When the Security State Stood Down Pt. 3
When the security state of the United States stands down, we see the change in our country’s priorities from social democracy towards militarism and authoritarianism. It has happened multiple times in our modern history from 1941–2021. This series will cover four such instances that are notable for the effects they’ve caused and the subsequent effects to come from them.
The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks (September 11th, 2001)
Between 1979 and 1989 laid the Soviet-Afghan War, a conflict involving insurgent groups, the Mujahadeen, an Arabic term that broadly refers to Islamic guerrillas that engage in jihad, or the fight on behalf of Islam, backed by Western countries versus the Soviet Army which backed the controlling Democratic Republic government that had rose to power after the Saur Revolution. Even though the communists initiated radical modernization and land reforms around the country, they vigorously suppressed opposition and executed thousands of political prisoners, which led to the rise of anti-government armed groups. Afghan insurgents began receiving massive amounts of support through aid, financing, and military training in Pakistan with significant help from the United States and the United Kingdom. As told in the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” and through our National Archives, the CIA played a significant role in asserting U.S. influence in Afghanistan by funding military operations designed to frustrate the Soviet invasion of the country. By the tail end of the conflict, a lowly Saudi national, with deep financial and familial ties to the Saudi royals, Osama Bin Laden, founded al-Qaeda with the goal of global jihad. He would represent the greatest example of “blowback”, or the unintended consequences of funding and training proxy fighters for war by the CIA.
The conflict would result in the near bankruptcy of the Soviet Union, the veneer of the military being invincible was undermined and led to political inclusion of other perspectives to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. On Christmas Day, President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, turned over all powers to Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced with the tricolor Russian flag. Declaration 142-H of the Supreme Soviet’s upper chamber recognized self-governing independence for the Soviet republics, formally dissolving the Union marking the end of the Cold War.
Around the same time, the CIA was going through a negative image problem. The Reagan administration had been funding the Contras, right-wing rebel groups in opposition to the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Contras had committed numerous human rights violations and used terrorist tactics often against civilian targets at the immediate consent of American agents on the ground. The use of these “Death Squads” at the behest of the CIA would become standard practice in future conflicts in Afghanistan leading up to the American invasion years later. After US support was banned by Congress, the Reagan administration covertly continued it, primarily by selling arms to Iran secretly while the country was under an arms embargo. It would be reported in 1996, by investigative reporter Gary Webb, that the Contra’s created a trade of selling crack cocaine into American markets primarily in black communities, with the protection and logistics of the CIA. Gary would be another truthteller, attacked viciously, discredited in the eyes of the news media, and on December 10th, 2004 he would be found dead with two gunshots to the head. Despite heavy skepticism from colleagues, his wife would admit that due to his inability to hold a job because of his work, he had been contemplating suicide and recently sold his house the week before his death.
Public sentiment for foreign policy would steadily move more towards non-interventionism following the H.W. Bush administration, especially amongst the liberal elite. A push for more globalization and peacekeeping efforts would be the primary focus during the Clinton administration. Though he would have foreign emergencies that weren’t handled well in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti. Absence the Cold War, the defense budget was slashed for a focus on a domestic policy agenda. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda would be busy during this entire time. On February 26, 1993, al-Qaeda detonated a timed car bomb in the parking garage below Tower One of the World Trade Center in New York City. Clinton ordered the NSC and FBI to find those responsible, he would send legislation to Congress to extend federal criminal jurisdiction, make it easier to deport terrorists, and act against terrorist fundraising. Bin Laden would move his operations to Afghanistan and plan the bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in August 1998. In response, Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes at targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. The CIA estimated that the strikes had missed Bin Laden by a few hours.
In 1999, Clinton begins the diplomatic pressures. Through Pakistan, he encourages the Taliban, which had been harboring Bin Laden, to give him up. He declared the Taliban regime as a state sponsor of terrorism when they refused in July of 1999. In August of 1999, Clinton orders the CIA to develop a plan to capture bin Laden and giving the CIA the authority to have bin Laden killed. On October 12, 2000, terrorists bomb the USS Cole in the Yemeni harbor of Aden. 17 Navy sailors died, and the CIA wouldn’t confirm bin Laden’s involvement until after the W. Bush administration took office. By the end of Clinton’s administration, a comprehensive policy paper was drafted titled: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from Jihadist Networks of al Qida: Status and Prospects. The paper outlined a method to “roll back” al Qaeda over a period of “three to five years.” It was also forwarded to the Bush Administration.
