Interesting Read on Post 9-11 Bureaucracies

[motordavid]

From last week's Newsweek...embolden sections are mine.
BR, mD


What America Has Lost

It’s clear we overreacted to 9/11.



Life Returns to Ground Zero

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.


I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted. In a crucially important Washington Post reporting project, “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years gathering information on how 9/11 has really changed America.

Here are some of the highlights.
-Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together.

-Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons.

-Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

-This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.”

-Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.



Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers.



Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.



In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?


Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs.

When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germs of every other … In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended?.?.?.?and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.



“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war,” Madison concluded.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/04/z...obref=obinsite

[Weasel]

If you stand back and look at how the US governing has changed overall over the years it is kinda scary... (and I'm just a young punk)

It almost seems like a pool where the water is getting green and out of control, so you have to "shock" it before you can get it back safe to swim in. And to shock this pool would take one term of a constitutionalist type of president... like the opposite of our current administration. Then we can go back and forth with some middle of the road type presidents to maintain balance. I know this is a vast generalization but the idea seems somewhat sound in my head.

[JCL]

Interesting article MD, thanks for posting.

Our local paper published the following on September 11, a retrospective look back. It is long, but I thought it was worth reading, and thought of it when I read your post, as there are some similar themes.

America's self-inflicted 9/11 legacy

Collateral damage from terror attacks can be felt throughout much of the world

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun September 11, 2010

Even in his most evil fantasies, Osama bin Laden cannot have foreseen that collateral damage from his Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States would include the emergence of Glenn Beck as a serious element in American politics. The vastly popular Fox News commentator's appeal for a revival of fundamental American values and "restoring honour" drew huge throngs of people to Washington at the end of August.

But while Beck, a glib salesman of cure-all political ShamWows, intended to convey a message of hope if America rededicates itself to the country's founding principles and obedience to the perceived will of God, the effect was just the opposite. That tens of thousands of people -- maybe even hundreds of thousands, depending on whose crowd estimates one believes -- felt moved to travel from across the country to this revivalist celebration of Christian, middleclass, patriotic values is a commentary on how low American self-esteem and self-confidence have fallen since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But a good deal of the damage to the American psyche in the last nine years has been self-inflicted. By its responses to the attacks on New York and Washington, particularly those replies launched by the administration of former president George W. Bush, the United States has done more damage to its stature both in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, in the judgment of very many of its own people than bin Laden ever could have achieved.

In the awful aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Americans abandoned some of the central ideologies of their republic with barely a murmur. They acceded to administration insistence that kidnappings -- "extraordinary rendition" -- torture, and the denial of the most basic human rights of detainees -- illegal combatants -- were essential weapons in the fight to keep America safe. In so doing they ignored the fundamental truth that campaigns against ideologically motivated terrorists are wars of ideas. A nation, a political and philosophical culture, conspires in its own defeat when it starts such a conflict by abandoning its most basic and cherished principles of human dignity. But that is exactly what the U.S. did, and matters such as the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and the public relations disasters of the Guantanamo Bay tribunals continue to damage America's international reputation and credibility.

And Americans agreed without a murmur to the creation at home of a security apparatus that is now so large, unwieldy and secretive that, to quote the Washington Post, "no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work." The best guess is that about a million people in more than 3,000 government and private agencies are working in about 10,000 locations across the U.S. on programs related to counter-terrorism and homeland security. Homeland security has become the watchword that justifies any abuse or erosion of traditional American liberties. It even sees armed border patrol agents stopping, questioning and requiring proof of citizenship from Americans going about their daily lives just south of the Canadian border. In the last five years these patrols, operating in northern New York state within 160 kilometres of the border with Canada, have arrested nearly 3,000 people. In all, about 6,000 people a year are being pulled out of buses, trains and cars and arrested in America's northern states if they are not carrying the documents to prove their identity.

It's the sort of picture that Hollywood used to use to give a snapshot of the iniquities of life behind the Iron Curtain. And the fallout from 9/11 has not happened in isolation, either at home or abroad.

Governments not only in the West but throughout the world have imposed all kinds of restrictions on their people and enhanced the capacities of their security agencies in the name of fighting terrorism and rooting out radicals. In several western countries, such as Canada and Britain as well as the U.S., what may well be a symbiotic response has arisen with the phenomenon of the radicalization of young, native-born Muslims, often from middleclass and professional backgrounds. It was young British Muslims apparently radicalized by bin Laden's example who launched the July 2005 suicide bombings in London that killed more than 50 people.
Britain already had a substantial closed-circuit television network on the public streets before those attacks. Now it has 4.2 million such cameras deployed, one for every 14 people, and it is reckoned that every person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times a day. Meanwhile, years of abandonment by successive American administrations of the most basic governmental responsibilities to oversee marketplace probity have caused a stubborn recession. Its defeat will require a rebirth of consumer and investment confidence that is not in the offing at the moment.

