Among the horrors of the suppression of protest in Syria comes news that a psychoanalyst has been arrested:
SYRIA: Judge rejects call for release of pyschoanalyst
By Jan Petter Myklebust
21 October 2011
A Syrian judge has rejected international appeals for the release of Dr Rafah Nached (pictured), the founder of the first psychoanalysis school in Damascus, who was arrested last month at Damascus airport and is being held in solitary confinement, according to campaigners.
Twenty-one French intellectuals are supporting an international campaign to free Nached, 66, who was approached by security guards as she was about to board a plane to Paris on 10 September to visit her daughter, who was due to give birth.
Those who signed the petition include philosopher Julie Kristeva, philosopher, writer and director of La Règle du Jeu Bernard-Henri Levy, and former minister of foreign affairs Roland Dumas.
As she was being arrested, Nached managed to telephone her husband, Dr Faisal Abdullah, who is a professor of ancient history at Damascus University. He alerted her colleagues via Facebook, saying he did not know which prison his wife had been taken to.
It has since been revealed that she is being held in solitary confinement in a woman’s prison on the outskirts of Damascus.
Abdullah fears for his wife’s health, since she suffers from hypertension and has recently undergone an operation for cancer.
On 18 October, psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller of the Association Mondiale de Psychanalyse in Paris, which set up the Free Rafah Nached campaign, sent out an email stating that the judge in Damascus had rejected the appeal for her release.
No formal charge has been made by the Syrian authorities, and it appears the only reason for her being held in custody is her profession as a psychoanalyst. She was the first practising psychoanalyst in Syria, having graduated from the University of Paris Diderot, and recently founded the school in Damascus in collaboration with French colleagues.
A statement on the Free Rafah Nashed blog, with an international petition calling for her release, said: “A review of Dr Nashed’s trajectory reveals a woman with a deep commitment to uncovering the secrets of the unconscious, not an insurgent, gangster or Islamist.
“When the revolution broke out in March, she, along with some Jesuit priests, organised support groups open to citizens of all affiliations, with the goal of helping them process the violence around them.”
The appeal asks those who support the release to send an email to this address.
Several hundred people gathered at a protest meeting in Paris organised by ‘Forum des Femmes – Carla, Judith, Isabelle, Julia and Aurelie’ outside the Palais des Congrès on 9 October to call for Nached’s release and hear an appeal by Kristeva, with several videos published on the event on You Tube.
On 2 October Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French president’s wife, published an open letter to Abdullah, expressing international understanding of the stress he and his family is exposed to, stating that Nached’s work is of no threat to the state and that she therefore expects that she be released without further delay.
Charles Hanley, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, sent an e-mail to its members on 6 October requesting them to sign the petition for Rafah’s release, as did the European Psychoanalytical Federation and the Société Psychanalytique de Paris.
Catherine Ashton, high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and vice-president of the European Commission, last month issued a statement calling for the immediate release of Nached “and all of those arbritrarily detained and arrested”.
The British Psychoanalytic Council has urged supporters to show solidarity by circulating information about Nached’s situation widely, and signing an international petition asking for her immediate release, and for the French Embassy to intervene to obtain information about her condition and the reasons for her detention.
In this week of Omar Qaddafi’s final fall as dictator and subsequent murder, Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive, well expresses my complex sentiments:
Qaddafi’s Death: Barbarism and Hypocrisy
By Matthew Rothschild
I never mourn the death of a dictator.
Good riddance to Muammar Qaddafi, who terrorized his people for 42 years.
But neither do I cheer summary executions of anyone, no matter how brutal.
Just as the United States was wrong to rub out an unarmed Osama bin Laden, so, too, the Libyan rebels were wrong to murder the captured Qaddafi.
“Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives,” he said. This may yet prove to be a precedent for future U.S. bombing wars, where a subsequent President will illegally attack another country with impunity, and will get away with it because he hasn’t put ground troops in harm’s way. During this Libya War , the Obama Administration used the lack of a threat to our service members as a justification for not invoking the War Powers Act.
President Obama crowed that the Libya War demonstrates “the strength of American leadership across the world.” Rather, it shows that might makes right.
