TomDispatch.com

Sometimes, if you want to catch the essence of a moment, however, grim, you need to turn to humor. Recently, the New Yorker’s resident satirist Andy Borowitz produced one of his patented fake news stories that began this way: “The president of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker, attempted on Wednesday to defuse the brewing controversy over his decision to change the network’s official slogan from ‘The Most Trusted Name in News’ to ‘Holy Crap, We’re All Gonna Die.’”

Can there be any question that a pandemic disease, which may, by December, be spreading at the rate of 10,000 cases per week in West Africa and, in a deeply interconnected world, can head anywhere is worthy of attention, preparation, and planning?  Can there be any question that a major global humanitarian effort to stem Ebola’s course in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea is imperative? Still, you have to wonder whether the second-by-second coverage of the two cases so far transmitted in this country, including the quarantining of a dog, isn't just the usual media overkill.  It’s a story that, like massive storms and extreme weather, has so many upsides for a media world that feels itself up against the wall: it’s easy to write (or film); there’s no need for “balance”; it’s guaranteed to instantly glue eyeballs at a time when your audience can be elsewhere in no-seconds flat; and it breeds overreaction and the sort of hysteria that brings in yet larger audiences, the sort that Borowitz captured so well.  On the other hand, it makes reality almost impossible to grasp by denying context or perspective.  Think of Ebola as the disease version of ISIS beheading videos. 

Add into the mix an election year in which Republicans are ready to tar Democrats with any kind of prospective disaster (and Democrats eager to blame Republican cost-cutting for the imagined pandemic-to-come).  The result: a growing mood that couldn’t be uglier or less amenable to thinking clearly about the actual dangers we face and what is to be done. 

As TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg points out today, given an administration already on the ropes over its new war in the Middle East, it would be all too easy for U.S. officials, amid the usual panic, to fall back on that comfortable template of the post-9/11 years, the war on terror, when it comes to Ebola.  After all, it’s already enscribed in the DNA of a national security state that is, effectively, a shadow government.  So no one should be surprised that Washington's first response to the Ebola crisis was to militarize it.  U.S. boots are already on the ground in West Africa and preparations are underway for a possible future call-up of the reserves and the National Guard.  In other words, in his initial move to contain Ebola, President Obama sent in the U.S. military, an organization as ill equipped to deal with a pandemic disease as it was to deal with “nation-building” in Afghanistan or Iraq.  He also called for the formation of medical “SWAT teams” to fight Ebola in this country -- not perhaps your typical image for responding to a disease, but one that fits this American moment to a T.  And the Pentagon has already responded by organizing "a 30-person rapid-response team that could provide quick medical support to civilian healthcare workers if additional cases of the Ebola virus are diagnosed in the United States."

Since we already live in the United States of Hysteria, TomDispatch sets out on a tour today of possible future front lines as Greenberg explores how, in our strange land, a disease could end up being treated as the latest terror operation against this country.  Tom

Fighting the Last War
Will the War on Terror Be the Template for the Ebola Crisis?
By Karen J. Greenberg

These days, two “wars” are in the headlines: one against the marauding Islamic State and its new caliphate of terror carved out of parts of Iraq and Syria, the other against a marauding disease and potential pandemic, Ebola, spreading across West Africa, with the first cases already reaching the United States and Europe.  Both wars seemed to come out of the blue; both were unpredicted by our vast national security apparatus; both have induced fears bordering on hysteria and, in both cases, those fears have been quickly stirred into the political stew of an American election year. 

The pundits and experts are already pontificating about the threat of 9/11-like attacks on the homeland, fretting about how they might be countered, and in the case of Ebola, raising analogies to the anthrax attacks of 2001. As the medical authorities weigh in, the precedent of 9/11 seems not far from their minds. Meanwhile, Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has tried to calm the country down while openly welcoming “new ideas” in the struggle against the disease.  Given the almost instinctive way references and comparisons to terrorism are arising, it’s hard not to worry that any new ideas will turn out to be eerily similar to those that, in the post-9/11 period, defined the war on terror.

