National Security officials embrace their own version of Trump's post-truth world

Today, the Senate intelligence committee offered bipartisan support for the nomination of Gina Haspel to head the CIA. Haspel, while a CIA officer, oversaw a torture site, and participated actively in efforts to destroy evidence of CIA torture.

Late last month, Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and a persistent critic of the Trump administration, took to the pages of the New York Times to attack the “post truth” condition of Trump’s America and to emphasize the “serious stress” being placed on American “traditions and institutions that protect us from living Hobbesian ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ lives.”

As the antidote to Trump’s attacks on American institutions, Hayden celebrated “intelligence work.” Such work, he claimed, “at least as practiced in the Western liberal tradition--reflects...threatened Enlightenment values: gathering, evaluating and analyzing information, and then disseminating conclusions for use, study or refutation.” Hayden proceeded to blame Trump for undermining those values through the president’s Muslim ban, his fragile ego, and own lack of intelligence.

Hayden argued that “intelligence shares a broader duty with...other truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.”

These are a striking set of claims. While few inhabitants of the realm of reality would dispute the idea that Donald Trump’s fascism is undermining institutions, values, discourse, and thereby democracy, Hayden’s argument about the claim of national security agencies to be conveyors of Enlightenment values, “truth-tellers” that foster open modes of discourse deserve closer scrutiny and a good deal of skepticism.

Michael Hayden served as NSA Director, National Intelligence deputy director, and CIA director during the the Bush administration, a troubled period defined by the aggrandizement of power by the security state, a rash declaration of poorly-defined and unexplained war on terror. This period, and the abuses by the security state that it set in motion--abuses which, it should be noted, continued through the Obama administration--actually helped to facilitate Trump’s rise to power.

During this period, intelligence agencies offered a series of misleading claims that enabled the declaration of aggressive war--a crime--against Iraq, a war which led to the unravelling of the Middle East, the disintegration of the careers of several American presidential aspirants, and the proliferation of international terrorism.

During this era, Hayden defended expanded powers of domestic surveillance for the security state, warning that such powers were essential for American security. Hayden privatized components of these dangerous efforts, and contracts accrued to a company staffed by former high ranking intelligence officers. Hayden pursued whistleblowers with a vengeance (offering highly personalized attacks on Edward Snowden and lying to senators about the NSA’s spying programs), demonstrating little patience with the argument that Americans needed to know what happened behind the closed doors of the security state.

At the same time, he rebuffed or ignored Congressional critics of the security state’s stealthily-expanded remit. Hayden reportedly told one internal critic that “We didn’t need [constitutional safeguards]” for expanding surveillance of Americans, acknowledging that he did not believe his agency needed to acquire warrants for this surveillance.

In confirmation hearings, Hayden attacked journalistic scrutiny of intelligence work. And he later defended the utility of torture. Hayden lied to Congress in an effort to obstruct investigations into torture, and his agency waged a long-term campaign to undermine the senate investigation and control the report that emerged from the investigation.

Hayden also presided over and later defended the CIA’s drone program, which involved using disposition matrices (statistical assessments) to murder often faceless people without anything resembling due process. Such murders violated key legal principles, allowed for simmering conflicts to continue beneath Congress’ radars, often struck the wrong targets, and killed massive numbers of innocent civilians (sometimes 90% of their victims)--not that they allowed for anything resembling a concrete statement of their intended targets’ guilt. Hayden made the extraordinary request to be allowed to blow people to smithereens on the basis of unknown vehicles or houses exhibiting activities associated with an Al Qaeda-esque “pattern of life.”

In sum, Michael Hayden was a national security leader who sought the unaccountable and secret expansion of intelligence agencies’ powers to surveil and intrude on the lives of American citizens. He enabled his agencies to murder--sometimes singly, sometimes on a massive scale--our global neighbors in flagrant violation of our laws and international accords. He defended torture, attacked the press, prosecuted whistleblowers to keep citizens from learning about his agencies’ work, and waged a cold war against elected representatives charged with overseeing his agencies and shedding light on the security state’s activities in the public interest.

Through these actions, Hayden exported violence and terror, and undermined the principles of an open society, arguing that the security state along had a right to evaluate the premises undergirding international policy, military intervention, civil liberties grabs, and constitutional safeguards.

In light of this track record, Hayden’s claims about the “Enlightened,” “liberal,” “truth telling,” and knowledge-disseminating qualities of intelligence agencies are not just absurd. They exhibit profound ignorance about the set of factors--and the rogue nature of our security services are one of these--that elevated Trump to office, are deliberately ahistorical in their efforts to deny the barbarism of U.S. national security policy, and represent a foray into “post truth” politics that might not quite rival Donald Trump’s excursions, but which promise to resonate long after this administration has ended.

