September 11 retrospective: Shields and Brooks find something meaningful to say about 9/11

I'll forgo my usual introductory carping about the conventionality of Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks. It's still there in their 09/09/2011 PBS Newshour appearance, Shields, Brooks on Obama's Jobs Speech, Perry's Debate Debut. Okay, I'll carp a bit. Sleep Mark doesn't seem to have noticed that President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits earlier this year, proposed cutting Medicare again in his Thursday jobs speech and is floating benefit cuts for Social Security again. But I was struck by their comments on the 9/11 anniversary.



Bobo surprised me again this week by saying something I wonder if he really intended to say:

I would just emphasize some of the positive things that have happened since 9/11 because of U.S. actions. Saddam is out. Gadhafi is out, not all because of U.S. actions. Taliban is out. Mubarak is out. There has been a change in the world. Al-Qaida has been destroyed. We haven't been attacked again. And so I would say it's at least a mixed blessing and that, after 9/11, the Middle East is in a period of turmoil, could turn out bad, could turn out good. [my emphasis]

Say what? "Al-Qaida has been destroyed." Say what?!? The massive terrible Terrorist Menace that we have to spend half the military budgets of the world to fight doesn't exist anymore? He's right, of course. There's little if anything left of Bin Laden original Al Qa'ida group, at least from what we can tell from the confused and often deeply self-interested news we get on the subject.

Shields has always been decent on the Iraq War, even as most of his political analysis has slid into mind-numbing conventional wisdom, albeit with a consistent Democratic Establishment twist. He challenged Bobo's otherwise bland Profound Reflection on 9/11 this way:

I think that to use 9/11 as a justification for going to war against Saddam Hussein is indefensible. It was indefensible then is indefensible against -- war on Iraq and a war of occupation. The United States now has two wars of occupation 10 years later.

I think Afghanistan, you could certainly make the case, after the attack of 9/11, that that was necessary and required. There was a sense of national unity and solidarity and compassion that existed in this country after 9/11, which is gone. It's no longer, no longer with us.

The United States' standing in the world, that sense of solidarity with the United States and support for the United States after the terrible events of 9/11 has been allowed to go away. I agree with David about the Arab spring. And I think it is encouraging, and I -- but I don't think that going to Iraq is an instrument of it.

Tags: 9/11,, david brooks, iraq war, mark shields

September 11 retrospective: National unity of fear

We hear invocations periodically, even from President Obama, about how we should recapture the national unity of 9/11.

I actually hope we in the United States never hase that kind of national unity again. Yes, there was a great deal of feeling of human solidarity and patriotism. There was also fear and rage, which very quickly produced jingoism and demagoguery. Some brave patriot in Arizona - of course! - gunned down a Sikh man, Balbir Singh Sodhi, on September 15 because I suppose he though Sodhi looked Muslim. Thousands of actual Muslims were being harassed, imprisoned and often abused because John Ashcroft's Justice Department and a lot of local police forces thought they needed to show they were on the ball by going after some kind of Muslims whether they had any good reason to or not.

It also produced a lot of inanity, like President Bush on September 27 advising the country to express their patriotism this way: "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed."

Neither the Cheney-Bush White House nor most Republicans in Congress actually wanted national unity. They wanted to use 9/11 to bash the Democrats. And they did. The only kind of unity they wanted was unity behind the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party was already showing the kind of serious weakness that may literally yet be fatal to it as a Party. The Republican Supreme Court handed the Presidency to Dick Cheney and George Bush in 2000 against the popular vote and against what the Electoral College vote would have been had their been an honest and complete recount in Florida. The Democrats should have raised holy hell after that infamous Court decision. They didn't.

Even after that display of the Republicans' extreme partisanship, the Democrats were eager to become cheerleaders on the Dick Cheney/George Bush war bandwagon.

The Democrats should have taken more time with the so-called USA PATRIOT Act (full name: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appro­priate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) and eliminated some of its police-state provisions. They should have held serious hearing into how our glorious generals with by far the larges military in the world weren't able to stop a few fanatics with simple weapons from smashing an airliner into their headquarters, the Pentagon. They should have asked why our cowboy President sat listening before a group of grade-schoolers listening to The Pet Goat with a look on his face like a deer in a headlight. They should have looked at that authorization of force that Cheney and Bush took as a blank check for their Global War on Terror (GWOT).

But they didn't. Rick Perlstein summarizes the Democrats' fecklessness in "Solidarity Squandered" The American Prospect Sept 2011:

The things that happen every time God's chosen nation goes to war to save civilization happened again. We witnessed civil-liberties violations, knuckleheaded jingoism, attacks on internal enemies (and not just Arab Americans), and the almost systematic suspension of sound judgment by experts and mandarins, who sought monsters to slay. Michael Kelly, editor of The Atlantic, called the left "objectively pro-terrorist," and blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote that "the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts ... may well mount what amounts to a fifth column."

A little more than a year later, when the administration proposed to go to war in Iraq, it became clear that many still surrendered to trust. Representative Dick Gephardt explained that he had voted for the war because "an A-bomb in a Ryder truck in New York, in Washington, and St. Louis ... cannot happen." The New Republic excoriated the "abject pacifism" and "intellectual incoherence of the liberal war critics." New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote, "History will not eas­ily excuse us if ... we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them." He concluded, "A return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all."

America had changed. Liberals, too many of us, had changed. We were not acting like guardians of solidarity. We were acting like suckers.

No, please, let's never again have the kind of "national unity" we had in September of 2001.

Tags: 9/11, democratic party

September 11 retrospective: From the Twin Towers to Baghdad (1 of 2)

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in The Age of Sacred Terror (2002) reflect on the then much more recent shock of the 9/11 attacks:

There is no objective way to measure surprise. Looking back over the last century, however, it is difficult to think of any events as shocking - as completely unexpected by the overwhelming majority of people - as those of September 11. For six decades, Pearl Harbor was synonymous with the notion of surprise attack for Americans. But, in fact, on December 7, 1941, the public had been expecting a conflict with Japan for months, if not years, and the base was considered a possible target long before it was struck.

And they mention two critical aspects of the framework that both foreign policy experts and the general publics - as well as our already-broken national media - were applying to understanding international relations that opened the country to the awful excesses to which Dick Cheney and the Cheney-Bush Administration took us.

