Posted by Randy Barnett:
Osama bin Elvis:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_15-2009_03_21.shtml#1237129515
[1]Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at
Boston University, has a fascinating analysis of the "war on terror"
that challenges the conventional wisdom of conservatives,
progressives, and libertarians alike. In fact, his essay [2]Osama bin
Elvis challenges so much conventional wisdom that it makes your head
spin. Yet it is curiously plausible and even sensible. This is
definitely a "read the whole thing" piece, but here are some excerpts
to whet your appetite:
On Osama bin Laden being an ex-existing terrorist
Negative evidence alone compels the conclusion that Osama is long
since dead. Since October 2001, when Al Jazeera's Tayseer Alouni
interviewed him, no reputable person reports having seen him�not
even after multiple-blind journeys through intermediaries. The
audio and video tapes alleged to be Osama's never convinced
impartial observers. The guy just does not look like Osama. Some
videos show him with a Semitic aquiline nose, while others show him
with a shorter, broader one. Next to that, differences between
colors and styles of beard are small stuff.
Nor does the tapes' Osama sound like Osama. In 2007 Switzerland's
Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which does
computer voice recognition for bank security, compared the voices
on 15 undisputed recordings of Osama with the voices on 15
subsequent ones attributed to Osama, to which they added two by
native Arab speakers who had trained to imitate him and were
reading his writings. All of the purported Osama recordings (with
one falling into a gray area) differed clearly from one another as
well as from the genuine ones. By contrast, the CIA found all the
recordings authentic. It is hard to imagine what methodology might
support this conclusion. [snip]
We do not know what happened to Osama. But whatever happened, the
original one, the guy who looked and sounded like a spoiled Saudi
kid turned ideologue, is no more. The one who exists in the tapes
is different: he is the world's terror master, endowed with
inexplicable influence. In short, whoever is making the
post-November 2001 Osama tapes is pretending to far greater power
than Osama ever claimed, much less exercised.
On why the real Osama was not all he was cracked up to be:
There is a good reason why neither Osama nor al Qaeda appeared on
U.S. intelligence screens until 1998. They had done nothing
noteworthy. Since the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa,
however, and especially after director of Central Intelligence
George Tenet imputed responsibility for 9/11 to Osama "game, set,
and match," the CIA described him as terrorism's prime mover. It
refused to countenance the possibility that Osama's associates
might have been using him and his organization as a flag of
convenience. As U.S. forces were taking over Afghanistan in 2001,
the CIA was telling Time and Newsweek that it expected to find the
high-tech headquarters from which Osama controlled terrorist
activities in 50 countries. None existed. In November 2008, without
factual basis and contrary to reason, the CIA continued to describe
him and his organization as "the most clear and present danger to
the United States." It did not try to explain how this could be
while, it said, Osama is "largely isolated from the day to day
operations of the organization he nominally heads." What
organization?
On why the CIA focused so heavily on the largely irrelevant Osama:
But why such gymnastics in the face of Osama's incontrovertible
irrelevance? Because focusing on Osama and al Qaeda affirms a CIA
axiom dating from the Cold War, an axiom challenged during the
Reagan years but that has been U.S. policy since 1993, namely:
terrorism is the work of "rogue individuals and groups" that
operate despite state authority. According to this axiom, the likes
of Osama run rings around the intelligence services of Arab
states�just like the Cold War terrorists who came through Eastern
Europe to bomb in Germany and Italy and to shoot Pope John Paul II
supposedly acted despite Bulgarian intelligence, despite East
Germany's Stasi, despite the KGB. This axiom is dear to many in the
U.S. government because it leads logically to working with the
countries whence terrorists come rather than to treating them as
enemies.
But what if terrorism were (as Thomas Friedman put it) "what states
want to happen or let happen"? What if, in the real world,
infiltrators from intelligence services�the professionals�use the
amateur terrorists rather than the other way around? What is the
logical consequence of noting the fact that the terrorist groups
that make a difference on planet Earth�such as Hamas and Hezbollah,
the PLO, Colombia's FARC�are extensions of, respectively, Iran,
Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and Venezuela? It is the negation of the
U.S. government's favorite axiom. It means that when George W. Bush
spoke, and when Barack Obama speaks, of America being "at war"
against "extremism" or "extremists" they are either being stupid or
acting stupid to avoid dealing with the nasty fact that many
governments wage indirect warfare.
