War on Terror

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[edit] Overview

The United States's War on Terror (2001-), also known as The War on Terrorism, is an example of an endless crisis. It is also a misnomer or at least a misleading use of the word "war", as it can lead to confusion over the appropriate response. "War" suggests retaliation using techniques effective in standard (symmetric) warfare but which are not effective (and even counterproductive) when used in asymmetric warfare.

The United States experienced one morning of coordinated attacks by perhaps a few dozen individuals on September 11, 2001; there have been no further attacks since, although several attempts have apparently been thwarted. There certainly has been no presence of enemy troops on or near US soil for many decades, probably not since Pearl Harbor.

[edit] Quotes

  • George W. Bush: "When terrorists murder at the World Trade Center, or car bombers strike in Baghdad, or hijackers plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic, or terrorist militias shoot rockets at Israeli towns, they are all pursuing the same objective - to turn back the advance of freedom, and impose a dark vision of tyranny and terror across the world."1
  • Professor Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York1:
    There's something profoundly illogical about talking about a war on terrorism. It's like a war on weather. You know, terrorism is a method, methodology, it's an approach, it's killing civilians to achieve a political objective. It's a means. It's not a discrete thing. It's not like Burma, you can have a war on Burma, you can have a war on fruit trees, because that's something physical. Terrorism is not tangible, and, as one might have guessed given this President, this administration, their orientations, this was a sort of portmanteau term which was used to group together those targets that they already had decided they were going to go after - so-called "rogue regimes", including governments that had and have had absolutely nothing to do with the people who attacked the United States, were a target before 9/11...
    In fact, the Iraqi government was an opponent of al-Qaeda. The Iranian government has always been an opponent of al-Qaeda. Hezbollah, which is another target of the war on the terror, has always been an opponent of al-Qaeda, so we are not talking about the people who attacked the United States. We are not talking about the terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans.
    To lump every form of radical Islam together, to lump for example Hamas - which is a movement that's never attacked the United States, which has not got attacking the United States or the West or opposing Western values as central to its program - with al-Qaeda is a huge, huge error. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake. Hamas is... whatever the heinousness of the means they may have used, it's a resistance movement.
    Hezbollah similarly is essentially a Lebanese resistance movement. To lump them together with al-Qaeda, which is a world-wide anarchistic, anti-Western millenarian movement which has no roots anywhere - it's a global movement - there's a fundamental falsehood there. A fundamental falsehood, and it has led the United States to do something which is extremely dangerous, which is to turn itself into the opponent of movements which, throughout the Islamic world, because they are seen as legitimate resistance movements, and are very popular, in a way, that is driving people towards the more radical, towards the much more dangerous movements like al-Qaeda.
The Rockridge Institute says:

The phrases "war on terror" and "crimes against humanity" use different words to frame the same issue and, in doing so, evoke different ideas and guide us toward different actions. The phrase "war on terror" frames the issue as an open-ended military action against a vague, indeterminate enemy, with open-ended war powers given to the President for an indefinite period. "Crimes against humanity" frames our response to 9/11 as a police action where international law enforcement agencies are directed to root out groups and individual criminals using many of the same methods effective against crime syndicates. Further, these phrases trigger related moral and political principle frames deep in our unconscious minds, shaping how we experience our relationships to our political leaders and to people in other countries.

"War" triggers fundamental moral and political principle frames that evoke an evil world in which we must look to an authoritarian President as commander-in-chief, whose orders we obey in order to protect our entire society from destruction by foreign enemies. With these frames dominating our thinking, we are more likely to tolerate giving up some of our civil liberties and dropping bombs that kill innocent civilians. By contrast, "crimes against humanity," as both a word and issue frame, triggers deep moral and political principle frames of an interdependent world where dangers occur, but they are not debilitating. With this frame foremost in our minds, we are more likely to protect society by enlisting the police, while also reaching out to our neighbors, who are suffering in other countries where poverty, disease, and oppression make it more likely that people will become terrorists.

