Egypt’s military rulers assert wider powers in wake of attack on Israeli Embassy

By Anthony Faiola, Published: September 16 2011
The Washington Post

CAIRO — Egypt’s military government is sharply expanding emergency powers to detain people without evidence or official charges, in what critics are decrying as the most significant curbs on personal freedoms here since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

In the wake of the mob assault on the Israeli Embassy last week, Egypt’s interim leaders are reviving and broadening laws used to detain thousands of dissidents during the Mubarak years, calling the move critical to maintaining law and order in a country confronting a tumultuous transition to democracy. Already, dozens of Egyptians arrested in connection with the embassy attack are being sent for processing in state security courts that are associated with the old emergency laws and that pass sentence without offering defendants the right to an appeal.

The decision finds the interim government walking a tightrope, trying to assure the West and the Egyptian public that it can address an admitted “security vacuum” here while holding on to the faith of pro-democracy and human rights groups. The move comes as the military is being pressed to set dates for parliamentary and presidential elections, against a backdrop of unease among advocates seeking to rapidly usher in a new era of civilian rule.

Groups across Egypt’s political spectrum, including the secular Free Egyptian Party and the conservative Muslim Brotherhood, are vocally denouncing the move as harkening back to the strong-arm tactics many here hoped would be swept away by the Arab Spring.

“The revolution happened to begin with because the emergency law had been active for 30 years in Egypt,” said Bassel Adel, head of the Free Egyptian Party. “It’s not right reactivating this law when the country is in this transitional, non-conclusive phase.”

When Egypt’s military formed a transitional government after Mubarak’s fall in February, political activists here hoped that emergency laws that dated to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war would quickly become a thing of the past. At first, the military authorities gave them reason to believe that might happen, releasing thousands of political and religious prisoners held under such laws, which effectively allowed extended detentions of suspects without trial or even official charges.

But in an announcement Wednesday, the military government signaled that it would not only maintain the laws but also expand them to cover lesser offenses, including interrupting the flow of traffic, interfering with the right to work, engaging in “thuggery” and the spreading of “false information.” Opponents fear the laws could be used by the military to put down a wave of labor strikes, target outspoken politicians or even curb the ongoing protests aimed at pressuring the interim government to move faster in handing over power.

“This is classic military thinking,” said Heba Morayef, Egypt representative for Human Rights Watch. “It’s a reminder that this is the same regime as Mubarak, a regime that does not know what democracy is.”

Those sentiments were echoed in Tahrir Square on Friday, when a crowd of roughly 1,500 activists returned to the symbolic heart of Egypt’s revolution to protest the return and expansion of the emergency laws. “Egypt is supposed to be moving forward,” said Hossam Yehia, a 20-year-old journalism student who took part in the uprisings that ousted Mubarak and was in the square again Friday. “But instead we are moving back.”

Since the uprising, Egypt’s interim government has processed more than 12,000 arrested suspects in military tribunals. By shifting dozens arrested in the Israeli Embassy attack in Cairo to the state security courts, the government has argued that it is at least prosecuting the cases before civilian rather than military tribunals.

An Egyptian government official who defended the move said that the measures were being taken purely for security reasons at a time when the public is fretting about lawlessness and crime and when the attack on the Israeli Embassy threatened to tarnish Egypt’s image abroad.

“The emergency law is being reinforced in order to protect public property and the streets and to stop the people who instigate violence,’’ said the Egyptian official, who insisted on anonymity to speak frankly about the issue. “It will not target views or freedom of expression or criticism,” the official added.

Western diplomats and observers described the move as a serious misstep by a novice military government scrambling to show it is still in charge after unchecked protesters tore down a cement wall at the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last Friday, forcing the emergency evacuation of diplomatic staff. They said Egypt’s military establishment appears committed to holding elections, as promised, but had employed the emergency law as a blunt tool in a bid to reassert authority.

“They had no idea what it was going to be like to run a country,” said a Western diplomat who insisted on anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive issue. The move, the diplomat said, was being driven by a sense of “panic” to prove the military remains in charge.

Special correspondent Ingy Hassieb contributed to this report.

At the Pentagon, the specter of a sequester

By George F. Will, Published: September 16 2011
The Washington Post

It must take some getting used to. Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, knows the Pentagon is under 24-hour cyber siege. There constantly are thousands of what he calls “exploitive” cyber probes from nations “pulsing the system,” trying to devise tools to disrupt the control systems without which complex societies such as ours cannot function. Panetta, a seasoned Washingtonian who laughs easily and a temperate Californian who frets about the San Francisco Giants’ bats, is not given to hyperbole. But he says any cyber attack that “crippled our [electricity] grid or took down our financial system would make Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined look mild” in terms of social disruption.

Although a cyber attack “is moving up” on his list of his worries, it ranks only “third or fourth,” behind North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear weapons programs; what he calls terrorism “nodes” in places such as Yemen, Somalia and North Africa; and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Iraq, the mission of the remnant of U.S. forces — the number 3,000 has been bruited — will, Panetta says, include counterterrorism actions “working with the Iraqis.” Which leaves a lot of room for danger.

Panetta’s most immediate worry, however, is visible from the windows of his office overlooking the Potomac — Capitol Hill, where the supercommittee created by August’s debt-ceiling agreement is sitting. By Thanksgiving, either it will agree to do something important — reduce the next decade’s debt by at least $1.2 trillion — or its disagreements will trigger something important: a sequester.

This would take from military budgets nearly $500 billion, in addition to a minimum of $350 billion in cuts already scheduled. An almost trillion-dollar trimming, Panetta says flatly, “cannot take place.” Actually, he knows it can: “The gun to the head could really go off.” Even without a sequester, the military “is going to be a smaller force.” And with a sequester? The 1.5 million active-duty members of the armed services and 700,000 civilian employees of the Defense Department depend on an industrial base of more than 3.8 million persons. According to the Pentagon, a sequester would substantially shrink those three numbers, perhaps adding a point to the nation’s unemployment rate. The cuts would leave the smallest Army and Marine Corps in more than a decade and the smallest tactical Air Force since this service became independent of the Army in 1947. The Navy has already shrunk almost to its smallest fleet size since World War I.

Time was, when Democrats looked at the defense budget with a skeptical squint, Republicans rallied round it. No more. Few Tea Partyers remember Washington’s hawk-vs.-dove dramas. They live to slow spending, period. They are constitutionalists but insufficiently attentive to the fact that defense is something the federal government does that it actually should do. And when they are told that particular military expenditures are crucial to force projection, they say: As in Libya? Been there, don’t want to do that.

Much of the defense budget is consumed by pay and health care for uniformed personnel, who have been abused enough by repeated deployments. The priciest new weapon, the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (at least $90 million per plane), is vital for the continued salience of aircraft carriers, which are the basis of the U.S. strategic presence in the Western Pacific. Inferring China’s geopolitical intentions from its military purchases is difficult, but Panetta says guardedly that in five years China’s force projection will be “much better.” The Marines, with their smaller carriers, need a short-takeoff model F-35. Cut the number of planes built, the cost per plane rises, and the ability to recoup costs through sales to allies declines.

Panetta’s two years as CIA director were important preparation for his current job; his nine terms in Congress and four years as Bill Clinton’s head of the Office of Management and Budget and as his chief of staff were essential. A defense secretary’s tenure, more than that of any other cabinet member, is graded by events a decade after he has left office, when the nation either has or does not have the military capabilities a crisis demands.

Until recently, Panetta thought there was a 90 percent probability of a sequester. Now he is less pessimistic because he thinks everybody was “burned” by the debt-ceiling battle. “The next few months,” he says, “are going to tell us a hell of a lot.” But the meaning of what is told may not become clear for 10 years.

georgewill@washpost.com

A troop drawdown that would fail Iraq

By John McCain, Joseph I. Lieberman and Lindsey O. Graham,
Published: September 16 2011
The Washington Post

Recent media reports have suggested that the Obama administration has decided to reduce sharply the number of U.S. troops it is willing to keep in Iraq beyond this year, possibly to as few as 3,000. Administration officials have denied that any decision has been made on force levels. We hope that is true, because such an approach would disregard the recommendations of our military commanders, jeopardize Iraq’s tenuous stability and needlessly put at risk all of the hard-won gains the United States has achieved there at enormous cost in blood and treasure.

We have frequently traveled to Iraq, meeting with national leaders in Baghdad, local officials throughout the country, and U.S. military commanders and diplomats. What we have consistently heard on these visits is that Iraq’s security and stability will require a continuing — though greatly reduced — U.S. military presence after the end of this year, when our current security agreement with Iraq expires. We have also heard that, given the essential missions that this post-2011 force must carry out, no fewer than 10,000 and as many as 25,000 troops will be required. No one has suggested that 3,000 would be enough.