On who were really the perpetrators of 9/11 etc:
Questioning Osama's relevance to today's terrorism leads naturally
to asking how relevant he ever was, and who might be more relevant.
That in turn quickly shows how flimsy are the factual foundations
on which rest the U.S. government's axioms about the "war on
terror." Consider: We know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)
planned and carried out 9/11. But there is no independent support
for KSM's claim that he acted at Osama's direction and under his
supervision. On the contrary, we know for sure that the expertise
and the financing for 9/11 came from KSM's own group (the U.S.
government has accepted but to my knowledge not verified that the
group's core is a biological family of Baluchs). This group carried
out the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and every other
act for which al Qaeda became known. The KSM group included the
perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings Abdul Rahman
Yasin, who came from, returned to, and vanished in Iraq, as well as
Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bombing, who came to the U.S.
from Iraq on an Iraqi passport and was known to his New York
collaborators as "Rashid the Iraqi." This group had planned the
bombing of U.S. airliners over the Pacific in 1995. The core
members are non-Arabs. They had no history of religiosity (and the
religiosity they now display is unconvincing). They were not
creatures of Osama. Only in 1996 did the group come to Osama's
no-account band, and make it count.
In life, as in math, you must judge the function of a factor in any
equation by factoring it out and seeing if the equation still
works. Factor out Osama. Chances are, 9/11 still happens. Factor
out al Qaeda too. Maybe 9/11 still happens. The other bombing plots
sure happened without it. But if you factor out the KSM group,
surely there is no 9/11, and without the KSM group, there is no way
al Qaeda would have become a household word.
Why focusing on Osama is dangerous:
Focusing on Osama bin Elvis is dangerous to America's security
precisely because it continues to substitute in our collective mind
the soft myth that terrorism is the work of romantic rogues for the
hard reality that it can happen only because certain states want it
to happen or let it happen. KSM and company may not have started
their careers as agents of Iraqi intelligence, or they may have
quit the Iraqis and worked for others, or maybe they just worked
for themselves. But surely they were a body unto themselves. As
such they fit Osama's description of those responsible for 9/11 as
"individuals with their own motivation" far better than they fit
the CIA's description of them as Osama's tools.
More important, focusing on Osama and al Qaeda distorts our
understanding of what is happening in Afghanistan. The latter-day
Taliban are fielding forces better paid and armed than any in the
region except America's. Does anyone suggest seriously that Osama
or al-Zawahiri are providing the equipment, the money, or the moral
incentives? Such amounts of money can come only from the super
wealthy of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The equipment can come only
through dealers who work at the sufferance of states, and can reach
the front only through Pakistan by leave of Pakistani authorities.
Moreover, the moral incentives for large-scale fighting in
Pushtunistan can come only as part of the politics of Pushtun
identity. Hence sending troops to Afghanistan to fight Pushtuns
financed by Saudis, supported by Pakistanis, and disposing of
equipment purchased throughout the world, with the objective of
"building an Afghan nation" capable of preventing Osama and al
Qaeda from messing up the world from their mountain caves, is an
errand built on intellectual self-indulgence.
On the competence of the CIA and the role it performs:
The CIA had as much basis for deeming Osama the world's terror
master "game, set, and match" in 2001 as it had in 2003 for
verifying as a "slam dunk" the presence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, and as it had in 2007 for determining that
Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. Mutatis mutandis, it
was on such bases that the CIA determined in 1962 that the Soviets
would not put missiles in Cuba; that the CIA was certain from 1963
to 1978 that the USSR would not build the first strike missile
force that it was building before its very eyes; that the CIA
convinced Bush 41 that the Soviet Union was not falling apart and
that he should help hold it together; that the CIA assured the U.S.
government in 1990 that Iraq would not invade Kuwait, and in 1996
that neither India nor Pakistan would test nuclear weapons. In
these and countless other instances, the CIA has provided the US
government and the media with authoritative bases for denying
realities over which America was tripping.
The force of the CIA's judgments, its authority, has always come
from the congruence between its prejudices and those of America's
ruling class. When you tell people what they want to hear, you
don't have to be too careful about premises, facts, and
conclusions.
Interesting indeed.
References
1. http://www.bu.edu/ir/faculty/codevilla.html
2. http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/13/osama-bin-elvis
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