Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Report: Massive FBI database set to quadruple in size
'Unclear' how FBI got thousands of hotel, car rental, shopping records
In the months after 9/11, the Pentagon's research arm launched a controversial project known as "Total Information Awareness" -- a massive database collating every available bit of digital information about, well, everything. After a public outcry, Congress defunded the project in 2003.
But now, it looks like it's back, and this time in the hands of the FBI, under the name National Security Branch Analysis Center, or NSAC. A news report at Wired magazine says the NSAC has now collected more than 1.5 billion pieces of information, much of it from the private sector.
And the data is being used "in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases," Wired reports.
The news report, based on declassified data, adds more weight to the argument that the expansion of government power in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has been used for more than hunting terrorists. RAW STORY reported on Wednesday that the "sneak-and-peek" search warrants the Bush administration said were crucial to counter-terrorism aren't actually being used for terrorist surveillance, and are primarily being used in drug investigations.
In the case of the NSAC, among the data collected is "more than 55,000 entries on customers of the Cendant Hotel chain ... which includes Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Super 8, Howard Johnson and Hawthorn Suites," Wired reports, as well as hundreds of records from Avis car rental agency, and 165 customer records from Sears.
"It’s unclear how the FBI got the records," the magazine states. And the FBI evidently wants to quadruple the NSAC's staff:
Wired.com’s analysis of more than 800 pages of documents obtained under our Freedom of Information Act request show the FBI has been continuously expanding the NSAC system and its goals since 2004. By 2008, NSAC comprised 103 full-time employees and contractors, and the FBI was seeking budget approval for another 71 employees, plus more than $8 million for outside contractors to help analyze its growing pool of private and public data.
A long-term planning document from the same year shows the bureau ultimately wants to expand the center to 439 people.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, NSAC became operational in 2007 and it is predicted that it will contain six billion records by 2012, which "amounts to 20 separate 'records' for each man, woman and child in the United States."
In an assessment of law enforcement data mining, the digital privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that a study concluded "that data mining is not an effective tool in the fight against terrorism. The report noted the poor quality of the data, the inevitability of false positives, the preliminary nature of the scientific evidence and individual privacy concerns in concluding that 'automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.'"
Concerns about the NSAC have been around for years. In 2007, Republican House Rep. Jim Sensebrenner (R-WI) asked the US Government Accountability Office to investigate "what information will be contained in the 'records' it collects, whether the 'records' of US citizens will be included in its database, how this data will be employed and how the FBI plans to ensure that the data is not misused or abused in any way."
According to Wired, "no report has been made public yet."
-- Daniel Tencer
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/massive-fbi-database/
In the months after 9/11, the Pentagon's research arm launched a controversial project known as "Total Information Awareness" -- a massive database collating every available bit of digital information about, well, everything. After a public outcry, Congress defunded the project in 2003.
But now, it looks like it's back, and this time in the hands of the FBI, under the name National Security Branch Analysis Center, or NSAC. A news report at Wired magazine says the NSAC has now collected more than 1.5 billion pieces of information, much of it from the private sector.
And the data is being used "in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases," Wired reports.
The news report, based on declassified data, adds more weight to the argument that the expansion of government power in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has been used for more than hunting terrorists. RAW STORY reported on Wednesday that the "sneak-and-peek" search warrants the Bush administration said were crucial to counter-terrorism aren't actually being used for terrorist surveillance, and are primarily being used in drug investigations.
In the case of the NSAC, among the data collected is "more than 55,000 entries on customers of the Cendant Hotel chain ... which includes Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Super 8, Howard Johnson and Hawthorn Suites," Wired reports, as well as hundreds of records from Avis car rental agency, and 165 customer records from Sears.
"It’s unclear how the FBI got the records," the magazine states. And the FBI evidently wants to quadruple the NSAC's staff:
Wired.com’s analysis of more than 800 pages of documents obtained under our Freedom of Information Act request show the FBI has been continuously expanding the NSAC system and its goals since 2004. By 2008, NSAC comprised 103 full-time employees and contractors, and the FBI was seeking budget approval for another 71 employees, plus more than $8 million for outside contractors to help analyze its growing pool of private and public data.
A long-term planning document from the same year shows the bureau ultimately wants to expand the center to 439 people.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, NSAC became operational in 2007 and it is predicted that it will contain six billion records by 2012, which "amounts to 20 separate 'records' for each man, woman and child in the United States."
