Vital Lessons From the United States’ Catastrophic Response to 9/11 | SYSTEM UPDATE #167
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, ever since Hamas executed a massacre inside Israel on October 7th, And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then vowed reprisals that would extract what he called, quote, an unprecedented cost.
We have been urging on this program that the lessons of the US's multi-year, multi-war response to the 9-11 attack be remembered and then applied.
But to apply those lessons, one must first know what those lessons are.
It has now been 22 years since the 9-11 attack took place.
There are thus many millions of Americans who are too young to have experienced it as cognizant adults, and millions more who were not even born then.
Even for those old enough to have lived through these events as adults, it is very easy to forget history.
Each year, memories fade or become distorted, sometimes deliberately.
Given how many Bush Cheney operatives and agents of the U.S.
security state under Bush and Obama are now embedded in our nation's largest media corporations, Supreme War on Terror propagandist and liar Jeffrey Goldberg was promoted as a reward for his lies to run the Atlantic, where he features warriors on terror such as the neocon speechwriter for the Bush White House, David Frum.
While the actual spokesperson for the Bush-Cheney White House, Nicole Wallace, has become one of the most popular MSNBC hosts, and CIA chiefs such as John Brennan, David Petraeus, and Michael Hayden are all employed by or regularly featured in the most influential media corporations, there has been a deliberate and Michael Hayden are all employed by or regularly featured in the most influential media corporations, there has been a deliberate campaign to minimize or even deny the crimes and destruction of their war on terror policies, in part to rehabilitate both them and their
militarist and in part to rehabilitate both them and their militarist and war-mongering ideology, but also in order to depict Donald The reaction by the United States to 9/11 is, more than anything else, what drove me to leave the practice of law in order to start working in journalism in 2005.
And more than any one specific policy, what alarmed me the most about the post-9-11 climate was the repressive environment that emerged.
From the start, Bush, Cheney, and their team of neocon speechwriters and propagandists insisted, often explicitly, That anyone dissenting from or even questioning their decrees was not just wrong, but was, quote, pro-terrorist, a traitor on the other side, the side of Al Qaeda.
Blatant lies, media disinformation campaigns, and character assassinations and smears were pervasive, all with the goal of imposing a cost on critics so severe and irreparable that many were deterred by design from speaking up.
The 9-11 attacks provoked as much unified and righteous rage as the recent Hamas attack in Israel did.
As a result, everything proposed by the U.S.
government in its wake, new wars, coups, massive civilian-killing bombing campaigns glorified under the name Shock and Awe, Torture and kidnapping programs and a radical transformation of our domestic politics to formalize into law previously unthinkable authoritarian powers in the Patriot Act and warrantless spying.
All of that was deemed inherently just.
After all, we were attacked by savage and primitive terrorists.
What decent person would possibly oppose policies justified in the name of destroying those terrorists and keeping us safe?
How could anyone other than a traitor or a terrorist supporter possibly oppose the Patriot Act?
I mean, it says right in the name that it's intended to fortify American patriotism.
The only possible motive someone might have for objecting to U.S.
government wars and other policies justified in the name of crushing the terrorists is because someone was either weak when it came to confronting the terrorists or because one was pro-Al Qaeda or pro-terrorist.
That really was the repressive and manipulative climate that was immediately imposed in the wake of 9-11, made possible by exploiting the emotions of decent people who were genuinely enraged by the 9-11 attack and who wanted to avenge the death of 3,000 of their fellow citizens and avenge the humiliation imposed on their country.
But within a relatively short period of time, Americans came to regret many of the policies they were induced to applaud.
They came to realize that not every policy justified in the name of crushing the terrorists, and most definitely not every war justified in the ground that it was necessary to keep us safe, was in fact justifiable or wise.
To the contrary, many of those policies ended up being deeply counterproductive, far more likely to fuel terrorism against Americans than stop it.
And, in many cases, were shameful, criminal, and morally reprehensible.
Those are the key lessons of 9-11, ones which are always worth applying, but especially when our government is yet again proposing that we involve ourselves in a new war by arming, funding, and fueling one of the parties to that war, or to otherwise involve our military in a new conflict as President Biden has already done by deploying aircraft carriers to the region and threatening deterrence and reprisals against other parties that might get involved.
We often forget The most vital historical lesson is because the passage of time and the emotions of more recent events leads us to forget.
And far more commonly and destructively because our leaders and their institutions of authority want us to forget.
Or at least to misremember it because they were the authors of those crimes and the lies and disastrous choices.
And their self-preservation and ongoing power require that those lessons be forgotten.
The history of the War on Terror and the disasters spawned by the U.S.
War on Terror are often ugly and depressing.
That is precisely why it is so vital that we stop and document them and remember them and then apply them to newly proposed wars.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Over the last seven years, there have been many divergencies between myself and how I view American politics on the one hand and the views and behavior of mainstream corporate journalism and the liberal wing of corporate media.
It began, I would say, with my scornful reaction To the deranged conspiracy theory that came from the bowels of the CIA, fed to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 2016, that claimed that Donald Trump was a puppet of the Russian government, had acted in collusion with it, that the Russians had seized power over the United States by having sexual blackmail tapes over Donald Trump.
A scandal and conspiracy theory that I not only regarded as baseless and laughable, but also quite dangerous.
Because it depended upon feeding Americans animosity and anger and hatred towards Russia and I knew it was only a matter of time before a war between the United States and Russia would inevitably emerge as it now has in Ukraine.
It was also due to the fact that there were all sorts of endless disinformation campaigns and lies spread by the corporate media in the name of electing Democrats and sabotaging and undermining Donald Trump, including the outright lie they ratified that also came from the CIA right before the 2020 election that told Americans to ignore the reporting on the Biden family's exploiting of their influence for profit based on the absolute lie that almost every media outlet embraced and ratified.
That those documents were the byproduct of Russian disinformation rather than they were, which were clearly authentic.
And I've certainly had very passionate divergences as well with the corporate media's embrace of a system of censorship, a regime of censorship effectuated through the creation of this fraudulent disinformation industry and this claim by them, the same people that spread a regime of censorship effectuated through the creation of this fraudulent disinformation industry and this claim by them, the same people that spread disinformation more than anybody, that they are now competent to
But I think the largest divergency, what has caused the biggest breach between myself and other journalists who have a similar view as I do on the one hand in corporate media and American liberalism on the other, was this insistence on the other.
I'm depicting Donald Trump not as a candidate with a bad ideology or not as somebody who was incompetent to run for president or unqualified to execute the office but instead as this once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation unprecedented evil the likes of which the United States has never seen before.
And the reason I found this so repellent and so odious and so offensive to the truth
Is because this claim was coming from the very same people who were the authors of all these lies and morally reprehensible policies and disastrous wars that impelled me to enter journalism in the first place and that I devoted the first 10 years of my journalism to documenting, namely all the crimes that took place under the banner of the war on terror, not just the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of that country that gave rise to ISIS,
Based on all sorts of falsehoods that the government and their media allies spread, but all of the prongs of the war on terror, from bombing eight Muslim countries and constantly killing civilians, to the creation of due process free prisons where people were put in cages for 15 or 20 years, some of whom are still kept there, without even bothering to try them with any crime, the creation of radical theories that said that even US citizens
could be imprisoned without trial without even contact with the outside world if the president just decrees them to be an enemy combatant all sorts of horrific and hideous lies and crimes that destroyed the constitution the importation of the patriot act and warrantless mass spying on domestic populations
and it was shocking to me genuinely to watch the very same people who did those things the worst crimes in american history or at least in the last seven or eight decades that the very same people responsible for them were welcomed back into the media were empowered by the media were celebrated by american liberals all of them were
Also that they could turn around and act like they were so alarmed by Donald Trump's unprecedented attack on all things decent.
And whatever you think of Donald Trump, there's simply no case to be made that anything that he did, whatever the worst things are, are in the same universe of destruction and moral crimes and legal crimes and the lies that were undertaken by the U.S. are in the same universe of destruction and moral crimes and legal crimes and the lies that were undertaken by the U.S. government and the U.S. security state under two separate presidents, all justified in the
And as we've been doing over the last two weeks, ever since this new war erupted between Israel and Gaza, where so many of the similarities between the post 9/11 climate in the United States and the climate that is governing now when it comes to the war in Israel are so self-evident and apparent.
We've been encouraging everybody to take a deep breath and try and be sober and not allow the same manipulation of your emotions that took place after 9/11 that bred so many of these disastrous policies to once again work.
To use your faculties of reason, your critical thought process, and most importantly of all, to remember the lessons of 9-11.
The fact that so many Americans were induced to support policies that they were told were vital to crush terrorists and to avenge the attack.
The same thing we're being told now with respect to Israel.
Only for so many Americans to come to realize, in some cases very quickly, in some cases over time, that the policies they were induced to support were in fact completely counterproductive.
That it didn't stop terrorism at all, but actually made the problem worse.
That it wasn't designed to benefit the American people, but only a tiny sliver of people in power, especially neocons who had their own agenda that had nothing to do with protecting the citizens of the United States.
And that in so many ways forever marred the perception of the United States and the world that wasn't done by Donald Trump, but instead by George Bush, Dick Cheney and his team of neocons, in many ways extended by President Obama.
And so when telling you that we hope that you will apply the lessons of 9-11, we stopped and realized, well, what are those lessons exactly?
That we're hoping will be applied.
And what is the history of 9-11 and the war on terror that we keep referring to as so crucial to preserve and then apply?
And so we decided to go back and one of the things we tried to do on Friday nights is to take a little bit of a step back from the immediacy of the news cycle and be able to delve deeply into the historical context necessary for understanding events.
We've been doing that.
We did that just recently with the 1990s and Waco and Ruby Ridge and the war on civil liberties on the part of the U.S.
security services that took place in the 1990s that have given rise to the abuses of today.
We've done that in other instances as well.
We've done interviews that are designed to take a little bit of a step back from the news cycle because people have more time on Friday night and over the weekend to consume those kind of programs than if we just throw it into the middle of the week.
And we found that the feedback is great.
Often they're the most watched shows.
And so we thought it was a perfect moment to go back and remind you of some of the low points of the War on Terror and the similarities that seem obvious to me.
with the current climate that has been deliberately cultivated as well in the name of launching new wars designed to crush the terrorists.
So one of the things, as I said, that disturbed me more than anything else as I watched and lived through the response to the 9-11 attack.
I lived in New York.
I was there on 9-11.
I shared all that rage and outrage and Was also manipulated like so many other people and uniting behind George Bush and Dick Cheney, like most of the country did.
They had 90% approval rating.
And the war in Afghanistan commanded virtually unanimous support, as did the enactment of the Patriot Act.
What really was, I think, most notable and that's worth remembering is the repressive climate that emerged, the utter intolerance for dissent, the inability to dissent without having your reputation completely destroyed.
And this emanated very deliberately from George Bush himself on September 20th, 2001, 10 days after the 9-11 attack, with the building still in rubble.
And the body count is still unknown.
He went before a joint session of Congress, his first address as president to the Congress since 9-11, in a speech written by the neocon warmonger David Frum, who has spent his career accusing everybody who opposes U.S.
government wars as being a traitor or being unpatriotic.
And Bush created this framework, this binary framework, where either you support everything the government does or you will be deemed to be on the side of terrorists.
Here's a reminder of what he said.
Every nation in every region now has a decision to make.
Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. - I mean, there you saw some intense applause, a standing there you saw some intense applause, a standing ovation, prolonged applause.
And that became the framework that I would suggest is just as present today.
Either you support the war on terror, either you support everything Israel does, or you stand accused of being pro-terrorist, pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Hamas.
And it wasn't just George Bush who said it, although obviously him saying that 10 days after the attack with the country united behind him was the most important proclamation.
It set the tone for everything that followed.
But all sorts of journalists and commentators and people in the media did everything possible to fortify that framework by constantly accusing anybody off-key of being a terrorist or a traitor.
The writer Andrew Sullivan, who since has apologized for this and come to regret it, but at the time he was a vehement supporter for the war on terror in the way that British pundits like to get.
There's something about British culture where they all want to be Winston Churchill.
The minute it's time for a new war, they don't go to war, but they like to prance around and beat their chest.
And insist that somehow they're powerful and courageous and purposeful because they want to send other people to war.
Coined a phrase, Andrew Sullivan did, a fifth column in the United States, meaning the term for traitors, for people who work within their own country to undermine and subvert their country by working with the enemy, that anybody who questioned George Bush or Dick Cheney, the war on terror, got immediately labeled that way.
Imagine how damaging that is to one's reputation Just like it's quite damaging now to be called pro-Hamas for questioning what the Israelis are doing or the U.S.
government's support for it.
Here is the media criticism group FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which compiled in November 2001.
The examples of how this was accomplished, of how any dissent was equated with treason.
The headline is, Covering the Fifth Column, Media Presents Pro-War Distortions of Peace Movement's Views.
And this is what it said, In place of consistent coverage of the peace movement, some pundits and columnists sounded the alarm about the threat to America from within.
New Republic editor Peter Beinart on September 24, 2001, thought critics of the administration's plan should either keep quiet or explain their loyalties.
Quote, domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides.
In other words, if you don't stand up and say, I support the United States and love the United States and I'm on the side of America before expressing any kind of dissent.
It means that you automatically are to be deemed treasonous just like anybody who criticizes the United States support for Israel or the Israeli attack without first standing up and saying Hamas, I condemn them vehemently as monsters and savages is deemed to be the same.
We have condemned the Hamas attack from the beginning, but it's this idea that unless you're constantly focused on that, no dissent is permitted without being accused of being on the side of Hamas.
New Republic columnist and former editor Andrew Sullivan had a more ominous warning in the London Sunday Times on September 16, 2001.
Quote, the middle part of the country, the great red zone that voted for Bush is clearly ready for war.
The decadent left and its enclaves on the coast is not dead and may well mount a fifth column.
The Washington Times columnist Robert Stacey McCain on September 27th was even more threatening, implying that military force should be used against anti-war protesters.
Quote, why are we sending aircraft carriers halfway around the world to look for enemies when our nation's worst enemies, communists proclaiming an anti-American jihad, will be right there in front of the Washington Monument on Saturday?
He was referring to a protest against the war on terror and against going to war.
Which has typically been considered a fundamental American right.
But wasn't at the time and isn't now.
Right-wing provocateur David Horowitz in the LA Times on September 28th chided today's student activists with this reminder, quote, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans is on the hands of the anti-war activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the communists.
Horowitz added that, quote, this country was too tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within.
That was very much the climate.
And the amazing thing about it was that the number of people dissenting was extremely small.
Almost nobody with any power.
And yet it wasn't enough for them that there was short of 100% unity.
It had to be 100% unity.
They couldn't stand the fact that there was a stray voice over here and one over here asking questions in the context of 99 to 1 votes in Congress or 434 to 1 votes in Congress or 90% approval ratings.
Just like they can't stand the fact that right now every major American politician with maybe one or two exceptions is voicing vehement support in both political parties for U.S. support for Israel in this war.
There's a college student group over here, and an assistant professor over here, and a speaker at a D-Day rally over there, offering very fringe and marginalized views, and they just are obsessed with it.
There can't be any dissent, just like what's true here.
In fact, just to give you a sense for how unified the country was in the name of whatever George Bush wanted to do in the name of stopping terror, and how little dissent there was, and how much it transformed American political life for the worse, look at what happened with the Patriot Act.
Here from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, its page on the Patriot Act has a little history.
They say this, by the way, the Patriot Act, for those of you who don't remember, the official name was the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.
That was the acronym that led them to call it the U.S.
Patriot Act of 2001.
The act was introduced less than a week after the September 11th attacks and passed with little debate or opposition.
The Patriot Act expanded surveillance for law enforcement by, this is what the Patriot Act did, and again, almost no debate, passed very quickly after 9-11 because no dissent was tolerated.
It expanded domestic and international wiretapping and pen register monitoring.
It expanded authority to access to electronic communications.
It allowed secret, quote, sneak and peek searches.
It removed privacy protections to allow federal agencies to share more information, and it expanded funding to federal law enforcement agencies.
The Patriot Act was passed in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
Although many provisions of the Act had been proposed before to substantial criticism, Congress swiftly approved the Act with little debate and no House, Senate, or Conference report.
Everybody was petrified to oppose something called the Patriot Act in the wake of 9-11 because to do so would get you accused of being on the side of Al Qaeda and not a patriot.
Here's the roll call vote for the U.S.
Senate passing the Patriot Act in October.
There you see 98 of 100 senators voted yes, one didn't vote, and one Voted no.
The only no vote, the one single no vote in the Patriot Act in the Senate was from the civil libertarian Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.
Every single other senator, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, all of them, along with every Republican voted yes.
Every single last one of them.
And as the history said, it contained a lot of provisions that others had long proposed but could never get anywhere near passing because it was considered such a radical departure from the American tradition.
It allowed massive amounts of domestic spying and the elimination of protections of all kinds.
Which is why, even then it was considered radical and people were worried about it, but still not a single senator other than Russ Feinbold was willing to vote no.
In the House, which is usually a little bit more balanced because people who represent single districts, if they're very conservative, very liberal, have more leeway, the vote was still extremely lopsided.
It was, here you see it.
357 votes in favor and only 66 opposed.
Three of those nay votes were Republicans, including Senator Ron Paul, unsurprisingly.
But the overall majority of the House in both political parties voted yes on the Patriot Act as well.
That's what happens when A climate gets created where any dissent is deemed to be synonymous with treason.
Now, in addition to the Patriot Act, there was also implemented, although unbeknownst to Americans until 2005 when the New York Times discovered it, A program that ordered mass warrantless spying on the calls of American citizens speaking to Americans overseas.
There was a law in place, the FISA Act, that required warrants in order for the U.S.
government to spy or surveil the telephone calls of American citizens, no matter with whom they were speaking.
And the Bush administration secretly ordered that warrant requirement, which is based in law, to just be ignored.
When it came to Americans speaking with foreigners, people on foreign soil, they just said, we don't need a warrant anymore.
We're not going to seek a warrant.
We're just going to listen in.
They did it in secret.
And we didn't know about it until 2005.
The New York Times actually discovered the existence of this program in 2004, six months before George Bush's re-election.
And when the New York Times advised the White House that it had discovered this program, the White House called the editor and the publisher of the New York Times into the Oval Office, George Bush did, and said, if you reveal this program, you're going to have blood on your hands.
You're going to cause terrorist attacks to take place.
And if you want this blood on your hands, then go ahead and publish it.
But if you don't, don't.
Now that argument never made sense.
How could it help terrorists to know that the U.S.
was spying on calls without warrants instead of with warrants?
It was only of interest to American citizens.
It's the Constitution and the law.
But the New York Times got scared and didn't publish it.
They allowed George Bush to be re-elected without telling Americans this was being done.
And the only reason the New York Times finally reported it was because one of the reporters, Jim Risen, got so angry that he couldn't report his story that he wrote a book in which he was going to report it.
And the New York Times got scared.
They didn't want to be scooped by their own reporter in a book.
And so they finally published it.
And they won a Pulitzer for this story.
And they celebrated their bravery, the New York Times did, even though they were howled into out of publishing it for almost 18 months.
But here's what was done in that climate where no dissent was permitted, where everything done in the name of terrorism was justified.
There you see the headline.
Bush lets the U.S.
spy on callers without warrants.
Quote, months after the September 11th attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency, the NSA, to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required
For domestic spying, according to government officials, under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years.
In an effort to track possible, quote, dirty numbers linked to al-Qaeda, the official said, of course it's always justified.
In the name of keeping you safe, that's the point.
So much of what's justified in the name of fighting terror is actually about nothing having to do with that.
The Patriot Act, for example, that we just covered, ended up being applied far more often in cases having nothing to do with terrorism than it did with terrorism cases, even though the justification for why they needed these radical powers was to stop terrorism.
The New York Times went on, quote, the agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence gathering practices, particularly for the NSA, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad.
As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched If not cross constitutional limits on legal searches, quote, this is really a sea change, said a former senior official who specializes in national security law.
It's almost a mainstay of this country that the NSA only does foreign searches.
At least, it used to be a mainstay of the United States until 9-11 happened, just like the Patriot Act was unthinkable until then, too.
So just on those bases alone, those two events, the Patriot Act and warrantless spying, and obviously with the Snowden story, we demonstrated that warrantless spying had also now taken place on domestic communications, collecting the list of everybody who Americans were calling and how long they were speaking.
Just on the basis of these things alone.
It should be evident how dangerous it is when you let people insist that anyone dissenting from the US government's policies and from its wars are pro-terrorist, pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Hamas.
Because when that climate is allowed to take root and nobody can dissent for fear of being accused of that, all sorts of things happen that are justified or sold in the name of fighting terrorism that in fact are about everything but that.
That is a crucial lesson to have learned.
Now, just to give you a sense as well for what the climate was like, this seems like a trivial example, but with all the talk now about getting people fired and cancelling them because they signed petitions that are pro-Palestinian or insufficiently pro-Israel, There was a lot of that going on back then as well.
Here from CNN in March of 2003, so about 10 days before the Iraq War started, the Dixie Chicks almost had their career destroyed for a very benign statement.
Quote, there are a lot worse things in country music than your wife leaving you or your dog dying.
There are stations not playing your music because you done gone and said some things against the president.
God, this is a CNN article that's incredibly patronizing about people who like country music.
They actually said that?
There's stations not playing your music because you done gone and said some things about the president.
Music superstars the Dixie Chicks are finding out that criticizing President Bush's plans for war in Iraq can cost you airplay big time.
Country stations across the United States have pulled the chicks from playlists following reports that lead singer Natalie Maine said in a concert in London earlier this week That she was, quote, ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.
That was it.
That's all she said.
She was an opponent of the Iraq War.
She said, I'm ashamed the President of the United States is from our state, Texas, and people burn their albums.
Radio stations were afraid to play their songs because of how much anger it would provoke.
Now obviously people have the legal right to ban, to burn the The albums of a music group because of their political views, but look at how little was required.
A little dissent was required to subject you to these sorts of public vilification campaigns.
Now again, this kind of dissent from the War on Terror was very marginalized.
by calls from irate listeners who thought criticism of the president was unpatriotic.
Now again, this kind of dissent from the war on terror was very marginalized.
Very few people were doing it because of this climate.
And the few who were, were automatically called traitors.
Noam Chomsky wrote a best-selling book, one of the very few that tried to offer a different perspective on 9-11.
Namely, at the time we were told, Americans were asking, rightly, understandably, why do they hate us?
Why would people be willing to sacrifice their lives to fly a plane in the building to kill as many of us as they can?
