When Glenn Greenwald and Andy McCarthy agree on something, it’s perhaps worth taking notice. Both are now on record with severe doubts about whether the Khorasan terror-group in Syria – the one we were just informed had been bombed – actually exists. Glenn wants to argue that it was a pretext to justify bombing Syria on more defensible grounds than fighting ISIS, which officials have noted does not pose a threat to the US, while we were told that Khorasan did. McCarthy wants to argue that it’s simply a new name given to an al Qaeda off-shoot, cynically designed to hide the fact that al Qaeda is alive and well and on the offense in the Middle East. Both have ideological biases – Glenn believing that much of the war on terror is based on fantasy, McCarthy believing that we need to return to torture and aggressive war to fight a new totalitarianism the “left” is too weak to name and shame. I don’t share either assumption, but I do worry about wars against “a more direct and imminent threat” that turns out, after the fact, not to be imminent, wars which find new enemies and dire plots every day, and in which the public simply has to trust the CIA and the Pentagon and the president as to the truth of it all, while we are encouraged to “go shopping.”

And the narrative about Khorasan turns out to have been a classic bait-and-switch. In the beginning of the new war, this group was named as planning imminent threats against the US with innovative explosive devices designed to bring down airplanes. Glenn has an exhaustive account of how the US media – from the NYT to NBC – simply repeated this argument from the administration (with scary graphics and scarier rhetoric). One example from CIA-sourced Eli Lake:

American analysts had pieced together detailed information on a pending attack from an outfit that informally called itself ‘the Khorasan Group’ to use hard-to-detect explosives on American and European airliners.

So at that point, this new and lethal al Qaeda branch had a “pending” threat to US aviation.

It was only after the attack had taken place that the story evolved a little. Last week we noted a Foreign Policy story that concluded that the group was no more capable of launching an attack on the US than ISIS – which is to say, none at all. Then this classic AP account:

Senior U.S. officials offered a more nuanced picture Thursday of the threat they believe is posed by an al-Qaida cell in Syria targeted in military strikes this week, even as they defended the decision to attack the militants. James Comey, the FBI director, and Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, each acknowledged that the U.S. did not have precise intelligence about where or when the cell, known as the Khorasan Group, would attempt to strike a Western target. . . . Kirby, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said, “I don’t know that we can pin that down to a day or month or week or six months … We can have this debate about whether it was valid to hit them or not, or whether it was too soon or too late…We hit them. And I don’t think we need to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes.”

The same could be said for ISIS. They pose no threat to the US, according to all the intelligence sources as well as the president. But hey, who needs “to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes”? Yeah, that’s how far we’ve come. Remember the “dodgy dossier” that the Blair government fabricated to justify the war in Iraq? It tells you something that our protectors don’t even feel the need to fake such a dossier any more. The standard for new wars is now merely the existence of “bad dudes” which the media can be relied upon to amplify into scary monsters. The strikes take place; we do not know if they were successful; and we subsequently find the “threat” was not imminent at all.

My point is simply that a) we have no idea if these multiple, metastasizing wars are actually justified by national security; and b) even when the CIA and White House say they’re not a threat to the US, we bomb them anyway. So we’re at a point when actual debate about what the threats really are to us has no real relationship to new wars. Those wars are pre-emptive now as a matter of course. The only justification is that they are “bad guys.”



Remember when we used to debate pre-emptive war? Now it’s simply routine – and that very debate has evaporated. Obama is running several undeclared, pre-emptive wars against threats the public has no way of judging, and the CIA has an institutional interest in hyping.

At this point, we simply have to trust our rulers on all this. But how can we at this point? The key officials who are supposed to command our trust – James Clapper and John Brennan – are proven, public, bald-faced liars, contemptuous of the Congress and the public. Brennan’s most recent attempt to claim he was not lying earlier this year when he claimed that CIA officials would never look into the Senate Committee’s computers merely underlines how utterly slippery he is. He should have been fired a very long time ago. That he remains in place and that Clapper can lie to the Congress and suffer no sanction tells you all you need to know about who really calls the shots on national security. Clapper told a clear lie to the Congress and has suffered no consequences.

And our role? To cheer each war and to wait until they come back to haunt us still further. Which, given the experience of the last few months, will merely empower the CIA and the Pentagon even more. Maybe you still believe that Obama can keep a lid on the worst of this. But even if you did, can you not see that the extraordinarily permissive standards for new pre-emptive wars all over the world is a standing invitation for a Clinton or a Cruz or a Rubio to do whatever the CIA tells them? The standards under which we are now operating are light years from anything we once considered rational. Has the world really changed so much – or have we?