In the months after September 11, 2001, it was regularly said that “everything” had changed. It’s a claim long forgotten, buried in everyday American life. Still, if you think about it, in the decade-plus that followed – the years of the PATRIOT Act, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “black sites,” robot assassination campaigns, extraordinary renditions, the Abu Ghraib photos, the Global War on Terror, and the first cyberwar in history – much did change in ways that should still stun us. Perhaps nothing changed more than the American national security state, which, spurred on by 9/11 and the open congressional purse strings that followed, grew in ways that would have been alien even at the height of the Cold War, when there was another giant, nuclear-armed imperial power on planet Earth.

Unfortunately, the language we use to describe the world of the national security state is still largely stuck in the pre-9/11 era. No wonder, for example, it’s hard to begin to grasp the staggering size and changing nature of the world of secret surveillance that Edward Snowden’s recent revelations have allowed us a peek at. If there are no words available to capture the world that is watching us, all of us, we’ve got a problem.

In ancient China, when a new dynasty came to power, it would perform a ceremony called “the rectification of names.” The idea was that the previous dynasty had, in part, fallen because a gap, a chasm, an abyss, had opened between reality and the names available to describe it. Consider this dispatch, then, a first attempt to “rectify” American names in the era of the ascendant national – morphing into global – security state.

Creating a new dictionary of terms is, of course, an awesome undertaking. From the moment work began, it famously took 71 years for the full 10-volume Oxford English Dictionary to first appear! So we at TomDispatch expect to be at work on our new project for years to come. Here, however, is an initial glimpse at a modest selection of our newly rectified definitions.

Definitions for a New Age

Secret: Anything of yours the government takes possession of and classifies.

Classification: The process of declaring just about any document produced by any branch of the U.S. government – 92 million of them in 2011 – unfit for unclassified eyes. (This term may, in the near future, be retired once no documents produced within, or captured by, the government and its intelligence agencies can be seen or read by anyone not given special clearance.)

Surveillance: Here’s looking at you, kid.

Whistleblower: A homegrown terrorist.

Leak: Information homegrown terrorists slip to journalists to undermine the American way of life and aid and abet the enemy. A recent example would be the National Security Agency (NSA) documents Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden leaked to the media. According to two unnamed U.S. intelligence officials speaking to the Associated Press, “[M]embers of virtually every terrorist group, including core al-Qaida, are attempting to change how they communicate, based on what they are reading in the media [of Snowden’s revelations], to hide from U.S. surveillance.” A clarification: two anonymous intelligence officialscommunicating obviously secret material to AP reporter Kimberly Dozier does not qualify as a “leak,” but as necessary information for Americans to absorb. In addition, those officials undoubtedly had further secret intelligence indicating that their information, unlike Snowden’s, would be read only by Americans and ignored by al-Qaeda-style terrorists who will not change their actions based on it. As a result, this cannot qualify as aiding or abetting the enemy.

Journalist: Someone who aids and abets terrorists, traitors, defectors, and betrayers hidden within our government as they work to accomplish their grand plan to undermine the security of the country.

Source: Someone who tells a journalist what no one, other than the NSA, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and similar outfits, should know (see “secret”). Such a source will be hunted down and prosecuted to the full extent of the law – or beyond (see “Espionage Act”). Fortunately, as Associated Press president Gary Pruitt recently pointed out, thanks to diligent government action, sources are drying up. (“Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even on stories that aren’t about national security. And in some cases, government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone, and some are reluctant to meet in person.”) Someday, they may no longer exist. When an unnamed administration official offers information privately to a journalist, however, he or she is not a source – just too humble to take credit for feeding us crucial information needed to understand the complex world we live in.

Blood: This is what leakers have on their hands. A leak, embarrassing the national security state, endangers careers (bloody enough) and, by definition, American lives. Thus, Bradley Manning, in releasing classified State Department and U.S. military documents to WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, in releasing NSA secrets to the Guardian, the Washington Post, the South China Morning Post, and Der Spiegel have blood on their hands. We know this because top U.S. officials have told us so. Note that it does not matter if no deaths or physical injuries can directly be traced to or attributed to their actions. This is, however, a phrase with very specific and limited application. American political and military officials who launch aggressive wars, allow torture, kidnapping, and abuse, run drone assassination programs, and the like do not have blood on their hands. It is well known that they are bloodless.

Insider Threat Program: The name of an Obama administration initiative to promote patriotism inside the government. Its goal is to encourage federal employees to become more patriotic by picking up on clues that potentially traitorous co-workers might consider leaking classified information to the enemy (see “journalist”). Government managers, again to promote love of country, are encouraged to crack down on any employees who are found not to have been patriotic enough to report their suspicions about said co-workers. (Words never to be associated with this program: informer, rat, or fink.)

Patriot: Americans are by nature “patriots.” If they love their country too well like (to take but one example) former Vice President Dick Cheney, they are “super-patriots.” Both of these are good things. Foreigners cannot be patriots. If they exhibit an unseemly love of country, they are “nationalists.” If that love goes beyond all bounds, they are “ultra-nationalists.” These are both bad things.

Espionage Act: A draconian World War I law focused on aiding and abetting the enemy in wartime that has been used more than twice as often by the Obama administration as by all previous administrations combined. Since 9/11, the United States has, of course, been eternally “at war,” which makes the Act handy indeed. Whistleblowers automatically violate the Act when they bring to public’s attention information Americans really shouldn’t bother their pretty little heads about. It may be what an investigative reporter (call him “Glenn Greenwald”) violates when he writes stories based on classified information from the national security state not leaked by the White House.

Trust: What you should have in the national security state and the president to do the right thing, no matter how much power they accrue, how many secrets of yours or anybody else’s they gather, or what other temptations might exist. Americans can make mistakes, but by their nature (see “patriots”), with the exception of whistleblowers, they can never mean to do wrong (unlike the Chinese, the Russians, etc.). As the president haspointed out, ”Every member of Congress has been briefed on [NSA’s] telephone program and the intelligence committees have been briefed on the Internet program, with both approved and reauthorized by bipartisan committees since 2006… If people don’t trust Congress and the judiciary then I think we are going to have some problems here.”

Truth: The most important thing on Earth, hence generally classified. It is something that cannot be spoken by national security officials in open session before Congress without putting the American people in danger. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has made clear, however, any official offering such public testimony can at least endeavor to speak in “the least untruthful manner” possible; that is, in the nearest approximation of truth that remains unclassified in the post-9/11 era.

U.S. Constitution: A revered piece of paper that no one pays much actual attention to any more, especially if it interferes with American safety from terrorism.

Amendments: Retrospectively unnecessary additions to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing a series of things, some of which may now put us in peril (examples: First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment “due process” clause). Fortunately, amendments turn out to be easy enough to amend within the national security state itself.

Checks and balances: No longer applicable, except to your bank statement.

The fourth branch of government: Classically, the U.S. had three branches of government (the executive, legislative, and judicial), which were to check and balance one another so that power would never become centralized in a single place unopposed. The Founding Fathers, however, were less farsighted than many give them credit for. They hadn’t a clue that a fourth branch of government would arise, dedicated to the centralization of power in an atmosphere of total secrecy: the national (or today global) security state. In the post-9/11 years, it has significantly absorbed the other three branches.

FISA court: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, much strengthened since September 11, 2001, created a FISA “court” to oversee the government’s covert surveillance activities. A secret “court” for the secret world of surveillance, it can, at just about any time, be convened and conducted via cell phone by the NSA or FBI. There is never a defense lawyer present, only the equivalent of a prosecution request. The search warrants that result read more like legislation by an unelected body. All national security requests for such warrants are granted. Its decisions are not made public. In its arcane rules and prosecutorial stance, it bears a greater relationship to the Inquisition courts of Medieval Europe than any other American court. Its motto might be, “guilty – there are no innocents.” We have no word for what it actually is. The activity it performs is still called “judicial oversight,” but “undersight” would be a more accurate description.

FISA judge: There is, in essence, nothing for a FISA judge to judge. FISA judges never rule against the wishes of the national security state. Hence, a more accurate term for this position might be “FISA rubberstamp.”

Congressional oversight: When a congressional representative forgets to do something. (Historical note: this phrase once had another meaning, but since 9/11, years in which Congress never heard a wish of the national security state that it didn’t grant, no one can quite remember what it was.)

National Security Agency (NSA): A top-secret spy outfit once nicknamed “No Such Agency” because its very existence was not acknowledged by the U.S. government. It is now known as “No Such Agency” because its work has been outsourced to high-priced high-school dropouts, or “No Snowden Anywhere” because it couldn’t locate the world’s most famous leaker.

American security (or safety): The national security state works hard to offer its citizens a guarantee of safety from the nightmare of terror attacks, which since 9/11 have harmed far more Americans than shark attacks, but not much else that is truly dangerous to the public. For this guarantee, there is, of course, a necessary price to be paid. You, the citizen and taxpayer, must fund your own safety from terrorism (to the tune of trillions of dollars heading into the national security budget) and cede rights that were previously yours. You must, for instance, allow yourself to be “seen” in myriad ways by the national security state, must allow for the possibility that you could be assassinated without “due process” to keep this country safe, and so on. This is called “striking a balance” between American liberty and security. Or as the president put it, “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience… We’re going to have to make some choices as a society… There are trade-offs involved.” By the way, in return for your pliancy, this guarantee does not extend to keeping you safe from cars, guns, cigarettes, food-borne diseases, natural disasters of any sort, and so on.

The Global War on You (GWOY): This term, not yet in the language, is designed to replace a post-9/11 Bush administration name, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), sometimes also called World War IV by neocons. GWOT was famously retired by President Obama and his top officials, turning the ongoing global war being fought on distant battlefields and in the shadows into a nameless war. That may, however, change. You are, after all, being called to the colors in a war on… you. Congratulations, son or daughter, Uncle Sam wants you (even if not in the way he used to in your grandparents’ day). You, after all, are the central figure in and the key to GWOY and the basis upon which the new global security state will continue to be built.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

Back in the early 1970s, I worked for Pacific News Service (PNS), a small antiwar media outfit that operated out of the Bay Area Institute (BAI), a progressive think tank in San Francisco.  The first story I ever wrote for PNS came about because an upset U.S. Air Force medic wanted someone to know about the American war wounded then pouring in from the invasion of Laos.  So he snuck me onto Travis Air Force Base in northern California and into a military hospital to interview wigged-out guys with stumps for limbs who thought the war was a disaster.  In some cases, they also thought we should have bombed the Vietnamese “back to the stone age.”

I was a good boy from the 1950s and sneaking onto that base made me nervous indeed.  It was also the most illegal act I encountered at either PNS or the institute in those years.  We did, of course, regularly have active duty antiwar soldiers and members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War pass through our office, and we had an antiwar GI in Vietnam writing for us under a pseudonym.  (At some point, we found out that the Pentagon had actually tracked down and interviewed every soldier in Vietnam with that pseudonymous name in its attempt to uncover our journalist.)

In any case, we doggedly researched, reported, wrote, and edited our stories on U.S. war policy, which we syndicated, with modest success, to mainstream newspapers as well as what, in those days, was romantically called “the underground press.” The only hints of “violence” you might have stumbled across in our office would have been discussions of the violence of U.S. war policy.

So imagine my surprise – okay, I shouldn’t have been, but I was anyway – when years later one of my co-workers got his FBI files thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, and it became clear, on reading through those heavily redacted, semi-blacked-out pages, that there had been an informer in our office, spying on us and feeding information to the Bureau.  If that was true in a modest place like PNS/BAI, where wouldn’t there have been such spies in the world of the antiwar movement?  In fact, U.S. government informers and sometimes agents provocateurs were, it seems, a widespread phenomenon of those years.  It’s a story that has never fully been told, in part obviously because the information to tell it just isn’t fully there.  By far the best account I’ve read on the subject, particularly when it comes to agents provocateurs – government agents sent in to provoke violence – was a section of Todd Gitlin’s 1980 book The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left.

Recently, as Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations about the high-tech gathering of global (and domestic) communications of every imaginable sort began unspooling, Gitlin’s work came to mind again. I had certainly been aware of how many post-9/11 “terror” cases against American Muslims rested on the acts and testimony of government informers, who sometimes even provided (fake) weaponry to hapless plotters and the spark to begin plotting in the first place.  I began to wonder, however, what we didn’t know about the low-tech side of America’s massive intelligence overreach.  So I picked up the phone and called Gitlin.  The answer, as his piece today indicates, is one hell of a horrifying lot.  Among the few outfits to pay significant attention to spies and informers in the ranks of groups opposed to some aspect of Washington’s policies, the ACLU stands out.  In fact, in a map that organization created, “Spying on First Amendment Activity – State by State,” you can take a Mr. Toad’s wild ride through what’s known of the universe of the twenty-first century American informer.  TomDispatch is pleased to follow up with a Mr. Todd’s wild ride through the thickets of American intelligence clearly on the march domestically. ~ Tom

Close Encounters of the Lower-Tech Kind

By Todd Gitlin

Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata).  American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around.  There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence.

Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows.  The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time – look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t.  What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon.  (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans of this sort.)

Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high.  But as always, dots need connecting.  Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.

Two Stories from Occupy Wall Street

The first is about surveillance. The second is about provocation.

On September 17, 2011, Plan A for the New York activists who came to be known as Occupy Wall Street was to march to the territory outside the bank headquarters of JPMorgan Chase.  Once there, they discovered that the block was entirely fenced in.  Many activists came to believe that the police had learned their initial destination from e-mail circulating beforehand.  Whereupon they headed for nearby Zuccotti Park and a movement was born.

The evening before May Day 2012, a rump Occupy group marched out of San Francisco’s Dolores Park and into the Mission District, a neighborhood where not so many 1-percenters live, work, or shop.  There, they proceeded to trash “mom and pop shops, local boutiques and businesses, and cars,” according to Scott Rossi, a medic and eyewitness, who summed his feelings up this way afterward:  “We were hijacked.” The people “leading the march tonight,” he added, were

“clean cut, athletic, commanding, gravitas not borne of charisma but of testosterone and intimidation. They were decked out in outfits typically attributed to those in the ‘black bloc’ spectrum of tactics, yet their clothes were too new, and something was just off about them. They were very combative and nearly physically violent with the livestreamers on site, and got ignorant with me, a medic, when I intervened… I didn’t recognize any of these people. Their eyes were too angry, their mouths were too severe. They felt ‘military’ if that makes sense. Something just wasn’t right about them on too many levels.”

He was quick to add, “I’m not one of those tin foil hat conspiracy theorists.  I don’t subscribe to those theories that Queen Elizabeth’s Reptilian slave driver masters run the Fed. I’ve read up on agents provocateurs and plants and that sort of thing and I have to say that, without a doubt, I believe 100% that the people that started tonight’s events in the Mission were exactly that.”

Taken aback, Occupy San Francisco condemned the sideshow: “We consider these acts of vandalism and violence a brutal assault on our community and the 99%.”

Where does such vandalism and violence come from?  We don’t know.  There are actual activists who believe that they are doing good this way; and there are government infiltrators; and then there are double agents who don’t know who they work for, ultimately, but like smashing things or blowing them up.  By definition, masked trashers of windows in Oakland or elsewhere are anonymous.  In anonymity, they – and the burners of flags and setters of bombs – magnify their power.  They hijack the media spotlight.  In this way, tiny groups – incendiary, sincere, fraudulent, whoever they are –seize levers that can move the entire world.

The Sting of the Clueless Bee

Who casts the first stone?  Who smashes the first window?  Who teaches bombers to build and plant actual or spurious bombs?  The history of the secret police planting agents provocateurs in popular movements goes back at least to nineteenth century France and twentieth century Russia.  In 1905, for example, the priest who led St. Petersburg’s revolution was some sort of double agent, as was the man who organized the assassination of the Czar’s uncle, the Grand Duke.  As it happens, the United States has its own surprisingly full history of such planted agents at work turning small groups or movements in directions that, for better or far more often worse, they weren’t planning on going.  One well-documented case is that of “Tommy the Traveler,” a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organizer who after years of trying to arouse violent action convincedtwo 19-year-old students to firebomb an ROTC headquarters at Hobart College in upstate New York. The writer John Schultzreported on likely provocateurs in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968.  How much of this sort of thing went on?  Who knows?  Many relevant documents molder in unopened archives, or have been heavily redacted or destroyed.

As the Boston marathon bombing illustrates, there are homegrown terrorists capable of producing the weapons they need and killing Americans without the slightest help from the U.S. government.  But historically, it’s surprising how relatively often the gendarme is also a ringleader.  Just how often is hard to know, since information on the subject is fiendishly hard to pry loose from the secret world.

Through 2011, 508 defendants in the U.S. were prosecuted in what the Department of Justice calls “terrorism-related cases.” According to Mother Jones’s Trevor Aaronson, the FBI ran sting operations that “resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants” – about one-third of the total.  “Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur – an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.  With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.”

In Cleveland, on May Day of 2012, in the words of a Rolling Stone exposé, the FBI “turned five stoner misfits into the world’s most hapless terrorist cell.” To do this, the FBI put a deeply indebted, convicted bank robber and bad-check passer on their payroll, and hooked him up with an arms dealer, also paid by the Bureau.  The FBI undercover man then hustled five wacked-out wannabe anarchists into procuring what they thought was enough C4 plastic explosive to build bombs they thought would blow up a bridge.  The bombs were, of course, dummies.  The five were arrested and await trial.

What do such cases mean?  What is the FBI up to?  Trevor Aaronson offers this appraisal:

“The FBI’s goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators – by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It’s a form of deterrence… Advocates insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn’t been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can’t be answered – as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge – is how many of the bureau’s targets would have taken the step over the line at all, were it not for an informant.”

Perhaps Aaronson is a bit too generous.  The FBI may, at times, be anything but thoughtful in its provocations.  It may, in fact, be flatly dopey.  COINTELPRO records released since the 1960s under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that it took FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover until 1968 to discover that there was such a thing as a New Left that might be of interest.  Between 1960 and 1968, as the New Left was becoming a formidable force in its own right, the Bureau’s top officials seem to have thought that groups like Students for a Democratic Society were simply covers for the Communist Party, which was like mistaking the fleas for the dog.  We have been assured that the FBI of today has learned something since the days of J. Edgar Hoover.  But of ignorance and stupidity there is no end.

Trivial and Nontrivial Pursuits

Entrapment and instigation to commit crimes are in themselves genuine dangers to American liberties, even when the liberties are those of the reckless and wild. But there is another danger to such pursuits: the attention the authorities pay to nonexistent threats (or the creation of such threats) is attention not paid to actual threats.

Anyone concerned about the security of Americans should cast a suspicious eye on the allocation or simply squandering of resources on wild goose chases. Consider some particulars which have recently come to light.  Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund(PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups – during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places.  In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’”

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily.  As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber.  That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either.  The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

Public Agencies and the “Private Sector”

So we know that Boston’s master coordinators – its Committee on Public Safety, you might say – were worried about constitutionally protected activity, including its consequences for “commercial and financial sector assets.”  Unsurprisingly, the feds worked closely with Wall Street even before the settling of Zuccotti Park.  More surprisingly, in Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations – and vice versa.

Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.”  Last December using FOIA,PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge:that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”  Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

• “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.”

• “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

• An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”

• DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” It advised corporate employees to dress conservatively, avoid political discussions and “avoid all large gatherings related to civil issues. Even seemingly peaceful rallies can spur violent activity or be met with resistance by security forces.”

• The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.

• In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.”  Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’”

Sometimes, “intelligence” moves in the opposite direction – from private corporations to public agencies.  Among the collectors of such “intelligence” are entities that, like the various intelligence and law enforcement outfits, do not make distinctions between terrorists and nonviolent protesters.  Consider TransCanada, the corporation that plans to build the 1,179 mile Keystone-XL tar sands pipeline across the U. S. and in the process realize its “vision to become the leading energy infrastructure company in North America.“ The anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska filed a successful Freedom of Information Act request with the Nebraska State Patrol and so was able to put TransCanada’s briefing slideshow up online.

So it can be documented in living color that the company lectured federal agents and local police to look into the use of “anti-terrorism statutes” against peaceful anti-Keystone activists.  TransCanada showed slides that cited as sinister the “attendance” of Bold Nebraska members at public events, noting “Suspicious Vehicles/Photography.” TransCanada alerted the authorities that Nebraska protesters were guilty of “aggressive/abusive behavior,” citing a local anti-pipeline group that, they said, committed a “slap on the shoulder” at the Merrick County Board Meeting (possessor of said shoulder unspecified).  They fingered nonviolent activists by name and photo, paying them the tribute of calling them “’Professionals’ & Organized.” Native News Network pointed out that “although TransCanada’s presentation to authorities contains information about property destruction, sabotage, and booby traps, police in Texas and Oklahoma have never alleged, accused, or charged Tar Sands Blockade activists of any such behaviors.”

Centers for Fusion, Diffusion, and Confusion

After September 11, 2001, government agencies at all levels, suddenly eager to break down information barriers and connect the sort of dots that had gone massively unconnected before the al-Qaida attacks, used Department of Homeland Security funds to start “fusion centers.”  These are supposed to coordinate anti-terrorist intelligence gathering and analysis.  They are also supposed to “fuse” intelligence reports from federal, state, and local authorities, as well as private companies that conduct intelligence operations.  According to the ACLU, at least 77 fusion centers currently receive federal funds.

Much is not known about these centers, including just who runs them, by what rules, and which public and private entities are among the fused.  There is nothing public about most of them.  However, some things are known about a few.  Several fusion center reports that have gone public illustrate a remarkably slapdash approach to what constitutes “terrorist danger” and just what kinds of data are considered relevant for law enforcement.  In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned, for instance, that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents.  The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.” (The map is no longer online.)

So far, the prize for pure fused wordiness goes to a 215-page manual issued in 2009 by the Virginia Fusion Center (VFC), filled with Keystone Kop-style passages among pages that in their intrusive sweep are anything but funny.  The VFC warned, for instance, that “the Garbage Liberation Front (GLF) is an ecological direct action group that demonstrates the joining of anarchism and environmental movements.”  Among GLF’s dangerous activities well worth the watching, the VFC included “dumpster diving, squatting, and train hopping.”

In a similarly jaw-dropping manner, the manual claimed – the italics are mine – that “Katuah Earth First (KEF), based in Asheville, North Carolina, sends activists throughout the region to train and engage in criminal activity. KEF has trained local environmentalists in non-violent tactics, including blocking roads and leading demonstrations, at action camps in Virginia.  While KEF has been primarily involved in protests and university outreach, members have also engaged in vandalism.”  Vandalism!  Send out an APB!

The VFC also warned that, “[a]lthough the anarchist threat to Virginia is assessed as low, these individuals view the government as unnecessary, which could lead to threats or attacks against government figures or establishments.”  It singled out the following 2008 incidents as worth notice:

• At the Martinsville Speedway, “A temporary employee called in a bomb threat during a Sprint Cup race… because he was tired of picking up trash and wanted to go home.”

• In Missouri, “a mobile security team observed an individual photographing an unspecified oil refinery… The person abruptly left the scene before he could be questioned.”

• Somewhere in Virginia, “seven passengers aboard a white pontoon boat dressed in traditional Middle Eastern garments immediately sped away after being sighted in the recreational area, which is in close proximity to” a power plant.

What idiot or idiots wrote this script?

Given a disturbing lack of evidence of terrorist actions undertaken or in prospect, the authors even warned:

“It is likely that potential incidents of interest are occurring, but that such incidents are either not recognized by initial responders or simply not reported. The lack of detailed information for Virginia instances of monitored trends should not be construed to represent a lack of occurrence.”

Lest it be thought that Virginia stands alone and shivering on the summit of bureaucratic stupidity, consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’”

And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies.  According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’”  The Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’”

Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.”

One of these investigations concerned Greenpeace protests planned for ExxonMobil shareholder meetings.  (Note: I was on Greenpeace’s board of directors during three of those years.)  The inquiry was kept open “for over three years, long past the shareholder meetings that the subjects were supposedly planning to disrupt.”  The FBI put the names of Greenpeace members on its federal watch list.  Around the same time, an ExxonMobil-funded lobby got the IRS to audit Greenpeace.

This counterintelligence archipelago of malfeasance and stupidity is sometimes fused with ass-covering fabrication.  In Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 (“a slow work day” in the Justice Department Inspector General’s estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects.  The “possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report added drily.

“The agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event, but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his supervisor.  He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that she was probably the person he photographed.”

The sequel was not quite so droll.  The Inspector General found that FBI officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured postdated “routing slips” and the rest of a phony paper trail to justify this surveillance retroactively.

Moreover, at least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian law enforcement.  In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis, Washington, worked undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest.  In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance group’s Listserv.  Once uncovered, he told activists there were others doing similar work in the Army.  How much the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment at least, unknowable.

Do we hear an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos – I have some in my own heavily redacted files obtained through an FOIA request – were routinely copied to military intelligence units?  Then, too, military intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws, were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws, would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case.  During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups (according to Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-70, an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera crews.  They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they were interested solely in “civil disturbance planning.”

Years later, I met one of these agents, now retired, in San Francisco.  He knew more about what I was doing in the late 1960s than my mother did.

Squaring Circles

In 2009, President Obama told the graduating class at the Naval Academy that, “as Americans, we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals.”  Security and ideals: officially we want both.  But how do you square circles, especially in a world in which “security” has often enough become a stand-in for whatever intelligence operatives decide to do?

The ACLU’s Tennessee office sums the situation up nicely: “While the ostensible purpose of fusion centers, to improve sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different levels and arms of government, is legitimate and important, using the centers to monitor protected First Amendment activity clearly crosses the line.”  Nationally, the ACLU rightly worries about who is in charge of fusion centers and by what rules they operate, about what becomes of privacy when private corporations are inserted into the intelligence process, about what the military is doing meddling in civilian law enforcement, about data-mining operations that Federal guidelines encourage, and about the secrecy walls behind which the fusion centers operate.

Even when fusion centers do their best to square that circle in their own guidelines, like the ones obtained by the ACLU from Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Fusion Center (CFC), the knots in which they tie themselves are all over the page.  Imagine, then, what happens when you let informers or agents provocateurs loose in actual undercover situations.

“Undercovers,” writes the Massachusetts CFC, “may not seek to gain access to private meetings and should not actively participate in meetings…  At the preliminary inquiry stage, sources and informants should not be used to cultivate relationships with persons and groups that are the subject of the preliminary inquiry.”  So far so good.  Then, it adds, “Investigators may, however, interview, obtain, and accept information known to sources and informants.”  By eavesdropping, say?  Collecting trash?  Hacking?  All without warrants?  Without probable cause?

“Undercovers and informants,” the guidelines continue, “are strictly prohibited from engaging in any conduct the sole purpose of which is to disrupt the lawful exercise of political activity, from disrupting the lawful operations of an organization, from sowing seeds of distrust between members of an organization involved in lawful activity, or from instigating unlawful acts or engaging in unlawful or unauthorized investigative activities.”  Now, go back and note that little, easy-to-miss word “sole.”  Who knows just what grim circles that tiny word squares?

The Massachusetts CFC at least addresses the issue of entrapment: “Undercovers should not become so involved in a group that they are participating in directing the operations of a group, either by accepting a formal position in the hierarchy or by informally establishing the group’s policy and priorities. This does not mean an undercover cannot support a group’s policies and priorities; rather an undercover should not become a driving force behind a group’s unlawful activities.”  Did Cleveland’s fusion center have such guidelines?  Did they follow them?  Do other state fusion centers?  We don’t know.

Whatever the fog of surveillance, when it comes to informers, agents provocateurs, and similar matters, four things are clear enough:

• Terrorist plots arise, in the United States as elsewhere, with the intent of committing murder and mayhem. Since 2001, in the U.S., these have been almost exclusively the work of freelance Islamist ideologues like the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston.  None have been connected in any meaningful way with any legitimate organization or movement.

• Government surveillance may in some cases have been helpful in scotching such plots, but there is no evidence that it has been essential.

• Even based on the limited information available to us, since September 11, 2001, the net of surveillance has been thrown wide indeed.  Tabs have been kept on members of quite a range of suspect populations, including American Muslims, anarchists, and environmentalists, among others – in situation after situation where there was no probable cause to suspect preparations for a crime.

• At least on occasion – we have no way of knowing how often – agents provocateurs on government payrolls have spurred violence.

How much official unintelligence is at work?  How many demonstrations are being poked and prodded by undercover agents?  How many acts of violence are being suborned?  It would be foolish to say we know.  At least equally foolish would be to trust the authorities to keep to honest-to-goodness police work when they are so mightily tempted to take the low road into straight-out, unwarranted espionage and instigation.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

American Anniversaries from Hell: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad – the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre – were at least noted in passing in our world. In my hometown paper, the New York Times, the Iraq anniversary was memorialized with a lead op-ed by a former advisor to General David Petraeus who, amid the rubble, went in search of all-American “silver linings.”

Still, in our post-9/11 world, there are so many other anniversaries from hell whose silver linings don’t get noticed. Take this April. It will be the ninth anniversary of the widespread release of the now infamous photos of torture, abuse, and humiliation from Abu Ghraib. In case you’ve forgotten, that was Saddam Hussein’s old prison where the U.S. military taught the fallen Iraqi dictator a trick or two about the destruction of human beings. Shouldn’t there be an anniversary of some note there? I mean, how many cultures have turned dog collars (and the dogs that go with them), thumbs-up signs over dead bodies, and a mockery of the crucified Christ into screensavers?

Or to pick another not-to-be-missed anniversary that, strangely enough, goes uncelebrated here, consider the passage of the USA Patriot Act, that ten-letter acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”? This October 26th will be the 11th anniversary of the hurried congressional vote on that 363-page (essentially unread) document filled with right-wing hobbyhorses and a range of provisions meant to curtail American liberties in the name of keeping us safe from terror. “Small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats rushed to support it back then. It passed in the Senate in record time by 98-1, with only Russ Feingold in opposition, and in the House by 357-66 – and so began the process of taking the oppressive powers of the American state into a new dimension. It would signal the launch of a world of ever-expanding American surveillance and secrecy (and it would be renewed by the Obama administration at its leisure in 2011).

Or what about celebrating the 12th anniversary of Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force, the joint resolution that a panicked and cowed body passed on September 14, 2001? It wasn’t a declaration of war – there was no one to declare war on – but an open-ended grant to the president of the unfettered power to use “all necessary and appropriate force” in what would become a never-ending (and still expanding) “Global War on Terror.”

Or how about the 11th anniversary on January 11th – like so many such moments, it passed unnoted – of the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that jewel in the crown of George W. Bush’s offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, with its indefinite detention of the innocent and the guilty without charges, its hunger strikes, and abuses, and above all its remarkable ability to embed itself in our world and never go away? Given that, on much of the rest of the planet, Guantanamo is now an icon of the post-9/11 American way of life, on a par with Mickey Mouse and the Golden Arches, shouldn’t its anniversary be noted?

Or to look ahead, consider a date of genuine consequence: the CIA’s first known assassination by drone, which took place in Yemen in 2002. This November will be the 11th anniversary of that momentous act, which would embed “targeted killing” deep in the American way of war, and transform the president into an assassin-in-chief. It, too, will undoubtedly pass largely unnoticed, even if the global drone assassination campaigns it initiated may never rest in peace.

And then, of course, there are the little anniversaries from hell that Americans could care less about – those that have to do with slaughter abroad. If you wanted to, you could organize these by the military services. As last year ended, for instance, no one marked the 11th anniversary of the first Afghan wedding party to be wiped out by the U.S. Air Force. (In late December 2001, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, eradicated a village of celebrants in eastern Afghanistan; only two of 112 villagers reportedly survived.) Nor in May will anyone here mark the ninth anniversary of an American air strike thattook out wedding celebrants in the western Iraqi desert near the Syrian border, killing more than 40 of them.

Nor, this July 12th, to switch to the U.S. Army, should we forget the sixth anniversary of the infamous Apache helicopter attacks on civilians in the streets of Baghdad in which at least 11 adults were killed and two children wounded? All of this was preserved in a military video kept secret until released by WikiLeaks. Or how about the first anniversary of the “Kandahar massacre,” which passed on March 11th without any notice at all? As you undoubtedly remember, Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales allegedly spent that night in 2012 slaughtering 16 civilians, including nine children, in two Afghan villages and, on being taken into custody, “showed no remorse.”

When it comes to the Marines, here’s a question: Who, this November 19th, will mark the eighth anniversary of the slaughter of 24 unarmed civilians, including children and the elderly, in the Iraqi village of Haditha for which, after a six-year investigation and military trials, not a single Marine spent a single day in prison? Or to focus for a moment on U.S. Special Forces: will anyone on August 21st memorialize the 90 or so civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children, killed in the Afghan village of Azizabad while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had reportedly been anti-Taliban?

And not to leave out the rent-a-gun mercenaries who have been such a fixture of the post-9/11 era of American warfare, this September 16th will be the sixth anniversary of the moment when Blackwater guards for a convoy of U.S. State Department vehicles sprayed Baghdad’s Nisour Square with bullets, evidently without provocation, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding many more.

All of the above only begins to suggest the plethora of blood-soaked little anniversaries that Americans could observe, if they cared to, from a decade-plus of the former Global War on Terror that now has no name, but goes on no less intensely. Consider them just a few obvious examples of what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once called the “known knowns” of our American world.

Impossible Anniversaries

In anniversary terms, Rumsfeld’s second category – the “known unknowns” – is no less revealing of the universe we now inhabit; that is, our post-9/11 lives have been filled with events or acts whose anniversaries might be notable, if only we knew the date when they occured. Take, for instance, the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Sometime in the first part of 2002, President Bush granted the National Security Agency the right to eavesdrop without court approval on people in the United States in the course of its terrorism investigations. This (illegal) program’s existence was first revealed in 2005, but it remains shrouded in mystery. We don’t know exactly when it began. So no anniversary celebrations there.

Nor for the setting up of the “Salt Pit,” the CIA “black site” in Afghanistan where Khaled el-Masri, a German car salesmankidnapped by the CIA in Macedonia (due to a confusion of names with a suspected terrorist) was held and mistreated, or other similar secret prisons and torture centers in places like Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, and Thailand; nor for the creation of Camp Nama in Iraq, with its ominously named “Black Room,” run as an interrogation center by the Joint Special Operations Command, where the informal motto was: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.”

Or how about the anniversary of the date – possibly as early as 2006 – when Washington launched history’s first known cyberwar, a series of unprovoked cyberattacks ordered by George W. Bush and later Barack Obama, against Iran’s nuclear program (and evidently some Middle Eastern banks dealing with that country as well). Given its potential future implications, that would seem to be a moment significant enough to memorialize, if only we knew when to do it.

Don’t for a moment think, though, that any little survey of known knowns and known unknowns could cover the totality of America’s unacknowledged anniversaries from hell. After all, there’s Rumsfeld’s third category, the “unknown unknowns.” In our advancing world of secrecy, with the National Security Complex and parts of the U.S. military increasingly operating in a post-legal America, shielded from whistleblowers and largely unaccountable to the rest of us or the courts, you can be guaranteed of one thing: there’s a secret history of the post-9/11 era that we simply don’t know about – yet. Call this last category “the unknown anniversaries.” We not only don’t know when they began, but even what they are.

A Hidden History Waiting to Be Written

When I was a boy, I loved a CBS TV series called ”You Are There,” “anchored” by Walter Cronkite. It took you into history – whether of Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake, the fall of the Aztec ruler Montezuma, or the end of the U.S. Civil War – and “reported” it as if modern journalists had been on the spot. (For years, I used to joke that the typical moment went like this: “General Lee, General Lee, rumor has it you’re about to surrender to Grant at Appomattox!” “No comment.”) The show had a signature tagline delivered in one of those authoritative male voices of the era that still rings in my head. It went: “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times… all things are as they were then, and you were there.”

If such a show were made about the post-9/11 years, it might have to be called “You Weren’t There.” Our days, instead of being filled with “those events that alter and illuminate our times,” would be enshrouded in a penumbra of secrecy that could – as with Bradley Manning, CIA agent John Kiriakou, or other whistleblowers – only be broken by those ready to spend years, or even a lifetime in prison. If the National Security Complex and the White House had their way, we Americans would be left to celebrate a heavily cleansed and censored version of our own recent history in which the anniversaries that should really matter would be squirreled away in the files of the state apparatus. There can be no question that a hidden history of our American moment is still waiting to be uncovered and written.

And yet, despite the best efforts of the last two administrations, secrecy has its limits. We should already know more than enough to be horrified by the state of our American world. It should disturb us deeply that a government of, by, and for the war-makers, intelligence operatives, bureaucrats, privatizing mercenary corporations, surveillers, torturers, and assassins is thriving in Washington. As for the people – that’s us – in these last years, we largely weren’t there, even as the very idea of a government of, by, and for us bit the dust, and our leaders felt increasingly unconstrained when committing acts of shame in our name.

So perhaps the last overlooked anniversary of these years might be the 12th anniversary of American cowardice. You can choose the exact date yourself; anytime this fall will do. At that moment, Americans should feel free to celebrate a time when, for our “safety,” and in a state of anger and paralyzing fear, we gave up the democratic ghost.

The brave thing, of course, would have been to gamble just a little of our safety – as we do any day when we get into a car – for the kind of world whose anniversaries we would actually be proud to mark on a calendar and celebrate.

Among the many truths in that still-to-be-written secret history of our American world would be this: we the people have no idea just how, in these years, we’ve hurt ourselves.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Recently by Tom Engelhardt: Super Weapons and Global Dominion

Weren't those the greatest of days if you were in the American spy game? Governments went down in Guatemala and Iran thanks to you. In distant Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam, what a role you played! And even that botch-up of an invasion in Cuba was nothing to sneeze at. In those days, unfortunately, you — particularly those of you in the CIA — didn't get the credit you deserved.

You had to live privately with your successes. Sometimes, as with the Bay of Pigs, the failures came back to haunt you (so, in the case of Iran, would your "success," though so many years later), but you couldn't with pride talk publicly about what you, in your secret world, had done, or see instant movies and TV shows about your triumphs. You couldn't launch a "covert" air war that was reported on, generally positively, almost every week, or bask in the pleasure of having your director claim publicly that it was "the only game in town." You couldn't, that is, come out of what were then called "the shadows," and soak up the glow of attention, be hailed as a hero, join Americans in watching some (fantasy) version of your efforts weekly on television, or get the credit for anything.

Nothing like that was possible — not at least until well after two journalists, David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, shined a bright light into those shadows, called you part of an "invisible government," and outed you in ways that you found deeply discomforting.

Their book with that startling title, The Invisible Government, was published in 1964 and it was groundbreaking, shadow-removing, illuminating. It caused a fuss from its very first paragraph, which was then a shockeroo: "There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible."

I mean, what did Americans know at the time about an invisible government even the president didn’t control that was lodged deep inside the government they had elected?

Wise and Ross continued: "The first is the government that citizens read about in their newspapers and children study about in their civics books. The second is the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War. This second, invisible government gathers intelligence, conducts espionage, and plans and executes secret operations all over the globe."

The Invisible Government came out just as what became known as "the Sixties" really began, a moment when lights were suddenly being shone into many previously shadowy American corners. I was then 20 years old and sometime in those years I read their book with a suitable sense of dread, just as I had read those civics books in high school in which Martians landed on Main Street in some "typical" American town to be lectured on our way of life and amazed by our Constitution, not to speak of those fabulous governmental checks and balances instituted by the Founding Fathers, and other glories of democracy.

I wasn't alone reading The Invisible Government either. It was a bestseller and CIA Director John McCone reportedly read the manuscript, which he had secretly obtained from publisher Random House. He demanded deletions. When the publisher refused, he considered buying up the full first printing. In the end, he evidently tried to arrange for some bad reviews instead.

Time Machines and Shadow Worlds

By 1964, the "U.S. Intelligence Community," or IC, had nine members, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). As Wise and Ross portrayed it, the IC was already a labyrinthine set of secret outfits with growing power. It was capable of launching covert actions worldwide, with a "broad spectrum of domestic operations," the ability to overthrow foreign governments, some involvement in shaping presidential campaigns, and the capacity to plan operations without the knowledge of Congress or full presidential control. "No outsider," they concluded, "can tell whether this activity is necessary or even legal. No outsider is in a position to determine whether or not, in time, these activities might become an internal danger to a free society." Modestly enough, they called for Americans to face the problem and bring "secret power" under control. ("If we err as a society, let it be on the side of control.")

Now, imagine that H.G. Wells's time machine had been available in that year of publication. Imagine that it whisked those journalists, then in their mid-thirties, and the young Tom Engelhardt instantly some 48 years into the future to survey just how their cautionary tale about a great democratic and republican nation running off the tracks and out of control had played out.

