A slightly revised version of the essay I wrote here on 10 December about the US Senate's CIA Torture Report has been published at Lobster; you can link to that version here. Lobster, edited by Robin Ramsey, is a site well worth following.
Thinking about it reminded me of a book review I did for Lobster five years ago, which seems even more relevant now, not just in light of that report but also the steady progression of just the problems the book, and my essay, were talking about then. I posted that review here back in 2009, but re-reading at it today I added a couple of things to update it, so I'll to reprint it here, as a sort of year-end warning:
SPIES, LIES AND THE WAR ON TERROR
This book is published
as the debate rages in America about whether or not the activities of
the Bush regime, specifically the torture of various combat detainees
and suspects rendered from various parts of the world, should be
subject to some sort of investigation, if not a truth and
reconciliation commission. The larger issues, involving the
systematic bending of the tasks of the intelligence community from
analysis of facts to manufacture of an excuse for war, but also
concerning both the morality and legality of such a war of
aggression, lie dormant behind the sexier images of torture and Abu
Ghraib. But the odd thing is that, in America's public debate, 'the
facts' of the past eight years remain contentious and debatable,
whereas, as this book clearly illustrates, they are part of a policy
continuum, whose boundaries had been set out clearly in the decades
before 9/11, and, on a broader scale, whose basic premises continue
to threaten civil liberties in the West.
The strength of this
book is the way it considers a spectrum of issues, and draws the
lines which connect them. It starts by examining the threat of
'Islamism', not in the wake of 9/11 but tracing it back to its roots
in the Carter administration's support for Afghan resistance to the
Soviet invasion. The simple point, that the US and Britain now find
themselves just as mired in that country as the Russians did three
decades ago, barely needs to be stated. That the architects of an
earlier alliance of 'creative destruction' (in the brilliant
terminology of neo-con apparatchick Michael Ledeen), the makers of
Iran Contra, should be setting the agenda for the second President
Bush came as no surprise, but that there was such a continuum through
the Clinton years perhaps should. Depending now on a Sunni 'arc of
moderation' has simply inflamed the area further, with Pakistan,
rapidly destablising, at the fulcrum of this divide.
Having set out broadly
the strategies responsible for creating this mess, and made clear
that those responsible remain determined to make it worse in the
interests of their concept of American (and British) ascendancy, the
book sets out briefly but comprehensively the nature of the
alternative intelligence (and media) structures created to massage
the facts into justifications for enacting those plans. Bush,
Chaney, and Rumsfeld devised their own intelligence apparatus, not
only to produce the desired results, but also to wage a propaganda
war on their own population.
Of course, this
material that has been out there for years, but what is interesting
in this new look at it is the way it is put into the context of an
overall approach to the 'threat of Islamism'. Besides revealing the
smoke and mirrors behind this essential charade, the book's
examination of other key long-term links, such as those between the
Project for the New American Century and Benjamin Netanyahu's first
Israeli government, whose focus continues into the second Natanyahu
era, indicate the absurdity of believing the present policies of the
West have any desire, much less possibility, of actually achieving a
'solution' in the Middle East.
That Richard Perle was,
in the early 1970s, passing classified information to the Israelis
from Senator 'Scoop' Jackson's office, where Paul Wolfowitz also
worked, simply reinforces the idea that we are seeing a 'long war'
whose modus operandi, as the authors make clear, we've seen before.
The phony intelligence estimates of the Soviet threat, produced in
the 1970s by the so-called Team B, were drafted largely by Wolfowitz.
The neo-con movement was experienced at phony excuses for military
chest-thumping thirty years ago; they simply got better at it with
practice.
After a discussion of
the eroding of civil liberties during this 'war on terror', the
authors move to a specific discussion of Europe. The US used the 9/11
'attack' to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, and create a
platform from which to launch many of its covert operations. One
question the authors do not address is the parallel between the way
the Pentagon sought to control intelligence, and thus create a
policy-making platform for itself, and the way NATO has itself become
an autonomous policy-making body, rather than an alliance
treaty-bound for mutual defense. They do trace another parallel, in
the way the European Union has morphed from a trade and travel
agreement into a vast non-elected form of government. They trace in
great detail the growing and most worrying aspect of control acquired
by unelected bodies, bureaucrats, and indeed failed or disgraced
politicians from member countries. Though in Britain we look to
Europe to protect human rights through its courts, the amount of
intelligence currently shared automatically by its members is
staggering, and puts projects like the introduction of ID cards in
this country into an even more-worrying perspective.
In the light of Jeb
Bush recently (in 2014) declaring an interest in becoming President,
it's tempting to look at the Bush family as a brand-name in the
service of the intelligence community, and Shrub Bush as an unelected
bureaucrat.It was Jeb who engineered the most crucial bit of fraud in
the 2000 Presidential election; it was Jeb who pardoned the
Cuban-exile terrorist Orlando Bosch.
Early in the days of
'axis of evil' and 'war on terror' those of us who alluded to George
Orwell and his notion of perpetual war were derided, while the David
Frums of the world inhabited the BBC's analysis programmes. If one
were to further draw connections to the paranoid work of Philip K
Dick in today's electro-magnetic world, one would be similarly
marginalised. Yet, as this book concludes, 'calls are monitored,
travel circumscribed, and torture is again being routinized (sic).
All this is done in the name of security in the War on Terror.' That
this has increased exponentially during the administration of a man
elected in large part because of his apparent opposition to it
remains a source of great shame and frustration for American voters.
What was most worrying
about the recent (ie, 2009) G20 protests in London was the way the
police have been encouraged to distance themselves from the
citizenry, whether protestors or passersby, and consider them
uniformly as threats. This is the enduring legacy of the war on
terror, and it begins, and ends, with the twisting of intelligence to
suit the purposes of bureaucrats with power. This is the chilling
warning this book provides.
Spies, Lies, and the
War On Terror
by Paul Todd, Jonathan
Bloch, and Patrick Fitzgerald
Zedbooks, £14.99, ISBN
9781842778319
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