Showing posts with label Isis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Isis. Show all posts

Saturday, August 21, 2021

Absurd: Afghanistan

 

 THE ABSURD TIMES

  

 

Bin Laden was moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan a year or so after the U.S. demanded his return. Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney & Co. knew this and approved it after refusing to accept his surrendering by the Taliban. There is also a Senate report on this, easily available.

 

 

Afghanistan

By

Honest Charlie

 

There is seriously way too much untangling to do to understand this situation. Certainly, we never had to be there is the first place and only created problems for everybody involved. In addition, Bin Laden considered Saddam Hussein as an "infidel," and was hardly a "friend".  All of this was fabricated and dutifully reported to us by our media or, rather, our media fed the opposite to us. The U.S. public swallowed it whole.

 

In addition, it seems that ISIS is now threatening the Talaban (which never had any ambitions beyond its own borders), never. Now Americans are being warned about dangers involved in getting to the Kabul Airport because of ISIS.

 

It is likely that most of this is being orchestrated in order to retard Biden's effort to pass social welfare programs here.  Here is a transcript of and interview with Spencer Ackerman:

 

As thousands of Afghans try to flee Afghanistan after the Talaban seized control, we look at the roots of the longest U.S. war in history and spend the hour with Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman. "This is not the alternative to fighting in Afghanistan; this is the result of fighting in Afghanistan," says Ackerman, whose new book, "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump," is based in part on his reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.


Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.orgThe War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

The United Nations is urging countries to keep their borders open with Afghanistan as thousands of Afghans try to flee by land or air, after the Taliban seized control of the country Sunday ahead of the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Earlier this week, President Biden defended his decision to pull troops out as part of a deal the Trump administration made with the Taliban.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war, when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I'm clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to look at the roots of what's become America's longest war. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan October 7, 2001, less than a month after the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within days of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, but the Bush administration rejected any negotiations with the Taliban. This is Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, responding to a question in October 2001.

REPORTER: Would you go so far as to say that no matter what the Taliban might say at this point, it may not make any difference? Are you ignoring whatever they may say?

PRESS SECRETARY ARI FLEISCHER: The president could not have made it any clearer two weeks ago when he said that there will be no discussions and no negotiations. So, what they say is not as important as what they do. And it's time for them to act. It's been time for them to act.

AMY GOODMAN: In December of 2001, just a month or two later, the Taliban offered to surrender control of Kandahar, if its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, would be allowed to, quote, "live in dignity" in opposition custody. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected the offer.

DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: If you're asking would an arrangement with Omar where he could, quote, "live in dignity" in the Kandahar area or some place in Afghanistan be consistent with what I have said, the answer is, no, it would not be consistent with what I have said.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Donald Rumsfeld speaking December 6, 2001. The U.S. War in Afghanistan would continue for almost 20 more years, through to now. According to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. has spent over $2.2 trillion in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By one count, at least 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians have died in the fighting. Afghanistan is now facing a massive humanitarian crisis, and the Taliban is back in power. While Mullah Mohammed Omar died in 2013, his brother-in-law, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now appears set to become Afghanistan's next president.

Well, today we're spending the hour with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Spencer Ackerman, author of the new book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. The book is based in part on his reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

Spencer, it's great to have you back. Congratulations on your book. So, we're talking to you in the midst of this chaos in Kabul right now as thousands of Afghans, Americans and other nationals are attempting to flee Afghanistan. The Taliban have taken over. But we chose to begin back 20 years ago — I'm not going to say "at the beginning," because it goes far back from there. But talk about this moment as the U.S. began bombing and occupying Afghanistan, when the Taliban basically said they would surrender and also give Osama bin Laden over. The U.S. rejected. President Bush rejected both.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: This was a central aspect of the war on terror at its inception and a foreshadowing of what its implications would be. Once we accept the frame that Bush offered — war on terror — we were then locked into a struggle not just against al-Qaeda, the entity culpable for the 9/11 attacks, but a much broader struggle against an enemy that a president could redefine at will and leave in the popular imagination with something along the lines of a civilizational challenge to America for the future, one in which America itself was in the balance.

Now, let's look, in particular, at that moment in Kandahar. The United States's Northern Alliance allies had routed the Taliban from Kabul. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan had fallen, after about five, six years in power, and they recognized, after a last stand they tried to put on in Kandahar didn't go the way they expected, that the end was near for them. And then they offered to Hamid Karzai, the U.S.'s appointed leader for a post-Taliban Afghanistan, that as long as Mullah Omar could live in some kind of house arrest, basically not be killed, not be put up on trial, they were prepared to entertain negotiations for what their role might be in a post-Taliban Afghanistan — basically, a political settlement at that point.

Karzai, for all his flaws that the United States would both contribute to and then criticize him for over the coming years, nevertheless knew Afghan history and recognized that unless there was some kind of political future for the Taliban, the Taliban would opt for a violent future. And they had a proven capacity not just to wage an insurgency, but to triumph in one. And Karzai took the deal.

