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The Pentagon's Real $trategy: Keeping the Money Flowing |
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Saturday, 18 June 2016 14:01 |
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Cockburn writes: "These days, lamenting the apparently aimless character of Washington's military operations in the Greater Middle East has become conventional wisdom among administration critics of every sort. Senator John McCain thunders that 'this president has no strategy to successfully reverse the tide of slaughter and mayhem' in that region. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies bemoans the 'lack of a viable and public strategy.' Andrew Bacevich suggests that 'there is no strategy. None. Zilch.'"
US Army Special Forces are seen doing training exercises at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, not unlike the kind of exercises done at military bases the world over. (photo: USAOC News Service/Flickr/Creative Commons)
The Pentagon's Real $trategy: Keeping the Money Flowing
By Andrew Cockburn, TomDispatch
18 June 16
When it comes to Pentagon weapons systems, have you ever heard of cost “underruns”? I think not. Cost overruns? They turn out to be the unbreachable norm, as they seem to have been from time immemorial. In 1982, for example, the Pentagon announced that the cumulative cost of its 44 major weapons programs had experienced a “record” increase of $114.5 billion. Three decades later, in the spring of 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the military’s major programs to develop new weapons systems -- by then 80 of them -- were a cumulative half-trillion dollars over their initial estimated price tags and on average more than two years delayed. A year after, the GAO found that 47 of those programs had again increased in cost (to the cumulative tune of $27 billion) while the average time for delivering them had suffered another month’s delay (although the Pentagon itself swore otherwise).
And little seems to have changed since then -- not exactly a surprise given that this has long been standard operating procedure for a Pentagon that has proven adamantly incapable not just of passing an audit but even of doing one. What we’re talking about here is, in fact, more like a way of life. As TomDispatch regular William Hartung has written, the Pentagon regularly takes “active measures to disguise how it is spending the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars it receives every year -- from using the separate ‘war budget’ as a slush fund to pay for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting wars to keeping the cost of its new nuclear bomber a secret.”
When it comes to those cost overruns, Exhibit A is incontestably the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a plane whose total acquisition costs were pegged at $233 billion back in 2001. That price now: an estimated $1.4 trillion for far fewer planes. (Even the F-35 pilot’s helmet costs $400,000 apiece.) In other words, though in test flights it has failed to outperform the F-16, a plane it is supposed to replace, it will be, hands down (or flaps up), the most expensive weapons system in history -- at least until the next Pentagon doozy comes along.
Today, Andrew Cockburn, whose recent book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (just out in paperback), is a devastating account of how U.S. drone warfare really works, suggests that this is anything but a matter of Pentagon bungling. Quite the opposite, it’s strategy of the first order.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Pentagon’s Real $trategy
Keeping the Money Flowing
 hese days, lamenting the apparently aimless character of Washington’s military operations in the Greater Middle East has become conventional wisdom among administration critics of every sort. Senator John McCain thunders that “this president has no strategy to successfully reverse the tide of slaughter and mayhem” in that region. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies bemoans the “lack of a viable and public strategy.” Andrew Bacevich suggests that “there is no strategy. None. Zilch.”
After 15 years of grinding war with no obvious end in sight, U.S. military operations certainly deserve such obloquy. But the pundit outrage may be misplaced. Focusing on Washington rather than on distant war zones, it becomes clear that the military establishment does indeed have a strategy, a highly successful one, which is to protect and enhance its own prosperity.
Given this focus, creating and maintaining an effective fighting force becomes a secondary consideration, reflecting a relative disinterest -- remarkable to outsiders -- in the actual business of war, as opposed to the business of raking in dollars for the Pentagon and its industrial and political partners. A key element of the strategy involves seeding the military budget with “development” projects that require little initial outlay but which, down the line, grow irreversibly into massive, immensely profitable production contracts for our weapons-making cartels.
If this seems like a startling proposition, consider, for instance, the Air Force’s determined and unyielding efforts to jettison the A-10 Thunderbolt, widely viewed as the most effective means for supporting troops on the ground, while ardently championing the sluggish, vastly overpriced F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that, among myriad other deficiencies, cannot fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm. No less telling is the Navy’s ongoing affection for budget-busting programs such as aircraft carriers, while maintaining its traditional disdain for the unglamorous and money-poor mission of minesweeping, though the mere threat of enemy mines in the 1991 Gulf War (as in the Korean War decades earlier) stymied plans for major amphibious operations. Examples abound across all the services.
