Monthly Archives: September 2021

PORTALES - A crowd of around 70 gathered in Portales on the day before the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, and were reminded of the Septembers 10, 11 and 12 of 20 years ago.

In a ceremony lasting less than 20 minutes at the parking lot of James Polk Stone Community Bank, Matt Rush took the audience through his memories of 20 years gone by since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

The Friday event, usually held on Sept. 11 but held on the day before with many people already near the Portales downtown square for work, has been an annual tradition at the bank, with owner David Stone noting the importance of honoring local first responders and never forgetting the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Rush, a longtime farmer in Roosevelt County, told the crowd that 20 years ago on that day, he was working with his dad on the wheat crop and it was just a normal day.

"You probably don't remember what you were doing on Sept. 10, 2001," Rush said, "but you were probably doing something similar the day before that, and the day before that, and probably the day before that."

He imagined the same scenario existed for everybody who perished in the attacks, whether they were showing up for work or getting on a morning flight. Their names are now on the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, and posted in countless other locations.

"What would you do," Rush said, "if you knew your history would be sacredly etched into the history books of the world?"

The last 20 years haven't been the same since the planes hit, Rush said, but he remembered the hope that he felt on Sept. 12, 2001. Stores couldn't keep American flags in stock, Rush said, and it didn't matter if you were conservative, liberal or libertarian.

"We saw one thing and one thing only, and that was America," Rush said. "I challenge you to remember that, to cling to that, to fight for that."

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9/11 Remembrance: 'Etched into the history books of the world' - easternnewmexiconews.com

Nickolas Davatzes, who was instrumental in creating the cable television networks A&E and the History Channel, which now reach into 335 million households around the world, died on Aug. 21 at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 79.

The cause was complications of Parkinsons disease, his son George said.

Mr. Davatzes (pronounced dah-VAT-sis) was president and chief executive of A&E, originally the Arts & Entertainment Network, which he ran from 1983 to 2005 as a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and the Disney-ABC Television Group. He introduced the History Channel in 1995 and remained an aggressive advocate, both within the industry and as a spokesman before Congress, for educational and public affairs programming.

By the mid-1980s, A&E had emerged mostly through buying programming and building a bankable viewer audience by negotiating distribution rights with local cable systems as the sole surviving advertiser-supported cultural cable service.

After 60 days here, I told my wife I didnt think this thing had a 20 percent chance, because every time I turned around there was another obstacle, Mr. Davatzes told The New York Times in 1989. I used to say that we were like a bumblebee we werent supposed to fly.

But they did. A&E became profitable within three years by offering an eclectic menu of daily programming that, as The Times put it, might include a biographical portrait of Herbert Hoover, a program about the embattled buffalo, a dramatization of an Ann Beattie short story and a turn from the stand-up comic Buzz Belmondo.

We dont want to duplicate The A-Team or Laverne & Shirley, Mr. Davatzes told The Times in 1985. There is a younger generation that has never seen any thought-provoking entertainment on television. Theyve seen a rock star destroying a guitar every 16 minutes, but theyve never seen classical music.

By network standards, he continued, our viewership will always be limited. But that is the function of cable to present enough alternatives so that individuals can be their own programmers.

Under the A&E umbrella, the network encompassed a broad mix of entertainment and nonfiction programming. It created a singular identity with scripted shows (100 Centre Street, A Nero Wolfe Mystery) and collaborations like its wildly popular co-production with the BBC of Pride and Prejudice, a mini-series based on the Jane Austen novel starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.

The network continued to expand its scope to include documentary series like Biography; Hoarders, which might be classified as an anthropological study of compulsive stockpiling; and the History Channels encyclopedic scrutiny of Adolf Hitler.

Mr. Davatzes was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2006. The French government made him a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1989. He was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 1999.

After his death, Frank A. Bennack Jr., the executive vice chairman of Hearst, called him the father of the History Channel.

Nickolas Davatzes was born on March 14, 1942, in Manhattan to George Davatzes, a Greek immigrant, and Alexandra (Kordes) Davatzes, whose parents were from Greece. Both his parents worked in the fur trade.