On September 10, ordinary Americans had no conception that one of the bloodiest days in the nation's history would be the work of terrorists, not of another nation. They did not identify Islamist radicals as a group intent on killing thousands. If pushed, they might have named skyscrapers in lower Manhattan as a potential target of attack, but mostly because the Twin Towers had been bombed eight years earlier. They had no inkling that a suicide attack on such a scale was a possibility or that any ­ one on earth had the wherewithal, or, more important, the desire to carry out such a crime. In fact, most Americans, if asked, would have likely said that their nation had never been more secure. More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, it had become a truism that the world had not seen such a demonant power since ancient Rome.

Those two factors, the understanding of military threats as a threat from other states and Cold War triumphalism, were decisive failures in understanding.

The first of them fit in extremely well with the desires of the nationalist-militarist types like Dick Cheney and with the neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith with whom Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld shared so much.

Benjamin and Simon discuss how that concept of terrorism was reinforced for policymakers in the years leading up to 2001 by various experiences including the 1988 terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103 for which Libya was believed to be responsible. Iran's connection to Lebanese Hizbullah had made Iran's sponsorship of terror a prominent concern for American foreign policy. The terrorist attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 in which 19 American service members were killed was suspected of being sponsored by Iran, but the lack of cooperation from Saudi Arabian authorities in the case prevented full clarification of the case.

The combination of seeing terrorism as a problem of state-sponsored terrorism and American tirumphalism would lead the Cheney-Bush Administration to embrace the concept of preventive war, although they were careful to use the term "pre-emptive war."

Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay in America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003) desccribe how President Bush wedded this conception of terrorism as a problem of state-sponsored terrorism into his expansive, unilateralist foreign policy aims:

The full extent of Bush's war on terror became apparent when he delivered his first State of the Union address in January 2002. "A ter­rorist underworld-including groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Jaish-i-Mohammed-operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the centers of large cities," Bush told Congress and the nation. But that was not all. The threat facing the United States extended beyond these terrorist groups to rogue states such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea that were bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction. "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil," Bush warned. "By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic."

Then, using the most dire language heard in any presidential speech since John F. Kennedy's first State of the Union address four decades earlier, Bush declared that the United States could no longer afford to sit and wait until America was struck again. "Time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

The importance of Bush's address lay in clearly identifying a major new threat to the United States - the combination of terrorism, tyrants, and technologies of mass destruction. ...

The key elements of this emerging strategy, which reflected the administration's hegemonist worldview, were American power and leadership, a focus on rogue states, and the need to act preemptively. [my emphasis]

As Daalder and Lindsay explain :

[C]ritics argued that the Bush strategy suffered from considerable conceptual confusion, which had real policy consequences. Most important, it conflated the notion of preemptive and preventive war. Preemptive wars are initiated when another country is clearly about to attack. Israel's decision to go to war in June 1967 against its Arab neighbors is the classic example. Preventive wars are launched by states against others before the state being attacked poses a real or imminent threat. "What made war inevitable," the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War, "was the growth in Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta." The purpose of initiating war in these circumstances is therefore to stop a threat before it can arise. Israel's strike against Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 was one example of preventive war. Cheney's argument that Iraq needed to be struck before it acquired nuclear weapons was another. Much of the Bush rhetoric - including the justification for the Iraq War - was consistent with the notion of preventive war, not preemption. Yet, while preemptive wars have had a long-recognized standing in international law as a legitimate form of self-defense, preventive wars did not. Not surprisingly, a resort to preventive war in the case of Iraq would prove highly controversial.

Tags: 9/11

September 11 retrospective: The anthrax attacks

It's well worth remembering that the anthrax attacks that began a few days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks contributed mightily to the sense of vulnerability, panic and rage that helped drive the public agenda in responding to terrorism and invading Iraq. As Brad Sylvester says in Investigator Discusses 2001 Anthrax Attacks Yahoo! Contributor Network 09/08/2011:

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks of the World Trade Center Towers in New York, America was still in a state of collective shock, trying to sort out our response to the terrorist attacks. The Amerithrax attacks which purported to be work of Islamic extremists following up the 9/11 attacks may have contributed to our assessment of the technological sophistication of Al-Qaeda's capabilities, laying a groundwork of perception that did not get entirely erased even when foreign terrorists were ruled out as potential perpetrators of the 2001 Anthrax letter terror campaign.

While we may never know if these attacks contributed to the Bush administration's obsession with the chase for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Amerithrax scare certainly helped escalate the fear of such bio-terror weapons in the minds of the American public, increasing the effectiveness of claims that the U.S. needed to root out such WMD in Iraq. [my emphasis]

And it's also worth remembering that those attacks have never been solved. Whatever holes there may be in our understanding of the 9/11 attacks themselves and the specific actions and motivations of the participants, we actually know a lot about how did what and why. Not so in the case of the anthrax attacks.

The case was in the news again this summer: Greg Gordon, FBI lab reports on anthrax attacks suggest another miscue McClatchy Newspapers 05/19/2011; New twist in anthrax case; Mike Wiser, et al, Justice Department lawyers contradict FBI findings McClatchy Newspapers 07/19/2011, the latter a joint report with ProPublica and Frontline; Mike Webb, Stephen Engelberg on the FBI’s Anthrax Case ProPublica 07/262011. This video from The Real News accompanied the May 19 McClatchy story:



Glenn Greenwald has returned to this subject again and again: DOJ casts serious doubt on its own claims about the anthrax attack Salon 07/19/2011.

Meryl Nass also still follows the case on her Anthrax Vaccine blog: Judge: You can't change anthrax filing yet. Government must "show good cause"/ McClatchy 07/28/2011.

As does Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel: Government Inches Closer to Admitting It Hasn't Solved Anthrax Attack 07/18/2011.

Tags: 9/11, anthrax attack

September 11 retrospective: Tom Hayden on the new militarism

Tom Hayden has a long op-ed with some thoughtful observations and reading suggestions, 9/11 blind Sacramento News and Review 09/08/2011, in which he discusses the very real problem presented by the Pentagon's Long War, the state of permanent war we entered soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001:

The military occupation of our minds will continue until many more Americans become familiar with the strategies and doctrines in play during the Long War. Not enough Americans in the peace movement are literate about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and the debates about "the clash of civilizations" — i.e., the West vs. the Muslim world.

He's not being hyperbolic. I've written here numerous times about theories of war that have become so popular in the officer corps, according to which the "center of gravity" (the most important point of potential weakness) in war is public opinion in the United States. This view of war, based largely on a deeply flawed reading of the experience of the Vietnam War - and for the Pentagon a self-serving one - inevitably encourages maximum emphasis on attempting to manage American public opinion. It's illegal for the government in general, including the military, to propagandize the US public. But the law is not vigorously enforced in the case of the Pentagon, to put it mildly. Hayden writes:

The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets, but our unborn children's future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfuscations and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy waged deliberately by the Pentagon.

