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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Moon Landing Faked!!!—Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories


Science News


Moon Landing Faked!!!—Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories



New psychological research helps explain why some see intricate government conspiracies behind events like 9/11 or the Boston bombing




moon landing, moon landing conspiracy,
 Why do so many doubt the U.S. was there? Image: NASA


Did NASA fake the moon landing? Is the government hiding Martians in Area 51? Is global warming a hoax? And what about the Boston Marathon bombing…an “inside job” perhaps?

In the book “The Empire of Conspiracy,” Timothy Melley explains that conspiracy theories have traditionally been regarded by many social scientists as “the implausible visions of a lunatic fringe,” often inspired by what the late historian Richard Hofstadter described as “the paranoid style of American politics.” Influenced by this view, many scholars have come to think of conspiracy theories as paranoid and delusional, and for a long time psychologists have had little to contribute other than to affirm the psychopathological nature of conspiracy thinking, given that conspiricist delusions are commonly associated with (schizotype) paranoia.

Yet, such pathological explanations have proven to be widely insufficient because conspiracy theories are not just the implausible visions of a paranoid minority.
For example, a national poll released just this month reports that 37 percent of Americans believe that global warming is a hoax, 21 percent think that the US government is covering up evidence of alien existence and 28 percent believe a secret elite power with a globalist agenda is conspiring to rule the world. Only hours after the recent Boston marathon bombing, numerous conspiracy theories were floated ranging from a possible ‘inside job’ to YouTube videos claiming that the entire event was a hoax.

So why is it that so many people come to believe in conspiracy theories? They can't all be paranoid schizophrenics. New studies are providing some eye-opening insights and potential explanations.

For example, while it has been known for some time that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are also likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, we would expect contradictory conspiracy theories to be negatively correlated. Yet, this is not what psychologists Micheal Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Suton found in a recent study. Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories. For example, the conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. An important conclusion that the authors draw from their analysis is that people don't tend to believe in a conspiracy theory because of the specifics, but rather because of higher-order beliefs that support conspiracy-like thinking more generally. A popular example of such higher-order beliefs is a severe “distrust of authority.” The authors go on to suggest that conspiracism is therefore not just about belief in an individual theory, but rather an ideological lens through which we view the world. A good case in point is Alex Jones’s recent commentary on the Boston bombings. Jones, (one of the country’s preeminent conspiracy theorists) reminded his audience that two of the hijacked planes on 9/11 flew out of Boston (relating one conspiracy theory to another) and moreover, that the Boston Marathon bombing could be a response to the sudden drop in the price of gold or part of a secret government plot to expand the Transportation Security Administration’s reach to sporting events. Others have pointed their fingers to a ‘mystery man’ spotted on a nearby roof shortly after the explosions.
While it remains unsure whether or not credence is given to only some or all of these (note: contradicting) conspiracy theories, there clearly is a larger underlying preference to support conspiracy-type explanations more generally.

Interestingly, belief in conspiracy theories has recently been linked to the rejection of science. In a paper published in Psychological Science, Stephen Lewandowsky and colleagues investigated the relation between acceptance of science and conspiricist thinking patterns. While the authors' survey was not representative of the general population, results suggest that (controlling for other important factors) belief in multiple conspiracy theories significantly predicted the rejection of important scientific conclusions, such as climate science or the fact that smoking causes lung cancer. Yet, rejection of scientific principles is not the only possible consequence of widespread belief in conspiracy theories.  Another recent study indicates that receiving positive information about or even being merely exposed to conspiracy theories can lead people to become disengaged from important political and societal topics. For example, in their study, Daniel Jolley and Karen Douglas clearly show that participants who received information that supported the idea that global warming is a hoax were less willing to engage politically and also less willing to implement individual behavioral changes such as reducing their carbon footprint.

These findings are alarming because they show that conspiracy theories sow public mistrust and undermine democratic debate by diverting attention away from important scientific, political and societal issues. There is no question as to whether the public should actively demand truthful and transparent information from their governments and proposed explanations should be met with a healthy amount of scepticism, yet, this is not what conspiracy theories offer. A conspiracy theory is usually defined as an attempt to explain the ultimate cause of an important societal event as part of some sinister plot conjured up by a secret alliance of powerful individuals and organizations. The great philosopher Karl Popper argued that the fallacy of conspiracy theories lies in their tendency to describe every event as 'intentional' and 'planned' thereby seriously underestimating the random nature and unintended consequences of many political and social actions. In fact, Popper was describing a cognitive bias that psychologists now commonly refer to as the “fundamental attribution error”: the tendency to overestimate the actions of others as being intentional rather than the product of (random) situational circumstances.

Since a number of studies have shown that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with feelings of powerlessness, uncertainty and a general lack of agency and control, a likely purpose of this bias is to help people “make sense of the world” by providing simple explanations for complex societal events — restoring a sense of control and predictability. A good example is that of climate change: while the most recent international scientific assessment report (receiving input from over 2500 independent scientists from more than a 100 countries) concluded with 90 percent certainty that human-induced global warming is occurring, the severe consequences and implications of climate change are often too distressing and overwhelming for people to deal with, both cognitively as well as emotionally. Resorting to easier explanations that simply discount global warming as a hoax is then of course much more comforting and convenient psychologically. Yet, as Al Gore famously pointed out, unfortunately, the truth is not always convenient.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Sander van der Linden is a doctoral candidate in social-environmental psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (Grantham Research Institute) and currently a visiting research scholar with the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication at Yale University. His research focuses on behavioral change, the psychology of communication and the construction of human risk perception.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Welcome to America: Children Forced to Wear Bulletproof Backpacks, Companies Sell Shields Disguised as Whiteboards





  News & Politics  


 

Bulletproof backpacks, ballistic safety vests and ballistic shields disguised as whiteboards are cropping up in schools around the country.

