The New York Times reports: A top Pentagon official said Thursday that the evolving war against Al Qaeda was likely to continue “at least 10 to 20 years” and urged Congress not to modify the statute that provides its legal basis.

“As of right now, it suits us very well,” Michael A. Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said, referring to the “authorization to use military force,” often referred to as the A.U.M.F., enacted by Congress in 2001.

The statute authorized war against the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and those who harbored them — that is, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Lawmakers are considering enacting a new authorization, because the original Qaeda network has been largely decimated, while the current threat is increasingly seen as arising from terrorist groups in places like Yemen that share Al Qaeda’s ideology but have no connection to the 2001 attacks.

That possibility has elicited a decidedly mixed reaction. Human rights groups that want to see the 12-year-old military conflict wind down fear that a new authorization would create an open-ended “forever war.” [Continue reading…]

Hendrik Hertzberg writes: In Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi masterpiece “Minority Report,” set in the year 2054 and released nine months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, homicide-squad detectives no longer spend their time tracking down people who have committed murder. Instead, they go after people who are about to commit murder, swooping down to stop them in the nick of time. Spielberg’s police officers don’t fight crime, they fight “Pre-Crime.” They don’t catch killers, they catch pre-killers.

The enormous anti-terror establishment that the United States has created in the years since 9/11 has a similar purpose. Its vast, sprawling, expensive array of governmental, quasi-governmental, and nominally private institutions and their tools—high tech, like ubiquitous surveillance cameras, satellites, wiretaps, computer algorithms, facial-recognition software, drones, and data collection and analysis on a global scale; lower tech, like networks of agents, bags of cash, and airport security checkpoints—are designed primarily to stop acts of terrorism before they happen. That turns out to be a good deal more difficult than investigating such an act once it occurs.

Or so it appears, judging from the contrast between the total unexpectedness of the Boston Marathon bombings, on April 15th, and the stunning speed with which the alleged (and there’s no reason to doubt the accuracy of the allegation) perpetrators were identified. Seventy-four hours after the carnage, we saw their pictures; eight hours after that, one was dead; six hours after that, we learned their names and perused their tweets and YouTube favorites; twelve hours after that, on the night of the fifth day, the second was in custody. To be sure, it was mainly traditional police work that solved the crime and cornered the criminals. But key clues—including two surveillance-camera images, culled from thousands, that were eventually found to be of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—were unearthed with the help of an all-pervasive, largely terror-sired security technosphere. [Continue reading…]

Remi Brulin writes: More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, we are finally getting a clearer picture of the ways in which the United States is waging what it calls its “war on terrorism.”

At the center of the government’s strategy has been the decision to shift the focus away from capturing and interrogating alleged terrorist suspects to killing them, with a series of covert wars prosecuted mostly by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command frequently relying on so-called kinetic operations: night raids, “find, fix and finish” operations, cruise missile strikes, and the increasing use of drones.

Yet these approaches raise not only fundamental legal and moral questions, but also doubts about their long-term strategic effectiveness. And, to a historian, they also carry disturbing echoes of the past.

Decades ago, Latin American regimes allied with the U.S., and then the U.S. government itself, insisted that they were fighting a war on terrorism. In the process, they resorted to methods and tactics that themselves fit any reasonable definition of terrorism. Indeed, America’s “targeted killings” and the 2004 decision to fund and train Iraqi special commandos echo very specific practices of the 1970s and 1980s. Considered in such a historical context, they highlight some of the fundamental contradictions and inconsistencies that lie at the heart of the discourse on terrorism. [Continue reading…]

Amy Davidson writes: “Stunning,” Judge Lewis Kaplan said Monday, to the defense lawyers for Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, who is being tried on terrorism conspiracy charges. They had just asked him to delay the trial, not for any of the reasons one might expect in this sort of case, like new evidence or classified case files or a defendant stashed in the limbo of Guantánamo — Ghaith is in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, which seems to be holding him just fine. The problem is the budget fight in Congress, of all things: thanks to sequestration, the federal public defenders on the case have been told they’ll be furloughed for days adding up to five and a half weeks. “It’s extremely troublesome to contemplate the possibility of a case of this nature being delayed because of sequestration,” Kaplan said. There are days when it can be hard to sort out the absurdities of the legal side of the war on terror from the absurdity of Washington in general.

