It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp. Take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state, and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
Just ask Rolando Negrin, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener who passed through one of those new “whole body image” scanners in May 2009 as part of his training for airport security. His coworkers claimed to have gotten a look at his “junk” and mocked him mercilessly, evidently repeatedly asking, “What size are you?” and referring to him as “little angry man.” In the end, calling it “psychological torture,” he insisted that he snapped, which in his case meant that he went after a coworker, baton first, demanding an apology.
Consider that a little parable about just how low this country has sunk, how psychologically insecure we’ve become while supposedly guarding ourselves against global danger. There is no question that, at the height of Cold War hysteria, when superpower nuclear arsenals were out of this world and the planet seemed a hair trigger from destruction, big and small penises were in play, symbolically speaking. Only now, however, facing a ragtag set of fanatics and terrorists—not a mighty nation but a puny crew—are those penises perfectly real and, potentially, completely humiliating.
We live, it seems, in a national security “homeland” of little angry bureaucrats who couldn’t be happier to define what safety means for you and big self-satisfied officials who can duck the application of those safety methods. Your government can now come up with any wacky solution to American “security” and you’ll pay the price. One guy brings a failed shoe bomb onto an airplane, and you’re suddenly in your socks. Word has it that bombs can be mixed from liquids in airplane bathrooms, and there go your bottled drinks. A youthful idiot flies toward Detroit with an ill-constructed bomb in his underwear, and suddenly they’re taking naked scans of you or threatening to grope your junk.
Two bombs don’t go off in the cargo holds of two planes and all of a sudden sending things around the world threatens to become more problematic and expensive. Each time, the price of safety rises and some set of lucky corporations, along with the lobbyists and politicians who support them, get a windfall. In each case, the terror tactic (at least in the normal sense) failed. In each case, the already draconian standards for our security were ratcheted up, while even more money was poured into new technology and human reinforcements that may, in the end, cause more disruption than any successful terror attack.
Directly or indirectly, you pay for the screeners and scanners and a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that officially wields an $80 billion budget, and all the lobbyists and shysters and pitchmen who accompany our burgeoning homeland-security complex. And by the way, no one’s the slightest bit nice about it either, which isn’t surprising since it’s a national security state we’re talking about, which means its mentality is punitive. It wants to lock you down quietly and with your full acquiescence, if possible. Offer some trouble, though, or step out of line, and you’ll be hit with a $10,000 fine or maybe put in cuffs. It’s all for your safety, and fortunately they have a set of the most inept terror plots in history to prove their point.
Since the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, Americans have been remarkably quiet when it comes to the national security disasters being perpetuated in their name. America’s wars, its soaring Pentagon budgets, its billion-dollar military bases, its giant new citadels still called embassies but actually regional command centers, its ever-escalating CIA drone war along the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the ever-expanding surveillance at home, and the incessant “night raids” and home razings thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, not to speak of Washington’s stimulus- package spending in its war zones have caused no more than the mildest ripple of protest, much less genuine indignation, in this country.
American safety has, in every case, trumped outrage. Now, for the first time in years, the oppressiveness of a national security state bent on locking down American life has actually gotten to some Americans. No flags are yet flying over mass protests with “Don’t Scan on Me” emblazoned on them. Still, the idea that air travel may mean a choice between a spritz of radiation and a sorta naked snapshot or—thrilling option B—having some overworked, overaggressive TSA agent grope you, has caused outrage, at least among a minority of Americans, amid administration confusion.
But here’s the thing: in our deluded state, Americans don’t tend to connect what we’re doing to others abroad and what we’re doing to ourselves at home. We refuse to see that the more than one trillion dollars that continue to go into the Pentagon, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the national security state yearly, as well as the stalemated or losing wars Washington insists on fighting in distant lands, have anything to do with the near collapse of the American economy, job devastation at home, or any of the other disasters of our age. As a result, those porno-scanners and enhanced pat-downs are indignities without a cause—except, of course, for the terrorists who keep launching their bizarre plots to take down our planes.
And yet whatever inconvenience, embarrassment, or humiliation you suffer in an airport shouldn’t be thought of as something the terrorists have done to us. It’s what the American national-security state that we’ve quietly accepted demands of its subjects, based on the idea that no degree of danger from a terrorist attack, however infinitesimal, is acceptable. When it comes to genuine safety, anything close to that principle is absent from other aspects of American life where—from eating to driving to drinking to working—genuine danger exists and genuine damage is regularly done.