After graduating from Bryant High School in Astoria, Queens, he earned a bachelors degree in economics in 1962 and a masters in sociology in 1964, both from St. Johns University, where he met his future wife, Dorothea Hayes.

In addition to his son George, he is survived by his wife; another son, Dr. Nicholas Davatzes; a sister, Carol Davatzes Ferrandino; and four grandchildren. Another son, Christopher, died before him.

After serving in the Marines, Mr. Davatzes joined the Xerox Corporation in 1965 and shifted to information technology at Intext Communications Systems in 1978. A friend introduced him to an executive at the fledgling Warner Amex cable company, who recruited him over lunch and had him sign a contract drawn on a restaurant napkin. He went to work there in 1980, alongside cable television pioneers like Richard Aurelio and Larry Wangberg.

The Arts & Entertainment Network took shape in 1983, when he helped put the finishing touches on a merger between two struggling cable systems: the Entertainment Network, owned by RCA and the Rockefeller family, and the ARTS Network, owned by Hearst and ABC.

His strategy in the beginning was twofold: to focus on making the network more available to viewers, and not to be diverted by producing original programs, instead focusing on acquiring existing ones.

If youre in programming, we know that 85 percent of every new show that goes on the air usually fails, said in a 2001 interview with The Cable Center, an educational arm of the cable industry.

Our overall approach is to create a sane economic model, Mr. Davatzes said in 1985. I like to tell people working for us that we dont eat at 21.

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Nickolas Davatzes, Force Behind A&E and the History Channel, Dies at 79 - The New York Times

Standing in front of Los Angeles City Hall on Saturday, 16-year-old Edan Saedi read the names of more than a dozen people who were killed Sept. 11, 2001.

Reading the names felt heavy on his heart, Edan said.

Those were people, who had stories, who had lives, he said.

Like his peers at the event aimed at teaching young people about the significance of the day, Edan was not alive when the attacks happened. He first learned about them in elementary school by reading a book of historical fiction that described the story of a firefighter.

I wasnt born when 9/11 occurred, but I feel like its one of those events we need to pass on to generations, he said. For me to be able to come here and say as a society we dont support hate, we dont support terrorism, that was the main reason to come today.

The event was organized by L.A. City Councilman Paul Koretz, the citys Civil and Human Rights and Equity Department and the nonprofit Parents, Educators/Teachers & Students in Action. It was part of a national event organized by Global Youth Justice, which distributed flags with 50 names of 9/11 victims to groups across the country so that they could be read aloud.

In advance of the anniversary, PESA created a presentation for teachers to share with their students about the history of Sept. 11 and distributed it to schools.

The whole idea was to give youth an understanding of what Sept. 11 was, said Seymour I. Amster, the groups executive director. Its one thing to say we are never forgetting, but its important to understand the complete history of Sept. 11.

Koretz, who was a state assemblyman when the attacks occurred, said watching Edan and other young people read the victims names gave him pause.

To think of these 20 years that seem to have passed in the blink of an eye, he said. And now we have a generation that didnt experience it and have to be told.

His hope, he said, was that the event at City Hall would help teach that next generation about dialogue and diversity and the importance of being tolerant of everyone which is exactly the opposite of 9/11.

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Reading names of 9/11 victims is a history lesson for L.A. youths - Los Angeles Times

Opponents of honoring the vestiges of slavery fought for years to change the face, or faces, of Monument Avenue, a promenade in the former Confederate capital memorializing military leaders and a politician who led a rebellion against the United States.

Richmond, Virginia's homages to the Confederate president, two generals and a naval officer came down last year following unrest over the police killing of George Floyd. But one man's bronze likeness, that of Robert E. Lee, remained upon Traveller, the horse that the monument's supporters fought to keep him astride.

Like Lee at the Appomattox Court House in 1865, they lost the battle and the war.

The 12-ton, 21-foot-high statue was removed Wednesday from its four-story plinth on Monument Avenue. While many had battled to vanquish the slave-holding general's sculpture from the public square, there was plenty of opposition, including from former President Donald Trump, who last week praised the service and wartime acumen of the man who had betrayed the United States.