It is a good thing that Ghaith is in a real court, at least, and not at Guantánamo, whose dysfunction has been thrown into relief in the last few weeks by a mass hunger strike. There are Republicans who are angry that he isn’t. “Taking the sequester scare tactics to a new level, now it appears we’ll have a confessed al Qaeda member sitting in an N.Y.C. jail and eating up taxpayer dollars while he waits out a manufactured delay in a trial that shouldn’t have been held on U.S. soil in the first place,” Senator John Cornyn told the Free Beacon, in a quote that might win a contest for packing multi-headed, multi-topic wrongheadedness into a single sentence. It costs many more taxpayer dollars to confine someone to Guantánamo indefinitely; why not try him in the city that was attacked on 9/11?

That said, the Obama Administration needs to be sure not to let sequestration get it off track in this case. Bringing Ghaith to Manhattan was a rare healthy response to the Republican tactic of making it hard for the Administration to get anyone out of Guantánamo — even the dozens of people who have been cleared for release (hence the hunger strike). Mostly, the Obama Administration has been fearful, in a way that has turned absurdity into lethality. Its frustrations with Guantánamo have led it to turn to drone strikes rather than to the guards at the M.C.C. It has built up another rickety extrajudicial program — the drone war — even as it has all but given up on the fight to close Guantánamo. That is not an argument for Guantánamo, just as saying that when you torture people you don’t kill them isn’t an argument for either torture or drones. You can say no to both. [Continue reading…]

Remi Brulin writes: Imagine a world where the security forces of several non-democratic states “coordinate intelligence activities closely,” “operate in the territory of one another’s countries” and have established a program “to find and kill terrorists” anywhere around the world as part of a “war” against “terrorism.” Such a dystopian reality appears to be precisely what Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth had in mind when writing, in his December 7, 2010 letter to President Obama, that current US policies of “targeted killings” may “set a dangerous precedent for abusive regimes around the globe to conduct drone attacks or other strikes against persons who they describe in vague or overly broad terms as terrorists.”

Such a nightmarish vision is much more, however, than a description of what could be. The first sentence above is a description of what was, taken verbatim from an August 3, 1976 secret memorandum by Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and describing the system of international cooperation between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay known as Operation Condor. Between 1976 and 1980 these regimes would, thanks to an elaborate and modern intelligence network, closely collaborate to “disappear” hundreds of people across state borders, among them some members of guerrilla movements but mostly political opponents, former legislators and even Presidents, journalists, religious personalities, often killed after having been submitted to the worst kinds of torture. Entitled “The “Third World War” and South America,” this memorandum makes for fascinating reading as it highlights how, over 35 years ago, close allies of the United States had already developed both a set of specific practices implemented in secret and aimed at fighting “the terrorists,” and a full discourse emphasizing at every turn the fact that they were “at war” against “terrorism.” Only a few weeks later, Orlando Letelier would become the most prominent victim to date of Operation Condor, a Chilean citizen assassinated by the Chilean intelligence services in the streets of Washington D.C.

A few week ago, Argentina opened a major trial into Operation Condor. In contrast, no US official has ever been held accountable for their potential role in this program, a form of impunity bolstered by the continued refusal of the US government to declassify hundreds of documents that would shed light onto the exact nature and extent of its knowledge and involvement at the time. The Shlaudeman memorandum testifies to the dangers of a policy shrouded in secrecy and a complete lack of accountability. It also underlies the importance of current calls on the government to provide much greater transparency regarding “war on terrorism” policies such as “targeted killings” or the resort to extraordinary renditions and torture, policies which, at least to some degree, bear resemblance to some of Operation Condor’s practices.

At the most basic level, this memorandum reminds us that long before America’s current “war on terrorism,” other States did develop a similar discourse. That various regimes have, historically, used the concept of “terrorism” to delegitimize their enemies (and the cause they claim to fight for) and thus justify the use of often profoundly immoral methods against them (think France in Algeria in the 1950s, or South Africa in its fight against Mandela’s African National Congress from the 1960s onward) is neither a new nor a very original notion. The Latin American case is especially relevant to current discussions however, for at least a couple reasons. First, because the United States government was intimately involved in some of the worst practices of these regimes, although the extent and exact nature of this involvement remains, to this day and especially as it pertains to Operation Condor, mostly unknown and classified. Second, because, as I document in my PhD dissertation, it is precisely in the Latin American context that the Reagan administration put the “fight against terrorism” at the heart of the American foreign policy discourse for the very first time. Not only that but, as I discussed in some detail in this interview with Glenn Greenwald, in doing so the US government essentially adopted the discourse used and developed by these authoritarian regimes during the previous decade. [Continue reading…]

In March, Democracy Now interviewed John Dinges, author of “The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents,” who talked about the Operation Condor trial currently underway in Argentina.