We now live not just with all the usual fears that life has to offer, but in something like a United States of Fear.
When George W. Bush and his cronies decided to sally forth and smite the Greater Middle East, they exulted that they were finally “taking the gloves off.” And so they were: aggressive war, torture, abuse, secret imprisonment, souped-up surveillance, slaughter, drone wars: there was no end to it. When those gloves came off, other people suffered first. But wasn’t it predictable—since wars have a nasty habit of coming home—that, in the end, other things would come off, and sooner or later they would be on you: your hat, your shoes, your belt, your clothes, and of course, your job, your world?
The imposition of more draconian safety and security methods is, of course, being considered for buses, trains, and boats. Can trucks, taxis, cars, and bikes be far behind? After all, once begun, there can, by definition, be no end to the search for perfect security. And what happens when the first terrorist with a suppository bomb is found aboard one of our planes? After all, such weapons already exist.
You must have a friend who’s extremely critical of everyone else but utterly opaque when it comes to himself. Well, that’s this country, too.
Here’s a singular fact to absorb: we now know that a bunch of Yemeni al-Qaeda adherents have a far better hit on just who we are, psychologically speaking, and what makes us tick than we do. They have a more accurate profile of us than our leading intelligence profilers undoubtedly do of them. In November 2010 they released an online magazine laying out just how much the two U.S.-bound cargo-bay bombs that caused panic cost them: a mere $4,200 and the efforts of “less than six brothers” over three months. They even gave their plot a name, Operation Hemorrhage (and what they imagined hemorrhaging, it seems, was not American blood, but treasure).
Now, they’re laughing at us for claiming the operation failed because, reportedly thanks to a tip from Saudi intelligence, those bombs didn’t go off. “This supposedly ‘foiled plot,’” they wrote, “will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. That is what we call leverage.” They are, they claim, planning to use the “security phobia that is sweeping America” not to cause major casualties, but to blow a hole in the U.S. economy. “We knew that cargo planes are staffed by only a pilot and a copilot, so our objective was not to cause maximum casualties but to cause maximum losses to the American economy.”
This is a new definition of asymmetrical warfare. The terrorists never have to strike an actual target. It’s not even incumbent upon them to build a bomb that works. Just about anything will do. To be successful, they only have to repeatedly send things in our direction, inciting the Pavlovian reaction from the U.S. national security state, causing it to further tighten its grip (or grope) at yet greater taxpayer expense.
In a sense, both the American national security state and al-Qaeda are building their strength and prestige as our lives grow more constrained and our treasure vanishes.
So you wanna be safer? I mean, actually safer? Here’s a simple formula for beginning to improve American safety and security at every level. End our trillion-dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Begin to shut down our global empire of bases. Stop building grotesque embassy-citadels abroad (one even has a decorative moat!). End our overseas war-stimulus packages and bring some of that money home. In short, stop going out of our way to tick off foreigners and then pouring our treasure into an American war machine intent on pursuing a generational global war against them.
Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan War until hell freezes over, keep the odd base or two in Iraq, dig into the Persian Gulf region, send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk, and make sure those drones aren’t far behind. In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we’re eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we’re in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization. Insist that a single percent of risk is 1 percent too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively if they won’t shut up.
It’s a formula for leaving you naked in airports, while increasing the oppressive power of the state. And here’s the dirty, little, distinctly Orwellian secret: the national security state can’t do without those Yemeni terrorists, as well as our homegrown variety (and vice versa). All of them profit from a world of war. You don’t, however. And on that score, what happens in an airport line should be the least of your worries.
The national security state is eager to cop a feel. As long as we don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse and, in the end, our world will genuinely be in danger.
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Osama bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? Each of these questions would seem to call out for debate, for answers. Or perhaps not.
Now you couldn’t call me a legal scholar. I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in sixty-seven years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial). Still, I feel at least as capable of responding to such questions as any constitutional law professor. My answer: they are irrelevant. Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don’t begin to come to grips with twenty-first-century American realities. In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as symptoms of nostalgia for a long-lost republic. At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society.
It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. If, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a postlegal state. If so, Is it legal is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.
Of course, when it came to a range of potential Bush-era crimes—the use of torture, the running of offshore “black sites,” the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists to lands where they would be tortured, illegal domestic spying and wiretapping, and the launching of wars of aggression—it’s hardly news that no one of the slightest significance has ever been brought to justice. On taking office, President Barack Obama offered a clear formula for dealing with this issue. He insisted that Americans should “look forward, not backward” and so turn the page on the whole period. Then he set his Justice Department to work on other matters—such as defending (and in some cases expanding) Bush-era positions on executive power. But honestly, did anyone anywhere doubt that no Bush-era official would ever be brought to trial here for such crimes?
Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a thief caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, become a university professor, and appear regularly on Sunday talk shows.
Of all the “debates” over legality in the Bush and Obama years, the torture debate has perhaps been the most interesting and, in some ways, the most realistic. After 9/11, the Bush administration quickly turned to a crew of handpicked Justice Department lawyers to create the necessary rationale for what its officials most wanted to do—in their quaint phrase, “take the gloves off.” And those lawyers responded with a set of pseudo-legalisms that put various methods of “information extraction” beyond the powers of the Geneva Conventions, the UN’s Convention Against Torture (signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by the Senate), and domestic antitorture legislation, including the War Crimes Act of 1996 (passed by a Republican Congress).
In the process, they created infamously pretzled new definitions for acts previously accepted as torture. Among other things, they essentially left the definition of whether an act was torture or not to the torturer (that is, to what he believed he was doing at the time). In the process, acts that had historically been considered torture became “enhanced interrogation techniques.” An example would be waterboarding, which had once been bluntly known as “the water torture” or “the water cure” and whose perpetrators had, in the past, been successfully prosecuted in American military and civil courts. Such techniques were signed off on after first reportedly being “demonstrated” in the White House to an array of top officials, including the vice president, the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state.
In the United States, the very issue of legality fell away almost instantly. Newspapers rapidly replaced the word torture—when applied to what American interrogators did—with the term enhanced interrogation techniques, which was widely accepted as less controversial and more objective. At the same time, the issue of the legality of such techniques was superseded by a fierce national debate over their efficacy. It has lasted to this day, and returned with a bang with the bin Laden killing.
Nothing better illustrates the nature of our postlegal society. Anti-torture laws were on the books in this country. If legality had truly mattered, it would have been beside the point whether torture was an effective way to produce “actionable intelligence” and so prepare the way for the killing of a bin Laden. By analogy, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that robbing banks can be a successful and profitable way to make a living, but who would agree that a successful bank robber hadn’t committed an act as worthy of prosecution as an unsuccessful one caught on the spot? Efficacy wouldn’t matter in a society whose central value was the rule of law. In a postlegal society in which the ultimate value espoused is the safety and protection a national security state can offer you, it means the world.
As if to make the point, the Supreme Court in May 2011 offered a postlegal ruling for our moment: it declined to review a lower court ruling that blocked a case in which five men, who had experienced extraordinary rendition (a fancy globalized version of kidnapping) and been turned over to torturing regimes elsewhere by the CIA, tried to get their day in court. No such luck. The Obama administration claimed (as had the Bush administration before it) that simply bringing such a case to court would imperil national security (that is, state secrets)—and won. As Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued the case, summed matters up, “To date, every victim of the Bush administration’s torture regime has been denied his day in court.”
To no one’s shock, in June 2011 Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama administration, after looking into ninety-nine cases of potential official torture in the Bush years, would prosecute none of them. To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who authorized such acts, as well as the lawyers who put their stamp of approval on them, are free to continue their lives untouched. Recently, the Obama administration even went to court to “prevent a lawyer for a former CIA officer convicted in Italy in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric from privately sharing classified information about the case with a Federal District Court judge.” (Yes, Virginia, elsewhere in the world a few Americans have been tried in absentia for Bush-era crimes.) In response, wrote Scott Shane of the New York Times, the judge “pronounced herself ‘literally speechless.’”
The realities of our moment are simple enough: other than abusers too low level (see England, Lynndie, and Graner, Charles) to matter to our national security state, no one in the CIA, and certainly no official of any sort, is going to be prosecuted for the possible crimes Americans committed in the Bush years in pursuit of the Global War on Terror.
It’s beyond symbolic, then, that only one figure from the national security world seems to remain in the “legal” crosshairs: the whistle-blower. If, as the president of the United States, you sign off on a system of warrantless surveillance of Americans—the sort that not so long ago was against the law in this country—or if you happen to run a giant telecom company and go along with that system by opening your facilities to government snoops, or if you run the National Security Agency (NSA) or are an official in it overseeing the kind of data mining and intelligence gathering that goes with such a program, then—as recent years have made clear—you are above the law.