In an assessment of law enforcement data mining, the digital privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that a study concluded "that data mining is not an effective tool in the fight against terrorism. The report noted the poor quality of the data, the inevitability of false positives, the preliminary nature of the scientific evidence and individual privacy concerns in concluding that 'automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.'"
Concerns about the NSAC have been around for years. In 2007, Republican House Rep. Jim Sensebrenner (R-WI) asked the US Government Accountability Office to investigate "what information will be contained in the 'records' it collects, whether the 'records' of US citizens will be included in its database, how this data will be employed and how the FBI plans to ensure that the data is not misused or abused in any way."
According to Wired, "no report has been made public yet."
-- Daniel Tencer
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/massive-fbi-database/
The Economy is a Lie, Too
Even the Part-Time Jobs are Disappearing
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over.
The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.
The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.
As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news.
The banks, now investment banks thanks to greed-driven deregulation that repealed the learned lessons of the past, were even more reckless than consumers and took speculative leverage to new heights. At the urging of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs’ CEO Henry Paulson, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bush administration went along with removing restrictions on debt leverage.
When the bubble burst, the extraordinary leverage threatened the financial system with collapse. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped forward with no one knows how many trillions of dollars to “save the financial system,” which, of course, meant to save the greed-driven financial institutions that had caused the economic crisis that dispossessed ordinary Americans of half of their life savings.
The consumer has been chastened, but not the banks. Refreshed with the TARP $700 billion and the Federal Reserve’s expanded balance sheet, banks are again behaving like hedge funds. Leveraged speculation is producing another bubble with the current stock market rally, which is not a sign of economic recovery but is the final savaging of Americans’ wealth by a few investment banks and their Washington friends. Goldman Sachs, rolling in profits, announced six figure bonuses to employees.
The rest of America is suffering terribly.
The unemployment rate, as reported, is a fiction and has been since the Clinton administration. The unemployment rate does not include jobless Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year and have given up on finding work. The reported 10% unemployment rate is understated by the millions of Americans who are suffering long-term unemployment and are no longer counted as unemployed. As each month passes, unemployed Americans drop off the unemployment role due to nothing except the passing of time.
The inflation rate, especially “core inflation,” is another fiction. “Core inflation” does not include food and energy, two of Americans’ biggest budget items. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) assumes, ever since the Boskin Commission during the Clinton administration, that if prices of items go up consumers substitute cheaper items. This is certainly the case, but this way of measuring inflation means that the CPI is no longer comparable to past years, because the basket of goods in the index is variable.
The Boskin Commission’s CPI, by lowering the measured rate of inflation, raises the real GDP growth rate. The result of the statistical manipulation is an understated inflation rate, thus eroding the real value of Social Security income, and an overstated growth rate. Statistical manipulation cloaks a declining standard of living.
In bygone days of American prosperity, American incomes rose with productivity. It was the real growth in American incomes that propelled the US economy.
In today’s America, the only incomes that rise are in the financial sector that risks the country’s future on excessive leverage and in the corporate world that substitutes foreign for American labor. Under the compensation rules and emphasis on shareholder earnings that hold sway in the US today, corporate executives maximize earnings and their compensation by minimizing the employment of Americans.
Try to find some acknowledgement of this in the “mainstream media,”
or among economists, who suck up to the offshoring corporations for grants.
The worst part of the decline is yet to come. Bank failures and home foreclosures are yet to peak. The commercial real estate bust is yet to hit. The dollar crisis is building.
When it hits, interest rates will rise dramatically as the US struggles to finance its massive budget and trade deficits while the rest of the world tries to escape a depreciating dollar.
Since the spring of this year, the value of the US dollar has collapsed against every currency except those pegged to it. The Swiss franc has risen 14% against the dollar. Every hard currency from the Canadian dollar to the Euro and UK pound has risen at least 13 % against the US dollar since April 2009. The Japanese yen is not far behind, and the Brazilian real has risen 25% against the almighty US dollar. Even the Russian ruble has risen 13% against the US dollar.
What sort of recovery is it when the safest investment is to bet against the US dollar?
The American household of my day, in which the husband worked and the wife provided household services and raised the children, scarcely exists today. Most, if not all, members of a household have to work in order to pay the bills. However, the jobs are disappearing, even the part-time ones.
