So who are we and what is this site, anyway?
This blog was intended to be a group effort to provide a public thoughtspace to complement our forum. It is impossible to explain who I am or what this site is without going back to the origins of the forum. I've lost track of how long ago we started the forum, but it must have been between two and three years ago. Most of us grew up together in the Silver Valley of North Idaho, a narrow space in the mineral rich ranges of the Idaho panhandle. As the leaded themes indicate, we are products of commercial pollution that makes us retarded and delinquent.
I was one of the first to move away, leaving Idaho in high school. I kept in touch with my closest friends during high school but hadn't known some of the others well or at all before leaving and didn't have any contact with most people from childhood school. Then came New Year's Eve in 1994. I ushered in the illustrious year of 1995 virtually passed out in the hottub at the cabin condo Gusalmighty had rented for the occasion. It was a grand party and I reconnected with Gusalmighty as well as many others I hadn't seen in about 6 years at that point.
It just so happened that my youngest sister was born 4 days later, an event that came to play a big role in the development of Gusalmighty.com as we know it today. Up until her birth, I had spent my summers working in Minnesota, only coming home to visit for short periods. After she was born though, I came back as much and for as long as possible, living in Idaho from June '96 to January '97. Over that period, Gus and I (and others) forged some strong
I eventually moved back to Minnesota to finish my B.A. in Anthropology. The Internet™ had become a big thing by now (I had only used it for email and some telnet chat sessions thus far, and remember WastedPotential holding my hand and introducing me to a "browser"), but we didn't take advantage of it right away. I kept in touch with phone calls and some email as well as visits during the school year and summers back in Idaho. Eventually I was emailing enough to try to start a mailing list, back when before egroups.com had been absorbed by Yahoo. That list didn't generate much interest at all, but it was the seed for something bigger.
By now I had graduated from the University of Minnesota and GusAlmighty had a domain. I think it was at a New Years' party (or maybe an infamous Halloween) that we decided that Gus was going to try his hand at coding a forum for us. WastedPotential had introduced me and a few others to the AsylumWhores (now a more palatable Nation rather than Whores) and I was keen on the power of forums. Yeah, yeah, I know that everyone else has been using newsgroups and BBSes since they got their 2400 baud modems. I guess you are just cooler than me.
So Gus did it, our own gusboard coded from scratch direct from the hand of the creator himself. By and by we had our own little breeding ground of inside jokes and drunken reminiscences. It wasn't extremely complex or feature rich, but it worked pretty fucking good and it was homegrown to boot. We admired Gus so much we didn't give him much shit when we lost access for a few weeks when he forgot to renew the domain name.
The board grew in popularity with a core membership of 10 or so of us and even started to attract visitors outside the inner circle. Once family members started showing up, Gus unveiled Gusboard 2.0, a secret password protected forum for all the shenanigans and tales of chaos that were still within the statute of limitations. We were evolving. Eventually we decided to take advantage of the efforts of others and switched to phpBB, briefly running the 1.0 before installing the current phpBB you see today.
We ran just as the forum for about a year or so until I started blogging here, originally hoping that it would be a collective effort but it kind of fell flat in that regard. The forum is a great place for us to keep in touch as we moved apart and the blog was a place for me to express myself. Turned out blogging was a lot harder than I expected, but I'm keeping at it. Eventually I'll build a readership, probably as soon as WastedPotential and GusAlmighty (among others) begin posting their views and experiences alongside me and keep it fresh (and worth reading).
So that's our history, but where are we today? This introduction is actually one of the first things I intended to write for the front page blog but I was holding out until we had more contributors. No one else seemed interested in posting here so it's kind of ended up being my own little soapbox by default. I moved to Japan after getting my M.A. in Anthropology and just finished my PhD. Call me Dr. Nute. The blog came out of my desire for a place to vent my notions about the world today. I was making lots of notes in book margins and scratch paper rants about modern technology and society and politics. The real impetus came after reading a thread about blogging at ArsTechnica and then seeing what psh had done to his site. Blogging can be a lot harder than it looks. I didn't get a whole lot done while I was finishing my dissertation, and since my daughter was born at about the same time, I haven't been able to get much done since then. I thought I was in a good place to be more consistent a few months ago when I announced that we had gone gold, but that too proved premature.
