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Perpetrators of more recent attacks have latched onto U.S. foreign policy to justify violence. The journals of Ahmad Rahami, accused of bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey last month, cited wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. In a 911 call, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub earlier this year, claimed he acted in retaliation for a U.S. airstrike on an ISIS fighter. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated his and his brother’s attack on the Boston Marathon. In many of these cases, pundits and politicians focus on the role of religion, something Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and author of “Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century,” describes as a “red herring,” citing a history of shifting ideologies used to justify terrorist acts.

The U.S. government has announced plans to spend millions of dollars on “Countering Violent Extremism” initiatives, which are supposed to involve community members in spotting and stopping would-be extremists. These initiatives have been criticized as discriminatory, because they have focused almost exclusively on Muslim communities while ignoring political motivations behind radicalization. “Politicians try very hard not to talk about foreign policy or military action being a major contributor to homegrown terrorism,” Sageman says, adding that government reticence to share raw data from terrorism cases with academia has hindered analysis of the subject.

Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”

Which is actually more homophobic: questioning the Clinton Foundation’s lucrative relationship to those intensely anti-gay regimes, or cheering and defending that relationship? All the evidence points to the latter. But whatever else is true, it is a blatant insult to everyone’s intelligence to claim that the motive of these regimes in transferring millions to the Clinton Foundation is a selfless desire to help them in their noble work. Another primary project of the Clinton Foundation is the elimination of wealth inequality, which “leads to significant economic disparities, both within and among countries, and prevents underserved populations from realizing their potential.” Who could possibly maintain that the reason the Qatari and Emirates regimes donated millions to the Clinton Foundation was their desire to eliminate such economic oppression?

It doesn’t exactly take a jaded disposition to doubt that these donations from some of the world’s most repressive regimes are motivated by a desire to aid the Clinton Foundation’s charitable work. To the contrary, it just requires basic rationality. That’s particularly true given that these regimes “have donated vastly more money to the Clinton Foundation than they have to most other large private charities involved in the kinds of global work championed by the Clinton family.” For some mystifying reason, they seem particularly motivated to transfer millions to the Clinton Foundation but not the other charities around the world doing similar work. Why might that be? What could ever explain it? Some Clinton partisans, unwilling to claim that Gulf tyrants have charity in their hearts when they make these donations to the Clinton Foundation, have settled on a different tactic: grudgingly acknowledging that the motive of these donations is to obtain access and favors, but insisting that no quid pro quo can be proven. In other words, these regimes were tricked: They thought they would get all sorts of favors through these millions in donations, but Hillary Clinton was simply too honest and upstanding of a public servant to fulfill their expectations. The reality is that there is ample evidence uncovered by journalists suggesting that regimes donating money to the Clinton Foundation received special access to and even highly favorable treatment from the Clinton State Department. But it’s also true that nobody can dispositively prove the quid pro quo. Put another way, one cannot prove what was going on inside Hillary Clinton’s head at the time that she gave access to or otherwise acted in the interests of these donor regimes: Was she doing it as a favor in return for those donations, or simply because she has a proven affinity for Gulf State and Arab dictators, or because she was merely continuing decades of U.S. policy of propping up pro-U.S. tyrants in the region?

While this “no quid pro quo proof” may be true as far as it goes, it’s extremely ironic that Democrats have embraced it as a defense of Hillary Clinton. After all, this has long been the primary argument of Republicans who oppose campaign finance reform, and indeed, it was the primary argument of the Citizens United majority, once depicted by Democrats as the root of all evil. But now, Democrats have to line up behind a politician who, along with her husband, specializes in uniting political power with vast private wealth, in constantly exploiting the latter to gain the former, and vice versa. So Democrats are forced to jettison all the good-government principles they previously claimed to believe and instead are now advocating the crux of the right-wing case against campaign finance reform: that large donations from vested factions are not inherently corrupting of politics or politicians. Indeed, as I documented in April, Clinton-defending Democrats have now become the most vocal champions of the primary argument used by the Citizens United majority. “We now conclude,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the Citizens United majority, “that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That is now exactly the argument Clinton loyalists are spouting to defend the millions in donations from tyrannical regimes (as well as Wall Street banks and hedge funds): Oh, there’s no proof there’s any corruption going on with all of this money. The elusive nature of quid pro quo proof — now the primary Democratic defense of Clinton — has also long been the principal argument wielded by the most effective enemy of campaign finance reform, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell. This is how USA Today, in 1999, described the arguments of McConnell and his GOP allies when objecting to accusations from campaign finance reform advocates that large financial donations are corrupting:

