Henk Hofland: 'Journalist van de Eeuw mist Primeur van de Eeuw.'
De vooraanstaande Midden-Oosten correspondent Patrick Cockburn schreef op de Amerikaanse website CounterPunch van 16 februari 2015 dat:
a good propagandist or even a journalist looking for a good story does not have to fabricate; a selective approach to the facts is all that is needed,
om hieraan toe te voegen dat
Television, newspapers and radio seldom indulge in truly damaging self-criticism over false stories that precipitated unjust wars or get a lot of people killed. The New York Times published numerous pieces before and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 falsely claiming proof that Saddam Hussein possessed or was building weapons of mass destruction. The New Yorker ran a false but highly influential story based on the evidence of a gunman who was prisoner of the Kurds claiming that Iraqi officials were working with al-Qaeda militants.
The reasons why media confessions of culpability tend to focus on minor sins is obvious. Persistent self-laceration over serious crimes of misreporting would cause real damage to a publication’s or television channel’s credibility while a deftly handled apology may enhance it. Thus The New York Times devoted two pages to a blow by blow account of plagiarism and misreporting by Jayson Blair in 2003 that damaged nobody, but it was May 2004 before The New York Times’ editors’ critique of their paper’s WMD coverage appeared – and was buried on page 10. It is worth re-reading The New York Times’s public editor’s acerbic comment on the affair saying that some 'stories pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of the editors.' Glad that doesn’t happen any more.
The same public editor rightly typifies anonymous sources as 'a licence granted to liars' but does not explain why there is such uncritical reliance on such sources: it is simply that journalists are not very well equipped to find out the truth. In movies bad people blub and confess their sins or admit to crimes that might land them in jail. In reality, wrongdoers have too much sense to do anything of the sort. Successful investigation without legal powers is extraordinarily difficult. Hence the reliance on officially inspired 'leaks.' Brian Williams’s vainglorious boasting looks likes destroying his career, but those who purvey the most destructive lies in the media will seldom be identified or punished.
Degene die de columns van Henk Hofland enige tijd heeft gevolgd, weet dat ook de oudste opiniemaker van de polder de propaganda van de neoliberale orde 'zo agressief' blijft herhalen dat het lijkt alsof 'er epauletten op zijn schouders groeien.' De man is bezeten van grootscheeps geweld zodra Washington, Wall Street en Brussel hun zin niet krijgen. Voor de nestor van de polderpers, als geen ander geschoold in het traditionele Koude Oorlogsdenken, geldt het adagium van de generaal Clausewitz dat 'oorlog de voortzetting is van politiek met andere middelen.' Hofland beseft niet dat de situatie sinds de val van de Sovjet Unie fundamenteel is veranderd, niet langer meer is sprake van twee aan elkaar gewaagde mogendheden, en de zogenaamde winnaar van de Koude Oorlog, de VS, is geen 'unipolar' supermacht die met haar neoliberalisme een einde aan de geschiedenis heeft gemaakt. Sinds de Koreaanse Oorlog heeft Washington geen enkele grote, militaire interventie gewonnen. Bovendien is het afgelopen decennium het geweld van de VS, zelfs met steun van de NAVO-bondgenoten, alleen maar in totale chaos en burgeroorlogen geëindigd, van Libië tot Afghanistan. De redenen van het feit dat desondanks de westerse politieke en economische elite en dus haar woordvoerders in de mainstream-pers dezelfde agressieve koers blijven volgen is voor de hand liggend:
- Het Amerikaanse militair-industrieel complex, dat meer dan de helft van het federale 'discretionary' budget opslokt, is sinds president Eisenhower er in 1961 voor waarschuwde, zo machtig geworden dat het Congres doet wat het complex eist.
- Het neoliberale kapitalisme kan alleen blijven voortbestaan wanneer het blijft expanderen, terwijl Rusland, China en hun bondgenoten niet door de macht van Wall Street willen worden geannexeerd.
- De groeiende kloof tussen rijk en arm heeft de jeugd in de derde wereld met de rug tegen de muur geduwd, waardoor ze niets meer te verliezen hebben en middels zogeheten 'terrorisme' beginnen terug te vechten.
