So, what, it’s 9/11 week now?

I first noticed it on Sunday night. . . that would be Sunday, 9/7. . . and have seen it every following night this week. Here is my photo from September 10th, 2008.

I have generally been a supporter of this “Tribute in Light,” as it is called. I like the concept, even if the execution looks a bit half-assed (the columns are too thin and too close together, and they move around a bit from year to year, rather than consistently approximating the position of the World Trade Center in the New York skyline). And, questions about what kind of fuel is used to generate the electricity needed for that long night’s journey into day do leave me with an uneasy feeling about the lights being a symbol of some of the problems that lead to the attacks as much as it is a tribute to the victims. But, all that aside, I thought the lights were a relatively elegant and fairly solemn commemoration of the attacks and the lives lost on 9/11/2001.

Relatively elegant and fairly solemn compared to so much of the political opportunism and grand guignol that typically surround remembrances of the attacks; relatively elegant and fairly solemn if the columns of light appear on 9/11, on the exact anniversary, and are not trotted out every now and then, popping up here and there, until they become little more than Vegas-style spectacle, stripped of the majority of their meaning.

Which is why seeing the towers of light on September 7th. . . and 8th. . . and 9th. . . and 10th disturbs me.

It has, obviously, been the case that our country’s “leadership” has used the memory and images of the attacks for personal and political gain almost form the very second of impact, but it was somewhat heartening to believe that New York, and New Yorkers, having felt the impact of the attacks more personally, having lost friends and colleagues, having inhaled and tasted the dust of the collapsed towers, still considered the events of the day, and the day itself, basically sacrosanct.

But, living as I do in New York, I am beginning to see a shift. “Nine-eleven,” the event, and “ground zero,” the scene of the event, have become, for better or worse, a kind of tourist attraction—and I think that New York City, the government entity (rather than the community), has noticed.

Seven years removed from the carnage of 2001, people still come from every part of the country and every corner of the globe to catch a glimpse of “ground zero” (or, these days, to catch a glimpse of the fence around the construction site that used to be ground zero). I am sure that many of those that visit do so with the utmost respect, but one need only take a gander at the tee-shirts, crystal figurines, and snow globes sold all around lower Manhattan to know that something other than solemn tribute is also at play here.

As a resident, I shouldn’t complain about tourists coming to my city and spending money—and generally, I don’t—but ground zero isn’t the Statue of Liberty or the Bronx Zoo, and 9/11 isn’t President’s Day or the Fourth of July. There is nothing fun about gazing on the site where thousands died, and the anniversary of the attack is nothing to celebrate.

But the city has trotted out some extra World Trade Center artifacts this week, and a pair of rusted beams from the destroyed towers are on display today and tomorrow in Battery Park (visitors are being allowed to sign these beams or write their own tributes—make of that what you will)—and now the Tribute in Light is a weeklong feature in the night sky. Can it be long before “9/11 weekend” is a blackout day for the airlines, travel agents offer ground zero package tours, or Macy’s offers special September 11th savings?

Someday (someday, and I am not holding my breath, nor am I really in any hurry) New York will have a permanent 9/11 memorial structured around the original WTC footprint. And that memorial will be surrounded by overly tall and mostly ugly buildings that will likely require so much security as to render the entire area less a place of remembrance and quiet contemplation than a zone of tedious inconvenience and harried hurly-burly. Until then, especially in this electoral year where we have the chance to cast out the opportunistic leaders that have dishonored the memories of the 9/11 dead, perhaps we can use this day to contemplate how far we’ve come and all that we’ve managed to accomplish in seven years. . .

. . . uh, yeah, well, on second thought, those columns of light sure do look pretty cool out there.


(cross-posted on guy2k, The Seminal, and Daily Kos)

A few words about a few words

WASHINGTON — A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.

. . . .

The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities,” the letter said. It was signed by Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

As the end of the Bush administration nears, the White House has been seeking to formalize in law and regulation some of the aggressive counterterrorism steps it has already taken in practice since the Sept. 11 attacks.

. . . .

The Democratic senators said the draft plan appeared to allow the F.B.I. to go even further in collecting information on Americans connected to “foreign intelligence” without any factual predicate. They also said there appeared to be few constraints on how the information would be shared with other agencies.

[emphasis added]

The story speaks for itself, except in one paragraph. That would be the third one excerpted above. It is subtle—I actually missed it the first time I read the story—but it is as powerful and insidious as it is sloppy and wrong.

See it?

. . . the White House has been seeking to formalize in law and regulation some of the aggressive counterterrorism steps it has already taken in practice since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since the story itself will point out toward its end that the Bush-era Justice Department has shown no evidence that these methods work, they are not “aggressive counterterrorism steps”—they are just aggressively intrusive and patently counter to the Constitution.

And, when is the establishment going to give up the canard about the administration’s illegal spying starting after the attacks of 9/11/01. There is evidence, submitted in open court, upheld by a judge (and mentioned in many of my posts, including this one), which confirms that the White House went to the nation’s telecommunications giants within weeks of Bush’s first inauguration. This is not a counterterrorism program implemented as a response to September 11th—this is a premeditated policy by this administration to go around the Constitution in order to collect information on Americans without court order or congressional oversight. This is not an issue of striking a balance between law enforcement and civil rights—there is no law enforcement intended here, and you don’t get to decide how much to abrogate the US Constitution.

