Pentagon’s $547 Million Af-Pak Propaganda Campaign

Things Which Don’t Go Away

Things the American government and media don’t let go of. And neither do I.

Iraq

“They’re leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts,” declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq.[1]

It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him choke up.

Enough to make him forget.

But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured … the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up … an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight theAmerican invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

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The Fatal Cure

Among the premises with which the Feds justify their War on Terror are the hordes of bad guys overrunning the planet. The government wants us to believe that millions of terrorists lurk worldwide, scheming to blow us sky-high. They penetrate our airports and spy on our infrastructure. In their spare time, they form sleeper cells that fiendishly and seamlessly blend into our communities. Indeed, one has probably infiltrated your neighborhood.

Protecting us from this threat domestically and internationally requires corresponding millions of bureaucrats, cops, and soldiers as well as trillions of our taxes -- and, of course, the surrender of our freedom, dignity, and privacy to the State.

Intriguingly, the Feds themselves gainsay this foolishness every year in a publication entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. The Department of State issues it — and you won’t be surprised to learn that though “U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide [it to] Congress, by April 30 of each year,” the Report for 2009 appeared only earlier this month. Try paying your taxes that late and see what happens.

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Imperial Cancer

With the welfare state cracking apart and with rising concerns among the citizenry about federal spending and debt, count on federal officials to provoke more overseas crises as a way to frighten people into rallying toward the government. It is an old tried-and-true trick that government officials use to distract people’s attention away from the problems government is causing and toward supporting the government’s efforts to keep people “safe.”

U.S. officials are not the only ones who have used this trick effectively. James Madison pointed out that officials in the Roman Empire did it too: “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”

In the war on terrorism, fear is the coin of the realm. “Be afraid, be very afraid” has become the standard catcall of the statists.

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If God Is Pro-War – He Lied

I have a question to ask you. I would then like you to ask it of others, particularly of Christians:

How many innocent people would you be willing to kill – purely to defend yourself?

For example, let’s say you are well armed and an armed robber is shooting at you – but the robber is holding a hostage directly in front of him.

Or, suppose someone is shooting at you from within a crowd. Maybe some in the crowd don’t like you. Let’s push it even further and say that most of them hate you, and sympathize with the attacker. To shoot back, you would be aiming at the attacker, but you know you would also hit others.

I repeat:

How many of them would you be willing to kill, even absolutely and purely in self-defense?

I asked this question of someone fairly high up in military intelligence recently. I had to press the point as he beat around the bush for a while. His (eventual) response? "I’m not sure I know the answer to that question." Well, at least he was thinking about it.

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An American Stasi?

The surveillance state.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that “there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities.”

What is a fusion center?

The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.

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Drones in U.S. skies – to keep eye on us?

In May of last year, David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus from 2006 to 2008, co-authored a strategic analysis (”Death From Above, Outrage Down Below,” New York Times, May 17, 2009). He emphasized that the "public outrage" among Pakistan's civilians caused by our drone attacks "is hardly limited to the region in which they take place."

Extensively reported by the news media, “the persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government and contributes to Pakistan's instability."

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Why This Gigantic “Intelligence” Apparatus? Follow the Money

The Washington Post published yesterday the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic U.S. apparatus of “intelligence” activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.

Among Priest and Arkin’s findings from a two-year study are the following:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

[We] discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

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.

Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

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The Neoconservative Perspective on Iran

It turns out John Bolton is still out there, and still frothing at the mouth about Iran:

What outsiders can do is create broad support for Israel’s inherent right to self-defense against a nuclear Holocaust and defend the specific tactic of pre-emptive attacks against Iran’s Esfahan uranium-conversion plant, its Natanz enrichment facility, and other targets.

Yikes! I hope he cleaned the flecks of spittle out of his mustache afterward.

Anyway, expressed like this, the public neoconservative perspective on Iran obviously seems insane. Even if the Iranian government obtains nuclear weapons, it’s not going to suddenly nuke Tel Aviv (or Paris or Washington) just for a few seconds of satisfaction before it itself is incinerated.

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Homeland Security Mission Creep: The Drug War

In recent columns, I’ve been discussing the way that the national security state, given an almighty big hammer in the name of “fighting terrorism,” is finding nails all over the place. Suppressing the anti-globalization movement, fighting the Drug War, and fighting “intellectual property crime” all fall under the post-9/11 security state’s expansive reading of its counter-terror mission.

Specifically, I’ve recently been examining the work of retired USAF Colonel Jennifer Hesterman, a national security scholar whose body of research covers the very broad area where counter-terrorism meets all those other missions.

Her monograph “Transnational Crime and the Criminal-Terrorist Nexus” (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press, 2005) devotes considerable space to the international drug trade as a support for international terrorism. She notes: “The once-clear lines between the international drug trade, terrorism, and organized crime are now blurring, crossing, and mutating as never before.” Laundered money from narco-trafficking is a source of funds for terrorists.

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