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FOCUS: Osama Bin Laden's America, Niger, 9/11, and Apocalyptic Humiliation |
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Tuesday, 31 October 2017 12:16 |
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Engelhardt writes: "Honestly, if there's an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks."
Osama bin Laden speaks to reporters in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, December 24, 1998. (photo: Rahimullah Yousafza/AP)
Osama Bin Laden's America, Niger, 9/11, and Apocalyptic Humiliation
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
31 October 17
 onestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald Trump recently offered aides and former campaign officials for their legal troubles in the Russia investigation (on which he’s unlikely to deliver) -- a mere $400,000 to $500,000 -- bin Laden managed to launch the American war on terror. He did so with little but a clever game plan, a few fanatical followers, and a remarkably intuitive sense of how this country works.
He had those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, a scattering of supporters elsewhere in the world, and the “training camps” in Afghanistan, but his was a ragged and understaffed movement. And keep in mind that his sworn enemy was the country that then prided itself on being the last superpower, the final winner of the imperial sweepstakes that had gone on for five centuries until, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded.
The question was: With such limited resources, what kind of self-destructive behavior could he goad a triumphalist Washington into? The key would be what might be called apocalyptic humiliation.
Looking back, 16 years later, it’s extraordinary how September 11, 2001, would set the pattern for everything that followed. Each further goading act, from Afghanistan to Libya, San Bernardino to Orlando, Iraq to Niger, each further humiliation would trigger yet more of the same behavior in Washington. After all, so many people and institutions -- above all, the U.S. military and the rest of the national security state -- came to have a vested interest in Osama bin Laden’s version of our world.
Apocalyptic Humiliation
Grim as the 9/11 attacks were, with nearly 3,000 dead civilians, they would be but the start of bin Laden’s “success,” which has, in truth, never ended. The phrase of that moment -- that 9/11 had “changed everything” -- proved far more devastatingly accurate than we Americans imagined at the time. Among other things, it transformed the country in essential ways.
After all, Osama bin Laden managed to involve the United States in 16 years of fruitless wars, most now “generational” conflicts with no end in sight, which would only encourage the creation and spread of terror groups, the disintegration of order across significant parts of the planet, and the displacement of whole populations in staggering numbers. At the same time, he helped turn twenty-first-century Washington into a war machine of the first order that ate the rest of the government for lunch. He gave the national security state the means -- the excuse, if you will -- to rise to a kind of power, prominence, and funding that might otherwise have been inconceivable. In the process -- undoubtedly fulfilling his wildest dreams -- he helped speed up the decline of the very country that, since the Cold War ended, had been plugging itself as the greatest ever.
In other words, he may truly be the (malign) genius of our age. He created a terrorist version of call and response that still rules Donald Trump's Washington in which the rubblized generals of America’s rubblized wars on an increasingly rubblized planet now reign supreme. In other words, The Donald, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster were Osama bin Laden’s grim gift to the rest of us. Thanks to him, literally trillions of taxpayer dollars would go down the tubes in remarkably pointless wars and “reconstruction” scams abroad that now threaten to feed on each other to something like the end of (American) time.
Of course, he had a little luck in the process. As a start, no one, not even the 9/11 plotters themselves, could have imagined that those towers in Manhattan would collapse before the already omnipresent cameras of the age in a way that would create such classically apocalyptic imagery. As scholar Paul Boyer once argued, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans never stopped dreaming of a nuclear attack on this country. Our pop culture was filled with such imagery, such nightmares. On that September day, many Americans suddenly felt as if something like it had finally happened. It wasn’t happenstance that, within 24 hours, the area of downtown Manhattan where the shards of those towers lay would be dubbed “Ground Zero,” a term previously reserved for the spot where a nuclear explosion had taken place, or that Tom Brokaw, anchoring NBC’s non-stop news coverage, would claim that it was “like a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan.”
The sense of being sneak-attacked on an apocalyptic scale -- hence the "new Pearl Harbor" and "Day of Infamy" headlines -- proved overwhelming as the scenes of those towers falling in a near mushroom cloud of smoke and ash were endlessly replayed. Of course, no such apocalyptic attack had occurred. The weapons at hand weren’t even bombs or missiles, but our own airplanes filled with passengers. And yes, it was a horror, but not the horror Americans generally took it for. And yet, 16 years later, it’s still impossible to put 9/11 in any kind of reasonable context or perspective in this country, even after we’ve helped to rubblize major cities across the Middle East -- most recently the Syrian city of Raqqa -- and so aided in creating landscapes far more apocalyptic looking than 9/11 ever was.