Meanwhile, ongoing and dramatic programs to invest vast sums in meaningless, useless, or superfluous weapons systems are the norm. There is no more striking example of this than current plans to rebuild the entire American arsenal of nuclear weapons in the coming decades, Obama's staggering bequest to the budgets of his successors.
Taking Nuclear Weapons to the Bank
These nuclear initiatives have received far less attention than they deserve, perhaps because observers are generally loath to acknowledge that the Cold War and its attendant nuclear terrors, supposedly consigned to the ashcan of history a quarter-century ago, are being revived on a significant scale. The U.S. is currently in the process of planning for the construction of a new fleet of nuclear submarines loaded with new intercontinental nuclear missiles, while simultaneously creating a new land-based intercontinental missile, a new strategic nuclear bomber, a new land-and-sea-based tactical nuclear fighter plane, a new long-range nuclear cruise missile (which, as recently as 2010, the Obama administration explicitly promised not to develop), at least three nuclear warheads that are essentially new designs, and new fuses for existing warheads. In addition, new nuclear command-and-control systems are under development for a fleet of satellites (costing up to $1 billion each) designed to make the business of fighting a nuclear war more practical and manageable.
This massive nuclear buildup, routinely promoted under the comforting rubric of “modernization,” stands in contrast to the president’s lofty public ruminations on the topic of nuclear weapons. The most recent of these was delivered during his visit -- the first by an American president -- to Hiroshima last month. There, he urged “nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles” to “have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them.”
In reality, that “logic of fear” suggests that there is no way to “fight” a nuclear war, given the unforeseeable but horrific effects of these immensely destructive weapons. They serve no useful purpose beyond deterring putative opponents from using them, for which an extremely limited number would suffice. During the Berlin crisis of 1961, for example, when the Soviets possessed precisely four intercontinental nuclear missiles, White House planners seriously contemplated launching an overwhelming nuclear strike on the USSR. It was, they claimed, guaranteed to achieve “victory.” As Fred Kaplan recounts in his book Wizards of Armageddon, the plan’s advocates conceded that the Soviets might, in fact, be capable of managing a limited form of retaliation with their few missiles and bombers in which as many as three million Americans could be killed, whereupon the plan was summarily rejected.
In other words, in the Cold War as today, the idea of “nuclear war-fighting” could not survive scrutiny in a real-world context. Despite this self-evident truth, the U.S. military has long been the pioneer in devising rationales for fighting such a war via ever more “modernized” weapons systems. Thus, when first introduced in the early 1960s, the Navy’s invulnerable Polaris-submarine-launched intercontinental missiles -- entirely sufficient in themselves as a deterrent force against any potential nuclear enemy -- were seen within the military as an attack on Air Force operations and budgets. The Air Force responded by conceiving and successfully selling the need for a full-scale, land-based missile force as well, one that could more precisely target enemy missiles in what was termed a “counterforce” strategy.
The drive to develop and build such systems on the irrational pretense that nuclear war fighting is a practical proposition persists today. One component of the current “modernization” plan is the proposed development of a new “dial-a-yield” version of the venerable B-61 nuclear bomb. Supposedly capable of delivering explosions of varying strength according to demand, this device will, at least theoretically, be guidable to its target with high degrees of accuracy and will also be able to burrow deep into the earth to destroy buried bunkers. The estimated bill -- $11 billion -- is a welcome boost for the fortunes of the Sandia and Los Alamos weapons laboratories that are developing it.
The ultimate cost of this new nuclear arsenal in its entirety is essentially un-knowable. The only official estimate we have so far came from the Congressional Budget Office, which last year projected a total of $350 billion. That figure, however, takes the “modernization” program only to 2024 -- before, that is, most of the new systems move from development to actual production and the real bills for all of this start thudding onto taxpayers’ doormats. This year, for instance, the Navy is spending a billion and a half dollars in research and development funds on its new missile submarine, known only as the SSBN(X). Between 2025 and 2035, however, annual costs for that program are projected to run at $10 billion a year. Similar escalations are in store for the other items on the military’s impressive nuclear shopping list.
Assiduously tabulating these projections, experts at the Monterey Center for Nonproliferation Studies peg the price of the total program at a trillion dollars. In reality, though, the true bill that will come due over the next few decades will almost certainly be multiples of that. For example, the Air Force has claimed that its new B-21 strategic bombers will each cost more than $564 million (in 2010 dollars), yet resolutely refuses to release its secret internal estimates for the ultimate cost of the program.