President George W. Bush wasn’t a great leader before or after 9/11, his administration came to power on the heels of a contested election result influenced by the supreme court and a miscounting of ballots in the state of Florida. He was given an economic surplus from the previous administration and no direct mandate towards progressive change. His polling numbers weren’t very high, and he took more vacation time in his first year of office than any other President before him. There are several concerning connections between the bin Laden family and the Bush family. There’s plenty of theories that could be summarized from Michael Moore’s highly partisan documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, and there are even more theories on the attack itself, that it could be staged, or consent manufactured over the attack at the Pentagon. These details and theories are still being explored today, and no third party has been sought out or prosecuted outside of the hijackers and subsequent terrorist organizations that took responsibility.
Throughout 2001 the CIA would produce several reports concerning imminent attacks by Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Vice President Dick Cheney and staff from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office questioned the validity of the reports, that they could be a deception on part of al-Qaeda to needlessly expend resources in response. 36 days before the attack, the President’s Daily Brief Titled bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US, prepared by the CIA, was given to President Bush on August 6, 2001. He was vacationing on his property in Texas. “All right. You’ve covered your ass.” Was the President’s now-infamous response regarding the briefings he was getting. He was very nonchalant about everything, without a care in the world.
On a Tuesday morning, September 11th, 2001, I can still recall where I was. I was on my way to broadcasting classes at Santa Monica city college, my mom called me while she was at work. She told me to stay where I was, turn on the TV, and don’t go anywhere. What I saw on TV was too unbelievable to believe. It looked like a Hollywood movie at first, reports first came out that a commercial airplane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I watched, horrified, as a second plane would strike the South Tower in a fireball. A third plane would be reported as striking the southwest side of the Pentagon. A fourth aircraft would crash in Pennsylvania that would later be linked to these events, that passengers attempted to overpower their assailants. First responders from the New York Fire and Police Departments risked certain death entering both towers to rescue trapped citizens in the inferno. Onlookers watched as helpless people threw themselves from the buildings. I remember feeling speechless, angry, and fearful. After the towers collapsed and the thick cloud of debris abated, New Yorkers that remained in Lower Manhattan were saturated in dust and ash from ground zero. 2,977 people were killed, more than 6000 were injured from sites in New York City and the Pentagon.
Everyone seemed to feel incredible dread except for the President of the United States, who was sitting quietly listening to a children’s book being read in a Florida elementary school class. After being informed about the first tower strike, the President remained sitting for 7 minutes until his chief of staff, Andrew Card, informed of the second plane to hit the second tower. He finally left under security protocols and gave direct executive orders from Air Force One. On September 14th, Bush would visit “ground zero”, he grabbed a bullhorn to speak to the first responders on the scene and upon being told to speak louder says “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear from all of us soon.” He was polling at a middling 55% favorability and skyrocketed to 90% favorability, the highest ever recorded for a President. The American exceptionalism and patriotic consent machine fired up to defend the new ideal: Empire. What would follow would be a reactionary response that American society is still living under today.
Once the guilty party was assessed, the world acted. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invoked Article 5, allowing its members to respond collectively in self-defense, and on October 7, the U.S. and allied military forces launched an attack against Afghanistan. The CIA would insert themselves and begin buying support from warlords and the creation of “death squads” as reported by Abby Martin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgFVqxc0DKw&t=7s
On September 10th, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would give a speech on military-bureaucratic inefficiency and waste. He railed against the excessive defense budget that produced little results. On the next day, flight 77 struck the Pentagon, in the very location where the files of the defense budget were located. The military budget exploded to gargantuan proportions from just under $300 billion under Clinton to just under $500 billion by the end of W. Bush’s Presidency, that figure has exploded to $750 billion today in an annual budget that is never debated on and always passes.