 
 
 
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

 
 
Welcome to post-Newtown America: where gun control legislation can’t be passed but companies are profiting by selling bulletproof backpacks for children in schools. The backpacks, along with ballistic safety vests and ballistic shields disguised as whiteboards in classrooms, are among the products companies are pushing in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre.

The Guardian reports that a Denver-based company, Elite Sterling Security, has sold 300 bulletproof backpacks over the last two months. The company has also received inquiries about their backpacks from 2,000 families across the U.S. And the company is in talks with schools in Colorado about “equipping them with ballistic safety vests, a scaled-down version of military uniforms designed to hang in classroom cupboards for children to wear in an emergency,” The Guardian reports.

“If you put it on her back, it almost covers her whole body,” one Colorado parent whose child wears a bulletproof backpack explained to the British newspaper. “It was a very hard conversation to have but she knows that it's something that will keep her safe." 

There are also ballistic shields that look like whiteboards in classrooms. Schools in North Dakota, Pennsylvania and California have bought them. 

Scott Staska, a superintendent of schools in Minnesota, said the ballistic shields are important for safety. “We have door locks, safety cameras, and emergency procedures all designed to assist with an emergency situation and we see the marker boards as one additional tool to help in the process,” he said. 

So while these places may not be taking the National Rifle Association up on its suggestion to put armed guards in schools, they’re coming very close to it. In post-Newtown America, schools are becoming places where seeing bulletproof vests, backpacks and shields is normal. But as Think Progress notes, psychiatrists have warned "that militarizing schools could cause long-term harm to children." 

Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and an assistant editor for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Worst President in America History Is Trying to Spin His Nightmare Legacy.





 

Are you ready for the George W. Bush comeback tour?

 
 
 

 


 
Americans are a forgiving and forgetting people. That’s all that can explain the rise in George W. Bush’s approval ratings since he left office in 2009. Back then, he had the lowest approval rating of any departing president since Richard Nixon (who departed in a helicopter after resigning in disgrace) with a 33 percent overall approval rating. Only 24 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the recession-bound economy. As recently as last November’s election, more voters blamed Bush than President Obama for the country’s ongoing economic woes.

Now, on the eve of the opening of his presidential library and an apparent Bush-rehabilitation tour, starting with a Diane Sawyer interview Wednesday night, Bush faces a kinder, gentler American public. According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, Americans are now split on the former president, with 47 percent approving of his performance and 50 percent disapproving. He’s still underwater, as the pollsters say, but that’s not a bad jump in four years. He’s even climbed on the economy, with 43 percent now approving of the job he did, while 57 percent stayed tethered to the reality-based community, and still disapprove.

Bush has even climbed among Democrats: 25 percent approve of the job he did, up from only 6 percent when he left office. (Who says Democrats are haters?)
What’s going on? And will Bush’s comeback tour bump his numbers up even more, which would be some rare good news for the broken, embattled Republican Party?

A few things are clear: This campaign is as much about cleaning up the mess he made for his brother Jeb, who clearly wants to claim his rightful place in the White House, as it is about refurbishing his legacy. Last week Bush told Parade magazine he hopes his brother runs. “I would hope that people would judge [him], if Jeb were to run, on his merits and his track record.…So I hope he will run.” The Bush rehabilitation project is something the entire Republican Party needs – as evidenced by the breathless reaction of the party’s top cheerleader, Jennifer Rubin. (I mean no sexism by calling Rubin a cheerleader; her hero Bush was a cheerleader in prep school.)

“Bush is back!” her dopey Washington Post column declared Tuesday.  Here’s a snippet:
It took less than 4 1/2 years of the Obama presidency for President George W. Bush to mount his comeback…Why the shift? Aside from the “memories fade” point, many of his supposed failures are mild compared to the current president (e.g. spending, debt). Unlike Obama’s tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11. People do remember the big stuff — rallying the country after the Twin Towers attack, 7 1/2 years of job growth and prosperity, millions of people saved from AIDS in Africa, a good faith try for immigration reform, education reform and a clear moral compass.
I warn you, it gets worse. This might be Rubin’s most craven and dishonest column since her countless craven and dishonest columns flacking for Mitt Romney.

But Rubin’s spin won’t work, and neither will Bush’s rehab tour. He is the worst president in modern history, by any measure. Americans don’t like disliking their presidents, so his recovery was predictable, but Bush’s media tour is likely to provoke a backlash, or at least closer media scrutiny to his record. Or at least it should.

* * *
I’ve always felt a tiny bit sorry for Bush. The self-described “black sheep” of his privileged family of compulsive, competitive overachievers, he was never supposed to be president: The honor was meant to go to his smarter, smoother brother Jeb. His favorite job ever, he told us in his autobiography, was being a sporting goods salesman at Sears.

I blamed the worst of his presidency on Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the worst people in the world. I thought his low profile since he left office (compared with Cheney’s brazen attacks on Obama) might reflect self-awareness that he’d been a screw-up, just like his days at his family-funded Arbusto Energy. I even saw an attempt at expiation in his oddly vulnerable self-portraits, several of them in the bathroom or shower no less, at least one featuring his reflection in the mirror. Maybe he was examining his failures and trying to wash away his sins?
No way. Bush is unapologetic in his new round of interviews, telling USA Today, “There’s no need to defend myself. I did what I did and ultimately history will judge.” A few years ago, Bush told Bob Woodward he didn’t care about history. “History,” he replied. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Now he’s counting on his presidential library to shape history’s verdict, calling it “a place to lay out the facts.”  (Oh, and don’t read anything into his painting. “It’s mellowing, and there’s nothing wrong, particularly for a Type A personality, to mellow out,” he also told USA Today.)

