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Monday, July 25, 2011

The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of "Terrorism"

Saturday, Jul 23, 2011 07:24 ET
The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of "Terrorism"
By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below - Update II)

For much of the day yesterday, the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible, one that, as James Fallows notes, remains at the Post with no corrections or updates. The morning statement issued by President Obama -- "It's a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring" and "we have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks" -- appeared to assume, though (to its credit) did not overtly state, that the perpetrator was an international terrorist group.

But now it turns out that the alleged perpetrator wasn't from an international Muslim extremist group at all, but was rather a right-wing Norwegian nationalist with a history of anti-Muslim commentary and an affection for Muslim-hating blogs such as Pam Geller's Atlas Shrugged, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch. Despite that, The New York Times is still working hard to pin some form of blame, even ultimate blame, on Muslim radicals (h/t sysprog):

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday's assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda's brutality and multiple attacks.

"If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda," said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn't, even when it's allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist. Of course, before Al Qaeda, nobody ever thought to detonate bombs in government buildings or go on indiscriminate, politically motivated shooting rampages. The NYT speculates that amonium nitrate fertilizer may have been used to make the bomb because the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, owned a farming-related business and thus could have access to that material; of course nobody would have ever thought of using that substance to make a massive bomb had it not been for Al Qaeda. So all this proves once again what a menacing threat radical Islam is.

Then there's this extraordinarily revealing passage from the NYT -- first noticed by Richard Silverstein -- explaining why the paper originally reported what it did:

Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.

There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible.

In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know -- by definition -- that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant -- also by definition -- that it was an act of Terrorism. As Silverstein put it:

How's that again? Are the only terrorists in the world Muslim? If so, what do we call a right-wing nationalist capable of planting major bombs and mowing down scores of people for the sake of the greater glory of his cause? If even a liberal newspaper like the Times can't call this guy a terrorist, what does that say about the mindset of the western world?

What it says is what we've seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn't Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn't). As Maz Hussain -- whose lengthy Twitter commentary on this event yesterday was superb and well worth reading -- put it:

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly. When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances. The U.S. and its allies can, by definition, never commit Terrorism even when it is beyond question that the purpose of their violence is to terrorize civilian populations into submission. Conversely, Muslims who attack purely military targets -- even if the target is an invading army in their own countries -- are, by definition, Terrorists. That is why, as NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language. Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

One last question: if, as preliminary evidence suggests, it turns out that Breivik was "inspired" by the extremist hatemongering rantings of Geller, Pipes and friends, will their groups be deemed Terrorist organizations such that any involvement with them could constitute the criminal offense of material support to Terrorism? Will those extremist polemicists inspiring Terrorist violence receive the Anwar Awlaki treatment of being put on an assassination hit list without due process? Will tall, blond, Nordic-looking males now receive extra scrutiny at airports and other locales, and will those having any involvement with those right-wing, Muslim-hating groups be secretly placed on no-fly lists? Or are those oppressive, extremist, lawless measures -- like the word Terrorism -- also reserved exclusively for Muslims?

UPDATE: The original version of the NYT article was even worse in this regard. As several people noted, here is what the article originally said (papers that carry NYT articles still have the original version):

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday's assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking al-Qaida's signature brutality and multiple attacks.

"If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from al-Qaida," said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.

Thus: if it turns out that the perpetrators weren't Muslim (but rather "someone with more political motivations" -- whatever that means: it presumably rests on the inane notion that Islamic radicals are motivated by religion, not political grievances), then it means that Terrorism, by definition, would be "ruled out" (one might think that the more politically-motivated an act of violence is, the more deserving it is of the Terrorism label, but this just proves that the defining feature of the word Terrorism is Muslim violence). The final version of the NYT article inserted the word "Islamic" before "terrorism" ("even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause"), but -- as demonstrated above -- still preserved the necessary inference that only Muslims can be Terrorists. Meanwhile, in the world of reality, of 294 Terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009 as counted by the EU, a grand total of one -- 1 out of 294 -- was perpetrated by "Islamists."

