Below is today’s column in USA Today on the death of Osama Bin Laden.
The death of Osama bin Laden has left the United States with a type of morning-after effect. For 10 years, an ever-expanding war on terror has been defined by one central dark figure: Osama bin Laden. It is perhaps not surprising that in a celebrity-driven society, even our wars seemed personality driven. For many, Iraq was about Saddam Hussein. Afghanistan was about Osama bin Laden. With both of these defining figures gone, however, it is time to take account of what has been lost, and what has been gained.
For civil libertarians, the legacy of bin Laden is most troubling because it shows how the greatest injuries from terror are often self-inflicted. Bin Laden’s twisted notion of success was not the bringing down of two buildings in New York or the partial destruction of the Pentagon. It was how the response to those attacks by the United States resulted in our abandonment of core principles and values in the “war on terror.” Many of the most lasting impacts of this ill-defined war were felt domestically, not internationally.
Starting with George W. Bush, the 9/11 attacks were used to justify the creation of a massive counterterrorism system with growing personnel and budgets designed to find terrorists in the heartland. Laws were rewritten to prevent citizens from challenging searches and expanding surveillance of citizens. Leaders from both parties acquiesced as the Bush administration launched programs of warrantless surveillance, sweeping arrests of Muslim citizens and the creation of a torture program.
What has been most chilling is that the elimination of Saddam and now bin Laden has little impact on this system, which seems to continue like a perpetual motion machine of surveillance and searches. While President Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned Americans of the power of the military-industrial complex, we now have a counterterrorism system that employs tens of thousands, spends tens of billions of dollars each year and is increasingly unchecked in its operations.
Just as leaders are unwilling to take responsibility to end the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, we face the same vacuum of leadership on civil liberties. Whether it is groping at airports or warrantless surveillance or the denial of rights to accused terrorists, our security laws will continue to be justified under a “war on terror” that by definition can never end. There will always be terrorism, and thus we will remain a nation at war — with all of the expanded powers given to government agencies and officials.
If bin Laden wanted to change America, he succeeded. Bush officials were quick to claim that our laws and even our Constitution made us vulnerable to attack — even though later investigations showed that the attacks could have been prevented under existing laws. Despite the negligence of agencies such as the FBI and CIA in allowing the attacks, those same agencies were given unprecedented power and budgets in the aftermath of 9/11.
President Obama has continued, and even expanded, many of the controversial Bush programs. His administration moved to quash dozens of public interest lawsuits fighting warrantless surveillance. Both Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have refused to investigate, let alone prosecute, officials for torture under the “water-boarding” program — despite clear obligations under treaties for such action. The Obama administration has continued military tribunals and the Caesar-like authority of the president to send some defendants to real courts and some to makeshift tribunals. The administration recently instructed investigators that they can ignore constitutional protections such as Miranda rights to combat terror. Once the power of the FBI and other agencies were expanded, no one had the courage to order the resumption of lost civil liberties or the return of prior limits on government power or surveillance. It is not the lack of security but the lack of courage in our leaders that continues the expansion of this security state.
The death of bin Laden is not the marker of an end of a period but a reminder that there is no end to this period. For those who have long wanted expansion of presidential powers and the limitation of constitutional rights, bin Laden gave them an irresistible opportunity to reshape this country — and the expectations of our citizens. We now accept thousands of security cameras in public places, intrusive physical searches and expanding police powers as the new reality of American life. The privacy that once defined this nation is now viewed as a quaint, if not naive, concept. Police power works like the release of gas in a closed space: expand the space and the gas fills it. It is rare in history to see ground lost in civil liberties be regained through concessions of power by the government. Our terrorism laws have transcended bin Laden and even 9/11. They have become the status quo. That is the greatest tragedy of bin Laden’s legacy — not what he did to us, but whatwe have done to ourselves.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, is a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors.
