REMEMBER HOW YOU FELT ON 9/11?

some really smart people are falling into the same trap

There has been way too much death. Beginning with the October 7th atrocities unleashed on innocent Israelis, horror is escalating by the minute with the latest being an explosion at a hospital in Gaza - reported to have killed hundreds, many of them children. Gaza Health officials blame Israel. Israel blames Islamic Jihad. Competing experts on social media are duking it out and Israel itself spent the overnight prepping an exculpatory audio/visual show that includes a secret communication between two fighters whose accent and other speech details have been questioned. (correction here)

I saw Joe Biden touch down this morning and imagined the phone call between Jerusalem and the WH that would have happened once news of bombing gained traction. Biden: We’ll look terrible supporting you if this story stands. What the fuck are your boys doing? You better get it sorted by the time we land. And voilá. It was.

But the truth is that I can’t know and we won’t have the final word until a year or so from now when it no longer matters - just another data point lost to history. In the meantime Team Israel and Team Gaza are locked in a propaganda war of epic size.

Some are saying the IDF just wouldn’t do such a thing but until this happened, Netanyahu had been brazen in suggesting no target was off the table and this hospital has been hit before.

The following sentence was written by a Zionist neocon who helped orchestrate the war in Iraq and was printed in a successful indy newsletter. He argued that such targets were just and then forgave and excused Israel by blaming Hamas and invoking the human shields defense. The explosions occurred within days.

Schools, hospitals, and mosques will be bombed in the coming days. This is what Hamas wants, what it has made sure will happen.

Meanwhile critical thinkers are laying out the dilemma.

As I edit this piece, Biden, in his most presidential navy blue suit is posing with Netanyahu and trying to appear the learned elder who has come to sort out the conflict. This diplomatic cosplay doesn’t hide that he is a dangerous and doddering corruptocrat whose foreign policy team created this disaster. I suspect the Biden crew got some polling numbers as the casualties mount - because Biden did soften, slightly, his dehumanizing rhetoric by suggesting Israel stop blocking aid trucks at the southern border.

In the meantime, the unofficial coalition of former lefties and permanent conservatives which had given me hope during Covidian times - has been ripped apart as surely as if hit by an errant rocket.

People I admired and in some cases, looked up to, are endorsing military action that is predicated on war crimes. This is a heavy statement and yes I know what Hamas did deserves the strongest punishment and retaliation possible but we can’t ignore the ugly truth that innocents are paying with their lives.

The likely outcome will be a mass removal of Palestinians from the strip — for security reasons. The phrase Hamas is using civilians as human shields will go down in history — like we had to destroy the village in order to save it did after Vietnam.

Since the Hamas attacks came to light, I’ve been scrolling hot-takes on Twitter, looking for wisdom from people who have been brave in the past. But I’m finding little. Douglas Murray totally lost it in an interview over the word proportional. I couldn’t believe it was the same man who cleverly took apart Canada’s hopeless legacy media in a Munk debate. But here he was — flinging the world proportionality around as if protecting civilians is for wimps. Cheered on by Dave Rubin, a recent guest on my show.

Glenn Greenwald got it right last night when he reminded us that those applauding the Israeli bombardments of civilians are using the same twisted logic as Osama Bin Laden.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, adamantly denied having planned the attack or played any role in it. He did, however, offer theories as to why it was morally and legally justified to target American civilians with violence. Because American citizens choose their leaders, he argued, and then choose them again, when deciding to reelect them, Americans are directly responsible for those leaders' actions, including when they bomb civilians, impose sanctions on regimes that starve and otherwise kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children; when they destabilize other countries or work to engineer coups in other countries and when they invade and attack other countries as they did with Iraq. 

….

When Hamas launched its horrific attack on Israeli civilians last Saturday, they did so based on the premise that there's no such thing as an innocent Israeli civilian because they elect their governments, which then occupy or blockade Palestinian land, or because they support the killing of innocent people in Gaza, or because they serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. The category of civilian is blurred or even erased when it comes to Israel under the worldview of Hamas. That's what drove what they did in Israel on Saturday. But it's not only Hamas that has embraced this view to justify their targeting of civilians and other atrocities. Over the last week, there have been explicit statements from Israeli officials and their American supporters that promulgate a quite similar theory, namely that because the people in Gaza elected Hamas – they did so the last time an election was permitted – 16 years ago – back in 2007 when most of the population either hadn't been born yet or were far too young to vote – then it means, however, that those so-called “Palestinian civilians” are not quite civilians since they either implicitly or even expertly endorse the violence of their Hamas leaders. The growing invocation of this theory to erode and erase the concept of civilian is quite dangerous and alarming, and we think it merits a good deal of thought and analysis. 

And it does seem we’re we back to the post 9/11 days when pleas for precision and temperance were met with derision by Conservatives and virtually all Democrats.

Bari Weiss is hosting on her Free Press website an interview with former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of America’s catastrophic Iraq War.

The interview was a love-in for Rice, a woman who supported waterboarding and other tortures at Abu Ghraib - a deep stain on America’s moral landscape. How Weiss could have such a short memory is beyond me. Or maybe she doesn’t, which is worse.

I was in awe of her New York Times resignation letter and can’t believe that someone with that much integrity would give a minute of her time and headline space to this neocon warhawk. Here is what Rice was OK with. I had in my personal archive the hard drive belonging to Charles Graner — who was court martialed and sent to prison for his role at Abu Ghraib and I can assure you the photo below is mild.

If you doubt Rice’s defence of torture or enhanced interrogation techniques, watch the clip below.

