Mind you, I’ve been covering Guantánamo since President George W. Bush and his team, having responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching their disastrous “Global War on Terror,” set up that offshore prison to house people American forces had captured. Previewing Diaz’s movie, I was surprised at how it unnerved me. After so many years of exposure to the grim realities of that prison, somehow his film touched me anew. There were moments that made me sob, moments when I turned down the sound so as not to hear more anguished cries of pain from detainees being tortured, and moments that made me curious about the identities of the people in the film. Although the names of certain officials are mentioned, the central characters are the detainees and individual interrogators, as well as defense attorneys and guards, all of whom interacted at Guantánamo’s prison camp over the course of its two-plus decades of existence.

While viewing it, I was reminded of a question that Tom Engelhardt, founder and editor of TomDispatch, has frequently asked me: “What is it about Guantánamo that’s so captivated you over the years?” Why is it, he wanted to know, that year after year, as its story of injustice unfolded in a never-ending cycle of trials that failed to start, prisoners cleared for release but still held in captivity, and successive administrations whose officials simply shrugged in defeat when it came to closing the nightmarish institution, it continues to haunt me so? “Would you be willing,” he asked, “to reflect on that for TomDispatch?” As it turned out, the death of my dad somehow helped me grasp a way to answer that question with previously unattainable clarity.

The Missing Outrage

As a start, in response to his question, let me say that, despite my own continued immersion in news about the prison camp, I’m struck that, in the American mainstream, there hasn’t been more headline-making outrage over the never-ending reality of what came to be known as Gitmo. From the moment it began in January 2002 and a photo appeared of shackled men bent over in the dirt beside the open-air cages that would hold them, wearing distinctive orange jumpsuits, its horrid destiny should have been apparent. The Pentagon Public Affairs Office published that immediately iconic image with the hope, according to spokesperson Torie Clarke, that it would “allay some of our critics” (who were already accusing the U.S. of operating outside of the Geneva Conventions).

Rather than allay them, it caught the path of cruelty and lawlessness on which the United States would continue for so many endless years. In April 2004, the world would see images of prisoners in American custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, naked, hooded, cuffed, sexually humiliated, and abused. Later reports would reveal the existence of what came to be known as “black sites,” operated by the CIA, in countries around the world, where detainees were tortured using what officials of the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

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For 22 years now, through four different administrations, that prison camp in Cuba, distinctly offshore of any conception of American justice, has held individuals captured in the war on terror in a way that defies any imaginable principles of due process, human rights, or the rule of law. Of the nearly 780 prisoners kept there, only 18 were ever actually charged with a crime and of the eight military court convictions, four were overturned while two remain on appeal.

A large number of those captured were originally sold to the Americans for bounty or simply picked up randomly in places in countries like Afghanistan known to be inhabited by terrorists and so assumed, with little or no hard evidence, to be terrorists themselves. They were then, of course, denied access to lawyers. And as I was reminded recently on a trip to England where I met with a couple of released detainees, those who survived Gitmo still suffer, physically and psychologically, from their treatment at American hands. Nor have they found justice or any remedy for the lasting harms caused by their captivity. And while the post-9/11 war on terror moment has largely faded into the past (though the American military is still fighting it in distant lands), that prison camp has yet to be shut down. 

A Generation Comes of Age

A second and more timely answer right now to Tom Engelhardt’s question is that my unwavering revulsion to the existence of Guantánamo has stemmed from a worldview that distinctly marked my father and many in his generation — men and women who came of age in the 1940s and early 1950s, whose first moments of adulthood coincided with the postwar emergence of the United States as a global superpower that touted itself as a guardian of civil rights, human rights, and justice. The opposition to fascism in World War II, the support for international covenants protecting civilians, a growing commitment at home to civil liberties and civil rights – those were their ideological guideposts. And despite the contradictions, the hypocrisy, and the failure that lurked just behind the foundational tenets of that belief system, many like my father continued to have faith in the honorable destiny of the United States whose institutions were robust and its motives honorable.

To be sure, there was deep denial involved in his generation’s sugar-coated version of the American experience. The revelation of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam; decisions to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, and elsewhere; the profound and systemic domestic racism of the country as described in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow; even the dirty dealings of the Nixon White House during Watergate; and, in this century, the official lying that set the stage for the disastrous Iraq War all should have dampened their rose-colored assessment of American democracy. Still, in so many ways he and many of his compatriots held fast to their belief in the power of this country to eternally return to its best self.

True to his belief in the American dream, my father took me to see movies and plays at our local college that amplified a worldview that he, like so many of his generation, embodied. I was often the youngest attendee at those films with stars like Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, an ode to free speech; Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, with its portrayal of the evils of racism; and Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men, whose message doubled down on the tenet that the accused are always innocent until proven guilty. And let’s not forget Judgement at Nuremberg, the dramatization of the post-World War Two war crimes tribunals, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, a series of trials in which Nazi leaders were convicted of committing genocide.

Those films, crying out for fairness, equality, and an end to racism, gave voice to champions of democracy, and energy to my father’s generation’s firm embrace of American possibilities.

Memory and Forgetting

A third answer, also underscored by my recent personal encounter with life’s fleetingness, is my growing fear, as an historian, that Guantánamo will simply be forgotten. In a sense, in the world of Donald Trump, collapsing bridges, and blazing wars in distant lands, it already seems largely forgotten. Although 22 years later it’s still home to 30 detainees from the war on terror, Guantánamo attracts little attention these days. If it weren’t for the invaluable work of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who has reported on Gitmo since Day One in January 2002, as well as a handful of other dedicated reporters including John Ryan at Lawdragon, few could know anything about what’s going on there now. As sociology professor Lisa Hajjar points out, “Media coverage at Guantánamo has become a rarity.” While the press pool for the hearings of the military commissions that are still ongoing there averaged about 30 reporters until perhaps 2013, it’s now been whittled down to, at most, “about four per trip,” according to Hajjar.

Gitmo media coverage (and so public attention) has essentially disappeared — hardly a surprise given the current globally crushing issues of war and deprivation, injustice and extralegal policies, not to speak of the mad discomfort of election 2024 here in America. Guantánamo, whose last inmate arrived in 2008 and whose viable path to closure has remained blocked year after year (no matter that three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — each declared his desire to shut it down), persists, its deviations from the law unresolved.

As it happens, flagging interest in Guantánamo has coincided with an eerie larger cultural phenomenon — a turn away from history and memory.

In the world of social media and the immediate moment, a malady of forgetfulness about past events should be a cause of concern. In fact, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn recently published a striking piece on the phenomena. Citing an Atlantic article by psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman, Corn noted that, while forgetting can help people get on with their lives after a traumatic experience, it can also prevent trauma survivors from learning the lessons of the past. Rather than confront the impact of what’s occurred, it’s become all too common to simply brush it all under the rug, which, of course, has its own grim consequences. “As clinical psychiatrists,” they write, “we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger — exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.”  In other words, events like the 9/11 attacks and what followed from them, the Covid pandemic, or even the events of January 6, 2021, as Corn’s psychiatrists point out, can bring such pain that forgetting becomes “useful,” even at times seemingly “healthful.”

Not surprisingly, an increasing forgetfulness about traumatic events is echoed on an even broader scale in a contemporary trend toward the abandonment of history, presumably in favor of the present and its megaphone, the social media universe. As historian Daniel Bessner has pointed out, this country is now undergoing a profound reconsideration of the very purpose and importance of the historical record. Across the country, universities are reducing the size of their history faculties, while the number of undergraduates majoring in history and related fields in 2018-2019 had already declined by more than a third since 2012.  

No wonder Guantánamo has been relegated to the past, a distant chapter in the ever-diminishing war on terror and no matter that it continues to function in the present moment. For example, two death penalty cases are currently in pretrial hearings there. One involves the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, which resulted in the deaths of 17 American sailors. As the intrepid Carol Rosenberg points out, the case has been in pretrial hearings since 2011. The other involves four defendants accused of conspiring in the attacks of September 11th. A fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al Shibh, was recently removed from the case, having been found incompetent to stand trial due to the post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from his torture at American hands. As for the remaining defendants, originally charged in 2008 and then again in 2011, no trial date has yet been set. The ever-elusive timetable for those prosecutions tells you everything. Evidence tainted by torture has made such a trial impossible.

The Cycles of American History

It’s hard to fathom how my father’s generation, stubbornly rose-colored in their vision of the country, swallowed the blatant failures of the post-9/11 years. My sense is that many of them, like my dad, just shook their heads, certain that the true spirit of American democracy would ultimately prevail and the wrongs of indefinite detention, torture, and judicial incapacity would be righted. Still, as the country spiraled into January 6th and its aftermath, the reality of America’s lost grip on its own promises of justice, morality, lawfulness, and accountability actually began to sink in. At least it did with my dad, who expressed clear and present fears of a country succumbing to the specter of his childhood, fascism, the very antithesis of the America he aspired to.

