Democrats Demonstrate Historical Amnesia

by Avi Davis

One of the most remarkable things about Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas was not the way the candidates sought to differentiate themselves from one another, but rather how much they struggled to make themselves look the same.

Part of this was due to the presence of a 72 -year-old firebrand, whose ideological weight made the stage sag way down to the far left and had all the candidates tumbling in that direction.  Bernie Sanders, with his calls for a political revolution, a crusade against Wall Street, free college tuition for all Americans and the break up of national banks sounded more like Fidel Castro in 1959, than a modern day American presidential contender.  And yet, he received by far the greatest applause of the evening, so long lasting  that at one point  the debate began to resemble a rally rather than a genuine exchange of ideas between thoughtful progressive candidates.

 

 

What is truly remarkable is how little resistance these entirely bankrupt and out- of-date ideas received from the other candidates.  When Jim Webb meekly attempted to challenge Sanders’ wild rhetoric  – pointing out that a political revolution is not exactly on the horizon and that Congress was unlikely to pay for the exorbitant programs Sanders was proposing, his criticisms were met with deafening silence.  Hillary Clinton, the long favored front runner, seemed too busy touting her experience and the fact that she is a female to be much engaged in confronting both Sanders’ and the audience’s silliness.

But letting this stuff go bears consequences.  That is because Sanders now has a national voice – which he may not have had before – and his brand of  socialist propaganda, which would never have passed muster 22 years ago when Bill Clinton faced off against his Democratic challengers, is going to be taken seriously in the upcoming presidential race.

The extraordinary thing is that here we are in 2015, twenty five years after the collapse of the world’s greatest failed experiment in socialism, in a country, by dint of its free enterprise system, which has ensured a greater level of prosperity for a greater proportion of its population, than any other nation in history.  Each one of the candidates harped on the great income disparity between rich and poor ( “the greatest gap since  the 1920s!,” at least three of them howled)  – but its all quite relative.  Even those in the lowest income brackets in our society today live lives of comfort and ease when compared to the existences of those same poor in the 1920s. Cell phones, 50″ television screens, owner-owned cars and a variety of other electronic  possessions can be seen in the homes of the most dirt poor areas of Detroit, New Orleans and East Los Angeles.  While these are not true determinants of income, they are symbols of an affluence that the poor in the rest of the world deeply envy and  why so many are risking their lives as illegal immigrants to cross our borders.

No one on that stage last night should have needed a history lesson in how socialism actually operates in the real world and how it significantly failed millions and upon millions of its adherents in the 20th Century.

 

 

But apparently no one was bold enough to stand up to Sanders and call him out for the ridiculous figure he casts in 21st Century American politics. They were all too busy retreading tired liberal tropes about brutal police tactics, institutional racism, billionaire avarice, climate change exigencies, Republican obstructionism, Wall Street chicanery and pharmaceutical industry malfeasance – all of which form part of Bernie Sanders’ bucket list of complaints against America.

And while Sanders was barking his socialist wares, Hillary Clinton was left free to address the country’s significant problems with broad platitudes. Although CNN host Anderson Cooper admirably continued to grill her about the consuming email scandal and her failures regarding Benghazi, none of her competitors seemed to consider these considerable vulnerabilities to be fair game. Sanders actually offered her a hand out of the furnace, seeming to agree with her that the concern of the country over her honesty and good faith, are not matters worthy of general discussion in Democratic circles but should be remaindered as Republican scare tactics.

The other big winner of the night was Barack Obama.  None of the candidates sought to distance themselves from Obama’s abysmal foreign policy record, the sluggish U.S. economy, his failures to assist his much venerated middle class, nor the Obamacare fiasco that any of them would need to fix immediately should they become President.  Clinton, whom the White House appears not too eager to see as as a presidential successor, went out of her way to avoid attacking Obama’s record and legacy, carefully sidestepping his most egregious failures.

This was the weak and uncourageous field which stood before the American public on the stage in Las Vegas last night.  We deserved and deserve much better.

 

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

 

Remembering Bush’s “Gulag” and Policies of Torture

The Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten found an appropriate way to commemorate the ninth anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday.  In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, titled A Post- 9/11 Betrayal Endures, Rutten wasted little time in inveighing against the actual murderers of 3,000 Americans and the heinous ideology that brought about their deaths on that clear September morning.

Instead Rutten filled the space identifying the true villains of the 9/11 era –  the Bush Administration with its establishment of the Guantanomo “Gulag” and its sanctioning of policies of torture.

”  The story of how the Bush- Cheney administration rushed to make torture an instrument of national policy in its ” war on terror” and how it created an international gulag in which to abuse prisoners is well known.,  Less remarked on  – for reasons that do nobody credit – is the fact that President Obama and his administration have embraced the secrecy and usurpations of power that made possible the Bush- Cheney betrayal of American values.”

It is  convenient, I suppose, for a mudslinger such as  Rutten to reach for  the nearest accessible clump of vitriol and fling it for all its worth at Bush’s historical record.  Leftists such as this old curmudgeon still believe that there is mileage to be pumped out of flaying the previous Administration, certain it will expiate the country of its lingering sins.

I wonder if he has ever considered that the succeeding Obama Administration kept much of the Bush anti- terror campaign in place because it found that not only was it legal,  but also extraordinarily effective.

The fact is that the CIA interrogation program at Guantanomo did not inflict torture by any reasonable standard  – whether that of the Geneva Convention, the guidelines set by the European Court of Human Rights or American Law.   The only instance in which torture, as it is defined internationally, could possibly be said to have taken place was in the water boarding of three high level al Qaeda operatives.

But water boarding in itself is not illegal under American law.  The report of the CIA Inspector General found that ” on 29 July 2003 , the Agency secured Department of Justice concurrence on water boarding.” The interrogators checked to see that it was legal – and it was.  The Obama Administration has not brought any prosecutions against either the Department of Justice officials who approved the water boarding, nor against those CIA agents who administered it, precisely because they know that no case against them could succeed in any American court of law.

We can also not ignore that the water boarding  of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, produced such a rich trove of intelligence that it is rightfully credited as having averted the next 9/11.   By the time his interrogators had finished with him, Mohammed was spilling the beans, without much prompting from his interlocutors, on al Qaeda’s operational structure, its financing,  its communications and its logistics  – giving rise, in the process, to over 6,000 intelligence reports.

He identified al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helped intelligence officers make sense of documents and travel records seized in terrorist raids.   This invaluable information was used by British officials in August, 2006 to interdict a plot of  two dozen terrorists to blow up seven trans-Atlantic flights , scheduled to depart Heathrow within hours of each other.

And what of Guantonomo itself ?  Can it really be compared to a Gulag –  the Soviet penal labor camp system that has become historically synonymous with the very concept of Hell ?