The Big Lie: Torture Got Bin Laden
The Daily Beast, 5/3/2011
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-republican-spin.html
Excerpt:
Dave Weigel predicts Republican spin:
Expect to hear more about this report that the information that led to the tailing of bin Laden’s courier, and eventually to his death, was acquired in interrogations that Obama ended once he took office. It may not be Republican candidates pointing this out. They don’t need to. George W. Bush has a considerable amen chorus in the press, with former staffers like Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, and John Yoo writing regular columns about how the 43rd president was right.
Predict it? It’s already become a meme. Last night, O’Reilly simply said “What about the waterboarding?” before moving on to other issues. A military reader writes how Fox is leading with the torture lie:
Driving right now – flipped on Fox News Channel out of curiosity on Sirius. Since 07h30, they have been openly encouraging waterboarding and have at least 6 times that I’ve noticed said that the reason we got OBL is directly attributable to what had been revealed during waterboarding sessions. I am, in two words, fucking disgusted.
Here’s Andrew Malcolm:
That previous president authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which convinced folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to give up, among many other things, the name of their top-secret courier, now deceased.
Leave aside the horrifying fact that Republicans, seeking to score some ownership of this triumph, would look to torture as their contribution. Why not the beefed up on-the-ground intelligence from 2005 on? That’s Bush’s legacy that Obama built on. Besides, there is no evidence that it played any part whatsoever. From the NYT:
Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.
It’s also a time to reflect on the Bush Adminstration’s decision to make a war with Iraq a top priority and to take resources and attention away from Afghanistan. We had the opportunity to capture OBL in 2001…but didn’t have the will to do it. This post from Think Progress sums up the story pretty well:
ANALYSIS: Bush’s Lackluster Hunt For Bin Laden
By Alex Seotz-Wald
5/3/2011
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/03/bush-did-not-catch-bin-laden/
Politico reports that supporters of George W. Bush are “irked” that the former president isn’t getting more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, despite the droves of conservatives lawmakers and pundits who have been rushing to give Bush equal credit as Obama.
But this praise for Bush relies on rewriting history to obscure the fact Obama re-prioritized the hunt for Bin Laden after Bush had largely abandoned the effort to focus on Iraq.
While many conservatives are triumphantly replaying Bush’s September 2001 declaration that he would find Bin Laden, just months later, by Bush’s own account, he was unconcerned about the terrorist mastermind. Asked about the hunt for Bin Laden at a March, 2002 press conference, Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq.” “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you,” Bush added.
By 2006, the trail for Bin Laden had gone “stone cold” and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes said Bush told him that hunting Bin Laden was “not a top priority use of American resources.” (Indeed, there was a flailing war in Iraq to fight.)
That year, it was revealed that the administration had he shuttered the CIA’s Bin Laden unit in late 2005. As the New York Times reported at the time, the move reflected a shift in resources to Iraq:
In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military’s counterterrorism units, like the Army’s Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.
But Bush’s biggest misstep in the Bin Laden hunt occurred years before, in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. As a 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report found, the Bush administration blew a critical opportunity to capture Bin Laden in 2001. Bin Laden was wounded and on the run, but top Bush national security officials rejected repeated pleas for reinforcements from commanders and intelligence officials fighting the terrorist leader in the caves of Tora Bora, despite the availability of resources:
Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias. […]
Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, [Commanding Gen. Tommy] Franks refused to deviate from the plan.
The report “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora,” but that decisions made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputies, and other top administration officials allowed Bin Laden to escape.
The consequence of this missed ooportunity are tremendous. As Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, told NPR yesterday, “if bin Laden had been killed in Afghanistan eight years ago in the caves of Tora Bora, al-Qaida might well have died with him. Now the organization is diversified enough it could weather bin Laden’s death — and hardly miss a beat.”
Moreover, as Rumsfeld himself acknowledged, Bush’s extra-legal torture and rendition policies did not help capture Bin Laden. Enhanced interrogation techniques did not work. Bush ordered one final push to capture Bin laden shortly before he left office, but this effort too was unsuccessful.
