 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and we're joined by Eugene Puneer of Breakthrough News. We're talking on September 11th, the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks and the attack on the Pentagon. A lot has changed across the world. There's been the war on terror, the impact on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran for that matter as well. A lot has also changed inside the United States itself from the nature of the state, attack on press freedoms, so many issues and we're going to be talking to Eugene about this. Eugene, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you so much for having me. Very honored to be here as always. Absolutely. Eugene, first question is really about maybe a macro picture, so to speak. So in these past 20 years where there's been so much and 9-11, of course, a very important anniversary marked by a lot of media organizations, a lot of people across the country. But we've also seen, like I said in the introduction, a lot of changes. So how do you sort of evaluate the post 9-11 United States over the past 20 years if you were to go through very quickly? No, absolutely. Well, I think it really marked a sea change in a range of different senses and maybe perhaps the most immediate, especially now when we're looking at the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was nearly concomitant with the 9-11 attacks. Of course, it was the quote-unquote immediate response to go in through Operation Anaconda in 2002. But what I will say is I think that we can look in retrospect as 9-11 as a real turning point, perhaps the beginning of the end for the unipolar imperialist reality that came into being with the fall of the Soviet Union. And I think so much of the international policy since that time, as we have seen the ability of so many elites to feel the United States could use 9-11 as a trojan horse, if you will, under the guise of counterterrorism, remake the world, even further in the vision of unipolar U.S. power, completely and totally collapse under its own weight. And in the context of that, many changes have been wrought here in the country itself. I think the most notable, of course, being around the issues of civil liberties. And while there is a long history of the violation of civil liberties in the United States, perhaps not the democracy shining city on a hill as it's often been held out to be, there was a significant change post 9-11 by the adoption of mass surveillance techniques through a range of different legal and legislative mechanisms. Of course, the Patriot Act being the most well-known one and different interweaved portions and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Section 702 of that and other previous authorities that were all sort of brought together. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which brought together dozens of different departments and created a massive militarized internal security apparatus. The beginning of, for the very first time in a long time, because of the abuses of COINTELPRO, of the turning of the surveillance apparatus in full into the domestic arena, certainly the CIA and the NSA had been operating similarly internationally. The surveillance of almost all calls and emails and everything like that, and we can certainly get more into that, which bled also, of course, into things like the war on drugs that were redefined as counterterrorism operations, the so-called narco-terrorist in Colombia, which was to use the authority of this post 9-11 reality to intensify the war on drugs and the drive towards mass incarceration. And then, of course, along with all of this becomes the intense racism and xenophobia directed towards anyone. And this is why I say racism, because even though it was around quote-unquote Muslims, it was around anyone perceived to be Muslim, which means anyone from South Asia, anyone from the Middle East, regardless of your heritage, you know, Sikhs, for instance, were very heavily targeted in the United States because of the perception, because they do have a certain type of religious appearance that they were Muslims. I mean, that's the level of ignorance as well that was brought to the table. But this, of course, became a big, big part of the ideological underpinning that there was a fifth column, if you will, inside of the United States itself, inside of the Muslim population. And that played a big role in the later and sort of similarly timed demonization of immigrants writ large and also, again, tied back into some of these issues of how terrorism bled into things like the war on drugs and other pieces like that to create sort of a universal boogeyman, if you will, as it's sort of fulfilled the same role that the Soviet Union fulfilled in the Cold War, which is the justification for the massive expansion of the military machine in the United States, which was a trend that was questioned. And this is the final thing I'll say about this. At the end of the Cold War, there's the idea of a peace dividend that's completely destroyed by 9-11, and the idea of rising military budgets every single year was brought right back into the mainstream of political thought. So a range of different changes and challenges, and of course, the sort of decline of the capitalist economic dynamism in the United States is happening at the same time. And so, yes, this 20 years has been quite eventful and I think has at the really ultimately been a major signal about overall the decline of U.S. imperial power, but like any animal that's backed into a corner, the increased viciousness of U.S. imperial power to maintain its hold on the world. Right, Indian, it's very interesting. You mentioned the military-industrial complex and the kind of growth it has seen over the past two decades because of what we call these forever wars. Of course, one aspect of it is surveillance. One aspect of it is the huge amount of money transfer that has actually happened from American taxpayers into making these big corporations rich. And of course, this plays into every element of it. But how does this also sort of express itself in the way the political system has also changed over the past 20 years? Because we do know that there's been, you've seen Trump, of course, over the past four years, but this is a system that continued during Obama's time, during George Bush's time, even now during Biden's time. So it's not really a Republican or a Democratic thing. It's a very bipartisan thing. So how has that reflected also in the political system? Well, you know, I think that's a great question. And of course, the authorization of the use of military force, only one person spoke up against it. That was Representative Barbara Lee from Oakland at the time. So it's been a completely bipartisan war making reality from the beginning. The issue of surveillance has been completely bipartisan. The maintaining of Guantanamo Bay Prison has been completely bipartisan. And so we have seen consistently here a, I mean, there certainly has always been quite a bit of convergence in the US foreign policy establishment, but really an extreme