Month: May 2011

Osama bin Laden was killed in a “posh Islamabad suburb” where he lived for six years and,  as Eli Lake recently wrote in The New Republic, “almost certainly relied on” some elements of Pakistan’s  military and intelligence apparatus to do so safely and secretly. This process was enabled by what Lake calls Pakistan’s “deep state.” That is, Pakistan’s national security bureaucracy is sufficiently muscled and autonomous to work relatively independently of Pakistani political leaders.

He describes Pakistan’s deep state like so: “a network of current and retired intelligence and military officers who are actively undermining the official policy of Pakistan’s government.” What Lake’s article astoundingly misses is that this seems a perfect description of the situation here in the U.S. Neoconservatives like Lake have found it extremely difficult to comprehend when condemning other nations for profound evils or institutional failures: for them it is a grave and reproachful wrong – even threat, while our exact behavior is either forgiven by default, or utterly imperceptible.

When it comes to a network of retired intelligence and military personnel that confer the “unwarranted influence” Eisenhower warned about, America likely outmatches Pakistan. In a Boston Globe review conducted last year, it was found that “From 2004-2008, 80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives” in our massive military-industrial complex. Among the Globe findings:

• Dozens of retired generals employed by defense firms maintain Pentagon advisory roles, giving them unparalleled levels of influence and access to inside information on Department of Defense procurement plans.
• The generals are, in many cases, recruited for private sector roles well before they retire, raising questions about their independence and judgment while still in uniform. The Pentagon is aware and even supports this practice.
• The feeder system from some commands to certain defense firms is so powerful that successive generations of commanders have been hired by the same firms or into the same field. For example, the last seven generals and admirals who worked as Department of Defense gatekeepers for international arms sales are now helping military contractors sell weapons and defense technology overseas.

Lake’s “deep state” critique seems to center on the ability of this network of retirees to excessively influence state policy and even work to undermine the national interest for their own benefit. The U.S. defense budget is the largest piece of the budget and unceasingly increases despite a lagging economy and crippling levels of federal debt. America’s bloated, corporatist, military-industrial complex disproportionately influences policy and results in a violent and oppressive military empire of global reach which manifests in various ways that endanger the American people. The fact that U.S. policy, particularly in the Middle East, systematically fuels anti-American Islamic terrorism should make this clear enough. But it also endangers many other people outside of the U.S., with increasing rates of civilian casualties as a result of drone attacks, or the fact that U.S. nuclear policy with regard to Israel, Pakistan, India, and Iran has been essentially proliferation. Surely this exposes a greater earthly threat to security than harboring an aging bin Laden in the center of Pakistan.

As for the intelligence community, it is well known to be, as a Washington Post investigation put it, “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.” “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies,” reported the Post, “work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence.” This is a monster, unelected intelligence world that is clearly beyond the grasp of any President or Congressman and, since it maintains its employees beyond election cycles it almost surely operates with a level of autonomy that would make most voters and policymakers cringe. In a post 9/11 world where our highest enemies are the result of blowback, these realities are not rocket science.

The U.S. national security apparatus has additionally proven strong and durable enough to pull virtually all post-war presidents into line to form a remarkably consistent foreign policy that most of the electorate is unaware of and would surely be appalled to fully understand.

Yet Pakistan’s “deep state” is the one we ought to worry about.

In trying to clarify that this is a Pakistani problem and not a U.S. problem, Lake writes:

All modern democratic societies have powerful national-security bureaucracies, but a deep state is a bureaucracy that has more power than the political leaders it ostensibly serves. One former senior U.S. counterterrorism official described Pakistan’s problem this way: “Imagine if the CIA was supporting the drug cartels of Mexico over the wishes of the Congress and the White House,” he said.

So when the CIA trained and funded the Nicaraguan Contra army who smuggled cocaine into the U.S. with CIA knowledge and protection, contributing to the crack epidemic and street gang violence in Los Angeles in the 1980s, that doesn’t qualify? And when Manuel Noriega of Panama received CIA largesse while drug trafficking, money laundering, and facilitating Contra drug deals, that also doesn’t count? And then when the CIA funded the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets despite the fact that they used part of those funds to ramp up their massive heroin trade and opium refining capacity, at one point having provided up to half of all the heroin used in the U.S., that’s to be ignored as well? (See here for more on the CIA and Drugs) To a certain extent these ventures occurred with some knowledge of respective presidential administrations and congressional leadership, but were a secret to the vast majority of elected representatives and to this day mostly unknown to the American people.

But of course it goes beyond just drugs. Most of the facts and realities about the United States national security state are not generally known about, face very little oversight, and often violate U.S. law. Everything from lavish, decades-long support for Middle Eastern dictatorships to assassination programs of U.S. citizens to all that which is too classified for any of the public to know about right now is done in the dark, without the knowledge of the people and their elected officials, and in direct contradiction of the interests of the United States. The “deep state” in America seems more threatening and out of control than does Pakistan’s.