JT,
Beautifully and importantly said. You exemplify what the practice of law should be about and do so fearlessly. It’s what keeps me coming back.
To echo Former Fed’s post, the rule of law needs to return for us to regain the liberties that we treasure. Until we can get a Supreme Court that is not bought and paid for and until we can get a Department of Justice that is not constrained by politics to go after admitted torturers, we will have no justice and the downward slide of our freedoms will continue.
Professor Turley,
I, most likely amongst legions of others—perhaps worldwide—appreciate your column article wherein you pull no punches.
The only manner in which U.S. citizens might regain the full measure of civil liberties and the core principles enumerated in the Bill of Rights is through the entrance of authentic constitutional law scholars and persons of intellect and legal/moral conscience into the political arena as active participants.
Without hesitation, you are the first person entering my mind who exemplifies the full embodiment of the aforementioned distinctive qualities. Why not have your name immortalized alongside the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, et al. and as one of the unique few capable of wresting the abuses of power from the likes of Bush, Cheney, Obama, and others?
Blouise,
Well said, lady
Thanks Ms. Elaine, I mean Ms. Blouise 🙂
Just popped in for a sec. Good luck today !!!!!
WHITE HOUSE TO RELEASE BIN LADEN DEATH PHOTO
Tue May 03 2011 10:22:50 ET
President Obama decided Tuesday morning to release at least one photo showing Osama Bin Laden’s death, a top source claims.
The images, being described as ‘graphic’, are bound to stir emotions in the east and the west, and will likely become the most viewed photographs in modern history.
One image shows a bullet wound to his head above his left eye.
Will it remove all doubt about the death?
The exact timing on the release is being debated.
Hypocrisy has been with us from the get-go. Note Buddha’s post to Amerika and remember that at the time those fine words were written thousands of men, women, and children wore the chains of slavery. The hypocrisy of Free white men living off the enslaved labor of others just didn’t compute.
Is it really surprising that we continue to manifest such a difference between our words and our actions? We are not now, nor have we ever been that which we claim to honor.
However, we have always been exceptionally good bullies … and we love to lecture others on the subject of our righteous goodness.
Adieu
I have been thinking of the wise words of John Adams the past couple of days:
I just hope we have not passed the tipping point. That concern is not unfounded.
For what was lost, what was really gained….
BTW – a great piece prof, thanks for writing it & getting into a paper many people read.
Whats most sad is that so many people recognize what we have done to ourselves, what we as a nation have become. And yet there seems to be no way to stop it, no way to return the country to what it can be what it should be.
I have told my children to get out of the US as I think the results are going to be much worse here than in the civilized world. But I don’t think the see it and the certainly are not reacting to it.
To me, the following notion is only a hypothetical:
“There will always be terrorism, and thus we will remain a nation at war…”
Unless humans manage to escape from the solar system, our nearest neighbor star will run out of hydrogen, and human life on this planet will cease to be possible, though it may take billions of years unless humans accomplish the eradication of humanity sooner than that.
No matter how I can model human terrorism, it is a transient event, even though it may persist for billions of years into the future.
If human terrorism will eventually cease (for want of humans to terrorize and be terrorized) why not go about learning what actually generates terror and terrorism and set about designing and developing a practical, practicable, and pragmatic alternative?
Why wait until there are no humans left to terrorize?
I herewith state, without equivocation, that I can no longer find evidence that the work in bioengineering I have been doing for decades has not unriddled the essential mechanism and process of terrorism.
Does anyone else on this planet have the will and the courage to actually explore, in detail, the merits or lack of merits of wht I have been doing, the better to learn whether it is or is not junk science, whether it is or is not pseudo-science?
One core aspect of terrorism is found within the work of the late Dr. Martin Cooperman, to the effect that reciprocal retaliation is a defeating process, whether it happens within a psychoanalytic dyad or in the whole of global human society.
