via Loonwatch.com Bob McCarthy Wants to Rip Out Muslim Bodies from Cemetery 04 October 2010 by Garibaldi Oct. 4,2010
The latest manifestation of Islamophobia to get some media attention has been the attempt by paranoid Islamophobes to have a Muslim community remove the body of their deceased ones from a cemetery that they own. Stephen Colbert mocked them with his skit on Muslim Vampires and Keith Olberman designated the leader of the anti-Muslims, Bob McCarthy, as the Worst Person in the World. (hat tip: Yursil)
David Cole in his article and commentary in March of 2006 on the book The Next Attack by Benjamin and Simon is still germane to what is happening these days.
And so I am re-posting a large portion of that article here as an object lesson in the stupidity of the American government and its outdated foreign policies and domestic policies which are only making matters worse and preparing the way for another extreme move to the right. Obama has already sold out on numerous issues to the right just a few more steps and he'll become an honorary Right-wing Hawkish Republican.
Note I came across this article and book review by David Cole which was referenced by John L. Esposito in his book The Future of Islam 2010 (pp. 161-164).
Bi-partisanship & mutual cooperation and a bit of give and take is one thing but total capitulation is another.
Obama is still allowing Harsh Techniques -Torture Lite on suspects while pursuing a policy of using drones to kill hundreds of innocent civilians while propping up illegitimate authoritarian, brutal anti-democratic governments in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia etc. while planning an attack on Iran and possibly a small strategic nuclear war but who knows. And it should be noted though he claims the Iraq war is over and it is now a paradise it isn't the country is in ruins after ten years of draconian inhumane sanctions and followed by a decade of war all in order to punish the civilian population for not ousting Saddam themselves . Saddam was not a threat to the USA or even to Israel and he did not support Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden and he was not connected to the 9/11 attacks no matter how many times these accusations are repeated by John McCain, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove or Dick Cheney and Fox News or CNN or the Religious Right And the Tea Party Gang and Dick Armey etc.
Besides all this Obama is also buying into the whole notion of spying on millions of Americans all in the name of "NATIONAL SECURITY" remember what Bush said about the US constitution "It's just a piece of paper" so who cares how its twisted and abused as long as it is not used to in anyway shape or form to undermine the statue of the super-wealthy and the political, military and managerial elite.
Highlighting the Failures by the Bush/Cheney Regimes Approach to the War on Terror and the fear that Obama has been following the same failed policies.In both administration we know that perception , deception, Talking Points and playing on the public's fears and gullibility in shaping public opinion to accept these failed policies in the War on Terror is more important than the reality that the world is less safe because of failed policies of the American government and its stoneage military thinking which has also been forced fed to its own citizens and to other countries including NATO itself. Bush/Cheney may be gone but many of their policies and their arrogant self-righteous bullying attitudes persist.
Excerpt From: Are we safer? by David Cole at The New York Review of Books March 9,2006 ( David Cole's commentary and review of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right
"Benjamin and Simon’s diagnosis of the Bush administration as fixated on outdated conceptions of war is ironic, given the administration’s insistence that “everything changed” after September 11, and that it has adopted an entirely new model for fighting global terror. For example, the Pentagon’s National Security Strategy, issued in September 2002, advanced a new and controversial justification for going to war. It argued that in light of the threats now posed by weapons of mass destruction, war is justified not only when the nation is attacked or faces imminent attack—the only justifications for war recognized by international law—but also when the US faces a more speculative but potentially catastrophic future threat. This was the theory for the Iraq war. Since the administration could not argue that an attack by Iraq on the United States was imminent, it contended that the potential for attack with weapons of mass destruction at some undetermined time in the future was sufficient to justify a “preventive” war.
The administration has invoked a similar “preventive” rationale to defend the use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment to interrogate al-Qaeda and other prisoners, maintaining that the information it obtains may help prevent future attacks. It has argued that the conflict with al-Qaeda is a new kind of war, and therefore traditionally recognized rules of war, such as affording detainees a hearing to decide whether they are in fact enemy combatants, and treating detainees humanely, do not apply.