As Gen. Stanley McChrystal said much too candidly in February 2010, "This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants." David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, defines "international information operations as part of counterinsurgency."

In his 2010 book, Counterinsurgency, Kilcullen wrote that Gen. Petraeus’ goal is to achieve a "unity of perception management measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators’ gallery of the international community."

This new "war of perceptions," relying on naked media manipulation, such as the treatment of media commentators as "message amplifiers" but also high-technology information warfare, only highlights the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment.

And he reminds us that despite the commitment of both parties to the present course of permanent war, the public rejects its assumptions:

The more we know about the Long War doctrine, the more we understand the need for a long peace movement. The pillars of the peace movement, in my experience and reading, are the networks of local progressives in hundreds of communities across the United States. Most of them are citizen volunteers, always immersed in the crises of the moment, nowadays the economic recession and unemployment. Look at them from the bottom up, and not the top down, and you will see:

• the people who marched in the hundreds of thousands during the Iraq War;

• those who became the enthusiastic consumer base for Michael Moore’s documentaries and the Dixie Chicks'anti-Bush statements;

• the first to support Howard Dean when he opposed the Iraq war, and the stalwarts who formed the anti-war base for then-candidate Barack Obama;

• the online legions of MoveOn who raised millions of dollars and turned out thousands of focused bloggers;

• the voters who dumped a Republican Congress in 2006 on the Iraq issue, when the party experts said it was impossible;

• the millions who elected Obama president by an historic flood of voluntary enthusiasm and get-out-the-vote drives;

• the majorities who still oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and want military spending reversed.

As Juan Cole discusses in Sadrists to Demonstrate in Baghdad against US Troops Remaining Informed Comment 09/08/2011, we may be actually about to get nearly all of the American troops out of Iraq, effectively ending the war we started in 2003. And by "we," I mean the Cheney-Bush Administration. It was a wholly unnecessary war.

He recommends two books I've reviewed here, Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism (2005) and the collection of essays edited by Bacevich, The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II (2007).

Tags: 9/11, long war, tom hayden

September 11 retrospective: Video from Al Jazeera English's "Empire" program: "9/12 and the 'war on terror' "

This is quite a good discussion of the 9/11 attacks, their background and their repercussions in American foreign policy. Even Peter Beinart has some good observations in it.



Tags: 9/11

September 11 retrospective: Torture

Much has been written about the Cheney-Bush Administration's torture policy. The 9/11 attacks on the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) became the excuse for the torture policy.

The Obama Administration made the indefensible decision to not prosecute the torture perpetrators, as they were required to do under American and international law. So was the Cheney-Bush Administration, but they were involved at the higest levels in perpetrating the crimes. One result of Obama's failure to prosecute the torture perpetrators has been that polls now show a majority of Americans approving of torture.

President Obama allegedly ended torture. There have been reports under this Administration of American officials participating in torture. We know that Bradley Mannng was kept in conditions amounting to torture, and of a serious kind (prolonged extreme isolation, humiliation by nudity). But his conditions were improved after a reporter confronted Obama with a question about Manning, although Obama's immediate response was to defend the way he had been treated. This is the closest evidence of which I'm aware that Obama may have specifically approved of torture, though it's possible he wasn't fully aware of how Manning was being tortured.

Obama has kept the Guantánamo station of what Al Gore memorably called the Bush Gulag open. He has accepted the lawless policy of indefinite detention without trial or charges. He has kept "black site" secret prisons open. Those are all in themselves conditions that virtually guarantee that torture will occur. I would be astonished if it's not going on, even though Obama doesn't obscenely celebrate torture the way Dick Cheney and virtually the entire Republican Party do.

But no matter how passionately the Republican Party celebrates it or how large a majority of Americans tell pollsters they support it, it's wrong and is destructive of the rule of law in a basic way that is only possibly matched by war itself. Jimmy Carter was on the mark in his 2005 book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis:

Aside from the humanitarian aspects, it is well known that, under excruciating torture, a prisoner will admit almost any suggested crime. Such confessions are, of course, not admissible in trials in civilized nations. The primary goal of torture of the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear. Some of our leaders have found that it is easy to forgo human rights for those who are considered to be subhuman, or "enemy combatants." [my emphasis]

The torture issue isn't going away.

Tags: 9/11, accountability for torture, torture

September 11 retrospective: George W. Bush and enduring lies

Shrub Bush: Still lying after all these years

Via Eric Bohlert, this New York Times report reminds us that Cheney and Bush promoted a lie about their decisive decisiveness on 9/11, Newly Published Audio Provides Real-Time View of 9/11 Attacks by Jim Dwyer 09/07/2011:

In its 2004 report, the commission praised front-line aviation officials. But it then thoroughly dismantled the accounts of senior government officials, who in the weeks after Sept. 11, and for more than a year afterward, assured the public that fighter pilots had been in hot pursuit of the suicidal hijackers. During these chases, according to accounts from Vice President Dick Cheney, the F.A.A. and the Defense Department, the pilots were described as ready to carry out a wrenching order from President George W. Bush to shoot down airliners.

The commission discovered that little of that was true: of the four flights, military commanders had nine minutes’ notice on one before it flew into the World Trade Center, and did not learn the other three had been hijacked until after they had crashed. Military commanders, given an order outside the chain of command to shoot down hijacked airliners, did not pass it along to the fighter pilots, but instructed them instead to identify the tail numbers of any suspected rogue planes. That turned out to be a prudent call because by then, there were no longer hijackers in the air for them to shoot.

The newly published multimedia document spells out precisely how the recordings contradicted the accounts of the senior officials.

Bush repeated this whopper in his 9/11 interview on the National Geographic Channel. I blogged about that interview after it first aired. But I didn't notice a single article or blog commentary about it; I'm sure there were some. I not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved by that.

Tags: 9/11, george w bush

September 11 retrospective: Start of the Afghanistan War

The Afghanistan War was a necessary response to the 9/11 attacks: in the beginning.

Since the official beginning of that war on October 7, 2001, it has been taken over by massive mission creep. It has become a full-blown counterinsurgency and nation-building mission. And it will surely end eventually, years from now, in essentially the same way the Soviet war in Afghanistan ended. American leaders at some point will decide it's no longer worth it, declare Mission Accomplished and leave. Given the Pentagon's fixation on maintaining military bases forever in places we have wars, the practical end of the war may come before all American troops are withdrawn. And, if the neoliberal/austerity/privatization/"free-market" dogma continues to increase its stranglehold on American policy, in 10 years from now we may be fielding only mercenaries rather than soldiers on the US armed services payroll. But at some point, the US will decide to quit the war.