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Call me moved. I recently went to the premiere of Citizenfour, Laura Poitras's engrossing new film on Edward Snowden, at the New York Film Festival. The breaking news at film's end: as speculation had it this summer, there is indeed at least one new, post-Snowden whistleblower who has come forward from somewhere inside the U.S. intelligence world with information about a watchlist (that includes Poitras) with "more than 1.2 million names" on it and on the American drone assassination program.

Here's what moved me, however. My new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World, ends with a "Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower," whose first lines are: "I don't know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year... And how exactly do I know this? Because despite our striking inability to predict the future, it’s a no-brainer that the national security state is already building you into its labyrinthine systems.” And now, of course, such a whistleblower is officially here and no matter how fiercely the government may set out after whistleblowers, there will be more. It’s unstoppable, in part thanks to figures like Poitras, who is the subject of today’s TomDispatch interview. Tom]

Edward Snowden and the Golden Age of Spying
A TomDispatch Interview With Laura Poitras

Here’s a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! stat from our new age of national security. How many Americans have security clearances? The answer: 5.1 million, a figure that reflects the explosive growth of the national security state in the post-9/11 era. Imagine the kind of system needed just to vet that many people for access to our secret world (to the tune of billions of dollars). We’re talking here about the total population of Norway and significantly more people than you can find in Costa Rica, Ireland, or New Zealand. And yet it’s only about 1.6% of the American population, while on ever more matters, the unvetted 98.4% of us are meant to be left in the dark.

For our own safety, of course. That goes without saying.

All of this offers a new definition of democracy in which we, the people, are to know only what the national security state cares to tell us.  Under this system, ignorance is the necessary, legally enforced prerequisite for feeling protected.  In this sense, it is telling that the only crime for which those inside the national security state can be held accountable in post-9/11 Washington is not potential perjury before Congress, or the destruction of evidence of a crime, or torture, or kidnapping, or assassination, or the deaths of prisoners in an extralegal prison system, but whistleblowing; that is, telling the American people something about what their government is actually doing.  And that crime, and only that crime, has been prosecuted to the full extent of the law (and beyond) with a vigor unmatched in American history.  To offer a single example, the only American to go to jail for the CIA’s Bush-era torture program was John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who revealed the name of an agent involved in the program to a reporter.

In these years, as power drained from Congress, an increasingly imperial White House has launched various wars (redefined by its lawyers as anything but), as well as a global assassination campaign in which the White House has its own “kill list” and the president himself decides on global hits.  Then, without regard for national sovereignty or the fact that someone is an American citizen (and upon the secret invocation of legal mumbo-jumbo), the drones are sent off to do the necessary killing.

And yet that doesn’t mean that we, the people, know nothing.  Against increasing odds, there has been some fine reporting in the mainstream media by the likes of James Risen and Barton Gellman on the security state’s post-legal activities and above all, despite the Obama administration’s regular use of the World War I era Espionage Act, whistleblowers have stepped forward from within the government to offer us sometimes staggering amounts of information about the system that has been set up in our name but without our knowledge.

Among them, one young man, whose name is now known worldwide, stands out.  In June of last year, thanks to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden, a contractor for the NSA and previously the CIA, stepped into our lives from a hotel room in Hong Kong.  With a treasure trove of documents that are still being released, he changed the way just about all of us view our world.  He has been charged under the Espionage Act.  If indeed he was a “spy,” then the spying he did was for us, for the American people and for the world.  What he revealed to a stunned planet was a global surveillance state whose reach and ambitions were unique, a system based on a single premise: that privacy was no more and that no one was, in theory (and to a remarkable extent in practice), unsurveillable.

