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March 19 Iraq War #4 (fourth newsletter)
3-17 Pentagon #9
3-16 Critical Thinking #3
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3-15 Fossil Fuels Industry #2
3-15 Civil Liberties #4
3-12 Pentagon Propaganda Maching #1
3-11 PTSD #3
3-11 FOI #2
3-8 UN Women’s Day #5
3-6 Preventing Wars #1
3-5 Syria
3-3 US Chamber of Commerce #1
3-1 Women’s History #1
3-1 Afghan Peace Movement #2
3-1 Nuclear Free Pacific #2
February 2-24 US Capitalism
2-24 Manning #3
2-24 Torture #7
2-22 President’s Day
2-21 Literature of Enemies
2-18 Daisy Bates (racism)
2-16 Drones/Assassinations #9
2-13 Pentagon #8
2-8 Genocide #1
2-8 Peace Leaders #1
2-7 Hope #3
2-7 Black History Month
2-2 UN World Wetlands
Jan. 30, 2013 Wikileaks/Assange #10
1-28 Obama #8
1-22 Drones #8
1-21 MLK #1
1-17 US
1-17 Nonviolence #7
1-16 Book Samplers (books on peace)
1-16 Guantanamo
1-14 Afghanistan-Pakistan #19
1-12 US
1-3 War Resistance, Dissent
1 CIA
2012
Dec. 31 Costs of War #5
31 Gene Sharp #1
30 Islamophobia #1
28 Economic Conversion #1
28 Nonviolence #5
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Contents of NSS Newsletter #1
Gagnon, New
Missile “Defense” in Maine
Melley, Secrecy
and NSS
Mueller, From
Threats to Fear to Political Control
Engelhardt on
Fear USA
Dick: Hearts and Minds
Graham on Military Urbanism
Dick: Hearts and Minds
Graham on Military Urbanism
Engelhardt,
Terror Fears
Turse,
President/Pentagon and Middle East Despots
Engelhardt,
Post-Legal USA
Douglass, Assassination
of JFK Jr
Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
Global
Network [globalnet@mindspring.com]
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for follow up. Start by Friday, March 22, 2013. Due by Friday, March 22, 2013.
By Bruce K. Gagnon, Special to the BDN
Posted March 20, 2013, at
2:36 p.m.
[Military investment a
poor way to create jobs; missile “defense” tests have failed; the missiles
contribute to an arms race and are part of a first strike policy. Gagnon’s Global Network is a leader for
missile sanity; OMNI sponsored his visit to Fayetteville
It is more than understandable why leaders in the
Caribou area would be excited about the recent announcement by
the Obama administration that a “missile defense” base on the East Coast of the
U.S. will now be studied. After all we are talking about “jobs,” and what
self-respecting community leader could turn away from that proposition?
Caribou, Maine, and Fort Drum, N.Y., have been mentioned as
possible East Coast basing locations for the technically challenged missile
defense interceptor system that the administration now plans to expand. Congress
has mandated that a study be undertaken to determine the best East Coast
location for the base.
Luckily we have another study to help us sort
through this important jobs question. It helps us to determine just what is the
most cost effective way to create jobs with our hard-earned tax dollars.
The University of Massachusetts-Amherst Economics Department
In
addition to the waste of our tax dollars by investing in military production,
we also know that these so-called “missile defense” systems are destabilizing
and will lead to a new arms race.
The Pentagon base-location studies have been
justified by the supposed “nuclear threats posed by North
Korea and Iran U.S.
These missile defense systems have not been proven to work. When Obama first became
president, he decided to de-emphasize this Boeing-led program (called
the ground-based mid-course missile defense system) because it had failed to
effectively perform during testing. This recent decision to ramp up the program
appears to be a political one. It indicates that Boeing, and their many
sub-contractors, have secured enough congressional support to put the program
back on track.
This proposal is the perfect example how our democracy, and our economy, have become
captives of the military industrial complex. We are reminded of President
Dwight Eisenhower’s warning to us to beware of the power of the weapons
industry. In his last speech to the American people before leaving office, the
Republican and former Army General said, “In the councils of government, we
must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military industrial complex.”
Further attacks on social progress here at home will be necessary to pay
for these unnecessary “missile defense” deployments.
The Pentagon’s missile defense programs are
actually the “shield”that accompanies U.S. Russia
or China , those nations
would theoretically launch a retaliatory response at the U.S.
Every year, the U.S. Space Command holds war
games to practice a first-strike attack on China Russia and China
North Korea and Iran thus have become convenient excuses for
the Pentagon to develop systems that are recreating the Cold War with Russia
and China and putting big bucks into the coffers of the aerospace industry.