Een illustrerend voorbeeld van dit laatste stond woensdag 18 februari 2015 in de New York Times. Onder de kop 'From a Private School in Cairo to ISIS Killing Fields in Syria (With Video)' was het relaas te lezen van 'Yaken Aly,' die met een verstikte stem over zijn zoon vertelde.
Mr. Aly raised his son, Islam Yaken, in Heliopolis, a middle-class Cairo neighborhood with tended gardens and trendy coffee shops, and sent him to a private school, where he studied in French. As a young man, Mr. Yaken wanted to be a fitness instructor. He trained relentlessly, hoping that his effort would bring him success, girlfriends and wealth. But his goals never materialized. He left that life and found religion, extremism and, ultimately, his way into a photograph where he knelt beside a decapitated corpse on the killing fields of Syria, smiling.
Ieder zichzelf respecterend individu zoekt een uitweg wanneer hij zichzelf permanent bedrogen voelt en zeker wanneer hij het gevoel heeft dat zijn waardigheid voortdurend wordt aangetast, omdat hij niet meetelt, beschouwd wordt als onwaardig. Bij vrouwen keert de woede hierover doorgaans naar binnen, in het uiterste geval leidt die woede en vernedering tot zelfvernietiging. Bij mannen richt de woede zich op de buitenwereld, sommigen gaan bij het leger, anderen kiezen voor het 'terrorisme' van sub-nationale groeperingen. Zonder werk kunnen jongeren hun eigen wereld niet opbouwen, geen huis, geen vrouw of man, geen kinderen, geen toekomst. Een voorbeeld van de situatie onder Arabische jongeren gaf op 5 februari 2006 de Amerikaanse deskundige Isobel Coleman, 'Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy; Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative; and Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program.' Onder de kop 'The Arab world is experiencing the first tremors of a youthquake' waarschuwde zij voor het volgende:
While the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, its greatest challenge today is probably not what most people think. It’s jobs.
With 65 percent of the region’s population under the age of 25, the Middle East has the fastest-growing labor force of any part of the world. This youth bulge is surging onto the labor market like a massive demographic tsunami. Just to keep pace with population growth, the Middle East must create 80 million new jobs over the next 15 years. And if it hopes to put a dent in its already high unemployment rate of 15 percent, it must create 100 million new jobs by 2020—a near doubling of today’s total employment.
To put this into perspective, the Middle East must create jobs at twice the pace of the United States in the go-go Clinton years, in an increasingly competitive international environment that is already accommodating the rise of India and China. Without making deep structural reforms, Middle East governments will never be able to meet the employment needs of its increasingly disaffected youth—a stark fact that, left unaddressed, leaves an entire generation ripe for radicalization.
Unemployment is a problem throughout Arab society, but it is most acutely a youth issue. Fifty percent of those unemployed are between the ages of 15 and 24. Unemployment is also highest among those with some formal education. In the past, these young graduates could expect employment in the public sector, but as formal education has significantly expanded over the past generation and government coffers have come under increasing pressure, the public sector can no longer absorb what public school systems produce.
Op de drempel van Europa tikt al enkele decennia een tijdbom, die nu op het punt staat te ontploffen. Geen enkele muur, hek of zee zal voor Europa voldoende zijn om de gevolgen van die explosie buiten de deur te houden. Vandaar ook dat de Europese Unie van Geert Mak's 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel,' allang afstand had moeten nemen van de gewelddadige NAVO-politiek onder aanvoering van de VS. In Nederland blijven evenwel de Makkianen als Geert Mak en Henk Hofland en de rest van de 'politiek-literaire elite' geloven in geweld als oplossing voor sociale, politieke, culturele en economische problemen. Met een lachwekkende superioriteitsgevoel claimen ze te weten wat goed is voor de hele mensheid, terwijl ze telkens weer buitengewoon slecht geïnformeerd blijken te zijn. Bewust blijven ze informatie negeren die niet in hun ideologisch wereldbeeld past, terwijl toch een goed geïnformeerde Amerikaanse geleerde als Noam Chomsky hier wel openlijk over spreekt:
There’s an interesting interview that just appeared a couple of days ago with Graham Fuller, a former CIA officer, one of the leading intelligence and mainstream analysts of the Middle East. The title is 'The United States Created ISIS.' This is one of the conspiracy theories, the thousands of them that go around the Middle East.