The 45th President, no stranger to defeat himself following the 2020 election, has long kept an army of fact-checkers typing away. Yet even by fabulist standards, his statement on the monument and the man it commemorates warrants closer dissection. Here are some of his claims:

Many generals consider Lee 'the greatest strategist of them all'

Trump is correct that President Abraham Lincoln wanted Lee, then a colonel in the US Army, to help lead the North and he declined, later telling his sister he could not "raise my hand against my birthplace," Virginia (which had seceded the day before Lincoln's offer).

It's also true that, in a handful of Civil War battles, Lee earned accolades, But the superlative employed by Trump ignores the storied careers, highlighted by military experts, of Gens. John Pershing, George Patton, William Sherman, David Petraeus and Douglas MacArthur, all of whom defended the United States rather than rebel uprisings.

Loyalty to country notwithstanding, Lee's tactics have been highly scrutinized -- most notably his style of leadership on the battlefield and his penchant for unnecessary aggression. Per the former, Lee was quoted in a conversation with Prussian army Capt. Justus Scheibert saying, "I think and work with all my powers to bring my troops to the right place at the right time, then I have done my duty. As soon as I order them into battle, I leave my army in the hands of God."

Like other Confederate leaders, he suffered from poor maps and unprepared staff, but he also made his own problems, wrote historian Joseph Glatthaar, who has penned numerous books on the military, including two on Lee.

"His most egregious problem was to repeat an error that surfaced in his initial campaign: Lee attempted to coordinate too many independent columns. He overburdened himself and his staff. ... What Lee achieved in boldness of plan and combat aggressiveness he diminished through ineffective command and control," Glatthaar wrote in "Partners in Command: The Relationship Between Leaders in the Civil War."

'Except for Gettysburg, (Lee) would have won the war'

Lee's Army of Northern Virginia scored many notable victories -- including when it was outnumbered at the Battles of Second Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville -- but he lost almost 30,000 troops in those campaigns, partially owing to his aggressive tactics.

Lee was 'perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war'

Trump is correct that Lee was "ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation," but those efforts were limited to White Americans.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer, writing for The Atlantic, are two of many who have dismantled the mythology and hagiography of a "kindly" Lee who voiced his opposition to human bondage while declining to end his involvement in the institution before the Civil War.

Yes, he called chattel slavery a "moral & political evil," but he also wrote, "I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former."

"The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy. This influence though slow, is sure," he wrote in 1856.

The patriarch of one of the wealthiest and most famous families in Lee's birthplace of Westmoreland County freed his slaves decades before the war, but this did not move the general to do the same. Upon inheriting his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis' slaves, Lee was told he could free them immediately if Custis' estate was in good standing, or within five years.

Wesley Norris was born on Custis' plantation and told in an abolitionist newspaper of running away with his cousin and sister after learning Lee intended to keep them enslaved for five more years. Upon capture, the trio were returned to Lee, who demanded to know why they'd absconded. Norris said:

"We frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty.

"We were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered.

"Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done. After this my cousin and myself were sent to Hanover Court-House jail, my sister being sent to Richmond to an agent to be hired."

It's been recognized 'as a beautiful piece of bronze sculpture'

Aesthetic aside, public odes to the Confederacy were recognized as an affront to a healing nation by none other than Lee himself, who died 20 years before his statue was erected by those seeking to promote the Civil War's problematic "Lost Cause" narrative.

"Lee feared that these reminders of the past would preserve fierce passions for the future," historian Jonathan Horn wrote in a 2016 op-ed. "Such emotions threatened his vision for speedy reconciliation. As he saw it, bridging a divided country justified abridging history in places."

Lee wrote to a fellow ex-general in December 1866, "As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated; my conviction is, that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; & of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour."

The year before he died, Lee declined an invitation to a confab of former Union and Confederate officers who had served in the Battle of Gettysburg, which a newspaper reported was, in part, aimed at discussing "enduring memorials of granite."

"I could not add anything material to the information existing on the subject," Lee wrote. "I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered."