Well lets see:   Between 1929 and 1953  more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag with a further 6 to 7 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR.  According to a 1993 study of  archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. More complete data puts the death toll for this same time period at 1,258,537, with an estimated 1.6 million casualties from 1929 to 1953.  These estimates exclude those who died shortly after their release but whose death resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps, which was a common practice.  The total population of the camps varied from 510,307 (in 1934) to 1,727,970 (in 1953).

Although conditions varied from camp to camp and place to place, the large majority of prisoners at most times faced meagre food rations, inadequate clothing, overcrowding, poorly insulated housing, poor hygiene, and inadequate health care. The overwhelming majority of prisoners were compelled to perform harsh physical labor. In most periods and economic branches, the degree of mechanization of work processes was significantly lower than in the civilian industry: tools were often primitive and machinery, if existent, short in supply. Officially established work hours were in most periods longer and days off were fewer than for civilian workers.  Often official work time regulations were extended by local camp administrators.

This is how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archepeligo described his camp:

“Philosophers, psychologists, doctors, writers could have observed in our camps more than in anywhere else in all the versatility and in full details the specific process of narrowing of man’s mental and intellectual horizon, decline of a man to the level of an animal and his process of dying alive.”

This , on the other hand, is how  Guantanomo was described by Judy Reiss, whose son Joshua was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, described the detention facility.  Reiss had opposed the Iraq War and was appalled by stories of abuse at Guantanomo:

” I expected it to look like a broken down prison, like I had heard in the news.  But let me tell you, its the Guantanomo Bay Resort and Spa.   If they even have a pimple, they will fly a dermatologists down to make sure its not cancer.  They can stop the court proceedings if they need to pray.  They eat a more varied and selective diet than either you or I.”

Indeed, they do. According to Marc A. Thiessen, author of  Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe, at one time the military spent $125,000 on baklava to feed the prisoners on each night of Ramadan.  The chef in charge of catering showed Thiessen how she prepared exotic Middle Eastern meals according to the Middle East standard of halal.  Each meal is prepared in a variety of ways to satisfy the dietary restrictions of the inmates – ” regular meal”, soft meal”, ” high fiber meal,” vegetarian meal” , vegetarian meal with fish”  and ” bland meal”.  One nurse told Thiessen that  “the biggest problem the terrorists face is from excessive consumption of food on their 6,500 calories per day diet.”

To stay in shape and avoid this ” Gitmo gut,” the prisoners have access to elliptical trainers. They can view  satellite television, with access to al -Jazeera and Arabic news and sports channels.   They receive language and art classes – and handheld video games in order to help them pass the time.

An independent review by Navy Inspector General Admiral Albert T. Church III  found that:

” Detainees wee more likely to suffer injury from playing soccer or volleyball during recreation periods than from interactions with interrogators or guards.  Almost without exception, therefore, GTMO detainers have been treated humanely.”

Why is none of this information more popularly known?   Why does  ” Gitmo” still maintain  such a hold  on the national consciousness as a place where American values were betrayed – as indelibly imprinted as the attacks of 9/ 11 themselves.

Clearly there is still much political juice to be squeezed from the indictment and even today, as Rutten so ably demonstrates, it makes good copy.

One can only wonder what the reaction of readers  would have been in the decade following the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941, that the only thing a commentator could recall was how unlawfully we treated the men responsible for the attack.

But those who still remember that it was not the U.S. Government that sent 19 young men on planes on that September morning to kill thousands of innocent Americans, but Islamists driven by a deep hatred for our values and ideals, will regard journalists such as Rutten for what they are -malcontents, more committed to nursing a  sense of grievance against the United States ( of whatever administration) and identifying Americans’  “malevolent impulses”,  than true pride and gratitude for the achievements of its government over nine difficult  years in keeping Americans safe.

The Press and “Matters of Public Interest”

Give the New York Times at least a little credit for editorial discretion.

Last week, in a note to its readers accompanying the release of the first installment of nearly 90,000 classified documents, it claimed that it had ” taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests.”

Well thank goodness we have the editorial board of the New York Times around to make critical judgements for us on issues of  national security.

By now everyone knows that the paper, alongside seven other international newspapers, was the recipent of documents from the website known as WikiLeaks, which specializes in obtaining classified information that the government does not want made public.  The documents, in this case,  offer information about the U.S. war in Afghanistan which purportedly illuminate the U.S. government’s  military planning and decision making processes over a five year period between 2005-09.

The New York Times justified the release of the documents by asserting that  ” There are times when the information is of significant public interest,  and this is one of those times.”

By what authority does the paper gauge “matters of public interest? ”

And who, we should all wonder, made the editorial board of the New York Times the arbiter of what is or what is not in the ambit of this country’s national security interests?

Those are questions the News York Times and other national newspapers rarely answer with any precision, if at all.  Rather, their conduct over the past decade has demonstrated a wilful contempt of  the U.S.government’s stated view of national security interests and a repeated failure to accede to the demands of successive administrations to keep national security materials well under wraps.

On December 16, 2005, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, experienced  investigative reporters at the Times, blew open the NSA wiretapping scheme, under the same justification of public interest.   They followed that performance with  a report on June 23, 2006  focusing on the disclosure of the government’s SWIFT program –  an international effort, led by the United States, designed to monitor the financial transactions of terrorist organizations. 

But things are not always as they seem at the New York Times.

As to the first incident, commentator Gabriel Schoenfeld in Necessary Secrets: National Security, The Media and the Rule of Law ably demonstrates that it was neither “matters of public interest”  nor concerns for individual privacy that stood as the prime motivations for the Times to publish Lichtblau and Blau’s original story on the NSA.  It was, rather, a determination not to be scooped by its own reporters who were both writing books at the time on the Bush Administration’s anti-terror campaign.  The eventual publication of those books  – Lichtblau’s Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice  and Risen’s State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration  soon revealed not a balanced examination of the efficacy of the Bush Administration’s counter terrorism campaign but a vitriolic contempt for the Bush Administration itself and a ruthless demonization – and throughly prejudiced – attack on its counter-terrorism measures. It cast into significant doubt the reasons for the exposure of the scheme.

As for the SWIFT program revelations, no legitimate reason was ever offered by the New York Times for the necessity of disclosing the program. In fact in a letter to readers the paper’s editor, Bill Keller, admitted that ” no serious abuses of privacy had been identified.” Rather, he stated, the article’s publication was a means of protecting the public against only potential violations by the Bush Administration:

  ” We remain convinced,”  he wrote, ” that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest “

In other words, the editor of the foremost and arguably the most influential newspaper in the country, believes that it is incumbent on journalists such as himself to determine ” matters of public interest ” that could have a  potential  bearing on the security of U.S.citizens.

But who elected or appointed such men to make these kind of decisions for us?   Who gave sanction to these self appointed tribunes to wrest from our elected leaders and our military personnel ( men and women, after all, in whom we repose our trust and confidence by fiat, to protect us) the authority to pass judgement on vital issues of national security? 