But this is another source: this is right at the heart of the US establishment. He hastens to point out that he doesn’t mean the US decided to put ISIS into existence and then funded it. His point is — and I think it’s accurate — that the US created the background out of which ISIS grew and developed. Part of it was just the standard sledgehammer approach: smash up what you don’t like.
In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq, a major crime. Just this afternoon the British parliament granted the government the authority to bomb Iraq again. The invasion was devastating to Iraq. Iraq had already been virtually destroyed, first of all by the decade-long war with Iran in which, incidentally, Iraq was backed by the US, and then the decade of sanctions.
They were described as 'genocidal' by the respected international diplomats who administered them, and both resigned in protest for that reason. They devastated the civilian society, they strengthened the dictator, compelled the population to rely on him for survival. That’s probably the reason he wasn’t sent on the path of a whole stream of other dictators who were overthrown.
Finally, the US just decided to attack the country in 2003. The attack is compared by many Iraqis to the Mongol invasion of a thousand years earlier. Very destructive. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, millions of refugees, millions of other displaced persons, destruction of the archeological richness and wealth of the country back to Sumeria.
One of the effects of the invasion was immediately to institute sectarian divisions. Part of the brilliance of the invasion force and its civilian director, Paul Bremer, was to separate the sects, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, from one another, set them at each other’s throats. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian conflict incited by the invasion.
You can see it if you look at Baghdad. If you take a map of Baghdad in, say, 2002, it’s a mixed city: Sunni and Shi’a are living in the same neighborhoods, they’re intermarried. In fact, sometimes they didn’t even know who was Sunni and who was Shi’a. It’s like knowing whether your friends are in one Protestant group or another Protestant group. There were differences but it was not hostile.
In fact, for a couple of years both sides were saying: there will never be Sunni-Shi’a conflicts. We’re too intermingled in the nature of our lives, where we live, and so on. By 2006 there was a raging war. That conflict spread to the whole region. By now, the whole region is being torn apart by Sunni-Shi’a conflicts.
The natural dynamics of a conflict like that is that the most extreme elements begin to take over. They had roots. Their roots are in the major US ally, Saudi Arabia. That’s been the major US ally in the region as long as the US has been seriously involved there, in fact, since the foundation of the Saudi state. It’s kind of a family dictatorship. The reason is it has a huge amount oil.
Britain, before the US, had typically preferred radical Islamism to secular nationalism. And when the US took over, it essentially took the same stand. Radical Islam is centered in Saudi Arabia. It’s the most extremist, radical Islamic state in the world. It makes Iran look like a tolerant, modern country by comparison, and, of course, the secular parts of the Arab Middle East even more so.
It’s not only directed by an extremist version of Islam, the Wahhabi Salafi version, but it’s also a missionary state. So it uses its huge oil resources to promulgate these doctrines throughout the region. It establishes schools, mosques, clerics, all over the place, from Pakistan to North Africa.
An extremist version of Saudi extremism is the doctrine that was picked up by ISIS. So it grew ideologically out of the most extremist form of Islam, the Saudi version, and the conflicts that were engendered by the US sledgehammer that smashed up Iraq and has now spread everywhere. That’s what Fuller means.
Saudi Arabia not only provides the ideological core that led to the ISIS radical extremism, but it also funds them. Not the Saudi government, but wealthy Saudis, wealthy Kuwaitis, and others provide the funding and the ideological support for these jihadi groups that are springing up all over the place. This attack on the region by the US and Britain is the source, where this thing originates. That’s what Fuller meant by saying the United States created ISIS.
You can be pretty confident that as conflicts develop, they will become more extremist. The most brutal, harshest groups will take over. That’s what happens when violence becomes the means of interaction. It’s almost automatic. That’s true in neighborhoods, it’s true in international affairs. The dynamics are perfectly evident. That’s what’s happening. That’s where ISIS comes from. If they manage to destroy ISIS, they will have something more extreme on their hands.