It's worth recalling how the flawed conception of the Afghanistan War at the start contributed to the current non-ending-mess situation of the war. Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay wrote in America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003) that on 9/11, the Pentagon had no plans for invading Iraq. Apparently they had current plans ready for invading just about anywhere else! As Dallder and Lindsay put it, "The U.S. military, which had contingency plans for virtually every conceivable eventuality, had no plans on the books for going after Afghanistan."

But the Cheney-Bush Administration was never especially interested in the Afghanistan War. They were focused on getting up and war against Iraq. And using the 9/11 attacks as a reason to shred the Constitution and to implement their cowboy foreign policy more generally. So not only did they have to come up with military war plans and get the soldiers, spies and equipment in place. They had to come up with a real strategy for the war in Afghanistan. And they did a slapdash job of it. As Daalder and Lindsay write:

But the real problem was in many ways more fundamental than the lack of adequate capabilities. The military operation lacked clarity of purpose. Was it to get Osama bin Laden? To destroy al Qeda? Topple the Taliban? Ensure Afghanistan would never again be a terrorist haven? Send a message to other terrorist supporters? All of the above? Bush's war council had not given definitive answers to any of these questions. Bush and his advisers agreed that after the horror of Sep­tember 11, some form of significant military action was necessary. "We're steady, clear-eyed and patient," the president told King Abdul­lah of Jordan in late September. "But pretty soon we'll have to start dis­playing scalps." However, there were many different objectives aside from revenge - and all of these permeated the design and execution of the military strategy in Afghanistan.

Displaying scalps. I haven't heard of any cases of Our Side literally taking scalps as trophies. Photos of prisoners being tortured, yes. But killing lots of foreigners and Muslims and A-rabs, we've done that. Under the Obama Administration, we even killed Osama bin Laden himself.

But the war in Afghanitan goes on. And on. And on.

Tags: 9/11, afghanistan war

September 11 retrospective: What we don't know

Robert Scheer writes on How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11 and the Religious Zealots Who Perpetrated It Truthdig 09/08/2011. He makes a very important point:

How little we know about the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks is laid out in the disclaimer on Page 146 of the official 9/11 presidential commission report. A box on that page states clearly that the conventional narrative of how those portentous events unfolded is based largely on the interrogation under torture of key witnesses who have never been permitted a single moment in a publicly observed court of law.

As the bipartisan commissioners ruefully conceded, their examination of the motives, financing and actions of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators had to "rely heavily on information from captured al Qaeda members" that the commissioners, despite having been granted the highest security clearance, were never allowed to seriously vet:

"We submitted questions for use in the interrogations but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process."

That sensitive interrogation process included the waterboarding of the key witnesses, led by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was scheduled to go on public, civilian trial in Manhattan last spring, until the Obama administration caved in to hysterical Republican-led pressure and called off the trial.

Now, we do know the basics of the history of Osama bin Laden and Al Qa'ida and the issues energizing them. But Scheer is right to point out that we never had a proper criminal investigation and prosecution because of the extra- and illegal methods the Cheney-Bush and Obama Administrations followed in the handling of the accused perpetrators.

Tags: 9/11, al qaida, robert scheer

Dominionist Christians in their context, for better or worse

Christian dominionists like to control their own marketing. And despite supposedly being bold in their witness for Jesus, they don't want to let their little lights shine before the unbelievers (Democrats, non-Christians, Catholics, most Protestants). It's not exactly timidity. They know that can't justify their positions in terms that most Americans and most Christians in the US or anywhere would support. So they mealy-mouth a lot.

Al Bundy - Christian dominionist theologian?

Our stumbling press is willing to facilitate the mealy-mouthing, since that's largely what our star pundits generally do anyway. So there's a discussions going on now in places that actually deal realistically with the Christian Right, like Talk to Action and Religion Dispatches, as to what the correct way to talk about the dominionists is. I understand why serious journalists and scholars like to be careful about their terminology. For scholars in particular, their work involves making careful distinctions.

This piece from Religion Dispatches is an especially good one on the topic, Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate by Sarah Posner and Anthea Butler 08/29/2011. They make an essential point in reference to the Christian Right in general and the Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a group that suddenly came to new (and to them unwelcome) public attention with Rick Perry's big prayer rally:

... theological disagreements among these folks are largely inconsequential from a broad political perspective; the overarching Christian nation ideology, along with opposition to secularism, LGBT rights and abortion rights, and favoring public prayer and Ten Commandments and so forth are unifying.

But the idea that the NAR in particular — as opposed to the broader apparatus and movement the religious right has built over four decades — is somehow, in a vacuum, more powerful, or more authoritarian, or more threatening to democracy is a view that is far too narrow, ahistorical, and uninformed. [my emphasis]

What makes Posner's and Butler's piece especially good is the way they describe the networks of relationships that participants in neo-Pentecostal groups experience and how the influence of the leadership enters into that experience. As Posner puts it, this is a "crucial point here that I think is frequently overlooked by some people who focus too hard on the NAR rhetoric without contextualizing it: how people actually live and experience these movements." Their description doesn't minimize the ugly side of the neo-Pentecostal experience. It puts it in its actual context as lived by its believers.

Butler slips in a kind of disclaimer that I've seen several times lately in similar articles by people who actually know the Christian Right. She says the lack of decent research by mainstream reporters "has also led to a whole cottage industry of those who write about dominionism, the NAR, and other theocratic movements from the opposite perspective: It’s taking over everything." Now, I'm willing to believe there are people exaggerating one aspect or another of this phenomenon. But who is she talking about? I've seen this kind of comment several times lately without those guilty ones supposedly doing this being referenced, linked or specified. Without knowing who they are talking about, this kind of comment isn't helpful. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like knee-jerk rhetoric to reassure the un-assurable that the speaker/writer isn't one of those stereotypical libruls who supposedly hates "people of faith" and their faiths, too.

But, as I said, Butler's and Posner's description of the neo-Pentecostal lived experience is an exceptionally good summary. Butler:

... there are streams of people crossing each other, and what is happening can have a multiplicity of meanings. That is how to think about the NAR, dominionism, all of these movements that people are involved in. In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favorite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don't just read the Bible, you read devotional books, and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed. That is the problem with focusing in only on NAR and dominionism. If you don't know the everyday context of how people, churches, and organizations deal with these broad-based movements, it can sound like a vast conspiracy theory.