The reasoning was laid out before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February by our top civilian and military leaders in Baghdad, Ambassador James Jeffrey and Gen. Lloyd Austin. As they explained, significant gaps in capability persist in the Iraqi Security Forces that cannot be closed before the end of 2011, including intelligence collection and fusion, counterterrorism operations, training and maintenance, and the protection of Iraq’s airspace. Either some U.S. forces must remain to help Iraqis fill these gaps, or they will go unaddressed — at the expense of Iraq’s security and ours.

The mission perhaps most critical to Iraq’s stability is in northern Iraq, where tensions between Arabs and Kurds run high. On several occasions, most recently in February, these tensions nearly turned violent. Only the stabilizing presence of U.S. forces has averted the outbreak of conflict that could spark a new civil war. To avoid that terrible outcome, it is essential for U.S. troops to retain a presence in these disputed territories after 2011. As a matter of military math, this mission will not be possible with only 3,000 troops.

Although any new security agreement must be negotiated with the Iraqi government — for which the politics of this question are extremely sensitive — the Iraqis do not appear to be the force pushing to reduce a future U.S. military presence. In fact, all of Iraq’s major political blocs, with the exception of the Sadrists, agreed last month to begin negotiations for a U.S. military mission beyond this year. This was a major breakthrough and reflects what Iraq’s key leaders have told us: They want U.S. troops to stay in Iraq.

Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, reiterated this earlier this month, warning: “Iraqi security forces are still not prepared to secure protection for Iraq.” If we fail to conclude a robust new security agreement that safeguards Iraq’s stability, it will be wrong to claim that all of the blame rests on the Iraqi side.

Some may claim that a smaller troop presence in Iraq after this year is necessitated by our fiscal woes. We strongly disagree. Whether the United States has 3,000 troops or a larger force in Iraq will make no meaningful difference to our budgetary situation. But it may prove the difference between a stable, democratic, U.S.-aligned Iraq vs. one that slides back into chaos — and that outcome could cost Americans enormously. It would also be viewed, throughout the world, as a major defeat for the United States and a boon to our two most dangerous adversaries, al-Qaeda and Iran.

When Ambassador Ryan Crocker departed Baghdad in 2009, he warned: “The events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened.” Those events are now upon us. Nearly 4,500 Americans, and far more Iraqis, have given their lives to achieve the real but tenuous stability that Iraq enjoys. Whether that stability will deepen or unravel has much to do with the choices our government makes in the coming weeks.

It is to President Obama’s credit that, after entering office, he did not immediately withdraw all our troops from Iraq, as many of his supporters hoped and demanded. Instead he adopted a more cautious drawdown, counseled by our military commanders. For the sake of our current and future national security, we ask the president to again heed the advice of our commanders and others with experience in Iraq and reject proposals for a radically smaller troop presence there, which risks being a very serious foreign policy and national security mistake for our country.

John McCain is a Republican senator from Arizona. Joseph I. Lieberman is an independent Democratic senator from Connecticut. Lindsey O. Graham is a Republican senator from South Carolina.

At White House, Weighing Limits of Terror Fight

NYT
September 15, 2011
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s legal team is split over how much latitude the United States has to kill Islamist militants in Yemen and Somalia, a question that could define the limits of the war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to administration and Congressional officials.

The debate, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, centers on whether the United States may take aim at only a handful of high-level leaders of militant groups who are personally linked to plots to attack the United States or whether it may also attack the thousands of low-level foot soldiers focused on parochial concerns: controlling the essentially ungoverned lands near the Gulf of Aden, which separates the countries.

The dispute over limits on the use of lethal force in the region — whether from drone strikes, cruise missiles or commando raids — has divided the State Department and the Pentagon for months, although to date it remains a merely theoretical disagreement. Current administration policy is to attack only “high-value individuals” in the region, as it has tried to do about a dozen times.

But the unresolved question is whether the administration can escalate attacks if it wants to against rank-and-file members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, and the Somalia-based Shabab. The answer could lay the groundwork for a shift in the fight against terrorists as the original Al Qaeda, operating out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, grows weaker. That organization has been crippled by the killing of Osama bin Laden and by a fierce campaign of drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where the legal authority to attack militants who are battling United States forces in adjoining Afghanistan is not disputed inside the administration.

One senior official played down the disagreement on Thursday, characterizing it as a difference in policy emphasis, not legal views. Defense Department lawyers are trying to maintain maximum theoretical flexibility, while State Department lawyers are trying to reach out to European allies who think that there is no armed conflict, for legal purposes, outside of Afghanistan, and that the United States has a right to take action elsewhere only in self-defense, the official said.

But other officials insisted that the administration lawyers disagreed on the underlying legal authority of the United States to carry out such strikes.

Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the laws of war, said the dispute reflected widespread disagreement about how to apply rules written for traditional wars to a conflict against a splintered network of terrorists — and fears that it could lead to an unending and unconstrained “global” war.

“It’s a tangled mess because the law is unsettled,” Professor Chesney said. “Do the rules vary from location to location? Does the armed conflict exist only in the current combat zone, such as Afghanistan, or does it follow wherever participants may go? Who counts as a party to the conflict? There’s a lot at stake in these debates.”

Counterterrorism officials have portrayed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — which was responsible for the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009 — as an affiliate of Al Qaeda that may be more dangerous now than the remnants of the original group. Such officials have also expressed worry about the Shabab, though that group is generally more focused on local issues and has not been accused of attacking the United States.

In Pakistan, the United States has struck at Al Qaeda in part through “signature” strikes — those that are aimed at killing clusters of people whose identities are not known, but who are deemed likely members of a militant group based on patterns like training in terrorist camps. The dispute over targeting could affect whether that tactic might someday be used in Yemen and Somalia, too.

The Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh C. Johnson, has argued that the United States could significantly widen its targeting, officials said. His view, they explained, is that if a group has aligned itself with Al Qaeda against Americans, the United States can take aim at any of its combatants, especially in a country that is unable or unwilling to suppress them.

The State Department’s top lawyer, Harold H. Koh, has agreed that the armed conflict with Al Qaeda is not limited to the battlefield theater of Afghanistan and adjoining parts of Pakistan. But, officials say, he has also contended that international law imposes additional constraints on the use of force elsewhere. To kill people elsewhere, he has said, the United States must be able to justify the act as necessary for its self-defense — meaning it should focus only on individuals plotting to attack the United States.

The fate of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, hangs heavily over the targeting debate, officials said. In several habeas corpus lawsuits, judges have approved the detention of Qaeda suspects who were captured far from the Afghan battlefield, as well as detainees who were deemed members of a force that was merely “associated” with Al Qaeda. One part of the dispute is the extent to which rulings about detention are relevant to the targeting law.

Congress, too, may influence the outcome of the debate. It is considering, as part of a pending defense bill, a new authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda and its associates. A version of the provision proposed by the House Armed Forces Committee would establish an expansive standard for the categories of groups that the United States may single out for military action, potentially making it easier for the United States to kill large numbers of low-level militants in places like Somalia.

In an interview, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said that he supported the House version and that he would go further. He said he would offer an amendment that would explicitly authorize the use of force against a list of specific groups including the Shabab, as well as set up a mechanism to add further groups to the list if they take certain “overt acts.”

“This is a worldwide conflict without borders,” Mr. Graham argued. “Restricting the definition of the battlefield and restricting the definition of the enemy allows the enemy to regenerate and doesn’t deter people who are on the fence.”

FBI says training lecture critical of Islam ended

By Pete Yost
Associated Press / September 15, 2011

WASHINGTON—The FBI said Thursday a lecture at the bureau's training academy that was critical of Islam has been discontinued.

The bureau employee who gave the lecture contended, among other things, that the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to be violent.

A federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity about the internal FBI training issue, says the lecture was given for just three days last April.

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen says that in the aftermath of the lecture, policy changes have been under way to better ensure that all training is consistent with FBI standards.

The online publication Wired.com first reported on the instruction given to agents.

Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI has stressed the importance of working with leaders in the Muslim community as an important part of the battle against terrorism.

The law enforcement official said the bureau should have kept a closer watch on the content of the lecture before it took place. The official said that as soon as the instructor's views were identified, the FBI stopped any further such lectures.

The goal of training programs, said the official, is to provide diverse views, but with balance and context that do not cross into inappropriate comments.

The materials for the instructional presentation said that mainstream American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers, that the Prophet Mohammed was a cult leader and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a funding mechanism for combat.

The FBI did not identify the lecturer. Wired identified an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop as the source for much of the material and said Gawthrop previously worked at the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity. Allen said the instructor who conducted the training no longer provides training on behalf of the FBI.

Allen also said that changes will help develop appropriate training content for new agent training and continuing education for all employees, as well as introduce a consultative element from experts outside the FBI.

FBI ‘Islam 101′ Guide Depicted Muslims as 7th-Century Simpletons

• By Spencer Ackerman
• 
• July 27, 2011  | 

As recently as January 2009, the FBI thought its agents ought to know the following crucial information about Muslims:

• They engage in a “circumcision ritual”
• More than 9,000 of them are in the U.S. military
• Their religion “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.”

And this was what the FBI considered “recommended reading” about Islam:

• A much-criticized tome, The Arab Mind, that one reviewer called “a collection of outrageously broad — and often suspect — generalizations“
• A book by one of Norwegian terrorist suspect Anders Behring Breivik’s favorite anti-Muslim authors.

All this is revealed in a PowerPoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit (.pdf), which trains new Bureau recruits. Among the 62 slides in the presentation, designed to teach techniques for “successful interviews/interrogations with individuals from the M.E. [Middle East],” is an instruction that the “Arabic mind” is “swayed more by words than ideas and more by ideas than facts.”
The briefing presents much information that has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with constitutionally-protected religious practice and social behavior, such as estimating the number of mosques in America and listing the states with the largest Muslim populations.
Other slides paint Islam in a less malicious light, and one urges “respectful liaison” as a “proactive approach” to engaging Muslims. But even those exhibit what one American Muslim civil rights leader calls “the understanding of a third grader, and even then, a badly misinformed third grader.”
One slide asks, “Is Iran an Arab country?” (It’s not.) Another is just a picture of worry beads.
“Based on this presentation, it is easy to see why so many in law enforcement and the FBI view American Muslims with ignorance and suspicion,” says Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal aid group. “The presentation appears to treat all Muslims with one broad brush and makes no distinction between lawful religious practice and beliefs and unlawful activities.”


A grainy copy of the PowerPoint was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Northern California chapter and the Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, and provided to Danger Room. The two groups filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year inquiring about government surveillance of American Muslim communities.
“In order for FBI training to be effective it has to present useful, factual and unbiased information. This material fails on all three criteria,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who now works for the ACLU. “Factually flawed and biased law enforcement training programs only expand the risk that innocent Muslim and Arab Americans will be unfairly targeted for investigation and prosecution, and stigmatized in their communities.” [Full disclosure: My fiancee works for the ACLU.]
In response to queries from Danger Room, the FBI issued the following statement about the PowerPoint: “The FBI new agent population at Quantico is exposed to a diverse curriculum in many specific areas, including Islam and Muslim culture. The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced. It was a small part of a larger segment of training that also included material produced by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point.”
It is unclear when the FBI stopped using the PowerPoint.
Among the most provocative aspects of the presentation is its recommended reading list. One book offered is The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, by Robert Spencer. Spencer is one of the ringleaders of the protest against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and the co-founder of Stop the Islamicization of America, which “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda,” in the view of the Anti-Defamation League. A manifesto written by the Norwegian terror suspect Anders Behring Breivik cited Spencer 64 times.
Another book cited is The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai. The volume was briefly infamous in 2004, after Seymour Hersh reported its influence among certain Iraq war hawks in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. According to Hersh, the takeaway of Patai’s book is that “Arabs only understand force” and are susceptible to “shame and humiliation.”
“It’s like asking law enforcement to learn ‘the facts’ about the African American experience by reading a book by the grand wizard of the KKK,” says Khera. “It is deplorable and offensive that the nation’s top law enforcement agency would promote such hateful so-called ‘experts’ on Islam.”
An FBI spokesman said Spencer’s book is no longer on the reading list but was not sure about the others. “We encourage our agents to seek out a variety of viewpoints. That does not mean we endorse or adopt the view of any particular author,” the bureau’s statement continues. “Broad knowledge is essential for us to better understand and respond to the threats we face. Knowledge also helps us defeat ignorance and strengthen relationships with the diverse communities that we serve.”
When dealing with Muslims and counterterrorism, the FBI’s record is mixed. It’s sent informants into mosques and used operatives to coax suspected extremists into active terror plots, arresting them before anyone was hurt. But its agents also stood up against torture at Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA’s undisclosed prisons. FBI Director Robert Mueller testified in 2008 that many of its terrorism cases “are a result of the cooperation from the Muslim community in the United States.”
In recent years, law enforcement agencies around the country have proven receptive to anti-Muslim crusaders. The Washington Monthly recently reported on the “growing profession” of terrorism consultants who get paid to make “sweeping generalizations about Muslims” to rapt audiences of cops. Adam Serwer at the American Prospect reports that another Breivik favorite, Walid Shoebat, also gets government cash to tell police things like “Islam is the devil.”
At a Capitol Hill event on Monday, a Florida-based researcher named Peter Leitner claimed that up to 6,000 Muslims in America are a “fifth column.” According to Leitner’s official biography, he founded a group called the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center; Higgins claims to have provided counterterrorism instruction to “FBI Counterterrorism Special Agents,” various police departments countrywide and even Blackwater.
“These characterizations of Islam and of Arab and Muslim people are not just disheartening — they are frightening,” says Veena Dubal, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus. “Degrading and inaccurate characterizations of Islam and of the ‘Arab mind’ don’t help individual agents fight terrorism. Rather, they imbue law enforcement with an extremely biased view of a diverse community.”

Senators Blast FBI Terror-Training ‘Lies’

• By Spencer Ackerman
• 
• September 15, 2011  | 

The FBI swears it has stopped teaching agents that “mainstream” Muslims are proto-terrorists and that Mohammed is a “cult leader.” But top Senators aren’t prepared to let the FBI turn the page on its anti-Islam counterterrorism training, revealed by Danger Room on Wednesday.
“There is no room in America for the lies, propagated by al-Qaida, that the U.S. is at war with Islam, or the lie propagated by others that all Muslims support terrorism,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, told Danger Room.

The FBI’s Islam Training Documents

Militancy Considerations

Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law

Doctrinal Basis for Jihad

Chart: Violence and Adherence to the Torah, Bible and Koran

Lieberman is one of the most consistently hawkish members of Congress. Not coincidentally, he’s been disturbed at recent reports that “inaccurate or even bigoted” anti-Islamic sentiment — his words — is substituting for diligent, responsible counterterrorism. In a letter this week to John Brennan, the president’s assistant on homeland security, Lieberman called for “meaningful standards” on law enforcement counterterrorism training, a point he reiterated to Danger Room.
“Proper training about violent Islamist extremism is absolutely essential for our law enforcement personnel in order to empower them to identify and understand this grave threat, and then protect the American people from it,” Lieberman says. “Part of this training must be an understanding of the clear and profound difference between Islamist extremism, which is a totalitarian political ideology that is at war with us, and Islam, which is a religion practiced by more than a billion people around the world, including millions of law-abiding and loyal Americans.”
Nor is Lieberman the only senator with oversight responsibilities disturbed by the FBI training materials. “Patriotic Muslim Americans can be one of our nation’s best weapons against radical Islamic terrorists,” Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee, told Danger Room. “Anyone who stigmatizes the entire Muslim American community will miss out on opportunities to work in partnership with that community to identify and take action against emerging terrorist threats before they can do harm to our country.”
A representative for Lieberman said the senator “looks forward to hearing from administration officials” about how these training materials came to be, a sentiment echoed by Wyden.

Wyden’s superior on the committee, chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, wasn’t as verbose. Her representative had no response. And that omerta was shared by the chairmen of the House’s counterterrorism oversight committees. A spokeswoman for Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House intelligence committee — and a former FBI agent himself — told Danger Room that there would be no comment.
The same went for Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee. King has accused U.S. Muslims of insufficient cooperation with law enforcement and held controversial hearings earlier this year about radicalization in American Muslim communities. But King wouldn’t defend the FBI or William Gawthrop, the Bureau employee who lead the incendiary training sessions. King also declined to comment through a representative.
Gawthrop’s FBI training did attract a lot of attention on extremist Islamist message boards, however. The online jihadists claimed it as a vindication — essentially demonstrating Lieberman’s point. “Looks like years of sucking up to the authorities, throwing innocent Muslims under the bus and cooperating with the feds has done ‘American Muslims’ no good at all,” wrote one forum user, as spotted by jihadisphere analyst Jarret Brachman.
Representatives for U.S. Muslims expressed anger at the FBI. Not only were Gawthrop’s training materials offensive — they instructed agents that the real threat to the U.S. comes not from terrorists but from “a normal assertion of the orthodox [Muslim] ideology” — they exposed the FBI as deceitful.
“This is especially disturbing because we had been told directly by the administration and by the FBI, through the press, that these materials were no longer being used,” says Farhana Khera, the executive director of the San Francisco civil rights group Muslim Advocates. “It leaves us to question why the FBI refuses to be fully forthcoming about its training materials and why it continues to use bigoted, woefully misinformed ‘experts’ and materials to train law enforcement.”
Muslim Advocates has drafted a letter to the Justice Department inspector general (.pdf) demanding an inquiry into FBI counterterrorism training.
The FBI has been quick to distance itself from Gawthrop’s training. In a stock answer to reporters today, it said that Gawthrop “no longer provides training on behalf of the FBI”; that his briefings were “quickly discontinued”; and that “policy changes have been underway to better ensure that all training is consistent with FBI standards.”
But the bureau did not answer Danger Room’s questions about the pedagogical standards it used to construct these teaching materials. It did not tell us who hired Gawthrop to teach. It did not answer a direct question about what the counterterrorism value of these briefings is supposed to be.
And Gawthrop is still an FBI official — although he seems to have been put on a muzzle.
In mid-October, the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA), an organization comprised of “law enforcement personnel, firefighters, military, first responders, private/corporate security, and other related professionals” will gather at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. One of the scheduled guest speakers at its 9th annual convention (.pdf) is none other than Gawthrop. He’s slated to present two lectures on October 20: “Strategic Themes & Drivers in Islamic Law” — perhaps the same briefing we’ve acquired — and “Influence of the Shariah on Law Enforcement Investigations.”
Or at least he was. FBI spokesman Christopher Allen told Danger Room that the FBI nixed Gawthrop’s appearance — a month ago. But that’s news to Mike Riker, the ICTOA president. He told Danger Room that they disinvited Gawthrop, in favor of someone with “more of a law enforcement” background.
“We’re not trying to bash anybody,” Riker said.

FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’

• By Spencer Ackerman
• 
• September 14, 2011  | 

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

The FBI’s Islam Training Documents

Militancy Considerations

Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law

Doctrinal Basis for Jihad

Chart: Violence and Adherence to the Torah, Bible and Koran

These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.
“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”
The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.
Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.
Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny.
They certainly aren’t the first time the FBI has portrayed Muslims in a negative light during Bureau training sessions. As Danger Room reported in July, the FBI’s Training Division has included anti-Islam books, and materials that claim Islam “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.” When Danger Room confronted the FBI with that material, an official statement issued to us claimed, “The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced.”
But these documents aren’t relics from an earlier era. One of these briefings, titled “Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law,” took place on March 21.
The Islam briefings are elective, not mandatory. “A disclaimer accompanied the presentation stating that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government,” FBI spokesman Christopher Allen tells Danger Room.
“The training materials in question were delivered as Stage Two training to counterterrorism-designated agents,” Allen adds. “This training was largely derived from a variety of open source publications and includes the opinion of the analyst that developed the lesson block.”
Not all counterterrorism veterans consider the briefings so benign. “Teaching counterterrorism operatives about obscure aspects of Islam,” says Robert McFadden, who recently retired as one of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service’s al-Qaida-hunters, “without context, without objectivity, and without covering other non-religious drivers of dangerous behavior is no way to stop actual terrorists.”
Still, at Quantico, the alleged connection between Islam and violence isn’t just stipulated. It’s literally graphed.

An FBI presentation titled “Militancy Considerations” measures the relationship between piety and violence among the texts of the three Abrahamic faiths. As time goes on, the followers of the Torah and the Bible move from “violent” to “non-violent.” Not so for devotees of the Koran, whose “moderating process has not happened.” The line representing violent behavior from devout Muslims flatlines and continues outward, from 610 A.D. to 2010. In other words, religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of aggression.
Training at Quantico isn’t designed for intellectual bull sessions or abstract theory, according to FBI veterans. The FBI conducts its training so that both seasoned agents and new recruits can sharpen their investigative skills.
In this case, the FBI’s Allen says, the counterterrorism agents who received these briefings have “spent two to three years on the job.” The briefings are written accordingly. The stated purpose of one, about allegedly religious-sanctioned lying, is to “identify the elements of verbal deception in Islam and their impacts on Law Enforcement.” Not “terrorism.” Not even “Islamist extremism.” Islam.

According to this FBI training, religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of aggression.

What’s more, the Islamic “insurgency” is all-encompassing and insidious. In addition to outright combat, its “techniques” include “immigration” and “law suits.” So if a Muslim wishes to become an American or sues the FBI for harassment, it’s all just part of the jihad.
On Tuesday, the leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), warned that law enforcement lacks “meaningful standards” to prevent anti-Islam material from seeping into counterterrorism training. Some FBI veterans suspect the increased pressure on American Muslims has a lot to do with the kind of training that Quantico offers.
“Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Danger Room after being shown the documents. ”Biased police training can only result in biased policing.” (Full disclosure: This reporter’s wife works for the ACLU.)
The chief of the Training Division, Assistant FBI Director Thomas Browne, came into his current job in January. His official biography lists no terrorism expertise beyond serving as a coordinator for a bureau “Domestic Terrorism Program” in Tennessee sometime in the last decade.
It is unclear what vetting process the FBI used to approve these briefings; if any Muslim scholars contributed to them; and what criteria Quantico uses to determine Islamic expertise. “The development of effective training is a constantly evolving process,” says FBI spokesman Allen. “Sometimes the training is adapted for long-term use. This particular training segment was delivered a single time and not used since.”
Several of these briefings were the work of a single author: an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop. In 2006, before he joined the Bureau, he gave an interview to the website WorldNetDaily, and discussed some of the themes that made it into his briefings, years later. The Prophet “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism,” Gawthrop told the website, which would later distinguish itself as a leader of the “birther” movement, a conspiracy theory that denies President Obama’s American citizenship.
At the time, Gawthrop’s major suggestion for waging the war on terrorism was to attack what he called “soft spots” in Islamic faith that might “induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target.” That is, to discredit Islam itself and cause Muslims to abandon their religion. “Critical vulnerabilities of the Koran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal,” he said. Alas, he lamented, he faced the bureaucratic obstacle of official Washington’s “political taboo of linking Islamic violence to the religion of Islam,” according to the website.

Back then, however, Gawthrop didn’t work for the FBI. He had recently stepped down from a position with the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity. That agency came under withering criticism during the Bush administration for keeping a database about threats to military bases that included reports on peaceful antiwar protesters and dovish Church groups. It is unclear how Gawthrop came to work for the FBI.
Through an intermediary, Gawthrop told Danger Room that he was unavailable for comment before our deadline.

‘Instead of looking for indicators of nefarious behavior, you have a sweeping generalization.’

The FBI didn’t always conflate terrorism with Islam. “I never saw that,” says Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s most distinguished counterterrorism agents and author of the new memoir The Black Banners, who retired from the bureau in 2005. “Sometimes, toward the end of my time, I started noticing it with different entities outside the FBI. You started feeling like they had a problem with Islam-as-Islam, because of the media. But that was a few people, and was usually hidden behind closed doors.”
Soufan, a Muslim, has interrogated members of al-Qaida and contributed to rolling up one of its cells in Yemen after 9/11. But by the logic of the FBI’s training materials, Soufan’s religious practices make him a potential terrorist.
McFadden, the former NCIS counterterrorist, has a lot of respect for his FBI colleagues, who he believes are ill-served by these Islam briefings. “These are earnest special agents and police officers who want to know how do their job better,” McFadden says.
Too often, McFadden says, counterterrorism training becomes simultaneously over-broad and ignorant. “Instead of looking for indicators of nefarious behavior, you have a sweeping generalization of things like, for instance, the Hawala system,” McFadden explains. “It’s a system that most of the developing world and expatriates from it use to move money around, including terrorists. But you can’t say the whole hawala system is about terrorism, just like you can’t say that Islam as a whole has anything to do with bad behavior.”
McFadden, a Catholic, believes that obsessing over obscure Koranic verses is as useful a guide to terrorist behavior as “diving into the rite of exorcism” is to understanding Catholicism.
On April 6, barely two weeks after the “Islamic Motivations for ‘Suicide’ Bombers” briefing at Quantico, FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the bureau’s budget before a congressional committee. Among his major points: the FBI needs cooperation from American Muslims to stop the next terrorist attack.
“Since September 11th, every one of our 56 field offices and the leadership of those offices have had outreach to the Muslim community,” Mueller said. “We need the support of that community … our business is basically relationships.” That is exactly the opposite message sent in the training rooms of Quantico, where the next generation of FBI counterterrorism is shaped.

Spencer Ackerman is Danger Room's senior reporter, based out of Washington, D.C., covering weapons of doom and the strategies they're used to implement.
Follow @attackerman and @dangerroom on Twitter.

Once again, Israel is scapegoated

By Editorial, Published: September 12 2011
The Washington Post

ISRAELIS WORRY that the Arab Spring is turning from a popular movement against dictatorship into another assault on the Jewish state, and their worry is not unfounded. Last week in Cairo a mob attacked the Israeli Embassy, forcing the evacuation of the ambassador and most of his staff; the previous week the Israeli ambassador to Turkey was expelled. Later this month Palestinians are expected to introduce a resolution on statehood at the United Nations, and Israel could be further isolated if, as expected, a large majority of the General Assembly votes in favor of it.

There’s little doubt that plenty of Arabs and Turks are angry at Israel. But it’s worth noting that, as often is the case in the Middle East, those passions are being steered by governments.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who aspires to regional leadership, has directed a campaign against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and stoked it with incendiary statements. Mr. Erdogan is furious that a U.N. investigation concluded that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, and thus its intervention to stop a Turkish-led flotilla last year, was legal. He also finds it convenient to lambaste Israel rather than talk about neighboring Syria, where daily massacres are being carried out by a regime Mr. Erdogan cultivated.

The assault on the embassy in Cairo has been condemned by the leaders of Egypt’s popular revolution and by some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both they and Western diplomats blame the ruling military for failing to secure the embassy, and they suspect the omission may have been part of an effort to divert rising public unrest toward a familiar target.

In the West Bank, polls have shown that President Mahmoud Abbas’s U.N. statehood initiative is regarded as a low priority by the majority of Palestinians, 60 percent of whom said the better option was resuming direct negotiations with Israel. But Mr. Abbas fears he may be the next target of popular uprising; the U.N. gambit appears aimed in part at preempting that.

This is not to say the trend is benign. Israel is looking more isolated than at any time in decades. It is more than a hapless bystander: Mr. Netanyahu’s government could have avoided a crisis with Turkey had it been willing to apologize for the deaths of nine Turks during the interception of the flotilla, which the U.N. panel rightly judged to be an excessive use of force. An incident in which five Egyptian guards were killed when Israeli forces pursued terrorists crossing the border helped to trigger the upsurge in tensions with Cairo. And Mr. Netanyahu’s slowness to embrace reasonable parameters for Palestinian statehood provided Mr. Abbas with a pretext for his U.N. initiative.

It nevertheless is in the interest of Western governments, as well as of Israel, to resist the counterproductive and irresponsible initiatives of Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erdogan. In Egypt, the military has cited the attack on the Israeli Embassy as a pretext to apply emergency laws and censor the media; those, too, are steps in the wrong direction. The core demands of the Arab Spring have nothing to do with Israel: They are about ending authoritarian rule and modernizing stagnating societies. Scapegoating Israel will not satisfy the imperative for change.

U.S. told Egypt it must rescue Israeli embassy workers or suffer 'consequences,' sources say

Published 23:17 10.09.11
Latest update 09:05 11.09.11
HAARETZ

Officials involved in attempt to resolve mob attack on Israeli embassy in Cairo say U.S. Secretary of Defense Panetta managed to speak with head of Egypt's ruling military only after 2 hours of repeated calling.
By Barak Ravid Tags: Egypt Arab Spring Benjamin Netanyahu


The United States told Egypt's military rulers during an attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo that they must act quickly in order to prevent Israeli personnel from being attacked by Egyptian protesters, Haaretz learned on Saturday.

According to senior U.S. source that were involved in the attempt to resolve the Cairo incident, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called Supreme Military Council head Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, conveying what the source called a forceful message concerning the need for speed in Egypt's ending of the embassy attack.

"There's no time to waste," Panetta reportedly told Tantawi in the 1 A.M. call, warning of a tragic outcome that "would have very severe consequences."

The U.S. source also said that Tantawi failed to answer incoming calls from U.S. officials throughout the evening, finally answering after more than two hours of attempts.

These reports came after earlier Saturday, a senior Israeli source indicated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak attempted repeatedly to reach the head of Egypt's Supreme Military Council, to no avail.

According to the Israeli source, the "Egyptians said every time that they were not able to track him down in order to connect the call." After failing to locate Tantawi himself, Netanyahu called head of Egyptian intelligence, Gen. Murad Muwafi.

Barak, in turn, called U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, asking him to discuss the issue with Tantawi, which Panetta was able to do shortly after.

Also on Saturday, Egypt raised its national alertness level following the severe nighttime incident late Friday, as thousands of Egyptian protesters attacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo, resulting in the evacuation of dozens of Israeli diplomats.

Egyptian commandos released six besieged security guards from the Israeli Embassy, while an Israeli Air Force plane evacuated over 80 diplomats, including family members from Cairo, after a mass group of Egyptian protesters broke into the embassy.


Netanyahu thanked on Saturday both the United States and Egypt for their aid in the wake of the embassy attack, adding that Israel's peace treaty with Egypt was an interest shared by both countries and "an anchor" in Israel's regional policy.

Netanyahu also referred to what he saw as a link between events such as the attack on the Israeli embassy and the stalled Middle East peace process.

Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism

By Patrick Cockburn:

September 11, 2011 "The Independent" - -The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate

What was the most devastating attack by al-Qa'ida in the past few months? Despite all the pious talk this weekend about combating "terrorism", few will have heard of it. It happened on 15 August when bombers killed 63 people in 17 cities up and down Iraq in the space of a few hours.

Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilisations.

As the arch-exponent of "terrorism", al-Qa'ida is both less and more than the picture of it presented by governments, intelligence agencies, journalists and commentators. As an organisation, it has always been small and ramshackle, but, if it appears larger, it is because it has the ability to tap into fierce local disputes. Osama bin Laden may have wanted to launch global jihad, but the majority of those who claimed to be al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have had a different and more immediate agenda.

In Iraq, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, the local franchisee, though never under the control of Bin Laden, was always more interested in butchering Iraqi Shia than in killing American soldiers. The Pakistani Taliban, closely linked to al-Qa'ida, still devotes part of its energies to sending suicide bombers to blow up Shia villagers and city labourers, even when it is facing offensives by the Pakistan army.

Al-Qa'ida's sectarianism is fortunate for the West. Many of the attacks attributed to al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have failed because those carrying them out could not build the simplest explosive device. Why this has happened is something of a mystery since such expertise is all too widespread in areas of al-Qa'ida strength, in central Iraq, north-west Pakistan and even parts of southern Yemen. But the knowledge is not passed on because the bombmakers in these areas fortunately remain absorbed in seeking to murder their Muslim neighbours and show limited interest in spreading mayhem to Chicago or New York.

Al-Qa'ida as a global organisation has always been something of a fiction. Bin Laden may have wanted international reach but, aside from 9/11, seldom achieved it. His propaganda has been accepted as reality by self-interested governments and intelligence agencies with an interest in exaggerating the al-Qa'ida threat to enhance their own authority. Even the most botched and amateur bombing attempt has been portrayed as if it were the Gunpowder Plot revisited. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula commented derisively that it did not matter if its plots failed or succeeded, because even failures disrupted world air traffic and created chaos.

Al-Qa'ida appears to have tentacles all over the world because groups, often with different agendas but using similar tactics, became its franchisees. This notion has also taken hold because autocracies everywhere have an interest in pretending that their opponents are all Islamic fundamentalists, hand-in-glove with al-Qa'ida. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi did this with great success in his relations with the CIA and MI6, partly because the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was led by veterans of the Afghan war, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj. India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, battling what were essentially widely supported separatist movements, could claim to be fearless fighters against Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.

On 9/11, al-Qa'ida's great success was to publicise its own existence and to spark an American overreaction that played straight into its hands. It provoked the US to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and become entrapped in civil wars of great complexity. It has become easy in retrospect to blame George W Bush and his lieutenants in Washington and on the ground for such errors as dissolving the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But at the time – though they have remained very quiet about it since – the Shia and Kurdish leaders were all in favour of eliminating these two main instruments of Sunni power and letting America take the blame.

The Iraq war relaunched al-Qa'ida in another way. From the beginning, US military spokesmen thought it was a smart idea to claim that insurgent attacks, whoever had made them, were the work of al-Qa'ida. The aim was to win support for the war in the US, but in Iraq, where the US occupation was increasingly unpopular, it gave the false impression that al-Qa'ida was leading the guerrilla attacks on the US army. Local children started waving black al-Qa'ida flags at US soldiers. Sunni Arabs thought they might be a useful ally and the movement found it easier to raise money across the Arab world.

Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organisation, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.

Could any US government have reacted differently after 9/11? Was not the popular desire for retaliation so strong that Washington could not avoid walking into the al-Qa'ida trap? There is something in this, but the reason this form of "terrorism" is so effective is that political leaders are tempted to use the opportunity to expand their power by highlighting the threat. They can portray critics who do not go along with this as naive or unpatriotic. Necessary reforms can be dumped amid a general call to rally around the flag.

This overreaction to "terrorist" attacks is not quite inevitable. In Northern Ireland after the start of the troubles in 1968, the Provisional IRA became expert at provoking the British Army and government into overreacting. When a British soldier was killed, the collective punishment of a Roman Catholic district would follow and young men rushed to join the Provisionals. It took a dozen years before the British Army realised that it was reacting as the IRA hoped it would react.

Has the US learned a similar lesson? It looks doubtful because no US president can admit that he has fought unnecessary wars in pursuit of an enemy that barely exists.

Ten years after 9/11, U.S. policymakers have been remarkably disinclined to learn from their mistakes.

latimes.com
Editorial
Get smarter on security


September 11, 2011

In the 10 years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. policymakers have done some things right and many things wrong. Yet they have been remarkably disinclined to learn from their mistakes.

To mark the anniversary, many media reports have assessed the impacts of the federal spending and policy changes that resulted from the attacks. In The Times, for example, staff writer Ken Dilanian examined the effects of laws making it possible for federal investigators to collect, analyze and store digital data and other communications from Americans, with little or no judicial or congressional oversight. The extent of this eavesdropping is kept secret, but a handful of high-profile cases have shown that even the once-privileged communications between a defendant and his lawyer are no longer off-limits, and that the ability to obtain a warrant without probable cause is leading to snafus such as the investigation of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, mistakenly considered a suspect in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. That doesn't appear to bother Congress, which in May overwhelmingly approved a four-year extension of the Patriot Act.

Meanwhile, the House in May approved a defense spending bill giving the president the authority to use military force against "Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces" whether they have any connection to the 9/11 attacks or not. That goes well beyond the powers handed to President Bush after the attacks and is in essence an authorization for endless war, against enemies of the commander in chief's choosing. It comes amid military-led nation-building exercises in two countries that have largely failed to create their own democratic institutions despite vast expenditures of American blood and treasure.

The aforementioned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost an estimated $4 trillion, and the U.S. now spends about $75 billion a year on domestic security. As Times staff writer Kim Murphy reported, a good portion of that homeland security money has been spread around for projects of highly dubious value, such as on cattle prods in Nebraska lest terrorists launch biological warfare against cows, and on an armored vehicle for the Glendale police. Yet even as Congress reassesses spending priorities in other federal departments in its zeal to reduce the deficit, there has been scant effort to examine the effectiveness of these programs or to trim the Department of Homeland Security's bloated budget.

As the Transportation Security Administration approves increasingly intrusive methods of screening passengers at airports, it's growing ever more questionable whether the safety benefits are worth the cost. To prevent terrorists from boarding a plane with plastic explosives concealed inside their clothing, security officials are now using airport scanners to view naked images of passengers. If terrorists adjust to the new regime by hiding explosives in their body cavities, which current scanners can't penetrate, it's reasonable to wonder what new types of probes fliers will be subjected to.

In the arena of foreign policy, meanwhile, the United States has focused extensively and successfully on securing the cooperation of foreign countries in the war against terror. But while doing so, it has ignored other priorities, such as expanding trade or combating climate change, that would have a far bigger effect on future prosperity and thus, arguably, on domestic security.

To be sure, not all of the nation's efforts since 9/11 have been wasted. Al Qaeda's ability to wage attacks overseas has been severely degraded, Osama bin Laden is no more, and untold numbers of dangerous enemies of the United States are dead or detained. There has not been a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil since that terrible day, which is either a tribute to the effectiveness of our security operations or an indicator of the incompetence of our enemies. Protecting Americans is and should remain a top priority of the federal government. But what rankles is that decision-making on terrorism and security still seems to be dominated by the same sense of panic that took hold in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. After 10 years we have learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn't, yet there has been far too little attempt to change the policies that don't.

As the nation looks back today, and rightly honors those who lost their lives, we'd urge Americans — and especially lawmakers — to put a little thought into looking forward too. Today, the number of people killed annually by Muslim terrorists outside war zones is roughly equal to the number who die in bathtub accidents, according to Ohio State University professor John Mueller, who has written extensively on terrorism risks and expenditures. That doesn't mean fighting terrorism should no longer be a priority, but it does mean we need to be sure that we balance it rationally with other priorities that are equally important.

My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American

September 11, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
NYT
By POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR

IN the late ’90s and early ’00s, I used to frequent a boutique in the East Village called Michael and Hushi. Hushi Mortezaie, an impish club kid born in Iran and raised in the Bay Area, made outlandish, psychedelic, robot-chic clothing and was getting the coolest of the East Village cool kids to wear his strategically slashed and torn Farsi-graffitied shirts, though none of them had any idea that in some cases they were bearing post-Iranian Revolution political slogans.

I — born in Iran, raised in the Los Angeles area — used to go to downtown parties in a skimpy halter top that featured newsprint-emblazoned mujahideen women brandishing machine guns, their bullets bedazzled in gold next to the words “Long Live Iran.” It was the first time I had worn anything having to do with my homeland; I loved that feeling of for once being able to both be Iranian and a play on it.

In one of the last days of August 2001, I remember being at the boutique again, and Hushi was giddy preparing for Fashion Week. His store windows were freshly adorned with his “Persian collection,” a new line of hijab-and-harem-pant Iranophilia. “Girl, get ready!” he said, “Iran is going to be the new black.”

Days later, there we were, two Middle Eastern 20-somethings who now had some explaining to do. Friends started speaking in roundabout inquiries: What exactly was the status of my green card? How were my father and brother faring? Were they Muslim, by the way?

Hushi’s stylists, meanwhile, were calling him to ask how he was — and when he was going to be getting rid of that window display. But somehow we really were fine, even under the heavy air of everyone’s condescending concern.

Little did we know that it would take almost a full decade for the proverbial 9/11 fallout to fall out, for anti-Muslim xenophobia to emerge, fully formed and fever-pitched, ostensibly over plans to build an interfaith cultural center near ground zero. Even in New York, stronghold of progressive ethics and cultural diversity, my former home of 12 years, August 2010 became the evil twin of that still-innocent August 2001.

In addition to the mosque, of course, there was the Florida pastor who wanted to burn Korans on the Sept. 11 anniversary, and who has yes-no-maybe-so reconsidered, after a hearty load of negative press and a dab of executive-branch headshaking. And, hey, what do you get when you put a drunk white college student, who had actually been to Afghanistan, into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? The wrong answer and a stabbing, allegedly.

It’s one test I would have passed. For the record: I am not Muslim. My immediate family ultimately kept us as agnostic as possible; religion went only as far as my mother praying to the American concept of a guardian angel and my dad “studying” Zoroastrianism. But most of the extended Khakpours are Muslim and, culturally, it’s a part of me insofar as I am a Middle Easterner.

I am also a New Yorker, a deal that was sealed forever nine years ago. I had just moved from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan to shack up with a boyfriend. The studio was 25 floors up, with a nearly all-glass wall that framed a perfect view of the World Trade Center.

Now, when I look back on ages 23 to 32, every aspect of my life is shadowed by what I saw through the glass that blue-and-gold Tuesday morning: two towers, each gashed and stunningly hazed in the glitter of exploding windows, falling, one after the other, over and over again. But what was once simple apprehension and mortification and trepidation has become increasingly entangled with feelings of exhaustion and marginalization and even indignation.

•

A deep dark admission: lately — and by lately I mean this era I worked so hard for, when a liberal person of color, a man who resembles my own father, would be our president — I’ve found myself thinking secretly, were certain things better in the George W. Bush era? Was it easier to be Middle Eastern then?

Just six days after 9/11, at the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind.” He added: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Did that assurance mean more to white Americans coming from someone who looked like them?

Xenophobia and racism still abounded, but the lid stayed on the pot. Perhaps when Republicans held both the White House and Congress, conservatives weren’t sweating a thing; for them, people of color, along with all our white liberal friends, were lumped together in one misery-loves-company fringe. But now that the tables have turned, conservatives have positioned themselves as aggrieved victims. (I recall the advice of an older female relative: Always let men you’re in relationships with have all the power; it’s when they lose power and get insecure that your problems start.)

Indeed, has the most irrational breed of 9/11 payback emerged precisely because we elected an African-American president whose middle name — the name of cousins of mine — has turned into an H-word slur? A commander in chief whom the most misled and confused perceive in cartoon cahoots with terrorists, or at least as their religion-mate? As if that weren’t enough, take last year’s Fort Hood gunman, add a helping of the would-be Times Square bomber and top it off with “ground zero mosque” — and voilà, a boiling hot summer of anti-Islamic assault. Suddenly, anyone with skin as dark as President Obama’s could be a “secret Muslim,” and any Muslim must surely be a not-so-secret terrorist.

The world Hushi and I were in, before 9/11 and just after, was not a picnic for brown people. And there’s no need to cast 2001 to 2008 in an ideal light. None of us breathed easy. It’s just that we expected to breathe easier as time went on.

•

My brother, who lives in Brooklyn, recently discovered that many of his Muslim friends in New York felt that the Islamic cultural center was a bad idea to begin with, for this sole reason: it was going to put them in danger. He and his friends feel a fear that they haven’t in ages, or ever.

During our late-night calls, my brother and I talk about nothing but what’s on the news, and we laugh a lot, but we laugh nervously. My sense of humor, honed in my immigrant childhood, was always my ultimate disarming mechanism, a handy way to infuse the blues with some off color.

This was my modus operandi during a book tour in 2007, when 90 percent of my Q-and-A’s were about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s notorious president, as my publication date coincided with his infamous visit to Columbia University. It was annoying and even baffling, because it had nothing to do with me or the book. But I laughed and joked with the audience so that it was clear to them I was, like, totally un-Ahmadinejad, dudes.

The hilarity started to curdle at the moment I was also feeling the most euphoric: during Mr. Obama’s bid for the presidency. It was around then that I began murdering whole days on the Internet, and not just on the Internet but in its dirty basement, the comments sections of blogs. There, an angry tribe of fake names spoke in misspelled obscenities and declaimed the true, evil nature of Middle Easterners and their intentions in this country. This is silly, I’d tell myself, these trolls aren’t representative of my neighbors or of Americans.

Then I’d go on Facebook, and engage in more online warfare with friends of friends, real flesh-and-blood people with real-life names, who a bit more politely and grammatically stated the same. And there was me — a non-Muslim, who has publicly criticized certain Islamic practices — flaccidly battling for Muslims worldwide. It got to the point that I was telling people I didn’t even know that their opinions were making my life downright “unlivable.”

It reminds me of how I used to experience so many mixed emotions when I’d see women in full burqa in Brooklyn: alarm at the spectacle (no matter how many times I’d seen it), followed by a certain feminist irk, and finally discomfiture at our cultural kinship. And then it would all turn into one strong emotion — protective rage — when I’d see a group of teenagers laughing and pointing at them.

•

Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more. But I should still be in my honeymoon phase, since I’m actually just a 9-year-old American. And that’s my other association with autumn 2001. As luck would have it, my citizenship papers finally went through not long after the towers fell. That November, I was in a Brooklyn federal courtroom singing, along with a room full of immigrants, the national anthem that I hadn’t sung since K through 12.

I remember on that day, 9/11 leaving the foreground of my mind for the first time. I remember looking around that room and feeling, in spite of myself, a sense of optimism about the future. I remember feeling a part of something. I remember feeling thrilled at the official introduction of the hyphen that would from now on gracefully declare and demarcate my two worlds: Middle-Eastern-American. The same hyphen that today feels like a dagger that coarsely divides had once, not too long ago at all, been a symbol of a most hallowed bond.

Fighter pilot recalls mission to stop 9/11 plane

By MARTIN GRIFFITH - Associated Press | AP – 9/10/11



This photo provided by the National Championship Air Races shows Heather Penney in front of the race jet "Ragu Grace", in Reno, Nev.. Fighter pilot Heather "Lucky" Penney didn't have time to be scared. There was a hijacked commercial airliner headed to Washington, D.C., and she was ordered to stop it. On Sept. 11, 2001, Penney and her commanding officer were ordered to stop United Airlines Flight 93 from hitting a target in the nation's capital. But they didn't have any missiles or even ammunition. So Col. Marc Sasseville decided they would use their own planes to bring it down. (AP Photo/National Championship Air Races, Tyson Rininger)

This photo provided by the National Championship Air Races shows Heather Penney RENO, Nev. (AP) — Fighter pilot Heather "Lucky" Penney didn't have time to be scared. There was a hijacked commercial airliner headed to Washington, D.C., and she was ordered to stop it.

"I was prepared to die for my country," she said. "It's something everyone else would have done if they were in my shoes. I didn't have time to feel fear. We had a mission, and there was a sense of urgency."

On Sept. 11, 2001, Penney and her commanding officer were ordered to stop United Airlines Flight 93 from hitting a target in the nation's capital. But they didn't have any missiles or even ammunition. So Col. Marc Sasseville decided they would use their own planes to bring it down.

He planned to strike the plane's cockpit. She opted to go for its tail, Penney said.

She didn't know it at the time, but the plane had already crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Her mission soon changed to helping defend Washington's airspace and escorting Air Force One, with then-President George W. Bush aboard, to Andrews Air Force Base.

"It was an important mission to bring the president home, but after the beginning of the day, it was rather anticlimactic," she said.

Penney, then a lieutenant with the Air National Guard's 121st fighter squadron, was the only female fighter pilot to be assigned to protecting that airspace.

"It was so surreal because the air space was so quiet," she recalled. "I really didn't have much emotion or time to reflect that day because I was focused on getting the job done."

Penney, 37, of Annapolis, Md., was among a first generation of women to take advantage when the military opened up combat flight training to them. A single mother, she quit as a fighter pilot in 2009 to devote more time to her two young daughters after serving two tours in Iraq.

She doesn't dwell on that day in September 2001, she said.

"I'm not willing to let my life be hijacked, and I don't think we should let our nation be hijacked," she told The Associated Press. "We're a great and resilient country, and there's no reason to react with fear or let that take us off our game plan."

She now works for defense contractor Lockheed Martin, flying a C-38 as a traditional Air Guard member, pursuing a second master's degree and preparing to race a jet in next week's National Championship Air Races in Reno.

Her father, John Penney, is a four-time champion in the event's Unlimited Class and a former military pilot. As a rookie last year, she finished second in her jet class.

"I'm proud to be part of the lineage of women in the jet community," said Penney, who lived in the Reno area when her father worked for William Lear's jet-making company in the 1980s. "But ultimately the jet doesn't care if you are a man or a woman, it only cares that you are a good pilot."

When she thinks about her role on Sept. 11 and how it will be remembered, she said she hoped media attention on the attacks won't make Americans fearful of the future.

"We saw so much of the best of ourselves come out that day, with strangers helping strangers and many courageous acts," she said. "We remembered something more important than ourselves, and that was the community to which we belonged."

9/11 observances across the U.S., around the world

By Vera H-C Chan | The Upshot – 2 hrs 57 mins ago 9/11/2011
Yahoo News

An American flag is unfurled during a commemoration at the Trocadero plaza in Paris, Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011. (AP …
Americans honored the places where terrorism struck 10 years ago with memorials and commemoration ceremonies Sunday. But beyond Manhattan, Shanksville, Pa., and Washington D.C., people in communities across the country and around the world also held anniversary observances.

Here are a few examples:

Firefighters across the United States climbed the length of 110 flight of stairs — the height of the Twin Towers — to honor the 343 New York firefighters who died in the line of duty. Colorado firefighters first undertook this event for the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and it spread to other fire stations. This year, Alaska participants climbed the Juneau Federal Building, Californians the TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco, South Carolinians at the Yachtsman Resort in Myrtle Beach, Texans at the Renaissance Tower in Dallas.
In Boston Public Garden, 3,000 American flags sprouted at the Garden of Rememberance, a 9/11 monument erected in 2004. Volunteers with Boston Cares gathered at dawn, according to the Boston Globe. Using mallets and screwdrivers, they planted all 3,000 within an hour. In New Jersey, its memorial, Empty Sky, debuted Saturday, drawing residents throughout the weekend.
Many museums hosted commemorative events (the 9/11 Memorial museum in Pennsylvania opened Sunday to victims' families and opens its doors to the general public on September 12). Washington D.C.'s Newseum waived entrance fees: One of its permanent exhibits is its 9/11 gallery, which includes a display of newspapers' front pages during that time and the North Tower's twisted broadcast antenna.
In the town of Belleville, Ill., a short ceremony gathered around a 35-foot, 7,100-pound steel beam, the centerpiece of the town's Sept. 11 Memorial Walkway of Southern Illinois. The New York Port Authority has granted more than 1,200 requests to disburse relics from the WTC site to places around the world.
Tributes have proliferated online, big and small, as Americans remembered where they were that day in 2001. A Gazette Times reader had flashbacks to her time in Oklahoma, when Tim McVeigh brought down the federal building with his homemade bomb. A NYT reader wrote about scooping dust from an abandoned car four days after the event, and keeping it in a jar. On Yahoo!, a woman recounted the birth of her daughter on 9/11.

Observances have also taken place far beyond U.S. shores, including a London service and prayers in Marie Rose Abad Village, a former Manila shantytown rehabilitated to fulfill a victim's wish to help destitute Filipinos. (Mental Floss recounts the global reactions in the days following the 2001 attacks.)

The largest overseas memorial, NPR reported, took place in France. A civic group, The French Will Never Forget, recreated a nine-story replica of the World Trade Center, across from the Eiffel Tower. Names of 9/11 victim were inscribed on each tower. The civic group's site also is commemorating American sacrifice during World War II, and has launched an initiative to "lay a red rose on each and every one of the 60,511 graves and 11 Missing in Action monuments of Americans fallen in France" from both world wars by July 4.

The movement reinforces a message France sent to the world, and Le Monde newspaper proclaimed in 2001, "Nous sommes tous Americains" — "We are all Americans."

A world without 9/11: No President Obama, more China trouble, same debt crisis

By Michael Lind, Published: September 9 2011
WP

Imagine that the twin towers still dominated the Manhattan skyline. Imagine that the Pentagon’s western facade had remained intact. Imagine that there was no reason to build a memorial in Shanksville, Pa. And imagine that the numbers 9 and 11 meant nothing more than an emergency telephone call.

The world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, that much is clear. But how much, and how radically?

Historians and novelists love constructing “what if” scenarios: What if Hitler had won World War II? What if the Confederacy had prevailed in the Civil War? What if a Chinese sailor, rather than Columbus, had discovered America?

Such debates are a simple game, at worst. But at its best, counterfactual history helps us distinguish what is truly constant in our time from what is merely contingent, what is enduring from what is fleeting.

So, with that in mind: What if the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, had never happened? What if the plan to hijack airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and possibly the Capitol had been called off or thwarted, or never even developed?

Of course, Osama bin Laden and his allies might have carried out another catastrophic and shocking attack. Absent such an event, however, U.S. efforts against al-Qaeda might have continued in their more limited pre-9/11 forms: some drone strikes against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Sudan, pressure on the Taliban to expel bin Laden, international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation. We’d never have known the “war on terror” as an organizing principle of an entire presidential administration.

And Osama bin Laden would never have become a household name.

Without the catalyst of the attacks, Congress would not have undertaken the greatest reorganization of the national security bureaucracy since the Truman years, stitching together the Department of Homeland Security from nearly two dozen agencies. Airline travel would still have its annoyances, but massively intrusive security screening might not be one of them.

American foreign policy would be strikingly different and almost certainly less bellicose. In the early months of the Bush administration, U.S.-Chinese tensions were high, and many American neoconservatives were focused on the rise of China as a military “peer competitor.” If the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had never come under attack, U.S. defense policy probably would have concentrated more on the Pacific than on the Middle East. A direct confrontation with China would have been unlikely, but without a distracting war on terror, Washington would have focused much more on China’s military buildup, its deals with anti-American regimes, and cyber-attacks by Chinese hackers against the United States and its allies.

No Sept. 11 means no invasion of Afghanistan, and possibly no invasion of Iraq. At most, we might have seen covert actions and more cruise missile attacks, such as those the Clinton administration launched in 1998, against countries harboring bin Laden and his allies. And terms such as “IED” (improvised explosive device) and “TBI” (traumatic brain injury) would not have become the defining reality for a generation of American troops.

Without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there would have been no effort to reorient the U.S. armed forces toward counterinsurgency operations. No 9/11, no COIN. America’s defense planners might have spent the first decade of the 21st century focusing on possible high-tech naval and air combat in Asia, rather than on policing and nation-building in occupied Muslim countries.

And the opening of an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan would have been a nonevent.

Certainly, the Middle East would still have been a priority for Washington, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would have remained one of America’s chief enemies in the region. But if 9/11 had never occurred, the United States might have continued its post-Persian Gulf War policy of “containment” against Hussein’s regime to this day — through no-fly zones and intermittent bombing of the territory that Hussein controlled.

But it is possible that, even without 9/11, the Bush administration would have chosen to invade Iraq. The much-hyped threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — which turned out not to exist — might have been enough for Washington to launch an invasion. Or the United States might have carried out plans, favored by many neoconservatives before 9/11, to back an Iraqi rebellion, a scheme opponents called the “Bay of Goats” scenario. If Hussein’s regime had fallen as a result of an American invasion or a domestic rebellion, then a bloody fracturing of the country along ethnic lines might have occurred regardless.

Without 9/11, Iran, another chief U.S. rival in the region, almost certainly would wield less influence than it does today. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan removed two of Iran’s major enemies — Hussein, who had waged war against Iran, and the Taliban, a Sunni radical regime that despised Iran’s Shiite mullahs. And the destruction of Hussein’s Sunni-minority regime has allowed Iran to greatly increase its influence among Iraq’s Shiite majority.

And what of the Arab Spring? How did 9/11 affect this movement? It seems clear that the timing of the revolts in the Arab world has had more to do with the long-term decay of sclerotic dictatorships than with anything the jihadist movement has offered — in part because its atrocities against Muslims as well as against “crusaders” and “Jews” have disgusted many Muslims. Paradoxically, if Muslim radicalism had been less tainted by the mass murder of 9/11, its long-term goal of replacing Arab regimes with Muslim theocracies might have had more appeal among the region’s revolutionaries.

On the home front, American politics would have unfolded in vastly different ways. Assume that, with no 9/11 to use as a pretext to invade Iraq, the election of 2004 would have been a peacetime contest, centered largely on economic issues. It may seem minor compared with today’s economic difficulties, but recall how a “jobless recovery” followed the crash of the tech bubble, and the subsequent bubble in real estate and stocks took time to inflate. George W. Bush, like his father before him, might not have won reelection if the Democratic nominee had run a reprise of the 1992 Clinton campaign, with the message “it’s the economy, stupid.”

But that doesn’t mean America would have had a President John Kerry. Kerry secured the Democratic nomination in 2004 in large part because primary voters believed that his war record and national security expertise made the Democrats less vulnerable to the claim that they were soft on terrorism. Remember his acceptance speech’s opening line, which brought the crowd at the national convention in Boston to its feet? “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty!”

Without the backdrop of the war on terror, a Vietnam War record might not have seemed to be a plus to Democratic primary voters, who are to the left of Democrats overall and the electorate in general. They might have chosen another candidate, one more in tune with new fundraising technologies, one focused on the populist economic issues that would have dominated the peacetime election.

President Howard Dean, anyone?

Whether Dean, Kerry or someone else, the winning Democrat in 2004 would almost certainly have run for reelection in 2008 (it is hard to imagine Hillary Rodham Clinton launching a primary challenge against a sitting president). That means Barack Obama might still be a senator from Illinois. There would have been no history-making first African American president, no birth-certificate controversy — and Obama could still be friends with his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

If Bush, unable to run as a wartime president, had lost in 2004, he would not have had four more years to alienate Republican moderates with wars and deficits. In this parallel universe, that group of voters might have stayed with the GOP rather than defecting to the Democrats in great numbers in 2008 — and would have wielded more influence in contemporary politics than the tea party movement. And unlike Obama, a Democratic president in a world without 9/11 might have paid less attention to right-leaning independents and governed as more of a progressive.

And what of the U.S. economy in a world in which Mohamed Atta and his fellow terrorists never hijacked airplanes? If the United States had not invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the national deficit and debt would be considerably lower today. According to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, between September 2001 and March 2011, Congress appropriated $1.283 trillion for the wars, additional security measures and health care for veterans — with 63 percent of the total related to Iraq and 35 percent to Afghanistan. Economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have estimated that the long-term cost of the wars, including veterans’ care, may exceed $3 trillion.

That’s a lot of money, no doubt. But as a contribution to the long-term budget deficit, the combined costs of the wars are lower than the costs of the Great Recession and related recovery measures. Recession-driven deficits, in turn, are lower than the long-term deficits caused by the Bush tax cuts.

Bottom line: Even without 9/11 and the subsequent wars, the United States still might be facing huge deficits — particularly if the Bush tax cuts had been enacted and if the stock and real estate bubbles had inflated and then popped, with disastrous effects for the global financial system and consumer demand.

Indeed, when historians write the actual — not counterfactual — history of our time, Sept. 11 might receive less attention than the crash of 2008, which produced the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The bubble that burst that year was a result of trends dating back to the 1970s, including American consumers taking on excessive debt to finance consumption, despite their stagnant incomes, and the low interest rates made possible by Japan and China, which recycled their huge trade surpluses into purchases of U.S. debt to keep their currencies artificially low and their exports competitive.

These macroeconomic imbalances would have made a global economic reckoning inevitable, with or without 9/11. As it happens, the costs to the world economy after the bubble burst, in lost wealth and slow growth, dwarf both the direct economic damage inflicted on Sept. 11, 2001 — $40 billion in insurance costs, temporary losses in the airline business and a stock market decline — and the indirect costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of spending on homeland security. And its possible full costs, including the failure of Europe’s experiment in integration and the self-defeating moves by countries exporting unemployment to one other through protectionist policies, have yet to be tallied by historians.

The fall of Lehman Brothers has resulted in far more economic damage and greater long-run consequences than the fall of the twin towers. This is not to minimize the horror of 9/11, its tragic death toll or the costs of its aftermath, but to put them in perspective. Whether the attacks of Sept. 11 had taken place or not, the world almost certainly would have been devastated by weapons of mass destruction — not airplanes hijacked by jihadists, nor the imaginary atomic bombs and chemical weapons of Saddam Hussein, but explosive credit derivatives in the hands of the world’s bankers.

outlook@washpost.com

Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and the author of “The American Way of Strategy.”