Philippe Diaz’s film about Gitmo (which I encourage readers to catch when it premieres at the end of April) should remind at least a few of us of the importance of living up to the image of the country my father and others in his generation embraced. Isn’t it finally time to highlight the grave mistake of Guantánamo? Isn’t it finally time to close that shameful prison, distinctly offshore of American justice, and reckon with its wrongs, rather than letting it disappear into the haze of forgotten history, its momentous violations unresolved. 

In 2005, in his confirmation hearings for attorney general, George W. Bush’s longtime legal counsel Alberto Gonzales maintained that the ideals and laws codified in the Geneva Conventions were “quaint and obsolete.” That phrase, consigning notions of justice and accountability to the dustbin of history, encapsulated this country’s post-9/11 strategy of evading the law in the name of “security.” And as long as Guantánamo remains open, that strategy remains in place.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, rather than letting Gonzalez etch in stone an epitaph for the ideals my father and his generation so revered, we could find hope in a future where their trust in the rule of law and in a government of responsible citizens who put country above personal fortune, law above fear, and peace above war might prevail? As we lay my dad’s generation to rest, shouldn’t we take some consolation in the possibility that their spirit may still help us find our way out of today’s distinctly disturbing and unnerving times?

Copyright 2024 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”

The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.

Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”

President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect the people and interests of the United States.” The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.   

“Reducing Terrorism” Leads to a 50,000% Increase in… Yes!… Terrorism

Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as “Base Americaine,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.

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Washington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of “security cooperation” efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to “counter and prevent violent extremism” in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.

Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM’s General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America’s longtime West African partners. “During the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,” he said. “These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve.”

Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers who benefited from American security cooperation have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the Global War on Terror. They include the very nations he named: Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); and Niger (2023). In fact, at least five leaders of a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an American official. When they overthrew that country’s democratically elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.

Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then “turn to partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments… particularly Russia.” But he also failed to lay out America’s direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.

“We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, even as Libya began to slip into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and mentorship by Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo proved hapless in battling local militants who had also benefitted from the arms flowing out of Libya. With Mali in chaos, those Tuareg fighters declared their own independent state, only to be pushed aside by heavily armed Islamist militants who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint French, American, and African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading terror and chaos to those countries.

Since then, the nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles armed with Kalashnikov rifles regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax) and terrorize and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by such armed groups have not only destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, prompting coups and political instability, but have spread south to countries along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence has, for example, spiked in Togo (633%) and Benin (718%), according to Pentagon statistics.

American officials have often turned a blind eye to the carnage. Asked about the devolving situation in Niger, for instance, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel recently insisted that security partnerships in West Africa “are mutually beneficial and are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.”  His pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.

After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all. Even the Pentagon tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger growing by more than 900% in the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts, while fighting and even dying there; despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Burkina Faso in the form of training as well as equipment like armored personnel carriers, body armor, communications gear, machine guns, night-vision equipment, and rifles; and despite U.S. security assistance pouring into Mali and its military officers receiving training from the United States, terrorist violence in the Sahel has in no way been reduced. In 2002 and 2003, according to State Department statistics, terrorists caused 23 casualties in all of Africa. Last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, attacks by Islamist militants in the Sahel alone resulted in 11,643 deaths – an increase of more than 50,000%.

Pack Up Your War

In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising to end his country’s forever wars.  He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. “I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” Biden announced months later. “We’ve turned the page.” 

Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers” missives to Congress, detailing publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations around the world, Biden said just the opposite. In fact, he left open the possibility that America’s forever wars might, indeed, go on forever. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”

Niger’s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants America’s forever war there to end. That would assumedly mean the closing of Air Base 201 and the withdrawal of about 1,000 American military personnel and contractors. So far, however, Washington shows no signs of acceding to their wishes. “We are aware of the March 16th statement… announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. “We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification… I don’t have a timeframe of any withdrawal of forces.”

“The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan last year. Now that the junta has told AFRICOM to leave, the command has little to say. Email return receipts show that TomDispatch’s questions about developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM’s press office were read by a raft of personnel including Cahalan, Zack Frank, Joshua Frey, Yvonne Levardi, Rebekah Clark Mattes, Christopher Meade, Takisha Miller, Alvin Phillips, Robert Dixon, Lennea Montandon, and Courtney Dock, AFRICOM’s deputy director of public affairs, but none of them answered any of the questions posed. Cahalan instead referred TomDispatch to the State Department. The State Department, in turn, directed TomDispatch to the transcript of a press conference dealing primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.

“USAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa… to limit the spread of terrorism across the region and beyond,” General Langley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.  But Niger’s junta insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to “limit the spread of terrorism” in Niger and beyond are a key reason why.  “This security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of Nigeriens — all the massacres committed by the jihadists were carried out while the Americans were here,” said a Nigerien security analyst who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

America’s forever wars, including the battle for the Sahel, have ground on through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with failure the defining storyline and catastrophic results the norm. From the Islamic State routing the U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan in 2021, from the forever stalemate in Somalia to the 2011 destabilization of Libya that plunged the Sahel into chaos and now threatens the littoral states along the Gulf of Guinea, the Global War on Terror has been responsible for the deaths, wounding, or displacement of tens of millions of people.

Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little effect on Washington’s desire to continue funding and fighting such wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington’s hand. Niger’s junta is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever war in one small corner of the world — doing what President Biden pledged but failed to do. Still, the question remains: Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?  Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Tomdispatch.com

I recall rooting for the Israelis, advertised then as crucial American allies, against Egypt, Syria, and other regional enemies at least ostensibly allied with the Soviet Union in that Cold War era. I bought the prevailing narrative of a David-versus-Goliath struggle. I even got a book on the Yom Kippur War that captivated me by displaying all the weaponry the U.S. military had rushed to Israel to turn the tide there, including F-4 Phantom jets and M-60 main battle tanks. (David’s high-tech slingshots, if you will.) Little did I know that, in the next 50 years of my life, I would witness increasingly destructive U.S. military attacks in the Middle East, especially after the oil cartel OPEC (largely Middle Eastern then) hit back hard with an embargo in 1973 that sent our petroleum-based economy into a tailspin.

As one jokester quipped: Who put America’s oil under the sands of all those ungrateful Muslim countries in the Middle East? With declarations like the Carter Doctrine in 1980, the U.S. was obviously ready to show the world just how eagerly it would defend its “vital interests” (meaning fossil fuels, of course) in that region. And even today, as we watch the latest round in this country’s painfully consistent record of attempting to pound various countries and entities there into submission, mainly via repetitive air strikes, we should never forget the importance of oil, and lots of it, to keep the engines of industry and war churning along in a devastating fashion.

Right now, of course, the world is witnessing yet another U.S. bombing campaign, the latest in a series that seems all too predictable (and futile), meant to teach the restless rebels of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and possibly even Iran a lesson when it comes to messing with the United States of America. As the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith put it: Mess with this country and “We’ll put a boot (think: bomb) in your ass.” You kill three soldiers of ours and we’ll kill scores, if not hundreds, if not thousands of yours (and it doesn’t really matter if they’re soldiers or not), because… well, because we damn well can!

America’s leaders, possessing a peerless Air Force, regularly exhibit a visceral willingness to use it to bomb and missile perceived enemies into submission or, if need be, nothingness. And don’t for a second think that they’re going to be stopped by international law, humanitarian concerns, well-meaning protesters, or indeed any force on this planet. America bombs because it can, because it believes in the efficacy of violence, and because it’s run by appeasers.

Yes, America’s presidents, its bombers-in-chief, are indeed appeasers. Of course, they think they’re being strong when they’re blowing distant people to bits, but their actions invariably showcase a distinctive kind of weakness. They eternally seek to appease the military-industrial-congressional complex, aka the national (in)security state, a complex state-within-a-state with an unappeasable hunger for power, profit, and ever more destruction. They fail and fail and fail again in the Middle East, yet they’re incapable of not ordering more bombing, more droning, more killing there. Think of them as being possessed by a monomania for war akin to my urge to play with toy soldiers. The key difference? When I played at war, I was a wet-behind-the-ears 10 year old.

The Rockets’ Red Glare, the Bombs Bursting in Air

No technology may be more all-American than bombs and bombers and no military doctrine more American than the urge to attain “peace” through massive firepower. In World War II and subsequent wars, the essential U.S. approach could be summarized in five words: mass production enabling mass destruction.