Now I have a tenure-track teaching job at a women's college here in Japan. It's a good job with great students. I get to teach classes all in English, most of which are topic based content focused classes where I can teach about world history, cross-cultural communication, political science, and whatnot. It's not all paradise, as I do have to teach writing and discussion classes and some classes have pretty low English skills. But it pays enough to cover my bills for now.
I'm interested in humans and have conversation knowledge in our evolutionary history as well as our psychological and cultural tendencies. I like beer and pizza and watching Mixed Martial Arts. I'm an armchair philosopher (as we all are, surely) and becoming more politically interested if not involved. I'm a parent and loving it. I play the bass and dig music. Charlie Hunter is my current favorite groovemeister. Check his site for free and paid downloads. Bad ass mutherscratcher, he. There is plenty more about me, I suppose, but thats sufficient for an intro.
As for everyone else, the only one that I can really talk with any relevance about is the man, Our Namesake, Gusalmighty. He runs a hosting company in Seattle and graciously hosts this space for
We're a pretty good group of people here. Among us, we range from high school dropouts to PhDs, tall fat fuckers with long hair to scrawny midgets, crank junkies to teetotalers (well, not quite teetotalers, but pretty close by Idaho standards), jazz funk to speed metal, Jeopardy qualifiers to geologists, hippies to Marines (some of which served in Afghanistan following 9/11), computer geeks to electrical journeymen to volunteer firefighters. We've had our necks broken, flipped trucks at highway speeds (with members riding in the back who get thrown out on the tarmac but still ship off to Marine boot camp a few days later), been nearly electrocuted by TVs, arrested, stabbed, strung out, beat up, broke down, tripped out, and pissed on. We've got skills ranging from utility pole inspection certification to culture analysis, from Marine certified marksmanship with weapons and cameras to forum coding. We'll sell you vitamins, rewire your home, install your cabinets, clean up the cocaine you spilled in the bedroom, put out the pallet fires you got in the backyard, host your website, and build you a geodesic dome on the fifth floor of your mobile home. We play guitars, basses, drums, and weiner whistles. We've lived through burning airplanes and bottles of Permafrost. And all in spite of (or because of?) every single one of us having a lead count 4 or 5 times the EPA standards for "healthy."
So who are we? We be disciples of Gusalmighty, yo. Come on in and introduce yourself. We have a lot of history together, but you are welcome to make yourself comfortable.
Richard Clarke has created a lot of ripples recently following the publication of his book "Against All Enemies." The press has treated the book as an assault of President Bush, but after reading it, I can't agree. Clarke absolutely criticizes the President, but the book's purpose, function, goal is not anti-Bush. He doesn't come off as upset at Bush per se as much as he is upset at the failures in government. Bush isn't the only one who takes the heat either. The FBI comes out looking about as inefficient and worthless as as a cheese grater with no holes in it. Paul Wolfovitz isn't discussed at length, but the little bits that bear mentioning by Clarke are damning enough. Wolfovitz pulled an intelligence chief out of Indonesia for raising a ruckus and beating the bushes looking for Al Qaeda, 6 months before the Bali blast by the specific people the agent was trying to get people to help him look for. Wolfie owes the victims and their families a direct and personal apology.
Clarke didn't strike as me as personally bitter about his demotion as much as he was pissed off that the position itself wasn't given more respect. I don't think he'd have written the book if he had been fired and told to wear a dead chicken up his butt if the new administration would have paid attention to and made more efforts to thwart the terrorism threat in the United States. It wasn't personal as much as professional bitterness that led to the book.
The story presented is fascinating on many accounts because it illustrates how the top levels of our government and civic institutions work. The book begins with the response teams at the White House and then goes back to Clarke's service under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush.
Clarke's analysis of the Bush team and the war in Iraq have generated the most media interest but the FBI and CIA get hit harder and more consistently and should bear more of the criticism and responsibility. Bush/Cheney/Rice could have done better by focusing on the potential for domestic attacks with the intensity they've devoted to Iraq (and discrediting Clarke, for that matter), but even if they had, there is no faith on my part, based on what Clarke wrote, that the FBI and CIA would have come through for him. On the other hand, had the FBI and CIA done their jobs better, they would have been able to convince the government that more needed to be done.
