1. Here’s an essential one: “We assess that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel.”

After the horrid October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israelis, the majority of them innocent civilians, the usual suspects went wild blaming Iran. The Wall Street Journal, a bizarre hybrid of Rupert Murdoch conspiracy theories and sterling reporting, erred on the side of the former with lurid allegations that Iran trained and put Hamas fighters up to the terrorist attack. The Iran War Lobby swung into action. And yet. The ODNI says all that was a fever dream.

2. It should come as no surprise that the Israeli response, which the International Court of Justice found plausibly genocidal, has given a fillip to al-Qaeda and ISIL, and that the ODNI expects it to provoke terrorism against the US. This conclusion, which seems fairly obvious, contradicts the favored inside-the-Beltway meme that Israel is an asset to US security. Its current government’s dedication to policies that produce starving children is likely to lead to anti-US terrorism.

3. But the assessment also says, “The Nordic Resistance Movement—a transnational neo-Nazi organization—publicly praised the attack, illustrating the conflict’s appeal to a range of threat actors.”

This ugly neo-Nazi movement, by the way, celebrated noisily when Trump won in 2016 and saw it as the beginnning of a global far right revolution.

The European and North American far right is confused about Arab-Israeli conflicts. On the one hand, some of them see Israel as “white” and so side with it against Arabs. But in this case apparently they were willing to idolize Hamas if only it would kill innocent Jews.

4. Another important observation: “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from HAMAS for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize HAMAS’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces.”

In other words, the stated goal of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of wiping out Hamas, is impossible. Hamas will pose a danger for “years to come.” Likewise, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s support for the far right Netanyahu government’s total war on Gaza is misplaced, since he said he believes it is waged “so that this never happens again.” Combine points 2, 3, and 4 we can conclude that Netanyahu is virtually assuring that it does happen again.

5. Then there is this:

“• Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has publicly stated his opposition to postwar diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward territorial compromise.”

First, the ODNI is saying that there isn’t an icicle’s chance in hell of there being a two-state solution as long as Netanyahu is prime minister. This conclusion contradicts everything President Biden keeps saying about the future of the Palestinians, and his tired mantra about the imaginary “two-state solution.”

Well, you could say, if the problem is Netanyahu, he may not be there very long. But what the assessment doesn’t say is that the entire Knesset just voted against a Palestinian state. So it isn’t just Netanyahu. It is the Israeli mainstream.

Times of India: “Netanyahu Out? U.S Intel’s Stark Assessment Of Israeli President’s Political Career I Key Details”

6. Speaking of Netanyahu not being there:

“• Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy. Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

Note that US intelligence concurs that the Netanyahu government is extremist, which is the only way to understand the hope for a more moderate successor. Netanyahu gets between 17% and 19% approval in opinion polls, and keen observers of the Israeli political scene believe that his far right Likud Party and its extremist allies (Religious Zionism and Jewish Power) will take a bath in the next parliamentary elections. So US intelligence is not telling us here anything we don’t already know.

Making this assessment public, however, is surely intended to give courage to Netanyahu’s political opponents and to signal that the US intelligence community thinks America would be better off with a different leader.

Reprint Edition.

Fakhreddin Azimi explains that Iran had parliamentary elections in the 1940s and 1950s after the old dictator, Reza Shah was deposed by Britain and its allies in 1941 for refusing to kick the Germans out of his country. Iran was jointly occupied during WW II by Britain, the United States and Russia, and was used by the allies to resupply Russia during its war on the Eastern Front with Nazi Germany.

The lower house in Iran was elected in 1950, and half of the senate was elected in a two-stage election in 1949-1950 (the shah appointed the other half). Many educated Iranians believed that Mohammad Reza Shah, the king, was interfering in the elections behind the scenes, packing parliament with royalists. It was believed that the shah wanted to do a new oil deal with the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) that would be favorable to the British, in return for their political and perhaps financial support of the king.

Many Iranians were unhappy with the 1933 deal between the AIOC and Reza Shah, which paid Iran a small royalty on its own petroleum. By 1950 the British government received more in taxes on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s profits than the Iranian people did on their own petroleum. Those who wanted a fifty-fifty share of the profits (a deal that the US firm ARAMCO had offered the Saudi royal family) formed the National Front. They staged a huge march in Tehran, led by elderly arisocrat Mohammad Mosaddegh, from his house to the palace of the shah, demanding free elections in which the shah and his interior minister did not intervene. Some 8 members of the National Front were elected. Mosaddegh was the first elected representative of Tehran in parliament, garnering 30,738 votes.

On April 29, 1951, the shah acquiesced in the growing nationalist sentiment and appointed Mosaddegh prime minister. Although in the Iranian system of that time the PM was appointed by the king rather than being elected by parliament, Mosaddegh had been elected with tens of thousands of votes to his seat, and the king by appointing him recognized the consensus of the other elected parliamentarians. He came to power by democratic means, which could not be said of the shah himself, who inherited the throne from his father, a minor colonel who made a British-backed coup in 1925.

Prime Minister Mosaddegh leaves for Embassy. Public Domain via GetArchive.

Two days after his appointment, Mosaddegh led parliament to vote to nationalize Iranian oil. The British had refused to negotiate a new deal, so Mosaddegh and parliament invited all of the British to leave the country. The US and the UK were furious that a country of the global South was asserting sovereignty over its natural resources. Americans are sure that all the petroleum in the world actually belongs to them. Trump even said the US should not have left Iraq without “taking its oil,” though what that means is hard to tell. So Washington and London imposed a boycott on Iranian oil sales and slapped down Italy and Japan when they bought Iranian petroleum from wildcat distributors. Does this sound familiar?

The British MI6 intelligence arm developed a plot to overthrow Mosaddegh, but they no longer had any assets in Iran to carry it out. They therefore shopped it to the CIA, which was interested. But Democrat Harry Truman was still president, and the CIA knew that he would give them hell if they suggested such a coup plot to him.