Perhaps it’s worth looking at an actual Enlightenment-era thinker to see what people of that era thought about the issues Hayden describes. Each spring, my European history students read passages from Cesare Beccaria, an eighteenth-century jurist and criminologist. On Crimes and Punishments remains a representative piece of Enlightenment-era thinking about law, criminality, and justice.

In it, Beccaria argued that although laws “ought to be conventions between men in a state of freedom,” they were historically too often “the work of the passions of a few, or the consequences of a fortuitous or temporary necessity,” the state of exception perhaps represented by the pressures our own “forever war” on terror placed on our institutions. Beccaria also commented on the role of punishments, the need for transparency, and the problems of torture.

Punishments, he declared, should not “torment a sensible being.” Those torments constituted “useless cruelty, the instrument of furious fanaticism, or the impotency of tyrants.”

“Secret accusations,” of the sort effectively levelled by the CIA and the NSA before the despatch of a drone to create a crater of mangled limbs and spattered blood in place of the human accused and his or her neighbors, “are a manifest abuse” stemming from “the weakness of the government,” and have the effect of making “men false and treacherous.” He approvingly cited Montesquieu’s notion that public, processual accusations “are more conformable to the nature of a republic.”

Beccaria reserved some of his harshest words for torture. “No man,” he wrote, “can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection, until it have been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted.” “It is confounding all relations,” Beccaria argued, to suggest that “pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture.” The purpose of torture, he acknowledged, as Hayden and his ilk fail to acknowledge, is “to terrify and be an example to others,” a legacy of “savage legislation” from the pre-Enlightenment darkness of the human past. Beccaria also noted that in the case of torture, the incentive to confess to end the terror and pain meant that “the very means employed to distinguish the innocent from the guilty will most effectually destroy all difference between them.”

Beccaria praised the early abolition of torture in Sweden and the abhorrence for the practice that he believed pertained in Britain.

Torture, he said, amounted to a declaration of barbarism: “Men, be insensible to pain. Nature has indeed given you an irresistible self-love, and an unalienable right of self-preservation; but I create in you a contrary sentiment, an heroic hatred of yourselves. I command you to accuse yourselves, and to declare the truth, midst the tearing of your flesh, and the dislocation of your bones.”

Beccaria, of course, does not represent the totality of Enlightenment thinking about terror and punishment. He did not anticipate the threat of international terrorism, but nor did he guess at the self-destructive qualities of democratic states exposed for centuries to what he and his compatriots believed to be systems of values and laws that transcended exception in order to endure alongside wiser and more enlightened and more democratic states.

Alongside the more obvious menaces to our democratic institutions represented by the Trump administration, and its fellow global authoritarians, lurk a group of people described in other contexts as “securocrats.” That constellation of national security officials have argued for over a decade now, often with bipartisan support, that laws and norms and institutions should be subordinated to their privileged knowledge, knowledge which, moreover, the public is not fit to see. Those officials have abused their power, fostered mistrust of government, meddled in elections, exported terror--torture, drone strikes, aggressive war--and battled representative institutions to assert their primacy at the heart of our government.

They now seek to associate themselves with resistance to authoritarianism, when in reality they have been its enablers. They have squandered a public trust that they never actually earned, and should be uprooted and disciplined, rather than praised and promoted. Rejecting Gina Haspel’s nomination provides one important opportunity for legislators to send such a signal. But so too would rejecting recent efforts to put the securocrats’ war on, of, and for terror on autopilot. Likewise, efforts to wind down U.S. backing for and participation in a Saudi-led campaign of terror and destabilization in Yemen.

The watchers should become the watched, and we should all give careful scrutiny for the willingness and wherewithal of our legislators to hold securocrats accountable at our extended moment of democratic crisis.

Senators Prepare to Declare a Forever War

A bipartisan group of senators have crafted SJ Resolution 159, designed to address a sprawling series of global conflicts waged by the United States for the past 17 years. SJ Resolution 159 functions as a broad authorization of military action in six countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya) against eight non-state entities (Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda in Syria, Haqqani Network, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb).

The authorization cedes responsibility for waging what amounts to war--although it steadfastly refuses to use that word--against these entities in these places, leaving open the possibility for the executive, with minimal oversight, to extend military force against “associated forces,” “organizations, persons, or forces,” in new geographies. The Resolution would obligate Congress to revisit this authorization--every four years.