Its builders imagined only one exemption: themselves.  This was undoubtedly at least part of the reason why, when Snowden let us peek in on them, they reacted with such over-the-top venom.  Whatever they felt at a policy level, it’s clear that they also felt violated, something that, as far as we can tell, left them with no empathy whatsoever for the rest of us.  One thing that Snowden proved, however, was that the system they built was ready-made for blowback.

Sixteen months after his NSA documents began to be released by the Guardian and the Washington Post, I think it may be possible to speak of the Snowden Era.  And now, a remarkable new film, Citizenfour, which had its premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 10th and will open in select theaters nationwide on October 24th, offers us a window into just how it all happened.  It is already being mentioned as a possible Oscar winner.

Director Laura Poitras, like reporter Glenn Greenwald, is now known almost as widely as Snowden himself, for helping facilitate his entry into the world.  Her new film, the last in a trilogy she’s completed (the previous two being My Country, My Country on the Iraq War and The Oath on Guantanamo), takes you back to June 2013 and locks you in that Hong Kong hotel room with Snowden, Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian, and Poitras herself for eight days that changed the world.  It’s a riveting, surprisingly unclaustrophic, and unforgettable experience.

Before that moment, we were quite literally in the dark.  After it, we have a better sense, at least, of the nature of the darkness that envelops us. Having seen her film in a packed house at the New York Film Festival, I sat down with Poitras in a tiny conference room at the Loews Regency Hotel in New York City to discuss just how our world has changed and her part in it.

Tom Engelhardt: Could you start by laying out briefly what you think we've learned from Edward Snowden about how our world really works?

Laura Poitras: The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the U.S.] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is "collect it all." I worked on a story with Jim Risen of the New York Times about a document -- a four-year plan for signals intelligence -- in which they describe the era as being "the golden age of signals intelligence."  For them, that’s what the Internet is: the basis for a golden age to spy on everyone.

Read more »

It was May 23, 2012, and President Obama was giving a graduation speech at the Air Force Academy when he told the assembled cadets that they should "never bet against the United States of America... [because] the United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs."  On that basis, he suggested, the twenty-first century, like the twentieth, would be an American one.  Then, on October 23, 2012, in the final presidential debate with Mitt Romney, he reiterated the point, saying: "America remains the one indispensable nation, and the world needs a strong America, and it is stronger now than when I came into office."

That phrase, “the indispensable nation,” is of relatively recent coinage, but it is now seemingly an indispensable word for any American politician and so it’s not surprising that the president continues to cling tightly to it.  On May 28, 2014, for instance, giving another commencement speech, this time at West Point, he once again went for that indispensable rhetorical jugular. “And when a typhoon hits the Philippines,” he assured the cadets, “or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help.  So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.  That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”  (Of course, to this day those schoolgirls remain kidnapped and there are still masked men in buildings in Eastern Ukraine, but those are small points indeed.)  On August 26th, Obama returned to the theme, speaking to the national convention of the American Legion. “No nation,” he told the assembled veterans ringingly, “does more to help people in the far corners of the Earth escape poverty and hunger and disease, and realize their dignity.  Even countries that criticize us, when the chips are down and they need help, they know who to call -- they call us.  That's what American leadership looks like.  That's why the United States is and will remain the one indispensable nation in the world.”

You get idea.  We are... go ahead, chant it: indispensable!  And this is: our century... if you don’t mind my completing the phrase... to screw up totally.  As it happens, that word “indispensable” is often used without any indication of what exactly our indispensability consists of.  Evidence from the last 13 years, however, suggests that we have been exceptionally, indispensably, undeniably, inscrutably important when it comes to destabilizing significant chunks of the planet and encouraging the growth of jihadist organizations.  Now, in the post-9/11 exceptionalist sweepstakes, President Obama and his crew (with the Republican wolves of war baying at his heels) have evidently decided to outdo themselves by launching yet another war, even lamer than the previous ones, based on an expanding bombing campaign that's going nowhere.  Today, State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren offers a sweeping worst-case vision of American indispensability in the Middle East.  And as an account of disasters to come -- I don’t hesitate to say it! -- it is both exceptional and indispensable reading as the latest iteration of the American Century goes down in flames. Tom

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Seven Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle with the Islamic State
By Peter Van Buren

You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster -- a friend crossing Death Valley with next to no gas in his car -- and then add, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Such is the Middle East today. The U.S. is again at war there, bombing freely across Iraq and Syria, advising here, droning there, coalition-building in the region to loop in a little more firepower from a collection of recalcitrant allies, and searching desperately for some non-American boots to put on the ground.