The answer, of course,  is no one.   The press simply deigns to itself such a right, even if the U.S. Constitution (through the First Amendment)  remains silent on the issue and abundant legislation ( including the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Comint Act of 1950 – both of which have sections which expressly focus on the published disclosure of classified  information)  and more than 200 years of court decisions have repeatedly stymied the release of documents which the government regards as having a bearing on public safety.

Such editorial presumption was illustrated by Keller in his June 23, 2006 letter:

” And yet the people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy and an essential ingredient for self-government. They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish.”

He is certainly not alone in considering the enshrined principle of freedom of the press as a blank check given to an unelected body of self appointed potentates to pass judgement on what is and what is not safe for us to know.

On June 27, 2006, Dan Baquet, the then editor of the Los Angeles Times, in justifying his own paper’s publication of the SWIFT program’s details, offered this rather revealing window on press arrogance:

” We (also) have an obligation to cover the government, with its tremendous power, and to offer information about its activities so citizens can make their own decisions. That’s the role of the press in our democracy. The founders of the nation actually gave us that role, and instructed us to follow it, no matter the cost.”

No matter the cost?   I wonder if  Baquet had actually read the debates  on the  drafting of the First Amendment?  He might be surprised to learn that the  recorded discussion in the House of Representatives in 1789 on Madison’s first draft of the Amendment  is rather unhelpful in gauging the ‘ Founders’ intentions’ and that there is no recorded debate at all on the issue in the Senate.   I wonder if he has read the vast body of jurisprudence since that time which makes it clear that there are absolute limits on the press’ supposed right to disclose classified materials to the public – particularly during war time.

What he might also discover is that there is certainly no fundamental right to reveal everything there is to know about the workings of counter-espionage and counter-terrorism in this country – even where it concerns protecting against the potential  for the abuse of privacy rights.

If the press wants to claim that its right to virtually legislate on national security issues is absolute, then surely the public has a similar right to demand from it the exact standards and policies by which it seeks to frame these decisions.  It is simply not enough for editors such as Keller and Baquet to claim arbitrary authority.   If the United States Congress and our judiciary have spent 220 years debating First Amendment rights, then why isn’t it appropriate for our self appointed fourth tier of government to be doing exactly the same thing? 

Maybe it is time for the press to examine, within itself and together with its reading public, the exact framework for the publication of classified documents whose disclosure could mean life or death for thousands of U.S. citizens.

Only then will we have a much more exact understanding of what the press actually means when it claims that it is taking action in ” matters of public interest ” and will be held accountable when it abuses its own standards.  And perhaps then American citizens, in whose service the press claims to be acting, will find a way to let our newspapermen know whether it considers those standards to be either admirably sustainable or else sadly deficient.

On the Border

Somewhere south of Campo, CA  there is a phalanx of illegal immigrants planning a journey tonight that could cost them their lives.

The story of the treacherous crossing of the Sonoran Desert and the Rio Grande into our border states is well known.  It has been depicted movingly in films such as El Norte and Sin Nombre and sung about with deep sentiment by artists such as U2 and Bruce Springsteen.

Less well known are the hardships that those seeking to protect our borders from illegal immigration must endure as they conduct a vigilant reconnaisance of the border.

The tragic battle between the Mexican illegals and their enablers( known as coyotes)  with the volunteer guardsmen, known as Minutemen, is one of the least understood sagas of our time.

The illegals, fleeing poverty, violence, the incessant killings in the drug wars and looking for a better life  north of the border are as much victims as they are villains.  They sometimes hand over their life savings to unscrupulous smugglers who bring them across the border into the arid southern states of  California, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas only to often be abandoned by them, left to die of thirst, raped or robbed of what few belongings they still possess.

The Minutemen, frustrated by powerlessness of the U.S. Border patrol to adequately monitor the border are a voluntary citizen patrol who monitor the southern crossings for illegals who trample their crops, kill their animals and threaten violence if they are confronted.   Although  there have been cases of Minutemen having engaged the Coyotes in armed combat, most merely report crossing to the  U.S. Customs and Border Patrol who take over from there.

You would think the Minutmen would be accorded hero status for their selfless efforts to protect the border from the relentless wave of illegal immigrants.  But they have been vilified as vigilantes and marksmen, who shoot first and ask questions later.  They are seen as racists who fail to understand that these hardworking immigrants are willing  to perform the dirty jobs that Americans no longer want to do.  The illegals are cast by liberals as the same breed of individuals who flooded into America in the 1880s through 1920s , immeasurably enriching our nation with their talents and skills.

The equation of  the illegal immigrants of today with the great immigrations of the late 19th Century is, however, spurious.  Ilegal immigrants as a whole do not add to national productivity as previous generations did  but in fact  make a far greater contribution, by comparison, to welfare  rolls, gang violence and inner city poverty as a percentage of the population than any of the previous of immigration waves to this country.  It is also fatuous to state that immigrants have  some kind of “right” to cross over the United States border in order to find work and a livlihood.  Such an attitude bespeaks a rejection of  U.S. sovereignty and the sanctioning of one world government.

The advocates of illegal immigrants also fail to appreciate the way the drug trade uses the open southern border as access to the rich urban markets of this country.  Many of the Coyotes double as drug runners. Smuggled in hollowed concrete posts, frozen broccoli packs, sacks of coffee and crates brimming with exotic woods and aromatic spices, enough drugs reach the streets of America to keep an estimated 12 million addicted.

If there is any true haplessness  in all of this, it is the Federal Government’s efforts to establish proper border controls and its failure to adequately safegauard and monitor the border.  A border fence has been under construction since 2005 with high tech components and titled The Secure Border Network Initiative.  This system has two main components: SBI,  the threat level associated with an illegal entry into the United States between the ports of entry, and SBI tactical infrastructure (TI), fencing, roads, and lighting intended to enhance U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents’ ability to respond to the area of the illegal entry and bring the situation to a law enforcement resolution (i.e., arrest). The current focus of the SBI program is on the southwest border areas between ports of entry that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol  has designated as having the highest need for enhanced border security because of serious vulnerabilities.

But as the Wall Street Journal reported this week, the $600 billion system isn’t operational yet and has been bedeviled by system failures.  These include blurry images, radar that couldn’t differentiate between people and animals and field agents who couldn’t log onto their laptops. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the prototype has been fixed, but Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, nevertheless  froze most funding to the project on Tuesday last week, pending a review.

In the meantime, citizens like  Jim Wood, identified in the photos below, have taken it upon themselves to address the border’s lapses and vulnerabilities.  Through his Declaration Alliance, he has raised the funds to build his own surveillance system near Campo in an attempt to give ordinary citizens  the ability to monitor the border and report suspicious movements to the Border Patrol.

Although his system is also prone to crashing, his lone efforts – and those of the Minutemen –  are one more proof that citizens cannot always rely on lumbering government bureaucracies to address urgent local, state or national problems.