Seymour Hersh has described how the confusion after 9/11, the intelligence failures and national psychic trauma paved the way for the desperation of American-run torture rooms at the notorious military prison, just west of Baghdad.

Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States government was in a state of panic, frenzy, and paranoia. Seymour M. Hersh, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, describes the intelligence community in the weeks following 9/11 as “confused, divided, and unsure about how the terrorists operated, how many there were, and what they might do next” (73). Hersh notes that as a result of this uncertainty, plus fear and lack of preparedness, the government developed a reliance on “eye-for-an-eye retribution” (46), a desire to inflict the same pain, trauma, and loss their country endured upon the foreign nations that bred the cold-blooded terrorists. America was fixated on crushing terrorism, on gaining crucial information by any and all means necessary. Hersh believes that the scandal has its “roots” in such an aggressive, emotional anti-terrorism policy, not in the “criminal inclinations of a few army reservists” (46). The soldiers’ actions were prompted and encouraged by the bitter, violent, and vengeful mentality of the U.S. government and military, regardless of what might have been the soldiers’ personal sentiments and inclinations

What Hersh describes is the very dynamic at play now — one encouraged by Israel’s western allies who repeat the same dangerous talking points when asked about collateral damage ( civilians) — we support Israel’s right to defend itself. Today, Biden warned Israel about acting on post 9/11-type rage but said and did nothing substantial to tamp it down.

After reviewing the Condi Rice piece, I hopped back over to the Free Press website, home to many talented writers I admire — looking for balance and found some. But I also discovered an opinion piece by Douglas Feith, a discredited neocon operator. In the run-up to Iraq, Feith and others in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans worked with Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi to provide dodgy intelligence that would propel America into a war with Iraq. The story that Saddam Hussein was harbouring Al Qaeda and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was completely false but did the trick. American troops were bogged down there for 11 years.

Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a whistleblower from Feith’s office said this about the intel Feith provided: DoD = Department of Defense — IG = Inspector General

KWIATKOWSKI: When I spoke to the DoD IG over a year ago (regarding the investigation that recently produced a report pronouncing the Feith operations as inappropriate), I tried to explain to the IG that what the Feith group and the Office of Special Plans was doing was information manipulation, not the production of what we legitimately call "intelligence."  Intelligence is vetted, contextualized, and conservative.  What Feith's OSP wanted, needed and produced was inflammatory bits of data, cherry-picked statements, and isolated observations by often shady characters, presented as if they were vetted, contextualized and conservative intelligence.   Unlike intelligence, this effort was designed not to inform decision makers, but to shape a national conversation such that decisions already made by the administration (to topple Saddam and get bases in Iraq) could be pursued without political backlash.  That's what Doug Feith and his folks did for Bush and Cheney in the Pentagon.  

And yet here is Feith, dusted off, giving cover for the killing of civilians in Gaza. It is a horrifying essay. Nowhere is Feith’s compromised background revealed.

Schools, hospitals, and mosques will be bombed in the coming days. This is what Hamas wants, what it has made sure will happen. Those, however well-intentioned, who blame Israel are complicit in Hamas’s war crimes.

The above paragraph was written before yesterday’s hospital attack that Israel is denying. I wonder if there will be a stealth digital edit. Later he makes a bid to ensure Israel isn’t blamed for the horror that is unfolding.

It’s time to place the blame rightly and stop incentivizing Hamas’s crimes against the Palestinians (let alone against the Israelis). For the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis, and to honor basic decency and law, it is the least we can do.

Feith is a dedicated supporter of Israel and military intervention in the Middle East. Like Rice, he is considered responsible for the American debacle in Iraq that killed nearly a million and was a meat grinder for American troops.

Feith got so much wrong that General Tommie Franks told Bob Woodward that Feith is the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth. And yet here we are, being lectured by a guy who should have taken his money and moved to Croatia. Do we never learn?

The American plan for Iraq actually created terrorists by firing Hussein’s Ba’athist militia who immediately fled to Fallujah to begin the insurgency. Rice and Feith are dishonest and dangerous and yet for some reason, repurposed by Bari Weiss on her website - one of the best in indy media.

A lot of the well-financed but non-legacy media platforms and their writers have gone all-in. In a recent podcast I spoke about Ben Shapiro’s hot-takes and his video that is essentially counselling war crimes. This is not a new position for him.

In a 2002 article, Shapiro wrote, "I am getting really sick of people who whine about 'civilian casualties'... when I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really care"

I wonder how free are his writers and podcasters at Daily Wire to take a different stand? Shapiro pays well. I hope we aren’t creating another generation of ideologically driven platforms that exist to appease the boss’s blind spots. And who will edit Free Press pieces that contradict Bari’s views?

Tulsi Gabbard, Dave Rubin, Bari Weiss, Bobby Kennedy and many others I admire are saying things that have shocked me to my core. I hope they will deeply regret it.

A few were also vaccine fanatics and pushed anti-vaxxer punishment but later bandwagon-jumped when the tide shifted and it became acceptable and perhaps more profitable to switch sides.

Please take some time to listen to a special edition podcast I dropped earlier this week. Aziz Abu Sarah is a Palestinian peace activist who condemns the Hamas attack on Israel, explains how pro-Palestinian demos have got it wrong and tells me that 90 percent of the people in Gaza have never met a Jewish person. Two solitudes.

And where is the influential Tucker Carlson — who could actually make a dent in the craziness? I’m stumped. And scared.

Coming up — my interview with brilliant economist and foreign policy expert, Jeffrey Sachs who stepped away from the ruling elite class to tell the truth. He says our most dangerous failing right now is that we lack grown ups in leadership and governance who understand the hard work of actual diplomacy. It is a shocker.

Stay critical.