The most fascinating feature of Bush’s library may be an interactive exhibit called “Decision Points Theater,” that includes everything from the 2003 Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the 2008 financial meltdown. It lets visitors assess “the decisions that I had to make and the recommendations I received,” he says, and then make their own decisions.

What an oddly passive thing to say, to put the emphasis on “the recommendations I received.” It lets Bush pass the buck, again.
Here are some decision points that belong in “Decision Points Theater,” but probably won’t be there.

When he got the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing, warning, “Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.,” he told the briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass,” and then went fishing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. (That “Type A personality,” by the way, took more vacation than any president in modern history.) Is that what the average Bush Library visitor would have done with such a warning?

After 9/11, he did not tell Americans to go shopping, contrary to popular myth. But he did tell us, “Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” He squandered national and international goodwill in the aftermath of the attack, and told us to go to Disney World, while he went ahead with budget-busting tax cuts and put two wars on a credit card, along with a pricey but popular prescription drug benefit for seniors. I’m not sure how “Decision Points Theater” is going to depict that sequence of decision-making.

I wonder if the Hurricane Katrina exhibit will feature the “recommendations” and advice that led him to praise failed FEMA director Michael Brown with his memorable “Heck of a job, Brownie.” Will Bush finally reveal that while he claimed he thought New Orleans had “dodged a bullet” the day after the storm, the White House had actually been informed that the levies had failed and there was massive flooding the night before? Any American visitor to “Decision Points Theater” presented with that information might second-guess the sluggishness of the administration’s response to a great city’s drowning.

Jennifer Rubin’s crowing about “7 1/2 years of growth and prosperity” under Bush might be the most deluded passage of her delusionary piece. Under Bush, the U.S. experienced the slowest overall rate of economic growth since World War II. Although wages had declined for many groups since the ’70s, household income had remained steady, mostly because families sent a second earner into the workplace. But under Bush, household income declined, too, for the first time since the Census Bureau tracked that data in 1967. Almost 22 million jobs were created under the Clinton administration; only 3 million net new jobs were added under Bush, fewer jobs than in any president’s two-terms since World War II.

Labor force participation had reached an all-time high in 2000 under Clinton; it dropped steadily under Bush. Unemployment jumped from 3.9 percent when Clinton left office to 7.2 percent at the end of 2008. And despite the supply-side notion that tax cuts would lead to more entrepreneurialism, in fact, the rate at which start-up companies created jobs actually fell between 2000 and 2010. Clinton left Bush a $236 billion budget surplus; Bush would leave his successor saddled with a $1.2 trillion deficit.

I don’t know how “Decision Points Theater” will tackle any of that.
* * *
The bottom line on the Bush presidency is this: After losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore, the man who’d run as a “compassionate conservative” known in Texas for reaching out to Democrats ran a hard-right, divisive administration instead. The guy who inveighed against “nation-building” let his neocon advisers push two deadly and impossible nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving almost 7,000 Americans dead, more than 50,000 wounded at an ultimate cost of $4 trillion-$6 trillion, according to a recent Harvard study.  His tax cuts blew out the budget, his economic policies favored the rich and the economy cratered on his watch.

It’s going to take more than a series of softball network interviews to rehabilitate Bush’s legacy. But Republicans need him to come out of hiding if his brother is going to have any chance of being president. So watch for not only flacks like Jennifer Rubin but leading party figures to act like the Bush rehab tour is a great success. They should face the truth: Bush’s ratings only improved because he went away. His comeback campaign is likely to remind people of the disaster he left in his wake, and backfire on him, his brother and his party.
Still, getting it out of the way now at least prevents charges that the GOP is hiding its last president, which let’s face it, has looked so dodgy given Bill Clinton’s prominence in his party. I’d predict Bush’s re-emergence will be a short-term media go-round, designed to erase the idea he’s been hidden away. Then he’ll be hidden away again, painting dog pictures. “I’m happy to be out of the limelight. I truly am,” he told USA Today. “I am happy.”

UPDATE: The PR blitz continues, with this ode to Bush from former press secretary Dana Perino, and innumerable Tweets from Karl Rove.

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. Read more of her work at Salon.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

America's Baffling Historical Amnesia: Suddenly President Bush's Approval Ratings Are the Same As Obama's




News & Politics  



A new poll shows that President George W. Bush’s reputation has a chance of being rehabilitated.

 
 
 
 
Are Americans forgetting the disaster that was the Bush administration? A new poll could be an indication that President George W. Bush’s reputation has a chance of being rehabilitated, though it’s not fully there yet.

Bush is stepping into the public eye after a long hiatus as his presidential library dedication takes place Thursday at the Southern Methodist University in Texas. Thousands of invited world leaders and dignitaries, including President Barack Obama and the four other living ex-presidents, will be on hand. And a poll released from the Washington Post/ABC News reveals that Americans are slowly beginning to warm back up to Bush. 

“Days before his second term ended in 2009, Bush’s approval rating among all adults was 33 percent positive and 66 percent negative. The new poll found 47 percent saying they approve and 50 percent saying they disapprove,” the Washington Post reports. “Among registered voters, his approval rating today is equal to President Obama’s, at 47 percent, according to the latest Post-ABC surveys.” 