No other country in the world has dedicated such vast resources as mine has to mass destruction through air power. Think of the full-scale bombing of cities in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, ending in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Think of the flattening of North Korea during the Korean War of the early 1950s or the staggering bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s. Or consider the massive use of air power in Desert Shield against Iraq in the early 1990s followed by the air campaigns that accompanied the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003 (and never quite seemed to stop thereafter). The butcher’s bill for such bombing has indeed been high, quite literally millions of non-combatants killed by America’s self-styled “arsenal of democracy.”

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And indeed, as you read this, another country is now faithfully following America’s example. Israel is systematically destroying Gaza, rendering it essentially uninhabitable for those Palestinians who survive the ongoing rampage. In fact, early in its war of annihilation, Israeli leaders cited the Allied destruction of the German city of Dresden in 1945 in support of their own atrocious air and ground campaign against the Palestinians.

Looking at this dispassionately as a military historian, the Dresden reference makes a certain twisted sense. In World War II, the Americans and their British allies in their “combined bomber offensive” destroyed German cities indiscriminately, seeing all Germans as essentially Nazis, complicit in the crimes of their government, and so legitimate targets. Something similar is true of the right-wing Israeli government today. It sees all Palestinians as essentially members of Hamas and thus complicit in last year’s brutal October 7th attacks on Israel, making them legitimate targets of war, Israeli- (and American-) style. Just like the United States, Israel claims to be “defending democracy” whatever it does. Little wonder, then, that Washington has been so willing to send bombs and bullets to its protégé as it seeks “peace” through massive firepower and genocidal destruction.

Indeed, of late, there has been considerable debate about whether Israel is engaged in acts of genocide, with the International Court of Justice ruling that the present government should strive to prevent just such acts in Gaza. Putting that issue aside, it’s undeniable that Israel has been using indiscriminate bombing attacks and a devastating invasion in a near-total war against Palestinians living on that 25-mile-long strip of land, an approach that calls to mind the harrowing catchphrase “Exterminate all the brutes!” from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.

In a sense, there’s nothing new under the sun. Certainly, the Old Testament itself provides examples of exterminatory campaigns (cited by Bibi Netanyahu as Israel first moved against the Palestinians in Gaza). He might as well have cited a catchphrase heard during America’s war in Vietnam, but rooted in the medieval crusades: “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

America’s Unrelenting Crusade in the Middle East

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush got into trouble almost instantly when he referred to the “war on terror” he had launched as a “crusade.” Yet, as impolitic as that word might have seemed, how better to explain U.S. actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan? Just consider our faith in the goodness and efficacy of “our” military and that all-American urge to bring “democracy” to the world, despite the destruction visited upon Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen over the last several decades. Or go back to 1953 and the role the CIA played in the overthrow of Iran’s legitimate democratic ruler and his replacement by the brutally repressive regime of the Shah.

Try to imagine such events from the perspective of a historian writing in the year 2200. Might that future scribe not refer to repeated U.S. invasions of, incursions into, and bombing campaigns across the Middle East as a bloody crusade, launched under the (false) banner of democracy with righteous vengeance, if not godly purpose, in mind? Might that historian not suggest that such a “crusade” was ultimately more about power and profit, domination and control than (as advertised) “freedom”? And might that historian not be impressed (if not depressed) by the remarkable way the U.S. brought seemingly unending chaos and death to the region over such a broad span of time?

Consider these facts. More than 22 years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. still has at least 30,000 troops scattered across the Middle East. At least one Navy carrier strike group, and often two, dominate the regional waters, while striking numbers of military bases (“Little Americas”) are still sprinkled across countries ranging from Kuwait to Bahrain, from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates and beyond. So many years later, about 900 U.S. troops still illegally occupy part of Syria (not coincidentally, where that country produces most of its oil) and 2,500 more remain in Iraq, even though the government there would like them to depart.

Yankee Go Home? Apparently Not in My Lifetime

Meanwhile, American military aid, mostly in the form of deadly weaponry, flows not only to Israel but to other countries in the region like Egypt and Jordan. Direct U.S. military support facilitated Saudi Arabia’s long, destructive, and unsuccessful war against the Houthis in Yemen, a conflict Washington is now conducting on its own with repeated air strikes. And of course, the entire region has, for more than two decades now, been under constant U.S. military pressure in that war on terror, which all too quickly became a war of terror (and of torture).

Recall that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the death of roughly a million Iraqis and the displacement of millions more as refugees. How could that not be considered part of a “crusade,” even if a fitful and failing one? Yet, here’s the rub: just as those Catholic crusades of the Middle Ages weren’t entirely or even primarily about religion, so today’s American version isn’t motivated primarily by an anti-Muslim animus. Of course, there is indeed an inescapably religious aspect to such never-ending American war-making, but what drives those wars is largely naked greed, vengeance, and an all-American urge both to appease and amplify the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Of course, as was true in the years after 9/11 and is still true today, Americans are generally encouraged to see their country’s imperial and crusading acts as purely defensive in nature, the righteous responses of freedom-bringers. Admittedly, it’s a strange kind of freedom this country brings at the tip of a sword — or on the nosecone of a Hellfire missile. Even so, in such an otherwise thoroughly contentious Congress, it should be striking how few members have challenged the latest bombing version of this country’s enduring war in the Middle East.

Forget the Constitution. No Congressional declaration of war is believed necessary for any of this, nor has it mattered much (so far) that the American public has grown increasingly skeptical of those wars and the acts of destruction that go with them. As it happens, however, the crusade, such as it is, has proven remarkably sustainable without much public crusading zeal. For most Americans, those acts remain distinctly off-stage and largely out of mind, except at moments like the present one where the deaths of three American soldiers give the administration all the excuse it needs for repetitive acts of retaliation.

No, we the people exercise remarkably little control over the war-making that the military-industrial-congressional complex has engaged in for decades or the costs that go with them. Indeed, the dollar costs are largely deferred to future generations as America’s national debt climbs even faster than the Pentagon war budget.

America, so we were told by President George W. Bush, is hated for its freedoms.  Yet the “freedoms” we’re allegedly hated for aren’t those delineated in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.  Rather, it’s America’s “freedom” to build military bases across the globe and bomb everywhere, a “freedom” to sell such bellicose activity as lawful and even admirable, a “freedom” to engage in a hyperviolent style of play, treating “our” troops and so many foreigners as toy soldiers and expendable props for Washington’s games.  

It’s something I captured unintentionally five decades ago with those toy soldiers of mine from an imagined glorious military past.  But after a time (too long, perhaps) I learned to recognize them as the childish things they were and put them away.  They’re now long gone, lost to time and maturity, as is the illusion that my country pursues freedom and democracy in the Middle East through ceaseless acts of extreme violence, which just seem to drone on and on and on.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

Tomdispatch.com

But Guantánamo, a prison that, from its founding, has violated U.S. codes of due process, fair treatment, and the promise of justice writ large isn’t the only unnerving legacy of the “war” on terror that still persists. If indefinite detention at Guantánamo was a key pillar of that war, defying longstanding American laws and norms, it was just one of the steps beyond those norms that still persist today.

In the days, weeks, and even years following the attacks of September 11th, the U.S. government took action to create new powers in the name of keeping the nation safe. Two of them, more than two decades after those attacks, are now rife with calls for change. Congress created the first just a week after 9/11 (with but a single no vote). It authorized unchecked and unending presidentially driven war powers that could be used without specified geographical limits — and, strangely enough, that power still remains in place, despite recent congressional efforts to curtail its authority. The second, the expansive use of secret surveillance powers on Americans, is currently under heated debate.

War Powers

The very first new authority created in the name of the war on terror was the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, passed by Congress one week after the 9/11 attacks. It gave the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.”

Unlike past declarations of war or authorizations for war in American history, it was staggeringly vague. It named no actual enemy or geographical locations. It made no reference to what conditions would end the hostilities and the power of that authorization. It was in essence “a blank check” for presidential war powers, as Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), the single member of Congress to vote no on its passage, warned at the time and has reiterated over the years.

It was also a game-changing authorization. Not only did it lack specifics, but it stripped Congress of its constitutionally authorized power to declare war. In the war on terror, Congress would defer to the president who could decide on his own when and where to launch attacks.

Over the course of the last two-plus decades, that 2001 AUMF has been used repeatedly to do exactly what Barbara Lee feared — namely, broaden the president’s power to commit acts of war against not just the terrorist groups who conspired in the 9/11 attacks, but groups in countries far and wide. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, as of 2021, it had been used in at least 22 countries, including Afghanistan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia,  Iraq,  Kenya, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen.

Twenty-two-and-a-half years later, in April 2023, Congressman Gregory Meeks, (D-NY), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, acknowledged that the 2001 AUMF had indeed become, in the words of fellow Democrat Annie Kuster (D-NH), “a blank check for presidents from both parties to wage war around the world.”

