Dennis Loo

“Many of the people coalescing around the Tea Party Movement, young and old, are at the beginning of their political awakening. They are angry and frustrated by what they see and rightly so. They’re in the midst of a personal storm. They see their own little boats on the verge of capsizing and they’re looking for the calmer seas of yesterday. Eventually many of them will realize that there are no simple solutions and reason will moderate their fear struck emotionalism.”

–”William,” Peoria, Illinois, in his comment at the New York Times, 2/16/10, in response to David Barstow’s 2/15/10 article, “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right.”

William recounts at the beginning of his comment his personal saga of holding up Goldwater signs in 1964:

“I remember in my callow youth, at eighteen, in 1964 standing on one of the main streets in Peoria holding my Goldwater sign aloft as Lyndon Johnson’s motorcade drove by. I was against ’segregation’ but nervous in an inchoate way that LBJ was proposing giving rights to blacks at the expense of the ‘rights of white men’ and would usher in a socialist revolution. I was afraid, even then, that some bogyman was going to take my guns, though I didn’t have one and wasn’t interested in buying one. It was just the prospect of not being able to wave one any time I wanted at some perceived threat that the Goldwater people had convinced me was an assault on my liberty and the beginning of tyranny. (It seems ironic now that LBJ gave me my first gun and provided me the training in its use.)

“I had little grounding in politics and almost no understanding what a modern nation state was about. I didn’t realize that we had gone from an agrarian nation to an urban mass society where a highly structured hierarchy was required for cars to move seamlessly from New York to California and a coordinated system of higher education was necessary for all of the technological changes that were to improve my life in so many ways. I was wedded to the idea that if I followed the common sense of any 18th century yeoman farmer democracy would be saved. At eighteen, the life I’d known was changing all too rapidly for me and I was afraid. JFK was dead and LBJ was co-opting his magnificent political vision to his own unsavory ends. The draft and Vietnam were lingering in the not to distant future. The prospect of bombing North Vietnam ‘into the stone age’ seemed preferable to having to risk my own life in the much more reasoned approach of limited warfare in the world of international power politics.”

William makes a number of very insightful observations about the Tea Party movement – the fact that the Tea Partiers are terribly new to political life/activism, that their world has been upended, for the most part because of the economic crisis, and in part, the lesser part, but a nonetheless prominent part, due to Obama’s color, and the fact that they seek simple answers to very complicated problems.

As someone from the political Left, I must add that the Tea Party people to a significant extent (since they are such a variegated and motley group) are responding with appropriate outrage on certain matters. The “Oath Keepers,” for example, Frank Rich describes as “a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose.” I am not an expert on the Oath Keepers, but I do not quarrel with their stand on what kind of orders they call upon law enforcement and military personnel to disobey: warrantless searches, arresting Americans as unlawful enemy combatants, or forcing civilians into “any form of detention camps.” Their recognition that such orders are coming – or here already – is correct. Warrantless searches have been going on since the passage of the Patriot Act. Treating Americans as unlawful enemy combatants, including ordering their assassination by Obama, has begun to happen, albeit in a small number of cases so far, and detention camps have been built and roundups conducted of thousands of suspected immigrants.

The Tea Partiers cohere the extremely widespread and just outrage against the bailouts and the corporate control over the country. The 9/11 Truth Movement, which has its adherents among the TP’ers, gets some of its impetus from the simple fact that the government’s explanation for 9/11 violates the laws of physics in some important particulars. The Tea Party movement is both right-wing, especially in terms of its national reactionary “leaders” such as Beck and Palin and libertarian (thus, the popularity of Ron Paul), but it also overlaps with left-wing sentiments, despite its lily-white character.

Is a civil war coming? The Tea Partiers are getting ready for one. And they are probably right about that. Which way will they point their guns, will it be in the interest of reaction or the reverse? That question is unsettled because the forces in motion are complex, powerful, and unfixed. The situation is unstable. Some of the Tea Party people, only a part, but a distinct part, can potentially be won to a progressive, left-position. They aren’t all dyed-in-the-wool racists. Those who dismiss them as loonies are mistaking a part and an element of their movement for the whole. Emotion isn’t a bad thing per se. Passion is a good thing. It needs, however, to be based on a scientific and accurate appraisal of what’s actually going on. They won’t become more rational spontaneously, which is where I disagree with “William.”