It was the Bush administration, the United States, that said such a deal was unacceptable — not to the Afghans, but unacceptable to the United States, that now took it on itself, as it has so often throughout its history in so many parts of the world, to tell Afghans the way their country was about to be. And everything that happened since, the 20 years of war since, has contributed on, if not quite a straight line, a kind of nausea-inducing glide path to the abject horror we're seeing at the Kabul airport with people desperate to flee, desperate to — so desperate as to grab onto C-17 cargo planes and fall to their deaths. This is not the alternative to fighting in Afghanistan; this is the result of fighting in Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could take it back even farther, to the U.S.-backed mujahideen, to the U.S.-backed Osama bin Laden, and talk about what happened when the U.S. decided to fund the mujahideen in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and then the mujahideen turning their — setting, literally, their gun sights, their U.S. weapons, on the United States, and how the Taliban came out of that?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yeah, it's important, because, like, an objection to this is always going to be that we, you know, portrayed, like, the 1980s Afghan mujahideen as the Taliban. They weren't the Taliban. They were the precursors of the Taliban.

What happened in the 1980s is the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the United States saw an opportunity. It saw an opportunity to inflict upon the Soviet Union, its great geopolitical adversary, a defeat as humiliating and as psychologically devastating as the one the United States suffered in Vietnam for its own imperial hubris. Over the course of the next 10 years, the United States, the Pakistani ISI and the Saudi intelligence services funded and equipped Islamic extremists, rebels who would come in from Pakistan — among them, a figure who would become intimately familiar as a Taliban ally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a particularly brutal person. And over the course of the 1980s, they inflicted tremendous damage on the Soviets, made the occupation, which was a brutal occupation by the Soviet Union, ever more violent and ever more protracted, to the point where the Soviets withdrew and, a couple years later, the regime the Soviets installed collapsed, much as like we're seeing the one that the United States installed collapsed.

The ensuing chaos and civil war was devastating for Afghanistan. Out of the ashes emerged the Taliban, an extreme group, a group that, you know, used mechanisms of extreme suffering and repression on the long-suffering Afghan people. And something that the United States never recognized throughout this entire period was that it had destabilized Afghanistan, not simply as a pawn of — not simply as a consequence of fighting the Soviet Union, but that was what the cost of fighting the Soviet Union was, that an entire country, millions of people, suffered tremendously, that they were treated as tools by the United States, that their aspirations, their desires for freedom, their desires for security ultimately didn't matter to the United States, much as they didn't matter to the Soviet Union. And in the chaos that resulted, the Taliban took power. They sheltered Osama bin Laden.

But they weren't the same thing as al-Qaeda. And the United States, after 9/11, decided that there was no relevant distinction between al-Qaeda, between the Taliban and between what it called "terrorist groups of global reach," which ultimately washes out to saying that while the respectable version of the Bush administration's policies were already an extremely expansive conception of who could be targeted, moving from terror groups like al-Qaeda to, ultimately, entire regimes — the deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, spoke in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 about "ending states" — but in the broader political, journalistic and then popular conception, the enemy could be all of Islam, or it could be something just short of all of Islam. And from there, it was an extremely short, rather immediate, transition to fearing American Muslims, fearing your neighbors, thinking your neighbors posed a threat to you — not that this apparatus of war and repression posed a threat to you.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Spencer, one of the things that hasn't gotten reported very much is that as the Taliban seized control in these last weeks of Afghanistan, a key person that they executed — he was imprisoned, and they executed him — was Abu Omar Khorasani, the former head of the Islamic State in South Asia. The significance of this?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yeah, this is an extreme complication that has come up in the last couple years of particularly U.S.-Taliban negotiations, by which I mostly mean back-channel negotiations. I shouldn't say "back-channel." To be a little bit more specific, they weren't authorized before they were authorized. It was somewhat of a freelance effort by a retired U.S. Army colonel named Chris Kolenda and a retired U.S. ambassador to Pakistan named Robin Raphel.

What they discovered in their talks with Taliban figures in Doha was that the Taliban were rather concerned about the rising presence of a so-called Islamic State branch in Afghanistan, what called itself, or the U.S. also called it, ISIS Khorasan, or IS Khorasan. Essentially, the Taliban feared a kind of next generation of extremist entity insurgency using Islamic justification inside Afghanistan — and with somewhat, I think it's fair to say, good reason, given the way that ISIS fought and displaced al-Qaeda, the organization and entity that it emerged out of, as well. And so, you even saw, over the last couple years, there was an excellent reporting that Wesley — oh man — that Wesley Morgan has done, where the Taliban has even been the beneficiary of U.S. airstrikes on ISIS Khorasan, to the point where it seemed like — you know, they never got as far as some kind of modus vivendi where they said, "You know what? We, in fact, have an enemy in common." But it was a dynamic that both the Taliban and the U.S. side, particularly the more pragmatic elements of the U.S. military, were attentive to, that the Taliban viewed ISIS not as the next so-called al-Qaeda entity to sponsor and permit a staging ground to attack either the United States or its allies or its interests, or so on and so forth, but, in fact, an enemy to be confronted, an enemy to be dominated, an enemy to be defeated. And when we hear all of the kind of loose talk about the necessity of returning to war in Afghanistan so it doesn't become a staging ground for further attacks on the United States, it's not quite sunk in yet, or it's not quite penetrated, it's not quite been grappled with, that the Taliban are showing like very early signs of seeing ISIS as a threat.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, they killed him. They executed him, took him out of a prison in Kabul on that final day, Sunday, as they took control of the country. Spencer Ackerman, talk about the role the U.S. war and occupation, the brutality of the U.S. airstrikes, the torture at Bagram, the night raids played in gaining new recruits for the Taliban.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: The United States tends not to attribute its brutality to any of the circumstances that it comes to bemoan when they manifest in the world. And Afghanistan is certainly a tragic example of that. The fact that, after 9/11, the United States, in its political and journalistic and intellectual elites, generally speaking, refused to accept that there was a direct and tragic and awful historic consequence of its destabilization of Afghanistan in the 1980s, to the degree that Taliban facilitation of Osama bin Laden in the country helped the execution of the 9/11 plot — which, it's important to note, did not involve Afghans and was not staged from Afghanistan, nor was it even planned in Afghanistan; it was far more planned in Germany. Nevertheless, that was an early foreboding of what we would see over the next 20 years, not just in Afghanistan, but throughout the war on terror: a disconnection, an unwillingness to face that America's violent and imperial actions breed their own next generation of enemies. That was on display once the United States went back into Afghanistan.