Why did they hate us like that?
And the answer people like David Fromm and Bill Kristol and neocons tried to peddle and Dick Cheney tried to peddle were, oh, they hate us for our freedoms.
They hate the fact that we're free, that we allow gay people to live openly, that we allow women to have careers and not be in burqas, that we get to vote.
That was the fairy tale they fed us.
And Noam Chomsky wrote a book saying, you know what?
Actually, they hate us because of the reasons they say they hate us that we're not allowed to hear.
Because we imposed a sanctioned regime on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of children.
We put military bases and soldiers and controlled the government of Saudi Arabia, which is sacred to their religion.
We support Israel and its violence against Palestinians.
Those are the reasons they gave.
But that was why they hated us.
And Noam Chomsky, for writing a book like that, even though it was a bestseller, people were hungry to hear an alternative version, was widely accused of being a traitor and on the side of terrorists.
Something that persists to this day.
Another example was Susan Sontag, the left-wing author.
Here is an article in Salon, which is the place I reported and was a columnist for from 2007 to 2012.
And at the time, Salon was one of the biggest and most important online magazines.
It basically pioneered the idea of online magazines along with Slate, and the founder was David Talbott.
Who we've recommended before.
He wrote a book, I think the best book, on the post-World War II history of the CIA called A Devil's Chessboard that delves into all the things the CIA did and how it got to be that under the Dulles brothers and the possibilities of who really killed JFK.
We're going to have David Toppet on, I think, next week on our show.
But he wrote an article about what had happened to Susan Sontag.
This was October 16th, just about five weeks after the 9-11 attacks.
And this is what the headline was, the quote, Traitor Fires Back.
Denounced as a fifth columnist by the right, Susan Sontag blasts America's cow-like media and scaremongering leaders and says she fears that another terror attack could turn the United States into a police state.
Quote, writer Susan Sontag has produced many texts during her four-decade career, including historical novels and reflections on cancer, photography, and the war in Bosnia.
But it was a brief essay less than a thousand words long in the September 24th issue of The New Yorker that created the biggest uproar of her life.
In the piece, which he wrote shortly after the terror attacks of September 11th, Sontag dissected the political and media blather that poured out of the television in the hours after the explosion of violence.
After subjecting herself to what she calls, quote, an overdose of CNN, Sontag reacted with a coldly furious burst of analysis, savaging political leaders and media mandarins for trying to convince the country that everything was okay.
That our attackers were simply cowards, and that our childlike view of the world need not be disturbed.
As if to prove her point, a furious chorus of sharp-tongued pundits immediately descended on Sontag, outraged that she had broken from the ranks of the soothingly platitudinous.
She was called, quote, an American hater, a moral idiot, a traitor, who deserved to be driven into the wilderness, never more to be heard.
Bill Maher, at the time, had a program on ABC News called Politically Incorrect, which, as the title suggested, was designed to, and often did, air views that were deemed politically incorrect, that typically were not heard.
That was the point of his show.
He was a comedian as well, who would say provocative things.
On May 14, 2002, Months after Bill Maher had been suspended, ABC announced they were firing him and ending the show because of comments he had made about 9-11.
Quote, ABC will announce today that Politically Incorrect, its late night comedy discussion program, will go out the air in January and will be replaced by a show starring the comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
ABC had been expected to make changes to its late-night programming with Politically Incorrect seen as particularly vulnerable to cancellation.
The show's host, Bill Maher, had alienated some advertisers, ABC executives, and even the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, with a comment he made soon after the terror attacks on September 11th.
Living up to his show's title, Mr. Maher took issue with characterizations of the hijackers as cowards.
Arguing that, quote, we have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.
Bill Maher was responding to people calling the 9-11 attackers cowards.
And he was saying what they did, of course, was reprehensible.
But it's kind of hard to accuse people of being cowards when they sacrificed their life for a cause.
They flew those planes into those buildings.
That took a lot of courage, whatever else you want to say about them, which he said the attack was reprehensible.
And he was saying perhaps it's more cowardly not to fight wars any longer with combat, but to just use cruise missiles like Bill Clinton did against al-Qaeda that are shot from the safe distance of 2,000 miles away or from 30,000 feet in the air, not doing actual combat the way the 9-11 attackers did.
Obviously, that's a provocative statement.
But as a sign of the climate, he got fired.
And not only did he get fired, But the White House Press Secretary at the time, Ari Fleischer, was asked about those comments in a way that was designed to make it seem as unpatriotic as possible, like he was attacking the troops.
And then Ari Fleischer gave this notorious warning to Americans on September 26, 2001.
Just six days after George Bush said, you're either with us or with the terrorists, here's what his Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said about Bill Maher's comments.
What was the President's reaction to television's Bill Maher and his announcement that members of our armed forces who deal with missiles are cowards, while the armed terrorists who killed 6,000 unarmed are not cowards, for which Maher was briefly moved off a Washington television station?
I have not discussed it with the President, Juan.
I'm getting there.
Surely, as commander, he was enraged.
I'm getting there, Les.
I'm sorry.
First of all, you see the media not defending Bill Maher, but demanding that the White House Press Secretary attack and denounce him.
He's saying, well, maybe you didn't discuss it with the President, but he's the Commander-in-Chief.
He must be outraged that Bill Maher insulted the troops, even though that's not what Bill Maher did.
He was accusing our leaders of using cowardly policies.
But the press was out for blood against anybody who was off-tone, just like they are now.
And they were demanding that Ari Fleischer, as the White House Secretary of State, express indignation.
And here's what he said.
I'm aware of the press reports about what he said.
I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself, but assuming the press reports are right, it's a terrible thing to say.
And it's unfortunate, and that's why there was an earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party.
They're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that.
There never is.
So Americans need to watch what they say and watch what they do.
This is not a time for comments like that.
You need to watch what you say.
As I indicated earlier, even though at the time there was this virtual unanimity, marching behind the president, supporting anything he did, acquiescing to any policy he suggested needed to be done in the name of fighting terrorism, people trusted the government and were angered by terrorism and those emotions were manipulated to induce that unity.
Shortly after, Americans started realizing they had been duped.
That a lot of what was done was not in any way designed to achieve the effects that was promised.
In fact, they ended up achieving the opposite.
Dick Cheney used to go all the time on Meet the Press.
That was his platform that he liked to use to disseminate his propaganda because there was a preposterous perception that Tim Russert, the host of Meet the Press, was some sort of hard-hitting journalist, even though he was incredibly subservient.
He played a role where he would pretend to be adversarial but he never asked questions that really bothered people in power.
So Dick Cheney liked that show because he was able to disseminate propaganda while appearing as though he was being confronted by a free and spirited press.
But when he went on in 2006, by this point, Bush and Cheney were unpopular figures.
The scales had fallen from the eyes of Americans about this war on terror.
And Tim Russert asked him about a poll that made clear that a lot of what had been done was regrettable and unwise.
Here's what Tim Russert asked him.
Quote, it's interesting.
Here's what the American people said in a recent poll.
Is the US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan creating more terrorists or eliminating terrorists?
And look at that.
Overwhelmingly, 54%, a clear majority, believe we are creating more terrorists.
And Dick Cheney said in response, I can't buy that, and went on to argue why Iraq and Afghanistan were necessary.
But imagine that.
These words had overwhelming support at the time they were presented.
The war in Afghanistan had one no vote, Barbara Lee.
And she was not only vilified as a terrorist lover, she had to have security for six months because of death threats made against her because the media attacked her for being an al Qaeda lover, for voting no on the war in Afghanistan, even though she was prescient and saying, if we go and fight there, it's not going to achieve anything good and we're going to be trapped there because war is not the solution.
And she turned out to be right in Afghanistan.
We got up 20 years later and the Taliban marched right back in.
So, a lot of Americans came to understand that this climate of repression that caused this unity ended up being misguided in all sorts of ways.
So I hope it doesn't take us five years to come to realize that perhaps our emotions are being exploited now.
The emotions that every decent person felt watching these Israeli civilians being terrorized and massacred.
And instead we demand the right to dissent without being called pro-Hamas or pro-terrorist and question whether cutting off humanitarian aid and food and water and then bombing and bombing and bombing a population of 2.2 million people in a densely packed area is going to make it less likely that Americans are going to be attacked or even Israel is going to be attacked or make it more likely just as Americans came to understand
That going to that part of the world and killing a bunch of people and invading and occupying their countries is going to make it more likely Americans are attacked, not less likely.
Now, in addition to the incredibly repressive climate against dissent and the equating of dissent with loving terrorists that was imposed, there were also borderline comical attempts to depict Al-Qaeda operatives as almost superhuman in their capabilities, that these people were not human.
They were not only savages, but they were like bomb villains, capable of things that ordinary humans could never possibly dream of accomplishing.
They were almost like this master terrorist race.
Here's a CNN article from January of 2002, and the title of it was Shackled Detainees Arrive in Guantanamo.
And what had happened was the U.S.
media, the U.S.
military had described the extreme detention methods they had used to transport people to Guantanamo.
They had not only tied them up but put goggles and earphones on them and blindfolds and extremely tight constraints.
And so questions started to be raised of why is that necessary?
Why do you have to Almost treat them like cargo in the way that you're tying them up to such an extent they can't see, they have no idea where they are, they can't move, they can barely breathe.
And here was the answer that was offered.
Quote, 20 Afghan war detainees arrived here Friday and were let off a C-141 transport plane in shackles by U.S.
military personnel.
The prisoners, the military prefers to call them detainees, will be held at first in outdoor cells with concrete floors and wooden ceilings, surrounded by a chain link fence until a more permanent facility is ready.
The detainees were chained to their seats for an 8,000 mile plane trip and even barred from using the toilet, with special provisions being made so they would not have to get up.
They were shaved from head to toe for hygiene considerations.
Rumsfeld said Friday that the prisoners' rights were not violated and that only one was sedated during the trip to Guantanamo.
Pentagon officials said the restraints on the prisoners were justified.
Listen to this, quote, these are people that would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.
Said General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
So these people are very, very dangerous people and that's how they're being treated.
Listen to what they said.
These are people that would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.
They were able to bring down airplanes from inside of it.
If you didn't just tie them up in normal ways, but sedate them and put them under extreme amounts of constraints.
That's how powerful they were, these extremely scary terrorists.
They could bring down an airplane with their teeth.
This is the sort of thing that was constantly injected into the bloodstream of American discourse.
Is it any wonder that people cowered in fear and said, whatever powers you need, whatever wars you need to go fight, please go do it to protect us from this.
Here was a concocted drawing of what we were told was a Al-Qaeda cave fortress in Afghanistan.
This was Fictional art, it was speculative, but it actually came from a random Russian guy who said he had served in Afghanistan in the 1980s and had seen this, so they created this, and they circulated this all over the news.
This was everywhere.
I mean, there you see it's supposed to be like a bond, a cavernous bond cave underneath the ground.
It had multiple layers and staircases.
And there you have, we can't show it to you because it's not enlargeable, but the cave is designed to look like it came from 23rd century technology with hydraulic power generated from mountainous streams and arms, all these arms down here that were stacked
That they weren't just hiding in caves, but they had these sophisticated, extremely technologically sophisticated caves that showed how incredibly advanced they were in terms of threats.
All of this was designed to create this cartoonish-like image of the people that we were fighting.
Just to give you a sense for how insane the climate was, I think this is probably one of the examples that I find, to this day, almost shocking that it worked.
