"War On Terror"
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Danny Moloshok / Reuters At around 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2011, officers with the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff's Department's Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team surrounded the home of 26-year-old José Guerena, a former U.S. Marine and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to serve a search warrant for narcotics. As the officers approached, Guerena lay sleeping in his bedroom after working the graveyard shift at a local mine. When his wife Vanessa woke him up, screaming that she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her, Guerena grabbed his AR-15 rifle, instructed Vanessa to hide in the closet with their four-year old son, and left the bedroom to investigate.
How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police - Arthur Rizer & Joseph Hartman - National - The Atlantic
How to Fund an American Police State | The Nation
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com . To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com . Click here to catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses post-9/11 police “mission creep” in this country, or download it to your iPod here . At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California.The militarisation of 'war on terror' in the US - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
New York, NY - In an instructive coincidence, the passage of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) by the US Congress came on December 15, 2011, the same day as the official start of US forces' pullout from Iraq . One front in the US' post-9/11 conflicts closed overseas, as another front seemingly opened at home. Now awaiting President Barack Obama's signature, which will turn it into law, the NDAA would further entrench here at home some of the defining features of the United States' extraterritorial campaign against political violence by non-state actors, continuing the onward march of the so-called "war on terror" through the American homeland. For years, my students, my colleagues and I have been dealing with the realities of indefinite military imprisonment without trial, and of trial before untested and unfair military commissions.
US detention policy: Exposing the dark side - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
Days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration started making decisions that led to the official authorisation of torture tactics, indefinite incommunicado detention and the denial of habeas corpus for people who would be detained at Guantánamo, Bagram, or "black sites" (secret prisons) run by the CIA, kidnappings, forced disappearances and extraordinary rendition to foreign countries to exploit their torturing services. While some of those practices were canceled when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, others continue to characterise US detention policy in the "war on terror". Even the canceled policies continue to stain the record because there has been a total failure to hold the intellectual authors of these illegal practices accountable or to provide justice for the victims of American torture and extraordinary rendition.
After 9/11, the administration of US President George W Bush initiated the era of the global war on terror. For many, this was a misguided response to terror attacks. But before the decade was over, US forces invaded two countries and are now fighting shadow wars in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, while an air war continues in Libya. Pentagon commands cover the entire planet, and US military assistance programmes are active in almost every country.
9/11 and the makers of history - CISAC
The events of that day were so jarring that they are recorded in our memories as if they had taken place last week. But it has been a long decade, one in which we have made as many mistakes as we have had successes. Now, and not after we suffer another major terrorist attack, is good time to pause, look back, learn lessons, and begin to chart a path away from the past. Looking back, we may see things that we do not want to revisit just yet, controversies that we wish to leave behind.
Richard A. Clarke: What We’ve Learned From 9/11 - The Daily Beast
François Burgat Discusses Western and Islamist Roles in Middle Eastern Political Strategy | Tufts Fletcher School
Dr. François Burgat is in a good place to critique the Western approach to Middle Eastern politics. French by origin, he has spent the last twenty years as a researcher and diplomat living throughout the Middle East. The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies invited Burgat, who is currently the director of the prestigious Institute Français du Proche Orient, to speak about his most recent book, Islamism in the Shadow of Al Qaida . His theory is that the West misunderstands Middle Eastern political tensions by labeling everything Muslim as political Islam and failing to understand its own contribution to the situation. “We over-theologize our understanding of political tensions,” he explained.
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Torturing Democracy Through the American Wars on Crime and Terrorism? - 2008 - Events - Public events - Home
Professor Coyne examines the cost to civil liberties and freedom of America's wars-without-end: the war on terrorism and the war on crime. Coyne's lecture touches on the constitutional questions raised by detention of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay, the US' continuing support of capital punishment, and his work for 'enemy combatants' and death-row prisoners. Media queries: please contact the Press Office if you would like to reserve a press seat or have a media query about this event, email pressoffice@lse.ac.uk | . Whilst we are hosting this listing, LSE Events does not take responsibility for the running and administration of this event. While we take responsible measures to ensure that accurate information is given here (for instance by checking that the room has been booked) this event is ultimately the responsibility of the organisation presenting the event.
Democratic principles in the War on Terror - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
I’d like to ask Chuck Todd: if Bush had John Yoo write a memo opining that it was perfectly legal for Bush to deploy hit squads within the U.S. to assassinate American citizens without any due process, would it be wrong to investigate and prosecute that, too, on the ground that everyone had permission slips from a DOJ lawyer and that’s just what lawyers do? The current President has, of course, obtained his own DOJ permission slip to assassinate American citizens without due process. Since that permission slip is too secret for us to see, we do not know whether the authorized assassination power is confined to foreign soil or extends to the U.S., although once one embraces the Bush-Cheney-Yoo theory that the entire world is a “battlefield,” there is no coherent way to limit those asserted powers to foreign soil.
The war on terror is corrupting all it touches | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian
Every student agitator is a terrorist, every internet hacker, cafeteria dissident, freedom fighter and insurgent leader On Monday the BBC Panorama programme substantiated an extraordinary allegation that suggested how far the war on terror has descended into legal abyss. The claim was that MI6 rolled the pitch for Tony Blair's bizarre 2004 hug-in with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi by apparently arranging for the CIA to kidnap Gaddafi's opponent in exile, Abdel Hakim Belhaj. He was seized in Bangkok, where he and his wife were en route to Britain.The Ideological Animal | Psychology Today
Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she'd be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—"former lefties" who did political 180s after 9/11.I n my 2004 book Fear: The History of a Political Idea , I argued that “one day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind.” When I wrote “one day,” I was thinking decades, not years.
Corey Robin - The Politics of Fear
Former Intel Chief: Call Off The Drone War (And Maybe the Whole War on Terror) | Danger Room | Wired.com
ASPEN, Colorado — Ground the U.S. drone war in Pakistan. Rethink the idea of spending billions of dollars to pursue al-Qaida. Forget chasing terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, unless the local governments are willing to join in the hunt. Those aren’t the words of some human rights activist, or some far-left Congressman. They’re from retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair — the man who was, until recently, nominally in charge of the entire American effort to find, track, and take out terrorists. Now, he’s calling for that campaign to be reconsidered, and possibly even junked.A slippery slope...
a "clash of civilizations?"
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