To offer a point of comparison, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the tactical nuclear bomber previously mentioned, was originally touted as costing no more than $35 million per plane. In fact, it will actually enter service with a sticker price well in excess of $200 million.
Nor does that trillion-dollar figure take into account the inevitable growth of America’s nuclear “shield.” Nowadays, the excitement and debate once generated by President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” scheme to build a defense system of anti-missile missiles and other devices against a nuclear attack is long gone. (The idea for such a defense, in fact, dates back to the 1950s, but Reagan boosted it to prominence.) Nevertheless, missile defense still routinely soaks up some $10 billion of our money annually, even though it is known to have no utility whatsoever.
“We have nothing to show for it,” Tom Christie, the former director of the Pentagon’s testing office, told me recently. “None of the interceptors we currently have in silos waiting to shoot down enemy missiles have ever worked in tests.” Even so, the U.S. is busy constructing more anti-missile bases across Eastern Europe. As our offensive nuclear programs are built up in the years to come, almost certainly eliciting a response from Russia and China, the pressure for a costly expansion of our nuclear “defenses” will surely follow.
The Bow-Wave Strategy
It’s easy enough to find hypocrisy in President Obama’s mellifluous orations on abolishing nuclear weapons given the trillion-dollar-plus nuclear legacy he will leave in his wake. The record suggests, however, that faced with the undeviating strategic thinking of the military establishment and its power to turn desires into policy, he has simply proven as incapable of altering the Washington system as his predecessors in the Oval Office were or as his successors are likely to be.
Inside the Pentagon, budget planners and weapons-buyers talk of the “bow wave,” referring to the process by which current research and development initiatives, initially relatively modest in cost, invariably lock in commitments to massive spending down the road. Traditionally, such waves start to form at times when the military is threatened with possible spending cutbacks due to the end of a war or some other budgetary crisis.
Former Pentagon analyst Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, who spent years observing and chronicling the phenomenon from the inside, recalls an early 1970s bow wave at a time when withdrawal from Vietnam appeared to promise a future of reduced defense spending. The military duly put in place an ambitious “modernization” program for new planes, ships, tanks, satellites, and missiles. Inevitably, when it came time to actually buy all those fancy new systems, there was insufficient money in the defense budget.
Accordingly, the high command cut back on spending for “readiness”; that is, for maintaining existing weapons in working order, training troops, and similar mundane activities. This had the desired effect -- at least from the point of view of Pentagon -- of generating a raft of media and congressional horror stories about the shocking lack of preparedness of our fighting forces and the urgent need to boost its budget. In this way, the hapless Jimmy Carter, elected to the presidency on a promise to rein in defense spending, found himself, in Spinney’s phrase, "mousetrapped," and eventually unable to resist calls for bigger military budgets.
This pattern would recur at the beginning of the 1990s when the Soviet Union imploded and the Cold War superpower military confrontation seemed at an end. The result was the germination of ultimately budget-busting weapons systems like the Air Force’s F-35 and F-22 fighters. It happened again when pullbacks from Iraq and Afghanistan in Obama’s first term led to mild military spending cuts. As Spinney points out, each successive bow wave crests at a higher level, while military budget cuts due to wars ending and the like become progressively more modest.
The latest nuclear buildup is only the most glaring and egregious example of the present bow wave that is guaranteed to grow to monumental proportions long after Obama has retired to full-time speechmaking. The cost of the first of the Navy’s new Ford Class aircraft carriers, for example, has already grown by 20% to $13 billion with more undoubtedly to come. The “Third Offset Strategy,” a fantasy-laden shopping list of robot drones and “centaur” (half-man, half-machine) weapons systems, assiduously touted by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, is similarly guaranteed to expand stunningly beyond the $3.6 billion allotted to its development next year.
Faced with such boundlessly ambitious raids on the public purse, no one should claim a “lack of strategy” as a failing among our real policymakers, even if all that planning has little or nothing to do with distant war zones where Washington’s conflicts smolder relentlessly on.
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years. In addition to numerous books, he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and the 2009 documentary on the financial crisis, American Casino. His latest book is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (just out in paperback).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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The Democrats' 'Super-Delegate' Mistake |
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Saturday, 18 June 2016 13:45 |
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Oliver writes: "Democratic 'super-delegates' - hundreds of party insiders - tilted the presidential race to Hillary Clinton though not chosen by voters, an undemocratic idea that was never intended, says Spencer Oliver who was there at the creation."
