Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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June 19, 2011 Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, How to End the War on Terror [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Only two days left to get your personalized, signed copy of the must-read history book of the summer, Adam Hochschild’s bestselling To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, in return for a $100 contribution to this website.  Anybody still thinking about doing so should head directly for our donation page by clicking here.  Tom] Every time we get a peek inside Washington’s war on terror, it just couldn’t be uglier.  Last week, three little home-grown nightmares from that “war” caught my attention.  One you could hardly miss.  On the front page of the New York Times, Glenn Carle, a former CIA official, claimed that the Bush administration had wanted “to get” Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog devastatingly critiqued the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and who writes regularly for TomDispatch).  Not only that, administration officials called on the CIA to dig up the dirt on him. Keep in mind that, though the Times quotes “experts” as saying “it might not be unlawful for the C.I.A. to provide the White House with open source material [on Cole],” that just shows you where “expertise” has gone in the post-9/11 world. Since the Watergate era, the CIA has been prohibited from domestic spying, putting American citizens off-limits.  Period. Of course, been there, done that, right? In case you think taking down Cole was just a matter of the bad old days of the Bush administration, note that the journalist who revealed this little shocker, James Risen, is being hounded by the Obama administration.  He's been subpoenaed by federal authorities to testify against a CIA agent accused of leaking information to him (on a bungled CIA plan to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program) for his book State of War.  It’s worth remembering that no administration, not even Bush’s, has been fiercer than Obama’s in going after government whistle blowers. In the meantime, in case you didn’t think American law enforcement could sink much lower while investigating “terrorist activity” and generally keeping an eye on Americans, think again.  According to Charlie Savage of the Times, a revised FBI operational manual offers its 14,000 agents new leeway in “searching databases,” using “surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention,” and “going through household trash.”  Yes, that’s right, if you see somebody at the dumpster out back, it may not be a homeless person but an FBI agent. And then there was Peter Wallsten’s account in the Washington Post of a nationwide FBI investigation of “prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.” According to Wallsten, news leaking out about it hasn’t sat so well with union supporters of President Obama (or, for all we know, with the president himself), since “targets” include “Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise.”  All are (shades of Cole in the Bush years) “vocal and visible critics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South America.” Strange are the ways of the American national surveillance state.  And lest you think these are simply minor aberrations, consider what TomDispatch regular Karen J. Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days, has to say about the direction the war on terror is taking in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death.  (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Greenberg discusses how fear of terrorism increases presidential power, click  here, or download it to your iPod  here.) Tom Business as Usual on Steroids The Obama Administration Doubles Down on the War on Terror By Karen J. Greenberg In the seven weeks since the killing of Osama bin Laden, pundits and experts of many stripes have concluded that his death represents a marker of genuine significance in the story of America’s encounter with terrorism.  Peter Bergen, a bin Laden expert, was typically blunt the day after the death when he wrote, "Killing bin Laden is the end of the war on terror. We can just sort of announce that right now." Yet you wouldn’t know it in Washington where, if anything, the Obama administration and Congress have interpreted the killing of al-Qaeda’s leader as a virtual license to double down on every “front” in the war on terror.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was no less blunt than Bergen, but with quite a different endpoint in mind.  “Even as we mark this milestone,” she said on the day Bergen’s comments were published, “we should not forget that the battle to stop al-Qaeda and its syndicate of terror will not end with the death of bin Laden.  Indeed, we must take this opportunity to renew our resolve and redouble our efforts.” National Security Adviser John Brennan concurred. “This is a strategic blow to al-Qaeda,” he commented in a White House press briefing. “It is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient blow to lead to its demise.  But we are determined to destroy it."  Similarly, at his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Defense, CIA Director Leon Panetta called for Washington to expand its shadow wars.  "We’ve got to keep the pressure up,” he told the senators. Click here to read more of this dispatch.