The elections in 2008 and the coming to office of Barack Obama with a Democrat administration carried, for very many Americans, the promise of positive revolutionary change and national spiritual revival. But the Obama revolution has fallen flat. He has struggled to demonstrate clear mastery over the tangle of massive problems bequeathed to him by the Bush administration, from wars to an imploding economy. And despite the promise and Obama's clear skill as a platform speaker, there is a disquieting soullessness about his performances and little aptitude for the common touch.

The aftermath of the 2001 attacks has also accelerated shifts in the tectonic plates of global power and influence that were already beginning to happen. The rise of China, India and other middle powers such as Brazil and the reconstructed Russia are products of globalization. But the speed of change has been affected in part by the sharp shift in United States foreign policy prompted by the drive to respond to the 2001 attacks. The Bush administration's declaration of a global "war on terror," the manipulation of intelligence information to attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq that Bush officials had labelled a priority years before, the reassessment of friends on the basis of their response to the Iraq invasion, and the acceleration of nuclear weapons programs in countries like Iran and North Korea that considered themselves threatened by the administration's "pre-emptive defence" doctrine, all served to disturb the world's view of America and Americans' view of themselves.

But none of this was what bin Laden intended. His central objectives are as distant and out of reach as they were when he started on his crusade with the founding of al-Qaida in September 1988. Osama bin Laden was one of 54 children -- 25 sons and 29 daughters -- by the more than 20 wives of Yemeniborn, Saudi Arabian mega-wealthy construction magnate Mohammed bin Laden. Osama bin Laden's world changed with the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979 and his encounter in Saudi Arabia soon afterward with charismatic Palestinian Muslim cleric Abdullah Azzam. With Azzam's encouragement, bin Laden got involved with the Services Office, which placed Arab volunteers with relief agencies helping Afghan refugees or with the Arab elements in the mujahedeen groups fighting the Soviets. Bin Laden, however, split with Azzam after coming under the influence of the far more radical Egyptians of the Muslim Brotherhood fighting in Afghanistan. Westerners who met bin Laden and the Arab mujahedeen at that time say they were far more dangerous and prickly people to deal with than the usually friendly Afghans. The Arabs were highly radicalized and showed active hatred of foreigners and non-Muslims.

It was through this Egyptian influence that bin Laden conceived, as the Afghan war ran down in the late 1980s with the imminent departure of the Soviets, of creating an organization using the young men trained fighting Russians to carry on and spread the jihad holy war in defence of Islam. Bin Laden's dream was, and presumably still is, the creation of a single Muslim state -- a caliphate -- from Indonesia across the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic in Morocco. At this time, bin Laden still supported the Saudi royal family, whose patronage had made his family massively wealthy. But that changed definitively in 1990 when the Saudi government allowed 500,000 American troops to use Saudi Arabia as a base from which to turn back Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. For bin Laden, this amounted to an unforgivable defilement of the holy ground of Saudi Arabia. In his mind, this gross insult to Islam justified the ousting of the Saudi royal family. But that was not easy to achieve. The royal family's grip on power was and is both backed by considerable muscle and exercised with a good deal of skill. During his exile in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, bin Laden began speaking out angrily against Saudi royal family hypocrisy. It was then that he hit on the notion that to undermine the legitimacy of the royal family in the eyes of Muslims, he should expose the links with the U.S. by attacking America. He also saw American influence over sectarian, non-Islamic regimes in the Middle East as equivalent to the Soviet empire. By launching jihad against "the head of the snake," he believed he could liberate Islam and hasten the creation of a fundamentalist caliphate.

The Central Intelligence Agency had opened a file on bin Laden six months before when, in June 1996, a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia was truck-bombed, killing 19 American soldiers. Al-Qaida struck again in 1998 when two truck bombs struck U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 257 people. And 17 American sailors died when an al-Qaida suicide bomber rammed the USS Cole with an explosives-packed boat in the port of Aden in Yemen in 2000. But it was not until the September 2001 attacks on the U.S. homeland that al-Qaida and bin Laden got the attention of the American people as a whole. The response of the newly installed Bush administration, however, was cockeyed from the start. Several of the ideological standard bearers of the incoming Bush administration -- men like defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick -- already had an agenda and script tucked in their pockets, drawn up at a think-tank called the Project for the New American Century. Reports from the project called for the U.S. to maintain its status as "the world's pre-eminent power" in the new century by acting vigorously with the help of a strongly supported military to defend and promote American principles and interests. High on the list was completing the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, from which the elder president Bush shrank in 1990. So firm was this fixation in the new Bush administration that after the September 2001 attacks, a sustained effort was mounted both in Washington and London to bend and interpret intelligence and information in a way that could be presented as justification for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

That was a gift for bin Laden because it allowed the creation of al-Qaida terror squads in Iraq, for which there had been no local fertile ground before. And it took the pressure off Afghanistan, allowing al-Qaida's allies, the Taliban, to regroup after the ousting of their regime at the end of 2001. Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces, including Canadians, are still paying the price of the Bush administration's Iraq obsession. But in his core objectives, bin Laden has failed.