So the Company bided its time and Eisenhower was elected in November, 1952. In early 1953 they sent the coup plot over to the president, who was all for it. The Republican Party elite misunderstood Modaddegh and the National Front as tilting toward Moscow. This was not true, at all, although Mosaddegh was willing to take support from Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party. He also took support from the religious conservative Ayatollah Kashani.

Authority Figures: Mark J. Gasiorowski explains that CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt (a cousin of FDR) was put in charge of Operation Ajax. He met with Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a far right wing military man who hated Mosaddegh. He also met two highly placed journalists who were agents run by the CIA. The shah initially was not in favor of a coup, but Roosevelt went to see him and gained his approval.

Media manipulation.: Roosevelt and his team had powerful journalists trash Mosaddegh. They even funded and began publishing six new newspapers that took an anti-Mosaddegh line.

Suborning members of the national Legislature: Roosevelt bought the allegiance of powerful members of the parliament to turn on Mosaddegh.

Street demonstrations: Pro-shah parties were paid to stage street demonstrations against Mosaddegh.

The first coup attempt involved the shah appointing Gen. Zahedi prime minister and having the head of the shah’s royal guard, Colonel Neʿmat-­Allāh Naṣīrī, arrest Mosqddegh. But the prime minister had gotten wind of this plot and had Nasiri arrested instead. The shah ran away to Rome.

The CIA used local Iranian agents to buy huge crowds of demonstrators who staged rallies throughout Tehran, pretending to be Communists. Even some of the real Communists were taken in and rushed to join them. But of course the propertied classes were suddenly terrified that a Communist take-over was imminent.

Then on 19 August a massive mob rallied at a major square in South Tehran and marched to the central bazaar or old covered market. They then attacked government buildings and “the offices of pro-Moṣaddeq organizations.” This crowd, also manipulated behind the scenes, said it was right wingers demonstrating against the leftist mob of the previous two days. But they were all just fueled by Kermit Roosevelt’s bags of millions of dollars.

Embed from Getty Images.
CIA-funded “pro-Shah” crowd, downtown Tehran, 26 August 1953 (Photo by – / INTERCONTINENTALE / AFP) (Photo by -/INTERCONTINENTALE/AFP via Getty Images)

At this point more military officers defected to Zahedi, and they succeeded in arresting Mosaddegh, who was deposed and tried for treason, then sentenced to house arrest. He died at home in 1967.

So the CIA coup of 1953 succeeded, whereas the Trump coup of 2021 failed.

But note the similarities in technique. Billionaire buddies of Trump such as Rupert Murdoch and Robert Herring had created television channels like Fox and OAN that supported the coup, just as the CIA founded 6 newspapers for the purpose. Wealthy Trump allies also flooded Facebook with false stories about Biden not having been legitimately elected, and the possibility of forestalling the congressional certification of the election. Right wing militias like the Oath Keepers used the Parler channel to organize the invasion of the Capitol, and Trump sicced them on it, just as CIA-bought crowds invaded government buildings in Tehran in mid-August.

Disinformation was also important. Just as the CIA mobs advertised themselves incorrectly as Communists to scare Iranians into supporting Gen. Zahedi, so Trumpies put out rumors that the January 6 insurrectionists were actually antifa.

Members of parliament were suborned against the sitting prime minister, just as Frank Navarro claims Trump lined up 100 members of Congress to overthrow Biden.

The techniques were all very similar. The only big failure of Trump was to get significant buy-in from the officer corps, though ex-generals like Michael Flynn were on board.

After World War II, arrogant American policy-makers switched out governments the way they changed their socks, honing techniques of disinformation and learning to deploy mobs strategically.

After all those decades, the chickens finally came home to roost.

“Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [the term blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”

Ominously enough, he added, “All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.” On page 10, he brought up — and remember he was writing this as the previous century ended — the name of “a former protege of the United States,” one Osama bin Laden. In the 1980s, that rich young Saudi had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group to battle the Russians that he called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army. By the time Chalmers wrote his book, the Russian war there was long over, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and bin Laden had turned against Washington. He was then believed responsible for the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On page 11, Chalmers added that such “retaliation” for American acts was “undoubtedly not yet at an end in the case of bin Laden.”

He summed things up this way: “Because we live in an increasingly interconnected international system, we are all, in a sense, living in a blowback world.”

Sadly, that remains even truer today and, if Chalmers could return from the dead, I have no doubt that he would have much to say about how we now find ourselves on the ultimate blowback planet.

Blowback in a Sole-Superpower World

To use an all-too-appropriate word, given what he was writing about, his book bombed. Boy, did it! The reviewer at the New York Times dismissed it as “marred by an overriding, sweeping, and cranky one-sidedness.” And it sold next to no copies. It was dead in the water, until, 18 months later… yes, I’m sure you’ve already guessed what I’m about to write next… on September 11, 2001, those towers in New York City came down and the Pentagon was clobbered.

Suddenly, Blowback was on every bookstore bestseller table in America. As Chalmers would mention in his new introduction to the 2003 paperback, Metropolitan Books had to reprint it eight times in less than two months to keep up with demand.

Buy the Book

In that volume, he had done something deeply unpopular at the time of publication (except among fringe groups on the left). He had called our country an empire — an imperial power intent on maintaining a staggering military presence globally in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China. A common term used in Washington at the time was the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. And he pointed out, ominously enough, that even without official enemies of any significance, thanks in part to its global imperial presence, Washington had “hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control.” He added tellingly that it “always demands more” and was “becoming an autonomous system.” In addition, the post-Vietnam, post-draft, “all volunteer” military was, he pointed out, increasingly “an entirely mercenary force.” Worse yet, he saw the growth of American militarism at home as another form of blowback from this country’s overextension abroad. (Sound familiar in 2022?)