Iraq remains the albatross around Bush’s neck. 57 percent told pollsters that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, though that’s down from 65 percent in 2008. But more and more Americans also approve of Bush’s economic performance. 43 percent approve of Bush’s economic policies, up from 24 percent in 2008. This statistic indicates that some American citizens are forgetting that Bush’s economic policies--tax cuts for the rich and deregulation--helped contribute to the economic crash. His administration was also responsible for bailing out Wall Street--a hugely unpopular decision. 

His advisers are busy trying to rehabilitate his image, and one told the Washington Post that the Iraq troop surge and the bailout were decisions that reflected “strong presidential leadership and, as we now see in retrospect, excellent judgment.” Some historians doubt a full rehabilitation of Bush’s reputation will take place, but the poll numbers show a slow inching towards that. 

It’s a clear as day indication that Americans suffer from some serious historical amnesia. The disasters of Iraq, the economy and Hurricane Katrina are serious blots on Bush’s historical record. It’s baffling that nearly half the country now says they approve of his presidency.
 
Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and an assistant editor for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Field of Nightmares: Enemy-Industrial Complex, Part 2







[Note for TomDispatch readers: This is part two of my series on how Washington helped create its enemies in the post-9/11 era. Part one was “The Enemy-Industrial Complex.” Also, I can't resist mentioning that I -- and so TomDispatch -- was named "Truthdigger of the week" at the invaluable website Truthdig.com. To read Alexander Kelly's piece on TD and me accompanying that honor, click here. Tom]

Filling the Empty Battlefield 

Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter 

By Tom Engelhardt

Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.”  In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened.  Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power.  He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world... for future forms of blowback.”

Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.”  In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged.  It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.

Talk about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did. All of this laid the foundation for... well, in 1999 when Johnson was writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had “freed ourselves of... any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe.”

With Blowback, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically unprecedented garrisoning of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally.  After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to the center of the 9/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and became a bestseller, while “blowback” and that phrase “unintended consequences” made their way into our everyday language.

Chalmers Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar.  Now, more than a decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter.  His name is Jeremy Scahill.  In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in service to its foreign wars, was working manically to “privatize” national security and the U.S. military by hiring rent-a-spiesrent-a-guns, and rent-a-corporations for its proliferating wars.

In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation to heart -- that we Americans can’t see our world as it is.  And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows.  As two administrations in Washington arrogated ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making.  In the process, they transformed an increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military.

In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state -- and no one else.  Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end.  It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name.  As a result, there was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written.  Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.

Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC.  In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., “an executive assassination wing,” as Seymour Hersh once put it, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.  It next turned its hunter/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military.  In those years, Scahill started following the footsteps of special ops types into the field, while mainlining into sources in their community as well as other parts of the American military and intelligence world.

In his new book, he dramatically retraces the bureaucratic intel wars in Washington as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community muscled up, and secret presidential orders gave JSOC, in particular, unprecedented authority to turn the globe into a free-fire zone.  Finally, as a reporter, he traveled to a series of danger spots -- Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan -- that Americans could care less about, where the U.S. military and the CIA (in conjunction with private security contractors) were experimenting with and developing new ways of waging Washington’s spreading secret wars.

As Scahill writes in his acknowledgements, thanking another reporter who traveled with him, “We were shot at together on rooftops in Mogadishu, slept on dingy floors in rural Afghanistan, and traveled together in the netherlands of Southern Yemen.”  That catches something of the spirit behind a book produced by a dedicated, unembedded, independent reporter -- a thoroughly impressive, even awe-inspiring piece of work.

In the process, Scahill, who in these years broke a number of major stories as national security correspondent for the Nation magazine, fills us in on those American military death squads in Iraq, nightmarish special ops night raids in Afghanistan (that target all the wrong people), secret renditions of terror suspects to a CIA-funded jail in Somalia (after President Obama had forsworn “rendition”), the dispatching of drones and cruise missiles in disastrous strikes on civilians in Yemen, the hunting down and assassination of American citizens (aka terror suspects, although 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki certainly wasn’t one) also in Yemen on the orders of the president, the complex world of JSOC-CIA-Blackwater operations in Pakistan -- and so much more, including an indication that JSOC has even launched secret ground operations of some sort in Uzbekistan. (Who knew?)

Dirty Wars is also, in Johnson’s terms, a history of the future; that is, a history of potential blowback-to-come, a message in a bottle sent to us from the hidden front lines of America’s global battlefields -- and therein lies a tale of tales.

Preparing the Battlefield

A couple of years back, TomDispatch correspondent Ann Jones told me something I’ve never forgotten.  Having spent time with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, she described their patrols in the countryside this way: yes, there were dangers, mainly IEDs (roadside bombs) and the odd potshot taken at them, but on the whole the areas they patrolled every day were eerily “empty.”  In some sense, it almost seemed as if no one was there, as if they were fighting a ghost war on -- her term -- an empty battlefield.

As it happens, her observation has a planetary analogue that lies at the heart of Scahill’s remarkable book.  As you may remember, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took no time at all for Bush administration officials to think big.  Notoriously, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began urging aides to build a case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein only five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.  Within weeks administration figures were already talking with confidence about the need to “drain the swamp” of terrorists and enemies on a global scale.  They were reportedly planning to target 60 to 80 countries, almost a third to close to one-half of the nations on this planet.  In other words, when they quickly declared a Global War on Terror, they weren’t kidding.  They meant it quite literally and, as Scahill reports, they promptly went to work building up the kinds of forces -- secret and at their command alone -- that could fight anywhere on the sly.