And the hypocrisy of the U.S. position could hardly be greater. In 2003, the Bush Administration rehabilitated Qaddafi, who became an ally of the United States in the “war on terror.” In fact, the CIA used Qaddafi’s intelligence service to torture detainees that the U.S. sent over to Libya.
The CIA “rendered” eight or nine detainees to Qaddafi’s intelligence service, and sent questions along with for the torturers to ask, according to Human Rights Watch, in an interview with Democracy Now.
The CIA may even have had agents present during some of the questioning.
In 2008, Condoleezza Rice visited Qaddafi in Libya.
When it was convenient for Washington to support Qaddafi, it did so.
When it was convenient to attack him, it did so.
But the Obama administration didn’t attack Bahrain when it cracked down on people fighting for democracy against that kingdom. No, Washington even let Saudi Arabia, another kingdom, invade Bahrain to help put down the nonviolent uprising.
For the people of Libya, long oppressed by Qaddafi, this is a day of liberation.
“Many things separate us,” he said. “National borders. Homeland insecurities. Armies, corporations and police. They have their laws. They have their debts. And we have our revolution. We are the 99 percent.”
Ezzeldin, a 28-year-old self-described “leftist activist” who is currently living in Jackson Heights and studying at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, told HuffPost he was camped out in Tahrir Square just a few months ago and is now spending days in Zuccotti Park. [From Huffington Post.
Patrick Howley, an editor from the right-wing rag, The American Spectator, brags online of his efforts to incite violence at yesterday’s Air and Space Museum protest.
After sneaking past the guard at the first entrance, I found myself trapped in a small entranceway outside the second interior door behind a muscle-bound left-wing fanatic and a 300-pound guard. The fanatic shoved the guard and the guard shoved back, hard, sending this comrade — and, by domino effect, me — sprawling against the wall. After squeezing myself out from under him, I sprinted toward the door. Then I got hit.
Being pepper-sprayed is a singularly agonizing experience — enormously painful, but even worse for a hypochondriac. When the spray begins soaking into your eyeball, swelling your eyelids and rendering them largely inoperable, it’s hard not to worry that you might soon have to invest in stronger-prescription glasses.
But as far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator — and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story. Under a cloud of pepper spray I forced myself into the doors and sprinted blindly across the floor of the Air and Space Museum, drawing the attention of hundreds of stunned khaki-clad tourists (some of whom began snapping off disposable-camera portraits of me). I strained to glance behind me at the dozens of protesters I was sure were backing me up, and then I got hit again, this time with a cold realization: I was the only one who had made it through the doors. As two guards pointed at me and started running, I dodged a circle of gawking old housewives and bolted upstairs.
The tourist reaction within the museum — like the reactions of those on D.C. tour buses and sidewalks Saturday — was one of confusion and mild irritation. In the absence of definitive national polling on the matter, that may be the best opinion sample we yet have of this rash of ill-defined, anti-corporate and anti-bailout protests developing across the country. What began on Wall Street is now spreading, and the question still remains: is it dangerous?
He admits the protesters were not seeking a confrontation:
But just as the lefties couldn’t figure out how to run their assembly meeting (many process points, I’m afraid to report, were left un-twinkled), so too do they lack the nerve to confront authority.
From accounts I’ve read, it sounds at least plausible that there may not have been any pepper spray incident if Patrick Howley had not set out to create trouble. What do you want to bet there won’t be any investigation of this deliberate attempt to provoke violence?
One of the saddest aspects of the situation in Libya was that, as the nonviolent protests were crushed, the understandable resort to armed struggle and the ensuing civil war created brutalizing forces on all sides. now, with rebel victory, comes word that some of the former rebels are now turning themselves into torturers. a small positive sign is that it appears that civilian authorities are trying to curtail this transformation.
If the rebels turned victors don’t stop their brutality soon, they will both destabilize the country and create a new authoritarianism to replace the defeated old one. Human rights are for everyone or they are secure for no one.
A NYTpiece on the new torture replacing the old torture:
Anti-Qaddafi Fighters Are Accused of Torture
By Kareem Fahim
TRIPOLI, Libya — First there were the blindfold, the wrist-scarring handcuffs and the death threats. Then came beatings and electric shocks. In the fog of pain, the detainee, who said he had done nothing wrong, would have confessed to anything, he later recalled.