Glenn Greenwald writes: Yesterday I had the privilege to watch Dirty Wars, an upcoming film directed by Richard Rowley that chronicles the investigations of journalist Jeremy Scahill into America’s global covert war under President Obama and specifically his ever-growing kill lists. I will write comprehensively about this film closer to the date when it and the book by the same name will be released. For now, it will suffice to say that the film is one of the most important I’ve seen in years: gripping and emotionally affecting in the extreme, with remarkable, news-breaking revelations even for those of us who have intensely followed these issues. The film won awards at Sundance and rave reviews in unlikely places such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. But for now, I want to focus on just one small aspect of what makes the film so crucial.

The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television. The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark.

It is the ultimate tactic of Othering: concealing their humanity, enabling their dehumanization, by simply relegating them to nonexistence. As Ashleigh Banfield put it her 2003 speech denouncing US media coverage of the Iraq war just months before she was demoted and then fired by MSNBC: US media reports systematically exclude both the perspectives of “the other side” and the victims of American violence. Media outlets in predominantly Muslim countries certainly report on their plight, but US media outlets simply do not, which is one major reason for the disparity in worldviews between the two populations. They know what the US does in their part of the world, but Americans are kept deliberately ignorant of it.

What makes Dirty Wars so important is that it viscerally conveys the effects of US militarism on these invisible victims: by letting them speak for themselves. Scahill and his crew travel to the places most US journalists are unwilling or unable to go: to remote and dangerous provinces in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, all to give voice to the victims of US aggression. We hear from the Afghans whose family members (including two pregnant women) were slaughtered by US Special Forces in 2010 in the Paktia Province, despite being part of the Afghan Police, only for NATO to outright lie and claim the women were already dead from “honor killings” by the time they arrived (lies uncritically repeated, of course, by leading US media outlets). [Continue reading…]

Rosa Brooks writes: When a government is accused of activities that stretch or violate the law, it has three choices: 1) change the activities to conform with the law; 2) change the law to conform with the activities; or 3) lie (about the nature of the activities, the meaning of the law, or both).

Option 3 isn’t a comfortable one for the Obama administration, which is, thank heaven, not prone to outright lying. Some senior officials tolerate a moderate amount of fudging and obfuscation, but when the fudge factor gets too high, it induces visible queasiness. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen more than a little such discomfort on the faces of those stuck with justifying U.S. drone policy to Congress and the public.

That’s not surprising: As the targets of U.S. drone strikes have expanded from senior Taliban and al Qaeda operatives to a far broader range of individuals with only the most tenuous links to al Qaeda, the administration’s legal arguments for targeted killings have grown ever more tortured and complex. In particular, it’s gotten progressively more difficult for officials to avoid blushing while claiming that U.S. drone policy is fully consistent with Congress’s 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorizes force only against those who bear some responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.

With Option 3 — lie, lie, lie — off the table, and fudging and obfuscation growing harder to comfortably sustain, the thoughts of administration officials turn naturally to Option 2: change the law. Thus, as the Washington Post reported last weekend, some administration officials are apparently considering asking Congress for a new, improved “AUMF 2.0,” one that would place U.S. drone policy on firmer legal footing.

Just who is behind this notion is unclear, but the idea of a revised AUMF has been gaining considerable bipartisan traction outside the administration. In a recent Hoover Institution publication, for instance, Bobby Chesney, who served in the Obama Justice Department, teams up with Brookings’s Ben Wittes and Bush administration veterans Jack Goldsmith and Matt Waxman to argue for a revised AUMF — one that can provide “a new legal foundation for next-generation terrorist threats.”

I’m as fond of the rule of law as the next gal, so in a general sense, I applaud the desire to ensure that future executive branch counterterrorist activities are consistent with the laws passed by Congress. But “laws” and “the rule of law” are two different animals, and an expanded new AUMF is a bad idea.

Sure, legislative authorization for the use of force against “next generation” terrorist threats would give an additional veneer of legality to U.S. drone policy, and make congressional testimony less uncomfortable for John Brennan and Eric Holder. But an expanded AUMF would also likely lead to thoughtless further expansion of targeted killings. This would be strategically foolish, and would further undermine the rule of law.