For what it's worth, descendants of Confederate luminaries Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson -- whose likenesses, too, have been removed from Monument Avenue -- told CNN after the deadly 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, that they believed such monuments were no longer suited for public display.

"We cannot ignore his decision to own slaves, his decision to go to war for the Confederacy, and, ultimately, the fact that he was a white man fighting on the side of white supremacy," Jackson's descendants wrote. "While we are not ashamed of our great great grandfather, we are ashamed to benefit from white supremacy while our black family and friends suffer. We are ashamed of the monument."

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CNN's Chris Boyette contributed to this report.

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History doesn't jibe with Trump's characterization of Robert E. Lee as a unifier and premier war strategist - Henry Herald

When we launched Lawfare eleven years and ten days ago, we pledged to devote what we then called the blog to that nebulous zone in which actions taken or contemplated to protect the nation interact with the nation's laws and legal institutions. It was two years into the Obama administration, and our main focus at the time was on the legal and policy issues that had continued to arise in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The twentieth anniversary of those attacks is a good moment to reflect on where we have been and where we are now, both as a country dealing with those legal and policy issues and as a site that was founded to address them.

Lawfare was not around for the formative years of the post-9/11 era, but those years loomed very large over the early debates on the site. Debates concerning whether the Bush administrations aggressive actions in a range of areas were justified were still very raw, and the open wounds from those discussions necessarily inflected how people felt about then-current disputes. If one thought that the history of Guantanamo was an abomination that needed to be extirpated root and branch, for example, one was apt see detention policy in the Obama administration very differently than if one regarded Guantanamo and the policies that came with it as a reasonable response to the problems of captures in the chaotic months after the attacks. If one took the war legal paradigm established by the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force as a reasonable and lawful response to an armed attack on the country, one was apt to respond very differently to the Obama administrations dramatic ramp-up in drone strikes than if one regarded the 2001 AUMF and its concomitant legal posture as a militarization of what should have been a more traditional response to a set of criminal acts. The immediate post-September 11 policymaking under the Bush administration, and its aftermath, thus necessarily formed a great deal of the warp and weft of this sites early writing.

The September 11 attacks had not been the first major operational successes for Al Qaeda. But September 11 was different. It was a paradigm-shifting moment, sharply altering the course of historyboth in geopolitical terms and in American legal terms. September 11 looms over the legal history relevant to Lawfare in a way that no prior or subsequent Al Qaeda attack does.

For the U.S. government after September 11, prevention of further attacks became the highest priority. And from that principle so much followed. For law enforcement, this meant an investigative and prosecutorial emphasis on detecting and disrupting plots before they could come to fruition, using tools ranging from conspiracy and material support charges to material-witness detention, an Al Capone-style emphasis on the use of available charges of other kinds, and a surge of reliance on confidential informants and cooperating witnesses.

For the National Security Agency, it meant a chalk-on-the-cleats efforts to squeeze the most possible information from the worlds rapidly-evolving communications networks in a fashion that at least pushed the limits of existing law.

For the Central Intelligence Agency, it meant a massive reorientation of efforts toward counterterrorism in general, and more specifically towards manhunting missions for suspected terrorists that would culminate in secret detentions, brutal interrogations and the use of lethal force.

For the Department of Defense, it meant deployment into armed conflict in the relatively-conventional setting of Afghanistan, as well as the unconventional operations conducted by Joint Special Operations Command elsewhere. It also meant large-scale detention operations and a novel attempt to use military trials of terrorism suspects.

For the Bush Administration more broadly, it meant recognition that a state of armed conflict existed between the United States and Al Qaeda, a proposition seconded by Congress when it passed the AUMF calling on the president to use all necessary and appropriate military force against whomever he determined was responsible for the attacks, as well as against any entity harboring that responsible party.

Thus was born what once was known as the Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT. President Bush emphasized that it would not be a short-term conflict, but rather a generational oneand he was correct on that score. Nor was the conflict ever meant to be merely coextensive with the use of force in Afghanistan. To be sure, thanks to al Qaedas concentrated presence in that country in the fall of 2001, Afghanistan was the initial center of gravity of the GWOT. But Al Qaeda always had presence beyond Afghan borders, as its earlier operational successes in East Africa and Yemen attested, and from the beginning episodic, the low-intensity war-in-the-shadows aspects of the GWOT in countries like Yemen and Pakistan were significant.