Here, then, are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that’s on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet’s most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Many thanks for the little flood of donations in the last couple of weeks!  They really do help ensure the continued existence of this website. For anyone still interested in a signed, personalized copy of my new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World, in return for a contribution of $100 (or more), just visit our donation page to check out the details. Otherwise, I urge all regular TomDispatch readers to consider picking up a copy of the book, for a friend if not yourself, and helping make it a success. If you are an Amazon customer, click here (and this site gets a small percentage of any purchase you make at no cost to you); if not, consider going to the website of Haymarket Books, Shadow Government's superb independent publisher, and picking up a copy directly.  Tom]

You may not believe in the supernatural, but it’s still a certifiable fact.  Your tax dollars are paying for ghosts.

Just ask John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, who recently wrote to three U.S. commanders in that country suggesting that the Pentagon might be “unwittingly helping to pay the salaries of non-existent members of the Afghan National Police”  -- that is, “ghost” police officers. He came to that conclusion after a recent trip to the country.  For one thing, there were those 54,000 “erroneous personnel ID numbers” in the payroll system for the Afghan security forces.  It’s the sort of thing that might make anyone suspicious.

Filling your ranks with ghost personnel may not result in an effective policing or fighting force.  It ensures, for one thing, that in a moment of need you can’t even know how many people are actually carrying weapons and how many are will-o’-the-wisps.  One thing is certain, however: it’s an absolutely top-notch way for Afghan police and army commanders to line their pockets with dollars.

And by the way, those Afghan ghosts have a history nearly as long as America’s second Afghan War.  In 2007, for instance, the U.S. Government Accountability Office was already reporting that the “actual number of present-for-duty soldiers” in Afghan military units was “about one-half to two-thirds of the total” at any given time.  While some of those were soldiers on leave, significant numbers were clearly ghost troops.  Similarly, in 2009, Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Washington University, estimated in a study that 25% of Afghan police units were, in fact, ghostly presences.

It’s not hard to understand why. From early on, the Afghan army and police forces -- set up, funded, equipped, and trained by the Americans and their NATO allies -- have hemorrhaged recruits.  Desertion rates have often reached 25%, which means that if an Afghan commander simply fails to report all the troops he's losing, the money to pay them just keeps coming in -- to him.  None of this should surprise anyone, including John Sopko, since reports on the inability of the Pentagon (and the U.S. government) to accurately track where their funds were going in Afghanistan, what they really paid for, and how they were actually used have been a commonplace in these years.

You could say that such ghosts have been subsisting on American tax dollars for more than four decades.  After all, “ghost soldiers” were a commonplace in South Vietnamese units in America’s long war in that country; and as we now know from the fall in June of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, Iraqi military units, which disintegrated at the approach of the militants of the Islamic State, were similarly filled with such specters.

The question is: Why do the armies that the U.S. has formed, armed, and trained in lands where we’re at war and on which endless billions of dollars have been lavished always appear so ghostly and, in the end, fight so much less effectively than the forces opposing them?  As retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore suggests, if you foster kleptocratic governments, you shouldn’t be shocked when their armed forces prove to be filled with grifters, skimmers, and con artists. Tom

Investing in Junk Armies 
Why American Efforts to Create Foreign Armies Fail 
By William J. Astore

In June, tens of thousands of Iraqi Security Forces in Nineveh province north of Baghdad collapsed in the face of attacks from the militants of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), abandoning four major cities to that extremist movement. The collapse drew much notice in our media, but not much in the way of sustained analysis of the American role in it. To put it bluntly, when confronting IS and its band of lightly armed irregulars, a reputedly professional military, American-trained and -armed, discarded its weapons and equipment, cast its uniforms aside, and melted back into the populace. What this behavior couldn’t have made clearer was that U.S. efforts to create a new Iraqi army, much-touted and funded to the tune of $25 billion over the 10 years of the American occupation ($60 billion if you include other reconstruction costs), had failed miserably. 