As I wrote long ago, 9/11 “was not a nuclear attack. It was not apocalyptic. The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud. It was not potentially civilization ending. It did not endanger the existence of our country -- or even of New York City. Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.”
On the other hand, imagine where we’d be if Osama bin Laden had had just a little more luck that day; imagine if the fourth hijacked plane, the one that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, had actually reached its target in Washington and wiped out, say, the Capitol or the White House.
Bin Laden certainly chose his symbols of American power well -- financial (the World Trade Center), military (the Pentagon), and political (some target in Washington) -- in order to make the government and people of the self-proclaimed most exceptional nation on Earth feel the deepest possible sense of humiliation.
Short of wiping out the White House, bin Laden could hardly have hit a more American nerve or created a stronger sense that the country which felt it had everything was now left with nothing at all.
That it wasn’t true -- not faintly -- didn’t matter. And add in one more bit of bin Laden good luck. The administration in the White House at that moment had its own overblown dreams of how our world should work. As they emerged from the shock of those attacks, which sent Vice President Dick Cheney into a Cold-War-era underground nuclear bunker and President George W. Bush onto Air Force One -- he was reading a children’s book, My Pet Goat, to school kids in Florida as the attacks occurred -- and in flight away from Washington to Barksdale Air Base in Louisiana, they began to dream of their global moment. Like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the partially destroyed Pentagon, they instantly started thinking about taking out Iraq’s autocratic ruler Saddam Hussein and launching a project to create a Middle East and then a planet over which the United States alone would have dominion forever and ever.
As befitted those Pearl Harbor headlines, on the night of September 11th, the president was already speaking of "the war against terrorism.” Within a day, he had called it “the first war of the twenty-first century” and soon, because al-Qaeda was such a pathetically inadequate target, had added, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there."
It couldn’t have been stranger. The United States was “at war,” but not with a great power or even one of the regional “rogue states” that had been the focus of American military thinking in the 1990s. We were at war with a phenomenon -- “terrorism” -- on a global scale. As Rumsfeld would say only five days after 9/11, the new war on terror would be “a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60 countries, including the United States." In the phrase of the moment, they were going to “drain the swamp” globally.
Even setting aside that terrorism then had no real armies, no real territory, essentially nothing, this couldn’t have been more wildly out of proportion to what had actually happened or to the outfit that had caused it to happen. But anyone who suggested as much (or something as simple and unimpressive as a “police action” against bin Laden and crew) was promptly laughed out of the room or abused into silence. And so a call-and-response pattern that fit bin Laden’s wildest dreams would be established in which, whatever they did, the United States would always respond by militarily upping the ante.
In this way, Washington promptly found itself plunged into a Global War on Terror, or GWOT, that was essentially a figment of its own imagination. The Bush administration, not Osama bin Laden, then proceeded to turn it into a reality, starting with the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, from the passage of the Patriot Act to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, a newly national-securitized Washington would be built up on a previously unheard of scale.
In other words, we were already entering Osama bin Laden’s America.
The War Lovers
In this way, long before Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson began downsizing the State Department, George W. Bush and his top officials (who, except for Colin Powell, had never been to war) committed themselves to the U.S. military as the option of choice for what had previously been called “foreign policy.” Fortunately for bin Laden, they would prove to be the ultimate fundamentalists when it came to that military. They had little doubt that they possessed a force beyond compare with the kind of power and technological resources guaranteed to sweep away everything before it. That military was, as the president boasted, “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” What, then, could possibly stop it from spearheading the establishment of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and elsewhere that would leave the Roman and British empires in the shade? (As it happened, they had absorbed nothing of the twentieth century history of insurrection, rebellion, and resistance in the former colonial world. If they had, none of what followed would have surprised them in the least.)
And so the wars would spread, states would begin to crumble, terror movements would multiply, and each little shiver of fear, each set of American deaths, whether by such movements or “lone wolves” in the U.S. and Europe, would call up just one response: more of the same.
Think of this as Osama bin Laden’s dream world, which we would create for him and his fellow jihadists.
I’ve been writing about this at TomDispatch year after year for a decade and a half now and nothing ever changes. Not really. It’s all so sadly predictable as, years after bin Laden was consigned to his watery grave, Washington continues to essentially do his bidding in a remarkably brainless fashion.
Think of it as a kind of feedback loop in which the interests of a domestic security and surveillance state, built to monumental proportions on a relatively minor fear (of terrorism), and a military eternally funded to the heavens on a remarkably bipartisan basis for its never-ending war on terror ensure that nothing ever truly changes. In twenty-first-century Washington, failure is the new success and repetition is the rule of the day, week, month, and year.