The first thing they might notice is that the Intelligence Community of 2012 with 17 official outfits has, by the simplest of calculations, almost doubled. The real size and power of that secret world, however, has in every imaginable way grown staggeringly larger than that. Take one outfit, now part of the IC, that didn't exist back in 1964, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. With an annual budget of close to $5 billion, it recently built a gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters — "the third-largest structure in the Washington area, nearly rivaling the Pentagon in size" — for its 16,000 employees. It literally has its "eye" on the globe in a way that would have been left to sci-fi novels almost half a century ago and is tasked as "the nation's primary source of geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT." (Don't ask me what that means exactly, though it has to do with quite literally imaging the planet and all its parts — or perhaps less politely, turning every inch of Earth into a potential shooting range.)

Or consider an outfit that did exist then: the National Security Agency, or NSA (once known jokingly as "no such agency" because of its deep cover). Like its geospatial cousin, it has been in a period of explosive growth, budgetary and otherwise, capped off by the construction of a "heavily fortified" $2 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah. According to NSA expert James Bamford, when finished in 2013 that center will "intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks." He adds: "Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital u2018pocket litter.'" We're talking not just about foreign terrorists here but about the intake and eternal storage of vast reams of material from American citizens, possibly even you.

Or consider a little-known post-9/11 creation, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is not even a separate agency in the IC, but part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration has just turned that organization into "a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens — even people suspected of no crime." It has granted the NCTC the right, among other things "to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them… copy entire government databases — flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students, and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited."

Or take the Defense Intelligence Agency, which came into existence in 1961 and became operational only the year their book came out. Almost half a century ago, as Wise and Ross told their readers, it had 2,500 employees and a relatively modest set of assigned tasks. By the end of the Cold War, it had 7,500 employees. Two decades later, another tale of explosive growth: the DIA has 16,000 employees.

In their 2010 Washington Post series, “Top Secret America,” journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin caught a spirit of untrammeled expansion in the post-9/11 era that would surely have amazed those two authors who had called for "controls" over the secret world: "In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space."

Similarly, the combined Intelligence Community budget, which in deepest secrecy had supposedly soared to at least $44 billion in 2005 (all such figures have to be taken with a dumpster-ful of salt), has by now nearly doubled to an official $75 billion.

Let's add in one more futuristic shocker for our time travelers. Someone would have to tell them that, in 1991, the Soviet Union, that great imperial power and nemesis of the invisible government, with its vast army, secret police, system of gulags, and monstrous nuclear arsenal, had disappeared largely nonviolently from the face of the Earth and no single power has since arisen to challenge the United States militarily. After all, that staggering U.S. intelligence budget, the explosion of new construction, the steep growth in personnel, and all the rest has happened in a world in which the U.S. is facing a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran and North Korea), a minority insurgency in Afghanistan, a rising economic power (China) with still modest military might, and probably a few thousand extreme Muslim fundamentalists and al-Qaeda wannabes scattered around the planet.

They would have to be told that, thanks to a single horrific event, a kind of terrorist luck-out we now refer to in shorthand as “9/11,” and despite the diminution of global enemies, an already enormous IC has expanded nonstop in a country seized by a spasm of fear and paranoia.

Preparing Battlefields and Building Giant Embassies

Staggered by the size of the invisible government they had once anatomized, the two reporters might have been no less surprised by another development: the way in our own time "intelligence" has been militarized, while the U.S. military itself has plunged into the shadows. Of course, it's now well known that the CIA, a civilian intelligence agency until recently headed by a retired four-star general, has been paramilitarized and is now putting a significant part of its energy into running an ever spreading "covert" set of drone wars across the Greater Middle East.

Meanwhile, since the early years of the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. military has been intent on claiming some of the CIA's turf as its own. Not long after the 9/11 attacks, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began pushing the Pentagon into CIA-style intelligence activities — the “full spectrum of humint [human intelligence] operations” — to "prepare" for future "battlefields." That process has never ended. In April 2012, for instance, the Pentagon released the information that it was in the process of setting up a new spy agency called the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS). Its job: to globalize military "intelligence" by taking it beyond the obvious war zones. The DCS was tasked as well with working more closely with the CIA (while assumedly rivaling it).

As Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, "Creation of the new service also coincides with the appointment of a number of senior officials at the Pentagon who have extensive backgrounds in intelligence and firm opinions on where the military's spying programs — often seen as lackluster by CIA insiders — have gone wrong."

And then just this month the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, originally a place for analysis and coordination, announced at a conference that his agency was going to expand into "humint" in a big way, filling embassies around the world with a new corps of clandestine operators who had diplomatic or other "cover." He was talking about fielding 1,600 "collectors" who would be "trained by the CIA and often work with the Joint Special Operations Command." Never, in other words, will a country have had so many "diplomats" who know absolutely nothing about diplomacy.

Though the Senate has balked at funding the expansion of the Defense Clandestine Service, all of this represents both a significant reshuffling of what is still called "intelligence" but is really a form of low-level war-making on a global stage and a continuing expansion of America's secret world on a scale hitherto unimaginable, all in the name of "national security." Now at least, it's easier to understand why, from London to Baghdad to Islamabad, the U.S. has been building humongous embassies fortified like ancient castles and the size of imperial palaces for unparalleled staffs of "diplomats." These will now clearly include scads of CIA, DIA, and perhaps DCS agents, among others, under diplomatic "cover."

Into this mix would have to go another outfit that would have been unknown to Wise and Ross, but — given the publicity Seal Team Six has gotten over the bin Laden raid and other activities — that most Americans will be at least somewhat aware of. An ever-greater role in the secret world is now being played by a military organization that long ago headed into the shadows, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). In 2009, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh termed it an "executive assassination ring" (especially in Iraq) that did not "report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days… directly to the Cheney office."

In fact, JSOC only emerged into the public eye when one of its key operatives in Iraq, General Stanley McChrystal, was appointed U.S. war commander in Afghanistan. It has been in the spotlight ever since as it engages in what once might have been CIA-style paramilitary operations on steroids, increases its intelligence-gathering capacity, runs its own drone wars, and has set up a new headquarters in Washington, 15 convenient minutes from the White House.

Big Screen Moments and "Covert" Wars

At their top levels, the leadership of the CIA, the DIA, and JSOC are now mixing and matching in a blur of ever more intertwined, militarized outfits, increasingly on a perpetual war footing. They have, in this way, turned the ancient arts of intelligence, surveillance, spying, and assassination into a massively funded way of life and are now regularly conducting war on the sly and on the loose across the globe. At the lowest levels, the CIA, DIA, JSOC, and assumedly someday DCS train together, work in teams and in tandem, and cooperate, as well as poach on each other's turf.

Today, you would be hard-pressed to write a single volume called The Invisible Government. You would instead have to produce a multi-volume series. And while you were at it — this undoubtedly would have stunned Wise and Ross — you might have had to retitle the project something like The Visible Government.

Don't misunderstand me: Americans now possess (or more accurately are possessed by) a vast "intelligence" bureaucracy deeply in the shadows, whose activities are a mass of known unknowns and unknown unknowns to those of us on the outside. It is beyond enormous. There is no way to assess its actual usefulness, or whether it is even faintly "intelligent" (though a case could certainly be made that the U.S. would be far better off with a non-paramilitarized intelligence service or two, rather than scads of them, that eschewed paranoia and relied largely on open sources). But none of that matters. It now represents an irreversible way of life, one that is increasingly visible and celebrated in this country. It is also part of the seemingly endless growth of the imperial power of the White House and, in ways that Wise and Ross would in 1964 have found inconceivable, beyond all accountability or control when it comes to the American people.

It is also ready to take public credit for its "successes" (or even a significant hand in shaping how they are viewed in the public arena). Once upon a time, a CIA agent who died in some covert operation would have gone unnamed and unacknowledged. By the 1970s, that agent would have had a star engraved on the wall of the lobby of CIA headquarters, but no one outside the Agency would have known about his or her fate.

Now, those who die in our "secret" operations or ones launched against our "invisible" agents can become public figures and celebrated "heroes." This was the case, for instance, with Jennifer Matthews, a CIA agent who died in Afghanistan when an Agency double agent turned out to be a triple agent and suicide bomber. Or just last week, when a soldier from Seal Team Six died in an operation in Afghanistan to rescue a kidnapped doctor. The Navy released his photo and name, and he was widely hailed. This would certainly have been striking to Wise and Ross.

Then again, they would undoubtedly have been no less startled to discover that, from Jack Ryan and Jason Bourne to Syriana, the Mission Impossible films, and Taken, the CIA and other secret outfits (or their fantasy doppelgangers) have become staples of American multiplexes. Nor has the small screen, from 24 to Homeland, been immune to this invasion of visibility. Or consider this: just over a year and a half after Seal Team Six's super-secret bin Laden operation ended, it has already been turned into Zero Dark Thirty, a highly pre-praised (and controversial) movie, a candidate for Oscars with a heroine patterned on an undercover CIA agent whose photo has made it into the public arena. Moreover, it was a film whose makers were reportedly aided or at least encouraged in their efforts by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House, just as the SEALs aided this year's high-grossing movie Act of Valor ("an elite team of Navy SEALs… embark on a covert mission to recover a kidnapped CIA agent") by lending the film actual SEALs as its (unnamed) actors and then staging a SEAL parachute drop onto a red carpet at its Hollywood premier.

True, at the time The Invisible Government was published, the first two James Bond films were already hits and the Mission Imposible TV show was only two years from launch, but the way the invisible world has since emerged from the shadows to become a fixture of pop culture remains stunning. And don't think this was just some cultural quirk. After all, back in the 1960s, enterprising reporters had to pry open those invisible agencies to discover anything about what they were doing. In those years, for instance, the CIA ran a secret air and sizeable ground war in Laos that it tried desperately never to acknowledge despite its formidable size and scope.

Today, on the other hand, the Agency runs what are called "covert" drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in which most strikes are promptly reported in the press and about which the administration clearly leaked information it wanted in the New York Times on the president's role in picking those to die.

In the past, American presidents pursued "plausible deniability" when it came to assassination plots like those against Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, Cuba's Fidel Castro, and Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem. Now, assassination is clearly considered a semi-public part of the presidential job, codified, bureaucratized, and regulated (though only within the White House), and remarkably public. All of this has become part of the visible world (or at least a giant publicity operation in it). No need today for a Wise or Ross to tell us this. Ever since President Ronald Reagan's CIA-run Central American Contra wars of the 1980s, the definition of "covert" has changed. It no longer means hidden from sight, but beyond accountability.

It is now a polite way of saying to the American people: not yours. Yes, you can know about it; you can feel free to praise it; but you have nothing to do with it, no say over it.

In the 48 years since their pioneering book was published, Wise and Ross's invisible government has triumphed over the visible one. It has become the go-to option in this country. In certain ways, it is also becoming the most visible and important part of that government, a vast edifice of surveilling, storing, spying, and killing that gives us what we now call "security," leaves us in terror of the world, never stops growing, and is ever freer to collect information on you to use as it wishes.

With the passage of 48 years, it's so much clearer that, impressive as Wise and Ross were, their quest was quixotic. Bring the "secret power" under control? Make it accountable? Dream on — but be careful, one of these days even your dreams may be on file.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

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In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Cold War was commonly said to have partially plunged "into the shadows" as a secret, off-the-grid, spy-versus-spy conflict fought between the planet’s two superpowers. No one caught this mood better than John le Carré in his famed Smiley novels which offered a riveting portrait of Soviet, British, and American spies locked in mortal combat, yet with more in common with each other than with either of their aboveground societies. So many decades later, with the Soviet Union long gone, it’s strange to discover that, in the case of the United States at least, those "shadows" have only lengthened. Increasingly, as the Iraq War fades into history (and out of memory) and the Afghan War winds down, the American way of war itself is being drawn into those shadows.

Admittedly, since World War II, control over war – who to fight, when to wage it, and how to fight it – has been on a migratory path into the White House and the national security bureaucracy, leaving Congress and the American people out in the cold. In the last decade, however, a high-tech, privatized, covert version of war has become presidential property, fought at the White House’s behest by robots, warrior corporations, and two presidentially controlled "private" forces (a paramilitarized CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command). With this transformation has gone a series of decisions that have plunged American-style war ever further into darkness. In the last few years, for instance, two presidents, enveloped in a penumbra of secrecy and without the knowledge of the American people or possibly much of Congress, deployed the latest in experimental weaponry – weapons that could someday unravel our world – in the first cyberwar in history. They wielded what someday will undoubtedly be reclassified as weapons of mass destruction against Iran, paving the way for future global cyberwars which could devastate this country.

In the same years, the same two presidents took control of another new form of conflict, drone warfare. Across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, they launched massive, high-tech campaigns of assassination ("targeted killings") that may have no equivalent in history. These have involved hundreds of air strikes and thousands of casualties. Enfolded in secrecy, a complex, increasingly codified panoply of national security processes (including "terror Tuesday" meetings to decide just who to kill), the president has turned himself into our first assassin-in-chief.

As the Washington Post recently reported in a three-part series, he has also overseen a process by which ad hoc killing has morphed into a codified, bureaucratic, normalized killing machine deeply embedded in the White House, a "disposal matrix" or "kill list" that will be handed off to future presidents in a "war" (once known as the Global War on Terror) with at least "a decade" to go and possibly no end in sight. In a language that used to be left to Hollywood’s version of the Mafia, the White House, as judge, jury, and executioner, now regularly puts out hits around the world, while discussing "the designation of who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted."

In one Post piece focused on Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti as the key base for presidential war in Africa, a detail caught my eye. It seemed to capture the ever-darkening nature of this war-making moment. Speaking of the hundreds of elite special operations forces there, Craig Whitlock wrote, "Most of the commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops on the base." Put another way, this new form of warfare is far enough into the shadows that the names of a major part of the U.S. military, tens of thousands of elite troops whose command has just gotten its own "secret targeting center" in Washington 15 minutes from the White House, can’t even be known to other U.S. military personnel who work with them.

Imagine, then, what our world might be like once future techno-versions of presidential war now being developed come online. What will it mean when, in the third decade of this century, in pursuit of the same Global War on Terror, drone war has morphed into a "triple canopy space shield" and "robotic information system," as described today in chilling detail by Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch regular and lead author of the new book Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline? Imagine when, from outer space to the spreading Camp Lemonniers of planet Earth, the White House can make secret war in a myriad of high-tech and robotic ways without even a nod to you and me. By then, in at least one possible future, our whole world may lie in those shadows. ~ Tom

Beyond Bayonets and Battleships Space Warfare and the Future of U.S. Global Power

By Alfred W. McCoy

It’s 2025 and an American "triple canopy" of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere. A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century. It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

They are still operating in another age. "Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917," complained Republican candidate Mitt Romney during the last presidential debate.

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: "Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed… the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities."

Obama later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: "What I did was work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe?… We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space."

Amid all the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words. Yet for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold new breakthrough in what’s called "information warfare" may prove significantly responsible should U.S. global dominion somehow continue far into the twenty-first century.

While the technological changes involved are nothing less than revolutionary, they have deep historical roots in a distinctive style of American global power. It’s been evident from the moment this nation first stepped onto the world stage with its conquest of the Philippines in 1898. Over the span of a century, plunged into three Asian crucibles of counterinsurgency – in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Afghanistan – the U.S. military has repeatedly been pushed to the breaking point. It has repeatedly responded by fusing the nation’s most advanced technologies into new information infrastructures of unprecedented power.

That military first created a manual information regime for Philippine pacification, then a computerized apparatus to fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam. Finally, during its decade-plus in Afghanistan (and its years in Iraq), the Pentagon has begun to fuse biometrics, cyberwarfare, and a potential future triple canopy aerospace shield into a robotic information regime that could produce a platform of unprecedented power for the exercise of global dominion – or for future military disaster.

America’s First Information Revolution

This distinctive U.S. system of imperial information gathering (and the surveillance and war-making practices that go with it) traces its origins to some brilliant American innovations in the management of textual, statistical, and visual data. Their sum was nothing less than a new information infrastructure with an unprecedented capacity for mass surveillance.

During two extraordinary decades, American inventions like Thomas Alva Edison’s quadruplex telegraph (1874), Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter (1874), Melvil Dewey’s library decimal system (1876), and Herman Hollerith’s patented punch card (1889) created synergies that led to the militarized application of America’s first information revolution. To pacify a determined guerrilla resistance that persisted in the Philippines for a decade after 1898, the U.S. colonial regime – unlike European empires with their cultural studies of "Oriental civilizations" – used these advanced information technologies to amass detailed empirical data on Philippine society. In this way, they forged an Argus-eyed security apparatus that played a major role in crushing the Filipino nationalist movement. The resulting colonial policing and surveillance system would also leave a lasting institutional imprint on the emerging American state.

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the "father of U.S. military intelligence" Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon security methods he had developed years before in the Philippines to found the Army’s Military Intelligence Division. He recruited a staff that quickly grew from one (himself) to 1,700, deployed some 300,000 citizen-operatives to compile more than a million pages of surveillance reports on American citizens, and laid the foundations for a permanent domestic surveillance apparatus.

A version of this system rose to unparalleled success during World War II when Washington established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as the nation’s first worldwide espionage agency. Among its nine branches, Research & Analysis recruited a staff of nearly 2,000 academics who amassed 300,000 photographs, a million maps, and three million file cards, which they deployed in an information system via "indexing, cross-indexing, and counter-indexing" to answer countless tactical questions.

Yet by early 1944, the OSS found itself, in the words of historian Robin Winks, "drowning under the flow of information." Many of the materials it had so carefully collected were left to molder in storage, unread and unprocessed. Despite its ambitious global reach, this first U.S. information regime, absent technological change, might well have collapsed under its own weight, slowing the flow of foreign intelligence that would prove so crucial for America’s exercise of global dominion after World War II.

Computerizing Vietnam

Under the pressures of a never-ending war in Vietnam, those running the U.S. information infrastructure turned to computerized data management, launching a second American information regime. Powered by the most advanced IBM mainframe computers, the U.S. military compiled monthly tabulations of security in all of South Vietnam’s 12,000 villages and filed the three million enemy documents its soldiers captured annually on giant reels of bar-coded film. At the same time, the CIA collated and computerized diverse data on the communist civilian infrastructure as part of its infamous Phoenix Program. This, in turn, became the basis for its systematic tortures and 41,000 "extra-judicial executions" (which, based on disinformation from petty local grudges and communist counterintelligence, killed many but failed to capture more than a handfull of top communist cadres).

Most ambitiously, the U.S. Air Force spent $800 million a year to lace southern Laos with a network of 20,000 acoustic, seismic, thermal, and ammonia-sensitive sensors to pinpoint Hanoi’s truck convoys coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail under a heavy jungle canopy. The information these provided was then gathered on computerized systems for the targeting of incessant bombing runs. After 100,000 North Vietnamese troops passed right through this electronic grid undetected with trucks, tanks, and heavy artillery to launch the Nguyen Hue Offensive in 1972, the U.S. Pacific Air Force pronounced this bold attempt to build an "electronic battlefield" an unqualified failure.

In this pressure cooker of what became history’s largest air war, the Air Force also accelerated the transformation of a new information system that would rise to significance three decades later: the Firebee target drone. By war’s end, it had morphed into an increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would make 3,500 top-secret surveillance sorties over China, North Vietnam, and Laos. By 1972, the SC/TV drone, with a camera in its nose, was capable of flying 2,400 miles while navigating via a low-resolution television image.

On balance, all this computerized data helped foster the illusion that American "pacification" programs in the countryside were winning over the inhabitants of Vietnam’s villages, and the delusion that the air war was successfully destroying North Vietnam’s supply effort. Despite a dismal succession of short-term failures that helped deliver a soul-searing blow to American power, all this computerized data-gathering proved a seminal experiment, even if its advances would not become evident for another 30 years until the U.S. began creating a third – robotic – information regime.

The Global War on Terror

As it found itself at the edge of defeat in the attempted pacification of two complex societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare – all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before.

After six years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to pacify the country’s sprawling cities. It then built a biometric database with more than a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans that U.S. patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia.

When President Obama took office and launched his "surge," escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, that country became a new frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric databases, as well as for full-scale drone war in both that country and the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar already loosed by the Bush administration. This meant accelerating technological developments in drone warfare that had largely been suspended for two decades after the Vietnam War.

Launched as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s "Operation Afghan Eyes." By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with "persistent hunter killer" capabilities, was heavily armed with missiles and bombs as well as sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development, between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours.

By 2009, the Air Force and the CIA were already deploying a drone armada of at least 195 Predators and 28 Reapers inside Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan – and it’s only grown since. These collected and transmitted 16,000 hours of video daily, and from 2006-2012 fired hundreds of Hellfire missiles that killed an estimated 2,600 supposed insurgents inside Pakistan’s tribal areas. Though the second-generation Reaper drones might seem stunningly sophisticated, one defense analyst has called them "very much Model T Fords." Beyond the battlefield, there are now some 7,000 drones in the U.S. armada of unmanned aircraft, including 800 larger missile-firing drones. By funding its own fleet of 35 drones and borrowing others from the Air Force, the CIA has moved beyond passive intelligence collection to build a permanent robotic paramilitary capacity.

In the same years, another form of information warfare came, quite literally, online. Over two administrations, there has been continuity in the development of a cyberwarfare capability at home and abroad. Starting in 2002, President George W. Bush illegally authorized the National Security Agency to scan countless millions of electronic messages with its top-secret "Pinwale" database. Similarly, the FBI started an Investigative Data Warehouse that, by 2009, held a billion individual records.

Under Presidents Bush and Obama, defensive digital surveillance has grown into an offensive "cyberwarfare" capacity, which has already been deployed against Iran in history’s first significant cyberwar. In 2009, the Pentagon formed U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with headquarters at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and a cyberwarfare center at Lackland Air Base in Texas, staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees. Two years later, it declared cyberspace an "operational domain" like air, land, or sea, and began putting its energy into developing a cadre of cyber-warriors capable of launching offensive operations, such as a variety of attacks on the computerized centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear facilities and Middle Eastern banks handling Iranian money.

A Robotic Information Regime

As with the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have served as the catalyst for a new information regime, fusing aerospace, cyberspace, biometrics, and robotics into an apparatus of potentially unprecedented power. In 2012, after years of ground warfare in both countries and the continuous expansion of the Pentagon budget, the Obama administration announced a leaner future defense strategy. It included a 14% cut in future infantry strength to be compensated for by an increased emphasis on investments in the dominions of outer space and cyberspace, particularly in what the administration calls "critical space-based capabilities."

By 2020, this new defense architecture should theoretically be able to integrate space, cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for – so the claims go – the delivery of seamless information for lethal action. Significantly, both space and cyberspace are new, unregulated domains of military conflict, largely beyond international law. And Washington hopes to use both, without limitation, as Archimedean levers to exercise new forms of global dominion far into the twenty-first century, just as the British Empire once ruled from the seas and the Cold War American imperium exercised its global reach via airpower.

As Washington seeks to surveil the globe from space, the world might well ask: Just how high is national sovereignty? Absent any international agreement about the vertical extent of sovereign airspace (since a conference on international air law, convened in Paris in 1910, failed), some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you can enforce it. And Washington has filled this legal void with a secret executive matrix – operated by the CIA and the clandestine Special Operations Command – that assigns names arbitrarily, without any judicial oversight, to a classified "kill list" that means silent, sudden death from the sky for terror suspects across the Muslim world.

Although U.S. plans for space warfare remain highly classified, it is possible to assemble the pieces of this aerospace puzzle by trolling the Pentagon’s websites, and finding many of the key components in technical descriptions at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As early as 2020, the Pentagon hopes to patrol the entire globe ceaselessly, relentlessly via a triple canopy space shield reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, driven by drones armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, monitored through a telescopic panopticon, and operated by robotic controls.

At the lowest tier of this emerging U.S. aerospace shield, within striking distance of Earth in the lower stratosphere, the Pentagon is building an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capable of surveilling all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flights, and eventually Triple Terminator missiles to destroy targets below. By late 2011, the Air Force and the CIA had already ringed the Eurasian land mass with a network of 60 bases for drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing air strikes against targets just about anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

The sophistication of the technology at this level was exposed in December 2011 when one of the CIA’s RQ-170 Sentinels came down in Iran. Revealed was a bat-winged drone equipped with radar-evading stealth capacity, active electronically scanned array radar, and advanced optics "that allow operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air."

If things go according to plan, in this same lower tier at altitudes up to 12 miles unmanned aircraft such as the "Vulture," with solar panels covering its massive 400-foot wingspan, will be patrolling the globe ceaselessly for up to five years at a time with sensors for "unblinking" surveillance, and possibly missiles for lethal strikes. Establishing the viability of this new technology, NASA’s solar-powered aircraft Pathfinder, with a 100-foot wingspan, reached an altitude of 71,500 feet altitude in 1997, and its fourth-generation successor the "Helios" flew at 97,000 feet with a 247-foot wingspan in 2001, two miles higher than any previous aircraft.

For the next tier above the Earth, in the upper stratosphere, DARPA and the Air Force are collaborating in the development of the Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 20 miles, it is expected to "deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours." Although the first test launches in April 2010 and August 2011 crashed midflight, they did reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound, and sent back "unique data" that should help resolve remaining aerodynamic problems.

At the outer level of this triple-tier aerospace canopy, the age of space warfare dawned in April 2010 when the Pentagon quietly launched the X-37B space drone, an unmanned craft just 29 feet long, into an orbit 250 miles above the Earth. By the time its second prototype landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in June 2012 after a 15-month flight, this classified mission represented a successful test of "robotically controlled reusable spacecraft" and established the viability of unmanned space drones in the exosphere.

At this apex of the triple canopy, 200 miles above Earth where the space drones will soon roam, orbital satellites are the prime targets, a vulnerability that became obvious in 2007 when China used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down one of its own satellites. In response, the Pentagon is now developing the F-6 satellite system that will "decompose a large monolithic spacecraft into a group of wirelessly linked elements, or nodes [that increases] resistance to… a bad part breaking or an adversary attacking." And keep in mind that the X-37B has a capacious cargo bay to carry missiles or future laser weaponry to knock out enemy satellites – in other words, the potential capability to cripple the communications of a future military rival like China, which will have its own global satellite system operational by 2020.

Ultimately, the impact of this third information regime will be shaped by the ability of the U.S. military to integrate its array of global aerospace weaponry into a robotic command structure that would be capable of coordinating operations across all combat domains: space, cyberspace, sky, sea, and land. To manage the surging torrent of information within this delicately balanced triple canopy, the system would, in the end, have to become self-maintaining through "robotic manipulator technologies," such as the Pentagon’s FREND system that someday could potentially deliver fuel, provide repairs, or reposition satellites.

For a new global optic, DARPA is building the wide-angle Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), which could be sited at bases ringing the globe for a quantum leap in “space surveillance." The system would allow future space warriors to see the whole sky wrapped around the entire planet while seated before a single screen, making it possible to track every object in Earth orbit.

Operation of this complex worldwide apparatus will require, as one DARPA official explained in 2007, “an integrated collection of space surveillance systems – an architecture – that is leak-proof.” Thus, by 2010, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget, and a massive $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, with 8,500 staffers wrapped in electronic security – all aimed at coordinating the flood of surveillance data pouring in from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes, and orbiting satellites. By 2020 or thereafter – such a complex techno-system is unlikely to respect schedules – this triple canopy should be able to atomize a single "terrorist" with a missile strike after tracking his eyeball, facial image, or heat signature for hundreds of miles through field and favela, or blind an entire army by knocking out all ground communications, avionics, and naval navigation.

Technological Dominion or Techno-Disaster?

Peering into the future, a still uncertain balance of forces offers two competing scenarios for the continuation of U.S. global power. If all or much goes according to plan, sometime in the third decade of this century the Pentagon will complete a comprehensive global surveillance system for Earth, sky, and space using robotics to coordinate a veritable flood of data from biometric street-level monitoring, cyber-data mining, a worldwide network of Space Surveillance Telescopes, and triple canopy aeronautic patrols. Through agile data management of exceptional power, this system might allow the United States a veto of global lethality, an equalizer for any further loss of economic strength.

However, as in Vietnam, history offers some pessimistic parallels when it comes to the U.S. preserving its global hegemony by militarized technology alone. Even if this robotic information regime could somehow check China’s growing military power, the U.S. might still have the same chance of controlling wider geopolitical forces with aerospace technology as the Third Reich had of winning World War II with its "super weapons" – V-2 rockets that rained death on London and Messerschmitt Me-262 jets that blasted allied bombers from Europe’s skies. Complicating the future further, the illusion of information omniscience might incline Washington to more military misadventures akin to Vietnam or Iraq, creating the possibility of yet more expensive, draining conflicts, from Iran to the South China Sea.

If the future of America’s world power is shaped by actual events rather than long-term economic trends, then its fate might well be determined by which comes first in this century-long cycle: military debacle from the illusion of technological mastery, or a new technological regime powerful enough to perpetuate U.S. global dominion.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse). Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the lead author of Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (University of Wisconsin, 2012), which is the source for much of the material in this essay.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

It’s pop-quiz time when it comes to the American way of war: three questions, torn from the latest news, just for you.  Here’s the first of them, and good luck!

Two weeks ago, 200 U.S. Marines began armed operations in,,,?:

a) Afghanistan b) Pakistan c) Iran d) Somalia e) Yemen f) Central Africa g) Northern Mali h) The Philippines i) Guatemala

If you opted for any answer, "a" through "h," you took a reasonable shot at it.  After all, there’s an ongoing American war in Afghanistan and somewhere in the southern part of that country, 200 armed U.S. Marines could well have been involved in an operation.  In Pakistan, an undeclared, CIA-run air war has long been underway, and in the past there have been armed border crossings by U.S. special operations forces as well as U.S. piloted cross-border air strikes, but no Marines.

When it comes to Iran, Washington’s regional preparations for war are staggering.  The continual build-up of U.S. naval power in the Persian Gulf, of land forces on bases around that country, of air power (and anti-missile defenses) in the region should leave any observer breathless.  There are U.S. special operations forces near the Iranian border and CIA drones regularly over that country.  In conjunction with the Israelis, Washington has launched a cyberwar against Iran’s nuclear program and computer systems.  It has also established fierce oil and banking sanctions, and there seem to have been at least some U.S. cross-border operations into Iran going back to at least 2007.  In addition, a recent front-page New York Times story on Obama administration attempts to mollify Israel over its Iran policy included this ominous line: "The administration is also considering… covert activities that have been previously considered and rejected."  So 200 armed Marines in action in Iran – not yet, but don’t get down on yourself, it was a good guess.

In Somalia, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, there have been far more U.S. drone flights and strikes against the Islamic extremist al-Shabaab movement and al-Qaeda elements than anyone previously knew.  In addition, the U.S. has at least partially funded, supported, equipped, advised, and promoted proxy wars there, involving Ethiopian troops back in 2007 and more recently Ugandan and Burundi troops (as well as an invading Kenyan army).  In addition, CIA operatives and possibly other irregulars and hired guns are well established in Mogadishu, the capital.

In Yemen, as in Somalia, the combination has been proxy war and strikes by drones (as well as piloted planes), with some U.S. special forces advisors on the ground, and civilian casualties (and anger at the U.S.) rising in the southern part of the country – but also, as in Somalia, no Marines. Central Africa?  Now, there’s a thought.  After all, at least 100 Green Berets were sent in there this year as part of a campaign against Joseph Kony’s Ugandan-based Lord’s Resistance Army.  As for Northern Mali, taken over by Islamic extremists (including an al-Qaeda-affiliated group), it certainly presents a target for future U.S. intervention – and we still don’t know what those three U.S. Army commandos who skidded off a bridge to their deaths in their Toyota Land Rover with three "Moroccan prostitutes" were doing in a country with which the U.S. military had officially cut its ties after a democratically elected government was overthrown.  But 200 Marines operating in war-torn areas of Africa?  Not yet.  When it comes to the Philippines, again no Marines, even though U.S. special forces and drones have been aiding the government in a low-level conflict with Islamic militants in Mindanao.

As it happens, the correct, if surprising, answer is "i."  And if you chose it, congratulations!

On August 29th, the Associated Press reported that a "team of 200 U.S. Marines began patrolling Guatemala’s western coast this week in an unprecedented operation to beat drug traffickers in the Central America region, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday."  This could have been big news.  It’s a sizeable enough intervention: 200 Marines sent into action in a country where we last had a military presence in 1978.  If this wasn’t the beginning of something bigger and wider, it would be surprising, given that commando-style operatives from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration have been firing weapons and killing locals in a similar effort in Honduras, and that, along with U.S. drones, the CIA is evidently moving ever deeper into the drug war in Mexico.

In addition, there’s a history here.  After all, in the early part of the previous century, sending in the Marines – in Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Repubic, and elsewhere – was the way Washington demonstrated its power in its own "backyard."  And yet other than a few straightforward news reports on the Guatemalan intervention, there has been no significant media discussion, no storm of criticism or commentary, no mention at either political convention, and no debate or discussion about the wisdom of such a step in this country.  Odds are that you didn’t even notice that it had happened.

Think of it another way: in the post-2001 era, along with two disastrous wars on the Eurasian mainland, we’ve been regularly sending in the Marines or special operations forces, as well as naval, air, and robotic power.  Such acts are, by now, so ordinary that they are seldom considered worthy of much discussion here, even though no other country acts (or even has the capacity to act) this way.  This is simply what Washington’s National Security Complex does for a living.

At the moment, it seems, a historical circle is being closed with the Marines once again heading back into Latin America as the "drug war" Washington proclaimed years ago becomes an actual drug war.  It’s a demonstration that, these days, when Washington sees a problem anywhere on the planet, its version of a "foreign policy" is most likely to call on the U.S. military.  Force is increasingly not our option of last resort, but our first choice.

Now, consider question two in our little snap quiz of recent war news:

In 2011, what percentage of the global arms market did the U.S. control?

(Keep in mind that, as everyone knows, the world is an arms bazaar filled with haggling merchants.  Though the Cold War and the superpower arms rivalry is long over, there are obviously plenty of countries eager to peddle their weaponry, no matter what conflicts may be stoked as a result.)

a) 37% ($12.1 billion), followed closely by Russia ($10.7 billion), France, China, and the United Kingdom. b) 52.7% ($21.3 billion), followed by Russia at 19.3% ($12.8 billion), France, Britain, China, Germany, and Italy. c) 68% ($37.8 billion), followed by Italy at 9% ($3.7 billion) and Russia at 8% ($3.5 billion). d) 78% ($66.3 billion), followed by Russia at 5.6% ($4.8 billion).

Naturally, you naturally eliminated "d" first.  Who wouldn’t?  After all, cornering close to 80% of the arms market would mean that the global weapons bazaar had essentially been converted into a monopoly operation.  Of course, it’s common knowledge that the U.S. arms giants, given a massive helping hand in their marketing by the Pentagon, remain the collective 800-pound gorilla in any room.  But 37% of that market is nothing to sniff at.  (At least, it wasn’t in 1990, the final days of the Cold War when the Russians were still a major competitor worldwide.)  As for 52.7%, what national industry wouldn’t bask in the glory of such a figure – a majority share of arms sold worldwide?  (And, in fact, that was an impressive percentage back in the dismal sales year of 2010, when arms budgets worldwide were still feeling the pain of the lingering global economic recession.)  Okay, so what about that hefty 68%?  It couldn’t have been a more striking achievement for U.S. arms makers back in 2008 in what was otherwise distinctly a lagging market.

The correct answer for 2011, however, is the singularly unbelievable one: the U.S. actually tripled its arms sales last year, hitting a record high, and cornering almost 78% of the global arms trade.  This was reported in late August but, like those 200 Marines in Guatemala, never made onto front pages or into the top TV news stories.  And yet, if arms were drugs (and it’s possible that, in some sense, they are, and that we humans can indeed get addicted to them), then the U.S. has become something close enough to the world’s sole dealer.  That should be front-page news, shouldn’t it?

Okay, so here’s the third question in today’s quiz:

From a local base in which country did U.S. Global Hawk drones fly long-range surveillance missions between late 2001 and at least 2006?

a) The Seychelles Islands b) Ethiopia c) An unnamed Middle Eastern country d) Australia

Actually, the drone base the U.S. has indeed operated in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean was first used only in 2009 and the drone base Washington has developed in Ethiopia by upgrading a civilian airport only became operational in 2011.  As for that "unnamed Middle Eastern country," perhaps Saudi Arabia, the new airstrip being built there, assumedly for the CIA’s drones, may now be operational. Once again, the right answer turns out to be the unlikely one.  Recently, the Australian media reported that the U.S. had flown early, secretive Global Hawk missions out of a Royal Australian Base at Edinburg.  These were detected by a "group of Adelaide aviation historians."  The Global Hawk, an enormous drone, can stay in the air a long time.  What those flights were surveilling back then is unknown, though North Korea might be one guess.  Whether they continued beyond 2006 is also unknown.

Unlike the previous two stories, this one never made it into the U.S. media and if it had, would have gone unnoticed anyway.  After all, who in Washington or among U.S. reporters and pundits would have found it odd that, long before its recent, much-ballyhooed "pivot" to Asia, the U.S. was flying some of its earliest drone missions over vast areas of the Pacific?  Who even finds it strange that, in the years since 2001, the U.S. has been putting together an ever more elaborate network of its own drone bases on foreign soil, or that the U.S. has an estimated 1,000-1,200 military bases scattered across the planet, some the size of small American towns (not to speak of scads of bases in the United States)?

Like those Marines in Guatemala, like the near-monopoly on the arms trade, this sort of thing is hardly considered significant news in the U.S., though in its size and scope it is surely historically unprecedented.  Nor does it seem strange to us that no other country on the planet has more than a tiny number of bases outside its own territory: the Russians have a scattered few in the former SSRs of the Soviet Union and a single old naval base in Syria that has been in the news of late; the French still have some in Francophone Africa; the British have a few leftovers from their own imperial era, including the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has essentially been transformed into an American base; and the Chinese may be in the process of setting up a couple of modest bases as well.  Add up every non-American base on foreign soil, however, and the total is probably less than 2% of the American empire of bases.

Investing in War

It would, by the way, be a snap to construct a little quiz like this every couple of weeks from U.S. military news that’s reported but not attended to here, and each quiz would make the same essential point: from Washington’s perspective, the world is primarily a landscape for arming for, garrisoning for, training for, planning for, and making war.  War is what we invest our time, energy, and treasure in on a scale that is, in its own way, remarkable, even if it seldom registers in this country.

In a sense (leaving aside the obvious inability of the U.S. military to actually win wars), it may, at this point, be what we do best.  After all, whatever the results, it’s an accomplishment to send 200 Marines to Guatemala for a month of drug interdiction work, to get those Global Hawks secretly to Australia to monitor the Pacific, and to corner the market on things that go boom in the night.

Think of it this way: the United States is alone on the planet, not just in its ability, but in its willingness to use military force in drug wars, religious wars, political wars, conflicts of almost any sort, constantly and on a global scale.  No other group of powers collectively even comes close. It also stands alone as a purveyor of major weapons systems and so as a generator of war.  It is, in a sense, a massive machine for the promotion of war on a global scale.

We have, in other words, what increasingly looks like a monopoly on war.  There have, of course, been warrior societies in the past that committed themselves to a mobilized life of war-making above all else.  What’s unique about the United States is that it isn’t a warrior society.  Quite the opposite.

Washington may be mobilized for permanent war.  Special operations forces may be operating in up to 120 countries.  Drone bases may be proliferating across the planet.  We may be building up forces in the Persian Gulf and "pivoting" to Asia.  Warrior corporations and rent-a-gun mercenary outfits have mobilized on the country’s disparate battlefronts to profit from the increasingly privatized twenty-first-century American version of war.  The American people, however, are demobilized and detached from the wars, interventions, operations, and other military activities done in their name.  As a result, 200 Marines in Guatemala, almost 78% of global weapons sales, drones flying surveillance from Australia – no one here notices; no one here cares. 

War: it’s what we do the most and attend to the least.  It’s a nasty combination.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

How Quickly Will the U.S. Leave Afghanistan?

In the wake of several deaths among its contingent of troops in a previously peaceful province in Afghanistan, New Zealand (like France and South Korea) is now expediting the departure of its 140 soldiers.  That’s not exactly headline-making news here in the U.S.  If you’re an American, you probably didn’t even know that New Zealand was playing a small part in our Afghan War.  In fact, you may hardly have known about the part Americans are playing in a war that, over the last decade-plus, has repeatedly been labeled "the forgotten war."

Still, maybe it’s time to take notice.  Maybe the flight of those Kiwis should be thought of as a small omen, even if they are departing as decorously, quietly, and flightlessly as possible.  Because here’s the thing: once the November election is over, "expedited departure" could well become an American term and the U.S., as it slips ignominiously out of Afghanistan, could turn out to be the New Zealand of superpowers.