Within the US, Attorney General John Ashcroft repeatedly promoted what he labeled a new “paradigm of prevention” in law enforcement. When the enemy is willing to commit suicide to inflict mass casualties on civilians, he argued, the US must act preemptively to prevent the next attack from occurring. On this theory, the administration subjected 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants to fingerprinting and registration, sought out 8,000 Arab and Muslim men for FBI interviews, and imprisoned over 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism preventive detention initiatives. As part of this program, the government adopted an aggressive strategy of arrest and prosecution, holding people on minor charges—in fact pretexts—such as immigration violations, credit card fraud, or false statements, or, when it had no charges at all, as “material witnesses.”"
and as David Cole points out the worst decision of all:
"...the US decision to halt UN inspections in Iraq and invade the country, against the wishes of the inspectors, the Security Council, and most of the world, has helped to inspire, recruit, and train a terrorist network. It is precisely when the state uses coercive measures such as war or detention that it must show it has convincing evidence and is using fair procedures. Solid evidence of wrongdoing and fair process are not technicalities to be cast aside whenever national security is threatened; without them, the use of force is likely to increase violence against Americans, not reduce it."
by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon Times Books, 330 pp)
Lessons From the Bush/Cheney war on terror blunders still ignored. For instance initiating hasty actions with poorly defined criteria such as Rounding up of thousands of individual Americans mainly Muslim Americans that is based only on their religious affiliation and their ethnicity and not based upon "reasonable cause ,suspicion etc. in all totaling 80,000 Arab and Muslim Americans for finger-printing and registration.
Then came the ill-conceived entirely unnecessary War of Aggression and brutal wantonly destructive invasion of Iraq eventually pissing off more Arabs and millions more Muslims as the Americans showed a callous disregard for human life especially the lives of Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims.
To add to the Bush Cheney folly they went ahead with what they considered a tough approach by allowing the abuse , torture and murders of Iraqi civilians and of so called insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan , Pakistan and a number of other countries as the USA believed it had and still has according to President Obama to enter any country extract or kill those whom they believe are terrorists or those who enable terrorists.
My own suggestion is that once the USA initiated these actions then at that point any International Laws agreements on torture and abuse or on kidnapping foreign civilians or the use of targeted assassinations and the use of various forms of Death Squads then all of those International Agreements and United Nations resolutions were made invalid and void. This would mean that the Secret police in India, China, Indonesia , Saudi Arabia or Israel etc. can take it as a given that by passing a few rather imaginative and creative laws they too can abuse and torture prisoners and that they too can go into any country they wish and extract or assassinate those whom they feel are a threat to their country which would mean even peaceful dissidents as we are seeing peaceful dissidents being spied upon, harassed , intimidated and even rounded up in the United States on Obama's Watch over the last couple of months.
Iraq Invasion and Occupation Quickly Forgotten as Obama is being encouraged to attack Iran and while he pursues counterproductive policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and even in South America where his administration has become hostile to any regime insisting on real reform such as the popular reformer President Zelaya of Honduras or Chavez of Venezuela: the Americans as always prefer dictators and brutal military regimes and Oligarchies to any real democratic government especially if it dares to regulate foreign owned corporations or protect the rights of workers, the poor, the indigenous peoples who are still under assault in many parts of the Americas including Mexico .
Are we safer? by David Cole at The New York Review of Books March 9,2006
(The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right
by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon Times Books, 330 pp)
President Bush is fond of repeating, “We are fighting them over there so that we won’t have to fight them here at home.” As a slogan, this may be good politics. But as a counterterrorism strategy, it appears to be a disaster. Fighting them “over there” has since 2003 meant committing over one hundred thousand troops, hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands of lives to a conflict in Iraq whose only clear connection to the “war on terror” has been its encouragement of terrorism. The US attack on Iraq has created the world’s principal breeding and training ground for anti-American terrorists. Many highly informed commentators have argued that the war in Iraq, based at best on faulty intelligence and at worst on outright lies, was a major diversion from the real enemy—al-Qaeda and the terrorists loosely linked with it, or inspired by it—and that the war with Iraq has therefore made us less secure.1
Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, counterterrorism experts at the National Security Council under President Clinton, argue in their new book, The Next Attack, that the problem is more deep-rooted than the administration’s erroneous venture in Iraq. In their view, the Iraq war is a symptom of the Bush administration’s obsession with fighting an offensive “war on terror,” an obsession that has caused the administration to disregard the less glamorous but more crucial task of shoring up America’s defenses against future attacks. Committed to an outmoded strategy directed at states rather than the loose-knit non-state terrorist movements that actually threaten us, the administration sought out a state to attack, and after an initial and justifiable campaign in Afghanistan, invaded Iraq. But when it comes to fighting the decentralized threat of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, Benjamin and Simon maintain, the best defense is not a good offense, but a good defense.