If, however, you happen to be an NSA employee who feels that the agency has overstepped the bounds of legality in its dealings with Americans, that it is moving in Orwellian directions, and that government malfeasance should be exposed, and if you offer even unclassified information to a newspaper reporter, as was the case with Thomas Drake, be afraid. You may be prosecuted by the Bush and then Obama Justice Departments, and threatened with thirty-five years in prison under the Espionage Act (not for “espionage,” but for having divulged the lowest of low-grade state secrets in a world in which, increasingly, everything having to do with the state is becoming a secret).
If you are a CIA employee who tortured no one but may have given information damaging to the reputation of the national security state—in this case, about a botched effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program—to a journalist, watch out. You are likely, as in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, to find yourself in a court of law. And if you happen to be a journalist like James Risen who may have received that information, you are likely to be hit by a Justice Department subpoena attempting to force you to reveal your source, under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court.
If you are a private in the U.S. military with access to a computer with low-level classified material from the Pentagon’s wars and the State Department’s activities, if you’ve seen something of the grim reality of what the national security state looks like when superimposed on Iraq, and if you decide to shine some light on that world, as army private Bradley Manning is believed to have done, they’ll toss you in prison and throw away the key. You’ll be accused of having “blood on your hands” and tried under the Espionage Act by those who actually have blood on their hands and are beyond all accountability.
When it comes to acts of state today, there is only one law: don’t pull up the curtain on the doings of any aspect of our spreading National Security Complex or the imperial executive that goes with it. And when someone in Congress actually moves to preserve some aspect of older notions of American privacy (versus American secrecy), as Senator Rand Paul did recently in reference to the Patriot Act, he is promptly smeared as potentially “giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected.”
This is the reality of postlegal America: since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Security Complex has engorged itself on American fears and grown at a remarkable pace. According to “Top Secret America,” a Washington Post series written in mid-2010, 854,000 people have “top secret” security clearances, “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks . . . [and] some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”
Just stop a moment to take that in. And then let this sink in as well: whatever any one of those employees does inside that national-security world, no matter how “illegal” the act, it’s a double-your-money bet that he or she will never be prosecuted for it (unless it happens to involve letting Americans know something about just how they are being “protected”).
The Intelligence Community, the National Security Complex, including the Pentagon and that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the imperial executive have thrived in these years. They have all expanded their powers and prerogatives based largely on the claim that they are protecting the American people from potential harm by terrorists out to destroy our world. Above all, however, they seem to have honed a single skill: the ability to protect themselves, as well as the lobbyists and corporate entities that feed off them. They have increased their funds and powers, even as they enveloped themselves as institutions in a penumbra of secrecy. The power of this complex of institutions is still on the rise, even as the power and wealth of the country it protects is visibly in decline.
The question Is it legal is obviously inapplicable in a land where the rule of law no longer applies to everyone. If you are an ordinary citizen, of course, it still applies to you, but not if you are part of the state apparatus that officially protects you. The institutional momentum behind this development is simple enough to demonstrate: it hardly mattered that, after George W. Bush took off those gloves, the next president elected was a former constitutional law professor. The National Security Complex is the King George of the present moment. In the areas that matter to that complex, Congress has ever less power and is generally ever more ready to cede what power it has left.
Democracy? The people’s representatives? How quaint in a world in which our real rulers are unelected, shielded by secrecy, and supported by a carefully nurtured, almost religious attitude toward security and the U.S. military.
The National Security Complex has access to us, to our lives and communications, though we have next to no access to it. It has, in reserve, those enhanced interrogation techniques and when trouble looms, a set of what might be called enhanced legal techniques as well. It has the ability to make war at will (or whim). It has a growing post-9/11 secret army cocooned inside the military: twenty thousand or more troops in special operations outfits like the SEAL team that took down Osama bin Laden, also enveloped in secrecy. In addition, it has the CIA and an expanding fleet of armed drone aircraft ready to conduct its wars and operations globally in semisecrecy, without the permission or oversight of the American people or their representatives. And war, of course, is the ultimate aphrodisiac for the powerful.
Theoretically, the National Security Complex exists only to protect you. Its every act is done in the name of making you safer, even if the idea of safety and protection doesn’t extend to your job, your foreclosed home, or aid in disastrous times.
Welcome to post-legal America. It’s time to stop wondering whether its acts are illegal and start asking: Do you really want to be this “safe”?