You undoubtedly know the phrase: the best laid plans of mice and men.  It couldn’t be more apt when it comes to the American project in Afghanistan.  Washington’s plans have indeed been carefully drawn up.  By the end of 2014, U.S. "combat troops" are to be withdrawn, but left behind on the giant bases the Pentagon has built will be thousands of U.S. trainers and advisers, as well as special operations forces to go after al-Qaeda remnants (and other "militants"), and undoubtedly the air power to back them all up.

Their job will officially be to continue to "stand up" the humongous security force that no Afghan government in that thoroughly impoverished country will ever be able to pay for.  Thanks to a 10-year Strategic Partnership Agreement that President Obama flew to Kabul to seal with Afghan President Hamid Karzai as May began, there they are to remain until 2020 or beyond.

In other words, it being Afghanistan, we need a translator.  The American "withdrawal" regularly mentioned in the media doesn’t really mean "withdrawal."  On paper at least, for years to come the U.S. will partially occupy a country that has a history of loathing foreigners who won’t leave (and making them pay for it).

Tea Boys and Old Men

Plans are one thing, reality another.  After all, when invading U.S. troops triumphantly arrived in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in April 2003, the White House and the Pentagon were already planning to stay forever and a day – and they instantly began building permanent bases (though they preferred to speak of "permanent access" via "enduring camps") as a token of their intent.  Only a couple of years later, in a gesture that couldn’t have been more emphatic in planning terms, they constructed the largest (and possibly most expensive) embassy on the planet as a regional command center in Baghdad.  Yet somehow, those perfectly laid plans went desperately awry and only a few years later, with American leaders still looking for ways to garrison the country into the distant future, Washington found itself out on its ear.  But that’s reality for you, isn’t it?

Right now, evidence on the ground – in the form of dead American bodies piling up – indicates that even the Afghans closest to us don’t exactly second the Obama administration’s plans for a 20-year occupation.  In fact, news from the deep-sixed war in that forgotten land, often considered the longest conflict in American history, has suddenly burst onto the front pages of our newspapers and to the top of the TV news.  And there’s just one reason for that: despite the copious plans of the planet’s last superpower, the poor, backward, illiterate, hapless, corrupt Afghans – whose security forces, despite unending American financial support and mentoring, have never effectively "stood up" – made it happen.  They have been sending a stark message, written in blood, to Washington’s planners.

A 15-year-old "tea boy" at a U.S. base opened fire on Marine special forces trainers exercising at a gym, killing three of them and seriously wounding another; a 60- or 70-year-old farmer, who volunteered to become a member of a village security force, turned the first gun his American special forces trainers gave him at an "inauguration ceremony" back on them, killing two; a police officer who, his father claims, joined the force four years earlier, invited Marine Special Operations advisers to a meal and gunned down three of them, wounding a fourth, before fleeing, perhaps to the Taliban.

About other "allies" involved in similar incidents – recently, there were at least 9 “green-on-blue” attacks in an 11-day span in which 10 Americans died – we know almost nothing, except that they were Afghan policemen or soldiers their American trainers and mentors were trying to "stand up" to fight the Taliban.  Some were promptly shot to death.  At least one may have escaped.

These green-on-blue incidents, which the Pentagon recently relabeled "insider attacks," have been escalating for months.  Now, they seem to have reached a critical mass and so are finally causing a public stir in official circles in Washington.  A "deeply concerned" President Obama commented to reporters on the phenomenon (“We’ve got to make sure that we’re on top of this…") and said he was planning to "reach out" to Afghan President Karzai on the matter.  In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta did so, pressing Karzai to take tougher steps in the vetting of recruits for the Afghan security forces.  (Karzai and his aides promptly blamed the attacks on the Iranian and Pakistani intelligence agencies.)

General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, flew to Afghanistan to consult with his counterparts on what to make of these incidents (and had his plane shelled on a runway at Bagram Air Field – "a lucky shot," claimed a NATO spokesman – for his effort).  U.S. Afghan War commander General John Allen convened a meeting of more than 40 generals to discuss how to stop the attacks, even as he insisted "the campaign remains on track."  There are now rumblings in Congress about hearings on the subject.

Struggling With the Message

Worry about such devastating attacks and their implications for the American mission, slow to rise, is now widespread.  But much of this is reported in our media as if in a kind of code.  Take for example the way Laura King put the threat in a front-page Los Angeles Times piece (and she was hardly alone).  Reflecting Washington’s wisdom on the subject, she wrote that the attacks "could threaten a linchpin of the Western exit strategy: training Afghan security forces in preparation for handing over most fighting duties to them by 2014."  It almost sounds as if, thanks to these incidents, our combat troops might not be able to make it out of there on schedule.

No less striking is the reported general puzzlement over what lies behind these Afghan actions.  In most cases, the motivation for them, writes King, "remains opaque."  There are, it seems, many theories within the U.S. military about why Afghans are turning their guns on Americans, including personal pique, individual grudges, cultural touchiness, "heat-of-the moment disputes in a society where arguments are often settled with a Kalashnikov," and in a minority of cases – about a tenth of them, according to a recent military study, though one top commander suggested the number could range up to a quarter – actual infiltration or "coercion" by the Taliban.  General Allen even suggested recently that some insider attacks might be traced to religious fasting for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, combined with unseasonable summer heat, leaving Afghans hungry, tetchy, and prone to impulsive acts, guns in hand.  According to the Washington Post, however, "Allen acknowledged that U.S. and Afghan officials have struggled to determine what’s behind the rise in attacks."

"American officials are still struggling," wrote the New York Times in an editorial on the subject, "to understand the forces at work."  And in that the editorial writers like the general reflected the basic way these acts are registering here – as a remarkable Afghan mystery.  In other words, in Washington’s version of the blame game, the quirky, unpredictable Afghans from Hamid Karzai on down are in the crosshairs.  What is the matter with them?

In the midst of all this, few say the obvious.  Undoubtedly, a chasm of potential misunderstanding lies between Afghan trainees and their American trainers; Afghans may indeed feel insulted by any number of culturally inapt, inept, or hostile acts by their mentors.  They may have been on edge from fasting for Ramadan.  They may be holding grudges.  None of the various explanations being offered, that is, may in themselves be wrong.  The problem is that none of them allow an observer to grasp what’s actually going on.  On that, there really should be few "misunderstandings" and, though you won’t hear it in Washington, right now Americans are actually the ones in the crosshairs, and not just in the literal sense either.

While the motives of any individual Afghan turning his gun on an American may be beyond our knowing – just what made him plan it, just what made him snap – history should tell us something about the more general motives of Afghans (and perhaps the rest of us as well).  After all, the United States was founded after colonial settlers grew tired of an occupying army and power in their midst.  Whatever the individual insults Afghans feel, the deeper insult almost 11 years after the U.S. military, crony corporations, hire-a-gun outfits, contractors, advisers, and aid types arrived on the scene en masse with all their money, equipment, and promises is that things are going truly badly; that the westerners are still around; that the Americans are still trying to stand up those Afghan forces (when the Taliban has no problem standing its forces up and fighting effectively without foreign trainers); that the defeated Taliban, one of the less popular movements of modern history, is again on the rise; that the country is a sea of corruption; that more than 30 years after the first Afghan War against the Soviets began, the country is still a morass of violence, suffering, and death.

Plumb the mystery all you want, our Afghan allies couldn’t be clearer as a collective group.  They are sick of foreign occupying armies, even when, in some cases, they may have no sympathy for the Taliban.  This should be a situation in which no translators are needed.  The "insult" to Afghan ways is, after all, large indeed and should be easy enough for Americans to grasp.  Just try to reverse the situation with Chinese, Russian, or Iranian armies heavily garrisoning the U.S., supporting political candidates, and trying to stand us up for more than a decade and it may be easier to understand.  Americans, after all, blow people away regularly over far less than that.

And keep in mind as well what history does tell us: that the Afghans have quite a record of getting disgusted with occupying armies and blowing them away.  After all, they managed to eject the militaries of two of the most powerful empires of their moments, the British in the 1840s and the Russians in the 1980s.  Why not a third great empire as well?

A Contagion of Killing

The message is certainly clear enough, however unprepared those in Washington and in the field are to hear it: forget our enemies; a rising number of those Afghans closest to us want us out in the worst way possible and their message on the subject has been horrifically blunt.  As NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski put it recently, among Americans in Afghanistan there is now "a growing fear the armed Afghan soldier standing next to them may really be the enemy."

It’s a situation that isn’t likely to be rectified by quick fixes, including the eerily named Guardian Angel program (which leaves an armed American with the sole job of watching out for trigger-happy Afghans in exchanges with his compatriots), or better "vetting" of Afghan recruits, or putting Afghan counterintelligence officers in ever more units to watch over their own troops.

The question is: Why can’t our leaders in Washington and in the U.S. military stop "struggling" and see this for what it obviously is? Why can’t anyone in the mainstream media write about it as it obviously is?  After all, when almost 11 years after your arrival to "liberate" a country, orders are issued for every American soldier to carry a loaded weapon everywhere at all times, even on American bases, lest your allies blow you away, you should know that you’ve failed.  When you can’t train your allies to defend their own country without an armed guardian angel watching at all times, you should know that it’s long past time to leave a distant country of no strategic value to the United States.

As is now regularly noted, the incidents of green-on-blue violence are rising rapidly.  There have been 32 of them reported so far this year, with 40 American or coalition members killed, compared to 21 reported in all of 2011, killing 35.  The numbers have a chilling quality, a sense of contagion, to them.  They suggest that this may be an unraveling moment, and don’t think – though no one mentions this – that it couldn’t get far worse.

To date, such incidents are essentially the work of lone wolf attackers, in a few cases of two Afghans, and in a single case of three Afghans plotting together.  But no matter how many counterintelligence agents are slipped into the ranks or guardian angels appointed, don’t think there’s something magical about the numbers one, two, and three.  While there’s no way to foresee the future, there’s no reason not to believe that what one or two Afghans are already doing couldn’t in the end be done by four or five, by parts of squads, by small units.  With a spirit of contagion, of copycat killings with a  message, loose in the land, this could get far worse.

One thing seems ever more likely.  If your plan is to stay and train a security force growing numbers of whom are focused on killing you, then you are, by definition, in an impossible situation and you should know that your days are numbered, that it’s not likely you’ll be there in 2020 or even maybe 2015.  When training your allies to stand up means training them to do you in, it’s long past time to go, whatever your plans may have been.  After all, the British had "plans" for Afghanistan, as did the Russians.  Little good it did them.

Imagine for a moment that you were in Kabul or Washington at the end of December 2001, after the Taliban had been crushed, after Osama bin Laden fled to Pakistan, and as the U.S. was moving into "liberated" Afghanistan for the long haul.  Imagine as well that someone claiming to be a seer made this prediction: almost 11 years from then, despite endless tens of billions of dollars spent on Afghan "reconstruction," despite nearly $50 billion spent on "standing up" an Afghan security force that could defend the country, and with more than 700 bases built for U.S. troops and Afghan allies, local soldiers and police would be deserting in droves, the Taliban would be back in force, those being trained would be blowing their trainers away in record numbers, and by order of the Pentagon, an American soldier could not go to the bathroom unarmed on an American base for fear of being shot down by an Afghan "friend."

You would, of course, have been considered a first-class idiot, if not a madman, and yet this is exactly the U.S. "hearts and minds" record in Afghanistan to date.  Welcomed in 2001, we are being shown the door in the worst possible way in 2012.  Washington is losing it.  It’s too late to exit gracefully, but exit in time we must.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

Her white hair peeked out from under a brilliant cerulean blue headscarf. Her lips and teeth were stained red from chewing areca nut and betel leaf, a mild stimulant favored by older Vietnamese women. She was missing her right eye. She also appeared to be in danger of floating away had a stiff breeze swept along the roadside where we were talking. Le Thi Xuan couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds.

But this 77-year-old whose height topped out at four-feet-and-change was a survivor. That now-empty eye-socket took an elbow from an American Marine back in the 1960s. That same day she survived a grenade attack that killed one of her sons and gravely wounded another.

Le Thi Xuan also survived torture. When questioned about the guerrilla fighters that the Americans called "Viet Cong," she told me, "I did not reveal anything, so they kept on beating me. Once they tired of that, they used electricity to torture me."

Le Thi Xuan’s ordeal was no anomaly. Electrical torture by Americans and their South Vietnamese allies was a commonplace of the Vietnam War. The prime method involved the use of hand-cranked field telephones to produce electricity and two wires that were generally affixed to sensitive areas of the anatomy: ears, fingers, nipples, genitals. The use of "water torture" or the "water rag" technique – what we now know as waterboarding – was also widespread.

Some years ago, investigating a military intelligence unit that had routinely subjected Vietnamese to torture, I got in touch with former Staff Sergeant David Carmon. When Army criminal investigators questioned Carmon in the early 1970s, he admitted using the water rag method on a detainee. "I held the suspect down, placed a cloth over his face, and then poured water over the cloth, thus forcing water into his mouth,” he said, according to his sworn statement. Once-classified military documents show that he also admitted using electrical shock on detainees. Decades later, he was still unrepentant. “I am not ashamed of anything I did, and I would most likely conduct myself in the same manner if placed in a Vietnam-type situation again,” he told me. American torturers of the post-9/11 era are, as best we can tell, generally no less unrepentant.

Until this moment, Americans (other than those who abused her) could have known nothing of Le Thi Xuan’s torture. Similarly, for decades almost no one knew of the rampant use of torture by Carmon’s unit. (The wartime investigation of it was buried in military files in the National Archives and forgotten.) But torture by U.S. military personnel has a long history, going back to the Indian Wars and to the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the last century, and its use has been no accident. As TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy makes clear in his latest piece, there’s a secret post-World War II and post-9/11 history of torture that’s been covered up and covered over – a bipartisan effort that extends to the present. It’s a sordid story that McCoy has been unraveling for years and brings up to date in his new book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. Knowing it can teach us a lot about America’s covert past, its present, and where the country may be headed in the years to come. ~ Nick Turse

How Two Administrations and Both Parties Made Illegality the American Way of Life

By Alfred W. McCoy

After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.

President Obama has closed the CIA’s "black sites," its secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. But via rendition – the sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that torture – and related policies, his administration has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. In this way, he has avoided the political stigma of torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them.

This "resolution" of the torture issue may meet the needs of this country’s deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy an international community determined to prosecute human rights abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term risk of another sordid torture scandal that will further damage U.S. standing with allies worldwide.

Perfecting a New Form of Torture

The modern American urge to use torture did not, of course, begin on September 12, 2001. It has roots that reach back to the beginning of the Cold War and a human rights policy riven with contradictions. Publicly, Washington opposed torture and led the world in drafting the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the Central Intelligence Agency began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with two findings foundational to a new form of psychological torture. In the early 1950s, while collaborating with the CIA, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered that, using goggles, gloves, and earmuffs, he could induce a state akin to psychosis among student volunteers by depriving them of sensory stimulation. Simultaneously, two eminent physicians at Cornell University Medical Center, also working with the Agency, found that the most devastating torture technique used by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, involved simply forcing victims to stand for days at a time, while legs swelled painfully and hallucinations began.

In 1963, after a decade of mind-control research, the CIA codified these findings in a succinct, secret instructional handbook, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. It became the basis for a new method of psychological torture disseminated worldwide and within the U.S. intelligence community. Avoiding direct involvement in torture, the CIA instead trained allied agencies to do its dirty work in prisons throughout the Third World, like South Vietnam’s notorious "tiger cages."

The Korean War added a defensive dimension to this mind-control research. After harsh North Korean psychological torture forced American POWs to accuse their own country of war crimes, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered that any serviceman subject to capture be given resistance training, which the Air Force soon dubbed with the acronym SERE (for survival, evasion, resistance, escape).

Once the Cold War ended in 1990, Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, which banned the infliction of "severe" psychological and physical pain. The CIA ended its torture training in the Third World, and the Defense Department recalled Latin American counterinsurgency manuals that contained instructions for using harsh interrogation techniques. On the surface, then, Washington had resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.

But when President Bill Clinton sent the U.N. Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included language (drafted six years earlier by the Reagan administration) that contained diplomatic "reservations." In effect, these addenda accepted the banning of physical abuse, but exempted psychological torture.

A year later, when the Clinton administration launched its covert campaign against al-Qaeda, the CIA avoided direct involvement in human rights violations by sending 70 terror suspects to allied nations notorious for physical torture. This practice, called "extraordinary rendition," had supposedly been banned by the U.N. convention and so a new contradiction between Washington’s human rights principles and its practices was buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Normalizing Torture

Right after his first public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his White House staff expansive secret orders for the use of harsh interrogation, adding, "I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

Soon after, the CIA began opening "black sites" that would in the coming years stretch from Thailand to Poland. It also leased a fleet of executive jets for the rendition of detained terrorist suspects to allied nations, and revived psychological tortures abandoned since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the agency hired former Air Force psychologists to reverse engineer SERE training techniques, flipping them from defense to offense and thereby creating the psychological tortures that would henceforth travel far under the euphemistic label "enhanced interrogation techniques."

In a parallel move in late 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to head the new prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, and gave him broad authority to develop a total three-phase attack on the sensory receptors, cultural identity, and individual psyches of his new prisoners. After General Miller visited Abu Ghraib prison in September 2003, the U.S. commander for Iraq issued orders for the use of psychological torture in U.S. prisons in that country, including sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and a recent innovation, cultural humiliation through exposure to dogs (which American believed would be psychologically devastating for Arabs). It is no accident that Private Lynndie England, a military guard at Abu Ghraib prison, was famously photographed leading a naked Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.

Just two months after CBS News broadcast those notorious photos from Abu Ghraib in April 2004, 35% of Americans polled still felt torture was acceptable. Why were so many tolerant of torture?

One partial explanation would be that, in the years after 9/11, the mass media filled screens large and small across America with enticing images of abuse. Amid this torrent of torture simulations, two media icons served to normalize abuse for many Americans – the fantasy of the "ticking time bomb scenario" and the fictional hero of the Fox Television show "24," counterterror agent Jack Bauer.

In the months after 9/11, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz launched a multimedia campaign arguing that torture would be necessary in the event U.S. intelligence agents discovered that a terrorist had planted a ticking nuclear bomb in New York’s Times Square. Although this scenario was a fantasy whose sole foundation was an obscure academic philosophy article published back in 1973, such ticking bombs soon enough became a media trope and a persuasive reality for many Americans – particularly thanks to "24," every segment of which began with an oversized clock ticking menacingly.

While campaigning for his wife Hillary in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Clinton typically cited "24" as a justification for allowing CIA agents, acting outside the law, to torture in extreme emergencies. "When Bauer goes out there on his own and is prepared to live with the consequences," Clinton told Meet the Press, "it always seems to work better."

Impunity in America

Such a normalization of "enhanced interrogation techniques" created public support for an impunity achieved by immunizing all those culpable of crimes of torture. During President Obama’s first two years in office, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz made dozens of television appearances accusing his administration of weakening America’s security by investigating CIA interrogators who had used such techniques under Bush.

Ironically, Obama’s assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 provided an opening for neoconservatives to move the nation toward impunity. Forming an a cappella media chorus, former Bush administration officials appeared on television to claim, without any factual basis, that torture had somehow led the Navy SEALs to Bin Laden. Within weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder announced an end to any investigation of harsh CIA interrogations and to the possibility of bringing any of the CIA torturers to court. (Consider it striking, then, that the only "torture" case brought to court by the administration involved a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who had leaked the names of some torturers.)

Starting on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the country took the next step toward full impunity via a radical rewriting of the past. In a memoir published on August 30, 2011, Dick Cheney claimed the CIA’s use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on an al-Qaeda leader named Abu Zubaydah had turned this hardened terrorist into a "fount of information" and saved "thousands of lives."

Just two weeks later, on September 12, 2011, former FBI counterterror agent Ali Soufan released his own memoirs, stating that he was the one who started the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah back in 2002, using empathetic, non-torture techniques that quickly gained "important actionable intelligence" about “the role of KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.”

Angered by the FBI’s success, CIA director George Tenet dispatched his own interrogators from Washington led by Dr. James Mitchell, the former SERE psychologist who had developed the agency’s harsh "enhanced techniques." As the CIA team moved up the "force continuum" from "low-level sleep deprivation" to nudity, noise barrage, and the use of a claustrophobic confinement box, Dr. Mitchell’s harsh methods got “no information.”

By contrast, at each step in this escalating abuse, Ali Soufan was brought back for more quiet questioning in Arabic that coaxed out all the valuable intelligence Zubaydah had to offer. The results of this ad hoc scientific test were blindingly clear: FBI empathy was consistently effective, while CIA coercion proved counterproductive.

But this fundamental yet fragile truth has been obscured by CIA censorship and neoconservative casuistry. Cheney’s secondhand account completely omitted the FBI presence. Moreover, the CIA demanded 181 pages of excisions from Ali Soufan’s memoirs that reduced his chapters about this interrogation experience to a maze of blackened lines no regular reader can understand.

The agency’s attempt to rewrite the past has continued into the present. Just last April, Jose Rodriguez, former chief of CIA Clandestine Services, published his uncensored memoirs under the provocative title Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions after 9/11 Saved American Lives. In a promotional television interview, he called FBI claims of success with empathetic methods "bullshit."

With the past largely rewritten to assure Americans that the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation" had worked, the perpetrators of torture were home free and the process of impunity and immunity established for future use.

Rendition Under Obama

Apart from these Republican pressures, President Obama’s own aggressive views on national security have contributed to an undeniable continuity with many of his predecessor’s most controversial policies. Not only has he preserved the controversial military commissions at Guantanamo and fought the courts to block civil suits against torture perpetrators, he has, above all, authorized continuing CIA rendition flights.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama went beyond any other candidate in offering unqualified opposition to both direct and indirect U.S. involvement in torture. “We have to be clear and unequivocal. We do not torture, period,” he said, adding, “That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions."

Only days after his January 2009 inauguration, Obama issued a dramatic executive order ending the CIA’s coercive techniques, but it turned out to include a large loophole that preserved the agency’s role in extraordinary renditions. Amid his order’s ringing rhetoric about compliance with the Geneva conventions and assuring "humane treatment of individuals in United States custody," the president issued a clear and unequivocal order that "the CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future." But when the CIA’s counsel objected that this blanket prohibition would also "take us out of the rendition business," Obama added a footnote with a small but significant qualification: "The terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ in… this order do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis." Through the slippery legalese of this definition, Obama thus allowed the CIA continue its rendition flights of terror suspects to allied nations for possible torture.

Moreover, in February 2009, Obama’s incoming CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the agency would indeed continue the practice "in renditions where we returned an individual to the jurisdiction of another country, and they exercised their rights… to prosecute him under their laws. I think," he added, ignoring the U.N. anti-torture convention’s strict conditions for this practice, "that is an appropriate use of rendition."

As the CIA expanded covert operations inside Somalia under Obama, its renditions of terror suspects from neighboring East African nations continued just as they had under Bush. In July 2009, for example, Kenyan police snatched an al-Qaeda suspect, Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, from a Nairobi slum and delivered him to that city’s airport for a CIA flight to Mogadishu. There he joined dozens of prisoners grabbed off the streets of Kenya inside "The Hole" – a filthy underground prison buried in the windowless basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency. While Somali guards (paid for with U.S. funds) ran the prison, CIA operatives, reported the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, have open access for extended interrogation.

Obama also allowed the continuation of a policy adopted after the Abu Ghraib scandal: outsourcing incarceration to local allies in Afghanistan and Iraq while ignoring human rights abuses there. Although the U.S. military received 1,365 reports about the torture of detainees by Iraqi forces between May 2004 and December 2009, a period that included Obama’s first full year in office, American officers refused to take action, even though the abuses reported were often extreme.

Simultaneously, Washington’s Afghan allies increasingly turned to torture after the Abu Ghraib scandal prompted U.S. officials to transfer most interrogation to local authorities. After interviewing 324 detainees held by Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) in 2011, the U.N. found that "torture is practiced systematically in a number of NDS detention facilities throughout Afghanistan." At the Directorate’s prison in Kandahar one interrogator told a detainee before starting to torture him, "You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban; even stones confess here."

Although such reports prompted both British and Canadian forces to curtail prisoner transfers, the U.S. military continues to turn over detainees to Afghan authorities – a policy that, commented the New York Times, "raises serious questions about potential complicity of American officials."

How to Unclog the System of Justice One Drone at a Time

After a decade of intense public debate over torture, in the last two years the United States has arrived at a questionable default political compromise: impunity at home, rendition abroad.

This resolution does not bode well for future U.S. leadership of an international community determined to end the scourge of torture. Italy’s prosecution of two-dozen CIA agents for rendition in 2009, Poland’s recent indictment of its former security chief for facilitating a CIA black site, and Britain’s ongoing criminal investigation of intelligence officials who collaborated with alleged torture at Guantanamo are harbingers of continuing pressures on the U.S. to comply with international standards for human rights.

Meanwhile, unchecked by any domestic or international sanction, Washington has slid down torture’s slippery slope to find, just as the French did in Algeria during the 1950s, that at its bottom lies the moral abyss of extrajudicial execution. The systematic French torture of thousands during the Battle of Algiers in 1957 also generated over 3,000 "summary executions" to insure, as one French general put it, that "the machine of justice" not be "clogged with cases."

In an eerie parallel, Washington has reacted to the torture scandals of the Bush era by generally forgoing arrests and opting for no-fuss aerial assassinations. From 2005 to 2012, U.S. drone killings inside Pakistan rose from zero to a total of 2,400 (and still going up) – a figure disturbingly close to those 3,000 French assassinations in Algeria. In addition, it has now been revealed that the president himself regularly orders specific assassinations by drone in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia off a secret "kill list." Simultaneously, his administration has taken just one terror suspect into U.S. custody and has not added any new prisoners to Guantanamo, thereby avoiding any more clogging of the machinery of American justice.

Absent any searching inquiry or binding reforms, assassination is now the everyday American way of war while extraordinary renditions remain a tool of state. Make no mistake: some future torture scandal is sure to arise from another iconic dungeon in the dismal, ever-lengthening historical procession leading from the “tiger cages” of South Vietnam to “the salt pit” in Afghanistan and “The Hole” in Somalia. Next time, the world might not be so forgiving. Next time, with those images from Abu Ghraib prison etched in human memory, the damage to America’s moral authority as world leader could prove even more deep and lasting.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse). Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, and investigative journalist. The associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a senior editor at Alternet.org, his latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books).  This article marks another of Turse's joint Alternet/TomDispatch investigative reports on U.S. national security policy and the American empire. Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, which provided documentation for the Oscar-winning documentary feature film Taxi to the Darkside. His recent book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (University of Wisconsin, 2012) explores the American experience of torture during the past decade.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

Mission Failure: Afghanistan A Message Written in Blood That No One Wants to Hear

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21?  It would dominate the news.  We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here.

Well, the equivalent has happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the superhero movies).  It even has a name: green-on-blue violence. In 2012 – and twice last week – Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security guards, largely in units being trained or mentored by the U.S. or its NATO allies, have turned their guns on those mentors, the people who are funding, supporting, and teaching them, and pulled the trigger. 

It’s already happened at least 21 times in this half-year, resulting in 30 American and European deaths, a 50% jump from 2011, when similar acts occurred at least 21 times with 35 coalition deaths. (The "at least" is there because, in May, the Associated Press reported that, while U.S. and NATO spokespeople were releasing the news of deaths from such acts, green-on-blue incidents that resulted in no fatalities, even if there were wounded, were sometimes not reported at all.)

Take July. There have already been at least four such attacks.  The first, on July 1st, reportedly involved a member of the Afghan National Civil Order Police, a specially trained outfit, shooting down three British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand Province, deep in the Taliban heartland of the country. The shooter was captured. Two days later, a man in "an Afghan army uniform" turned his machine gun on American troops just outside a NATO base in Wardak Province, east of the Afghan capital Kabul, wounding five before fleeing.  (In initial reports, the shooter in all such incidents is invariably described as a man "in an Army/police uniform" as if he might be a Taliban infiltrator, and he almost invariably turns out to be an actual Afghan policeman or soldier.)

Then, on July 22nd, a security guard gunned down three police trainers – two former U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and a former United Kingdom Revenue and Customs Officer (while another retired Border Protection agent and an Afghan interpreter were wounded). This happened at a police training facility near Herat in Afghanistan’s generally peaceful northwest near the Iranian border.  The next day, a soldier on a military base in Faryab Province in the north of the country turned his gun on a group of American soldiers also evidently working as police trainers, wounding two of them before being killed by return fire.

Note that these July attacks were geographically diverse: one in the Taliban south, one east of the capital in an area that has seen a rise in Taliban attacks, and two in areas that aren’t normally considered insurgent hotbeds.  Similar attacks have been going for years, a number of them far more high profile, including the deaths of an American lieutenant colonel and major, each shot in the back of the head inside the heavily guarded Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul; the killing of four French soldiers (and the wounding of 16) by an Afghan non-commissioned officer after an argument; the first killing of an American special forces operative by a U.S.-trained Afghan commando during a joint night raid; an elaborate attack organized by two Afghan soldiers and a civilian teacher at a joint outpost that killed two Americans, wounded two more, and disabled an armored vehicle; and the 2011 shooting of nine trainers (eight American officers and a contractor) in a restricted section of Kabul International Airport by an Afghan air force pilot.

In 2007-2008, there were only four green-on-blue attacks, resulting in four deaths.  When they started multiplying in 2010, the initial impulse of coalition spokespeople was to blame them on Taliban infiltrators (and the Taliban did take credit for most of them).  Now, U.S. or NATO spokespeople tend to dismiss such violence as individual pique or the result of some personal grievance against coalition forces rather than Taliban affiliation.  While reaffirming the coalition mission of training a vast security force for the country, they prefer to present each case as if it were a local oddity with little relation to any of the others – “an isolated incident [that] has its own underlying circumstances and motives.”  (Privately, the U.S. military is undoubtedly far more worried.)

In fact, there is a striking pattern at work that should be front-page news here.  Green-on-blue attacks have been countrywide, in areas of militant insurgency and not; they continue to escalate, and (as far as we can tell) are almost always committed by actual members of the Afghan military or police who have experienced the American project in their country in a particularly up-close and personal way.

In addition, these attacks are, again as far as anyone can tell, in no way coordinated.  They are individual or small group acts, in some cases clearly after significant thought and calculation, in others just as clearly impulsive.  Nonetheless, they do seem to represent a kind of collective vote, not by ballot obviously, nor – as in Lenin’s phrase about Russia’s deserting peasant soldiers in World War I – with their feet, but with guns. 

The number of these events is, after all, startling, given that an Afghan who turns his weapon on well-armed American or European allies is likely to die.  A small number of shooters have escaped and a few have been captured alive (including one recently sentenced to death in an Afghan court), but most are shot down.  In a situation where foreign advisors and troops are now distinctly on guard and on edge – and in some cases are shadowed by armed compatriots ("guardian angels") whose job it is to protect them from such events – these are essentially suicidal acts.

So it’s reasonable to assume that, for every Afghan who acts on such a violent impulse, there must be a far larger pool of fellow members of the security forces the coalition is building who have similar feelings, but don’t act on them (or simply vote with their feet, like the 24,590 soldiers who deserted in the first six months of 2011 alone).  Unlike James Holmes’s rampage in Aurora, such acts, extreme as they may be, are not in the usual sense mad ones.  And scattered and disparate as they may be, they have a distinctly unitary feel to them.  They seem, that is, like a single repetitive act being committed, as if by plan and program, across the length and breadth of the country – or perhaps a primal Afghan scream of rejection of the American and NATO presence from an armed people who have known little but fighting, bloodshed, and destruction for more than three decades.

If the significance of green-on-blue violence hasn’t quite sunk in yet here, consider this: such acts in such numbers are historically unprecedented.  No example comes to mind of a colonial power, neocolonial power, or modern superpower fighting a war with "native" allies whose forces repeatedly find the weapons they have supplied turned on them.  There is nothing in our historical record faintly comparable – not in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Indian wars, the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the last century, Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, or Iraq in this century.  (In Vietnam, the only somewhat analogous set of events involved U.S. soldiers, not their South Vietnamese counterparts, repeatedly turning their weapons on their own officers in acts that, like "green-on-blue" violence, got a label all their own: "fragging.") 

Perhaps the sole historical example that comes close might be the Indian Rebellion of 1857.  That, however, was a full-scale revolt, not a series of unconnected, ever escalating individual acts. 

Whatever the singular bitterness or complaint behind any specific attack, a cumulative message clearly lurks in them that the U.S. military and Washington would undoubtedly prefer not to hear, and that reporters, even when they are toting up the numbers, prefer not to consider too deeply.  To do so would be to acknowledge the full-scale failure of the ongoing American mission in Afghanistan.  After all, what could be more devastating 12 years after the invasion of that country than having such attacks come not from the enemies the U.S. is officially fighting, but from the Afghans closest to us, the ones we have been training at a cost of nearly $50 billion to take over the country as U.S. combat troops drawdown?

What we’re seeing in the most violent form imaginable is a sweeping message from our Afghan allies, the very security forces Washington plans to continue bolstering up long after the 2014 drawdown date for U.S. "combat forces" passes.  To the extent that bullets can be translated into words, that message, uncompromising and bloody-minded, would be something like: your mission’s failed, get out or die. 

If the Aurora shootings got all the attention here last week, far more Americans are dying at the hands of Afghan allies than died in James Holmes’s hail of gunfire.  And yet the message from the more deadly of those rampages is barely in the news and few here are paying attention.

In reality, the American mission in Afghanistan failed years ago.  It’s as if we refused to notice, but the Afghans we were training did.  Now, they are sending a message that couldn’t be blunter or grimmer from that endlessly war-torn land.  Not to listen is, in fact, to condemn more Americans to death-by-ally.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

That Makes No Sense! Your Security’s a Joke (and You’re the Butt of It)

When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours.  In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line – which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable force – "that makes me mad!"  It was the book’s title and a repetitively cathartic moment in our reading lives.  And it came to mind recently as, in my daily reading, I stumbled across repetitively mind-boggling numbers from the everyday life of our National Security Complex.

For our present national security moment, however, I might amend the book’s punch line slightly to: That makes no sense!

Now, think of something you learned about the Complex that fried your brain, try the line yourself… and we’ll get started.

Are you, for instance, worried about the safety of America’s "secrets"?  Then you should breathe a sigh of relief and consider this headline from a recent article on the inside pages of my hometown paper: "Cost to Protect U.S. Secrets Doubles to Over $11 Billion." 

A government outfit few of us knew existed, the Information Security Oversight Office or ISOO, just released its "Report on Cost Estimates for Security Classification Activities for Fiscal Year 2011" (no price tag given, however, on producing the report or maintaining ISOO).  Unclassified portions, written in classic bureaucratese, offer this precise figure for protecting our secrets, vetting our secrets’ protectors (no leakers please), and ensuring the safety of the whole shebang: $11.37 billion in 2011.

That’s up (and get used to the word "up") by 12% from 2010, and double the 2002 figure of $5.8 billion. For those willing to step back into what once seemed like a highly classified past but was clearly an age of innocence, it’s more than quadruple the 1995 figure of $2.7 billion.

And let me emphasize that we’re only talking about the unclassified part of what it costs for secrets protection in the National Security Complex.  The bills from six agencies, monsters in the intelligence world – the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Office of of the Director of National Intelligence – are classified.  The New York Times estimates that the real cost lies in the range of $13 billion, but who knows?

To put things in perspective, the transmission letter from Director John P. Fitzpatrick that came with the report makes it utterly clear why your taxpayer dollars, all $13 billion of them, are being spent this way: "Sustaining and increasing investment in classification and security measures is both necessary to maintaining the classification system and fundamental to the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration."  It’s all to ensure transparency.  George Orwell take that!  Pow!

Now let’s try the line again, this time with more gusto: That makes no sense!

On the other hand, maybe it helps to think of this as the Complex’s version of inflation.  Security protection, it turns out, only goes in one direction.  And no wonder, since every year there’s so much more precious material written by people in an expanding Complex to protect from the prying eyes of spies, terrorists, and, well, you.

The official figure for documents classified by the U.S. government last year is – hold your hats on this one – 92,064,862.  And as WikiLeaks managed to release hundreds of thousands of them online a couple of years ago, that’s meant a bonanza of even more money for yet more rigorous protection.

You have to feel at least some dollop of pity for protection bureaucrats like Fitzgerald.  While back in 1995 the U.S. government classified a mere 5,685,462 documents – in those days, we were practically a secret-less nation – today, of those 92 million sequestered documents, 26,058,678 were given a "top secret" classification.  There are today almost five times as many "top secret" documents as total classified documents back then.

Here’s another kind of inflation (disguised as deflation): in 1996, the government declassified 196 million pages of documents.  In 2011, that figure was 26.7 million.  In other words, these days what becomes secret remains ever more inflatedly secret.  That’s what qualifies as “transparency, participation, and collaboration” inside the Complex and in an administration that came into office proclaiming "sunshine" policies.  (All of the above info thanks to another of those ISOO reports.)  And keep in mind that the National Security Complex is proud of such figures!

So, today, the "people’s" government (your government) produces 92 million documents that no one except the nearly one million people with some kind of security clearance, including hundreds of thousands of private contractors, have access to.  Don’t think of this as "overclassification," which is a problem.  Think of it as a way of life, and one that has ever less to do with you.

Now, honestly, don’t you feel that urge welling up?  Go ahead.  Don’t hold back: That makes no sense!

How about another form of security-protection inflation: polygraph tests within the Complex.  A recent McClatchy investigation of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which oversees U.S. spy satellites, found that lie-detector tests of employees and others had "spiked" in the last decade and had also grown far more intrusive, "pushing ethical and possibly legal limits."  In a program designed to catch spies and terrorists, the NRO’s polygraphers were, in fact, being given cash bonuses for "personal confessions" of "intimate details of the private lives of thousands of job applicants and employees… including drug use… suicide attempts, depression, and sexual deviancy."  The agency, which has 3,000 employees, conducted 8,000 polygraph tests last year.

McClatchy adds: "In 2002, the National Academies, the nonprofit institute that includes the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the federal government shouldn’t use polygraph screening because it was too unreliable.  Yet since then, in the Defense Department alone, the number of national-security polygraph tests has increased fivefold, to almost 46,000 annually."

Now, think about those 46,000 lie-detector tests and can’t you just sense it creeping up on you?  Go ahead.  Don’t be shy!  That makes no sense!

Or talking about security inflation, what about the "explosion of cell phone surveillance" recently reported by the New York Times – a staggering 1.3 million demands in 2011 "for subscriber information… from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations"?

From the Complex to local police departments, such requests are increasing by 12%-16% annually.  One of the companies getting the requests, AT&T, says that the numbers have tripled since 2007.  And lest you think that 1.3 million is a mind-blowingly definitive figure, the Times adds that it’s only partial, and that the real one is "much higher."  In addition, some of those 1.3 million demands, sometimes not accompanied by court orders, are for multiple (or even masses of) customers, and so could be several times higher in terms of individuals surveilled.  In other words, while those in the National Security Complex – and following their example, state and local law enforcement – are working hard to make themselves ever more opaque to us, we are meant to be ever more "transparent" to them.

These are only examples of a larger trend.  Everywhere you see evidence of such numbers inflation in the Complex.  And there’s another trend involved as well.  Let’s call it by its name: paranoia.  In the years since the 9/11 attacks, the Complex has made itself, if nothing else, utterly secure, and paranoia has been its closest companion.  Thanks to its embrace of a paranoid worldview, it’s no longer the sort of place that experiences job cuts, nor is lack of infrastructure investment an issue, nor budget slashing a reality, nor prosecution for illegal acts a possibility.

A superstructure of "security" has been endlessly expanded based largely on the fear that terrorists will do you harm.  As it happens, you’re no less in danger from avalanches (34 dead in the U.S. since November) or tunneling at the beach (12 dead between 1990 and 2006), not to speak of real perils like job loss, foreclosure, having your college debts follow you to the grave, and so many other things.  But it matters little.  The promise of safety from terror has worked.  It’s been a money-maker, a stimulus-program creator, a job generator – for the Complex.

Back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote a Harper’s Magazine essay entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."  Then, however, paranoia as he described it, while distinctly all-American, remained largely a phenomenon of American politics – and often of the political fringe.  Now, it turns out to be a guiding principle in the way we are governed.

Yes, we’re in a world filled with dangers.  (Paranoia invariably has some basis, however twisted, in reality.)  And significant among them is undoubtedly the danger the national security state represents to our lives, which are increasingly designed to be open books to its functionaries.  Whether you like it or not, want it or not, care or not, you are ever more likely to be on file somewhere; you are ever more liable to be polygraphed until you "confess"; your cell phone, email, and texts are no longer your property; and one of the 30,000 employees of the Complex assigned to monitor American phone conversations and other communications may be checking you out.  So it goes in twenty-first-century America.

Maybe if you haven’t said it yet, you’re finally feeling the urge.  Go on then, give it a try.