There have been calls for the repeal of that AUMF over the years, including from — you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn — Representative Lee (repeatedly). This past fall, several such bills were introduced in both the House and Senate, including a bipartisan version by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). 

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In the spring of 2023, Representative Meeks submitted his bill to replace the 2001 AUMF with a new one. In doing so, he sought to reestablish Congress’s constitutionally granted power to declare war, emphasized the statutory obligation of the president to brief Congress after launching any attack, and added that the president must brief Congress on a regular basis as to the uses of the AUMF.

In addition, he inserted language aimed at curtailing the Act’s expansiveness, including a requirement that the enemies to whom it could be applied be specifically named. He suggested three: the original al-Qaeda; the Islamic State Khorasan, based in Afghanistan and known as IS-K; and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Moreover, his bill called for an annual reconsideration of those enemies and added provisions designed to end the president’s right to authorize the AUMF’s use for new groups by claiming they were just extensions of, or forces associated with, the already named groups. Furthermore, his bill prohibited its use against any unnamed enemy, “whether or not the entity is involved in an armed conflict against a force of a United States ally or partner or is an affiliate, associated force, or successor entity of an entity described in such subsection.”

To further constrain the broadness of that 2001 authorization, Meeks included a sunset clause at the end of four years unless it was reauthorized by Congress.

In a world where wars have broken out in Ukraine and now the Middle East, and where additional hostilities are simmering when it comes to the U.S., Iran, China, and Russia, such language would ensure that a separate congressional declaration of war would have to be approved for any enemy the U.S. decided to attack.

In these many ways, the new version of the AUMF would rein in the aberration of those war powers that came into being in the aftermath of 9/11.

And yet the time to redesign the authority of presidential war powers, as created more than 22 years ago by the war on terror, has still not arrived. Meeks’s bill, like Rand Paul’s, gained remarkably little traction. Likewise, a bill from those relatively few congressional representatives calling for a full repeal of that AUMF rather than a replacement of it failed to make it to a vote.

Surveillance

In addition to indefinite detention at Guantánamo and the authorization of endless, expansive war-making, ever more expansive intelligence collection, at home as well as abroad, has been a foundational pillar of the war on terror — and, like the AUMF, bringing it under some control has been mired in debate and controversy in recent months. In 2023, some members of Congress tried to put limits on part of a controversial law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, passed in the summer of 2008 in the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency. It authorized the collection and sharing of foreign intelligence for the purpose of deterring national security threats.

The problem was not the stated purpose of Section 702 — to acquire information on foreigners abroad who might pose a threat to the United States — but the domestic uses to which it’s been put. The act allows foreigners abroad to be surveilled without a warrant. But since its inception, it’s also been used for warrantless investigations of Americans whose communications have been caught up in sweeping searches of the communications of foreigners — investigations that have become known as “back-door searches.”

Constitutional scholars and civil liberties advocates have fought against Section 702 from its inception, arguing that such searches violate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant based on probable cause of criminal activity. As Elizabeth Gotein of the Brennan Center for Justice explains, “Section 702 lets the government collect the communications of non-Americans located abroad without a warrant. But because Americans talk to people outside the country, the surveillance inevitably sweeps in our private phone calls, emails, and text messages, too — information that the government would normally need a warrant to access.”  

In addition, experts note that, over time, the broad authority to collect the communications of Americans has been abused in alarming ways by the authorities. Gotein points out that 702-based warrantless searches have scrutinized the “communications of Black Lives Matter protesters, members of Congress, a local political party, a state court judge, journalists, and in one case, more than 19,000 contributors to a congressional campaign.” For their part, intelligence officials seeking a continuation of Section 702 point out that recent reforms have led to more responsible use of the authority.

Now, for the third time since its passage, Section 702 is up for renewal. December 31, 2023, was the legal deadline for a vote on it. Unlike the two prior times, however, the renewal date came and went without a vote. Instead, substantial opposition by legal experts and others led to several competing bills calling for Section 702’s reform.

One of the proposed bills, the Government Surveillance Reform Act, introduced by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, as well as representatives Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) in the House, proposed that a warrant requirement be added to the search requirements when looking at the location data of Americans, web browsing and search records, vehicle data, and the like. In Lee’s version, any queries about the communications collected in a 702 search would, in accordance with the Fourth Amendment, require a warrant for material involving Americans.  The new bill would amount, in Gotein’s words, to closing “the backdoor search loophole.”

The Biden administration has, however, taken a notably aggressive stance against changes to the law, especially when it comes to the introduction of the warrant requirement. Numerous high-ranking officials have spoken out publicly, insisting that the warrant requirement would imperil their ability to keep the nation safe. In his written testimony before Congress, FBI Director Chris Wray insisted that it was “an essential tool” in the counterterrorism toolbox. In fact, he told Congress, it was potentially “the critical link that allows us to identify the intended target or build out the network of attackers so we can stop them before they strike and kill Americans.” Andrew McCabe, acting director of the FBI after Donald Trump fired Director Jim Comey, put it even more starkly in a podcast devoted to the issue, labeling Section 702 “arguably the most significant national security tool in the intelligence community.” He then insisted that the requirement for a warrant was “completely unworkable.”

So fraught was the congressional loggerhead over Section 702 that the deadline for a decision proved unworkable. Instead, Congress inserted an extension to mid-April 2024 in this year’s defense spending bill, signed into law by President Biden three days before Christmas.

It’s likely that, as with the 2001 AUMF, the attempt to change Section 702 will fail. Powers once given, it seems, only prove ever harder to relinquish and, all too sadly, the overreach engendered by the war on terror has by now become an accepted part of the American (and congressional) way of life.

Guantánamo

And then there’s the most glaring symbol of the never-ending, often extralegal legacy of the war on terror, the continued existence of that grim prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Twenty-two years ago, the Bush administration set up that offshore detention facility for war-on-terror detainees, placing it beyond the reach of military, federal, or international law. Since then, on numerous occasions, new protections for the rights of prisoners there have been put into place, but none of them have addressed one fundamental wrong — namely, the decision that the federal court system was incapable of prosecuting those accused of engaging in terrorism against the United States, including those who conspired in the 9/11 attacks. 

Despite candidate Biden’s assertion that, unlike Donald Trump, he would support the closure of Guantánamo, his appointment of a special representative to oversee the transfer of its prisoners to federal prisons, and the actual transfer of 10 detainees, substantial efforts to finally shut down the prison have been noticeably absent. Once a facility that held 780 men captured in the war on terror, it now holds 30 individuals, 16 of whom have been cleared for transfer elsewhere, pending appropriate security arrangements. Another 10 are scheduled for trial by military commissions but their trials are not expected to begin anytime soon.

Whether it’s an endlessly expansive authorization for eternally conducting war around the world, the redefinition of surveillance powers to include Americans under the guise of a foreign threat, or the seemingly lackadaisical acceptance of Guantánamo as an institution, there is certainly one lasting lesson from the war on terror.  Once powers previously outlawed or at least restrained in the name of fair, just, and responsible laws and norms become codified and implemented, the road back to normalcy is tantamount to impossible.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that wiser heads will prevail in the days to come. It is, however, a terrifyingly fragile approach, given the outlook for the 2024 election.

Copyright 2024 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

Ayman al-Zawahiri was from a prominent, elite Egyptian family. His relatives were Arab nationalists in that most nationalist of eras, the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Egypt 1954-1970 after a young officers coup in 1952. Some teenagers act out by becoming delinquents. Al-Zawahiri defied the rest of his relatively secular family by becoming a devotee of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood theorist of Islamic revolution. Qutb and the Brotherhood had been involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Col. Abdel Nasser in Alexandria in 1954. A thousand or so members were rounded up and tried, some of them tortured. Qutb was jailed as a conspirator. Qutb argued that the secular, nationalist Egyptian government was full of people who only looked and spoke like Muslims but that they had actually gone over to the evil Pharaoh. They were no longer really Muslims, but godless tyrants, apostates. And, he implied, apostates deserve to be killed. Qutb was accused of conspiring again to assassinate Abdul Nasser from prison in 1965 and was executed in 1966. Al-Zawahiri, age 15, was crushed.

In 1967 when Abdel Nasser lost the 6-Day War with Israel, al-Zawahiri rejoiced. He was maybe the only Egyptian not in mourning. He was glad to see Pharaoh taken down a notch.

Al-Zawahiri yielded to his family demands that he go to medical school. By the late 1970s he had a fancy practice in the shishy Ma’adi district of Cairo. I was at the American University in Cairo then, and some of my professors lived in Ma’adi, and invited us over for pot luck. We were around the corner from al-Zawahiri’s clinic. Who knows, maybe I saw him on the street. He had taken the Hippocratic Oath to protect human life, but would become one of history’s most notorious mass murderers.