The idea that citizens must sometimes take matters into their own hands where a reliance on government has failed them – whether it be in regard to drug trafficking, the terrorist menace or the diminution of national sovereignty – has taken hold of the imaginations of many citizens around the world.

It is a fine line, of course, between law and order and pure vigilantism. But for many, it is the only viable means of protecting homes and their local environment when government action is completely ineffective.

The minutemen’s effort is the brainchild of Web developer Jim “Woody” Wood. He got the idea when he and other minutemen flocked to the Campo border in 2005 to rally against immigration reform. But he got bored as few immigrants were spotted. He decided a surveillance system would be best. (Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal)

Mr. Wood, who lives two hours north of the border in Mission Viejo, Calif., raised money to start the project through his Web site, borderfenceproject.com. People have to take a multiple-choice test on the site in order to gain access to the camera images. (Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal)

He says if he had permission, he would detain illegal aliens. For now, though, he’s focused on expanding his surveillance system at the pace his two herniated discs and Parkinson’s disease will allow. “A lot of this heavy labor is not something that I’m really capable of,” he said. (Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal)

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano diverted some of the project’s funding towards more practical tools, such as mobile radios and laptops. With the exception of a small section in Arizona currently being tested, spending on the ambitious border-long system is on hold until a review she ordered in January is completed. (Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal)

In Campo, Calif., a fence stretches along a desolate area of the U.S.-Mexico border. The federal government wants to install radar, sensors and cameras, but the plan is beset by delays. Campo agents were supposed to be hooked up to the virtual fence in early 2009. (Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal)

The Volunteer Attorneys

The battle over the attorneys continues.  First the Bush administration fired nine Justice Department attorneys in December, 2006 occasioning a Congressional investigation of Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’ conduct and resulting, a year later, in his resignation.  Then the Obama administration launched an investigation into the conduct of Legal Counsel to the President’s office, helmed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee to determine the extent of their liability for giving legal sanction to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.  Unlike Gonzales, Yoo and Bybee emerged innocent of all charges, even if they were badly singed by the process. 

Now its the Republicans’ turn.  In his book Courting Disaster, former  Department of Defense speech writer Marc Thiessen devoted an extensive chapter to the way in which several Obama appointees to the Justice Department had voluntarily defended Guantanomo Bay detainees.  U.S. justice calls for every man to have his innocence defended in court by legal counsel and indeed our courts are mandated to appoint  legal counsel where the accused has not elected to defend himself .    But should those who have volunteered to represent the enemies of the state be serving in our own Department of Justice? 

That is the volatile question posed by Keep America Safe, an organization co-founded by Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.  In an advertisement distributed through YouTube, Cheney demands that  Attorney-General Eric Holder identify the seven Department of Justice attorneys who once served as voluntary counsel for the Guantanomo Bay al Qaeda inmates.  Should Holder be forced to disclose those names and why is it important? 

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Journal posed that very question two attorneys who should know something about the issue.  Steve Jones was the Oklahoma City based attorney who defended Timothy McVeigh after his arrest in 1996 on charges of planning the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City.  Andrew C. Mc Carthy was the lead federal prosecutor of the plotters of the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993. 

Jones leads off with a case for attorneys who defend unpopular clients.  He  states that it has long been the position of American system of justice to offer a defense of criminals who our system labels innocent until proven guilty.  John Adams defended British soldiers accused of shooting several Boston’s citizens in 1770 and suffered public opprobrium for doing so.  But that did not stop him from becoming our second president. 

As an attorney Abraham Lincoln also took up unpopular causes, as did many of our distinguished federal judges.  Jones concludes that “neither history nor experience demonstrates that the points being made by Ms. Cheney and her allies have any merit.  They merely represent “forensic vigilantism,” and “a political lynch mob mentality.” 

Not so, says McCarthy.   It is not an American tradition for U.S. attorneys to volunteer to represent enemies of the state, but rather a modern anomaly.  The prisoners at Guantanomo Bay, were not U.S. citizens who had been deprived of their right to habeas corpus but unprivileged, alien enemy combatants.   U.S. law has also not traditionally extended the right of legal counsel in habeas corpus cases, even to U.S. citizens – and until 2004, enemy prisoners were not entitled to challenge their detention at all.  Moreover, he defends the Keep America Safe advertisement in its insistence that when attorney volunteer to participate in cases, where there is no requirement of representation of legal counsel, that choice likely reflects their policy preferences.  

On balance, Jones’ case comes out as unconvincing.   It fails to answer the question of how the American public should regard those who voluntarily (rather than as draftees, as he was) defend non-citizen enemies of the state and whether it has a right to have the political orientation and policy biases exposed through a demonstration of their choices. 

There is almost no question that at a time of grave national security risk (or war, as Mc Carthy calls it), the country’s legal team should be composed of individuals, who, at the very least, place the country’s security first and individual human rights in only a secondary position.  For as the John Yoo episode well demonstrated, we rely upon these attorneys for the legal justification of our national security policy.  If their position is that the individual rights of terrorists trumps the need for the American public to be protected, then we should demand their resignation. 

In the end, this debate exemplifies the struggle between the exigencies of national defense on the one hand and the rights of individuals to privacy and protection on the other.  In another sense it also illustrates the battle between those who reject American particularism, which requires that American law apply to just Americans  – and those who support the notion that American protections and privileges should have universal application.    

Does the decision of the so called ‘al- Qaeda Seven’ to defend non-citizen enemy combatants make them, ipso facto, supporters of al Qaeda’s ideology?  Of course not.  But equally it does not makes them heroes of conscience whom we should reward with employment in an important national office tasked with responsibility for our safety and well being.

The Resurrection of John Yoo

Imagine you are an attorney in a law firm and one day your boss comes in and asks you to research an urgent matter for which he needs an immediate answer.  Over the next few weeks, you pour over case and statutory law, and in the end render a legal brief that, in your opinion, represents United States law as it stands today. 

 Unfortunately, the case for which the legal brief was initially requested is lost at trial.  The clients are unhappy, but understand that this is the way things sometimes go in our courts of justice. 

Several years later, the law firm decides that it needs to buttress its reputation for legal exactitude, and while going through the files comes across your brief.  Certain that the legal brief  you had written was the ultimate cause of the lost trial and subsequent damage to the firm’s reputation, it decides to launch an internal investigation into your conduct, threatening you with censure, public disgrace and even disbarment.   And indeed, for the next several years your career is put under the microscope, as the firm systematically rips apart your life.  After years of investigation, however, management cannot find one thing in your conduct or even in the legal brief that was either unethical or in breach of professional standards.   You are told that you are free to leave  – as long as you clean up the mess left on the floor by your evisceration.    