As these forces were dispatched globally to collect intelligence, train foreign forces (also often “special” and secret), and especially hunt and kill terrorists, a new tradecraft term came into play, a phrase as crucial to Scahill’s book as “blowback” was to Johnson’s.  They were, it was claimed, going out to “prepare the battlefield” (or alternately, “the battlespace” or “the environment”).  That process of preparation couldn’t have been more breathtakingly hubristic.  Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the situation this way: “Today, the entire world is the ‘battlespace.’”

Here’s the strange thing, though: when those secret forces went out to do their dirty work, that global battlefield was, using Jones’s term, remarkably, eerily empty.  There was hardly anyone there.  Perhaps hundreds or at most a few thousand jihadis scattered mainly in the backlands of the planet.  If “preparing the battlefield” turned out to be the crucial term of the era, it wasn't exactly a descriptively accurate one.  More on the mark might have been: “creating the battlefield” or “filling the empty battlefield.”

The pattern that Scahill traces brilliantly might have boiled down to a version of the tag line for the movie Field of Dreams: if you prepare it, they will come.  The result was not so much a war on, as a war of, and for, terror.  Washington would, at one and the same time, produce a killing machine and a terror-generating machine.  Dirty Wars catches the way its top officials became convinced that the planet’s last superpower, with “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” (as American presidents now never grow tired of repeating), could simply kill its way to victory globally.

As Scahill also shows, they were often remarkably successful at eliminating the figures on their “kill list” of targeted enemies from Osama bin Laden on down: Bin Laden himself in Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Aden Hashi Ayro in Somalia, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as various “lieutenants” of top al-Qaeda figures and allied groups.  And yet, as those on the kill lists died, thanks to the CIA’s drones and JSOC’s raiders, so did others.  Often enough, they were innocent civilians -- and in quantity.  People who shouldn’t have ever had their doors kicked in, their sons arrested or their pregnant wives shot down, and who bitterly resented what they experienced.  And so before Washington knew it, the kill list was growing larger, not smaller, and its wars were becoming more, not less, intense and spreading to other lands.  The battlefield, copiously prepared, was filling with enemies.

A Perpetual Motion Machine for the Destabilization of the Planet

As Washington launched its post-9/11 adventures, the neoconservative allies of the Bush administration, believing the wind in their sails, eyed the vast area from North Africa to the Central Asian border of China (aka “the Greater Middle East”) that they liked to call the “arc of instability.”  The job of the U.S., they imagined, was to bring stability to that “arc” by using America's overwhelming military power to create a Pax Americana in the region.  They were, in other words, fundamentalists and the U.S. military was their born-again religion.  They believed that its techno-power would trump every other form of power on the planet, hands down.

In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and in light of the ongoing disastrous war in Afghanistan, if you look at the Greater Middle East today -- from Pakistan to Syria, Afghanistan to Mali -- you’ll know what instability is really all about.  Twelve years later, much of the region has been destabilized to one degree or another, which might pass as the definition for Washington of short-term success and long-term failure.

In reality, they should have known better from the start.  After all, behind the global war launched by the Bush administration and carried on by Obama was a twenty-first-century replay of a brutal flop of a strategy in Washington’s failed war in Vietnam.  The phrase that went with it back then was “the crossover point,” the supposedly crucial moment in what was bluntly thought of as a “war of attrition.” 

The idea was simple enough.  The staggering firepower available to Washington would be brought to bear on the Vietnamese enemy with the obvious, expectable result: sooner or later, a moment would be reached in which the U.S. would be killing more of that enemy than could be replaced by recruitment in South Vietnam or the infiltration of reinforcements from the North.  At that moment, Washington would “crossover” into victory.  We know just where that led -- to the infamous body count (which the Bush administration tried desperately to avoid in Iraq and Afghanistan), to slaughter on a staggering scale, and to defeat when the prodigious number of enemies killed somehow never resulted in the U.S. crossing over.

And here’s the ironic thing.  Like his father who, as the first Gulf War ended in 1991, spoke ecstatically of having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” George W. Bush and his top officials had an overwhelming allergy to the memory of Vietnam.  Yet they still managed to launch a global war of attrition against a range of groups they defined as “terrorists.” They were clearly planning to kill them, one by one if possible, or in “signature” groups if necessary, until some crossover point was reached, until the enemy was losing more members than could be replaced and victory came into sight. As in Vietnam, of course, that crossover point never arrived and it’s increasingly clear that it never will.  Scahill’s reporting couldn’t be more incisive on the subject.
Dirty Wars is really the secret history of how Washington launched a series of undeclared wars in the backlands of the planet and killed its way to something that ever more closely resembled an actual global war, creating a world of enemies out of next to nothing.  Think of it as a bizarre form of unconscious wish fulfillment and the results -- they came! -- as a field of nightmares.

What was created in the process now seems more like a perpetual motion machine for the destabilization of the planet.  Just follow the spread of drone bases and of JSOC’s raiders, and you can actually watch the backlands of the globe destabilizing before your eyes, or read Scahill’s book and get a superb blow-by-blow account of just how it happened.  The process is now well underway in Africa where destabilization seems to be heading south from Libya via Mali.

Reread Blowback 13 years later and it’s hard to believe that anyone was so ahead of his times, given the human predilection for being unable to foresee much of anything.  Perhaps the saddest thing that can be said about Dirty Wars is that, the way things look, 13 years from now Scahill's book, too, may seem as fresh as last night’s news.  He has laid out a style of off-the-books war-making that seems destined to be perpetuated, no matter what administration is in power.