Behind the scenes, al-Zawahiri formed one of the two branches of the youth terrorist organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). They had no use for the Muslim Brotherhood, the leadership of which made a pact with President Anwar El Sadat to give up political violence if he would let them organize. Sadat was a rightwinger who took over Abdel Nasser’s leftwing government, and he thought he needed a counterweight to the leftists, so he did a deal with the right wing Muslim Brotherhood. They disapproved of land reform and nationalization of industries, so they were perfect for Sadat’s purposes even if they were a little nutty about religion. Sadat encouraged the young Muslim Brotherhood types on college campuses to organize into “Islamic Groupings” to offset the Nasserists and Communists. The Islamic Grouping formed a national organization, advised by Sheikh Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh.

I remember in 1978 when a gaggle of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members were arrested by the Egyptian police, having been caught with bomb-making materials and bombs. It was the headline of the government-owned newspaper, al-Ahram [The Pyramids] . Al-Zawahiri still had the cover of practicing medicine in Ma’adi, but the Egyptian secret police were beginning to realize that he was dangerous.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran gave hope to religious radicals in Egypt that they could overthrow Sadat and make a Sunni version of that revolution in Egypt.

The EIJ found ways of getting in touch with cadets at the most prominent Egyptian military academy, and some secretly joined them, including one Lt. Khalid al-Islambouli. In 1981, both branches of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad made a 12-man council with the Islamic Grouping, and the ensemble decided to take out Sadat. It was decided that al-Islambouli and other recruits in the military would jump out of their troop transport vehicle during a military parade while Sadat was in the reviewing stand.

They pulled it off, and in 1981 Sadat was assassinated. However, the Egyptian masses weren’t interested in being ruled by religious zealots, and Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, an air force officer who planned out Egypt’s campaign in the 1973 war, became president-for-life.

Egyptian religious radicals were at that point rounded up, including al-Zawahiri. In the meantime, Ronald Reagan had come to power in the US, and he and some congressional Cold Warriors wanted to respond to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by backing Afghan jihadis. Some of the seven main such groups were tribal and relatively secular. Several were religious extremists, such as the Hizb-i Islami of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar. Hikmatyar became the CIA favorite and got the lion’s share of the billions the US sent in via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Egyptian government wanted to get the radicals off its hands. Instead of executing those implicated in Sadat’s killing or keeping them in prison, both steps sure to make further trouble, they offered them a deal. Leave Egypt and go do your jihad against the Soviets, or else. Most of them took the deal, including al-Zawahiri. It may be that the Reagan administration pressured Mubarak to send them off. We may never know. Al-Zawahiri set up a clinic on the Pakistan side, in Peshawar, to treat the jihadis wounded in firefights with the Red Army.

Meantime, I went off to Pakistan for my Ph.D. research and studied Urdu in Lahore. It was in late 1981 that I went up with a friend to Peshawar. Al-Zawahiri wasn’t there yet– he didn’t get out of prison until 1984– but the place was like Berlin in the Cold War, a hotbed of plotting, with many Afghan refugees around. I spoke Dari Persian with them and heard about their ordeals. My time in South Asia in the 80s and early 90s gave me insights into religious politics in Pakistan and Afghanistan that would later help me interpret al-Qaeda.

In 1989, the Soviets completely withdrew from Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden, who had been a fundraiser for the Mojahedin, based in Peshawar and Saudi Arabia, went back to Jedda. He immediately gave a sermon in Jedda about the need to take down the other superpower, the US, (with which he had been implicitly allied only a few months before). He complained bitterly about US backing for Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians during the first Intifada.

By 1996, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had gathered again in Afghanistan, as the Taliban were taking over the country. They merged their two organizations, EIJ and al-Qaeda, and became Qaedat al-Jihad. They declared holy war on the US and al-Zawahiri developed a new approach. He came to believe that he hadn’t been successful in overthrowing Arab governments because the US propped them up. So, first, he’d have to find a way to get them out of the Middle East and make it clear that dominating it came with a high price. After the US withdrew, then its puppets in the region (as he thought of them) would be easily overthrown.

Hence the attacks on the East Africa US embassies, the attack on the USS Cole, and the 9/11 attacks.

Those attacks failed, despite their gut-wrenching death toll and all the noise they made. They did encourage copy-cat attacks on a much smaller scale– Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003-2006. Because I knew that terrain, I got called to Washington by think tanks a lot in the first decade of the last century, giving talks and presentations to the US government personnel who got time off to come to the panels, on what al-Qaeda was and how it operated and how I thought it could be defeated. I hope I helped.

The Bush administration took cynical advantage of 9/11 to launch a war of conquest in Iraq and to begin a 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. Neither of the latter were useful for counter-terrorism, and indeed, were always likely to proliferate terrorism. The US was not dissuaded from playing its superpower role in the region and propping up governments it found useful. Indeed, Washington doubled down on that role, most unwisely. The Bush administration made an opening for al-Qaeda and its offshoot, ISIL in Iraq, and the US government over two decades failed to convince rural Afghans, whom they bombed assiduously all that time, to choose it over the Taliban.

The US squandered 20 years of sole superpower status and some $7 trillion on its fruitless “war on terror,” which had no benefit at all for the United States. If counter-terrorism were desirable, it could have been done with a light, rapid-response force, not with massive land campaigns in Central and West Asia.

Al-Zawahiri gradually lost any relevance. He was viewed as a joke in Egypt, and he opposed the 2011 youth revolts because they were primarily secular in character. He was backed for a while by some of the Syrian Jihadis who from 2011 tried to overthrow the Syrian government with a guerrilla war. But they faced pressure from Gulf patrons to dissociate themselves from al-Zawahiri. A section of them split off into ISIL, who thought that al-Zawahiri was old hat.

Ironically, during the Syrian civil war, until Russian and Iranian intervention ended it, the US CIA was supporting religious radical groups trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad who at least were battlefield allies of al-Qaeda. We were back to the 1980s in some ways.

As al-Zawahiri died, the Egyptian military was still ruling Egypt and the Saudi, Jordanian and other royal families al-Qaeda saw as Quislings were all still in power and benefiting from high oil prices. The US was still the predominant superpower, and a rising China likes Muslim radicalism even less than Washington does.

Al-Zawahiri goes down in the forgotten annals of failed, minor revolutionaries, distinctive only for the number of innocent civilians he murdered. His was a dead end for the Muslim world, and the vast majority of Muslims saw al-Qaeda for what it was.

An unprecedented 18% of Arab youth now are “not religious,” and many youth and others in the Arab world give as a reason for their cooling to religion the long decades of religious radicalism that have roiled the region. Al-Zawahiri dreamed of an Islamic state — though the rigidity and harshness of his vision was more a nightmare — but his crude, Nazi-like methods undermined the very basis for any such thing.

As for the US, almost no one will care that al-Zawahiri was finally brought to justice. People younger than 33 probably mostly don’t know who he was. Americans had moved on, turning inward. This generation faces the climate emergency, economic challenges, a rising American far right that threatens the foundations of democracy in a way al-Zawahiri never did, and renewed Washington-Moscow tensions. Most Americans regret that they allowed Washington to spend trillions on its murky and self-contradictory “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda can now be seen for what it was — a small, opportunistic and destructive terrorist organization that leaves virtually no legacy, and certainly no positive one.

The report released on Thursday acknowledged the impact of the US-led coalition’s assault to take the city from the terror group Daesh in 2017, “Raqqa endured the most structural damage by density of any city in Syria.”

That structural damage consisted of the destruction or impairment of 11,000 buildings between February and October 2017, including over 40 schools, 29 mosques, eight hospitals, five universities, and Raqqa’s irrigation system.

The RAND report also cited statistics by Amnesty International, the site Airwars, and the coalition itself which showed the significant number of civilian casualties that occurred as a result of the campaign. Between 6 June and 30 October 2017, the killed civilians numbered from approximately 744 to 1,600.

By the end of the battle to take the city, according to the report, “60 to 80 per cent” of it was “uninhabitable.” There was also significant resentment of the population towards Washington and its local Kurdish allies, with the huge structural damage and civilian casualties having “undermined…long-term US interests” in the region.

The report concluded that the US did not commit war crimes, however, arguing that the military attempted to respect international laws regarding the protection of civilians in wartime. There was “room for improvement,” though, with the report recommending that the US military – in the future – should be prepared to send more ground troops or forces into the field in order to gain better situational awareness and engagement, instead of simply relying on airstrikes with inevitable gaps in intelligence.

The RAND Corporation’s report and its conclusion that no war crimes were directly committed comes months after the Pentagon announced that it was launching an investigation into an airstrike and bombing raid on the Syrian town of Baghuz in 2019, the last major battle to oust Daesh from its strongholds in the country. That New York Times newspaper reported that the results of that strike, which killed at least 80 civilians, was underplayed by the US military in an attempt to conceal war crimes.

