Tom Engelhardt
Tomgram: Self-Portrait in a Tortured World
Wed Jan 5, 2005 16:15
64.140.158.54
Tomgram: Self-Portrait in a Tortured World
American Gothic:
Self-Portrait with Shackles for the Year 2005
By Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2102
Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines jammed with rich tourists and poor peasants alike. And even in the midst of the collective horror, much of what the Bush administration is, much of whom we now are becoming, showed through unbecomingly.
Only one small spot in the vast Indian Ocean basin "seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to come -- the ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary "aircraft carrier" for the war in Iraq. It also houses "Camp Justice," one of the secret little hideaway resorts the administration has set up, or contracted out for, on prime global real estate to hold "high value" prisoners in the war on terror. The camp, named by someone who must have had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by the Bush administration -- two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and practices far from the prying eyes of the American public and its court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored in that jewel-in-the-crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo to devotees) -- a grim prison camp set up on territory in Cuba that is close at hand, U.S.-controlled, and yet -- or so Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year -- beyond the reach of our courts.
On military bases like Diego Garcia and in special military- or CIA-controlled prisons like Guantanamo, the "war on terrorism" was to be carried to its informational climax by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had. Whether in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, on Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, on U.S. Navy ships at sea, or outsourced to the friendly jails of allied nations whose interrogators practice torture, this varied and ever developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of criminal imprisonment -- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for "World War IV," the war after the Cold War and expected by neocon devotees to last at least as long. Now, according to the latest report from Dana Priest of the Washington Post, the administration is considering exactly how to turn forever into a series of post-penal establishments capable of coping with the realities of life imprisonment beyond all charges and to the end of time.
Devil's Island, USA
There's something, I suppose, that just hates a secret -- and so, as the year of Abu Ghraib ended, ever more of America's secret world of torture (generally called "abuse" in our press) has been tumbling out of the darkness and into the news -- thanks largely to leaks from anonymous but obviously angry sources inside the military and the intelligence "community." For instance, in December we learned from Dana Priest and Scott Higham of the Washington Post, which has been doing the best of this reporting in the mainstream, that deep in the heart of our Guantanamo prison camp was a super-secret CIA wing built in the last year for high-value prisoners previously being passed from place to place globally, "a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public."
Consider it mentioned. And how were they being passed around the CIA's planetary holding areas? Well, as the year ended, Priest revealed that the CIA had its own, possibly one-jet air arm for shuttling these peripatetic prisoners around the planet --"a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities [that]… since 2001… has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers." It's registered to a dummy corporation officered and directed by dummy humans and it has "permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide." A list of where it's been spotted offers a suggestive, though hardly complete, little map of our shadowy system of secret imprisonment: "Since October 2001 the plane has landed in Islamabad; Karachi; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Baghdad; Kuwait City; Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat, Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles International Airport, at Jordan's military airport in Amman and at airports in Frankfurt, Germany; Glasgow, Scotland, and Larnaca, Cyprus."
Egypt and Thailand, for example, are missing from the list, although it's believed that prisoners have been held by the CIA in the jails of both countries as part of the Agency's program of "extraordinary rendition" -- a tortured euphemism that stands in for a policy going back deep into the Clinton years but that really hit its stride after 9/11 in which we contract out the torture of our prisoners to countries previously better known for such practices.
Meanwhile, by year's end, the American Civil Liberties Union, wielding the Freedom of Information Act (which the Bush administration has tried hard to limit), had pried loose a series of stunning emails and memorandums from disturbed and angry FBI agents who had observed interrogation sessions at Guantanamo. They were writing their bosses back on the mainland, complaining of the nature of the "humane" methods military interrogators were using at Guantanamo, not to speak of the fact that some of those military or intelligence interrogators were impersonating FBI agents. (By the way, isn't it curious that it was the ACLU and not the media that did the necessary work to spring these documents?)
When it came to Guantanamo, what we had previously were largely the claims of former prisoners, most of which turned out to be all too accurate but were more easily dismissible; now the FBI has nailed the government on what's been happening, despite endless denials, in our own Devil's Island. These documents are a clear indication that torture, mistreatment, and abuse in American-controlled prisons, holding areas, military camps, and interrogation cells add up to stunning set of contraventions of the Geneva Conventions ("To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment…"); that, in a phrase used for the first time recently in a recent headline on a Washington Post editorial, "war crimes" are being committed routinely out there in the imperium.
Let's recall for a moment what our President had to say at a news conference about such accusation of torture last June: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government."