UPDATE II: This article expertly traces and sets forth exactly how the "Muslims-did-it" myth was manufactured and then disseminated yesterday to the worldwide media, which predictably repeated it with little skepticism. What makes the article so valuable is that it names names: it points to the incestuous, self-regarding network of self-proclaimed U.S. Terrorism and foreign policy "experts" -- what the article accurately describes as "almost always white men and very often with military or government backgrounds," in this instance driven by "a case of an elite fanboy wanting to be the first to pass on leaked gadget specs" -- who so often shape these media stories and are uncritically presented as experts, even though they're drowning in bias, nationalism, ignorance, and shallow credentialism.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/23/nyt/index.html

The Lesser Evil

The Lesser Evil
by Chris Sullivan

Suppose it were possible for anybody who ever lived to be president of the United States.

At every election, we're always told that if we don't vote for Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dumber will be elected and the Supreme Court will be filled with activist judges or some terrible UN treaty will be pushed through or what's left of our rights will be further eroded. That's probably true in either case, but may be worse in the case of Tweedle Dumber. But what if there is a third or fourth or any number of other candidates who have no chance of winning, but are decent people with a zeal to protect individual rights -- sort of a Clark Kent of politics. Should you stick to principle and vote for them or "hold your nose and vote for Tweedle Dum"?

Since this is all theoretical, lets say that Lucifer has the nomination wrapped up for the Evil Party and is polling something like 46% of the vote against any nominee of the Stupid Party.

The Stupid Party has a hard-fought three way race with Hitler, Stalin and Lincoln eviscerating each other in a political gladiatorial game. As the votes are counted at the convention, the great state of Erehwon casts the winning votes for Stalin and the crowd is jubilant. Ten thousand balloons are released as fourteen tons of confetti are dropped on the delirious crowd. All the delegates agree that Stalin is the electable candidate even though some are less than convinced he can defeat Lucifer since Stalin only polls 40% in a match up against Lucifer.

Stalin is the clear favorite among religious people since he is clearly not as bad as Lucifer and has pledged not to appoint any mass murderers or child molesters to the Supreme Court.

Things start looking better for Uncle Joe after focus groups find that emphasizing his WW II alliance with the U.S. against Hitler plays well and old pictures are brought out showing him kissing babies. Stalin, after reinventing himself and hiring the best public relations consultants has now closed the gap to 42 – 47% against Lucifer.

Just as Stalin starts to look like he might have a chance to catch Lucifer, disaster strikes. The Truth Party, a small splinter group of what most people would classify as extremists nominates Jesus Christ as its candidate.To make matters worse for Stalin, the Truth Party is on the ballot in 42 states, in some of which he has his greatest strength.

The Stupid Party establishment tries to persuade the officers of the Truth Party to withdraw Jesus' nomination and throw their support to Stalin, but the Truth Party people won't hear of it. The Stupids launch an advertising campaign through a political front group advising people not to waste their vote on Jesus. Bumper stickers are printed with the slogan, "A Vote For Jesus Is A Vote For Lucifer."

The anti-Jesus campaign back-fires and causes his numbers to go up and Stalin's to go down. Now the situation appears desperate, so the Stupids promise to balance the ticket and put Jesus on as Vice President.The Truth Party extremists remain intransigent and will not take the deal.

Just as the nimbus clouds appear to be gathering over the Stalin campaign, Pastor Jack Agee gives it a boost by reminding his followers that Uncle Joe set up Birobidzhan as a Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union and has pledged increased support for Israel. Pastor Agee seems miffed that he can't get any assurance that Jesus will support Israel; in fact, he's been unable to find out Jesus' position on anything.

Jesus seems uninterested in winning the campaign and has not made any speeches or gone to any political rallies. When located by a reporter for Mendax News Service and asked about his program, he says something about his kingdom not being of this world and also something about bearing witness to the truth; nothing very good for a soundbite.