By the time we founded Lawfare in 2010, the more-controversial aspects of the GWOT had all emerged into public view. And all of the GWOTs various components were still under active debate. Many were by then the subject of litigation. Others were subject to repeated rounds of congressional activity. And the entire premise, that there really was a war in the legal sense of the term such as would invoke the war powers of the government, was still the subject of endless intellectual disputation.

The increasingly intense controversies had already begun even before the decision to invade Iraq poured massive amounts of fuel on the fire. From the beginning of the AUMF-authorized campaign against Al Qaeda, many people rejected the possibility of a state of armed conflict outside of Afghanistan, thus calling into question the use of lethal force in more-remote locations like Yemen and Pakistan. That the United States had begun pioneering the use of remotely-piloted aircraft to deliver that lethal forcethe first drone strike occurred in Yemen in November 2002added to anxieties about that policy, as did dawning awareness of the role of the CIA in using lethal force.

Other hot-button issues during this period included the legality of non-prisoner-of-war detention; the legality of military detention at Guantanamo after the first detainees arrived in January 2002; the emergence of the innocent-bystander narrative for detainees; the many controversies that have hounded the military commissions since their initial establishment in 2001; anxieties about prevention-oriented law enforcement; concerns over racial profiling and harsh approaches to immigration; the very controversial CIA black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques program; and controversies related to the first sets of leaks about National Security Agency surveillance and data collection programs.

All of these matters were widely challenged in courts, in the executive branch, in Congress, and of course in the public during the Bush presidency. The courts and Congress at times supported and at times pushed back against the Bush administrations policiesas the Supreme Court did in Hamdi, Hamdan, Boumediene, and Congress did with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the Military Commission Act of 2006, and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

By the time Lawfare made its appearance in 2010, in other words, years and years of debate, policymaking and court decisions had already accreted. The legal legacy of September 11 had grown rich, yet at least when we founded the site, many of the big questions still seemed open.

It was actually the Barack Obama administration that clarified how much settlement had occurred on the big-picture legal issues by the end of Bush's second term.

Following Barack Obamas lofty inaugural address and some high-profile first-day executive orders calling for Guantanamo to shut down and ending the CIAs detention authority and capacity to use coercive interrogation, the Washington Post headline on January 21, 2009 proclaimed that Bushs War on Terror Comes to a Sudden End. The central claim of the Dana Priest story was that With the stroke of his pen, [Obama] effectively declared an end to the war on terror, as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the U.S. government in battling its enemies will not be limitless. Four months later, on May 11, 2009, former Vice President Cheney charged that the Obama administration had moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11.

The reality, we now know, was closer to the opposite. By the time Obama came to office, many of the early Bush counterterrorism policies had already ceased or been amended and endorsed across all three branches of the federal government. Obama made some adjustments at the margins, most notably in formally ending the CIAs detention, interrogation and black site program (though it had been largely defunct, in actual practice, since 2006). But against expectation, with a few minor tweaks, he kept military detention at Guantanamo (and continued Bushs policy of reducing the population size as much as possible); continued the war paradigm to address counterterrorism threats; maintained the late-Bush era position on habeas corpus, including its non-application for military detention outside Guantanamo; continued military commissions; significantly ramped up targeted killing that had begun under Bush (including outside traditional battlefields); maintained the traditional executive branch posture on the state secrets doctrine; continued the surveillance programs as they stood in the late Bush years; continued and increasingly relied on material support prosecutions for terrorists; perpetuated Bushs broad conception of imminence for self-defense use-of-force purposes, and further embraced the unwilling and unable construct for justifying the use of force on the territory of a foreign government that had not consented to such actions.