Welk belang heeft de Europese bevolking bij het agressieve NAVO-beleid? Welk belang hebben gewone burgers bij het steeds verder oostwaarts oprukken van NAVO-bases rondom Rusland? Welk belang heeft u, lezer, bij NAVO-bombardementen en Amerikaanse en Britse invasies, die in strijd zijn met het internationaal recht, en die de opkomst van ISIS als gevolg hebben gehad? Stel uzelf de vraag nogmaals nadat u het volgende heeft gelezen van de Amerikaan Steven Chovanec, 'an independent geopolitical analyst based in Chicago, IL. He is an undergraduate of International Studies at Roosevelt University and is a regular writer and blogger on geopolitics and important social matters. His writings can be found at undergroundreports.blogspot.com, find him on Twitter @stevechovanec.' Chovanec schrijft
Britain’s leading national security scholar Dr. Nafeez Ahmed further clarifies the United States’ role in actively coordinating the financing and arms shipments to the most virulent elements of the Syrian opposition, including al Qaeda linked groups al Nusra and ISIS, citing leaked Stratfor documents, Rand Corporation reports, mainstream media journalism, and Israeli intelligence as evidence.
Britain’s leading national security scholar Dr. Nafeez Ahmed further clarifies the United States’ role in actively coordinating the financing and arms shipments to the most virulent elements of the Syrian opposition, including al Qaeda linked groups al Nusra and ISIS, citing leaked Stratfor documents, Rand Corporation reports, mainstream media journalism, and Israeli intelligence as evidence.
The Islamic State, home-grown through US foreign policy actions aimed at consolidating control of regions/resources conducive to generate global power (Iraq) and containing any power that challenges US leadership (Syria), accounts now for the modern 'threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being,' that will 'sell intervention or military action,' abroad in order to 'protect a new order,' and discourage others from 'challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political or economic order.'
A direct external threat is necessitated in order to justify and sell US military aggression abroad, and the so called 'Global War on Terror,' a perpetual military doctrine aimed at fostering continual and never-ending war abroad, continues to deliver on this necessity.
Critics of this analysis will argue that Obama is sincere in his stated goal of dismantling and disintegrating the extremist terrorist organization, however as leading Middle-Eastern correspondent Patrick Cockburn has pointed out,
'The US campaign against ISIS is weakened not so much by lack [of] ''boots on the ground,'' but by seeking to hold at arm’s-length those who are actually fighting Isis while embracing those such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey who are not. There is a similar situation in Iraq, where most of the fighting against Isis is by the Shia militias from which the US keeps its distance.'
Cockburn is referring to the US’ non-strategy of fighting ISIS by embracing key creators of the terrorist group such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey, while distancing itself from those who are and have been fighting against ISIS, such as Syria, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia. 'President Obama promised less than a month ago "to degrade and destroy" the fundamentalists with air power, but Isis is still expanding and winning victories,' Cockburn concludes.
Further skepticism of Obama’s stated goals are posited by former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter terrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge,
'For the US and UK, to find an answer as to a way out of the mess that is now the Islamic State one must first ask whether for their foreign policy it’s actually a mess at all. Certainly ISIS remains a potent and useful tool for key US and UK allies such as Saudi Arabia, and perhaps also Israel, which seek the destabilization of enemies Syria and Iraq, as well as a means for applying pressure on more friendly states such as Lebanon and Jordan. It’s understandable therefore that many question the seriousness of US and UK resolve to destroy ISIS, particularly given that for years their horrific crimes against civilians, particularly minorities, in Syria were expediently largely unmentioned by the West’s governments or media.'
ISIS has also allowed for other stated US foreign policy goals in the region: mainly the breaking up of Iraq into separate factions under the control of pro-US forces, and the justification of a long-term US military presence in the region. According to US private intelligence firm Stratfor in late 2002, then Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had co-authored a scheme which depicted the strategic advantages of an Iraq partition focused on US control of oil:
'After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.
Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection – and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.'
'The expansion of the "Islamic State" has provided a pretext for the fundamental contours of this scenario to unfold, with the US and British looking to re-establish a long-term military presence in Iraq in the name of the 'defense of a young new state,' Dr. Nafeez Ahmed determines.
Given this, coupled with Vice President Biden’s and former CIA Station Chief Graham Fuller’s concessions that US policy in Syria of arming rebel oppositions was one of the lead causes of the rise of ISIS, Obama’s tactic of continuing this disastrous policy by funneling more aid to non-existent moderate rebels, utilizing key al Qeada-linked extremist funder Saudi Arabia to train such an opposition, further belies the stated claims of the Obama administration of acting to destroy the ISIS.