Take, for example, the recent events in Niger. Consider the pattern of call-and-response there. Almost no Americans (and it turned out, next to no senators) even knew that the U.S. had something like 900 troops deployed permanently to that West African country and two drone bases there (though it was no secret). Then, on October 4th, the first reports of the deaths of four American soldiers and the wounding of two others in a Green Beret unit on a “routine training mission” in the lawless Niger-Mali border area came out. The ambush, it seemed, had been set by an ISIS affiliate.
It was, in fact, such an obscure and distant event that, for almost two weeks, there was little reaction in Congress or media uproar of any sort. That ended, however, when President Trump, in response to questions about those dead soldiers, attacked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for not calling the parents of the American fallen (they had) and then got into a dispute with the widow of one of the Niger dead (as well as a Democratic congresswoman) over his condolence call to her. The head of the Joint Chiefs was soon forced to hold a news conference; former four-star Marine General and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, whose son had died in Afghanistan, felt called upon to go to the mat for his boss, falsely accuse that congresswoman, and essentially claim that the military was now an elite caste in this country. This certainly reflected the new highly militarized sense of power and worth that lay at the heart of bin Laden’s Washington.
It was only then that the event in distant Niger became another terrorist humiliation of the first order. Senators were suddenly outraged. Senator John McCain (one of the more warlike members of that body, famous in 2007 for jokingly singing, to the tune of an old Beach Boys song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”) threatened to subpoena the administration for more Niger information. Meanwhile his friend Senator Lindsey Graham, another war hawk of the first order, issued a classic warning of this era: “We don’t want the next 9/11 to come from Niger!”
And suddenly U.S. Africa Command was highlighting its desire for more money from Congress; the military was moving to arm its Reaper drones in Niger with Hellfire missiles for future counterterrorism operations; and Secretary of Defense Mattis was assuring senators privately that the military would “expand” its “counterterrorism focus” in Africa. The military began to prepare to deploy Hellfire Missile-armed Reaper drones to Niger. “The war is morphing,” Graham insisted. “You’re going to see more actions in Africa, not less; you’re going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you’re going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field.”
Rumors were soon floating around that, as the Washington Post reported, the administration might “loosen restrictions on the U.S. military's ability to use lethal force in Niger” (as it already had done in the Trump era in places like Syria and Yemen). And so it expectably went, as events in Niger proceeded from utter obscurity to the near-apocalyptic, while -- despite the strangeness of the Trumpian moment -- the responses came in exactly as anyone reviewing the last 16 years might have imagined they would.
All of this will predictably make things in central Africa worse, not better, leading to... well, more than a decade and a half after 9/11, you know just as well as I do where it’s leading. And there are remarkably few brakes on the situation, especially with three generals of our losing wars ruling the roost in Washington and Donald Trump now lashed to the mast of his chief of staff.
Welcome to Osama bin Laden’s America.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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FOCUS: Can We Stick in the Fork and Call Him Done? |
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Tuesday, 31 October 2017 10:34 |
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Keillor writes: "When his old campaign manager was
indicted Monday, Mr. Trump called me on the phone, crying like a baby,
and begged me to endorse him. I said, 'You're already president, Mr.
President. You were elected.' He said, 'I'd still like your endorsement.'"
Garrison Keillor. (photo: WPPB)
Can We Stick in the Fork and Call Him Done?
By Garrison Keillor, The Salt Lake Tribune
31 October 17
 hen his old campaign manager was indicted Monday, Mr. Trump called me on the phone, crying like a baby, and begged me to endorse him. I said, “You’re already president, Mr. President. You were elected.” He said, “I’d still like your endorsement.” I have a recording of the phone call. It’s so sad. Donald Trump is done. He couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in New York, his hometown. I was very very nice about it. Very nice. But New Yorkers love dogs and he does not. There are 14 recorded instances of him kicking small dogs, and I have documentary proof of all but two of them.
Plus many other instances of him running around grabbing women’s cats. Knocked on the door, grabbed the cat, walked away. Just to show that a famous rich guy could get away with it. Where is the apology? No, the man couldn’t even get a job as a school crossing guard in New York. Look at him leading his grandchildren toward the helicopter -- thank God there’s a Marine there to keep them from walking into the rotor.
He’s very wary of children, afraid they’ll pull off the wig. It’s from La Bouffant on 8th & 45th, 3rd floor. Horsehair. Palomino filly. I have receipts.