Hillary Clinton looks on as Bernie Sanders speaks during a Democratic presidential debate. (photo: John Locher/AP)
The Democrats' 'Super-Delegate' Mistake
By Spencer Oliver, Consortium News
18 June 16
Democratic “super-delegates” – hundreds of party insiders – tilted the presidential race to Hillary Clinton though not chosen by voters, an undemocratic idea that was never intended, says Spencer Oliver who was there at the creation.
he issue of the Democratic Party’s “super-delegates” threatens to divide the Democratic Party at the Philadelphia convention as Sen. Bernie Sanders argues that the automatic vote given these party leaders made the race undemocratic because they did not compete in the primaries and caucuses and broke heavily and early in favor of Hillary Clinton.
And Sanders has a point. I was there at the creation of this party feature and I can attest that the idea of “super-delegates” making up around 15 percent of the voting delegates – and thus holding a powerful influence over the selection process – was never what was intended.
The original thinking was that a relative handful of state party chairs who had to remain neutral while setting up the primaries and caucuses would still get to go to the conventions. However, the numbers of “super-delegates” kept expanding and expanding as other party leaders lobbied to be included among those not having to compete in the delegate-selection process.
The “super-delegate” system was born in the wake of Democratic Party efforts after the 1968 convention to make the presidential selection process more open and democratic. I was involved in the work of all the reform commissions as the administrative assistant to Democratic National Committee Chair in 1966, later as President of the National Young Democrats, and subsequently as the founding Executive Director of the Association of State Democratic Chairs.
Named for their various leaders, these reform efforts were called the Wagner, McGovern, Fraser, O’Hara and Sanford Commissions, which made their reform recommendations to the DNC. All were tasked with making our party more open, more transparent, more inclusive, more democratic, and ultimately more successful in attracting the broad support of America’s diverse population. In other words, the idea was to put more power in the hands of rank-and-file Democrats.
This represented a major reform from the 1960s when party bosses like Carmine DeSapio in New York, powerful Governors like David Lawrence in Pennsylvania and Mike DiSalle in Ohio, and legendary Mayors like Richard Daley in Chicago dominated the Democratic conventions and had an outsized role in picking the Democratic presidential nominee.
The reform commissions were a response to that unpopular and highly criticized system. The Mississippi Freedom Party at the Atlantic City convention in 1964 and the anti-war protesters in Chicago in 1968 made the reform inevitable and certainly necessary.
Reforms and Consequence
The reforms brought American citizens much more extensively into the process of choosing the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer. The reforms also required State Democratic Chairs to be neutral as they organized their states’ primary and caucus systems. However, that meant the state chairs could not be elected to attend the party conventions as delegates committed to one candidate or the other.
So, the State Democratic Chairs proposed the idea of so-called “super-delegates” in the early 1970s, arguing that they should be automatic delegates because the reforms called for by the Wagner Commission and the DNC would otherwise exclude them from participation in the conventions. The DNC bought that argument. After all, they would be a relatively small number of delegates.
But then the governors wanted the same privilege, followed by congressional leaders and then the DNC members themselves. This expanding group now constitutes nearly 30 percent of the 2,383 delegates needed for nomination, significantly diluting the strength of the pledged delegates elected in primaries and caucuses.
Along the way, the “super-delegates” seem to have forgotten why they are there — and how they got there — in the first place.
On Feb. 12, 2016, when DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was asked on CNN whether the existence of “super-delegates” might give the impression to regular voters that the process was rigged, she answered: “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grass-roots activists. We … want to give every opportunity to grass-roots activists and diverse committed Democrats to be able to participate, attend and be a delegate at the convention. And so we separate out those unpledged delegates to make sure that there isn’t competition between them.”
But “super-delegates” really were an unintended outgrowth of the reform process and indeed fly in the face of the reform goals, which were to extend to the average voter the power to select the party’s nominee. By contrast, the “super-delegates” are given the power to vote for the nominee simply because they occupy – or in some cases occupied years ago – positions that entitle them to vote without having to earn that privilege by participating in the primaries or caucuses. Is this fair? Is this democratic?