Much remains unknown when it comes to our recent non-war wars.  Thirteen years from now we may know far more about what JSOC, the CIA, and others were really doing in these years.  None of that, however, is likely to change the pattern Scahill has set down for us.

So let’s not hesitate to say it: mission accomplished!  The world may not have been a battlefield then.  But they prepared the global battlespace so well that it’s heading in that direction now.

Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a way of coming home.  Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings.  The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in American history.  In its own way, it was also an example of the empty battlefield.  An 87-square mile metropolitan area was almost totally locked down. At least 9,000 heavily up-armored local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, hundreds of National Guard troops, SWAT teams, armored vehicles, helicopters, and who knows what else hit the streets of greater Boston’s neighborhoods in a search for two dangerous, deluded young men, one of whom ended up bloodied inside a boat in a backyard just outside the zone the police had cordoned off to search in Watertown.  It was a spectacle that would have been unimaginable in pre-9/11 America.

The expense must have been staggering (especially if you add in business losses from the city’s shutdown).  In the end, of course, one of the suspects was killed and the other captured -- and celebrations of that short-term success began immediately on the streets of Boston and in the media.  But here, too, killing your way to success is unlikely to prove a winning strategy.  After all, we’re already in Scahill’s blowback world in which, no matter the number of deaths, there is unlikely to be a crossover point.

After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombing suspect, was captured, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a new phrase into the American lexicon.  While calling for the 19-year-old to be held as an “enemy noncombatant” (à la Guantanamo), he wrote, "The homeland is the battlefield."  That should send chills down the spine of any reader of Dirty Wars.

Above all else, there’s this: while the world burned and melted, Washington set itself one crucial global mission: to send its secret forces out onto that global battlefield to hunt random jihadis. It may be the worst case of imperial risk assessment since Nero fiddled and Rome burned.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers:  This essay focused on Jeremy Scahill’s new book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books).  In June, a film of the same title directed by Rick Rowley and based on the book will hit the theaters.  I’ve seen it in preview.  Its focus differs from the book’s.  Scahill is its narrator.  It's deeply personal and is powerfully humanizing of those whose doors we’ve kicked in during this last grim decade-plus.  It could be the documentary of the year.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

Sunday, April 21, 2013

The Enemy-Industrial Complex



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The Enemy-Industrial Complex




Posted on Apr 16, 2013
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

In response to Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, Tom Engelhardt wrote the following on TomDispatch’s Facebook page Tuesday:

It’s exactly when we experience a nightmare like yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon that we need a serious assessment of risk and danger in this country. An event like this, horrific as it is, and the panic that goes with it will inevitably be the spark for yet greater investment, both emotionally and financially, in the national security state, greater up-armoring of the police, a further militarization of society, further moves to give latitude to intelligence agencies as they search amongst us, and so on. Perhaps counterintuitively, this is exactly the moment for a piece like the one I wrote yesterday – though obviously I had no crystal ball and couldn’t see a terror bombing coming – on the general lack of major enemies in our American world. The panic of a terrible event like this makes us even blinder to reality, to what dangers we actually face (and don’t face), globally and locally. The murder of innocents is always a terrible and tragic thing, but it’s also a moment to suck it up and not plunge deeper into the twenty-first century American Big Muddy. Terror is a horrific thing, but it does not truly endanger us as a country. It is, in many ways, strangely helpless, even when it can kill and wound small (or even, as on 9/11, large) numbers of people. Give into it and you’re not really “safe,” you’re just in another America.


This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.

The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration.  Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable.  The coverage in the media has been hair-raising.  The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.

Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn’t count on Guam either.

It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult.  If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,”  we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment.
 
In the previous century, there were two devastating global wars,  which left significant parts of the planet in ruins.  There was also a “cold war” between two superpowers locked in a system of mutual assured destruction (aptly acronymed as MAD) whose nuclear arsenals were capable of destroying the planet many times over.  Had you woken up any morning in the years between December 7, 1941, and December 26, 1991,  and been told that the leading international candidate for America’s Public Enemy Number One was Kim Jong-un’s ramshackle, comic-opera regime in North Korea, you might have gotten down on your hands and knees and sent thanks to pagan gods.

The same would be true for the other candidates for that number one position since September 11, 2001: the original al-Qaeda (largely decimated), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula located in poverty-stricken areas of poverty-stricken Yemen, the Taliban in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, unnamed jihadis scattered across poverty-stricken areas of North Africa, or Iran, another rickety regional power run by not particularly adept theocrats.

All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror.”  We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow.  From our police to our borders,  we’ve up-armored everywhere.  We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.”  And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.

Few in this country have found this striking.  Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.

You know that feeling when you wake up and realize you’ve had the same recurrent nightmare yet again? Sometimes, there’s an equivalent in waking life, and here’s mine: every now and then, as I read about the next move in the spreading war on terror, the next drone assassination, the next ratcheting up of the surveillance game, the next expansion of the secrecy that envelops our government, the next set of expensive actions taken to guard us—all of this justified by the enormous threats and dangers that we face—I think to myself: Where’s the enemy?  And then I wonder: Just what kind of a dream is this that we’re dreaming?

A Door Marked “Enemy” and No One Home

Let’s admit it: enemies can have their uses.  And let’s admit as well that it’s in the interest of some in our country that we be seen as surrounded by constant and imminent dangers on an enemy-filled planet.  Let’s also admit that the world is and always will be a dangerous place in all sorts of ways.