If you think that is pretty harsh, then think of what the life of White House counsel John Yoo’s and Jay Bybee’s lives were like over the past few years.   In the latter years of the Bush administration and throughout the first year of  the Obama administration, both men were subjected to an intense investigation  which was focused on finding a culprit for the legal briefs used in authorizing what is popularly referred to today as  “CIA torture.” 

Fortunately, that ordeal is now over.   Five days ago the results of  an independent study led by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, revealed that the real malfeasance had taken place in the  the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility which had investigated  the Office of Legal Counsel to which Yoo and Bybee once belonged.   Margolis found evidence of  bias, sloppy legal reasoning and unwarranted expectations leveled against Yoo and Bybee and dismissed the absurd claim that they had somehow broken the law by the mere act of offering their legal opinions. 

I am not going to presume to offer my own judgment on the credibility of Yoo’s or Bybee’s legal briefs. Perhaps they did make mistakes.  But the effect of  this witch-hunt must surely be to caution every would be legal advisor to any president, to hedge his or her advice and to caution the president against taking any action that could have a potentially negative political or moral impact. 

Yoo himself argues that setting the dogs loose upon the President’s advisers will only end up emasculating the commander-in -chief’s extensive powers to prosecute a vigorous war on the country’s enemies.  Thus:   

“Ending the Justice Department’s ethics witch hunt not only brought an unjust persecution to an end, but it protects the president’s constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.”

Since his liberation from the Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo has written a highly acclaimed and scholarly work on the necessity for a strong executive.  But others, more concerned with the torment of the country’s defenders, will continue to pound the drum of Bush era malfeasance in the hope that it will engender a  new form of ethics that will offer  kindness to the country’s enemies and extend solicitude to its prisoners. 

But if the United States is struck again, don’t expect any of these 60s-era nostrums to survive.  They will be as dead as the adminstration that sponsors them.

The trouble is, thousands of us might be as well.

Israel Does the West’s Dirty Work

The outrage in Britain that has followed the revelation that eleven Israelis, traveling under false British passports, executed a Hamas mastermind in Dubai last month, is a wonder to behold.    Prime Minister Gordon Brown has sputtered that Israel has questions to answer about the theft of the passports.  The British foreign secretary, David Millband, has gone on record threatening to sever ties with the Mossad.  Opposition leader David Cameron, together with his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, are demanding an inquiry. And the British press is howling for retribution. 

The British establishment has made it clear that it has very little interest in the maintenance of  Israeli security.  But does it have any real interest in the maintenance of its own? .  Just this week, the second most senior justice in  the country exposed   the workings of  Britain’s own intelligence network and its link with the Americans, when he excoriated the agency for its handling of the ex-Guantanomo inmate Binyam Mohamed, severely compromising MI5’s ability to work in concert with foreign intelligence services; Lax British immigration policies, its ludicrously benevolent welfare system and an insistence of the right of free speech for even those who preach the overthrow of the British government and the destruction of the West, has transformed London into “terrorist central”  and a major node for the financing of terrorist activity world wide.

You’ll notice though that none of the British protests actually involve a denial that Mahmoud al Mabhouh was an innocent.  That is because the British government is well aware  that the Israelis bumped off a dangerous guy, a weapons purchaser and smuggler, whose activities have caused hundreds of Israeli deaths and injuries over the past 15 years. He trafficked in death and knew the risks of doing so. 

Lets also not forget that the British government and public are  no strangers to extra-judicial killings by British agents.  Countless works of  British fiction, from the 1840s and the Great Game onward, have been based on real life British spies knocking off villains who threaten British security in places as distant as Singapore, Kabul and Kenya. 

Today, however, we live in a different world, where terrorists use technology to network with one another and share their own forms of intelligence.  Hamas is a vital part of this network and no one should think for a moment that it does not have its own operatives in the U.K. supporting the financing  and coordination of military operations in Gaza and Damascus.  When are the British elites going to understand that this worldwide terrorist network, is poised as much at the heart of Britain as it is against the United States  and Israel?   Will it ever appreciate that those countries’ enemies  are as much their own  as any?

 Mahmoud al Mahbouh  stood as much  a  threat to  British security as it does to Israel’s. Rather than lambasting that country for its impudent use of British passports, it should be expressing its gratitude, much as it should have following the Entebbe Raid in 1976 and the Iraq’s Osirak Reactor Raid in 1981.   As a Western democracy, the Israelis demonstrated that they will not sit by idly, lugubriously building legal justifications for intervention, while terrorists plot and plan the murder their citizens.

The Charmed Life of Binyam Mohamed

No one ever knew that becoming a terrorist would offer such an effortless path to fame and celebrity. Certainly not Binyam Mohammed.

Mr. Mohamed is today the center of British national attention, having acquired the dubious prestige of being tortured at the hands of both MI5 and the CIA.

How did he do it?  He was believed to be involved in a plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in an American or British city.  Arrested in Pakistan in 2002,  he was shackled, threatened, deprived of sleep, and questioned by officers from MI5. He was subsequently “rendered” by the CIA to a prison in Morocco, where he was allegedly subjected to torture.  Mr. Mohamed  thereafter spent six years  at Guantanomo Bay before being repatriated to the United Kingdom in 2009.

He told investigators he had travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in an attempt to kick a drug addiction, but was accused of links to Al-Qaeda and charged with plotting to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the US.   The charges were later dropped when the US admitted its case was based on confessions obtained using torture.

Ethiopian-born Mr Mohamed, 31, who was granted refugee status when he came to Britain in 1994, is now alive and apparently flourishing somewhere in Devon. But at least one MI5 officer is being investigated, and could face trial, simply for asking him questions while he was held in custody in Pakistan.  And MI5 is under taack, not for what it did, but for what it allowed to occur without protest.

A U.K. police inquiry into the officer, which began last July at the request of Attorney General Baroness Scotland,  is understood to be at an advanced stage, and lawyers have discussed whether the officer could be charged under the Human Rights Act, which prohibits torture. An MI6 officer is also under investigation over an unrelated case.

But Mr. Mohamed’s true elevation to star status arrived last week when the U.K. Court of Appeal ordered the disclosure of seven paragraphs of evidence which showed that MI5 knew Mohamed was being mistreated by the CIA.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had tried to prevent the publication of the material.  But to no avail.   In his judgement, (an unpublished draft of which was somewhow leaked to the press) Lord Neuberger, Master of the Rolls, and the second most senior judge inthe country, found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights or denounce torture and had engaged in a culture of suppression about the information.

Now where have we heard this before?

In the United States the CIA has come under repeated attack from Democrats and human rights organizations for its program of enhanced interrogation.   This, despite the fact that legal clearance was given for their actions.  Many of  those who performed what they thought was their duty in protecting the country, are now under threat of prosecution.  So too are the attorneys who gave them the go ahead.

