Invisible Wars: A Conversation With Norman Solomon
We interview Solomon about his new book exposing the tragic consequences of the media's sycophantic relationship with the American war machine.
For years, Brown University’s Costs of War project has done the important work of analyzing and calculating the horrific consequences of the United States’ so-called “War on Terror.”
In May, Costs of War released a scathing report that seemingly fell under the radar despite its implications: Researchers estimated that at least 4.5 million people have been directly or indirectly killed as a result of America’s borderless, never-ending, and all-consuming post-9/11 campaigns—which have given rise to the security and surveillance state, unsettling new powers for the executive branch, a punishing crackdown on whistleblowers, and tremendous grief and pain in countries touched by militarized occupations.
A war that began in Afghanistan and spread later to Iraq has metastasized into something hardly resembling the early contours of America’s ostensible counter-terror operation—stretching into Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other parts of Africa. While the United States does maintain a troop presence in many of these countries—nations America is not legally at war with—many of the deaths have been attributed to its massively expanded drone campaign.
As The Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts it: “The low-footprint nature of drone strikes—which can be carried out without having personnel in the country being hit—made it politically easier for the U.S. to mount operations in countries with which it was not technically at war. Hundreds of strikes have been carried out in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, carried out by the highly secretive Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command at the Pentagon.”
Now, renowned journalist and author Norman Solomon is out with an important new book exposing the media’s vital role in the U.S. war-making machine and tragic civilian death toll connected to these wars. “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” breaks down the grossly underreported aspects of U.S.-led post-9/11 global wars and analyzes the mechanics perpetuating them. (Buy the book at Bookshop.org.)
Among the reoccurring themes of the book is the corporate media’s role in building up the U.S. war machine and regurgitating its lethal lies and deceit. As Solomon so effectively documents, the media provided cover for government and Pentagon officials, lavishing them with praise and failing to scrutinize many of the claims that proved vital to the Bush administration’s justification for the brutal invasion of Iraq, for example.
Solomon is correct to place so much blame on the feet of the media, which effectively suspended its role as truth-seekers and intervened on behalf of war-makers by acting as propagandists and pseudo-stenographers. The mass media, Solomon argues, has also failed to convey the total human costs of these wars—all of them undeclared, by the way.
Another largely unnoticed and flat-out ignored element of the last 22 years has been a slow-crawling coup by the executive branch to assume war-making responsibilities—powers the U.S. Constitution entrusts to Congress. It’s important to note that the United States never declared war on any of the countries it has invaded and occupied since 9/11. Its justification comes from the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, which has been reinterpreted since its passage to provide the executive with newfound powers to execute these wars.
Such powers became so expansive that the Obama administration declared it was within its legal right in 2011 to kill a U.S. citizen (without trial) who moved to Yemen and became an influential propagandist for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The memo, which the Obama administration fought to keep secret, cited the 2001 AUMF as justification.
“We do not believe [Al-Awlaki’s] citizenship provides a basis for concluding that he is immune from a use of force abroad that the AUMF otherwise authorizes,” Acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron wrote in the memo.
(You can learn more about AUMF in our episode featuring a former U.S. Army Captain who sued the Obama administration for what he believed was an unconstitutional war against ISIS because Congress had yet to declare war on the terror group.)
Most importantly, Solomon goes into great detail to highlight the human suffering and moral and ethical deficiencies resulting from these wars. The lives of so many civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have been so devalued that these people are virtually nonexistent—or as Solomon argues, they’ve been made invisible.
“The ‘war on terror’ became—for the White House, Pentagon, and Congress—a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries, rarely seen, much less understood,” Solomon writes. “Whatever the intent, the resulting carnage often included civilians. The dead and maimed had no names or faces that reached those who signed the orders and appropriated the funds. As years went by, it turned out that the point wasn’t to win the multicontinent war so much as to keep waging it, a means with no plausible end; the quest, in search of enemies to confront if not defeat, made stopping unthinkable. No wonder Americans couldn’t be heard wondering aloud when the ‘war on terror’ would end. It wasn’t supposed to.”
Watch our full interview with Norman Solomon:
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