Post by Mya on Feb 14, 2022 8:56:37 GMT
JD: We’ve forgotten how much of a ludicrous culture shift took place, and how the security state was successful in marketing this coalescing, but also insidious, idea of an all-encompassing, quote-unquote, war on terror. Can you talk a bit about the culture change that occurred as a result, too?
SA: Yeah, absolutely, because it is wild. Going back and rereading both my own journalism from the time ,as well as what other people had been writing about these events contemporaneously, was just bracing. And the ways in which you see, in contemporary journalism, the kind of uncritical acceptance of extremely violent language and practice in the name of righteous revenge and aggrieved patriotism and justification, I certainly don’t exempt my own bad journalism.
Dan Rather: Special expanded coverage: America fights back.
Bob Woodruff: We have two stories from Afghanistan tonight that could deeply affect American interests there.
Brian Williams: Andrea, after Pearl Harbor, people showed their anger by elbowing each other in line to sign up to go fight.
Tom Friedman: You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this. That, Charlie, was what this war was about.
Lawrence Eagleburger: The whole idea is to take apart the military capability of the Taliban, and cause the regime to collapse, and in the process unearth bin Laden, and his crowd, and get them.
SA: We should also recognize that it’s not just the security state that’s pushing this culture shift. It is politicians of both parties that are doing that in various styles and to various degrees as well. We have really widespread elite complicity in both the construction and maintenance of the war on terror.
But you saw the culture just absolutely conquered by the reign of terror. You saw it in ways both subtle — where New York City subway trains suddenly put an American flag on them, which remains to this day — and then you see them in really unsubtle ways, like Toby Keith writing “courtesy of the red, white and blue” —
Toby Keith: The U.S. of A. — because we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.
SA: — to indicate that we’re still ready to beat the shit out of you into submission if you resist, because 9/11. You see it in how quickly Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Television entertainment company creates a fantasy war on terror called “24,” in which the good guy, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is enthusiastically torturing people — [sounds of Kiefer Sutherland beating someone] — in a circumstance of emergency.
24 Character: Please, please, you’ve got to stop him.
24 Character: He needs answers. And he’s gonna get them.
SA: He’s always got to stop a bomb from exploding, and only he is brave and serious enough to stop that as expressed by his willingness to engage in brutality and only brutality against those people who have the information about this imminent attack that only torture can extract in order to save people. In reality, this never happens. It certainly doesn’t happen throughout the CIA and the military’s warren of post-9/11 torture prisons.
But what it does as well is not just normalize the need for that brutality — at one point, several years later, the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the guiding legal light of the right, during the emergence of revelations about torture from the CIA and the military, says: What are you going to do? Are you gonna arrest Jack Bauer?
“24,” like the culture at large, really saw as its real villains, not just the terrorists that Jack Bauer had to torture, but the bureaucrats, the civil libertarians, the attorneys, and the politicians who were there to say: You can’t torture that guy, Jack Bauer, that’s barbaric! And that goes as well to serve the purposes of the war on terror by making sure that we thought of the responsible thing to do during the war on terror to unleash the people who are willing to do, you know, the rough thing necessary to safeguard freedom.
JD: The mania that was produced by this was wildly bipartisan, both politically and socially. Following 9/11, the security state is given essentially limitless power — again, in a bipartisan way. The Patriot Act, the AUMF, even FISA, many of these mechanisms are still in place to this day. How is the Bush administration able to construct this surveillance apparatus in plain sight?
SA: The Bush administration does this both in plain sight and then out of plain sight away from any meaningful democratic review. Part of that it does in the overt ways, through, as you mentioned, the Patriot Act.
GWB: This new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the internet, and cell phones. As of today, we’ll be able to better meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology.
SA: In addition to being kind of the teeth of the war on association emanating far and far outwards from any actual terrorist — any actual infliction of violence — to those who know those people and then know those people, or who contribute money to causes that present themselves as refugee charities or so on, and so forth, and then allowing surveillance to route away from me seeking Jack’s records, but toward me seeking from other services you use for communication. So those services are more likely to turn that stuff over to me — a guy with a badge — then potentially you would be if they served you directly.
Even beyond that, which was: A, controversial in its very brief window of debate, but also B, overwhelmingly approved by Congress, it is at that same time that, in secret, Mike Hayden at the NSA is constructing surveillance at a scale simply never seen before by humankind. He was constructing an apparatus that functioned as a panopticon to pick up, at first, Americans’ communications into Afghanistan, and then very quickly became something far more ambitious.
When, a year later, Hayden is asked to testify to a joint House and Senate Intelligence Committees investigation of what went wrong — not from Bush, but from the intelligence agencies ahead of 9/11 — Hayden gives this really impassioned speech that, on the surface of it, seems like a really important call for people to democratically debate where they want the boundaries between liberty and security to be drawn.
Mike Hayden: We have to find the right balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty. If we fail in this effort by drawing the line in the wrong place — that is, overly favoring liberty or security — then the terrorists win and liberty loses in either case.