So as I said earlier, the crucial narrative, and it's hard to overstate how important this was, was to convince Americans, to hide from Americans the real reason the people who brought the 9-11 attacks to American shores did so.
There were all kinds of documents and interviews that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had given about what was the nature of their grievances with the United States.
It wasn't that, oh, it's a free country and we hate that.
It was all about the violence we brought to that part of the world, the repression and oppression and attacks they felt that we were bringing to that part of the world, cuing their government leaders, installing leaders that were controlled by the West.
Including on their most sacred land, bombing and sanctioning and supporting the Israelis.
That was the reality of their grievance.
You can agree with it, you can disagree with it.
Obviously it doesn't justify the civilian attacks, though Bin Laden used a theory now in vogue.
Which was that American civilians were legitimate military targets because of the fact that we elected the leaders who did all those things.
Very similar to the arguments now that there's really no such thing as Palestinian civilians who were innocent because they elected Hamas back in 2007, when half the population hadn't even been born yet, let alone near the age where they could vote.
And we did a whole show last week about these theories that have been circulating to try and suggest that there's really no such thing as an innocent civilian in the Arab world.
That's very similar to the theory bin Laden had launched, but they couldn't have Americans hear that the real grievances were the violence we were bringing into that part of the world, because that might lead Americans to ask, well, Maybe we shouldn't be involved in that part of the world this way.
If we're bringing violence to their part of the world, it seems natural.
Violence is going to come to our part of the world.
The CIA has a doctrine, a term for that called blowback, that when we interfere in parts of the world, it's going to blow back on the United States.
They wanted to make sure Americans had a cartoon vision in their head.
That the only reason these people did this were because they hate us for our freedom and they're primitive savages and barbaric monsters who want to murder us for their own sake.
They just are so full of hate and barbarism that they need to murder people who aren't like them.
Does that sound familiar?
That's very similar to what we're being told about Hamas.
They're not even human.
These are savages.
They have no political grievances about occupation of the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza.
They just want to kill Jews because they're full of primitive hatred.
And there's really no civilians because they're the ones who adopted them, who voted for them.
Any interviews with Osama Bin Laden?
And the network news organizations agreed that they wouldn't.
And listen to the argument that the U.S.
government concocted to justify why network news organizations should not air any interviews with Bin Laden.
Here from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, this was the journalists who were Warning about what was happening, the White House urges TV networks to stop airing Bin Laden tapes.
Calling it, quote, an expression of concern, the White House asked news media networks to not air pre-recorded messages from terrorist Osama Bin Laden in their entirety, and the networks announced that they would comply with the request.
That's already amazing, isn't it?
That you have these very newsworthy interviews from the person we're told perpetrated this historic attack on the United States that was going to cause all sorts of wars and violence and the transformation of our own government.
And the government told news networks not to air them and the government and the news network said, OK, yes, sir, we won't.
We'll keep them hidden because you want us to.
That already is amazing, is it not?
In a conference call with network executives on October 10th, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned that such tapes from Bin Laden and his henchmen could be used to frighten Americans, gain supporters, and send messages about future terrorist attacks.
All five major news organizations, ABC, CBS, NBC, and its affiliate MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, agreed not to air unedited videotaped statements from Bin Laden or his followers, and to remove language the government considers inflammatory.
This marked a rare moment when all the networks decided on a joint agreement limiting prospective news coverage.
In a press conference, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Bush administration fears that the tapes are a way for Bin Laden to send coded messages to other terrorists.
Quote, the means of communication in Afghanistan right now are limited, he said.
One way to communicate outside Afghanistan to followers is through the Western media, he said.
Airing tapes from Bin Laden, quote, is a forum for pre-recorded, pre-taped propaganda inciting people to kill Americans.
And what they were specifically worried about is that Osama Bin Laden in these videos would include some sort of signal or hidden message to the al-Qaeda sleeper cells we were told were lurking inside America.
He would use a phrase that was a coded message or tug on his ear and that would activate sleeper cells in the United States to go and do another kind of attack like 9-11.
And so the media was convinced by this idiocy And we're told not to air these interviews, and they didn't.
And so the only thing we as Americans heard about Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda or their outlook or their motives was what the government wanted us to know, which is that they hate us for our freedoms.
And so we never had this debate, the one Noam Chomsky tried to provoke in his book that got him called a terrorist and a terrorist lover and a traitor, about whether there was any connection between that terrorist attack and our policy, just like now it's forbidden To try and ask what context is there for what's happening between Israel and Palestine that helps us understand better this violence that is taking place constantly over decades.
There's just a cartoon fairy tale we're offered and that's it.
And that's exactly what happened then.
In fact, so dehumanized and exaggerated were the Al Qaeda operatives by the United States government that there was a phrase for them, the worst of the worst.
This is what we were always told.
They were torturing and holding in Guantanamo with no charges or in Bagram with no charges or due process.
These are the worst of the worst.
Here from Foreign Policy Magazine, October of 2008, the worst of the worst?
They told us to overlook the abuses because Guantanamo howls, quote, the worst of the worst.
But new statistics prove that the vast majority of prisoners detained there never posed any real risk to America at all.
I can't stress enough how continuously we were told that these people are barely human.
They can bring down a plane with their teeth.
We can't afford trials or charges or due process for the ones we decide we want to put in a cage because these people are a threat unlike anything we've seen before.
Quote, when a federal judge ordered the release of 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees earlier this month, it was the first real chance in the seven-year history of the prison camp that any of the prisoners might be transferred to the United States.
In making his ruling, the judge categorically rejected the Bush administration's claims that any of the released prisoners, who are all Chinese Muslims, Where enemy combatants are posed a risk to U.S.
security.
By the way, isn't it ironic that we now claim China is genocidal for its incarceration of Chinese Muslims when this is the nature of this controversy?
That a court had ruled that we were detaining them unjustly?
The decision was temporarily suspended by the appeals court, but the judge was on solid ground.
In 2009, a very high-ranking official in the Bush administration, the Chief of Staff to General Colin Powell when he was Secretary of State, came out and made a remarkable admission or accusation.
Here from CBC News, quote, "Most Guantanamo detainees are innocent," says ex-Bush official.
Quote, "Many detainees locked up in Guantanamo Bay were innocent men swept up by US forces, unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants." A former Bush administration official said Thursday, quote, "There are still innocent people there, Republican Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the AP, quote, some have been there six or seven years.
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S.
soon realized many detainees held at the military prison in Guantanamo were innocent.
But nonetheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a, quote, mosaic of intelligence.
Quote, it did not matter if the detainee were innocent.
Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance, Wilkerson wrote in his blog.
Here from France News, France 24, in April of 2010, you see the headline, Bush quote, knew Guantanamo prisoners were innocent, says Powell aide, quote, according to a damning court statement made by a senior aide to former U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, former President George Bush knew that many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but refused to let them go for political reasons.
Former President Bush knew that Guantanamo detainees were innocent.
AA2 Colin Powell said in a document that AFP obtained Friday.
He swore under oath to this.
The allegations were made by retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and a lawsuit filed by a former Guantanamo inmate.
There have been all sorts of studies that most of the people in Guantanamo are Almost all of whom have never been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of a crime.
They were just decreed to be guilty.
In fact, were guilty of nothing.
And never really posed a high-level threat to the United States because these were not high-level operatives.
These were, at best, very low-level soldiers, people who weren't very intelligent, who weren't very capable.
And as it turned out, the vast majority of them ended up by the government's own admission of being either innocent or not posing a threat, even though we were constantly told over and over that these were the worst of the worst, that these were people with superhuman villainous powers.
There's one specific case of a person who was detained at Guantanamo for 15 years.
The U.S.
government admitted four or five years before his release that he posed no threat to the United States, but it took four years to negotiate his release for a country to take him under what conditions.
His name is Mohamed Oued Salhi, and he wrote a memoir in Guantanamo because he had befriended One of the guards, one of the guards at Guantanamo who came to see his humanity and understand that he wasn't a threat, he came to see the humanity of his Guantanamo guard.
He wrote a memoir about how 15 years of his life was taken by being put in a cage in Guantanamo and the extreme limitations posed on him once he was released, but he became a spokesperson for the virtues of forgiveness and humanity and connection.
And has become this incredibly inspiring voice.
He could have obviously become extremely angry filled with rage and resentment for having been put in a cage and tortured and abused as the Guantanamo prisoner assigned to him admitted had happened not just to him but to many of the detainees and instead he came to Evangelize about this other type of way of looking at things.
I've gotten to know him fairly well as a result of just, we interviewed him on our show once, I've had a chance to talk to him, he's an incredible person.
And he's gone around and done events with this Guantanamo guard, this American guard who went to Guantanamo thinking it was a patriotic thing to do only to see the dark reality of what we were doing in the war on terror.
And his book became a film, a feature film as well.
Here from The Guardian in January of 2021, the harrowing ordeal of Guantanamo prisoner comes to the big screen.
Quote, the Mauritanian tells the story of Mohammed Al-Sayy, who was held in the notorious prison Guantanamo for 14 years without charge or trial.
He was detained in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years without charge or trial and wrote a best-selling memoir about his captivity and torture.
Which includes sleep deprivation and beatings.
Now, his story will be told in a forthcoming feature film whose reconstruction of the U.S.
detention center is so realistic that he became visibly distressed when he saw it.
Tsai, who was born in Mauritania in 1970, was held at Guantanamo between 2002 and 2016.
He had sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda during the 1980s Afghanistan insurrection.
Which, by the way, was when the US was supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union and heralding them as heroes.
Although he claimed that he later renounced Al Qaeda and denied involvement with terrorism, an administrative review eventually determined that he did not pose a, quote, continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.
While in detention, he wrote his Guantanamo diary, describing the physical and psychological torture, quote, I started to hallucinate and hear voices as clear as crystal.
Later on, the guards used these hallucinations and started talking with funny voices.
Through the plumbing, encouraging me to hurt the guard and plot an escape, but I wasn't misled by them.
He claimed to have been driven to make false confessions to end the torment, telling his interrogators that he planned to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto.
Asked if he was telling them the truth, he replied, quote, I don't care as long as you are pleased.
The story of What happened is really remarkable.
In fact, like I said, he went around to all sorts of events with the guard who was assigned to him, which I'm going to show you because it's really remarkable.
But I think one of the things that has been lost in the history of the war on terror is exactly what is meant when we talk about the torture regime that was used.
The CIA would kidnap people off the streets of Europe who they claimed were Muslim radicals and ship them not only to Egypt and Syria to be tortured by our despotic allies Bashar al-Assad and at the time Hosni Mubarak, who later became people we tried to remove, but also to CIA black sites, sites that were in Eastern Europe and unknown locations that in a violation of international law, human rights organizations had no ability to visit.
as well as to guantanamo and these people were subject to techniques that the united states have long considered to be torture had long prosecuted as torture and it went way beyond waterboarding which is what the government tried to lead people to believe was the full extent of the what they called enhanced interrogation techniques here from the guardian in december 2014 after government reports and investigations had been released
you see the headline rectal rehydration and waterboarding the cia torture reports grisliest findings the full horror of the cia interrogation and detention programs launched in the wake of the september 11th terrorist attacks was laid bare in the long-awaited senate report released on tuesday And by the way, this is a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that was investigating the CIA and its torture regime in Guantanamo and elsewhere.