When analyzing these policies we should understand that the pursuit of power and the containment of challengers to America’s global preeminence are key US foreign policy goals, and that the pursuit of these goals has been justified through misrepresenting foreign threats to the US homeland since as far back as 1947; and perhaps most importantly, we should recognize that it is
Al deze informatie wordt door de 'politiek-literaire elite' in de polder angstvallig verzwegen. Stel uzelf de vraag: waarom? Welk belang heeft een hoogbejaarde praatjesmaker als Henk Hofland bij oorlog? En welke informatie verzwijgen de mainstream-opiniemakers nog meer?
Journalist van de Eeuw mist Primeur van de Eeuw
Een eigenaardige column, woensdagavond in NRC Handelsblad, van Henk Hofland, in 2000 uitgeroepen tot Journalist van de Eeuw.
Hofland stelt dat de dinsdag in de Volkskrant afgedrukte foto’s van de Enschedese Indië-veteraan Jacobus R. van respectievelijk een executie en een greppel vol gedode Indonesiërs ten tijde van de Politionele Acties, ‘voor hem oud nieuws’ zijn.
Als huzaar eerste klas, gedetacheerd bij de Leger Film- en Fotodienst, had de jonge Hofland in 1949 ‘niet een paar, maar ettelijke’ van ‘dergelijke gruwelfoto’s’ gezien. En wel uit de eerste hand van betrokken militairen zelf.
Hoflands opmerkingen staan haaks op die van allerlei historici van het Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie en het Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie, die deze week in de media verklaren dat met de foto’s van Jacobus R., eindelijk een einde komt aan de al jaren durende schimmigheid over de vraag of en hoe verschrikkelijk onze jongens hebben huisgehouden in de voormalige kolonie.
De Journalist van de Eeuw heeft het dus altijd al geweten, maar kennelijk heeft hij al die jaren gezwegen. Terwijl Hofland in de jaren zestig, toen de discussie over de acties in Nederlands-Indië losbarstte, toch heel eenvoudig had kunnen verwijzen naar de ervaringen uit zijn huzarentijd in de Leger Film- en Fotodienst. Wie weet had hij onderzoekers opmerkzaam kunnen maken over fotomateriaal dat daar was opgeslagen.
En wie weet had Hofland, toen de onduidelijkheid in de tijdvakken erna bleef voortduren, er zelf over kunnen publiceren in de NRC; per slot van rekening ben je niet voor niks Journalist van de Eeuw. Hij had ook nog de Primeur van de Eeuw kunnen hebben.
Aan het einde van zijn column, schrijft Hofland: “In de Verenigde Staten is een oeuvre gemaakt aan speelfilms en documentaires over Vietnam. Hier zoeken we nog altijd ruzie over wat we toen hebben gedaan in Indonesië – nu ook in de vuilnisbak.” Ja, wij maken daar nog steeds ruzie over, omdat er nog altijd veteranen zijn die nog steeds niet het bijzondere van al dan niet zelf gepleegde wandaden uit hun Indië-tijd onderkennen en dat zoals Jacobus R. zonder enig commentaar wegstoppen tussen foto’s van naakte Indo-meisjes en van andere huiselijke taferelen. En dat allemaal omdat er journalisten rondlopen die van alles lichten vanachter hun veilige bureau, behalve tegels.
http://www.hpdetijd.nl/2012-07-12/journalist-van-de-eeuw-mist-primeur-van-de-eeuw/
If ever there was a system in need of “reform,” this was it. And yet the NSA has successfully outlasted the long Snowden moment without a single thing being walked back, not even the most shocking revelation for Americans: that the agency was gathering and storing their bulk phone “metadata.” A year ago, a presidential advisory board on privacy concluded that the bulk data collection was “illegal and unproductive” and recommended changes. None have yet taken place. “Reform” efforts on the NSA collapsed in Congress even before the Republicans took the Senate. As with the police, so the president has announced minor “tweaks” to the system of data collection and it’s marching right on.
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Walking Back the American Twenty-First Century?
In Whose America?
Machine Guns, MRAPs, Surveillance, Drones, Permanent War, and a Permanent Election Campaign
Machine Guns, MRAPs, Surveillance, Drones, Permanent War, and a Permanent Election Campaign
I never fail to be amazed -- and that’s undoubtedly my failing. I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the west? Maybe not.
