“Forward, the Light Brigade!”, Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew, Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die, Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred. — Alfred Lord Tennyson
That above stanza from the Poem, “Charge of the Light Brigade” was Alfred Lord Tennyson’s lamentation on the failed military operation in the Crimean War featuring British light cavalry spearheaded by Lord Cardigan against Russian soldiers during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854. Do you see where I am going with this? …… That’s right! I’m going to relate this to the 21st Century Charge of the Light Brigade.
There has been so much going on in the United States since the inception of the pandemic. — The death of George Floyd due to Qualified Immunity of the Police, the qualifying nationwide protest accompanied by the BLM insurrection, the US Capitol Insurrection, and the incoming disasters sponsored by the FED with QE. But the September 11, 2001 attacks have to seem to be long gone amongst many and haven’t come to terms on how it was a cumulative effort by the State to cling onto hegemony- the so-called inevitable necessity to establish the “Common Good” — Hence creating a recipe for a ‘Surveillance State”.
CIA at its Best?
Which came first you may ask. The Chicken or the Egg? The 9/11 terrorist operation was largely facilitated by the government’s vast military and intelligence failures, but obsessively compulsive interventions in the Middle East also produced the incentive for such an attack. (not trying to justify the heinous attack which killed thousands of innocent children, men, and women here though) —but the inability of the US government to defend its own citizens when they were severely harmed. But were the CIA necessarily held accountable?
The justification presented for the necessity of the state — and the necessity of supporting the regime at any specific time that it “keeps us protected.” Presumably, the hundreds of billions of tax collected from taxpayers year after year after year is both vital and praiseworthy because, without it, our neighborhoods would be pandemonium and foreign invaders would butcher Americans.
Yet this rationale for state power also presumes that the nation's alleged defenders are actually competent at their jobs. the CIA's intelligence briefings for the Bush administration in 2001 (prior to September 11) were extremely vague and never communicated much beyond the bland facts that Islamic terrorists exist and might carry out attacks—sometime, somewhere. The agency never devoted many resources to follow up on the possibility of these attacks. Briefings on the topic of Islamic terrorism were historical in nature, with little effort given to anticipating the details of possible future acts. There was no "actionable warning."
The 9/11 Commission noted this problem:
So why was the CIA leadership so incapable of taking the al-Qa'ida threat seriously?
In the Book, Constructing Cassandra: Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947–2001, Jones and Silberzahn conclude, was due to sizable weaknesses in the CIA's analytical capabilities. Just as a general example, the authors note that even as late as 2013, "very few CIA analysts [could] read or speak Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Farsi—which collectively comprise the languages spoken by nearly half the world's population."7
Jones and Silberzahn note this is part of a general problem at the CIA of cultural homogeneity. Prior to 9/11, and likely still today, the CIA's capabilities in understanding foreign cultures is limited by the fact the CIA is largely the domain of college-educated Americans, generally from the same socioeconomic strata.
As noted by one CIA officer shortly after 9/11:
Defenders of the CIA may still come up with excuses for the CIA’s incapacity to know the details of the 9/11 operation beforehand and, but it is glaringly obvious that the CIA isn’t even looking in the appropriate general direction to find such information had it presented itself. Rather, in 2001, the CIA seems to become more interested in working with politicians and the media to leak headlines that emphasized the foreign dangers that the CIA was most open to discussing.
Alas, considering these abject failures, the CIA and the intelligence community have incurred minimal harm to their reputations. There is no reason to assume that the issue has much evolved or that the federal bureaucracy is any more capable now than it was on September 10, 2001. In government bureaucracy, there is no market test or objective measure of success. The intel agencies in the United States were compensated with a significant boost in funding over the 1990s levels in the decade following 9/11.
Twenty years after 9/11, a much-needed culture of skepticism around the nation's "intelligence community" has yet to arise. This attitude will only pave the way for the next time it becomes tragically clear that America's well-funded collection of intelligence agencies doesn't actually "keep us safe."
It takes many years for a society to recover from fits of panic and paranoia such as these. Nineteen years after 9/11, the federal government still has the power to spy on law-abiding Americans with impunity. It still has the power to simply assassinate American citizens—including children—without any due process. American police have been militarized with "surplus" military hardware from various failed and failing wars. The taxpayers will still be paying interest on the trillions of dollars spent on disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan decades from now. Thousands of American troops died for nothing in conflicts that have done nothing to make any American safer. (Hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners have died in those same conflicts.)