type of convergence. Because as I mentioned before, you had criticism from the left and from the right of these sort of broader US imperial interventions in the wake of the collapse of the Cold War. And what we saw the 9-11 attacks be used as a pretext for was to bring back this idea of total US domination of every region of the world, no matter what the cost may be, and all sides of the political arena and agenda agreeing to that both major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, and the impact of the policies has been significant. I mean, there is at least one credible study that said in the 2016 election, they did an interesting analysis of counties and found that there was a direct correlation between the number of people who were killed in three of the major states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and one other that's now alluding me, where the counties that were decisive for Trump had higher overall averages of people who had been killed in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, this was really what drove the real initial rise of radicalism in this country that we now have seen. A lot of people have seen Bernie Sanders. They've seen a lot about socialism. They've seen the uprisings around racism. Well, really people of my generation, I'm in my mid-30s that formed an important backbone, and we were the elders in some of these recent movements. But nevertheless, that formed an important backbone. Our experiences were really shaped by the impact of the war and the struggle or the struggle against the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan and US imperial and military adventures abroad. So that became obviously a much bigger factor in terms of our own, in terms of this country's own development of a resistance as well. And I would say, folks active in all sorts of movements, from the climate justice movement to whatever, will trace their roots to this time. So we've certainly seen that as also a big impact in the politics. So both on the left and the right, the various, I think, the fallout, if you will, of the actions of the US government in the wake of 9-11 have played a radicalizing effect. And so since it's from the left and the right, you could say it's both good and bad. But nevertheless, it has put stress on the center in the US political arena. And I think that's the biggest impact is it put a lot of stress on the center. And it's created even more ripple effects that are making people seek more substantive and more holistic solutions to the broader problems that exist in the country and how the US responds to the broader problems as it considers, as it is on the globe. So I think it's been a huge impact on US politics. I mean, the other big impact on US politics, of course, it has brought in a major way more than ever before in the history of the United States, certain ethnicities and social groups, immigrant groups from the South Asian community, the Muslim community writ large, the Arab community, communities that were, certainly have grown larger in the past 20 years, but were traditionally not as big of a part of the political conversation. We're driven more into the political conversation in many ways, purely as a defensive mechanism against the growth of racism and xenophobia, which I think has had a tremendous effort impact in the country on a lot of different policies, but particularly towards the policy of backing Zionism in Israel. So we've seen quite a bit of interesting changes, I think, as a result of this post-911 reality. Usually you mentioned a very important point, if you come to that later, which is about the anti-war protests, but I just wanted to maybe also ask you about the neocon vision, which in the early 2000s really animated. Those who were conducting all these wars, it was about building societies or building societies and exporting democracy and US values and all that kind of stuff. But today in 2021, we're looking at the withdrawal from Afghanistan, we're looking at the retreat not only from Iraq militarily, but even largely from West Asia where the US has really lost a lot of its power and influence. So how really is this vision sort of say adapting itself? Is it adapting itself at all? Or is it incomplete retreat right now? I would say in terms of the population writ large, it is absolutely in retreat. But I think that like all retreats, they can turn into rally points as well. And I think that's what we have seen with the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan. I think that really from my point of view in the past 20 years, it hasn't really been since 9-11 that I've seen as much neocon propaganda injected into the media sphere in the United States so pervasively across all platforms than when the US was withdrawing from Afghanistan. And because there were so many harrowing images of people attempting to escape, because of I think the fact that the social ideology of the Taliban is widely reviled by many people around the world and certainly leaves much to be desired, no doubt about that. But nevertheless, because of the fears that many people rightfully may have had of what could be seen and what was seen in the 1990s, especially around the issue of rights for women, but also in terms of other different issues that were out there, it became a moment where this neocon consensus where if we go back just to 2020, every single Democrat, every single Democrat in the primary campaign said I'm going to withdraw from Iraq, I mean from Afghanistan except for maybe one or two. And some said they're going to leave Iraq too. Beto O'Rourke even said he's going to pull troops out of Syria. And of course, Donald Trump was already in negotiations with the Taliban to remove itself from Afghanistan. So basically a year ago today, the entire political establishment was like we must leave. But because of the way it happened and it created such a tragic humanitarian picture and of course the collapse of this failed occupation in and of itself just terrible the way that it went down I think in terms of how it looked and the reality for many people offered an opportunity for these neocons to say we should have been there. This was a good mission. What about all these other issues? What about values and all these things that have been exposed as totally false? Of course, there was no expansion of democracy and rights and values, just the expansion of murder of millions of people in the destruction of multiple countries and whole societies and historic cultures. But all of that was sort of in a way wiped away as all of the major newspapers and started playing up these takes coming from the neocon establishment. So I do believe that when you look at the polling the vast majority of people still do not want to see these wars and these adventures take place. But we have seen a bit of a strengthening of this neocon ideology cynically using the images coming out of Afghanistan as a springboard in order to present their own views that the United States should be using quote unquote humanitarian means to bring democracy and peace and justice and all of that abroad. So