The following was sent to Pen-L by Jim Devine (without comment). A peculiar feature of it is that McDermott, after clearly establishing that the political leadership is responsible for the practices analyzed, he shifts the problem from that leadership to the dangers of the apparatus "getting out of control." That is of course an actual danger, but it is not a present danger: the present danger comes from the political leadership itself. Nevertheless the account McDermott gives is a bit disturbing, to say the least.
It also bears significantly on the question of whether leftists should be concerned with the DP or the so-called "Right." This national security state and the repressive apparatus now in place is obviously a bi-partisan policy. I would suggest that it is only an independent left mass movement that can fight this repressive machinery, and clearly (as I argued in my first post) it is the DP which is the main enemy of those attempting to build such a movement. An obsession with the "Right" cripples left thought and analysis.
Carrol
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from John McDermott:
OBAMA PLUS & MINUS : # II: WAR ON TERROR
There is no positive side to the President's War on Terror. His Administration overrides the distinction between legal and illegal governmental actions. In some respects the War on Terror is misnamed; it is more often than not a terror war against terror. As with Bush-II, the Administration has been addressing a mid-sized police problem with a full national mobilization waging total war. Accordingly it has embedded a hugely outsized covert operations apparatus within government that, experience tells us, will plague us for many decades. And, in a related vein, it has given the U.S. for the first time a unified national police force, a super police and with all that that implies.
TWELVE WARS PLUS TWO MORE
The Obama Administration is now waging a minimum of twelve wars around the globe, at least four on its own initiative. There are two additional wars that probably should be added to the list as well - and then there are an unnumbered many more whose existence is indicated and/or promised but with details still obscured.
The war in Afghanistan is now winding down. Of that more below. The other wars include continuing active military operations in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan of course, Colombia, the Philippines, Congo, the Central African Republic South Sudan and Uganda. We are also supporting Kurdish guerilla attacks inside Iran's borders. In addition, there have been reports that we've participated in anti-guerrilla operations in Algeria. Whether active operations continue is unclear but we retain combat units there.
These multiple little wars represent only a fraction of the problem. The Times recently reported that US Special Forces have been active in 70 countries since 2001 and the latest news is that their numbers are to be increased in the light of even more contemplated military interventions. This is all in line with the declared intention of the Obama Administration to scale down the size and the employment of regular US forces in favor of "Special Forces" carrying out the well-named, "Dark Ops".
Although confirmation is missing, it seems very likely that we have been giving logistic, intelligence and communications assistance to the anti-Assad rebels in Syria. That and the Algeria reports constitute the "plus two" of my title. Considering the Administration's budding naval arms race with China, coup attempts in Venezuela, and its current stance toward Iran , the Obama foreign policy one-sidedly rests on military might and threat.
The modus operandi of terrorists past and present has been to target innocent third parties in order to force this or that government to adopt or terminate some policy or action. This is not the behavior of the Bush/Obama War on Terror but the latter does customarily and knowingly target innocent third parties as a "collateral" to its anti-terror operations. In that strict sense it is not simply a War on Terror but a terror War on Terror. Accordingly, in the view of many overseas observers, the U.S. is now among the major contributors to the very high levels of international violence and lawlessness that now threaten every citizen in every country.
But I've listed only eleven of the confirmed wars. The missing war is the War on Drugs. Our intervention in Colombia has a triadic focus; anti-left, anti-terror, and anti-drug. US military units, intelligence, and other support are deeply involved in attempts to disrupt the international narcotics traffic. However, as with our partially humanitarian intervention into Libya, possibly Syria, and the four central African countries, there is even further reason to group the War on Drugs with the others.
SUPER-POLICE
The press and other media have not really confronted the fact that we now have for the first time in our history a single, nationally unified police force. Actually, "nationally" is somewhat misleading since it operates without regard to any national borders. The Homeland Security and Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Acts (2002 and 2004, respectively), amalgamated multiple US intelligence and police/investigatory agencies into one administrative structure, notably including anti-drug activities. Even the National Park Service police, like many lesser, seemingly innocuous federal agencies, have joined the FBI, the Secret Service, police from the Treasury Department, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), the Immigration Service, etc. and the various military police agencies in this unified national security police force -- a super-police.
Above and beyond the administrative unification of the cited police agencies, all of them, as well as almost 80 state and local police agencies, now work together with Homeland Security on anti-terrorism projects and, more significant by far, all contribute to and then share the files of a unified national intelligence data base maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. From your suspected opinions and my idiosyncrasies to others' actual and potential crimes, the surveilled information is all there, increasingly accessible for 'official' use. Another roughly 75 private firms are also part of this super police, including of course many with special security, intelligence, cipher and even militarily armed agents.
Earlier I promised to return to the war in Afghanistan. As we know that failed war is being wound down. But not really! The press reported in late February that regular US forces are in process of being withdrawn but they are being replaced with Special Forces troops - about 12,00O is the cited number, i. e, on a scale not much smaller than the 'regular' effort so far. The great advantage in switching from ordinary "GI" units to the "elite" variety is that the media seem to accept that the latter should operate in relative secrecy, follow whatever policies they follow without reportorial second-guessing, in short, stay within what is well named the 'shadow-world'.