An expanded AUMF is also unnecessary. Even if Congress simply repealed the 2001 AUMF (as the New York Times editorial board urges) instead of revising it, the president already has all the legal authority he needs to keep the nation safe.

If U.S. drone policy is currently on shaky legal ground, it’s not for lack of inherent executive authority (or international law authority) to use force against any terrorist organization that poses an imminent and grave threat to the United States. U.S. drone policy is on shaky legal ground because the administration has lost sight of the difference between threats that are imminent and grave and threats better characterized as speculative and minor. [Continue reading…]

In an editorial, the New York Times says: Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was enacted with good intentions — to give President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban rulers who sheltered and aided the terrorists who had attacked the United States.

But over time, that resolution became warped into something else: the basis for a vast overreaching of power by one president, Mr. Bush, and less outrageous but still dangerous policies by another, Barack Obama.

Mr. Bush used the authorization law as an excuse to kidnap hundreds of people — guilty and blameless people alike — and throw them into secret prisons where many were tortured. He used it as a pretext to open the Guantánamo Bay camp and to eavesdrop on Americans without bothering to obtain a warrant. He claimed it as justification for the invasion of Iraq, twisting intelligence to fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.

Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama does not go as far as to claim that the Constitution gives him the inherent power to do all those things. But he has relied on the 2001 authorization to use drones to kill terrorists far from the Afghan battlefield, and to claim an unconstitutional power to kill American citizens in other countries based only on suspicion that they are or might become terrorist threats, without judicial review.

The concern that many, including this page, expressed about the authorization is coming true: that it could become the basis for a perpetual, ever-expanding war that undermined the traditional constraints on government power. The result is an unintelligible policy without express limits or protective walls.

Last Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the president would soon shed more light on his “targeted killing” policy. Mr. Obama needs to. In the last few weeks, confusion over these issues has been vividly on display. On one hand, the administration has said it would use lethal force only when capturing a terrorist was impossible, and it did arrest Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden who once served as a spokesman for Al Qaeda, and arraigned him on Friday in federal court in Manhattan. The Washington Post reported last week that counterterrorism officials considered using the authorization law as the basis for the government’s authority to kill Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader in Algeria and Mali, but decided it did not apply because he was not part of Al Qaeda or an associated group.

But the administration still has not fully disclosed to Congress the legal documents on which the targeted killing program is based. And in that same article, The Post said the administration was debating whether it could stretch the law to make it apply to groups that had no connection, or only slight ones, to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks.

A big part of the problem is that the authorization to use military force is too vague. It gives the president the power to attack “nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Making the law more specific, however, would only further enshrine the notion of a war without end. And, as Jeh Johnson, then counsel to the defense secretary, said in a speech last November, “War must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs.”

The right solution is for Congress to repeal the 2001 authorization. It could wait to do that until American soldiers have left Afghanistan, which is scheduled, too slowly, for the end of 2014. Better yet, Congress could repeal it now, effective upon withdrawal.

Fareed Zacharia writes: As we debate whether the two parties can ever come together and get things done, here’s something President Obama could probably do by himself that would be a signal accomplishment of his presidency: End the war on terror. Or, more realistically, start planning and preparing the country for phasing it out.

For 11 years, the United States has been operating under emergency wartime powers granted under the 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” That is a longer period than the country spent fighting the Civil War, World War I and World War II combined. It grants the president and the federal government extraordinary authorities at home and abroad, effectively suspends civil liberties for anyone the government deems an enemy and keeps us on a permanent war footing in all kinds of ways.

Now, for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, an administration official has sketched a possible endpoint.

In a thoughtful speech at the Oxford Union last week, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing general counsel for the Pentagon, recognized that “we cannot and should not expect al-Qaeda and its associated forces to all surrender, all lay down their weapons in an open field, or to sign a peace treaty with us. They are terrorist organizations. Nor can we capture or kill every last terrorist who claims an affiliation with al-Qaeda.”

But, he argued, “There will come a tipping point . . . at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” At that point, “our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.”

Phasing out or modifying these emergency powers should be something that would appeal to both left and right. James Madison, father of the Constitution, was clear on the topic. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” he wrote, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

If you want to know why we’re in such a deep budgetary hole, one large piece of it is that we have spent around $2 trillion on foreign wars in the past decade. [Continue reading…]

And ending the war on terror wouldn’t just save money — it would allow for the possibility that America as a nation might be able to climb out of one of the most destructive expressions of collective insanity into which any nation has ever fallen.

