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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071029/holmes

Apocalypse Now?

by STEPHEN HOLMES

[from the October 29, 2007 issue]

Is there anything historically unprecedented about the Bush Administration's military adventurism, intense secrecy and fearmongering? This question is vexing, especially to those historians and political scientists who, however appalled by current US foreign policy, cannot be genuinely surprised by the most recent incarnation of an imperial presidency. But it remains a critical question, not least because the answer to it could shed light on what progressives can hope to achieve after Bush.

Chalmers Johnson, a former Navy man, cold war consultant to the CIA and emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego, helps us unravel this mystery by breathing new life into an old myth. In ancient Greece, Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution for acts of hubris. Transgressions would never go unpunished; balance and proportion would inevitably be restored. The contemporary incarnation of Nemesis is "blowback," a notion apparently coined by the CIA and commonly used to explain the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 as a form of delayed revenge for the American-orchestrated overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh's democratically elected government in 1953. Admonitory aphorisms about self-defeating aggression--malefactors reap what they sow--also provide the best general framework for understanding the origins of 9/11, or so Johnson would have us believe in Nemesis, the third volume of "an inadvertent trilogy" that includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004).

Johnson has no patience for those who attribute 9/11-style terrorism to a clash of civilizations or an unchanging "Salafi radicalism" and its irredeemably wicked adherents. He argues that anti-American rage, rather than emerging fully formed from a highly malleable religious tradition, has been triggered by decades of immoral and illegal behavior by American officials and proxies abroad. It is unavoidable that some of these "secret U.S. government operations and acts in distant lands would come back to haunt us," Johnson writes. He is thinking of covert actions well-known to Iranians and Guatemalans and Chileans (not to mention the US agents who carried them out) but that have barely penetrated the consciousness of most American citizens.

Identifying blowback as the root cause of 9/11, Johnson also argues that Bush's excessively violent and lawless reaction to the attack, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, will provoke blowback of its own. Significantly, because Johnson inaugurated his three-part series before the Bush Administration had begun to inflict its impulsiveness and inexperience on the world in earnest, he presents Bush's militarized response to 9/11 less as a sharp departure from the military policies of preceding administrations than as a predictable continuation of them, stressing, for instance, that "the United States has been continuously engaged in or mobilized for war since 1941."

Extrapolating freely from the documented history of blowback, Johnson speculates that we have already entered the "last days" of the Republic. America's post-World War II "imperialism," he predicts, will soon put an end to self-government in the United States: "I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent." The destruction of the American Republic may even illustrate a profound historical regularity, he implies: "Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny." He even thinks that the American military is now "ripe" for "a Julius Caesar"--that is, for "a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path."

Johnson's conviction that imperialism tends to transform democracies into autocracies is based largely on his study of ancient Rome. He argues that the basic dynamics of Rome's imperial adventures and annexation of conquered territory ushered in the collapse of the Roman Republic. As sporadic and regional military campaigns were replaced by continuous and distant ones, Rome's citizen army had to be replaced by a standing army. Loyal not to political classes in Rome but to their commanders in the field, the professionalized Roman legions made it possible for Caesar to initiate the dismantling of the Republic brought to a conclusion by his grand-nephew Augustus.

"Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end," Johnson writes, adding that "Bush has unleashed a political crisis comparable to the one Julius Caesar posed for the Roman constitution," threatening to subvert the traditional constitutional order and put dictatorship in its place. Rather than relying on a standing army and a Praetorian Guard, our cardboard Caesar from Crawford is backed by the Pentagon and its affiliated weapons contractors, not to mention the CIA: "The United States today, like the Roman Republic in the first century, BC, is threatened by an out-of-control military-industrial complex and a huge secret government controlled exclusively by the president." Imperial republics, Johnson suggests, are destined to be destroyed by an inner contradiction.

One reason for Johnson's end-of-days gloom is that he can identify no power center capable of resisting the forces that currently drive American foreign policy. He claims that because of the costliness of re-election campaigns and the insidious influence of Congressional lobbyists, "the legislative branch of our government is broken." An elected body that owes its incumbency partly to military contractors (who, in turn, provide not only campaign funding but also jobs for voters in swing districts) cannot reasonably be expected to swivel around and eliminate the corruption that nourishes it. In Johnson's words, "our political system may no longer be capable of saving the United States as we know it, since it is hard to imagine any president or Congress standing up to the powerful vested interests of the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, and the military-industrial complex."

But if Congress cannot slam on the brakes, what of the American people? In a few passages, Johnson flirts with the hope that a genuinely democratic movement might possibly put a halt to America's self-defeating militarism. He even tries to explain away the public's early support for the war in Iraq by recycling the traditional excuse about good kings being misled by evil advisers, suggesting that well-meaning American citizens have been deceived by a perfidious corporate media.

The duping of the public brings us to one of Johnson's central claims, namely that America's violent overreaction to 9/11 was due in part to the manufactured ignorance of American voters about their government's homicidal and exploitative actions abroad. Ignorant of the numerous ways the misconduct of the United States has excited a craving for retaliation around the world, Americans necessarily saw 9/11 as a wholly unprovoked attack and therefore as an attack requiring not self-examination but military annihilation of the enemy. The illusion that 9/11 came from nowhere, Johnson argues, that it had nothing to do with America's past behavior in the Arab world, contributed to the flaring of aggressive emotions among Americans.