We didn’t know at the time that there was a much larger plan in the works from the Pentagon. Four-star General Wesley Clark, interview with Democracy Now in 2007, said that 10 days after the attacks, he was in the Pentagon visiting a friend. Without identifying the colleague, Clark tells the publication that the general told him they were preparing for war with Iraq. A few weeks later, after the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan, Clark returned to the Pentagon to ask the same question of his colleague. Not only was the war with Iraq still planned, but the plan expanded to also include other countries. Clark was shown a classified memo from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that listed seven countries that were to be toppled by the U.S. military in the coming five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Congress would pass the A.U.M.F 1 or (Authorized Use for Military Force) which empowered the President to act unilaterally against any terrorist threat they deem credible without consent of Congress in the declared War on Terror. The AUMF 1 would be used again and again by future Presidents to justify more conflicts and bombings without the consent of Congress. Though the plan leaked from Clark wouldn’t come through in the timetable planned, it would touch on the various countries laid out as the years went on. President Obama wouldn’t end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that he promised he would on the campaign trail and instead authorized military operations without the consent of congress into overthrowing Gaddafi in Libya, turning the country into a failed state. He financed terrorists in efforts to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Asad in Syria. He assisted in the bombings of Lebanon during Israels’ invasion. And aided in the blockade of Yemen while Saudi Arabia conducted a famine campaign. President Trump would not be any better, he continued hawkish policies exacerbated under Obama, sending ground troops into Syria and bombing it. He increased tensions with Iran by assassinating an Iranian general and unilaterally destroying the Iran Nuclear Deal. President Biden so far has continued the imperialist policies by bombing Iraq, Syria, Somalia and continuing the United States' illegal occupation of foreign countries offensively. Though he has publicly ended the war in Afghanistan, he will keep spec-ops, contractors and assist in bombings when need be.
Manufactured Consent by Noam Chomsky outlines what the media will do when they push the states’ necessary narrative forward as facts. With troops being deployed to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban that was harboring Osama bin Laden, the message at home from the White House and voices in the media were: “Iraq is the real threat, Iraq harbors terrorism, Saddam Hussein helped to plan 9/11, Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”, and on and on it went for over a year until the American people believed the false narrative concocted by the Bush Administration. Once respected military commander Colin Powell would historically hold a vial of yellow substance in front of the UN, declaring it to be chemical weapons from Iraq, perjuring himself. On October 16th, 2002, Congress passes the A.U.M.F. 2, which gave the President sweeping authority for combat operations into Iraq. On March 20th, 2003, Bush addressed the nation while simultaneously ordering an offensive strike and invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation that never attacked us. Torture would be approved, illegal, and against our own laws, by President George w. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. It would be conducted at CIA black sites around the world, in foreign countries, forward operating bases, and Guantanamo Bay. Congress would eventually find out about this but stopped short of impeaching the President because they were also complicit in its approval.
The Bush administration and the media would also instill a constant assault of fear. Playing on people’s anxieties over terrorism. With the Cold War at an end, the American military machine had a new threat to sell more weapons for and a new fear for society to obsess over. Terror alerts matched to your favorite color palette were flashing daily changes that heightened and exhausted the public to accept whatever the trusted leaders in office were telling them, even at the cost of their own freedoms. Passed just 45 days after 9/11, the Patriot Act would ensure the destruction of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution that protects against illegal search and seizure. It would help to expand illegal surveillance by the NSA and FBI and eventually the Capitol Police. It would allow citizens’ private communication to be regularly monitored by the state, with personal data becoming commodities we have no control over. This authority over media, misinformation, censorship, and narrative control has been utilized time and time again to justify any illegal activity that the leaders of this country purport to do on behalf of the people that are being controlled by it.
After 9/11, the path of this country has moved dangerously and violently towards the Empire. To speak out against the established narrative makes you a pariah amongst your own family. Tribalism is rampant, with divisive narratives deployed by corporate-owned media to keep everyone arguing over nothing material while the crooks sneak out the back with all the loot. Class solidarity will be pounced on by bad actors to dissolve the only real threat to this hegemony. The poor people of this country would volunteer for what could be interpreted as patriotic service, but instead would find themselves lied to and discarded. We’re still in it today, as we bomb poor people in other countries repeating our own history. That we make our greatest enemies to ourselves, that we don’t fix any problem, we exacerbate them because it serves the interest of the ones that pull the strings, the oligarchy.