And throughout the Afghanistan War, even during periods where counterinsurgency campaigns, at least on paper, paid lip service to the idea that protecting Afghan lives and property and so forth was going to ultimately be decisive in the war, it never acted that way. It never acted as if what the point of the war was was the protection of Afghan lives. It more often acted in such a way that it did not draw distinctions between Afghan lives and Afghan enemies. And amongst the major reasons for this is not necessarily like a specific decision to target Afghan civilians, but an inability to understand the country, understand its dynamics and understand the rather complicated relationships, in many ways, between people who fight for the Taliban and the Taliban itself, or people who aid the Taliban under threat to their own life or threat to their family, or simply seek to endure the war, as so many people throughout so many wars simply aspire to, simply by not taking action that harmed the Taliban, because they understood the consequences that could — that they could experience. Over time, all of these things strengthened the Taliban, made the Taliban seem like, once again, a viable alternative to the United States.

And then, on a different level, the United States's contribution — and not just the United States alone's contribution — to the misery in Afghanistan came through the corruption that it always blamed on the Afghans but was a significant driver of itself, so-called development experts. Development aid and development money poured into Afghanistan far beyond a consideration of what a devastated Afghan economy could in fact absorb. And some of this money was very deliberately flooded in from the CIA to pay off warlords to ensure that they would ultimately be responsive to American interests, which would often be violent interests, which would often be things like, as the Joint Special Operations Command would perform throughout the Afghanistan War, Army Special Forces, in particular, throughout the Afghanistan War, raids on people's houses suspected of being, aiding or facilitating the Taliban — and again, the Taliban, not even al-Qaeda, not the thing that attacked the United States, certainly not the core of al-Qaeda that plotted, planned and executed 9/11. The United States was now in extended war with a one-time harborer, ally of al-Qaeda rather than the thing itself, responsible for all of Afghanistan, but never acting responsibly toward the Afghan people.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to January 2015. This is the Obama years. Two hostages — one American, one Italian man — were accidentally killed by a U.S. drone strike along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Here's then-President Obama later apologizing for the killings.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This morning, I want to express our grief and condolences to the families of two hostages: one American, Dr. Warren Weinstein, and an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto, who were tragically killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation. … Since 9/11, our counterterrorism efforts have prevented terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives, both here in America and around the world. And that determination to protect innocent life only makes the loss of these two men especially painful for all of us.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there you have President Obama apologizing. Spencer, you have spent a good amount of time in Afghanistan. You were embedded there, and then you also reported independently there. Can you talk about the significance of this moment?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: This was a profound moment. This is the only time that the United States, particularly the president of the United States, has not only acknowledged drone strikes that killed civilians, but apologized for it. And the reason why it's such a significant moment in its singularity is — both in the book and for an earlier series that I did for The Guardian in 2016, I interviewed people, Pakistanis and Yemenis principally, who were survivors of drone strikes or whose relatives were killed in drone strikes. And one of the stories I tell in Reign of Terror is from a young Pakistani man named Faheem Qureshi.

Faheem Qureshi was 13 years old when Obama launched his first drone strike. And it blew up Faheem's compound, where he lived with his family. And they were gathering for a celebration of one of his relatives who had just returned from a successful business trip to the United Arab Emirates. Forty days later, Faheem woke from his coma. He had burns over most of his body. He was missing an eye. And he had learned that most of his family's breadwinners had been killed in the strike, so that when he left the hospital, his responsibilities would immediately be providing for his family, however it was that his mangled body would perform.

And I talked to him about the difficulties he experienced throughout the, you know, next, at that point, about seven years. And among the things he discussed was that he had tried, through Pakistani authorities and through the U.S. Embassy, to get some kind of acknowledgment that what had happened to him had in fact happened, and that it didn't just happen as an act of God, it happened as an act by the United States of America. And none of that ever came. What did come was a supply of blood money, essentially, a payoff essentially to say, like, "OK, this is what will count for restitution, and your account is settled, and you're not going to get any public acknowledgment, let alone an apology."

And I kept hearing, when I interviewed people — not just Faheem, but other people whose lives were changed irrevocably by drone strikes — about how Obama had apologized when he had killed white people, and never when he had killed people like them, never when he had killed their loved ones, never when the consequences of his actions had left someone maimed, had left someone in a position where he had to give up his dream of being a chemist and work however he could in the hope that, as he had put it to me, some of his younger cousins and his brothers would be able to live happy and prosperous lives. And I asked him, "What do you think of Barack Obama?" And he said, "If there's a list of tyrants somewhere, Barack Obama's name is on it because of his drone strikes."

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, we're going to break and then come back. Spencer is author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He's a national security reporter who publishes the Forever Wars newsletter on Substack.

When we come back, we're going to look at, well, what he calls the "Reign of Terror." We're going to look also at the rise of right-wing extremism in United States, what all, under Trump and Biden, intelligence agencies call the major domestic terror threat, as Republican congressmembers now say that their deep concern is the threat of foreign terrorists. Stay with us.