How large is the War on Terror? Michael Hayden, who has served as director of both the the NSA and the CIA, confessed on PBS's Frontline that even he had no idea of the full extent of this apparatus. The press and TV report that since 2001 between 800, 000 and 1,100, 000 persons have been added to the list of those previously enjoying "national security clearance"; that number apparently does not include those members of the regular armed forces who are employed in anti-terrorism operations. And the number may not include all the members of state and local police, their intelligence operatives and those employees of private security firms that have been brought into the super-police. In a way it doesn't matter; the number of the participating agencies in the super-police is stupendous; its "effectives" surely exceed two million persons, and there is limitless funding: As one member of Congress put it, after 9/11 Congress "turned on the spigot."
TERROR AGAINST TERROR
It is forbidden by long-standing Executive Order for any US official to order the assassination of any person; but such assassination orders are routine now. The Obama Administration has carried out in its three years of office 265 assassination missions, about four times the number of those mounted by the Bush-II Administration in its eight years. Most of these killings are carried out by unmanned (i.e., drone) aircraft based in third countries or on the high seas, commanded from a base in northern California, and actually operated by pilots sitting before play-station consoles in a base just outside Las Vegas! Most, but as we know, not all; there are the face-to-face killings too. As with bin Laden.
There is an extensive "gee-whiz' literature about the technological sophistication, thus accuracy of these drones; - "Can read a license plate from 30, 000 feet!", i.e., almost 6 miles, but it has to be taken with a grain of salt. Recently the Associated Press carried out an extensive investigation on the ground in Pakistan in order to see just how often they "got" the targeted individuals and how much "collateral damage" there was. After reading the report, which it appears was reasonably thorough and reliable, a US military spokesperson celebrated its finding that "almost 90%" of the victims were really "terrorists". That, of course, was better than the earlier estimate the military were working from - "over 75%" but.
The killing of Osama bin Laden was prototypical. The instructions to the team sent on the mission were explicit; kill him on sight! Do not take a prisoner! However, in the media reports it is acknowledged, but not underlined, that they really were not sure that bin Laden was in the compound. The were only "90% sure" and they weren't really all that confident that it was he until they ran visual tests on the dead body, and not satisfactorily sure until they did DNA tests hours later on the aircraft carrier. If, as was entirely possible, the man in the compound was, say, a reclusive novelist, perhaps a Pakistani J.D. Salinger, then there would have no press hoopla. The poor fellow - plus an armed companion and three unarmed by-standers, would have disappeared into the files as "collateral damage". In short, and I think it important to emphasize this, five persons were simply gunned down by an administrative decision of the President who believed but was not sure that bin Laden was there. The killing was carried out with the almost certain knowledge that others, some surely innocent by-standers, would be killed as well.
As indicated, the media have not stressed these aspects of the killing operation but it is unintentionally revealing that they resort to old-fashioned gangster expressions when they talk of it, typically, "They got him!" or, sometimes more graphically, "They took him out!"
The issue here is not whether bin Laden richly deserved the final end he received. But the Obama people weren't sure it was bin Laden they were killing and they accepted that there would be other, by-stander victims as well. As has been the pattern of throughout the drone attacks. More important, the point is that since 2001, both the Bush-II and the Obama Administrations have acted on the premise that they have a relatively indiscriminate 'license to kill' -- and trying diligently to cloud over the fact that is they themselves who have issued the license. I will come back to this point below.
Very much the same is true of "rendition", i.e., the kidnapping into custody of this or that suspected terrorist, typically for an indefinite term of detention, along with another euphemism, "enhanced interrogation". Again, these decisions are made within the highest, most secret circles, with Congress alternately grandstanding or mute, and with the courts loath to step in.
"A-LEGAL" AS A CATEGORY
The War on Terror demands new terms and categories to understand what's going on, much less to propose remedies. That becomes particularly clear when one reads the legal, constitutional and related defenses that have been mounted by its official spokespersons. I have three such defenders particularly in mind: John Yoo, was a member of the State Department's Office of Legal Counsel for the Bush-II Administration; the arguments of his original memo supporting "enhanced interrogation" and related doings have been expanded in a 2006 book, War by Other Means. And two recent speeches, at the Yale Law School by Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Defense Department (on February 22), and at the Northwestern Law school by Attorney General Eric Holder (on March 5).
All three echo familiar arguments on the subject of fighting terror via "enhanced interrogation", rendition, and/or targeted assassination, including Johnson's and Holder's specific defense of the killing of the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen late last year. Yoo, Johnson and Holder all reach back to the idea that we are in a war, that the President as Commander-in-Chief is fully within his constitutional rights and has ample legal precedent in waging it as it has actually been waged. To read their texts, Yoo's is the most lawyerly, it all seems quite open-and-shut but in fact all three put forward a pure sophist's argument. It goes as follows,
'We are at war and the President as Commander-in-Chief has the right, underlined by ample precedent, to target for killing or imprisonment those who wage that war against us.'
One then rejoins that the Bill of Rights imperatively forbids the taking of a US citizen's life without due process. Or, alternately, that while we can imprison those actually caught fighting against us on a battlefield, we must accord them the status of "prisoner of war", cannot mistreat them to gain information, must allow Red Cross representatives to visit them, and so forth. To which they typically rejoin,
'No, this is a new kind of war to which the old rules and legalities don't apply.'
In short, they have it both ways. Because it's a war the Laws of War allow the President to do this and that. Because it's a different kind of war, the Laws of War don't constrain what he does. What that leaves them with is the proposition, "Anything goes! As instanced in the al-Awlaki case, Attorney General Holder argued that since it wasn't "feasible" to capture citizen al-Awlaki for trial, it was legitimate to kill him on the spot.
(To be continued)