The FBI was just wholly pathetic. The only way to communicate was on the phone or face to face. They were not even using technology that the terrorists used to plan the attacks. Inexcusable, and blame lies on every President and FBI head for the last 20 years.
The CIA dragged its feet all over the place, especially during the Clinton years, when it came time to make moves against the terrorists. As Clarke points out, the CIA has been burned time and again when they conduct secret operations that go awry. CIA ends up holding the bag, whether they deserve it or not.
The military wasn't very helpful either. As Clarke describes it, the debacle in Somalia was due to tactical errors by the officers in Africa but Clinton took the heat for it. This is in spite of Clinton's resolve not to run from the country but stay in until power could be transferred to the UN 6 months later. The terrorists (and Somalia was an Al Qaeda and terrorist incident, according to Clarke (as was the Bosnia flareup)) took it as that though, and were emboldened by it, just as when the mujahidin in Afghanistan defeated the Soviets and the Soviets didn't just retrench but up and ran home.
When Clinton came the military for suggestions on taking care of Al Qaeda, they consistently came up with full-on assaults and invasions, options that were so overwhelmingly complex they didn't have a chance at being implemented. Even if Clinton had an interest in following such plans, their size and complexity guaranteed casualties and would have required lengthy negotiations with allies to get permission. But Clinton wanted immediate action to arrest bin Laden or destroy Al Qaeda camps. Besides, Clinton didn't trust the military much after they fucked up Somalia.
Then (this is a big one to me) was the whole impeachment process. Not only did the childishness, pettiness, and lack of integrity by the president and the Congress weaken our nation by harshly dividing it on partisan lines (that have been further amplified and divisive since then), but they destroyed Clinton's political capital when he needed it to attack Al Qaeda. The attacks on Afghanistan following the embassy bombings in Africa were widely criticized as wag-the-dog distractions by the President to bolster his domestic position and divert attention from his personal indiscretions and legal mistakes.
According to Clarke, though, the motivation for the attacks were entirely distinct from the domestic turmoil Clinton was dealing with. The only connection between that military action and Monica was that the President wasn't able to implement the full desired assault because of the criticism arising from the impeachment issue. Had Clinton told the truth under oath or had Congress not needlessly impeached him, there would have been a greater chance that we would have killed bin Laden and disrupted Al Qaeda. As Clarke explains it, Clinton was much more willing to use American military force or covert operations to arrest bin Laden than we are aware of. The military and CIA were unwilling and unable to put into action the plans authorized by the President. For example, Clinton signed every single request for covert kidnapping and arrest of terrorists in office, but many of them were not carried out operationally.
I recount all of this not out of defense of Clinton but as illustrations of how our institutions failed us even when our government tried to help us. I do not see how Bush could have done any better pre-9/11 (but that doesn't excuse him for not trying).
Another HUGE revelation comes from the interrogation of the Saudi Arabian terrorist Zabaydi. The U.S. tried to play good cop/ bad cop by sending in a good cop team of U.S. agents to reap the benefits of the fear that was supposed to be inflicted by the bad cop team of "Saudi" agents, who were actually U.S. agents appearing as Saudis and hoping to use the threats of Saudi punishments as leverage. Surprisingly, Zabaydi was exalted to be granted private consultation with Saudis and told them to call a particular number and talk to a particular person who would help get him out of the mess. Turns out that this particular person was Crown Prince Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, who Zabaydi claimed had general knowledge of the impending attacks in advance. He also had a few other major Saudi Arabian leaders' phone numbers memorized, indicating a familiarity and closeness with the ruling family. Once he realized that he was talking to U.S. investigators, however, Zabaydi clammed up and recanted his earlier statements.
