Jeff Sparrow Friday 16 January 2015
It’s time to re-examine the disastrous consequences of the “war on terror”. If only because it might help us resist the politics of fear today
‘Rumsfeld calculated, perfectly calmly, that the panic provided the administration a brief opportunity to push through long-desired policies.’ Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The CIA tortured men to death because Americans were frightened.
That was Barack Obama’s explanation for the atrocities contained in the Senate report (remember that?), a document that, while heavily censored, gave a glimpse of the almost medieval barbarisms employed by the agency in its secret dungeons.
“I understand why it happened,” Obama said. “I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this.”
Bill Clinton agreed.
It was “a very frightening time in America”, the former president explained.
“A lot of people did a lot of things that they thought were necessary to protect us that may have been inconsistent with or flatly contradictory to international norms.”
But these claims must be immediately amended, for not everyone was frightened after 9/11. Some people reacted with chilling deliberation.
“Need to move swiftly,” secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld said on the day of the attack. “Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.”
Rumsfeld calculated, perfectly calmly, that the panic provided the administration a brief opportunity to push through long-desired policies, irrespective of their relationship to 9/11.
The most obvious was an attack on Iraq, plans for which began almost immediately.
Rumsfeld’s private calm (those notes to his aides were never meant to leak) contrasts starkly with the hysteria that dominated the public sphere, an hysteria to which he contributed.
For the last three months of 2000 – and for much of 2002 – politicians and pundits competed with each other to proclaim just how scared they were.
Fear became, paradoxically, an overt expression of strength: the more bizarre and over-the-top you sounded, the more “serious” you seemed about national security.
Thus, almost without exception, terrorism “experts” assured the public that a second wave of 9/11-style attacks would take place imminently.
Looking back at that time, Rudy Giulani, the former New York City mayor, remembered “[a]nybody, any one of these security experts, including myself, would have told you on September 11, 2001, we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multi-years of attacks like this.”
The circulation of letters containing powdered anthrax – later attributed to a disgruntled scientist – allowed the rhetoric to ramp up further. Attorney general John Ashcroft painted scenarios in which terrorists used crop-dusting planes to poison the heartland, while President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and – of course! – Rumsfeld pointed the finger at Saddam Hussein, already a familiar villain.
“The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas weapons for over a decade,” explained Bush.
Naturally, people were frightened. Naturally, as Rumsfeld understood so well, that fear provided a political window.
Something must be done, the cry went up. Do it now! Do it at once!
In 2015, we’re still living with the consequences.
Torture’s one of them.
On 16 September 2001, in the very early days of the panic, Dick Cheney explained during an NBC interview: “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will.”
Everyone knew what that meant. But something had to be done, and torture was certainly something.
The rectal “exams” and “rehydrations”, the beatings, the water tortures and the other techniques of interrogatory enhancement followed more or less inevitably.
The Senate report might have now entirely disappeared from the American political scene but does anyone truly think that, around the world, the deeds performed in Cheney’s black sites have forgotten?
As Robert Fisk pointed out the other day, France’s relationship with its Muslim minority is still marked by the Algerian struggle for independence, a bloody conflict marked by terrorism on the one hand, and torture, assassination and repression on the other. That war ended half a century ago but its consequences are still being felt.
Similarly, Obama might want to look forward rather than back when it comes to torture but the past will have its due, irrespective of whether that suits the presidential agenda or not.
If we’re serious about peace, we might begin by re-examining the disastrous legacy of the “war on terror” so far, rather than just plunging ahead as if the million or more lives lost and the trillions of dollars spent meant nothing at all.
No matter how much politicians want to forget it, Rumsfeld’s war – the Iraq invasion he “swept up” in the panic – will be shaping international politics for decades to come, including in France.
Unfortunately, in the wake of the Paris atrocities, we seem to be reliving those initial weeks after 9/11, a “scoundrel time” in which the understandable numbness that so many feel provides fertile ground for demagogues and political operators.
Already, the cry’s gone up for pat solutions and decisive action – which, as we saw in 2001, invariably means politicians slapping a fresh coat of paint on their personal hobbyhorses, however weather beaten these might be.
Many of the leaders marching under the “Je suis Charlie” banner are simultaneously dusting off schemes for stricter anti-terror regimes.
Free speech is sacred – and here’s a plan to retain all your internet data.
“In politics,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”
The future lasts a long, long time. Let’s remember that ideas that were terrible yesterday remain so today – and the next day and the day after that and for all the other days in which we’ll be affected by them.