Bringing calumnies down on our security services seems to be all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic these days.  Since the September 11 attacks, a succession of judgments have gone in favor of terrorist suspects – on the detention of foreign  suspects without trial, on curfew orders, on possession of extremist materials, on the weakening of control orders, on the legality of terrorist asset-freezing orders.  On each occasion, the human rights of terrorist suspects have trumped the demands of national security.

After it emerged that the country’s second most senior judge had accused MI5 of a “culture of suppression” and of misleading Parliament, the Director- General of MI5, Jonathan Evans, stated that was “the precise opposite of the truth”.  He said that accusations that MI5 colluded in torture would be used by the country’s enemies as “propaganda to undermine our will and ability to confront them”.

What exactly, did the Americans do to Mr. Mohamed?   Well, the court said,  Mr Mohamed had been deprived of sleep, shackled and threatened with the suggestion that he would “disappear” and that MI5 was fully aware of it.  He was, however, never waterboarded, never slapped and never subjected to the ” cruel and inhumane ” treatment  that the U.K. 2000 Human Rights Act proscribes.   It is difficult to argue that the treatment described amounted to “torture,” even if one’s moral or ethical sensibilities are offended.

All of this comes with a certain irony.   The Obama Administration built its electoral campaign on the idea that somehow they were more “moral” than the Bush administration by refusing to countenance the use of enhanced interrogation techniques to elicit information from terrorist suspects.  But the Obama Administration is prepared to countenance unmanned predator drone attacks on terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Why is that action, which often results inthe death of the target,  somehow morally superior to capturing them and then obtaining  information about their operations that could save  more lives?

Those who defend the policy of shooting terrorists are not excoriated for being “amoral fascists”, although it is certainly not unreasonable,  from their point of view,  to claim that killing is at least as bad as torture.  Indeed, that is exactly what pacificists do claim.  An absolute ban on killing is usually criticized for being unrealistic.   But the idea that there should be an absolute ban on the use of any form of torture now has the status of othodoxy: to question it is to put yourself beyond the moral pale.  That’s why the head of MI5 and the Foreign and Home Secretaries never do so, instead insisting that it is impossible that the security services would ever collude in torture.

Another important issue is why should anyone trust what terrorists say?

Al Qaeda detainees, in particular, routinely lie about their treatment.   Much of what Binyam Mohamed has said about his treatment while in custody can’t be verified. For example, Mohamed has claimed that his genitals were mutilated with a razor blade while he was in Moroccan custody.   If that is true, most Westerners  would object to it, as it is not part of any disciplined interrogation regime.

But we don’t know that it is true at all and could simply be a lie.   Lying , after all, is quite an art among terorrists. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself, the undisputed orgnizer of the attacks on the World Trade Center attack,  has admitted as much-  ” Thats what I do – I lie and lie and lie and lie. ” Binyam Mohamed was almost certainly schooled in the same lie factory  nd has every reason to fabricate stories about his incarceration since  he is well aware that our supine, credulous media will just lap it up.  They will always  prefer the testimony of hardened killers than the words of servants of the State.

And just because the information against Mohamed was “coerced,”  does not mean it is inaccurate.    In fact, both intelligence services agree that Mohamed was a dangerous terrorist, having trained in exactly the same al Qaeda camps as most of the 9/11 hijackers.  He had extremely valuable information and the fact that his release was ordered by the Obama Administration could prove to be a terrible blow to our ability to gather further vital information that could save American lives.

The argument is  made that such judgments represent a triumph for the rule of law and demonstrate the health of the very democracy we are seeking to protect from those who would do us harm.  But this poses  serious questions about how a liberal democracy is supposed to protect itself from people who do not play by the rules.   If the judicial establishment – egged on by the human rights lobby – routinely thwarts the security services in their vital work (its low opinion of MI5 was laid bare in letters released with the judgment), we must accept that the public’s safety may well be compromised.

Lets also not forget how the squeamishness of the West in attempting to elicit information from these killers, is having untold consequences for vital intelligence gathering.   In his new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe, former Department of Defense speech writer, Marc A. Thiessen, offers a penetrating account of the effectiveness of the CIA procdeures, illustrating how the information gathered from such high profile suspects as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah contributed to the fact that in  the seven years since the  9/11 attacks, not one succesful al Qaida attack was carried out against an American target anywhere in the world.

He also illustrates how preposterous it is to describe the enhanced interrogation procedures as torture while  putting paid to the notion that they were at any time illegal.  He convincingly  dismisses portrayals of the Gunatanomo Bay Detention Facility as a torture camp,  describing such an absurdity as pure propaganda from leftist critics whose first motivation is  the  health and welfare of enemy combatants rather than the safety and security of American citizens.

Thiessen demonstates how the cessation of the CIA program has immeasurably weakened the United States , making it far more vulnerable to an enemy attack for failed intelligence.  He notes that Obama admitted as much when he went to the CIA in April, 2009 to boost the morale of the agency int he wake of the release of the Justice Department memos.

” I’m sure that sometimes its seems as if it means we’re operation with one hand tied behind our back, or that those who argue for a higher standard are naive.  I understand that.   So yes, you’ve got a harder job. And so do I.  And that’s OK. “

No its not OK.   The threat of a renewed terrorist attack on Western targets is real and everpresent.  Another successful attack, as almost occured on Christmas Day, will not be the responsbility of failed intelligence.  It will be the responsibility of a political establishment, more concerned with offending moral sensibilities than with  prosecuting an aggressive campaign against those seeking to kill us.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mohamed can eat his crumpets and scones in Devon with perfect equanimity, in the knowledge that his own campaign to destroy the effectiveness of the West’s intelligence gathering apparatus is proving extraordinarily successful.  Expect to see him soon on British television talk shows hawking his latest book, The War on Terrorism:  The Lies and Deceptions Leading to the Breakdown of Your Civilzation.

It couldn’t come from a more authoritative source.

A Truth Too Hard to Handle

If anyone wants to get a close look at the way both our government and military delude themselves about fundamental dangers this country faces, then go no further than the recently issued Department of Defense report on the Fort Hood slayings- Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood.

In this 85 page report, released last week and which relates to the November 5th massacre of 13 enlisted men and women together with an unborn child, you will find recommendations for tighter security for recruitment purposes, updated procedures to help the Department of Defense identify contributing factors to violent conduct and the suggested development of programs to educate DoD personnel when individuals might commit violent acts or become radicalized.

