DN - Report: Military Doctors Designed, Enabled U.S. Torture of Prisoners at Guantanamo, Secret Prisons

Which Is the More Dangerous Obsession?

Trey Smith

David Rohde writes in, Our Fear of Al-Qaeda Hurts Us More Than Al-Qaeda Does,

Twelve years after September 11, 2001, the United States’ obsession with al Qaeda is doing more damage to the nation than the terrorist group itself.

On the surface, it's hard not to disagree with him. So much that has gone on under Presidents Bush and Obama has been predicated on this idea that we want to stop the next 9/11 BEFORE it happens. That's why we've undertaken such extraordinary measures like curbing civil rights and spying on anything that moves.

But, if you dig only an inch or two below the surface, things don't add up. The erosion of our civil rights hasn't made us safer; all it has done is make Americans less secure in our public and private lives. The plethora of intelligence programs doesn't appear to be aimed at stopping terrorism at all. What the myriad of recent revelations has shown is that surveillance is being conducted on ordinary citizens of the world and even leaders of allied countries. Unless you think the Chancellor of Germany or the President of Brazil is a closet terrorist, it would seem that the prevention of terrorism isn't what this is all about.

In my mind's eye, this seeming obsession is nothing more than a ruse. Terrorism is this generation's bogeyman. Our leaders use it to shift away our attention from their true obsessions: power and wealth.

When you scrape away all the hubris, power and money for the few is what we're left with.

Be Careful What You Publicly (or Privately) Say

Trey Smith

A well-known and highly respected Yemeni anti-drone activist was detained yesterday by UK officials under that country's "anti-terrorism" law at Gatwick Airport, where he had traveled to speak at an event. Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen.

When he objected that his political views had no relevance to security concerns, UK law enforcement officials threatened to detain him for the full nine hours allowed by the Terrorism Act of 2000, the same statute that was abused by UK officials last month to detain my partner, David Miranda, for nine hours.

Shiban tells his story today, here, in the Guardian, and recounts how the UK official told him "he had detained me not merely because I was from Yemen, but also because of Reprieve's work investigating and criticising the efficacy of US drone strikes in my country."

The notion that Shiban posed some sort of security threat was absurd on its face. As the Guardian reported Tuesday, "he visited the UK without incident earlier this summer and testified in May to a US congressional hearing on the impact of the covert drone programme in Yemen."

Viewing anti-drone activism as indicative of a terrorism threat is noxious. As Reprieve's Cory Crider put it yesterday, "if there were any doubt the UK was abusing its counter-terrorism powers to silence critics, this ends it."
~ from UK Detention of Reprieve Activist Consistent with NSA's View of Drone Opponents as "Threats" and "Adversaries" by Glenn Greenwald ~

If you are Muslim and you hold views that are counter to the US/UK, you better keep such views to yourself! That's the message of this detention and others cited by Greenwald. In fact, when it comes to an opposition to the use of drones, you don't even have to be a Muslim! You represent a "threat," nonetheless.

If anyone STILL thinks that this mass surveillance apparatus is focused strictly on anti-terrorism, your head must be so far up your arse that you will never be able to extricate it. In recent months, it has been revealed that the NSA (and GCHQ) regularly spies on journalists, the UN, long-time allies, state-run corporations (i.e., Brazil's chief oil company), leaders of sovereign nations (e.g., Brazil and Mexico), and just about everyone else. Unless we all are considered potential terrorists, it is more than obvious that this ubiquitous spying isn't tied to terrorism at all.

Conservatives have long been concerned with a nonexistent blueprint of the UN to create a world government. The fear is that such a world government would deprive red-blooded Americans of the freedoms (i.e., the right to own as many guns as humanly possible) they hold dear. To counter this fear, such conservatives have been ardent supporters of the military-intelligence-industrial complex.

It is more than ironic that the very institution these folks cherish is the one that is trying to create a quasi world government in secret. When you know what everyone else is up to, it makes it that much easier to control and/or manipulate them. You don't have to declare yourselves as a de facto world government, but it leads to much the same result. You get to call the shots and anyone who opposes you is quickly threatened, bribed, blackmailed, detained, imprisoned, tortured or dispatched with by one means or another.