Politics might dictate that this war can only be ended through some kind of declaration of victory, but an honest reckoning will eventually require acknowledging that this was the greatest blunder in America’s history. A trap was laid, and like a brainless giant, the United States stepped right into it.

Who could imagine that by making the meager investment of a few flying lessons and some box cutters, a small band of fanatics could persuade a country that prides itself as “the greatest nation on earth” to near bankrupt itself, act with such stupidity and inflict such enormous harm?

This is a long passage from an article on Adam Curtis’ blog, published on September 11, 2010. Curtis illustrates his piece with lots of photographs and video clips. Much of the video is integral to the narrative but unfortunately no embedding code is available. The passage I’ve selected includes a couple of videos and readers will need to go to the BBC website to view these.

In July 1979 a conference was held in Jerusalem to discuss the phenomenon of “International Terrorism”. It was organised by a young Benjamin Netanyahu at the Jonathan Institute, named after his brother who had been killed by terrorists at Entebbe.

All sorts of people were there, including George Bush Snr, many Neoconservatives who would become influential in Bush Jnr’s adminsitration, and Prime Minister Begin.

But the agenda of the conference was shaped by a new breed of what would become known as “terror experts”. And all of them were convinced by the new theory that the KGB were running almost all terrorism around the world.

They were also great, and sometimes very weird, characters.

One was an Australian journalist and novelist who wrote for the British Economist called Robert Moss.

Moss was one of the earliest promoters of the idea of hidden Soviet control. And in 1976 he helped write the speech for Mrs Thatcher that led the Soviets to call her the Iron Lady.

Later – in the mid 80s – Moss decided he had found a route to perceiving higher truths in the world. Truths hidden from ordinary mundane consciousness.

Through his dreams.

He developed a system he called Active Dreaming. You can find his theory here.

“When we act to bring the energy and imagery of dreams into physical reality, we become poets of consciousness and infuse our world with magic. Deep into multidimensional reality”

Another “terror expert” was a French historian called Annie Kriegel.

She had been a hardline Stalinist in the French Communist Party, but had turned violently against the Soviet Union.

Kriegel was convinced that all the terrorist acts in the Middle East were being co-ordinated from Moscow. This was music to the ears of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli leaders who were seeking further US support.

In 1982 Kriegel wrote a book that said that the massacres in the Sabra-Chatila camps were organised by the Soviets and carried out by German terrorists under KGB control.

But perhaps the most important expert was another ex-communist. An American called Claire Sterling.

Sterling was a journalist who lived in Italy. She took all the “evidence” of Soviet control that was produced a the conference and bundled it up together into a book called The Terror Network.

It had a dramatic thesis.

It said that there was a “Global Terror Network” underneath the surface of most Western societies and the Middle East.

That all of them – the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof gang, Provisional IRA, South Moluccans, Japanese Red Army, Iranian terrorists, Turkish People’s Liberation Army, Spain’s ETA, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah, the military arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization were all part of a grand Soviet scheme.

The aim of the scheme was to force the police in a Western democracies to crack down on individual freedoms. Then a repressive police state would emerge and breed resentment – making the masses ripe for Communist revolution.

One of Sterling’s closest friends in Italy was a young American academic called Michael Ledeen. He was fascinated by the theory.

And then early in 1981 he became a special assistant to the new US Secretary of State in the first Reagan administration.

Who was General Alexander Haig.

Haig read The Terror Network and immediately bought Sterling’s theory – because it proved what he instinctively knew about the Soviet threat.

And few days later Haig went to Congress and publicly accused Moscow of “training, funding, and equipping” international terrorists. He announced that “international counterterrorism will take the place of human rights.”

William Casey, the new head of the CIA also read and believed Sterling’s book.

The only problem was the no-one else took it seriously.

Many of those running the Reagan administration knew that the Soviet Union was supporting and arming liberation movements in the developing world, but they didn’t believe in the Global Terror Network.

Casey met with his CIA analysts. He told them that the book – The Terror Network – “has told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year.”

His analysts then patiently explained to him that much of Claire Sterling’s evidence was composed of Black Propaganda they themselves had invented and spread around Europe to discredit to Soviets.

Even Reagan – for all his anti-communism – didn’t take it seriously.