People who are in that web don't often recognize differences, or they don’t care about them. They care about their spiritual lives, and that's what keeps these movements going. They can go from one meeting to the next if they have the funds to do so, and the highs are good. Who doesn’t want to go to a meeting that feeds your soul where you meet like-minded people?

All of the groups are enmeshed in a symbiotic web. These evangelists', apostles’, and leaders’ messages are the commodity, and you have to buy the books, conferences, and other materials in order to get the blessings. I know that will seem distasteful and a caricature to some, but these events are well-attended, and at a hundred bucks a person, revenues from book and DVD sales. Conferences and meetings like Lou Engles’ The Call are not just prayer meetings, they are Christian marketplaces, with all sorts of spiritual wares being sold. [my emphasis]

Posner amplifies that description:

... if you’ve ever been to a neo-Pentecostal conference or revival you’ve seen this sort of thing. And as [Carlton] Pearson's biography clearly demonstrates, if you give up that central idea that there is a hell (and hence a Satan), you'll be banished from not only friendships, but the lucrative ministries that Pearson himself helped to create.

All that said, there are different ways that people experience this, or faith healings, or other performances you find in these environments. Not everyone is in lockstep, when you sit down and talk with them. I remember vividly the 2007 event at Gimenez's church in Virginia Beach—this was before John Gimenez passed away—and there was quite a lineup of different preachers (I mean entrepreneurs)! I remember Lou Engle was on what I might, looking back, call a prophecy bender: rocking, as he does, and really doing an extended sequence on some dream he had about Jerusalem. People were wandering out of the sanctuary, as I did, and I was chatting with a woman in the hall. She commented about she hadn't seen him preach in a while. And she seemed pretty unimpressed with this one.

I point this out only to emphasize how these individual players do not necessarily always enrapture the audience; I've seen this at various events. On the other hand, I've seen others, like Rod Parsley and Kenneth Copeland, have the audience eating out of their hands (and also putting money in their hands).

These events are, like I said, performances that are carefully staged and mapped out; there may be a series of speakers who seem like they are reacting spontaneously to what's happening, moved by the holy spirit. But it's carefully orchestrated, along with mesmerizing music, for maximum impact. It's big business.

However, I suspect this ability to understand and empathize with rank-and-file participants may also contribute to the temptation to downplay that nuttiness and cultish aspects of these movements. Posner, for instance, expresses misgivings that some (unnamed) "people have been distracted by focusing too much on bizarre statements Perry’s prayer friends made (the Statue of Liberty is a demonic idol, Oprah is the harlot of Babylon, and so forth)."

But this stuff is also standard fare in the neo-Pentecostal subculture. I just clicked on the website of Charisma, a leading Pentecostal magazine, and found this article on the front page: J. Lee Grady, Unraveling the Power of Witchcraft—One Warlock at a Time 09/07/2011. Ole Jaylee apparently believes literally in the ability of witches and warlocks to magically affect people:

Just a year ago, Victor Hugo Perez Vargas was a leader in Peru’s vast but secretive occult movement. His strange ability to curse people and cause accidents seemed to be increasing. He was being mentored by a well-known satanist master and he attended witchcraft conferences. ...

Victor, who is 36, was drawn into this occultism as a teenager in the city of Moyobamba, where friends convinced him to have sex with dogs in order to receive supernatural power. Witches told him to do this so he could hear better and see in the spiritual realm. After the perverse initiation rites, he began to hear voices—and he discovered his ability to kill people with his words.

I'm sorry. People who can swallow tales about warlocks causing accidents by cursing and initiation rites involving dog-fucking are just superstitious and gullible. If it hurts their feelings to see or read someone saying that, then they just need to grow up. Ole Jaylee has his head stuck in the 19th century:

Victor’s transformation showed me how the Holy Spirit is working in Peru, where occultism has been a tradition ever since ancient Incas sacrificed children on altars to their sun god. Today, occultists from Africa, Europe and the United States attend witchcraft gatherings in Peru because they consider the country a central power center for New Age energy.

He goes on to describe an exorcism allegedly performed on the warlock's girlfriend, a description evidencing less critical thinking ability than the average illiterate backwoods hick can muster.

He goes on to describe his conversion to a brand of Christianity evidently as superstitious as the most dim-witted occultist. "I had a vision of the feet of Jesus," the redeemed and exorcised former warlock says. It reminds me of an episode of the old TV series Married...With Children in which Al Bundy has a vision of God's shoes and starts to manufacture and market them, only to later to discover they were the shoes a deceased fellow shoe salesman had invented and had never been able to sell, either.

And Pentecostalists like Jaylee often track in National Inquirer fantasies like this:

Observers say witchcraft is growing in Peru today, and human sacrifice still occurs—although it is rarely reported. (Several weeks ago, a girl’s dismembered body was found in Mayobamba.) Teresa Gomez believes this is all a last-ditch effort by satanic forces.

"These satanists want to take over the nation of Peru," she says. "Witches come here because there was so much blood sacrifice during the Inca times." She also noted that poor families, especially in jungle areas, have been known to sell their children to be sacrificed in occult rituals.

Substitute "Jews" for "poor families" and you've got the bad old medieval (and later) "blood libel" about Jews sacrificing Christian babies. This is a mean, superstitious, and militant ignorant brand of Christianity. I don't see any good reason for other Christians, journalists, scholars, Democratic politicians or anyone else who's not crouching in a corner trembling in fear of flying demons and witches' curses to treat this kind of nonsense as anything other than a sad, degenerate brand of religion that will certainly do most participants more harm than good.

Ole Jaylee is at least not so mired in the 16th century he doesn't have a Twitter account, where you can read confessions like this: "I hope this doesn't disappoint anyone...but I like Easy Listening music. It calms me." I don't know, Jaylee, sounds like you've got one of them thar Guy Lombardo demons or something. You'd better lock yourself in a room and listen to Christian contemporary for 24 hours straight. It may not git rid of yore Easy Listenin' demon, but it will strip you brain badly enough that you're unlikely to be able to hurt anybody. Also not be able to write your silly column.

Tags: anthea butler, christian dominionism, christian right, pentecostalism, sarah posner

September 11 retrospective: More on chances missed

Mitch Carnell has a good summary on the sense of missed opportunity in After 9/11, Our Unity Morphed into Rage Ethics Daily 09/06/2011:

For a very short time, our country came together with a sense of communal grief and then a huge spirit of neighbor helping neighbor.