Driving People Insane

Trey Smith

In an angry speech before the United Nations General Assembly, a democratically-elected president had this to say.

In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy. In the absence of the respect for sovereignty, there is no basis for the relationship among nations.

In year's past, if you were to guess that these words were spoken by the sitting US President, no one would fault you. US Presidents are known to say lots of noble things. But these words were spoken by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and they were directed AT the United States! Her words were targeting the massive surveillance of world citizens by the NSA.

What she said should be a no-brainer: A lack of privacy is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Dictators, despots and demagogs do not want their citizens to think for themselves. No, they want the unwashed masses uncritically to toe the party line. They want people always to be looking over their shoulder and to be too frightened to utter any degree of dissent.

In a manner of speaking, mass surveillance is a form of terrorism. It is not the kind of terrorism that directly can end life in a split second -- though, at times, it can lead to death -- but it IS the kind of terrorism that can lead to indiscriminate intimidation, imprisonment and torture. Mass surveillance terrorizes people from writing, saying or even thinking things that the government does not approve of. It is so terrorizing that real democracy becomes near too impossible.

Not only is mass surveillance a form of terrorism, but it also leads to wide scale mental health problems. If you know that you are always being watched, you are more apt to become paranoid. You may start to have delusions that may or may not be all that delusional. It would not be uncommon for people to develop trust issues and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

DN - Angela Davis: "Terrorism is Part of Our History"

Shh! Dammit!

Trey Smith

In relation to last night's post about the efforts of the US and British intelligence agencies widespread and well-funded efforts to decrypt all encrypted communications, it turns out that reporting this revelation involved a courageous act of journalism. While it is understandable that spy agencies wouldn't want the public to know that they actively are working to make private communications difficult or near too impossible, these agencies asked (or demanded) that their secrets remain hidden.

Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.

The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of internet users in the US and worldwide.

Let's be honest here. This new revelation may well cause "bad guys" to change the way they communicate. Many of them may have been shocked to read the level to which these agencies have already compromised encrypted communications. To make the case that the "bad guys" already assumed that this was going on is, to my mind, a bit disingenuous.

But I firmly side with these three publications because this is information the general public needs to know. Why? Because it appears that these spy agencies target the innocent far more frequently than they target the terrorists. These programs need to be discussed and debated. You can't do that if you don't know about them in the first place.

~

On its most fundamental level, as Bruce Schneier writes,

Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us.

By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.

This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned.

The internet could have played a role in democratizing the world. It allows for the free flow of information and the ability of citizens the world over to communicate with each other. But a free flow of information is something the world elites fear more than anything else. They may say their number one fear is terrorism, but what causes them to shake in their boots the most is the fear that the general public will figure out what they are really up to! If we figure it out...who knows what might happen!

Severely Wounded, But Not Crippled

Trey Smith

In an increasingly phantasmagorical world, here’s my present fantasy of choice: someone from General Keith Alexander’s outfit, the National Security Agency, tracks down H.G. Wells’s time machine in the attic of an old house in London. Britain’s subservient Government Communications Headquarters, its version of the NSA, is paid off and the contraption is flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, where it’s put back in working order. Alexander then revs it up and heads not into the future like Wells to see how our world ends, but into the past to offer a warning to Americans about what’s to come.

He arrives in Washington on October 23, 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day after President Kennedy has addressed the American people on national television to tell them that this planet might not be theirs -- or anyone else’s -- for long. ("We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.") Greeted with amazement by the Washington elite, Alexander, too, goes on television and informs the same public that, in 2013, the major enemy of the United States will no longer be the Soviet Union, but an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that the headquarters of our country’s preeminent foe will be found somewhere in the rural backlands of... Yemen.