The Tea Party movement reflects the fracturing forces of capital and imperialism as capital attempts to hold the center together, even as the forces of capitalism and its logic create greater and greater levels of instability through plunder and manifest and increasingly dramatic inequities. The GOP and the Democratic Parties are both in danger from this movement, even as the GOP tries to stoke, hijack, and control the Tea Partiers. The Massachusetts election of Brown demonstrates both the power of the Tea Party movement and the bankruptcy of their “rejection” of establishment politics by participating in electoral, establishment politics – how is electing a Republican any kind of repudiation of what is wrong in this country’s political arena?

The Tea Party movement also reflects, in part, the relative strength of the forces of the reactionary Right and the relative weakness so far of the Left. Imagine the impact if the genuine Left (needless to say I’m not speaking here of the Democratic Party as the Left) had the equivalent of Fox News and the pulpit that that network alone is. We don’t have its equivalent, obviously, and we’re not going to get it, either. But what we can do with even a modest increase in funding and participation in the Left by new forces is immense…

I want to call attention to an aspect of a story that no one so far, to my knowledge, has pointed out.

Cass Sustein, close friend to Obama and Head of his Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, proposed a year ago along with his co-author, fellow Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule, a government program to secretly infiltrate “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” by using ostensibly “independent” credible voices, who are actually secretly in the pay of the government, to counter “conspiracy theorists” such as the 9/11 Truth movement and other “extremist” groups. They dub this program “cognitive infiltration.”

The full citation for their paper is as follows: Sunstein, Cass R. and Vermeule, Adrian, Conspiracy Theories (January 15, 2008). Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 08-03; U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 199; U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 387. Available at SSRN:http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585

Marc Estrin first called attention to this here. Daniel Tencer at RawStory picked Estrin’s story up and wrote a very good story about it here. Glenn Greenwald wrote in his usual estimable way about this subsequently here.

As Glenn Greenwald writes: “This program would target those advocating false ‘conspiracy theories,’ which they [Sustein and Vermeule] define to mean: ‘an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.’”

Sustein and Vermeule, in other words, want to carry out a stealth government program  - a machination by powerful people who conceal their role – that is itself an example of a conspiracy, the very existence of which the program is supposed to claim doesn’t exist.

In other words, they are doing exactly what they claim crazy conspiracy theory people think that the government is doing, in order to combat the crazy conspiracy people.

In the abstract to their paper, “Conspiracy Theories,” published on January 15, 2008, they state, in part:

“A distinctive feature of conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality. Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy. Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups.”

A crippled epistemology indeed. It is true that wild conspiracy theories abound. But since a conspiracy means that some people get together to plan and implement something, and don’t tell people what they’re doing, a conspiracy also describes surprise birthday parties, price-fixing, what politicians do routinely amongst themselves, adultery, and so on. These activities abound as well, and they’re quite real. Just because you claim that the government is up to no good, and is concealing from public view what its real agenda is, doesn’t mean that you’re not possibly right. This proposal for “cognitive infiltration” itself proves that governments conspire, or at least, that former academics who are now in the government, propose to conspire. The history of COINTELPRO, of course, also proves that the government conspires, as does the NSA’s massive surveillance over all of us before it was uncovered, the planting of fake stories in Iraqi newspapers by the US Military, the recent Gruber scandal, and so on and so on.

If Sustein weren’t now ideally positioned in his current post to actually implement the proposal that he suggested a year ago, we would perhaps be forgiven if we thought that Sustein and Vermeule were engaged in a satire.

The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago.[2] If nothing happens, it will be harder still to say this is necessary. – Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, War Studies Program Chair, Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, July 8, 2007.

[T]here will be another terrorist attack between now and next November…the public will run into the arms of the Republicans as a cause of that, and … Democrats are essentially helpless to do anything about that. – A Sacramento Democratic strategist, paraphrased at a July 17, 2007 Democratic gathering

We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court. – David Addington, Cheney’s ex-Chief of Staff, February 2004[3]

[T]he only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. – Michael Scheuer, former CIA officer in charge of the Bin Laden Unit, June 30, 2009 on Fox News’ Glenn Beck show

In my last article “Security Failures and the Myth of Omniscience“ I described the counterproductive nature of our government’s manic search for total information. Gathering information everyday that is four times what is held in the Library of Congress – by the NSA itself – based on surveillance of all Americans and our activities and surveillance of people abroad, on the grounds that anyone could be a terrorist and should be treated as such, is the equivalent of trying to find a needle in a haystack while being caught in a blinding windstorm of hay.

