Saturday, 10 September 2011
September 11 Lessons: Combating Ignorance, Avoiding Arrogance
Ten years ago, we were right, but it didn't matter.
Ten years ago, within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, it was clear that the architects of US foreign policy were going to use the events to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of those policies began to articulate principled and practical arguments against the mad rush to war.
We were right then, but it didn't matter. Neither the general public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments.
The public wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized an opportunity to attempt to expand US power.
We were right, but the wars came.
The destructive capacity of the US military meant quick ''victory'' that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, each year it became clearer that the position staked out by the early opponents of the wars was correct. That mad rush to war had not only been illegal and immoral, but it was a failure on whatever pragmatic criteria one might use. The US military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organization, but we are neither stronger nor safer as a result. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as critics predicted.
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it is tempting to want to linger on the part about ''being right,'' but it's more important to focus on why ''it didn't matter'' because we are still right, and it still doesn't matter. Understanding this is necessary to shape a realistic political program for the next decade - as bad as the past ten years have been, the next ten are likely to be worse, and we need to speak bluntly about these political/economic/social realities in the United States.
What We Did, and Didn't, Accomplish
When I say ''we were right,'' I count in the ''we'' those people who can be described as ''anti-empire,'' rather than just ''anti-war.'' This is how I described that position in an interview:
The broad outlines of US foreign policy since WWII have remained unchanged: A desire to deepen and extend US power around the world, especially in the most strategically crucial regions such as the energy-rich Middle East; always with an eye on derailing the attempts of any Third World society to pursue a course of independent development outside the US sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to US hegemony from other powerful states. The Bush administration policy is a departure from recent policy in terms of strategy and tactics, and perhaps also in the intensity of ideological fanaticism.... None of this is unprecedented; all of it is dangerous and disturbing.
The folks at the core of the resistance to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq mostly shared that critique, seeing both the continuities and the distinctive threat of the moment. Others spoke out and organized, but offered no framework for understanding the invasions - liberal Democrats who prefer less brutal methods of empire maintenance or simply reject wars started by Republican presidents; isolationists, including some Republicans, who think that reducing military adventures will preserve US affluence; and folks who identify as pacifist and reject any war.
Although the anti-empire analysis has continued to be the most compelling explanation of US policy and its effects, anti-empire movements remain small. The movements that have seen some growth in recent years - the Tea Party and right-wing libertarianism - include some anti-war elements, but repudiate a left critique, of empire or anything else...
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Robert Jensen @'truthout'
Andy Worthington: Ten Years After 9/11, America Deserves Better than Dick Cheney’s Self-Serving Autobiography
On August 30, when In My Time, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s self-serving autobiography was published, the timing was pernicious. Cheney knows by now that every time he opens his mouth to endorse torture or to defend Guantánamo, the networks welcome him, and newspapers lavish column inches on his opinions, even though astute editors and programmers must realize that, far from being an innocuous elder statesman defending the “war on terror” as a robust response to the 9/11 attacks, Cheney has an ulterior motive: to keep at bay those who are aware that he and other Bush administration officials were responsible for authorizing the use of torture by US forces, and that torture is a crime in the United States.
As a result, Cheney knew that, on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that launched the “war on terror” that he is still so concerned to defend, his voice would be echoing in the ears of millions of his countrymen and women, helping to disguise a bitter truth: that, following the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was largely responsible for the abomination that is Guantánamo, and for the torture to which prisoners were subjected from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantánamo and the “black sites” that littered the world.
Alarmingly, while Cheney has been largely successful in claiming that the use of torture was helpful, despite a lack of evidence that this was the case, what strikes me as even more alarming is that many Americans are still unaware of the extent to which the torture for which Cheney was such a cheerleader did not keep them safe from terrorist attacks, but actually provided a lie that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
As a long time believer in unfettered executive power, Cheney’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks, along with those of his legal counsel, David Addington. The two men had met while defending Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, on the basis that the President should be beyond criticism, and it was Cheney and Addington who were behind a military order issued by George W. Bush on November 13, 2001, which established the President’s right to hold those he regarded as terrorists as a new type of prisoner (who later became the infamous “enemy combatants”), and, if he wished, to prosecute them in trials by military commission, which were designed to secure easy convictions and to use evidence derived through the use of torture.
It was Addington, no doubt after consultation with Cheney, who wrote the memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, which claimed that the Geneva Conventions contained “quaint” provisions, and that the circumstances in which the “war on terror” was being waged rendered “obsolete” the Conventions’ “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” The memo advised the President to discard the Geneva Conventions for the prisoners at Guantánamo, which had opened two weeks earlier...
As a result, Cheney knew that, on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that launched the “war on terror” that he is still so concerned to defend, his voice would be echoing in the ears of millions of his countrymen and women, helping to disguise a bitter truth: that, following the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was largely responsible for the abomination that is Guantánamo, and for the torture to which prisoners were subjected from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantánamo and the “black sites” that littered the world.