The persistent repetition of the "war on terror" word and issue frame triggers and reinforces deep moral and political principle frames. So, even when someone opposes the Iraq policy, they often do it by invoking the frame they wish to negate. This is why Americans who want to shift the ideas underlying American political debate — towards a greater emphasis on the values of empathy, social responsibility, fairness, honesty, integrity, and community — must do so by changing the deep moral and political principle frames that we use in thinking. We do this in large part by stating these frames openly and often. In other words, it is nearly impossible to persuasively articulate a law enforcement policy on Iraq when one is continually using the phrase "war on terror."

[edit] References

[edit] Note 1

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[edit] Filed Links

  • 2008-07-13 /S/D/ Overstating Our Fears “The threat from Islamic terrorism is no larger now than it was before Sept. 11, 2001. Islamic societies the world over are in turmoil and will continue for years to produce small numbers of dedicated killers, whom we must stop. U.S. and allied intelligence do a good job at that; these efforts, however, will never succeed in neutralizing every terrorist, everywhere. .. Why are these views so starkly at odds with what the Bush administration has said since the beginning of the "Global War on Terror"? This administration has heard what it has wished to hear, pressured the intelligence community to verify preconceptions, undermined or sidetracked opposing voices, and both instituted and been victim of procedures that guaranteed that the slightest terrorist threat reporting would receive disproportionate weight -- thereby comforting the administration's preconceptions and policy inclinations.” Commentary: George Washington's blog
  • 2008-07-02 /S/D/ China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo ”What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. .. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
  • 2008-06-15 /S/D/ America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men “But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy. .. "He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said. .. An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.”
  • 2008-06-13 /S/D/ McCain: Guantanamo Ruling One of the ‘Worst Decisions’ in History “The presumptive GOP nominee said the decision, a 5-4 ruling Thursday that determined Guantanamo detainees have the right to seek release in civilian courts, would lead to a wave of frivolous challenges. .. “We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called ... habeas corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases,” he said at a town hall meeting in New Jersey.” So much for McCain being anti-torture.
  • 2008-05-16 /S/D/ Is the U.S. the World's Largest State Sponsor of Terrorism? Some highlights of American terrorism, past and present. We owe it to ourselves to put a stop to this. -W.
  • 2008-05-15 /S/D/ Biden calls Bush comments 'bulls**t' Speaking about George W. Bush's comments accusing Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats of wanting to appease terrorists, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden said “He’s the guy who’s weakened us. He’s the guy that’s increased the number of terrorists in the world. His policies have produced this vulnerability the United States has. His intelligence community pointed that out not me. The NIE has pointed that out and what are you talking about, is he going to fire Condi Rice? Condi Rice has talked about the need to sit down. So his first two appeasers are Rice and Gates. I hope he comes home and does something.” A longer and uncensored account of Biden's comments is here. Note that most of the comments in that latter link are supportive of Bush while completely ignoring the substance of Biden's remarks.
  • 2008-05-09 /S/D/ Report Pushes Passage Of Thought Crimes Bill “The Internet is now becoming a new front in the phony terror war. Legislation like the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 that is in the forms of HR 1955 and S 1959 which seek to give the government powers to define thoughts and belief systems as homegrown terrorism, is on the brink of being pushed down our throats. HR 1955 was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 404-6 and now it appears as if the U.S. Senate is attempting to justify its future passage. ... First off, the threat of terrorist operated Internet sites is a complete fraud. IntelCenter, a CIA front group which supposedly finds all of these Al-Qaeda terrorist video and audio tapes on the Internet, never provides the source of where they obtain the terrorist propaganda. If these materials were real terrorist propaganda and they didn’t want to reveal the source, why have we not seen warrants served, the web servers seized and people questioned? Why is it that the terrorist video and audio tapes that are released by this so called terrorist organization always seems to indirectly help the Bush administration? ... Al-Qaeda is a massive psychological warfare operation designed to make the American people believe that the war on terror is actually real.”