Perhaps even more menacing is the near universal predisposition of Americans to place a religious like faith in their nation. This tribal commitment to God and State, to the flag and its supposed spirit, facilitates a kind of nationalism that dissolves any ability to criticize America as they criticize other countries. It keeps alive a nation-wide devotion to the principle “wrong for them, right for us.” Pakistan’s military and intelligence communities are overly secret and engage in all kinds of overreach; unthinkable that America’s is precisely such as well.

Apologists for the Democratic Party who refine “lesser evil voting” to a high art, should have been hanging their heads low for quite a while now with the advent of Obama’s Bush policies on national security and foreign policy (among others). But this jingoist, warring bipartisanship – regardless of campaign slogans to the contrary – manifests throughout Congress as well, of course. Harry Reid has been summoning the ghost of Dick Cheney to fear monger civil libertarians on the Patriot Act. Either you’re for the Patriot Act, or you’re for the terrorists, he says.

Spencer Ackerman:

Remember back when a Republican was in the White House and demanded broad surveillance authority? Here’s Reid back then. ”Whether out of convenience, incompetence, or outright disdain for the rule of law, the administration chose to ignore Congress and ignore the Constitution,” Reid said about Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. When Bush insisted Congress entrench that surveillance with legislation in 2008, Reid turned around and demanded Bush “stop fear-mongering and start being honest with the American people about national security.” Any claim about the detrimental impact about a lapse in widespread surveillance were “scare tactics” to Reid that ”irresponsibly distort reality.” (Then Reid rolled over for Bush.)

That’s nowhere near the end of Reid’s hypocrisy here. When the Senate debated renewing the Patriot Act in 2006, Reid, a supporter of the bill’s surveillance procedures, himself slowed up the bill’s passage to allow amendments to it — the better to allow “sensible checks on the arbitrary exercise of executive power.” Sounding a whole lot like Rand Paul, the 2006-vintage Reid registered his “objection to the procedural maneuver under which Senators have been blocked from offering any amendments to this bill” and reminded his colleagues, ”the hallmark of the Senate is free speech and open debate.”

This happens to be as predictable as gravity effects the fallen here on earth. Still, with election cycles revving up, we can be sure the entirety of the American electorate will clamor for their chosen parties and candidates, utterly convinced by their perfunctory rhetoric. And consistent libertarians will endure a year or two of condemnation for cynicism and patriotic duties to vote gone unfulfilled, and then find their vindication again when those newly elected liars prove as cowardly and dishonest as Harry Reid.

On May 2, Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

The American Conservative asks six foreign-policy experts to consider the implications for the War on Terror.

• Andrew Bacevich: War on Terror Is a Fraud
• David Rieff: Fighting the Last War
• Jacob Heilbrunn: Death of the Bush Doctrine
• Adam Garfinkle: Reform the Reforms
• Michael C. Desch: How Much Does Osama Matter?
• Ivan Eland: Declare Victory and Come Home

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) continues to demand debate on the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act. Sen. Harry Reid has accused Paul of supporting terrorists by delaying the extension of the act.

“He’s fighting for an amendment to protect the right – not of average citizens, but of terrorists – to cover up their gun” purchases, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “If he thinks that it’s going to be a badge of courage on his side to have held this up for a few hours, he’s made a mistake … Unless the Senator from Kentucky stops standing in the way, our law enforcement will no longer be able to use some of the most critical tools they need to counter terrorists and combat terrorism.”

Paul and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced an amendment that attempts to safeguard American’s civil liberties by increasing oversight of government surveillance powers. Reid has objected to debating this and other amendments, saying that any delay in passage endangers national security.

Paul spoke on the Senate floor yesterday:

As we know, the Patriot Act provisions up for renewal passed a cloture vote for a four year extension 74-8. The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez on the Patriot Act’s extension:

Back in February, Democratic leader Harry Reid promised fellow senator Rand Paul that—after years of kicking the can down the road—there would be at least a week reserved for full and open debate over three controversial provisions of the Patriot Act slated to expire this weekend, with an opportunity to propose reforms and offer amendments to any reauthorization bill.  And since, as we know, politicians always keep their promises, we can look forward to a robust and enlightening discussion of how to modify the Patriot Act to better safeguard civil liberties without sacrificing our counterterror capabilities.

Ha! No, I’m joking, of course. Having already cut the legs out from under his own party’s reformers by making a deal with GOP leaders for a four-year extension without reform, Reid used some clever procedural maneuveringto circumvent Rand Paul’s pledged obstruction, slipping the Patriot extension into an unrelated small-business bill that’s privileged against filibusters. All this just to prevent any debate on amendments…

In an immediate sense, all that would push Reid to do something this slimy is political risk. That means heavy pressure from the Obama administration to renew these coveted, empowering provisions. Aside from that, it seems to be symptomatic of a culture in Congress that debate can only happen when (1) it’s about pandering and poisoning constituents with misleading rhetoric, and (2) when it doesn’t ruffle any feathers of entrenched interests or political leadership. In other words, true debate is the ultimate taboo.