What’s Good for Kazakhstan…
I am reminded of my past experience as secretary general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s parliamentary assembly in organizing the election observation mission to the first elections in Kazakhstan in 1994 when we were trying to encourage the former Soviet republics to transition toward democracy.
The Kazakhs were trying to move in that direction, but they adopted an election law that allowed the President to appoint 25 percent of the parliament. For that reason, we declared that the election was clearly unfair. The Kazakhs were mortified and internationally embarrassed. They later changed the law and – although democracy has not yet blossomed in that part of the world – such non-electoral legislative appointments have disappeared throughout the area. Yet, a similar rule exists in the Democratic Party of the United States of America.
I am not arguing that our party leaders should not attend the Philadelphia convention. They should be on the floor, entitled to speak, to lobby, to advocate and to impart their wisdom and experience to their fellow delegates. They have certainly earned that right. But they should not have the right to vote for the Democratic Party’s choice for president and vice president.
That “super-delegates” would hold such power over the selection process was never the intent of the party’s reforms and indeed goes against the goals of those reforms, which have largely succeeded in drawing citizens more directly into the process while also broadening the Democratic Party’s tent to include minorities, women, unions, young people, LGBT – just about every component needed for electoral victory.
This divisive issue of “super-delegates” can be easily resolved. The party leaders, i.e., the “super-delegates” themselves and – most importantly – our members of Congress and governors, should make the “super-delegates” non-voting delegates, with all the convention privileges and honors they deserve, except the right to vote on the nomination. The DNC could even do this by meeting the day before the convention and amending the party’s rules to correct this democratic deficit in our system.
Spencer Oliver recently retired as Secretary General of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. He previously served for eight years as a senior official at the DNC. And for more than twenty years on Capitol Hill, concluding as Chief Counsel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
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Omar Mateen and the Extremist Formula |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37266"><span class="small">Greg Shupak, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 18 June 2016 13:34 |
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Shupak writes: "The abominable massacre in Orlando made absolutely clear that transphobia and homophobia remain major problems in Western society. The killer, Omar Mateen, was a Muslim, and so the atrocity is unsurprisingly being weaponized against Muslims, revealing how pervasive Islamophobia is in the United States as well."
American Muslims at an anti-Islamophobia rally in New York. (photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)
Omar Mateen and the Extremist Formula
By Greg Shupak, Jacobin
18 June 16
It’s telling that sections of the media think that Islam is the decisive factor in cases like Orlando.
he abominable massacre in Orlando made absolutely clear that transphobia and homophobia remain major problems in Western society. The killer, Omar Mateen, was a Muslim, and so the atrocity is unsurprisingly being weaponized against Muslims, revealing how pervasive Islamophobia is in the United States as well.
Islamophobia takes multiple, overlapping forms. The conservative Islamophobia of Trump supporters and assorted other racist forces casts Muslims as threats to the nation. A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal offered a more sophisticated version of this worldview: “Can we finally drop the illusion that the jihadist fires that burn in the Middle East don’t pose an urgent and deadly threat to the American homeland?”
Liberal Islamophobia, on the other hand, presents Muslims as threats to progressive values such as feminism or LGBT equality. The post-Orlando comments of Barney Frank, a former Democratic representative from Massachusetts, exemplify this strand:
There is an Islamic element here. Yes, the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t do this, but there is clearly, sadly, an element in the interpretation of Islam that has some currency, some interpretation in the Middle East that encourages killing people — and LGBT people are on that list. And I think it is fair to ask leaders of the Islamic community, religious and otherwise, to spend some time combating this.
Nick Cohen falls into this camp as well when he points to the contemptible record of the governments of Muslim-majority states on LGBT issues. Cohen sees these states’ policies as evidence that “Western LGBT people have reason to be frightened that there will soon be police officers outside gay clubs,” as though Western queer and trans people haven’t already endured incalculable violence from domestic, non-Muslim sources (or that citizens ruled by authoritarian, US-backed governments are the authors of their countries’ policies).
In addition, since police in Western countries have often inflicted violence on LGBT people, many fear the presence of police at gay clubs for reasons other than what Cohen has in mind.
Islamophobes, whether liberal or conservative, abstract Muslims from Western civilization. Even though the Pulse massacre was perpetrated in America by an American citizen, the threat to America is foreign. America is LGBT-friendly, so even though Mateen was born and raised in America, he is not America. The reverse is also true: the West is abstracted from what happens in the East; US policy in the Middle East is not connected to jihadism in the region.