Via Middle East Monitor )

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – A relative of mine, who works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiling data on foreigners entering the United States, recently posted a curious logo on his Facebook profile: a white Roman numeral three on a black background surrounded by 13 white stars. For those who don’t know what this symbol stands for, it represents the “Three Percenters,” a group that the Anti-Defamation League has identified as an anti-government militia. Its members have a record of violent criminal attacks and strikingly partisan activity, including arrests and guilty pleas in connection with the bombing of a Minnesota mosque in 2017 and appearances as “guards,” carrying assault-style weaponry, at several pro-Trump rallies. Six of its members have been charged with plotting to assault the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When my husband, a Naval officer of nearly 20 years, saw this symbol on a family member’s Facebook page, he pointed out to me that, despite the Hatch Act, created to ensure nonpartisanship among federal workers, DHS employees are not always held accountable for exercising “free speech” that would violate that law. The Three Percenters claim that they’re protesting government tyranny. The roman numeral itself refers to a debunked claim that only 3% of Americans in the original 13 colonies took up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War.

What does it mean that an employee of the Department of — yes! — Homeland Security can openly and proudly promote a homegrown militia whose members have threatened and attacked American lawmakers and police? Sadly enough, this fits all too well an agency that national security expert Erik Dahl of the Costs of War Project recently described as looking the other way in the face of rising far-right extremism. That includes anti-government, white-supremacist, and anti-Semitic groups, armed and otherwise. Such right-wing militias and extremist outfits, as Dahl makes clear, have killed an increasing number of people in this country since the 9/11 attacks, significantly more than groups inspired by foreign Islamist organizations like al-Qaeda. And yet, in both its public statements and policies, the domestic agency created after the 9/11 attacks to keep this country “secure” has consistently focused on the latter, while underestimating and often ignoring the former.

How U.S. Security Changed after 9/11

The Department of Homeland Security was quite literally a product of 9/11 and so was formed in a political climate of nearly unwavering support for anything Congress or the White House proposed to combat extremist violence. It officially arrived on the scene just weeks after the 9/11 attacks as the “Office of Homeland Security” when President George W. Bush appointed former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge as its first director. By 2002, now a “department,” it would bring together 22 different government agencies, including the Transportation and Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Its mission, as stated in a proposal by President Bush, was to “protect our homeland… against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” In the end, that new department would represent the largest reorganization of government since World War II. Though few here think of it that way, it would prove to be a second Pentagon and, over the years, would be funded in a similarly profligate fashion.

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Under such circumstances, you won’t be surprised to learn that its creation also led to a striking amount of redundancy in the national security establishment. In 2004, Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to provide the president with an overview of all intelligence efforts. According to Dahl, the director of national intelligence and the organizations he or she oversees are supposed to stand on the front lines of combating violent attacks on U.S. soil. Law enforcement groups like the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (under the FBI) have, in fact, thwarted the largest number of potential terrorist attacks since 9/11 and, at the moment, seem to be focused on the most significant threats to this country, which are all too internal. For example, a January 2022 joint statement by senior FBI and Justice Department officials warned that “the threat posed by domestic violent extremism and hate crimes is on the rise” and that FBI investigations of suspected domestic violent extremists have more than doubled since the spring of 2020.

In February 2020, even Christopher Wray, President Trump’s FBI director, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that violent extremists targeting people based on their race or ethnicity “were the primary source of ideologically-motivated lethal incidents and violence in 2018 and 2019, and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremist movements since 2001.” Of the 16 (unsuccessful) terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in 2020, 14 were prevented by police or most often FBI agents or those from Joint Terrorism Task Forces. For example, in March 2020, the FBI shot and killed a man in Missouri while attempting to arrest him. He was under investigation for planning to bomb a hospital to protest his city’s Covid-19 lockdown measures.

To be sure, there have also been threats from foreign terrorist organizations and those who act at their behest. Take, for example, the December 6, 2019, attack of a Saudi-born military trainee directed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He managed to kill three sailors at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida. According to Dahl, since 9/11, there have been 146 thwarted attacks planned by foreign terrorist groups or those inspired by them here. The vast majority were prevented by law enforcement sting operations or tips from the public.

Meanwhile, DHS is often not focused on threats of violence at all, but on responding to allegations of mistreatment by its own officers toward people in their custody or toward one another. A list of 2019 and 2020 congressional testimony by DHS officials typically included topics like monitoring reports on terrible conditions in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, on the mistreatment and deaths of immigrant children in Customs and Border Patrol custody, or on harassment and bullying within the Coast Guard.

When it came to terrorism, prior to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, DHS officials were primarily focused on their roles as gatekeepers for those entering or traveling within the U.S. In testimony they gave, there was no mention at all about the rise of domestic extremists and the risk they might pose to American lives and property. Typically, in public remarks at American University in March 2019, then DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen stated that Islamist militants pose the primary terrorist threat to the U.S.

On January 5, the day before the Capitol uprising, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis published a summary account that oh-so-presciently stated: “Nothing significant to report.” Never mind that law enforcement figures had recently been sharing numerous tips on the subject of domestic terrorism, including from soon-to-be protesters exchanging maps of the Capitol’s interior on social media.

Dangers Ahead

While some amount of redundancy is certainly to be expected in government, the level introduced by the Department of Homeland Security should raise issues that go beyond the logistical problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. After all, what does it say about a department created to make this country more secure that just about all those “cooks” focus on only one potential danger, while ignoring the main and all-too-obvious “security” threat to American lives right now?

It’s simple really. Though the word in its name is “homeland,” as in “domestic,” its focus is almost solely on those who come from outside our borders, both jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS that might indeed plot to launch or at least promote terror attacks here and — a particular emphasis of the Trump years — immigrants illegally crossing our border with Mexico.

Even more sinister, when it comes to redundancy, our government now has a second armed entity that can direct its force in an arbitrary way. Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the forever-war and new-Cold-War-focused Pentagon is, of course, staggeringly over-funded, even if its rank and file are — take my word for it as a military spouse — ever more depleted from our endless wars abroad, the pandemic ravaging this country, and relentless training. Meanwhile, since 9/11, we’ve overfunded what quickly became a second Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, capable of focusing on whatever it considers to be most politically expedient.

During the Trump administration, DHS suppressed those populations the president and his advisers deemed the greatest threats to this country, even if that meant young children whose families were seized at the southern border. No less chillingly, during the Trump presidency, DHS Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli acknowledged that the agency had sent its employees to monitor and suppress protests in Portland, Oregon, against the police killing of George Floyd. DHS officers began patrolling that city’s streets in unmarked vehicles and detaining protesters allegedly without even telling them why in order, according to Cuccinelli, to “move them to a safe location for questioning.” However, a November 2020 report issued by the DHS’s own inspector general concluded that the people deployed to Portland had no authority (or training) to act as law enforcement officers and had engaged in unconstitutional, violent attacks on protesters, journalists, members of watchdog groups, and bystanders.

All of this should be a reminder of what life in another Trump (or Trumpist) presidency in these (dis)United States could be like for a DHS that already ignores the real potential terrorists in this country. Count on one thing: any regard for civil liberties and human rights would undoubtedly go out the window.

If such a president were to use the bully pulpit to denigrate anyone who disagreed with him or whose way of life differed from his own, then imagine what a Department of Homeland Security that, even now, ignores the deepest security threat to this country, might be like. In a New Yorker article in 2020, journalist Masha Gessen pointed out that “homeland” was, from the start, “an anxious, combative word: it denotes a place under assault, in need of aggressive defense from shape-shifting dangers.” She argued that its sudden use by our government, post-9/11, suggested a move from defending ourselves against other militaries towards defending ourselves against individuals who might, in the end, threaten a leader’s power. And this, Gessen pointed out, is the premise on which secret police forces are built.

Before entering the mental-health field, I spent years living and working as an activist in Russia. Its Federal Security Service, or FSB, has used intimidation, detention without charge, and extra-judicial execution to show everyone from opposition figures to feminist rock bands the might of President Vladimir Putin. Its focus has been on keeping people from challenging the status quo of a patriarchal nation expected to show unquestioning loyalty to its strongman ruler.

The terror that many Russians feel about their internal police is, of course, rooted in history. The FSB’s predecessor, the Soviet Union’s notorious KGB, wielded similar violence against many whose free expression was deemed to threaten state power. Most friends and acquaintances of mine in Russia have relatives in older generations who were taken away, never to be seen again, for reasons as subjective as publishing a poem or talking to the wrong neighbor on the street.

As I reflect on how far state oppression can go, I only hope that the U.S. will never again see a leader who allows federal power to be used in such an arbitrary way. Yet, thanks in part to the Department of Homeland Security, I’m all too aware that this country is remarkably well set up for just such a figure.