As Republicans raise concerns that Biden's withdrawal of U.S. troops will turn Afghanistan "back to a pre-9/11 state — a breeding ground for terrorism," Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman lays out how the U.S. war on terror after the September 2001 attacks actually fueled white, right-wing extremism. Ackerman says U.S. elites consciously chose to ignore "the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history." His new book is "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump."


Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.orgThe War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We're spending the hour with Spencer Ackerman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

Spencer, you begin your book, with the prologue, with Timothy McVeigh visiting the far-right paramilitary compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma, before what you call, the prologue's chapter heading, "the worst terrorist attack in American history." Talk about the connection you see between the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and the so-called war on terror.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: I thought it was extremely important to see the war on terror in its fullness, in its totality, and only then can we understand its implications. And I think the only way to really do that is to look at who were the exceptions to the war on terror, who the war on terror didn't target, despite fundamentally similar actions. And there we can understand not just what the war on terror is, but its relationship to American history, which shapes it so deeply.

And so, I also wanted to kind of start with a journalistic cliché, where the reporter kind of zoologically takes a reader through this unfamiliar and scary world of violence committed by fanatical people who are training with heavy weapons and talk about committing mass atrocity for a sick and supposedly divinely inspired religion. But I wanted those people to be white. I wanted the reader to see how similar these actions were, how similar some of the motivations were, how similar some of the justifications were. But we never treated them like that.

The whole purpose of the phrase "war on terror" was a kind of social compromise amongst respectable elites in order to not say the thing that they were in fact building, which was an expansive war only against some people's kinds of terror, only against nonwhite people's kinds of terror, only against foreigners' kinds of terror, and not against the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history, one that seeks to draw its own heritage out of the general American national heritage, people who call themselves not dissenters, not rebels, but patriots, people who are restoring something about America that they believe a corrupt elite, that is now responsive to nonwhite power at the expense of the extant racial caste, that has been deeply woven inside not just the American political structure, but the American economy, that drives American politics — how that ultimately never gets treated.

This is exactly what Timothy McVeigh was about. This is what Timothy McVeigh had as his motivations for murdering 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, including 19 children. And we looked away from it. We looked away from how deep the rootedness of white supremacist violence was in this country. We listened to what I believe are principled civil libertarian objections against an expensive category of criminalized association. Treating people who might have believed as McVeigh did, odious as I believe that is, but ultimately not committing acts of violence — treating them as, essentially, indistinct from McVeigh was absolutely intolerable, as it always should have been, to the American political elites, but that intolerability did not extend to Muslims.

And there it was easy, after 9/11, to construct an apparatus fueled by things like the PATRIOT Act, that expanded enormous categories of criminal association, known as material support for terrorism, authorized widespread surveillance, that certainly would not be focused simply even on American Muslims, as disgusting as it was that it was focused on them primarily. But, ultimately, all of these things that both parties, that the leaders of the security services and intellectuals created, maintained and justified, so readily, against the threat of a foreign menace, seen as civilizational, seen as an acceptable substitute for a geopolitical enemy that had served as a rallying purpose throughout the 20th century — the war on terror is kind of a zombie anti-communism in a lot of its political cast and association. And never would any of this be visited upon white people. From the start, the war on terror showed you exactly who it was going to leave out from its carceral, from its surveillance and from its violent gaze.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to Donald Trump this week, considering a 2024 challenge to President Biden, said in a statement Biden "surrendered" to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee demanded a plan from Biden to stop Afghanistan from becoming a, quote, "safe haven" for terror groups after the Taliban takeover. This is Republican Congressman Michael McCaul on CNN.

REPMICHAEL McCAUL: We are going to go back, Jake, to a pre-9/11 state, a breeding ground for terrorism. And, you know, I hate to say this — I hope we don't have to go back there — but it will be a threat to the homeland in a matter of time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have the Republicans now talking about a foreign terrorist threat. The Republicans, who have been denying the insurrection of January 6, calling it, you know, no worse than a group of tourists coming to Washington, D.C., and not wanting to investigate that, even though, under Bush, under Trump, the intelligence agencies have said the number one domestic terror threat is right-wing white supremacists.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: We see who the war on terror, then as now, is a mechanism for having terrorism excused, not terrorism dealt with: when that terrorism is white, when it is politically powerful. When, for reasons that they themselves probably ought better to explain, politicians sympathize with it, seek to draw strength from it, that's a real serious red flag for American democracy. We don't have to treat it as if it is a new red flag for American democracy. This is always how American democracy has been eroded. This is always alongside the ways in which capital has been extremely willing to ally with white supremacy. This is what the creation of Jim Crow was. This is how the maintenance of segregation in the North of the country, which we don't often talk about as much in its different permutations — I'm a New Yorker. This city is segregated even still. You see that definitely with the way the school system is constructed.

Ultimately, we are seeing, throughout this past week, the ease with which the Republican Party, supposedly now in the Trump era feeling antipathy to the war on terror, readily snapped to war on terror politics when it comes to the demonization of refugees, the idea that America has a responsibility to take in the refugees that it itself creates, out of this psychotic, racist fear of white replacement, that demographics are ultimately driving the erosion of, you know, in its respectable settings, white political power, not just on the fringes, but at the centers of American governance.