Maine Veterans for Peace and CodePink Maine
Bruce K. Gagnon, of Bath, is the coordinator of
the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear
Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
Suspicious
Minds: On Timothy Melley
The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and
the National Security State
·
In 1994, the fiction writer Charles Baxter published
“Dysfunctional Narratives,” an essay in which he claims to have uncovered “the
greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty years.” His argument
is an unorthodox one: Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Beckett, Kafka, Hemingway and Faulkner
aren’t mentioned at all, and the person in question, it turns out, isn’t even a
novelist, though he did write books (ones full of sentences that are “leaden
and dulling, juridical-minded to the last, impersonal but not without savor,”
and that “present the reader with camouflage masked as objective thought”).
This person’s influence on America fiction, however, is traceable neither to
his books nor their prose style, but rather to his apparent addiction to
deniability—that noxious brew of disavowal, compartmentalization, structured
ignorance and deception-as-policy through which negative outcomes become all
but impossible to blame on anyone in particular. The person Baxter has in mind
is none other than Richard Nixon, who brought the rhetoric of deniability to
the public stage as no one had before, and who made its quintessential
phrase—“mistakes were made”—a staple of American discourse about decisions and
their consequences.
Baxter goes on to argue that widespread narratives of disavowal
“humiliate the act of storytelling”: “You can’t reconstruct a story—you can’t
even know what the story is—if everyone is saying, ‘Mistakes were made.’ Who
made them? Well, everybody made them and no one did, and it’s history anyway,
so we should forget about it.” Without motives, agency or resolution, our
national story becomes “dysfunctional.” So too stories about the self, which
attempt to address unhappiness but are ill-equipped to do so, at least when
unhappiness results from the actions of governments, corporations or banks, all
of which have become deniability experts. Authors create characters who are
unhappy, confused or trapped—and looking for answers why. But because the
misdeeds of banks, for example, are fiendishly hard to understand (often by
design) and not easily shoehorned into the conventions of realist storytelling,
novels are more likely to point the finger at something close by and easily
named. Family life works well as a cause of unhappiness, and so does childhood
trauma (even better if its memory has been repressed and the narrative can
trace its recovery). “That’s the whole story,” Baxter writes glumly. “When
blame has been assigned, the story is over.”
By his own description, Baxter is an author committed to fiction
where characters take actions and live with their effects. “Mistakes and crimes
tend to create narratives, however, and they have done so from the time of the
Greek tragedies,” he notes. Consequently, the “culture of disavowals”—which
Baxter sees everywhere, from talk shows to graduate fiction workshops to the
acclaimed novels of the day—strikes him as a defeat: the domestication, in the
most pejorative sense of the word, of life and literature by the powers that
be.
Timothy Melley, a professor at Miami
University, is also interested in how American fiction has been influenced by
institutionalized deception from on high, 
particularly with regard to the
covert sectors of government that came into being during and after World War
II. But his account—which he eventually frames in explicit opposition to
Baxter’s—locates the origins of deniability much earlier than Nixon. If
deniability has an author, Melley argues inThe
Covert Sphere, it is George Kennan, who in 1948 penned National
Security Council directive NSC-10/2, the document that changed the CIA, then
barely one year old, from a purely intelligence-gathering outfit into an agency
charged with “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including
sabotage, anti-sabotage” and so on. Crucially, NSC-10/2 ordered that these
operations be implemented in such a way that, if discovered, “the US
More than sixty years later, the
American covert sector is a thriving, many-tentacled monster of deniability
funded by at least $75 billion per year, consisting of at least forty-five
government agencies, 1,271 smaller government organizations and 1,391 private
corporations. [Dick’s bold.] Thanks to the occasional
revelation by investigative journalists or congressional committees, most
Americans have a vague idea that the covert sector exists, that it has a great
deal of power, and that it has in the past resorted to surveillance,
kidnapping, torture and assassination in the name of protecting American
interests. But what people know best about the covert sector is that it remains
mostly unknowable by design: it lies, it keeps its past and future plans
secret, it spreads misinformation both abroad and at home, and it shrouds its
every move in a thick haze of overlapping cover stories and disavowals. It is
the massive “known unknown” of American life, the supreme dysfunctional
narrative, doing its business somewhere out of sight while we eat breakfast, or
sleep, or read about it in the news without learning what it is. “Mistakes were
made” implies a corollary, unspoken but I think widely felt: more mistakes are
being made right now, and will remain unknown until long after the damage is
done.