If measured according to the methodology used when I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the unemployment rate today in the US is above 20%. Moreover, there is no obvious way of reducing it. There are no factories, with work forces temporarily laid off by high interest rates, waiting for a lower interest rate policy to call their workforces back into production.
The work has been moved abroad. In the bygone days of American prosperity, CEOs were inculcated with the view that they had equal responsibilities to customers, employees, and shareholders. This view has been exterminated. Pushed by Wall Street and the threat of takeovers promising “enhanced shareholder value,” and incentivized by “performance pay,” CEOs use every means to substitute cheaper foreign employees for Americans. Despite 20% unemployment and cum laude engineering graduates who cannot find jobs or even job interviews, Congress continues to support 65,000 annual H-1B work visas for foreigners.
In the midst of the highest unemployment since the Great Depression what kind of a fool do you need to be to think that there is a shortage of qualified US workers?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. This fall CounterPunch/AK Press will publish Robert's War of the Worlds: How the Economy Was Lost. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over.
The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.
The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.
As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news.
The banks, now investment banks thanks to greed-driven deregulation that repealed the learned lessons of the past, were even more reckless than consumers and took speculative leverage to new heights. At the urging of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs’ CEO Henry Paulson, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bush administration went along with removing restrictions on debt leverage.
When the bubble burst, the extraordinary leverage threatened the financial system with collapse. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped forward with no one knows how many trillions of dollars to “save the financial system,” which, of course, meant to save the greed-driven financial institutions that had caused the economic crisis that dispossessed ordinary Americans of half of their life savings.
The consumer has been chastened, but not the banks. Refreshed with the TARP $700 billion and the Federal Reserve’s expanded balance sheet, banks are again behaving like hedge funds. Leveraged speculation is producing another bubble with the current stock market rally, which is not a sign of economic recovery but is the final savaging of Americans’ wealth by a few investment banks and their Washington friends. Goldman Sachs, rolling in profits, announced six figure bonuses to employees.
The rest of America is suffering terribly.
The unemployment rate, as reported, is a fiction and has been since the Clinton administration. The unemployment rate does not include jobless Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year and have given up on finding work. The reported 10% unemployment rate is understated by the millions of Americans who are suffering long-term unemployment and are no longer counted as unemployed. As each month passes, unemployed Americans drop off the unemployment role due to nothing except the passing of time.
The inflation rate, especially “core inflation,” is another fiction. “Core inflation” does not include food and energy, two of Americans’ biggest budget items. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) assumes, ever since the Boskin Commission during the Clinton administration, that if prices of items go up consumers substitute cheaper items. This is certainly the case, but this way of measuring inflation means that the CPI is no longer comparable to past years, because the basket of goods in the index is variable.
The Boskin Commission’s CPI, by lowering the measured rate of inflation, raises the real GDP growth rate. The result of the statistical manipulation is an understated inflation rate, thus eroding the real value of Social Security income, and an overstated growth rate. Statistical manipulation cloaks a declining standard of living.
In bygone days of American prosperity, American incomes rose with productivity. It was the real growth in American incomes that propelled the US economy.
In today’s America, the only incomes that rise are in the financial sector that risks the country’s future on excessive leverage and in the corporate world that substitutes foreign for American labor. Under the compensation rules and emphasis on shareholder earnings that hold sway in the US today, corporate executives maximize earnings and their compensation by minimizing the employment of Americans.
Try to find some acknowledgement of this in the “mainstream media,”
or among economists, who suck up to the offshoring corporations for grants.
The worst part of the decline is yet to come. Bank failures and home foreclosures are yet to peak. The commercial real estate bust is yet to hit. The dollar crisis is building.
When it hits, interest rates will rise dramatically as the US struggles to finance its massive budget and trade deficits while the rest of the world tries to escape a depreciating dollar.
Since the spring of this year, the value of the US dollar has collapsed against every currency except those pegged to it. The Swiss franc has risen 14% against the dollar. Every hard currency from the Canadian dollar to the Euro and UK pound has risen at least 13 % against the US dollar since April 2009. The Japanese yen is not far behind, and the Brazilian real has risen 25% against the almighty US dollar. Even the Russian ruble has risen 13% against the US dollar.