National (In)Security?

It should be baffling to us all that the organization tasked with protecting our homeland was unable to avert the most threatening violent attack on our democratically elected government since Confederate troops advanced on Washington, late in the Civil War.

A friend and Park Police officer who was stationed at the Capitol on January 6th recalls being more scared than she had ever been in her 20 years of service. She and some 150 colleagues who specialize in crowd control around national infrastructure lacked a memorandum of understanding with the Capitol Police that would have allowed them to help defend Congress. She said that, as far as she could see, January 6th was a failure of leadership more than anything else because capable people had not been given permission to act.

If we and our lawmakers don’t hold the Department of Homeland Security — a creation of this country’s disastrous war on terror — to account for its actions (or lack of them) and question not just what it does but why it even exists, then I fear for our future. After all, what 9/11 really left us with was not just those destroyed towers in New York and a damaged Pentagon, but our own second Pentagon, a “defense” department capable of being aimed in the worst way possible at the American people. The problem is that the enemy of the future for DHS may very well be the American people — and not just the terrorists among us either.

And, in truth, none of us should be surprised. After all, the original proposal for that agency called for the targeting of invisible enemies capable of striking the “homeland.” In other words, the enemy could be anyone. It could, in fact, be the Department of Homeland Security. And that should concern us all.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

It is time for President Biden to turn the page once and for all on this sordid chapter in our nation’s history.

By Farrah Hassen | –

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The U.S. prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base reached its shameful 20th anniversary of operations on January 11 — with a legacy marked by the detention of nearly 800 Muslim men and boys, the majority of them held without charge or trial for years and many subjected to torture and other cruel and inhumane treatment.

President Biden has so far failed to take consequential action during his first year in office to fulfill his pledge of closing the prison before his term ends. His administration has in fact done the opposite and is now reportedly spending millions of dollars to upgrade it.

Without taking bold action, Biden risks following in President Obama’s footsteps of empty promises that ultimately perpetuate an untenable status quo. Meanwhile, the remaining 39 prisoners and our nation’s rule of law still languish.

Prolonging the Prison

Weeks after taking office, Biden initiated an interagency review of operations at Guantánamo. He has since overseen the release of only one prisoner, Abdul Latif Nasser from Morocco, even though 13 of the remaining 39 men had been approved for release by high-level U.S. government review processes.

Nasser spent 19 years at Guantánamo without charge before being freed last July. His release, however, had already been negotiated and approved during the Obama administration in 2016.

On the day of Gitmo’s 20th anniversary, the Pentagon announced that five more detainees held for years without charge have been approved for release, now bringing that total to 18. If Nasser’s case is any indication, however, detainees could still remain imprisoned at Gitmo well into or even beyond Biden’s presidency, with no seeming urgency in sight.

In a perhaps telling move, President Biden has not yet reestablished a special envoy position at the State Department created under President Obama to close Guantánamo. His contradictory approach to the prison is also evident in his administration’s latest plans to build a second courtroom at Gitmo for continued military commissions trials, likely to cost American taxpayers $4 million, as the New York Times reported on December 29, 2021. This suggests prolonging the prison rather than closing it.

The new courtroom aims to have military judges holding proceedings simultaneously by 2023, and disturbingly when it comes to transparency, will ban the public from the chamber.

A Legal Black Hole

Additional courtroom space will not address the real reasons behind the Kafkaesque judicial process at Guantánamo however. More importantly, the prison was intentionally designed to be a legal black hole for bypassing the U.S. Constitution and international law.

It was created in 2002 by then-President Bush during his “War on Terror” to ostensibly house those Vice President Dick Cheney declared “the worst of the worst,” but it has since become synonymous with blatant abuse and injustice.

Searing and dehumanizing images have emerged of prisoners in bright orange jumpsuits kneeling before U.S. soldiers, shackled, handcuffed, hooded, and blindfolded. Grisly human rights violations have also been exposed. Prisoners have been subjected to extraordinary rendition and documented acts of physical and psychological torture, including extended sleep deprivation and waterboarding during CIA “enhanced interrogations,” as well as religious persecution and humiliation for their Islamic faith.

Subsequent military commissions at Gitmo have further thwarted justice and transparency. These commissions have deprived detainees of their fundamental due process rights, including the right to meaningfully challenge the basis of their detention in federal court, as affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Boumediene v. Bush ruling of 2008. The Court’s earlier 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld also held that the military commissions used to try detainees at Guantánamo violated both U.S. law and the four Geneva Conventions.

Further, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty ratified by the U.S., not only prohibits torture under any circumstance, but also arbitrary and indefinite detention of any person without charge.

Getting Around Congress

While Biden has sought to expand Gitmo facilities, Congress has also put up roadblocks to closing it. The 2022 defense authorization bill, which Biden signed last December, extends prohibitions on transferring Gitmo detainees to the U.S. or other countries. This effectively prevents Biden from shutting down the prison, a fact he acknowledged while still signing the bill into law.

To bypass this congressional funding freeze, which also stymied Obama’s efforts to close Gitmo, President Biden can and must pursue executive action to honor his pledge.

He should use his executive authority to empower the Justice Department to pursue plea agreements in federal courts, which attorneys and human rights organizations have advocated. For the 12 men at various stages of military prosecution, Biden, as commander-in-chief, should pursue negotiated resolutions to their cases rather than rely on the failed military commissions, as Department of Defense attorney Ian Moss recommends.

Of the remaining 39 detainees, those already cleared for release and others who have not faced criminal charges should be immediately repatriated to their home countries if possible or resettled in third countries with security guarantees.

And fundamentally, meaningful accountability and remedy for decades of human rights abuses at Guantánamo must follow. As Human Rights Watch and the Watson Institute’s latest report reiterates, “The U.S. government has failed to hold account the key architects of post 9/11 unlawful renditions, detentions, and torture.”

While America’s longest war in Afghanistan may have ended, each day the Guantánamo prison remains open tarnishes our global standing. The indefinite detention of these prisoners without charge, alongside their mistreatment, flouts U.S. and international law. Furthermore, the end to war in Afghanistan has also eroded any legal justification that the U.S. may have had for their continued detention.

More personally for detainees, it means another day of confinement, without seeing their children and families. As five former prisoners wrote in an open letter to President Biden, “Some of us had children who were born in our absence and grew up without fathers. Others experienced the pain of learning that our close relatives died back home waiting in vain for news of our return. Waiting in vain for justice.”

The Guantánamo prison should never have reached its 20th anniversary. It is time to turn the page once and for all on this sordid chapter in our nation’s history.

Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

( Tomdispatch.com) – It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.

Days earlier, Congress had authorized Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determine[d] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons.” By then, it was already evident, as Bush said in his address, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. But it was equally clear that he had no intention of conducting a limited campaign. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he announced. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

Congress had already assented to whatever the president saw fit to do. It had voted 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate to grant an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that would give him (and presidents to come) essentially a free hand to make war around the world.

“I believe that it’s broad enough for the president to have the authority to do all that he needs to do to deal with this terrorist attack and threat,” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) said at the time. “I also think that it is tight enough that the constitutional requirements and limitations are protected.” That AUMF would, however, quickly become a blank check for boundless war.

In the two decades since, that 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has been formally invoked to justify counterterrorism (CT) operations — including ground combat, airstrikes, detention, and the support of partner militaries — in 22 countries, according to a new report by Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. During that same time, the number of terrorist groups threatening Americans and American interests has, according to the U.S. State Department, more than doubled.

Under that AUMF, U.S. troops have conducted missions across four continents. The countries in question include some of little surprise like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few unexpected nations like Georgia and Kosovo. “In many cases the executive branch inadequately described the full scope of U.S. actions,” writes Savell, noting the regular invocation of vague language, pretzeled logic, and weak explanations. “In other cases, the executive branch reported on ‘support for CT operations,’ but did not acknowledge that troops were or could be involved in hostilities with militants.”

Buy the Book

For nearly a year, the Biden administration has conducted a comprehensive evaluation of this country’s counterterrorism policies, while continuing to carry out airstrikes in at least four countries. The 2001 AUMF has, however, already been invoked by Biden to cover an unknown number of military missions in 12 countries: Afghanistan, Cuba, Djibouti, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Niger, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen.

“A lot is being said about the Biden administration’s rethinking of U.S. counterterrorism strategy, and while it’s true that Biden has conducted substantially less drone strikes so far than his predecessors, which is a positive step,” Savell told TomDispatch, “his invocation of the 2001 AUMF in at least 12 countries indicates that the U.S. will continue its counterterrorism activities in many places. Basically, the U.S. post-9/11 wars continue, even though U.S. troops have formally left Afghanistan.”