I think it's yet to be seen how much that is able to come back. I think it's much more contested grounds than it was in 2001 and 2002 and 2003 and there's much more opposition inside of I think both sides ideologically in the country. So it'll certainly be interesting to see but yes like any retreats there are rally points and I think that's what we've seen recently. Absolutely. And you did of course you work in the media space and I think the last 20 years have also seen quite a bit of attacks on the media in terms of their targeting of whistleblowers. You've seen what happened with pinkie leaks and of course there's also been the factor say the mainstream media acting or the corporate media acting as cheerleaders for war on multiple occasions. So right now in terms of media freedoms in terms of the situation of media how do you see the country like that? Well I think the space for media has been drastically restricted. I mean of course there has been the criminalization of Julian Assange who isn't even American citizen who wasn't even on American soil when he was publishing these things but the attacks and the attempts to destroy Assange and by extension WikiLeaks and to send a message to anyone that if you publish documents that have been however whether you know or whether you don't know have been perloined from the government and embarrassed them that they will you know do the absolute utmost they can to destroy your life and destroy your media organization. But we've seen this even with mainstream media and this is during the Obama and the Trump administration of course during the Obama administration they were using the how people were swiping into the State Department at Fox News and others to try to track the sources of leaks. We've learned during the Trump administration that they have been more aggressively you were more aggressively using the Justice Department in order to pursue the records of journalists and try to find a way to criminalize people reporting on activity inside of the government and even just in terms of a narrative management point of view we've seen the evolution of the US government especially the US military policy learning from Vietnam of heavily restricting the world the ability of reporters to actually access areas where these wars are happening they invented the concept of the embedded journalist you know in Vietnam they were just you just jump on a helicopter you're on the front lines you report whatever you want to report now the military learning from that the only way to get in there is to have their approval and you know you're in there with the military units of the United States it's you know there's people following you there's minors there's all of this so we've actually seen an expansion of sort of the the management and the molding of the coverage on the ground directly from the correspondence by the US media and of course there are many other things maybe we seen kindalinean who now works for MSNBC who was fired from a previous job because he was actually directly injecting the propaganda of the CIA he was working with the CIA fired from the LA Times but because of that now still working for MSNBC we have a number of mainstream journalists who have increasingly decided that they themselves should actually work with the government the Washington Post of course has now said because of what happened with WikiLeaks and Julian Sange they say they will no longer publish any documents that are stolen from the government no matter how big the scoop that they would never publish them if they're stolen from the government so it gives you a sense of what has really happened in terms of the chilling effect as it concerns the media and I think because the United States still has a very sort of robust media scene it also it does it's the appearances of it don't seem that significant but I think even being willing to bring the espionage act against a journalist for something that all journalists in America do on a daily basis just goes to show you that there's been a big change and that people are being affected and self-censoring and changing their behavior because of the fact that the you the government has become much more interventionist in terms of editorial lines absolutely and it is finally going back to point you mentioned which is the anti-war movement the kind of young movements that have come up over the past two decades for it for a lot of us the protests in the US in the immediate aftermath of the you know the traditional dark war they were a major milestone in terms of the peace movement in terms of how these movements were organized and so 20 years down the line how do you see the situation of these movements are they still able to command the same kind of you know numbers or same kind of influence that they've had or what are the challenges they're facing right now well I think the biggest challenge is between actually perception and action I think that while there are certainly many many people who are against these wars what we saw with not only the fact that they overrode the anti-war movement and went to war in Iraq also the fact that the Democratic Party in 2006 campaigned against Bush on ending the war in Iraq and then did not do that and then also of course Obama who comes in as the most celebrated president who'd criticized the war in Iraq but does the surge in Afghanistan obviously destabilizes Libya I think has created a crisis to some degree in terms of people's confidence of the ability to make change so I think we're seeing a growth now especially in relationship to US policy towards Israel and the Palestinian solidarity movement in the United States has been growing by leaps and bounds and is bigger than it's ever been and it's sort of the new crack in the wall in terms of criticism of foreign policy I would say overall though there has been I think it increased cynicism in people because of the fact that it seems that the two major parties are so impervious to what is a majority critique within the population of the military industrial complex I think there's quite a bit that has to be done to continue to rebuild that capacity and continue to push it because the ideas are certainly there the organizations are certainly there like I said I think we have seen vis-a-vis Palestine a real strong reopening in terms of people criticizing US foreign policy we're seeing certainly on the sort of liberal left side of the spectrum more politicians being forced to speak on those issues even if it's in a cynical hypocritical self-promoting way because there is such a deep reality so I think we're in a very challenging circumstance really of trying to transition the consciousness of people not to rely on political parties but to rely on themselves and rely on their own political power but I do think that there is quite a bit of sentiment there to be built on and that these issues will continue to be potent in the political sphere from a people powered context absolutely thank you so much Eugene for talking to us once again thank you so much for having me that's all your time for today keep watching people's