So if you want to defend the millions of dollars that went from tyrannical regimes to the Clinton Foundation as some sort of wily, pragmatic means of doing good work, go right ahead. But stop insulting everyone’s intelligence by pretending that these donations were motivated by noble ends. Beyond that, don’t dare exploit LGBT rights, AIDS, and other causes to smear those who question the propriety of receiving millions of dollars from the world’s most repressive, misogynistic, gay-hating regimes. Most important, accept that your argument in defense of all these tawdry relationships — that big-money donations do not necessarily corrupt the political process or the politicians who are their beneficiaries — has been and continues to be the primary argument used to sabotage campaign finance reform. Given who their candidate is, Democrats really have no choice but to insist that these sorts of financial relationships are entirely proper (needless to say, Goldman Sachs has also donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, but Democrats proved long ago they don’t mind any of that when they even insisted that it was perfectly fine that Goldman Sachs enriched both Clintons personally with numerous huge speaking fees — though Democrats have no trouble understanding why Trump’s large debts to Chinese banks and Goldman Sachs pose obvious problems). But — just as is true of their resurrecting a Cold War template and its smear tactics against their critics — the benefits derived from this tactic should not obscure how toxic it is and how enduring its consequences will likely be.

Next up was the lower court’s dismissal of the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs had failed to state a claim. The plaintiffs had alleged that the NYPD’s surveillance program was facially discriminatory because it targeted Muslims. In response, the City had demanded information about “when, by whom, and how the policy was enacted and where it was written down.” But the court found the plaintiffs had met their burden, alleging specifics about the program “including when it was conceived (January 2002), where the City implemented it (in the New York Metropolitan area with a focus on New Jersey), and why it has been employed because of the belief ‘that Muslim religious identity … is a permissible proxy for criminality.’” In other words, the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged a facially discriminatory policy even when they couldn’t identify a piece of paper on which it was memorialized. For civil rights lawyers concerned that cases like Iqbal and Twombly are closing off avenues for civil rights litigation, the Third Circuit holding provides some comfort. A key issue in the case was the NYPD’s intent in monitoring Muslims. The City had successfully argued below that it “could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.” Its motive, the City argued, was counterterrorism, not treating Muslims differently. The problem with this argument, the Third Circuit explained, was that the City was mixing up “intent” and “motive.” The intent inquiry focuses on whether a person acts intentionally rather than accidentally, while the motive inquiry focuses on why a person acts. “[E]ven if NYPD officers were subjectively motivated by a legitimate law enforcement purpose … they’ve intentionally discriminated if they wouldn’t have surveilled Plaintiffs had they not been Muslim,” the court concluded.

The court then turned to whether, assuming differential treatment, the NYPD program was nevertheless justified on security or public safety grounds. It began its inquiry by examining the appropriate standard of review, concluding that it was appropriate to apply heightened scrutiny to religion-based classifications under the equal protection clause rather than simply to examine whether the City had a rational basis for its actions. Even though religious affiliation, unlike race, is capable of being changed, the Third Circuit agreed with many of its sister courts that it was of such fundamental importance that people should not be required to change their faith.

New York City had argued that the surveillance program met the heightened scrutiny standard because it was necessary to meet the threat of terrorism. In support, the City put forward its oft-repeated argument that a “comprehensive understanding of the makeup of the community would help the NYPD figure out where to look — and where not to look — in the event it received information that an Islamist radicalized to violence may be secreting himself in New Jersey.” The court was not convinced that this was a sufficiently close fit with the goal, finding that the City failed to meet its burden of rebutting the presumption of unconstitutionality created by plausible allegation of discrimination. Harking back to the World War II internment of Japanese Americans

the Third Circuit cautioned: No matter how tempting it might be to do otherwise, we must apply the same rigorous standards even where national security is at stake. We have learned from experience that it is often where the asserted interest appears most compelling that we must be most vigilant in protecting constitutional rights … Given that “unconditional deference to [the] government[’s] … invocation of ‘emergency’ … has a lamentable place in our history,” the past should not preface yet again bending our constitutional principles merely because an interest in national security is invoked.

Lastly, the Third Circuit rejected as “threadbare” the City’s argument that plaintiffs First Amendment free exercise and establishment clause claims failed because they did not allege “overt hostility and prejudice.” As with the equal protection claims, it was not necessary for plaintiffs to demonstrate animus. *     *     * In conclusion, the court reminded us that the targeting of Muslims, which has been a leitmotif of US security policy, was not new. We have been down similar roads before. Jewish-Americans during the Red Scare, African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, and Japanese-Americans during World War II are examples that readily spring to mind. We are left to wonder why we cannot see with foresight what we see so clearly with hindsight — that “[l]oyalty is a matter of the heart and mind[,] not race, creed, or color.”