This is the sort of impotent half-knowledge that Baxter bemoans
in “Dysfunctional Narratives.” Melley agrees that repeated exposure to
lying-as-policy has been bad for everyone. Citizens have been pushed into a
state of “radical unknowing,” or knowing for certain only that they really
don’t know. But unlike Baxter, Melley thinks America’s writers, or at least a
few of them, have risen admirably to the challenge—not by constructing
narratives that Baxter would ever call functional, but by playing dysfunction
for all it’s worth, the better to pinpoint its effect on the national and
individual consciousness.
This is a familiar argument: radical new times have rendered
obsolete familiar literary modes and pleasures. Paeans to an art that revels in
its own instability, uncertainty or inconclusiveness—its intentional,
self-aware dysfunctionality—are as old as literature itself, as are
conservative laments such as Baxter’s. But Melley
isn’t interested (or at least not exclusively so) in cheerleading for the
postmodern. What makes his argument fascinating is his attention to the actual
history of America
* * *
As the first-ever government agency with deniability written
into its charter, the CIA was from the beginning a storytelling machine. It was
no coincidence that in its early days the organization was full of literature
students and writers recruited by influential scholars of English, or that for
decades it operated as perhaps the most generous literary patron in the West,
funding scores of novels, translations and literary journals. And so it is
oddly apt that most Americans know most of what they know about the covert
sector—or, more accurately, half-know most of what they half-know—not from
fact-oriented discourses like journalism, history and the law, but instead from
novels, films, TV shows, comic books and narrative video games: in other words,
through fictions, some of them quite outlandish, some chock-full of accurate
information and insight, most somewhere in between, and all of them more or
less dismissible as “just fiction.”
Melley’s boldest suggestion is that fiction about the covert
activity assumes an outsize role not only for members of the general public,
but also for most individuals within the covert sector. This is, he argues, a
natural consequence of the secret government’s size and
“hypercompartmentalization,” itself a natural outcome of its foundational
obsession with deniability. The covert sector is so large, so fragmented into
agencies, subdivisions, private contractors and shell companies—often competing
with each other for funding and operational jurisdiction—that it can be
difficult, if not impossible, for any one of the beast’s many tentacles to know
what the rest have in their clutches. This is exacerbated by complex
classification schemes that parcel out information—even of a single
operation—piecemeal on a “need to know” basis, a process that can leave even
those with high-security clearances in the dark. Often, Melley claims, those at
the top of the totem pole are the most ignorant of all, because what is
required of them is not knowledge but its opposite: public expressions of shock
when, against the odds, this or that unsavory activity comes to light. Even if
those technically “inside” the covert state know a bit more than John Everyman,
it is certainly plausible that they hanker to know more—to view the monster
from above, and to see its many tentacles writhing at once. Like the rest of
us, some often have nowhere better to turn than fiction.
Such a proposition is difficult to prove, but Melley attempts to
marshal compelling evidence. In the 1960s, he notes, CIA employees reportedly
watched Mission Impossible each week in search of ideas for new
gadgets. JFK loved Ian Fleming novels and wanted America US Hollywood
screenwriter.
As has been more widely observed, the television show 24—an
eight-season ticking time bomb scenario—has figured prominently in decidedly
nonfictional decisions about the treatment of Muslims in US
Melley devotes an entire chapter to the notoriously muddled
notion of “brainwashing,” a nonsensical term for a process of total thought
control that has never really existed outside of novels, movies, and hysterical
think-tank studies and news stories about the Communist threat. Much of the
hysteria about brainwashing was stirred up by government PR specialists: Edward
Hunter, the first journalist to use the term, was a former employee of the
Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of the CIA. The
propaganda affected not only the public but also the compartmentalized covert
sector itself. While one tentacle cooked up stories about brainwashing—which
inevitably seeped into thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate—the other sank
millions of dollars into the search for its antidote, or better yet, a
counterweapon. Again and again, researchers were forced to conclude that there
is no such thing as brainwashing, just old-fashioned torture, most useful not
for changing someone’s mind or turning them into a sleeper agent, but for the
age-old purpose of making someone repeat whatever story you want (or, put
otherwise, for producing fiction under extreme duress).
The findings of this “Manhattan Project of the mind,” as the
historian Alfred McCoy has called it, were collected in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK
Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, used for years as the basis for the
military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program.