AUMFing in Africa

“[W]e are entering into a long twilight struggle against terrorism,” said Representative David Obey (WI), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, on the day that the 2001 AUMF’s fraternal twin, a $40 billion emergency spending bill, was passed. “This bill is a down payment on the efforts of this country to undertake to find and punish those who committed this terrible act and those who supported them.”

If you want to buy a house, a 20% down payment has been the traditional ideal. To buy an endless war on terror in 2001, however, less than 1% was all you needed. Since that initial installment, war costs have increased to about $5.8 trillion.

“This is going to be a very nasty enterprise,” Obey continued. “This is going to be a long fight.” On both counts he was dead on. Twenty-plus years later, according to the Costs of War Project, close to one million people have been killed in direct violence during this country’s ongoing war on terror.

Over those two decades, that AUMF has also been invoked to justify detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; efforts at a counterterrorism hub in the African nation of Djibouti to support attacks in Somalia and Yemen; and ground missions or air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The authorization has also been called on to justify “support” for partner armed forces in 13 countries. The line between “support” and combat can, however, be so thin as to be functionally nonexistent.

In October 2017, after the Islamic State ambushed U.S. troops in Niger — one of the 13 AUMF “support” nations — killing four American soldiers and wounding two others, U.S. Africa Command claimed that those troops were merely providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. Later, it was revealed that they had been working with a Nigerien force under the umbrella of Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging counterterrorism effort in northwest Africa. Until bad weather prevented it, in fact, they were slated to support another group of American commandos trying to kill or capture Islamic State leader Doundoun Cheffou as part of an effort known as Obsidian Nomad II.

Obsidian Nomad is, in fact, a 127e program — named for the budgetary authority (section 127e of title 10 of the U.S. Code) that allows Special Operations forces to use select local troops as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Run either by Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units, or by more generic “theater special operations forces,” its special operators have accompanied local commandos into the field across the African continent in operations indistinguishable from combat.

The U.S. military, for instance, ran a similar 127e counterterrorism effort, codenamed Obsidian Mosaic, in neighboring Mali. As Savell notes, no administration has ever actually cited the 2001 AUMF when it comes to Mali, but both Trump and Biden referred to providing “CT support to African and European partners” in that region. Meanwhile, Savell also notes, investigative journalists “revealed incidents in which U.S. forces engaged not just in support activities in Mali, but in active hostilities in 2015, 2017, and 2018, as well as imminent hostilities via the 127e program in 2019.” And Mali was only one of 13 African nations where U.S. troops saw combat between 2013 and 2017, according to retired Army Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who served at Africa Command and then headed Special Operations Command Africa during those years.

In 2017, the Intercept exposed the torture of prisoners at a Cameroonian military base that was used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for training missions and drone surveillance. That same year, Cameroon was cited for the first time under the 2001 AUMF as part of an effort to “support CT operations.” It was, according to Bolduc, yet another nation where U.S. troops saw combat.

American forces also fought in Kenya at around the same time, said Bolduc, even taking casualties. That country has, in fact, been cited under the AUMF during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. While Biden and Trump acknowledged U.S. troop “deployments” in Kenya in the years from 2017 to 2021 to “support CT operations,” Savell notes that neither made “reference to imminent hostilities through an active 127e program beginning at least in 2017, nor to a combat incident in January 2020, when al Shabaab militants attacked a U.S. military base in Manda Bay, Kenya, and killed three Americans, one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors.”

In addition to cataloging the ways in which that 2001 AUMF has been used, Savell’s report sheds light on glaring inconsistencies in the justifications for doing so, as well as in which nations the AUMF has been invoked and why. Few war-on-terror watchers would, for example, be shocked to see Libya on the list of countries where the authorization was used to justify air strikes or ground operations. They might, however, be surprised by the dates cited, as it was only invoked to cover military operations in 2013, and then from 2015 to 2019.

In 2011, however, during Operation Odyssey Dawn and the NATO mission that succeeded it, Operation Unified Protector (OUP), the U.S. military and eight other air forces flew sorties against the military of then-Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, leading to his death and the end of his regime. Altogether, NATO reportedly conducted around 9,700 strike sorties and dropped more than 7,700 precision-guided munitions.

Between March and October of 2011, in fact, U.S. drones flying from Italy regularly stalked the skies above Libya. “Our Predators shot 243 Hellfire missiles in the six months of OUP, over 20 percent of the total of all Hellfires expended in the 14 years of the system’s deployment,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Gary Peppers, the commander of the 324th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron during Operation Unified Protector, told the Intercept in 2018. Despite those hundreds of drone strikes, not to mention attacks by manned aircraft, the Obama administration argued, as Savell notes, that the attacks did not constitute “hostilities” and so did not require AUMF citation.

The War for Terror?

In the wake of 9/11, 90% of Americans were braying for war. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was one of them. “[W]e must prosecute the war that has been thrust upon us with resolve, with fortitude, with unity, until the evil terrorist groups that are waging war against our country are eradicated from the face of the Earth,” he said. More than 20 years later, al-Qaeda still exists, its affiliates have multiplied, and harsher and deadlier ideological successors have emerged on multiple continents.

As both political parties rushed the United States into a “forever war” that globalized the death and suffering al-Qaeda meted out on 9/11, only Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood up to urge restraint. “Our country is in a state of mourning,” she explained. “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”

While the United States was defeated in Afghanistan last year, the war on terror continues to spiral elsewhere around world. Last month, in fact, President Biden informed Congress that the U.S. military “continues to work with partners around the globe, with a particular focus” on Africa and the Middle East, and “has deployed forces to conduct counterterrorism operations and to advise, assist, and accompany security forces of select foreign partners on counterterrorism operations.”

In his letter, Biden acknowledged that troops continue detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and support counterterrorism operations by the armed forces of the Philippines. He also assured Congress and the American people that the United States “remains postured to address threats” in Afghanistan; continues its ground missions and air strikes in Iraq and Syria; has forces “deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS”; others in Turkey “to support Counter-ISIS operations”; around 90 troops deployed to Lebanon “to enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities”; and has sent more than 2,100 troops to “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups,” as well as approximately 3,150 personnel to Jordan “to support Counter-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”

In Africa, Biden noted, U.S. forces “based outside Somalia continue to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISIS and al-Shabaab, an associated force of al Qaeda” through air strikes and assistance to Somali partners and are deployed to Kenya to support counterterrorism operations. They also remain deployed in Djibouti “for purposes of staging for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations,” while in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, U.S. troops “conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations” and advise, assist, and accompany local forces on counterterrorism missions.

Just days after Biden sent that letter to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the release of an annual counterterrorism report that also served as a useful assessment of more than 20 years of AUMF-fueled counterterror operations. Blinken pointed to the “spread of ISIS branches and networks and al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Africa,” while noting that “the number of terrorist attacks and the overall number of fatalities resulting from those attacks increased by more than 10 percent in 2020 compared with 2019.” The report, itself, was even bleaker. It noted that “ISIS-affiliated groups increased the volume and lethality of their attacks across West Africa, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and northern Mozambique,” while al-Qaeda “further bolstered its presence” in the Middle East and Africa. The “terrorism threat,” it added, “has become more geographically dispersed in regions around the world” while “terrorist groups remained a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide.” Worse than any qualitative assessment, however, was the quantitative report card that it offered.

The State Department had counted 32 foreign terrorist organizations scattered around the world when the 2001 AUMF was passed.. Twenty years of war, around six trillion dollars, and nearly one million corpses later, the number of terrorist groups, according to that congressionally mandated report, stands at 69.

With the passage of that AUMF, George W. Bush declared that America’s war would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet after 20 years, four presidents, and invocations of the AUMF in 22 countries, the number of terrorist groups that “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security” has more than doubled.

“The 2001 AUMF is like a blank check that U.S. presidents have used to conduct military violence in an ever-expanding number of operations in any number of places, without adequate oversight from Congress. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg,” Savell told TomDispatch. “To truly end U.S. war violence in the name of counterterrorism, repealing the 2001 AUMF is the first step, but much more needs to be done to push for government accountability on more secretive authorities and military programs.”

When Congress gave Bush that blank check — now worth $5.8 trillion and counting — he said that the outcome of the war on terror was already “certain.” Twenty years later, it’s a certainty that the president and Congress, Representative Barbara Lee aside, had it all wrong.

As 2022 begins, the Biden administration has an opportunity to end a decades-long mistake by backing efforts to replace, sunset, or repeal that 2001 AUMF — or Congress could step up and do so on its own. Until then, however, that same blank check remains in effect, while the tab for the war on terror, as well as its AUMF-fueled toll in human lives, continues to rise.

Copyright 2021 Nick Turse

Via Tomdispatch.com