Overly narrow definitions of Islamophobia, which define the practice solely as a failure to differentiate between Muslims who are “extremists” and those who are “moderates,” will not suffice. Liberals like Frank and Cohen and even conservatives with the right-wing bona fides of George W. Bush or the Journal’s editors are typically savvy enough to make such a distinction.
Islamophobia finds its naturalized, socially acceptable expression in the many commentators and politicians who assume Islam is the central factor in cases like Pulse — even when there’s reason to believe something more complex has taken place.
The Wall Street Journal’s two editorials on Orlando, like the comments from Frank and Cohen, say nothing about causes other than devotion to jihad. In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman argues that until “the websites, social networks and mosques” stop promoting intolerant ideas, “we’re just waiting around for the next Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, or Orlando.”
Incoherent Jihad
Yet the assumption that Islamism was the primary force driving Mateen to murder is not self-evident. For one thing, it’s not clear whether Mateen understood even elementary features of Middle East politics — he reportedly wasn’t even able to decipher the differences between ISIS and Hezbollah.
Mateen’s comments during the massacre offer little more enlightenment. He told police that he wouldn’t stop his attack until America stopped bombing “my country.” (By “my country” Mateen presumably meant either ISIS’s caliphate or Afghanistan, his parents’ country of origin, where the United States recently opted to escalate its war.)
According to eyewitnesses, he said he wanted to spare African Americans: “I don’t have a problem with black people . . . This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.” But apparently a largely Latino crowd of LGBT people at a gay bar was the apotheosis of US militarism.
Jihad may have been on Mateen’s mind, but nothing so far suggests that it was a central part of who he was. Clearly there are other dimensions to the story that can’t be explained through a theological lens.
Patriarchal Poison
Mateen had multiple relationships to institutionalized violence and domination. His ex-wife says he beat her and describes him as unstable, while the son of the imam at Mateen’s mosque says has was an “an aggressive person” who “used to work out a lot.” Mateen may also himself have been gay, and self-loathing fostered by the toxic masculinity rampant in US society could have been at play in his rampage.
The more information that comes out, the more layered the story becomes. Mateen worked for the private security firm G4S, a company that apparently has “an institutionalized global problem” with protecting violent, racist conduct by its security officers and has been found to exhibit a “systematic tolerance of astonishing abuse,” with “numerous cases of employees being charged with the sexual abuse of young boys” and a record of running an “abusive and unsanitary” jail.
What has emerged is not only the portrait of someone who flirted with jihad but also of someone who may have had had mental health problems, who was a product of the brutal American carceral state, and who was a violent, misogynistic, homophobic alpha-male of the sort that is found everywhere, regardless of faith.
This tapestry is obscured when people like Frank take for granted that religion is the operative factor in Orlando, or when Cohen writes that Mateen killed as many LGBT people as possible “because his [jihadi] ideology authorized homophobia.”
None of this is to deny that Mateen’s conception of Islam and Middle East politics was part of why he did what he did. That would be an equally blinkered conclusion.
The point is simply that a confluence of factors were at play, and that too many observers are crafting a facile clash-of-civilizations narrative that often produces disastrous consequences.
Damn the Consequences
Commentators and politicians obscure such complexities because reducing the story of Pulse to one of jihadi terror makes it easier to sell the public on policies that will oppress and kill people who are or might be seen as Muslim — including people who are LGBT — in the United States and around the world.
The Pulse massacre, for instance, is being used to push for increased surveillance of Muslims. Frank claims that the attack “reinforces the case for significant surveillance by law enforcement of people who have given some indication of adoption of these angry Islamic hate views.”
Meanwhile, Friedman writes that “we need to ensure our government has all the surveillance powers it needs — under appropriate judicial review — to monitor and arrest violent extremists of all stripes. The bad guys now have too many tools to elude detection.”
The Wall Street Journal argues in its first editorial that “the FBI is right to use ‘sting’ operations against Americans who show jihadist leanings on social media or with friends” and in its second editorial that “Western law enforcement agencies must pay more attention to what goes on inside mosques than in Christian Science reading rooms.”
Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump advocate escalating the war against ISIS in response to the Orlando killings, even though US officials say there is no evidence of a direct Islamic State link. Already the estimated number of civilians killed by the US-led coalition’s war against ISIS is at least 1,312, and that campaign will continue to enrich capitalists even as it is more likely to proliferate than quell jihadi terrorism.