Trump shot a man on Fifth Avenue last year just to see if he could get away with it and he did. His base said, “Well, some people just need to be shot, that’s all. As a warning to the others.” Why is he so hung up on virility? Because the Army rejected him on account of bone spurs that you get from wearing high heels. Everybody knows that.
Just look at how he salutes the Marine honor guard -- TOTAL DISASTER -- it’s not a salute, it’s a little yoo-hoo. Uniforms are a huge turn-on for him. And when he salutes the flag, he doesn’t even look at it. Total disrespect for the flag. And the salute is very weak in the wrists. Know why there’s ABSOLUTELY NO video of him hitting a golf ball? Because (pardon me for being politically incorrect) he swings like a girl. And when he slices it into the parking lot, he tees up another ball. Mr. Mulligan. Mr. Multi-Mulligan.
He sits at that ridiculous little desk in the Oval Office and signs a presidential proclamation as if he’s Kim Jong Un or something and he holds it up like a kid holding up his school project that his mama wrote for him. The man can barely read, that’s why he hates TelePrompter. Total lightweight.
He is NOT A NICE PERSON and so the name Trump is as popular as herpes these days. Trumpet players have taken up the cornet. Card players refer to the lead suit as the jump suit. Tramps prefer to be called hoboes, town dumps are now refuse heaps, and girls named Dawn are becoming Cheryls. To residents of his crummy building on Fifth Avenue, it’s now known as Chump Tower because it’s caused so much grief and tragedy for people. It wasn’t constructed -- it was fabricated. FABRICATED. Plywood modules shipped down from Canada and installed by minimum-wage temps from Hoboken. I can prove this. I have documentation. The wind whistles through the tower at night, roaches the size of rats. Ask anybody.
People who voted for him are humiliated. So his ratings have tanked. The same people who admire him tend to drive Dodge Darts and wear sweatshirts from schools they didn’t attend. Nobody stays in his hotels except foreign CEOs and their tootsies. He is weak. Weak on .s, weak on 1st Amendment, worst president in history. Failed real estate and now politics. His record = BAD. First president in my lifetime who DOES NOT KNOW the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The lips are not even moving.
He quit holding rallies in stadiums because nobody wants to go hear a loser brag about his manliness for an hour, you can hear that in any barroom. Only places he can draw a crowd are rural areas where billboards are riddled with bullet holes, shot by men angry because they can’t read. He is so over. Totally irrelevant, exhausted, flamed out. The sleepytime eyes and la-di-da hair and the tweet-tweet-tweet say it all. Real men don’t tweet. Ask anybody. We bark, we protest, we thunder, condemn, denounce, we give ’em hell, sometimes we post. Wimps tweet. And now the perps are going to start walking and talking. And the fat lady is waiting in the wings.
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Robert Mueller's Show of Strength: A Quick and Dirty Analysis |
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Tuesday, 31 October 2017 08:28 |
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Excerpt: "The first big takeaway from Monday morning's
flurry of charging and plea documents [...] is this: The president of
the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly
served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet
government of Vladimir Putin."
Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate
Intelligence Committee in Washington, D.C. (photo: James Berglie/TNS)
Robert Mueller's Show of Strength: A Quick and Dirty Analysis
By Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare
31 October 17
 he first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.
The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.
Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to Monday—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which still must be considered as allegation and the other of which can now be considered as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had "nothing to do with Russia."
The release of these documents should, though it probably won’t, put to rest the suggestion that there are no serious questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the latter’s interference on the former’s behalf during the 2016 election. It also raises a profound set of questions about the truthfulness of a larger set of representations Trump campaign officials and operatives have made both in public and, presumably, under oath and to investigators.
And here’s the rub: This is only Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s opening salvo.
As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy.
Let’s start with the surprise unsealing of the Papadopoulos plea agreement and stipulation of fact. Papadopoulos first became publicly affiliated with the Trump campaign in March 2016. That month, Trump faced significant pressure to announce foreign policy advisers after numerous Republican foreign policy and national security experts publicly vowed never to work for him. In response, Trump produced a list of names of purported experts, a list that included both Papadapoulos and Carter Page.
The Washington Post reported in August of this year that Papadopoulos, between March and May of 2016, had “offered to set up ‘a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,’” but that the campaign had rebuffed his numerous attempts. It turns out he did a lot more than that.