He warned that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of the war in Afghanistan should have been a warning to Washington. Even more ominously, at a moment when this country’s foreign-policy establishment considered us the “indispensable nation” (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s phrase), he suggested that we were already experiencing “imperial overextension” and on the long downward slope that all empires experience sooner or later.

And keep in mind that all of this was written before 9/11; before President George W. Bush and crew launched devastatingly ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; before this country’s civilian population became — as the nightmare at Uvalde reminded us recently — armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry. It was long before Donald Trump and before the Republican Party was transformed into something unrecognizable. It was well before Congress became essentially incapable of passing anything of significance for most Americans, even as it was instantly capable of providing $54 billion in aid and arms for the Ukrainians and endless funds for the Pentagon.

President Blowback

Just last month, 22 years later, I reread Blowback. Chalmers is, of course, long gone. (He died in November 2010.) But with the news of these last years and what may be on the horizon in mind, I couldn’t help thinking about how he would have updated the book, were he still here.

As a start, I doubt he would have been particularly surprised by Donald Trump. In June 2005, reintroducing a piece he had done for TomDispatch in 2003 on the scourge of militarism, he was already writing: “The American governmental system is no longer working the way it is supposed to. Many distinguished observers think it is badly damaged in terms of Constitutional checks and balances and the structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny.”

And as I added in that same 2005 introduction, reflecting Chalmers:

“In September 2003, only four months after [President George W. Bush’s] ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of Iraq — but that, in the process, the American constitutional system as we’ve known it might well be destroyed.”

Yes, the possibility of our system spinning downward toward some version of tyranny wouldn’t, I suspect, have surprised him. Of course, he didn’t predict Donald Trump. (Who did?) But if anyone could have imagined this country “governed” — and I put that in quotes for obvious reasons — by a billionaire grifter and TV impresario who thought not just unbearably well of, but only of himself, it was Chalmers. Had he been here in 2016, when that bizarre figure ran for president, as he’d been dreaming about doing since at least 2011, and won, I’d put my money on his not being even slightly taken aback. Nor, I suspect, would he have been surprised when the economic inequality that helped Trump to victory only grew ever more rampant in his years in office, while billionaires began to multiply like fleas on a rabid dog.

Honestly, if you think about it for a moment, it’s hard not to imagine The Donald’s success as another version of blowback. In fact, he’s almost inconceivable without the sort of imperial mess Chalmers had in mind and that this country did such a splendiferous job of encouraging with its disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its never-ending war on terror. If it weren’t for the mess that our military machine made of the world in this century (and the money it gobbled up in the process), his rise would be hard to imagine. He now seems like the cause of so much, but honestly, as I wrote during the election campaign of 2016 referring to the disease then in the news: “Perhaps it would be better to see Donald Trump as a symptom, not the problem itself, to think of him not as the Zika Virus but as the first infectious mosquito to hit the shores of this country.”

He certainly marked another key moment in what Chalmers would have thought of as the domestic version of imperial decline. In fact, looking back or, given his insistence that the 2020 election was “fake” or “rigged,” looking toward a country in ever-greater crisis, it seems to me that we could redub him Blowback Donald. (Of course, that “B” could also stand for Blowhard.) And given the present Republican Party, as well as the growing evidence that this country’s political system could be coming apart at the seams, it’s hard not to think that Chalmers was onto something big as the last century ended.

Of one thing I’m sure. He wouldn’t have been slightly shocked to discover that, these days, just about the only thing Congress can agree upon across party lines is the annual raising of the Pentagon budget to levels that now match the military budgets of the next 11 countries combined.

Twenty-First-Century Blowback

In the back of my mind, while rereading his book, I kept wondering how else Chalmers might have updated it in 2022. And what came to mind repeatedly was that potentially ultimate subject, climate change.

Now, Chalmers certainly had a sense of the environmental damage the American empire was already causing, but climate change was not yet on his mind. Recently, to my surprise, I came across a passing reference to it in something I wrote but never published in the 1990s and was surprised I even knew about it then. Still, in this century, as I became ever more aware of it and wrote and published ever more about it at TomDispatch, I came to believe that it would indeed be potentially devastating for humanity. For years, though, I didn’t quite grasp that it would be so in my own lifetime.

Back then, I imagined it as largely a phenomenon of the future, not something for which you could find evidence in the news daily (whether identified as such or not). Yes, at some point I realized, for instance, that South Asia might be more susceptible to climate extremes than many other areas. Still, I hadn’t expected that I would live to see springtime weather with temperatures in the range of 115 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or that such horrific and, without air conditioning, increasingly deathly warmth would be followed by devastating flooding. Or that such extremes would grow more common so quickly.

Nor, honestly, had I expected a wave of record July temperatures (and humidity) here in the northeast U.S. and across much of my own country this very May (it hit 95 degrees on a recent day in Philadelphia!). Nor did I imagine that the Southwest and West would be embroiled in a megadrought the likes of which hasn’t been seen on this continent in at least 1,200 years, with devastating, often record-setting fires, blazing in New Mexico and elsewhere ever earlier in the year. Or the unprecedented severe drought and record flooding in parts of Brazil and Argentina. Or the staggering burning and flooding in Australia. Or the unparalleled floods in recent years in China, Germany, and other countries.

I hadn’t imagined that every spring I’d see more or less the same spring article predicting another terrible, if not record, Atlantic hurricane season. Or that I’d hear about a May hurricane of record strength hitting the Pacific coast of Mexico.

And of course, that’s just to start down what seems like an increasingly endless list. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned those three rare tornadoes in Germany or the record May heat wave in Spain, or… but why go on? You get the idea. In fact, you or people you know are undoubtedly living that very reality, too, in some daunting fashion — and at this moment, thanks to the war in Ukraine and endless other distractions, the world is only burning yet more fossil-fuels promising so much worse to come.