The authors of the resolution--Senators Kaine, Flake, Corker, Coons, Young, and Nelson--suggest that the resolution is designed to “provide an updated, transparent, and sustainable statutory basis for counter-terrorism operations.” But what it really does is entrench ignorance, legitimate what Dexter Filkins called the “forever war,” and place on autopilot a broad range of conflicts. It marks an extraordinarily irresponsible Congressional abdication of responsibility, and an unbelievable misreading of the past seventeen years of dismally failed American international policy and warmaking.

The resolution contains a litany of dangerous features.

Congress should be responsible for exercising close oversight of war to ensure that violence is a last resort, undertaken only in the public interest,when all else has failed, and in close conformance with domestic and international law. In stark contrast, this resolution suggests that Congress wants nothing to do with its constitutional obligations, and is content to allow an overmighty executive to accumulate and wield further powers, leaving Congressional representatives to focus on their squabbles, and on carrying out the bidding of their monied sponsors.

Wars should be avoided at all costs. But when waged, they should be designed to achieve clear objectives, in conjunction with a series of political, economic, and social goals. Conflicts on autopilot generate their own toxic logic, seldom related to the public interest. In contrast, this resolution leaves the executive free to wage these wars without clearly articulating the relationship between military action and objectives related to the public interest.

Moreover, the resolution envisions wars that stretch over the horizon and span generations. Children born the year of 9/11 will soon be old enough to fight in the forever war it spawned. By leaving the duration of the authorization open and imposing weak oversight only at four year intervals, the resolution’s sponsors accept the legitimacy and logic of a “forever war,” a war waged on a time-scale so vast that periods longer than U.S. participation in the Second World War are regarded as appropriate intervals for revisitation.

We should be appalled at the suggestion that our country should be committed in this deliberately slipshod fashion to the logic of these “long wars.” But we should be more disturbed still by the way in which this resolution is designed to undermine incentives for re-thinking the logic of such a war. By undermining those incentives, the resolution legitimates a strategy that has failed time and again. The conflicts in which the U.S. has embroiled itself across the Sahel, Sahara, Horn of Africa, Middle East, South Asia, and Arabian Peninsula, are political, social, and economic in their origin. They are complex. And war is a blunt and ineffective instrument, designed to address proximate rather than ultimate causes, and to generate short-term rather than long-term “fixes.” A war policy on autopilot will be unaffected by any of the nuance necessary to address complex problems. It will be subjected to none of the rigor of debate that should define the decision to commit money and lives to armed conflict.

Deploying violent military force has been proven in most of these instances not just to be an ineffective policy. It has also been demonstrated, time and again, to be a destructive tool. Our war in Iraq created a power vacuum, spread terrorism to previously unaffected areas, and facilitated our own descent into acts of barbarism.

Alongside that conflict, the war in Afghanistan has failed to address the underlying sources of conflict in that country, all the while providing the glue to link fundamentalists there to others in the region, making real the fearsome transnational terror links that the Bush administration manufactured to lead us in our nightmarish descent into permanent war.

Our 17-year war has also had domestic repercussions. For centuries commentators have observed how long-term national security “crises” corrode democracy, damage institutions, empower rogue domestic actors, and undermine the public trust. We have seen all of these things occur in the United States, and continuing this directionless conflict only magnifies the damage that our embrace of all things “national security” will do to institutions that actually do serve the public interest.

Of course proponents of the resolution would argue that it is not “war” they are authorizing, but “military force,” a euphemistic term that does not evoke the violence of war, which maims people, strips people of their families, flattens homes, destroys economies, and consumes lives. The sponsors are Orwellian in their refusal to confront the violence that their nice, neutral-sounding resolution naturalizes.

Perhaps the most elementary observation one could make about the resolution is its utterly baffling and truly incomprehensible suggestion that it somehow makes sense to throw together a series of different conflicts in different geographies, with different origins, different actors, different trajectories, and different outlooks, under the umbrella of a single resolution. If using war to address any one of these conflicts would amount to using a sledge hammer against a grain of sand or a drop of water, this blanket military authorization against what might be anywhere between six and forty conflicts is akin to using said hammer against a sand dune or ocean wave.

This all-American mash-up of diverse conflicts, actors, and interests into a single, reconstituted war on terror is the ultimate expression of our legislators’ fatal hubris, profound ignorance, and serial irresponsibility. Any person of minimal intelligence and good-will would recognize that policy must be crafted and oversight offered in a highly specific way, in which particular military actions are scrutinized with reference to particular political goals and particular social and economic contexts and the welfare of particular people in those contexts.