So while Obama came in with the broad expectation that he would end the war approach to terrorism, the Obama presidency is best seen as regularizing and bureaucratizing the war on terrorism. Obamas main innovations were to play up legal constraints and to add layers of process; to rely less on heavy-footprint forces and more on light-footprint onesspecial operations forces, drones, and cyber capabilities; and eventually to extend the war, and the AUMF, to the Islamic State through an imaginative interpretation of the 2001 AUMF. And of course Obama ordered the daring May 2011 operation in Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Guantanamo provided a particularly striking example of the continuity, much to the Obama administration's chagrin. Obama came in promising to close the detention facility within a year. That proved impossible in the face of legal hurdles and congressional opposition; and the Obama administrations position on detention in any event did not differ all that much from the Bush administrations. So where people expected dramatic change, they saw grudging continuity. And where they expected resolution of outstanding questions in the form of an Obama repudiation of Bush policy, they were forced to face the outstanding questions anew because of Obamas adoption of key aspects of Bush policy.

It was thus during the Obama years that many of these questions were finally settled in a rough bipartisan consensus that has persisted ever since. And Lawfares early history was consumed with questions related to the terms of what became that consensus. The key elements of that institutional settlement, all components of which have dissenters and some of which are more broadly embraced than others, include:

Because Lawfare did a lot of writing defining and defending of these elementsespecially the insistence that the armed conflict empowered the government against non-state actors much as it did in a traditional warLawfare in its early years was generally associated with the conservative end of the political spectrum, which at that time largely took a hawkish view on counterterrorism questions. The broad project of the Obama administration during this period lay in institutionalizing a framework many liberals preferred to abolish. As much writing on this site, and of our writing personally, was concerned with defining the terms of the overall institutional settlement and defending its vitality, this project had an enthusiastic audience in the administration. But it was anathema to many advocates and scholars outside of government, who often saw it as advocacy of a more palatable diet of Bush-era counterterrorism policy.

There were other questions, of course, that resisted settlement in this period and that also consumed a great deal of attention on the site. Two, in particular, stand out:

To be sure, the general stability of the Obama-era consensus depended, as one of us noted in 2012, on certain stabilizing assumptions. Most notably, the institutional settlement that developed in that period presupposed that there was at least a conventional ongoing conflict in Afghanistanand, at that time, in Iraq and Syria. It also assumed secondarily that there really was still an Al Qaeda in the original sense from 2001. Through the Obama administration, these assumptions did not face serious challenge. And the result was that over the eight years of the Obama administration, the questions that consumed Lawfare in its first few years began to fade; with greater stability in the framework came less need for debate. By the time Obama left office, it was clear that Guantanamo was going to stay open and what the rules for detention there would be. It was clear what NSA was allowed to do and wasnt allowed to do. The rules for drone strikes, even when they might target a U.S. citizen, were clear as well. And it was clear as well what kind of conduct could and could not get a person locked up for material support for terrorism. The answers the United States had come to on these questions each had their dissenters, but there were, in fact, known and seemingly-stable answers.

And long before the stabilizing factors undergirding the institutional settlement began to unwind, new issues began to appear on the sites horizon. It may have started with Edward Snowden, who presented Lawfare with its first giant set of issues that was in significant part unconnected to September 11. Cybersecurity similarly came to loom increasingly large. We even began to think about climate change in national security terms.

Then there was the arrival of Donald Trump. There was the simultaneous acceleration of Chinas rise and Russias spoiler activities. And there was the 2016 presidential election, which brought together a counterintelligence investigation, foreign interference in American elections, Trumps own attacks on Muslims and the intelligence community, and a collection of cybersecurity dilemmas. The world of great-power competition had returned suddenly and with oxygen-consuming intensity, making the GWOT seem less compelling, especially since so many of its big legal questions were largely settled. The shocking emergence of foundational, domestic security concerns having to do with the fragility of bedrock elements of the countrys political orderincluding but not limited to rising domestic extremism on the right, the abuse of presidential power, serious and not-serious talk about a deep state, and the involvement of foreign actors in the political systemnecessarily shifted the sites energy away from the counterterrorism questions that had been our bread and butter for the years before.