What you won’t find is the following:

• The name of the assassin
• Documentation on his Islamic background
• The characterization of his motives
• Information on how signs of his radicalism were manifested in his actual military career
• The kinds of communications he received from a Yemen based sheikh in the weeks and months prior to the killings.
• The Jihadist inspiration behind the attacks.
• Why the details of the killer’s behavior at Walter Reed Hospital, referred to in his file, were not passed on to his military superiors

So lets fill in the blanks for those military researchers who still remain mind-numbingly agog that such an event could have occurred at all:

• The killer (not the alleged killer) at Fort Hood was Major Nidal Malik Hassan
• He is a Muslim
• His writings, communications with fellow officers prior to the events of November 5,  all provide convincing evidence that that he was a Jihadist, driven by a religious ideology
• He took inspiration from Yemen-based preacher named Imam Anwar AlWaki and had at least ten email communications with him in the 30 days prior to the shootings;
• He shouted “Allahu Akbar “as he sprayed  the dining room with bullets
• He admitted that he committed his acts of murder in the name of Islam

In fact, not once in the report are the words “ Islam,”  “Jihad”  or “anti-Americanism” employed.   Nor are we given a sense that this event registered as anything more than another case of criminal behavior which can be adequately dealt with by the criminal justice system.  Hence the military’s apparent unwillingness to ascribe motivation to the attack or even a name to the ‘alleged’ offender.   After all, to do so would be prejudice Hassan’s upcoming trial, a prospect the report’s authors seem to fear more than the truth itself.

Instead the report is content to commend the military personnel at Fort Hood on how effectively they responded to the attack (in other words ‘it was bad but could have been a helluva lot worse’) and reaches the astonishing conclusion that “identifying potentially dangerous people before they act is difficult” and that “religious fundamentalism in itself is not a risk factor.”

The report screams the word “denial” at us, bathed as it is in the politically correct milk of multicultural sensitivity.   In this regard, of course, it is completely in keeping with the sentiments of Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey, who, in the wake of the massacre, proclaimed that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

No, sir, what is far worse is the obfuscation of a basic truth – that Islamists are among  us and want to kills us.  What registers as an graver issue than even  this however, is the way such cognitive dissonance leads to the eclipse of good judgment within our military leadership.  For underlying this empty report is the notion that the country is not at war at all, but rather faces occasional incidents which amount to little more than isolated criminal nuisances.

It is extraordinary that the most violent act of murder committed against U.S. troops on American soil in modern times, should be summed up as a case of a good soldier gone bad.

But Hassan didn’t ‘go bad.’   He was already bad.   The fact that his colleagues and superiors failed to notice, despite all the warning signs he offered them, is an indictment of the system in which he operated – a system apparently quite comfortable with its soldiers’ regular expression of  rabid anti-Americanism and the spouting of Jihadist ideology.

The true report of what happened at Fort Hood is not yet available.  But when it does become available it will almost certainly not bear the stamp of the Department of Defense.   The truth, apparently, in Jack Nicholson inimitable words, is just a little  too hard for that institution to handle.

A Decade in Review

When the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, I had to wonder what all  the fuss was about.  The clock apparently marked off two thousand years, but from what, no one was quite certain.   I guess I am one of those contrarians who believes that we are woefully underserved by the Gregorian Calendar, which has been in use in the West since 1582.  That is because marking off dates in decades, centuries and millennia is next to meaningless when we remember that Jesus was actually born in the year 4 BCE (therefore providing a somewhat awkward starting point for the first millennium); that the Earth’s orbit around the sun takes not 365 days but 365.2423 days, (a number not divisible by 4, 7 or 12) and that there wasn’t even a common subscription to the Gregorian Calendar until England converted to it in 1752 (abandoning the long used Julian Calendar).

Therefore, we might assume, there are minutes, hours and even days that might be unaccounted for in our  spin through the universe.  Given this sad state of affairs, using the clock to mark off a decade seems pretty pointless. With no universally accurate measurement of time, its all just pomp and circumstance about nothing.

Yet dates do bear meaning for us time-bound humans if only as a means of segmenting our lives into appreciable chunks of relevance and allowing us the means of chronicling our passage through life.

The marking of another decade is therefore an opportunity to reflect on what has passed in the ten years since that last supposed millenarian event.

Our past decade was bracketed by two completely unexpected occurences – the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the financial collapse of 2008.  Everything else in between –  the contested federal election of  2000, the three turbulent years of Intifada which broke the back of the Middle East peace process,  the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  the tsunami which devastated Southern Asia in December, 2004, the flooding of New Orleans in August, 2005 – were blips on our radar screens by comparison.

Having trawled through the events of the decade, there appear four major themes  that I believe will dictate much of what occurs in the coming years of this century:  

1. The Emergence  of Tension between National Security and Individual Rights

After the shock of 9/11 subsided and Americans got on with their normal lives, the horror of the day receded, while the government remained active in pressing for tighter security, passing the Patriot Act of 2002 with little dissent, establishing Guantanomo Bay as a maximum security prison  and creating the Department of Homeland Security. This retreating tide however, exposed the hulk of the embittered federal election of 2000 and the remembrance of George W. Bush as an illegitimate president.

It wasn’t long, then, before the Democratic Party had launched into an assault on the Bush Administration’s national security measures – measures that almost any American government, from left or right, would certainly have enacted following such a devastating attack.

The hatred for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld became so palpable in the latter part of the first Bush Administration that a romday could not go by without some vituperative attack on the character and morals of the governing Administration from some major media source.  The failure to uncover evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the most important reason proffered for the invasion of Iraq, only underscored, for the left at least, the Administration’s mendacity.

As the decade progressed though, it became increasingly clear that the struggle was not between opposing Democratic and Republican policies on issues of national security, but between two fundamentally differing world views.  The war on terror, declared by the Bush Administration, was not a conventional war and could not be fought conventionally.  It would involve not only a struggle abroad, but a struggle to contain potential terrorist activity within.  Therefore wire tapping, stricter control over financial transfers, tough border controls and increased surveillance of potential insurgents within our towns and cities, were all necessary measures.

Yet the idea that Americans might have to surrender some fundamental rights to privacy was anathema to the left and they refused to countenance it.  Perhaps they refused to understand that America was as much at war as it had been in 1917 or 1941; perhaps they failed to appreciate that individual liberty and the protection of personal rights were more robust than they had ever been in America’s history, even with the tightened security measures.  But the venom with which the left attacked these necessary security measures was a gauge of the struggle between the right to privacy and national security imperatives. It will remain the guiding national debate of much of the coming decade.

2. The Rise of Radical Environmentalism

What started as a fringe movement in the early 1970s gained world attention in the 2000s.   Environmentalism transformed from a movement to combat pollution and to conserve wilderness areas  into a multinational effort to build awareness of anthropogenic global warming and as an attack against human development itself.  With world politicians subscribing to the spurious notion of ‘scientific consensus’ on the issue, radical environmentalists, who decry human interference in the environment and are in fact opposed to development of almost any kind, were able to hitch their wagon  to luminaries such as Al Gore and Mikhail Gorbachev and obtain an international spotlight they didn’t otherwise deserve.

