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Dear Progressive Reader,

Watching the tragic images ([link removed]) of Afghans attempting to climb on a U.S. aircraft to flee their country brings back similar memories from April 1975 in Saigon. Yet as Zoltán Grossman writes ([link removed]) this week, “Media coverage of the Taliban takeover of Kabul would lead most Americans to believe that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began after 9/11, with the invasion launched to topple the previous Taliban government. But Afghanistan has been at war continuously for forty-two years, and the Pentagon has been involved every step of the way, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.”

President Joe Biden is currently receiving much of the blame for events occasioned by the withdrawal of U.S. troops. But the force, which had already been reduced to about 2500, if spread out, would have represented only one U.S. soldier for every hundred square miles of the country. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates ([link removed]) , there is a lot of blame to go around to many past administrations.

Perhaps the real lesson is one that seems hard to learn—military might is not the way to build stable and just societies. As Brad Wolf and Patterson Deppen note ([link removed]) this week, “Measured in terms of military bases, the United States has the largest empire in world history. It maintains 80 to 90 percent of all the foreign military bases on Earth. . . The moment is ripe to end the sprawling U.S. empire of military bases.”

But another lesson, less discussed, is that of all the voices who raised concerns about these policies when they were being created. Peace activists and scholars like Howard Zinn (who would have turned 99-years-old next Tuesday) who spoke out against the war ([link removed]) from the beginning, and also whistleblowers ([link removed]) within the government who exposed the falsehoods behind the rhetoric. I reached out to one whistleblower, Martin Edwin Andersen, whom I had interviewed ([link removed]) a few years ago, to ask his thoughts. “Twenty years and trillions of dollars later, a time in which our own country went feudal in adopting torture and ‘endless war’ fantasies to fight barbarism,” he said in an email, “it is clear that the self-declared shining city on the hill could have
saved our own empire and other nations a lot of pain had it been willing to listen to national security, intelligence community, and human rights whistleblowers before, during, and after 9/11.”

Andersen went on to cite the stories of several such whistleblowers, including “Bogdan Dzakovic, a Federal Aviation Administration anti-terrorist team leader, [who] was one of the few people in the federal government who identified the threat of terrorism and aviation security vulnerabilities,” and “Coleen Rowley, the FBI special agent who blew the whistle on al Qaeda operatives attending flight school in the United States before the attack.” Andersen says these, and “scores of others” exposed threats and “shocking senior executive service incompetence and complicity at the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and other agencies,” but suffered bureaucratic consequences or job loss for their efforts. Andersen goes on to mention another, Robert J. MacLean, “the former federal air marshal who in 2003 exposed another global al Qaeda plot in which hijackers would again breach cockpits.” MacLean became the first whistleblower in history whose case was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. But in spite of th
is, he was fired by the TSA.

It was, Andersen notes, a Republican member of Congress, Christopher Shays, who said in a hearing ([link removed]) in 2006, “Extraordinary powers needed to wage war on our enemies could, if unchecked, inflict collateral damage on the very rights and freedoms we fight to protect.” And, Shays continued, “The use of expansive executive authorities demands equally expansive scrutiny by Congress and the public. One absolutely essential source of information to sustain that oversight: whistleblowers.”

Finally, one last item of note. August 19 marks the anniversary of the murder of Spanish poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca, who was killed ([link removed]) by fascist paramilitaries at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. His remains have never been located, although, as I wrote ([link removed]) in 2017, the quest continues. “The dead are still with us,” a friend wrote me this week from Spain. Today so many countries around the globe are attempting to reckon with their histories of repressive regimes. As researcher Miguel Caballero Pérez told me that day while standing on the field where he believes Lorca’s body is buried, “It is important to know what happened.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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