America Has Used Walter White Logic Since 9/11

The earliest moral compromises made to fight terrorism spiraled out of control, doing grave harm at home and abroad.

By CONOR FRIEDERSDORF

In Breaking Bad, Walter White starts off as the most sympathetic of all possible meth cooks. A brilliant chemist, he is stuck teaching bored students at an Albuquerque high school. He does his best to support his pregnant wife and their partially disabled son, but earns so little that he must work night shifts at an area car wash just to make ends meet. Despite it all, he soldiers on dutifully until he is unexpectedly diagnosed with lung cancer. That trauma changes him. Suddenly he confronts the prospect of dying penniless. He doesn't want an impoverished widow or two kids without a college fund or even a small savings account. So he resolves to cook (and later sell) just enough meth to give his family a middle-class existence.

Of course, his plan from the start is to manufacture a dangerous narcotic. His profits will come from addicts whose lives are being ruined by his product. But we still begin in his corner. We see White as an unlucky man playing the hand he's dealt in a fallen world, where drug addicts will get high with or without his blue meth. Isn't it better, in a way, for him to manufacture Albuquerque's choice high? At least he isn't going to accidentally blow up his lab during a cook, or put out an impure product. Surely it's better for a dying, middle-class family man to be enriched than Tuko Salamanca, the cartel-backed sociopath who White and his product displace.

That's what we told ourselves. 

* * *

Reuters

America sometimes reminds me of Walter White.

Not in every way, of course. There isn't anything like a perfect parallel between the plot of Breaking Bad and the course that the U.S. has taken since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the unexpected trauma that made us look at our place in the world anew. I certainly don't think Breaking Bad's writers were attempting an allegory. But I submit that the show's arc (especially Walter White's character arc) imparts lessons about moral logic and its consequences that the U.S. ought to heed.  

White starts off with everyone's sympathy. But as soon as the writers have us rooting for him to get rich (and get out) before he gets caught, they produce five seasons that amount to a slowly unfolding rebuke to everyone who felt any investment in his success.

The source of our moral discomfort?

White "has cooked crystal meth in bulk, hooking addicts from his native Albuquerque all the way to Prague," Ross Douthat explains. "He has personally killed at least seven people and is implicated in the deaths of hundreds more. He has poisoned an innocent child, taken out a contract on his longtime partner, and stood by and watched a young woman choke." Every season is more riveting than the last, in part because having bought into the logic that prompted White to start cooking, we are implicated in the predictable consequences, and they just keep getting more gruesome. Of course he wouldn't be satisfied with the initial, relatively modest sum of money that he sought. Of course he would become implicated in the violence of the black market. Of course lying to his wife and son would be corrosive, and of course exempting himself from core mores and norms would put him on a slippery slope, where the prospect of being caught or killed keeps helping him to rationalize "one last" horrific moral compromise, even when there are alternatives. 

At some point, White crosses a line. Breaking Bad fans may not agree on the particular moment, but he eventually does something that causes a given viewer to think, "That's unforgivable."

But as abhorrent as we find his worst transgressions, as much as we tell ourselves that we could never condone them, we can't help but see how they flowed logically, if not quite inevitably, from the initial course of moral compromise he chose. It causes us to reflect on the earliest episodes and to reconsider our initial judgement. Is the lesson that it was always wrong to grant White any license to break bad? Or is there an alternative trajectory in which White could have cooked for a while without becoming a moral monster or doing much harm?

Either way, viewers can't escape the fact that White rationalizes even his worst atrocities with logic not unlike what viewers condoned when he first cooked. I'm not a bad person. I'm just trying to fulfill my responsibility to provide for my family. Bad circumstances forced me into these compromising positions—when I do bad things, it isn't the same as when other drug dealers do them. After all, I am not a criminal. Implicit all along is an unspoken rationalization. Walter White is a man who believes in his own exceptionalism. That's how he manages to think of himself as a good person, even as he orchestrates the death of an innocent man and poisons a child. As chilling as most viewers found that self-justifying quality, how many forgave him lesser sins early on in part because they saw him as an exceptional case? 

*  *  *

"Jes

Americans are, like Walter White, a self-justifying sort.

We see ourselves as exceptional. Often times we behave as if the rules that apply to the rest of the world, rules we want constraining them, don't and needn't really apply to us. We're not a regular nation, not like the Chinese or the Brazilians or even the French. Take it from The New York Times, our paper of record. Other nations forcing water into a prisoner's lungs is torture.

When we do it? Enhanced interrogation.

America doesn't torture. We're the good guys!

After 9/11 we wanted national-security officials to provide for our safety. Understandably so. They felt tremendous pressure to fulfill that responsibility. Couldn't they have done so without transgressing against basic laws, mores, and norms? Many in the Bush Administration didn't think so, but they didn't fully share that with us. They decided on what they thought was best for us, but thought telling us would be a bad idea: We might not go along with their plans for torture, indefinite detention, or warrantless spying. To be honest, many of us didn't really want to know the details of policy, or to follow the ideas of those making it to their logical conclusions.

What scary implications!