As the campaign is in the closing days, Stalin and Lucifer are polling within the margin of error with each other and with Jesus as a spoiler. Should good people vote for the good or for the lesser evil?

http://differentbugle.blogspot.com/2011/07/lesser-evil.html

David Wu

Notice in this article his political association is not mentioned or at least that I could see.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/59706.html
Susan

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U.S. Taxpayers Finance Taliban

U.S. Taxpayers Finance Taliban
"A year-long military-led investigation has concluded that U.S. taxpayer money has been indirectly funneled to the Taliban under a $2.16 billion transportation contract that the United States has funded in part to promote Afghan businesses." ( Washington Post)

They can't keep track of what they spend now.

Political Accounting
There Are Human Costs to Every Government Snafu
James Bovard
September 1999 • Volume: 49 • Issue: 9 •

Why does the federal government, according to its own auditors, squander tens of billions of tax dollars year after year? Attempts to understand the actions of politicians and bureaucrats on the basis of private-sector decision-making are doomed to failure. Efforts to "fix" government by ending specific boondoggles are quixotic crusades. Government will continue to be profoundly wasteful because that is how politicians maximize their powera subject that interests politicians far more than do General Accounting Office reports.

"Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," observed George Orwell.^{[1 ]} Ruth Grant wrote that "hypocrisy and politics are inextricably connected on account of the peculiar character of political relationships."^{[ 2]}Since government is coercion, politics is largely the exercise of deception regarding the intended use of coercion.

The benevolence of government rarely transcends the venality of politics. Paternalism seeks to generate mass happiness by forcibly sacrificing as many people and groups as necessary to the Greater Good. And who defines the Greater Good? The same people who benefit from maximizing the sacrifices.

The amount of power a politician can seize over other people is inversely related to the politician's honesty. If the politician openly tells people how much more coercive power he seeks and how he intends to use it, there will likely be strong opposition to the expansion of government. Politicians rarely wish to admit that they are pursuing a larger "market share" in the life of the average citizen. Because politicians and government officials often seek more power than they publicly admit, many, if not most, of their analyses of government policies are skewed.

The Social Security Model

If a politician camouflages his plans, people may fail to resist the increased power until it is too late. This is the thumbnail history of Social Security, a program that illustrates the natural combination of paternalism and political fraud. As the Brookings Institution's Martha Derthick observed, "In the mythic construction begun in 1935 and elaborated thereafter on the basis of the payroll tax, Social Security was a vast enterprise of self-help in which government participation was almost incidental."^{[3 ]} The Social Security Administration for decades told people that their payroll taxes were being held for each citizen in individual accounts; in reality, as soon as the money came in, politicians found ways to spend it.^[4]Social Security Commissioner Stanford Ross, after he announced his resignation, conceded in 1979 that "the mythology of Social Security contributed greatly to its success. . . . Strictly speaking, the system was never intended to return to individuals what they paid."^[5] Ross said that Americans should forget the "myth" that Social Security is a pension plan and accept it as a tax on workers to provide for the "vulnerable of our society." But Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York accurately characterized Social Security taxes as "outright thievery" from young working people.^[6]American citizens now shoulder over $17 trillion in unfunded liabilities.^{[7 ]} The General Accounting Office issued the first comprehensive report on government assets and liabilities in 1998and curiously left Social Security obligations out of the liability column. A New York Times article noted,

A footnote in a draft portion of the report released Monday notes that after 2029, the Social Security trust fund will be "totally exhausted" and "current tax income will be sufficient to pay approximately 75 percent of the benefits due." But that is not really a liability, the administration's accounting experts explained Monday, because technically the government owes the money to itself, not the pensioners, and because Congress is free to change the amount paid Social Security recipients. After thinking about the political implications of that statement, however, more politically sensitive administration officials called reporters late Monday to stress that the government did not really have plans to cut back on Social Security payments. "It's an accounting device," one official said. "That's all it is."[8]

If the defenders of Social Security insist that the fraud was justified because otherwise the American people would not have accepted the coercive redistribution scheme, the question arises: What future limits should there be on government's prerogative to deceive the people? If Social Security is an acceptable fraud, what would government have to do before it was considered to have gone too far? Social Security is a perfect symbol of political generosity: it robs scores of millions of young people, it halves the national savings rate, and thereby sabotages investment and productivity increases,[9] and it maximizes bureaucratic and political discretion over people's fortunes. If the average worker had a dollar for every time a congressman lied about Social Security, his retirement would be safe. There is no "Honesty in Intervention Act" governing new laws or political action. Current taxpayers are still paying for the lies that politicians told to get re-elected in 1936, 1938, 1940, ad nauseam. The fact that politicians replace old lies with new lies does not reduce the burden on citizens of laws that were enacted on false pretenses generations ago.