In any number of ways, Lawfare reflected these changes. No editorial decision ever drove the site away from counterterrorism and towards these new issues. The change flowed, rather, organically from the subjects that were moving our writers. Lawfare writers followed the Mueller investigation with the kind of intensity we once reserved for Guantanamo litigation; our writers debated the plain-statement rule in the application of criminal laws to the president in a fashion in which they would once have debated the availability of habeas to a detainee at Bagram; and Lawfare covered obstruction of justice statutes the way we once covered only the material support and conspiracy laws. Rule of law and domestically-directed separation of powers questions came to loom very large for Lawfare.

All of which gave rise to big new audiences. Whereas Lawfare was born in dialogue with a relatively small group of government lawyers over technical counterterrorism legal questions, this period saw it for the first time become a mass-market product speaking to the general public. It also gave rise to the perception in many corners that the ideological valence of the site had changed and that the site had become more political. Whereas during the Obama administration the site was commonly identified with a certain form of conservatism, in the Trump years the site was increasingly identified with the political leftor, at least, with criticism of President Trump (for there was never any shortage of Never Trump conservatives on the site).

There was a specific sense, beyond simply that the fact that we published a great deal of criticism of Trump from a rule-of-law perspective, in which the perception that the site had changed was true. It had grown a great deal. It was covering a far greater range of material. Whereas it had once been bound together by a certain sensibility towards a series of post-September 11 challenges, it was now far more diverse in its range of writers, subjects, and approaches. Many of its writers had no sense of its roots in a certain set of arguments that had roiled national security lawyers in 2010 and 2011. Many of its writers did not think of national security law and the law of counterterrorism as one and the same subject. And the relatively conservative sensibility the three of us shared on post-9/11 issues more than a decade ago doesnt map easily onto the hard national security choices of today.

Meanwhile, as we mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the core stabilizing assumptions of the Obama-era settlementa settlement writers on this site chronicled and often championedare starting to change. Most notably, the United States is out of Afghanistan. President Biden said, We succeeded in what we set out to do in Afghanistan over a decade ago. It was time to end this war.

Taken out of context, this might sound like a true end to the War on Terrora deck of the Missouri moment for the post-9/11 era. But there are reasons to doubt that the Obama-era settlement is about to unravel just yet.

Bidens very next words were: This is a new world. The terror threat has metastisized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan. We face threats from al-Shabaab in Somalia; al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula; and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and establishing affiliates across Africa and Asia.

That is still the language of the GWOT. The war that ended was the war in Afghanistan, the war with the Taliban, not the GWOT itself. Its verbiage may be in the dustbin alongside unlawful enemy combatant, but like the lingering GTMO detainee population, the practical reality of the GWOT remains. Or at least so we predict.

Whatever happens on this front, Lawfare will continue to cover it as we always have, even as we likewise continue to cover the other hard national security choices our nation has come to confront. Whereas the site was once about the legal legacy of September 11, today it should be just as much about cybersecurity, immigration, counter-intelligence, disinformation, domestic terrorism, health policy and climate change to the extent those raise security issues, and so much more.

Born of the 9/11 conflict, Lawfare has grown beyond it. But we will never leave it behind.

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September 11 and the History of Lawfare - Lawfare

We are living in the age of reimagination. We are not reducing police, we are reimagining policing not packing the Supreme Court but"reimagining justice" not embracing media bias but reimagining journalism not embracing censorship but "reimagining free speech.

Conversely, the lack of such imagination can be a career-ending flaw. As a result, many remain silent rather than question the need for the revisions that come with reimagination.

That dilemma was evident as a federal task force recently issued a call to reimagine history at the National Archives, including adding warnings to protect unsuspecting visitors before they read our founding documents. We are reimagining ourselves out of the very founding concepts that once defined us. Reimagining the founding documents comes at a time when many are calling to reimagine the First Amendment and other constitutional guarantees.

National Archivist David Ferrierocreated a racism task force for the National Archives after last summers protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Such task forces are created with the expectation that they will find problems, and once recommendations are made objecting to anti-racist reforms can easily be misconstrued as being insensitive or even racist.

Obviously, documents and spaces can be viewed differently from different backgrounds. There is also a need to contextualize our history to deal honestly with our past. However, the reimagination line should not divide the woke from the wicked. Yetthat is the fear for many academics who do not want to risk their careers after campaigns against dissenting voices on campuses around the country.