Over time, the consequences of the moral license that national-security officials granted themselves after 9/11 became impossible to ignore. Different Americans awakened to reality at different times. Some became apologists for the people in charge. A word or statute could always be twisted to launder their actions into what passed as legal, and it was easy enough to conflate "legal" with morally defensible.

Yet many others grew morally uncomfortable. Why?

Over 12 years, the United States has rounded up an unknown number of innocents and held them alongside terrorists at an island prison, without evidence, charges, or trial, keeping some for years even after deeming them no threat. The U.S. tortured an unknown number of prisoners in an official torture program, then destroyed evidence of it. Americans ran a prison at Abu Ghraib where many others were tortured and abused in the most disgusting ways imaginable. The Iraq War implicates us in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents. Successive presidents set precedents such that American citizens can now be put on a secret kill list on one man's orders and killed without any due process. A 16-year-old American was killed in a drone strike with no explanation given to this day; scarcely no one in power demanded one. With the blessings of the White House, the New York Police Department has ethnically profiled and spied on innocent Muslim Americans who were deemed suspicious for no reason besides their religion.

The NYPD failed to apologize, even after that destructive surveillance program sowed anxiety and mistrust in the community and produced zero counterterrorism leads. 

"So

America's drone program has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocents and nightmarish living conditions for Yemenis and Pakistanis under regular flight paths. What's more, the U.S. doesn't apologize, explain itself, and compensate the families of the dead when it inadvertently kills innocent people with drones. Instead, we do our best to pretend that we had no role in the killing, leaving impoverished survivors to bury their own dead, to repair their own homes, and to wonder if seemingly arbitrary death from the sky will take them next. 

As well, we've built a global surveillance apparatus unprecedented in human history, one so unaccountable that Americans only found out about violations of the Fourth Amendment and data collection on tens of millions of Americans because a contractor gave up his comfortable life in Hawaii and risked his freedom to tell us about it. If not for Edward Snowden, even the blatant legal violations of the NSA would still remain completely unknown to us. The United States is also violating the privacy of hundreds of millions of innocent foreigners, including leaders of close allies; intentionally undermining the security of global IT systems to facilitate spying; and doing great harm to American companies whose security we've breached. 

Looking back, this shouldn't surprise us.

On 9/11, innocents of all races and religions were murdered en masse. Additional attacks seemed imminent, and it wasn't long before anthrax was sent through the mail and snipers terrorized the Capitol. The shock changed our national-security officials.

In secret memos and rushed legislation, they resolved to transgress against moral and legal norms just enough "to keep us safe," and the public started off in their corner. Of course, almost from the start they were plotting torture, spying on innocents, exploiting the terrorist attack to push an invasion of Iraq and detaining the not guilty. But the U.S. public was still sympathetic. They saw America as a target of terrorism playing the hand it was dealt in a fallen world, where innocents were hurt and killed regardless. Wasn't it better, in a way, for America to maintain its role as benevolent global hegemon? We weren't going to start a nuclear war, as North Korea or Pakistan might in our absence. Better for America to assert itself overseas than to cede the Middle East to al-Qaeda, Saddaam Hussein, and Hezbollah.

It was a self-justifying kind of illogic with conclusions that seldom followed from the premises. 

Even today, national-security officials tell themselves that everything they've done has flowed naturally enough from that initial recalibration of their moral decision-making, their repudiation of a "pre-9/11 mindset," which Americans happily endorsed as the cancer of al-Qaeda filled the lungs of New Yorkers with black smoke.

That is exactly right: We got it wrong from the moment we declared that "everything changed," and it has stayed wrong. Lots of old rules did still applied, or should have.

Flouting them has proved corrosive.

Of course this is what happens when a traumatized nation gives its leaders license to hastily rewrite laws, reinterpret others in secret, and wield unaccountable power across the globe. Of course we invaded a country unnecessarily. Of course we've found self-justifying ways to torture illegally and kill innocents without taking responsibility for doing so. Of course we're still holding some innocents at Gitmo. Of course our civil liberties are being shredded and Muslim Americans are hit hardest. The world dealt us an unfair blow, and we used it as an excuse to break bad. 

We permitted who knows what to be done in secret. What did we expect?

We became inured to the selfishness of our actions.

We slid predictably down the slope upon which we stepped, and the farther we go the uglier it gets.

We haven't hit bottom yet or anything close to it.

"You 

National-security officials still insist all their actions are taken for the sake of their country. Dissenters can't help but suspect that, at least sometimes,that's just something they tell themselves as they enjoy wielding extraordinary power and making their own rules as they go. In any case, their actions have done more to harm than help the United States, just as Walter White did more to harm than to help his family. That's what happens when people decide they need no longer abide by civilizational norms.

Core values are there for a reason. 

What Americans have seen more clearly with every year are the consequences of granting ourselves extraordinary moral license, as if American exceptionalism means that anything we do is justified so long as there's a chance defensible ends will be advanced. It's Walter White logic we embraced—and it enabled morally monstrous behavior. Many legal and moral constraints serve as vital checks on human nature, and that doesn't change when you hire Saul Goodman or John Yoo to get around them.