Business Accounting versus Government Accounting

Paternalism will always be based on political accounting, which is practically the opposite of private accounting. Businesses prosper by reducing costs, while politicians prosper by denying that costs exist. For politicians, it is more important that spending forecasts be popular than accurate. The more that politicians and bureaucrats underestimate the cost of their favored policies, the easier it becomes to hustle those policies to voters and other legislators. Medicareone of the largest expansions of government power since the New Dealsteamrolled through Congress in 1965 in part because of a spending forecast that made the expansion of handouts seem easily affordable. By 1990, however, Medicare was costing almost ten times more per year than the 1965 forecast had predicted it would cost.[10]

The political concept of waste is almost diametrically opposed to the economic concept of waste. In economics if an activity produces something that other people value, it can be successful; in politics if a program garners votes, campaign contributions, or power, it is successful. Government programs are often effectively designed to waste money because politicians benefit from an inefficient, spendthrift program as much as or more than they would benefit from an efficient, well-targeted program. Congressmen brag about the amount of federal money spent in their districts, not about whether audit reports found minimal fraud.

Political accounting means that government leaders will be ignorant or misled or dishonest about the true cost of policies they impose. The GAO's financial report concluded: "Because of the government's serious systems, record-keeping, documentation, and control deficiencies, amounts reported in the consolidated financial statements and related notes do not provide a reliable source of information for decision-making by the government or the public."[11] GAO found that "significant financial systems weaknesses, problems with fundamental record keeping, incomplete documentation, and weak internal controls . . . prevent the government from accurately reporting a large portion of its assets, liabilities, and costs."[12] Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee declared, "We are spending almost $2 trillion a year and managing a $850 billion loan portfolio based on erroneous or non-existent information. It means basically that we don't know what the government's assets are, we don't know what the government's liabilities are, we don't know what it costs to run government."[13 ]

After the audit was released, a senior Clinton administration official told the Associated Press: "This is an old closet that we haven't cleaned out in 200 years."[14] If politicians are going to have the closet cleaned out only once every couple centuries, maybe they have no right to control the house. A report that should have been proof of the political class's incompetence instead merely evokes another round of promises to try harder next time.

Cost Is No Object

Paternalism presumes that government agencies judiciously weigh costs and benefits before extending their power. However, many bureaucracies have little or no curiosity about the impact of agency actions on private citizens. The House Commerce Committee surveyed federal agencies and concluded in a 1997 report, "Where costs [of regulation to private companies] are addressed, they represent only the smallest and most insignificant portion of total costs. . . . With little or no documentation on the costs of regulation, agencies have no basis to judge whether any possible benefits from a new regulation would outweigh the possible costs of the regulation."[15 ] Because government agencies do not have to pay for the costs they impose, they have no incentive to track the burdens. The committee warned that "federal agencies may inadvertently be exposing our Nation to incalculable economic harms."[16] The only way such government ignorance could not be harmful is if it were true that government dictates are always superior to private decisions.

Efforts to evaluate government programs by private accounting standards are always contrary to how government agencies gauge their own successes. Government agencies measure their achievements by how much they prohibit; private companies gauge their accomplishments by how much they produce. Government bureaucracies brag about the number of fines they have imposed; private companies brag about the number of inventions they have created. Government bureaucrats pride themselves on forcing private citizens to obey orders; private companies pride themselves on discovering ways that help each person find his own path.

Governments do not squander money in a vacuum. The more of an economy that is subject to political command and control, the greater the opportunities and prosperity forgone. Wasteful government spending crowds out productive private investment; as a result, the entire society becomes increasingly impoverished compared to what people could have achieved.

