No Responsibility and No Apologies
By Karen J. GREENBERG
The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked by days of remembrances– for the bold rescue workers of that minute, for the thousands murdered as the Twin Towers collapsed, for those who died in the Pentagon, or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fighting off the hijackers of the business jet they remained in, along with for those who battled in the permanently wars that were America’s action to those al-Qaeda attacks.
For some, the memory of that dreadful day consisted of headshaking over the errors this country made in reacting to it, mistakes we deal with to this moment.
Among the more popular heads being shaken over the misbehavior that followed 9/11, and the failure to fix any of it, was that of Jane Harman, a Democrat from California, who was then in the House of Representatives. She would sign up with all but one member of Congress– fellow California representative Barbara Lee— in ballotfor the remarkably vague Authorization for using Force, or AUMF, which led the way for the intrusion of Afghanistan and so much else. It would, in truth, put Congress in cold storage from then on, enabling the president to bypass it in choosing for years to come whom to attack and where, as long as he validated whatever he did by alluding to a distinctly imprecise term: terrorism. So, too, Harman would votefor the Patriot Act, which would later be utilized to put in place enormous warrantless surveillance policies, and then, a year later, for the Bush administration’s intrusion of Iraq (based on the liethat Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction).
However on the event of the 20th anniversary of the attacks, Harman offered a various message, one that couldn’t have been better or, typically speaking, rarer in this country– a message laced through and through with remorse.” [W] e went beyond the thoroughly tailored usage of military force authorized by Congress,” she wrote remorsefully, referring to that 2001 authorization to use force against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. So, too, Harman railed against the decision, based on “cherry-picked intelligence,” to go to war in Iraq; the everlasting usage of drone strikes in the forever wars; as well as the creation of an overseas jail of injustice at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and of CIA black sitesall over the world indicated for the torture of prisoners from the war on horror. The upshot, she concluded, was to produce “more opponents than we ruined.”
Such remorses and even apologies, while limited, have not been absolutely unknown in post-9/ 11-era Washington. In March 2004, for example, Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief for the Bush White House, would publicly say sorryto the American people for the administration’s failure to stop the 9/11 attacks. “Your federal government failed you,” the previous authorities informed Congress and then proceeded to slam the choice to go to war in Iraq as well. Similarly, after years of staunchly safeguarding the Iraq War, Senator John McCain would, in 2018, finally term it “a mistake, an extremely serious one,” adding, “I need to accept my share of the blame for it. “A year later on, a bench poll would find that a bulk of veterans regretted their service in Afghanistan and Iraq, feeling that both wars were “not worth battling.”
Recently, some more minor players in the post-9/ 11 period have said sorry in distinct ways for the functions they played. For instance, Terry Albury, an FBI agent, would be convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking filesto the media, exposing the bureau’s policies of racial and spiritual profiling, in addition to the staggering series of security measures it carried out in the name of the war on horror. Sent to prison for 4 years, Albury recently completed his sentence. As Janet Reitman reportedin the New York Times Publication, feelings of guilt over the “human cost” of what he was involved in caused his act of revelation. It was, in other words, an apology in action.
As was the comparable act of Daniel Hale, a former National Security Firm analyst who had actually worked at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan assisting to identify human targets for drone attacks. He would get a 45-month sentence under the Espionage Act for hisleaks— documents he had actually gotten on such strikes while working as a private professional after his government service.
As Hale would describe, he acted out of a sensation of intense remorse. In his sentencing statement, he explained seeing“through a computer monitor when an unexpected, scary flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down, splashing purple-colored crystal guts.” His variation of an apology-in-action came from his regret that he had actually continued on at his post even after seeing the horrors of those endless killings, frequently of civilians. “Nonetheless, in spite of my better impulse, I continued to follow orders.” Ultimately, a drone attack on a lady and her 2 children led him over the brink. “How might I possibly continue to believe that I am a great person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness” was the way he put it and so he dripped his apology and is now serving his time.
“We Were Wrong, Plain and Basic”
Beyond federal government and the national security state, there have actually been others who struck a chord of atonement as well. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, for example, Jameel Jaffer, when Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU and now head of the Knight First Modification Institute, took “the opportunity to look inward.” With some regret, he showedon the options human-rights companies had actually made in campaigning versus the abuse and abuse of war-on-terror detainees.
Jaffer argued that their emphasis needs to have been less on the deterioration of American “traditions and worths” and more on the expenses in regards to human suffering, on the “experience of the people damaged.” In using up the cases of individuals whose civil liberties had often been egregiously broken in the name of the war on horror, the ACLU exposed much about the damage to their customers. Still, the desire to have done a lot more plainly haunts Jaffer. Concludingthat we “substituted a dispute about abstractions for a debate about prisoners’ specific experiences,” Jaffer asks,” [I] s it possible” that the selected course of the NGOs “did something more than just bracket prisoners’ human rights– that it might have, even if just in a small way, added to their dehumanization as well?”
Jonathan Greenblatt, now head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), spoke in a similarly rueful style about that company’s choice to oppose plans for a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, near Ground Zero– a plan that became known popularly as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” As the 20th anniversary approached, he statedbluntly, “We owe the Muslim neighborhood an apology.” The desired center broke down under intense public pressure that Greenblatt feels the ADL added to.” [T] hrough deep reflection and discussion with many friends within the Muslim neighborhood,” he includes, “the genuine lesson is a basic one: we were incorrect, plain and simple.” The ADL had advised that the center be integrated in a different area. Now, as Greenblatt sees it, an institution that “might have assisted to heal our country as we nursed the wounds from the scary of 9/11” never ever entered being.