And when John Brennan, the head of the CIA, knew the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating it, he had the CIA spy on that committee when it was led by Dianne Feinstein.
And when she discovered it, John Brennan lied publicly denying it happened, only to then admit it and apologize for it, but didn't resign.
And this is why they were so scared of this report.
Quote, while parts of the program had been known, and much more will never be revealed, the catalog of abuse is nightmarish and reads like something invented by the Marquis de Sade or Hieronymus Bosch.
Detainees were forced to stand on broken limbs for hours, kept in complete darkness, deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, sometimes standing, sometimes with their arms shackled above their heads.
Prisoners were subjected to rectal feeding without medical necessity.
Rectal exams were conducted with quote excessive force.
The report highlights one prisoner later diagnosed with anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids, and symptomatic rectal prolapse.
The report mentions mock executions, Russian roulette, U.S.
agents threaten to slit the throat of a detainee's mother, sexually abuse another, and threaten prisoners' children.
One prisoner died of hypothermia, brought on in part by being forced to sit on a bare concrete floor without pants.
Here from the Huffington Post in December of 2014, another article on the Senate Report.
Quote, Senate Report says torture program was more gruesome widespread than CIA claim.
Quote, the newly released document tears apart the CIA's past claims that only a small number of detainees were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques.
The agency had said it held fewer than 100 detainees and subjected fewer than one third of those to controversial tactics such as waterboarding.
But Senate investigators found that the CIA had actually kept 119 detainees in custody, 26 of whom were illegally held.
And despite CIA insistence that the program was limited in scope, Senate investigators conclude that the use of torture was much more widespread than previously thought.
The study reveals several gruesome instances of torture by mid-level CIA officers who participated in the program, including threats of sexual violence using a broomstick and the use of rectal hydration in instances of harsh interrogation that lasted for days or weeks on end.
And contrary to the agency's prior insistence that only three detainees were subject to waterboarding, the Senate report suggests it was likely used on more.
The CIA accused Feinstein's staff earlier this year of taking highly sensitive material from the secure agency facility where the investigation was conducted.
Feinstein, meanwhile, insisted the investigators had a right to the document, and further accused the agency of improperly monitoring the computers her staff used to construct the study.
The DOJ declined to investigate either the CIA or Feinstein's allegations.
The CIA has since conceded that it didn't properly monitor Senate investigators' computers and is conducting an independent accountability review board to determine what consequences, if any, its employers should face.
That was all under John Brennan, who, of course, is now widely celebrated, who works for NBC News, where he tells you what to believe and what the truth is.
Now here is, just to give you a sense, and again all of this is about what happens.
When we acquiesce to our government blindly because our emotions are manipulated or we're told that we just have to acquiesce to the government because that's what's necessary to crush terrorism and we don't ask questions because we're accused of being traitors or pro-terrorist or pro-Al Qaeda or pro-Hamas.
This is what happens when that kind of climate is cultivated.
And when things that are justified in the name of terrorism are automatically approved, these are the sorts of things that you get.
That's part of the lesson of 9-11 that I think needs to be applied.
Here is the Guantanamo detainee I mentioned.
He currently lives in Amsterdam, along with Steve Wood.
That was his guard at Guantanamo.
And they went around doing a series of events because of the friendship they developed.
And both of them ended up traumatized.
Not only Slahi for the torture he endured, but Steve Wood, the Guantanamo detained guard for what he was forced to do and witness.
Here's what part of what they said.
War is really bad all around.
He does not maybe want to admit that he is also very damaged because you cannot visit pain on someone without visiting pain on yourself. - Steve would please join us in conversation We will talk about Guantanamo Bay and your very, very special friendship with Mohamedou Olcay tonight.
My name is Joeri Albrecht and I'm director of the Bali.
This evening we will be talking about a very, very, very special friendship.
I want to thank you both very, very much for being here and talking to the audience and talking to each other and talking to us.
I think it's a wonderful, a wonderful thing that you're willing to sit here and share your friendship.
And be able to talk about that, you know, out in the open in such a special relationship you both forged in such amazing, amazingly difficult circumstances.
And Mamadou Oudtslaai, thank you very much.
This is the fifth conversation we're conducting together about your life, about the things you have been going through.
Just to remind the public a little bit, you were trained as an engineer in Germany and arrested in your home country of Mauritania in 2001.
And after a year you were taken to Guantanamo Bay Prison.
Where Mohamedou Oudslaei, where you were held for 14 years, mostly in solitary confinement and severely tortured.
No charges were ever brought against you.
You were never convicted.
You were never found guilty of anything you were accused of.
And that after years and years of investigation.
In 2015, while you were still incarcerated, your book Guantanamo Diary was published.
All right, so that's kind of the summary of what happened to him, and now here is the Guantanamo Guard, Steve Wood, who made connections to Slahe during his time in Guantanamo.
Listen to what he says.
It doesn't sound like a... Like, to me, America does nothing wrong.
George Bush is God, pretty much.
He's not a liar, like obviously he is.
So I go there thinking, oh yeah, it's going to be a lot better than what it is, you know.
I remember my first day working in the regular cell blocks.
This was before I was switched to Mohammed.
He was a second detainee.
Me and a partner were escorting to the showers.
My partner started reefing on his arm.
Like, that right there.
He would have ended up torturing people if he would have kept doing that.
He had a smile on his face.
That's what I realized.
It was a dark place, you know.
People turn dark very easily there, you know.
What do you mean with that?
What happens to people?
The human mind is weak.
I don't understand.
The guy with the arm-twisting, I can't comprehend it.
Was it a shock to you?
Yeah, I was definitely shocked.
Like, you know, I was pro-war, pro-everything-America, you know.
Yeah, but to have a 10-flick bang on somebody like that, that was just, it didn't make sense to me.
No, I find that clip so, so moving, so striking because this is not somebody who works for Amnesty or Human Rights Watch.
It's not Noam Chomsky.
It's not somebody who is an advocate for Muslim rights.
This is a soldier who joined the American military because he said he thought George Bush was God.
He believed all the mythology about the United States, that we were the country that does good in the world.
We don't lie.
We don't abuse anything.
And then he got to Guantanamo and he was shocked by what he saw.
And what he said there was so important.
When he was asked why does he think this happened, he said, I don't really know, except just the human mind is weak.
It can be easily prompted to do all kinds of savage things.
This is why we need to constantly subject the claims of political leaders to the utmost scrutiny, especially when it comes time to unleash violence and use the machine of war.
But it's also a very stark warning, a poignant warning, when we're in a situation like we are now, and now when we're being told yet again that our rage at a group of people that we're told are primitive and savage and barbaric and barely human, and not just the people who perpetrated the attack, but all the people near them who are now going to be killed while we're bombing or helping Israel bomb,
It's the same narrative, it's the same impulses being provoked and these lessons are universal.
And I also find the story of Salahi to be, of Muhammad to be amazing because it's almost unfathomable that somebody who was kept in a cage for 15 years unjustly would get out and have anything other than hatred and a desire for vengeance in their heart.
And yet, he became the opposite.
He wrote about the necessity for seeing the humanity in everybody, including people who are completely different from yourself.
We're talking here about somebody who is steeped in Muslim radicalism.
Who was led to, through religious fanaticism, to take all kinds of acts, including going to Afghanistan to fight with the Mujahideen as part of a jihad against the Soviet Union and the invaders, and yet now goes around embracing all human beings and seeing the common humanity in them.
These are the people we were told were subhuman, savage, and barely who have no humanity.
We interviewed him, as I mentioned,
On our show this was actually before we started doing a nightly program here on Rumble when we just had a periodic show on Rumble that actually this is I believe even when I was yeah this is when we were doing a sporadic maybe two or three time a week a month show on Rumble and here was the interview this is an excerpt from the interview that we conducted with Mamadou this was when I first got to know him and talked to him and then developed a friendship with him after you can listen to
You know, this is a saying that I wish I had said myself, but I hadn't.
This is a saying from a Canadian of Lebanese descent, a young woman, who is, I think, a writer like you.
She said, I forgive you, not because you ask for forgiveness, not because you deserve forgiveness, but because I need to move forward.
And I need forgiveness, you know?
And that's so powerful because you know that I preach to the choir because holding grudge consumes a lot of energy.
And like, this person you made so important because you give them so big space in your life and in your head.
But when you forgive them, you say, I wish you the best, man.
You know, we, we, we stood up on the wrong foot, but You know what?
I'm just going to let this go.
It's not easy.
It's not easy.
But I can assure you that I've done it.
And I don't regret it at all.
And a lot of people reach out to me, including those who torture me.
And they're very sorry about it.
And you will see it.
You will see it.
Some of them don't want me to talk about it publicly.
But, you know, it pays off.
No, again, there's this feature film, The Martanian, which was based on his memoir, which actually is extremely good.
I think I wrote about it at the time, in the context of interviewing him, that I think contains a totally separate lesson about who human beings are, how we're trained and conditioned to think about them.
And he's saying the same thing, that he was trained and conditioned to think about his captors and Americans and different kinds of people that he has now come to find the humanity in, despite this incredibly brutal experience that he went through.
And I think sometimes it's dehumanizing rhetoric that we're encouraged to embrace.
This kind of cartoon vision of humanity is part of what leads us to do, in the words of his guard, into these sort of savage acts.
Now, there's a couple other things that I think are crucial for the war on terror, including what to me became the most extreme case in the United States that really led me to start questioning the post-9-11 climate that had arisen in the United States, and then obviously the things that led us into the Iraq War, and just the overall cost of the war on terror. and then obviously the things that led us into the and we want to show you that because it completes the picture, and we're going to get to that right after this important word from our sponsor.
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One key component of what happened after 9-11, the war on terror, that often gets overlooked because there's so much focus on what we did to foreign nationals and in Iraq and that often gets overlooked because there's so much focus on what we did to foreign nationals and in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the eight Muslim countries that President Obama ended up bombing largely with drones and
is the effects, the very radical effects on our political rights domestically as American citizens.
We talked a little bit about the Patriot Act and the NSA spying that was imposed that was warrantless and indiscriminate and mass and domestic.
But the case of Jose Padilla, probably one that not very many people know about, was the thing that, for me, living in New York as a constitutional lawyer, when I watched it, it was the thing I actually never thought was possible in the United States.
And ended up being the assertion by the federal government of the right to arrest and imprison American citizens found on American soil and to put them into prison with no charges of any kind having to be brought, with no right to a lawyer, with no access to the outside world, totally incommunicado for three years.
Based solely on the President's unreviewable and unchecked decree, accusation that got treated as a conviction, that the person had joined a terrorist group and was an enemy combatant.
I never honestly thought, I thought that was the one line that the United States government would never cross.
decreeing that an American citizen could be arrested on U.S. soil and imprisoned without charges, without access to a lawyer.
I mean, if anything is foundational to the constitutional scheme, it's the right of due process, the right that the government that you have as an American citizen, that the U.S. government cannot imprison you or punish you for crimes without proving that you're guilty of them, without charging you and giving you a lawyer and all the rights of confrontation without charging you and giving you a lawyer and all the rights of confrontation with witnesses and cross-examination and all the other rights that come from being Yet that's exactly what the Bush administration did extremely early on after 9-11.
In fact, starting in the beginning of 2002, it arrested an American citizen named Jose Padilla at Chicago International Airport on American soil.
He was an American citizen his whole life, born in the United States.
And he spent the next three years in prison with no charges being brought without the right to a lawyer to talk to anybody in the outside world.