To return to Chalmers Johnson, if you think about it for even 30 seconds, climate change has obviously become the greatest blowback event in human history — with almost unimaginably greater climate chaos likely to come. As he would undoubtedly have noted, if you’re living in the most significant blowback nation in human history, since no other country has put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than the United States, you’re truly facing — to cite the subtitle of his book — “the costs and consequences of American empire” and, of course, of the imperial oil companies that continue to have such a hand in (mis)shaping our world.

Worse yet, in this century, that newest of imperial powers, China, has already outstripped this country in terms of the fossil-fuelization of this planet’s atmosphere. (Yet another classic case of imperial over-stretch in the offing.)

Talk about decline! These days it almost seems to precede imperial rise. Yikes!

And so many years later, just to out-Chalmers the master himself, let me offer another prediction: if the Republicans sweep into Congress in 2022 and Blowback Donald or one of his act-alikes sweeps (or even creeps) into the White House in 2024, consider that the potential end of the American story, since it would ensure that, for years to come, nothing would be done to stop the ultimate version of blowback.

Copyright 2022 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com )

Published in Foreign Policy No. 156 (Sep. – Oct., 2006), pp. 26-28, 30, 32. Copyright Foreign Policy, all rights reserved. Not for further reprint.

These responses were my assessment of 9/11 and the Bush Forever Wars five years after the attacks. It is perhaps worth revisiting them now, 20 years after the attacks. I think I mostly got it right. I pointed out the US had not refashioned Iraq and Afghanistan but just continued the civil war in both countries by backing the previously weaker side. I pointed out that in many ways 9/11 had also been a disaster for al-Qaeda. I pointed to the future threat of cyber-terrorism. One thing that I would like to underline to today’s readers is that the things I said here in fall, 2006, were extremely controversial and would have been angrily denounced by everyone in official Washington. After you read it, you can see what Bush was telling people around the same time here. Because I said these things I was widely and viciously attacked by the right wing in the U.S., who deluged my university administration for years with demands that I be fired; I was subject to an illegal and outrageous investigation of my private life by the CIA; and I was turned down for a job at Yale (which they had asked me to apply for!). As all Wolverines know, the University of Michigan is in any case the best university in the world, and I was always unlikely to leave Ann Arbor. I say all this not in any search for sympathy; I am aware of my privilege. I say it because much of what I said here later on became common wisdom, and I just want to underline how unusual these views were at that time. In fact, it was brave of Foreign Policy to print them; the Bushies and Neoconservatives were vindictive.

9/11 Was a Victory for Al Qaeda

Only somewhat. The operation was certainly a tour de force of large-scale, theatrical terrorism. But did it really advance the goals of the organization? As a result of the attacks, al Qaeda lost its bases and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. Some al Qaeda strategists had wanted to expand the Taliban’s rule from Afghanistan to neighboring countries, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and eventually Pakistan. Instead, the movement’s leaders were forced to either flee overseas or take refuge in a remote network of caves. Military strikes and intelligence operations have disrupted the organization, and hundreds of key operatives have been arrested in Pakistan. Intercepted correspondence and Internet postings reveal that some al Qaeda operatives are bitter toward Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for incurring the full wrath of the United States. Although al Qaeda as a movement or franchise may have benefited from the successes of the Iraqi insurgency, al Qaeda’s leadership did not anticipate the Iraq war. The organization has capitalized on the fighting to further its message and recruiting, but the war was not part of its overarching strategy.

Small Attacks by Local Cells Have Replaced 9/11 -Style Operations

Probably. Post-9/11 terrorism — from Bali to Madrid to London — has become the province of small, local groups who are emulating al Qaeda but not in direct contact with it. These cells can learn a few tricks on the Internet, and they can certainly inflict pain, but they cannot hope to accomplish much. At most, they can carry bombs onto trains. The economic and social disruption of these operations is limited, which is why al Qaeda itself would not bother with them. The core al Qaeda leadership prefers terrorism that has a powerful psychological and political impact. Attaining that level of impact has now become very difficult. The 9/11 hijackers exploited conceptual gaps in U.S. security procedures: American experts did not expect hijackers to be capable of piloting jetliners, and they did not expect them to commit suicide. It would be very difficult to accomplish such an advanced operation again. The organization’s command and control has been severely disrupted, and security agencies around the world are watchful. But al Qaeda is not out of the game entirely. In February 2006, its operatives almost succeeded in bombing the Abqaiq oil refining facility in Saudi Arabia, which would have caused an enormous short term spike in the price of petroleum and widespread fuel shortages. But the fact that a once porous Saudi security apparatus foiled the attack highlights al Qaeda’s limited capabilities.

9/11 Was a Clash of Civilizations

False. The notion that Muslims hate the West for its way of life is simply wrong, and 9/11 hasn’t changed that. The exhaustive World Values Survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents in much of the Muslim world endorsed democracy as the best form of government. Polling by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has found that about half of respondents in countries such as Turkey and Morocco believe that if a Muslim immigrated to the United States, his or her life would be better. The one area where Muslim publics admit to a value difference with the United States and Europe is standards of sexual conduct and, in particular, acceptance of homosexuality. In other words, Muslims reject what might be called Hollywood morality, just as do American conservatives and evangelicals. Those differences alone do not drive people to violence.

If it is not a clash of civilizations, what is it?

It is a clash over policy. Bin Laden has expressed outrage at the occupation of the three holy cities — Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem- – by the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia (now ended) and the Israeli possession of Jerusalem. Before the Iraq war, polling consistently showed that Muslims were most concerned about the United States’ wholehearted support of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. The bloody U.S. occupation of Iraq has now created another point of tension: The Muslim world does not believe that Iraq will be better off because of the U.S. intervention. Autonomy and national independence appear to be part of what Muslims mean by democracy, and they consider Western interventions in Muslim affairs a betrayal of democratic ideals. September 11 and the American response to it have deepened the rift over policy, but they haven’t created a clash of civilizations.