And that is a politics of the war on terror that has been here from the start. Trump makes it vastly less subtle, to the extent that it was subtle, than it was before. And his hold on the party is not an accident. His hold here has everything to do with the way that he was able to recognize the ways in which the war on terror is an excellent sorting mechanism for figuring out who is a real American and who is a conditional American. And then, as we saw him using the tools of the war on terror on the streets of cities like Portland and Washington, D.C., and New York and in the skies over as many as 15 cities last summer, he's willing to use it on Americans that he calls terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, you write repeatedly about Adham Hassoun. Tell us his story.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Amy, I just want to thank you so much for asking about Adham. I knew you would. You have truly been one of the journalistic heroes of this era.

And Adham Hassoun is a symbol of the ways that the war on terror criminalized people. Adham Hassoun is a Palestinian-born man who survived — he grew up in the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s and immigrated to Florida in the 1990s. And as a refugee himself and an active participant in his community in Miami, in South Florida, in the Islamic community there, he wrote a lot of checks to refugee charities, people that he had thought were helping refugees and helping war victims in places like Bosnia, where the wars became genocidal in the Balkans against Balkan Muslims.

And, ultimately, among the people that he met and tried to help was a convert named José Padilla. José Padilla would, after 9/11, become famous as someone John Ashcroft accused of trying to set off a radiological weapon inside the United States. And very shortly after that happened — Padilla was at first placed in military custody, an American citizen; that was allowed at the time — the feds came for Adham. And even though Adham had committed no violence, Adham had done nothing criminal, the feds and immigration authorities locked him up, and they leaned on him to try and inform on his community, to try and be an informant. And he refused to do that. He considered it an affront to his dignity. He considered it unjust.

And as a result, he spent a tremendous amount of time — he spent years in jails in Florida, while, ultimately, the FBI and the local prosecutor — who eventually would be the Trump Cabinet member Alex Acosta — came up with pretexts to prosecute him. He was originally charged as a co-defendant with José Padilla, who is now placed in federal custody. And even though there was no way that the government could connect him to any act of violence, thanks to the PATRIOT Act and thanks to, frankly, the atmosphere politically in the years after 9/11, that he could be charged with things that simply were not acts of violence or acts of active contribution to specific people committing specific acts of violence that the government could name, and he was convicted. And as he was sentenced, the judge reduced his sentence — the feds were seeking life for Adham — because the judge recognized that the government couldn't point to any act that he — you know, act of violence that he was responsible for. That was in 2007. He served until 2017 in federal prison, a variety of federal prisons.

And then, in 2017, when he had finished his sentence, he had figured that he would be deported, that ultimately he would go back to probably Lebanon. He was kind of done, as you can imagine, with the United States at that point. But he didn't. What happened instead was that he was sent into ICE detention in western New York, outside of Buffalo, at a place called Batavia. And after the PATRIOT Act became law in 2001, there was great civil libertarian fear over one of its provisions, Section 412. Section 412 said that any nondeportable noncitizen, which is to say a stateless person who doesn't have a country that will take that person in, who is deemed a threat to national security by the authorities — ultimately, in this case, the determination is made by the secretary of homeland security — could be imprisoned indefinitely. That never happened throughout the whole war on terror, until it was time to keep Adham Hassoun locked up.

Ultimately, in early 2020, around like late February, early March, Adham gets sick, to the point where he — we don't know for sure, but he thought that he got COVID. By April of that year, Batavia was the ICE detention facility with the highest COVID outbreak inside. So, here was a figure who the United States criminalized, robbed of his freedom, and then ultimately endangered his life by the incompetence and indifference that it showed in allowing COVID to run wild in facilities filled with people that the United States functionally treated as nonpeople.

And it took a very valiant effort by local attorneys and by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge his detention. Ultimately, instead of outright losing the case, as a judge indicated after she ruled Adham had to go free, because the FBI admitted —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, Spencer.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: — that it relied on a — sorry. Adham was ultimately successful, once the government dropped its case in order to preserve its power to do this. And he lives in freedom, I'm happy to say, right now in Rwanda.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds. What has surprised you most about what is happening today?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Very little at this point, I'm sorry to say, surprises me. But the general indifference by the American political and intellectual elites to the relationship between the war on terror and the erosion of democracy is also a very deep thread and very historically rooted, not just in the war on terror, but before, and certainly seeing that those connections have to be made in order to have any form of real democracy in this country and safety and dignity for so many people.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter. His new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much.

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Monday, October 14, 2019

COGITO ERGO KURD

Monday, October 14, 2019


Cogito Ergo Kurd





THE ABSURD TIMES


A COUPLE THINGS
BY
CZAR.DONIC




Hey, we were just talking about you.




First, I have something to say right now.  And you better listen.  Enough of this QUID PRO QUO.  I don't wanna hear you use the phrase again.  As if you learned some Latin?  Come off it already. 

Look, it's like this.  The best part of Grad school was writing my Dissertation.  I had lots of fun with it.  But there was a lot of crap that went on first.  See, we needed two Foreign Languages then or "High Proficiency" in one.  So, I took the German one and later found that I had scored the highest ever at the school of the Princeton Exam.  They said the rules have just changed.  So, I had to pick up another, and I looked around.  I kept saying "I don't want to learn another exam," and people would just shake their heads.  Until a good friend said "You don't have to learn a language, all you have to do is pass a test."  That made all the difference, so I studied for three weeks and passed the French exam. (I think, the lowest possible passing score, but I'm not sure and don't care.)

So, I got through the other stuff and was finally able to work of my dissertation.  What I had determined was that Medieval Scholasticism was almost exactly the same as Boolean Logic, except they didn't have the symbols.  What's why people argue about how many angels can dance of the head of a pin and so on.  These are exercises in logic.