After 9/11, the KUBARK manual’s list of torture techniques was mined no less
assiduously than episodes of 24 for
ideas about how to torture men who, ironically, were often described by Western
academics and journalists as having turned to terrorism as the result of some
unbelievably potent, almost magical form of indoctrination. In 2004, a remake
of The Manchurian Candidatereplaced the Commie “hypnosis” of
the original with a suitably futuristic “nanochip” that makes Denzel Washington
do whatever his global overlords say.
* * *
When fact and fiction crossbreed this promiscuously—especially
within a powerful, weaponized bureaucracy—all manner of disasters are possible.
President Eisenhower was on to something when he complained that intelligence
briefings from Tehran
The literary stars of Melley’s account—the authors he identifies
as best understanding how the nature of the covert sector creates a
particularly “puzzling relation” between representation and reality—are a
familiar bunch. Mailer gets credit for stressing, in Harlot’s
Ghost, the deep
affinities between spycraft and literature, and for explicitly trumpeting
fiction’s unique virtues over journalism in his novelistic memoir Armies
of the Night. Denis Johnson is praised for recasting the Vietnam
War, in Tree of Smoke, as first and foremost a
series of propaganda fictions. Doctorow and Robert Coover receive high marks
for their perceptive novelistic treatments of the fiction-laced “spectacle of
secrecy” that was the Rosenberg
The more a work is, like our public sphere, scarred by radical
unknowing, the more Melley praises it. His favorite sections of Don DeLillo’s Libra are not the detailed reimaginings of
Lee Harvey Oswald’s life (or even of his love for James Bond), but instead the
descriptions of Nicholas Branch, the fictitious CIA analyst brought out of
retirement to write the agency’s internal report on the Kennedy assassination.
Day after day Branch sits in his office, paralyzed by the mounting stacks of
papers around him. He has access to any agency document he requests, but he
also knows that a good deal of agency work goes into destroying some documents
and forging others; plus some of his requests go unanswered. He should know more than anyone else about the
Kennedy assassination, but in an important sense he knows less, having lost all
ability to distinguish coincidence from significance, real documents from
forgeries, and actual forgeries from forged forgeries—that is, forgeries
deliberately designed to look like forgeries to an analyst, and so send him
down the wrong path.
Similarly, in each of Joan Didion’s three novels about the
security state (A Book of Common Prayer, Democracyand The
Last Thing He Wanted), a narrator sets out to tell the story of a
citizen caught up in the workings of the covert sector and, inevitably,
“instead narrates her own failure to tell the story she meant to tell.” Like
Branch, Didion’s narrators fail in part because they don’t have access to
certain data, in part because they have access to more potentially relevant
data than they could ever sort, and no clue how even to begin telling the
story. The fear is that filling in the covert sector’s narrative gaps—writing a
speculative key to its coded maps—might only serve to obscure the truth. “I
still believe in history,” says the journalist-narrator of The
Last Thing He Wanted, then instantly doubles back. “Let me amend
that. I still believe in history to the extent I believe history to be made
exclusively and at random” by men shrouded in “entire layers of bureaucracy
dedicated to the principle that self-perpetuation depended on the ability not
to elucidate but obscure.” In the looking-glass world of the covert sector,
functional stories of cause and effect too easily become part of a cover-up
built on false understanding. The narrator ofDemocracy (one “Joan Didion”), surveying the
story she is in the middle of telling, puts it bluntly: ”I am resisting
narrative here.” Charles Baxter, we can assume, is not a fan.
For Melley, this mode finds its purest expression in Tim
O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. The main
character, John Wade, is a Vietnam Vietnam
* * *
I admire these books; indeed, some I love, in part for the
virtues Melley catalogs. And his account of their spawning ground—the “known
unknowns” of the covert sector—is fascinating. But his response to Baxter’s
argument in “Dysfunctional Narratives” is deeply dissatisfying. Baxter’s essay
explores how large dysfunctional systems might influence fiction about subjects
other than systems: how distortions of power subtly discourage artists from
writing about power in the first place, whether or not their subject is
explicitly political. To respond, as Melley does, by noting that an extremely
small handful of authors have successfully written about systems is almost a
non sequitur.
What Melley’s account reveals most about his favorite books is
how dismayingly similar they are—and not just in their self-aware “I can’t go
on, I’ll go on” approach to storytelling. Almost every book he discusses has at
its center a character drawn by circumstance into the dysfunction of the covert
sector. In The Last Thing He Wanted, the narrator
discovers that her father is an arms dealer. In Democracy,
the main character is having an affair with a CIA agent. Both main characters
in A Book of Common Prayer are
married to prominent players in the secret government. John Wade, the amnesiac
veteran from In the Lake of the Woods, is a direct
participant in a military atrocity and the cover-up. The principal narrator of
Coover’s The Public Burning is Vice President Richard Nixon
himself. DeLillo’s Nicholas Branch works in the belly of the CIA, and his Lee
Harvey Oswald is, well, Lee Harvey Oswald.
