Is There Any Hope for America to Transcend the Disastrous Thinking of the National Security State?
November 24, 2014 |
Covering war, empire, the national security state and occasionally a cultural commentary, Tom Dispatch features some of the best and most established progressive writers on the block -- the likes of Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, and Andrew Bacevich -- and it has done so at a remarkably steady pace for over a decade: about 150 essays a year. AlterNet has been proud to publish virtually every article produced by Tom Dispatch, and we consider TD an incredibly valuable resource. It's mainly a one-man show with Tom Engelhardt, known far and wide as a writer's editor for top-flight publishers, at the helm.
So it was a pleasure to spend a recent morning with Tom Engelhardt to discuss his new book, Shadow Government (Haymarket, 2014), and how we will grapple with the worsening effects of the National Security state.
AlterNet: Looking back over the past decade, it seems things have gotten worse. True or false?
Engelhardt: Thirteen years later, it's gotten endlessly worse. What I see as the worst part of it is that -- forget politics for a minute -- there just seems to be no learning curve in Washington. It's like, you know what it reminds me of, but not in an amusing way? That old movie Groundhog Day? Bill Murray wakes up the next morning and it's always the same. Except in this case, each day gets worse.
And now we're at a point where, the National Security State -- what I call in the title of my book, the Shadow Government -- has little accountability whatsoever. If I were break into a house, and I was found and caught, I would be brought to court for it. I might end up in jail.
If the Shadow Government breaks into a house, nothing will happen. You can run through the crimes, they range from destroying evidence of a crime they committed, CIA destroying its own tapes, perjury before Congress, to kidnapping and assassination, including the murder of American citizens, torture which we all know about. Every kidnapping which we like to call rendition because it sounds somewhat politer.
AlterNet: There are basically zero consequences for committing these crimes.
Engelhardt: Not a single person has gone to jail. I always think the torture thing is the telling one. There are 101 cases of torture, CIA torture brought before the justice department. Two of them included the actual deaths, the killing functionally of prisoners in black sites. One in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. Of those 101 cases, not one was brought to trial. The Justice Department dismissed them all. One man however has gone to jail over the CIA torture program is John Kiriakou, who was a CIA agent, and his crime was to release the name of a CIA agent who'd been involved in the torture program.
You really don't need to know more than that. It's true that Washington always had a certain lack of accountability, but people did over the years get brought up in charges. In this period, no. The federal apparatus is in post-legal America. We're still in legal America. That's a terrible change.
AlterNet: So How long has Tom Dispatch been publishing now?
Engelhardt: Well, it started as a small email list just as the Afghan War started, October 2001. And you know, it's funny. I think the first thing I would say is that, to go back to the beginning, my initial impulse starting Tom Dispatch was very modest. I'm no megalomaniac but I made a mistake around 9/11; I had the feeling that 9/11 might open us up to the pain of the world. It didn't. When I started to see the repeated ceremonies around us as the biggest survivor, dominator, victim, of bad guy Osama Bin Laden, I was appalled. I had the feeling that this was going to be a terrible moment for this country, the worst with my life, I had the feeling this was going to be a terrible moment.
I have two kids and I just had that urge not to pass, not to not do anything. I just couldn't imagine passing the world on to them without having done anything. But I had no idea what to do. I was using the internet at the time, but I didn't know much about the online world. I didn't know you can read around newspapers everywhere.
1 opmerking:
Wanneer wordt Obama opgepakt voor misdaden tegen de mensheid........41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147
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