The pursuit itself is doomed to fail. You cannot connect the dots if all you see everywhere you look are dots.

The discourse and practices that now pass for the “mainstream” in American politics have gone so far and become so peculiar that it is almost impossible to describe it without resorting to what might superficially look like alarmist talk. The only way to keep our heads in this situation is to remain relentlessly logical and hold fast to our moral compass.

Unfortunately, there is one more logical step to our government’s pursuit of total information. The more that intelligence and security measures fail to protect us against anti-state terror, the more they succeed in justifying their very existence.

If “terrorist” incidents don’t occur at least once in a while, then the rationale for ubiquitous surveillance, the growing incursions on civil liberties, the express violations of the law in the name of “security,” the use of rendition, torture, the nullification of habeas corpus, the indefinite detention of even those who have been found innocent in trials, and the ongoing unjust wars and occupations, all become more transparently illegitimate, counter-productive and irrational.

The government doesn’t need to fabricate terrorist incidents since its very policies provoke more and more people to want to strike back at the US. All the government or some segment within the government (such as the CIA) needs to do is look the other way when an incident is about to occur. The system is a closed circle with a self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating logic to it.

As long as the underlying logic of the “war on terror” isn’t challenged, the logic of it is uncontestable and foolproof.

How so?

Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1: Bush and Cheney launch a war upon Iraq based on lies. They are caught lying, but they aren’t impeached, aren’t prosecuted, and their war on Iraq  continues to be funded by a Democratically controlled Congress and is being continued under their successor, Barack Obama.

Plaintiff’s Exhibit 2: Bush and Cheney endorse and propagate torture as the norm for US forces worldwide. They are caught doing so, in express violation of national and international law, making them the target of contempt worldwide but they aren’t prosecuted nor impeached. Instead, Congress approves of this by passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Their practices are still being shielded from prosecution and many of these practices continue under their successor, Barack Obama.

Plaintiff’s Exhibit 3: Bush and Cheney admit that they have been kidnapping and sending people to other countries known for routine torture and to CIA “black sites.” They admit that they have been using waterboarding, described by Cheney as a “no brainer.” They aren’t prosecuted for this and their successor Barack Obama continues to use rendition.

Plaintiff’s Exhibit 4: Bush and Cheney expressly violate the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) and are caught doing so. They are not prosecuted for their felonious conduct nor are they impeached. Congress retroactively approves of it. Barack Obama continues the massive, warrantless surveillance.

Plaintiff’s Exhibit 5: A lawyer named John Yoo provides the legal fig leaf of a justification for torture and continues to teach Constitutional Law at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, defended by his law school dean against demands for his firing and prosecution as a war criminal under the fig leaf in his case of “academic freedom.” A lawyer named Jay Bybee co-writes these torture memos with Yoo and is awarded with a Federal Judgeship and passes judgments in a black robe from the bench on “criminal” suspects.

Those people who have been paying attention to Obama’s presidency may have noticed that Obama hasn’t closed Guantanamo, hasn’t restored habeas corpus, continues and has expanded the wars and occupations to Pakistan and Yemen using the same justifications as Bush of 9/11, blocked the release of the deeply incriminating torture photographs, renewed the Bush White House’s self-serving claims of “national security” in court to block the suits of detainees who have been tortured, and has gone even further than Bush by asserting the right to detain people indefinitely even when they have been acquitted by Military Tribunals or in Federal Court. This is not hyperbole. This is what he has in fact being doing and what is all on the public record.

What we have here is the political equivalent of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy: mothers who deliberately and secretly slowly poison or injure their child in order to prove the need of the child for their mother’s care. The more dependent and weakened the child becomes, the more he or she needs their mother’s loving care. The American people are the equivalent of that child. Our leaders are slowly poisoning us.

What is the underlying logic that must be challenged if this syndrome is to ever end? The “war on terror” is premised on the notion that it is acceptable and moral to value American lives over that of others. The idea that it is ok to kidnap, indefinitely detain, waterboard and kill others in the name of protecting Americans and American interests is the rationale that undergirds the war on terror’s egregious record. Those who recognize the counter-productive, extraordinarily destructive and dangerous nature of the “war on terror” must explicitly challenge the very idea that American lives are worth more than any other people’s lives.