This is a crucial warning of the kinds of things that are likely to happen when you just get sucked up into the narrative that we're under attack by terrorists and everything and anything is justified to stop them.
We had on last night a member of the Israeli Knesset who's currently suspended from his functions for 45 days because of his criticism of the Israeli war effort in Gaza and what he views as the excessive force being used in the violation of humanitarian principles.
And he described how protests are being forcibly broken up by Israeli police and how people who express criticism of the Netanyahu government on social media are being abducted in their homes by the police and interrogated and charged.
And the climate that emerged already in Israel, that that's the climate that happened here in the United States as well.
Not just the foreign nationals, but domestic ones as well.
Here is how it all started, which is when John Ashcroft, Who had been a Republican senator from Missouri who became the Attorney General under the Bush administration and one of the leading advocates of a lot of the abuses and radical powers of the Justice Department and the FBI in the name of the war on terror.
He happened to be in Moscow visiting President Putin at the time that the United States government abducted Jose Padilla, an American citizen, at Chicago International Airport.
And this is the press conference he gave where he accused Padilla of very grave crimes, but then announced that Padilla had no right to a trial, no right to be charged, and instead was going to go to prison indefinitely with no charges of any kind.
Here's what Ashcroft said.
From information available to the United States government, we know that Abdullah al-Mujahid is an al-Qaeda operative and was exploring a plan to build and explode a radioactive dirty bomb.
Al Qaeda name or his terrorist name that he, according to the United States government, adopted when he joined Al Qaeda and became a terrorist in order not to call him by his actual legal name, Jose Padilla, to obscure the fact that he's actually an American citizen.
At no point does John Ashcroft say he's an American citizen abducted on US soil, but here's what he says.
Let me be clear.
We know from multiple independent and corroborating sources that Abdullah al-Mujahir was closely associated with al-Qaeda and that as an al-Qaeda operative he was involved in planning future terrorist attacks on innocent American civilians in the United States.
The safety of all Americans and the national security interests of the United States require that Abdullah al-Mujahir be detained by the Defense Department as an enemy combatant.
In determining that al-Mujahid is an enemy combatant who legally can be detained by the United States military, we have acted with legal authority both under the laws of war and clear Supreme Court precedent, which establish that the military may detain a United States citizen who has joined the enemy and has entered our country to carry out hostile acts.
Is that not terrifying?
If that's not terrifying, I don't know what's terrifying.
Now, as it turned out, the U.S.
government did finally charge Jose Padilla in 2005, three years after keeping him in a military brig with no charges.
And when they did, they were not able to convict him on that charge that Ashcroft announced that he was trying to import a radiological bomber.
He was called the dirty bomber in the media that was never proven.
And the only reason the United States government bothered to ever charge him at all was because the Supreme Court was about to rule on his case and the U.S.
government charged him so that it could go to the Supreme Court and say, oh, you don't have to rule on this case because now it's moot.
Jose Padilla had sued the U.S.
government saying it's unconstitutional to imprison me without charges or access to a lawyer.
And the Bush administration only charged him, the Justice Department did, so that they could avoid a Supreme Court ruling.
And when they did, and I got him to plead guilty, because if you don't plead guilty to these kind of crimes, you go to prison for the rest of your life, the charge that he was trying to import a radiological bomb into the United States was not even among them.
But nonetheless, even if you want to think he was guilty of everything that he was accused of, how can it possibly be a democracy if the Attorney General has the right to stand up and voice accusations against you in the media?
Claim that, oh don't worry, we have all these intelligence reports that he's really guilty.
And now the military is going to arrest him.
On American soil and bring him to a prison where he will have none of the constitutional rights because we've declared him with no evidentiary hearing of being an enemy combatant.
That is the theory the Bush administration succeeded in adopting and implementing.
The right to detain American citizens and imprison them with no charges.
That is what I always thought was the line that the United States wouldn't cross.
And it got almost no attention let alone dissent because of the fact that the United States was in this mindset.
That we were in an existential war against the terrorists and therefore everything the Bush administration did, as long as they justified it in the name of fighting terrorism, was wise and just and moral and necessary and therefore we acquiesce to it.
That is the lesson to learn from what we're being told now.
Here is an article I wrote, one of the very first articles I ever wrote, right after I started A blog to write about politics.
I started that blog in late October of 2005.
This article was November 23rd, 2005.
One of the very first articles I ever published was on the Jose Padilla case because of how influential it was for me in my trajectory of coming to realize something had gone very wrong in the United States and the climate that had emerged and the policies we were adopting.
And the headline was, True Tyranny Defined.
Bush administration versus Jose Padilla.
Here's what I wrote.
Of the many abuses of power by the Bush administration, the most disturbing, dangerous, and under-publicized one is the fact that the administration has irrigated into itself the power to single out U.S.
citizens and unilaterally imprison them indefinitely and without a trial of any kind.
The administration has brought to life and is now defending what is literally the worst totalitarian nightmare.
Being locked away by your own government indefinitely without being charged with a crime, without a trial, and without any recourse to challenge your imprisonment.
And the decision yesterday by the administration to finally bring charges against U.S.
citizen Hodeidah Padilla, who has been kept incarcerated in a military prison for three years solely on George Bush's order, in solitary confinement and indefinitely,
Was done not in order to signal a retreat by the administration with regard to its claim right to imprison US citizens without any judicial process, but instead to protect and solidify that power by ensuring that its patent unconstitutionality cannot be ruled upon by the US Supreme Court in the pending Padilla case.
Almost certainly the administration wants to have its claim power to unilaterally and indefinitely imprison US citizens endorsed by the Supreme Court only once the highly deferential Sam Alito has replaced Sandra Day O'Connor and the court is safely comprised of a majority of justices with an almost absolutist reverence for unchecked executive power.
We are not talking about new or modern or exotic liberties here.
The right not to be imprisoned in the absence of due process is a right that was not just recognized upon the founding of the country but was one of the first liberties established by 13th century England when British subjects rejected the notion that the king had absolute unlimited powers and forced King John to accept the Magna Carta.
The 13th century liberty is what has been abrogated by this administration, as Justice Jackson wrote in his concurring opinion in Brown v. Allen in 1953, quote, Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
The judges of England developed by the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.
And then here was Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Paine in 1790, quote, I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
Now not only was Jose Padilla imprisoned for three years, By the Bush administration with no trial based solely on the say-so of the president.
Did you know this has happened?
That this right was aggressively and explicitly advocated and implemented in the United States in the name of the war on terror?
Not only was he detained with no charges, but he was also found to have been tortured by the government.
Abusive detention conditions so severe that it amounted to torture.
Hear from NBC News in December of 2006.
There you see the headline, attorneys.
Images show harsh tactics on Padilla.
Quote, still video images of alleged terror operative Jose Padilla in chains and wearing headphones and blacked out goggles demonstrate the harsh tactics used by NUS interrogators while he was in military custody as an enemy combatant, his lawyer said in court papers.
Still video images of alleged terror operative Jose Padilla in chains and wearing headphones Demonstrate these harsh interrogation techniques, his lawyers said in court papers.
The images, taken from an unclassified Defense Department video, show Padilla being chained hand and foot and led out of his cell by three guards dressed in camouflage and wearing riot helmets and visors.
The video images are the first publicly released photos of Padilla's three-and-a-half-year detention at a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
They were filed late Friday in federal court in Miami as part of an attempt by Padilla's lawyers to get criminal terrorism support charges against him dismissed.
Based on what they claim was treatment that amounted to torture while in military custody.
Quote, the extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged both mentally and physically.
His lawyer said the government's treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.
Padilla claims, among other things, that he was forced to stand in painful stress positions, given LSD or some other drug as a truth serum, subjected to loud noises and noxious odors, and forced to endure sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold, and harsh lights.
Now that was what was happening domestically inside the United States and I want to just now to conclude remind you of some of the aspects of
The war in Iraq, because obviously what was done there was, most people now remember, quite extreme in terms of the deceit and the involvement in the media, but I don't think its severity has quite been preserved and remembered, and it has a lot of relationships to what is taking place right now as well.
Now, I'm having difficulty technologically with this screen.
It's not actually on, so...
We're trying to fix it now, but I think we can kind of work our way around that.
So, I think it's worth remembering that the War on Terror did not only involve Iraq.
What it entailed was a series of bombing campaigns and other wars in many nations.
General Wesley Clark, who was a senior military official in the Pentagon, in 2011 gave an interview where he recalled what neocons inside the Bush administration were telling him was their actual plan at the time.
And it is stunning.
To hear him describe what they were announcing in the early part of the War on Terror in terms of all the wars they wanted to fight because of what ended up actually happening.
Here you see the article in Salon that I wrote about when he gave this interview, Wes Clark and the neocon dream.
In 2007, the retired general described a neocon policy coup aimed at toppling the governments of seven countries.
Can we put this graphic on the screen?
There you see the headline there, Wes Clark and the neocondrian.
This is what he said, quote, In October 2007, General Wesley Clark gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the 7-minute excerpt in the video below, in which he denounced what he called, quote, a policy coup engineered by neocons in the wake of 9-11.
After recounting how a Pentagon source had told him weeks after 9-11 of the Pentagon's plans to attack Iraq, Notwithstanding its non-involvement in 9-11, this is how Clark described the aspirations of the coup being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and what he called, to quote, a half-dozen other collaborators from the Project of the New American Century.
The Project of the New American Century was a project of neocons founded by people like Bill Kristol and his partner, William Kagan, who's Victoria Nuland's wife, a husband rather, And this was the neocon project in the 1990s that was calling for regime change in Iraq, well before 9-11.
9-11 became the pretext for it.
Just like a lot of people in Israel have wanted to clear Gaza of Palestinians and bomb Gaza into smithereens, as the Israeli Knesset MP told me last night because of a long-time plan to try and take Gaza as part of Greater Israel, and then this is now the excuse used to accomplish that.
9-11, prior to 9-11, all of these wars were planned by neocons and they got to use 9-11 as the pretext.
Quote, six weeks later, I saw the same officer that I was speaking with and I asked him, why haven't we attacked Iraq?
Are we still going to attack Iraq?
And he said, quote, sir, it's worse than that.
He said, he pulled out a piece of paper off his desk.
He said, quote, I just got this memo from the secretary of defense's office.
It says we're going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years.
We're going to start with Iraq and then we're going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Look at those countries that the neocons were saying at the time they intended to use 9-11 in order to attack.
It starts with Iraq and then we're going to go to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
And of course, The United States ended up in a regime change operation in Syria and ended up doing a regime change operation in Libya.
It repeatedly bombed Somalia.
And back then, there was an effort to go from Baghdad to Tehran.
In fact, there were neocons who would leak to the press that only boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran.
And to this very day, they haven't gotten that, but still want it.
There's efforts right now.
To convince Americans that we need to go to war with Iran, claiming that Iran was responsible for this Hamas attack.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal claiming that evidence proved Iran had planned it.
Exactly the sort of thing that they did back then.
Claiming that Iraq was behind 9-11 in order to get us to attack Iraq.
Claiming that Iran was involved in order to get us to attack Iran.
But look at this plan that neocons, according to Wesley Clark, a senior general, had cooked up well before 9-11.
All these countries they wanted to go in, invade and bomb and take over.
Which ended up happening, except Iran, which to this very day they're still trying.
In fact, they're using the current terrorist attack now To insist that it's necessary.