This relative uniformity of approach is evidence of a
shortcoming at least as significant as the type pinpointed by Baxter. It may
seem natural that fiction hoping to plumb the conceptual depths of the covert
sector should involve its biggest institutions. But one of Melley’s central
claims is that the nature of the covert sector has contributed to postmodern
shifts in the nature of all public knowledge—not just knowledge about CIA
coups, for example. The authors he spotlights are similarly obsessed with the
idea of the secret services as pockets of the national unconscious. Here’s the
narrator of DeLillo’s The Names, a man who works for the CIA
but doesn’t know it:
If America is
the world’s living myth, then the CIA is America
But doesn’t the unconscious find expression in daily life? By
which I mean: Shouldn’t it be possible to write an essentially realistic novel
that contains not a single secret government plot but nonetheless makes contact
with the scars those plots have left on the national psyche? Other than a few
halfhearted pages on John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, this possibility
merits no real consideration in The Covert Sphere. In this regard, the
book operates in ignorance of one of its most important insights: that the work
of the covert sector extends far beyond the confines of the CIA’s offices and
involves the uneasy acceptance of radical unknowing, which comes in an
ever-multiplying number of forms and is a presence in all our lives—even if
we’re not paranoiacs who work in the CIA archives or write newsletters about
how 9/11 was an inside job, even if our fathers are not international arms
dealers, even if we are knowing readers of high-concept novels. Not only that,
but Melley’s way of thinking about the relationship between literature and
politics leaves little room for the possibility that the best novels about 9/11
or World War I or Vietnam could be ones that do not mention or even bear direct
traces of these conflicts.
* * *
There is a basic truth about the covert sector that is
remarkably easy to overlook: however unknowable and mysterious it may be—however
much it may seem to be a separate reality parallel to ours—it is not literally
another world. Remote military outposts, for example, are buildings like any
other, occupying space, requiring plumbing and electricity. Such banal facts
are at the center of fascinating work by Trevor Paglen, whom Melley mentions
only in passing, perhaps because Paglen doesn’t write fiction. His work is part
investigative journalism, part geography, part art photography. Many of his
projects have involved scrounging for information about where exactly in the
physical world the work of the covert state gets done: its torture dungeons;
the remote airports where planes shuttling from dungeon to dungeon land for
fuel; the spots in the night sky where surveillance satellites lurk; the small
offices in strip malls that house CIA shell companies. Then he gets as close as
he can and takes photographs, often using an extremely high-powered lens.
Paglen also trains his camera on smaller traces of covert activity: leases and
purchase orders signed by nonexistent people; uniform patches for government
programs mentioned in no congressional budget. Encountering these images for
the first time, I felt a dizzying sense of revelation, all the more dizzying
because I knew their central claim—that the covert sector exists in physical
space—was completely obvious. I was, I suppose, metasurprised: surprised to
find myself surprised.
There are many such moments in the British filmmaker Patrick
Keiller’s “Robinson” trilogy. Each of its installments consists almost entirely
of static shots of English cities and countryside accompanied by voice-overs
from an invisible narrator who relates the observations of a London-obsessed
loner named Robinson. Keiller’s camera captures lichen growing on roadway
signs; supermarkets, busy intersections and freeways; spiders spinning
cobwebs—and also the British covert sector, in the form of restricted-access
military bases, some still in use and hidden behind fences and foliage, others
deserted and weathered and beginning to be reclaimed by the land. Keiller is
implicitly convinced that it’s all connected, but less in the manner of a
DeLillo paranoiac and more like a nature writer describing a physical journey
through an ecosystem.
Keiller has professed his love for W.G. Sebald’s 1995 novel The
Rings of Saturn, in which the anonymous narrator (a man not unlike
Keiller’s Robinson) describes his walking tour along the southeast coast of England
Whether this meets Baxter’s standard for functional narrative, I
don’t know—but it’s surely at least a modest start. It seems clear that
American letters could use a small army of Paglens, Keillers and Sebalds
roaming our geographies of secrecy, pens and cameras in hand. In fact, one of
the best living describers of the American landscape, John McPhee, published a
fascinating book in 1984 called La Place de la Concorde Suisse, in which
he travels around Switzerland Switzerland
Also in this issue, Marcy Wheeler inquires into whether Congress can protect
Americans against the increasingly invasive security state.