What sort of recovery is it when the safest investment is to bet against the US dollar?
The American household of my day, in which the husband worked and the wife provided household services and raised the children, scarcely exists today. Most, if not all, members of a household have to work in order to pay the bills. However, the jobs are disappearing, even the part-time ones.
If measured according to the methodology used when I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the unemployment rate today in the US is above 20%. Moreover, there is no obvious way of reducing it. There are no factories, with work forces temporarily laid off by high interest rates, waiting for a lower interest rate policy to call their workforces back into production.
The work has been moved abroad. In the bygone days of American prosperity, CEOs were inculcated with the view that they had equal responsibilities to customers, employees, and shareholders. This view has been exterminated. Pushed by Wall Street and the threat of takeovers promising “enhanced shareholder value,” and incentivized by “performance pay,” CEOs use every means to substitute cheaper foreign employees for Americans. Despite 20% unemployment and cum laude engineering graduates who cannot find jobs or even job interviews, Congress continues to support 65,000 annual H-1B work visas for foreigners.
In the midst of the highest unemployment since the Great Depression what kind of a fool do you need to be to think that there is a shortage of qualified US workers?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. This fall CounterPunch/AK Press will publish Robert's War of the Worlds: How the Economy Was Lost. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/
The Weakness of National Military Strength
Wednesday 23 September 2009
by: Lawrence S. Wittner, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
photo
(Illustration: Ben Heine / flickr)
During 2008, the nations of the world spent nearly $1.5 trillion on their military forces. That is what has been reported by the highly respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which noted that the five biggest spenders were the United States ($607 billion), China ($85 billion), France ($66 billion), Britain ($65 billion) and Russia ($59 billion). Adjusted for inflation, the total represents an increase of 45 percent in military expenditures over the past decade.
And so the game of national military "defense" continues, despite clear indications of its negative consequences.
One consequence is a vast diversion of national resources from meeting basic human needs. As President Dwight Eisenhower stated in 1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Another consequence is the undermining of democracy. In the eighteenth century, America's founding fathers were deeply troubled by the prospect of "Caesarism" - the rise of military strongmen who would seize power and stamp out democratic government. Since then, there have been plenty of military takeovers, and not only in the distant past. Among the most notorious of the modern military officers who overthrew democratic governments and set up bloody dictatorships were Francisco Franco in Spain, Anastasio Somoza Garcia in Nicaragua, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Georgios Papadopoulos in Greece, Suharto in Indonesia and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. One of the most repressive regimes in power today was established by Burma's military officers. Only this June, a military coup ousted the democratically elected president of Honduras.
The most obvious weakness of national military preparedness is that it often fails to protect nations from the war and destruction it is supposed to prevent. Despite high levels of military might, nations have been fighting wars for centuries, bringing them to the brink of ruin. Of what value was it to the nations fighting World War I that, in the prewar years, they had been armed to the teeth? Did their weaponry avert war? Might it not even have encouraged that conflict? Was victory in the great "War to End War" that much better than defeat?
Or take the experience of Germany and Japan, two nations that had embarked on rapid military buildups in the 1930's and then suffered almost total disaster (human and material) during World War II. By contrast, during the Cold War, when they stayed on the sidelines - keeping military expenditures low and their troops out of combat - they thrived and prospered. Indeed, it could be said that the real victors in the Cold War were the Germans and the Japanese!
And what about the United States, the world's top spender on the military since the end of World War II? Has this nation experienced "peace through strength"? The reality is that, since 1945, it has been continuously at war, either hot or cold. Furthermore, despite the vast resources, including the lives of millions of Americans, devoted to US national defense, the nation's leaders now tell us that it is more threatened than ever. If it is, one is forced to ask: Of what value were the trillions of dollars of post-1945 military spending? Certainly the overdeveloped US military machine - by far the most powerful in the world - did nothing to safeguard the nation against the terrorist attack in 2001 that took almost 3,000 lives and was conducted by nineteen men armed only with box-cutters. Why is all this military might not doing a better job of protecting us?
The fundamental reason is that what one nation views as defending its vital interests is viewed by other nations as threatening their vital interests. The result is frequently a sense of national insecurity, a growing arms race, and - in many cases - war. Terrorist groups, too, are often motivated by a sense of grievance against heavily armed nations, especially when those nations establish overseas military bases and occupation regimes on their soil.