Yes, Yemen, a place most Americans, then and now, would be challenged to find on a world map. I guarantee you one thing: had such an announcement actually been made that day, most Americans would undoubtedly have dropped to their knees and thanked God for His blessings on the American nation. Though even then a nonbeliever, I would undoubtedly have been among them. After all, the 18-year-old Tom Engelhardt, on hearing Kennedy’s address, genuinely feared that he and the few pathetic dreams of a future he had been able to conjure up were toast.

Had Alexander added that, in the face of AQAP and similar minor jihadist enemies scattered in the back lands of parts of the planet, the U.S. had built up its military, intelligence, and surveillance powers beyond anything ever conceived of in the Cold War or possibly in the history of the planet, Americans of that time would undoubtedly have considered him delusional and committed him to an asylum.

Such, however, is our world more than two decades after Eastern Europe was liberated, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War definitively ended, and the Soviet Union disappeared.
~ from And Then There Was One by Tom Engelhardt ~

It amazes me that, no matter how frequently we're told that al-Qaeda has been seriously wounded, it continues to be such a supposedly feared enemy. It is like the cat with nine lives. No matter how many higher ups we neutralize, the threat never diminishes.

Think about the number of reports within the last decade. We took out the head -- one bin Laden -- and several operational commanders and yet the War on Terror hasn't skipped a beat. This represents a weird paradox for the US Commander-in-Chief (Bush or Obama). To prove that our military might is needed and capable, the president must announce successes in our continuous war against the Axis of Evil. He must show that we are wounding our supposed adversary. But he can't tell us that we've crippled them...because if al-Qaeda was said to be crippled, then the rationale for our continued militarization and increased mass surveillance would be greatly lessened.

Accordingly, he must straddle the line between saying that we are winning this war, BUT the war itself is far from over. Yes, we hold the upper hand, but our hand must remain on the throttle, lest we lose our superior position.

So, we continue to build the largest military and mass surveillance system the world has ever known in order to combat ragtag outfits skulking around in caves and other out of the way locales. It seems a bit surreal, doesn't it?

TYT - Terror Threat Shows NSA Spying on U.S. Citizens is Pointless

TYT - Terror Threats Close Embassies, But Why Now?

The Sky Is (Kinda, Sort Of) Falling

Trey Smith

At a bit past 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Monday evening, the top stories on CNN.com happened to include the following:

• A-Rod Suspended, Can Keep Playing During Appeal
• Sources: Al Qaeda Attack Plan Nearly Set
• 11 Jailbreaks Linked to Al Qaeda Plot?
• 50 Cent Enters Not Guilty Plea
• Johnny Football's Offseason Craziness
• Beauty Queen Arrested in Bomb Case
• Spelling Error Costs Boy on "Jeopardy"
• Neil Patrick Harris: "I Was Goosed"
• You Should Swim With Sharks Here

CNN, always calm and even-handed in matters of national security and terrorism, was kind enough to pad their reports of imminent national annihilation between enough syrupy goo to send the Fluffernutter people running for their therapists...but there it is all the same: The End Of The World, Again.

It has been like this for days, on all the networks and above the fold of every newspaper: ZOMG SKY FALLING TAKE APPROPRIATE PRECAUTIONS NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE ZOMG.

And it is all very familiar, actually. Take this short, vapid bit from the Associated Press, also delivered on Monday evening:

Two officials say a secret message that was intercepted between al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri and his deputy in Yemen led to the shutdown of U.S. embassies.

A U.S. intelligence official and a Mideast diplomat said al-Zawahri's message was picked up several weeks ago and appeared to initially target Yemeni interests.

The intelligence official said the message was sent to Nasir al Wuhayshi, the head of the terror network's organization, based in Yemen, that is known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive issue publicly.

Right.

Two officials, names not provided, and a message from al-Zawahri, details not provided. Never mind the fact that I've lost count of the number of times we were told al-Zawahri was dead; it was certain in 2006 until it wasn't, and again in 2008, and in the years before and since, I'm pretty sure he died more times than The Cat That Came Back.

So we're back to this crap again.