The techniques were familiar to Libyans, but the perpetrators were not: they were former rebels, according to the detainee, a 36-year-old man who said he had worked in military intelligence for the government of Col.Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The man, who requested that his name not be published because he feared retribution from his former captors, said he was arrested by armed former rebels almost two weeks ago, held in a building for four days and tortured.
His story was impossible to immediately verify, but he displayed what he said was evidence of the torture: huge bruises and welts on his legs, stripes of black and blue across the back of his thighs, and scars on his feet and ankles that he said marked the spots where his captors attached electrical wires.
He was later transferred to another building in Tripoli, across the street from the cabinet offices of the Transitional National Council, the former rebels’ provisional government. There, in cells with fresh blood on the walls, he was held for another day until he was released, with apologies, by a former rebel official, he said.
Now, he is moving to Tunisia, he said. “I do not trust anyone in Libya.”
His case underscores the growing concern about armed brigades of former rebel fighters in the Libyan capital who rushed to fill the power vacuum after Colonel Qaddafi’s forces fled more than a month ago. In a city with weak central authority and a justice system being rebuilt almost from scratch, the fighters have become detectives, prosecutors, judges and jailers, many of whom answer only to their own commanders, or to no one.
The fighters have detained thousands of people; some are criminal suspects, former officials or Qaddafi soldiers. Others simply come from towns that opposed the revolution. Some are being held in prisons, others at makeshift, and sometimes secret, detention centers.
Some are being tortured. The ordeal of the 36-year-old detainee bore similarities to cases recorded by the group Human Rights Watch in six facilities administered by the anti-Qaddafi forces in Tripoli. In a report released Friday, the group said that detainees reported abuse including beatings and electric shocks. None of the 53 detainees interviewed, the group said, had been brought before a judge.
“What we’re seeing is a symptom of a fundamental problem,” said Tom Malinowski, the group’s Washington director. “Civilians have good plans but lack authority over the militia groups.” Mr. Malinowski credited the transitional government with allowing observers to visit detention centers, and said that some were well run. He added, “I doubt there’s a civilian official who knows where all the facilities are.”
Human Rights Watch reported that many of the people arrested by militias, brigades and other security groups associated with the transitional government were sub-Saharan Africans or dark-skinned Libyans. In some cases, the former rebel guards at detention facilities forced sub-Saharan African prisoners to perform manual labor.
Detainees suspected of the most serious crimes, including murder and rape, received the worst abuse, the report said.
The 36-year-old detainee said bad luck, not guilt, had led to his arrest and torture, after he tried to buy a gun to replace one confiscated by the former rebels. Soon, the man found himself accused of supplying arms to a Qaddafi cell.
From their accents, he guessed that some of his captors were from the mountain city of Zintan. One was kind, loosening his blindfold and his handcuffs. Another asked him to write his life story on a few sheets of paper.
He broke down crying, he recalled. “How can I write my whole life story? What do they want from me?”
The beatings started on the third day. Some guards cursed him as a former intelligence officer, and others chanted, “The blood of the martyrs will not be shed in vain.” He was strung from the ceiling and his legs were beaten, he said.
On the fourth day, he was transferred to a former government building in Tripoli. His fellow captives, he said, included someone accused of wearing a pro-Qaddafi hat, several women and a man who had been helping the transitional government secure the former government’s secret files.
A doctor treated him, and one of his captors congratulated him on being cleared of wrongdoing, adding, “This is a clean revolution.”
How do you make this song a reality? To be sure, singing songs about peace will not bring peace. But reading about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, visiting the conflict area and talking to the people on the ground are concrete steps that can make a difference.
In this song, Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian singers and musicians joined together to perform the Hebrew-Arabic song “Hevenu Shalom Aleinu” (We Brought Peace Upon Us) – “Ma Ana Ajmal Min Salam” (There is Nothing More Beautiful Than Peace). Sung in both Hebrew and Arabic, this Middle Eastern, Sepharadic-style, jazzy and inspiring song challenges us to rise above the propaganda, renounce hatred, supremacy, violence, and terrorism, and “rock the boat” until Israelis and Palestinians understand there is only one path to security and peace, and that is through sharing the land and upholding the human rights of all inhabitants of the Holy Land.