The War on Terror Has no End

That’s the plan. The Bush administration has defined the struggle vaguely precisely so that it can’t end; George W. Bush clearly enjoys the prerogatives of being a war president. So, the administration has expanded the goals and targets of this war from one group or geographical area to another. There is an ongoing counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda and, more broadly, the Salafist jihadi strain of Sunni radicalism. Then there is the struggle to empower the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to crush permanently the Pashtun-centered Taliban. In Iraq, the goal is to ensure the primacy of the Kurds and the Shiites over the Sunni Arabs. And then there is the effort to contain or overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Syria and the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran. Even North Korea sometimes gets included in this sprawling campaign. It is less a coherent war than a hawk’s wish list.If the war on terror is indeed all these things, then it could drag on for decades. More likely, the American public will not tolerate such a costly grab bag of initiatives for much longer. If there is no major attack in the United States, pressure will build on Washington to stop fiddling with the politics of Kandahar and Ramadi, much less those of Damascus and Tehran. At some point, the American public will have to choose between paying for Bush’s ongoing wars and Medicare.And that will be the true end of the war on terror.

9/11 Radically Changed U.S. Foreign Policy

No. American policy has changed only at the margins. The attacks temporarily removed constraints on U.S. political elites, allowing them to pursue their policies more aggressively. As we now know, President Bush and his advisors wanted to undermine Saddam’s regime well before September 11. Absent the attacks, the administration might have employed a limited bombing campaign, a covert operation, or a coup attempt. The attacks suddenly made a years long land war in the Middle East politically palatable. But that energy has now dissipated, and it has left behind little fundamental change in U.S. policy.Despite talk of a war on terror, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, the Persian Gulf monarchies, Morocco,and Pakistan remain close U.S. allies. Relations with Libya were warming in the Clinton era, and the Iraq war didn’t alter its trajectory. American support for Israel remains steadfast. And Iran and Syria were in Washington’s sights well before 9/11.It is possible to imagine a response to 9/11 that would have been dramatically different. The United States might have allied with the Baathist secularists in Syria and Iraq, and with the Shiites in Iran, to counter the extremist Sunni threat. Instead, all Washington’s old friends in the area (including the three regimes that had recognized the Taliban — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) are still friends, and the old enemies are still enemies. The most dramatic changes, of course, are in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both countries have effectively been fighting civil wars for 25 years, with the United States backing the losing side (the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq). After 9/11, the Bush administration transformed the losers in those conflicts into winners. But the civil wars continue, with the unseated groups now playing the role of insurgents. The change is significant, but the transformation is far less complete than what was imagined in the spring of 2003. The administration’s plan for liberalization and democratization in the Middle East has yielded little beyond a failed state in Iraq, an unstable Lebanon torn between Hezbollah and Israel, and polite but noncommittal noises from allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Next 9/11 Will Be Even Worse

It’s anyone’s guess. Al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear material have been amateurish. In 2002, U.S. agents in Afghanistan seized canisters from Taliban and al Qaeda compounds, only to discover that al Qaeda operatives had likely been duped into purchasing phony nuclear materials. The organization has pursued other tools of mass destruction, but without much success. Al Qaeda agents were reportedly planning to use poison gas in New York’s subway system, though it appears that Zawahiri mysteriously called off the operation. Perhaps the experience of the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist group in Tokyo deterred him; its 1995 attack killed 12 people rather than the thousands the terrorists had hoped to claim. Still, it would be irresponsible to minimize the threat. Technological advances are allowing small groups to wreak major damage, and al Qaeda has often attracted skilled engineers and scientists. Breakthroughs in DNA research, for example, could lead to designer viruses that would be a terrorist’s dream. The Internet has created new vulnerabilities as major engineering infrastructure, from dams to nuclear plants, has come to rely on it. The world’s financial systems are increasingly vulnerable as well. Governments, universities, and corporations must ensure that emerging technologies don’t go astray. Al Qaeda may not have fundamentally changed the world on 9/11, but that is no reason to give it a second chance.

Want to Know More?

1 For a discussion of the roots of 9/11 and insight into what makes militants tick, see Fawaz Gerges’s The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006). Noted Islam scholar Gilles Kepel examines the politics behind radical Islam in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon speculate on what the next 9/11 might look like in The Next Attack:The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (New York: Times Books, 2005). FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress surveyed more than 100 leading foreign-policy experts about the prospects for America’s war against terror in The Terrorism Index (FOREIGN POLICY,July/August 2006). Richard Clarke offers an insider’s look at the U.S. government’s struggle to adapt to the world of global terrorism in Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004). The 911 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004) examines the attack in minute detail, assesses the policy failures that made it possible, and suggests reforms to prevent it from happening again.

—

Bonus Video:

9/11: One Day In America | Documentary Series Trailer | National Geographic UK

I’m not sure even an old foreign policy hand like President Biden understands how explosive this move is. Bin Salman is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, and mildly criticizing him is enough to get people thrown in jail and tortured. It is absolutely forbidden inside the kingdom to tie the crown prince to Khashoggi’s murder.

President Biden’s team seems to think that it can sideline Bin Salman, and just deal with King Salman, 85. In my view, this is like a foreign power thinking they could have sidelined Jared Kushner and just dealt with the odious Trump directly.

Bin Salman is enormously popular with Saudi youth and he has concentrated the levers of power in his hands. He will try to tough out the Biden years while continuing his domestic plans.

Biden says he will call King Salman to discuss the issue. US officials are no longer talking to Bin Salman himself.