Here’s a scenario to chill you to the bone:
Without warning, the network—a set of terrorist super cells—struck in northern Germany and Germans began to fall by the hundreds, then thousands. As panic spread, hospitals were overwhelmed with the severely wounded. More than twenty of the victims died.
No one doubted that it was al-Qaeda, but where the terrorists had come from was unknown. Initially, German officials accused Spain of harboring them (and the Spanish economy promptly took a hit). Then, confusingly, they retracted the charge. Alerts went off across Europe as fears spread. Russia closed its borders to the European Union, which its outraged leaders denounced as a “disproportionate” response. Even a small number of Americans visiting Germany ended up hospitalized.
In Washington, there was panic, though no evidence existed that the terrorists were specifically targeting Americans or that any of them had slipped into this country. Still, at a hastily called news conference, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano raised the new terror alert system for the first time from its always “elevated” status to “imminent” (that is, “a credible, specific, and impending threat”). Soon after, a Pentagon spokesman announced that the U.S. military had been placed on high alert across Europe.
Commentators on Fox News, quoting unnamed FBI sources, began warning that this might be the start of the “next 9/11”—and that the Obama administration was unprepared for it. Former vice president Dick Cheney, in a rare public appearance at the American Enterprise Institute, denounced the president for “heedlessly putting this country at risk from the terrorists.” In Congress, members of both parties rallied behind calls for hundreds of millions of dollars of supplementary emergency funding for the Department of Homeland Security to strengthen airport safety. (“In such difficult economic times,” said House Speaker John Boehner, “Congress will have to find cuts from nonmilitary discretionary spending at least equal to these necessary supplementary funds.”)
Finally, as the noise in the media echo chamber grew, President Obama called a prime-time news conference and addressed the rising sense of hysteria in Washington and the country, saying: “Al-Qaeda and its extremist allies will stop at nothing in their efforts to kill Americans. And we are determined not only to thwart those plans, but to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat their networks once and for all.” He then ordered a full review of U.S. security and intelligence capabilities and promised a series of “concrete steps to protect the American people: new screening and security for all flights, domestic and international; . . . more air marshals on flights; and deepening cooperation with international partners.”
The first part of this scenario is, of course, a “terrorist” version of the 2011 E. coli outbreak in Germany—the discovery of an all-new, antibiotic-resistant “super-toxic variant” of the bacteria that caused death and panic in Europe. Although al-Qaeda and E. coli do sound a bit alike, German officials initially (and incorrectly) accused Spanish cucumbers, not terrorists in Spain or German bean sprouts, of causing the crisis. And the “disproportionate” Russian response was not to close its borders to the European Union, but to ban EU vegetables until the source of the outbreak was iscovered.
Above all, the American overreaction was pure fiction. In fact, scientists here urged calm and midlevel government officials issued statements of reassurance on the safety of the country’s food supply system. No one attacked the government for inaction. Cheney did not excoriate the president, nor did Napolitano raise the terror alert level. And Obama’s statement, quoted above, was actually given on January 5, 2010, in the panicky wake of the “underwear bomber’s” failed attempt to blow a hole in a Christmas Day plane headed from Amsterdam to Detroit.
Ironically, non-super-toxic versions of E. coli now cause almost as much damage yearly in the United States as the super-toxic strain did in Europe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have estimated that earlier in the decade about sixty Americans died annually from E. coli infections and ensuing complications, and another 2,000 were hospitalized. More recently, the figure for E. coli deaths has dropped to about twenty a year. For food-borne disease more generally, the CDC estimates that 48 million (or one of every six) Americans get sick yearly, 128,000 are hospitalized, and about 3,000 die.
By comparison, in the near decade since 9/11, while hundreds of Americans died from E. coli, and at least 30,000 from food-borne illnesses generally, only a handful of Americans, perhaps fewer than twenty-five, have died from anything that might be considered a terror attack in this country, even if you include the assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the Piper Cherokee PA-28 that a disgruntled software engineer flew into an Austin, Texas, building containing an IRS office, killing himself and an IRS manager. (“Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well,” he wrote in his final note.)
In other words, in terms of damage since 9/11, terror attacks have ranked above shark attacks but below just about anything else that could possibly be dangerous to Americans, including car crashes, which have racked up between 33,800 and 43,500 deaths a year since 2001.