His guilty plea is for lying to FBI investigators in a Jan. 27, 2017, interview regarding his conduct and contacts. As we’ve discussed in the past, it isn’t uncommon for false statements to the FBI to be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 offenses in these sorts of cases. Proving that someone is lying is often easier than proving that the underlying offense violates the law. Here, for example, Papadopoulos’s underlying activity—working with Russian government officials to obtain “dirt” on Clinton and set up a Putin-Trump meeting—may have been legal, if wholly disreputable. Lying about it, however, is a crime. We can assume that Mueller had the goods on Papadopoulos beyond lying to the bureau in some manner. The lying, after all, is merely the charge he pleaded to in the context of a plea deal in which prosecutors have cut him a break.
That said, the Papadopoulos stipulation offers a stunningly frank, if probably incomplete, account of what occurred during the spring of 2016 in the Trump campaign. To wit, during that period, Trump campaign officials were actively working to set up a meeting with Russian officials or representatives. And from a very early point in the campaign, those meetings were explicitly about obtaining hacked, incriminating emails.
It isn’t clear which emails the various parties might have been discussing here. There are, after all, the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee, which first became public on June 14, 2016, though the breach had occurred more than a year earlier. There are the hacked emails of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, a breach that occurred on March 19, 2016, but that did not become public until Oct. 9, 2016. There are also the purported 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department, a matter dating to 2015, which may not have ever been hacked but which Trump campaign folks clearly believed had been. There is also possibly some other category of alleged emails that wasn’t a matter of public discussion. But it’s clear that Trump campaign officials were after emails and, well, let’s just say they didn’t go to the FBI when they found themselves in conversations with Russian officials about them.
The stipulation also contains some rather damaging information about President Trump himself. Papadopoulos says he attended a “national security” meeting on March 31, 2016, at which Trump himself was present, along with his other foreign policy advisers. In that meeting, Papadopoulos told the group that he had connections to arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Putin. This means that Trump either knew or should have known about his campaign’s effort to interface with Russia, even as news of various criminal hacking and attempts to interfere with the U.S. election were becoming public.
The Manafort-Gates indictment is, in a different way, also dramatic. The amount of money allegedly at issue in breathtaking. According to Paragraph 6 of the indictment, “more than $75,000,000 flowed through the offshore accounts” that Manafort and Gates controlled. Eighteen million of these dollars are specifically alleged to have been laundered. This money laundering “to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities” allegedly took place through the entire period of Manafort’s service in the Trump campaign.
Manafort’s alleged unregistered foreign agency on behalf of Ukraine and its Party of Regions, by contrast, reportedly ended in 2014, when then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych was ousted. So President Trump can at least claim that his campaign manager is not under indictment for being an unregistered foreign agent at the time he was running Trump’s campaign.
But that’s about the only good news in the indictment for the president. Because Manafort is alleged to have lied about his foreign-agent status and made false statements into this year. In other words, at the same time Papadopoulos admits he was working Russian government officials for Clinton emails and for a Trump-Putin meeting, Manafort was allegedly still laundering the money he had obtained by illegally representing one of Putin’s allied strongmen.
In the wake of the document releases, Trump turned to Twitter to dismiss it all:
We offer no prediction as to how this will play politically or whether such antics will carry any water with Republicans who must be feeling a little uneasy today.
We will say this: Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.
Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished Monday morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7517"><span class="small">Nick Turse, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 30 October 2017 13:11 |
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Turse writes: "For the past two years, the U.S. has
maintained a special operations contingent in almost every nation on
Russia’s western border."
U.S Army Europe Commanding General Ben Hodges
speaks during the inauguration ceremony of bilateral military training
between U.S. and Polish troops in Zagan, Poland, January 30, 2017. (photo: Kacper Pempel/Reuters)
From America With Love, US Commandos Are a 'Persistent Presence' on Russia’s Doorstep
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch
30 October 17
Memo to Senator John McCain: Senator, the other day I noticed that, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, you threatened to subpoena the Trump administration for information about the recent attack in Niger that killed four American soldiers. “There’s a mindset over there that they’re a unicameral government,” you said. “It was easier under Obama... We are coequal branches of government; we should be informed at all times. We’re just not getting the information in the timely fashion that we need.”
How true! But let me make one small suggestion. If you really want to know what led to those deaths in Niger, the first place you might consider looking -- no subpoena needed -- is this very website, TomDispatch. Or, to be more specific, Nick Turse’s coverage of the way U.S. Africa Command and American Special Operations forces have, with a certain stealth but also without significant coverage in the mainstream media, extended the war on terror deep into Africa. He alone has covered this story and the secret bases, widespread “training missions” (like the one in Niger), and barely noticed wars being fought there since at least 2012, when I was already writing this of his work:
“So here’s another question: Who decided in 2007 that a U.S. Africa Command should be set up to begin a process of turning that continent into a web of U.S. bases and other operations? Who decided that every Islamist rebel group in Africa, no matter how local or locally focused, was a threat to the U.S., calling for a military response? Certainly not the American people, who know nothing about this, who were never asked if expanding the U.S. global military mission to Africa was something they favored, who never heard the slightest debate, or even a single peep from Washington on the subject.”
