by digby
My piece for salon this morning is about the national security opportunists who use fear to advance their agenda. You know who they are:
It’s also not unusual that intelligence and national security officials immediately seize the opportunity to advance their agenda whether or not their agenda would have prevented the attacks. The most famous example of this phenomenon, of course, is the war in Iraq, which had been pushed hard by neoconservative hawks for over a decade prior to 9/11 but which was put on the table in the earliest days after the attacks on the World Trade Center under the understanding that this was their chance to do what they wanted to do anyway. True, it actually exacerbated the terrorist threat but the architects of the policy considered that a small price to pay for the ability to finally “take out” the hated tyrant Saddam Hussein.
That was a dramatic example and one that really stands alone in the annals of national security opportunism. More relevant to today is the quick and easy passage of the Patriot Act, which had been offered in earlier Congresses and rejected due to its authoritarian components and constitutional vagueness. Once 9/11 happened, there was no stopping it despite the fact that nobody knew in those early days if it would have been helpful in preventing the attacks. (We later learned that there was plenty of information available prior to the attacks that wasn’t properly followed up. There was even a presidential memo titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.”) But in their need to “do something” after the fact, the political leadership pretty much agreed to anything the national security establishment had on its wish list.
It was a lesson they learned well. One must never let a terrorist attack go to waste. These past few years have revealed that our intelligence services not only took advantage of the moment to legalize much of what they’d always wanted to do, they went further still. The legacy of post 9/11 overreach includes torture and indiscriminate spying on Americans, both of which have, as a result, moved from being strictly illegal and taboo to being matters of partisan and ideological debate. And while the idea of Americans fighting terrorism with ground troops in the middle of sectarian quagmires and civil wars is not popular with the American public, it remains a point of disagreement among many in the national security realm.
So it should come as no surprise that the immediate response to the terrorist attack in Paris was for all the usual suspects to immediately push their agenda. And nobody does it better than former NSA chief Michael Hayden, the face of American spying. Like a cat who just slurped an entire bucket full of cream he smugly announced:
I was talking to you guys about 12 months ago about these massive amounts of metadata that NSA held in storage. That metadata doesn’t look all that scary this morning…
Whether collecting metadata would have stopped those attacks is left unexplored. But he also claimed that these are a new “sophisticated” kind of terrorism, “the high end of the new genre of attacks.” One wonders if he’s ever heard of workplace violence in America where armed people burst into an office and shoot down multiple people. It’s quite common. We even have a name for it: “going postal.” (But we probably shouldn’t tell him about that. Hayden would be happy to use all that data to closely monitor every American for possible thought crimes.)
Hayden’s not the only one.
Click over to see the inane stuff Lindsay Graham said on Hugh Hewitt's show. Basically president Obama killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.
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