Forgive my crashing cynicism, but I still have a huge hangover from the days when Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or even George Dubya himself would sling impending-doom terror alerts whenever a friend of the administration got indicted, the stock market dropped more than a few points, or anything else happened that required a big, juicy CNN banner (accompanied by appropriately dramatic music) to make everyone look away...and here we are, right in the middle of a national conversation about whether we're all comfortable about the degree to which the government can track us like tagged whales.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but seriously folks: talk about timing, right?
~ from You Are, In Fact, Being Watched by William Rivers Pitt ~

In case you missed it, there is an imminent threat of doom from al-Qaida. They could strike at ay given moment and we're not exactly sure where. The situation is so dire that President Obama decided to keep his appointment with Jay Leno by appearing on The Tonight Show Tuesday night!

Say what?

Put a microphone in their faces or have a pen ready to scribble down notes and many of our esteemed leaders will tell you we have every reason to be afraid. Yet, once the camera lights go off and reporters put down their pens, no one in Washington is acting like there's a reason to be afraid. No, it seems to be business as usual.

A skeptic like me looks more towards how people act, not simply what they say. In this case, neither the president nor the other pro-NSA folks in the capitol are acting like there is much of anything to worry about. As Rivers Pitt points out, the mainstream media isn't providing wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage on the supposed danger either. Taken together, these actions don't match their words in any way, shape or form. No, this seems like another example of wag the dog!

As Predictable As Clockwork

Trey Smith

The closure of 22 US embassies over an alleged security threat was seized on by defenders of the National Security Agency on Sunday, amid claims that its controversial surveillance programme alerted authorities to "pre-9/11" levels of terrorist chatter.

A meeting of President Barack Obama's top security officials on Saturday concluded that intelligence apparently gathered from overseas communications intercepts showed a serious but unspecified threat against Western and US interests. The administration moved to shut the embassies across North Africa and the Middle East as a precaution.

On Sunday the state department announced that diplomatic posts in 19 cities will remain closed at least until end of this week. A spokeswoman said the decision to keep the embassies and consulates closed is a sign of an "abundance of caution" and is "not an indication of a new threat."

Britain said its embassy in Yemen would stay closed until the Muslim festival of Eid on Thursday.

Intelligence committee members in Washington who had been briefed on the alert said it was the most serious they had seen for years and repeatedly cited the threat during Sunday's political talk shows as a reason to resist growing calls in Congress for reform of the NSA's sweeping powers.

"There has been an awful lot of [terrorist] chatter, which is very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11," said the Republican senator Saxby Chambliss on NBC's Meet the Press. "As we come to the end of Ramadan, which is always an interesting time for terrorists, and the upcoming 9/11 anniversary, this is the most serious threat that I have seen in the last several years."
~ from Terrorist Threat Followed 'Pre-9/11 Levels' of 'Chatter', Say NSA Defenders by Dan Roberts and Robert Booth ~

As The Church Lady used to say, "How convenient!" Right at the moment when more and more representatives and senators have jumped onto the "Let's Rein in the NSA" bandwagon, a rather nebulous threat is "discovered." There isn't much the talking heads will tell us except that it sounds ominous. 

What is it with the Bush and Obama administrations?  Why is it that these so-called threats seem to pop up at the most politically opportune times?  And why are they always so vague?  You know, it's as if they are just making them up!  They say just enough to get the public in a tizzy and those recalcitrant lawmakers to shut up and then, when nothing happens, they shrug their shoulders as if to say, "Hey, these things happen."

These so-called nondescript threats are interesting because lately they seem to be the ONLY ones our crack intelligence community picks up on.  When the embassy/CIA outpost in Benghazi was attacked, it caught these same people completely off guard.  For some unknown reason, the initial demonstrations and the ouster of Mubarak in Egypt caught us off guard too.  Our overarching spy operations somehow didn't pick up on the planning for the Boston Marathon Bombings until after they happened -- even then they were initially bewildered -- and the NSA somehow missed the communiques of months of planning for the recent prison breaks.

Do you see a pattern here?  When it comes to the communications and planning of events that actually take place, the NSA seems asleep at the wheel.  But when it comes to nebulous threats that don't turn into anything definitive, the NSA is on top of the situation!