This song is dedicated to the thousands of ordinary people around the world, including many Jews, who are helping to promote human rights, equality and justice.
Thank you for listening! Shamai Leibowitz
PERFORMERS (in order of appearance):
Israeli Jews:
Leah Shabat
Shlomo Gronich
Zehavah Ben
Eli Luzon
Palestinians:
Sahmir Shukri
Nivine Jaabri
Elias Julianos
Lubna Salame
TRANSLITERATION OF SONG
(Hebrew)
yesh beneynu hiburim
she’horeynu lo halmu
yesh beneynu diburim
she’ad koh lo nishme’u.
anahnu kan bishvil koolam
anahnu gesher ve’soolam
bishvil mi she’holem
bishvil mi she’halam.
Review of The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant by Jean Alonso. Leap Year Press, 2011. Available at Amazon here.
Did you ever demand any answers?
The who, the what or the reason why?
Did you ever question the setup?
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy?
Did you think it right
To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight,
never make a fight, never make a fight?
Suddenly jobs are on the political agenda. Politicians from the President on down state that creating jobs for American workers is their top priority. Often any jobs, as with the low-wage jobs that Texas Governor Rick Perry brags he “created.” Sometimes they want to create “good paying” jobs. But in this discourse having a job is everything, because it allows one to pay the bills and avoid poverty.
Those who worked with Jean Alonso making missiles in a Massachusetts defense plant – referred to as American Missile and Communications Corporation but sounding suspiciously like Massachusetts-based Raytheon – knew how important it was to have a job in this society. But they also recognized that ”good jobs” should mean far more than good-paying ones. And they knew, from their own bitter experience, that many jobs can be toxic, destroying the mind and soul, and sometimes the body as well, of those who work them.
Alonso’s book The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant begins as the missiles fly at the start of the first Gulf War. The fragile community in the plant is strained by tensions between the patriotic workers and Alonso with her antiwar views and activities. Alonso copes with her own anguish by conducting an informal survey of how her coworkers feel about their work. She learns that these coworkers are filled with a profound sense of hopelessness and despair:
“I feel like a zero.”
“Inferior.”
“Empty.”
“Helpless.”
“I’m very depressed and anxious.”
“I’m so unhappy here I get aches and pains from it.”
“Apathetic. I can’t do anything at home anymore but watch TV.”
“I was a musician, you know, so I still need to write everyday – if you don’t you have no soul. But I go home and I’m too tired.”
“I feel like there’s something crushed inside – I feel really defeated. It’s like giving up on your whole self in order to make a living – you can’t figure a way out.” (pp. 10-11).
These responses, expressing feelings that had never been spoken among these workers, start Alonso and a small group of coworkers on a journey to make sense of what was happening to them at work and why. Through monthly meetings buttressed by Alonso’s library research, they explore the deadening effects of repetitive work accompanied by social powerlessness in the workplace. They try to understand Alonso’s realization that “something in this work is changing us, as if we were living by Love Canal” (p. 37).
Over the next couple of years this group of defense plant workers examine their dashed hopes and dreams as well as an extensive body of social science literature, in an attempt to figure out just how the work was changing them. They confessed to each other that their ability to reason had diminished after years in the plant. The lack of mental stimulation was reducing their very intelligence. And, indeed, as Alonso learned from her reading, a German researcher had found that IQ declines following years of unskilled labor. This cognitive decline didn’t seem so surprising to the workers when one of them recalled being told by a supervisor, “You don’t get paid to think.” These workers discovered through their own experience that mindless work induces mindlessness.
Alonso later realized that the experience of the American Missile workers wouldn’t have seemed strange to Adam Smith, who in 1776 wrote of the mind-destroying effects of unskilled work as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the then new industrial system:
The understanding of the greater part of men is necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man’s whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations and he naturally loses, therefore, the habit [of solving problems] and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become… But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall (p. 180).
In addition to cognitive problems, the plant workers confronted elevated depression, anxiety, and apathy. Alonso’s research convinced her that these symptoms were similar to those experienced by victims of what psychologist Judith Herman called “complex chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome” or CCPTSD. She quotes Herman as saying that those suffering from CCPTSD “have a history of subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period of time” (p. 125).