This fact that national military buildups promote violent conflict has been recognized for years by intelligent citizens and by many government officials. Consequently, there have been modest moves toward establishing a collective security approach to world affairs. These include the development of the League of Nations and the United Nations. But national governments - especially those of the larger countries - have resisted giving up more than a very small portion of their sovereignty to international institutions. Although they pay lip service to the United Nations, they put their faith (and money) in national military might. And this keeps us running endlessly on a treadmill, ever anxious about our national security, as military expenditures rise year by year.
Isn't it time for a different approach?
»
Dr. Wittner is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is "Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement" (Stanford University Press).
http://www.truthout.org/092309T
by: Lawrence S. Wittner, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
photo
(Illustration: Ben Heine / flickr)
During 2008, the nations of the world spent nearly $1.5 trillion on their military forces. That is what has been reported by the highly respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which noted that the five biggest spenders were the United States ($607 billion), China ($85 billion), France ($66 billion), Britain ($65 billion) and Russia ($59 billion). Adjusted for inflation, the total represents an increase of 45 percent in military expenditures over the past decade.
And so the game of national military "defense" continues, despite clear indications of its negative consequences.
One consequence is a vast diversion of national resources from meeting basic human needs. As President Dwight Eisenhower stated in 1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Another consequence is the undermining of democracy. In the eighteenth century, America's founding fathers were deeply troubled by the prospect of "Caesarism" - the rise of military strongmen who would seize power and stamp out democratic government. Since then, there have been plenty of military takeovers, and not only in the distant past. Among the most notorious of the modern military officers who overthrew democratic governments and set up bloody dictatorships were Francisco Franco in Spain, Anastasio Somoza Garcia in Nicaragua, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Georgios Papadopoulos in Greece, Suharto in Indonesia and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. One of the most repressive regimes in power today was established by Burma's military officers. Only this June, a military coup ousted the democratically elected president of Honduras.
The most obvious weakness of national military preparedness is that it often fails to protect nations from the war and destruction it is supposed to prevent. Despite high levels of military might, nations have been fighting wars for centuries, bringing them to the brink of ruin. Of what value was it to the nations fighting World War I that, in the prewar years, they had been armed to the teeth? Did their weaponry avert war? Might it not even have encouraged that conflict? Was victory in the great "War to End War" that much better than defeat?
Or take the experience of Germany and Japan, two nations that had embarked on rapid military buildups in the 1930's and then suffered almost total disaster (human and material) during World War II. By contrast, during the Cold War, when they stayed on the sidelines - keeping military expenditures low and their troops out of combat - they thrived and prospered. Indeed, it could be said that the real victors in the Cold War were the Germans and the Japanese!
And what about the United States, the world's top spender on the military since the end of World War II? Has this nation experienced "peace through strength"? The reality is that, since 1945, it has been continuously at war, either hot or cold. Furthermore, despite the vast resources, including the lives of millions of Americans, devoted to US national defense, the nation's leaders now tell us that it is more threatened than ever. If it is, one is forced to ask: Of what value were the trillions of dollars of post-1945 military spending? Certainly the overdeveloped US military machine - by far the most powerful in the world - did nothing to safeguard the nation against the terrorist attack in 2001 that took almost 3,000 lives and was conducted by nineteen men armed only with box-cutters. Why is all this military might not doing a better job of protecting us?
The fundamental reason is that what one nation views as defending its vital interests is viewed by other nations as threatening their vital interests. The result is frequently a sense of national insecurity, a growing arms race, and - in many cases - war. Terrorist groups, too, are often motivated by a sense of grievance against heavily armed nations, especially when those nations establish overseas military bases and occupation regimes on their soil.
This fact that national military buildups promote violent conflict has been recognized for years by intelligent citizens and by many government officials. Consequently, there have been modest moves toward establishing a collective security approach to world affairs. These include the development of the League of Nations and the United Nations. But national governments - especially those of the larger countries - have resisted giving up more than a very small portion of their sovereignty to international institutions. Although they pay lip service to the United Nations, they put their faith (and money) in national military might. And this keeps us running endlessly on a treadmill, ever anxious about our national security, as military expenditures rise year by year.
Isn't it time for a different approach?
»
Dr. Wittner is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is "Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement" (Stanford University Press).
http://www.truthout.org/092309T
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