~

Here's another decidedly odd thing about these supposed vague threats.  On the one hand, we've been told that Edward Snowden's disclosures of classified information will cause the "terrorists" to find new and/or different ways to communicate as they plot their nefarious plans.  That's what makes these leaks so dangerous, we're told.  

However, the article above and many others I've read would seem to indicate that the terrorists haven't been reading about all of these revelations (or they aren't very smart) because they are communicating in the same manner they did pre-9/11.  I mean, if the accusations by the Pro-NSA backers are true, wouldn't you think that the "terrorists" would know to tone down the chatter?

How Could This Happen?

Trey Smith

A daring prison break earlier this week during which Pakistani Taliban insurgents freed about 250 of their colleagues was meant to convey that the group is a major threat to national security despite losing swaths of territory, havens and strategic conduits in the northwest tribal areas during military counterterrorist operations this year.

Al Qaida activists with knowledge of the details of the raid said the Dera Ismail Khan prison in northwest Pakistan, reputedly one of the most secure in the country, was one of several high-profile targets that militants from the Taliban, whose formal name is Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, had selected during a nationwide intelligence gathering operation between January and March.

The list was drawn up prior to a Taliban offer of peace talks extended to the right-of-center Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party during campaigning before the May general election that the PML-N won, the activists said. The party’s leader, Nawaz Sharif, had said during his campaign that he would attempt to negotiate an end to the Taliban insurgency, which has cost Pakistan 48,000 lives and about $60 billion. But the Taliban feared that once Sharif was prime minister he would withdraw the offer under pressure from the military and the United States. The planned series of attacks was intended to apply pressure so that he would not, the activists said.
~ from Months of Planning Led to Pakistan Prison Break That Freed Scores of Terrorists by Tom Hussain ~

We have been told over and over again that the reason no significant changes should be made to the various NSA intelligence operations is that they are needed to thwart the activities of Al Qaida and yet a detailed plan put together over several months caught the US flat-footed. While I realize that no spying operation will have a perfect record, there have been several prison breaks conducted by Al Qaida over the past two weeks. If these intelligence programs are as effective as advertised, don't you think at least one prison break might have been stopped?

There is something else to consider as well. Here we had 200 well-armed freedom fighters or terrorists (it depends on a person's point of view) attacking a prison in Pakistan and yet no US drone strikes. This seems very odd to me. From numerous reports, drone operators tend to mount attacks often on flimsy suspicions -- people believed to be armed even when no weapons are seen -- and yet here we have a small army of men WITH guns and rocket launchers. Why didn't a drone try to take them out? If we can blow up people at a wedding, why can't we blow up people attacking a prison that holds "terrorists"?

DN - Jeremy Scahill: GOP Remarks at Guantánamo Hearing Part of Bid to Revive Torture as U.S. Policy

Not One Attributable Death

Trey Smith

The US counter-intelligence official who led the Pentagon's review into the fallout from the WikiLeaks disclosures of state secrets told the Bradley Manning sentencing hearing on Wednesday that no instances were ever found of any individual killed by enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases.

Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet. "I don't have a specific example," he said.

It has been one of the main criticisms of the WikiLeaks publications that they put lives at risk, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. The admission by the Pentagon's chief investigator into the fallout from WikiLeaks that no such casualties were identified marks a significant undermining of such arguments.
~ from Bradley Manning Leak Did Not Result in Deaths by Enemy Forces, Court Hears by Ed Pilkington ~

This report underscores the great irony in the prosecution of Bradley Manning. Despite what many Bush and Obama administration officials have maintained for so long, no deaths can be tied to the information Manning disclosed. On the other hand, Manning disclosed how others definitely were responsible for causing death and yet they aren't being prosecuted at all!

What a topsy-turvy world we live in: The wrongdoers get to go free while the courageous individuals who expose the non-prosecuted criminality are the ones who are punished severely.