We had all been wounded and shocked. We were catapulted into the horrors of terrorism that the rest of the world already knew.

All too soon our oneness gave way to frustration and rage. Our president expressed our collective hate in language so explosive that even he would come to regret it.

We went to war against people who had done us no harm. We vented our wrath on what we thought was an easy target. We proudly proclaimed, "Shock and Awe."

Here we are 10 grueling years later still mired in the consequences of our revenge. Our nation has sacrificed its blood, emptied its treasury and forfeited its prestige abroad.

I'm usually reserved about collective summaries referring to what "we" did collectively as a nation. But it works here. As the German truism goes, there's not such thing as collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility.

In the end, that unity of "communal grief" and the sense that that "We had all been wounded and shocked" was inevitably fleeting and ambiguous. And what did that "huge spirit of neighbor helping neighbor" really amount to? There were donations to disaster relief, of course. And volunteers for the Ground Zero clean-up. But by far most collective effort went into the vast expansion of the national security state and wars. The "frustration and rage" found far more practical expression than the "spirit of neighbor helping neighbor."

And he ends with an appropriate question:

Perhaps the lessons would be worth the price had we learned from what has transpired, but there is little evidence to show that we have.

There are those who are urging us toward yet another war and other voices who want us to continue the folly of this one.

Where are the voices of reason? Where are the voices of peace?

Tags: 9/11, mitch carnell

September 11 retrospective: Chances missed

Anatol Lieven wrote about the risks and opportunities in the American and Western response to the 9/11 attacks in Strategy for terror Prospect 10/20/2001, which he says was written "a few hours after the attacks." (A somewhat revised version of this essay was included in James Hege, Jr. and Gideon Rose, eds, How Did This Happen? (2001) that somewhat confusingly makes it sound like it was written after the October 7 start of the Afghanistan War.)

Even in retrospect, I still think this was a true statement for the immediate aftermath of 9/11: "On the assumption that the perpetrators are identified and traced to some physical space a ferocious military response will be necessary. Not to do this would be to betray the victims and display weakness." It was, as he said, "the worst terrorist attack in history and the worst attack of any kind ever directed against the American mainland."

But this observation now looks like a description of opportunities terribly squandered:

A hardline response from the US is appropriate in the short-term. Moreover it would be wrong to execute any significant policy shifts that could be construed as a victory for the terrorists. ... Above all, a new US policy needs to be shaped by three linked realisations. First, that since the end of the cold war, there has come into being the basis of a unified world system in which the world’s other leading states are partners, not enemies, and in which all these states are under threat from similar forces. In other words, there really is the makings of an "international community" - or would be, if the US could stop acting as if it alone constituted this community. The community is based on shared adherence to western-led modernity. The only categorical opponents of this modernisation project are indeed religious maniacs - who are not to be found in Moscow or Beijing. Second, that with the exception of certain middle eastern states, the real threat to the world order comes not from states, but from below: from alienated populations. And third, since the US cannot occupy and police the Muslim world in the struggle against Muslim terrorism, it is essential to have the co-operation of leading Muslim states. This is something which was already emphasised by the aftermath of the attacks on Khobar Towers and the USS Cole. [my emphasis]

He didn't get the following exactly right. But he was correct in identifying the core problem, the fact that the American military establishing really has a strong self-perpetuaing dynamic, as John Kenneth Galbraith patiently insisted for much of his adult life:

The failure, until now, to move away from the cold war has its roots not only in various forms of inherited bigotry, but also in very strong interests within the US security establishment. This establishment was a product of the cold war, and it needs a cold war-type enemy: huge, identifiable, and, most importantly, armed with either high-tech conventional arms or with old-style nuclear missiles. Hence the endless insistence on the danger of a restoration of the Soviet Union. [my emphasis]

We need to be fair to Lieven on this. Who knew that the national security establishment and the many private firms that profit from it could recreate and bogeyman called "Al Qai'di," one based only in small part on the real existing organization lead by Osama bin Laden in 2001, that could serve as well or better than the nuclear-armed Communist Soviet Union to justify military spending at higher levels than the peak of the Cold War?

He made the following pragmatic observations that are also a reminder of opportunities lost:

One way of combating the kind of attacks we saw is of course better security in the US; but this will not necessarily prevent a terrorist attack, as long as that terrorist is prepared to die. In the end, the key to fighting this war successfully has to be good intelligence - and given the difficulty that American agents have of penetrating the world of the Islamist extremists, for such intelligence the west desperately needs Arab and Muslim allies. The Saudis in particular will have to be persuaded to drop the decades-old strategy begun by Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Ibn Saud, according to which the House of Saud has turned a blind eye to Saudi-based radicalism beyond the borders of the kingdom, as long as the radicals do not cause trouble within Saudi Arabia itself.

The help of leading Muslim states will also be essential if there is to be an invasion and occupation of some part of the Muslim world. For, in their different ways, the US bombardment of targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of the Nato bombardment of Yugoslavia, have shown the inadequacy of long-range bombardment when it comes to destroying enemies on the ground, who are dispersed and hidden in a friendly civilian population. [my emphasis]

It's not that these aspects were entirely neglected. On the contrary, most of the real successes in the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) have come from police and intelligence work, not from blowing up Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and whereever else the US military may be operating without public knowledge. It didn't come from creating a sado-masochistic torture regime in Guantánamo and our "black site" prisons, either, although many Republicans including Dick Cheney were happy to know that such twisted acts were occurring.

It's worth noting here that the United States, even with a government more deeply concerned with human rights and encouraging democracy abroad than either the Cheney-Bush or the Obama Administrations, has limited ability to pick and choose which government we deal with. I can't see that the diplomatic isolation of Cuba and Iran for decades has in itself yielded useful results.

What the US should have been doing and should do now is cooperate with governments, even nasty ones, on anti-terrorism while taking very seriously basic human rights concerns. Torture is a crime. And despite Obama's irresponsible and illegal decision to give effective amnesty ("Look Forward, Not Backward") to American torture perpetrators, the torture issue isn't going away. Dick Cheney may be doing a profitable book tour. And there's no guarantee of which individuals will eventually be put before a court on torture charges from that Adminsistration. Torture goes to the hear of the rule of law. There will be an historical and legal reckoning for the Bush Administration's torture crimes. The tragedy and shame is that it should have come from the American government itself. A large portion of the American Constitution will remain in abeyance until there is a real reckoning with the torture crimes.