This is an interesting thought. But before we lay all the blame on newspapers and networks that may have deceived the American public, we need to consider the possibility that many Americans did not and do not want to be informed about the misdeeds of their own government abroad. A majority of the electorate supported Bush for some time after the pretexts for the Iraq War were exposed as mendacious and the appalling behavior of some American personnel at Abu Ghraib became well-known. Support waned only after the war turned into an undeniable and embarrassing fiasco, not because a large majority was appalled that the war had been launched on false pretenses or conducted by immoral and illegal means.

For his part, Johnson desperately wants his fellow citizens to look at their country, if only for a moment, through the eyes of others. He almost begs his American readers to imagine what it would be like to have foreign soldiers stationed on bases inside the United States, molesting teenage American girls and running over American pedestrians while driving drunk. That anyone is listening is doubtful, however, which is why Johnson, in the end, lodges no more hope in American citizens than in the Congress they periodically elect. America's chilling disregard, not merely to the plight of ordinary Iraqis today but even to the deaths, since the 2003 invasion, of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians who had never harmed any Americans, springs from sources deep within American political culture. It was not produced by Karl Rove's trompe l'oeil propaganda and cannot be overcome by Chalmers Johnson's scholarship, however penetrating and thoughtful.

How, then, can Johnson, after surveying the illegal and immoral acts of previous American Presidents, go on to accuse the Bush Administration of betraying American traditions? How can he recount, in dismaying detail, the history of American bullying overseas but also avoid normalizing, and thereby to some extent exonerating, the actions of Bush and his circle? He struggles to avoid normalizing Bush by portraying the Administration not only as perpetuating deplorable habits of militarism and hubris but also as deviating from an American ideal of democratic anti-imperialism whose restoration he tries to imagine. In the end, he indicts the Administration principally for its radical subversion of traditional checks and balances. Under Bush, more than ever before, the separation of powers "increasingly appears to be a dead letter."

Admittedly, the "atrophying of the legislative and judicial branches" has been going on for decades. Black budgets have weakened executive-branch accountability, and the power of the purse has been diluted by various other gimmicks, including the stashing of off-budget funds in the CIA's secret Swiss bank accounts by dubious allies with obscure agendas, such as the Saudi royal family. Even the most illustrious of Bush's predecessors, moreover, have exercised excessive executive power during wartime. Johnson reminds us that "Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus; Woodrow Wilson had his 'Red Scare' with the illegal jailing or deportation of people who opposed his intervention in World War I; Franklin Roosevelt conducted a pogrom against Americans of Japanese ancestry, incarcerating almost all of them in the continental United States in detention camps." In the past, however, or so Johnson argues, "the separation of powers, even if no longer a true balance of power, continued to serve as a check on any claims of presidential dominance." That last rampart has now been breached, he concludes, pointing to warrantless wiretaps and ghost prisons as conspicuous examples of unilateral executive actions undertaken with negligible oversight or accountability.

This line of analysis is quite promising. Behind checks and balances lies a simple insight: an executive branch that is consistently shielded from well-informed criticisms is highly unlikely to perform well. The executive needs and deserves some degree of secrecy, especially in national security affairs. But secrecy can easily become excessive--and when it does, it begins to overprotect the official view of reality, based as it is on tunnel vision, overconfidence, whimsical fixations, failures of contingency planning, blindness to noxious side effects of superficially appealing strategies and the effective capture of government agencies by private-sector profiteers. By stressing the pathological effects of excessive executive-branch secrecy and the inability of a corrupted legislature to challenge it effectively, Johnson brings us a step closer to understanding the historical uniqueness of the Bush Administration.

A step closer, but a step short nevertheless. Earlier incarnations of the imperial presidency, especially under Nixon, can be characterized in much the same way. To understand what makes the current Administration seem unprecedented in American history, therefore, it's probably best to focus on the expansion of executive secrecy and the concomitant weakening of checks and balances, undertaken in response not to a palpable threat from a militarily powerful hostile state but to evanescent and unquantifiable threats from future unknown jihadists. For the executive to ask Congress and the country, on the basis of undisclosed information, for unchecked powers to fight an enemy whose true capacities are impossible to ascertain and who will perhaps continue to lurk in the shadows forever--that is truly unprecedented. The United States may not yet be in the last days of the Republic, as Johnson warns. But the country has never faced a problem quite like this. Can an eighteenth-century Constitution prevent the executive branch from using a twenty-first century terrorist threat as an all-purpose pretext for concocting secret illicit agendas unrelated to American national security? Can a weakened system of checks and balances fend off an executive power grab in a semi-permanent climate of public fear provoked by invisible dangers? Even those who hope that the answer will be yes may honorably fear that the answer will be no.

From Johnson's perspective, neither Congress nor the American public nor the Democratic Party offers much hope. Gazing into his crystal ball, Johnson reports that "we will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon." The United States will be embroiled in foreign wars until it collapses, in other words. At this point, we can finally grasp the force of Johnson's farfetched analogy between George W. Bush and Julius Caesar. A Democratic Brutus may deliver a fatal blow to the Bush political machine in 2008, but the chances of saving the country by returning it to idealized republican origins are nil.