"A nation of law" and that should comfort us. The United States, of course, signed onto the Geneva Conventions and, as a signatory, is fully bound by them because, according to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, "[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." It doesn't get any higher, does it? And that remains true no matter how many times our attorney-general designee and former overseer of a series of tortured legal documents meant to give the administration the ability to torture more or less at will, refers to the Conventions as "quaint" documents.
Throw in a slew of other recent torture revelations, including a claim by a British prisoner in Guantanamo, for instance, that "the 'strappado,' a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists," was used on him, and you end up with a Grand Guignol menu of interrogation techniques. These, in turn, add up to something like a self-portrait for rest of the world of Bush administration America in 2005.
A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the man "danced as he was shocked"; mock drowning or "waterboarding"; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee's hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee's head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, Afghanistan to the CIA's secret prisons around the world.
Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses. Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those "bad apples" manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland.
Take as just one tiny example of how widespread and commonplace such practices may be: During the recent assault on Falluja, American troops came upon Mohammad al-Jundi, the Syrian driver of two kidnapped French journalists (since released elsewhere). This was presented in our news as a tiny act of liberation of a prisoner held by terrorists. So what do you imagine was the first act of this former driver, when freed? According to Agence France-Presse, he's now suing his American liberators for torture and ill-treatment. His French lawyer Jacques Verges "said that after being found by American troops, al-Jundi was taken in handcuffs to a military base where he was beaten and kicked. Verges said al-Jundi claimed to have been thrice threatened with mock executions and tortured with electric shocks." Ho-hum. Life on the frontier.
Militarism as Religion
The question, of course, is responsibility. Where exactly does it rest? Among the more striking of the ACLU revelations (and the least dealt with in our press) was a single FBI e-mail sent from Guantanamo to senior FBI officials in the States which "makes 11 references to an Executive Order ‘signed by President Bush' that authorized these abusive interrogation methods… that permitted military interrogators in Iraq to place detainees in painful stress positions, impose sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, intimidate them with military dogs and use other coercive methods." Other e-mails link the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the extreme methods used in Guantanamo. (Note by the way that, while our press generally will not use the word "torture" when describing such acts at Guantanamo and elsewhere, the FBI agents don't hesitate to do so.)
Whether there was such an order -- the White House denies it, but at this point that no longer means a thing -- there was certainly a powerful sense among the interrogators, torturers, abusers at Guantanamo and elsewhere that their course had been set at the very top of the system, and in this they couldn't have been more right.
But I get ahead of myself. I was talking about the extraordinarily rendited island of Diego Garcia when I wandered off into the imperial dark side. We only know what the military tells us -- no damage -- about the effects of the tsunami on that very low-lying island, only on average 4 feet above sea level, but that's not so odd. The island has been a blacked-out area, a zone of silence in the Indian Ocean ever since, to oblige us Yanks, the Brits shipped all the Diego Garcians off into misery and poverty on the island of Mauritius, clearing the decks for us.
In normal Internet fashion, some on the Web quickly concluded that there was something deeply conspiratorial about Diego Garcia alone getting the tsunami news in a prompt fashion. But the reason was simple: Unlike the governments of South Asia, the Pentagon was keyed into scientific early warning networks, as it is now keyed into just about everything that matters on this planet. The Pentagon is increasingly like that famed creation of 1950s sci-fi, the Blob; an alien life form capable of absorbing anything that crosses its path. It has swallowed, for instance, many of the functions of the State Department and, having divided the globe into 5 commands (the latest being -- gulp -- Northcom, which means us) and with the heavens tossed in as well (Spacecom), its top commanders now travel the world like planetary plenipotentiaries.
Here, for instance, is how Washington Post columnist David Ignatius described the global processional of our latest Centcom commander:
"Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general."
Indeed. The military has become not just our war-fighting and occupying force, but our main "nation-building" force, our major diplomatic force (now that military-to-military relations have become the essence of foreign policy), our preponderant intelligence force, a major propaganda outfit (or call it public diplomacy, if you will), our central ministry for advanced R&D research and basic science, the only part of the government seriously preparing for a global-warming world, and our planetary rescue outfit as well -- to name just a few of its roles. With more clearly to come.
Take, for instance, intelligence. That CIA jet may seem extravagant, but, in fact, it's a pale shadow of the airborne CIA of the Vietnam era when the Agency covertly operated a full-scale airline, Air America. The Pentagon now controls an estimated 80% of the nation's $40 billion-plus intelligence budget and it's clearly eager for more. Perhaps the most curious news report of the pre-holiday season was a front-page piece in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt (Pentagon Seeks to Expand Role in Intelligence-Collecting). It focused on a plan being put toge
American Gothic:
Self-Portrait with Shackles for the Year 2005
By Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2102
Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines jammed with rich tourists and poor peasants alike. And even in the midst of the collective horror, much of what the Bush administration is, much of whom we now are becoming, showed through unbecomingly.