Shame on the White House for committing these egregious abuses. Shame on Congress for abdicating their responsibilities to stop it. And, shame on the New York Times for perpetuating the administration-generated myth that this abuse is somehow a counterterrorism tactic.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Who are you, John Kiriakou? (And who ordered the torture?)

ABC News bills its exclusive interview with John Kiriakou as “Coming In from the Cold: CIA Spy Calls Waterboarding Necessary but Torture,” but where exactly was this spy coming in from?

In his interview with Brian Ross, Kiriakou says a great many things—and it is quite the mixed bag. Sure, he says that he now believes waterboarding to be torture (he tried it and lasted about five seconds), but he also takes a twisted road to say that it was necessary for such a “high value” detainee.

In fact, much of the interview, and much of the tone of the ABC tape, goes to great ends to inflate the importance of Abu Zubaydah. To watch the report, you would believe that Zubaydah was the linchpin to breaking open the whole 9/11 conspiracy, and you would also believe that the crucial information was first divulged by AZ as a direct result of the waterboarding.

Ross and his colleagues do little to undercut this contention. It makes for an exciting exclusive, but not for very good journalism. The truth—if we can ever truly get there in these hyper-secret times—about Abu Zubaydah and his importance seems much, much hazier than Kiriakou or ABC leads us to believe.

Though I don’t have time to post a complete point-by-point (I’m a little under the weather today), I have read numerous major reputable publications on this subject, and I can safely say that for every bit of information that Kiriakou (or, for that matter, George W. Bush) claims was revealed by AZ after his torture, there is credible evidence that the US knew the intel before Zubaydah was even captured. The Washington Post and New York Times have covered this, and even the Report of the 9/11 Commission makes note that the supposedly key information that Kiriakou and Bush like to attribute to AZ—the “nickname” of Khalid Shaykh Mohammed—was known to the US before the attacks of 9/11/01.

Ron Suskind, in his book, The One Percent Doctrine, calls Zubaydah a low-level logistics guy, responsible for making minor travel arrangements, who knew nothing of al Qaeda’s inner workings. Suskind also notes that AZ was, in the words of one intelligence analyst, “insane, certifiable, [a] split personality.”

Like I said—none of that is in the Ross piece. Instead, the takeaway on this is that waterboarding may very well be torture by 2007 standards, but in those heady, just barely post-9/11 days, even torture could be forgiven since it lead to such crucial—and dare I say, because Kiriakou does—life-saving intelligence.

I can already feel the goalposts moving on this debate. Is it not only a matter of time before all the “serious” people “admit” that waterboarding is, y’know, basically a technique that borders on torture now that we look at it, but given the times and the “ticking time bomb,” sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Watch this space.

One interesting thing that John Kiriakou does say, and at some length, is that instructions for this “enhanced interrogation”—like that used to rough up Abu Zubaydah—came directly from CIA headquarters:

The former intelligence officer says the interrogators’ activities were carefully directed from Langley, Va., every step of the way.

“It wasn't up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m gonna slap him. Or ‘I'm going to shake him.’ Or ‘I'm gonna make him stay up for 48 hours.’ Each one of these steps, even though they're minor steps, like the intention shake-- or the openhanded belly slap, each one of these had to have the approval of the Deputy Director for Operations.

“. . . . [B]efore you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He's uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’ And that permission would come. ‘You're allowed to him one time in the belly with an open hand.’"

This is information that should prick up the ears of more than one committee chair in Congress as they begin to ask questions about torture and the destroyed tapes of Abu Zubaydah’s (and at least one other’s) interrogation.

But, to the matter at hand, I still have questions about who John Kiriakou is. Aside from his being a retired CIA officer of undetermined grade, it appears that he now has a job in the business. . . and when I say “the business,” I mean “the industry.”

Lindsay Beyerstein reported yesterday that Kiriakou, who is credited as a “security consultant” on the upcoming Paramount release The Kite Runner, was connected with the film’s producers by “lobbyists from Viacom.”

The film adaptation of the Khaled Hosseini novel has been the center of some controversy of late. Several of the young stars of the film had to be spirited out of their native Afghanistan after fears arose that the boys and their families might be targets of violence because of a simulated rape scene in the movie.

Several papers credit Rich Klein, a “Middle East expert” with Kissinger McLarty Associates (KLA), as having made many of the arrangements for the evacuation. Klein seems to be the go-to guy for many productions looking to film in the Middle East. KLA is a K Street consulting firm formed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Mack McLarty, the former White House Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton. (I do no know if John Kiriakou is connected in any way with KLA, nor do I know if KLA is the Viacom lobbyist that Beyerstein references.)

It’s a tangled, but interesting connection. One, of course, not mentioned by Ross or ABC. It is also a connection made more interesting when you note the Nightline feature that will appear one day after it aired the Kiriakou piece—that would be an interview with the makers of. . . wait for it. . . The Kite Runner.


UPDATE: It seems that Kevin Drum had some similar thoughts about Abu Zubaydah’s suddenly fast-rising stock.


(cross-posted to Daily Kos and The Seminal)