Rand Paul was on CNN expressing frustration with this sort of culture of obedience, mob rule, and sluggishness when it came to the illegal war in Libya (via):

Senator Rand Paul: “We go week after week in the Senate and do nothing. I feel like sometimes I should return my check because I go up, they do no votes and no debate. Look at this horrendous debt crisis – we don’t debate that either.

Anderson Cooper: “Really, you feel like that? You feel like you’re not doing anything there?”

Paul: “Yes. I feel… Absolutely. We go up week to week and there’s no debate in Congress. No debate in the Senate. We sit idly by. Some weeks we vote on two-three non-controversial judges and we go back home. It, really…”

Cooper: “Why is that?”

Paul: “I’m trying to get a vote on Libya. They say they don’t have time. I was told, when I wanted to bring up my resolution on Libya – which I did force them to, but I had to kinda capture the floor…”

Cooper: “It got tabled like 90-10…”

Paul: “Yeah, and they weren’t too happy with me because I used some parliamentary procedures to gain access to the floor, and they came running down to the floor. They were apoplectic that I had taken over the floor, and the thing is is that we should be having these debates on the floor – they don’t want to have any debate. I’m asking right now to vote on Libya – I have a resolution saying we’re in violation of the War Powers Act. It’s hard for me to get the floor unless I somehow sneak on the floor when no one’s looking to try to get a vote. Why would we not want to debate great Constitutional questions? When I ran for office, that’s what I thought – there will be great and momentous debates on the floor. We don’t have any because they prevent the debates from ever even beginning.“

Today’s violent clashes in Yemen appear to have been instigated when Yemeni soldiers loyal to President Saleh began stockpiling weapons and munitions at the al- Ramah school near Shaykh Sadiq al-Amhar’s residence in the capital Sana’a. Sadiq al-Amhar is the head of the Hashid tribal federation from which Saleh also hails and his recent decision to side with the masses of anti-Saleh protestors had raised tribal tensions considerably, but reached a tipping point when this battle erupted between Saleh forces and Sadiq loyalists – an airline office was set on fire, at least one government building was taken over, 38 lives were lost and 24 people were injured.

This all came after Saleh refused, for the third time in one week, to sign a deal led by the GCC States and by U.S. and E.U. diplomats to step down from power, as the Yemeni people are demanding. The general conclusion seems to be that now that outright hostilities within the tribal federation have broken out Yemen has reached a critical juncture and prospects for a transition of power with relative peace is less likely, while out-and-out civil war is more likely.

The Obama administration officially said yesterday that they are “reassessing” the exorbitant and deleterious economic and military aid to Yemen due to this crisis. One might wonder why the atrocities the Yemeni government has been committing against protestors was not enough to reassess or halt our support. And one would be forgetting that this kind of brutality has been understood by the U.S. as a corollary to the aid. Harsh responses to the developing Houthi rebellion in the past few years, responses Saleh calls Operation Scorched Earth, were expected results of U.S. support while so-called U.S. “counterterrorism” programs were pursued with impunity.

U.S. diplomats have been present in meetings where Saleh was supposed to have signed the deal to step down, and as the Post explained, “White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan told the Yemeni president ‘that if he doesn’t sign, we’re going to have to consider possible other steps,’” but these facts shouldn’t be misconstrued for some new and improved U.S. policy of humanitarianism and concern for the well-being of Yemenis. Rather, they seem to fit a well-established approach to how U.S. national security planners deal with lavishly supported proxies who are in trouble: support them as long as possible, and when it reaches a tipping point plan for a transition that keeps as much of the old (and subservient) regime in power. This process has been followed for decades with a number of U.S. supported dictators from Duvalier to Ceaucescu to Suharto.

With Suharto in Indonesia, the U.S. continued to support the tyrant, while “issuing tepid calls for reform…and worrying deeply about what might follow.” Support continued past his rule – when popular protests became overwhelming and military favor began to dwindle – and Suharto’s vicious Vice Presient B.J. Habibie headed the transition (with a cabinet consisting of mostly the same faces as under Suharto). Dictatorship was soon overcome by the people for some kind of democracy, but the U.S. followed this protocol nicely – as they did in Egypt, supporting Mubarak right until the very end, and then attempting to keep people like Omar Suleiman in power and in fact still supporting a transition government made up largely of Mubarak’s people.

Whether or not we’re at that point in Yemen remains to be seen. All we can hope is that Brennan’s “other steps” don’t mean a continued support for dictatorship, and hopefully not a fourth (fifth?) war in a Muslim country.