There are long-term repercussions associated with this broad authorization and the power it cedes to the executive--not just the presidency, but the array of acronymed security services who thrive, financially and otherwise in the environment created by permanent war. So long as the executive--in its democratic guise or from its dark, undemocratic corners, increasingly guarded from legislative oversight--can make a link to existing forms or sources of terrorism, it can expand the array of geographies in which we wage war to any corner of the globe. Congress could push back, but this resolution itself is a clear signal that Congress is weary of the tiresome task of doing its job.

We have relatively recent experience of what can happen when Congress takes the opportunity to back a war with an eye to passing the buck and making the hollow declaration of supporting the troops as it sends them off to kill and be killed. The war in Iraq in 2003 became the moment when a comparatively targeted response to 9/11 went off the tracks.

Both parties are to blame for the state of affairs which allows our confederacy of senatorial dunces--Kaine, Flake, Corker, Coons, Young, and Nelson--to parade their resolution as a good idea. Republicans have long embraced the strategy of beating their chests and howling at the moon--or rather, at our darker complected global neighbors--to distract their gullible base from the party’s moral depravity and intellectual bankruptcy.

From the depths of not dissimilar intellectual impoverishment, the Democratic Party made a cynical gamble after 9/11 that embracing aggressive war could be used to counteract those who questioned its patriotism--a patriotism defined by respect for a flag and defilement of the public welfare. Little did they imagine that this decision would cost them two presidencies, help to undermine trust in the state they sought to make work in the public interest, and facilitate the elevation of a fascist to the presidency.

But the flaws of the two parties aside, it is in the clear interests of members of Congress to offer a thundering bipartisan rejection to a resolution that represents historic levels of bipartisan stupidity. That they exhibit this stupidity at a time when the executive is in the hands of a man who by any reckoning, and by the judgment of several of this resolution’s sponsors from across the parties, is an ignoramus of historical proportions, trailing a bloated ego and wearing his elephantine insecurity and malignant disrespect for the constitution on his ill-fitting sleeve, is particularly obscene and demands explanation.

Citizens expect their representatives to represent their interests, exert oversight, and ensure that policy--domestic and international--is carried out in the public interest. Congress gains nothing in the long term by ceding its authority to a less accountable and already overmighty executive.

We also know full well that we cannot trust the grimy, bloodstained securocrats, some of them state terrorists themselves. Their institutional interests and methods run counter to the public interest. Torture, drone strikes, and rogue NSA spying, and the constant efforts of the securocrats to beat back legislative oversight, are clear signals of the need for tighter oversight still, and the need for legislators to ensure that there is a close relationship between the broad political, economic, and social goals of our international policy, and the manner in which we use our military. Those who seek to introduce a greater degree of equality and justice into our own domestic politics have a particular obligation to ensure that their international policy offers the same on a global scale.

The aggrandizement of the foreign policy executive and the abuse of power by securocrats is a bipartisan problem. In different ways and to different degrees, this accumulation and abuse has been perpetuated and expanded by all recent presidencies. It is a product of hubris, of corroded institutional culture, and the self-perpetuating logic of violence.

Our legislators should reject this resolution and its craven, destructive, and toxic approach to international policy. But in return, they should create something good. They should redouble their efforts to exert oversight over disparate and often disconnected wars. They should work to educate themselves about the particular roots of conflict. They should reflect on how their behavior over the past decade and a half has often worsened conflicts at the great expense of the people absorbed by them. They should consider how and where social and economic policy, and negotiation, and an emphasis on collective responses, international law and norms, and attention to the welfare of our fellow global citizens, can re-frame the way in which they contemplate conflicts.

And they should consider whether at times the U.S. might ultimately make itself stronger in the world if it holds back from using its power and instead focuses on institution-building, norm-reinforcing, law-affirming, and peace-building. They might consider that at heart, democracy is a recognition that it is in the long-term interests of societies to distribute power broadly, and to legitimate deliberation rather than a state of nature in which the strong might prevail in the short term, but have then precious little to look forward to in the wilderness that passes for peace in their moral wasteland, where might, rather than justice and equality, makes right.

It is precisely to such a desolation that this resolution’s commitment to a forever war on autopilot will take our country if we do not work to stop it. It is a commonplace among beltway deadbeats that Americans don’t care about foreign policy, and that legislators consequently have no reason to do so either. It is urgent--for anyone who cares about justice and equality in our world, and the health of our own democracy--that we prove the cynics wrong.