The supposed benefits of the tradeoff between freedom and political control is based almost entirely on the bogus premise that politicians will provide more welfare (after seizing increased power over everyone else) than private citizens can generate through their voluntary agreements and hard work. A 1998 report by economist James Gwartney and colleagues for the congressional Joint Economic Committee found that since 1960, average government expenditures for the 23 major industrial countries had risen from 27 percent of GDP to 48 percent of GDP in 1996while the average economic growth rate "fell from 5.5% in the 1960s to 1.9% in the 1990s." Gwartney observed: "While growth has declined in all [23] countries, those countries with the least growth of government have suffered the least."[17] Gwartney concluded: "If government expenditures as a share of GDP in the United States had remained at their 1960 level, real GDP in 1996 would have been $9.16 trillion instead of $7.64 trillion, and the average income for a family of four would have been $23,440 higher."

Squandering Lives

The failure of a government policy does not merely reduce the number of bureaucrats who receive "outstanding achievement" job evaluations. Governments cannot waste tax dollars without squandering part of the lives of the people who earned those dollars. There are human costs to every government snafu. A billion tax dollars wasted pre-empts 10,000 families from buying starter homes, or pre-empts 100,000 people from buying bottom-of-the-line new cars, or pre-empts a million people from taking a summer vacation, or pre-empts citizens from buying 40 million new books or 80 million cases of beer.

The value of liberty and personal independence is almost never factored into the calculus of paternalism. Social scientists, politicians, and bureaucrats consider the expected benefits of any proposed new rule and ignore the effect of its forcible imposition. Every government program, every government intervention, every government penalty carries a hidden cost of pre-emption. The fact that people prefer to live as they choose and not as others command never shows up on intellectual radar screens. If the costs do not show up in the official government budget, they do not officially exist. Any government cost-benefit analysis of a proposed new rule or regulation that disregards the value of individual freedom implicitly assumes that private freedom is a good at the disposal of the political class.

Since most politicianssimply by their career choiceindicate a desire for power, any measure that increases power will be considered a success. If a policy increases the number of people beholden to them, then it is good as an end in itself. The ultimate conflict of interest that subverts paternalism is that government officials want power and citizens want freedom.

There is no reason to expect contemporary Leviathans to become significantly more efficient in the future. The only way to fix most government programs is to repeal the underlying law and abolish the government agency. Anything less will be little more than a future full-employment program for investigative journalists.

Notes

George Orwell, The Orwell Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), p. 366.
Ruth W. Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 2.
Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1979), p. 232.
Two classic books on this topic are Dillard Stokes, Social SecurityFact and Fancy (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956) and Abraham Ellis, The Social Security Fraud (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996 [1971]).
"Outgoing Social Security Head Assails 'Myths' of System and Says It Favors the Poor," New York Times, December 2, 1979.
Pat Wechsler, "Will Social Security Be There for You?" Newsday, January 14, 1990.
Daniel J. Mitchell and Gareth G. Davis, "Social Security Trust Fund Report Shows Need for Reform," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #1176, May 4, 1998.
David Sanger, "Glitches Galore Pop Up in Full Audit of Government," New York Times, March 31, 1998.
Martin Feldstein, "Economics: His Defense," New York Times, October 5, 1980.
Jake Hansen, "Medicare's Dire Outlook," Washington Times, June 3, 1995.
Editorial, "What the GAO Foundor Didn't Find," Washington Times, April 3, 1998.
James Glassman, "No-Account Government," Washington Post, April 21, 1998.
"What the GAO Found orDidn't Find."
"First Government Audit Completed," Associated Press, March 30, 1998.
House Commerce Committee, Survey of Federal Agencies on Costs of Federal Regulations, House Report 97-H-272-1, January 1997.
Ibid.
"On average, government expenditures in 1995 consumed only 20% of GDP in the five economies with the most rapid real economic growth rates during 1980–95: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. In these countries, the size of government in 1995 was virtually the same as in 1975." James Gwartney, "Less Government, More Growth," Wall Street Journal, April 10, 1998.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/political-accounting/