Lindsey Graham said we should go bomb Iran's refineries.
Right now Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio have called for similar things.
Quote, Clark said the aim of this plot was this, quote, they wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.
He then recounted a conversation he had ten years earlier with Paul Wolfowitz back in 1991, in which the then number three Pentagon official, after criticizing Bush 41 for not toppling Saddam Hussein, told Clark, quote, but one thing we did learn from the Persian Gulf War is that we can use our military in the region, in the Middle East, and the Soviets won't stop us.
And we've got about five to ten years to clean up those old Soviet regimes, Syria, Iran, Iraq, before the next great superpower comes to challenge us.
It's hard to overstate how pernicious these neocons are and were.
As Clark put it, quote, "The purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments.
It's not to deter conflicts." It's hard to overstate how pernicious these neocons are and were.
And yet the neocons are the people who are now governing the Democratic Party.
They're all fully integrated into it.
They're in all of their media outlets.
Bill Kristol and David Frum are heroes to liberal America.
These are the people who first turned against Donald Trump, who tried to depict him as a unique and unprecedented evil.
And yet these are bloodthirsty monsters who wanted to destabilize the entire Middle East to bomb multiple countries using the U.S.
military for their own agenda, as Wesley Clark said, to destabilize the Middle East in order to control it.
What did Donald Trump do that's anywhere remotely near violence and bloodshed and savagery and barbarism of this kind, all justified by 9-11?
And the very same people are now out there using the attack in Israel to justify all the sorts of same things, using the same tactics, accusing people who oppose them of being on the side of the terrorists, pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Hamas.
It's all the same thing.
They're complete parallels.
Now, as I said earlier, Dick Cheney's favorite venue to use for his propaganda was Meet the Press.
Let me just show you a few things that he did on that network, on that program.
It was an NBC program every Sunday, Meet the Press, hosted by Tim Russert until he passed away.
Here he is on September 16, 2001.
Listen to what he's telling the country.
This is the first interview or one of the first interviews Dick Cheney gave and he chose to give it to meet the press and this is what he said.
We're getting ready for this operation and we can by no means assume now that that's all there is.
There may well be other operations that have been planned and are in fact in the works.
When the President said, everyone in uniform, get ready.
Does that suggest a massive call up of reserves?
We've had some reserve call up.
We called up, of course, 35,000 reservists.
We felt that was important to do here.
I think the way to think about it, Tim, is to think about the target and what our objectives are here.
Obviously, we're interested in Individuals who are directly involved in planning, coordinating, ordering the attack.
But those tend to be individuals or small groupings of individuals, cells perhaps, in various places around the world.
We need to go find them and root them out.
But we also, what's different here, what's changed in terms of U.S.
policy is the President's determination to also go after those nations and organizations and people that lend support to these terrorist operators.
If you've got a nation out there now that has provided a base, training facilities, a sanctuary, as has been true for example in this case probably with Afghanistan, then they have to understand, and others like them around the world have to understand, that if you provide sanctuary to terrorists, you face the full wrath of the United States of America, and that we will in fact Full wrath.
aggressively go after these nations to make certain that they cease and desist from providing support for these kind of organizations.
Full ref, that's a very strong statement today, Afghan, this morning.
It is indeed creative ways to come after us that don't involve any of those techniques at all, but it's something totally new.
Osama bin Laden released a training video, 100 minutes long, which was obtained by the Western media this summer.
And I want to show a portion of that to you and give you a chance to respond to it, and we'll play it right now.
These are followers of his chanting, we have to fight every day, even to the shedding of blood in God's righteous path.
There he is himself, with his own rifle.
They go on to say, we thank God for granting us victory the day we destroyed the coal in the sea.
That's the USS Destroyer that was hit last year.
Those are his supporters marching.
There you are, as Secretary of Defense, visiting Saudi Arabia, used in this video to rally support for Osama bin Laden.
And bin Laden himself, we have to practice the way of the suicidal commandos of faith and the heroism of the resistance fighter.
And we refuse their culture and we will take advantage of their misfortunes and the blood of their wounded.
He goes on to say, Mr. Secretary, that with small capabilities, we can defeat the U.S. America is much weaker than it appears.
What's your message this morning to Osama bin Laden?
Well, I think he seriously misreads the American people.
I think you have to ask yourself why somebody would do what he does.
Why is someone so motivated?
Obviously he's filled with hate for the United States and for everything we stand for.
Why?
Freedom and democracy.
Why does he hate us so much?
It must have something to do with his background, his own upbringing.
the son of a prominent Saudi family, successful business group with significant wealth.
He went and served in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen during the war against the Russians.
And he has, for whatever reason, developed this intense hatred of everything that relates to the United States.
And his objective, obviously, is to try to influence our behavior to force us to withdraw from that part of the world.
And clearly he's not going to be successful.
He has stated unequivocally that he wants the United States out of the Middle East.
He no longer wants the United States to be the ally of Israel.
Will our relationship with Israel change in any way, shape, or form because of this event?
No.
The fact of the matter is that we'll not allow him to achieve his aims.
We're not about to change our policies or change our basic fundamental beliefs.
What we are going to do is aggressively go after Mr. Bin Laden, obviously, and all of his associates, and even if it takes a long time, I'm convinced eventually we'll prevail.
So, there you saw this kind of contradictory narrative, which was, okay, these are monsters, these are savages, here they are in training videos celebrating attacks on the United States, and when he asked, why does he hate us so much, he first said that fairy tale, which was, Oh, they hate everything we stand for.
They hate us for our freedoms.
And then Tim Ruster, I guess to his credit, said, well, what about these claims that they hate us because we're involved in that part of the world and because we're supporting Israel?
And then Dick Cheney said, well, we're not going to change any of that.
We're going to continue to do that.
But you saw that attempt to try and say the reason that Al Qaeda attacked the United States is because they're savages who hate what we stand for.
And I think that is a crucial aspect of what ended up leading to so much of these subsequent abuses was the idea that all that they were trying to do was to destroy our way of life because they're primitive barbarians and savages who grew up in a lot of religion.
And if you think about what's being said now about the current war, it's something very similar.
It's stripped of all of its political context and its motive.
Let's listen to the rest.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said this is a failure of great dimension in terms of intelligence.
Will George Tenet remain as director of the CIA?
I think George clearly should remain as director of the CIA.
I think I have great confidence in him.
I've watched him operate now and worked closely with him for the last seven or eight months.
I think he and his people do superb workforce and I think it would be a tragedy if somehow we were to go back now in the search for scapegoats and say
You see there the parable as well that the Hamas attack happened, we're told, because the Israelis simply failed to detect this gigantic intelligence failure that this attack was being planned in one of the most monitored and surveilled places on earth, which is Gaza.
And something very similar happened in the United States where this 9-11 attack was planned in multiple countries by dozens of people.
The United States was spending billions and billions of dollars a year on this mass system of electronic surveillance and yet apparently there was no warning or attack, said the Bush government at the time, that we subsequently learned that there were all kinds of clues in the system that should have triggered us to know that would have led us to do so.
The role of the media is something that is incredibly significant as well, because they were serving as the partner of the U.S.
government the entire time.
They were constantly feeding the public everything the government wanted the public to believe.
So here's the New York Times on September 8, 2002, in a particularly notorious article At the time, the US government was preparing Americans for a vote they wanted in October to authorize the use of military force against Iraq.
That was the vote there, where almost every Senate Republican, half of the Senate Democrats, including, again, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
And one of the main arguments they were trying to advance was that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or was strongly pursuing and aggressively pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
And this article from the New York Times was a vital step in convincing the public of something that turned out to be completely false, which is that Saddam Hussein was close to or had acquired an active nuclear weapons program.
And it was by Michael Gordon, who's currently a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he reports on national security and does the same thing as he did here, which is just repeat the claims from the CIA from anonymous sources and presents that as news.
And then Judy Miller, the only person in all of American media who paid any price for disseminating falsehoods.
Here was the headline, "The U.S. says Saddam Hussein intensifies his quest for A-bomb parts." Now watch how they did, quote, reporting, because it's exactly how they do it now.
Quote, more than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.
How did they know that that happened?
Such an amazingly inflammatory claim because Bush administration officials said that today.
Every article practically in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal about war, about foreign policy, is framed this way.
X, Y, and Z happened, comma, U.S.
officials say.
And the New York Times used this formulation to convince Americans of a cataclysmic falsehood based solely on what they were being fed by the Bush-Cheney administration.
Quote, in the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes Which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The diameter, thickness, and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.
The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear weapons.
President Hussein had met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists, and according to American intelligence, just over and over, according to American intelligence, this is an incredibly significant article that just comes right from the U.S. Constitution, government out of the mouths of the New York Times, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West.
Iraqi defectors who once worked for the nuclear weapons establishment have told American officials that acquiring nuclear arms is again a top Iraqi priority.
American intelligence agencies are also monitoring construction at the nuclear sites.
Now, so much of the reporting that you're hearing now is constructed the same exact way.
American officials tell us, Israeli officials claim, no verification, no evidence needed.
And watch what happens.
So the Bush administration leaked to the New York Times this false intelligence that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking to buy the kind of aluminum tubes that could only be used for nuclear weapons.
Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press and this was just shortly, just a few months after, a couple weeks after, no, it was actually the morning after the New York Times article.
Here's the New York Times article.
Let's put that headline on the screen.
It's from September 8th of 2002.
That's where they leaked the Bush administration's claims about the aluminum tubes.
Dick Cheney then went on Meet the Press that morning.
The morning that the article came out.
September 8th, 2002.
A month before the vote in the Senate.
And here's what Dick Cheney did.
when asked about proof that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons.
This is what Dick Cheney said, quote, Now the most recent developments have to do with our now being able to conclude, based on intelligence that's become available, some of it has been made public.
More of it hopefully will, that Saddam has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons, and that he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon, that there are efforts underway inside Iraq to significantly expand his capability. - No. that there are efforts underway inside Iraq to significantly expand Now, the more recent developments have to do with our now being able to conclude, based on intelligence that's becoming available, That this happened.
And then Tim Russert said, what specifically has he obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program?
And then Dick Cheney replied with this, quote, well, in the nuclear weapons area, you've got sort of three key elements that you need to acquire.
And he went through the first two elements that are needed for nuclear weapons acquisition.
And then he said, the third thing you need is fissile material, weapons-grade material.
Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium.
And what we've seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he is now trying through his illicit procurement network to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.
And then Tim Ruster interjected aluminum tubes.
And Dick Cheney said, specifically aluminum tubes.
There's a story in the New York Times this morning, and I don't want to attribute the Times.
I don't want to talk about it.
Obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that in fact he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge.
It's also important not just to focus on the nuclear threat.
I mean, that sort of grabs everyone's attention, and that's what we're used to dealing with.
But come back to 9-11 again, and one of the real concerns about Saddam Hussein, as well as his biological weapons capability, The fact that he may at some point try to use smallpox, anthrax, plague, some other kind of biological agent against other nations, possibly including even the United States.
So this is not just a one-dimensional threat, this just isn't a guy who is now back trying to build nuclear weapons, it's the fact that we've also seen him in these other areas, chemicals, but especially in biological weapons, increasing his capacity to produce and develop these weapons upon his enemies.
And then Tim Russert says, but if we ever did that, would we not just wipe him off the face of the earth?
And then Dick Cheney said, who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim?
We don't know.
And then Tim Russert asked, could it have been Saddam?