About the Author
Peter
C. Baker
Peter C. Baker lives in Chicago
and Wilmington , North Carolina
Also by the Author
Institutionalized torture says not look what we can do, but look
what we disown, what only the bad apples among us require.
--Mueller, John. Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism
Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe them. Free P, 2007. Rev. NYT
Book Review (Feb. 18, 2007).
UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper LXXVII: March 30, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
John Mueller, Overblown:
How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry InflateNational Security Threats and
Why We Believe Them (New York
Introduction: Overblown.
Thesis: "[O]ur reaction against
terrorism has caused more harm than the thre at warrants—not just to civil
liberties, not just to the economy, but even to human lives" (2). Most Americans have "a false sense of
insecurity"
(3). Similar periods of fear have occurred in the past; our efforts should be devoted to
reducing
harmful fears (4-5). Current policy actually stokes these fears (6-7). Policing should be the priority, not making war (7-8). We can learn from the past in this regard (8-10).
PART
I: TERRORISM'S IMPACTChapter
1: The Limited Destructiveness of Terrorism.
The actual danger of dying from terrorism isabout the same as being killed
by lightning (based onstatistics since the late 1960s) (13). The practicalproblems for use of WMD in terrorist attacks have
beenvastly underestimated by commentators (14-24).Predictions that one terrorist attack will be followed bymore of
the same have not turned out to be true (25-28).
Chapter 2: Overreacting to Terrorism: The Terrorism Industry.
Most of the harm from terrorism is inflicted by the
overreaction of those
attacked (29). Harm
from overreaction to 9/11 has "massively
outstripped" the harmfrom the event itself (29-32). Politicians have inflated the fear
(33-36). Need
to CYA leads bureaucrats to play upthe danger (37-39). Media ignore statisticaldemonstrations of the small size of the threat (39-41)."Risk entrepreneurs"
stoke fears, too (41-43).Commentators' fears are ridiculously apocalyptic (43-47)."[T]he enemy, in fact, is
us" (47).
PART
II: HISTORICAL COMPARISONSChapter 3: Dates of Infamy: Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Reports at the time exaggerated
the impact of PearlHarbor (52). A containment strategy toward Japan
Chapter 4: Cold War, Containment, and Conspiracy.
Application of Kennan's containment doctrine led
to aseries of overreactions (67-70). To the coup inCzechoslovakia (70-72). There was no intention orplanning on the part of the Soviet Union to attack thecapitalist world militarily (72-74). Korea
Gaither Report
were overreactions (asEisenhower saw) (76-78). The U.S.
overreacted
to Cuba Vietnam U.S.
overreacted
to the invasion of Afghanistan Soviet Union was the reason the USSRcollapsed; internal causes were at work
(84-86). Fear of an internal enemy, once created, declines only verygradually (86-89). Inflation of the threat and a tendencyto take "a challenging
episode as a harbinger" typifyreactions
both to international communism andinternational terrorism (90-92).
Chapter 5: Nuclear Fears, Cold War Terrorism, andDevils du Jour.
Concerns about nuclear apocalypse havewaxed
and waned, but not in proportion to danger (93-99).Brief
commentaries on a series of "devils du jour"; in eachcase they turn
out not to have been as dangerous asfeared—Tito, Kim Il-sung, Castro, Nasser, Sukarno,Qaddafi, Khomeini, Japan's
economic prowess (100-11).Beginning with Carter, there has been an
unhealthypresidential obsession with terrorism (111-14). In general,policies
are all to often dictated by "concerns inspired byrhetoric and posturing"
and reflect emotional rather thanrational
reactions (114-15).
Chapter 6: Disorderliness in the New World
Order.
After the Cold War, obsessions
with new problemsemerged (117-18). "Complexity" was
elevated, absurdly,to the status of a new threat (118-20). The SamuelHuntington
clash-of-civilizations crowd promoted "ethnicwarfare" to the status of a general threat, but this
wasvastly exaggerated (120-22). In fact, there are fewer warsaround than ever at present (if
war is defined as a conflictproducing 1000+ combat deaths a year) (122). Mostrecently, the U.S. has promoted "rogue states" to
thestatus of a general problem: Panama , North
Korea , Iraq
PART III: APPROACHING TERROR AND TERRORISMChapter 7: An
Alternative Terrorism Policy:Absorbing, Policing, Reducing Fear, AvoidingOverreaction.