Only one problem: everything they wrote back then, everything "important", was written in Latin, so I had to learn how to read that.  And there was a lot of it!  OK?  So don't try to fucking impress because you learned three words in Latin, second or third hand, from some shyster attorney or TV news reader.  Enough already!

Now, let's go on to see the carry over from the last issue.  Republicans made a big deal about the poor Kurds.  Trump ran away from them with his tail between his legs when he learned that the Turks were coming.   I'm adding this just to complete the story.  It didn't surprise me a bit and I'm glad the Kurds, for awhile, found a new ally.  Guess who?  Just remember we did it.

Here we go:
Syrian troops are massing near the Turkish border, one day after Bashar al-Assad's government reached a deal to help protect the Kurds from Turkey's deadly air and ground assault. On Sunday, the Kurds agreed, in a deal brokered by Russia, to hand over two border towns to the Syrian government in exchange for protection. The Kurds had been allied with the United States up until last week, when President Trump abruptly pulled U.S. troops from northern Syria, paving the way for Turkey's assault. More than 130,000 people have already been displaced over the past five days since Turkey invaded northern Syria. The death toll is unknown. Turkey is facing increasing international condemnation for invading northern Syria. The European Union has called on all member states to stop selling arms to Ankara. We speak with Ozlem Goner, an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the City University of New York and a member of the Emergency Committee of Rojava.