Especially after the US and its local allies forced al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, the threat of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is not centralized, but globalized and dispersed. The subway bombings in Madrid and London in 2003 and 2005 were the work not of disciplined al-Qaeda agents acting on orders from above but of small bands of young men with little or no connection to al-Qaeda, and little or no previous record as terrorists. Benjamin and Simon see these attacks as signs of a “new breed of self-starting terrorist cells,” and argue that the development of such cells has been vastly facilitated by the Internet. In 1998, they report, there were only twelve Web sites for terrorist groups; in 2005, there were 4,400. The Web sites spread both religious doctrine calling for violence and practical instructions for carrying it out. The consequences have been dire: according to the RAND Corporation, three quarters of all suicide bombings since 1968 took place in the four years after September 11.
Because the terrorist threat is decentralized and globalized, it cannot be fought by traditional military methods. There is no territory to take, no land to occupy, and, with few exceptions, no country to hold accountable. The target is constantly moving and growing. Benjamin and Simon suggest that we think of the terrorist threat as two concentric circles—a relatively small inner one consisting of committed terrorists, violently opposed to what they see as infidel Western governments and institutions, and a larger outer circle consisting of those susceptible of being moved to the inner circle. The challenge, they argue, is not only to find and incapacitate the inner circle, but also to reduce migration from the outer to the inner circle. Or, as Donald Rumsfeld asked in an October 2003 internal Pentagon memo, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”2
Much of Benjamin and Simon’s book concentrates on the war with Iraq, which they view as having played into the terrorists’ hands. Drawing on their own experience and contacts when they were members of Clinton’s National Security Agency, they retell the now-familiar story of how the Bush administration was bent on regime change in Iraq almost from the day it took office. It started planning for war against Iraq immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11; pressured intelligence agencies to make a case for the invasion of Iraq; created its own ad hoc Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, headed by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, to make the case when the intelligence agencies were reluctant to do so; and then failed to plan for the war’s aftermath. According to Benjamin and Simon, administration officials, certain that the US would be welcomed with open arms, literally prohibited planners from even considering the problem of postwar security.
There is little question that the Iraq war, instead of supporting the struggle against terror, has weakened it. In February 2005, CIA Director Porter Goss told Congress that “Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-US jihadists,” and those “who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups, and networks.”3 The military analyst Anthony Cordesman has identified thirty-two “adaptations” to US strategy that the insurgents have successfully made since the war began, including “mixed attacks” in which one bomb follows another with some delay, in order to maximize injury to police and rescue workers; more sophisticated surveillance of US forces and their allies; improved infiltration of the Iraqi military and police forces; and increasingly deadly improvised explosive devices. The insurgents have obtained access to large caches of Saddam Hussein’s arms that the US military failed to secure. And they have been able to demonstrate to the world their commitment and their willingness to die by daily attacks on the US and Iraqi military and police forces—many of them suicide attacks that are videotaped and promptly disseminated throughout the world via the Internet.
As Benjamin and Simon put it, the administration “failed the first test of military leadership. They did not know who their real enemy was.” The authors cite the constant bombing and heavy ground fire of the “shock and awe” campaign at the beginning of the Iraq war as an illustration of the problem. The bombing was effective for a few weeks in subduing Saddam Hussein. But if the enemy is a terrorist ideology spread throughout the Muslim diaspora, a “shock and awe” strategy is very likely to backfire by reinforcing the enemy’s description of the United States as an aggressive force without regard for the lives of innocent Muslims.
National security policy, the authors argue, should reject the model of a military “war on terror,” and instead adopt an intelligence-based approach that (1) seeks to identify, capture, and disrupt terrorists; (2) safeguards the most dangerous weapons to keep them out of terrorists’ hands; (3) identifies and protects the most vulnerable targets in the US; and (4) reduces the creation of new terrorists by addressing the grievances that drive people to extreme violence in the first place.
The Bush administration’s stubborn adherence to the traditional conception of war has caused it to disregard more important and effective defensive actions. The administration, Benjamin and Simon write, has failed to safeguard nuclear weapons materials in the former Soviet Union; failed to identify and protect the most vulnerable targets within the United States, such as water supplies; failed to work effectively with private businesses that are responsible for other vulnerable targets, such as chemical plants; and failed to increase in any significant measure the monitoring of container cargo at shipping ports, of which only one in twenty is inspected. According to the authors, the FBI is still so reluctant to adapt its methods to the realities of terrorism that it has used its intelligence “analysts” to take out the garbage and answer phones, the result being a very large turnover of employees who should be piecing together scraps of intelligence in order to find terrorists and disrupt their plans.