Since terrorism aims to
terrify, a rationalstrategy to combat it
must
seek to reduce fears to areasonable level (141-42). An alternative policy isproposed: an emphasis on reasonable goals (completesecurity is impossible) and on policing, prevention,
andabsorbing losses; educating people to reduce their fears (adifficult task),
engaging in practices (even irrational ones)that
demonstrably do reduce fears (144-65). Policyoverreactions also need to be restrained (165-70).
Chapter 8:
Terrorism and Terror.
The "war" onterrorism is going relatively well, thanks
mostly to ordinarypolice work; the "war" on terror is not, due to the stokingof public fears (173-74). Given the FBI's inability
"to find asingle true terrorist cell anywhere in the United Statesafter
years of obsessive questing," it is not unreasonableto suspect that "perhaps terrorists scarcely
exist in theUnited States" (180; 179; 174-82). It may also be that9/11 and subsequent al-Qaeda
terrorism has provedcounterproductive (182-85). "It is not entirely clear
thatthe
U.S. war in Afghanistan Iraq may prove to becounterproductive to the U.S. U.S. , an "Iraq
syndrome" is likelyto develop: an attack on Iran
could be even morecounterproductive for the U.S. U.S.
The United
States
In 2008, when the US National Intelligence Council issued its
latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack
Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer
a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom
Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle
their seat belts, because the United
States
This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into
the national bloodstream, how the country—gripped by terror fantasies—was
locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while
America quietly burned.
Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with
the triumphalist "sole superpower" of 1991 heading slowly for the
same exit through which the Soviet Union left
the stage twenty years earlier.
About the
author
Tom Engelhardt created and runs TomDispatch.com, a project of The
Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War, The
End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The
Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his TomDispatch
interviews, Mission Unaccomplished.
Reviews
Praise for Tom Engelhardt's The American
Way
“Tom Engelhardt’s biting look atUnited States
—Mother Jones Online
“Tom Engelhardt’s biting look at
—Mother Jones Online
“Essential…. seamlessly edited…. establishes
him as one of the grand chroniclers of the post–9/11 era.”
—Dan Froomkin, Nieman Watchdog
—Dan Froomkin, Nieman Watchdog
“These simple pleas for readers to reconsider
an idea they might previously have taken for granted are one of the strengths
of this book. Engelhardt avoids the overly strident or self-righteous
condescension that characterizes too much online political writing, instead
using clear and unvarnished prose to attack the fundamental principles of the
post–September 11 mindset.”
—Foreign Policy in Focus
—Foreign Policy in Focus
"Tom Engelhardt, as always, focuses his
laser-like intelligence on a core problem that the media avoid: Obama's
stunning embrace of Bush's secret government by surveillance, torture, and
sanctioned assassination. A stunning polemic."
—Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians and Planet of Slums
—Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians and Planet of Slums
“With an excellent mind and an equally fine
pen, Engelhardt demonstrates true patriotism to the American founding....
Reading such good prose invigorates like little else in this world of sorrows.
But one should not consider Engelhardt merely a writer of golden prose. This
body has a soul as well, and Engelhardt convincingly presents evidence as well
as argument throughout the book.... The American Way
—The American Conservative
—The American Conservative
"Reading
—Socialist
—Socialist
PUBLIC DOESN’T GET IT, CAN’T SEE IT, DON’T CARE
By Dick Bennett
Daily in many
articles various local government agencies lament the “unavoidability,” the
“unfortunate necessity” of cutting their budget—their services to the public,
their benefits to their workers. Never
any mention of that insatiable monster in our living room devouring food and
furniture: the US Military.
And it’s not only officials deciding to
cut services and refusing to acknowledge the military cause of their financial
distress: even the public votes for the
cuts without a word about the costly wars.
For example, the Associated Press report by Elliot Spagat, “Pension-Cut
Votes Called Stage Setters” (6-7-12)
tells us that the voters of the Californian cities of San
Diego and San Jose
City, county, state leaders: wake up, speak up.
Cities as Battlespace: The New
Military Urbanism
Thursday, 25
November 2010
18:00 - 19:00
Location: CRASSH,17 Mill Lane ,
Cambridge
18:00 - 19:00
Location: CRASSH,
Stephen Graham (Professor of Cities and Society, Global
Urban Research Unit, School of Architecture , Newcastle University
This lecture draws on a
newly-published book - Cities Under
Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, 2010) -- to explore emerging crossovers between the
‘targeting’ of everyday life in so-called ‘smart’ border and ‘homeland
security’ programmes and related efforts to delegate the sovereign power to
deploy lethal force to increasingly robotized and automated war machines.