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Syrian troops are massing near the Turkish border, one day after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reached a deal to help protect the Kurds from Turkey's deadly air and ground assault. On Sunday, the Kurds agreed, in a deal brokered by Russia, to hand over two border towns to the Syrian government in exchange for protection. The Kurds had been allied with the United States up until last week, when President Trump abruptly pulled U.S. troops from northern Syria, paving the way for Turkey's assault. On Sunday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced the U.S. had ordered all remaining U.S. forces out of northern Syria.
More than 130,000 people have already been displaced over the past five days since Turkey invaded northern Syria. The death toll is unknown. Turkey says more than 500, quote, "terrorists" have been "neutralized." Turkey frequently refers to Kurdish groups as "terrorists." The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is reporting Turkish-backed proxies have shot dead nine Kurdish civilians, including a prominent political leader, Hevrin Khalaf, who was killed along with her driver on Saturday. She was the secretary-general of the Future Syria Party.
Kurdish authorities are reporting 785 people affiliated with the Islamic State, including many women and children, escaped from a Kurdish-controlled displacement camp in northern Syria. The escape occurred as Turkish-backed forces shelled nearby targets. On Sunday, President Trump's former Defense Secretary James Mattis warned the current turmoil will lead to a resurgence of ISIS. This comes as The New York Times is reporting U.S. forces failed to transfer five dozen "high value" Islamic State prisoners out of Syria before Trump withdrew troops from northern Syria.
Turkey is facing increasing international condemnation for invading northern Syria. The European Union has called on all member states to stop selling arms to Ankara.
To talk more about the situation in northern Syria, we're joined by Ozlem Goner. She is an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the City University of New York and a member of the Emergency Committee of Rojava. She is from Turkey and of Kurdish origin.
Professor Ozlem Goner, thanks so much for being with us. Can you talk about what you understand to be the latest situation now in northern Syria?
OZLEM GONER: Thank you for having me, Amy.
Well, the situation, as you just said, that Kurds needed to have a deal. So we need to just look at the situation just a little back and see that last year — actually, the beginning of this year, in January, President Trump once again said that he's going to withdraw the troops from Syria, and so leaving the Kurds alone. And this didn't happen because there was a lot of reactions against this. And then, at the time, he had said that, "Well, we're going to do this, but in time and in due warning so that our allies there can protect themselves." But this didn't happen, because just a random phone call this past week between Erdoğan and Trump, he all of a sudden decided to take all troops out of there, without any notification, without any time for the Kurdish troops to protect themselves.
So, once they were left unprotected — and it's important to realize that it's not just President Trump, but we tried very hard to develop international solidarity against this, to call for a no-fly zone, so that even if the U.S. troops get out of the place, that the Kurds can be protected with their self-defense measures combined with a no-fly zone, so that Turkey cannot do air attacks, which is the majority of losses last time happened because of this. So, this did not take place. This did not go through. There's no protection, no protection from the U.S. whatsoever. It was just very prompt taking of the troops out of there. So, the Kurds, in order to escape genocide, had to make a deal. And this is a shame, because they had to make a deal with a regime that has been repressing them for decades now in order to protect themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what this deal is, how it happened. It was brokered by Russia.
OZLEM GONER: Yes. Yes, it was brokered by Russia. Russia — basically, once the U.S. withdrew from the region, Russia became the major power in the region, controlling and negotiating between Turkey, Assad forces and the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces. So Russia is the only actor in the playing field right now, in addition to Iran, but right now we're speaking of the Russian leadership. And so, the terms of the deal are still unknown, because, you know, for the part of the Kurds, their urgent need for self-protection and to prevent genocide made them just urgently accept this offer from the Assad regime. Their hope is that they can keep their autonomy. This was what the leaders of the Syrian Democratic Forces were saying, that this is just to protect the borders for now and to prevent the Turkish invasion, Turkish war, Turkish genocide — I mean, Kurdish genocide at the hands of Turkish forces.
And especially, just you mentioned this, and it's very important to understand, that Turkey — it's not just the ISIS fighters escaped. Turkey actually bombed the ISIS prisons so that they can escape. So Turkey is — I mean, actually, Süleyman Soylu, the Turkish interior minister, five days ago, when asked at a TV program, when Turks were concerned about the potential ISIS attack, he was like, "Be comfortable. No need to be concerned. They don't have any option but to ally with us." So they're very openly allying with ISIS.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's go to President Trump, who was responding to questions from reporters last week —
OZLEM GONER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — asking what will happen to ISIS fighters in the region who are imprisoned and who could escape. He said, "Well, they'll escape to Europe."
OZLEM GONER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: This is what he said.
REPORTER: ISIS fighters escape and pose a threat elsewhere.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, they're going to be escaping to Europe. That's where they want to go. They want to go back to their homes, but Europe didn't want them from us.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to what Trump just said?
OZLEM GONER: Well, this is — I mean, you know, this is just outrageous. This is just outrageous. I mean, there is the reemergence and resurgence of ISIS that happened because of Trump's sudden decision to withdraw the troops, without any protection whatsoever, without any plan to do something with these ISIS fighters and also their families. And it's very important to understand what we call ISIS families is women and children. These are fighters. They have done enormous human rights violations in the regions. There's tons of interviews with these women in the camps, in the refugee camps. And so, they are letting them free to kill the Kurds aligned with the Turkish forces. So, Trump says that it's Europe's responsibility, but, obviously —
AMY GOODMAN: Trump said, actually — he said that —
OZLEM GONER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, the ISIS fighters — 
OZLEM GONER: They will — yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — will go to Europe.
OZLEM GONER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: But he made very clear they will not come to the United States.
OZLEM GONER: Well, I mean, we know what happened. We know how they can mobilize to attack and make terrorist attacks in all parts of the world. So, this is — I mean, and especially for someone who's been using this discourse of terror for such a long time and threat for such a long time, it's outrageous not to see the imminent threat. And it's outrageous to not see the cooperation of Turkey and the open statement that we're going to cooperate with ISIS, that we're going to use the forces, the jihadists, the ISIS, in addition to the Turkish land forces and air forces, to attack an unprotected territory. And the only means that these people have is self-defense. And it's important to understand that this is not just the Kurds in the region who are under threat, but the minorities and religious minorities who have been especially targeted by ISIS. So they are looking for revenge. They're looking for, first, exterminating these leftover populations, that they started — you know, the Yazidi genocide that they had committed and enslaved thousands. I mean, and letting them both operate in that region and then saying they will go to Europe, and we know the danger that they impose to world, this is basically President Trump's fault. But also — yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you say about Trump tweeting today, "Kurds may be releasing some to get U.S. [sic] involved" — "to get us involved"?
OZLEM GONER: Well, this is — I mean, we all — tweeting. Who tweets about these issues? Who tweets — seriously. Why would Kurds do that? We know — I mean, we just — this is — just to bring a human face to this, we saw a woman holding her baby, crying — her dead baby — saying that "We have fled Kobani." Her husband died in Kobani. Now her daughter died, again at the hands of Turkish forces, again cooperating with the jihadists and ISIS. Why would they do such — I mean, ISIS, the major — the losses that the Kurds suffer at the hands of ISIS is 11,000 people. And these are civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain, 11,000 people who —
OZLEM GONER: Eleven thousand people fighting against ISIS were killed. So the major losses —
AMY GOODMAN: In northern Syria.
