And a few 2002 PSs

[Closing this out with a few excerpts from emails to a friend in the UK.]

February 26, 2002
Thanks for the link to the "Independent" story. [It was about Arab "disappeareds" in the US, including a particular case.] I did know about it and about the particular case, but the update was good - because yes, it is barely mentioned here. There was a fair amount of press when all this was first being done but of course it faded quickly, as things tend to do whenever there isn't some government official - preferably from the White House - pounding on it day after day. The assertion that we don't have an "official" press is really a joke since so much of the media by default allow the government (again, mainly the White House) to determine what is and isn't news.

As the article notes, there have been upwards of 2,000 Arabs detained, often without charges and on the flimsiest of pretexts, although most have by now been released. Still, the numbers held is likely in the hundreds. (The article notes that the DOJ admits holding 327. The number is suspect, but is probably not too far off.)

There was also the issue of questioning thousands of Arab men about their knowledge of terrorist activities based solely on the fact that they were Arab men. The first encounters were harsh and generated so much bad publicity - including the fact that a number of local police departments refused to cooperate on the grounds it was discriminatory enforcement - that it eventually became a matter of simply asking people a list of 20-something standardized questions of the most general (and for a real investigation, unhelpful) type, along the lines of "Have any of your neighbors acted suspiciously?"

One maddening thing was an article in "Time" magazine about this, which concluded with the astonishing claim that all in all, this wholesale questioning of Arab men was a good thing because it wound up forcing the FBI to be more sensitive to Arab cultural traditions in the US! And I guess all in all, slavery was a good thing because it brought Europeans into contact with other cultures.


April 12, 2002
[T]here is a bitter taste to having been right about the results of attacking Afghanistan: massive civilian deaths, no breaking of al-Qaeda (BTW - when was the last time Tony Blair or any other leading UK politician mentioned Osama bin Laden? His name seems to have disappeared altogether from public discourse here.), and the promotion of more terrorism - ala suicide bombers and the IDF [Israeli Defense Force].

Sidebar: I have a real problem with the term "state terrorism," since even when applied to such worthy targets as the IDF, the adjective in the term serves to move them a slight step away from those other terrorists, the "real," unadjectived, terrorists. Screw that. If "terrorism" is understood as attacking noncombatants and the infliction of social pain and chaos for political ends, they're all just terrorists, period. No distinctions. On the other hand, I think it was Alexander Haig who, using the traditional definition of "terrorist" (under which governments need not apply) once remarked something to the effect that terrorism was the weapon of the desperate, of those who felt they had no other choice. So then what do we see in the Middle East? Israeli v. Palestinian? Terrorist v. terrorist? Or terrorist v. the desperate?

I have said before and I say again now that the real obstacle to some kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace is not Yassir Arafat, not the PA, not the US, not even Sharon personally. It is the decades-long refusal by Israel to admit that the Palestinians have the same right that Israelis do: a home of their own. Not some pathetic rump state dominated by Israel, not some other country declared their home by Israel (i.e., Jordan), not some territory sliced into pieces by Israeli "security corridors" connecting Israeli settlements, but a home. Of their own.


May 30, 2002
What's getting me now about all the stuff coming out about intelligence knowledge about al-Qaeda plans prior to September 11 isn’t so much "What did the White House know?" but more "How could they not know or at least suspect?"

Consider they knew that

- al-Qaeda was working on a plan to hijack planes. (There apparently was actually a section titled that or something similar in an intelligence briefing given to Bush in August)

- people connected to al-Qaeda were taking piloting lessons in the US and Germany.

- there had been discussions among Muslim extremists about flying a plane into the Eiffel Tower.

- Italian intelligence had intercepted a conversation between two Muslims suspected of terrorist ties bragging about how something really spectacular was in the works, something people would remember all their lives.

- as far back as 1999 an American intelligence officer raised the idea of terrorists using hijacked planes as missiles and apparently mentioned in connection with this suspected terrorists who were taking piloting lessons.

I mean, just how big do the dots have to be before they get connected to at least the point of tipping the airlines that something was up? At what point do we shift from suspecting incompetence to suspecting willful ignorance? And just what role does the Bush administration's connection to the Saudis have to do with this? Now, I don't believe that even the people around Bush would knowingly allow September 11 to happen. But I do wonder how much a concern about offending the Saudis - which aggressive attention to al-Qaeda certainly could threaten to do - lead to a policy of handling things "carefully" which in turn lead to downplaying the potential (and in retrospect, obvious) threat.