While E. coli deaths have dropped in recent years, no one expects them to get to zero, nor have steps been taken that might bring us closer to the 100 percent safety mark. As Gardiner Harris of the New York Times wrote, “A law passed by Congress last year gave the Food and Drug Administration new powers to mandate that companies undertake preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of such outbreaks, and the law called for increased inspections to ensure compliance. The agency requested additional financing to implement the new law, including hiring more inspectors next year. Republicans in the House have instead proposed cutting the agency’s budget.”
Here, then, is one of the strange phenomena of our post-9/11 American age: in only one area of life are Americans officially considered 100 percent scared, and so 100 percent in need of protection: terrorism.
No one has been urging that a Global War on Food-Borne Illnesses be launched. In fact, at this moment, six strains of E. coli that do cause illness in this country remain unregulated. Department of Agriculture proposals to deal with them are “stalled” in the Office of Management and Budget. Meanwhile, the super-toxic E. coli strain that appeared in Europe remains officially unregulated here. On the other hand, send any doofus America-bound on a plane with any kind of idiotic device, and the politicians, the media, and the public promptly act as if the sky were falling or civilization itself were at risk.
This might be of only moderate interest if it weren’t for the U.S. national security state. Having lost its Communist superenemy in 1991, it now lives, breathes, and grows on its self-proclaimed responsibility to protect Americans 100 percent of the time, 100 percent of the way, from any imaginable terror threat. The National Security Complex has, in fact, grown fat by relentlessly pursuing the promise of making the country totally secure from terrorism, even as life grows ever less secure for so many Americans when it comes to jobs, homes, finances, and other crucial matters. It is on this pledge of protection that the complex has managed to extort the tidal flow of funds that have allowed it to bloat to monumental proportions and encase itself in a cocoon of self-protective secrecy and immunity.
In the days after 9/11, Vice President Cheney proposed a new formula for American war policy. Its essence was this: even a 1 percent chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty. Journalist Ron Suskind dubbed it “the one percent doctrine.” It may have been the rashest formula for “preventive” or “aggressive” war offered in the modern era and, along with the drumbeat of bogus information that Cheney and crew dished out about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it was the basis for the Bush administration’s disastrous attempt to occupy that country and build a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.
There was, it turns out, a “homeland” equivalent, never quite formulated or given a name, but remarkably successful at feeding an increasingly all-encompassing domestic war state. Call it the 100 percent doctrine (for total safety from terrorism). While the 1 percent version never quite caught on, the 100 percent doctrine has already become part of the American credo. Thanks to it, the National Security Complex is a self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating mechanism. Any potential act of terrorism simply feeds the system, creating new opportunities to add yet more layers to one bureaucracy or another, or to promote new programs of surveillance and control—and the technology that goes with them. Every minor deviation from terror safety, even involving plots that failed dismally or never had the slightest chance of success, is but an excuse for further funding.
Meanwhile, the complex continually “mans up” (or drones up) and, from Pakistan to Yemen, launches attacks officially meant to put terrorists out of action but that create more of them in the process. In other words, consider it a terrorist-creating machine that needs—what else?—repeated evidence of or signs of terrorism to survive and thrive.
Though few here seem to notice, none of this bears much relationship to actual American security. But if the National Security Complex doesn’t make you secure, its 100 percent doctrine is by no means a failure. On the basis of ensuring your security from terror, it has managed to make itself secure from bad times, the dangers of downsizing, most forms of accountability, or prosecution for acts that once would have been considered crimes.
In fact, terrorism is anything but the greatest of our problems or threats, which means that acquiescing to a state dedicated to expansion on the principle of keeping you safe from terror is like making a bargain with the devil.
So suck it up. Nothing is secure. No one is safe. Now eat your sprouts.
George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. When he turned the big six-five, it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it’s as if she’s been wiped from history. As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February 2011 and it hit the bestseller lists, but months later, where is he?
And can anyone be surprised? They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing. The country imploded economically while they were at the helm. Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff. In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about?
Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.) Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you’ll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: they didn’t turn the page on us.
They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn’t. It’s not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word homeland, both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever. Or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie. Or Guantánamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close. Or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating. Or the National Security Agency’s surveillance of and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing. No, it’s scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over. Among them all, consider the Obama administration’s updated version of that signature Bush invention, the Global War on Terror.
Yes, Obama’s national security officials threw that term to the dogs back in 2009, and now pursue a no-name global strategy that’s meant not to remind you of the Bush era. Recently, the White House released an unclassified summary of its 2011 “National Strategy for Counterterrorism,” a nineteen-page document in prose only a giant bureaucracy with a desire to be impenetrable could produce. If it makes a feeble attempt to put a little rhetorical space between Obama-style counterterrorism and what the Bush administration was doing, it still manages to send one overwhelming message: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding amongst us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes.