Saudi Arabia’s modern history took a sharp and dangerous turn on January 23, 2015, when Salman Bin Abdulaziz acceded to the throne of Saudi Arabia. He made his cunning and ambitious young son, Mohammed Bin Salman, the minister of defense, and within two months the Saudi kingdom was at war in Yemen. The Yemen War, which has stretched on for five years without any benefit to anyone, was Bin Salman’s brainchild. Bin Salman went on to sideline rival after rival, and by summer of 2017 he was crown prince.

Saudi Arabia. h/t Wikimedia.

King Salman allegedly has spells of disorientation, and his son is young and vigorous and actually runs things. He kidnapped his cousins in the royal family, imprisoning them in the Ritz Carlton Riyadh, and shook them down for $100 billion. He kidnapped the sitting prime minister of Lebanon and tried to force him to resign (Beirut was outraged and refused to accept the resignation under duress.)

He colluded with the ruler of the United Arab Emirates to overthrow or at least sideline the government of Qatar, trying to make a deep fake of Qatar’s emir speaking on television, so as to smear him to the Americans. He helped impose a blockade on little Qatar aimed at crashing its economy. Likely he was trying to get hold of its natural gas wealth and its sovereign wealth fund, the latter valued at $345 billion. Bin Salman used his friendship with Jared Kushner to inveigle the odious Trump into supporting, at least initially, this Saudi attack on an ally.

So that’s three countries Bin Salman attacked in some way since 2015. Number of countries Saudi Arabia had attacked since it was formed in 1930 and until 2014?

Zero.

Saudi Arabia is a relatively small country by citizen population but extremely wealthy because of petroleum. It had avoided military adventurism, preferring to use its vast wealth as a carrot and a stick. Saudi Arabia was a little timid. If it felt menace, as by the 1979 Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran (which promulgated the idea that there is no place for kings in Islam), it worked through third parties to curb the threat.In the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, Saudi Arabia bankrolled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Iran.

But invading countries and bombing the bejesus out of them or kidnapping prime ministers. Not so much, before 2015.

On October 2, 2018, Washington Post columnist of Saudi extraction Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He needed to do the paperwork to finalize his divorce (imposed on him, more or less, when he was forced out of his country by Bin Salman’s increasing authoritarianism). He wanted to marry his Turkish girlfriend. Mohammed Bin Salman’s brother, Khalid Bin Salman, was ambassador to the US, and he assured Khashoggi that he was welcome in the consulate in Turkey. Was he part of the trap?

A hit team of Saudi assassins flew in. They seized him and put a bag over his head and smothered him to death. To sneak the body out of the consulate, they had brought along a medical examiner who used a bone saw to cut up Khashoggi’s corpse. Apparently even the hit team became nauseous at the slaughter. The ME advised them to listen to music.

The CIA assessed that Bin Salman directly ordered the hit on Khashoggi. He was apparently upset that Khashoggi was writing op eds for the Washington Post that criticized the odious Trump, and was afraid these articles might harm Saudi-US relations, since Khashoggi had until recently been part of the Saudi elite. The odious Trump is notoriously thin-skinned.

CNN’s Alex Marquardt has seen top secret Saudi documents that make it clear that the assassins flew to Istanbul on a plane owned by a Saudi company that was bought up by . . . Mohammed Bin Salman. As if any were needed, here is another piece of evidence for his complicity.

The CIA report is set to hit on Thursday. Stay tuned.

—-

Bonus Video:

Sky News Australia: “Biden to raise murder of US journalist with Saudi King”

I don’t guess I’m thanking Israel for committing a flagrant act of terrorism. If Israel can murder a scientist in Iran, what is to stop it from murdering people it doesn’t like in other countries, including in the United States?

Former director of the CIA, John Brennan, put the reasons for our shocking ingratitude succinctly:

This was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict.
Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits. https://t.co/0uZhyBTM3S

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) November 27, 2020

I do not know whether a foreign government authorized or carried out the the murder of Fakhrizadeh. Such an act of state-sponsored terrorism would be a flagrant violation of international law & encourage more governments to carry out lethal attacks against foreign officials.

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) November 27, 2020

Brennan pointed out that in international law there is a difference between killing a member of a non-state terrorist group and simply murdering the citizen of a sovereign country.

By going public in this way, I suspect Brennan is trying to give the incoming Biden administration officials cover to distance themselves from Israel’s action. Brennan’s former deputy, Avril Haines, has been named by Biden the incoming CIA chief.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

Brennan called Trump’s breach of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal signed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany “the height of folly” and a “disaster.” This is because Brennan knows that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal closed off all four plausible paths for Iran ever to weaponize its civilian nuclear enrichment program. By destroying the treaty, Trump has left Iran free to enrich to higher levels, with more and better centrifuges than the treaty had allowed.

Israeli officials at least say that they do not accept this firm international consensus, and want to destroy the JCPOA because they hold it provides cover for a secret Iranian weapons program. This is no doubt a guilt complex speaking, since Israel has dozens of atomic bombs that it made clandestinely while promising Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon that they would never do such a thing. The difference is that the UN inspection regime in the JCPOA is rigorous, and no country under its inspections has ever developed a nuclear bomb. Israel on the other hand never accepted inspections, and so was free to make its deadly arsenal.

By going nuclear, Israel started an arms race in the Middle East that has cost the United States trillions of dollars. Iraq’s 1980s nuclear enrichment program was in response to the Israeli Bomb, and that Iraq so much as did those (failed) experiments helped lead to the disastrous 2003 Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now we are going around about Iran and could well end up at war with it, a war Israel is goading Washington on to.

With the murder of Fakhrizadeh, its responsibility for which Israel is leaking to the New York Times, the government of Benyamin Netanyahu joins a rogues gallery of backers of state terrorism who kill civilians abroad.

They include Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, who had his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam poisoned to death at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in February, 2017.