That makes no sense!

There’s just one catch.  The direction your government has taken – call it "transparency" or anything else you want – may boggle the mind.  It may seem as idiotically wrong-headed as having 17 significant agencies and outfits in a single government on a budget of $80 billion-plus a year call the product of their work "intelligence." It may not make sense to you, but it does make sense to the National Security Complex.  For its "community," the coupling of security with redundancy – with too much, too many, and always more – means you’re speaking the language of the gods, you’re hearing the music of the angels.

So much of what the Complex does may seem like overkill and its operations may often look laughable and inane.  Unfortunately, the joke’s on you.  In our country, the bureaucrats of the Complex increasingly have the power to make just about any absurdity they want the way of our world not just in practice, but often in court, too.  And if you really think that makes no sense, then maybe you better put some thought into what’s to be done about it.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

The Military Solution The Lessons Washington Can’t Draw From the Failure of the Military Option

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began.  Certainly, a smaller percentage of us – less than 1% – serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans. 

And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate.  The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might. 

In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of "privatization" and now goes to war with the Pentagon.  With its $80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded.  There are so many competing agencies and outfits, surrounded by a universe of private intelligence contractors, all enswathed in a penumbra of secrecy, and they have grown so large, mainly under the Pentagon’s aegis, that you could say intelligence is now a ruling way of life in Washington – and it, too, is being thoroughly militarized.  Even the once-civilian CIA has undergone a process of para-militarization and now runs its own "covert" drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere.  Its director, a widely hailed retired four-star general, was previously the U.S. war commander in Iraq and then Afghanistan, just as the National Intelligence Director who oversees the whole intelligence labyrinth is a retired Air Force lieutenant general.   

In a sense, even the military has been "militarized." In these last years, a secret army of special operations forces, 60,000 or more strong and still expanding, has grown like an incubus inside the regular armed forces. As the CIA’s drones have become the president’s private air force, so the special ops troops are his private army, and are now given free rein to go about the business of war in their own cocoon of secrecy in areas far removed from what are normally considered America’s war zones.

Diplomacy, too, has been militarized.  Diplomats work ever more closely with the military, while the State Department is transforming itself into an unofficial arm of the Pentagon – as the secretary of state is happy to admit – as well as of the weapons industry. 

And keep in mind that we now have two Pentagons, thanks to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is focused, among other things, on militarizing our southern border.  Meanwhile, with the help of the DHS, local police forces nationwide have, over the last decade, been significantly up-armored and have, in the name of fighting terrorism, gained a distinctly military patina.  They have ever more access to elaborate weaponry and gadgets, including billions of dollars of surplus military equipment of every sort, often being funneled to once peaceable small town police departments.

The Military Solution in the Greater Middle East  

Militarization in this country is hardly a new phenomenon.  It can be traced back decades, but the process hit warp speed in the post-9/11 years, even if the U.S. still lacks the classic look of a militarized society.  Almost unnoticed has been an accompanying transformation of the mindset of Washington – what might be called the militarization of solutions. 

If the institutions of American life and governance are increasingly militarized, then it shouldn’t be surprising that the problems facing the country are ever more often framed in militarized terms and that the only solutions considered are similarly militarized.  This paucity of imagination, this constraining of what might be possible, seems especially evident in the Greater Middle East. 

In fact, Washington’s record there, seldom if ever collected in one place, should be eye-opening.  Start with a dose of irony: before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was a commonplace among neoconservatives to label the region extending across the oil heartlands of the planet, from North Africa to the Chinese border in Central Asia, "the arc of instability."  After a decade in which Washington has applied its military might and thoroughly militarized solutions to the region, that decade-old world now looks remarkably "stable."  

Here, in shorthand, is a little regional scorecard of what American militarization has meant in the Greater Middle East, 2001-2012:

Pakistan:  The U.S. has faced a multitude of complex problems in this nuclear nation beset with insurgent movements, its tribal areas providing sanctuary to both Afghan and Pakistani rebels and jihadis, and its intelligence service entangled in a complicated relationship with the Taliban leadership as well as other rebel groups fighting in Afghanistan.  Washington’s response has been – as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently labeled it – war.  In 2004, the Bush administration launched a drone assassination campaign in the country’s tribal borderlands largely focused on al-Qaeda leaders (combined with a few cross-border special forces raids).  Those rare robotic air strikes have since expanded into something like a full-scale covert drone war that is killing civilians, is intensely unpopular throughout Pakistan, and by now is clearly meant to punish the Pakistani leadership for its transgressions as well. 

Frustrated by what they consider Pakistani intransigence, elements in the U.S. military and intelligence community are reportedly pressing to add a new set of cross-border joint special operations/Afghan commando raids to the present incendiary mix.  American air strikes from Afghanistan that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November, with no apologies offered for seven months, brought to a boil a crisis in relations between Washington and Islamabad, with the Pakistani government closing off the country to American war supplies headed for Afghanistan. (That added a couple of billion dollars to the Pentagon’s expenses there before the crisis was ended with a grudging apology this week).  The whole process has clearly contributed to the destabilization of nuclear Pakistan.

Afghanistan: Following a November 2001 invasion (light on invading U.S. troops), the U.S. opted for a full-scale occupation and reconstruction of the country.  In the process, it managed to spur the reconstruction and reconstitution of the previously deeply unpopular and defeated Taliban movement.  An insurgent war followed.  Despite a massive surge of U.S. forces, CIA agents, special operations troops, and private contractors into the country, the calling in of air power in a major way, and the expansion of a program of "night raids" by special ops types and the CIA, success has not followed.  By the end of 2014, the U.S. is scheduled to withdraw its main combat forces from what is likely to be a thoroughly destabilized country.

Iran: In a program long aimed at regime change (but officially focused on the country’s nuclear program), the U.S. has clamped energy sanctions – often seen as an act of war – on Iran, supported a special operations campaign of unknown proportions (including cross-border actions), run a massive CIA drone surveillance program in the country’s skies, and (with the Israelis) loosed at least two major malware "worms" against the computer systems and centrifuges of its nuclear facilities, which even the Pentagon defines as acts of war.  It has also backed a massive build-up of U.S. naval and air power in the Persian Gulf and of military bases in countries on Iran’s peripheries, along with "comprehensive multi-option war-planning" for a possible 2013 strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities.  (Though little is known about it, an assassination campaign against Iranian nuclear scientists has usually been blamed on the Israelis.  Now that the joint U.S.-Israeli authorship of acts of cyberwar against Iran has been confirmed, however, it is at least reasonable to wonder whether the U.S. might also have had a hand in these killings.)  All of this has embroiled the region and brought it to the edge of yet more war, while in no obvious way shaking the Iranian regime.

Iraq: The U.S. invaded in March 2003, occupying the country.  It fought (and essentially lost) an eight-year-long counterinsurgency war, withdrawing its last troops at the end of 2011, but leaving behind in Baghdad the world’s largest, most militarized embassy.  The country, now an ally and trading partner of Iran, remains remarkably unreconstructed and significantly destabilized, with regular bombing campaigns in its cities.

Kuwait: Just across the border from Iraq, the U.S. has continued a build-up of forces.  In the future, according to a U.S. Senate report, there could be up to 13,000 U.S. personnel permanently stationed in the country. 

Yemen: Washington, long a supporter of the country’s strong-man ruler, now backs the successor regime.  (In Yemen, as elsewhere, Washington has been deeply uncomfortable with Arab-Spring-style democracy movements among its allies.)  For years, it has had an air campaign underway in the southern part of the country aimed at insurgents linked to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).  More recently, it has put at least small numbers of special operations troops on the ground there as advisers and trainers and has escalated a combined CIA drone and Air Force manned-plane air campaign in southern Yemen.  There have been at least 23 air strikes already this year, evidently causing significant civilian casualties, reportedly radicalizing southerners, increasing support for AQAP, and helping further destabilize this impoverished and desperate land.

Bahrain: Home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, tiny Bahrain, facing a democratic uprising of its repressed Shiite majority, called in the Saudi military on a mission of suppression.  The U.S. has offered military aid and support to the ruling Sunni monarchy.

Syria:  In radically destabilized Syria, where a democracy uprising has morphed into a civil war with sectarian overtones that threatens to further destabilize the region, including Lebanon and Iraq, the CIA has now been dispatched to the Turkish border.  Its job: to direct weapons to rebels of Washington’s choice (assuming that the CIA, with its dubious record, can sort the democrats from the jihadis).  The weapons themselves are arriving, according to the New York Times, via a "network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar."  It’s a project that has "this can’t end well" written all over it.

Somalia: Long a failed state, Somalia has suffered, among other things, through a U.S.-fostered Ethiopian invasion back in 2006 (and another more recently), drone attacks, CIA and special forces operations, a complicated U.S. program to subsidize a force of African (especially Ugandan) troops in the capital and support for a Kenyan invasion in the south – each step in the process seemingly leading to further fragmentation, further radicalization, and greater extremism. 

Egypt: Ever since Tahrir Square, Washington has been focused on its close ties with the Egyptian military high command (key figures from which visit Washington every year) and on the billions of dollars in military aid it continues to provide to that military, despite the way it has usurped democratic rule. 

Libya: The Obama administration called in the U.S. Air Force (along with air power from NATO allies) to support an inchoate uprising and destroy the regime of long-time strong-man Muammar Gaddafi.  In this they were successful.  The long-term results still remain unknown.  (See, for instance, the Islamist revolt in destabilized neighboring Mali.) 

How to Set the Planet on Fire and Learn Nothing

This remains a partial list, lacking, to give but one example, the web of drone bases being set up from the Seychelles Islands and Ethiopia to the Arabian Peninsula – clearly meant for expanded drone wars across the region.  Nonetheless, it is a remarkable example of the general ineffectiveness of applying military or militarized solutions to the problems of a region far from your own shores.  From Pakistan and Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia, the evidence is already in: such "solutions" solve little or nothing, and in a remarkable number of cases seem only to increase the instability of a country and a region, as well as the misery of masses of people. 

And yet the general lack of success from 2002 on and a deepening frustration in Washington have just led to a stronger conviction that some recalibrated version of a military solution (greater surges, lesser surges, no invasions but special forces and drones, smaller "footprint," larger naval presence, etc.) is the only reasonable way to go. 

In fact, military solutions of every sort have such a deep-seated grip on Washington that the focus there might be termed obsessive.  This has been particularly obvious when it comes to the CIA’s drone wars.  Back in the Vietnam War years, President Lyndon Johnson was said to have driven his generals crazy by "micromanaging" the conflict, especially in weekly lunch meetings in which he insisted on picking specific targets for the air campaign against North Vietnam. 

These days, however, Johnson almost looks like a laissez-faire war president.  After all, thanks to the New York Times, we know that the White House has a "nominating" process to compile a "kill list" of terror suspects, and that the president himself decides which drone air attacks should then be launched, not target area by target area, but individual by individual.  He is choosing specific individuals to kill in the Pakistani, Yemeni, and Somali backlands. 

It should be considered a sign of the times that, whatever shock this news may have caused in Washington (mainly because of possible administration leaks about the nature of the "covert" drone program), few have even mentioned presidential micromanaging, nor, it seems, are any generals up in arms.  Some may have found the "nomination" process shocking, but rare are those who seem to think it strange that a president of the United States should be involved in choosing individuals (including U.S. citizens) for assassination-by-drone in distant lands.  

The truth is that such "solutions," first tested in the Greater Middle East, are now being applied (even if, as yet, in far more modest ways) from Africa to Central America.  In Africa, I suspect you could track the growing destabilization of parts of that continent to the setting up of a U.S. command for the region (Africom) in 2007 and in subsequent years the slow movement of drones, special forces operatives, private contractors, and others into a region that already has problems enough.

Here’s a 2012 American reality then: as a great power, the U.S. has an increasingly limited toolkit, into which it is reaching far more often for ever more similar tools.  The idea that the globe is a chessboard, that Washington is in control of the game, and that each militarized move it makes will have a reasonably predictable result couldn’t be more dangerous.  The evidence of the last decade is clear enough: there is little less predictable or more likely to go awry than the application of military force and militarized solutions, which are cumulatively incendiary in unexpected ways, and in the end threaten to set whole regions on fire.  None of this, however, seems to register in Washington.

The United States is commonly said to be a great power in decline, but the militarization of American policy – and thinking – at home and abroad is not.  It has Washington, now a capital of perpetual war, in its grip. 

This process began, post-9/11, with the soaring romanticism of the Bush administration about, as the president put it, the power of the "greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known" (a.k.a. the U.S. military) to change the world.  It was a fundamental conviction of Bush and his top officials that the most powerful military on the planet could bring any state in the Greater Middle East to heel in a "cakewalk."  

Today, in the wake of two failed wars on the Eurasian continent, a de-romanticized version of that conviction has become the deeply embedded, increasingly humdrum way of life of a militarized Washington.  It will remain so. 

If Barack Obama, the man who got Bin Laden, is reelected, nothing of significance is likely to change in this regard.  If Mitt Romney wins, the process is likely to accelerate, possibly moving from global misfire, failure, and obsession to extreme global fantasy, with consequences – from Iran to Russia to China – difficult now to imagine. 

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There The Value of American – and Afghan – Lives

“Do you do this in the United States? There is police action every day in the United States… They don’t call in airplanes to bomb the place.” – Afghan President Hamid Karzai denouncing U.S. air strikes on homes in his country, June 12, 2012

It was almost closing time when the siege began at a small Wells Fargo Bank branch in a suburb of San Diego, and it was a nightmare. The three gunmen entered with the intent to rob, but as they herded the 18 customers and bank employees toward a back room, they were spotted by a pedestrian outside who promptly called 911. Within minutes, police cars were pulling up, the bank was surrounded, and back-up was being called in from neighboring communities. The gunmen promptly barricaded themselves inside with their hostages, including women and small children, and refused to let anyone leave.

The police called on the gunmen to surrender, but before negotiations could even begin, shots were fired from within the bank, wounding a police officer. The events that followed – now known to everyone, thanks to 24/7 news coverage – shocked the nation. Declaring the bank robbers "terrorist suspects," the police requested air support from the Pentagon and, soon after, an F-15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base dropped two GBU-38 bombs on the bank, leaving the building a pile of rubble.

All three gunmen died. Initially, a Pentagon spokesman, who took over messaging from the local police, insisted that "the incident" had ended "successfully" and that all the dead were "suspected terrorists." The Pentagon press office issued a statement on other casualties, noting only that, "while conducting a follow-on assessment, the security force discovered two women who had sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The security force provided medical assistance and transported both women to a local medical facility for treatment.” It added that it was sending an "assessment team" to the site to investigate reports that others had died as well.

Of course, as Americans quickly learned, the dead actually included five women, seven children, and a visiting lawyer from Los Angeles. The aftermath was covered in staggering detail. Relatives of the dead besieged city hall, bitterly complaining about the attack and the deaths of their loved ones. At a news conference the next morning, while scenes of rescuers digging in the rubble were still being flashed across the country, President Obama said: "Such acts are simply unacceptable. They cannot be tolerated." In response to a question, he added, "Nothing can justify any airstrike which causes harm to the lives and property of civilians."

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey immediately flew to San Diego to meet with family members of the dead and offer apologies. Heads rolled in the local police department and in the Pentagon. Congress called for hearings as well as a Justice Department investigation of possible criminality, and quickly passed a bill offering millions of dollars to the grieving relatives as "solace." San Diego began raising money for a memorial to the group already dubbed the Wells Fargo 18.

One week later, at the exact moment of the bombing, church bells rang throughout the San Diego area and Congress observed a minute of silence in honor of the dead.

The Meaning of "Precision"

It couldn’t have been more dramatic and, as you know perfectly well, it couldn’t have happened – not in the U.S. anyway. But just over a week ago, an analogous "incident" did happen in Afghanistan and it passed largely unnoticed here. A group of Taliban insurgents reportedly entered a house in a village in Logar Province, south of Kabul, where a wedding ceremony either was or would be in progress. American and Afghan forces surrounded the house, where 18 members of a single extended family had gathered for the celebration. When firing broke out (or a grenade was thrown) and both U.S. and Afghan troops were reportedly wounded, they did indeed call in a jet, which dropped a 500-pound bomb, obliterating the residence and everyone inside, including up to nine children.

This was neither an unheard of mistake, nor an aberration in America’s Afghan War. In late December 2001, according to reports, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, wiped out 110 out of 112 wedding revelers in a small Afghan village. Over the decade-plus that followed, American air power, piloted and drone, has been wiping out Afghans (Pakistanis and, until relatively recently, Iraqis) in a similar fashion – usually in or near their homes, sometimes in striking numbers, always on the assumption that there are bad guys among them.

For more than a decade, incident after incident, any one of which, in the U.S., would have shaken Americans to their core, led to "investigations" that went nowhere, punishments to no one, rare apologies, and on occasion, the offering of modest "solatium" payments to grieving survivors and relatives. For such events, of course, 24/7 coverage, like future memorials, was out of the question.

Cumulatively, they indicate one thing: that, for Americans, the value of an Afghan life (or more often Afghan lives) obliterated in the backlands of the planet, thousands of miles from home, is next to nil and of no meaning whatsoever. Such deaths are just so much unavoidable "collateral damage" from the American way of war – from the post-9/11 approach we have agreed is crucial to make ourselves "safe" from terrorists.

By now, Afghans (and Pakistanis in tribal areas across the border) surely know the rules of the road of the American war: there is no sanctity in public or private rites. While funerals have been hit repeatedly and at least one baby-naming ceremony was taken out as well, weddings have been the rites of choice for obliteration for reasons the U.S. Air Force has, as far as we know, never taken a moment to consider, no less explain. This website counted five weddings blown away (one in Iraq and four in Afghanistan) by mid-2008, and another from that year not reported until 2009. The latest incident is at least the seventh that has managed, however modestly, to make the news here, but there is no way of knowing what other damage to wedding parties in rural Afghanistan has gone uncounted.

Imagine the uproar in this country if a jet took out a wedding party. Just consider the attention given every time some mad gunman shoots up a post office, a college campus, or simply an off-campus party, if you want to get an idea. You might think then that, given the U.S. record of wedding carnage in Afghanistan, which undoubtedly represents some kind of modern wedding-crasher record, there might have been a front-page story, or simply a story, somewhere, anywhere, indicating the repetitive nature of such events.

And yet, if U.S. carnage in that country gets attention at all, it’s usually only to point out, in self-congratulatory fashion, that the Taliban – with their indiscriminate roadside bombs and their generally undiscriminating suicide bombers – are far worse. If an American college campus is shot up, what are the odds that the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech won’t be mentioned? And yet not a single report on the recent deaths in Logar Province has even noted that this is not the first time part of an Afghan wedding party has been taken out by the U.S. Air Force.

Over the years, such incidents, when they rose individually to the level of news, almost invariably followed the same pattern: initial denials by U.S. military or NATO spokespeople that any civilian casualties had occurred and then, if outrage in Afghanistan ratcheted up or the news reports on the incident didn’t die down, a slow back-peddling under pressure, and the launching of an "investigation" or, as in the case of the Logar bombing, a "joint investigation" with Afghan authorities, that seldom led anywhere and often was never heard from or about again. In the end, in some circumstances, apologies were offered and modest "solatium" payments made to the survivors.

And yet, over the years, amid all the praise for the "precision" of American air power, for the ability of the Air Force to bring a bomb or a missile to its target in a fashion that we like to call "surgical," it is no small thing – explain it as you will – to wipe out parts or all of seven weddings. You might almost think that our wars on the Eurasian continent had been launched as an assault on "family values." At the very least, the Afghan War has given a different meaning to the ceremonial phrase "till death do us part."

The Country Crasher

For years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has bitterly complained about similar air strikes that kill and wound civilians in or near their homes and repeatedly demanded that they be stopped. In this particular case, he cut short a trip to China and returned to Afghanistan to denounce the attack as "unacceptable." Ordinarily, this has meant remarkably little.

In this case, however, the Afghan president, who lacks much real power (hence his old nickname, "the mayor of Kabul"), seems to have the wind at his back. Perhaps because the Obama administration is on edge about its disintegrating relations with Pakistan (thanks, in part, to its unwillingness to offer an apology for cross-border U.S. air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November); perhaps because the list of recent U.S. blunders and disasters in Afghanistan has grown long and painful – the urinating on bodies of dead enemies, the killing of civilians "for sport," the burning of Korans, the slaughter of 16 innocent villagers by one American soldier, the rise of green-on-blue violence (that is, Afghan army and police attacks on their American allies); perhaps because of its need to maintain a façade of – if not success, then at least – non-failure in Afghanistan as drawdowns begin there in an election year at home; or perhaps thanks to a combination of all of the above, Karzai’s angry initial response to the Logar wedding killings did not go unnoticed in Washington.

In fact, the initial denials that any civilian deaths had occurred were quickly dropped, the head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, promptly apologized to the president, and then, in what might have been a unique act in the Afghan War record, went to Logar Province to meet with the provincial governor and apologize directly to grieving relatives. (“The faces of the people were very sad," said Mohammad Akbar Stanekzai, a parliamentarian member of a delegation Karzai appointed to investigate the incident. "They told [General Allen], ‘These incidents don’t just happen once, but two, three, four times and they keep happening.’”)

At the same time, it was announced that there would be a change in the American policy of calling in air strikes on homes and villages in support of U.S. operations. The Afghans promptly claimed that the Americans had agreed to stop calling in air power at all in their country. The Americans offered a far vaguer version of the policy change. Anonymous U.S. military officials in Kabul quickly suggested that it represented only "a subtle shift in the ground realities of the war against the Taliban." In fact, it did contain loopholes big enough to slip a B-52 through. As General Allen put it, "What we have agreed is that we would not use aviation ordnance on civilian dwellings. Now that doesn’t obviate our inherent right to self-defense. We will always… do whatever we have to do to protect the force."

It’s easy enough, however, to sense an urge in Washington to calm the waters, not to have one more thing go truly wrong anywhere. At this very moment, the president and his top officials are undoubtedly praying that the Eurozone doesn’t collapse and that the Af-Pak theater of operations doesn’t disintegrate into chaos or burst into flames in the early months of a planned drawdown of U.S. troops; that, in fact, nothing truly terrible happens – until at least November 7, 2012.

Karzai has clearly grasped the Obama administration’s present feeling of vulnerability and frustration in the region and, gambler that he is, he promptly upped the ante. While the Americans were speaking of those "subtle" changes, he branded American air strikes in Afghanistan an "illegitimate use of force" and demanded that, when it came to air attacks on Afghan homes, the planes simply be grounded, whatever the dangers to U.S. or Afghan troops.

Back in 2009, then war commander General Stanley McChrystal ordered a somewhat similar reining in of American air strikes, a position countermanded by the next commander, General David Petraeus, who called the planes back in force. Now, those air strikes will, to one degree or another, once again be a limited option. But realistically, air power remains essential to the American way of war, whatever Karzai may demand. So count on one thing: before this is all over, it will be called in again – and in Afghanistan, weddings will still be celebrated.

In the meantime, after more than a decade of our most recent Afghan War, the Obama administration and the U.S. military are clearly willing to hang out a temporary sign saying: "Washington at work. Afghans, thank you for your patience…" Just across the border in Pakistan, however, "kill lists" are in effect and the air campaign there is being ratcheted up.

In the process, one thing can be said about American firepower: it has been remarkably precise in the way it has destabilized the region. In December 2001, we first took on the role of wedding crashers. More than 10 years later, it couldn’t be clearer that we’ve been country crashers, too.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

The President and His Apostles

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.  The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they – and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self – are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against.  They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, "Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will," we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the "nomination" of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially.  Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with "three dozen of his current and former advisers."  In other words, it was essentially an administration-inspired piece – columnist Robert Scheer calls it "planted" – on a "secret" program the president and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.

The language of the piece about our warrior president was generally sympathetic, even in places soaring.  It focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who – we now know – has personally approved and overseen the growth of a remarkably robust assassination program in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan based on a "kill list." Moreover, he’s regularly done so target by target, name by name.  (The Times did not mention a recent U.S. drone strike in the Philippines that killed 15.)  According to Becker and Shane, President Obama has also been involved in the use of a fraudulent method of counting drone kills, one that unrealistically deemphasizes civilian deaths.

Historically speaking, this is all passing strange.  The Times calls Obama’s role in the drone killing machine "without precedent in presidential history."  And that’s accurate.

It’s not, however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in any way involved in assassination programs.  The state as assassin is hardly unknown in our history.  How could President John F. Kennedy, for example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat (and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully murdered.)  Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the CIA carried out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix.  It proved to be a staggeringly profligate program for killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply swept up in the process.

In previous eras, however, presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts.  We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.

Religious Cult or Mafia Hit Squad?

Here’s a believe-it-or-not footnote to our American age.  Who now remembers that, in the early years of his presidency, George W. Bush kept what the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward called “his own personal scorecard for the war” on terror?  It took the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world’s most dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by Bush once captured or killed. That scorecard was, Woodward added, always available in a desk drawer in the Oval Office.

Such private presidential recordkeeping now seems penny-ante indeed.  The distance we’ve traveled in a decade can be measured by the Times’ description of the equivalent of that "personal scorecard" today (and no desk drawer could hold it):

"It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret ‘nominations’ process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases, and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia. The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by [counterterrorism 'tsar' John O.] Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name."

In other words, thanks to such meetings – on what insiders have labeled "terror Tuesday" – assassination has been thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president.  Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children.  He is, in other words, if not a king, at least the king of American assassinations.  On that score, his power is total and completely unchecked.  He can prescribe death for anyone "nominated," choosing any of the "baseball cards" (PowerPoint bios) on that kill list and then order the drones to take them (or others in the neighborhood) out.

He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn’t enough and that the CIA’s drones can instead strike at suspicious "patterns of behavior" on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan. He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism that can stop him.  An American global killing machine (quite literally so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a single, unaccountable individual.  This is the nightmare the founding fathers tried to protect us from.

In the process, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the president has shredded the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing Americans that they will not "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."  The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced a secret memo claiming that, while the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee does apply to the drone assassination of an American citizen in a land with which we are not at war, "it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch."  (That, writes Greenwald, is "the most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime.")  In other words, the former Constitutional law professor has been freed from the law of the land in cases in which he "nominates," as he has, U.S. citizens for robotic death.

There is, however, another aspect to the institutionalizing of those "kill lists" and assassination as presidential prerogatives that has gone unmentioned.  If the Times article – which largely reflects how the Obama administration cares to see itself and its actions – is to be believed, the drone program is also in the process of being sanctified and sacralized.

You get a sense of this from the language of the piece itself.  ("A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan…")  The president is presented as a particularly moral man, who devotes himself to the “just war” writings of religious figures like Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and takes every death as his own moral burden.  His leading counterterrorism advisor Brennan, a man who, while still in the CIA, was knee-deep in torture controversy, is presented, quite literally, as a priest of death, not once but twice in the piece.  He is described by the Times reporters as "a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama."  They then quote the State Department’s top lawyer, Harold H. Koh, saying, "It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war."

In the Times telling, the organization of robotic killing had become the administration’s idée fixe, a kind of cult of death within the Oval Office, with those involved in it being so many religious devotees.  We may be, that is, at the edge of a new state-directed, national-security-based religion of killing grounded in the fact that we are in a "dangerous" world and the "safety" of Americans is our preeminent value.  In other words, the president, his apostles, and his campaign acolytes are all, it seems, praying at the Church of St. Drone.

Of course, thought about another way, that "terror Tuesday" scene might not be from a monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia council directly out of a Mario Puzo novel, with the president as the Godfather, designating "hits" in a rough-and-tumble world.

How far we’ve come in just two presidencies!  Assassination as a way of life has been institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.

Downhill All the Way on Blowback Planet

After 5,719 inside-the-Beltway (largely inside-the-Oval-Office) words, the Times piece finally gets to this single outside-the-Beltway sentence: "Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president."

Arguably, indeed!  For the few who made it that far, it was a brief reminder of just how narrow, how confining the experience of worshiping at St. Drone actually is.  All those endless meetings, all those presidential hours that might otherwise have been spent raising yet more money for campaign 2012, and the two countries that have taken the brunt of the drone raids are more hostile, more dangerous, and in worse shape than in 2009.  (And one of them, keep in mind, is a nuclear power.)  News articles since have only emphasized how powerfully those drones have radicalized local populations – however many "bad guys" (and children) they may also have wiped off the face of the Earth.

And though the Times doesn’t mention this, it’s not just bad news for Yemen or Pakistan.  American democracy, already on the ropes, is worse off, too.

What should astound Americans – but seldom seems to be noticed – is just how into the shadows, how thoroughly military-centric, and how unproductive has become Washington’s thinking at the altar of St. Drone and its equivalents (including special operations forces, increasingly the president’s secret military within the military). Yes, the world is always a dangerous place, even if far less so now than when, in the Cold War era, two superpowers were a heartbeat away from nuclear war.  But – though it’s increasingly heretical to say this – the perils facing Americans, including relatively modest dangers from terrorism, aren’t the worst things on our planet.

Electing an assassin-in-chief, no matter who you vote for, is worse.  Pretending that the Church of St. Drone offers any kind of reasonable or even practical solutions on this planet of ours, is worse yet.  And even worse, once such a process begins, it’s bound to be downhill all the way.  As we learned last week, again in the Times, we not only have an assassin-in-chief in the Oval Office, but a cyberwarrior, perfectly willing to release a new form of weaponry, the most sophisticated computer "worm" ever developed, against another country with which we are not at war.

This represents a breathtaking kind of rashness, especially from the leader of a country that, perhaps more than any other, is dependent on computer systems, opening the U.S. to potentially debilitating kinds of future blowback.  Once again, as with drones, the White House is setting the global rules of the road for every country (and group) able to get its hands on such weaponry and it’s hit the highway at 140 miles per hour without a cop in sight.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the rest of them knew war, and yet were not acolytes of the eighteenth century equivalents of St. Drone, nor of presidents who might be left free to choose to turn the world into a killing zone.  They knew at least as well as anyone in our national security state today that the world is always a dangerous place – and that that’s no excuse for investing war powers in a single individual.  They didn’t think that a state of permanent war, a state of permanent killing, or a president free to plunge Americans into such states was a reasonable way for their new republic to go.  To them, it was by far the more dangerous way to exist in our world. 

The founding fathers would surely have chosen republican democracy over safety.  They would never have believed that a man surrounded by advisors and lawyers, left to his own devices, could protect them from what truly mattered.  They tried to guard against it.  Now, we have a government and a presidency dedicated to it, no matter who is elected in November.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

They have a way of slipping under the radar, whether heading into Pakistan looking for Osama bin Laden, Central Africa looking for Joseph Kony, or Yemen assumedly to direct local military action against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  I’m talking, of course, about U.S. special operations forces. These days, from Somalia to the Philippines, presidential global interventions are increasingly a dime a dozen; and they are normally spearheaded by those special ops troops backed by CIA or Air Force drones. Few Americans even notice.

An ever expanding secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military, special operations types remain remarkably, determinedly anonymous.  With the exception of their commander, Admiral William McRaven, they generally won’t even reveal their last names in public, which only contributes to their growing mystique in this country.

But for a crew so dedicated to anonymity, they also turn out to be publicity hounds of the first order.  In 2011, for instance, active-duty U.S. Navy Seals (first-name only please!) became movie stars, spearheading a number one box office hit, Act of Valor. It was the film equivalent of a vanity-press production, focused as it did on their own skills in battle in… hmmm, the Philippines (to prevent a terror strike against the U.S.).  A team of SEALs even parachuted onto Sunset Boulevard for the film’s Hollywood premiere.

Then last week another special ops team, in coordination with their Norwegian and Australian counterparts, heroically rescued the mayor of Tampa Bay, held “hostage.”  They also rappelled down from helicopters and arrived in Humvees to secure the area around the Tampa Convention Center, which will service 15,000 members of the media when the Republicans hit town to nominate Mitt Romney for president. Whew! Another close publicity call!

It was a mock assault on terror watched by thousands of Tampa residents, all timed to the annual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, also in town and swarmed by 8,000 attendees, including McRaven.  Its goal: to bring together special operators from around the world and the industry that arms and accessorizes them.  (U.S. special ops forces have a $2 billion purchasing budget each year for all the gadgets the defense industry can produce.)

Oh, and if you want a measure of how hot the special ops guys are these days, how much everyone wants to horn in on their act, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke before the conference, offering, according to Danger Room’s David Axe, "a vision in which shadowy U.S. and allied Special Operations Forces, working hand in hand with America’s embassies and foreign governments, together play a key role preventing low-intensity conflicts."  And if those conflicts aren’t prevented, then the Foreign Service, Clinton assured her listeners, will be happy to lend its "language and cultural skills" to the fighting prowess of the special ops troops.  Diplomacy?  It’s so old school in such a sexy, new, "covert" war-fightin’ world.

The basic principle is simple enough: if you see a juggernaut heading your way, duck.  As TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, editor most recently of The Short American Century, makes clear, war American-style is heading back “into the shadows” and it’s going to be one roller-coaster of a scary ride.  (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses what we don’t know about special operations forces, click here or download it to your iPod here.)  ~ Tom

Unleashed: Globalizing the Global War on Terror

By Andrew J. Bacevich

As he campaigns for reelection, President Obama periodically reminds audiences of his success in terminating the deeply unpopular Iraq War.  With fingers crossed for luck, he vows to do the same with the equally unpopular war in Afghanistan.  If not exactly a peacemaker, our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president can (with some justification) at least claim credit for being a war-ender.

Yet when it comes to military policy, the Obama administration’s success in shutting down wars conducted in plain sight tells only half the story, and the lesser half at that.  More significant has been this president’s enthusiasm for instigating or expanding secret wars, those conducted out of sight and by commandos.

President Franklin Roosevelt may not have invented the airplane, but during World War II he transformed strategic bombing into one of the principal emblems of the reigning American way of war.  General Dwight D. Eisenhower had nothing to do with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.  Yet, as president, Ike’s strategy of Massive Retaliation made nukes the centerpiece of U.S. national security policy.

So, too, with Barack Obama and special operations forces.  The U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) with its constituent operating forces – Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and the like – predated his presidency by decades.  Yet it is only on Obama’s watch that these secret warriors have reached the pinnacle of the U.S. military’s prestige hierarchy.

John F. Kennedy famously gave the Green Berets their distinctive headgear.  Obama has endowed the whole special operations "community" with something less decorative but far more important: privileged status that provides special operators with maximum autonomy while insulating them from the vagaries of politics, budgetary or otherwise.  Congress may yet require the Pentagon to undertake some (very modest) belt-tightening, but one thing’s for sure: no one is going to tell USSOCOM to go on a diet.  What the special ops types want, they will get, with few questions asked – and virtually none of those few posed in public.

Since 9/11, USSOCOM’s budget has quadrupled. The special operations order of battle has expanded accordingly.  At present, there are an estimated 66,000 uniformed and civilian personnel on the rolls, a doubling in size since 2001 with further growth projected. Yet this expansion had already begun under Obama’s predecessor.  His essential contribution has been to broaden the special ops mandate.  As one observer put it, the Obama White House let Special Operations Command "off the leash."

As a consequence, USSOCOM assets today go more places and undertake more missions while enjoying greater freedom of action than ever before.  After a decade in which Iraq and Afghanistan absorbed the lion’s share of the attention, hitherto neglected swaths of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are receiving greater scrutiny. Already operating in dozens of countries around the world – as many as 120 by the end of this year – special operators engage in activities that range from reconnaissance and counterterrorism to humanitarian assistance and "direct action." The traditional motto of the Army special forces is "De Oppresso Liber" ("To Free the Oppressed").  A more apt slogan for special operations forces as a whole might be "Coming soon to a Third World country near you!"

The displacement of conventional forces by special operations forces as the preferred U.S. military instrument – the "force of choice" according to the head of USSOCOM, Admiral William McRaven – marks the completion of a decades-long cultural repositioning of the American soldier.  The G.I., once represented by the likes of cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s iconic Willie and Joe, is no more, his place taken by today’s elite warrior professional.  Mauldin’s creations were heroes, but not superheroes.  The nameless, lionized SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden are flesh-and blood Avengers.  Willie and Joe were “us.”  SEALs are anything but “us.”  They occupy a pedestal well above mere mortals.  Couch potato America stands in awe of their skill and bravery.

This cultural transformation has important political implications.  It represents the ultimate manifestation of the abyss now separating the military and society. Nominally bemoaned by some, including former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, this civilian-military gap has only grown over the course of decades and is now widely accepted as the norm.  As one consequence, the American people have forfeited owner’s rights over their army, having less control over the employment of U.S. forces than New Yorkers have over the management of the Knicks or Yankees.

As admiring spectators, we may take at face value the testimony of experts (even if such testimony is seldom disinterested) who assure us that the SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, etc. are the best of the best, and that they stand ready to deploy at a moment’s notice so that Americans can sleep soundly in their beds.  If the United States is indeed engaged, as Admiral McRaven has said, in “a generational struggle,” we will surely want these guys in our corner.

Even so, allowing war in the shadows to become the new American way of war is not without a downside.  Here are three reasons why we should think twice before turning global security over to Admiral McRaven and his associates.

Goodbye accountability.  Autonomy and accountability exist in inverse proportion to one another.  Indulge the former and kiss the latter goodbye.  In practice, the only thing the public knows about special ops activities is what the national security apparatus chooses to reveal.  Can you rely on those who speak for that apparatus in Washington to tell the truth?  No more than you can rely on JPMorgan Chase to manage your money prudently.  Granted, out there in the field, most troops will do the right thing most of the time.  On occasion, however, even members of an elite force will stray off the straight-and-narrow.  (Until just a few weeks ago, most Americans considered White House Secret Service agents part of an elite force.)  Americans have a strong inclination to trust the military.  Yet as a famous Republican once said: trust but verify.  There’s no verifying things that remain secret.  Unleashing USSOCOM is a recipe for mischief.

Hello imperial presidency.  From a president’s point of view, one of the appealing things about special forces is that he can send them wherever he wants to do whatever he directs.  There’s no need to ask permission or to explain.  Employing USSOCOM as your own private military means never having to say you’re sorry.  When President Clinton intervened in Bosnia or Kosovo, when President Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, they at least went on television to clue the rest of us in.  However perfunctory the consultations may have been, the White House at least talked things over with the leaders on Capitol Hill.  Once in a while, members of Congress even cast votes to indicate approval or disapproval of some military action.  With special ops, no such notification or consultation is necessary.  The president and his minions have a free hand.  Building on the precedents set by Obama, stupid and reckless presidents will enjoy this prerogative no less than shrewd and well-intentioned ones.

And then what…?  As U.S. special ops forces roam the world slaying evildoers, the famous question posed by David Petraeus as the invasion of Iraq began – “Tell me how this ends” – rises to the level of Talmudic conundrum.  There are certainly plenty of evildoers who wish us ill (primarily but not necessarily in the Greater Middle East).  How many will USSOCOM have to liquidate before the job is done?  Answering that question becomes all the more difficult given that some of the killing has the effect of adding new recruits to the ranks of the non-well-wishers.

In short, handing war to the special operators severs an already too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.  Remember George W. Bush’s "Global War on Terror"?  Actually, his war was never truly global.  War waged in a special-operations-first world just might become truly global – and never-ending.  In that case, Admiral McRaven’s “generational struggle” is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. His latest book is The United States of Fear. Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a TomDispatch regular.  He is editor of the new book The Short American Century, just published by Harvard University Press. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses what we don’t know about special operations forces, click here or download it to your iPod here.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing

Here's the essence of it: you can trust America's crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need to constantly look over their shoulders.

Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types. In the process, you simply couldn't be better protected.

And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state. Trust them implicitly. They will never give you a bum steer.

You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world — the 30,000 people hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the 4.2 million with security clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center that the National Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area — but there's a good reason. That's what's needed to make truly elevated, surgically precise decisions about life and death in the service of protecting American interests on this dangerous globe of ours.

And in case you wondered just how we know all this, we have it on the best authority: the people who are doing it — the only ones, given the obvious need for secrecy, capable of judging just how moral, elevated, and remarkable their own work is. They deserve our congratulations, but if we're too distracted to give it to them, they are quite capable of high-fiving themselves.

We're talking, in particular, about the use by the Obama administration (and the Bush administration before it) of a growing armada of remotely piloted planes, a.k.a. drones, grimly labeled Predators and Reapers, to fight a nameless, almost planet-wide war (formerly known as the Global War on Terror). Its purpose: to destroy al-Qaeda-in-wherever and all its wannabes and look-alikes, the Taliban, and anyone affiliated or associated with any of the above, or just about anyone else we believe might imminently endanger our "interests."

In the service of this war, in the midst of a perpetual state of war and of wartime, every act committed by these leaders is, it turns out, absolutely, totally, and completely legal. We have their say-so for that, and they have the documents to prove it, largely because the best and most elevated legal minds among them have produced that documentation in secret. (Of course, they dare not show it to the rest of us, lest lives be endangered.)