The Global War on Terror was the bastard spawn of the disorientation and soaring hubris of the days after the 9/11 attacks, which set afire the delusional geopolitical dreams of Bush, Cheney, their top national security officials, and their neocon supporters. And here’s the saddest thing: the Bush administration’s most extreme ideas when it comes to GWOT are now the humdrum norm of Obama administration policies—and hardly anyone thinks it’s worth a comment.
It’s easy to forget just how quickly GWOT was upon us or how strange it really was. On the night of September 11, 2001, addressing the nation, President Bush first spoke of winning “the war against terrorism.” Nine days later, in an address to a joint session of Congress, the phrase “war on terror” was already being expanded. “Our war on terror,” Bush said, “begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
In those early days, there were already clues aplenty as to which way the wind was gusting in Washington. Top administration officials immediately made it plain that a single yardstick was to measure planetary behavior from then on: Were you “with us or against us”? From the Gulf of Guinea to Central Asia, that question would reveal everything worth knowing, and terror would be its measure.
As the New York Times reported on September 14, Bush’s top officials had “cast aside diplomatic niceties” and were giving Arab countries and “the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism or face the certain prospect of death and destruction.” According to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage took that message directly to his country’s intelligence director: either ally with Washington in the fight against al-Qaeda, or prepare to be bombed “back to the Stone Age,” as Armitage reportedly put it.
Global War on Terror? They weren’t exaggerating. These were people shocked by what had happened to iconic buildings in the “homeland” and overawed by what they imagined to be the all-conquering power of the U.S. military. In their fever dreams, they thought that this was their moment and the apocalyptic winds of history were at their backs. And they weren’t hiding where they wanted it to blow them, either. That was why they tried to come up with names to replace GWOT—World War IV (the third was the Cold War) and the Long War being two of them—that would be even blunter about their desire to plunge us into a situation from which none of us would emerge in our lifetimes. But to the extent anything stuck, GWOT did.
As journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine, in a “Presidential Finding” on September 17, 2011, only six days after the World Trade Center towers went down, Bush granted the CIA an unprecedented license to wage war globally. By then, the CIA had presented him with a plan whose name was worthy of a sci-fi film: the “Worldwide Attack Matrix.” According to Suskind, it already “detailed operations [to come] against terrorists in 80 countries.”
In other words, with less than two hundred countries on the planet, the president had declared open season on nearly half of them. Of course, the Pentagon wasn’t about to be left out while the CIA was given the run of the globe. Soon enough, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld began building up an enormous CIA-style secret army of elite special operations forces within the military. By the end of the Bush years, these had reportedly been deployed in—don’t be surprised—sixty countries. In the Obama era, that number expanded to seventy-five—mighty close to the eighty in the Worldwide Attack Matrix.
And one more thing, there was a new weapon in the world, the perfect weapon to make mincemeat of all boundaries and a mockery of national sovereignty and international law (with little obvious danger to us): the pilotless drone. Surveillance drones already in existence were quickly armed with missiles and bombs and, in November 2002, one of these was sent out on the first CIA robot assassination mission—to Yemen, where six al-Qaeda suspects in a vehicle were obliterated without a by-your-leave to anyone.
That CIA strike launched the drone wars, which are now a perfectly humdrum part of our American world of war. In June 2011, the Obama administration leaked news that it was intensifying its military-run war against al-Qaeda in Yemen by bringing the CIA into the action. The agency is now to build a base for its drone air wing somewhere in the Middle East to hunt Yemeni terrorists (and assumedly those elsewhere in the region as well). Yemen functionally has no government to cooperate with, but in pure Bushian fashion, who cares?
At the same time, unnamed American officials leaked the news that, for the first time, a U.S. military drone had conducted a strike against al-Shabab militants in Somalia, with the implication that this was a “war” that would also be intensifying. Meanwhile, curious reports were emerging from Pakistan, where the CIA has been conducting an escalating drone war since 2004 (strikes viewed “negatively” by 97 percent of Pakistanis, according to a 2011 Pew poll). Top Pakistani officials were threatening to shut down the agency’s drone operations at Shamsi air base in Baluchistan. Shamsi is the biggest of the three borrowed Pakistani bases from which the CIA secretly launches its drones. The Obama administration responded bluntly. White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan insisted that, whatever happened, the United States would continue to “deliver precise and overwhelming force against al-Qaida” in the Pakistani tribal areas.
As Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog summed things up, “The harsh truth is that the Pakistanis can’t stop the drone war on their soil. But they can shift its launching points over the Afghan border. And the United States is already working on a backup plan for a long-term drone war, all without the Pakistanis’ help.” In other words, permission from a beleaguered local ally might be nice, but it isn’t a conceptual necessity.
If Bush’s crew is long gone, the world they willed us is alive and well. After all, there are reasonable odds that, on the day you read this, somewhere in the free-fire zone of the Greater Middle East, a drone “piloted” from an air base in the western United States or perhaps a secret “suburban facility” near Langley, Virginia, will act as judge, jury, and executioner somewhere in the “arc of instability.” It will take out a terrorist suspect or suspects, or a set of civilians mistaken for terrorists, or a “target” someone in Washington didn’t like, or that one of our allies-cum-intelligence-assets had it in for, or perhaps a mix of all of the above. We can’t be sure how many countries’ American drones, military or CIA, are patrolling, but in at least six of them—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq—they have launched strikes in recent years that have killed more “suspects” than ever died in the 9/11 attacks.
And there is more—possibly much more—to come. In late June 2011, the Obama administration posted that unclassified summary of its 2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism at the White House website. It’s a document that carefully avoids using the term war on terror, even though counterterrorism adviser Brennan did admit that it “tracked closely with the goals” of the Bush administration.
The document tries to argue that, when it comes to counterterrorism (or CT), the Obama administration has actually pulled back somewhat from the expansiveness of Bush-era GWOT thinking. We are now, it insists, only going after “al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents,” not every “terror group” on the planet. But here’s the curious thing: when you check out its “areas of focus,” other than “the Homeland” (always capitalized as if our country were the United States of Homeland), what you find is an expanded version of the Bush global target zone, including the Maghreb and Sahel (North Africa), East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, South Asia, Central Asia, and—thrown in for good measure—Southeast Asia. In most of those areas, Bush-style hunting season is evidently still open.
If you consider deeds, not words, when it comes to drones the arc of instability is expanding—and based on the new counterterrorism document, the next place for our robotic assassins to cross borders in search of targets could be the Maghreb and Sahel. There, we’re told, al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), with roots in Algeria but operatives in northern Mali, among other places, potentially threatens “U.S. citizens and interests in the region.”
Here’s how the document puts the matter in its classically bureaucratese version of English: “[W]e must therefore pursue near-term efforts and at times more targeted approaches that directly counter AQIM and its enabling elements. We must work actively to contain, disrupt, degrade, and dismantle AQIM as logical steps on the path to defeating the group. As appropriate, the United States will use its CT tools, weighing the costs and benefits of its approach in the context of regional dynamics and perceptions and the actions and capabilities of its partners in the region.”
That may not sound so ominous, but best guess: the GWOT is soon likely to be on the march across North Africa, heading south. And Obama national security appointments only emphasize how much the drone wars are on Washington’s future agenda. After all, Leon Panetta, the man who since 2009 ran the CIA’s drone wars, has moved over to the Pentagon as secretary of defense, while Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus, the war commander who loosed American air power (including drone power) in a massive way in Afghanistan, is moving on to the CIA.
On his first visit to South Asia as secretary of defense, Panetta made the claim that Washington was “within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” Perhaps it won’t surprise you that such news signals not a winding down, but a ratcheting up, of the Global War on Terror. Panetta, as Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported, “hinted of more to come, saying he would redouble efforts by the military and the spy agency to work together on counterterrorism missions outside the traditional war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
More to come, as two men switching their “civilian” and military roles partner up. Count on drone-factory assembly lines to rev up as well, and the military’s special operations forces to be in expansion mode. And note that by the penultimate page of that CT strategy summary, the administration has left al-Qaeda behind and is muttering in bureau-speak about Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran and Syria (“active sponsors of terrorism”), and even the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
On the Bush administration’s watch, the United States blew a gasket, American power went into decline, and the everyday security of everyday Americans took a major hit. Still, give them credit. They were successful on at least one count: they made sure that we’d never stop fighting their war on terror. In this sense, Obama and his top officials are a drone national security team, carrying out the dreams and fantasies of their predecessors, while Bush and his men (and woman) give lucrative speeches and write books hundreds or thousands of miles away.