Attempting to Rewrite History

Trey Smith

While the 10-part 2013/1984 miniseries is now in the rear view mirror, it is not like I plan never to make reference to Orwell again! I have spent the past few days ruminating about how the rhetoric from the NSA apologists during the brief debate about the Amash amendment in the US House last week reminded me of the chief function of Oceania's Ministry of Truth: Rewriting history.

The centerpiece for those who sought defeat of said amendment was that putting a halt to the NSA's indiscriminate vacuuming up of telephonic metadata -- particularly the data of millions of innocent Americans -- would leave the US open to another terrorist attack like 9/11. Without this valuable tool, they argued, we would once again become sitting ducks.

It sounds like a plausible argument...IF you neglect the facts concerning the months before the 2001 attack. As it turns out, both the FBI and CIA -- using intelligence methods already in place -- had tried to warn the Bush administration of the growing threat. Both agencies had picked up quite a bit of intelligence that indicated that an attack -- utilizing airplanes as weapons -- was in the offing, possibly within the borders of the US itself.

The problem was NOT that these spy agency were hamstrung because they lacked the necessary tools to figure out what was going on -- the problem was the lack of political will to act on the intelligence information already gathered!  In other words, even though the program being debated in the US House last week [supposedly] did not exist at that time, our intelligence community still was close to being on top of the situation.

But these facts did not undergird the position of the naysayers, so they threw them aside.  They sought to rewrite history so that it bolstered their political agenda.  The mainstream media played its trusty role by amplifying this historical rewrite by not pointing out that the history involved pointed in the other direction.

In the coming weeks and months, the NSA apologists will utilize this historical rewrite again and again.  In time, if we don't challenge them, history itself may become rewritten.  If we allow them to lie long and loud enough, it won't matter what is true because most people will come to accept the falsehood as a historical fact and today's Ministry of Truth will have accomplished its main objective.

TYT - Teen Jailed Over League of Legends Now on Suicide Watch

The Most Misappropriated Word in Use in America

Trey Smith

A representative for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation told a group of concerned citizens that complaining about water quality could be considered an “act of terrorism,” The Tennessean reports.

Sherwin Smith, deputy director of TDEC’s Division of Water Resources, made the claim during a meeting with residents of Maury County, Tennessee. Organized by State Rep. Sheila Butt, R-Columbia, the gathering sought to address complaints by residents that area water was making their children sick. In audio obtained by The Tennessean, Smith can be heard equating water quality complaints, an act of citizenry, with DHS-defined acts of terrorism:

We take water quality very seriously. Very, very seriously … But you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.

~ from Tennessee Official Says Complaining About Water Quality Could Be Considered 'Act of Terrorism' by Steven Hsieh ~

Terrorism. It used to have somewhat of an objective definition. If you look in the dictionary, you will find definitions like the following:

• The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
• a method of government or of resisting government involving domination or coercion by various forms of intimidation, as bombing or kidnapping.
• the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear

How in the world could ANYBODY equate complaining about water quality with intimidation, coercion and violence? That's absolutely bonkers!

But this Tennessee official is not alone.  In Canada and the US, some authorities are labeling those who protest the Keystone XL Pipeline as terrorists.  There were suggestions by some that the majority of peaceful Occupy protesters were terrorists.  At one time during Dubya's administration, Quaker organizations -- the poster children for nonviolence -- were being investigated as potential terrorists.

That's right.  One of the most pacifistic groups in the nation -- whose members routinely refuse military service -- were being looked at as potential purveyors of violence!

What once had a rather specific meaning has been turned into a nebulous word that can mean almost anything that government officials want it to mean at any given moment.  More often than not, they employ it against people who dissent against their machinations, policies and laws.  If you stand in their way against corporate dominance or federal criminality, there is a really good chance that they will slap the terrorist label on you.

The sad irony is that US government itself has become the largest terrorist organization in the world!  It's general modus operandi is the threat or use of force and violence against Muslims throughout the world and many of its own citizens domestically.  This is done to intimidate, coerce and instill fear in anyone who opposes US elite hegemony.  