Although the U. S. has removed its troops from Saudi Arabia, they remain in the Gulf states and there is no sign of Washington abandoning the Saudi royal family. The notion of a Muslim caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia is as much a dream as it ever was. Governments in the Middle East and places like Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Philippines where al-Qaida copycat groups have been formed have been largely victorious over the terrorists. Libya, long a supporter of terrorism everywhere and anywhere, has even repaired its relationship with the West. And one of the results of bin Laden's efforts at destabilization has been the rising influence in the Middle East of Iran, which is, of course, a Shiite Islamic republic and thus in bin Laden's devoutly Sunni Muslim eyes, an heretical nation of the worst sort.

[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

[chilliwilli]

I thought this interview with COL Lawrence Wilkerson touches a bit on both above reads:

[NIGHTMAREuki]

you guys will probably think this is bull but science doesn't lie
I just hope some day truth will be known and people responsible for this tragedy are brought to justice, so all these people did not die for nothing.

[JCL]

Originally Posted by NIGHTMAREuki

you guys will probably think this is bull but science doesn't lie

Neither does science prove what happened, at least with respect to your video and conclusion. True science includes collecting evidence, forming a hypothesis, testing it through experimentation, and coming to a conclusion that is then subject to testing, refinement, retesting, abandonment, etc. A scientific hypothesis can be disproven, but it is not so much proven as it is accepted until a better hypothesis comes along.

To conclude that step one of this process (collecting data) leads to conclusive proof of a theory is not correct. They found a substance, so let's accept that at face value for a moment. Then they went all the way to conclusions about why that substance was there, and who did what to whom. That stops being science. Some might even call it a conspiracy theory.

[gregorio]

Aside from our fighting forces (the guys on the line, not the windbags in DC), since when has ANY government run entity been efficient, reliable or even necessary? I expected worse.

[chilliwilli]

Was on my rooftop on the evening of the 9th anniversary, sharing a bottle of wine and saw the two "tribute lights"...to our surprise, a third light was lit shortly after. Every year since the tragedy, two skylights are lit on the memorial as a tribute to the towers. For a minute, i thought it was the wine till it was confirmed by others.

I phoned a friend who lives within walking distance and is all too familiar with the tragedy...he mentioned this engineers name and that we probably wouldn't see any news reporting on the 3rd light...

1,280 Architects and Engineers Launch Third Light Beam into NYC Night Skyline

OP...Pardon if i've veered your thread off-topic.

[JCL]

Originally Posted by chilliwilli

I phoned a friend who lives within walking distance and is all too familiar with the tragedy...he mentioned this engineers name and that we probably wouldn't see any news reporting on the 3rd light...

Continuing off topic....

I went to the AE911Truth.org site to read about their third light. Sorry to be so direct, but what a bunch of nutcases. It did cost them $2100 to put the light up, and they report that they have only raised $437 from 15 contributors so far, so the good news is that the world is catching on to them. There is hope for the world.

The conspiracy of 911 was that once it happened, the government jumped on it as an excuse to launch a war. End of story. The idea that the government planned the deaths of those civilians so that they could have a war has been championed by a lot of conspiracy theory groups. The best counterpoint that I have seen is Debunking 911 Conspiracy Theories and Controlled Demolition Homepage Worth reading. AE911Truth.info is also good, as it directly confronts the claims on the similar dot org site.

So, back to the thread topic of the fallout of 911. It seems that a large percentage of the population need to believe that someone caused it, and that is wasn't terrorists. MD's first post included an article that made the point that America over-reacted to 911. It would appear that the over-reaction continues.

[chilliwilli]

Originally Posted by JCL

Continuing off topic....

Touché...

Call it what you wish...over-reaction, nut case, conspiracy theory...it is your opinion. The original/official account is still theory, is it not? When the Chairman of the inquiry insists that he and the commission were set up to fail, and that their inquiry should only be the beginning for further investigative commissions...one can't help but expect further investigative commissions. Instead, what i mostly see is attempts to debunk debunks upon debunks.

I prefer to remain neutral on this...sticking with scattered facts such as zero convictions since the tragedy and await the outcome (in whatever form that may be). We can post links back n forth all day...but imo, until a commission (private, without such conflicts of interest) reconvenes...speculation and theories will continue.

In the meantime, a group of individuals who seem qualified, have discovered what they claim to be physical evidence...what that evidence represents and suggests, is not for me to speculate on but to be witness to it's testing and investigation.

Not all people over-reacted...