By their own account, they have, in fact, been covertly exceptional, moral, and legal for more than a decade (minus, of course, the odd black site and torture chamber) — so covertly exceptional, in fact, that they haven't quite gotten the credit they deserve. Now, they would like to make the latest version of their exceptional mission to the world known to the rest of us. It is finally in our interest, it seems, to be a good deal better informed about America's covert wars in a year in which the widely announced "covert" killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a major selling point in the president's reelection campaign.

No one should be surprised. There was always an "overt" lurking in the "covert" of what now passes for "covert war." The CIA's global drone assassination campaign has long been a bragging point in Washington, even if it couldn't officially be discussed directly before, say, Congress. The covertness of our drone wars in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere really turns out to have less to do with secrecy — just about every covert drone strike is reported, sooner or later, in the media — than assuring two administrations that they could pursue their drone wars without accountability to anyone.

A Classic of Self-Congratulation

Recently, top administration officials seem to be fanning out to offer rare peeks into what's truly on-target and exceptional about America's drone wars. In many ways, these days, American exceptionalism is about as unexceptional as apple pie. It has, for one thing, become the everyday language of the presidential campaign trail. And that shouldn't surprise us either. After all, great powers and their leaders tend to think well of themselves. The French had their "mission civilisatrice," the Chinese had the "mandate of heaven," and like all imperial powers they inevitably thought they were doing the best for themselves and others, sadly benighted, in this best of all possible worlds.

Sometimes, though, the American version of this does seem… I hate to use the word, but exceptional. If you want to get a taste of just what this means, consider as Exhibit One a recent speech by the president's counterterrorism "tsar," John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. According to his own account, he was dispatched to the center by President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to the administration's secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the drones and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone operations generally.

Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to North America, "a city upon a hill" has caught something of at least one American-style dream — a sense that this country's fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest of the world, an exception to every norm. In the last century, it became "a shining city upon a hill" and was regularly cited in presidential addresses.

Whatever that "city," that dream, was once imagined to be, it has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first century. It has become — even in our dreams — an up-armored garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state. So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first "shining drone upon a hill" speech, which also qualifies as an instant classic of self-congratulation.

Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so — if not peacefully — at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for the gods. American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are "ethical and just,” “wise,” and “surgically precise" — exactly what you'd expect from a country he refers to, quoting the president, as the preeminent "standard bearer in the conduct of war."

Those drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are based on staggeringly "rigorous standards" involving the individual identification of human targets. Even when visited on American citizens outside declared war zones, they are invariably "within the bounds of the law," as you would expect of the preeminent "nation of laws."

The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone known to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid anyone who is even the most mediocre of the mediocre. (Forget the fact that, as Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, the CIA has recently received permission from the president to launch drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed "patterns of suspicious behavior" of groups of unidentified individuals, as was already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)

Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if unbelievably rarely — and for that we couldn't be more regretful. Such deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our actions. "This too," Brennan assured his audience, "is a reflection of our values as Americans."

"I would note," he added, "that these standards, for identifying a target and avoiding… the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed what is required as a matter of international law on a typical battlefield. That's another example of the high standards to which we hold ourselves."

And that's just a taste of the tone and substance of the speech given by the president's leading counterterrorism expert, and in it he's no outlier. It catches something about an American sense of self at this moment. Yes, Americans may be ever more down on the Afghan war, but like their leaders, they are high on drones. In a February Washington Post/ABC News poll, 83% of respondents supported the administration's use of drones. Perhaps that's not surprising either, since the drones are generally presented here as the coolest of machines, as well as cheap alternatives (in money and lives) to sending more armies onto the Eurasian mainland.

Predator Nation

In these last years, this country has pioneered the development of the most advanced killing machines on the planet for which the national security state has plans decades into the future. Conceptually speaking, our leaders have also established their "right" to send these robot assassins into any airspace, no matter the local claims of national sovereignty, to take out those we define as evil or simply to protect American interests. On this, Brennan couldn't be clearer. In the process, we have turned much of the rest of the planet into what can only be considered an American free-fire zone.

We have, in short, established a remarkably expansive set of drone-war rules for the global future. Naturally, we trust ourselves with such rules, but there is a fly in the ointment, even as the droniacs see it. Others far less sagacious, kindly, lawful, and good than we are do exist on this planet and they may soon have their own fleets of drones. About 50 countries are today buying or developing such robotic aircraft, including Russia, China, and Iran, not to speak of Hezbollah in Lebanon. And who knows what terror groups are looking into suicide drones?

As the Washington Post's David Ignatius put it in a column about Brennan's speech: "What if the Chinese deployed drones to protect their workers in southern Sudan against rebels who have killed them in past attacks? What if Iran used them against Kurdish separatists they regard as terrorists? What if Russia used them over Chechnya? What position would the United States take, and wouldn't it be hypocritical if it opposed drone attacks by other nations that face u2018imminent' or u2018significant' threats?"

This is Washington's global drone conundrum as seen from inside the Beltway. These are the nightmarish scenarios even our leaders can imagine others producing with their own drones and our rules. A deeply embedded sense of American exceptionalism, a powerful belief in their own special, self-evident goodness, however, conveniently blinds them to what they are doing right now. Looking in the mirror, they are incapable of seeing a mask of death. And yet our proudest export at present, other than Hollywood superhero films, may be a stone-cold robotic killer with a name straight out of a horror movie.

Consider this as well: those "shining drones" launched on campaigns of assassination and slaughter are increasingly the "face" that we choose to present to the world. And yet it's beyond us why it might not shine for others.

In reality, it's not so hard to imagine what we increasingly look like to those others: a Predator nation. And not just to the parents and relatives of the more than 160 children the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented as having died in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. After all, war is now the only game in town. Peace? For the managers of our national security state, it's neither a word worth mentioning, nor an imaginable condition.

In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had. But mention drones and they light up. They're having a love affair with those machines. They just can't get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.

What they can't see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn't precise. It isn't glorious. It isn't judicious. It certainly isn't a shining vision. It's hell. And it's a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. His latest book is The United States of Fear.

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Data Mining You: How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth.  On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism – about you and me, that is – for up to five years.  (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.)  This, Clapper claimed, "will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively."

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington.  George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words "practically and effectively," not to speak of "mission."

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists.  Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years – or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence think it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part – and it hardly made a ripple.

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read "Tread on Me" and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.  That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.

Oh, and in those nine days abroad, a new word surfaced on my horizon, one just eerie and ugly enough for our new reality: yottabyte.  Thank National Security Agency (NSA) expert James Bamford for that.  He wrote a piece for Wired magazine on a super-secret, $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah.  Focused on data mining and code-breaking and five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, it is expected to house information beyond compare, "including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails – parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’"

The NSA, adds Bamford, "has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net."

Which brings us to yottabyte – which is, Bamford assures us, equivalant to septillion bytes, a number "so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude."  The Utah center will be capable of storing a yottabyte or more of information (on your tax dollar).

Large as it is, that mega-project in Utah is just one of many sprouting like mushrooms in the sunless forest of the U.S. intelligence world.  In cost, for example, it barely tops the $1.7 billion headquarters complex in Virginia that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, with an estimated annual black budget of at least $5 billion, built for its 16,000 employees.  Opened in 2011, it’s the third-largest federal building in the Washington area.  (And I’ll bet you didn’t even know that your tax dollars paid for such an agency, no less its gleaming new headquarters.)  Or what about the 33 post-9/11 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work that were under construction or had already been built when Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote their "Top Secret America" series back in 2010?

In these last years, while so many Americans were foreclosed upon or had their homes go "underwater" and the construction industry went to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just continued to grow.  And there’s no sign that any of this seems abidingly strange to most Americans.

A System That Creates Its Own Reality

To leave the country, of course, I had to briefly surrender my shoes, hat, belt, computer – you know the routine – and even then, stripped to the basics, I had to pass through a scanner of a sort that not so long ago caused protest and upset but now is evidently as American as apple pie.  Then I spent those nine days touring some of Spain’s architectural wonders, including the Alhambra in Granada, the Mezquita or Great Mosque of Cordoba, and that city’s ancient synagogue (the only one to survive the expulsion of the Jews in 1492), as well as Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, his vast Barcelona basilica, without once – in a country with its own grim history of terror attacks – being wanded or patted down or questioned or even passing through a metal detector.  Afterwards, I took a flight back to a country whose national security architecture had again expanded subtly in the name of "my" safety.

Now, I don’t want to overdo it.  In truth, those new guidelines were no big deal.  The information on – as far as anyone knows – innocent Americans that the NCTC wanted to keep for those extra 4½ years was already being held ad infinitum by one or another of our 17 major intelligence agencies and organizations.  So the latest announcement seems to represent little more than bureaucratic housecleaning, just a bit of extra scaffolding added to the Great Mosque or basilica of the new American intelligence labyrinth.  It certainly was nothing to write home about, no less trap a fictional character in.

Admittedly, since 9/11 the U.S. Intelligence Community, as it likes to call itself, has expanded to staggering proportions.  With those 17 outfits having a combined annual intelligence budget of more than $80 billion (a figure which doesn’t even include all intelligence expenditures), you could think of that community as having carried out a statistical coup d’état.  In fact, at a moment when America’s enemies – a few thousand scattered jihadis, the odd minority insurgency, and a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran, North Korea, and perhaps Venezuela) – couldn’t be less imposing, its growth has been little short of an institutional miracle.  By now, it has a momentum all its own.  You might even say that it creates its own reality. 

Of classic American checks and balances, we, the taxpayers, now write the checks and they, the officials of the National Security Complex, are free to be as unbalanced as they want in their actions.  Whatever you do, though, don’t mistake Clapper, Holder, and similar figures for the Gaudís of the new intelligence world.  Don’t think of them as the architects of the structure they are building.  What they preside over is visibly a competitive bureaucratic mess of overlapping principalities whose "mission" might be summed up in one word: more.

In a sense – though they would undoubtedly never think of themselves this way – I suspect they are bureaucratic versions of Kafka’s Joseph K., trapped in a labyrinthine structure they are continually, blindly, adding to.  And because their "mission" has no end point, their edifice has neither windows nor exits, and for all anyone knows is being erected on a foundation of quicksand.

Keep calling it "intelligence" if you want, but the monstrosity they are building is neither intelligent nor architecturally elegant.  It is nonetheless a system elaborating itself with undeniable energy.  Whatever the changing cast of characters, the structure only grows.  It no longer seems to matter whether the figure who officially sits atop it is a former part-owner of a baseball team and former governor, a former constitutional law professor, or – looking to possible futures – a former corporate raider.

A Basilica of Chaos

Evidently, it’s our fate – increasing numbers of us anyway – to be transformed into intelligence data (just as we are being eternally transformed into commercial data), our identities sliced, diced, and passed around the labyrinth, our bytes stored up to be "mined" at their convenience.

You might wonder: What is this basilica of chaos that calls itself the U.S. Intelligence Community?  Bamford describes whistleblower William Binney, a former senior NSA crypto-mathematician "largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network," as holding "his thumb and forefinger close together" and saying, "We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."

It’s an understandable description for someone who has emerged from the labyrinth, but I doubt it’s on target.  Ours is unlikely to ever be a Soviet-style system, even if it exhibits a striking urge toward totality; towards, that is, engulfing everything, including every trace you’ve left anywhere in the world.  It’s probably not a Soviet-style state in the making, even if traditional legal boundaries and prohibitions against spying upon and surveilling Americans are of remarkably little interest to it.

Its urge is to data mine and decode the planet in an eternal search for enemies who are imagined to lurk everywhere, ready to strike at any moment.  Anyone might be a terrorist or, wittingly or not, in touch with one, even perfectly innocent-seeming Americans whose data must be held until the moment when the true pattern of eneminess comes into view and everything is revealed.

In the new world of the National Security Complex, no one can be trusted – except the officials working within it, who in their eternal bureaucratic vigilance clearly consider themselves above any law.  The system that they are constructing (or that, perhaps, is constructing them) has no more to do with democracy or an American republic or the Constitution than it does with a Soviet-style state.  Think of it as a phenomenon for which we have no name.  Like the yottabyte, it’s something new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange and ugly moniker.

For now, it remains as anonymous as Joseph K. and so, conveniently enough, continues to expand right before our eyes, strangely unseen.

If you don’t believe me, leave the country for nine days and just see if, in that brief span of time, something else isn’t drawn within its orbit.  After all, it’s inexorable, this rough beast slouching through Washington to be born.

Welcome, in the meantime, to our nameless new world.  One thing is guaranteed: it has a byte.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. His latest book is The United States of Fear.

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American Anniversaries from Hell: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad – the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre – were at least noted in passing in our world. In my hometown paper, the New York Times, the Iraq anniversary was memorialized with a lead op-ed by a former advisor to General David Petraeus who, amid the rubble, went in search of all-American “silver linings.”

Still, in our post-9/11 world, there are so many other anniversaries from hell whose silver linings don’t get noticed. Take this April. It will be the ninth anniversary of the widespread release of the now infamous photos of torture, abuse, and humiliation from Abu Ghraib. In case you’ve forgotten, that was Saddam Hussein’s old prison where the U.S. military taught the fallen Iraqi dictator a trick or two about the destruction of human beings. Shouldn’t there be an anniversary of some note there? I mean, how many cultures have turned dog collars (and the dogs that go with them), thumbs-up signs over dead bodies, and a mockery of the crucified Christ into screensavers?

Or to pick another not-to-be-missed anniversary that, strangely enough, goes uncelebrated here, consider the passage of the USA Patriot Act, that ten-letter acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”? This October 26th will be the 11th anniversary of the hurried congressional vote on that 363-page (essentially unread) document filled with right-wing hobbyhorses and a range of provisions meant to curtail American liberties in the name of keeping us safe from terror. “Small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats rushed to support it back then. It passed in the Senate in record time by 98-1, with only Russ Feingold in opposition, and in the House by 357-66 – and so began the process of taking the oppressive powers of the American state into a new dimension. It would signal the launch of a world of ever-expanding American surveillance and secrecy (and it would be renewed by the Obama administration at its leisure in 2011).

Or what about celebrating the 12th anniversary of Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force, the joint resolution that a panicked and cowed body passed on September 14, 2001? It wasn’t a declaration of war – there was no one to declare war on – but an open-ended grant to the president of the unfettered power to use “all necessary and appropriate force” in what would become a never-ending (and still expanding) “Global War on Terror.”

Or how about the 11th anniversary on January 11th – like so many such moments, it passed unnoted – of the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that jewel in the crown of George W. Bush’s offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, with its indefinite detention of the innocent and the guilty without charges, its hunger strikes, and abuses, and above all its remarkable ability to embed itself in our world and never go away? Given that, on much of the rest of the planet, Guantanamo is now an icon of the post-9/11 American way of life, on a par with Mickey Mouse and the Golden Arches, shouldn’t its anniversary be noted?

Or to look ahead, consider a date of genuine consequence: the CIA’s first known assassination by drone, which took place in Yemen in 2002. This November will be the 11th anniversary of that momentous act, which would embed “targeted killing” deep in the American way of war, and transform the president into an assassin-in-chief. It, too, will undoubtedly pass largely unnoticed, even if the global drone assassination campaigns it initiated may never rest in peace.

And then, of course, there are the little anniversaries from hell that Americans could care less about – those that have to do with slaughter abroad. If you wanted to, you could organize these by the military services. As last year ended, for instance, no one marked the 11th anniversary of the first Afghan wedding party to be wiped out by the U.S. Air Force. (In late December 2001, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, eradicated a village of celebrants in eastern Afghanistan; only two of 112 villagers reportedly survived.) Nor in May will anyone here mark the ninth anniversary of an American air strike that took out wedding celebrants in the western Iraqi desert near the Syrian border, killing more than 40 of them.

Nor, this July 12th, to switch to the U.S. Army, should we forget the sixth anniversary of the infamous Apache helicopter attacks on civilians in the streets of Baghdad in which at least 11 adults were killed and two children wounded? All of this was preserved in a military video kept secret until released by WikiLeaks. Or how about the first anniversary of the “Kandahar massacre,” which passed on March 11th without any notice at all? As you undoubtedly remember, Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales allegedly spent that night in 2012 slaughtering 16 civilians, including nine children, in two Afghan villages and, on being taken into custody, “showed no remorse.”

When it comes to the Marines, here’s a question: Who, this November 19th, will mark the eighth anniversary of the slaughter of 24 unarmed civilians, including children and the elderly, in the Iraqi village of Haditha for which, after a six-year investigation and military trials, not a single Marine spent a single day in prison? Or to focus for a moment on U.S. Special Forces: will anyone on August 21st memorialize the 90 or so civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children, killed in the Afghan village of Azizabad while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had reportedly been anti-Taliban?

And not to leave out the rent-a-gun mercenaries who have been such a fixture of the post-9/11 era of American warfare, this September 16th will be the sixth anniversary of the moment when Blackwater guards for a convoy of U.S. State Department vehicles sprayed Baghdad’s Nisour Square with bullets, evidently without provocation, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding many more.

All of the above only begins to suggest the plethora of blood-soaked little anniversaries that Americans could observe, if they cared to, from a decade-plus of the former Global War on Terror that now has no name, but goes on no less intensely. Consider them just a few obvious examples of what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once called the “known knowns” of our American world.

Impossible Anniversaries

In anniversary terms, Rumsfeld’s second category – the “known unknowns” – is no less revealing of the universe we now inhabit; that is, our post-9/11 lives have been filled with events or acts whose anniversaries might be notable, if only we knew the date when they occured. Take, for instance, the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Sometime in the first part of 2002, President Bush granted the National Security Agency the right to eavesdrop without court approval on people in the United States in the course of its terrorism investigations. This (illegal) program’s existence was first revealed in 2005, but it remains shrouded in mystery. We don’t know exactly when it began. So no anniversary celebrations there.

Nor for the setting up of the “Salt Pit,” the CIA “black site” in Afghanistan where Khaled el-Masri, a German car salesman kidnapped by the CIA in Macedonia (due to a confusion of names with a suspected terrorist) was held and mistreated, or other similar secret prisons and torture centers in places like Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, and Thailand; nor for the creation of Camp Nama in Iraq, with its ominously named “Black Room,” run as an interrogation center by the Joint Special Operations Command, where the informal motto was: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.”

Or how about the anniversary of the date – possibly as early as 2006 – when Washington launched history’s first known cyberwar, a series of unprovoked cyberattacks ordered by George W. Bush and later Barack Obama, against Iran’s nuclear program (and evidently some Middle Eastern banks dealing with that country as well). Given its potential future implications, that would seem to be a moment significant enough to memorialize, if only we knew when to do it.

Don’t for a moment think, though, that any little survey of known knowns and known unknowns could cover the totality of America’s unacknowledged anniversaries from hell. After all, there’s Rumsfeld’s third category, the “unknown unknowns.” In our advancing world of secrecy, with the National Security Complex and parts of the U.S. military increasingly operating in a post-legal America, shielded from whistleblowers and largely unaccountable to the rest of us or the courts, you can be guaranteed of one thing: there’s a secret history of the post-9/11 era that we simply don’t know about – yet. Call this last category “the unknown anniversaries.” We not only don’t know when they began, but even what they are.

A Hidden History Waiting to Be Written

When I was a boy, I loved a CBS TV series called “You Are There,” “anchored” by Walter Cronkite. It took you into history – whether of Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake, the fall of the Aztec ruler Montezuma, or the end of the U.S. Civil War – and “reported” it as if modern journalists had been on the spot. (For years, I used to joke that the typical moment went like this: “General Lee, General Lee, rumor has it you’re about to surrender to Grant at Appomattox!” “No comment.”) The show had a signature tagline delivered in one of those authoritative male voices of the era that still rings in my head. It went: “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times… all things are as they were then, and you were there.”

If such a show were made about the post-9/11 years, it might have to be called “You Weren’t There.” Our days, instead of being filled with “those events that alter and illuminate our times,” would be enshrouded in a penumbra of secrecy that could – as with Bradley Manning, CIA agent John Kiriakou, or other whistleblowers – only be broken by those ready to spend years, or even a lifetime in prison. If the National Security Complex and the White House had their way, we Americans would be left to celebrate a heavily cleansed and censored version of our own recent history in which the anniversaries that should really matter would be squirreled away in the files of the state apparatus. There can be no question that a hidden history of our American moment is still waiting to be uncovered and written.

And yet, despite the best efforts of the last two administrations, secrecy has its limits. We should already know more than enough to be horrified by the state of our American world. It should disturb us deeply that a government of, by, and for the war-makers, intelligence operatives, bureaucrats, privatizing mercenary corporations, surveillers, torturers, and assassins is thriving in Washington. As for the people – that’s us – in these last years, we largely weren’t there, even as the very idea of a government of, by, and for us bit the dust, and our leaders felt increasingly unconstrained when committing acts of shame in our name.

So perhaps the last overlooked anniversary of these years might be the 12th anniversary of American cowardice. You can choose the exact date yourself; anytime this fall will do. At that moment, Americans should feel free to celebrate a time when, for our “safety,” and in a state of anger and paralyzing fear, we gave up the democratic ghost.

The brave thing, of course, would have been to gamble just a little of our safety – as we do any day when we get into a car – for the kind of world whose anniversaries we would actually be proud to mark on a calendar and celebrate.

Among the many truths in that still-to-be-written secret history of our American world would be this: we the people have no idea just how, in these years, we’ve hurt ourselves.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse).

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If all goes
as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A. Only
the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will
ever filter back to our world.

After all,
American war is heading
for the "shadows"
in a big way. As news articles have recently
made clear, the tip of the Obama administration’s global spear
will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing
ranks of U.S. special operations forces. They are so secretive that
they don’t like their operatives to be named, so covert that they
instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger
Room blog notes,
"not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable
to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act." By now,
they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable
for its actions.

Although the
special ops crew (66,000 people in all) exist on our tax dollars,
we’re really not supposed to know anything about what they’re doing
– unless, of course, they choose the publicity venue themselves,
whether in Pakistan knocking
off Osama bin Laden or parachuting
onto Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to promote Act
of Valor. In case you somehow missed the ads,
that’s the new film about "real terrorist threats based on
true stories starring actual Navy SEALs." (No names in the
credits please!)

Of course,
those elite SEAL teams are johnnies-come-lately when compared to
their no less secretive "teammates" in places like Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Somalia – our ever increasing armada of drones.
Those robotic warriors of the air (or at least their fantasy doppelgangers)
were, of course, pre-celebrated – after a fashion – in
the Terminator
movies. In Washington’s global battle zones, what’s
called our "traditional combat role" – think
big invasions, occupations, counterinsurgency – is going, going,
gone with the wind, even evidently in Afghanistan by 2013. War American-style
is instead being inherited by secretive teams of men and machines,
both hunter-killers who specialize in assassination operations,
and both of whom, as presented to Americans, just couldn’t be sexier.

And we’ll all
be just so happy – as a recent poll indicates
we are
– with our robotic warriors and their shadowy special ops teammates,
if with nothing else in our fraying world. They present such an
alluring image of the no-pain, all-gain battlefield and are undoubtedly
a relief for many Americans, distinctly tired – so the polls
also tell us – of wars that aren’t covert and don’t work. So
who even notices that, as Andrew Bacevich, bestselling author and
(most recently) editor of The
Short American Century: A Postmortem, points out, we’re
being plunged into a real-life war novel that has no plot and no
end. How post-modern! How disastrous, if only we have the patience
to wait! (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview
in which Bacevich discusses the changing face of the Gobal War on
Terror, click here,
or download it to your iPod here.)
~ Tom

Scoring
the Global War on Terror
From Liberation to Assassination in Three Quick Rounds

By Andrew Bacevich

With the United
States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has
styled an "era of persistent conflict," the war
formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym
WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse. Without
achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United
States military has withdrawn from Iraq. It is trying to leave Afghanistan,
where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome.

Elsewhere –
in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, for example – U.S.
forces are busily opening up new fronts. Published reports that
the United States is establishing
"a constellation of secret drone bases" in or near the
Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula suggest that the scope
of operations will only widen further. In a front-page story, the
New York Times described
plans for "thickening" the global presence of U.S.
special operations forces. Rushed Navy plans to convert an aging
amphibious landing ship into an "afloat forward staging base"
– a mobile launch platform for either commando
raids or minesweeping
operations in the Persian Gulf – only reinforces the point.
Yet as some fronts close down and others open up, the war’s narrative
has become increasingly difficult to discern. How much farther until
we reach the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin? What exactly is
the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin? In fact, is there a storyline
here at all?

Viewed close-up,
the "war" appears to have lost form and shape. Yet by
taking a couple of steps back, important patterns begin to appear.
What follows is a preliminary attempt to score the WFKATGWOT, dividing
the conflict into a bout of three rounds. Although there may be
several additional rounds still to come, here’s what we’ve suffered
through thus far.

The
Rumsfeld Era

Round 1:
Liberation. More than any other figure – more than any
general, even more than the president himself – Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld dominated the war’s early stages. Appearing
for a time to be a larger-than-life figure – the "Secretary
at War" in the eyes of an adoring (if fickle) neocon fan club
– Rumsfeld dedicated himself to the proposition that, in battle,
speed holds the key to victory. He threw his considerable weight
behind a high-tech American version of blitzkrieg. U.S.
forces, he regularly insisted, were smarter and more agile than
any adversary. To employ them in ways that took advantage of those
qualities was to guarantee victory. The journalistic term adopted
to describe this concept was "shock and awe."

No one believed
more passionately in "shock and awe" than Rumsfeld himself.
The design of Operation Enduring Freedom, launched in October 2001,
and of Operation Iraqi Freedom, begun in March 2003, reflected this
belief. In each instance, the campaign got off to a promising start,
with U.S. troops landing some swift and impressive blows. In neither
case, however, were they able to finish off their opponent or even,
in reality, sort out just who their opponent might be. Unfortunately
for Rumsfeld, the "terrorists" refused to play by his
rulebook and U.S. forces proved to be less smart and agile than
their technological edge – and their public relations machine
– suggested would be the case. Indeed, when harassed by minor
insurgencies and scattered bands of jihadis, they proved
surprisingly slow to figure out what hit them.

In Afghanistan,
Rumsfeld let victory slip through his grasp. In Iraq, his mismanagement
of the campaign brought the United States face-to-face with outright
defeat. Rumsfeld’s boss had hoped to liberate (and, of course, dominate)
the Islamic world through a series of short, quick thrusts. What
Bush got instead were two different versions of a long, hard slog.
By the end of 2006, "shock and awe" was kaput. Trailing
well behind the rest of the country and its armed forces, the president
eventually lost confidence in his defense secretary’s approach.
As a result, Rumsfeld lost his job. Round one came to an end, the
Americans, rather embarrassingly, having lost it on points.

The
Petraeus Era

Round 2:
Pacification. Enter General David Petraeus. More than any other
figure, in or out of uniform, Petraeus dominated the WFKATGWOT’s
second phase. Round two opened with lowered expectations. Gone was
the heady talk of liberation. Gone, too, were predictions of lightning
victories. The United States was now willing to settle for much
less while still claiming success.

Petraeus offered
a formula for restoring a semblance of order to countries reduced
to chaos as a result of round one. Order might permit the United
States to extricate itself while maintaining some semblance of having
met its policy objectives. This became the operative definition
of victory.

The formal
name for the formula that Petraeus devised was counterinsurgency,
or COIN. Rather than trying to defeat the enemy, COIN sought to
facilitate the emergence of a viable and stable nation-state. This
was the stated aim of the "surge" in Iraq ordered by President
George W. Bush at the end of 2006.

With Petraeus
presiding, violence in that country did decline precipitously. Whether
the relationship was causal
or coincidental remains the subject of controversy. Still, Petraeus’s
apparent success persuaded some observers that counterinsurgency
on a global scale – GCOIN, they called it – should now
form the basis for U.S. national security strategy. Here, they argued,
was an approach that could definitively extract the United States
from the WFKATGWOT, while offering victory of a sort. Rather than
employing "shock and awe" to liberate the Islamic world,
U.S. forces would apply counterinsurgency doctrine to pacify it.

The task of
demonstrating the validity of COIN beyond Iraq fell to General
Stanley McChrystal, appointed with much fanfare in 2009 to command
U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Press reports celebrated
McChrystal as another Petraeus, the ideal candidate to
replicate the achievements already credited to "King David."

McChrystal’s
ascendency came at a moment when a cult of generalship gripped Washington.
Rather than technology being the determinant of success as Rumsfeld
had believed, the key was to put the right guy in charge and then
let him run with things. Political figures on both sides of the
aisle fell all over themselves declaring McChrystal the right guy
for Afghanistan. Pundits of all stripes joined
the chorus.

Once installed
in Kabul, the general surveyed the situation and, to no one’s surprise,
announced
that "success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign."
Implementing that campaign would necessitate an Afghan "surge"
mirroring the one that had seemingly turned Iraq around. In December
2009, albeit with little evident enthusiasm, President Barack Obama
acceded
to his commander’s request (or ultimatum). The U.S. troop
commitment to Afghanistan rapidly increased.

Here things
began to come undone. Progress toward reducing the insurgency or
improving the capacity of Afghan security forces was – by even
the most generous evaluation – negligible. McChrystal made
promises
– like meeting basic Afghan needs with "government in
a box, ready to roll in" – that he proved utterly incapable
of keeping. Relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai
remained strained. Those with neighboring Pakistan, not good to
begin with, only worsened. Both governments expressed deep
resentment at what they viewed as high-handed American behavior
that killed or maimed noncombatants with disturbing frequency.

To make matters
worse, despite all the hype, McChrystal turned out to be miscast
– manifestly the wrong guy for the job. Notably, he
proved unable to grasp the need for projecting even some
pretence of respect for the principle of civilian control back
in Washington. By the summer of 2010, he was out – and Petraeus
was back in.

In Washington
(if not in Kabul), Petraeus’s oversized reputation quelled the sense
that with McChrystal’s flame-out Afghanistan might be a lost cause.
Surely, the most celebrated soldier of his generation would repeat
his Iraq magic, affirming his own greatness and the continued viability
of COIN.

Alas, this
was not to be. Conditions in Afghanistan during Petraeus’s tenure
in command improved – if that’s even the word – only modestly.
The ongoing war met just about anyone’s definition of a quagmire.
With considerable understatement, a 2011 National Intelligence Estimate
called
it a "stalemate." Soon, talk of a "comprehensive
counterinsurgency" faded. With the bar defining success slipping
ever lower, passing off the fight to Afghan security forces and
hightailing it for home became the publicly announced war aim.

That job remained
unfinished when Petraeus himself headed for home, leaving the army
to become CIA director. Although Petraeus was still held in high
esteem, his departure from active duty left the cult of generalship
looking more than a little the worse for wear. By the time General
John Allen succeeded Petraeus – thereby became the eighth U.S.
officer appointed to preside over the ongoing Afghan War –
no one believed that simply putting the right guy in charge was
going to produce magic. On that inclusive note, round two of the
WFKATGWOT ended.

The
Vickers Era

Round 3:
Assassination. Unlike Donald Rumsfeld or David Petraeus, Michael
Vickers has not achieved celebrity status. Yet more than anyone
else in or out of uniform, Vickers, who carries the title Under
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, deserves recognition as the
emblematic figure of the WFKATGWOT’s round three. His low-key, low-profile
persona meshes perfectly with this latest evolution in the war’s
character. Few people outside of Washington know who he is, which
is fitting indeed since he presides over a war that few people outside
of Washington are paying much attention to any longer.

With the retirement
of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Vickers is the senior remaining
holdover from George W. Bush’s Pentagon. His background is nothing
if not eclectic. He previously served in U.S. Army Special Forces
and as a CIA operative. In that guise, he played a leading role
in supporting the Afghan mujahedeen in their war against Soviet
occupiers in the 1980s. Subsequently, he worked in a Washington
think tank and earned a PhD in strategic studies at Johns Hopkins
University (dissertation title: "The Structure of Military
Revolutions").

Even during
the Bush era, Vickers never subscribed to expectations that the
United States could liberate or pacify the Islamic world. His preferred
approach to the WFKATGWOT has been simplicity itself. "I just
want to kill those guys," he says
– "those guys" referring to members of al-Qaeda.
Kill the people who want to kill Americans and don’t stop until
they are all dead: this defines the Vickers strategy, which over
the course of the Obama presidency has supplanted COIN as the latest
variant of U.S. strategy.

The Vickers
approach means acting aggressively to eliminate would-be killers
wherever they might be found, employing whatever means are necessary.
Vickers "tends to think like a gangster," one admirer
comments.
"He can understand trends then change the rules of the game
so they are advantageous for your side."

Round three
of the WFKATGWOT is all about bending, breaking, and reinventing
rules in ways thought to be advantageous to the United States. Much
as COIN supplanted "shock and awe," a broad-gauged program
of targeted assassination has now displaced COIN as the prevailing
expression of the American way of war.

The United
States is finished with the business of sending large land armies
to invade and occupy countries on the Eurasian mainland. Robert
Gates, when still Secretary of Defense, made the definitive
statement on that subject. The United States is now in the business
of using missile-armed
drones and special
operations forces to eliminate anyone (not excluding U.S. citizens)
the president of the United States decides has become an intolerable
annoyance. Under President Obama, such attacks have proliferated.

This is America’s
new MO. Paraphrasing a warning issued by Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, a Washington Post dispatch succinctly
summarized what it implied: "The United States reserved
the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat
to U.S. national security, anywhere in the world."

Furthermore,
acting on behalf of the United States, the president exercises this
supposed right without warning, without regard to claims
of national sovereignty, without Congressional authorization,
and without consulting anyone other than Michael Vickers and a few
other members of the national security apparatus. The role allotted
to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that
a successful assassination has occurred. And applaud
we do, for example, when a daring raid by members in SEAL Team
Six secretly enter Pakistan to dispatch Osama bin Laden with two
neatly placed kill shots. Vengeance long deferred making it unnecessary
to consider what second-order political complications might ensue.

How
round three will end is difficult to forecast. The best we can say
is that it’s unlikely to end anytime soon or particularly well.
As Israel has discovered, once targeted assassination becomes your
policy, the list of targets has a way of growing ever longer.

So what tentative
judgments can we offer regarding the ongoing WFKATGWOT? Operationally,
a war launched by the conventionally minded has progressively
fallen under the purview of those who inhabit what Dick Cheney once
called "the dark side," with implications that few
seem willing to explore. Strategically, a war informed
at the outset by utopian expectations continues
today with no concretely stated expectations whatsoever, the forward
momentum of events displacing serious consideration of purpose.
Politically, a war that once occupied center stage in national
politics has now slipped to the periphery, the American people moving
on to other concerns and entertainments, with legal and moral questions
raised by the war left dangling in midair.

Is this progress?

February
28, 2012

Tom
Engelhardt [send him mail]
co-founder
of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of
the American Empire
Project. His book, The
End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly
issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best
of TomDispatch book, The
World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire
(Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also
the author of The
American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. His
latest book is The United States of Fear. Andrew
J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations
at Boston University. A TomDispatch
regular, he is the author most recently of Washington
Rules: The American Path to Permanent War and the editor
of the new book The
Short American Century: A Postmortem, just out from Harvard
University Press. To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio
interview in which Bacevich discusses the changing face of the Gobal
War on Terror, click here,
or download it to your iPod here.

The
Best of Tom Engelhardt

Recently by Tom Engelhardt: The Visible Government

The School Security America Doesn’t Need: After Newtown: Turning Schools Into Prisons

Outrage over the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre may or may not spur any meaningful gun control laws, but you can bet your Crayolas that it will lead to more seven-year-olds getting handcuffed and hauled away to local police precincts.

You read that right.  Americans may disagree deeply about how easy it should be for a mentally ill convicted felon to purchase an AR-15, but when it comes to putting more law enforcement officers inside our schools, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and liberal Democrats like Senator Barbara Boxer are as one.  And when police (or “school resource officers” as these sheriff’s deputies are often known) spend time in a school, they often deal with disorder like proper cops – by slapping cuffs on the little perps and dragging them to the precinct.

Just ask the three nine-year-old girls and an eight-year-old boy who got into a fight at their Baltimore elementary school – then got arrested by real police.  Or Salecia Johnson, age six, cuffed and arrested for throwing a tantrum at her elementary school in Milledgeville, Georgia.  Or Wilson Reyes, a seven-year-old at a Bronx, New York, elementary school who last December 4th was cuffed, hauled away, and interrogated under suspicion of taking $5 from a classmate.  (Another kid later confessed.)

The last of these incidents made the cover of the New York Post, but the New York City Police Department still doesn’t understand what they did wrong – sure, the first-grader spent about 4 hours handcuffed in a detention room, but that’s “standard for juvenile arrest.”

Which is precisely the problem: standard juvenile misbehavior (a five-year-old pitching a fit, a 12-year-old doodling on a desk, a 13-year-old farting in class, a class clown running around the football field at halftime in a banana suit) is increasingly being treated like serious crime, resulting in handcuffs and arrest.  If you can’t understand why such “consistency” is crazy, please desist from reading the rest of this article.

It seems grotesque that the horrific slaughter of those 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, will result in more children getting traumatized, but that’s exactly where we’re headed – with firm bipartisan support.

In his amazing post-Newtown speech last December, Wayne LaPierre, the CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, called for armed guards in all schools – a demand widely hailed as jaw-droppingly nutty.  A few weeks later, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) proposed $50 million in federal grants to install more metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and National Guard troops in schools, but made her pitch in the caring cadences of a Marin County Democrat.  And when President Obama ordered more police in schools (point 18 in his 23-point Executive Order responding to the Sandy Hook tragedy), it was all over.

So here’s an American reality of 2013: we will soon have more police in our schools, and more seven-year-olds like Joseph Andersons of PS 153 in Maspeth, New York, getting arrested.  (He got handcuffed after a meltdown when his Easter egg dye-job didn’t come out right.)

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

In fairness to the feds, similar kinds of local responses were already underway before the La Pierre-Boxer Axis of Tiny Handcuffs even arose.  Across the country, from Florida and Connecticut to Tennessee, Indiana, and Arizona, despite tough budgetary times, municipal governments are now eagerly scrounging up the extra money for more metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and armed guards in schools.  (The same thing happened after the Columbine shooting 14 years ago.)  No one keeps national statistics, but arrests of the 10-and-under set do seem to be on the rise since Sandy Hook. A typical recent case: in January, a seven-year-old at a Connecticut school was arrested by the police for “threatening” a teacher.  Jitters are understandable after the trauma of Sandy Hook – but arresting a seven-year-old?

Truth be told, we were already well on our way to turning schools into carceral fortresses before the Sandy Hook slaughter even happened.  In fact, the great national infrastructure project of the past 20 years may be the “school-to-prison pipeline.”  After all, we are the nation that arrested Isamar Gonzalez for being in her high school early to meet with a teacher, then arrested her principal, Mark Federman, when he tried to intervene.

The stats speak as loudly as the anecdotes: of the Chicago School District’s 4,600 arrests in 2011, 86% were for misdemeanors. That school system spends $51.4 million on security guards, but only $3.5 million for college and career coaches.  And for every incident that makes the news, there are scores that don’t.  Despite a growing body of damning research by civil libertarians of the left and the right, including Annette Fuentes’s excellent book Lockdown High, political opposition to the school-to-prison pipeline has proven feeble or nonexistent.  Brooklyn State Senator Eric Adams, who represents one of the most liberal districts in the country, has staked out the civil libertarian outer limit by helpfully suggesting that Velcro handcuffs might be more suitable than metal ones for arresting young children.

The metal detector at the schoolhouse door is threatening to become as iconic an American symbol as baseball or type 2 diabetes.  Not that metal detectors in place were capable of preventing the massacre at Red Lake High School in Minnesota in 2005: young Jeffrey Weise just barged right in and shot six people dead; nor could the metal detectors at George Washington High School in Manhattan or Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn prevent teens from getting stabbed. Yet metal detectors and school police proliferate across the country. 

One state, however, truly leads the way. Self-satisfied Yankees have traditionally slandered the state of Mississippi as a jerkwater remnant of the past.  As for me, I say Mississippi represents the American future.  A new report by advocacy groups shows how the Hospitality State is leading the nation in cruel and draconian school over-policing.  Felony assault charges for throwing peanuts on the school bus!  Dress codes enforced by handcuffing a child to a railing for hours for the crime of not wearing a belt!  Cops escorting a five-year-old home for wearing the wrong color shoes! And constant arrests of kids for “disorderly conduct.”

Yes, the “Mississippi model” of non-union teachers plus “zero tolerance” discipline is the kind of schooling that some of the best and brightest among our education “reformers” have been touting – and what they are increasingly getting.  In fairness, Governor Rick Perry’s Texas is struggling with Mississippi for vanguard status, with cutting-edge surveillance of students and 300,000 misdemeanor arrests in 2010 for “crimes” like tossing a paper airplane.  And Massachusetts is a strong contender for third place.