Still, in American terms, the bloodlettings, the devastations of this new century and the last years of the previous one have been remarkably minimal or distant; some of the worst, as in the multi-country war over the Congo with its more than five million dead have passed us by entirely; some, even when we launched them, have essentially been imperial frontier conflicts, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or interventions of little cost (to us) as in Libya, or frontier patrolling operations as in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Northern Africa.  (It was no mistake that, when Washington launched its special operations raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, to get Osama bin Laden, it was given the code name “Geronimo” and the message from the SEAL team recording his death was “Geronimo-E KIA” or “enemy killed in action.”)

And let’s admit as well that, in the wake of those wars and operations, Americans now have more enemies, more angry, embittered people who would like to do us harm than on September 10, 2001.  Let’s accept that somewhere out there are people who, as George W. Bush once liked to say, “hate us” and what we stand for.  (I leave just what we actually stand for to you, for the moment.) 

So let’s consider those enemies briefly.  Is there a major state, for instance, that falls into this category, like any of the great warring imperial European powers from the sixteenth century on, or Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, or the Soviet Union of the Cold War era?  Of course not.
There was admittedly a period when, in order to pump up what we faced in the world, analogies to World War II and the Cold War were rife.  There was, for instance, George W. Bush’s famed rhetorical construct, the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), patterned by his speechwriter on the German-Italian-Japanese “axis” of World War II.  It was, of course, a joke construct, if reality was your yardstick.  Iraq and Iran were then enemies.  (Only in the wake of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have they become friends and allies.)  And North Korea had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them.  Similarly, the American occupation of Iraq was once regularly compared to the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan, just as Saddam Hussein had long been presented as a modern Hitler.

In addition, al-Qaeda-style Islamists were regularly referred to as Islamofascists, while certain military and neocon types with a desire to turn the war on terror into a successor to the Cold War took to calling it “the long war,” or even “World War IV.”  But all of this was so wildly out of whack that it simply faded away. As for who’s behind that door marked “Enemy,” if you opened it, what would you find?  As a start, scattered hundreds or, as the years have gone by, thousands of jihadis, mostly in the poorest backlands of the planet and with little ability to do anything to the United States.  Next, there were a few minority insurgencies, including the Taliban and allied forces in Afghanistan and separate Sunni and Shia ones in Iraq.  There also have been tiny numbers of wannabe Islamic terrorists in the U.S. (once you take away the string of FBI sting operations that have regularly turned hopeless slackers and lost teenagers into the most dangerous of fantasy Muslim plotters).  And then, of course, there are those two relatively hapless regional powers, Iran and North Korea, whose bark far exceeds their potential bite.

The Wizard of Oz on 9/11

The U.S., in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century.  There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China.  It’s true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died.  When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn’t actually an apocalyptic event.
The enemy was still nearly nonexistent.  The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars.  It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects.  It in no way endangered the state.  In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers.  It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one.  It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years.  It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.

When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less.  And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment—a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country.  The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on “A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century.”  If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.


To put this in perspective, consider two obvious major dangers in U.S. life: suicide by gun and death by car.  In 2010, more than 19,000 Americans killed themselves using guns.  (In the same year, there were “only” 11,000 homicides nationwide.)  In 2011, 32,000 Americans died in traffic accidents (the lowest figure in 60 years, though it was again on the rise in the first six months of 2012).  In other words, Americans accept without blinking the equivalent yearly of more than six 9/11s in suicides-by-gun and more than 10 when it comes to vehicular deaths.  Similarly, had the underwear bomber, to take one post-9/11 example of terrorism, succeeded in downing Flight 253 and murdering its 290 passengers, it would have been a horrific act of terror; but he and his compatriots would have had to bring down 65 planes to reach the annual level of weaponized suicides and more than 110 planes for vehicular deaths.

And yet no one has declared war on either the car or the gun (or the companies that make them or the people who sell them).  No one has built a massive, nearly trillion-dollar car-and-gun-security-complex to deal with them.  In the case of guns, quite the opposite is true, as the post-Newtown debate over gun control has made all too clear.  On both scores, Americans have decided to live with perfectly real dangers and the staggering carnage that accompanies them, constraining them on occasion or sometimes not at all. 

Despite the carnage of 9/11, terrorism has been a small-scale American danger in the years since, worse than shark attacks, but not much else.  Like a wizard, however, what Osama bin Laden and his suicide bombers did that day was create an instant sense of an enemy so big, so powerful, that Americans found “war” a reasonable response; big enough for those who wanted an international police action against al-Qaeda to be laughed out of the room; big enough to launch an invasion of revenge against Iraq, a country unrelated to al-Qaeda; big enough, in fact, to essentially declare war on the world.  It took next to no time for top administration officials to begin talking about targeting 60 countries, and as journalist Ron Suskind has reported, within six days of the attack, the CIA had topped that figure, presenting President Bush with a “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” a plan that targeted terrorists in 80 countries.

What’s remarkable is how little the disjuncture between the scope and scale of the global war that was almost instantly launched and the actual enemy at hand was ever noted here.  You could certainly make a reasonable argument that, in these years, Washington has largely fought no one—and lost.  Everywhere it went, it created enemies who had, previously, hardly existed and the process is ongoing.  Had you been able to time-travel back to the Cold War era to inform Americans that, in the future, our major enemies would be in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya, and so on, they would surely have thought you mad (or lucky indeed).

Creating an Enemy-Industrial Complex
 
Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable.  The vast national security building and spending spree—stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world’s intercepted communications—would have been unlikely.

Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety.  The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.

Without 9/11 and the perpetual “wartime” that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit U.S. Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the “drone lobby” that goes with them might never have developed; and the U.S. military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it—effectively the president’s private army, air force, and navy—and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.