The shop floor environment that Alonso and her fellow workers experienced daily was, indeed, totalitarian. Every motion was monitored. Bathroom breaks were strictly regulated. Supervisors yelled at workers as if they were disobedient children. Conversations were monitored and often forbidden. Escape, while not impossible, became ever more difficult as years in the plant went by and economic chains bound the workers.
In her efforts to better understand the totalitarian aspects of her work environment, Alonso studied military culture and found many similarities to the culture at American Missile. The similarities were not accidental. She realized that the company deliberately sought out supervisors with military backgrounds. The fact that the company was part of the military-industrial complex, producing missiles for US wars, probably made military culture especially desirable to management.
At the time that Alonso writes about, relations between workers in the plant were especially stressed as many of the workers sought a sense of meaning and community through patriotic identification with the company’s missile-producing mission and with the war in progress and became less tolerant of those questioning the war. Pressure to not rock the boat increased as demand for the missiles rose.
Like many manufacturing companies, American Missile had a union. Unfortunately, this was as much a part of the problem as part of the solution. Union officials refused to pursue cases of sexual abuse, wouldn’t recognize the women’s committee founded by Alonso and others, and systematically harassed militants. Thus, much of the energy to improve the workplace was channeled into often futile attempts at union reform.
Throughout The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant Alonso weaves her personal account of nearly two decades in the factory with an account of the research into the effects of the work environment on workers. The result is one of the most thought provoking books you will find to read this year. As the politicians talk endlessly about “jobs” while providing few, Alonso reminds us that a good society will provide not just jobs, or even well-paying jobs, but jobs that enhance the spirit and development of those who work them.
Surely today, 235 years after Adam Smith described the mind-destroying nature of unskilled work, an “improved and civilized society,” – as Smith described the new industrial capitalism – should be one that proves him wrong. Such a society would be one in which all who work find that their jobs enhance their thinking, spirit, and sense of humanity. Such a society would be one in which workers are not merely the tools of the already wealthy and powerful, but makers of a more decent world for themselves, their fellow workers, and the rest of society. While the politicians beholden to the powerful are not likely to be concerned with this goal, surely the vast majority of us ought to be.
What did you learn in the morning?
How much did you know in the afternoon?
Were you content in the evening?
Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?
Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool?
Did the place where you were living
Enrich your life and then
Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men,
all your fellow men, all your fellow men?
As Richard Cheney (F-Felon) romps around the airwaves promoting his new book, Daily Kos reminds us of the perhaps unprecedented failures of the Bush administration, and Cheney himself, to tackle or even take seriously the Al Qaeda threat. This provides a useful summary that should be widely disseminated:
Dick Cheney wants you to forget
By Laurence Lewis
Dick Cheney is back in the news again, as he becomes the latest member of the Bush administration to cash in on what should be cause for criminal investigation and likely prosecution. This is a classic chickenhawk, who himself got five deferments to avoid fighting his generation’s war, and whose idea of recreation is to shoot birds that were raised as hunting fodder and released by the staff of an exclusive club, and who even in such a cruel, controlled environment still somehow managed accidentally to shoot a man in the face. This is a man who as regent and Lord Protector to the Lesser Bush oversaw the destruction of the U.S. economy, the evisceration of the Clinton budget surplus and the creation of the largest budget deficit in U.S. history, and was catastrophically irresponsible with what may have been the last chance to address the most important issue humanity has ever faced. But nothing so defined the Bush-Cheney era as issues of national security. And Cheney doesn’t want you to remember what really happened under his Protectorate on national security. And you can be certain that the traditional media won’t recount what happened under Cheney’s Protectorate on national security. That is up to us.I’ve posted this numerous times in numerous forms and it will need to be posted any time Bush or Cheney returns to the headlines. The facts are clear and the evidence overwhelming. Under Bush and his regent and Lord Protector Cheney, U.S. national security was undermined as it never before had been. Remember this. Bear witness. Don’t let anyone forget.
With characteristic intelligence and class, Bush responded with the words:
All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.
And went fishing.
