Keep an American soldier locked up naked in a cage and driven half mad while deprived of all basic rights, and you will be instantly condemned as a barbaric terrorist. Unless the jailer is an authorized agent of the U.S. government, in which case even treatment approaching torture will go largely unnoticed. Certainly if a likable constitutional law professor happens to be president, all such assaults on human dignity will easily pass muster.

After being interned like some wild animal in that cage in Kuwait, Pfc. Bradley Manning was transferred to the Quantico, Va., Marine base and further subjected to conditions that his lawyer termed “criminal.” Not all that far from the White House, and yet our ever-enlightened president seems not to have noticed that this soldier, whose alleged criminal offense is that he attempted to inform the public of crimes committed in its name, has been held in an environment clearly created to destroy his very sense of self.

As Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, a lieutenant colonel in the Army reserves and a veteran of 12 years of active duty, put it: “Brad’s treatment at Quantico will forever be etched into our nation’s history as a disgraceful moment in time.” Coombs warned that the most serious charge facing his client, “aiding the enemy,” is a “scary proposition” designed to “silence a lot of critics of our government.”

Who is that “enemy” other than the public that came to be informed about the true nature of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by news reports based on a trove of documents allegedly made available to the WikiLeaks website by Manning? The documents were labeled secret, but as the many important news reports based on them revealed, they contained information that an enlightened public had a need and right to know.

Yet for too many in the mainstream media, led by the example of the editors of The New York Times, the recent military courtroom proceedings where Manning’s lawyer finally got to document the government’s attempt to destroy his client were largely a nonevent. Conveniently so, given that the Times and other major news outlets that were thrilled to exploit the information that Manning uncovered are deeply afraid of being associated with the brave whistle-blower himself.

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Funny, he doesn’t look like Marie Antoinette. But when former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller asks his readers if they are “bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” it displays the arrogance of disoriented royal privilege.

Perhaps his contempt for anti-corporate protesters was honed by the example of his father, once the chairman of Chevron. In any case, it is revealing, given the cheerleading support that the Times gave to the radical deregulation of Wall Street that occurred when Keller was the managing editor of the newspaper.

As the Times reported on its news pages in 1998, heralding the merger that created Citigroup as the world’s largest financial conglomerate: “In a single day, with a bold merger, pending legislation in Congress to sweep away Depression-era restrictions on the financial services industry has been given a sudden, and unexpected, new chance of passage.”

The report all too breathlessly continued, “Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement, lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from Wall Street and insurance. …”

The “fine-tuned” law, combined with another one similarly drafted by congressional Republicans and also signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, exempted trading in collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps from government regulation. That was the very action that enabled the banking crisis that has brought the nation’s economy to its knees and protesters to Wall Street. Citigroup, where Clinton’s treasury secretary and deregulation advocate Robert Rubin ended up as chairman, specialized in what proved to be toxic mortgage-backed securities and had to be bailed out with massive taxpayer credits.

One would think that the failure of The New York Times to cover this sorry tale as it was unfolding would leave Keller with some humble understanding of why protesters, undeterred by rain, should be celebrated rather than scorned. But such accountability has hardly been a hallmark of those in the media or in business and political circles, who with few exceptions got it so wrong.

Just how wrong was laid out in the Tuesday night Republican debate by Ron Paul, whose consistent libertarian critique has been refreshing throughout the banking meltdown. Other presidential candidates stumbled over their earlier support of the TARP banking bailout, and one of them, Herman Cain, responding to a question about Occupy Wall Street, stuck by his statement “don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job, you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

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For a decade, the main questions about 9/11 have gone unanswered while the alleged perpetrators who survived the attacks have never been publicly cross-examined as to their methods and motives. It is not conspiratorial but rather obviously plausible to suggest that they have been kept out of sight because legal due process, constitutionally guaranteed to even the most heinous of criminals, might provide information that our government would find embarrassing.

We remain in ignorance as to what drove religious zealots formerly allied with the United States to turn against us, and what was the role of our ally, Saudi Arabia, the country of origin for most of the hijackers and their financing. Why in the aftermath of the attack did the United States embrace Pakistan, which was one of only three governments (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the others) to diplomatically recognize the Taliban and which turned out to be harboring the fugitive Osama bin Laden? And why did we instead invade Iraq, a nation known to be engaged in a deadly war with bin Laden and his al-Qaida?

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

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

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

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Ignorance is the real victor in the president’s reluctant decision to abandon the effort to bring the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attack to account in civilian court. The significance of a fair and public trial would be to reveal to the world the motives and makeup of those we must defeat, and yet the very people in this country who claim to be the most militant in combating terrorism have been the most energetic and effective in stifling that inquiry.

It must be said that Barack Obama deserves credit for attempting to show the world that truth will triumph and justice will prevail when even the most dastardly offenders are given their day in court. But faced with a shrill Republican-led opposition in Congress that succeeded in banning the trials on U.S. soil, the president reluctantly reversed the decision he had made upon taking office to halt military commission trials of those detained at Guantanamo. The announcement Monday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates rescinding the ban on the military trials also called for the indefinite imprisonment of those Guantanamo inmates thought to be too dangerous to be released but against whom the government doesn’t have enough evidence to obtain convictions. The shortcomings of the military commission trials was denounced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who said such proceedings fall “far short of core constitutional values by failing to provide judicial review of cases considered by the review board’ and to guarantee “meaningful assistance of counsel” to those accused.