Only one small spot in the vast Indian Ocean basin "seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to come -- the ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary "aircraft carrier" for the war in Iraq. It also houses "Camp Justice," one of the secret little hideaway resorts the administration has set up, or contracted out for, on prime global real estate to hold "high value" prisoners in the war on terror. The camp, named by someone who must have had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by the Bush administration -- two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and practices far from the prying eyes of the American public and its court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored in that jewel-in-the-crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo to devotees) -- a grim prison camp set up on territory in Cuba that is close at hand, U.S.-controlled, and yet -- or so Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year -- beyond the reach of our courts.
On military bases like Diego Garcia and in special military- or CIA-controlled prisons like Guantanamo, the "war on terrorism" was to be carried to its informational climax by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had. Whether in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, on Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, on U.S. Navy ships at sea, or outsourced to the friendly jails of allied nations whose interrogators practice torture, this varied and ever developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of criminal imprisonment -- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for "World War IV," the war after the Cold War and expected by neocon devotees to last at least as long. Now, according to the latest report from Dana Priest of the Washington Post, the administration is considering exactly how to turn forever into a series of post-penal establishments capable of coping with the realities of life imprisonment beyond all charges and to the end of time.
Devil's Island, USA
There's something, I suppose, that just hates a secret -- and so, as the year of Abu Ghraib ended, ever more of America's secret world of torture (generally called "abuse" in our press) has been tumbling out of the darkness and into the news -- thanks largely to leaks from anonymous but obviously angry sources inside the military and the intelligence "community." For instance, in December we learned from Dana Priest and Scott Higham of the Washington Post, which has been doing the best of this reporting in the mainstream, that deep in the heart of our Guantanamo prison camp was a super-secret CIA wing built in the last year for high-value prisoners previously being passed from place to place globally, "a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public."
Consider it mentioned. And how were they being passed around the CIA's planetary holding areas? Well, as the year ended, Priest revealed that the CIA had its own, possibly one-jet air arm for shuttling these peripatetic prisoners around the planet --"a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities [that]… since 2001… has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers." It's registered to a dummy corporation officered and directed by dummy humans and it has "permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide." A list of where it's been spotted offers a suggestive, though hardly complete, little map of our shadowy system of secret imprisonment: "Since October 2001 the plane has landed in Islamabad; Karachi; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Baghdad; Kuwait City; Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat, Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles International Airport, at Jordan's military airport in Amman and at airports in Frankfurt, Germany; Glasgow, Scotland, and Larnaca, Cyprus."
Egypt and Thailand, for example, are missing from the list, although it's believed that prisoners have been held by the CIA in the jails of both countries as part of the Agency's program of "extraordinary rendition" -- a tortured euphemism that stands in for a policy going back deep into the Clinton years but that really hit its stride after 9/11 in which we contract out the torture of our prisoners to countries previously better known for such practices.
Meanwhile, by year's end, the American Civil Liberties Union, wielding the Freedom of Information Act (which the Bush administration has tried hard to limit), had pried loose a series of stunning emails and memorandums from disturbed and angry FBI agents who had observed interrogation sessions at Guantanamo. They were writing their bosses back on the mainland, complaining of the nature of the "humane" methods military interrogators were using at Guantanamo, not to speak of the fact that some of those military or intelligence interrogators were impersonating FBI agents. (By the way, isn't it curious that it was the ACLU and not the media that did the necessary work to spring these documents?)
When it came to Guantanamo, what we had previously were largely the claims of former prisoners, most of which turned out to be all too accurate but were more easily dismissible; now the FBI has nailed the government on what's been happening, despite endless denials, in our own Devil's Island. These documents are a clear indication that torture, mistreatment, and abuse in American-controlled prisons, holding areas, military camps, and interrogation cells add up to stunning set of contraventions of the Geneva Conventions ("To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment…"); that, in a phrase used for the first time recently in a recent headline on a Washington Post editorial, "war crimes" are being committed routinely out there in the imperium.
Let's recall for a moment what our President had to say at a news conference about such accusation of torture last June: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government."