Second, it's crucial to understand this causation because it's often asked "what can we do to stop Terrorism?" The answer is right in front of our faces: we could stop embracing the polices in that part of the world which fuel anti-American hatred and trigger the desire for vengeance and return violence.

There seems to be this pervasive belief in the US that we can invade, bomb, drone, kill, occupy, and tyrannize whomever we want, and that they will never respond. That isn't how human affairs function and it never has been. If you believe all that militarism and aggression are justified, then fine: make that argument. But don't walk around acting surprised and bewildered and confounded (why do they hate us??) when violence is brought to US soil as well. It's the inevitable outcome of these choices, and that's not because Islam is some sort of bizarre or intrinsically violent and uncivilized religion. It's because no group in the world is willing to sit by and be targeted with violence and aggression of that sort without also engaging in it

Being targeted with violence is a major cost of war and aggression. It's a reason not do it. If one consciously decides to incur that cost, then that's one thing. But pretending that this is all due to some primitive and irrational religious response and not our own actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional. Just listen to what the people who are doing these attacks are saying about why they are doing them. Or listen to the people who live in the places devastated by US violence about the results. None of it is unclear, and it's long past time that we stop pretending that all this evidence does not exist.

Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.  Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good — i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama

Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so. But it’s precisely because the Government is so often not “well-motivated” that such powers are so dangerous.  Advocating them on the ground that “we will use them well” is every authoritarian’s claim.  More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture:  when our side does X, X is Good, because we’re Good and are working for Good outcomes.  That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.

Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan.  With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority.  Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.  This created an infinite “feedback loop” in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned.  Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”

Sunstein himself — as part of his 2008 paper — explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls “credible independent experts” to advocate on the Government’s behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don’t trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are “independent.”  In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” but warns that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.”  In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda — i.e., pretending that someone is an “independent” expert when they’re actually being “prodded” and even paid “behind the scenes” by the Government — but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don’t make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.  

In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber:  covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line.  Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different.  Why?  Because, as Sunstein puts it:  we have “a well-motivated government” doing this so that “social welfare is improved.”  Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years — coordinated government/media propaganda — is instantaneously transformed into something Good.* * * * *What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.  That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories — both domestically and in Muslim countries — as his prime example.

It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power:  namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption. Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.

It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.

The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to “infiltrate” discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means.  It’s called “covert propaganda” and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are. UPDATE II:  Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that “bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.”  Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin).  Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as “objective,” and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions “anonymously or even with false identities.”

UPDATE III:  Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for ”cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:

So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.”  I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.”  That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment.  Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.

And to compound this already glaring conflict of interest, it was revealed recently that an alleged “secret deal” was struck by JIT in which any member could bar the release of evidence. With all members of JIT being pro-NATO and decidedly arrayed against Moscow, such a “deal” could prevent crucial evidence from being revealed that would effect an otherwise distorted conclusion drawn by the investigators aimed specifically at advancing their greater political agenda in Eastern Europe. Had Malaysia been a member of JIT, the ability of other members to withhold evidence would have been greatly diminished and it is likely such a bizarre deal would not have been conceivable, real or imaged, in the first place.

With the ongoing conflict in Ukraine perceived as a proxy war between NATO and Moscow, JIT’s membership including the NATO-backed Kiev regime itself (a possible suspect), two NATO members (Belgium and the Netherlands) and Australia who has passed sanctions against Russia over the conflict, is a textbook case of conflict of interest.

To casual observers, the current investigation led by NATO members and Kiev, a possible suspect, would be no different than the Donetsk People’s Republic and Russia leading it. Few would consider a DPR or Russian led investigation impartial, and few should see a NATO-led investigation as impartial. Had Malaysia been included in the process, an argument could have been made that an actual investigation was taking place rather than a complex propaganda campaign. Malaysia’s exclusion is a troubling sign for the victims of the MH17 disaster, meaning the true culprits will never be known. The overt politically motivated nature of the investigation will on one hand  help fuel NATO’s propaganda war, but on the other hand, fuel the doubts of millions worldwide over the true events that took place in the skies of eastern Ukraine that day. Like so many other events in human history that took place amid a high stake political struggle, the downing of MH17 will be shrouded in mystery, mystery draped over the truth by the irresponsible leadership of NATO, and those in Washington, London and Brussels egging on the conflict in Ukraine to this very day.