Safe Schools Without Police or Metal Detectors

The over-policing of our schools is particularly grotesque because it’s so unnecessary.  All schools need order and all students need self-discipline (as do adults), but putting police and metal detectors in a school often just adds another layer of violent chaos to an already tough situation.  In my own policy research on school security overkill in New York City, I’ve found plenty of high schools, and not in the fancy parts of town, that do just fine without police or scanners.

In fact, they do better than fine: one report I coauthored with advocates from the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that schools without police or metal detectors actually get significantly better educational results (higher graduation rates, lower truancy) than their heavily policed counterparts.

So why aren’t these low-impact schools being held up as models?  Why don’t City Hall and the New York City Department of Education seem to want to know about these more effective – not to mention cheaper – models? Alas, despite a steady 15-year nationwide drop in crime, politicos continue to score points with voters by showing that they aren’t afraid to crack down on children, especially the working-class Black and Latino youth who bear most of the brunt of these policies. The psycho-racial-political dynamics are pretty much the same throughout the country.

But there are proven, demonstrably better, ways to do school discipline.  Ask Judge Steve Teske whose visionary common sense has brought down referrals to juvenile court by 70% in Clayton County, Georgia, by forcing schools to handle minor disciplinary infractions without handcuffs or police arrests.  (In the same period in that county, serious weapons charges, like bringing guns and knives to school, have fallen by 80% – further evidence that restraining a police presence actually makes schools safer.)

For another example of the right way to respond to school violence, look no further than Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, site of the 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher by two heavily armed students. In response, the school made the choice not to add a phalanx of armed guards. (Columbine actually had an armed school resource officer on duty the day of the killings, and he was unable to slow, let alone stop, the carnage.)

In fact, Columbine today remains an open campus with no metal detector at the front door.  Instead, its administration has worked hard to improve communications with the student body, trying to build an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect.  Columbine parents have supported this approach for a simple reason: they don’t want their children treated like criminals.  Because Littleton, Colorado, is a largely affluent community with political muscle, they’ve been able to resist the avalanche of punitive measures that have been generated by every school massacre since the one that took place at theirs.

Other schools – particularly urban ones with working-class African-American and Latino students – are not so lucky. When President Obama announced his pledge of more “resource officers” in schools, he was quick to qualify it with an “if they want them.” A laudable sentiment that doesn’t really reflect how things usually work on the ground.

One Brooklyn high school principal I interviewed told me of the constant pressure he experienced from higher up in the New York City Department of Education to put in a metal detector and more police personnel. Another school security success story I profiled back in 2008 has since had a metal detector rammed down its educational throat despite its immaculate disciplinary record.  Now, its students are made to feel like potential criminals from the moment they arrive every morning.  The logic is, in its way, all-American: crazy white kids go on shooting sprees, and then the screws tighten on Black and Latino kids.

Resisting the Axis of Tiny Handcuffs

Is there any hope of preventing the rush to put more first graders in handcuffs? Yes, but don’t expect any help from the NRA, which is actively promoting a heavily armed vision of heaven on Earth in which armed guards will be everywhere, with all public space turned into an airport security line.  As for Barbara Boxer, evidently she wasn’t as struck as I was by the t-shirts that Sacramento’s school security police made with the slogan “U Raise ‘Em, We Cage ‘Em” emblazoned on the image of a child behind bars. Or maybe she should talk to constituents like five-year-old arrestee Michael Davis or the seven-year-old in San Mateo whom a cop blasted in the face with pepper spray for climbing a bookshelf. It remains to be seen if the NRA and Boxer, united, can ever be defeated.

This response to the Newtown massacre is of a piece with a developing post-9/11 American national-security-lockdown mentality – the belief that an armed response will solve most of our problems, domestic and foreign.  It’s a habit of thought that leads not figuratively but quite literally to a police state.  The over-policing of schools is just a part of the increasing militarization of the police nationwide, which in turn fuels the smoldering paranoia that drives civilians to stock up on AR-15s and the like.

Ending this cycle of armed fear and violence will require getting police out of the schools along with the whole battery of security state accessories.  The only way to get there will be via the broadest possible civil libertarian coalition: Black community groups and Ron Paul types, immigrants’ rights activists and teachers and principals unions that see the big picture, liberals and conservatives united against the nanny/thug state.

There could be no finer spokesperson for such an ecumenical gathering than the newly crowned Miss America, Alabama-raised Brooklyn-residing Mallory Hytes Hagan.  After wowing the pageant judges with her terpsichorean prowess, she demonstrated the soundest policy judgment.  Asked if she thought it was a good idea to bring armed guards into schools, Ms. Hagan’s response was clear.  “No, I don’t think the proper way to fight violence is with violence.”  According to the New York Daily News, she said it “firmly.” Let people of goodwill rally behind this model citizen to end all the grotesque violence in our schools.

Chase Madar (@ChMadar) is a civil rights attorney in New York City who has written about the proven alternatives to school security overkill. His latest book is The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower (Verso).

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and The United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Nick Turse). Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). You can watch his recent conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. His website is NickTurse.com. You can follow him on Tumblr and on Facebook.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

Offshore Everywhere How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It

Make no mistake: we're entering a new world of military planning.  Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut nuclear arsenal.  Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, cherished by their services and well-lobbied congressional representatives, aren't leaving the scene any time soon, though delays or cuts in purchase orders are planned.  All this should reassure us that, despite the talk of massive cuts, the U.S. military will continue to be the profligate, inefficient, and remarkably ineffective institution we've come to know and squander our treasure on.

Still, the cuts that matter are already in the works, the ones that will change the American way of war.  They may mean little in monetary terms — the Pentagon budget is actually slated to increase through 2017 — but in imperial terms they will make a difference.  A new way of preserving the embattled idea of an American planet is coming into focus and one thing is clear: in the name of Washington’s needs, it will offer a direct challenge to national sovereignty.

Heading Offshore

The Marines began huge amphibious exercises — dubbed Bold Alligator 2012 — off the East coast of the U.S. last week, but someone should IM them: it won't help.  No matter what they do, they are going to have less boots on the ground in the future, and there's going to be less ground to have them on.  The same is true for the Army (even if a cut of 100,000 troops will still leave the combined forces of the two services larger than they were on September 11, 2001).  Less troops, less full-frontal missions, no full-scale invasions, no more counterinsurgency: that’s the order of the day.  Just this week, in fact, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta suggested that the schedule for the drawdown of combat boots in Afghanistan might be speeded up by more than a year.  Consider it a sign of the times.

Like the F-35, American mega-bases, essentially well-fortified American towns plunked down in a strange land, like our latest "embassies" the size of lordly citadels, aren’t going away soon.  After all, in base terms, we're already hunkered down in the Greater Middle East in an impressive way.  Even in post-withdrawal Iraq, the Pentagon is negotiating for a new long-term defense agreement that might include getting a little of its former base space back, and it continues to build in Afghanistan.  Meanwhile, Washington has typically signaled in recent years that it's ready to fight to the last Japanese prime minister not to lose a single base among the three dozen it has on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

But here's the thing: even if the U.S. military is dragging its old habits, weaponry, and global-basing ideas behind it, it's still heading offshore.  There will be no more land wars on the Eurasian continent.  Instead, greater emphasis will be placed on the Navy, the Air Force, and a policy "pivot" to face China in southern Asia where the American military position can be strengthened without more giant bases or monster embassies.

For Washington, "offshore" means the world's boundary-less waters and skies, but also, more metaphorically, it means being repositioned off the coast of national sovereignty and all its knotty problems.  This change, on its way for years, will officially rebrand the planet as an American free-fire zone, unchaining Washington from the limits that national borders once imposed.  New ways to cross borders and new technology for doing it without permission are clearly in the planning stages, and U.S. forces are being reconfigured accordingly.

Think of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden as a harbinger of and model for what's to come.  It was an operation enveloped in a cloak of secrecy.  There was no consultation with the "ally" on whose territory the raid was to occur.  It involved combat by an elite special operations unit backed by drones and other high-tech weaponry and supported by the CIA.  A national boundary was crossed without either permission or any declaration of hostilities.  The object was that elusive creature "terrorism," the perfect global will-o’-the-wisp around which to plan an offshore future.

All the elements of this emerging formula for retaining planetary dominance have received plenty of publicity, but the degree to which they combine to assault traditional concepts of national sovereignty has been given little attention. 

Since November 2002, when a Hellfire missile from a CIA-operated Predator drone turned a car with six alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen into ash, robotic aircraft have led the way in this border-crossing, air-space penetrating assault. The U.S. now has drone bases across the planet, 60 at last count.  Increasingly, the long-range reach of its drone program means that those robotic planes can penetrate just about any nation's air space.  It matters little whether that country houses them itself.  Take Pakistan, which just forced the CIA to remove its drones from Shamsi Air Base.  Nonetheless, CIA drone strikes in that country's tribal borderlands continue, assumedly from bases in Afghanistan, and recently President Obama offered a full-throated public defense of them.  (That there have been fewer of them lately has been a political decision of the Obama administration, not of the Pakistanis.)

Drones themselves are distinctly fallible, crash-prone machines.  (Just last week, for instance, an advanced Israeli drone capable of hitting Iran went down on a test flight, a surveillance drone — assumedly American — crashed in a Somali refugee camp, and a report surfaced that some U.S. drones in Afghanistan can't fly in that country's summer heat.)  Still, they are, relatively speaking, cheap to produce.  They can fly long distances across almost any border with no danger whatsoever to their human pilots and are capable of staying aloft for extended periods of time.  They allow for surveillance and strikes anywhere.  By their nature, they are border-busting creatures.  It's no mistake then that they are winners in the latest Pentagon budgeting battles or, as a headline at Wired's Danger Room blog summed matters up, "Humans Lose, Robots Win in New Defense Budget."

And keep in mind that when drones are capable of taking off from and landing on aircraft carrier decks, they will quite literally be offshore with respect to all borders, but capable of crossing any.  (The Navy’s latest plans include a future drone that will land itself on those decks without a human pilot at any controls.)

War has always been the most human and inhuman of activities.  Now, it seems, its inhuman aspect is quite literally on the rise.  With the U.S. military working to roboticize the future battlefield, the American way of war is destined to be imbued with Terminator-style terror.

Already American drones regularly cross borders with mayhem in mind in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.  Because of a drone downed in Iran, we know that they have also been flying surveillance missions in that country’s airspace as — for the State Department — they are in Iraq.  Washington is undoubtedly planning for far more of the same.

American War Enters the Shadows

Along with those skies filled with increasing numbers of drones goes a rise in U.S. special operations forces.  They, too, are almost by definition boundary-busting outfits.  Once upon a time, an American president had his own "private army" — the CIA.  Now, in a sense, he has his own private military.  Formerly modest-sized units of elite special operations forces have grown into a force of 60,000, a secret military cocooned in the military, which is slated for further expansion.  According to Nick Turse, in 2011 special operations units were in 120 nations, almost two-thirds of the countries on Earth.

By their nature, special operations forces work in the shadows: as hunter-killer teams, night raiders, and border-crossers.  They function in close conjunction with drones and, as the regular Army slowly withdraws from its giant garrisons in places like Europe, they are preparing to operate in a new world of stripped-down bases called "lily pads" — think frogs jumping across a pond to their prey.  No longer will the Pentagon be building American towns with all the amenities of home, but forward-deployed, minimalist outposts near likely global hotspots, like Camp Lemonier in the North African nation of Djibouti.

Increasingly, American war itself will enter those shadows, where crossings of every sort of border, domestic as well as foreign, are likely to take place with little accountability to anyone, except the president and the national security complex. 

In those shadows, our secret forces are already melding into one another.  A striking sign of this was the appointment as CIA director of a general who, in Iraq and Afghanistan, had relied heavily on special forces hunter-killer teams and night raiders, as well as drones, to do the job.  Undoubtedly the most highly praised general of our American moment, General David Petraeus has himself slipped into the shadows where he is presiding over covert civilian forces working ever more regularly in tandem with special operations teams and sharing drone assignments with the military.

And don't forget the Navy, which couldn't be more offshore to begin with.  It already operates 11 aircraft carrier task forces (none of which are to be cut — thanks to a decision reportedly made by the president).  These are, effectively, major American bases — massively armed small American towns — at sea.  To these, the Navy is adding smaller "bases."  Right now, for instance, it's retrofitting an old amphibious transport docking ship bound for the Persian Gulf either as a Navy Seal commando "mothership" or (depending on which Pentagon spokesperson you listen to) as a "lily pad" for counter-mine Sikorsky MH-53 helicopters and patrol craft.  Whichever it may be, it will just be a stopgap until the Navy can build new “Afloat Forward Staging Bases” from scratch.

Futuristic weaponry now in the planning stages could add to the miliary’s border-crossing capabilities.  Take the Army's Advanced Hypersonic Weapon or DARPA's Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, both of which are intended, someday, to hit targets anywhere on Earth with massive conventional explosives in less than an hour.

From lily pads to aircraft carriers, advanced drones to special operations teams, it's offshore and into the shadows for U.S. military policy.  While the United States is economically in decline, it remains the sole military superpower on the planet.  No other country pours anywhere near as much money into its military and its national security establishment or is likely to do so in the foreseeable future.  It's clear enough that Washington is hoping to offset any economic decline with newly reconfigured military might.  As in the old TV show, the U.S. has gun, will travel.

Onshore, American power in the twenty-first century proved a disaster.  Offshore, with Washington in control of the global seas and skies, with its ability to kick down the world’s doors and strike just about anywhere without a by-your-leave or thank-you-ma’am, it hopes for better.  As the early attempts to put this program into operation from Pakistan to Yemen have indicated, however, be careful what you wish for: it sometimes comes home to bite you.

Note: I couldn't have written this piece without the superb reportage of TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse on bases, drones, and special operations forces.  I offer him a deep bow of thanks. ~ Tom

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. His latest book is The United States of Fear.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered.  Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country's oil industry.  In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police.  He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington's "bulwark" in the Persian Gulf — until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.  While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington's men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring.  In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.

1967: Under the U.S. "Atoms for Peace" program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which — call it irony — is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program).  Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the Shah might use the "peaceful atom" as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands.  "An aggressive successor to the Shah," went a 1974 Pentagon memo, "might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran's complete military dominance of the region."  But that didn't stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.

The Shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran’s national "right" and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants.  As a 1970s ad by a group of American power companies put the matter: "The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world.  Yet he's building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country.  He knows the oil is running out — and time with it."  In other words, the U.S. nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.

September 1980: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein launches a war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.  In the early 1980s, he becomes Washington's man, our "bulwark" in the Persian Gulf, and we offer him our hand — and also “detailed information” on Iranian deployments and tactical planning that help him use his chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian military.  Oh, and just to make sure things turn out really, really well, the Reagan administration also decides to sell missiles and other arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran on the sly, part of what became known as the "Iran-Contra Affair" and which almost brings down the president and his men.  Success!

March 2003: Saddam Hussein is, by now, no longer our man in Baghdad but a new "Hitler" who, top Washington officials claim, undoubtedly has a nuclear weapons program that could someday leave mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities.  So the Bush administration launches a war of aggression against Iraq, which like Iran just happens to — in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz — "float on a sea of oil."  (Bush officials hope, in the wake of a "cakewalk" of a war to revive that country's oil industry, to privatize it, and use it to destroy OPEC, driving down the price of oil on world markets.)  Nine years later, a Shiite government is in power in Baghdad closely allied with Tehran, which has gained regional strength and influence thanks to the disastrous U.S. occupation.

So call it an unblemished record of a kind not easy to find.  In more than 50 years, America's leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn't lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback.  Now, another administration in Washington, after years of what can only be called a covert war against Iran, is preparing yet another set of clever maneuvers — this time sanctions against Iran's central bank meant to cripple the country's oil industry and crack open the economy followed by no one knows what.

And honestly, I mean, really, given past history, what could possibly go wrong?  Regime change in Iran?  It's bound to be a slam dunk and if you don't believe it, check out Pepe Escobar, that fabulous peripatetic reporter for Asia Times and TomDispatch regular.  ~ Tom

The Myth of "Isolated" Iran: Following the Money in the Iran Crisis By Pepe Escobar

Let’s start with red lines. Here it is, Washington's ultimate red line, straight from the lion's mouth.  Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us."

How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat.  Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was "enrichment" of uranium. Now, it's evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).

What if, however, there is no "red line," but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.

Banking on Sanctions?

Let's start here: In December 2011, impervious to dire consequences for the global economy, the U.S. Congress — under all the usual pressures from the Israel lobby (not that it needs them) — foisted a mandatory sanctions package on the Obama administration (100 to 0 in the Senate and with only 12 "no" votes in the House). Starting in June, the U.S. will have to sanction any third-country banks and companies dealing with Iran's Central Bank, which is meant to cripple that country's oil sales.  (Congress did allow for some "exemptions.")

The ultimate target? Regime change — what else? — in Tehran. The proverbial anonymous U.S. official admitted as much in the Washington Post, and that paper printed the comment.  ("The goal of the U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, offering the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration is at least as intent on unseating Iran's government as it is on engaging with it.") But oops! The newspaper then had to revise the passage to eliminate that embarrassingly on-target quote. Undoubtedly, this "red line" came too close to the truth for comfort.

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen believed that only a monster shock-and-awe-style event, totally humiliating the leadership in Tehran, would lead to genuine regime change — and he was hardly alone. Advocates of actions ranging from air strikes to invasion (whether by the U.S., Israel, or some combination of the two) have been legion in neocon Washington.  (See, for instance, the Brookings Institution's 2009 report Which Path to Persia.)

Yet anyone remotely familiar with Iran knows that such an attack would rally the population behind Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards.  In those circumstances, the deep aversion of many Iranians to the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat would matter little. 

Besides, even the Iranian opposition supports a peaceful nuclear program.  It's a matter of national pride.

Iranian intellectuals, far more familiar with Persian smoke and mirrors than ideologues in Washington, totally debunk any war scenarios.  They stress that the Tehran regime, adept in the arts of Persian shadow play, has no intention of provoking an attack that could lead to its obliteration. On their part, whether correctly or not, Tehran strategists assume that Washington will prove unable to launch yet one more war in the Greater Middle East, especially one that could lead to staggering collateral damage for the world economy.

In the meantime, Washington's expectations that a harsh sanctions regime might make the Iranians give ground, if not go down, may prove to be a chimera.  Washington spin has been focused on the supposedly disastrous mega-devaluation of the Iranian currency, the rial, in the face of the new sanctions. Unfortunately for the fans of Iranian economic collapse, Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani has laid out in elaborate detail the long-term nature of this process, which Iranian economists have more than welcomed.  After all, it will boost Iran's non-oil exports and help local industry in competition with cheap Chinese imports. In sum: a devalued rial stands a reasonable chance of actually reducing unemployment in Iran.

More Connected Than Google

Though few in the U.S. have noticed, Iran is not exactly "isolated," though Washington might wish it.  Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani has become a frequent flyer to Tehran. And he's a Johnny-come-lately compared to Russia's national security chief Nikolai Patrushev, who only recently warned the Israelis not to push the U.S. to attack Iran. Add in as well U.S. ally and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.  At a Loya Jirga (grand council) in late 2011, in front of 2,000 tribal leaders, he stressed that Kabul was planning to get even closer to Tehran.

On that crucial Eurasian chessboard, Pipelineistan, the Iran-Pakistan (IP) natural gas pipeline — much to Washington's distress — is now a go. Pakistan badly needs energy and its leadership has clearly decided that it's unwilling to wait forever and a day for Washington's eternal pet project — the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline — to traverse Talibanistan.

Even Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu recently visited Tehran, though his country's relationship with Iran has grown ever edgier.  After all, energy overrules threats in the region. NATO member Turkey is already involved in covert ops in Syria, allied with hardcore fundamentalist Sunnis in Iraq, and — in a remarkable volte-face in the wake of the Arab Spring(s) — has traded in an Ankara-Tehran-Damascus axis for an Ankara-Riyadh-Doha one.  It is even planning on hosting components of Washington's long-planned missile defense system, targeted at Iran.

All this from a country with a Davutoglu-coined foreign policy of "zero problems with our neighbors."  Still, the needs of Pipelineistan do set the heart racing.  Turkey is desperate for access to Iran's energy resources, and if Iranian natural gas ever reaches Western Europe — something the Europeans are desperately eager for — Turkey will be the privileged transit country.  Turkey's leaders have already signaled their rejection of further U.S. sanctions against Iranian oil.

And speaking of connections, last week there was that spectacular diplomatic coup de théâtre, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Latin American tour. U.S. right-wingers may harp on a Tehran-Caracas axis of evil — supposedly promoting "terror" across Latin America as a springboard for future attacks on the northern superpower — but back in real life, another kind of truth lurks.  All these years later, Washington is still unable to digest the idea that it has lost control over, or even influence in, those two regional powers over which it once exercised unmitigated imperial hegemony. 

Add to this the wall of mistrust that has only solidified since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.  Mix in a new, mostly sovereign Latin America pushing for integration not only via leftwing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador but through regional powers Brazil and Argentina. Stir and you get photo ops like Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saluting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. 

Washington continues to push a vision of a world from which Iran has been radically disconnected.  State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is typical in saying recently, "Iran can remain in international isolation."  As it happens, though, she needs to get her facts straight.

"Isolated" Iran has $4 billion in joint projects with Venezuela including, crucially, a bank (as with Ecuador, it has dozens of planned projects from building power plants to, once again, banking). That has led the Israel-first crowd in Washington to vociferously demand that sanctions be slapped on Venezuela.  Only problem: how would the U.S. pay for its crucial Venezuelan oil imports then?

Much was made in the U.S. press of the fact that Ahmadinejad did not visit Brazil on this jaunt through Latin America, but diplomatically Tehran and Brasilia remain in sync. When it comes to the nuclear dossier in particular, Brazil's history leaves its leaders sympathetic.  After all, that country developed — and then dropped — a nuclear weapons program. In May 2010, Brazil and Turkey brokered a uranium-swap agreement for Iran that might have cleared the decks on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear imbroglio.  It was, however, immediately sabotaged by Washington. A key member of the BRICS, the club of top emerging economies, Brasilia is completely opposed to the U.S. sanctions/embargo strategy.

So Iran may be "isolated" from the United States and Western Europe, but from the BRICS to NAM (the 120 member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement), it has the majority of the global South on its side.  And then, of course, there are those staunch Washington allies, Japan and South Korea, now pleading for exemptions from the coming boycott/embargo of Iran's Central Bank.

No wonder, because these unilateral U.S. sanctions are also aimed at Asia.  After all, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, together, buy no less than 62% of Iran's oil exports.

With trademark Asian politesse, Japan's Finance Minister Jun Azumi let Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner know just what a problem Washington is creating for Tokyo, which relies on Iran for 10% of its oil needs.  It is pledging to at least modestly "reduce" that share "as soon as possible" in order to get a Washington exemption from those sanctions, but don't hold your breath. South Korea has already announced that it will buy 10% of its oil needs from Iran in 2012.

Silk Road Redux

Most important of all, "isolated" Iran happens to be a supreme matter of national security for China, which has already rejected the latest Washington sanctions without a blink. Westerners seem to forget that the Middle Kingdom and Persia have been doing business for almost two millennia. (Does "Silk Road" ring a bell?)

The Chinese have already clinched a juicy deal for the development of Iran's largest oil field, Yadavaran. There's also the matter of the delivery of Caspian Sea oil from Iran through a pipeline stretching from Kazakhstan to Western China. In fact, Iran already supplies no less than 15% of China's oil and natural gas. It is now more crucial to China, energy-wise, than the House of Saud is to the U.S., which imports 11% of its oil from Saudi Arabia.

In fact, China may be the true winner from Washington's new sanctions, because it is likely to get its oil and gas at a lower price as the Iranians grow ever more dependent on the China market.  At this moment, in fact, the two countries are in the middle of a complex negotiation on the pricing of Iranian oil, and the Chinese have actually been ratcheting up the pressure by slightly cutting back on energy purchases.  But all this should be concluded by March, at least two months before the latest round of U.S. sanctions go into effect, according to experts in Beijing. In the end, the Chinese will certainly buy much more Iranian gas than oil, but Iran will still remain its third biggest oil supplier, right after Saudi Arabia and Angola.

As for other effects of the new sanctions on China, don't count on them.  Chinese businesses in Iran are building cars, fiber optics networks, and expanding the Tehran subway. Two-way trade is at $30 billion now and expected to hit $50 billion in 2015.  Chinese businesses will find a way around the banking problems the new sanctions impose.

Russia is, of course, another key supporter of "isolated" Iran.  It has opposed stronger sanctions either via the U.N. or through the Washington-approved package that targets Iran's Central Bank. In fact, it favors a rollback of the existing U.N. sanctions and has also been at work on an alternative plan that could, at least theoretically, lead to a face-saving nuclear deal for everyone.

On the nuclear front, Tehran has expressed a willingness to compromise with Washington along the lines of the plan Brazil and Turkey suggested and Washington deep-sixed in 2010. Since it is now so much clearer that, for Washington — certainly for Congress — the nuclear issue is secondary to regime change, any new negotiations are bound to prove excruciatingly painful.

This is especially true now that the leaders of the European Union have managed to remove themselves from a future negotiating table by shooting themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet.  In typical fashion, they have meekly followed Washington's lead in implementing an Iranian oil embargo. As a senior EU official told National Iranian American Council President Trita Parsi, and as EU diplomats have assured me in no uncertain terms, they fear this might prove to be the last step short of outright war.

Meanwhile, a team of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors has just visited Iran.  The IAEA is supervising all things nuclear in Iran, including its new uranium-enrichment plant at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom, with full production starting in June. The IAEA is positive: no bomb-making is involved.  Nonetheless, Washington (and the Israelis) continue to act as though it's only a matter of time — and not much of it at that.

Follow the Money

That Iranian isolation theme only gets weaker when one learns that the country is dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia for rials and rubles — a similar move to ones already made in its trade with China and Japan.  As for India, an economic powerhouse in the neighborhood, its leaders also refuse to stop buying Iranian oil, a trade that, in the long run, is similarly unlikely to be conducted in dollars. India is already using the yuan with China, as Russia and China have been trading in rubles and yuan for more than a year, as Japan and China are promoting direct trading in yen and yuan.  As for Iran and China, all new trade and joint investments will be settled in yuan and rial.

Translation, if any was needed: in the near future, with the Europeans out of the mix, virtually none of Iran's oil will be traded in dollars.

Moreover, three BRICS members (Russia, India, and China) allied with Iran are major holders (and producers) of gold. Their complex trade ties won't be affected by the whims of a U.S. Congress.  In fact, when the developing world looks at the profound crisis in the Atlanticist West, what they see is massive U.S. debt, the Fed printing money as if there's no tomorrow, lots of "quantitative easing," and of course the Eurozone shaking to its very foundations.

Follow the money. Leave aside, for the moment, the new sanctions on Iran's Central Bank that will go into effect months from now, ignore Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz (especially unlikely given that it's the main way Iran gets its own oil to market), and perhaps one key reason the crisis in the Persian Gulf is mounting involves this move to torpedo the petrodollar as the all-purpose currency of exchange.

It's been spearheaded by Iran and it's bound to translate into an anxious Washington, facing down not only a regional power, but its major strategic competitors China and Russia.  No wonder all those carriers are heading for the Persian Gulf right now, though it's the strangest of showdowns — a case of military power being deployed against economic power.

In this context, it's worth remembering that in September 2000 Saddam Hussein abandoned the petrodollar as the currency of payment for Iraq's oil, and moved to the euro. In March 2003, Iraq was invaded and the inevitable regime change occurred. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold dinar both as Africa's common currency and as the currency of payment for his country's energy resources. Another intervention and another regime change followed.

Washington/NATO/Tel Aviv, however, offers a different narrative.  Iran's "threats" are at the heart of the present crisis, even if these are, in fact, that country's reaction to non-stop US/Israeli covert war and now, of course, economic war as well.  It's those "threats," so the story goes, that are leading to rising oil prices and so fueling the current recession, rather than Wall Street's casino capitalism or massive U.S. and European debts. The cream of the 1% has nothing against high oil prices, not as long as Iran's around to be the fall guy for popular anger.

As energy expert Michael Klare pointed out recently, we are now in a new geo-energy era certain to be extremely turbulent in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.  But consider 2012 the start-up year as well for a possibly massive defection from the dollar as the global currency of choice. As perception is indeed reality, imagine the real world — mostly the global South — doing the necessary math and, little by little, beginning to do business in their own currencies and investing ever less of any surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds.  

Of course, the U.S. can always count on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates — which I prefer to call the Gulf Counterrevolution Club (just look at their performances during the Arab Spring). For all practical geopolitical purposes, the Gulf monarchies are a U.S. satrapy. Their decades-old promise to use only the petrodollar translates into them being an appendage of Pentagon power projection across the Middle East.  Centcom, after all, is based in Qatar; the U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain. In fact, in the immensely energy-wealthy lands that we could label Greater Pipelineistan — and that the Pentagon used to call “the arc of instability” — extending through Iran all the way to Central Asia, the GCC remains key to a dwindling sense of U.S. hegemony.

If this were an economic rewrite of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Pit and the Pendulum," Iran would be but one cog in an infernal machine slowly shredding the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Still, it's the cog that Washington is now focused on.  They have regime change on the brain.  All that's needed is a spark to start the fire (in — one hastens to add — all sorts of directions that are bound to catch Washington off guard).

Remember Operation Northwoods, that 1962 plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terror operations in the U.S. and blame them on Fidel Castro's Cuba.  (President Kennedy shot the idea down.)  Or recall the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, used by President Lyndon Johnson as a justification for widening the Vietnam War.  The U.S. accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of unprovoked attacks on U.S. ships.  Later, it became clear that one of the attacks had never even happened and the president had lied about it.

It's not at all far-fetched to imagine hardcore Full-Spectrum-Dominance practitioners inside the Pentagon riding a false-flag incident in the Persian Gulf to an attack on Iran (or simply using it to pressure Tehran into a fatal miscalculation).  Consider as well the new U.S. military strategy just unveiled by President Obama in which the focus of Washington's attention is to move from two failed ground wars in the Greater Middle East to the Pacific (and so to China). Iran happens to be right in the middle, in Southwest Asia, with all that oil heading toward an energy-hungry modern Middle Kingdom over waters guarded by the U.S. Navy.

So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call "Iran" may turn out to be as much about China and the U.S. dollar as it is about the politics of the Persian Gulf or Iran's nonexistent bomb.  The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born?

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. His latest book is The United States of Fear. Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, a TomDispatch regular, and a political analyst for al-Jazeera and RT. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

Debacle! How Two Wars in the Greater Middle East Revealed the Weakness of the Global Superpower

It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact.  It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana.  It was to be "mission accomplished" all the way.  And then, of course, it wasn’t.  And then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over (sorta).

It was the Iraq War, and we were the uninvited guests who didn’t want to go home.  To the last second, despite President Obama’s repeated promise that all American troops were leaving, despite an agreement the Iraqi government had signed with George W. Bush’s administration in 2008, America’s military commanders continued to lobby and Washington continued to negotiate for 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain in-country as advisors and trainers.

Only when the Iraqis simply refused to guarantee those troops immunity from local law did the last Americans begin to cross the border into Kuwait.  It was only then that our top officials began to hail the thing they had never wanted, the end of the American military presence in Iraq, as marking an era of "accomplishment."  They also began praising their own "decision" to leave as a triumph, and proclaimed that the troops were departing with – as the president put it – "their heads held high."

In a final flag-lowering ceremony in Baghdad, clearly meant for U.S. domestic consumption and well attended by the American press corps but not by Iraqi officials or the local media, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta spoke glowingly of having achieved "ultimate success."  He assured the departing troops that they had been a "driving force for remarkable progress" and that they could proudly leave the country "secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people begin a new chapter in history, free from tyranny and full of hope for prosperity and peace."  Later on his trip to the Middle East, speaking of the human cost of the war, he added, "I think the price has been worth it."

And then the last of those troops really did "come home" – if you define "home" broadly enough to include not just bases in the U.S. but also garrisons in Kuwait, elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, and sooner or later in Afghanistan.

On December 14th at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the president and his wife gave returning war veterans from the 82nd Airborne Division and other units a rousing welcome.  With some in picturesque maroon berets, they picturesquely hooahed the man who had once called their war “dumb.” Undoubtedly looking toward his 2012 campaign, President Obama, too, now spoke stirringly of "success" in Iraq, of "gains," of his pride in the troops, of the country’s "gratitude" to them, of the spectacular accomplishments achieved as well as the hard times endured by "the finest fighting force in the history of the world," and of the sacrifices made by our "wounded warriors" and "fallen heroes."

He praised "an extraordinary achievement nine years in the making," framing their departure this way: "Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq – all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering – all of it has led to this moment of success… [W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people."

And these themes – including the "gains" and the "successes," as well as the pride and gratitude, which Americans were assumed to feel for the troops – were picked up by the media and various pundits.  At the same time, other news reports were highlighting the possibility that Iraq was descending into a new sectarian hell, fueled by an American-built but largely Shiite military, in a land in which oil revenues barely exceeded the levels of the Saddam Hussein era, in a capital city which still had only a few hours of electricity a day, and that was promptly hit by a string of bombings and suicide attacks from an al-Qaeda affiliated group (nonexistent before the invasion of 2003), even as the influence of Iran grew and Washington quietly fretted.

A Consumer Society at War

It’s true that, if you were looking for low-rent victories in a near trillion-dollar war, this time, as various reporters and pundits pointed out, U.S. diplomats weren’t rushing for the last helicopter off an embassy roof amid chaos and burning barrels of dollars.  In other words, it wasn’t Vietnam and, as everyone knew, that was a defeat.  In fact, as other articles pointed out, our – as no fitting word has been found for it, let’s go with – withdrawal was a magnificent feat of reverse engineering, worthy of a force that was a nonpareil on the planet.

Even the president mentioned it.  After all, having seemingly moved much of the U.S. to Iraq, leaving was no small thing.  When the U.S. military began stripping the 505 bases it had built there at the cost of unknown multibillions of taxpayer dollars, it sloughed off $580 million worth of no-longer-wanted equipment on the Iraqis.  And yet it still managed to ship to Kuwait, other Persian Gulf garrisons, Afghanistan, and even small towns in the U.S. more than two million items ranging from Kevlar armored vests to port-a-potties.  We’re talking about the equivalent of 20,000 truckloads of materiel.

Not surprisingly, given the society it comes from, the U.S. military fights a consumer-intensive style of war and so, in purely commercial terms, the leaving of Iraq was a withdrawal for the ages.  Nor should we overlook the trophies the military took home with it, including a vast Pentagon database of thumbprints and retinal scans from approximately 10% of the Iraqi population.  (A similar program is still underway in Afghanistan.) 

When it came to "success," Washington had a good deal more than that going for it.  After all, it plans to maintain a Baghdad embassy so gigantic it puts the Saigon embassy of 1973 to shame.  With a contingent of 16,000 to 18,000 people, including a force of perhaps 5,000 armed mercenaries (provided by private security contractors like Triple Canopy with its $1.5 billion State Department contract), the "mission" leaves any normal definition of "embassy" or "diplomacy" in the dust.

In 2012 alone, it is slated to spend $3.8 billion, a billion of that on a much criticized police-training program, only 12% of whose funds actually go to the Iraqi police.  To be left behind in the "postwar era," in other words, will be something new under the sun.

Still, set aside the euphemisms and the soaring rhetoric, and if you want a simple gauge of the depths of America’s debacle in the oil heartlands of the planet, consider just how the final unit of American troops left Iraq. According to Tim Arango and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, they pulled out at 2:30 a.m. in the dead of night.  No helicopters off rooftops, but 110 vehicles setting out in the dark from Contingency Operating Base Adder.  The day before they left, according to the Times reporters, the unit’s interpreters were ordered to call local Iraqi officials and sheiks with whom the Americans had close relations and make future plans, as if everything would continue in the usual way in the week to come.

In other words, the Iraqis were meant to wake up the morning after to find their foreign comrades gone, without so much as a goodbye.  This is how much the last American unit trusted its closest local allies.  After shock and awe, the taking of Baghdad, the mission-accomplished moment, and the capture, trial, and execution of Saddam Hussein, after Abu Ghraib and the bloodletting of the civil war, after the surge and the Sunni Awakening movement, after the purple fingers and the reconstruction funds gone awry, after all the killing and the dying, the U.S. military slipped into the night without a word.

If, however, you did happen to be looking for a word or two to capture the whole affair, something less polite than those presently circulating, "debacle" and "defeat" might fit the bill.  The military of the self-proclaimed single greatest power of planet Earth, whose leaders once considered the occupation of the Middle East the key to future global policy and planned for a multi-generational garrisoning of Iraq, had been sent packing.  That should have been considered little short of stunning.

Face what happened in Iraq directly and you know that you’re on a new planet.

Doubling Down on Debacle

Of course, Iraq was just one of our invasions-turned-counterinsurgencies-turned-disasters.  The other, which started first and is still ongoing, may prove the greater debacle.  Though less costly so far in both American lives and national treasure, it threatens to become the more decisive of the two defeats, even though the forces opposing the U.S. military in Afghanistan remain an ill-armed, relatively weak set of minority insurgencies.

As great as was the feat of building the infrastructure for a military occupation and war in Iraq, and then equipping and supplying a massive military force there year after year, it was nothing compared to what the U.S had to do in Afghanistan.  Someday, the decision to invade that country, occupy it, build more than 400 bases there, surge in an extra 60,000 or more troops, masses of contractors, CIA agents, diplomats, and other civilian officials, and then push a weak local government to grant Washington the right to remain more or less in perpetuity will be seen as the delusional actions of a Washington incapable of gauging the limits of its power in the world.

Talk about learning curves: having watched their country fail disastrously in a major war on the Asian mainland three decades earlier, America’s leaders somehow convinced themselves that nothing was beyond the military prowess of the "sole superpower."  So they sent more than 250,000 American troops (along with all those Burger Kings, Subways, and Cinnabons) into two land wars in Eurasia.  The result has been another chapter in a history of American defeat – this time of a power that, despite its pretensions, was not only weaker than in the Vietnam era, but also far weaker than its leaders were capable of imagining.

You would think that, after a decade of watching this double debacle unfold, there might be a full-scale rush for the exits.  And yet the drawdown of U.S. "combat" troops in Afghanistan is not scheduled to be completed until December 31, 2014 (with thousands of advisors, trainers, and special operations forces slated to remain behind); the Obama administration is still negotiating feverishly with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on an agreement that – whatever the euphemisms chosen – would leave Americans garrisoned there for years to come; and, as in Iraq in 2010 and 2011, American commanders are openly lobbying for an even slower withdrawal schedule.

Again as in Iraq, in the face of the obvious, the official word couldn’t be peachier.  In mid-December, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta actually told frontline American troops there that they were "winning" the war.  Our commanders there similarly continue to tout "progress" and "gains," as well as a weakening of the Taliban grip on the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, thanks to the flooding of the region with U.S. surge troops and continual, devastating night raids by U.S. special operations forces.

Nonetheless, the real story in Afghanistan remains grim for a squirming former superpower – as it has been ever since its occupation resuscitated the Taliban, the least popular popular movement imaginable. Typically, the U.N. has recently calculated that "security-related events" in the first 11 months of 2011 rose 21% over the same period in 2010 (something denied by NATO).  Similarly, yet more resources are being poured into an endless effort to build and train Afghan security forces.  Almost $12 billion went into the project in 2011 and a similar sum is slated for 2012, and yet those forces still can’t operate on their own, nor do they fight particularly effectively (though their Taliban opposites have few such problems).

Afghan police and soldiers continue to desert in droves and the U.S. general in charge of the training operation suggested last year that, to have the slightest chance of success, it would need to be extended through at least 2016 or 2017.  (Forget for a moment that an impoverished Afghan government will be utterly incapable of supporting or financing the forces being created for it.)

The Pashtun-based Taliban, like any classic guerrilla force, has faded away before the overwhelming military of a major power, yet it still clearly has significant control over the southern countryside, and in the last year its acts of violence have spread ever more deeply into the non-Pashtun north.  And if U.S. forces in Iraq didn’t trust their local partners at the moment of departure, Americans in Afghanistan have every reason to be far more nervous.  Afghans in police or army uniforms – some trained by the Americans or NATO, some possibly Taliban guerrillas dressed in outfits bought on the black market – have regularly turned their guns on their putative allies in what’s referred to as "green-on-blue violence."  As 2011 ended, for instance, an Afghan army soldier shot and killed two French soldiers.  Not long before, several NATO troops were wounded when a man in an Afghan army uniform opened fire on them. 