The final 3 chapters of book address the post-9/11 response of the Bush team and lays out Clarke's opinion on what should have been done instead. Bush doesn't get as much attention in the book as I expected based on the media treatment. We see the Bush teams in action on 9/11 in the first chapter and then don't really touch on them until the end of the book. Clarke points out how the notion of Iraq as a terrorist state is utterly false and discredits any attempt to portray Iraq as a terrorism threat. While always reserving the possibility that he may be wrong, his assessment is worth paying attention to because of his expertise in this specific department, on these specific issues.
In spite of the accuracy of claims regarding Saddam Hussein's barbarism and the unquestionable desirability of his removal, going into Iraq was a major mistake in the pursuit of security for the United States and the world. The invasion diverted attention from the hunt for Bin Laden and our efforts to reform Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. If that wasn't bad enough, we spurned our allies and squandered the opportunities provided by the cohesiveness and goodwill, both domestically and internationally, 9/11 brought about.
And if losing sight of our goals and destroying our own support structure wasn't bad enough, the invasion of an oil-rich Arab nation that did not pose a threat to us has done more to aid bin Laden's cause than anything he has ever done himself. We validated his predictions and the latent beliefs of many that the United States is a wanton aggressor. We've handed radicals actual fodder for recruitment at the same time that we created a power vacuum in the exact center of the region that incubates hostile individuals, granting them a physical location that serves the dual purpose of providing training grounds and attack targets in one easy-to-access geographic location.
Yes, we have made life better for some Iraqis, but we have drastically reduced the short- and long-term security of our nation and way of life in the process while squandering military lives and billions (that is thousands of millions) of dollars.
We cannot forget that all of the issues pertaining to the prevention of 9/11 covered by Clarke all took place prior to 9/11. We've become accustomed to a world defined by the attacks and it can be easy to forget how secure we felt, how complacent we were. There were other things going on in the world that commanded the attention of intelligence services and policy makers. There are infinite possible ways that we could have been attacked and the evidence was not handled correctly by the intelligence sector. Had the information that Al Qaeda operatives were in the U.S. been collated with the knowledge of non-citizens from the Middle East taking flying lessons and our established awareness of the appeal airplanes had to terrorists, and aided by but not dependent on Presidential leadership that provided an impetus to connect the dots, I believe that the attacks could have been prevented. We've stopped other big attacks (the tunnels on the east coast, the millennium bombing attempts, security at Olympics, etc) and could have stopped this one. That isn't to say that the terrorists would never had slipped one past the goalie eventually. Even though they have to only succeed once and we have to succeed every time, there is no reason why we can't. Every major attack is preventable and failure to do so is exactly that, failure.
The paths charted following 9/11, however, are not defendable by relying on our complacency, innocence, naivete, and lack of imagination. This is why the smaller portion of Clarke's book is getting so much attention. We can have greater expectations following 9/11 because the veil has dropped and we can see what we are up against. Making options that reduce the power of terrorists and the desirability of being a terrorists the highest priority and reducing the priority (regardless of the desirability) of options that are good and worthy options but that just don't address the threats of terrorism is what we expected, but it is not what we got.
This fall, the American public has to decide on wether to reelect an administration that has taken a mistaken course of action following 9/11 and which shows no indication of changing its attitude or direction or elect a new administration with essentially unknown and untested policies. Situations like these favor the incumbent because no one is comfortable switching horses in mid-stream on issues with such importance, but we can not excuse the failures and mistakes of Bush et. al. nor ignore the likelihood that they will continue such trajectories in the next term. I'm not saying "Anybody but Bush" here, as we have to expect the alternative candidates to provide plausible policies. But we have to weigh the proposed policies of the challengers against Bush's whole record, not just his conviction and zeal. With that in mind, I find it very difficult to imagine a candidate who focuses on catching bin Laden and fixing the problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia as doing more harm than Bush will up to 2008.
Clarke's message is that he tried hard over 2 decades to pay attention to the threats against the country and do what he could to protect us. He is against the blatant enemies of the state, but he was also frustrated throughout by different administrations' policies, turf battles in Washington, D.C., and others' failures to comprehend what he believed to be obvious, that we were in danger. His book reads quick and easy, and I recommend it to everyone and anyone interested in knowing more about how our government works in general as well as details pertaining to the whole 9/11 debacle.