A high-spirited book full of arresting details, Nemesis is nevertheless marred by several implausible claims, most of them associated with the strained analogy between ancient Rome and contemporary America. The book's principal shortcoming, however, is the inherent slipperiness of the concept of blowback. Johnson's determination to establish that subsequent harms to America are caused by prior American misdeeds often seems fanciful. The following is typical: "On August 5, 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in a letter to an Arab-language newspaper in London, promised a reprisal for recent U.S. renditions from Albania. Two days later, al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with a loss of 224 lives." Such intimations of causality don't quite succumb to the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, but they veer perilously close. Moreover, when American bullying does not produce the predicted American setback (as when the bad behavior of American soldiers in Japan does not cause the Japanese to close US bases there), Johnson readily discovers countervailing causal forces (such as the Japanese need to support US bases to pre-empt the rise of Chinese power in East Asia) and thereby casts doubt on the inevitability of negative fallout from America's unrestrained behavior abroad.

But the largest problem with blowback is the sheer miscellaneous variety of Johnson's examples. Given Cheney's historically unsubstantiated conviction that violence, if violent enough, invariably generates compliance, Johnson is right to stress the contrary, namely that violence often breeds violence, imperial oppression fostering anticolonial terrorism, for instance. But most of the unintended negative consequences of American policy to which Johnson draws our attention have only a tenuous relation to the breeding of violence by violence: for instance, how habits of borrowing without forethought from Japan's and China's central banks risk driving the United States into bankruptcy, or how the antisatellite warfare for which the Pentagon is planning would inevitably create orbital debris so extensive as to destroy the effectiveness of satellite-based telecommunications.

Such examples of self-defeating behavior are so diverse that the purpose of grouping them together, without any attempt to distinguish or relate them, sometimes seems merely rhetorical. True enough, serendipity is ubiquitous in human history, and those who indulge in omnipotent fantasies will eventually come crashing to earth. But the amply documented unpredictability of history makes it hard to take seriously Johnson's seer's pose. Similarly, his tendency to discover the inevitable unfolding of higher justice in every unintended consequence of immoral behavior can only be ascribed to wishful thinking.

To dwell on such theoretical shortcomings is not to deny that Nemesis is a serious contribution to current debates, richly repaying careful study. True, readers skeptical about blowback will have to unearth other, less mythological, sources of hope than Johnson's curious conceit that America's wrongdoings will be justly punished by an inexorable fate. But the chances of finding equivalent consolation in the nonmythical world are probably not very great.

Bush's Response to 9/11 Was Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves

By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 24, 2007, Printed on October 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65838/

Introduction note by Tom Dispatch editor Tom Engelhardt.

They came in as unreformed Cold Warriors, only lacking a cold war -- and looking for an enemy: a Russia to roll back even further; rogue states like Saddam's rickety dictatorship to smash. They were still in the old fight, eager to make sure that the "Evil Empire," already long down for the count, would remain prostrate forever; eager to ensure that any new evil empire like, say, China's would never be able to stand tall enough to be a challenge. They saw opportunities to move into areas previously beyond the reach of American imperial power like the former SSRs of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, which just happened to be sitting on potentially fabulous undeveloped energy fields; or farther into the even more fabulously energy-rich Middle East, where Saddam's Iraq, planted atop the planet's third largest reserves of petroleum, seemed so ready for a fall -- with other states in the region visibly not far behind.

It looked like it would be a coming-out party for one -- the debutante ball of the season. It would be, in fact, like the Cold War without the Soviet Union. What a blast! And they could still put their energies into their fabulously expensive, ever-misfiring anti-missile system, a subject they regularly focused on from January 2000 until September 10, 2001.

They were Cold Warriors in search of an enemy -- just not the one they got. When the Clintonistas, on their way out of the White House, warned them about al Qaeda, they paid next to no attention. Non-state actors were for wusses. When the CIA carefully presented the President with a one-page, knock-your-socks-off warning on August 6, 2001 that had the screaming headline, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," they ignored it. Bush and his top officials were, as it happened, strangely adrift until September 11, 2001; then, they were panicked and terrified -- until they realized that their moment had come to hijack the plane of state; so they clambered aboard, and like the Cold Warriors they were, went after Saddam.

Chalmers Johnson was himself once a Cold Warrior. Unlike the top officials of the Bush administration, however, he retained a remarkably flexible mind. He also had a striking ability to see the world as it actually was -- and a prescient vision of what was to come. He wrote the near-prophetic and now-classic book, Blowback, published well before the attacks of 9/11, and then followed it up with an anatomy of the U.S. military's empire of bases, The Sorrows of Empire, and finally, to end his Blowback Trilogy, a vivid recipe for American catastrophe, Nemesis: The Fall of the American Republic. All three are simply indispensable volumes in any reasonable post-9/11 library. Here is his latest consideration of that disastrous moment and its consequences as part of a series of book reviews he is periodically writing for Tomdispatch.

A Guide for the Perplexed: Intellectual Fallacies of the War on Terror

By Chalmers Johnson

This essay is a review of The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes (Cambridge University Press, 367 pp., $30).]

There are many books entitled "A Guide for the Perplexed," including Moses Maimonides' 12th century treatise on Jewish law and E. F. Schumacher's 1977 book on how to think about science. Book titles cannot be copyrighted. A Guide for the Perplexed might therefore be a better title for Stephen Holmes' new book than the one he chose, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror. In his perhaps overly clever conception, the matador is the terrorist leadership of al Qaeda, taunting a maddened United States into an ultimately fatal reaction. But do not let the title stop you from reading the book. Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks -- and how and why the United States has magnified many times over the initial damage caused by the terrorists.