Physicians for Responsibility has found that the first ten years of the Bush-Obama “war on terror” killed 1.3 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — and LGBT people are surely among the victims.
Friedman says that the only thing that can stop jihadi terror attacks is a
meaningful mass movement by Muslim governments, clergymen and citizens to delegitimize this behavior. It takes a village and only stops when the village clearly says, ‘No more!’ And that has not happened at the scale and consistency it needs to happen.
Of course, missing from Friedman’s condescending formula is the uncomfortable fact that the US government could curtail the influence of jihadis around the world if it stopped empowering them.
The American state is supporting jihadis in Syria, and the US-Saudi war on Yemen is strengthening ISIS and al-Qaeda branches in that country. Mateen’s father, there is evidence to suggest, fought in the US-backed mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Reverberations of such policies in the West can be expected and, when the next Paris or Brussels or Orlando happens, more US warmongering can be expected to follow.
Public responses to hawkish posturing like “not all Muslims” or “but what about Christian and Jewish extremists?” are tedious but sometimes helpful. It is worthwhile to point out that, according to the Global Terrorism Index, “lone wolf” attacks like the one in Orlando account for the majority of terrorist deaths in the West since 2006 and that “Islamic fundamentalism was not the primary driver of lone wolf attacks, with 80 per cent of deaths in the West from lone wolf attacks being attributed to a mixture of right-wing extremists, nationalists, anti-government elements, other types of political extremism and supremacism.”
And it’s also necessary to push back against all strains of Islamophobia by complicating stories premised on the assumption that Islam is necessarily the decisive factor in atrocities like Orlando.
Only then can we hope to build the solidarities necessary to overcome transphobia, homophobia, racism, and imperialist warfare.
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FOCUS: The FBI Was Right Not to Arrest Omar Mateen Before the Shooting |
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Saturday, 18 June 2016 11:55 |
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Greenwald writes: "The massacre at an Orlando LGBT club has predictably provoked the same reaction as past terror attacks: recriminations that authorities should have done more to stop it in advance, accompanied by demands for new police powers to prevent future ones."
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Reuters)
The FBI Was Right Not to Arrest Omar Mateen Before the Shooting
By Glenn Greenwald, The Washington Post
18 June 16
he massacre at an Orlando LGBT club has predictably provoked the same reaction as past terror attacks: recriminations that authorities should have done more to stop it in advance, accompanied by demands for new police powers to prevent future ones. Blame-assigners immediately pointed to the FBI’s investigation of the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen. “The FBI closed this file because the Obama administration treats radical Islamic threats as common crimes,” GOP Sen. Lindsey O. Graham argued on Fox News. “If we kept the file open and we saw what he was up to, I think we could have stopped it.” Others cited core fundamental rights, demanding they be eroded. “Due process is what’s killing us right now,” proclaimed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin about the FBI’s inability to act more aggressively against Mateen.
Ever since the Sept. 11 attack almost 15 years ago, every act of perceived terror, and even thwarted ones, have triggered identical responses. The Boston Marathon attack, for instance, prompted this critique of the bureau, which had looked into the older brother: “Many people thought the FBI should have continued to investigate [Tamerlan] Tsarnaev until the Boston plot was uncovered,” David Gomez recalled this week in Foreign Policy. About Orlando, he wrote: “As more terrorists become successful in hiding from the FBI in plain sight using encryption and other means, perhaps it is time to revisit the probable-cause standard to open investigations in potential terrorism cases.”
Underlying this mind-set is an assumption that is both dubious and dangerous: that absolute security is desirable and attainable. None say that explicitly, but it’s the necessary implication of the argument. Once this framework is implicitly adopted, a successful attack becomes proof that something went wrong, law enforcement failed to act properly and more government authorities are needed. To wit: Hillary Clinton this week proposed an “intelligence surge” to halt “plots before they can be carried out.” And Donald Trump called for more intelligence activity to give “law enforcement and the military the tools they need to prevent terrorist attacks.”
This is wrong, and based on what we know, the FBI acted properly. Agents have the power they need, and they were right to close the case on Mateen. Just because someone successfully carried out a violent mass attack does not prove that police powers were inadequate or that existing powers were misapplied. No minimally free society can prevent all violence. In the United States, we do not hold suspects for crimes they have not committed.
It is possible, indeed probable, that violent attacks will occur even with superb law enforcement. This is the tradeoff we make for liberty.