In the meantime, U.S. troop strength is starting to drop; NATO allies look unsteady indeed; and the Taliban, whatever its trials and tribulations, undoubtedly senses that time is on its side.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers

Weak as the several outfits that make up the Taliban may be, there can be no question that they are preparing to successfully outlast the greatest military power of our time.  And mind you, none of this does more than touch on the debacle that the Afghan War could become.  If you want to judge the full folly of the American war (and gauge the waning of U.S. power globally), don’t even bother to look at Afghanistan.  Instead, check out the supply lines leading to it.

After all, Afghanistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia.  The U.S. is thousands of miles away.  No giant ports-cum-bases as at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam in the 1960s are available to bring in supplies.  For Washington, if the guerrillas it opposes go to war with little more than the clothes on their backs, its military is another matter.  From meals to body armor, building supplies to ammunition, it needs a massive – and massively expensive – supply system.  It also guzzles fuel the way a drunk downs liquor and has spent more than $20 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq annually just on air conditioning.

To keep itself in good shape, it must rely on tortuous supply lines thousands of miles long.  Because of this, it is not the arbiter of its own fate in Afghanistan, though this seems to have gone almost unnoticed for years.

Of all the impractical wars a declining empire could fight, the Afghan one may be the most impractical of all.  Hand it to the Soviet Union, at least its "bleeding wound" – the phrase Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave to its Afghan debacle of the 1980s – was conveniently next door.  For the nearly 91,000 American troops now in that country, their 40,000 NATO counterparts, and thousands of private contractors, the supplies that make the war possible can only enter Afghanistan three ways: perhaps 20% come in by air at staggering expense; more than a third arrive by the shortest and cheapest route – through the Pakistani port of Karachi, by truck or train north, and then by truck across narrow mountain defiles; and perhaps 40% (only "non-lethal" supplies allowed) via the Northern Distribution Network (NDN).

The NDN was fully developed only beginning in 2009, when it belatedly became clear to Washington that Pakistan had a potential stranglehold on the American war effort.  Involving at least 16 countries and just about every form of transport imaginable, the NDN is actually three routes, two of them via Russia, that funnel just about everything through the bottleneck of corrupt, autocratic Uzbekistan.

In other words, simply to fight its war, Washington has made itself dependent on the kindness of strangers – in this case, Pakistan and Russia.  It’s one thing when a superpower or great power on the rise casts its lot with countries that may not be natural allies; it’s quite a different story when a declining power does so.  Russian leaders are already making noises about the viability of the northern route if the U.S. continues to displease it on the placement of its prospective European missile defense system.

But the more immediate psychodrama of the Afghan War is in Pakistan.  There, the massive resupply operation is already a major scandal.  It was estimated, for instance, that, in 2008, 12% of all U.S. supplies heading from Karachi to Bagram Air Base went missing somewhere en route.  In what Karachi’s police chief has called "the mother of all scams," 29,000 cargo loads of U.S. supplies have disappeared after being unloaded at that port.

In fact, the whole supply system – together with the local security and protection agreements and bribes to various groups that are part and parcel of it along the way – has evidently helped fund and supply the Taliban, as well as stocking every bazaar en route and supporting local warlords and crooks of every sort.

Recently, in response to American air strikes that killed 24 of their border troops, the Pakistani leadership forced the Americans to leave Shamsi air base, where the CIA ran some of its drone operations, successfully pressured Washington into at least temporarily halting its drone air campaign in Pakistan’s borderlands, and closed the border crossings through which the whole American supply system must pass.  They remain closed almost two months later.  Without those routes, in the long run, the American war simply cannot be fought.

Though those crossings are likely to be reopened after a significant renegotiation of U.S.-Pakistani relations, the message couldn’t be clearer.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in those Pakistani borderlands, have not only drained American treasure, but exposed the relative helplessness of the "sole superpower."  Ten (or even five) years ago, the Pakistanis would simply never have dared to take actions like these.

As it turned out, the power of the U.S. military was threateningly impressive, but only until George W. Bush pulled the trigger twice.  In doing so, he revealed to the world that the U.S. could not win distant land wars against minimalist enemies or impose its will on two weak countries in the Greater Middle East.  Another reality was exposed as well, even if it has taken time to sink in: we no longer live on a planet where it’s obvious how to leverage staggering advantages in military technology into any other kind of power.

In the process, all the world could see what the United States was: the other declining power of the Cold War era.  Washington’s state of dependence on the Eurasian mainland is now clear enough, which means that, whatever "agreements" are reached with the Afghan government, the future in that country is not American.

Over the last decade, the U.S. has been taught a repetitive lesson when it comes to ground wars on the Eurasian mainland: don’t launch them.  The debacle of the impending double defeat this time around couldn’t be more obvious.  The only question that remains is just how humiliating the coming retreat from Afghanistan will turn out to be. The longer the U.S. stays, the more devastating the blow to its power.

All of this should hardly need to be said and yet, as 2012 begins, with the next political season already upon us, it is no less painfully clear that Washington will be incapable of ending the Afghan War any time soon.

At the height of what looked like success in Iraq and Afghanistan, American officials fretted endlessly about how, in the condescending phrase of the moment, to put an "Afghan face" or "Iraqi face" on America’s wars.  Now, at a nadir moment in the Greater Middle East, perhaps it’s finally time to put an American face on America’s wars, to see them clearly for the imperial debacles they have been – and act accordingly.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. His latest book is The United States of Fear.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

These last weeks, there have been two "occupations" in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage — that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park.  The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive — the police occupation of the Wall Street area. 

On a recent visit to the park, I found the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic, and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) — on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it.  At the park's edge, there is a police observation tower capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically and literally hundreds of police are stationed in the vicinity.  I counted more than 50 of them on just one of its sides at a moment when next to nothing was going on — and many more can be seen almost anywhere in the Wall Street area, lolling in doorways, idling in the subway, ambling on the plazas of banks, and chatting in the middle of traffic-less streets.

This might be seen as massive overkill.  After all, the New York police have already shelled out an extra $1.9 million, largely in overtime pay at a budget-cutting moment in the city.  When, as on Thursday, 100 to 150 marchers suddenly headed out from Zuccotti Park to circle Chase Bank several blocks away, close to the same number of police — some with ominous clumps of flexi-cuffs dangling from their belts — calved off with them.  It's as if the Occupy Wall Street movement has an eternal dark shadow that follows it everywhere.

At one level, this is all mystifying.  The daily crowds in the park remain remarkably, even startlingly, peaceable.  (Any violence has generally been the product of police action.)  On an everyday basis, a squad of 10 or 15 friendly police officers could easily handle the situation.  There is, of course, another possibility suggested to me by one of the policemen loitering at the Park's edge doing nothing in particular: "Maybe they're peaceable because we're here."  And here’s a second possibility: as my friend Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, said to me, "This is the most important piece of real estate on the planet and they're scared.  Look how amazed we are.  Imagine how they feel, especially after so many decades of seeing nothing like it."

And then there's a third possibility: that two quite separate universes are simply located in the vicinity of each other and of what, since September 12, 2001, we've been calling Ground Zero.  Think of it as Ground Zero Doubled, or think of it as the militarized recent American past and the unknown, potentially inspiring American future occupying something like the same space.  (You can, of course, come up with your own pairings, some far less optimistic.)  In their present state, New York's finest represent a local version of the way this country has been militarized to its bones in these last years and, since 9/11, transformed into a full-scale surveillance-intelligence-homeland-security state. 

Their stakeout in Zuccotti Park is geared to extreme acts, suicide bombers, and terrorism, as well as to a conception of protest and opposition as alien and enemy-like.  They are trying to herd, lock in, and possibly strangle a phenomenon that bears no relation to any of this.  They are, that is, policing the wrong thing, which is why every act of pepper spraying or swing of the truncheon, every aggressive act (as in the recent eviction threat to "clean" the park) blows back on them and only increases the size and coverage of the movement. 

Though much of the time they are just a few feet apart, the armed state backing that famed 1%, or Wall Street, and the unarmed protesters claiming the other 99% might as well be in two different times in two different universes connected by a Star-Trekkian wormhole and meeting only where pepper spray hits eyes.

Which means anyone visiting the Occupy Wall Street site is also watching a strange dance of phantoms.  Still, we do know one thing.  This massive semi-militarized force we continue to call "the police" will, in the coming years, only grow more so. After all, they know but one way to operate. 

Right now, for instance, over crowds of protesters the police hover in helicopters with high-tech cameras and sensors, but in the future there can be little question that in the skies of cities like New York, the police will be operating advanced drone aircraft.  Already, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse indicates in his groundbreaking report, the U.S. military and the CIA are filling the global skies with missile-armed drones and the clamor for domestic drones is growing.  The first attack on an American neighborhood, not one in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, or Libya, surely lurks somewhere in our future.  Empires, after all, have a way of coming home to roost. ~ Tom

America's Secret Empire of Drone Bases – Its Full Extent Revealed for the First Time

By Nick Turse

They increasingly dot the planet.  There's a facility outside Las Vegas where "pilots" work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about. 

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide.  Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America's ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now. 

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases — some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment — are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war.  They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad — in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign "footprint" and little accountability.

Using military documents, press accounts, and other open source information, an in-depth analysis by TomDispatch has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations.  There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.

A Galaxy of Bases

Over the last decade, the American use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has expanded exponentially, as has media coverage of their use.  On September 21st, the Wall Street Journal reported that the military has deployed missile-armed MQ-9 Reaper drones on the "island nation of Seychelles to intensify attacks on al Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Somalia."  A day earlier, a Washington Post piece also mentioned the same base on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago, as well as one in the African nation of Djibouti, another under construction in Ethiopia, and a secret CIA airstrip being built for drones in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. (Some suspect it’s Saudi Arabia.)

Post journalists Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock reported that the "Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen."  Within days, the Post also reported that a drone from the new CIA base in that unidentified Middle Eastern country had carried out the assassination of radical al-Qaeda preacher and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

With the killing of al-Awlaki, the Obama Administration has expanded its armed drone campaign to no fewer than six countries, though the CIA, which killed al-Awlaki, refuses to officially acknowledge its drone assassination program.  The Air Force is less coy about its drone operations, yet there are many aspects of those, too, that remain in the shadows.  Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes recently told TomDispatch that, "for operational security reasons, we do not discuss worldwide operating locations of Remotely Piloted Aircraft, to include numbers of locations around the world."

Still, those 60 military and CIA bases worldwide, directly connected to the drone program, tell us much about America's war-making future.  From command and control and piloting to maintenance and arming, these facilities perform key functions that allow drone campaigns to continue expanding, as they have for more than a decade.  Other bases are already under construction or in the planning stages.  When presented with our list of Air Force sites within America's galaxy of drone bases, Lieutenant Colonel Haynes responded, "I have nothing further to add to what I've already said."

Even in the face of government secrecy, however, much can be discovered.  Here, then, for the record is a TomDispatch accounting of America's drone bases in the United States and around the world.

The Near Abroad

News reports have frequently focused on Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas as ground zero in America's military drone campaign.  Sitting in darkened, air-conditioned rooms 7,500 miles from Afghanistan, drone pilots dressed in flight suits remotely control MQ-9 Reapers and their progenitors, the less heavily-armed MQ-1 Predators. Beside them, sensor operators manipulate the TV camera, infrared camera, and other high-tech sensors on board the plane.  Their faces are lit up by digital displays showing video feeds from the battle zone.  By squeezing a trigger on a joystick, one of those Air Force "pilots" can loose a Hellfire missile on a person half a world away.

While Creech gets the lion's share of media attention — it even has its own drones on site — numerous other bases on U.S. soil have played critical roles in America's drone wars.  The same video-game-style warfare is carried out by U.S and British pilots not far away at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force's 2nd Special Operations Squadron (SOS).  According to a factsheet provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, the 2nd SOS and its drone operators are scheduled to be relocated to the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida in the coming months.

Reapers or Predators are also being flown from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, March Air Reserve Base in California, Springfield Air National Guard Base in Ohio, Cannon Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Ellington Airport in Houston, Texas, the Air National Guard base in Fargo, North Dakota, Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, and Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, New York.  Recently, it was announced that Reapers flown by Hancock's pilots would begin taking off on training missions from the Army's Fort Drum, also in New York State.

Meanwhile, at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, according to a report by the New York Times, teams of camouflage-clad Air Force analysts sit in a secret intelligence and surveillance installation monitoring cell-phone intercepts, high-altitude photographs, and most notably, multiple screens of streaming live video from drones in Afghanistan.  They call it "Death TV" and are constantly instant-messaging with and talking to commanders on the ground in order to supply them with real-time intelligence on enemy troop movements.  Air Force analysts also closely monitor the battlefield from Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida and a facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.

CIA drone operators also reportedly pilot their aircraft from the Agency's nearby Langley, Virginia headquarters.  It was from here that analysts apparently watched footage of Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, for example, thanks to video sent back by the RQ-170 Sentinel, an advanced drone nicknamed the "Beast of Kandahar."  According to Air Force documents, the Sentinel is flown from both Creech Air Force Base and Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.

Predators, Reapers, and Sentinels are just part of the story.  At Beale Air Force Base in California, Air Force personnel pilot the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned drone used for long-range, high-altitude surveillance missions, some of them originating from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam (a staging ground for drone flights over Asia).  Other Global Hawks are stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, while the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio manages the Global Hawk as well as the Predator and Reaper programs for the Air Force. 

Other bases have been intimately involved in training drone operators, including Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and New Mexico's Kirtland Air Force Base, as is the Army's Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which is home to "the world's largest UAV training center," according to a report by National Defense magazine.  There, hundreds of employees of defense giant General Dynamics train military personnel to fly smaller tactical drones like the Hunter and the Shadow.  The physical testing of drones goes on at adjoining Libby Army Airfield and "two UAV runways located approximately four miles west of Libby," according to Global Security, an on-line clearinghouse for military information.  

Additionally, small drone training for the Army is carried out at Fort Benning in Georgia while at Fort Rucker, Alabama — "the home of Army aviation" — the Unmanned Aircraft Systems program coordinates doctrine, strategy, and concepts pertaining to UAVs.  Recently, Fort Benning also saw the early testing of true robotic drones — which fly without human guidance or a hand on any joystick.  This, wrote the Washington Post, is considered the next step toward a future in which drones will "hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans."

The Army has also carried out UAV training exercises at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and, earlier this year, the Navy launched its X-47B, a next-generation semi-autonomous stealth drone, on its first flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California.  That flying robot — designed to operate from the decks of aircraft carriers — has since been sent on to Maryland's Naval Air Station Patuxent River for further testing.  At nearby Webster Field, the Navy worked out kinks in its Fire Scout pilotless helicopter, which has also been tested at Fort Rucker and Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, as well as Florida's Mayport Naval Station and Jacksonville Naval Air Station.  The latter base was also where the Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system was developed.  It is now based there and at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State.

Foreign Jewels in the Crown

The Navy is actively looking for a suitable site in the Western Pacific for a BAMS base, and is currently in talks with several Persian Gulf states about a site in the Middle East.  It already has Global Hawks perched at its base in Sigonella, Italy.

The Air Force is now negotiating with Turkey to relocate some of the Predator drones still operating in Iraq to the giant air base at Incirlik next year.  Many different UAVs have been based in Iraq since the American invasion of that country, including small tactical models like the Raven-B that troops launched by hand from Kirkuk Regional Air Base, Shadow UAVs that flew from Forward Operating Base Normandy in Baqubah Province, Predators operating out of Balad Airbase, miniature Desert Hawk drones launched from Tallil Air Base, and Scan Eagles based at Al Asad Air Base.

Elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, according to Aviation Week, the military is launching Global Hawks from Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, piloted by personnel stationed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, to track "shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Arabian Sea."  There are unconfirmed reports that the CIA may be operating drones from the Emirates as well.  In the past, other UAVs have apparently been flown from Kuwait's Ali Al Salem Air Base and Al Jaber Air Base, as well as Seeb Air Base in Oman.    

At Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Air Force runs an air operations command and control facility, critical to the drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The new secret CIA base on the Arabian peninsula, used to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, may or may not be the airstrip in Saudi Arabia whose existence a senior U.S. military official recently confirmed to Fox News.  In the past, the CIA has also operated UAVs out of Tuzel, Uzbekistan.

In neighboring Afghanistan, drones fly from many bases including Jalalabad Air Base, Kandahar Air Field, the air base at Bagram, Camp Leatherneck, Camp Dwyer, Combat Outpost Payne, Forward Operating Base (FOB) Edinburgh and FOB Delaram II, to name a few.  Afghan bases are, however, more than just locations where drones take off and land. 

It is a common misconception that U.S.-based operators are the only ones who "fly" America's armed drones.  In fact, in and around America's war zones, UAVs begin and end their flights under the control of local "pilots."  Take Afghanistan's massive Bagram Air Base.  After performing preflight checks alongside a technician who focuses on the drone's sensors, a local airman sits in front of a Dell computer tower and multiple monitors, two keyboards, a joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and various switches, overseeing the plane's takeoff before handing it over to a stateside counterpart with a similar electronics set-up.  After the mission is complete, the controls are transferred back to the local operators for the landing.  Additionally, crews in Afghanistan perform general maintenance and repairs on the drones.

In the wake of a devastating suicide attack by an al-Qaeda double agent that killed CIA officers and contractors at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost in 2009, it came to light that the facility was heavily involved in target selection for drone strikes across the border in Pakistan.  The drones themselves, as the Washington Post noted at the time, were "flown from separate bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Both the Air Force and the CIA have conducted operations in Pakistani air space, with some missions originating in Afghanistan and others from inside Pakistan.  In 2006, images of what appear to be Predator drones stationed at Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan’s Balochistan province were found on Google Earth and later published.  In 2009, the New York Times reported that operatives from Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, had taken over the task of arming Predator drones at the CIA's "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Following the May Navy SEAL raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, that country's leaders reportedly ordered the United States to leave Shamsi.  The Obama administration evidently refused and word leaked out, according to the Washington Post, that the base was actually owned and sublet to the U.S. by the United Arab Emirates, which had built the airfield "as an arrival point for falconry and other hunting expeditions in Pakistan." 

The U.S. and Pakistani governments have since claimed that Shamsi is no longer being used for drone strikes.  True or not, the U.S. evidently also uses other Pakistani bases for its drones, including possibly PAF Base Shahbaz, located near the city of Jacocobad, and another base located near Ghazi.  

The New Scramble for Africa

Recently, the headline story, when it comes to the expansion of the empire of drone bases, has been Africa.  For the last decade, the U.S. military has been operating out of Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion base in the tiny African nation of Djibouti.  Not long after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became a base for Predator drones and has since been used to conduct missions over neighboring Somalia.   

For some time, rumors have also been circulating about a secret American base in Ethiopia.  Recently, a U.S. official revealed to the Washington Post that discussions about a drone base there had been underway for up to four years, "but that plan was delayed because u2018the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed.'" Now construction is evidently underway, if not complete.

Then, of course, there is that base on the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.  A small fleet of Navy and Air Force drones began operating openly there in 2009 to track pirates in the region's waters.  Classified diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks, however, reveal that those drones have also secretly been used to carry out missions in Somalia.  "Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport," the Post reports, the base consists of three or four "Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors, according to the cables." 

The U.S. has also recently sent four smaller tactical drones to the African nations of Uganda and Burundi for use by those countries' militaries.

New and Old Empires

Even if the Pentagon budget were to begin to shrink, expansion of America's empire of drone bases is a sure thing in the years to come.  Drones are now the bedrock of Washington's future military planning and — with counterinsurgency out of favor — the preferred way of carrying out wars abroad. 

During the eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, as the U.S. was building up its drone fleets, the country launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and carried out limited strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, using drones in at least four of those countries.  In less than three years under President Obama, the U.S. has launched drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.  It maintains that it has carte blanche to kill suspected enemies in any nation (or at least any nation in the global south).  

According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office published earlier this year, "the Department of Defense plans to purchase about 730 new medium-sized and large unmanned aircraft systems" over the next decade.  In practical terms, this means more drones like the Reaper.

Military officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Reaper "can fly 1,150 miles from base, conduct missions, and return home… [T]he time a drone can stay aloft depends on how heavily armed it is."  According to a drone operator training document obtained by TomDispatch, at maximum payload, meaning with 3,750 pounds worth of Hellfire missiles and GBU-12 or GBU-30 bombs on board, the Reaper can remain aloft for 16 to 20 hours.  

Even a glance at a world map tells you that, if the U.S. is to carry out ever more drone strikes across the developing world, it will need more bases for its future UAVs.  As an unnamed senior military official pointed out to a Washington Post reporter, speaking of all those new drone bases clustered around the Somali and Yemeni war zones, "If you look at it geographically, it makes sense — you get out a ruler and draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take off from."

Earlier this year, an analysis by TomDispatch determined that there are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe — a shadowy base-world providing plenty of existing sites that can, and no doubt will, host drones.  But facilities selected for a pre-drone world may not always prove optimal locations for America's current and future undeclared wars and assassination campaigns.  So further expansion in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is a likelihood.   

What are the Air Force's plans in this regard?  Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes was typically circumspect, saying, "We are constantly evaluating potential operating locations based on evolving mission needs."  If the last decade is any indication, those "needs" will only continue to grow.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, and investigative journalist. The associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a senior editor at Alternet.org, his latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books).  This article marks another of Turse's joint Alternet/TomDispatch investigative reports on U.S. national security policy and the American empire.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

[Note to Readers:  Who hasn't received one – or 100 – of those "Nigerian" letters offering you, in florid prose, millions of potential dollars and with nary a catch in sight?  But who knew that the highest officials in Washington have been receiving them as well – and from our war zones rather than Africa.  Today, TomDispatch.com is proud to release examples of such letters from a treasure trove of documents shown to us by the new website ScamiLeaks.  (For unknown reasons, the British Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel all refused to take part in this process, and so it's been left to TomDispatch to release a selection of them to the world.)

Though we lack the staff of those papers, we have nonetheless done due diligence.  We investigated each of the letters that follow and now believe that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, was never trapped in a Kabul airport bathroom, that "Iraqi parliamentarian" Sami Malouf does not exist, and that the letter writer who calls herself Serena Massoud could not be the lost granddaughter of the Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Massoud whom al-Qaeda operatives assassinated two days before the 9/11 attacks.  Curiously enough, however, all the Washington or Pentagon scandals the letter writers mention involving lost, squandered, or stolen money turn out to be perfectly real.  In fact, they represent one of the true scams of our time.

Below, then, are three of the letters we have chosen as representative from the enormous archive that ScamiLeaks will soon release to the world.  We have touched none of them, not even to correct various obvious grammatical errors and misspellings.  We have only added a small number of links not in the originals, so that readers can explore the corruption scandals the letter writers refer to.  We do not know whether any of the Washington officials addressed responded to these letters or were taken in by them (as they evidently were by scam after scam in our war zones these last ten years).

Whatever you make of the three letters below, consider them collectively a little parable about the fallout from our now decade-old set of wars in the Greater Middle East. ~ Tom

To My Closest of Friends President and Professor Barack Obama,

I send this missive to you with deepest urgency.  My embarrassment at importuning you in any way in your busy life is beyond expression.  Please excuse my rushedness, but I, your friend and associate, Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, have lost my wallet, passport, and Kabul Bank deposit book in the men's room of Kabul International Airport.

It is to my dismay to discover, in addition, that the $31 billion in small bills I had secured within the sleeves of my chapan, thanks to your most generous heart and the reconstruction abilities of the American contractor, is now gone as well.  Without it, I cannot return to the presidential palace.

Please let me ask whether you can at moment soonest respond at this email address and let me know that you are willing to deposit a new $33 billion in the Kabul Bank for me.  I will then, of course, provide you with the necessary account numbers and transmission information.  (Lest you would think me in any way dishonest, my dear friend, I hasten to point out that Kabul Bank is the shining light of Afghan Banking and the extra $2 billion above and beyond the lost $31 billion, are deeply necessary if I am to present alms on my way from the airport to the Palace.)

As we are the closest of companions, I reassure you immediately and in no uncertain terms that this money of yours, a mere pittance compared to what is surely available to the President of the United States, is Absolutely Safe in the Kabul Bank (whose small troubles will soon be straightened out) and will in no way be lost to you.  If you remit the said sum to me with all due speed, I will return it to you with $2 billion in interest within the month.  You have my sincerest promise of that.

Act with great haste, my erstwhile companion!

Your Friend and Associate in Need,

Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan

Attention: Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Gythner, Washington CD

From: Barrister Hammad al-Saad, First Assistant and Secretary to Parliamentarian Sami Malouf, Baghdad, Iraq

With due respect, Good News!

Thanks to a dead business associate who lacks all heirs, an accountant for my lawerly firm, Al-Azawi & Sons, has discovered an abandoned sum of $6.6 billion (SIX BILLION SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS) in U.S. bills in a deserted warehouse on the outskirts of Baghdad owned by said dead associate.   They are all shrink-wrapped $100 (ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR) bills with your Benjamin on the front cover.  No one has claimed this money.

It has come to our attention that one of your Predecessors also lost $6.6 billion (SIX BILLION SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS) in shrink-wrapped $100 (ONE HUNDRD DOLLAR) bills with same Benjamin on cover, which were shipped to my country by C-130 cargo plane in 2003.  In the discrepitude of Iraq at that moment, such a misplacement is not strange. 

However, your loss of such moneys must weigh deeply on you.  We wish to alleviate that weight and return to you the rightful sums.  This can happen almost immediately.  In order to ship Benjamin to you, we must, of course, avoid Iraqi customs, which is sorrowfully corrupt.

To do this we need a few small fees from you, esteemed Gythner, to grease other palms with friendship and hire such a plane as to return your sums.  I, Barrister Hammad Al-Saad, will personally fly this money to you.  This is 100% (ONE HUNDRED PERCENT) risk free!

Do not worry.  You are in our thoughts momentarily.  Please contact us to firm up details and to exchange pleasantries on necessary fees!

Yours Most Fully Sincerely and Honorably,

Hammad Al-Saad

To: David Petreaus, Director-General of the Central Intelligence Agency

From: Serena Massoud, Granddaughter of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshi

My dearest,

I beg your indulgence, Kind General, I am the Lost Granddaughter of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the erstwhile, sadly al-Qaeda assassinated Lion of Panjshir.  Mine is a dismal tale to tell and it is yours to be patient, I hope with utter nonindifference, while I explain.

Let me preface this dawn of the weighted heart by assuring you that it will be worth all your whiles.  I, Serena Massoud, out of my full heart and deep love for America and the CIA, and You – I, a poor Afghan woman awash in her times, wish to return to you $125 million.  This, you will agree, is part of the $360 million that, according to one of your most esteemed news sources, "has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals, and power brokers with ties to both."

I must beg your forgiveness.  To explain how such fundings came almost into my own hands and how – with barely no effort on your part – you will get them back, I have a tangled tale to tell of a dark and stormy decade in my country whose breezes and gales buffeted me.  But if I told it all to you, dear General, you would stumble into Incredulity.

Let me just state that, after many and various adventures of the terrible kind, I found myself, against my uttermost will, in the grips of marriage to Omar Fahim Dadulah, whom you would know as a War Lord.  He was a man of Evil Incarnate and his treatment of yours truly was not to be described.  He was, moreover, In League With the Taliban, and among those whom Navy Times so rightly describes as absorbing your moneys with obscure nefariousness of purpose.

Without straining your patience, My Darling Director-General, in the end he was expectably poisoned by the self-same proclaimed Taliban and, as death came upon him, called me to his bedside.  He then informed me in tones too solemn to mistake of that fund of $125 million, the very dollars which you have slipped upon the Taliban in trucking fees and safety passes and the like, which he had hidden in a spot unmentionable and which he meant for me.

I beg of you, my dearest General, lend me a helping hand to assist me in claiming this money.  Be my guardian, let me be your orphan ward, and receive the money in your account.  Also promise to invest a small part of it for me in a lucrative business since I am still a young woman and make arrangements for me to come over to your country to further my education and secure a beloved citizenship permit.

I have seen the photos of you.  Your chest of medals is the light of my day.  It is with the most profound and sincerity that I make this gesture to you from deep within my loving soul.  Your open heart has touched me.  I eagerly await your tiptoed words.

Humbly Yrs and Only Yrs,

Serena Masoud

A Further Note: The "Nigerian" letter scam is, in its own way, remarkable.  Smart grifters from another land generally pose as highly (or strategically) placed individuals, but also ignorant yokels and innocents with a minimalist grasp of over-the-top nineteenth-century English.  It's a highly skilled compositional con and it works, evidently to the tune of tens of millions of dollars yearly.  If you want to explore how it operates, fleecing significant numbers of people, the Snopes.com website is most useful.  (Click here.)  For a wonderful older essay on the charms of those scam letters, check out Douglas Cruickshank's "I crave your distinguished indulgence (and all your cash)" at Salon.com. 

If, on the other hand, you prefer to explore the scams Washington has been involved in these last endless years of war, you could start with Adam Weinstein's recent Mother Jones piece "The All-Time Ten Worst Military Contracting Boondoggles."  The individual scams from this period are a dime a dozen (or rather, unfortunately, billions of dollars a dozen, making the "Nigerians" look like the rubes they aren't). These would include, to mention just a few examples, that missing $31 to $60 billion in contractor waste and fraud in the Afghan and Iraq war zones; the $6.6 billion (evidently largely Iraqi oil money held in U.S. banks) that the Bush administration sent in pallets of shrink-wrapped bills to Iraq, and which then went missing-in-action; the $360 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars that, according to a special military task force, headed directly for the Taliban and other Afghan lovelies; the $65 billion that went into the development of the F-22, the most expensive fighter jet ever built not to be used – since May, all of the F-22s in the U.S. fleet have been grounded indefinitely; and the more than $140 billion in contracts the Pentagon awarded to companies in 2010 without a hint of competitive bidding, up from $50 billion in 2001. 

Believe me, the "Nigerians" have a great deal to learn from the Pentagon and from U.S. operations in the Greater Middle East, as do the real rubes in the larger scam of things, gullible American taxpayers!

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.

The Best of Tom Engelhardt

It was built for… well, not to put too fine a point on it, victory. I'm talking, of course, about the ill-named Camp Victory, the massive military complex, a set of bases really, constructed around an old hunting lodge and nine of former dictator Saddam Hussein's opulent palaces near Baghdad International Airport.

Within months of American troops entering Baghdad in April 2003, it was already "the largest overseas American combat base since the Vietnam War." It would become the grand visiting place for American politicians — back when the U.S. was still being called the global "hyperpower" — arriving in what was almost imagined as our 51st state. It was the headquarters for the American military effort and later "surge" strategy in Iraq. It was also the stomping grounds for at least 46,000 U.S. troops stationed there and who knows how many spooks, contractors, hire-a-guns, Defense Department civilians, and third-world workers. It had its own Cinnabon and Burger King, its massive PXs, and it's 27-mile perimeter of "blast walls and concertina wire," as well as its own hospital and water-bottling plant. It was a "city," a world, unto itself.

American reporters passed through it regularly and yet for most Americans who didn't set foot in it, our massive outpost in the heart of the oil heartlands of the planet (the place we were supposed to garrison for decades, if not generations) might as well not have existed. For all the news about Iraq that, once upon a time, was delivered to Americans, the humongous Camp Victory itself never struck journalists as particularly newsworthy, nor generally did the billions of dollars that went into building the more than 500 U.S. bases, mega to micro, that we now know were constructed in that country at U.S. taxpayers' expense.

All this was true until Camp Victory was at the edge of what can only be called ultimate defeat and finally found, if not its chronicler, then its obituary writer in Annie Gowan of the Washington Post. Perhaps it's often true that only at a funeral do any of us get our due. But with the last American slated to leave Camp Victory (though not Iraq) in early December, with the gates to be locked and the keys turned over to the Iraqi government, she quotes Lt. Col. Sean Wilson, an Army public affairs officer, on the emptying of the base this way: "This whole place is becoming a ghost town. You get the feeling you're the last person on Earth." (Of course, Iraqis might have a different impression.)

The U.S. military will evidently conduct no final interment ceremonies in which the base is renamed Camp Defeat before being abandoned. Nonetheless, even as Washington hangs on grimly to its remaining militarized toeholds in Iraq, that should be the one-line summary obit on America's great Iraq adventure.

In his latest piece of reportage for TomDispatch, Nick Turse offers us an eye-opening reminder that, while the U.S. is drawing down to bare bones in Iraq, it has actually been building up its forces, operations, and infrastructure in the Greater Middle East. Still, somewhere in the Camp Victory story, isn't there a modest lesson that Washington could draw? (Though, as Turse makes clear, it won’t…) ~ Tom

Obama's Arc of Instability Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time

By Nick Turse

It's a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called "the arc of instability." It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them — from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia — Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.

Garrisoning the planet is just part of it. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities right up to full-scale war. But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind: the odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in which the United States is in no way militarily involved.

Covenant of the Arc

"Freedom is on the march in the broader Middle East," the president said in his speech. "The hope of liberty now reaches from Kabul to Baghdad to Beirut and beyond. Slowly but surely, we’re helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom."

An arc of freedom. You could be forgiven if you thought that this was an excerpt from President Barack Obama's Arab Spring speech, where he said "[I]t will be the policy of the United States to… support transitions to democracy." Those were, however, the words of his predecessor George W. Bush. The giveaway is that phrase "arc of instability," a core rhetorical concept of the former president's global vision and that of his neoconservative supporters.

The dream of the Bush years was to militarily dominate that arc, which largely coincided with the area from North Africa to the Chinese border, also known as the Greater Middle East, but sometimes was said to stretch from Latin America to Southeast Asia. While the phrase has been dropped in the Obama years, when it comes to projecting military power President Obama is in the process of trumping his predecessor.

In addition to waging more wars in "arc" nations, Obama has overseen the deployment of greater numbers of special operations forces to the region, has transferred or brokered the sale of substantial quantities of weapons there, while continuing to build and expand military bases at a torrid rate, as well as training and supplying large numbers of indigenous forces. Pentagon documents and open source information indicate that there is not a single country in that arc in which U.S. military and intelligence agencies are not now active. This raises questions about just how crucial the American role has been in the region's increasing volatility and destabilization.

Flooding the Arc

Given the centrality of the arc of instability to Bush administration thinking, it was hardly surprising that it launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and carried out limited strikes in three other arc states — Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Nor should anyone have been shocked that it also deployed elite military forces and special operators from the Central Intelligence Agency elsewhere within the arc.

In his book The One Percent Doctrine, journalist Ron Suskind reported on CIA plans, unveiled in September 2001 and known as the "Worldwide Attack Matrix," for "detailed operations against terrorists in 80 countries." At about the same time, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed that the nation had embarked on “a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60 countries." By the end of the Bush years, the Pentagon would indeed have special operations forces deployed in 60 countries around the world.

It has been the Obama administration, however, that has embraced the concept far more fully and engaged the region even more broadly. Last year, the Washington Post reported that U.S. had deployed special operations forces in 75 countries, from South America to Central Asia. Recently, however, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me that on any given day, America's elite troops are working in about 70 countries, and that its country total by year's end would be around 120. These forces are engaged in a host of missions, from Army Rangers involved in conventional combat in Afghanistan to the team of Navy SEALs who assassinated Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, to trainers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines within U.S. Special Operations Command working globally from the Dominican Republic to Yemen.

The United States is now involved in wars in six arc-of-instability nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It has military personnel deployed in other arc states, including Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. Of these countries, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all host U.S. military bases, while the CIA is reportedly building a secret base somewhere in the region for use in its expanded drone wars in Yemen and Somalia. It is also using already existing facilities in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates for the same purposes, and operating a clandestine base in Somalia where it runs indigenous agents and carries out counterterrorism training for local partners.

In addition to its own military efforts, the Obama administration has also arranged for the sale of weaponry to regimes in arc states across the Middle East, including Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. It has been indoctrinating and schooling indigenous military partners through the State Department's and Pentagon's International Military Education and Training program. Last year, it provided training to more than 7,000 students from 130 countries. "The emphasis is on the Middle East and Africa because we know that terrorism will grow, and we know that vulnerable countries are the most targeted," Kay Judkins, the program's policy manager, recently told the American Forces Press Service.

According to Pentagon documents released earlier this year, the U.S. has personnel — some in token numbers, some in more sizeable contingents — deployed in 76 other nations sometimes counted in the arc of instability: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Syria, Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

While arrests of 30 members of an alleged CIA spy ring in Iran earlier this year may be, like earlier incarcerations of supposed American "spies", pure theater for internal consumption or international bargaining, there is little doubt that the U.S. is conducting covert operations there, too. Last year, reports surfaced that U.S. black ops teams had been authorized to run missions inside that country, and spies and local proxies are almost certainly at work there as well. Just recently, the Wall Street Journal revealed a series of "secret operations on the Iran-Iraq border" by the U.S. military and a coming CIA campaign of covert operations aimed at halting the smuggling of Iranian arms into Iraq.

All of this suggests that there may, in fact, not be a single nation within the arc of instability, however defined, in which the United States is without a base or military or intelligence personnel, or where it is not running agents, sending weapons, conducting covert operations — or at war.

The Arc of History

Just after President Obama came into office in 2009, then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair briefed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Drawing special attention to the arc of instability, he summed up the global situation this way: "The large region from the Middle East to South Asia is the locus for many of the challenges facing the United States in the twenty-first century." Since then, as with the Bush-identified phrase "global war on terror," the Obama administration and the U.S. military have largely avoided using "arc of instability," preferring to refer to it using far vaguer formulations.

During a speech at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Symposium earlier this year, for example, Navy Admiral Eric Olson, then the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, pointed toward a composite satellite image of the world at night. Before September 11, 2001, said Olson, the lit portion of the planet — the industrialized nations of the global north — were considered the key areas. Since then, he told the audience, 51 countries, almost all of them in the arc of instability, have taken precedence. “Our strategic focus," he said, "has shifted largely to the south… certainly within the special operations community, as we deal with the emerging threats from the places where the lights aren’t.”

More recently, in remarks at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studiesin Washington, D.C., John O. Brennan, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, outlined the president's new National Strategy for Counterterrorism, which highlighted carrying out missions in the "Pakistan-Afghanistan region" and "a focus on specific regions, including what we might call the periphery — places like Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and the Maghreb [northern Africa]."

"This does not," Brennan insisted, "require a u2018global' war" — and indeed, despite the Bush-era terminology, it never has. While, for instance, planning for the 9/11 attacks took place in Germany and would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid hailed from the United Kingdom, advanced, majority-white Western nations have never been American targets. The "arc" has never arced out of the global south, whose countries are assumed to be fundamentally unstable by nature and their problems fixable through military intervention.

Building Instability

A decade's evidence has made it clear that U.S. operations in the arc of instability are destabilizing. For years, to take one example, Washington has wielded military aid, military actions, and diplomatic pressure in such a way as to undermine the government of Pakistan, promote factionalism within its military and intelligence services, and stoke anti-American sentiment to remarkable levels among the country's population. (According to a recent survey, just 12% of Pakistanis have a positive view of the United States.)

A semi-secret drone war in that nation's tribal borderlands, involving hundreds of missile strikes and significant, if unknown levels, of civilian casualties, has been only the most polarizing of Washington's many ham-handed efforts. When it comes to that CIA-run effort, a recent Pew survey of Pakistanis found that 97% of respondents viewed it negatively, a figure almost impossible to achieve in any sort of polling.

In Yemen, long-time support — in the form of aid, military training, and weapons, as well as periodic air or drone strikes — for dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh led to a special relationship between the U.S. and elite Yemeni forces led by Saleh's relatives. This year, those units have been instrumental in cracking down on the freedom struggle there, killing protesters and arresting dissenting officers who refused orders to open fire on civilians. It's hardly surprising that, even before Yemen slid into a leaderless void (after Saleh was wounded in an assassination attempt), a survey of Yemenis found — again a jaw-dropping polling figure — 99% of respondents viewed the U.S. government's relations with the Islamic world unfavorably, while just 4% "somewhat" or "strongly approved" of Saleh's cooperation with Washington.

Instead of pulling back from operations in Yemen, however, the U.S. has doubled down. The CIA, with support from Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, has been running local agents as well as a lethal drone campaign aimed at Islamic militants. The U.S. military has been carrying out its own air strikes, as well as sending in more trainers to work with indigenous forces, while American black ops teams launch lethal missions, often alongside Yemeni allies.

These efforts have set the stage for further ill-will, political instability, and possible blowback. Just last year, a U.S. drone strike accidentally killed Jabr al-Shabwani, the son of strongman Sheikh Ali al-Shabwani. In an act of revenge, Ali repeatedly attacked of one of Yemen’s largest oil pipelines, resulting in billions of dollars in lost revenue for the Yemeni government, and demanded Saleh stop cooperating with the U.S. strikes.