Stephen Holmes is a law professor at New York University. In The Matador's Cape, he sets out to forge an understanding -- in an intellectual and historical sense, not as a matter of journalism or of partisan politics -- of the Iraq war, which he calls "one of the worst (and least comprehensible) blunders in the history of American foreign policy" (p. 230). His modus operandi is to survey in depth approximately a dozen influential books on post-Cold War international politics to see what light they shed on America's missteps. I will touch briefly on the books he chooses for dissection, highlighting his essential thoughts on each of them.

Holmes' choice of books is interesting. Many of the authors he focuses on are American conservatives or neoconservatives, which is reasonable since they are the ones who caused the debacle. He avoids progressive or left wing writers, and none of his choices are from Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project. (Disclosure: This review was written before I read Holmes' review of my own book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic in the October 29 issue of The Nation.)

He concludes: "Despite a slew of carefully researched and insightful books on the subject, the reason why the United States responded to the al Qaeda attack by invading Iraq remains to some extent an enigma" (p. 3). Nonetheless, his critiques of the books he has chosen are so well done and fair that they constitute one of the best introductions to the subject. They also have the advantage in several cases of making it unnecessary to read the original.

Holmes interrogates his subjects cleverly. His main questions and the key books he dissects for each of them are:

* Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11? Here he supplies his own independent analysis and conclusion (to which I turn below).

* Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence, as exemplified in Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 2003)? While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus," Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on the use of force in international politics: "Far from guaranteeing an unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States, with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the Middle East" (p. 72).

* How was the war lost, as analyzed in Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (Pantheon, 2006)? Holmes regards this book by Gordon, the military correspondent of the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, as the best treatment of the military aspects of the disaster, down to and including U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military. I would argue that Fiasco (Penguin 2006) by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks is more comprehensive, clearer-eyed, and more critical.

* How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmare? Here Holmes considers James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004). One of Mann's more original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hard-liners into toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to replace.... We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power" (p. 106).

* What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration, as captured in Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003)? According to Holmes, Mann's work "repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing." He argues that perhaps Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in Washington, D.C., allotted disproportionate influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror, they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they happened to preside" (p. 107).

* Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War, as argued by an old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996)? It is not clear why Holmes included Huntington's eleven-year-old treatise on "Allah made them do it" in his collection of books on post-Cold War international politics except as an act of obeisance to establishmentarian -- and especially Council-on-Foreign-Relations -- thinking. Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for homogeneity" (p. 136).

* What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror, as seen by Samantha Power in "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (Basic, 2002). As Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in U.S. foreign-policy thinking after the end of the Cold War. ... Their influence was small, however, and after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the Constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch -- they were, after all, doing what they had always wanted to do -- but Holmes' argument that "a savvy prowar party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p. 157) is worth considering.

* How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war, as illustrated by Paul Berman in Power and the Idealists (Soft Skull Press, 2005)? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of the wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous extremism" (p. 181). Berman, Holmes points out, conflated anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason for including Berman is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists in their support of the war on terrorism.

* How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become America's mission in the world, as seen by the apostate neoconservative Francis Fukuyama in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006)? Holmes is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore, because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon "democratization" project for the Middle East.

Fukuyama argues that democracy is the most effective antidote to the kind of Islamic radicalism that hit the United States on September 11, 2001. He contends that the root of Islamic rebellion is to be found in the savage and effective repression of protestors -- many of whom have been driven into exile -- in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Terrorism is not the enemy, merely a tactic Islamic radicals have found exceptionally effective. Holmes writes of Fukuyama's argument, "[T]o recognize that America's fundamental problem is Islamic radicalism, and that terrorism is only a symptom, is to invite a political solution. Promoting democracy is just such a political solution" (p. 209).

The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic transitions.

* Why is the contemporary American antiwar movement so anemic, as seen through the lens of history by Geoffrey Stone in Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (W. W. Norton, 2004)? Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting public protest. Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

* How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State, as put into perspective by John Ikenberry in After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001)? This book is Holmes' oddest choice -- a dated history from an establishmentarian point of view of the international institutions created by the United States after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialist in international relations, applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building missions.

* Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-Constitutional authority in the hands of the president, as expounded by John Yoo in The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)? In this final section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George Bush's and Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of the President's war-making power. Holmes wonders, "Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn" (p. 291).

Holmes then points out that Yoo is a prominent member of the Federalist Society, an association of conservative Republican lawyers who claim to be committed to recovering the original understanding of the Constitution and which includes several Republican appointees to the current Supreme Court. His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons is devastating: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure -- that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay or ignore" (p. 301).

Is Islam the Culprit or Merely a Distraction?

In addition to these broad themes, Holmes investigates hidden agendas and their distorting effects on rational policy-making. Some of these are: Cheney's desire to expand executive power and weaken Congressional oversight; Rumsfeld's schemes to field-test his theory that in modern warfare speed is more important than mass; the plans by some of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's advisers to improve the security situation of Israel; the administration's desire to create a new set of permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East to protect the U.S. oil supply in case of a collapse of the Saudi monarchy; and the desire to invade Iraq and thereby avoid putting all the blame for 9/11 on al Qaeda -- because to do so would have involved admitting administration negligence and incompetence during the first nine months of 2001 and, even worse, that Clinton was right in warning Bush and his top officials that the main security threat to the United States was a potential al Qaeda attack or attacks.

This is not the place to attempt a comprehensive review of Holmes' detailed critiques. For that, one should buy and read his book. Let me instead dwell on three themes that I think illustrate his insight and originality.