  • 2008-05-07 /S/D/ Neocons Admit that "War On Terror" Is a Hoax “Key war on terror architect Douglas Feith has now confirmed Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Wesley Clark in admitting that the so-called War on Terror is a hoax. .. In fact, starting right after 9/11 -- at the latest -- the goal has always been to create "regime change" and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon so as to protect Israel. And the goal was never really to destroy Al Qaeda.” Crossposts: LiveLeak
  • 2008-05-06 /S/D/ Terrorist Triage “In those days [1998-2000] Sheehan was among that persistent, relentless and finally shrill chorus of voices trying to warn the Clinton administration that Osama bin Laden and his boys represented a horrific danger to the United States and its interests. Days after the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors, experienced analysts like Sheehan at the State Department and Richard A. Clarke at the White House were certain Al Qaeda was behind it, but there was no support for retaliation among the Clintonistas or, even less, the Pentagon.” Um... that last claim is so not true; Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan specifically because of the threat he perceived from Osama. “But what's interesting is not that Sheehan was so right, for all the good it did, or that President Bill Clinton and then President George W. Bush were so wrong not to pay attention. What's interesting is Sheehan's argument now that Al Qaeda just isn't the existential-twilight-struggle threat it's often cracked up to be.”
  • 2008-03-27 /S/D/ Supplier Under Scrutiny on Aging Arms for Afghans “ Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. .. But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur. .. With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces. .. Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging...”
  • 2008-03-24 /S/D/ The conservative case for Barack Obama by Andrew J. Bacevich: “Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives — and the state of the conservative movement — they could do worse.”
  • 2008-03-21 /S/D/ How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? by Andrew Sullivan: “But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent — even glib — about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that Bush and Cheney created and oversaw. I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom — the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, it was yet another epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean.”
  • 2008-03-16 /S/D/ Gays worse than terrorists, but hey, no offense intended! “Gays are a bigger threat than Islamist terrorists? Only if one feels less than confident about their own sexuality. In the real world, gays don’t threaten anyone with their choices. Kern, however, has paranoid notions of gay infiltration of city councils in an effort to drive America to ruin. Oh, the humanity!” A right-wing blog actually attacking gay-bashing -- whooda thunk it?
  • 2008-03-03 /S/D/ White House guts Intelligence Oversight Board “the White House issued a new executive order effectively gutting the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), “created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.” Under the order, many of the IOB’s investigative powers will now be transfered to DNI Mike McConnell. “Rather than intelligence agencies reporting their activities to the board for review, they will now report them to McConnell,” the AP notes. Smintheus has more.”
  • 2008-02-18 /S/D/ Why Torts Trumped Terrorism “Pelosi could have exercised leadership prerogatives and called up the FISA bill to pass with unanimous Republican support. Instead, she refused to bring to the floor a bill approved overwhelmingly by the Senate. House Democratic opposition included left-wing members typified by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, but they were only a small faction of those opposed. The true reason for blocking the bill was Senate-passed retroactive immunity to protect from lawsuits private telecommunications firms asked to eavesdrop by the government. The nation's torts bar, vigorously pursuing such suits, has spent months lobbying hard against immunity.” Novak frames Pelosi's decision as bowing to a special interest group (trial lawyers) rather than being a principled stand against Bush's illegal wiretapping.
  • 2008-02-16 /S/D/ Saudis 'threatened Blair with terror' “Previously secret files, just revealed, describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries. Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court on Thursday to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists.”
  • 2008-01-24 /S/D/ Iraq: The Damage of Falsehoods “The Bush administration calls Iraq the central front in the war on terror. Give me a break. Iraq is a place where President Bush decided to place 165,000 troops as stationary targets for an unidentifiable enemy to attack and kill continuously. All while the real terrorists who are plotting to attack us here at home are roaming freely around the world, and Bin Laden is safely hidden in the mountains of Pakistan. How does that make Iraq the central front in the war on terror?”