The occasion for such reflections: machine guns in my hometown. To be specific, several weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced the formation of a new 350-officer Special Response Group (SRG). Keep in mind that New York City already has a police force of more than 34,000 -- bigger, that is, than the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, Laos, Switzerland, or Zimbabwe -- as well as its own “navy,” including six submersible drones. Just another drop in an ocean of blue, the SRG will nonetheless be a squad for our times, trained in what Bratton referred toas “advanced disorder control and counterterror.” It will also, he announced, be equipped with “extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns -- unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.” And here’s where he created a little controversy in my hometown. The squad would, Bratton added, be “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.”
Now, that was an embarrassment in liberal New York. By mixing the recent demonstrationsover the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others into the same sentence with the assault on Mumbai and the Charlie Hebdo affair in France, he seemed to be equating civil protest in the Big Apple with acts of terrorism. Perhaps you won’t be surprised then that the very next day the police department started walking back the idea that the unit would be toting its machine guns not just to possible terror incidents but to local protests. A day later, Bratton himself walked his comments back even further. (“I may have in my remarks or in your interpretation of my remarks confused you or confused the issue.”) Now, it seems there will be two separate units, the SRG for counterterror patrols and a different, assumedly machine-gun-less crew for protests.
Here was what, like the sun going down in the west, shouldn’t have shocked me but did: no one thought there was any need to walk back the arming of the New York Police Department with machine guns for whatever reasons. The retention of such weaponry should, of course, have been the last thing to shock any American in 2015. After all, the up-armoring and militarization of the police has been an ongoing phenomenon since 9/11, even if it only received real media attention after the police, looking like an army of occupation, rolled onto the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in response to protests over the killing of Michael Brown.
In fact, the Pentagon (and the Department of Homeland Security) had already shunted $5.1 billion worth of military equipment, much of it directly from the country’s distant battlefields -- assault rifles, land-mine detectors, grenade launchers, and 94,000 of those machine guns -- to local police departments around the country. Take, for example, the various tank-like, heavily armored vehicles that have now become commonplace for police departments to possess. (Ferguson, for instance, had a “Bearcat,” widely featured in coverage of protests there.)
Since 2013, the Pentagon has transferred for free more than 600 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, worth at least half a million dollars each and previously used in U.S. war zones, to various “qualified law enforcement agencies.” Police departments in rural areas like Walsh County, North Dakota (pop. 11,000) now have their own MRAPs, as does the campus police department at Ohio State University. It hardly matters that these monster vehicles have few uses in a country where neither ambushes nor roadside bombs are a part of everyday life.
Post-Ferguson, a few scattered departments have actually moved to turn these useless vehicles back in. It's clear, however, that police forces “kitted out with Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles” -- that is, almost indistinguishable from soldiers -- are now the future of American policing and there’s no walking that back. Since Ferguson, President Obama has essentially refused to do so and Congress certainly won’t. Despite a small uproar over the pile of military equipment being transferred to the police, there is no indication that the flow will be stanched.
When it comes to all this militarized equipment, as the president has emphasized (and the task force he appointed to look into these matters will undoubtedly reemphasize), “reform” is mainly going to be focused on “better training” in how to use it. In other words, reform will prove to be a code word for further militarization. And don’t count on anyone returning those 94,000 machine guns either in a country that seems to be in some kind of domesticarms race and in which toddlers now regularly find their parents’ loaded guns and wound or kill them.
How the National Security State Outlasted Its Critics
Not so long ago, that 9/11 “changed everything” seemed like the hyperbolic cliché of a past era. From the present moment, however, it looks ever more like a sober description of what actually happened. Congratulations, that is, are due to Osama bin Laden. Even dead and buried at sea, he deserves some credit. He proved to be midwife to the exceedingly violent birth of a new American world. Today, 13 years after the attacks he launched, an exceptionally healthy, well-armed teenage America is growing fast. Under the banner of Fear and Terror that bin Laden inspired, this country has been transformed in myriad ways, even if we only half notice because we’re part of it. And it isn’t a world much interested in walking anything back.