Holmes rejects any direct connection between Islamic religious extremism and the 9/11 attacks, although he recognizes that Islamic vilification of the United States and other Western powers is often expressed in apocalyptically religious language. "Emphasizing religious extremism as the motivation for the [9/11] plot, whatever it reveals," he argues, "...terminates inquiry prematurely, encouraging us to view the attack ahistorically as an expression of 'radical Salafism,' a fundamentalist movement within Islam that allegedly drives its adherents to homicidal violence against infidels" (p. 2). This approach, he points out, is distinctly tautological: "Appeals to social norms or a culture of martyrdom are not very helpful.... They are tantamount to saying that suicidal terrorism is caused by a proclivity to suicidal terrorism" (p. 20).

Instead, he suggests, "The mobilizing ideology behind 9/11 was not Islam, or even Islamic fundamentalism, but rather a specific narrative of blame" (p. 63). He insists on putting the focus on the actual perpetrators, the 19 men who executed the attacks in New York and Washington -- 15 Saudi Arabians, two citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. None of them was particularly religious. Three were living together in Hamburg, Germany, where they did appear to have become more interested in Islam than they had been in their home countries. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the group, age 33 on 9/11, had Egyptian and German degrees in architecture and city planning and became highly politicized in favor of the Palestinian cause against Zionism only after he went abroad.

Holmes notes, "According to the classic study of resentment, [Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)] 'every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more specifically, an agent, a "guilty" agent who is susceptible of pain -- in short, some living being or other on whom he can vent his feelings directly or in effigy, under some pretext or other.' If suffering is seen as natural or uncaused it will be coded as misfortune instead of injustice, and it will produce resignation rather than rebellion. The most efficient way to incite, therefore, is to indict" (p. 64).

The role of bin Laden was, and remains, to provide such a hyperbolic indictment -- one that men like Atta would never have heard back in authoritarian Egypt but that came through loud and clear in their German exile. Bin Laden demonized the United States, accusing it of genocide against Muslims and repeatedly contending that the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia ever since the first Gulf War in 1991 was a far graver offense than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though that had led to the death of one million Afghans and had sent five million more into exile.

The fact that the 9/11 plot involved the attackers' own self-destruction suggests possible irrationality on their part, but Holmes argues that this was actually part of the specific narrative of blame. Americans feel contempt for Muslims and ascribe little or no value to Muslim lives. Therefore, to be captured after a terrorist attack involved a high likelihood that the Americans would torture the perpetrator. Suicide took care of that worry (and provided several other advantages discussed below).

The United States as "Sole Remaining Superpower"

Another subject about which Holmes is strikingly original is the subtle way in which the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the United States' self-promotion as the sole remaining superpower clouded our vision and virtually guaranteed the catastrophe that ensued in Iraq. "Because Americans.... have sunk so much of their national treasure into a military establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an enemy that has now disappeared," he argues, "they have an almost irresistible inclination to exaggerate the centrality of rogue states, excellent targets for military destruction, [above] the overall terrorist threat. They overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected) and underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as instruments of American power" (pp. 71-72).

Holmes draws several interesting implications from this American overinvestment in Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial axioms of American national security doctrine. In a much more significant way than in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state actor on the international stage successfully attacked the United States, contrary to a well-established belief in Pentagon circles that only states have the capability of menacing us militarily. Equally alarming, by employing a strategy requiring their own deaths, the terrorists ensured that deterrence no longer held sway. Overwhelming military might cannot deter non-state actors who accept that they will die in their attacks on others. The day after 9/11, American leaders in Washington D.C. suddenly felt unprotected and defenseless against a new threat they only imperfectly understood. They responded in various ways.

One was to recast what had happened in terms of Cold-War thinking. "To repress feelings of defenselessness associated with an unfamiliar threat, the decision makers' gaze slid uncontrollably away from al Qaeda and fixated on a recognizable threat that was unquestionably susceptible to being broken into bits" (p.312). Holmes calls this fusion of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein a "mental alchemy, the 'reconceiving' of an impalpable enemy as a palpable enemy." He endorses James Mann's thesis that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others did not change the underlying principles guiding American foreign policy in response to the 9/11 attacks; that, in fact, they did the exact opposite: "[T]he Bush administration has managed foreign affairs so ineptly because it has been reflexively implementing out-of-date formulas in a radically changed security environment" (p. 106).

Unintended consequences also played a role, Holmes argues: "If conservative Congressmen had not blocked [Pennsylvania Governor] Tom Ridge's nomination as Defense Secretary [in 2000] for the ludicrously immaterial reason that he was wobbly on abortion, then the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, including Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, would have been in no position to hijack the administration's reaction to 9/11" (pp. 93-94). Rumsfeld enthusiastically endorsed Bush's description of his "new" policies as a "war" because the Office of the Secretary of Defense then became the lead agency in designing and carrying out America's response.

There was little or no countervailing influence. "By sheer chance," Holmes writes, "Rice and Powell -- no doubt orderly managers -- have pedestrian minds and perhaps deferential personalities. Neither provided a gripping and persuasive vision of the United States' role in the world that might have counteracted the megalomania of the neoconservatives, and neither was capable of outfoxing the hard-liners in an interagency power struggle" (p. 94).

The costs of equating al Qaeda with Iraq and of concentrating on a military response were high. "It meant that some of the troops sent to Iraq in the first wave believed, disgracefully, that they were avenging the 3,000 dead from September 11.... Cruel and arbitrary behavior by some U.S. forces helped stoke the violent insurgency that followed" (p. 307).