As difficult as this may be to confront, the logic is inescapable: to curb and undo this monstrous war on terror we have to go directly up against the notion of superpower nationalism and counter-pose the one size fits all logic of patriotism with internationalism – everyone’s life, no matter what their national origin, is precious and equally important. There is no other path that promises the possibility of breaking this vicious and ever worsening circle.

Like Jake Sully in Avatar, we’re confronted with the question: Are we the Nav’i or the US Marines?  We can’t be both. We have to choose.

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[1] In one of the final scenes of the film classic Spartacus, when the powerful slave uprising that Spartacus led is finally defeated by Rome, the Romans offer amnesty to all of the slaves and respite from crucifixion if they will simply identify amongst themselves their leader. As Spartacus begins to rise to identify himself, his comrades rise one by one by one to declare in a rising crescendo: “I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus…”

[2] Delaney paraphrased by Toronto Star reporter, Andrew Chung.

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/04/AR2007090402292_pf.html

We want to be able to search everything, so we could see if Mohammed Atta ever got a parking ticket in Roselle. You can’t connect the dots if you can’t see them. – Richard Kelly, New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center’s Director

[E]ach day [the NSA] collects four times the volume of information stored in the Library of Congress – Matthew Aid, Intelligence Historian

[If a terrorist incident has a] one percent chance of occurring, then it need[s] to be treated as a certainty. – Dick Cheney

As ridiculous as Cheney’s one percent doctrine sounds, his approach is that of our government, under both Republicans and Democrats, in gathering information about possible threats.

I call it the myth of omniscience.

Knowing that Mohammed Atta got a parking ticket in Roselle would be meaningless information even if they already strongly suspected that Atta was an important figure in a pending terrorist plot. What would this piece of information have done for them? As it happens, and as the whole world knows, US intelligence failed to finger Atta as a player in an upcoming attack. Having more information about Atta wouldn’t have helped. The problem was more basic.

Our government’s directive to the over two hundred thousand people engaged in intelligence work since 9/11 is that all leads must be followed up. Their suspects’ list has now more than 500,000 names on it and it’s growing daily.

Talk about a wild goose chase!

This makes for an interesting kind of symmetry: our government is guilty of suffocating people with water – aka waterboarding – and our government for its part is drowning in data as a result of drowning people to obtain “data.” One of the reasons why waterboarding was initiated was because top Bush officials insisted that actionable intelligence be produced tout suite. And everyone amongst this merry band of torturers/interrogators was and is convinced that their detainees are all in cahoots with Al-Qaeda. Those are the “right” answers they get when they put the screws on detainees.

The failure to interdict the Nigerian briefs bomber is not attributable to a lack of information. The problem is that there was and is too much information of the wrong kind.

You can’t connect the dots if you’re covering your map with millions upon millions of dots. You cannot connect the dots when you make no distinction between useful data and useless data and when you’re constantly escalating the amount of useless data that you are inputting.

The problem here might be described as a problem of the noise to signal ratio. In receiving radio broadcasts, for instance, it is hard to hear the signal when there is too much noise.

The redundancies in information gathering and the warrantless surveillance over everyone, with all of these data shielded from public scrutiny by self-serving claims that disclosing any of this would “harm national security,” and that it’s all “state secrets,” are producing a cacophony of ever more deafening noise.

By treating everyone as a suspect and marking every activity and association as suspicious and necessary to compile and track, the government is intermingling irrelevant and useless information with actual terrorist plots. This is the equivalent of taking haute cuisine and mixing it with tons of sewage.

The path our government is taking is doomed to fail again and again. We are the ones who pay for those failures, along with, and most especially, the victims of our country’s unjust wars and policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and who knows where next.

There is a reason why our government continues to amass more and more information, producing paralysis in their ranks. It’s not due to stupidity on their part. It’s because it is their view that everyone must be treated as a potential suspect.

The approach that everyone should be subjected to surveillance is not only the wet dream of police and intelligence personnel. It’s the product of public order policies that date from the 1970s worldwide that have supplanted the previous paradigm that people who are guilty of something should be tracked and everyone else should be left alone. In this brave new world, the government believes that, for example, you are a “low-level terrorist” if you exercise your right to speak out and protest.