By 2013, in a passage that sounds eerily up to date as we read of ISIS-allied militants on the lawless Niger-Mali border, he was already reporting that
“while correlation doesn’t equal causation, there is ample evidence to suggest the United States has facilitated a terror diaspora, imperiling nations and endangering peoples across Africa. In the wake of 9/11, Pentagon officials were hard-pressed to show evidence of a major African terror threat. Today, the continent is thick with militant groups that are increasingly crossing borders, sowing insecurity, and throwing the limits of U.S. power into broad relief. After 10 years of U.S. operations to promote stability by military means, the results have been the opposite. Africa has become blowback central.”
Four years later, when the Niger events occurred, nothing had changed, except that the U.S. military had moved, again with little attention (except from Turse), even deeper into the heart of Africa, setting up a remarkable array of bases and outposts of every sort (including two drone bases in Niger).
So here’s another tip for you, Senator McCain, when it comes to a completely different area of the world. Please understand. I’m just trying to save you the need for yet more subpoenas in, say, 2020. Instead, check out Turse’s piece today on the way in which U.S. Special Operations forces have quietly moved not into Africa this time, but into Europe, in country after country in the former borderlands of the Soviet Union. It’s a story that -- I give you my guarantee on this, Senator -- will make the news one of these days, just as the war on terror in Africa has done recently and, if you keep up with Turse, you’ll be among the few in the know ahead of time.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
From America With Love
U.S. Commandos Are a “Persistent Presence” on Russia’s Doorstep
 hey are very concerned about their adversary next door,” said General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado, in July. “They make no bones about it.”
The “they” in question were various Eastern European and Baltic nations. “Their adversary”? Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Thomas, the commander of America’s most elite troops -- Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets among them -- went on to raise fears about an upcoming Russian military training event, a wargame, known as “Zapad” or “West,” involving 10 Russian Navy ships, 70 jets and helicopters, and 250 tanks. “The point of concern for most of these eastern Europeans right now is they're about to do an exercise in Belarus... that's going to entail up to 100,000 Russian troops moving into that country.” And he added, “The great concern is they're not going to leave, and... that's not paranoia...”
Over the last two decades, relations between the United States and Russia have increasingly soured, with Moscow casting blame on the United States for encouraging the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine a year later. Washington has, in turn, expressed its anger over the occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia following the Russo-Georgian War of 2008; the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine after pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych was chased from power; and interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. There have been recriminations on both sides over the other nation’s military adventurism in Syria, the sanctions Washington imposed on Moscow in reaction to Crimea, Ukraine, and human rights issues, and tit-for-tat diplomatic penalties that have repeatedly ramped up tensions.
While Zapad, which took place last month, is an annual strategic exercise that rotates among four regions, American officials nonetheless viewed this year’s event as provocative. “People are worried this is a Trojan horse,” Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who commands U.S. Army forces in Europe, told Reuters. “[The Russians] say, ‘We’re just doing an exercise,’ and then all of a sudden they’ve moved all these people and capabilities somewhere.”
Russia is not, however, the only military power with “people and capabilities” in the region. In passing, SOCOM’s Thomas also mentioned the presence of other forces; troops that he readily admitted the public might not be aware of. Those soldiers were -- just as he feared of the Russian troops involved in Zapad -- not going anywhere. And it wasn’t just a matter of speculation. After all, they wear the same uniform he does.
For the past two years, the U.S. has maintained a special operations contingent in almost every nation on Russia’s western border. “[W]e've had persistent presence in every country -- every NATO country and others on the border with Russia doing phenomenal things with our allies, helping them prepare for their threats,” said Thomas, mentioning the Baltics as well as Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia by name.
Commandos and Their Comrades
Since 9/11, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) have grown in every conceivable way from funding to manpower, the pace of operations to geographic sweep. On any given day, about 8,000 special operators -- from a command numbering roughly 70,000 in total -- are deployed in around 80 countries. Over the course of a year, they operate in about 70% of the world’s nations.
According to Major Michael Weisman, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, elite U.S. forces have deployed to 21 European countries in 2017 and conducted exercises with an even larger number of nations. “Outside of Russia and Belarus we train with virtually every country in Europe either bilaterally or through various multinational events,” he told TomDispatch.