American confusion about the nature of the enemy -- rogue state vs. non-state terrorist organization -- produced two different counterstrategies, both of which almost certainly made the situation worse. First, by focusing on a rogue state (Iraq), rather than on a non-state actor (al Qaeda), the Pentagon drew attention to what it came to call the "hand-off scenario" in which a nuclear-armed rogue state might hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who would use them against the U.S. To counter this threat, the Pentagon developed a strategy of preventive war against rogue states with the objective of bringing about regime change in them. The only way to prevent nuclear proliferation to terrorist groups -- so the argument went -- was to forcibly democratize Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes, some of which had long been allied with the United States.

The other strategy was a return to what seemed like a form of deterrence: a "scare the Muslims" campaign. This involved a resort to massive "shock and awe" bombing raids on Baghdad with the intent of demonstrating the futility of defying the United States.

By reacting to the threat of modern terrorism with an attack on a substitute target -- without even bothering to calculate the enormous potential costs involved -- the Pentagon greatly overestimated what military force could achieve. Both the regime-change and overawe-the-Muslims approaches carried with them potentially devastating unintended consequences -- particularly if any of the premises, such as about who possessed WMD, were wrong. Overly abstract ideas were substituted for empirical knowledge of, and logical responses to, an enemy's capabilities. Thus, insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, two devastated, poor countries, have managed to fight one of the most powerful American expeditionary forces in history to a virtual standstill. In short, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11 provocation was not only dishonorable and unethical, given the cruel suffering it has inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to produce as much hatred as fear, as much burning desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and docility. Some of the sickening effects are unfolding before our eyes. That even more malevolent consequences remain in store is a grim possibility not to be wished away" (p. 10).

Complicity of the Left in American Imperialism

Holmes is also interesting on why the American Left has been so ineffectual in countering the efforts of Washington's pro-war party. Deeply guilt-ridden over the Clinton administration's failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and frustrated by the constraints of international law and United Nations procedures, some influential progressives in America had already advocated a preemptive and unilateralist turn in American foreign policy that the Bush administration hijacked. Human rights activists had heavily promoted intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo to halt ethnic cleansing -- and doing so without any international sanction whatsoever. Some of them became as enthusiastic about using the American armed forces to achieve limited foreign policy goals as many neocons. Even U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright made herself notorious with her 1993 wisecrack to then Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

Although Holmes tries not to overstate his case, he suspects that the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s -- at one point he speaks of "human rights as imperial ideology" (p. 190) -- may have played at least a small role in the public's acceptance of Bush's intervention in Iraq. If so, it is hard to imagine a better example of the disasters that good intentions can sometimes produce. The result in Iraq, in turn, has more or less silenced calls from the Left for further campaigns of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. The U.S. is conspicuously not participating in the U.N. intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The Rule of Law

As a legal scholar, Holmes is committed to the rule of law. "[L]aw is best understood," he writes, "not as a set of rigid rules but rather as a set of institutional mechanisms and procedures designed to correct the mistakes that even exceptionally talented executive officials are bound to make and to facilitate midstream readjustments and course corrections. If we understand law, constitutionalism, and due process in this way, then it becomes obvious why the war on terrorism is bound to fail when conducted, as it has been so far, against the rule of law and outside the constitutional system of checks and balances" (p. 5).

This short-circuiting of normal constitutional procedures he sees as probably the most consequential post-9/11 blunder of the Bush administration. The President's repeated claims that he needs high levels of secrecy and the ability to arbitrarily cancel established law in order to move decisively against terrorists draw his utter contempt. "By dismantling checks and balances, along the lines idealized and celebrated by [John] Yoo, the administration has certainly gained flexibility in the 'war on terror.' It has gained the flexibility, in particular, to shoot first and aim afterward" (p. 301). Although such an assumption of dictatorial powers has happened before during periods of national emergency in the United States, Holmes is convinced that the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s helped anesthetize many Americans to the implications of what the government was doing after 9/11.

Even now, with the Iraq War all but lost and public opinion having turned decisively against the President, there is still a flabbiness in mainstream criticism that reveals a major weakness in the conduct of American foreign policy. For example, while many hawks and doves today recognize that Rumsfeld mobilized too few forces to achieve his military objectives in Iraq, they tend to concentrate on his rejection of former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki's advice that he needed a larger army of occupation. They almost totally ignore the true national policy implications of Rumsfeld's failed leadership. Holmes writes, "If Saddam Hussein had actually possessed the tons of chemical and biological weapons that, in the president's talking points, constituted the casus belli for the invasion, Rumsfeld's slimmed-down force would have abetted the greatest proliferation disaster in world history" (p. 82). He quotes Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor: "Securing the WMD required sealing the country's borders and quickly seizing control of the many suspected sites before they were raided by profiteers, terrorists, and regime officials determined to carry on the fight. The force that Rumsfeld eventually assembled, by contrast, was too small to do any of this" (pp. 84-85). As a matter of fact, looters did ransack the Iraqi nuclear research center at al Tuwaitha. No one pointed out these flaws in the strategy until well after the invasion had revealed that, luckily, Saddam had no WMD.

With this book, Stephen Holmes largely succeeds in elevating criticism of contemporary American imperialism in the Middle East to a new level. In my opinion, however, he underplays the roles of American imperialism and militarism in exploiting the 9/11 crisis to serve vested interests in the military-industrial complex, the petroleum industry, and the military establishment. Holmes leaves the false impression that the political system of the United States is capable of a successful course correction. But, as Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of checks and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."