But then – on 13th of May 1981 – Mehmet Ali Agca tried to kill the Pope in Rome.

Agca was a member of an extreme right wing Turkish group called the Grey Wolves. But at first Agca said he had done it on his own – it was neither right or left, he said. He was tried and put in prison.

But then in May 1982 Agca suddenly changed his story.

But he didn’t say he had done it as a member of the extreme right. Instead he insisted he had been part of a communist conspiracy to kill the Pope that had been organised by the Bulgarian secret service – and was being controlled behind that by Moscow.
[…]
Claire Sterling seized on this and went into action. She talked to lots of “intelligence informants” in Italy and the rest of Europe and wrote an article for Readers Digest. It caused a worldwide sensation.

Sterling said that Agca showed the incredible spider’s web that Moscow had created to control terrorism throughout the world. It had been built in such a way that it was normally impossible to see the links. But, like a flash of lightning on a dark night, Agca had shown how web really worked.

In his case, the KGB controlled the Bulgarian Secret service, and they in turn controlled the Turkish criminal mafia.

The Bulgarians had told the Mafia to find someone who could never be suspected of being linked to Moscow, bring him to Rome and tell him to shoot the Pope.

He would be interpreted as a Muslim fanatic, while Moscow would be rid of a Polish Pope who was a supporting the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Claire Sterling became a media celebrity. She appeared on TV across America and the world.
[…]
Sterling’s theory caused consternation in the Reagan administration, and especially in the CIA.

Almost all CIA officers and analysts were united in a belief that what Sterling was saying was rubbish. They produced an internal report saying there was no evidence linking the KGB to the assassination attempt.

But the head of the CIA, William Casey, was convinced by Sterling.

A senior CIA analyst called Melvin Goodman testified in 1991 to a Senate Committee as to what Casey then did.

He forced CIA officers to alter the report’s main judgements and to “stack the deck” in favour of KGB complicity. The sections of the report that expressed doubts and had counter arguments were erased.

The altered report was then sent to the White House. And it became one of the underpinnings of President Reagan’s increasingly simplified view of the world – that there was an interconnected network of terror in the world.

Although a new puppet master had also appeared, along with the Soviet Union – Iran. [Continue reading…]

Adam Curtis writes: At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of “black ops” to track down and arrest the terrorists.

In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance – and he turned up in Kabul dressed like this.

And everyone believed him and his stories. In the process Idema brilliantly exposed the emptiness and fakery of much of the TV and newspaper reporting of the war on terror.

He told the journalists and the TV presenters all kinds of lies and fantasies. He even became the central, heroic figure in a book called The Hunt for Bin Laden.

Then Idema charged journalists fortunes for what he said was an “al qaeda” video of a “a training camp” – where strangely many of the terrorists spoke in english, and allegedly you could hear Idema’s voice on the soundtrack. Few of the journalists did anything to really check if any of what he was saying was true.

CBS did a special programme about the tapes fronted by Dan Rather, called “Heart of Darkness”. They did check on the tapes – the producers went to some of the new breed of “terror experts” that were spawning after 2001. CBS’s press office said that they “showed the tapes to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda”.

The BBC did a report that showed the tapes. And they travelled to the village where they had been recorded – and found an old man who said, yes there had been Arabs there.

But much later a number of journalists did investigate Jack Idema properly – and the consensus now is that the tapes are probably fakes. [Continue reading…]

Michael Ware writes: I should be dead. I wish I was.

Those eight words were not easy to write. It’s even harder now reading them back. Seeing them there, sullen and sad and monosyllabic in their black and white.

For the longest time I wished I was dead. I wished one of my multitude of near-misses wasn’t. Later there then came a time—when I’d first stopped living in war and first found Brooklyn—a time when I consciously, achingly desired death. Craved it. Longed so hard and bitterly for it that it became some taut tripwire strung within me where no one could see. But then, perhaps, thinking back, decoding it anew, maybe the wish was not to be dead? Not entirely? Not when I drill down into it. Maybe my wish rather was for all the pain to simply end?

Yes, that’s starting to seem more like it. Maybe it wasn’t death I wanted so much as it was oblivion.