Benjamin and Simon’s critique of homeland security is largely corroborated by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission’s assessment in December 2005 of the Bush administration’s progress in fulfilling the forty-one recommendations in the commission’s Final Report, released in July 2004. Grading the administration on each of its recommended reforms, the 9/11 Commission gave it five F’s, twelve D’s, eight C’s, several incompletes, and only one A–. Among the measures that received either an F or a D are some of the most basic requirements of security. The administration was given a D for its identification of vulnerable potential targets, as well as for its efforts to secure weapons of mass destruction, its screening of checked luggage and cargo for explosives, its arrangements for sharing information among intelligence agencies, and its support of secular educational reform in Muslim countries. It received an F for, among other things, its failure to develop common standards with other nations for detaining and prosecuting terrorist suspects as well as for its failure to establish an effective program to screen airline passengers for potential terrorists.4
2.
Benjamin and Simon’s diagnosis of the Bush administration as fixated on outdated conceptions of war is ironic, given the administration’s insistence that “everything changed” after September 11, and that it has adopted an entirely new model for fighting global terror. For example, the Pentagon’s National Security Strategy, issued in September 2002, advanced a new and controversial justification for going to war. It argued that in light of the threats now posed by weapons of mass destruction, war is justified not only when the nation is attacked or faces imminent attack—the only justifications for war recognized by international law—but also when the US faces a more speculative but potentially catastrophic future threat. This was the theory for the Iraq war. Since the administration could not argue that an attack by Iraq on the United States was imminent, it contended that the potential for attack with weapons of mass destruction at some undetermined time in the future was sufficient to justify a “preventive” war.
The administration has invoked a similar “preventive” rationale to defend the use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment to interrogate al-Qaeda and other prisoners, maintaining that the information it obtains may help prevent future attacks. It has argued that the conflict with al-Qaeda is a new kind of war, and therefore traditionally recognized rules of war, such as affording detainees a hearing to decide whether they are in fact enemy combatants, and treating detainees humanely, do not apply.
Within the US, Attorney General John Ashcroft repeatedly promoted what he labeled a new “paradigm of prevention” in law enforcement. When the enemy is willing to commit suicide to inflict mass casualties on civilians, he argued, the US must act preemptively to prevent the next attack from occurring. On this theory, the administration subjected 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants to fingerprinting and registration, sought out 8,000 Arab and Muslim men for FBI interviews, and imprisoned over 5,000 foreign nationals in antiterrorism preventive detention initiatives. As part of this program, the government adopted an aggressive strategy of arrest and prosecution, holding people on minor charges—in fact pretexts—such as immigration violations, credit card fraud, or false statements, or, when it had no charges at all, as “material witnesses.”
...This “preventive” approach was used to launch the attack on Iraq, and has been used to justify Guantánamo, disappearances, CIA black sites, torture, NSA domestic spying, and Vice President Cheney’s open demand that the Congress approve the infliction of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment on foreign nationals captured in the “war on terror.” Those measures have done incalculable damage to the perception of the US around the world, as illustrated by Condoleezza Rice’s chilly reception during her recent visit to Europe as well as by polls showing anti-Americanism at all-time highs.
What unites the Bush administration’s obsession with, on the one hand, the old model of war against states and, on the other, its use of the new “preventive paradigm” at home and abroad is an almost total contempt for the importance of maintaining legitimacy in the struggle against terrorism. The administration’s policies presume that the US can defeat global terrorism by declaring war on it, using smart bombs, dispatching troops, and treating prisoners harshly. But as Iraq illustrates, such tactics can have disastrous consequences, particularly when divorced from the constraints of the rule of law. They undermine the legitimacy of the United States as a responsible world power while reinforcing the enemy’s appeal.
No one concerned with American security disputes that it is necessary to prevent terror attacks or that coercion and military action can be justified. Both NATO and the UN Security Council recognized the acts of September 11 as an armed attack that justified self-defense. The Afghanistan offensive succeeded in capturing or killing many al-Qaeda leaders, closing their training camps, and seizing records and computers from their headquarters that helped to locate still other al-Qaeda operatives. By contrast, the US decision to halt UN inspections in Iraq and invade the country, against the wishes of the inspectors, the Security Council, and most of the world, has helped to inspire, recruit, and train a terrorist network. It is precisely when the state uses coercive measures such as war or detention that it must show it has convincing evidence and is using fair procedures. Solid evidence of wrongdoing and fair process are not technicalities to be cast aside whenever national security is threatened; without them, the use of force is likely to increase violence against Americans, not reduce it.
and so it goes,
GORD.
No comments:
Post a Comment