OZLEM GONER: In northern Syria. I mean, so, Trump, as we know, historically, there is the role of Europe by colonizing this region of the world, by separating Kurds into four different nation-states, who repress Kurds in different forms, and we weren't able to build international solidarity to protect, to do something against this colonization over the century. And then, this is important because then the U.S., when he — it's important to say that when he says, "We don't have a responsibility. It's not our fault," who created the jihadis? Who created ISIS? Who made it in such a big threat to the world in the first place? So we need to understand U.S. involvement in this region.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that history.
OZLEM GONER: So, if you look at it, Europe, first, because it was the colonizing agent of the early construction of this region and early separation of Kurds under four nation-states, denying their sovereignty, so denying their self-defense. And also, right now everybody is like, "Who is terrorist? PKK." And Erdoğan is using this, that they are terrorists: "We have annihilated 400, 500" — they are called "terrorists," because Europe had denied sovereignty from them. And so, when they were denied to be a nation-state, their forces of self-protection, self-defense was called terrorism.
And so, and then, we know the World War II and the U.S. involvement in this region, and so how the U.S. has created these — first, it initiated, you know, the Assad regime, these regimes, these repressive regimes, to suppress the left in the Middle East in different countries, the Baath regime in Iraq and the Turkish Sunni Islamic, neoliberal, capitalist regimes, the right regimes, against the Turkish left. So they have cultivated this region. And then we know, since early 2000, especially following September 11, it's created this war on so-called terror, reviving, recreating these jihadist forces, these Islamic forces, and letting them to run the region according to the U.S. interests. You know, so the major role that the U.S. has played in creating these monsters, that then killed, massacred the people of the region, and then denying responsibility for this is outrageous.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you — I want to ask you about Hevrin Khalaf.
OZLEM GONER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Turkish-backed proxies shot dead nine Kurdish civilians, including —
OZLEM GONER: That's right.
AMY GOODMAN: — this prominent political leader. She was the secretary-general of the Future Syria Party. Who was she?
OZLEM GONER: Well, she was a human rights defender. She was also working — as you know, one of the major successes of the Syrian revolution has been to promote women and has been to fight against patriarchy. So, she was one of these major figures, a human rights defender, who was very active. And this is — you know, they attack — they will attack, first, human rights defenders. They will attack women, as this act is showing, that especially the jihadi and ISIS forces have been very famous in attacking. And as you know, she was — you know, we don't know the exact what happened there exactly, but we know that there was sexual violence. And so, this is very important that they are going to attack these people who have been cultivating a democratic, nonpatriarchal, gender-egalitarian system, because this is what — not just ISIS, but the Turkish government is standing with the jihadis, who are very suppressive, very patriarchal, and who want to — who can't tolerate women being in the forefront. And so, women have been the targets first. Women, and then it's going to be the religious minorities, obviously all Kurds.
So, there is — you know, I mean, it's just outrageous, not just what the Trump administration did. But I think it's time for also the left to rethink about Turkey's attempts to become the regional power, and to see how Turkey's colonizing these places, these people, with the use of the jihadis and ISIS, and to be against this, to be against — really create a strong stance against this.
AMY GOODMAN: So, President Trump, at about the same time that he had his conversation with Erdoğan two Sundays ago and then announced that the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops — not that he's saying they'll go home, because it was then almost immediately announced that the Pentagon is going to send 1,800 more troops —
OZLEM GONER: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — on top of the thousands more they had already said a few weeks before, to Saudi Arabia.
OZLEM GONER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: The significance of this?
OZLEM GONER: So, thank you so much for bringing that, Amy, because people think, "Well, they celebrated." And this was — this is why I'm —
AMY GOODMAN: Well, antiwar forces who really want to end the war.
OZLEM GONER: And I'm emphasizing — and this is what I am saying that the U.S. left should really reconsider, its foreign policy and its understanding of the region, and how this region and the cultivation of this region has been based on colonialism and imperialism, and because — because the troops are a very minor part of the role of the U.S. in the region. Well, first of all, it's replacing these troops, so we're not even talking about the troops leaving the region. It's just putting the troops, taking them from here and putting them there, so letting these people get massacred because "I made a deal with Turkey" and then because we're in good relations with — so, we're going to send them there. So, first of all, troops, even though it's a minor issue in the whole region and the governing of the region, even the troops are not brought back to the U.S. They're just replaced. But also there's much more. I mean, the armament deal, where is Turkey getting its weapons? Where is Turkey getting its airplanes to attack one of the most defenseless populations of the world? It's getting it from the U.S. and European companies. So their complicity in this war against Kurds in the past century, and especially this recent episode, is very striking and is —
AMY GOODMAN: Trump also, after announcing they were withdrawing troops from that area, not necessarily bringing them home, also announced he'll be having a meeting at the White House with Erdoğan. The Washington Post ran a piece saying Trump's decision on Syria crystallizes questions about his business and his presidency.
OZLEM GONER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: The article notes Trump himself has acknowledged his conflict of interest with Turkey. Even after Trump became president, Trump Towers Istanbul remained part of the Trump Organization, continued to generate revenue for Trump himself.
OZLEM GONER: Exactly. Trump doesn't have business interests in Rojava. When he's saying, "Well, we don't have interests in there," he doesn't have interests in there. He doesn't have hotels, he doesn't have companies in Rojava. And we all know that Rojava is an anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, ecologically friendly, ecologically sensitive democracy, pluralist democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: This area of northern Syria.
OZLEM GONER: This area of northern Syria that's led by Kurdish coalition forces and also other ethnic minorities, religious minorities, who were able to live peacefully in a region that was under the attack of ISIS. And in the midst of the war, they were able to create a pluralist, feminist, ecological democracy. So, obviously, Trump's interest does not lie with this. His economic interest does not lie with this region. His ideological interest does not lie with. So, that is why it is us, the U.S. and the left, who needs to see and see what's happening and to support this region.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, what happens now? The Kurds have made a deal with Syria.
OZLEM GONER: Yes. So, what happens now is that we really need to push for the Kurdish autonomy. Mazlum Kobani, one of the leaders, commanders of the Syrian Democratic Forces, said that we had to make this deal to protect our people against genocide. So, and it's important because we need to make sure that we create international solidarity, that, first of all, I mean, there are economic sanctions against Turkey, to try everything to bring, you know, the Turkish occupation down, but, at the same time, to make sure that Syrian Democratic Forces is a legitimate political actor, while we're pushing the leaders to bring Turkey to make peace in the region, and Syrian Democratic Forces to establish its autonomy, because this is under threat. And right now they're making this deal. They might lose their autonomy. They might be giving in to the regime. The regime, the Assad regime, has been —
AMY GOODMAN: Which they have fought for so long.
OZLEM GONER: The Assad regime has been violent against Kurds for decades. It's not like they want to make this negotiation. They have to, because the U.S. left them unprotected, because the U.S. was not able to establish a no-fly zone that would give them some protection. And now Assad can imprison, can torture, can kill, can murder the leaders of the Syrian Democratic Forces. And this really reminds me of, you know, early Turkish massacres where the leaders of the Kurds, such as in Dersim, which is my region, had to negotiate with the Turkish. They had to give in, themselves, and to protect their people. So, they're doing this to prevent a genocide, because Trump administration betrayed them and because the U.S. left does not — and the European left, the world left has not developed mechanisms and solidarity to protect them. So, it's a shame that they had to turn to another dictator to protect themselves from one dictator.
AMY GOODMAN: Ozlem Goner, I want to thank you for being with us — of course, we'll continue to follow this — assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the City University of New York, member of the Emergency Committee of Rojava.