Consider the National Security Agency. In June 2013, it was faced with the beginning of a devastating rollout of a trove of top-secret documents exposing its inner workings. Thanks to Edward Snowden, Americans (and Germans and Brazilians and Mexicans and Afghans) came to know that the agency had, in the post-9/11 years, set up a surveillance state for the ages, one for which the phrase Orwellian might be distinctly inadequate. The NSA was listening in on or intercepting the communications of 35 chancellors, presidents, and other world leaders, the secretary-general of the U.N., the offices of the European Union, foreign corporations, peasants in the backlands of the planet, and oh yes, American citizens galore (and that’s just to start down a far longer list). All of this effort has -- from the point of view of “intelligence” -- been remarkably expensive but (as far as anyone can tell) relatively useless. Few terrorists have been found, next to no plots broken up, and little useful, actionable intelligence provided to the government, despite the yottabytes of data collected. The whole effort should have been written off as a bust and scaled back radically. The agency’s methods arguably violated the Constitution, made a mockery of the idea of privacy, and tore up sovereignties of every sort. Instead, that global surveillance system remains embedded in our world and growing, its actions sanctified.
Clearly, in the new post-9/11 American rulebook, no one was to have the right to keep a secret -- except the national security state itself, which was madly classifying anything in sight, while the Obama Justice Department went after anyone who leaked anything about it or blew a whistle on it with a fierceness never before experienced in our history. Hence, the towering anger of top NSA officials (and their retired colleagues) at Edward Snowden when he exposed their “privacy” to scrutiny, too.
If ever there was a system in need of “reform,” this was it. And yet the NSA has successfully outlasted the long Snowden moment without a single thing being walked back, not even the most shocking revelation for Americans: that the agency was gathering and storing their bulk phone “metadata.” A year ago, a presidential advisory board on privacy concluded that the bulk data collection was “illegal and unproductive” and recommended changes. None have yet taken place. “Reform” efforts on the NSA collapsed in Congress even before the Republicans took the Senate. As with the police, so the president has announced minor “tweaks” to the system of data collection and it’s marching right on.
Similarly, the CIA outlasted Senator Dianne Feinstein. After years of effort, a truncated, redacted version of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report that she oversaw was finally released, filled with American horrors and barbarities. The result, as with Snowden’s revelations, was nada. For torture, no one at the CIA is to be held responsible or accountable; nor did the CIA pay any price for hacking into the computer systems of the committee’s staff or turning on the woman once known as the senator from the national security state. The whole process seemed to signal that congressional oversight of the U.S. intelligence community was now more fiction than fact.
Admittedly, when President Obama came into office, in what may be the single exception to the rule of the era, he walked back one crucial set of Bush administration policies, ending torture and closing the “black sites” at which much of it occurred. Since then, however, the CIA has expanded, while its power, like the national security state within which it is lodged, has only grown.
The process of expanding that shadow government and freeing it from supervision has, in fact, been unending. Only last week, for instance, the Obama administration announced that the 17 intelligence outfits that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community were about to get a new baby. Amid a thicket of outfits now devoted to cyberintelligence, including “cyber-operations centers” at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, the new Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, which will be housed in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will “analyze cyberthreats and coordinate strategy to counter them.” It will assumedly be the civilian equivalent of the military’s 2009 creation, the U.S. Cyber Command. And keep in mind that all this is happening in the country that is responsible for launching the planet’s first cyberwar.
Or consider another growth industry: drones and their progeny. They are spinning off into domestic air space at a startling rate and can now be found from America’s borderlands to thousands of feet up in the skies above commercial jetliners to the White House grounds (reportedly thanks to the recreational activities of a drunken employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency). Abroad, Washington’s drones have been this country's true “lone wolf” hunters, inflicting terror from the skies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya in 2011, and most recently Syria. In five of those seven countries they have been at it for years, in the case of Pakistan flying hundreds of strikes in its tribal borderlands.
Washington’s grimly named Predator and Reaper drones have been hunting their prey in the backlands of the planet 24 hours a day for more than a decade now. Thousands of people have been wiped out, including women, children, and wedding parties, as well as numerous significant and insignificant figures in terror outfits of every sort. And yet in not one of those countries has the situation improved in any significant way in terms of U.S. policy goals. In most of them it has grown worse and the drones have been a factor in such developments, alienating whole populations on the ground below. This has been obvious for years to counterinsurgency experts. But a reconsideration of these drone wars is beyond the pale in Washington. Drone assassination is now a sacrosanct act of the American state, part of a “global” war 13 years old and ongoing. No one in any position of power, now or in the immediate future, is going to consider flying them back.