SA: But, in truth, Hayden, by activating the surveillance program known as Stellar Wind, the NSA decides that boundary for itself, it does this in secret with practically no one on even the secret surveillance court that is supposed to oversee these operations, knowing except for the chief justice of it, and then in kind of rudimentary outline, the intelligence and political leadership of Congress, they take that as consent. It’s also clear from what we know of the record so far that that leadership in Congress, Democratic and Republican, does not meaningfully dissent from these operations.
theintercept.com/2021/09/01/intercepted-reign-of-terror-spencer-ackerman/
SA: Yeah, absolutely, because it is wild. Going back and rereading both my own journalism from the time ,as well as what other people had been writing about these events contemporaneously, was just bracing. And the ways in which you see, in contemporary journalism, the kind of uncritical acceptance of extremely violent language and practice in the name of righteous revenge and aggrieved patriotism and justification, I certainly don’t exempt my own bad journalism.
Dan Rather: Special expanded coverage: America fights back.
Bob Woodruff: We have two stories from Afghanistan tonight that could deeply affect American interests there.
Brian Williams: Andrea, after Pearl Harbor, people showed their anger by elbowing each other in line to sign up to go fight.
Tom Friedman: You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this. That, Charlie, was what this war was about.
Lawrence Eagleburger: The whole idea is to take apart the military capability of the Taliban, and cause the regime to collapse, and in the process unearth bin Laden, and his crowd, and get them.
SA: We should also recognize that it’s not just the security state that’s pushing this culture shift. It is politicians of both parties that are doing that in various styles and to various degrees as well. We have really widespread elite complicity in both the construction and maintenance of the war on terror.
But you saw the culture just absolutely conquered by the reign of terror. You saw it in ways both subtle — where New York City subway trains suddenly put an American flag on them, which remains to this day — and then you see them in really unsubtle ways, like Toby Keith writing “courtesy of the red, white and blue” —
Toby Keith: The U.S. of A. — because we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.
SA: — to indicate that we’re still ready to beat the shit out of you into submission if you resist, because 9/11. You see it in how quickly Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Television entertainment company creates a fantasy war on terror called “24,” in which the good guy, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is enthusiastically torturing people — [sounds of Kiefer Sutherland beating someone] — in a circumstance of emergency.
24 Character: Please, please, you’ve got to stop him.
24 Character: He needs answers. And he’s gonna get them.
SA: He’s always got to stop a bomb from exploding, and only he is brave and serious enough to stop that as expressed by his willingness to engage in brutality and only brutality against those people who have the information about this imminent attack that only torture can extract in order to save people. In reality, this never happens. It certainly doesn’t happen throughout the CIA and the military’s warren of post-9/11 torture prisons.
But what it does as well is not just normalize the need for that brutality — at one point, several years later, the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the guiding legal light of the right, during the emergence of revelations about torture from the CIA and the military, says: What are you going to do? Are you gonna arrest Jack Bauer?
“24,” like the culture at large, really saw as its real villains, not just the terrorists that Jack Bauer had to torture, but the bureaucrats, the civil libertarians, the attorneys, and the politicians who were there to say: You can’t torture that guy, Jack Bauer, that’s barbaric! And that goes as well to serve the purposes of the war on terror by making sure that we thought of the responsible thing to do during the war on terror to unleash the people who are willing to do, you know, the rough thing necessary to safeguard freedom.
JD: The mania that was produced by this was wildly bipartisan, both politically and socially. Following 9/11, the security state is given essentially limitless power — again, in a bipartisan way. The Patriot Act, the AUMF, even FISA, many of these mechanisms are still in place to this day. How is the Bush administration able to construct this surveillance apparatus in plain sight?
SA: The Bush administration does this both in plain sight and then out of plain sight away from any meaningful democratic review. Part of that it does in the overt ways, through, as you mentioned, the Patriot Act.
GWB: This new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the internet, and cell phones. As of today, we’ll be able to better meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology.
SA: In addition to being kind of the teeth of the war on association emanating far and far outwards from any actual terrorist — any actual infliction of violence — to those who know those people and then know those people, or who contribute money to causes that present themselves as refugee charities or so on, and so forth, and then allowing surveillance to route away from me seeking Jack’s records, but toward me seeking from other services you use for communication. So those services are more likely to turn that stuff over to me — a guy with a badge — then potentially you would be if they served you directly.
Even beyond that, which was: A, controversial in its very brief window of debate, but also B, overwhelmingly approved by Congress, it is at that same time that, in secret, Mike Hayden at the NSA is constructing surveillance at a scale simply never seen before by humankind. He was constructing an apparatus that functioned as a panopticon to pick up, at first, Americans’ communications into Afghanistan, and then very quickly became something far more ambitious.
When, a year later, Hayden is asked to testify to a joint House and Senate Intelligence Committees investigation of what went wrong — not from Bush, but from the intelligence agencies ahead of 9/11 — Hayden gives this really impassioned speech that, on the surface of it, seems like a really important call for people to democratically debate where they want the boundaries between liberty and security to be drawn.
Mike Hayden: We have to find the right balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty. If we fail in this effort by drawing the line in the wrong place — that is, overly favoring liberty or security — then the terrorists win and liberty loses in either case.
SA: But, in truth, Hayden, by activating the surveillance program known as Stellar Wind, the NSA decides that boundary for itself, it does this in secret with practically no one on even the secret surveillance court that is supposed to oversee these operations, knowing except for the chief justice of it, and then in kind of rudimentary outline, the intelligence and political leadership of Congress, they take that as consent. It’s also clear from what we know of the record so far that that leadership in Congress, Democratic and Republican, does not meaningfully dissent from these operations.
theintercept.com/2021/09/01/intercepted-reign-of-terror-spencer-ackerman/