Thanks to the reaction to 9/11, governments in the US are further expanded, far more costly, and far less Constitutionally accountable. This is what happens when a country believes itself to be in a utopia of the constant state of emergency. Due process has become a joke. Fast forward 20 years, This has been exacerbated by the ongoing covid-19 crisis. Government officials issue “laws” and “decrees” without discussion or due process. In the name of “security,” Americans are trashed, imprisoned, wrecked, and shamed. Those who oppose the regime’s power are silenced, intimidated, detained, screamed at, and disregarded.
PATRIOT ACT — PATRIOTIC ENOUGH?
It started with the infamous and incongruously named PATRIOT Act, the name is an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. enacted just 6 weeks after the attacks and before any inquiry into how al Qaeda had managed to get past the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
Characteristically, this act was a prototype for George Orwell’s 1984. The new law forced retailers and libraries to tell the FBI what books you’ve read or ordered, your internet service providers (ISPs) to cough up details on your website browsing history, and imposed new financial transaction reporting requirements on your bank or credit union.
As the Bush administration ended in December 2008, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey modified the Attorney General’s Guidelines on Domestic FBI Investigations to create a new category of FBI investigation known as an “Assessment”. Prior to Mukasey’s move, initiating an investigation of a person or a domestic group required some kind of criminal predicate.
By commencing an “Assessment,” an FBI agent could run informants, conduct physical surveillance on a target, and search commercial and government databases (including classified databases) all without any need for supervisor approval for 30 days; and no need to go in front of a judge and acquire a probable cause-based warrant.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
As the Brennan Center for Justice noted in 2012,
“Until 9/11, police departments had limited authority to gather information on innocent activity, such as what people say in their houses of worship or at political meetings. Police could only examine this type of First Amendment-protected activity if there was a direct link to a suspected crime. But the attacks of 9/11 led law enforcement to turn this rule on its head.”
DHS, a completely new, gigantic bureaucracy stitched together through removing existing agencies and departments from one location on the federal organization chart and placing them all under one Secretary of Homeland Security, has never thwarted a single terrorist attack on the United States since its inception. (I’m sorry but this is true)
It has, however, made air travel a living hell through its appendage known as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which now wants to take every traveler’s picture and, The absurd adoption of a de facto national identity card under the REAL ID Act requires you to “show your documents” for even the shortest of travels domestically. Regardless of its motives, it has created virtually indestructible and intrusive government surveillance activities and programs that effectively decimate the Fourth Amendment.
A prime example of the inefficiency of these federal security establishments is in a 2003 terrorist advisory, which warned local law-enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone people who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.” DHS officials also urged local lawmen to be on alert for potential suicide bombers who may be identified by characteristics such as a “pale face from recent shaving of beard.” They “may appear to be in a ‘trance” or their “eyes appear to be focused and vigilant”; either their “clothing is out of sync with the weather” or their “clothing is loose.” etc.
Bureaucratic momentum propels the formation of new classes of prospective adversaries on a regular basis with this state-sponsored surveillance business. According to Nixon White House adviser Tom Charles Huston, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation was constantly expanding its target list “from the child with a bomb to the youngster with a picket sign, and from the boy with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposition candidate.” …
I could go on and on blabbering with raw examples, but that would be a waste of your valuable reading time. Following the terrorist attacks, Americans were repeatedly warned that they needed to go about our daily lives or else “the terrorists will win.” For America, the post-9/11 world meant more searches, more laws, more surveillance, more debt, and endless sermons about how “you’re either with us or with the terrorists.” We were persuaded that we’d have to make the sacrifice. Your “liberty” demands it.
Meanwhile, the feds themselves made no concessions. This is just more of what the feds had always wanted. More taxpayer money. More power. More unfettered authority to detain, spy on, tax, investigate, and govern. Their enormous failures on 9/11 culminated in no revisions or accountability. Everything was served to them on a golden platter.
If the destruction of American liberties was something the terrorists wanted, then they got what they wanted, too. But who led the Light Brigade, ‘Half a league, Half a league, Half a league onward?’ — The answer is quite obvious which establishment/entity is responsible. The topic itself gives the answer. and in this context, who rode into the ‘Valley of Death’? — The American Taxpayer and the US Troops. Not to forget the international casualties as a precipitate. The Federal Government has failed you! yes, you! The ‘Free’ American Citizen. and the rest of the world will consider this as a lesson within their own jurisdiction to empower Individual freedom over Government tyranny under the facade of the “Collective Will”