The irony here is that while a variety of those Americans least responsible for the scaries of the last twenty years have straight or indirectly placed a vital lens on their own actions (or do not have thereof), the figures genuinely responsible stated not an apologetic word. Rather, there was what Jaffer has actually called an utter absence of “important self-reflection” among those who introduced, oversaw, commanded, or supported America’s permanently wars.
Simply ask yourself: When have any of the public officials who made sure the excesses of the war on horror reflected openly on their mistakes or expressed the least sense of remorse about them (no less offering real apologies for them)? Where are the generals whose reflections could help forestall future stopped working efforts at “nation-building” in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia? Where are the military contractors whose regret led them to abandon earnings for humankind? Where are any voices of reflection or apology from the military-industrial complex including from the CEOs of the huge weapons makers who generated fortunesoff those twenty years of war? Have any of them signed up with the little chorus of voices reflecting on the wrongs that we’ve done to ourselves as a nation and to others internationally!.?.!? Not on the recent 9/11 anniversary, that’s for sure.
Examining Your Shoulder or Into Your Heart?
What we still usually continue to hear instead is little except a full-throated defense of their actions in supervising those dreadful wars and other disputes. To this day, for instance, former Afghan and Iraq War commander David Petraeus mentionsthis nation’s “massive accomplishments” in Afghanistan and continues to double down on the idea of nation-building. He still firmly insists that, globally speaking, Washington “usually needs to lead” due to its “huge prevalence of military abilities,” including its skill in “recommending, assisting, and enabling host countries’ forces with the armada of drones we now have, and an unequal [ed] capability to fuse intelligence.”
Similarly, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, nationwide security consultant to Donald Trump, had a virtual melt downon MSNBC days prior to the anniversary, railing against what he considered President Biden’s incorrect choice to actually withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan. “After we left Iraq,” he grumbled, “al-Qaeda morphed into ISIS, and we had to return.” However it didn’t seem to cross his mind to question the initial ill-advised and wrongly justified decision to get into and occupy that country in the very first location.
And none of this is atypical. We have consistently seen those who produced the devastating post-9/ 11 policies safeguard them no matter what the truths tell us. As an attorney in the Department of Justice’s Workplace of Legal Counsel, John Yoo, who composed the notorious memosauthorizing the abuse of war-on-terror detainees under interrogation, followed up the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan with a callfor President Obama to “restart the interrogation program that helped lead us to bin Laden.” As the Senate Torture Reporton Interrogation would conclude several years later, using such brutal strategies of abuse did not in fact lead the U.S. to bin Laden. On the contrary, as NPR has summed it up, “The Senate Intelligence Committee concerned the conclusion that those claims are overblown or totally lies.”
Amongst the unrepentant, obviously, is George W. Bush, the guy in the White House on 9/11 and the president who managed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the securitization of crucial American organizations and policies. Bush proved defiant on the 20th anniversary. The optics informed everything. Talking to a crowd at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where that hijacked plane with 40 passengers and four terrorists crashed on 9/11, the former president was flanked by previous Vice President Cock Cheney. His Machiavellian oversight of the worst excesses of the war on terror had, in fact, led directly to era-defining abrogations of laws and norms. However no apologies were forthcoming.
Rather, in his speechthat day, Bush highlighted in a simply positive style the very policies his partnership with Cheney had spawned. “The security determines included into our lives are both sources of convenience and pointers of our vulnerability,” he said, giving a peaceful nod of approval to policies that, if they were “comforting” in his estimate, also defied the guideline of law, constitutional securities, and previously sacrosanct norms limiting governmental power.
Throughout these twenty years, this country has had to face the difficult lesson that accountability for the errors, mistakes, and lawless policies of the war on fear has shown not just elusive, however inconceivable. Normally, for instance, the Senate Torture Report, which documented in 6,000 mostly still-classified pages the brutal treatment of detainees at CIA black sites, did not result in any officials included being held liable. Nor has there been any responsibility for going to war based upon that lie about Iraq’s expected weapons of mass damage.
Instead, for the many part, Washington has actually decided all these years later to continue in the direction laid out by President Obama throughout the week leading up to his 2009 inauguration. “I do not believe that any person is above the law,” he said. “On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward rather than looking in reverse … I do not want [CIA workers and others to] all of a sudden seem like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”
Examining their shoulders is something, checking out their own hearts quite another.
The current deaths of previous Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who, to name a few scaries, supervised the structure of Guantanamo and using ruthless interrogation strategies there and in other places and of previous CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, who accepted the reasoning of Department of Justice attorneys when it pertained to authorizing torture for his firm, need to advise us of one thing: America’s leaders, civilian and military, are not likely to reconsider their actions that were so extremely incorrect in the war on horror. Apologies are seemingly out of the question.
So, we need to be appreciative for the few figures who courageously breached the divide in between self-righteous defensiveness when it pertained to the erosion of once-hallowed laws and norms and the type of healing that the passage of time and the opportunity to reflect can yield. Possibly history, through the stories left, will prove more qualified when it concerns acknowledging wrongdoing as the best way of looking forward.