The number of commandos in Europe has also expanded exponentially in recent years. In 2006, 3% of special operators deployed overseas were sent to the continent. Last year, the number topped 12% -- a jump of more than 300%. Only Africa has seen a larger increase in deployments over the same time span.
This special-ops surge is also reflected in the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, overseas missions designed to prepare American commandos in a variety of warfighting skills while also strengthening relations with foreign forces. In 2012, special operators conducted 29 JCETs on that continent. Last year, the number reached 37, including six in Bulgaria, three in Estonia, three in Latvia, three in Poland, and three in Moldova.
The United States has devoted significant resources to building and bolstering allied special ops forces across the region. “Our current focus consists of assuring our allies through building partner capacity efforts to counter and resist various types of Russian aggression, as well as enhance their resilience,” SOCOM’s Thomas told members of the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year. “We are working relentlessly with our partners and the Department of State to build potency in eastern and northern Europe to counter Russia’s approach to unconventional warfare, including developing mature and sustainable Special Operations capabilities across the region.”
This year, U.S. commandos could be found in nations all along Russia’s borders. In March, for example, Green Berets took to snowmobiles for a cold-weather JCET alongside local troops in Lapland, Finland. In May, Navy SEALs teamed up with Lithuanian forces as part of Flaming Sword 17, a training exercise in that country. In June, members of the U.S. 10th Special Forces Group and Polish commandos carried out air assault and casualty evacuation training near Lubliniec, Poland. In July, Naval Special Warfare operators took part in Sea Breeze, a two decade-old annual military exercise in Ukraine. In August, airmen from the 321st Special Tactics Squadron transformed a rural highway in Jägala, Estonia, into an airstrip for tank-killing A-10 Thunderbolts as part of a military drill. That same month, U.S. special operators advised host-nation commandos taking part in Exercise Noble Partner in the Republic of Georgia.
“Working with the GSOF [Republic of Georgia’s Special Operations forces] was awesome,” said Captain Christopher Pulliam, the commander of the Georgia Army National Guard’s Company H (Long-Range Surveillance), 121st Infantry Regiment. (That, of course, is a unit from the American state of Georgia.) “Our mission set requires that we work in small teams that gather specific intel in the area of operations. The GSOF understand this and can use our intel to create a better understanding of the situation on the ground and react accordingly.”
Special Warriors and Special Warfare
The United States isn’t alone in fielding a large contingent of special operations forces. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that Russia’s Spetsnaz (“special purpose”) troops number around 30,000, a sizeable force, although less than half the size of America’s contingent of commandos. Russia, SOCOM’s Thomas told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year, is “particularly adept at leveraging unconventional approaches to advancing their interests and it is clear they are pursuing a wide range of audacious approaches to competition -- SOF [special operations forces] often present a very natural unconventional response.”
Indeed, just like the United States and myriad militaries around the world, Russia has devoted significant resources to developing its doctrine and capabilities in covert, clandestine, and unconventional forms of warfare. In a seminal 2013 article in the Russian Academy of Military Science’s journal Military-Industrial Courier, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov explained the nature of modern hybrid warfare, including the use of elite troops, this way:
“In the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template... The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness... [t]he broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures... is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special operations forces.”
Spetsnaz troops have indeed played a role in all of Russia’s armed interventions since 2001, including in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria. During that same span, U.S. Special Operations forces have been employed in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Niger, and the Central African Republic. They have also had a presence in Jordan, Kenya, Djibouti, and Cameroon, among other countries to which, according to President Trump, U.S. combat-equipped forces are currently deployed.
In an interview late last year, retired Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland, chief of U.S. Army Special Operations Command from 2012 to 2015 and now the Senior Mentor to the Army War College, discussed the shortcomings of the senior military leadership in regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “bad national policy decisions... that shaped U.S. campaigns in those theaters,” and a reliance on a brand of conventional war-fighting with limited effectiveness in achieving political goals. “[I]t is important to understand why SOF has risen from footnote and supporting player to main effort,” he added, “because its use also highlights why the U.S. continues to have difficulty in its most recent campaigns -- Afghanistan, Iraq, against ISIS and AQ [al-Qaeda] and its affiliates, Libya, Yemen, etc. and in the undeclared campaigns in the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine -- none of which fits the U.S. model for traditional war.”