And Dick Cheney said, I don't know.
I don't know who did it.
I'm not here to speculate or suggest that he did.
My point is that it's the nature of terrorist attacks or those unconventional warfare methods that it's very hard sometimes to identify who's responsible.
Now, just to stop there for a second, two things to note about what happened there.
Dick Cheney and the Bush administration planted a lie in the New York Times.
The New York Times mindlessly repeated that Saddam Hussein was on the market to buy aluminum tubes that could only be used for nuclear weapons.
And then that morning Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press and Tim Russert said, well, how do you, what evidence do you have that he's trying to get nuclear weapons?
And Dick Cheney said, look, I don't want to talk about it, but now that the New York Times somehow got it, here's the New York Times article.
Even they say he's on the market for nuclear weapons materials.
So they manipulated the New York Times, got the New York Times to abandon its journalistic function by publishing lies based on anonymous administration officials, and then they turned around, the administration did, and cited the New York Times report as though it was some independent finding to justify the lie they were trying to sell to the American people.
These are the same people now, the same media cycle, the same methods, the same people trying to convince you of all sorts of things to support a war.
And then the second part of it was we did a entire episode, a Friday night episode on the anthrax attacks, which happened three weeks after the 9-11 attacks and went through how all these people, John McCain and Joe Lieberman and the Bush administration tried to blame Saddam Hussein for the anthrax attacks, even though it was completely false.
And here was Dick Cheney doing the same thing all the way in 2002, by which point they knew he wasn't involved.
He threw that out there.
He said, well, we need to know.
Maybe they're also developing anthrax.
And then on his own, Dick Cheney said, remember the anthrax attacks?
Who did that?
Tim Russert said, are you saying Iraq did it?
And Dick Cheney said, I don't know.
Maybe they did.
This is the way they manipulate public opinion and they haven't changed anything.
This is still how they do it.
We're just able to look back retrospectively and see how these falsehoods, these very provocative and inflammatory falsehoods were disseminated and who did it.
One more point about this interview.
Tim Russert said the following, quote, one year ago you were on Meet the Press, just five days after September 11th.
I asked you a specific question about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
Let's watch.
And here is the video.
Quote, Mr. Ruster, do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation, meaning 9-11?
Vice President Cheney, no.
And then Tim Russert went back to the interview and he asked Dick Cheney, has anything changed in your mind?
And this is what Dick Cheney said.
Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this.
I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9-11.
I can't say that.
On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light.
And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq on the one hand and the Al Qaeda organization on the other.
They're the ones who put out into the public discourse that now we have evidence linking Iraq to the 9-11 attack.
And the journalist who did the most to promote that was Jeffrey Goldberg.
We've shown you his articles many times at the New Yorker, suggesting that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Al Qaeda so that by the time the Americans invaded Iraq, six months after in fact, Most Americans overwhelmingly believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9-11 attack.
That's why they supported an attack on Iraq, an invasion of Iraq, because they knew 9-11 had happened.
They wanted to avenge those attacks against anybody who did it.
And Dick Cheney was out there, and neocons were out there, salting the public opinion with all sorts of little clues about how an Iraqi named Mohammed Atta had met with bin Laden in Prague, and all these attempts to suggest without saying That there was a linkage.
So by the time the Americans invaded Iraq with the overwhelming approval of the American population, according to The Guardian, on September 7, 2003, quote, the U.S.
public thinks Sodom had a role in 9-11, quote, 7 in 10 Americans.
Continue to believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the September 11th attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.
They finally said that after the invasion of Iraq.
Before it, Tim Rustert and Dick Cheney were saying, well, it seems like you have some evidence now.
Quote, 69% of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to a Washington Post poll published yesterday.
These are the people who are claiming that Donald Trump is a menace because he lies, that the internet has to be censored because of disinformation.
These are the people who are claiming that Donald Trump is a menace because he lies, that the internet has to be censored because of disinformation.
These are the people who convinced Americans, 70%, in fact, that of a complete lie, that it was Iraq responsible for the 9-11 attacks, just like we're now being told that Iran was responsible for the attack on Israel by the same people who have wanted for just like we're now being told that Iran was responsible for the attack on Israel by the same people who have wanted for decades Good luck.
Thank you.
Do you see at the very least the extreme levels of skepticism that you ought to have about these liars and the way that the media and the government work jointly while pretending to be adversarial?
The attack on Israel also brought us the rejuvenation of Condoleezza Rice, who was the Bush National Security Advisor.
She was the one who chaired the meetings in the Bush White House where all those torture techniques that I demonstrated to you earlier had been used en masse in Guantanamo.
She was the one who chaired the meetings where those were approved.
And even John Ashcroft said, history is going to look very poorly on us for what we're doing here today.
But Condoleezza Rice also was the one who, unlike Colin Powell, who led the way in convincing Americans that they had evidence with those test tubes at the UN, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, she was the one who scaremongered Americans about his use of nuclear weapons, that he had nuclear weapons and was going to give them to the terrorists.
And that was why we had to go take out Saddam, to prevent him from giving nuclear weapons that he didn't have.
to the terrorists who would then use them against the United States.
And when she was asked for evidence to support her claims about why the United States needed to go into Iraq, this is what she said.
Here she is on September 8, 2002 on CNN.
There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
That was her phrase that she repeated over and over, scaring Americans, making them think that if we didn't go and attack Iraq, a country of 26 million people, and remove Saddam Hussein, and if Americans ask for evidence, they shouldn't.
They should just support it, because if not, we were going to have a mushroom cloud in the United States, and that would be the evidence that Americans doubted existed.
Just pure fear-mongering to get people to submit to the things they wanted to do, including a major war.
As I said, it's not just Iraq.
Iraq is just one of the examples we focused on because it's just such an extreme and vivid illustration of how these people lie and manipulate emotions where there's a terrorist attack.
But let's remember here from 2017, the Obama administration continued many of the same policies and expanded others.
Here is from NBC News, the U.S.
bombed Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia in 2016.
That seven predominantly Muslim countries just in 2016, the last year Obama and Biden were in power.
Quote, the U.S.
dropped 26,171 bombs on seven countries in 2016, according to an analysis by the Council of Foreign Relations.
The U.S.
dropped an average of 72 bombs every day, the equivalent of three an hour in 2016, according to an analysis of American strikes around the world.
The report from the Council on Foreign Relations comes as Barack Obama finishes up his presidency One that began with promises to withdraw from international conflicts.
It was also a presidency, by the way, that began with him winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
According to the New York City Space Think Tank, 26,171 bombs were dropped on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan during the year.
They warned that its estimates were, quote, undoubtedly low.
Considering that reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, And a single quote strike, according to the Pentagon's definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions.
Here in 2014 was a CNN report on just how violent the Obama administration was in the name of the war on terror.
Quote, countries bombed by the United States under the Obama administration.
Here's the war-ending president.
Do you see how ironic there being CNN is about President Obama?
Here's the quote war-ending president.
Who, as of Tuesday, has ordered airstrikes in seven different countries that we know of.
President Obama has always acknowledged there are times when military force is necessary, even when he accepted his Nobel Prize.
In 2009, he said there could be instances where war is, quote, mortally justified.
Here are the seven places where the Obama administration is known to have ordered airstrikes, and it goes for that same list.
Now we begin the show by talking about the extreme amount of unity that was fostered as a result of this insane warmongering.
These are people who could bring down an airplane with their teeth.
These are super villains.
They're monsters and subhumans.
And it led to 20 years of war, 20 years of war in multiple countries and torture and kidnapping and renditioning coups.
And the neocons who are largely responsible for it still haven't gotten enough.
They're still not satiated.
They want many more wars and they're using now this new terrorist attack to bring those in and usher those in.
Including finally getting the United States to end Israel's enemies once and for all in Gaza.
But if you have any doubts about whether severe regrets are warranted about the things we were induced by our government media to do because our fears of terrorism and our anger over it were exploited, here is this to conclude our show, this study by Brown University.
A very comprehensive study they conducted and published in September 1st, 2021 called Cost of War Project.
The cost of the 20 year war on terror, $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths.
Quote, a report from the Cost of War Project at Brown University revealed that 20 years of post-911 wars have cost the U.S.
an estimated $8 trillion and have killed more than 900,000 people.
Nearly 20 years after the United States' invasion of Afghanistan, the cost of its global war on terror stands at $8 trillion and 900 deaths.
Quote, the war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful.
And the war continues in over 80 countries, said Catherine Lutz, co-director of Cost of War and a professor of international and public affairs at Brown, during a virtual event hosted by the Watson Institute on Wednesday, September 1st.
Quote, the Pentagon and the U.S.
military have now absorbed the great majority of the federal discretionary budget.
And most people don't know that.
Our task now and in future years is to educate the public on the way in which we fund those wars and the scale of that funding.
The research team's $8 trillion estimate accounts for all direct costs of the country's post-911 wars, including Department of Defense overseas contingency operation funding, State Department war expenditures, and counterterror war-related costs, including war-related increases to the Pentagon's base budget, care for veterans to date and in the future, homeland security spending, and interest payments on borrowing for those wars.
The total includes funds that the Biden administration requested in May of 2021.
So this is now four administrations.
The death toll standing at an estimated 897,000 to 929,000 includes U.S.
military members, allied fighters, opposition fighters, civilians, journalists, and humanitarian aid workers who were killed as a direct result of war, whether by bombs, bullets, or fire.
It does not, the researchers noted, include the many indirect deaths the war on terror has caused by way of disease, displacement, and lack of access to food or clean drinking water.
Now we spent two and a half hours showing you the evidence of the complete disaster and destruction that this war on terror unleashed and the way in which it was
Induced which was by an exploitation of exactly the kind of emotions that are prevailing today in the attempt to stigmatize dissent or questions by accusing anyone expressing or asking them of being on the side of terrorists and traitors and wanting people in the United States or in Israel dead.
It's the same exact tactics.
And it's only a partial fraction of what we could show you about the war on terror and the horrors and bloodshed and moral and legal crimes it ushered in as part of the United States government to say nothing of the radical transformation of our own politics and government into an authoritarian surveillance state, one that has very few of the protections the Constitution had promised.
But I think this is more than sufficient To A, enable you to see the lessons that ought to be learned, ought to be drawn from the way our own terrorist attack on the United States was used to bring all this in and to justify it and to get us to approve it.
And then B, to make clear how vital it is that we not repeat those mistakes.
Again, decent people are going to be outraged at the attack of Hamas in Israel.
Just like all decent people were outraged watching 3,000 American civilians die when buildings crashed on top of them.
Their airplanes were flown into the buildings or the ground.
They were jumping out of windows.
All of that is horrific without doubt.
But that doesn't mean that things that are Done in the name of avenging it or stopping those kinds of attacks in the future are really designed to do that.
Think of how many people have been enriched by these trillions of dollars spent.
How many people whose lives have been destroyed by the deaths that have been caused.
And we're clearly about to enter something very similar again.
And I think above all what we're devoted to doing, more than insisting that any particular viewpoint be adopted by you, Is demanding the right of people to express opposition, to ask questions, to encourage a restraint.
Without the same slimy character assassinations and smear artists vilifying people as being on the side of terrorists or being anti-semitic or being on the side of Hamas, it's time that those tactics are met with the scorn that they deserve because that's the only way sober and constructive debate, debate that's vital when our country wants to enter a new war, is actually possible.
So that concludes our show for tonight.
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