  • 2008-01-13 /S/D/ Unraveling the Myth of Al Qaida “The myth of "al Qaida" is built on an expansive foundation of many half-truths and hidden facts. It is a CIA creation. It was shaped by the agency to serve as a substitute "enemy" for America, replacing the Soviets whom the Islamist forces had driven from Afghanistan. Unknown American officials, at an indeterminate point in time, made the decision to fabricate the tale of a mythical worldwide network of Islamic terrorists from the exploits of the Afghan Mujahedeen. The CIA already had their own network of Islamic militant "freedom fighters," all that was needed were a few scattered terrorist attacks against US targets and a credible heroic figurehead, to serve as the "great leader."”
  • 2007-12-20 /S/D/ Inherent Powers, Ignoble History Make New Idea Anything But Innocuous “According to the bill, “homegrown terrorists” can be anyone who “... intimidate(s) or coerce(s) the United States government, the civilian population ... or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social belief,” a definition broad enough to include Americans who organize mass marches on Washington to “coerce” changes in government policy.”
  • 2007-12-18 /S/D/ 9/11 "Confession" Falls Apart “Bottom line: According to the FBI, the information which formed the basis for the 9/11 Commission Report was based on the ramblings of a literally crazy guy after he had been tortured for many, many weeks in a manner that was guaranteed to destroy his trust in his interrogators and which was contrary to effective interrogation techniques.”
  • 2007-09-20 /S/D/ Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Persons Who Commit, Threaten to Commit, or Support Terrorism George W. Bush extends the national emergency declared on 2001-09-23 (in response to the 2001-09-11 attacks) for another year.
  • 2007-08-01 /S/D/ Bush Keeps Israel Close, Saudi Arabia Closer "From the White House comes the news that self-styled anti-terrorism crusader George Bush wants to sell $20 billion in high-tech military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the source of most of the financing, and 15 of the 19 hijackers, for the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the United States." Where are all the hardline anti-terror, "you're either with us or you're a traitor" crowd?? Why aren't they screaming about this?
  • 2007-03-25 /S/D/ Terrorized by 'War on Terror': How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America (alt) by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski: “The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.”
  • 2007-02-25 /S/D/ US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran “America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme. .. The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime.” So... in pursuit of the War on Terror, we are now funding terrorist organizations.
  • 2006-12-04 /S/D/ Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation “That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.” Article describes the completely out-of-proportion treatment given to an American citizen on US soil, just because of an accusation that he is a terrorist. Commentary: digby
  • 2006-09-23 /S/D/ Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat “A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.” ... “It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.”
  • 2006-09-11 /S/D/ Fascists Under the Bed by Patrick J. Buchanan: “Contrary to what Bush believes, the 9/11 killers and London and Madrid bombers were not out to repeal the Bill of Rights, if any ever read it. They are out to kill us and we have to get them first. ... If Mr. Bush does not want a war of civilizations, he will drop these propaganda terms that are designed to inflame passions rather than inform the public of the nature of the war we are in.”
  • 2005-07-25 /S/D/ Guardsman: CIA beat Iraqis with hammer handles “CIA officials used a sledgehammer handle to beat various prisoners in Iraq, and one official, whose name is classified, would often brag about his abuse of prisoners, according to testimony in a closed session of a military hearing. ... In the March hearing, Sgt. 1st Class Gerold Pratt of the Utah National Guard said he saw classified personnel use a 15-inch wooden sledgehammer handle to hit prisoners. .. "They'd ask you a question, and if they didn't like it, they'd hit you," he said.”
  • 2001-09-25 /S/D/ Machiavelli on Our War by Michael A. Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at AEI. Written 2 weeks after 9/11, the author expounds a philosophy rife with false dilemma – good versus evil, us versus them, winning versus losing – and advocates this thinking as the best possible guidance for our leaders.

[edit] Collections

[edit] Discussion

[edit] Editorial

[edit] News

[edit] Opinion

  • 2006-09-11 The Phony War: "President Bush not only created a fake 'War on Terror' to scare voters into supporting his policies – he is failing to address the real threat facing America" by Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone: "According to nearly a dozen former high-ranking officials who have been on the front lines of the administration's counterterrorism effort, the president is not only fighting the wrong war – he is fighting it in a way that has actually made the threat worse. The war on terrorism, they say, has been mismanaged and misdirected almost from the start, in no small part because the president simply does not understand the nature of the enemy he is fighting."
  • 2006-05-11 video Cafferty-Dictatorship: Jack Cafferty discusses Bush's warrantless wiretapping
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