There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force. To take up these subjects, however, moves the discussion into largely unexplored territory. For now, Holmes has done a wonderful job of clearing the underbrush and preparing the way for the public to address this more or less taboo subject.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/65838/

A previous CBO estimate put the wars' costs at more than $1.6 trillion. This one adds $705 billion in interest, taking into account that the conflicts are being funded with borrowed money.

The new estimate also includes President Bush's request Monday for another $46 billion in war funding, said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., budget committee chairman, who provided the CBO's new numbers to USA TODAY.

Assuming that Iraq accounts for about 80% of that total, the Iraq war would cost $1.9 trillion, including $564 billion in interest, said Thomas Kahn, Spratt's staff director. The committee holds a hearing on war costs this morning.

"The number is so big, it boggles the mind," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for the White House budget office, said, "Congress should stop playing politics with our troops by trying to artificially inflate war funding levels." He declined to provide a White House estimate.

The CBO estimates assume that 75,000 troops will remain in both countries through 2017, including roughly 50,000 in Iraq. That is a "very speculative" projection, though it's not entirely unreasonable, said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the non-partisan Lexington Institute.

As of Sept. 30, the two wars have cost $604 billion, the CBO says. Adjusted for inflation, that is higher than the costs of the Korea and Vietnam conflicts, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Defense spending during those two wars accounted for a far larger share of the American economy.

In the months before the March 2003 Iraq invasion, the Bush administration estimated the Iraq war would cost no more than $50 billion.

	COMPARING U.S. WARS Cost of wars, adjusted for inflation: (in billions; FY 2008 dollars) World War II $3,900 Korea $456 Vietnam $518 Persian Gulf War $88 Iraq/Afghanistan $604 Sources: Congressional Budget Office, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, USA TODAY research

The Bush Era's Dark Legacy of Torture

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on October 27, 2007, Printed on October 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66270/

There's a scene in the political drama Rendition where Peter Sarsgaard -- playing a well-meaning but ultimately cowardly senior aid to a powerful senator -- unsuccessfully approaches the icy head of the CIA's counterterrorism unit (Meryl Streep) about the case of Anwar El-Ibrahimi, an Egyptian immigrant with an American wife and child who has been kidnapped by hooded CIA operatives at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on erroneous suspicions of terrorist ties and sent to be tortured in an unidentified North African country (presumably Egypt). Put off by her arrogance and frustrated by her rebuff, Sarsgaard's character says in a stern up-close whisper, "Perhaps I should have a copy of the Constitution delivered to your office."

Streep answers archly: "What are you taking issue with?" she hisses. "The disappearance of a particular man? Or a national security policy?"

To anyone opposed to the government practice of snatching people off the street, erasing any record of their whereabouts, flying them off to a black hole in some human rights-violating netherworld, and subjecting them to sadistic torture techniques in the name of a "war on terror," the answer is painfully obvious. But in our enduringly surreal political era, the question cuts to the heart of the actual debates that are currently playing out on Capitol Hill.

The day before the national premier of Rendition, amid no fanfare, a joint hearing was held by the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees on the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, the software engineer who was famously detained at JFK Airport in 2002 and covertly flown to his native Syria, where, for ten months, he was physically and mentally tortured -- in a U.S. operation inside a nation the administration labels "terrorist." Eventually, Arar was sent home to an apology and compensation from the Canadian -- not U.S. -- government. Despite the fact that it was the United States that sent him to face such a nightmare, four years later the Bush administration has yet to apologize to Mr. Arar -- or even acknowledge his ordeal. In fact, despite an independent Canadian investigation that last fall cleared him of anything remotely resembling criminal activity (In 2004, the same year President Bush was named "Person of the Year" by Time magazine, Arar was named Time Canada's "newsmaker of the year"), Arar remains on the United States terrorist watch list and was thus unable to travel to Washington to testify at the hearing on his own case. Instead, he delivered his words in front of a camera from Ottawa, his testimony delivered to the Congress courtesy of satellite hookup.

It was not the first time the Congress has discussed extraordinary rendition -- or Arar's case, for that matter. The case achieved notoriety years ago, and YouTube contains multiple clips of a very angry Sen. Patrick Leahy laying into former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this past winter about the torture of Maher Arar.

"We knew damn well if he went to Canada he wouldn't be tortured," the Vermont senator boomed. "He'd be held and he'd be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria he'd be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity of this country ... to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You know and I know that this has happened a number of times the past five years by this country."

There was no such drama at this hearing; in part because there was no administration official to grill. But there were plenty of theatrics, mostly from the Republican side. Pausing only to offer their personal -- not official -- apologies to Mr. Arar for the "tragic mistake" that led to his kidnap and torture, defenders of extraordinary rendition did everything they could to spin and promote the program as an indispensable tool in the War on Terror.

Leading the charge was Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican, who opened with a smirk and a nod at what must be his imagined collusion between Hollywood and Congress. "Let us note that this is an opportune moment to be having a hearing on the issue of rendition," he said, "because it just happens to be the subject of a movie that is about to come out. What a coincidence!" Casting extraordinary rendition as a government program like Medicare only less problematic -- "hundreds of thousands of people die because of human error in the Medicare system" -- Rohrabacher repeatedly invoked Sept. 11 to remind people that, in a time of war, "there's no such thing as perfection." "This was one year after the most brutal and bloody foreign attack on American soil in the history of our country," he said about Arar's ordeal, which took began on Sept. 26, 2002." More importantly, "rendition is used to fight our war against radicals who want to end our way of life." (Rohrabacher is uniquely poised to make such accusations, having traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight alongside the Mujahadeen against the Soviets -- on the very same side as Bin Laden.)