Earlier this year, in Egypt and Tunisia, long-time U.S. efforts to promote what it liked to call "regional stability" — through military alliances, aid, training, and weaponry — collapsed in the face of popular movements against the U.S.-supported dictators ruling those nations. Similarly, in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, popular protests erupted against authoritarian regimes partnered with and armed courtesy of the U.S. military. It's hardly surprising that, when asked in a recent survey whether President Obama had met the expectations created by his 2009 speech in Cairo, where he called for "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," only 4% of Egyptians answered yes. (The same poll found only 6% of Jordanians thought so and just 1% of Lebanese.)

A recent Zogby poll of respondents in six Arab countries — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — found that, taking over from a president who had propelled anti-Americanism in the Muslim world to an all-time high, Obama managed to drive such attitudes even higher. Substantial majorities of Arabs in every country now view the U.S. as not contributing "to peace and stability in the Arab World."

Increasing Instability Across the Globe

U.S. interference in the arc of instability is certainly nothing new. Leaving aside current wars, over the last century, the United States has engaged in military interventions in the global south in Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Egypt, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, the Philippines, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia, Thailand, and Vietnam, among other places. The CIA has waged covert campaigns in many of the same countries, as well as Afghanistan, Algeria, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia,Iran, and Syria, to name just a few.

Like George W. Bush before him, Barack Obama evidently looks out on the "unlit world" and sees a source of global volatility and danger for the United States. His answer has been to deploy U.S. military might to blunt instability, shore up allies, and protect American lives.

Despite the salient lesson of 9/11 — interventions abroad beget blowback at home — he has waged wars in response to blowback that have, in turn, generated more of the same. A recent Rasmussen poll indicates that most Americans differ with the president when it comes to his idea of how the U.S. should be involved abroad. Seventy-five percent of voters, for example, agreed with this proposition in a recent poll: "The United States should not commit its forces to military action overseas unless the cause is vital to our national interest." In addition, clear majorities of Americans are against defending Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and a host of other arc of instability countries, even if they are attacked by outside powers.

After decades of overt and covert U.S. interventions in arc states, including the last 10 years of constant warfare, most are still poor, underdeveloped, and seemingly even more unstable. This year, in their annual failed state index — a ranking of the most volatile nations on the planet — Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace placed the two arc nations that have seen the largest military interventions by the U.S. — Iraq and Afghanistan — in their top ten. Pakistan and Yemen ranked 12th and 13th, respectively, while Somalia — the site of U.S. interventions under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, during the Bush presidency in the 2000s, and again under Obama — had the dubious honor of being number one.

For all the discussions here about (armed) "nation-building efforts" in the region, what we've clearly witnessed is a decade of nation unbuilding that ended only when the peoples of various Arab lands took their futures into their own hands and their bodies out into the streets. As recent polling in arc nations indicates, people of the global south see the United States as promoting or sustaining, not preventing, instability, and objective measures bear out their claims. The fact that numerous popular uprisings opposing authoritarian rulers allied with the U.S. have proliferated this year provides the strongest evidence yet of that.

With Americans balking at defending arc-of-instability nations, with clear indications that military interventions don't promote stability, and with a budget crisis of epic proportions at home, it remains to be seen what pretexts the Obama administration will rely on to continue a failed policy — one that seems certain to make the world more volatile and put American citizens at greater risk.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. Nick Turse is a historian, investigative journalist, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and a senior editor at Alternet.org. His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books). You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. This article is a collaboration between Alternet.org and TomDispatch.com.

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Let’s bag it.

I’m talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the tolling of bells, the honoring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence.  The works.

Let’s just can it all.  Shut down Ground Zero.  Lock out the tourists.  Close "Reflecting Absence," the memorial built in the "footprints" of the former towers with its grove of trees, giant pools, and multiple waterfalls before it can be unveiled this Sunday.  Discontinue work on the underground National September 11 Museum due to open in 2012.  Tear down the Freedom Tower (redubbed 1 World Trade Center after our "freedom" wars went awry), 102 stories of "the most expensive skyscraper ever constructed in the United States." (Estimated price tag: $3.3 billion.)  Eliminate that still-being-constructed, hubris-filled 1,776 feet of building, planned in the heyday of George W. Bush and soaring into the Manhattan sky like a nyaah-nyaah invitation to future terrorists.  Dismantle the other three office towers being built there as part of an $11 billion government-sponsored construction program.  Let’s get rid of it all.   If we had wanted a memorial to 9/11, it would have been more appropriate to leave one of the giant shards of broken tower there untouched.

Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven’t we had enough of ourselves?  If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness?  No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror.  No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money.  No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts.  And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance.  This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 – who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used – as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.

Isn’t it finally time to go cold turkey?  To let go of the dead?  Why keep repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion, when we’ve proven that we, as a nation, can’t handle it – and worse yet, that we don’t deserve it?

We would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion, forgetting it all if only we could.  We can’t, of course.  But we could stop the anniversary remembrances.  We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later.  We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are.  We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror.

Ceremonies of Hubris

Within 24 hours of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the first newspaper had already labeled the site in New York as "Ground Zero."  If anyone needed a sign that we were about to run off the rails, as a misassessment of what had actually occurred that should have been enough.  Previously, the phrase "ground zero" had only one meaning: it was the spot where a nuclear explosion had occurred.

The facts of 9/11 are, in this sense, simple enough.  It was not a nuclear attack.  It was not apocalyptic.  The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud.  It was not potentially civilization ending.  It did not endanger the existence of our country – or even of New York City.  Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.

A second irreality went with the first.  Almost immediately, key Republicans like Senator John McCain, followed by George W. Bush, top figures in his administration, and soon after, in a drumbeat of agreement, the mainstream media declared that we were "at war."  This was, Bush would say only three days after the attacks, “the first war of the twenty-first century.”  Only problem: it wasn’t.  Despite the screaming headlines, Ground Zero wasn’t Pearl Harbor.  Al-Qaeda wasn’t Japan, nor was it Nazi Germany.  It wasn’t the Soviet Union.  It had no army, nor finances to speak of, and possessed no state (though it had the minimalist protection of a hapless government in Afghanistan, one of the most backward, poverty-stricken lands on the planet).

And yet – another sign of where we were heading – anyone who suggested that this wasn’t war, that it was a criminal act and some sort of international police action was in order, was simply laughed (or derided or insulted) out of the American room.  And so the empire prepared to strike back (just as Osama bin Laden hoped it would) in an apocalyptic, planet-wide "war" for domination that masqueraded as a war for survival.

In the meantime, the populace was mustered through repetitive, nationwide 9/11 rites emphasizing that we Americans were the greatest victims, greatest survivors, and greatest dominators on planet Earth.  It was in this cause that the dead of 9/11 were turned into potent recruiting agents for a revitalized American way of war.

From all this, in the brief mission-accomplished months after Kabul and then Baghdad fell, American hubris seemed to know no bounds – and it was this moment, not 9/11 itself, from which the true inspiration for the gargantuan "Freedom Tower" and the then-billion-dollar project for a memorial on the site of the New York attacks would materialize.  It was this sense of hubris that those gargantuan projects were intended to memorialize.

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, for an imperial power that is distinctly tattered, visibly in decline, teetering at the edge of financial disaster, and battered by never-ending wars, political paralysis, terrible economic times, disintegrating infrastructure, and weird weather, all of this should be simple and obvious.  That it’s not tells us much about the kind of shock therapy we still need.

Burying the Worst Urges in American Life

It’s commonplace, even today, to speak of Ground Zero as "hallowed ground."  How untrue.  Ten years later, it is defiled ground and it’s we who have defiled it.  It could have been different.  The 9/11 attacks could have been like the Blitz in London in World War II.  Something to remember forever with grim pride, stiff upper lip and all.

And if it were only the reactions of those in New York City that we had to remember, both the dead and the living, the first responders and the last responders, the people who created impromptu memorials to the dead and message centers for the missing in Manhattan, we might recall 9/11 with similar pride.  Generally speaking, New Yorkers were respectful, heartfelt, thoughtful, and not vengeful.  They didn’t have prior plans that, on September 12, 2001, they were ready to rally those nearly 3,000 dead to support.  They weren’t prepared at the moment of the catastrophe to – as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so classically said – "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Unfortunately, they were not the measure of the moment.  As a result, the uses of 9/11 in the decade since have added up to a profile in cowardice, not courage, and if we let it be used that way in the next decade, we will go down in history as a nation of cowards.

There is little on this planet of the living more important, or more human, than the burial and remembrance of the dead.  Even Neanderthals buried their dead, possibly with flowers, and tens of thousands of years ago, the earliest humans, the Cro-Magnon, were already burying their dead elaborately, in one case in clothing onto which more than 3,000 ivory beads had been sewn, perhaps as objects of reverence and even remembrance.  Much of what we know of human prehistory and the earliest eras of our history comes from graves and tombs where the dead were provided for.

And surely it’s our duty in this world of loss to remember the dead, those close to us and those more removed who mattered in our national or even planetary lives.  Many of those who loved and were close to the victims of 9/11 are undoubtedly attached to the yearly ceremonies that surround their deceased wives, husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters.  For the nightmare of 9/11, they deserve a memorial.  But we don’t.

If September 11th was indeed a nightmare, 9/11 as a memorial and Ground Zero as a "consecrated" place have turned out to be a blank check for the American war state, funding an endless trip to hell.  They have helped lead us into fields of carnage that put the dead of 9/11 to shame.

Every dead person will, of course, be forgotten sooner or later, no matter how tightly we clasp their memories or what memorials we build.  In my mind, I have a private memorial to my own dead parents.  Whenever I leaf through my mother’s childhood photo album and recognize just about no one but her among all the faces, however, I’m also aware that there is no one left on this planet to ask about any of them.  And when I die, my little memorial to them will go with me.

This will be the fate, sooner or later, of everyone who, on September 11, 2001, was murdered in those buildings in New York, in that field in Pennsylvania, and in the Pentagon, as well as those who sacrificed their lives in rescue attempts, or may now be dying as a result.  Under such circumstances, who would not want to remember them all in a special way?

It’s a terrible thing to ask those still missing the dead of 9/11 to forgo the public spectacle that accompanies their memory, but worse is what we have: repeated solemn ceremonies to the ongoing health of the American war state and the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden.

Memory is usually so important, but in this case we would have been better off with oblivion.  It’s time to truly inter not the dead, but the worst urges in American life since 9/11 and the ceremonies which, for a decade, have gone with them.  Better to bury all of that at sea with bin Laden and then mourn the dead, each in our own way, in silence and, above all, in peace.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.

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This is, of course, the week before the tenth anniversary of the day that "changed everything."  And enough was indeed changed that it’s easy to forget what that lost world was like.  Here’s a little reminder of that moment just before September 11, 2001:  

The “usually disengaged” president, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd labeled him, had just returned from a prolonged, brush-cutting Crawford vacation to much criticism and a nation in trouble. (One Republican congressman complained that “it was hard for Mr. Bush to get his message out if the White House lectern had a ‘Gone Fishing’ sign on it.”) Democrats were on the attack. Journalistic coverage seemed to grow ever bolder. Bush’s poll figures were dropping. A dozen prominent Republicans, fearful of a president out of touch with the national mood, gathered for a private dinner with Karl Rove to “offer an unvarnished critique of Mr. Bush’s style and strategy.” Next year’s congressional elections suddenly seemed up for grabs. The president’s aides were desperately scrambling to reposition him as a more “commanding” figure, while, according to the polls, a majority of Americans felt the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld had “cratered”; in the Middle East “violence was rising.”

That’s a taste of the lost world of September 6-10, 2001 – a moment when the news was dominated by nothing more catastrophic than shark attacks off the Florida and North Carolina coasts – in a passage from a piece ("Shark-Bit World") I wrote back in 2005 when that world was already beyond recovery.  A few days later, we would enter a very American hell, one from which we’ve never emerged, with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leading the way.  Almost a decade later, Osama bin Laden may be dead, but his American legacy lives on fiercely in Washington policy when it comes to surveillance, secrecy, war, and the national security state (as well as economic meltdown at home).

This week, TomDispatch will attempt to assess that legacy, starting with this post by Noam Chomsky.  It’s a half-length excerpt from a new "preface" – actually a major reassessment of America’s war-on-terror decade – part of Seven Stories Press’s 10th anniversary reissue of his bestseller on 9/11.  Entitled 9-11: Was There an Alternative?, its official publication date is this Thursday, and it includes the full version of the new essay, as well as the entire text of the older book.  It can be purchased as an e-book and is being put out simultaneously in numerous languages including French, Spanish, and Italian. Thanks to the editors at Seven Stories, TomDispatch is releasing this excerpt exclusively, but be sure to get yourself a copy of the book for the complete version.  ~ Tom

Was There an Alternative? Looking Back on 9/11 a Decade Later

By Noam Chomsky

We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” Eric Margolis writes. “‘Bleeding the U.S.,’ in his words.” The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap… Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction… may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States" – particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.

That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at once. As discussed in my book 9-11, written shortly after those attacks occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognize "that a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the U.S. and its allies into a ‘diabolical trap,’ as the French foreign minister put it."

The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that "bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world," and largely succeeded: "U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally." And arguably remains so, even after his death.

The First 9/11

Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The "crime against humanity," as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered.

In 9-11, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the "horrendous crime" of 9/11 was committed with "wickedness and awesome cruelty," an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists – call them "the Kandahar boys" – who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called "the first 9/11": September 11, 1973, when the U.S. succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. The goal, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the "virus" that might encourage all those "foreigners [who] are out to screw us" to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the National Security Council that, if the US could not control Latin America, it could not expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world."

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was "nothing of very great consequence," as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F. Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from "hemispheric defense" – an anachronistic holdover from World War II – to "internal security," a concept with a chilling interpretation in U.S.-dominated Latin American circles.

In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites," including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the U.S. client state.

The consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course, reverberate.

From Kidnapping and Torture to Assassination

All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The lead article discusses "the visionary international order" of the "second half of the twentieth century" marked by "the universalization of an American vision of commercial prosperity." There is something to that account, but it does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.

The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an end at least a phase in the "war on terror" re-declared by President George W. Bush on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its significance.

On May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law, beginning with the invasion itself.

There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition – except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they shot in self-defense when she "lunged" at them, according to the White House.

A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have considered the option of capturing bin Laden alive: "The administration had made clear to the military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive."

The authors add: "For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance." Furthermore, "capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges." Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing – an act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

As the Atlantic inquiry observes, "The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration’s counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive." That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who "told German TV that the U.S. raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial," contrasting Schmidt with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who "defended the decision to kill bin Laden although he didn’t pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House panel… that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way.’”

The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticized by allies. The highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that "justice was done" as an "absurdity" that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law. Pakistan law "requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international human rights law insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever violent death occurs from government or police action. The U.S. is therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true circumstances of this killing."

Robertson usefully reminds us that "[i]t was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden – the Nazi leadership – the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution ‘would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride… the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.’"

Eric Margolis comments that "Washington has never made public the evidence of its claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks," presumably one reason why "polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that the U.S. government and/or Israel were behind 9/11," while in the Muslim world skepticism is much higher. "An open trial in the U.S. or at the Hague would have exposed these claims to the light of day," he continues, a practical reason why Washington should have followed the law.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress "suspects." In June 2002, FBI head Robert Mueller, in what the Washington Post described as "among his most detailed public comments on the origins of the attacks," could say only that "investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany, and the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources in Afghanistan."

What the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to permit a trial of bin Laden if they were presented with evidence. Thus, it is not true, as President Obama claimed in his White House statement after bin Laden’s death, that "[w]e quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda."

There has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in mid-2002, but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in civilized societies – and whatever the evidence might be, it does not warrant murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily apprehended and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided since. Thus, the 9/11 Commission provided extensive circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It is doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent court, considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any event, the conclusions of a congressionally authorized investigation, however convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused from suspect to convicted.

There is much talk of bin Laden’s "confession," but that was a boast, not a confession, with as much credibility as my "confession" that I won the Boston marathon. The boast tells us a lot about his character, but nothing about his responsibility for what he regarded as a great achievement, for which he wanted to take credit.

Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, and still does.

Crimes of Aggression

It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognized in much of the Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well. He had some experience with assassinations. He had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a CIA-organized operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly women and girls as they left the mosque – one of those innumerable crimes that do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of "wrong agency." Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks.

One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests that the movement might have been split at that time had the U.S. exploited the opportunity instead of mobilizing the movement, particularly by the attack on Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as intelligence agencies had anticipated. At the Chilcot hearings investigating the background to the invasion of Iraq, for example, the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 testified that both British and U.S. intelligence were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat, that the invasion was likely to increase terror, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalized parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an "attack on Islam." As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.

It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos had landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he was not a "suspect" but the "decider" who gave the orders to invade Iraq – that is, to commit the "supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and its national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.

To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.

Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the "supreme international crime" – the crime of aggression. That crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg.  An "aggressor," Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as "[i]nvasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State …." No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.

We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: "If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

It is also clear that announced intentions are irrelevant, even if they are truly believed. Internal records reveal that Japanese fascists apparently did believe that, by ravaging China, they were laboring to turn it into an "earthly paradise." And although it may be difficult to imagine, it is conceivable that Bush and company believed they were protecting the world from destruction by Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides may try to convince themselves otherwise.

We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the "supreme international crime" including all the evils that follow, or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and the allies were guilty of judicial murder.

The Imperial Mentality and 9/11

A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carriles and many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion "inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch." The coincidence of these deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine – "already… a de facto rule of international relations," according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison – which revokes "the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists."

Allison refers to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed at the Taliban, that "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves." Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror – for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate. When Bush issued this new "de facto rule of international relations," no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and the murder of its criminal presidents.

None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the U.S. is self-immunized against international law and conventions – as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear.

It is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him "Geronimo" – the Apache Indian chief who led the courageous resistance to the invaders of Apache lands. 

The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk… We might react differently if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes "Jew" and "Gypsy."

The examples mentioned would fall under the category of "American exceptionalism," were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality.

Perhaps the assassination was perceived by the administration as an "act of vengeance," as Robertson concludes. And perhaps the rejection of the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the moral culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the "supreme international crime" in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination is another illustration of the important fact that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (Seven Stories Press), an updated version of his classic account, just being published this week with a major new essay – from which this post was adapted – considering the 10 years since the 9/11 attacks.

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Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death? The Military’s Marching Orders to the Jihadist World

Put what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation’s hair stand on end. This particular paragraph should also have sent chills through the body politic, launched warning flares, and left the people’s representatives in Congress shouting about something other than the debt crisis.

Last weekend, two reliable New York Times reporters, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, had a piece in that paper’s Sunday Review entitled “After 9/11, an Era of Tinker, Tailor, Jihadist, Spy.” Its focus was the latest counterterrorism thinking at the Pentagon: deterrence theory. (Evidently an amalgam of the old Cold War ideas of “containment” and nuclear deterrence wackily reimagined by the boys in the five-sided building for the age of the jihadi.) Schmitt and Shanker’s article was, a note informed the reader, based on research for their forthcoming book, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.

And here’s the paragraph, buried in the middle of their piece, that should have stopped readers in their tracks:

“Or consider what American computer specialists are doing on the Internet, perhaps terrorist leaders’ greatest safe haven, where they recruit, raise money, and plot future attacks on a global scale. American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.”

The italics are mine, and as the authors urge us to do, let’s consider for a moment this tiny, remarkably bizarre window into military reality. As a start, just where those military “computer specialists” are remains unknown. Perhaps they are in the Pentagon, perhaps somewhere in the National Counterterrorism Center, but whoever and wherever they are, here’s the question of the week, possibly of the month or the year: Just what kind of “orders” can they be posting “so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away”?

And even if our computer experts really were capable of turning wavering young Muslims back from the shores of jihadism – and personally I wouldn’t put my money on the Pentagon’s skills in that realm – what about young Muslims (or older ones for that matter) who weren’t on that fence and took those “orders” seriously? What exactly are they being “ordered” to do?

Talk about a potential Frankenstein situation – and all we can do is ask questions. Just what monsters, for example, might the military’s computer specialists be helping to forge? And who exactly is supervising those “specialists” and their vituperative messages? (Especially since they are unlikely to be in English, and we already know that Arabic, Pashto, Dari, and Farsi speakers at the higher levels, or even lower levels, of the Pentagon are, at best, few and far between.)

Keep in mind that we already have an example of a similarly wacky program lacking meaningful oversight that went awry, hit the headlines, and resulted in the perfectly real deaths of at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent and undoubtedly many more Mexicans. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives launched its now infamous gun-tracking program in Arizona in late 2009, under the moniker “Operation Fast and Furious” (a reference to a series of movies about street car racers). It was meant to track cross-border gun sales to Mexico’s drug cartels by actually letting perfectly real weapons cross the border – more than 2,000 of them, as it turned out. ATF agents, according to a Washington Post report, would be “instructed not to move in and question the [gun runners] but to let the guns go and see where they eventually ended up.” And so they did for more than a year and, not exactly surprisingly, those weapons ended up “on the street” and in the ugliest of hands.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart asked an apt question about the program: “The ATF plan to prevent American guns from being used in Mexican gun violence is to provide Mexican gangs with American guns. If this is the plan that they went with, what plan did we reject?”

Assumedly, the same question could be asked of the military’s online anti-jihadist program, involving as it evidently does messages believed to be too extreme for wavering young Muslims with an interest in the jihadi “philosophy.” Shouldn’t someone start asking whether those Pentagon’s “orders” to jihadis might not turn out to be the online equivalent of so many loose guns?

After all, what are those specialists ordering them to do? And if actual jihadis actually tried to follow those “confusing and contradictory orders,” possibly being confused and contradictory kinds of guys, if they took them seriously and interpreted them in ways not predicted by their putative Pentagon handlers, is there a possibility that anyone could die as a result? And if such messages turn off some prospective jihadis, isn’t it possible that they might turn on others? And could they, for instance, have been ordered to commit confused and contradictory acts that might end up involving Americans?

Really, someone should blow Schmitt and Shanker’s paragraph up to giant size, tack it up somewhere in the Capitol, and call for a congressional investigation. If the ATF could do it, why not the Pentagon? And honestly, is this how Americans want to see their tax dollars spent?

Read the Schmitt and Shanker piece and you’ll get a sense of what Shakespeare might have called the “oerweening pride” rife in the Pentagon when it comes to their skills and their ability to put one (or two, or three) over on the jihadist community. So pleased with themselves were they, that they evidently couldn’t help bragging to the two reporters about their skills. The old phrase “too smart for your own good” comes to mind. It’s enough to make you worry, even based on so little information (which the new book from the two reporters may significantly amplify).

And by the way, if you want another unsettling analogy, when it comes to off-the-wall ideas for “deterring” jihadist networks, check out the major record companies and their efforts to deter communities and individuals from illegally downloading music. The Recording Industry Association of America, representing the four major record labels, decided to make a cautionary example of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota mom, by suing her “for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network Kazaa in 2006.” So far, the organization has dragged her through three trials, getting terrible publicity. Even if they win and leave her in hock for the rest of her life, do you think for one second that they will have made a dent in the world of illegal downloads or deterred anyone? Just ask your kid.

Don’t think deterrence here, think blowback.

Honestly, if Schmitt and Shanker’s claim is accurate, you should be shaking in your boots. And someone on Capitol Hill should be starting to ask some relevant questions, including this one: Could “computer specialists” in the employ of the Pentagon be responsible for your death in a future terrorist attack?

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.

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On the Mend? America Comes to Its Senses

At periodic intervals, the American body politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers.  Whenever an especially acute attack occurs, a sort of delirium ensues, manifesting itself in delusions of grandeur and demented behavior. 

By the time the condition passes and a semblance of health is restored, recollection of what occurred during the illness tends to be hazy.  What happened?  How’d we get here?  Most Americans prefer not to know.  No sense dwelling on what’s behind us.  Feeling much better now!  Thanks!

Gripped by such a fever in 1898, Americans evinced an irrepressible impulse to liberate oppressed Cubans.  By the time they’d returned to their senses, having acquired various parcels of real estate between Puerto Rico and the Philippines, no one could quite explain what had happened or why.  (The Cubans meanwhile had merely exchanged one set of overseers for another.)

In 1917, the fever suddenly returned.  Amid wild ravings about waging a war to end war, Americans lurched off to France.  This time the affliction passed quickly, although the course of treatment proved painful: confinement to the charnel house of the Western Front, followed by bitter medicine administered at Versailles.

The 1960s brought another bout (and so yet more disappointment).  An overwhelming urge to pay any price, bear any burden landed Americans in Vietnam.  The fall of Saigon in 1975 seemed, for a brief interval, to inoculate the body politic against any further recurrence.  Yet the salutary effects of this "Vietnam syndrome" proved fleeting.  By the time the Cold War ended, Americans were running another temperature, their self-regard reaching impressive new heights.  Out of Washington came all sorts of embarrassing gibberish about permanent global supremacy and history’s purpose finding fulfillment in the American way of life.

Give Me Fever

Then came 9/11 and the fever simply soared off the charts.  The messiah-nation was really pissed and was going to fix things once and for all.

Nearly 10 years have passed since Washington set out to redeem the Greater Middle East.  The crusades have not gone especially well.  In fact, in the pursuit of its saving mission, the American messiah has pretty much worn itself out.

Today, the post-9/11 fever finally shows signs of abating.  The evidence is partial and preliminary.  The sickness has by no means passed.  Oddly, it lingers most strongly in the Obama White House, of all places, where a keenness to express American ideals by dropping bombs seems strangely undiminished.

Yet despite the urges of some in the Obama administration, after nearly a decade of self-destructive flailing about, American recovery has become a distinct possibility.  Here’s some of the evidence:

In Washington, it’s no longer considered a sin to question American omnipotence.  Take the case of Robert Gates.  The outgoing secretary of defense may well be the one senior U.S. official of the past decade to leave office with his reputation not only intact, but actually enhanced.  (Note to President Obama: think about naming an aircraft carrier after the guy).  Yet along with restoring a modicum of competence and accountability to the Pentagon, the Gates legacy is likely to be found in his willingness – however belated – to acknowledge the limits of American power.

That the United States should avoid wars except when absolutely necessary no longer connotes incipient isolationism.  It is once again a sign of common sense, with Gates a leading promoter.  Modesty is becoming respectable.

The Gates Doctrine

No one can charge Gates with being an isolationist or a national security wimp.  Neither is he a "declinist."  So when he says anyone proposing another major land war in the Greater Middle East should "have his head examined" – citing the authority of Douglas MacArthur, no less – people take notice.  Or more recently there was this:  “I’ve got a military that’s exhausted,” Gates remarked, in one of those statements of the obvious too seldom heard from on high.  ”Let’s just finish the wars we’re in and keep focused on that instead of signing up for other wars of choice.”  Someone should etch that into the outer walls of the Pentagon’s E-ring.

A half-dozen years ago, "wars of choice" were all the rage in Washington.  No more.  Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Or consider the officer corps.  There is no "military mind," but there are plenty of minds in the military and some numbers of them are changing.

Evidence suggests that the officer corps itself is rethinking the role of military power.  Consider, for example, "Mr. Y," author of A National Strategic Narrative, published this spring to considerable acclaim by the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.  The actual authors of this report are two military professionals, one a navy captain, the other a Marine colonel.

What you won’t find in this document are jingoism, braggadocio, chest-thumping, and calls for a bigger military budget.  If there’s an overarching theme, it’s pragmatism.  Rather than the United States imposing its will on the world, the authors want more attention paid to the investment needed to rebuild at home.

The world is too big and complicated for any one nation to call the shots, they insist.  The effort to do so is self-defeating. "As Americans," Mr. Y writes, "we needn’t seek the world’s friendship or proselytize the virtues of our society.  Neither do we seek to bully, intimidate, cajole, or persuade others to accept our unique values or to share our national objectives.  Rather, we will let others draw their own conclusions based upon our actions… We will pursue our national interests and let others pursue theirs…"

You might dismiss this as the idiosyncratic musing of two officers who have spent too much time having their brains baked in the Iraqi or Afghan sun.  I don’t.  What convinces me otherwise is the positive email traffic that my own musings about the misuse and abuse of American power elicit weekly from serving officers.  It’s no scientific sample, but the captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels I hear from broadly agree with Mr. Y.  They’ve had a bellyful of twenty-first-century American war and are open to a real debate over how to overhaul the nation’s basic approach to national security.

Intelligence Where You Least Expect It

And finally, by gum, there is the United States Congress.  Just when that body appeared to have entered a permanent vegetative state, a flickering of intelligent life has made its reappearance.  Perhaps more remarkably still, the signs are evident on both sides of the aisle as Democrats and Republicans alike – albeit for different reasons – are raising serious questions about the nation’s propensity for multiple, open-ended wars.

Some members cite concerns for the Constitution and the abuse of executive power.  Others worry about the price tag.  With Osama bin Laden out of the picture, still others insist that it’s time to rethink strategic priorities.  No doubt partisan calculation or personal ambition figures alongside matters of principle.  They are, after all, politicians.

Given what polls indicate is a growing public unhappiness over the Afghan War, speaking out against that war these days doesn’t exactly require political courage.  Still, the possibility of our legislators reasserting a role in deciding whether or not a war actually serves the national interest – rather than simply rubberstamping appropriations and slinking away – now presents itself.  God bless the United States Congress.

Granted, the case presented here falls well short of being conclusive.  To judge by his announcement of a barely-more-than-symbolic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Obama himself seems uncertain of where he stands.  And clogging the corridors of power or the think tanks and lobbying arenas that surround them are plenty of folks still hankering to have a go at Syria or Iran.

At the first signs of self-restraint, you can always count on the likes of Senator John McCain or the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal to decry (in McCain’s words) an "isolationist-withdrawal-lack-of-knowledge-of-history attitude" hell-bent on pulling up the drawbridge and having Americans turn their backs on the world.  In such quarters, fever is a permanent condition and it’s always 104 and rising.  Yet it is a measure of just how quickly things are changing that McCain himself, once deemed a source of straight talk, now comes across as a mere crank.

In this way, nearly a decade after our most recent descent into madness, does the possibility of recovery finally beckon.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses voices of dissent within the military, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

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Signs of the Great American Unraveling

It’s already gone, having barely outlasted its moment – just long enough for the media to suggest that no one thought it added up to much.

Okay, it was a little more than the military wanted, something less than Joe Biden would have liked, not enough for the growing crew of anti-war congressional types, but way too much for John McCain, Lindsey Graham, & Co.

I’m talking about the 13 minutes of “remarks” on “the way forward in Afghanistan” that President Obama delivered in the East Room of the White House two Wednesday nights ago.

Tell me you weren’t holding your breath wondering whether the 33,000 surge troops he ordered into Afghanistan as 2009 ended would be removed in a 12-month, 14-month, or 18-month span. Tell me you weren’t gripped with anxiety about whether 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, or 15,000 American soldiers would come out this year (leaving either 95,000, 93,000, 88,000, or 83,000 behind)?

You weren’t? Well, if so, you were in good company.

Billed as the beginning of the end of the Afghan War, it should have been big and it couldn’t have been smaller. The patented Obama words were meant to soar, starting with a George W. Bush-style invocation of 9/11 and ending with the usual copious blessings upon this country and our military. But on the evidence, they couldn’t have fallen flatter. I doubt I was alone in thinking that it was like seeing Ronald Reagan on an unimaginably bad day in an ad captioned “It’s never going to be morning again in America.”

Idolator President

If you clicked Obama off that night or let the event slide instantly into your mental trash can, I don’t blame you. Still, the president’s Afghan remarks shouldn’t be sent down the memory hole quite so quickly.

For one thing, while the mainstream media’s pundits and talking heads are always raring to discuss his policy remarks, the words that frame them are generally ignored – and yet the discomfort of the moment can’t be separated from them. So start with this: whether by inclination, political calculation, or some mix of the two, our president has become a rhetorical idolator.

These days he can barely open his mouth without also bowing down before the U.S. military in ways that once would have struck Americans as embarrassing, if not incomprehensible. In addition, he regularly prostrates himself before this country’s special mission to the world and never ceases to emphasize that the United States is indeed an exception among nations. Finally, in a way once alien to American presidents, he invokes God’s blessing upon the military and the country as regularly as you brush your teeth.

Think of these as the triumvirate without which no Obama foreign-policy moment would be complete: greatest military, greatest nation, our God. And in this he follows directly, if awkwardly, in Bush’s footsteps.

I wouldn’t claim that Americans had never had such thoughts before, only that presidents didn’t feel required to say them in a mantra-like way just about every time they appeared in public. Sometimes, of course, when you feel a compulsion to say the same things ad nauseam, you display weakness, not strength; you reveal the most fantastic of fantasy worlds, not a deeper reality.

The president’s recent Afghan remarks were, in this sense, par for the course. As he plugged his plan to bring America’s “long wars” to what he called “a responsible end,” he insisted that “[l]ike generations before, we must embrace America’s singular role in the course of human events.” He then painted this flattering word portrait of us:

“We’re a nation that brings our enemies to justice while adhering to the rule of law, and respecting the rights of all our citizens. We protect our own freedom and prosperity by extending it to others. We stand not for empire, but for self-determination… and when our union is strong no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach… we are bound together by the creed that is written into our founding documents, and a conviction that the United States of America is a country that can achieve whatever it sets out to accomplish.”

I know, I know. You’re wondering whether you just mainlined into a Sarah Palin speech and your eyes are glazing over. But hang in there, because that’s just a start. For example, in an Obama speech of any sort, what America’s soldiers never lack is the extra adjective. They aren’t just soldiers, but “our extraordinary men and women in uniform.” They aren’t just Americans, but “patriotic Americans.” (Since when did an American president have to describe American soldiers as, of all things, “patriotic”?) And in case you missed the point that, in their extraordinariness and their outsized patriotism they are better than other Americans, he made sure to acknowledge them as the ones we “draw inspiration from.”

In a country that now “supports the troops” with bumper-sticker fervor but pays next to no attention to the wars they fight, perhaps Obama is simply striving to be the premier twenty-first-century American. Still, you have to wonder what such presidential fawning, omnipresent enough to be boilerplate, really represents. The strange thing is we hear this sort of thing all the time. And yet no one ever comments on it.

Oh, and let’s not forget that no significant White House moment ends these days without the president bestowing God’s blessing on the globe’s most extraordinary nation and its extraordinary fighters, or as he put it in his Afghan remarks: “May God bless our troops. And may God bless the United States of America.”

The day after he revealed his drawdown plan to the nation, the president traveled to Ft. Drum in New York State to thank soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division for their multiple deployments to Afghanistan. Before those extraordinary and patriotic Americans, he quite naturally doubled down.

Summoning another tic of this presidential moment (and of the Bush one before it), he told them that they were part of “the finest fighting force in the world.” Even that evidently seemed inadequate, so he upped the hyperbole. “I have no greater job,” he told them, “nothing gives me more honor than serving as your commander in chief. To all of you who are potentially going to be redeployed, just know that your commander in chief has your back… God bless you, God bless the United States of America, climb to glory.”

As ever, all of this was overlooked. Nowhere did a single commentator wonder, for instance, whether an American president was really supposed to feel that being commander in chief offered greater “honor” than being president of a nation of citizens. In another age, such a statement would have registered as, at best, bizarre. These days, no one even blinks.

And yet who living in this riven, confused, semi-paralyzed country of ours truly believes that, in 2011, Americans can achieve whatever we set out to accomplish? Who thinks that, not having won a war in memory, the U.S. military is incontestably the finest fighting force now or ever (and on a “climb to glory” at that), or that this country is at present specially blessed by God, or that ours is a mission of selfless kindheartedness on planet Earth?

Obama’s remarks have no wings these days because they are ever more divorced from reality. Perhaps because this president in fawning mode is such an uncomfortable sight, and because Americans generally feel so ill-at-ease about their relationship to our wars, however, such remarks are neither attacked nor defended, discussed nor debated, but as if by some unspoken agreement simply ignored.

Here, in any case, is what they aren’t: effective rallying cries for a nation in need of unity. Here’s what they may be: strange, defensive artifacts of an imperial power in visible decline, part of what might be imagined as the Great American Unraveling. But hold that thought a moment. After all, the topic of the president’s remarks was Afghanistan.

The Unreal War

If Obama framed his Afghan remarks in a rhetoric of militarized super-national surrealism, then what he had to say about the future of the war itself was deceptive in the extreme – not lies perhaps, but full falsehoods half told. Consider just the two most important of them: that his “surge” consisted only of 33,000 American troops and that “by next summer,” Americans are going to be so on the road to leaving Afghanistan that it isn’t funny.

Unfortunately, it just ain’t so. First of all, the real Obama surge was minimally almost 55,000 and possibly 66,000 troops, depending on how you count them. When he came into office in January 2009, there were about 32,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Another 11,000 had been designated to go in the last days of the Bush administration, but only departed in the first Obama months. In March 2009, the president announced his own “new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” and dispatched 21,700 more troops. Then, in December 2009 in a televised speech to the nation from West Point, he announced that another 30,000 would be going. (With “support troops,” it turned out to be 33,000.)

In other words, in September 2012, 14 months from now, only about half the actual troop surge of the Obama years will have been withdrawn. In addition, though seldom discussed, the Obama “surge” was hardly restricted to troops. There was a much ballyhooed “civilian surge” of State Department and aid types that more than tripled the “civilian” effort in Afghanistan. Their drawdown was recently addressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but only in the vaguest of terms.

Then there was a major surge of CIA personnel (along with U.S. special operations forces), and there’s no indication whatsoever that anyone in Washington intends reductions there, or in the drone surge that went with it. As a troop drawdown begins, CIA agents, those special ops forces, and the drones are clearly slated to remain at or beyond a surge peak.

Finally, there was a surge in private contractors – hired foreign guns and hired Afghans – tens of thousands of them. It goes unmentioned, as does the surge in base building, which has yet to end, and the surge in massive citadel-style embassy building in the region, which is assumedly ongoing.

All of this makes mincemeat of the idea that we are in the process of ending the Afghan war. I know the president said, “Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.” And that was a foggy enough formulation that you might be forgiven for imagining more or less everything will be over “by 2014″ – which, by the way, means not January 1st, but December 31st of that year.

If what we know of U.S. plans in Afghanistan plays out, however, December 31, 2014, will be the date for the departure of the last of the full Obama surge of 64,000 troops. In other words, almost five years after Obama entered office, more than 13 years after the Bush administration launched its invasion, we could find ourselves back to or just below something close to Bush-era troop levels. Tens of thousands of U.S. forces would still be in Afghanistan, some of them “combat troops” officially relabeled (as in Iraq) for less warlike activity. All would be part of an American “support” mission that would include huge numbers of “trainers” for the Afghan security forces and also U.S. special forces operatives and CIA types engaged in “counterterror” activities in the country and region.

The U.S. general in charge of training the Afghan military recently suggested that his mission wouldn’t be done until 2017 (and no one who knows anything about the country believes that an effective Afghan Army will be in place then either). In addition, although the president didn’t directly mention this in his speech, the Obama administration has been involved in quiet talks with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to nail down a “strategic partnership” agreement that would allow American troops, spies, and air power to hunker down as “tenants” on some of the giant bases we’ve built. There they would evidently remain for years, if not decades (as some reports have it).

In other words, on December 31, 2014, if all goes as planned, the U.S. will be girding for years more of wildly expensive war, even if in a slimmed down form. This is the reality, as American planners imagine it, behind the president’s speech.

Overstretched Empire

Of course, it’s not for nothing that we regularly speak of the best laid plans going awry, something that applies doubly, as in Afghanistan, to the worst laid plans. It’s increasingly apparent that our disastrous wars are, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry recently admitted, “unsustainable.” After all, just the cost of providing air conditioning to U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan – $20 billion a year – is more than NASA’s total budget.

Yes, despite Washington’s long lost dreams of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, some of its wars there are still being planned as if for a near-eternity, while others are being intensified. Those wars are still fueled by overblown fears of terrorism; encouraged by a National Security Complex funded to the tune of more than $1.2 trillion annually by an atmosphere of permanent armed crisis; and run by a military that, after a decade of not-so-creative destruction, can’t stop doing what it knows how to do best (which isn’t winning a war).

Though Obama claims that the United States is no empire, all of this gives modern meaning to the term “overstretched empire.” And it’s not really much of a mystery what happens to overextemded imperial powers that find themselves fighting “little” wars they can’t win, while their treasuries head south.

The growing unease in Washington about America’s wars reflects a dawning sense of genuine crisis, a sneaking suspicion even among hawkish Republicans that they preside ineffectually over a great power in precipitous decline.

Think, then, of the president’s foreign-policy-cum-war speeches as ever more unconvincing attempts to cover the suppurating wound that is Washington’s global war policy. If you want to take the temperature of the present crisis, you can do it through Obama’s words. The less they ring true, the more discordant they seem in the face of reality, the more he fawns and repeats his various mantras, the more uncomfortable he makes you feel, the more you have the urge to look away, the deeper the crisis.

What will he say when the Great American Unraveling truly begins?

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.

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