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Good golly I can't believe its been so long since I've posted. I really do have good stuff waiting in the wings, I just have to either focus on creating time to formalize it for the blog or lower my standards about what I write and smash stuff out more often. I'm in danger of losing my 2 readers!
I just got Clarke's new book Against All Enemies and anticipate reading it over the next couple days. There is a great discussion about this issue (as well as many others) over at the Asylum. I don't have time to read or post there much, but the political forum is pretty good (civil too).
PaintCHiPs, one of my most admired and respected internet friends, post the following bit of analysis in the midst of the current discussion about Clarke. My apologies for stooping to lengthy quotes of what others have written for my occasional posts, but this is just too good, and encapsulates my feelings on a range of points pretty damn well. Bravo, PaintCHiPs!
Frankly, I'm not terribly interested in the pre-911 stuff as it concerns Al Queda, and in fact agree basically with euphorbia's position that the Bush team only had 9 months, didn't have the political capital to do much, was continuing the Clinton policy (which, for what they knew, was a decent enough policy), etc. Hindsight is always 20/20, and the blame game for 9-11 doesn't particularly interest me. It would have taken a miracle and a helluva lot of luck, more than anything, to have stopped 9-11, and I don't know that anybody is particularly at fault for it, or really could have stopped it without something akin to divine intervention. It slightly interests me in the sense that Bush is running on his terrorism cred, when in fact it seems, by anyone's admission (even theirs), his policy towards terrorism pre-9-11 was not anymore "tough on terrorism" than any other president before him, but I do agree that 9-11 was a watershed for Bush, I supported his actions immediately following it, and, to his credit, thought he handled the whole immediate affair very well. Again, though, to be fair, it was 9-11 that changed, not Bush, and that's the point that DOES interest me about these Clarke accusations.
My contention all throughout was that Iraq had nothing to do with the War on Terror and was just being packaged that way so the Bush administration could fulfill their own agenda regarding Iraq. I don't see any reasonable scenario, post 9-11, that would have caused Iraq to avoid invasion. The administration acted like it was a war of last resort, but frankly, they were going to invade basically no matter what, and it wasn't 9-11 that made up their minds on it, it was 9-11 that allowed them the political capital to execute a plan their minds were already well made up on. And, it's a difficult argument to have with people, because it comes down to this: Some people believe that that's fine, that Iraq DESERVED to be overthrown, regardless of the means, and the Bush administration could have made up a story about Vietnam POWs being tortured in Baghdad with bamboo shoots and used that as a justification and frankly I think a lot of people would still be fine with it. "Well sure, we don't KNOW that there were or were not those POWs, but at the end of the day, the world is a safer place because blah blah blah blah blah." That's the jist of this argument. Some people could frankly care less WHY or HOW we invaded Iraq, they're just happy it was done, and thus will defend it to their deaths regardless of the details.
I'm not of that camp. I think means are important. I think considering things in the bigger picture is important. And, I think this administration was going to invade Iraq no matter what, regardless of intelligence, regardless of excuses, regardless of world opinion, because that was their agenda, for whatever reason. Iraq didn't change after 9-11. Iraq was the same ineffectual, contained threat run by a brutal dictator that it was on 9-10-01. The only difference was that Bush had the political capital to finally take it out. What bothers me, however, is that I think the price paid to do it was too high, and I think the administration would have been better served by being honest about it from the get-go instead of dressing it up in half-truths and wild assertions. To take out Iraq, we sacrificed an unprecedented amount of moral world leadership and goodwill, we spent an incredible amount of money, we sacrificed a great many lives, both American and Iraqi, we vastly increased Al Queda presence in the Middle East and, as Clarke says, played right into their hands, we poorly planned the after-party, and we lost a great deal of credibility, world-wide and at home. All to contain a threat that was no worse or greater than it was pre-911, on the grounds that it was worse or greater post-911.