But it is not the rights of the accused, important as they are, that should be the main concern here. Rather it is the right – indeed, need – of the American public to learn the truth about the motives, financing and methods of those who are alleged to have torn at the heart of our social fabric. What led 15 solid citizens of our ally Saudi Arabia to hijack those planes under direction of their Western-educated leaders is still murky. How did our allies in the war against Soviet communism in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, come to mastermind that savage attack on America? It is startling that, almost a decade after the attack, we still must rely for our understanding of what happened on a narrative informed not by the full disclosure revealed by the evaluation of a vetted record and robust cross-examination in open court of the key witnesses but rather by the unexamined and unquestioned reckoning of the facts supplied by the government officials who interrogated and indeed tortured the prisoners, most significantly Mohammed.

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What WikiLeaks
did was brilliant journalism, and the bleating critics from the
president on down are revealing just how low a regard they have
for the truth. As with Richard Nixon’s rage against the publication
of the Pentagon Papers, our leaders are troubled not by the prospect
of these revelations endangering troops but rather endangering their
own political careers. It is our president who unnecessarily sacrifices
the lives of our soldiers and not those in the press who let the
public in on the folly of the mission itself.

What the documents
exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the Afghanistan
occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a regional
quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to
connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national
security interest is doomed. What is revealed on page after page
is that none of the local actors, be they labeled friend or foe,
give a whit about our president’s agenda. They are focused
on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively homegrown.

Our fixation
on al-Qaida has nothing to do with them. President Barack Obama’s
top national security adviser admitted as much when he said last
December that there were fewer than 100 of those foreign fighters
left in Afghanistan. Those who do remain in the region are hunkered
down in Pakistan, and as the leaked documents reveal, that nation
is just toying with us by pretending to cooperate while its intelligence
service continues to support our proclaimed enemies. As Gen. Stanley
McChrystal made clear in his famous report, the battles in Afghanistan
are tribal in nature and the agendas are local – be they about
drugs, religion or the economic power of military blackmail. The
documents contain a steady drumbeat of local hustles that are certainly
deadly but rise to the level of a national security threat against
the U.S. only when we insist on making their history our own.

It has ever
been so with the Afghans, and our continued attempt to bend their
passions to our purposes will always lead to horrid results. That
is, in fact, just how their nation came to be the launching pad
for the 9/11 attacks, which is the ostensible purpose of our occupation.
We meddled in their history in a grand Cold War adventure to humble
the Soviets by attacking the secular government in Kabul with which
Moscow sided.

When presidential
press secretary Robert Gibbs intones, “We are in this region
of the world because of what happened on 9/11,” he is mouthing
a dangerous half-truth. The opposite is the case: 9/11 happened
because the U.S. was in the region, and not the other way around.
Entanglement with Afghanistan has been based on a tissue of lies
since day one, when Jimmy Carter first decided to throw in with
the religious fanatics there, as current Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates revealed in his 1996 memoir. Gates had served on Carter’s
National Security Council and in his book exposed what the publisher
touted as “Carter’s never-before revealed covert support
to Afghan mujahedeen – six months before the Soviets invaded.”

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July
31, 2010

What a shame that the one movie about the Iraq war that has a chance of being viewed by a large worldwide audience should be so disappointing. According to press reports, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally found a movie about the Iraq war they liked because it is “apolitical.” Actually, The Hurt Locker is just the opposite; it’s an endorsement of the politically chauvinistic view that the world is a stage upon which Americans get to deal with their demons no matter the consequence for others.

It is imperial hubris turned into an art form in which the Iraqi people appear as numbed bystanders when they are not deranged extras. It is a perverse tribute to the film’s accuracy in portraying the insanity of the U.S. invasion – while ignoring its root causes – that the Iraqis are at no point treated as though they are important.

They never have been, at least in the American view. No Iraqi had anything to do with attacking us on 9/11, and while we are happy to have an excuse to grab their oil and deploy our bloated military arsenal, the people of Iraq are never more than an afterthought. Whatever motivates Iraqi characters in the movie to throw stones or blow themselves up is unimportant, for they are nothing more than props for a uniquely American-centered show. It is we who matter and they who are graced by our presence no matter how screwed up we may be.

Indeed, the only recognition of the humanity of the people being conquered comes in a brief glimpse of a young boy, a porn video seller, the one Iraqi whose existence touches the concern of the film’s reckless soldier hero. The American cares deeply about the quality of the sex videos he purchases, but, as it transpires, he is indifferent to the quality of his own family’s life back home. Even that depressingly sad commentary on life in America is mitigated by the fact that it produces even more dedicated warriors. Maybe a deeply unsatisfying home life is a necessary prerequisite for being all you can be in the Army.

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Why not speak ill of the dead?

Robert McNamara, who died this week, was a complex man – charming even, in a blustery way, and someone I found quite thoughtful when I interviewed him. In the third act of his life he was often an advocate for enlightened positions on world poverty and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. But whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him.

To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense. Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.

Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America’s leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.

Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

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