Alarmingly, while Cheney has been largely successful in claiming that the use of torture was helpful, despite a lack of evidence that this was the case, what strikes me as even more alarming is that many Americans are still unaware of the extent to which the torture for which Cheney was such a cheerleader did not keep them safe from terrorist attacks, but actually provided a lie that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
As a long time believer in unfettered executive power, Cheney’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks, along with those of his legal counsel, David Addington. The two men had met while defending Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, on the basis that the President should be beyond criticism, and it was Cheney and Addington who were behind a military order issued by George W. Bush on November 13, 2001, which established the President’s right to hold those he regarded as terrorists as a new type of prisoner (who later became the infamous “enemy combatants”), and, if he wished, to prosecute them in trials by military commission, which were designed to secure easy convictions and to use evidence derived through the use of torture.
It was Addington, no doubt after consultation with Cheney, who wrote the memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, which claimed that the Geneva Conventions contained “quaint” provisions, and that the circumstances in which the “war on terror” was being waged rendered “obsolete” the Conventions’ “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” The memo advised the President to discard the Geneva Conventions for the prisoners at Guantánamo, which had opened two weeks earlier...
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Swept up and away
Previously released cables also featured unvarnished opinions. But the new lot include the names of people who talked to American officials. In countries like China that could bring nasty consequences. Even the most ardent advocates of open government would not defend the publication (also in the cables) of the private phone numbers of foreign leaders, such as the Queen of the Netherlands (a note adds that she speaks English well). WikiLeaks had earlier worked with media allies who edited out such sensitive details, though relations have now soured.
The cause of the fiasco is that WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, let multiple copies of a master file containing all the cables proliferate online, all encrypted with the same password (actually a phrase) that he had given David Leigh, a Guardian journalist. Mr Leigh later published the passphrase in a book (he says he thought it was no longer valid). People—perhaps including estranged former supporters of Mr Assange’s—started dropping hints until the secret was out. WikiLeaks has now joined other sites in publishing the cables in full.
Mr Assange’s file management looks sloppy, but Mr Leigh’s blunder seems bigger: since digital data is easily copied, safeguarding passwords is more important than secreting files. James Ball, an ex-ally now also at the Guardian, says Mr Assange intended to publish the bulk of the cables, unexpurgated, anyway, once he had released the juiciest ones to the media.
Either way, the damage is done. Diplomats may now be cagier about what they put in cables, but their work has not ground to a halt. The leaks show “we have not been lied to,” says a foreign diplomat. The lines American officials maintained to their allies turn out to be largely what they also told their bosses, she says. Carne Ross, a former British envoy who now runs Independent Diplomat, a consultancy, says that the risk of leaks may encourage more official integrity. A senior European politician dismisses that as “bullshit”.
The only consolation to harried diplomats and their fearful interlocutors is that another leak on this scale seems unlikely. America has tightened the rules that once gave some 2.5m people—including the alleged leaker, Bradley Manning, an army private—access to everything classified “secret” and below. Most other rich-world governments were already more careful than America was; they are even more so now.
But digital records are inherently vulnerable. WikiLeaks is just one prominent example of the assault on government security. An operation dubbed GhostNet, apparently originating in China, pilfered information from over 100 countries. Any of it could end up leaked.
WikiLeaks itself seems in trouble. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, once a leading member, has left to set up his own outfit, OpenLeaks. His absence temporarily crippled the ability of WikiLeaks to accept new submissions. It has had trouble fund-raising (you can buy Ku Klux Klan garb with major credit cards, but for months issuers barred donations to WikiLeaks). Mr Assange, dogged by leaks about misrule and mayhem, is fighting extradition from Britain to Sweden on sex-assault charges; a judgment is due next month. Though WikiLeaks made a big splash, wider changes in online publishing now matter more.
His legacy, however, will remain. WikiLeaks was not the first site to create an electronic dead-letter drop, but it was the first to try to combine it with a legal structure as impervious as its technical one, by basing its servers in countries with strong privacy laws. Copycat sites have sprung up, though SafeHouse, a submissions page at the Wall Street Journal, drew derision for its plentiful caveats and get-out clauses.
Still, that approach may be more honest. Replicating WikiLeaks, it seems, is hard. OpenLeaks is trying, and unlike WikiLeaks it plans to let leakers decide who gets their material; but nearly a year after Mr Domscheit-Berg started, it still isn’t accepting submissions. And he too is making enemies. A German hackers’ outfit, the Chaos Computer Club, has expelled him, ostensibly for asking its members to test his system. In fact, say German media reports, the hackers felt he had mishandled relations with Mr Assange.
John Young of Cryptome, the oldest and best established whistle-blowers’ site, says that the fundamental mistake made by WikiLeaks was to promise an impossible level of security. (Cryptome explicitly says it “never claims trustworthiness, authenticity or security…Expect to be deceived.”) Everyone will learn from Mr Assange’s failures. People will have more ways to leak secrets, and will think harder about whom to entrust them to—especially media outfits that claim to be tech-savvy and trustworthy. Governments and companies will be warier about what they put online. That is an indelible record.
@'The Economist'
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