I won’t tell you how close I did or did not come in those angry days, after what feels now like an unspeakable decade of reporting wars; wars from Lebanon to Georgia, to Pakistan and Afghanistan; all mere accompaniments to six or seven years in Iraq. But I will tell you of when, on a day I cannot distinctly remember, that I came to know I wouldn’t do it. That no matter what, no matter how badly I pined for it, I would nonetheless continue. Even if that meant being sentenced to a slow, quiet torment for the term of my natural life. That was the day I finally accepted it was a choice no longer mine to make. [Continue reading…]

Peter Maass writes: The phrase “war on terror” is rarely heard these days. Our fight in Iraq ended last year with the pullout of the remaining troops. Combat forces are set to be withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014, and their fade-away has been highlighted by the fact that more private contractors are getting killed in the country than GIs. President Obama has declared, with apparent justification, that the end of our post-9/11 wars is near. Quite soon, Dover Air Force Base, where the fallen are brought home, will no longer have its grim intake of Americans who have seen the true end of war. The flow of flag-draped coffins ceased long ago; although Obama overturned a Bush-era ban on photos of them, they have been infrequently shown in newspapers or even on the web. No one cares to look.

That does not mean we’re done with war, however. There is talk of attacking Iran and Syria; American forces all but led the NATO assault in Libya, drone strikes are taking place from Pakistan to Somalia and Yemen, prisoners continue to be held at Guantánamo Bay, a shadowy game of cyber-war rages around the globe and the US government, in the name of national security, is prosecuting more whistleblowers than ever before while accumulating (or trying to accumulate) wide powers to conduct domestic surveillance of computers and cellphones. The paradox is that although war is waning in the classic configuration of brigades fighting an enemy on foreign shores, we are not rid of its specter, burdens, threats, costs and restrictions. What should we make of wartime that has the appearance of peacetime?

Mary Dudziak’s new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Dudziak, a legal historian at the University of Southern California, argues that we are experiencing “not a time without war, but instead a time in which war does not bother everyday Americans.” Her smooth foray into legal and political history reveals that in not just the past decade but the past century, wartime has become a more or less permanent feature of the American experience, though we fail to recognize it. She doesn’t say so explicitly, but we are experiencing a reverse Orwellian situation, in which the state, rather than elevating war to perpetuate itself, obscures war to perpetuate itself.

Dudziak assembles an intellectual Rubik’s Cube, playing with ideas of time, law, killing and politics, and arranging them into a pattern that all but eliminates the distinctions we long assumed to have existed between war and peace. “We tend to believe that there are two kinds of time, wartime and peacetime, and history consists of moving from one kind of time to the next,” she writes. “Built into the very essence of our idea of wartime is the assumption that war is temporary…. When we look at the full time line of American military conflicts, however, including the ‘small wars’ and the so-called forgotten wars, there are not many years of peacetime. This shows us that war is not an exception to normal peacetime, but instead an enduring condition.” [Continue reading…]

Philip Knightley describes how the Saudi-CIA operation that foiled the latest al Qaeda bombing plot, employed a technique first used in the Soviet Union.

When the story of the foiled bomb plot first broke it seemed too good to be true. The security authorities had intercepted a man carrying a supposedly undetectable bomb which was being examined at the FBI laboratories in Quantico, Virginia. This suggested an amazing piece of intelligence work. What had led the authorities to the man? Why were they suspicious of him? Had they been tipped off? As details emerged it became apparent that the action was rather more straightforward.

In the tradition of [the founder of the KGB, Felix] Dzerzhinski, the Saudi intelligence service had apparently “dangled” one of its agents in front of known al-Qa’ida members hoping for a “bite”. To make the bait attractive, the agent, it later emerged, was a British passport holder. Al-Qa’ida was fooled and handed him the bomb with instructions to smuggle it on a plane bound for the United States. He handed it over to the Saudis. It seems likely that the Saudis passed on the information the agent had gathered on al-Qa’ida to enable the US to mount a drone attack on an al-Qaida leader in Yemen. The Saudis are thought to have planned more operations for its star undercover agent but were forced to abandon them when the story leaked to the Western media. Thus espionage history repeated itself, and echoes can be heard of the most famous of all counter-espionage operations in the Soviet Union, the Trust.

The Trust appeared to be a huge anti-Bolshevik organisation working from Moscow to overthrow the Communists and reverse the revolution. Instead,Dzerzhinski used it to identify anti-communists. All he needed to do was set up the organisation and wait to see who joined it. He could then choose when to roll it up and arrest its members or whether to let it run in the hope of revealing bigger prey.