Just because US officials constantly misappropriate the world terrorism to buttress their political designs does not mean that the rest of us must accept their disjointed use of the word.  The next time President Obama or some other official uses the word, terrorist (or terrorism), ask yourself a question:  Does the person or group referenced use violence or the threat thereof to instill fear in civilians to advance a political agenda or ideology?

If the answer is no, then you should reject the perceived emotive response that comes with use of that word.  Put another way, stop allowing them to manipulate you at will.

A Very Small Figure

Trey Smith

Back in 2011, Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina professor of sociology, remarked,

Muslim American terrorist plots have killed since 9/11 — since the 3,000 killed on 9/11 — have killed 33 individuals in the United States since that time. Over that same period of time, there have been more than 150,000 murders in the United States, or 14 or 15,000 murders every year. Muslim American terrorism, then, has been a very small, very low percentage of the overall violence in the United States.

I don't know what the exact figure is as of today, but it remains miniscule compared to most other ways people are killed. An American is more likely to die from being struck by lightening, drowning, slipping in the bathtub or falling victim to a food-borne illness than to die from a Muslim terrorist attack. Heck, each of us has far greater chance of being killed by a white male in a mass shooting!

And yet, despite the fact that terrorist-related deaths in the US are abysmally low, our entire lives are impacted in one way or another by this supposed threat. If not for the economic angle -- something I have discussed frequently -- it makes no sense at all.

What is even more insane is that we don't apply the same vigilance to those acts that result in much higher annual death tolls. Suggest that we place even a few minor restrictions on gun sales and too many people fly into a tizzy. Suggest that more regulation and effort go into insuring that our workplaces are safer and too many people say that is a step too far. Suggest that all sorts of pollution or food additives are killing people before their time and too many people call you some kind of hippie kook.

But suggest that we need to give away our constitutional rights and spend the vast majority of our taxpayers dollars to minimize a minimal threat and too many people say, "For our safety and peace of mind, it's worth the price."

It's baffling.

The Numbers Keep Growing

Trey Smith

Just for the sake of argument, let's suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend (I know it's a stretch) that the Obama administration and the apologists for the nation's spy apparatus in Congress, Democratic and Republican, are telling us the gods' honest truth.

They have, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, "amped up" their defense of the NSA's massive spying program, claiming that not two, but 50 terrorist plots have been foiled thanks to their metadata mining and their intrusive monitoring of our phone and email conversations and website browsing activity.

Think what that means: for years now, the Jihadists have known that the US spy apparatus is ubiquitous, and that it is able to track all their communications. Of course they knew this, because they would have seen all these plots being foiled (the real ones, not the many ones that were created by FBI or CIA provocateurs and plants), and, not being stupid, they would have put it together and realized that the plots that depended upon a lot of phone calls and internet communications were getting busted up, while ones that were handled either solo, or that were developed by careful word-of-mouth communication and courier were managing to succeed.

But we poor schmucks, the American people, have been left in ignorance, imagining that our carefully crafted and painstakingly memorized six or eight-digit passwords, including at least one letter and one number (or if we're really good, some symbol or other), were doing the job of keeping our online lives private and that our unlisted numbers, or our decision not to list an address with the phone company, were keeping our telephonic communications secure.

Ho ho! Were we fooled!

But really (stepping back into the real world again now), are we going to believe this nonsense about 50 NSA-foiled plots?
~ from Cranking Up the Washington Lie Machine by Dave Lindorff ~

Do I believe that the various top secret NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden have thwarted at least 50 terrorist plots? Hell no! I base this conclusion on one fact: Team Obama is very self-serving and, had they foiled all these plots, they would have leaked details about them all along the way.

For all his administration's war on federal whistleblowers, the administration itself is very leaky. Every time they "strike a blow against terrorism," they are quick to get the word out. They want us to know that Obama is one tough dude and not somebody these bad guys can mess with.

It defies credulity to think that, during the last presidential election, Team Obama would have sat on a slew of juicy leaks and not used them to show that their man was tougher on terrorism than Romney. If numerous plots had been foiled, Obama's minions would have gone to every friendly reporter to spill the tantalizing details. They would have appeared on every mainstream political talk show to tout the president's creds.