Doing that which causes a problem only leads to solving the problem after it has become sufficiently recognized and understood that doing what causes a problem can never solve it.
That my posted comments here on this blawg have sometimes resulted in seemingly hateful transferences being sent my way is a sadly profound hint of my work being terribly accurate in some key respects?
If the traditional infant-child transition (sometimes called the infant-child discontinuity because of the common amnesia for early infancy and childhood people often experience) is, as the research I have done suggests to me, is the psychosocial developmental stage during which terror and the ways of terrorism are typically internalized, then there may yet be merit in exploring whether very young infants are actually capable of the forms of deception which may be the root mechanism of terrorism.
Until someone actually demonstrates that one or more mistakes actually made could have been avoided through any achievable process, I will continue to explore the possibility that terrorism is an artifact of socialization trauma, which is itself an artifact of the limits of the thus-far-accomplished evolution of human society.
If it is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly when that is the only actually achievable pathway leading toward learning to do it well.
It may be so simple that only little children can understand it, children so young as to be unable to tell what they understand.
Except for some people who keep core aspects of early infancy and childhood.
What is autism, taken as a whole? I can tell only what I have learned. For me, autism is a condition in which the self is a proper object of study, such that self (personhood) and society are separable and thereby can be understood as separate phenomena.
For as long as social tradition coercively mandates severe errors of attribution through terrorizing little children into self-denial and self-deception, how are the consequences of such severe errors to be averted?
It is my best guess that the remedy for terrorism is so simple that only a simpleton like me might notice it.
I find it useful to mentally model the universe as though made of three components. There is everything which has not yet happened. There is everything that is happening now. There is everything that has already happened.
The observable fact that the end of the era of human terrorism has not yet happened is no evidence that it will not eventually happen.
Why wait?
If not now, when?
If not here, where?
If not us, who?
Why live in terror of the not yet demonstrated to be forever-impossible end of terrorism?
Mike A.,
Adding to what you said: Think of the legacy our leaders and media have left us with. Many Americans and a majority of teenagers who were polled approve of “enhanced interrogation methods.”
**********
As America continues to wage two wars in the Middle East, a striking new study shows a shift in attitudes about how to treat captured enemies. Daniel Stone reports on why the post-9/11 generation is in favor of gruesome interrogation techniques.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-12/red-cross-study-finds-60-percent-of-young-people-support-torture/#
By Danial Stone
The Daily Beast
Excerpt:
It’s a simple question with a gut-wrenching answer: In a time of war, is it ever OK to torture an enemy?
For decades, the answer was an automatic no. The often-cruel conditions endured by prisoners of war during World War Two spurred the Geneva Conventions, which stipulated an agreed-upon set of standards for handling war victims. By the late 1960s, when any young man could have been drafted to go to Vietnam, the humane treatment of soldiers was at the forefront of many Americans’ concerns.
But now, during a time of two overseas wars, Americans’ opinions on torture seem to have fractured, and largely on generational lines. A new study by the American Red Cross obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults.
Amerika.
Remember these words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Bda,
Here’s a more in-depth report on the events leading up to the raid. Sounds very much like the report I heard on CNN that we were discussing on another thread:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2
Hunt for al Qaeda’s website, Osama bin Laden:
Online war strategy or censorship?
http://www.thinkandask.com/news/findingbinladen.html
I agree with Prof. Turley that our loss of liberty is likely to be permanent, for both political and sociological reasons. Even my own children, all of whom are adults, view my concerns as overwrought. And in the era of “persistent conflict” with extremism, there will be precious little political stomach to reverse intrusive security legislation. http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/war-on-terror-promises-era-of-persistent-conflict-30653/?utm_source=Newsletter159&utm_medium=email&utm_content=0503&utm_campaign=newsletters
FYI:
Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, 47, is one of 54 children (25 girls, 29 boys.)