Or there is the Saudi government, whose hit squad smothered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to death in an Istanbul consulate on October 2, 2018 and then cut his body up with a bone saw.

And then there is Vlad “the Poisoner” Putin, who enjoys using toxins only a government has access to in order to signal his responsibility, even while denying it orally.

Here is the kind of thing Brennan was talking about: Both the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute that governs the International Criminal Court forbid the murder of non-combatants. Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was a civilian. This action is a war crime, and if it is pursued systematically, it is a crime against humanity.

In 2010-2012, four other Iranian scientists were murdered — Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, also likely by Israel through agents it ran inside Iran. So this activity does seem to be systemic and therefore is a crime against humanity.

The alternative to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal is, at some point down the road, war, which is what Netanyahu is plumping for. Only he is trying to goad the US into fighting that war for him.

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Bonus Video:

Democracy Now! “A Trap? Why Assassination of Top Iranian Nuclear Scientist Could Tie Biden’s Hands in Future Talks”

The 53-page report, “‘They’ve Shot Many Like This’: Abusive Night Raids by CIA-Backed Afghan Strike Forces,” documents 14 cases from late 2017 to mid-2019 in which CIA-backed Afghan strike forces committed serious abuses, some amounting to war crimes. The US should work with the Afghan government to immediately disband and disarm all paramilitary forces that operate outside the ordinary military chain of command and cooperate with independent investigations of all allegations of war crimes and other human rights abuses.

Abusive Night Raids by CIA-Backed Afghan Strike Forces

• Download the full report in English
• Download the appendices to the report

“In ramping up operations against the Taliban, the CIA has enabled abusive Afghan forces to commit atrocities including extrajudicial executions and disappearances,” said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director and author of the report. “In case after case, these forces have simply shot people in their custody and consigned entire communities to the terror of abusive night raids and indiscriminate airstrikes.”

The report is based on interviews with 39 local residents and other witnesses to night raids in Ghazni, Helmand, Kabul, Kandahar, Nangarhar, Paktia, Uruzgan, Wardak, and Zabul provinces, as well as with Afghan human rights groups that have documented these raids.

Since 2001, the CIA has maintained a counterterrorism operation in Afghanistan parallel to but distinct from the US military operation. It has continued to recruit, equip, train, and deploy Afghan paramilitary forces in pursuit of Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces, and, since 2014, militants affiliated with the Islamic State (also known as ISIS).

Night raids by these strike forces aimed at killing or capturing insurgents largely occur in rural areas that are under Taliban control or contested. The forces breach the walls of residential compounds, search the homes, and question the inhabitants. Some men have been detained without their families knowing their whereabouts. Others have been summarily shot.

In many of the night raids Human Rights Watch investigated, strike forces attacked civilians because of mistaken identity, poor intelligence, or political rivalries in the locality. These units have also sometimes targeted houses based on intelligence that family members had provided food to Taliban or ISIS insurgents, even if under duress.

A resident in Wardak province told Human Rights Watch that the strike force “destroyed the gate to our compound with an explosive device. They killed one of my sons at the back of our home and took the other with them.… The forces accused us, ‘Why are you feeding the Taliban?’ But the Taliban come asking for food. If you don’t feed them, then they harass you.”

In Paktia province in August 2019, a paramilitary unit killed eight men who were visiting their families for the Eid holidays and three others in the same village. Witnesses said none offered any resistance before being shot. The forces fatally shot a 60-year-old tribal elder in the eye and his nephew, a student in his 20s, in the mouth.

Afghan community elders, health workers, and others described abusive raids as having become a daily fact of life for many communities – with devastating consequences. One diplomat familiar with strike force operations referred to them as “death squads.”

Night raids have often been accompanied by airstrikes that have indiscriminately or disproportionately killed Afghan civilians. The dramatic increase in civilian casualties from US air operations over the past year may reflect changes to tactical directives eliminating measures that had formerly reduced civilian harm, including limitations on striking residential buildings. The US and Afghan governments have not adequately investigated alleged unlawful airstrikes in Afghanistan. In one case Human Rights Watch investigated, an airstrike called in by strike forces in Nangarhar killed at least 13 civilian members of two families, including several children.

“The US and Afghan governments should cooperate with independent investigations into these allegations,” Gossman said. “These are not isolated cases but illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations – and even war crimes – by these paramilitary forces.”

During night raids on medical facilities, strike forces have assaulted and sometimes killed medical staff and civilian caregivers and damaged facilities. In July, a strike force unit raided a medical clinic in Wardak province, accused clinic staff of treating Taliban fighters, and killed two caregivers, a guard, and a clinic lab worker.

The laws of war protect patients, including wounded fighters, and all medical personnel from attack. While medical facilities can be searched to ensure they are genuinely providing medical services, it is unlawful to disrupt facility operations or confiscate medical equipment.

Taliban forces have frequently committed laws-of-war violations and human rights abuses, including indiscriminate attacks that have killed and injured numerous civilians. However, Taliban atrocities never justify Afghan or US government violations.

The Afghan government should impartially investigate all allegations of abuse by Afghan security forces, prosecute those responsible for war crimes and serious abuses, and disband and disarm paramilitary forces operating outside normal chains of command. The US government should investigate any US personnel involved in these abuses, prosecute those responsible for war crimes, and cease supporting Afghan forces that have been responsible for serious violations.

“CIA-backed Afghan forces in case after case have disregarded protections to which civilians and detainees are entitled, and have committed war crimes,” Gossman said. “The US and Afghan governments should end this pathology and disband all irregular forces.”

On October 30, 2019, the CIA responded to Human Rights Watch’s report.

——-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

ITV S. Africa: HRW ACCUSE CIA & AFGHAN SECURITY OF EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLINGS

When President Donald Trump likened a whistleblower’s White House sources to spies and made a lightly veiled reference to execution, he highlighted a longstanding peril facing those who come forward to alert the public to governmental wrongdoing.

