A declassified version of a new National Intelligence Estimate regarding the threat to the U.S. by terrorism was made public today, concluding that radical Islamic fundamentalist plotters are still out there and some jackasses inside the country could get radicalized enough to launch small scale attacks.
An advanced class of 7th graders with access to the internet could have collectively written a more incisive report relying simply on open source documents. Danger Room's Noah knows it and ABC's Brian Ross sees the same thing.
In fact, what's most notable about the report outside of its inanity, is that one single word is repeated continually through the report.
That word is "Homeland."
Take for example, this sentence:
Overlook, if you will, the absolute banality of the observation that Al Qaeda wants to hit prominent targets in the United States with a devastating attack. (It's about the equivalent of writing a news story that geeks with money like and buy gadgets.)
Instead, think about the use of the word "Homeland" to describe the United States. The estimate repeats the term 11 times in its meager two pages of "key findings". That repetitions signals more than anything that this report is a document crafted for political purposes by an apparatus with a dangerous world view or at least by an apparatus headed by folks who hunger for a conflict.
People who write and think of their country as the Homeland with a capital H tend to think that they can redefine torture, ignore international treaties, fund disinformation efforts to keep morale high, launch wars based on hunches and emphasize the power of the executive branch because they consider themselves the good guys who are the only ones who know what's right for the country. They only want to protect the Homeland, don't you see? The vocabulary is symptomatic of a rigid, nationalistic world view.
There is no such thing as a Homeland. The United States is not Franco's Spain, the National Socialist Party's Germany, or Mussolini's Italy. We do not face imminent destruction of our country or way of life.
Al Qaeda is not Nazi Germany. They are a rabid, fundamentalist religious cult that wants to roll back the modern world for the comfortable certainty of a militant religion, and the movement woos converts by exploiting legitimate and fabricated grievances against Muslims around the world. The group is fighting a rear-guard and ultimately doomed fight against the onslaught of modernity and its squadrons of lattes, fashion trends and cultural dislocations.
While Al Qaeda's rabid and utterly predictable response to modernity was falling out of favor with most Muslims and Muslim-dominated governments throughout the Nineties, it has been re-fueled by this Administration's historically ignorant, testosterone-and-ego-driven post 9/11 foreign policy. Any fool can see this Administration's imperial ambitions repeat the mistakes of colonialism.
The National Intelligence Estimate, at least the unclassified version, doesn't come out and say it, but this Administration has been feeding the animals. In fact, by using the vocabulary of Fascism, the Intelligence Community itself feeds the animals.
So please stop it already. This isn't the Homeland. This is the United States of America. Change the words and the policy will follow.