U.S. Special Operations Command Europe? failed to answer TomDispatch’s questions about those “undeclared campaigns” on Russia’s doorstep, but more public and conventional efforts have been in wide evidence. In January, for example, tanks, trucks, and other equipment began arriving in Germany, before being sent on to Poland, to support Operation Atlantic Resolve. That effort, “designed to reassure NATO allies and partners... in light of the Russian intervention in Ukraine,” according to the Congressional Research Service, began with a nine-month rotation of about 3,500 soldiers from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, who were replaced in September by 3,300 personnel and 1,500 vehicles from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, which would be deployed to five countries. Earlier this month, Russia’s Defense Ministry complained that the size of the U.S. contingent in the Baltics violates a Russian-NATO agreement.
Red Dawn in the Gray Zone
Late last year, a group of active-duty and retired senior military officers, former ambassadors, academics, and researchers gathered for a symposium at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, D.C., titled “Russian Engagement in the Gray Zone.” Conducted via Chatham House rules -- that is, in accounts of the meeting, statements could not be attributed to any specific speaker -- the Americans proceeded to vilify Russia both for its bellicosity and its underhanded methods. Among the assessments: “Russia is always at a natural state of war and it prioritizes contactless war”; “Russia de-emphasizes kinetic activities and emphasizes the indirect/non-lethal approach”; and “Russia places a priority on subversion.”
The experts at NDU called for a comprehensive campaign to undermine Russia through sanctions, by courting “disenfranchised personnel” and “alienated persons” within that country, by developing enhanced cyber-capabilities, by utilizing psychological operations and “strategic messaging” to enhance “tactical actions,” and by conducting a special ops shadow war -- which General Charles Cleveland seems to suggest might be already underway. “[T]he United States should learn from the Chechnya rebels’ reaction. The rebels used decentralized operations and started building pockets of resistance (to include solo jihadists),” reads a synopsis of the symposium.
“SOCOM actions will need,” the NDU experts asserted, “to be unconventional and irregular in order to compete with Russian modern warfare tactics.” In other words, they were advocating an anti-Russian campaign that seemed to emphasize the very approach they were excoriating Russia for -- the “indirect/non-lethal approach” with a “priority on subversion.”
In the end, Russia’s much-feared “West” war game, in which Spetsnaz troops did participate, concluded with a whimper, not a bang. “After all the anxiety, Russia's Zapad exercise ends without provocation,” read the headline in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes on September 20th.
For months, while Russia insisted its war game would involve fewer than 13,000 soldiers, the U.S. and its allies had warned that, in reality, up to 100,000 troops would flood into Belarus. Of those Russian troop levels, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Möller, a Swedish military observer who attended Zapad, said, “We reported about 12,400.” Of such exercises, he added, “This is normal military business as we do in all countries with armed forces. This is not training for attacking anyone. You meet the enemy, you stop the enemy, you defeat the enemy with a counterattack. We are doing the same thing in Sweden.”
Indeed, just as Möller suggested, more than 20,000 troops -- including U.S. Special Operations forces and soldiers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, and Sweden -- had gathered in his country during the Zapad exercise for Aurora 2017. And Sweden was hardly unique. At the same time, troops from the U.S., Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Lithuania, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom were carrying out Rapid Trident, an annual military exercise, in neighboring Ukraine.
What message was the U.S. sending to Russia by conducting training exercises on its borders, Catherine Herridge of Fox News asked General Raymond Thomas in Aspen? “That's a fascinating question because I am -- I try to appreciate the adversary's optic to -- I realize that a way to gauge a metric if you will for how well we're doing,” the SOCOM chief replied somewhat incoherently.
Herridge was, of course, asking Thomas to view the world through the eyes of his adversary, to imagine something akin to Russia and its ally Syria conducting war games in Mexico or Canada or in both countries; to contemplate Spetsnaz troops spread throughout the Western hemisphere on an enduring basis just as America’s elite troops are now a fixture in the Baltics and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
In the end, Thomas’s take was understated in a way that undoubtedly wouldn’t have been the case had the roles been reversed. “I am curious what Putin and his leadership are thinking,” the special ops chief mused. “I think it was a little unnerving.”
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. He recently covered ethnic cleansing by government forces in South Sudan for Harper’s Magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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n November 20, 2008, sitting in my cell in Guantanamo, I swallowed food for the first time since 2006. It was a celebration of sorts. Earlier that day, my friends and I had listened to Judge Richard Leon announce his decision in our case, Boumediene v. Bush. It had taken nearly seven years and a successful appeal to the United States Supreme Court to compel the judge to review our case, but once he did, it only took a matter of days for him to realize there was no case against us. When he ordered our release, I was so relieved, so overcome with emotion, so excited to be reunited with my wife and children, that I don’t even remember what I ate.