Arguing that both cases represent examples of a new military urbanism, the rest
of the lecture will develop a thesis outlining the scope and power of
contemporary interpenetrations between urbanism and militarism. The new
military urbanism is defined as encompassing a complex set of rapidly evolving
ideas, doctrines, practices, norms, techniques and popular cultural arenas
through which the everyday spaces, sites and infrastructures of cities—along
with their civilian populations— are now rendered as the main targets and
threats within a limitless ‘battlespace’. The new military urbanism, it is
argued, rests on five related pillars; these are explored in turn. Included
here are the normalization of militarized practices of tracking and targeting
everyday urban circulations; the two-way movement of political, juridical and
technologi- cal techniques between ‘homeland’ cities and cities on colonial
frontiers; the rapid growth of sprawling, transnational industrial complexes
fusing military and security companies with technology, surveillance and
entertainment ones; the deployment of political violence against and through everyday
urban infrastructure by both states and non-state fighters; and the
increasingly seamless fusing of militarized veins of popular, urban and
material culture. The talk finishes by discussing the new political
imaginations demanded by the new military urbanism.
Bored to Death in Afghanistan
(and Washington )
Mating Déjà Vu with a Mobius Strip in the Graveyard of Empire By Tom Engelhardt
[Opener: Three examples of brainless security mania.—Dick]
One day in October 2001, a pilot for Northwest Airlines refused to let Arshad Chowdhury, a 25-year-old American Muslim (“with a dark complexion”) who had once worked as an investment banker in the World Trade Center, board his plane at San Francisco National Airport. According to Northwest’s gate agents, Chowdhury writes in the Washington Post, “he thought my name sounded suspicious” even though “airport security and the FBI verified that I posed no threat.” He sued.
Now, skip nearly a decade. It’s May 6, 2011, and two New York-based African-American imams, a father and son, attempting to take an American Airlines flight from
So how is the war in
I don’t, and let me suggest two reasons why: first, boredom; second, the missing learning curve. MORE http://aep.typepad.com/american_empire_project/2011/05/bored-to-death-in-afghanistan-and-washington.html#more
100% Scared
How the National Security Complex Grows on Terrorism Fears
By Tom Engelhardt
Here’s a scenario to chill you to the bone:
Without warning, the network -- a set of terrorist super cells -- struck in northern
No one doubted that it was al-Qaeda, but where the terrorists had come from was unknown. Initially, German officials accused
|
6/9/2011
|
Obama’s Reset: Arab Spring or Same Old Thing?
How the President and the Pentagon Prop Up Both Middle Eastern Despots and American Arms Dealers
By Nick Turse
If you follow the words, one
This week, the words will take center stage. On Thursday, according to administration officials, President Obama will “reset” American policy in the Middle East with a major address offering a comprehensive look at the Arab Spring, “a unified theory about the popular uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain,” and possibly a new administration approach to the region.
In the meantime, all signs indicate that the Pentagon will quietly maintain antithetical policies, just as it has throughout the Obama years. Barring an unprecedented and almost inconceivable policy shift, it will continue to broker lucrative deals to send weapons systems and military equipment to Arab despots. Nothing indicates that it will be deterred from its course, whatever the president says, which means that Barack Obama’s reset rhetoric is unlikely to translate into meaningful policy change in the region.
|
5/17/2011
|
“Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal? Post-Legal
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the
Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar. I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court). Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.
|
5/31/2011
|
Douglass, Jim. JFK and
the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Interv. The Servant Song (Fall 2010). Agape Community. Agape:
Pres. Kennedy “stood up to his
own national security state and his generals….He wanted to end the war in Vietnam,
looked to abolish nuclear weapons and finally end war as we know it. He was planning to pursue rapprochement with
Castro through Khrushchev.
Douglass: He was killed “because
the national security state felt it was necessary to kill him because he was a
traitor.” Douglass: “Kennedy’s se3curity was withdrawn. He was driven into a trap. He had been set up.” The national security forces in government
and corporate world “do not want us to see the connections…to understand that
1963 is right now.”
From review of Jim Douglass’s’Gandhi and the Unspeakable.
Douglass learns that as
Gandhi pursued his "redemptive vision of a united, nonviolent India in the
nuclear age," he was murdered "by an anti-Muslim, Hindu nationalist
group, with the silent complicity of forces in the newborn Indian
government" that wanted instead a
national security state rooted in nuclear weapons and Hindu fundamentalism.
Those forces of violence continue to affect India ,
Pakistan
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