The complaint that the FBI, once it had Mateen under suspicion, should have acted more aggressively to stop him illustrates a kind of pathology. By all accounts, Mateen had committed no crime (though his ex-wife later said he had battered her). At the time the FBI decided to close its file on him, he had not joined any terrorist organization, nor attended a terror training camp, nor communicated with terror operatives about any plots. Although he boasted to office colleagues about ties to al Qaeda and Hezbollah, agents found those claims dubious. There is not, as far as we know, even evidence that he had expressed support for violence.
When the FBI has reason to suspect someone of extremist activity, they open an investigative file and gather whatever information they can. But once they conclude that there is no evidence of criminality, they close the file. That’s how it should be: none of us should want permanent inquiries into citizens without evidence of lawbreaking, and we should certainly not want punishments meted out based on unproven suspicions. The FBI followed these principles in closing its file on Mateen, and it deserves praise for that, not armchair criticism. “As I would hope the American people would want, we don’t keep people under investigation indefinitely,” FBI Director James Comey said. If agents “don’t see predication for continuing it, then we close it.”
What plausible theory exists for empowering the government to restrict the actions, rights or liberty of a citizen who has broken no laws? For obvious reasons, the temptation to vest more power in law enforcement agencies is potent after witnessing carnage like what we’ve seen this week in Orlando. Our compassion and instinct tells us: isn’t it worth any cost to prevent such a massacre in the future?
But history leaves no doubt about the serious costs, and dangers, from straying too far on the liberty-security axis. Encouraging law enforcement agencies to take action against citizens who are not even charged with, let alone convicted of, breaking the law is inherently abusive, and certain to lead to its own serious injuries.
Those dangers are vividly seen by examining the long list of American Muslims who have arrived at an airport expecting to travel, only to be told that they have been secretly deemed by unidentified officials as too suspicious to board an airplane, and have no effective recourse to challenge or even learn the basis for this restriction. That Democrats, who once found such due-process-free no-fly lists appalling, now seek in the wake of San Bernardino and Orlando to expand their use to ban gun purchases illustrates how easily terror attacks induce an abandonment of reasoned analysis.
We collectively understand tradeoffs in many other contexts. Outside of disease and suicide, the most common cause of death for Americans is fatal car accidents. Roughly 36,000 people died from car-related deaths in 2015 (gun deaths are a close second). There are numerous measures that could be taken to reduce car accidents: lowering speed limits, bolstering safety regulations for automakers, putting stop signs and lights on every corner. But our reflexive response to reading about an auto fatality is not to demand implementation of these measures.
That’s because we rationally assess that this fatality level — tragic and horrifying as it is — is the worthwhile cost paid in exchange for the benefits of efficient auto travel and affordable cars. We understand that absolute safety on the road is neither attainable nor desirable – and that we can minimize, but cannot fully avoid, the risk of injury or death if we want to use automobiles efficiently. We accept that some deaths are inevitable.
Yet Americans have eschewed that reasoning process in the face of terrorism and mass attacks. Each attack has been cited as intrinsic proof of policy failures, of the need for greater powers and more aggressive policing. We insist on endlessly trading liberties for false security, eagerly doing so with each new attack.
That mind-set does far more harm than good. In the wake of Sept. 11, it ushered in the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, torture and two decade-long wars. It led to the official dilution of Miranda rights for terrorism suspects after Omar Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit in 2010 with a bomb in his underwear. And it led Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to advocate new and aggressive responses to Orlando: from an escalation of the bombing campaign against various ISIS locales to increased surveillance activities.
Terror attacks, by design, succeed in terrorizing. If you are a resident of any western country, it is more likely that you will die from a lightning strike than from a terrorist attack perpetrated by a Muslim. Writing in The New Yorker in early this year, the physicist Lawrence Krauss noted that “even if you include 9/11, the total death toll from terrorism amounts to less than one per cent of the death toll from gun violence.”
Hypothetically, there may one day be a threat severe enough to justify rebalancing security and liberty. But terrorism, by every metric, comes nowhere close. It is obviously unfortunate that nobody was able to stop Mateen, but that does not mean the FBI could or should have.
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s he handed down a six-month sentence to Brock Turner for sexually assaulting a woman behind a dumpster, Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky acknowledged the former Stanford swimmer's remorse — "remorse, which I think, subjectively, is genuine," 