Obama has said that he has the right to hold people indefinitely even if they have been acquitted in a trial. The new Democratic President, in other words, has declared that he has the power of those in The Minority Report who believed that they could tell when somebody was going to do something. “You may have been proven innocent, but we know that you’re guilty.”

If everyone’ s a suspect, then you can’t devote the necessary attention and resources to the people who really merit attention.

The problem we face then as a society is that our political and business leaders have introduced a new norm in which if possibly, maybe, conceivably, by the remotest chance, you might do something someone else doesn’t like, if you do something that can be construed as trying to affect government policy, then you are a TERRORIST.

Here is the USA PATRIOT Act’s definition for a new crime dubbed “domestic terrorism:” “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws … [if such acts] … appear to be intended …to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.”

Doesn’t this make an overly enthusiastic or aggressive lobbyist a “domestic terrorist”?

When Bush falsely claimed that if we didn’t invade Iraq that we’d be hit by WMD from Saddam Hussein, wasn’t he then intimidating the nation and Congress into giving him the OK to attack Iraq? He was, therefore, a domestic terrorist.

The Patriot Act’s definition for terrorism is, of course, only applied to those that the government doesn’t like. But if they are allowed to get away with this scam, then who really is terrorizing the nation and the world? It isn’t only Al-Qaeda…

The Nigerian student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, with the explosive underwear, on the Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, is one of this week’s – and probably for a number of weeks’ – big story.

There are a number of different ways of approaching this story.

I just want to focus on one aspect. In today’s New York Times Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian, points out that the National Security Agency “each day collects four times the volume of information stored in the Library of Congress… ‘To pluck out the important threats is an almost impossible task,’ he said.”

An almost impossible task.

So U.S. intelligence is buried under an avalanche of too much information. They are unable to act because they don’t know what to do about all of the information they have.

Billions have been spent on improving and revamping counter-terrorist intelligence in the U.S. since 9/11 in the name of preventing another attack. Close to a trillion has been sunk into the unjust wars that have been and are still being justified on the grounds of “fighting terror.” More than a million Iraqis have died in this war and tens of thousands of Americans. Thousands have died in Afghanistan and many innocents have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan and now in Yemen. Kidnapping, torture, torture to death (of at least one hundred) and indefinite detention has been and is still being carried out in the name of protecting the U.S., violating international and national law, and making the U.S. a rogue nation before the world. Warrantless surveillance over all of us and the suspension of several different Constitutional rights round out the picture of this “war on terror.” The character of life in the U.S. has been radically and fundamentally distorted and the whole world held hostage to this war of terror.

Yet on Christmas Day Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab manages to escape detection during airport security, despite being on a watch list, despite beefed up airport security, despite the NSA intercepting communications within Al-Qaeda of a coming attack by a “Nigerian,” and despite his prominent banker father approaching Nigerian and CIA and State Department officials in November fervently warning them that his son was a “security threat” who had told his family that they weren’t going to see him again.

Washington is scratching its collective head about how this could happen. How can so many resources, so many people, so much information, and so much attention be devoted to this and yet fail?

Certainly some of the problem here has to do with the nature of bureaucracies and their unwillingness to share information with other agencies. And certainly some of the problem is that surfeit of information that Aid refers to.

But US intelligence got it together sufficiently when Bush was president and delivered to him as dire a warning as it is possible to give to a US president, via his Presidential Daily Bulletin, short enough for even Bush to read, on August 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

What was Bush’s response to the CIA briefer? “You’ve covered your ass now.”

The Times today refers to the August 6, 2001 PDB this way: “The C.I.A. sounded the alarm about an impending attack, including the now-famous President’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001…

“But the information that could have unraveled the plot remained at each of the three agencies and was never put together.”

This is not quite true. Counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke was setting off alarm bells everywhere in the weeks before 9/11. He did his utmost to try to get the White House to beef up security. He directed the FAA to inspect passengers and baggage, which the FAA refused to do. And, we all know by now how seriously the White House took Clarke’s fervent warnings.

The warnings about 9/11 were not an example of an intelligence failure. They were an example of the heads of the bureaucracies refusing to take seriously what was being given it by intelligence. This was after the World Trade Center had already been bombed once, after the USS Cole was attacked, after other incidents of hijackers using planes as missiles against buildings, etc.

The writing was on the wall. Yet they refused to read the writing.

Why would they do that?