In intelligence circles the Trust became a textbook operation and its principles copied worldwide. But to be most effective required a ruthlessness that Western services often felt unable to carry out. For instance, if the authenticity of a front organisation was questioned, the KGB did not hesitate to initiate a terrorist incident to reinforce the organisation’s reputation. So the Trust would plant bombs that would kill innocent people just so that possible recruits would think it a genuine organisation.

Fareed Zacharia writes: Whatever you thought of President Obama’s recent speech on Afghanistan, it is now increasingly clear that the United States is winding down its massive military commitments to the two wars of the last decade.

We are out of Iraq and we will soon be largely out of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. Threats remain but these are being handled using special forces and intelligence. So, finally, after a decade, we seem to be right-sizing the threat from terrorist groups.

Or are we?

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end. [Continue reading…]

Henry A Giroux writes: Since 9/11, the war on terror and the campaign for homeland security have increasingly mimicked the tactics of the enemies they sought to crush. Violence and punishment as both a media spectacle and a bone-crushing reality have become prominent and influential forces shaping American society. As the boundaries between “the realms of war and civil life have collapsed,” social relations and the public services needed to make them viable have been increasingly privatized and militarized. The logic of profitability works its magic in channeling the public funding of warfare and organized violence into universities, market-based service providers and deregulated contractors. The metaphysics of war and associated forms of violence now creep into every aspect of American society.

As the preferred “instrument of statecraft,” war and its intensifying production of violence cross borders, time, space and places. Seemingly without any measure of self-restraint, state-sponsored violence flows and regroups, contaminating both foreign and domestic policies. One consequence of the permanent warfare state is evident in the public revelations concerning a number of war crimes committed recently by US government forces. These include the indiscriminate killings of Afghan civilians by US drone aircraft; the barbaric murder of Afghan children and peasant farmers by American infantrymen infamously labeled as “the kill team”; disclosures concerning four American Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters; and the recent uncovering of photographs showing “more than a dozen soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team, along with some Afghan security forces, posing with the severed hands and legs of Taliban attackers in Zabul Province in 2010.” And, shocking even for those acquainted with standard military combat, there is the case of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who “walked off a small combat outpost in Kandahar province and slaughtered 17 villagers, most of them women and children and later walked back to his base and turned himself in.” Mind-numbing violence, war crimes and indiscriminate military attacks on civilians on the part of the US government are far from new, of course, and date back to infamous acts such as the air attacks on civilians in Dresden along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Military spokespersons are typically quick to remind the American public that such practices are part of the price one pays for combat and are endemic to war itself.

The history of atrocities committed by the United States in the name of war need not be repeated here, but some of these incidents have doubled in on themselves and fueled public outrage against the violence of war. One of the most famous was the My Lai massacre, which played a crucial role in mobilizing anti-war protests against the Vietnam War. Even dubious appeals to national defense and honor can provide no excuse for mass killings of civilians, rapes and other acts of destruction that completely lack any justifiable military objective. Not only does the alleged normative violence of war disguise the moral cowardice of the warmongers, it also demonizes the enemy and dehumanizes soldiers. It is this brutalizing psychology of desensitization, emotional hardness and the freezing of moral responsibility that is particularly crucial to understand, because it grows out of a formative culture in which war, violence and the dehumanization of others becomes routine, commonplace and removed from any sense of ethical accountability. [Continue reading…]

Gareth Porter writes: A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a “senior intelligence official” briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden’s compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, “continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management.” Bin Laden was, “not just a strategic thinker for the group,” said the official. “He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions.” The official called the bin Laden compound, “an active command and control center.”

The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout, “the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation,” and administration officials could not resist leaking to reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden’s trusted courier from al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden’s role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real story, told here for the first time, is that bin Laden was in the compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the al-Qaeda leadership.

The CIA’s claim that it found bin Laden on its own is equally false. In fact, the intensive focus on the compound in Abbottabad was the result of crucial intelligence provided by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Truthout has been able to reconstruct the real story of bin Laden’s exile in Abbottabad, as well as how the CIA found him, thanks in large part to information gathered last year from Pakistani tribal and ISI sources by retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir. But that information was confirmed, in essence, in remarks after the bin Laden raid by the same senior intelligence official cited above – remarks that have been ignored until now. [Continue reading…]

Glenn Greenwald writes: In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s summary execution one year ago, many predicted that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. Here’s what has happened since then:

*With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without a single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.

* For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.

* With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror. [Continue reading…]