And that's what this administration isn't talking about in regards to Clarke. There's all kind of innuendo (oh, he wrote a civil and complimentary resignation letter, the scum) and character assertions, but very little in regards to factual countering. His assertion (the one I’m interested in anyway) is that this administration faced a new problem by reverting to old thinking. I’m sure they thought they were doing their best to protect us, but at the same time, the assertion isn’t that they were evil or trying to hinder our national security, but that, instead of redefining their agenda to coincide with new threats, they were redefining new threats to coincide with their agenda. The part of Clarke’s allegations that I take to heart the most is that this administration acted as if they were preserved in amber, coming into office as if they had just thawed out after 8 years instead of a fresh team ready to face new challenges in new ways. That, to me, isn’t being strong on terrorism, and it‘s a claim from Clarke that is backed up independently by a wide variety of sources, i.e. this isn‘t some crackpot floating left-field theories here, but as qualified an insider as you can get making assertions that have already been made many times before. You can make innuendos about Clarke being out for a quick buck, or sucking up to Kerry, or miffed at his demotion, or whatever, but none of that is really addressing the core issue: is he right?
I just look at this country now and don’t like what I see. 9-11 was an incomparable tragedy, but at the same time, it was an incredible opportunity. This country was divided in 2000, but post 9-11, we were united in a way we hadn’t experienced since World War II. Clinton had done a lot to shore up American hegemony and moral leadership on the world stage, and 9-11 finally brought with it a sympathy on the global stage that we’d never had before, where people put aside old grudges and really stood behind us. 9-11 showed us the problems we’ve had on national security, intelligence, inter-agency cooperation and communication, giving us a very clear litmus test on what worked and what didn’t. We could have played to all of that. Instead, we overplayed our hand gregariously, and instead of capitalizing on an opportunity, we positively squandered it by engaging in old agendas. We turned unprecedented national unity into a political scene more vehemently and perhaps irrevocably divided than ever. We took that global sympathy and moral leadership and threw it back in everyone’s faces, to the point where, only three years later, we’re scorned and derided globally, nobody particularly wants to have anything to do with us, and the ones that do get fucked by their voters for the trouble (even good, solid governments, like Spains). We took the glaring failures of intelligence, border control, law enforcement, whatever, and instead of working for honest change we just threw money and authority at them carte blanche and said “fix it“, and of course that‘ll have incredible repercussions for decades on our civil liberties and national identity because at no time in the process did we say “but by the way, these are the ideals we want to protect, because they’re what makes us a beacon of freedom in the first place” . Instead of beginning an open and honest dialogue with the American public, capitalizing on a time when it didn’t matter if you were a Senator or a fireman, you were both Americans, we dug foxholes and enshrouded the political process in more secrecy than at any time in my lifetime. We took a budget surplus and instead of a reasonable short term deficit to cover the immediate costs of 9-11, coupled with raised taxes to help the economy in light of a slight dip due to investor worry, we took that as a sign that deficits don’t matter anymore, so we may as well just spend as much as we want and cut taxes to cover it. And then all sorts of little things. Bush, widely derided by the left and chastised from within his own party, felt the need, to shore up his base and since he felt he could no longer unite anyway, decided to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants and push for a constitutional ban on gay marriages as an electoral strategy. Just stupid shit like that. The point is, 9-11 could have been a great opportunity for America, and instead of capitalizing on that, we so grossly overplayed it that we not only obliterated so much higher ground, we set upon a course to dig ourselves deeper and deeper into the shit than ever. And that, to me, falls squarely on Bush’s shoulders.
That’s what Clarke’s allegations get at, in my mind. Squandered opportunities. Missed chances for the sake of tired agendas. I have no doubt that if we would have culled popular opinion at home and abroad following 9-11 instead of throwing it in people‘s faces, that in a few years, we would have easily been able to accomplish what we wanted, multilaterally, in Iraq. That Bush would have truly become a uniter, sailing into re-election with approval ratings in the high 60s. That we would have been able to really work to improve our national security and our moral interests at the same time.
But, as Clarke said, this administration wasn’t interested in new ideas or new agendas. They just saw new events as reasons to push for old grudges. Didn’t matter what the reality was, all that mattered was what reality was wanted. And that’s the truly missed opportunity from 9-11.
If you care to respond directly to the quote, go read the thread at the Asylum and respond accordingly. If you want to talk about what was said in general, post here