Discussions of extraordinary rendition are too often sanitized -- and this hearing was no exception. What actually happens to a prisoner was memorably described by Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece, "Outsourcing Torture" in February of 2005, in which she described the rendition of two Egyptian men following Sept. 11:

"On December 18, 2001, at Stockholm's Bromma Airport, a half-dozen hooded security officials ushered two Egyptian asylum seekers, Muhammad Zery and Ahme Agiza, into an empty office. They cut off the Egyptians' clothes with scissors, forcibly administered sedatives by suppository, swaddled them in diapers, and dressed them in orange jumpsuits ... the suspects were blindfolded, placed in handcuffs and leg irons according to a declassified Swedish government report, the men were then flown to Cairo on a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet."

The lawmakers on Capitol Hill may consider themselves in too genteel a setting to talk so bluntly. But, while his testimony was not graphic, Maher Arar's refusal to comply with the "bad apples" narrative -- one that would render his ordeal an unfortunate exception to an otherwise legitimate program -- his story is a powerful counter-narrative against the lies and excesses of the "war on terror." "An error in a program does not mean that that program in and of itself is a wrong program," Rohrabacher argued. Such claims have become staples in defending the most repressive policies of the administration's war, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Blackwater. "The most fundamental question that has not been answered yet is why did the U.S. government decide to send me to Syria and not to Canada," he told the legislators. "I would believe that this was an innocent mistake if it weren't happening to others ... Inflicting people with torture under any circumstances is wrong."

This is the message the Bush administration -- and much of Congress -- has been continually unwilling to hear. It is too easy to label the Arar case a "tragic mistake," as though only innocent people have the right not to be tortured. While the hearing on Capitol Hill did something to address the repugnance of an "extrajudicial" (read: illegal) program like extraordinary rendition, there was little suggestion that the program is under threat, or anything vaguely resembling an investigation. In fact, there was an air of helplessness to the proceedings when it came to the question of how to proceed. ("Now that we will have a new attorney general, maybe there's hope.") "This is not the end of the examination into what happened to Maher Arar," co-chairman Bill Delahunt concluded. But the Arar case is only the tip of the iceberg.

Contrary to common perception, extraordinary rendition was not born under Bush but under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, when it gave approval to the CIA to send "terror" suspects to be interrogated in Egypt. In the wake of Sept. 11, the program was dramatically escalated by the Bush administration; in the words of former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black, who once oversaw the rendition program, "All you need to know: there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off." (Or as Rohrabacher said at the hearing, "When you are at war with people who are willing to slaughter those numbers of people, that does affect the way you do business.")

In February of this year, the European Parliament released a report that documented some 1,245 secret CIA flights that passed through European airspace between 2001 and 2005, many to countries with dismal human rights records. How many of those planes carried prisoners is hard to know, but the number of people who appear to have been tortured under the banner of the American flag over the past six years is disturbingly high. There's the explosive case of Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr ("Abu Omar") who was kidnapped in Milan and sent to Egypt with the complicity of Italian officials. (This past February, an Italian judge indicted 25 suspected CIA operatives for their role in his abduction.) There's the case of Binyam Mohamed, kidnapped in a Karachi airport and subjected to brutal torture in Morocco. There is Khalid A-Masri, a Kuwaiti living in Germany who was kidnapped in Macedonia and brutally interrogated for five months. The list goes on.

One of the unnerving strengths of Rendition, the film, is what it captures about the callousness and missionary zeal of leaders who believe their own rhetoric. When Dana Rohrabacher suggested that, as a father of two, Arar might be grateful for extraordinary rendition, given that it has prevented terrorist attacks that might hurt them, he sounds a lot like Meryl Streep when she says that 7,000 people in London are alive thanks to the program, among them, her grandchildren. The difference: an actress of her caliber delivers the line with a cold precision that gives it a slightly terrifying credibility -- credibility that is utterly lacking when it flows from the lips of elected representatives. Particularly the president. "You can't expect me and people in the government to do what we need to do to protect you and your family if we don't gave the tools that we think are necessary to do so," a petulant George W. Bush told Matt Lauer when he confronted him on the CIA's secret prisons last fall. Anyway, he said, "whatever we have done is legal."

Many have lauded the making of Rendition as a generally positive development -- dissent, Hollywood style -- but its happy ending, where a noble CIA agent exposes the injustice of one judicial miscarriage in isolation of a state-sanctioned program of kidnapping and torture, stands in jarring contrast to the case of Maher Arar, whose attempts to clear his name have been blocked at every turn by the Bush administration. For him, "the abuse is ongoing." "They have not allowed me to pursue justice in courts," he says. "... I have not been able to establish trust in the system."

At one point in Rendition, Jake Gyllenhaal's character, the CIA operative overseeing his first torture of a rendered prisoner, quotes Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice to question the validity of torture as an interrogation technique: "I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything." U.S. lawmakers do not labor in a foreign dungeon, nor is their speech -- or silence -- coerced through simulated drowning. With every torture taxi that takes off, the U.S. Constitution and the nation's reputation are extraordinarily rendered along with the victims of a U.S. program that should have been something out of Hollywood fiction and not official policy.

Liliana Segura is a freelance writer living in New York.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/66270/

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