But Bush wasn’t the only member of his administration to blow off warnings, and ignore the threat of terrorism. Indeed, Attorney General John Ashcroft revealed his own lack of concern just a day before the attacks:
In his final budget request for the fiscal year 2003 submitted on Sept. 10 to the budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the attorney general called for spending increases in 68 programs, none of which directly involved counterterrorism. Upgrading the F.B.I.’s computer system, one of the areas in which he sought an increase, is relevant to combating terrorism, though Mr. Ashcroft did not defend it on that ground.But in his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Mr. Ashcroft did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators.
Mr. Ashcroft proposed cuts in 14 programs. One proposed $65 million cut was for a program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training to localities for counterterrorism preparedness.
When Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, sought to transfer money to counterterrorism from the missile defense program, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a letter on Sept. 6, 2001, saying he would urge Mr. Bush to veto the measure. Mr. Levin nonetheless pushed the measure through the next day on a party-line vote.
And former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke had this to say about National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice:
…I believe it was, George Tenet called me and said, “I don’t think we’re getting the message through. These people aren’t acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances.” And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser’s office. And I’ve used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet’s warnings as “He had his hair on fire.” He was about as excited as I’d ever seen him. And he said, “Something is going to happen.”Now, when he said that in December 1999 to the national security adviser, at the time Sandy Berger, Sandy Berger then held daily meetings throughout December 1999 in the White House Situation Room, with the FBI director, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the head of the Defense Department, and they shook out of their bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks. And we did prevent the attacks in December 1999. Dr. Rice chose not to do that.
We know, for example, that then National Security Adviser Rice was warned repeatedly in 2001 about an imminent al-Qaeda attack against the U.S., but, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, she simply didn’t believe that a cave dweller like Osama bin Laden could be that much of a threat. She was warned by the outgoing Clintonite Sandy Berger, in January 2001. She was warned by the White House counterterrorism scold Richard Clarke. And now, with Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, and subsequent Washington Post reports, we’ve been reminded that cia Director George Tenet warned Rice on July 10, 2001, that “the system was blinking red,” meaning that there could be “multiple, simultaneous” al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests in the coming weeks or months.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even Bush himself later made it clear:
The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Hugh Shelton, said the Bush administration pushed terrorism “farther to the back burner”. And in a sympathetic portrait of the young administration, Bush at War, the president himself told the author, Bob Woodward, that he “didn’t feel that sense of urgency” about going after Osama bin Laden.
But when it comes to fighting terrorism, administration officials say the United States has no new initiatives to offer. Top antiterrorism officials in the U.S. government tell NEWSWEEK that Bush and his lieutenants have yet to put forth a counterterrorism plan. So far at least, the Bush team has kept on Clinton’s counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke.
One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.Berger attended only one of the briefings—the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. “I’m coming to this briefing,” he says he told Rice, “to underscore how important I think this subject is.” Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, “I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.”
Though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months and was still refining a plan to use one armed with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader when Sept. 11 unfolded, current and former U.S. officials say.
Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism — which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying — while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA’s attention.
Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission’s suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. “Frankly, the White House shut it down,” Hart says. “The president said ‘Please wait, we’re going to turn this over to the vice president. We believe FEMA is competent to coordinate this effort.’ And so Congress moved on to other things, like tax cuts and the issue of the day.”
“We predicted it,” Hart says of Tuesday’s horrific events. “We said Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers — that’s a quote (from the commission’s Phase One Report) from the fall of 1999.”
Let’s highlight that:
Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism — which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying — while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA’s attention.
Not only did the entire Bush administration ignore multiple screaming warnings, but Cheney himself was tasked with studying the risk of domestic terrorism! And even though Bush himself said he’d periodically review the issue:
Neither Cheney’s review nor Bush’s took place.
Bush and Cheney. Both. Both given specific warnings. Both claiming they would study the risks. Neither doing so. Their entire administration failing in every possible way, despite numerous specific and personal warnings. Despite numerous specific and personal warnings that kept coming, right up until the days before the September 11 attacks. And after the attacks we had this:
The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.
And just half a year later, we had Bush saying this:
And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.
But that was only the beginning. There was more. Much more. The Bush-Cheney team undermined national security in multiple ways, including abusing and damaging the U.S. military. Click through to see the links. And share. And never forget.