For all of this to happen, there had to be an enemy-industrial complex as well, a network of crucial figures and institutions ready to pump up the threat we faced and convince Americans that we were in a world so dangerous that rights, liberty, and privacy were small things to sacrifice for American safety.  In short, any number of interests from Bush administration figures eager to “sweep it all up” and do whatever they wanted in the world to weapons makers, lobbyists, surveillance outfits, think tanks, military intellectuals, assorted pundits… well, the whole national and homeland security racket and its various hangers-on had an interest in beefing up the enemy.  For them, it was important in the post-9/11 era that threats would never again lack a capital “T” or a hefty dollar sign.

And don’t forget a media that was ready to pound the drums of war and emphasize what dangerous enemies lurked in our world with remarkably few second thoughts.  Post-9/11, major media outlets were generally prepared to take the enemy-industrial complex’s word for it and play every new terrorist incident as if it were potentially the end of the world.  Increasingly as the years went on, jobs, livelihoods, an expanding world of “security” depended on the continuance of all this, depended, in short, on the injection of regular doses of fear into the body politic.

That was the “favor” Osama bin Laden did for Washington’s national security apparatus and the Bush administration on that fateful September morning.  He engraved an argument in the American brain that would live on indelibly for years, possibly decades, calling for eternal vigilance at any cost and on a previously unknown scale.  As the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), that neocon think-tank-cum-shadow-government, so fatefully put it in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” a year before the 9/11 attacks: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

So when the new Pearl Harbor arrived out of the blue, with many PNAC members (from Vice President Dick Cheney on down) already in office, they naturally saw their chance.  They created an al-Qaeda on steroids and launched their “global war” to establish a Pax Americana, in the Middle East and then perhaps globally.  They were aware that they lacked opponents of the stature of those of the previous century and, in their documents, they made it clear that they were planning to ensure no future great-power-style enemy or bloc of enemy-like nations would arise. Ever.

For this, they needed an American public anxious, frightened, and ready to pay.  It was, in other words, in their interest to manipulate us.  And if that were all there were to it, our world would be a grim, but simple enough place.  As it happens, it’s not.  Ruling elites, no matter what power they have, don’t work that way.  Before they manipulate us, they almost invariably manipulate themselves. I was convinced of this years ago by a friend who had spent a lot of time reading early Cold War documents from the National Security Council—from, that is, a small group of powerful governmental figures writing to and for each other in the utmost secrecy.  As he told me then and wrote in Washington’s China, the smart book he did on the early U.S. response to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, what struck him in the documents was the crudely anti-communist language those men used in private with each other.  It was the sort of anti-communism you might otherwise have assumed Washington’s ruling elite would only have wielded to manipulate ordinary Americans with fears of Communist subversion, the “enemy within,” and Soviet plans to take over the world.  (In fact, they and others like them would use just such language to inject fear into the body politic in those early Cold War years, that era of McCarthyism.)

They were indeed manipulative men, but before they influenced other Americans they assumedly underwent something like a process of collective auto-hypnotism in which they convinced one another of the dangers they needed the American people to believe in.  There is evidence that a similar process took place in the aftermath of 9/11.  From the flustered look on George W. Bush’s face as his plane took him not toward but away from Washington on September 11, 2001, to the image of Dick Cheney, in those early months, being chauffeured around Washington in an armored motorcade with a “gas mask and a biochemical survival suit” in the backseat, you could sense that the enemy loomed large and omnipresent for them.  They were, that is, genuinely scared, even if they were also ready to make use of that fear for their own ends.

Or consider the issue of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, that excuse for the invasion of Iraq.  Critics of the invasion are generally quick to point out how that bogus issue was used by the top officials of the Bush administration to gain public support for a course that they had already chosen.  After all, Cheney and his men cherry-picked the evidence to make their case, even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed, and ignored facts at hand that brought their version of events into question.  They publicly claimed in an orchestrated way that Saddam had active nuclear and WMD programs.  They spoke in the most open ways of potential mushroom clouds from (nonexistent) Iraqi nuclear weapons rising over American cities, or of those same cities being sprayed with (nonexistent) chemical or biological weapons from (nonexistent) Iraqi drones.  They certainly had to know that some of this information was useful but bogus.  Still, they had clearly also convinced themselves that, on taking Iraq, they would indeed find some Iraqi WMD to justify their claims.


In his soon-to-be-published book, Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill cites the conservative journalist Rowan Scarborough on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s growing post-invasion irritation over the search for Iraqi WMD sites.  “Each morning,” wrote Scarborough, “the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust.  Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier.  One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’  At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers.”

In other words, those top officials hustling us into their global war and their long-desired invasion of Iraq had also hustled themselves into the same world with a similar set of fears.  This may seem odd, but given the workings of the human mind, its ability to comfortably hold potentially contradictory thoughts most of the time without disturbing itself greatly, it’s not.

A similar phenomenon undoubtedly took place in the larger national security establishment where self-interest combined easily enough with fear.  After all, in the post-9/11 era, they were promising us one thing: something close to 100% “safety” when it came to one small danger in our world—terrorism.  The fear that the next underwear bomber might get through surely had the American public—but also the American security state—in its grips.  After all, who loses the most if another shoe bomber strikes, another ambassador goes down, another 9/11 actually happens?  Whose job, whose world, will be at stake then?
They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war.  They live in the Cathedral of the Enemy.  They were the first believers and they will undoubtedly be the last ones as well.  They are invested in the importance of the enemy.  It’s their religion.  They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they.

The comic strip character Pogo once famously declared: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” How true. We just don’t know it yet.
 
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt