TomDispatch.com

Here’s a little fact of our age: Rear Admiral Peter Clark is the 16th commander of America’s notorious prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, opened in January 2002, and it seems he won’t be the last.  As the New York Times recently reported, the Trump administration is already readying a draft executive order that would direct the Pentagon to use that prison to “detain suspected members of ‘Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, including individuals and networks associated with the Islamic State.’” One such terror suspect, Abu Khaybar, held in Yemen by “another country” and long associated with al-Qaeda, is supposedly being eyed as the possible first new Guantánamo detainee since the end of the Bush era.

Consider all of this a guarantee that what might be the world’s most notorious prison will undoubtedly have a 17th, 18th, and 19th commander -- brought to you by the job-creating administration of Donald J. Trump who, during the 2016 election campaign, swore that he would keep that prison open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” In addition, instead of spending what he claimed was $40 million a month sprucing up Gitmo, he “guaranteed” that he would do it for “peanuts.”  Post-election, according to no less of an authority than White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, the president still "believes that Guantánamo Bay does serve a very, very healthy purpose in our national security."  Of course, the Islamic State agrees with both of them that it would be “healthy” indeed -- for ISIS, that is, which has already staged horrific videoed torture and killing scenes, while mockingly dressing its prisoners in the orange jumpsuits Guantánamo made (in)famous.

All I can say is thank god that, despite promising on day one of his presidency to shut down Guantánamo within a year, President Obama didn’t issue an executive order in his last months in office to do so (as he certainly could have).  It would have set a terrible example of executive overreach for President Trump and might have led him, despite endless Republican complaints about such overreach during the Obama era, to resort to rule by executive order himself.  (Sad!)  So all looks upbeat indeed when it comes to the future of Guantánamo-style extra-legality and to that crown jewel in what was once a Bermuda Triangle of offshore injustice, even if we don’t yet know whether the Trump administration will send U.S. citizens there.  Unfortunately, not all Americans have experienced the benefits of Gitmo equally.  TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and an expert on Guantánamo, who has written on that subject for this website for more than a decade, is certainly one of those. She tells her sad story today. Tom

Guantánamo's Last 100 Days
The Story That Never Was
By Karen J. Greenberg

In the spring of 2016, I asked a student of mine to do me a favor and figure out which day would be the 100th before Barack Obama’s presidency ended. October 12th, he reported back, and then asked me the obvious question: Why in the world did I want to know?

The answer was simple. Years before I had written a book about Guantánamo’s first 100 days and I was looking forward to writing an essay highlighting that detention camp’s last 100 days. I had been waiting for this moment almost eight years, since on the first day of his presidency Obama signed an executive order to close that already infamous offshore prison within a year. 

I knew exactly what I would write. The piece would narrate the unraveling of that infamous detention facility, detail by detail, like a film running in reverse. I would have the chance to describe how the last detainees were marched onto planes (though not, as when they arrived, shackled to the floor, diapered, and wearing sensory-deprivation goggles as well).  I would mention the dismantling of the kitchen, the emptying of the garrison, and the halting of all activities.

Fifteen years after it was first opened by the Bush administration as a crucial site in its Global War on Terror, I would get to learn the parting thoughts of both the last U.S. military personnel stationed there and the final detainees, just as I had once recorded the initial impressions of the first detainees and their captors when Gitmo opened in January 2002. I would be able to dramatize the inevitable interagency dialogues about security and safety, post-Guantánamo, and about preparing some of those detainees for American prison life. Though it had long been a distant dream, I was looking forward with particular relish to writing about the gates slamming shut on that symbol of the way the Bush administration had sent injustice offshore and about the re-opening of the federal courts to Guantánamo detainees, including some of those involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.

Read more »

If you had asked Americans about Afghanistan before 1979, it’s a reasonable bet that most of us wouldn’t have known much about that country or even been able to locate it on a map.  Perhaps only to the “freaks” of that era, in search of a superb hashish high, would its name have rung a special bell.  It was, after all, a key stop -- considered particularly friendly and welcoming -- on what was then called “the hippy trail.” In those years, you would have been taken for either an idiot or a mad person if you had told any American, freak or not, that between 1979 and 2017, the United States would engage in two wars in that country, the first against the Soviet Union and the second against the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other terror outfits; that Washington would be at war there for more than a quarter of a century (with a decade-plus off during a brutal Afghan civil war and the rise of the Taliban); and that almost 16 years into its second Afghan War, its generals would be considering how many more U.S. troops to recommend that a new president send in to continue the conflict into the distant future.

And yet that’s a perfectly reasonable summary of the situation from the moment Washington dispatched the CIA (and piles of money) to that region to give the Soviet Union, which had sent the Red Army into Kabul in 1979, a “bloody nose” and its own “Vietnam.”  The irony: they succeeded.  Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called his country’s war there “the bleeding wound” and when the Red Army finally limped out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Soviet Union itself was at the edge of implosion.  From that experience, the political leadership in Washington seemed to draw only one lesson: it could never happen to us.  Sending an American army of occupation into Kabul and then, like the Soviets, pouring money into the military and the wars that followed would never result in a “bleeding wound,” not for the “sole superpower” on planet Earth.  The result, as TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore writes today, has been a bloody wound par excellence or at least one hell of a bloody nose.  As once again an American commander there calls for yet more U.S. troops and Defense Secretary James Mattis, who as the head of Central Command once oversaw the Afghan War, considers just what Washington's next steps should be, rest assured of one thing: based on the record to date, they’re not likely to be steps in the direction the Russians took in 1989 -- not yet, anyway. Tom

Losing a War One Bad Metaphor at a Time
Thrashing About in the Afghan Petri Dish
By William J. Astore

America’s war in Afghanistan is now in its 16th year, the longest foreign war in our history.  The phrase “no end in sight” barely covers the situation.  Prospects of victory -- if victory is defined as eliminating that country as a haven for Islamist terrorists while creating a representative government in Kabul -- are arguably more tenuous today than at any point since the U.S. military invaded in 2001 and routed the Taliban.  Such “progress” has, over the years, invariably proven “fragile” and “reversible,” to use the weasel words of General David Petraeus who oversaw the Afghan “surge” of 2010-2011 under President Obama.  To cite just one recent data point: the Taliban now controls 15% more territory than it did in 2015.

That statistic came up in recent Senate testimony by the U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan, John "Mick" Nicholson Jr., who is (to give no-end-in-sight further context) the 12th U.S. commander since the war began.  Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he called for several thousand more U.S. troops to break what he optimistically described as a "stalemate."  Those troops would, he added, serve mainly as advisers and trainers to Afghan forces, facilitating what he labeled “hold-fight-disrupt” operations.  

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Reviews of our latest Dispatch book, John Feffer's superb dystopian novel, Splinterlands, are just beginning to come in and they're uniformly superb.  The Washington City Paper, citing its "brilliance," writes, "If you’re having a hard time deciding whether to read 1984 or The Origins of Totalitarianism -- or if you’ve already read them both and want something in-between -- consider local author John Feffer’s Splinterlands."  The Midwest Book Review adds, "Readers who enjoy dystopian stories that hold more than a light look at political structures and their downfall will more than appreciate the in-depth approach John Feffer takes in his novel."  I urge you to support TomDispatch (and get a riveting late night read) by picking up a copy, or for a $100 donation ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), get your own signed, personalized copy from the author via our donation page (where numerous other books of our moment are also available) and give this site a real helping hand.  Tom]

The Art of the Trumpaclysm
How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself
By Tom Engelhardt

It’s been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it's been! It’s driving people back to newspapers (online, if not in print) and ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack for “breaking news” or audiences. It’s a smash in both the Hollywood and car accident sense of the term, a phenomenon the likes of which we’ve simply never experienced. Think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and the cameras rolled. It’s proved, in every way, to be a giant leak. A faucet. A spigot. An absolute flood of non-news, quarter-news, half-news, crazed news, fake news, and over-the-top actual news.

And you know exactly what -- and whom -- I’m talking about.  No need to explain.  I mean, you tell me: What doesn’t it have?  Its lead actor is the closest we’ve come in our nation's capital to an action figure.  Think of him as the Mar-a-Lego version of Batman and the Joker rolled into one, a president who, as he told us at a news conference recently, is “the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life” and the “least racist person” as well.  As report after report indicates, he attacks, lashes out, mocks, tweets, pummels, charges, and complains, showering calumny on others even as he praises his achievements without surcease.  Think of him as the towering inferno of twenty-first-century American politics or a modern Godzilla eternally emerging from New York harbor.

Read more »

The members of what TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, calls “the Church of America the Redeemer” are in some disarray these days and in quite an uproar over the new Pope and his aberrant set of cardinals now ensconced in Washington. Perhaps there was no more striking -- or shocking -- evidence of that than the brief comments that hit the front page of the New York Times last week in an article on a month of “turmoil” in the Trump White House, but never became a headline story nationally. Amid the hurricane of news about the fall of national security adviser of 24 days Michael Flynn, the reported contacts of Trump associates with Russia, and a flurry of leaks to major papers from what are assumedly significant figures in the intelligence community (talk about "feud"!), one thing should have stood out. Here’s the passage from that Times piece: "Gen. Tony Thomas, head of the military’s Special Operations Command, expressed concern about upheaval inside the White House. 'Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil. I hope they sort it out soon because we’re a nation at war,' he said at a military conference on Tuesday. Asked about his comments later, General Thomas said in a brief interview, 'As a commander, I’m concerned our government be as stable as possible.'”

It may not have looked like much, but it should have stunned the news media and the country. That it didn’t tells us a great deal about how the U.S. has changed since September 11, 2001.  Thomas, the head of the crème de la crème, secretive military force (all 70,000 of them) cocooned inside the U.S. military, had just broken the unwritten rules of the American political game in a major way. He fired what amounted to an implicit warning shot across the bow of the Trump administration's listing ship of state: Mr. President, we are at war and you better get your house in order fast. Really? Direct public criticism of the president from a top commander in a military once renowned for its commitment to staying above the political fray?  Consider that something new under the sun and evidence that what might once have been considered a cliché -- sooner or later wars always come home -- is now an ever more realistic description of just where we’ve ended up 15-plus years after the Bush administration launched the war on terror. Seven days in May?  Maybe not, but when the nation's top special warrior starts worrying in public about whether civilian leaders are up to the task of governing, it's no ordinary day in February.

It’s true, of course, that in many graphic ways -- including the migration of spying devices developed on this country's distant battlefields to police departments here, drone surveillance flights not in Afghanistan but over this country, and the increasing militarization of our police -- our wars in the Greater Middle East have indeed made their way back to “the homeland.”  Still, not like this, not directly into the sacrosanct heartland of democracy and of the political elite, into what Bacevich might call the precincts of the American political Vatican, where those like New York Times columnist David Brooks once happily opined about American “greatness.” It seems that we’re now plunged into the political equivalent of war in the nation’s capital, even if in the fog of battle it’s still a little hard to tell just who is who on that battlefield. Tom

Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer
David Brooks on Making America Great Again
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Apart from being a police officer, firefighter, or soldier engaged in one of this nation’s endless wars, writing a column for a major American newspaper has got to be one of the toughest and most unforgiving jobs there is.  The pay may be decent (at least if your gig is with one of the major papers in New York or Washington), but the pressures to perform on cue are undoubtedly relentless.

Anyone who has ever tried cramming a coherent and ostensibly insightful argument into a mere 750 words knows what I’m talking about.  Writing op-eds does not perhaps qualify as high art.  Yet, like tying flies or knitting sweaters, it requires no small amount of skill.  Performing the trick week in and week out without too obviously recycling the same ideas over and over again -- or at least while disguising repetitions and concealing inconsistencies -- requires notable gifts.

David Brooks of the New York Times is a gifted columnist.  Among contemporary journalists, he is our Walter Lippmann, the closest thing we have to an establishment-approved public intellectual.  As was the case with Lippmann, Brooks works hard to suppress the temptation to rant.  He shuns raw partisanship.  In his frequent radio and television appearances, he speaks in measured tones.  Dry humor and ironic references abound.  And like Lippmann, when circumstances change, he makes at least a show of adjusting his views accordingly.

Read more »

If you’re going to surround yourself with generals in the Oval Office, as Donald Trump has done, that means one thing in these years: you’re going to appoint men whose careers were made (or unmade) by what was once known as the Global War on Terror.  They will be deeply associated with Washington’s 15 years of disastrous wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, which have left that region a set of failed or near-failed states and a hotbed of terror outfits, including various branches of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.  Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis, for instance, led troops in the initial post-invasion period in Afghanistan in 2001; in the taking of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in 2003; in the fierce fighting for the city of Fallujah in 2004; and then, from 2010 to 2013, he was in charge of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), with responsibility for the Greater Middle East. In that post, he cooked up a scheme to take out either an Iranian oil refinery or power plant in the “dead of night,” an act of war meant to pay that country back for supplying mortars to Iraqi insurgents killing American troops. That plan, nixed by the Obama White House, seems to have played a role in his removal from the CENTCOM post five months early.

General John Kelly, head of the Department of Homeland Security, also commanded troops and fought in Iraq.  (His son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010.)  Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn held key intelligence positions in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while his temporary replacement (and now National Security Council chief of staff), General Joseph “Keith” Kellogg, retired and working with private contractor Oracle at the time of the invasion of Iraq, was sent to Baghdad as chief operating officer of the Coalition Provisional Authority that the Bush administration set up to run its ill-fated occupation of that country.  He lasted only five months as that body began its “reconstruction” of Iraq, after disbanding Saddam’s army and so putting its officers and troops on the unemployment line, which meant at the disposal of the developing insurgency.  Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, the new national security adviser, just tapped for the job by Trump, isn't even retired and held command posts in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the evidence of these last years, such experiences seem to have tied these men to the war against terror in a deep and visceral way, making any major reconsideration of what they had lived through inconceivable.  In the new Trump era, clues to this ongoing reality can already be found in two recent events: the first Trump-ordered action in the Greater Middle East, a thoroughly botched Special Operations raid in Yemen, which did not achieve its objective but got large numbers of civilians and one Navy SEAL killed and which, given the last 15 years of U.S. military action in the region, looked painfully familiar; and the request of the present U.S. Afghan commander, General John Nicholson Jr., for “several thousand” more American military advisers, one that it’s hard to imagine he would have made before the Senate Armed Services Committee without the agreement of Defense Secretary Mattis.  It’s also a request that was clearly meant as no more than an opening bid in a potentially far larger surge of American forces into Afghanistan.  (Where have you heard that before?)

Under the circumstances, it’s good to know that, even if not at the highest ranks of the U.S. military, there are officers who have been able to take in what they experienced up close and personal in Iraq and Afghanistan and make some new -- not desperately old -- sense of it.  U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, a former history instructor at West Point and the author of Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge, who writes his inaugural TomDispatch post today, is obviously one of them and I doubt he’s alone in the American armed forces after all these years. Tom

How We Got Here
The Misuse of American Military Power and The Middle East in Chaos
By Danny Sjursen

The United States has already lost -- its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there? 

At this point, it’s at least reasonable to look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course. Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the kid gloves. Maybe there just weren’t ever enough troops. (Bring back the draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of thousands of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about lots more of them, maybe even a nuke?) 

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on -- and on and on. 

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that? 

Read more »