But the global warming lobby has not provided entirely convincing science.  Simply put, our climate and weather is governed by so many variables that predictions are fraught with difficulty.  Computer models have been used to advance the idea of likely severe weather change but they are fed data that are not always verifiable.  The same models have been used to predict weather patterns over the coming 100 years, but, as was discovered in October of this year, with the revelation that climate researchers in England manipulated, manufactured or otherwise doctored the same data, put the lie to the idea that climate science is not susceptible to political pressure or ideology.  It seems, at least from the rash of emails uncovered in exchanges between the climate researchers, that sometimes the models are adapted to reach conclusions which are keeping with a political platform rather than as a reflection of real climate science.

The Bush Administration brooked this wave as bravely as it could, but its power as public policy was irresistible.  We have now seen the discussion of global warming completely overwhelm our national narrative and become one of the leading political discussion points of this century. It came into political form last year in the guise of Cap and Trade legislation which thankfully exhausted itself before it could obtain strenuous political support.  But it lives on in the rhetoric of our president, in widespread support in the media and  academia and as a subject of strong advocacy among members of our political class.

But even as the movement has gained such extraordinary traction, there has been a countervailing movement pushing back against it.  It was led by the weather itself.

The past ten years have proven, even according to most climatologists, decidedly colder than the previous twenty.  The year 2008 was actually one of the coldest in the northern hemisphere since the 1850s.  Scientific reports are emerging that  it might not be man-produced fossil fuels which are causing any heating of the earth’s  atmosphere but in fact natural cycles of the sun and the absence of cloud cover.

Whatever the conclusion of the scientific debate, there is now, for once, public discussion on the issue and doubt is beginning to creep into some independent thinkers’ minds.  The collapse of an international agreement on climate control at the International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December, reflects, to a certain degree, this concern.  We await developments but the likelihood is that anthropogenic global warming will fade as a matter of international consensus.

3.  The Fragility of the International Economic System

Why the financial crash of September 2008 came as such a surprise, is beyond my understanding.  The collapse of major U.S.financial institutions, many of which had been around for a nearly century, was due to a complete failure of imagination and an unwillingness to take seriously the growing signs of collapse.

Credit, used in increasingly complicated and sophisticated ways, to the point where borrowings were made against assets that barely existed, undermined the entire structure of our paper (rather than monetized) economy.  The signs should have been apparent, but even such revered figures as former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, couldn’t figure it out.  But in retrospect it was fairly clear: the economy had grown top heavy with debt based on collapsing assets, and like a listing galleon over-freighted with cargo, just toppled over.

The international repercussions were telling.  Almost every Western economy was struck by the seismic shock which followed the U.S. banking crisis of 2008. It drove down the international value of the dollar, upended the U.S. balance of trade and created havoc in world currency markets.

The cure administered to address the country’s economic woes seemed sometimes worse than the disease. The relatively modest Bush stimulus package in September, 2008 was followed by the massive $787 billion Obama stimulus for 2009, with hundreds of billions being made available to shore up not just the banking and investment industries but public companies as well.  Never in American history had public funds been used to support failing enterprises in this way.   It set an ominous precedent for any future economic difficulties that the country might be forced to confront.

The future of the West and its international financial system hangs in large part, on how the United States manages its fiscal problems.  Building confidence in economic stability is probably the first order of business for any American government.

4. The Scourge of Islamic Fundamentalism

Prior to 9/11 terrorism appeared as little more than nuisance which affected other countries and not the United States.  While it is true there had been urban terrorists of the 70s and 80s, the Oklahoma bombing of 1995 and assorted attacks against American military units stationed outside the country – these were perceived as the work of isolated groups with no unified motivation.  Domestic terrorism, the kind which resulted in huge urban casualties, and motivated by an abiding hatred of U.S citizens as a people, was largely unknown.

The events of that September day, however, changed everything.  The recognition that Americans were vulnerable, not just on isolated military bases in Beirut or Riyadh, but in their own homes and public places, altered the national dialogue. It  has had a sizable impact on daily life, from the lines at security check points at  airports, to the security measures regarding bank accounts to tougher immigration policies.

Yet what has failed to penetrate the West’s public consciousness was the motivation behind the September 11 attacks and the subsequent assaults on Western targets around the world.  The rise of Islam, which began to take its fundamentalist political shape with the establishment of the Iranian theocracy in 1979, gathered clout with the upsurge in oil prices and sought to fill the oppositional role vacated in the 1990s with the fall of communism. Fundamentalist Islamic communities grew prodigiously in Europe where they took advantage of the benevolent welfare benefits offered to new immigrants by their host countries. As they gained in collective confidence and drew inspiration from the growing international prestige of the Iranian theocracy, these communities made a play for political power, though not necessarily through the political system.   The French riots of 2005 and the Danish cartoon riots of 2006, both made it adamantly clear that the Islamic communities of Europe intended to become a serious political force to be reckoned with.

The reaction of the West was craven appeasement. Steeped in multicultural pieties, Western leaders bent over backwards to make it clear they were not knee jerk racists and would take no issue with Muslim demands for a certain degree of  communal autonomy and separation from mainstream culture.  This effort had its crowning achievement in February, 2008 when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the former Chief Justice of Britain both conceded that the establishment of a parallel legal system to adjudicate certain internal Muslim disputes, is  inevitable.

It all took place against a backdrop of the rise of Islamic terrorism throughout the West. The 2002 Bali Night Club bombing,  the  2005 London bombings, the 2006 Madrid Bombings, the 2008 Mumbai attack and hundreds of other assaults on soft targets in major world capitals, were all carried out, almost without exception, in the name of Islam.  Apologists wrung their hands over the claim that these desperate attacks were not the work of true followers of the Muslim faith and that Islam remained a religion of peace.

But contrary proof was readily available.  There were few Muslim religious leaders willing to publicly condemn the terrorist plague which had engulfed the societies in which they lived.  In the United States, the willful blindness to the reality of Muslim representative organizations covertly supporting terrorism while feigning allegiance to American values was even more troubling.  The Bush Administration went out of its way to pretend that the drive behind the terrorist scourge was something other than real Islam and the Obama Administration has continued on the same wayward path.

Until Western leaders connect the dots and recognize that the West is engaged in a physical, moral and philosophical battle with hardened murderers pledged to a religious creed that calls for the the West’s destruction;  until it concedes that representatives of those men live, plot and recruit within their very own societies and are an ever present danger to us; until they face the reality that not all religions are “religions of peace” and that some might actually more resemble death cults pledged to the slaughter of unbelievers – we face a very difficult and prolonged struggle for which there is no certain victory.

Conclusion

The years 2000-2009 have been decried as a lost decade by many pundits and commentators.  I don’t agree with them.  I see the past decade as offering important lessons about the world in which we live – from the true nature of Islam to the fragility of the international economic system to the necessity to sometimes trade individual rights for personal security. What we make of these lessons will determine the kind of world in which we will live in the coming decade.  Lets hope the human capacity for growth, ingenuity and recovery continues to reassert itself and that we will come to view these past ten years as the necessary growing pains of a maturing civilization.