"A nation of law" and that should comfort us. The United States, of course, signed onto the Geneva Conventions and, as a signatory, is fully bound by them because, according to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, "[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." It doesn't get any higher, does it? And that remains true no matter how many times our attorney-general designee and former overseer of a series of tortured legal documents meant to give the administration the ability to torture more or less at will, refers to the Conventions as "quaint" documents.
Throw in a slew of other recent torture revelations, including a claim by a British prisoner in Guantanamo, for instance, that "the 'strappado,' a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists," was used on him, and you end up with a Grand Guignol menu of interrogation techniques. These, in turn, add up to something like a self-portrait for rest of the world of Bush administration America in 2005.
A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the man "danced as he was shocked"; mock drowning or "waterboarding"; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee's hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee's head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, Afghanistan to the CIA's secret prisons around the world.
Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses. Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those "bad apples" manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland.
Take as just one tiny example of how widespread and commonplace such practices may be: During the recent assault on Falluja, American troops came upon Mohammad al-Jundi, the Syrian driver of two kidnapped French journalists (since released elsewhere). This was presented in our news as a tiny act of liberation of a prisoner held by terrorists. So what do you imagine was the first act of this former driver, when freed? According to Agence France-Presse, he's now suing his American liberators for torture and ill-treatment. His French lawyer Jacques Verges "said that after being found by American troops, al-Jundi was taken in handcuffs to a military base where he was beaten and kicked. Verges said al-Jundi claimed to have been thrice threatened with mock executions and tortured with electric shocks." Ho-hum. Life on the frontier.
Militarism as Religion
The question, of course, is responsibility. Where exactly does it rest? Among the more striking of the ACLU revelations (and the least dealt with in our press) was a single FBI e-mail sent from Guantanamo to senior FBI officials in the States which "makes 11 references to an Executive Order ‘signed by President Bush' that authorized these abusive interrogation methods… that permitted military interrogators in Iraq to place detainees in painful stress positions, impose sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, intimidate them with military dogs and use other coercive methods." Other e-mails link the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the extreme methods used in Guantanamo. (Note by the way that, while our press generally will not use the word "torture" when describing such acts at Guantanamo and elsewhere, the FBI agents don't hesitate to do so.)
Whether there was such an order -- the White House denies it, but at this point that no longer means a thing -- there was certainly a powerful sense among the interrogators, torturers, abusers at Guantanamo and elsewhere that their course had been set at the very top of the system, and in this they couldn't have been more right.
But I get ahead of myself. I was talking about the extraordinarily rendited island of Diego Garcia when I wandered off into the imperial dark side. We only know what the military tells us -- no damage -- about the effects of the tsunami on that very low-lying island, only on average 4 feet above sea level, but that's not so odd. The island has been a blacked-out area, a zone of silence in the Indian Ocean ever since, to oblige us Yanks, the Brits shipped all the Diego Garcians off into misery and poverty on the island of Mauritius, clearing the decks for us.
In normal Internet fashion, some on the Web quickly concluded that there was something deeply conspiratorial about Diego Garcia alone getting the tsunami news in a prompt fashion. But the reason was simple: Unlike the governments of South Asia, the Pentagon was keyed into scientific early warning networks, as it is now keyed into just about everything that matters on this planet. The Pentagon is increasingly like that famed creation of 1950s sci-fi, the Blob; an alien life form capable of absorbing anything that crosses its path. It has swallowed, for instance, many of the functions of the State Department and, having divided the globe into 5 commands (the latest being -- gulp -- Northcom, which means us) and with the heavens tossed in as well (Spacecom), its top commanders now travel the world like planetary plenipotentiaries.
Here, for instance, is how Washington Post columnist David Ignatius described the global processional of our latest Centcom commander:
"Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general."
Indeed. The military has become not just our war-fighting and occupying force, but our main "nation-building" force, our major diplomatic force (now that military-to-military relations have become the essence of foreign policy), our preponderant intelligence force, a major propaganda outfit (or call it public diplomacy, if you will), our central ministry for advanced R&D research and basic science, the only part of the government seriously preparing for a global-warming world, and our planetary rescue outfit as well -- to name just a few of its roles. With more clearly to come.
Take, for instance, intelligence. That CIA jet may seem extravagant, but, in fact, it's a pale shadow of the airborne CIA of the Vietnam era when the Agency covertly operated a full-scale airline, Air America. The Pentagon now controls an estimated 80% of the nation's $40 billion-plus intelligence budget and it's clearly eager for more. Perhaps the most curious news report of the pre-holiday season was a front-page piece in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt (Pentagon Seeks to Expand Role in Intelligence-Collecting). It focused on a plan being put toge
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