Fact Fiction

As most of you are aware, I am an anti-war advocate. If there is one thing that I despise more than anything it is the abuse of power to support political agendas that seek the promotion of militarism for whatever purpose – and I could really care less who that reality applies to, be it a world super power or the corrupt government of a third world dictatorship.

We live in a world in which those that cast themselves as beacons of civility and conscience are, in fact, the planet’s foremost gunrunners and enablers of conflict. That is fact, not fiction, and no argument to the contrary can alter that reality.

For every action there is a reaction. There are those that labour under the misconception that 9/11 was an attack without foundation. But the truth remains that some of those involved in a covert capacity during the CIA’s support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were not so daft as to overlook the fact that their self-serving actions might ultimately produce consequences in the future. The CIA refers to this phenomenon as blowback, which is the ‘unintended consequences of covert operations’. Due to the nature of such operations, when blowback occurs the general public cannot put it into context because the initial covert actions of their country were never revealed to them. Thus, a catastrophe such as 9/11 can occur and the American people are unable to put it into proper context. Instead, simplistic rationales are provided them, such as ‘they hate us for our freedoms’. This then snowballs into the production of an amplified xenophobic state that then allows those in power to capitalize on it and, in the case of the current administration, use that ‘political currency’ to enact extremely dangerous policies. Ironically, those very policies may very well result in further blowback, and, as was the case following 9/11, the public will only be exposed to one side of the equation.

The promotion of freedom is not something that the United States has ever been in the business of. Those with ideologically based misrepresentations can argue against that statement until they’re blue in the face, but historical precedents provide far too many examples to the contrary. In truth, the United States has acted as an enabler for more dictators and strongmen that have benefited US interests than supporting the true, uninfluenced growth of democratic principles. In fact, it is safe to say that the United States has not supported the implementation of truly uninfluenced democratic government in its entire history, even though many Americans labour under the misconception that that is not the case. Even the Mashall Plan and American influence in post war Japan came with considerable exploitative strings attached.

Economic exploitation has always been America’s foremost weapon. With it comes the ability to treat with wholly corrupted governments eager to benefit from US military assistance and political protection while allowing US economic interests to exploit natural resources and a laundry list of equally profitable sectors. It also allows the United States to employ questionable regimes as buffers against those that they deem a threat to their global interests. The Iran-Iraq war provides a perfect example of this, as does US support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 80’s, and the support for numerous governments in Latin America and South East Asia.

Hegemony is not a word that should be lost on the American people; nor Canadians for that matter. Hegemony, in terms of modern international relations, is the existence of ‘a power that can dictate the policies of all other powers in its vicinity, or that is able to defeat any other power or combination of powers that it might be at war with’. Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony Or Survival poses a very simple question – have US actions post 9/11 been undertaken for national security reasons or to help institute a global hegemonic reality in the wake of the Cold War? Given the tenets of the Bush Doctrine and the philosophy on which it was based, that being the Defense Planning Guidance initially written by Paul Wolfowitz in the early 90’s, it is hard to argue that the actions of the United States, especially with regards to Iraq, represent a purely national security based agenda. Further actions also lend credence to a modern American hegemonic reality, such as the illegal detention of globally apprehended prisoners held without any legal recourse, arms proliferation, and the use of covert influencing in various parts of the world to help institute friendly governments or damage those that threaten US interests.

I remember watching the twin towers crumble to the ground in 2001 and the first thought that crossed my mind was that the CIA was going to be gifted one of the biggest headaches that it had ever received. Since that day, the mandate of the CIA has been broadened, though no official recognition of that fact has ever been realistically addressed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. For the first time in their history the CIA became jailors and were utilized in areas completely foreign to their experience. While the halls at Langley were being filled with overzealous, politically driven individuals, many of whom were responsible for the promotion of tenuous information that the agency’s old guard would have balked at, the CIA found themselves in the business of taking Extraordinary Rendition to new heights, of instituting Black Sites at which off the books detainees were held and interrogated beyond every lawful measure, and swallowing wholly politicized nonsense that to many experienced Station Chiefs reeked of preconceived policy initiatives.

Of course, once it was learned that sculpted intelligence was used by the administration to justify the invasion of Iraq, the CIA was thrown to the wolves, and many of its longstanding and highly knowledgeable assets found that their parking passes had been revoked. Not surprisingly, some of these individuals represented an element within the agency that was highly dubious of the entire affair from the get go.

One of the most telling accounts of the Bush Administration’s disregard for the CIA was the repeated disregard of two Aardwolves sent by the CIA’s Baghdad Station Chief in 2003 warning the Administration of the true strength and threat posed by the insurgency. Due to the fact that the missives pulled no punches in their relation of information that the Administration simply did not want to hear, the Station Chief was removed in December of 2003. As James Risen put it in State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, the Station Chief had “committed the unpardonable sin of telling the truth”.

Though unknown to a lot of Americans. The CIA instituted an operation prior to the invasion of Iraq in which it utilized Iraqi-Americans with family members that had worked on Iraqi’s WMD program in the past. Those that agreed to return to Iraq under false pretenses to gather intelligence for the CIA regarding the state of Iraq’s program all returned with the same story – that the program had not merely been suspended, but had been non-existent for more than a decade. Those Iraqis that clued in to what their American relatives were up to, according to reports, displayed a panicked state of disbelief that the United States might invade the country based on the premise that Iraq possessed an active program or possessed WMD’s. Not surprisingly, the intelligence gather during the operation was ultimately disregarded.

What occurred on the morning of September 11th, 2001, shocked the world, and that includes many parts of the Muslim world was well. That said, the justification for the attacks that day have been wholly disregarded, and not because of the warped ideology promoted as the root cause, but because they were carried out against a nation whose covert actions in the Middle East over the decades prior could not be allowed to be entered into the equation.

Transgressions are a tricky thing. Terrorism is the use of violence to intimidate. When employed by fringe radicals it is labeled an unforgivable act. When it is employed on a much more complex scale by nations that have at their disposal the ability to covertly manipulate perception, it is not. In fact, such actions are viewed as ones of emancipation, security, and the promotion of all things judicious.

History provides transparency of culpability. No matter our transgressions, history has cast us in such a light that to even suggest the possibility of willful wrong doing renders those that would dare claim it fit for an insane asylum. Ironically, it is those that would suggest they be committed that are the individuals that perpetuate global lunacy.