Since this did not happen, it points to the notion that they are pulling these growing numbers out their asses in order to justify programs that they can't really justify.

Trapped Inside the Oval Office, Part 2

Trey Smith

Famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars reporting on Mr. Obama's Afghanistan Policy Review in the fall of 2009 provides an instructive case-study of just how limited a President's options are when faced with institutional opposition from within the Executive Branch.

Woodward reported that after Mr. Obama had acceded to the military demand for an addition 21,000 troops shortly after taking office, he asked them to produce a set of options that would include a reduced U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. The Pentagon refused to do so and instead began publicly lobbying for an additional 40,000 troops. Joint Chief of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen first pushed for a troop increase at a September 15 Senate Armed Services hearing. White House aides Rahm Emanuel and Tom Donilon were, Woodward reports, "furious. The president is being screwed by the senior uniformed military, they (said). The generals and admirals are systematically playing him, boxing him in." Mullen apologized and said it wouldn't happen again.

But then two weeks later, on October 1, 2009, U.S. Afghan military commander Stanley McChrystal committed an act of insubordination far more serious than the later Rolling Stone interviews which got him fired. He again publicly lobbied for more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in a major speech in London. Woodward reports that "McChrystal's comments marked a seminal moment for the White House staff. What better proof that the military was on a search-and-destroy mission aimed at the president? (National Security Advisor) James Jones said that McChrystal's speech was either “insubordination or stupid. It read like a direct challenge to the president. 'It is a firing offense, but McChrystal won't be fired because we need him.'" Woodward also reported that "Obama felt disrespected and trapped. The White House saw the speech as a scheme on the part of McChrystal, Mullen and Petraeus."

And Mr. Obama was indeed trapped, far more controlled by the military than its actual "Commander-in-Chief". As CIA chief Leon Panetta summed up the situation: "no Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he asked for it. So just do it. Do what they say." Mr. Obama was thus forced to accede to the Pentagon's harebrained scheme for a "surge" that increased U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 30,000 (with an additional 10,000 from NATO allies) that achieved little and continued to weaken U.S. national security by worsening conditions in neighboring, and far more important, Pakistan.

The logic behind Panetta's "give them what they want" mentality is obvious. A President might conceivably survive another 9/11 or losing in Afghanistan - but not if military sources continually leaked information to the media and Congress blaming it on his or her failure to support the military. And, for the same reason, a President is often "trapped" by the NSA, CIA or any other major Executive agency.
~ from America's Most Anti-Democratic Institution: How the Imperial Presidency Threatens U.S. National Security, by Fred Branfman ~

I am often amazed that so many of my fellow Americans don't recognize that the military (or spy agencies) -- just like any other business or organization -- wants to grow. It wants more money, more power and more influence. This is why the military brass aren't interested in the concept of peace. A lack of real, perceived or imaginary enemies is a direct threat to their preeminence. As long as they can convince us that there are bogeymen around every corner, too many Americans will give them a free hand to keep us "safe."

How is it that for years our number one priority to stem the flow of terrorism was to get Osama bin Laden and yet, once we got him, we were told that the threat was as great as ever! Each time we kill another "important" leader in the terrorist network and we're told how this death will hamper the command structure, nothing actually changes. One would think that, since we've killed or arrested so many terrorist cogs, the threat would recede, but we are told the precise opposite! The threat is as great now as it was before we took out x, y and z.

It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that it doesn't matter how many terrorist higher ups we kill. We could slaughter thousands at a time and we would still be told that we weren't safe enough yet, that now is not the time to let down our guard.

The institution of the military craves perpetual war because this kind of war insures that the military will be THE prime focus of government. They actively are pursuing a strategy that guarantees to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of people who want nothing more than to avenge the death and destruction we routinely visit upon them. By relentlessly pursuing this strategy, the military-industrial complex guarantees that it will create far more "terrorists" than it can ever kill which means it willfully generates the threat that it says it must protect us from!

This post is part of a miniseries.  If you missed Part 1, go here.