One reason for the emphasis on conventional military action in the American response to terrorism is what Lieven himself says at the start of this essay, that the 9/11 attacks were "a very serious act of war, conducted by a formidably cruel, brave, fanatical and well-organised enemy with a terrifying capacity for both savagery and self-sacrifice." (my emphasis) I thought that at the time. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder used the phrase "act of war" immediately after the attacks in offering his unlimited support for the US in responding to it. (Schröder soon found that applying limits was indeed necessary!)

In retrospect, this understanding was wrong. It was a spectacular act of terrorism by a small, fanatical group acting on behalf of a demented religious ideology, not on behalf of a state. But by framing it immediately as a war, it lead to the consequences we now no so well. And we surely don't know all the consequences, since a pathological attitude toward government secrecy prevailed during the Bush Administration and, tragic to say, has been intensified under the Obama Administration.

Lieven also points to that perenniel failure of American foreign policy, the need to have a real peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. While noting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major problem for US relations with the Muslim world, he reminds us, "To blame Muslim-based terrorism on Israel would be unfair and inadequate." It is part of the cause of such terrorism, even far removed geographically from Israel-Palestine. He points to severe development problems in the Arab world as having created the breeding ground for jihadist appeals. BAsed on his own research and reporting from Pakistan, he describes the appeal as follows:

In these depressing circumstances, adherence to a radical Islamist network provides a sense of cultural security, a new community and some degree of social support-modest, but still better than anything the state can provide. Poverty is recast as religious simplicity and austerity. Perhaps, even more importantly, belief provides a measure of pride: a reason to keep a stiff back amidst continual humiliations and temptations. In the blaring, stinking, violent world of the modern "third world" Muslim city, the architecture and aesthetic mood of the mosque is (like the Catholic churches in central America described by Graham Greene in The Lawless Roads) the only oasis, not only of beauty but of an ordered and coherent culture and guide to living. Of course this is true ten times over for a young male inhabitant of an Afghan, Chechen or Palestinian refugee camp.

Tags: 9/11, afghanistan war, anatol lieven, global war on terror, gwo, terrorism

Making big bucks for Jesus. Or for somebody.

Investigative reporting isn't dead, fortunately for the public. Bob Smietana reports on his investigation of the financial management of Jay Sekulow, one of the most prominent figures in the Christian Right, in Christian crusaders cash in: Sekulow's family, firm collect millions The Tennessean 09/04/2011. Sekulow heads the Christian Right's main legal bulldog organization, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and another, less famous one called Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (CASE).

I suppose this could be a case of "doing well but doing good," if you think ACLJ's rightwing political causes are good:

Along with its spiritual benefits, Sekulow's new calling has come with significant financial benefits.

Since 1998, the two charities have paid out more than $33 million to members of Sekulow's family and businesses they own or co-own, according to the charities' federal tax returns, known as form 990s.

Contributors to charities and nonprofits need to pay attention to the evaluations they receive from independent watchdogs like the American Institute of Philanthropy. Religious charities often have problematic ethical practices, especially ones not associated directly with major denominations.

This is a telling part of Smietana's story:

In a phone call, Ronn Torossian, a public relations executive serving as ACLJ’s spokesman, portrayed Sekulow as a great lawyer getting by on modest pay.

"You are asking about one of the most successful lawyers in the country whose income is very small and owns a very small home," he said.

Property records show Jay and Pam Sekulow own three homes, including one they bought in 2008 in Franklin for $655,000 and another in Norfolk, Va., bought in 2005 for $690,000. Their third home, which once belonged to CASE, is in Waynesville, N.C., and is assessed at $262,800, according to Haywood County, N.C., tax records.

Maybe the $263K one is small. So it would be true that Sekelow "owns a very small home." So I suppose that Torossian's statement is technically not a departure from Christian honesty.

Robert Parham comments on Smietana's story in Conservative Evangelical Turns Nonprofits into Lucrative Family Business Ethics Daily 09/04/2011. One of the bad ethical signs of Sekelow's operations is the prominent role family members play in governing the charities. Parham notes that Sekelow is not unique among conservative evangelical nonprofits in that practice, which he calls "a disturbing problem within some high-visibility quarters of the evangelical and Pentecostal community."

Faith can become a family business ...

High-profile examples exist in which financial gain is spread throughout a faith-based family organization, and family members seek control of the organization from generation to generation.

Some examples illustrate that passing organizational control from the founder to his children is seldom successful:

• Faith-healer Oral Roberts passed his mantle to son Richard Roberts, who was forced to resign as president of Oral Roberts University due to financial improprieties.

• With his wife and children in the faith business, Robert Schuller named son Robert as his successor. When that didn't work out, he gave the mantle to his daughter, Sheila. The Crystal Cathedral is now in bankruptcy.

• Billy Graham passed the leadership mantle to son Franklin, who has squandered the credibility of the Graham name with extremist statements and had extremely generous compensations from two nonprofits.

Other examples of an entrepreneurial evangelical founder passing the mantle of leadership to the next generation include Pat Robertson naming son Gordon the CEO of Christian Broadcasting Network.

Tags: christian right, jay sekulow

September 11 retrospective: "Why do they hate us?"

This column from the British Guardian of 09-13-2001 catches the mood of that question with some critical perspective: Seumas Milne, They can't see why they are hated. Separated in time from the event by hours rather than years, he wrote:

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

... Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

Obviously, the terrorist attacks were a surprise and a terrible shock. It was also the case that we didn't have a firm idea right at first who had done this. So that added to the feeling of bewilderment, as well. Our national media had spent far more time chasing the nonexistent Whitewater scandal and obsessing over Monica Lewinsky than on educating the public about foreign policy in general and Islamic jihadist groups in particular. No wonder people were asking, "What possible reason could there be for this?"

It's interesting to see that Milne was worried within a day or two of the attack that the leaders in the US and Britain were "reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric." Source Watch has compiled a page of various quotes on the question, "Why do that hate us?" This one from President Bush on October 11, a month after the attacks, is one that sticks out for me: "I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed."

It's understandable that the Cheney-Bush Administration would want to ask such self-referential questions and not focus on any reasons for the attack that might in any way suggest that they may have been justified. Otherwise, people might have focused much more on other obvious questions. Like, "What did Bush know about the threat and what did he do about it?" Or, "We spend a bizillion dollars on the military and they can't even stop a few fanatics from crashing an airliner into the Pentagon itself?" Cheney and Bush much preferred that we worship our glorious generals and cheer for the Administration and whatever actions it took in foreign policy.