For example,for many of us, the National Archives Rotunda containing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is a moving, reverential place celebrating common articles of constitutional faith. That is not what the task force members saw.

Instead, they declared that the iconic Rotunda is one of three examples of structural racism: a Rotunda in our flagship building that lauds wealthy White men in the nations founding while marginalizing BIPOC, women, and other communities.They called for reimagining the space to be more inclusive, including possible dance and performance art.Even the famous murals in the Rotunda might have to go: The task force noted that some view the murals as an homage to White America.

The report objected to the laudatory attention given white Framers and Founders, particularly figures like Thomas Jefferson.It encouraged the placement of trigger warnings to forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological and psychological symptoms.

The task force report called for reimagining the portrayal of founding documents onOurDocuments.gov, the website for Americas milestone documents. The task force objected that the100 milestone documents of American history included adulatory and excessive language to document the historical contributions of White, wealthy men.

The task force called for warnings and revision of racist language but stressed that such language means not only explicitly harmful terms, such as racial slurs, but also information that implies and reinforces damaging stereotypes of BIPOC individuals and communities while valorizing and protecting White people. It also called for the creation of safe spaces in every facility run by the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA).

A task forcesubgroup recommended that NARA "retire" the term "charters of freedom" as descriptors for the founding documents because these documents did not result in freedom for everyone." In addition, new signage would contain trigger warnings to protect tourists from potential trauma in seeing the documents; visitors would now be warned that the documents they are reading may "contain harmful language that reflects attitudes and biases of their time.

It is not clear how such signage truly ameliorates the harm for some in reading founding documents, as opposed to making a statement about the history itself.

Hopefully, most people visiting the National Archives have some passing knowledge of the age and history of both the documents and the country.

Before we bubble-wrap our history, it is worth discussing other inherent messages not from the documents, but the warning signs themselves.

There is no question that the documents, like many of the Framers, reveal an inherent hypocrisy in speaking of natural rights that were cruelly denied to millions left in slavery. That hypocrisy continued as women and minorities fought for the guarantees of those documents.

However, it is not the documents but our failure to live up to those principles that is the tragedy of our nation.

There were early figures who recognized that hypocrisy even some like Jefferson, who personally embodied the contradictions of the time. Jefferson originally included a168-word passage in the Declaration of Independence thatcondemned slavery as one of the evils foisted upon the colonies by the British crown; it was cut to secure the vote of Southern states. Yet Jefferson himself owned a large number of slaves, as did many of the Founders and Framers. Some other early figures John Adams, Thomas Paine, Roger Sherman, Alexander Hamilton, theMarquis de Lafayetteand others were adamantabolitionists. They too are part of our history.

The Constitution itself is like a codified stratigraphic record of our struggle with own values.Indeed,more than 600,000 Americans were killedduring the Civil War to guarantee those rights and ultimately reaffirm them with the 14th, 15thand 16thAmendments to the Bill of Rights.The Constitution contained the powers in the first three articles that allowed a free nation to end segregation, realize womens suffrage, and guarantee equality for insular minorities.These documents were a promise that our nation strived to fulfill, a struggle that continues to this day.

The National Archives Rotunda is a reverential place because it represents a leap of faith by a nation composed of different races, religions and values. The documents compose our covenant of faith not with the government or the past but with each other. We have not always lived up to the ideals expressed in the documents yet our history is not defined by where we began but, instead, by where we strive to be.

Before we bring in the dance groups and post the trigger warnings, perhaps what we need is a reaffirmation rather than a reimagination of who we are.

The National Archives is our collective story. These documents imagined a new country and a set of ideals that no nation had ever realized in history.They are a collective statement of transcendence from where we were to where we hoped to be as a people. Perhaps we are not there yet, but we have come a long way. That is worth understanding and even celebrating without the historical bumpers and safety proofing. Just imagine that.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can find his updates on Twitter@JonathanTurley.

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Reaffirm who we hope to be, instead of 'reimagining' our history | TheHill - The Hill