The elaborate legal apologia for U.S. behavior obscures beneath jargon certain hard truths:

America is not justified in torturing because someone might have intelligence that may prove useful.

America is not justified in invading any country because it may one day pose a threat.  

America is not justified in holding anyone on earth prisoner for as long as it likes, without presenting any evidence or issuing any charges or holding any trial, due to a chance he's dangerous.

America is not justified in killing innocents with drones and fleeing the scene like a hit-and-run driver because it would be inconvenient for us to bear the consequences of our actions. 

America is not justified in spying on anyone and everyone on earth, just because it's possible that invading the privacy of hundreds of millions might make us infinitesimally safer. 

Yet we've done all that, and felt justified in doing so. 

The trauma of 9/11 is not an excuse. That we have a history of behaving more morally than some countries, that the world is better off with an American rather than a Russian or Chinese hegemon, is not an excuse. That national-security officials are often motivated by keeping their families and yours safe is not an excuse.

The real, ongoing threat of terrorism is not an excuse.

For so many of our actions, there is no excuse. And so we should reject the moral code that has enabled us to behave inexcusably. We should abide by older laws and norms whose value are now more apparent. To tweak and repurpose a great line from Skyler White, this country needs someone to protect us from the people who are protecting this country. We need it fast. And we're the only someones around to do it.

The Detroit Sleeper Cell That Wasn't

... after years of legal wrangling, the “Detroit Sleeper Cell” became something very different: a cautionary tale about the dangers of pursuing terrorism cases too zealously and connecting dots where they might not exist.

The Justice Department, after winning terrorism convictions against two of the men in 2003, took the extraordinary step the next year of moving to throw out the charges and repudiating its own case. 

Prosecutors, remarkably, discredited their own witnesses and found fault with virtually every part of a case they had brought.

The prosecution, the Justice Department belatedly acknowleged, was a “three-legged stool” that toppled under its own weight.

The videotape found of Las Vegas landmarks, originally thought to be a terrorist “casing” video, might have been simply a tourist’s keepsake. An audiotape thought to contain an anti-American hate speech appeared to be just an old children’s song in Arabic about a duck.

And the odd sketch in a day planner of what looked like a blueprint for an attack on a Turkish air base? Perhaps nothing more than a mentally ill man’s doodling of a Middle East map, prosecutors were forced to acknowledge.

Prosecutors turned against prosecutors. Ethics inquiries were opened and criminal charges filed — this time against two government officials who helped put the case together. Attorney General Ashcroft was reprimanded by the judge in the case for falsely linking the suspects to the Sep. 11 attacks in violation of a gag order.

There were no clear winners in the case; a certain loser was the federal government itself, as its “new paradigm” of thwarting terrorists before they struck clashed headlong into age-old notions of justice and due process.

We in the media breathlessly covered every warning and tip about threats real and imagined: scuba divers, cargo trucks, tourist helicopters around the Statue of Liberty, a cable-cutting blowtorch on the Brooklyn Bridge and more, as if they were the next big attack. 

But by 2004, the year that the case collapsed in court, the pendulum had begun to shift. Three years removed from Sept. 11, the Bush administration was facing tougher scrutiny of its tactics in the “war on terror” from the media, the courts and the public at large. The Detroit case, once a symbol of the new threat of Islamic terrorism, became a symbol of government over-reaching instead.

Weeks after the collapse of the Detroit prosecution, a Times colleague, Danny Hakim, and I wrote a long investigative piece that examined the unraveling of such a high-profile case. What we found was infighting within the Justice Department, internal doubts about the strength of the case, tainted witnesses and questionable legal tactics.

We found that, inside the Justice Department, prosecutors believed aspects of the case were weak even as they were moving ahead with a major terrorism indictment against the Detroit men.

“We can charge this case with the hope that the case might get better,” the head of the counter-terrorism section wrote in 2002, “and the certainty that it will not get much worse.”

In fact, it did.

Twelve years after the dramatic arrests of “the Detroit Sleeper Cell,” remnants of the case are still being litigated in the federal courts. The difference now is that the Justice Department is the defendant — the result of a long feud between the department and a former employee, Richard Convertino, the original prosecutor in the Detroit case.

The Justice Department blamed Mr. Convertino for much of the bungled case and even brought criminal obstruction charges against him in 2006 for reportedly withholding evidence from defense lawyers for the Detroit men. But Mr. Convertino was acquitted of the charges and insisted he became the scapegoat for bad decisions that were largely made by higher-ups in Washington.

Last year, an appeals court revived a lawsuit that Mr. Convertino filed against the Justice Department. He is trying to establish that someone at the department improperly and anonymously leaked his name to The Detroit Free Press in 2004 as the target of an internal ethics investigation growing out of his handling of the Detroit case.

Earlier this year, a judge ordered the newspaper to turn over internal documents related to its original story on the ethics charges. The legal battle over Mr. Convertino’s lawsuit could mean still more embarrassment for the Justice Department in a case it once embraced.