The CIA has sometimes been called the president’s private army. Today, it's running most (but not all) of Washington’s drone campaigns and so those robotic lone wolves could be considered the president’s private air force. In the process, the twenty-first-century White House has been officially and proudly turned into an assassin’s lair and don’t expect that to change in 2016 or 2020 either.
Permanent War and the Permanent Election Campaign
Similar points could be made about the 13-year-old “global war” the Bush administration launched and the specific wars, raids, conflicts, invasions, and occupations that have been carried out under its aegis. President Obama has been fighting Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0 for six months, claiming that Congressional post-9/11 authorizations allow him to do so. Now, he wants a three-year extension on something he claims he doesn't need and has delivered a text to Congress filled with enough loopholes to send an army (and air force) through -- and not just in Iraq and Syria either. Not getting this authorization wouldn’t, however, significantly affect the administration’s plans in the Middle East. So much for the "power" of Congress to declare war. That body is nonetheless evidently going to spend months holding hearings and “debating” a new authorization, even as fighting goes on without it, based on informal agreements pounded out by the White House and the Pentagon. (Alice would have found Wonderland sane by comparison.)
In this way, the White House has in our time become a war-making and assassination-producing machine. In the same period, terror groups and membership in them have leaptacross the Greater Middle East and Africa; no terror organization has been destroyed (though the original al-Qaeda, a modest enough outfit to begin with, has been weakened); most have expanded; the Islamic State, the first mini-terror state in history, has taken over significant parts of Iraq and Syria and is expanding elsewhere; Libya is a chaos of competing militias, some of an extreme Islamic nature; Yemen is believed to be in a state of collapse with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on the rise; Afghanistan remains a war disaster area; Pakistan is significantly destabilized; and so on. And yet, as the president’s authorization request indicates, there is no walking any of this back.
In the meantime, on the domestic front in this “too big to fail” century, the country that eternally sallies forth under the banner of democracy has been working on a new political system which, as yet, has no name. Here’s what we do know about our latest version of “democracy”: in a period when plenty of American citizens weren’t too small to fail, the inequality gap has grown to yawning proportions. On the principle that what goes up must come down, some part of the vast infusion of money flowing to the .01% or even the .001% has, with a helping hand from the Supreme Court, been raining down on the electoral system.
In the same way that the national security state was funded to the tune of almost a trillion dollars a year and war became perpetual, the new political system, focused on TV advertising, has created a perpetual campaign season. (It is now estimated that the 2016 presidential campaign alone could cost $5 billion, essentially doubling the $2.6 billion spent in 2012.) And here’s the most recent news from that round-the-clock campaign, whose focusis increasingly on donors, not voters: the Koch brothers and their allied donor networks have pledged nearly one billion dollars for election season 2016 (more than double the amount they contributed in 2012). And they already have pledges for $249 million, which suggests that they may even exceed their present guesstimate.
Despite comments from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg about her personal desire to roll back the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates of money, it’s clear that this court won’t be walking its election-financing positions back anytime soon. In donor terms, think of what that court did as the equivalent of the Pentagon putting all those machine guns and MRAPs in the hands of the police.
And keep in mind that, as the U.S. changes, the world does, too. Consider it a form of reverse blowback, as from drones to surveillance to cyberwar, Washington helps lay the groundwork for a new more extreme century in which, from sovereignty to privacy, boundaries are there to be broken, new kinds of weaponry to be tested out in the real world, and new kinds of conflicts to be launched.
In sum, we, the people, are ever less in control of anything. The police are increasingly not “ours,” nor are the NSA and its colleague outfits “our” intelligence agencies, nor are the wars we are fighting “our” wars, nor the elections in which we vote “our” elections. This is a country walking back nothing as it heads into a heavily militarized future. In the process, an everyday American world is being brought into existence that, by past standards, will seem extreme indeed. In other words, in the years to come an ever-less recognizable American way of life will quite expectably be setting in the west. Don’t be shocked.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His new book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World(Haymarket Books).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