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Small tip for next spring.  I just saw Robert Kenner’s documentary film “Merchants of Doubt” (inspired by a remarkable book of the same name) that exposes the way a tiny group of scientists were used first by Big Tobacco and then by Big Oil to sow doubt and uncertainty on subjects ranging from the dangers of cigarettes to global warming.  The book was written by TomDispatch author Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (and she's a major figure in the film).  As a tale of scientific flim-flam artists and grifters, the movie manages to be both shocking and thoroughly enjoyable, with a cast of characters ranging from a magician to a right-wing congressman who came to accept the reality of climate change -- and lost his seat.  It’s a tale of our time, grim yet sometimes quite funny and a must-see when it hits your neighborhood in perhaps March of 2015. Tom]

Think of it as a Walrusgram written on the sand of a northwest Alaskan beach and sent to the planet.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic marine mammal aerial survey noticed them first, those 35,000 walruses that had come ashore in unheard of numbers because their usual sea ice has simply melted away.  The photos are dramatic.  You couldn’t ask for a clearer message from a species that normally doesn’t write out its thoughts on the subject of our changing, warming planet.

For those who prefer their science not from the walrus’s mouth (so to speak), there has been equally relevant news on the same subject lately from another species.  Think of them as scientists clambering ashore from a wounded world.  Only weeks ago, it was reported that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere had reached record levels in 2013 and, perhaps even more unsettlingly, that oceans and terrestrial plant life, both major “carbon sinks,” were absorbing less CO2 than in the past.  Now, we have news that the oceans have actually been warming significantly faster than anyone previously imagined.  The latest figures indicate that “the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought... [and that] the upper levels of the planet’s oceans -- those of the northern and southern hemispheres combined -- had been warming during several decades prior to 2005 at rates that were 24 to 58 percent faster than had previously been realized.”

None of this is good news, of course, not if you have any sort of investment in future generations living on a planet anywhere near as hospitable as the one we’ve been on for so long.  But talk about dissociation.  While those walruses were climbing out of the water and the scientists were reporting their latest grim numbers, in the American heartland thousands of workers shaken loose from other worlds have been heading for boom times in North Dakota and elsewhere in our fracklands.  There, the exploitation of previously unrecoverable oil shale and natural gas deposits via hydro-fracking has pundits bragging about this country as “Saudi America” and the president aggressively planning to make “the oil weapon” a central feature in American foreign policy.

Between the two worlds, the one producing ever more fossil fuels amid a let-the-good-times-roll spirit of triumphalism and the one slowly melting down under the impact of what those fossil fuels release into the atmosphere, there sometimes seems no connection at all.  Clear as the link may be, each of these worlds often might as well be located on a different planet.

TomDispatch’s Laura Gottesdiener had the rare urge to land on that other planet, the one most of us never experience that produces fossil fuels with such exuberance, and see just what we’re all missing.  Here's her vivid report from the front lines of American fossil-fuel extraction. Tom

A Trip to Kuwait (on the Prairie)
Life Inside the Boom
By Laura Gottesdiener

At 9 p.m. on that August night, when I arrived for my first shift as a cocktail waitress at Whispers, one of the two strip clubs in downtown Williston, I didn’t expect a 25-year-old man to get beaten to death outside the joint. Then again, I didn’t really expect most of the things I encountered reporting on the oil boom in western North Dakota this past summer.

Read more »