In many instances, whistleblowers find the abusive power they have revealed turned against them, both ending their careers and harming their personal lives.

In the private sector, whistleblowers are often ignored and told their concern is not part of their job description – and are commonly retaliated against by being demoted or fired.

When a whistleblower is in the U.S. intelligence and national security sphere, they’re often speaking out about misdeeds by powerful figures – and, as a result, have frequently faced death threats, physical attacks, prosecution and prison.

The new whistleblower report that alleges wrongdoing by the president is a reminder of the vital importance of holding wrongdoers accountable, regardless of their level of power. When those acts affect national security, whistleblowing is even more important. But as I’ve found in my whistleblowing research, whistleblowers in this arena have far fewer legal protections from retaliation than those in corporate settings or elsewhere in government.

Targets of retaliation

The consequences for government whistleblowers in the last 20 years have been harsh, in part because laws about classified information have made it difficult for people to publicize wrongdoing on sensitive issues.

After William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe alleged in 2002 that their employer, the National Security Agency, mismanaged intelligence-gathering software that potentially could have prevented 9/11, their homes were raided and ransacked by the FBI as their families watched. Ultimately, the NSA revoked their security clearances and they were forced to sue to recover the confiscated personal property.

Another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, alleged in 2002 that the agency’s mass-surveillance programs after 9/11 involved fraud, waste and violations of citizens’ rights. He became the subject of one of the biggest government leak investigations of all time and was prosecuted for espionage, which he ultimately settled through a plea agreement.

A third NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden has spent years in exile, fearing an unfair trial should he return to the U.S.

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has spent years in federal prison for releasing classified documents regarding U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Difficult consequences can come not just from the government but also from the public and the media. The New York Times has come under criticism for revealing identifying details about the current whistleblower’s position.

Few protections

Most laws governing federal whistleblowers lay out a procedure for coming forward with concerns, offer protections for confidentiality, and prevent recipients of information from harassing, threatening, demoting, firing or discriminating against the person raising the complaint.

Whistleblowers reporting securities law violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission have those protections. So do whistleblowers who report on fraudulent billing or claims against the government, such as Medicare or Medicaid fraud.

It can be difficult to find a balance between the government’s need to protect highly sensitive classified information and the public’s interest in uncovering wrongdoing. As a result, protections for whistleblowers in the intelligence community lack robust protections. The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 outlines a process for whistleblowers in the intelligence community to raise concerns, but doesn’t explicitly protect the whistleblower from retaliation or being publicly identified. Two executive-branch directives, created during the Obama administration, do bar retaliation against whistleblowers. However, they create a conflict of interest, because the person who determines whether there has been retaliation may be the person doing the retaliating.

Those Obama-era directives also prevent the whistleblower from seeking an independent court’s review. They do not specify whether and exactly how aggrieved whistleblowers are entitled to back pay or reinstatement of employment, which are common whistleblower remedies.

It’s no surprise, then, that in the first 10 years after the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act was enacted, no intelligence whistleblower was compensated for retaliation. While there have been no subsequent inquiries or information to determine whether intelligence whistleblowers have fared better since 2009, the law as it stands makes it nearly impossible for them to be protected.

Whistleblowers bring much-needed attention to matters of interest and importance to the public. Their courage – and willingness to face professional and personal peril – helps bring to light information that others would prefer to keep secret. That helps society as a whole fight injustice, waste, corruption and abuse of power, rather than passively and blindly accepting it.

Jennifer M. Pacella, Assistant Professor of Business Law and Ethics, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Washington, DC (AFP) – US President Donald Trump revoked a policy Wednesday that required the Central Intelligence Agency to account for civilian deaths from drone strikes.

The move reversed a two-year-old order by his predecessor Barack Obama, who came under pressure for greater transparency after sharply increasing the use of drones for targeted attacks in military and counterterrorism operations.

It could give the CIA greater latitude to conduct strikes as Trump increasingly relies on the spy agency, rather than the military, for lethal drone operations.

Rights groups immediately criticized the move, saying it reverses a hard-fought effort for transparency and accountability in drone strikes, which became central to US strategy in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attack on the United States.

“The Trump Administration’s action is an unnecessary and dangerous step backwards on transparency and accountability for the use of lethal force, and the civilian casualties they cause,” said Rita Siemion of Human Rights First.

Trump’s action rescinded the July 1, 2016 order by Obama requiring the US director of national intelligence to report annually the number of strikes taken against “terrorist targets” outside of active war zones, and give an assessment of combatant and civilian deaths that resulted.

Trump’s move though applied only to strikes by non-defense department agencies — the CIA, in effect.

It did not overturn requirements set by Congress for the Pentagon to account for civilian casualties in its operations.

Activists say the move could make the CIA even less accountable than in the past.

The agency took the lead role in drone strikes in post-9/11 counterterror activities, targeting Al-Qaeda and other extremists especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, with frequent reports of significant “collateral” civilian deaths.

Under pressure to rein in the scores of strikes annually, in 2016 Obama ordered tighter procedures for managing the strikes and reducing civilian casualties.

Around the same time he forced the CIA to slash its drone activities and put the military more in charge of them.

But after Trump took office in January 2017, the CIA’s drone attacks resumed, according to reports.

Its role could grow as US forces reduce their presence in Syria and Afghanistan.

Shannon Green, director of programs at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, called Trump’s order Wednesday “a blow to transparency.”

“While public reporting on the use of lethal force by all agencies is crucial, ensuring that all agencies are accountable for preventing civilian casualties and then responding to claims of harm is perhaps even more important,” she said.

© Agence France-Presse

Featured Photo: “A US Predator drone armed with a missile stands on the tarmac of Kandahar military airport in Afghanistan (AFP Photo/MASSOUD HOSSAINI)”