Ironically, it's hard to recall or even imagine now. But there was actually legitimate reason for the public to be concerned for the first few days after 9/11 that the Bush Administration wouldn't respond in a sufficiently direct and forceful way to the attack. He had actually campaigned for a more "humble" foreign policy than the intervening ways of the Clinton Administration. A substantial number of Republicans in Congress had opposed the Kosovo War, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott leading the antiwar group in the Senate. Candidate Bush had sneered at the concept of "nation building." And most of us in the public had no idea at the time was a major bad actor Dick Cheney was. It's now downright embarrassing to that a lot of us actually though Cheney would be a mature, constructive influence on Shrub Bush.

We know now that senior officials, notably Rummy's deputy at the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to use the attack to implement forcible regime change in Iraq. Tony Blair, we now know, was a major influence in convincing Bush to attack Afghanistan first. It's likely, although I'm not certain how fully it's documented, that Blair agreed to support the invasion of Iraq if Bush agreed to attack Afghanistan first.

The Afghanistan War was launched on October 7, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks. How did that go? Tom Engelhardt, Details of Secret Pact Emerge: Troops Stuck in Afghanistan Until 2024 Alternet 08/23/2011.

Gideon Levy looks at a different "why do they hate us?" question, but one of a similar kind, in The reason why the Egyptians hate us Haaretz 28.08.2011. The US has looked to Israel for many of our lessons in fighting terrorism. The fact that it's been 44 years since the Six Day War and neither terrorism nor the proximate causes have been solved should get more consideration from Americans than it does. Levy writes:

The fact that it has not always been this way should be food for thought in Israel. But as usual, the question of why does not come up for discussion here. Why is there terror? Because. Why is there hatred? Because. It is much easier to think that Egypt hates us and that's that, and divest ourselves of responsibility. Peace with Egypt, which is considered an asset only when it is at risk, was a peace that Israel toyed with and breached from the beginning.

It required recognizing the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and granting it autonomy within five years. Israel conducted ridiculous negotiations, headed by its interior minister (Yosef Burg ) with the intention of making the negotiations go away, and never met its obligations. The invasion of Lebanon the day after the treaty was completed in 1982 was dangerous and impertinent. Against all odds, Egypt withstood this baiting.

People who ask why Egyptians hate us should think back to these two pivotal actions by Israel. Public memory may be short-lived, but hatred is not. Its flames have been fanned since then. People who want to understand why the Egyptians hate us should recall the scenes of Operations Cast Lead and Defensive Shield, the bombing of Beirut and the shelling of Rafah. If Israelis were exposed to scenes in which some country acted in the same way toward Jews, such hatred would burn within us toward that country as well. The Arab masses saw terrible pictures and its hatred increased.

Understanding the multiple causes of terrorism is not the same as making excuses for it. Explaining it in a realistic way is not the same as justifying it. But that's exactly the kind of thinking that Bush promoted in saying things like, "I'm amazed that there's such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am -- like most Americans, I just can't believe it because I know how good we are."

Tags: 9/11, afghanistan war, gideon levy

September 11 retrospective: more PBS person-on-the-street interviews on 9/11

This is the third day in a row I've been posting these short videos from PBS Newshour's YouTube channel. I've been partially making fun of them. But except for the ones who come across as outright bigots, I'm not making fun of them so much as the person-on-the-street format. They are at least asking the same set of questions to everyone, it seems. But the questions are things like whether the person thinks the 9/11 attacks "changed everything." It's too general a question to get much of any kind of interesting perspective from someone who's not used to doing TV interviews. If it were followed up with questions like, what do you see different about politics now? What do you think has changed for the better? What has changed for the worse?, that would likely get more meaningful responses.

If the ones posted on YouTube are any measure, a lot of people tended to focus on their obvious encounters with airport security. That would be interesting in itself if there were some kind of representative sample and follow-up questions were used. Are the subjects aware of the massive warrantless NSA spying on e-mails? Are they aware that the FBI can get a person's library records without the slightest evidence or criminal activity?

But without some systematic treatment and organization, we get essentially a series of informal and often poorly-informed chatter.

A middle-aged Texas Latina, short version: Ah'm gone vote for Rick Perry 'cause ah hate Muslims.



This Texas lady doesn't have much distinctive to say, but she comes off as a very sympathetic person:



Why would you ask someone under 25 if the US is safer now that before 9/11? Unless you ask them for specifics that would indicate they actually know something about it, you get general stuff like this:



Or like this:



Not that uniformed responses are restricted to younger people, though.

Then there are a series of interviews with serving military and emergency-response personnel. But what should you expect to get in an interview like this but fairly conventional safe responses?

That's what they get here from the emergency response fellow who seems like a very pleasant guy:



Same with this firefighter who sounds like a nice fellow:



Here, they interview a woman who works in public relations for the US Army. You've got to be kidding me! She talks about her personal career path since 9/11; she's not spouting some Pentagon propaganda. But she's not saying that much either, and if you're listening closely to doesn't make entire sense. Her response is about how her career changed since 9/11, and winds up saying she's now doing the same thing she was back then. Say what?



Here we have a National Guardsman giving superficial but sensible enough response to questions that practically beg for a superficial response:



Here's one that illustrates what a lazy form of journalism this is. It's a man in Texas obviously not fully fluent in English. He actually sounds like he has some substantive opinions on the questions he's asked, maybe more so than most of the others whose responses are posted. But it would have taken some follow up questions to get them articulated clearly.



I like this young woman in the next one. She shows that would can say something at least a bit meaningful while you're answering lame questions from lazy journalists:



Tags: 9/11

September 11 retrospective: More random opinions on 9/11 via PBS Newshour

Continuing from yesterday's collection of PBS Newshour YouTube videos of person-on-the-street interviews in which the subjects offer mostly canned or clueless comments.

Here we have a Delaware Bubba. Short version of his comments: Hanging out at gun shows is my favorite thing to do.



Short version from this lady: I come from overseas but I don't really know anything much about Muslim-Christian relations.



Short version from the next guy, who comes across as generally well-informed and tolerant, but probably not knowing that much about Islam: Racial and religious bigotry suck. (This is one of the best of these clips I've seen.)



A kid from Wisconsin, short version: I'm too young to remember much before 2001, but I think I heard recently that some terrorist named Osama or something was killed.



Short version of this woman of Cuban descent: I'm a grown-up so I know that there's no 100% security and that it's good to be prepared for emergencies.



Another Delaware guy, short version: Patriotism means being afraid of foreigners.



Another grown-up, short version: I'm not a Pod Pundit on TV but I sure think constantly waging war against other countries is a really bad idea.



Tags: 9/11