Blame the US -- Jane Mayer

[Anonymous]

is this lady ashkenazi?  seems like it but I can't find anything on it...

(another Naomi Wolf & Naomi Klein?)

she's made her rounds in the 'alternative press' promoting the idea that these wars on "terror" reveal something about America's moral decadence.

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/arc ... mayer.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/18/t ... e_mayer_on
http://www.charlierose.com/guests/jane-mayer
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JI06Ak01.html :

Has the George W Bush administration's "war on terror" been turned into a war on America's ideals of justice and the respect of basic human rights? For author Jane Mayer the answer is an unqualified yes.

Indeed, the author makes a convincing case to the effect that the cumulative legislation and executive decision taken by Washington's governing establishment have seriously eroded some of the basic protections enjoyed by the American citizen. Increased surveillance, wiretapping and domestic spying have increasingly resulted from executive decisions rather than from the court system thus giving the government an unprecedented, and often uncontrolled leeway to interfere with the daily activities of the average American.

 More seriously, the author documents cases in which American citizens, outside the United States have been subjected to detention and interrogation by their own government while being denied any due process. The deduction drawn by the author is that the United States under the Bush administration has seen many of its core values as defined by the constitution systematically eroded to the point of endangering the very principal of government on which the American society is allegedly based.

To substantiate this claim the author draws both on the chain of events that led to the September 11 attack and to its aftermath.

The depiction that the author gives of the buildup to September 11 and on the total unpreparedness to deal with an attack that was looming on the horizon is convincing. September 11 was not an isolated event but rather the last stage of a series of attacks that included the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen and the attack on the US Embassy in Nairobi. The evidence gathered by the author makes it clear that the attack could certainly have been foreseen and perhaps even thwarted had the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)done their job.

That they failed to do so was due neither to a lack of intelligence nor to technical shortcomings. While the writing was on the wall, there was no one to read it and even more to draw the right conclusions. Granted, isolated figures both within the FBI and the CIA were aware of the existence of Bin Laden and of the threat he represented but the political mindset be it the Clinton or the subsequent Bush administration proved simply incapable of conceptually foresee the unexpected. This conjectural deficiency extended to the operational frontlines.

On August 16, 2001, the FBI arrested a French citizen of Moroccan descent, Zacarias Moussaoui, who while attending flight school in Minnesota insisted on being taught only how to fly an aircraft and not how to take off and land. However, neither the FBI nor the CIA mustered the necessary clearances to open Moussaoui's hard drive and without them no one was willing to face the risk of doing so. Had the hard disk been accesses it is well possible that at least part of the September 11 attack could have been pre-empted.

This lack of mental adjustment to the simple possibility that the US might one day be the target of a terrorist attack probably explains in part why America reacted as it did to what objectively was barely a pinprick of no substantive consequence. While Mayer does not address this issue, the damage done by the September 11 attack was essentially psychological. The US that day lost four civilian aircraft, had two major buildings destroyed and some others partially damaged for a total loss of some 3,000 civilians. Neither the American state as such, the security of the nation or the functioning of the economy was ever put in danger.

In contrast, there were some 30,000 dead in one morning when the Germans bombed the defenseless city of Amsterdam. While the cosmetics of the attack played a major role in amplifying its impact on American society, if one reads through the lines of Mayer's book it is clear that America's reaction - not to say over-reaction - to the September 11 attack was inversely proportional to the nation's psychological unpreparedness to the assault.

What emerges is an American society that is prone to operate in a climate of extremes. Slow, painstaking, cautious undertakings, day after day and year after year are not part of the American way of doing thing things. Complacency and unpreparedness followed by overreaction are, hence the "war on terror", the world's most powerful nation mobilized to come to terms with a small terrorist group which at the cost of 19 dead and half a million dollars has succeed in inflicting on America a psychological and institutional trauma unequalled since Vietnam.

The core of Mayer's book is a dissection of the Bush administration reaction to the attack, hence the so-called "war on terror"; a war which she describes in all its sordid details. Rendition, the secret transporting of suspects to countries where they can be held in indefinite detention and submitted to interrogation with no restriction; waterboarding, consisting basically of drowning a suspect but only to the point in which he can be revived for further questioning; administrative detention by administrative decree outside the framework of any legal restrictions.

The description she gives of this process is compelling and so are some of the questions she raises, the main one being whether torture actually works. In her view, it is a risky undertaking with the victim prone to say anything he believes his tormentors want to hear in order to alleviate the pain. More to the point, with many of al-Qaeda moved by faith rather than gain, a more differentiated approach might work where brute force will not. One of the cases she refers to is the one of Al Libi, one of al-Qaeda's main commanders.

Captured by the Pakistanis and handed over to the FBI who interrogated him at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, he provided invaluable intelligence after his American interrogator, Russell Fincher, himself a devote Christian succeeded in establishing a personal rapport with him. All came to an end when the CIA literally kidnapped Al Libi from the FBI and on which he disappeared never to be heard again.

If Jane Mayer's description of how the Bush administration created a new ill-defined setting for its "war on terror" outside any conventional legal norms, impervious to outside scrutiny and subject to no oversight is convincing, the perspective in which she views it is less so. Had she delved a bit deeper in America's recent past she would have found not so much an aberration but a trend.

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