Mr. Cohen, a fastidious Yale Law School graduate who is known inside the White House as the administration’s “financial Batman,” is a first line of attack against the Islamic State. His title is under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence and he may be more important in the fight against the Islamic State than the Tomahawks fired off American warships or the bombs dropped from F-16s. He has become a fixture in Mr. Obama’s Situation Room.
.. Before the Islamic State rose to prominence, Mr. Cohen was best known in the administration as the point man in shaping and carrying out a set of sanctions meant to cripple Iran’s economy and force its leaders into talks to halt its progress toward developing a nuclear weapon. “It’s safe to say that without David’s relentless efforts, we would not be where we are in terms of getting the Iranians to the negotiating table with the chance of reaching a diplomatic solution,” said Antony J. Blinken, the deputy national security adviser.
.. 13 years ago Treasury’s intelligence operations consisted of a single person sitting in a cramped room churning out reports for senior officials. Today Mr. Cohen presides over a 700-person, $200 million-a-year counterterrorism office within Treasury that was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He likes to point out that it includes the only in-house intelligence unit in any finance ministry in the world.
.. “I never dreamed of this job in particular because it didn’t exist,” Mr. Cohen, 51, said during the interview, conducted in his cavernous office at Treasury, next door to the White House. “But it is my dream job. I’m able to touch pretty much every single national security issue we’re facing.”
The Reign of ‘Terror’
Pape argued that desires for national self-determination and an end to military occupation were at the root of nearly every instance of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, and that while religion was used a tool for recruiting and procuring aid from abroad, it was rarely the cause.
.. To put it bluntly, by stifling inquiry into causes, the rhetoric of “terror” actually increases the likelihood of terrorism.
.. Having been desensitized by language, the willingness to risk civilian casualties becomes increasingly widespread. For example, according to a CBS/New York Times poll of 1216 Americans published on September 16, 2001, nearly 60 percent of those polled supported the use of military force against terrorists even if “many thousands of innocent civilians may be killed,” an echo of the view taken by Netanyahu in his book.
The NSA Speech: Obama Accepts the Logic of Staying Terrorized
The president began his speech on NSA reform by harkening back to “the dawn of our republic,” when a small, secret “surveillance committee” was established in Boston. “The group’s members included Paul Revere,” he said, “and at night they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids.” In this telling, the patriots, literal revolutionaries rebelling against the government of their day, were forerunners of the National Security Agency.
.. National-security leaders behave as if preventing even a single terrorist attack is so important that, to marginally decrease its likelihood, it was incumbent upon us to torture prisoners, invade Iraq, and establish a system of mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocents to identify a tiny minority of terrorists. So long as the NSA is charged with stopping every Boston bombing-style attack, and given more power until it can do so, it will verge toward totalitarianism, because no society can stay free and eliminate the risk of terrorism.
.. Yes, the intelligence agencies are filled with lots of honest, honorable Americans, but for goodness’ sake, the men who spied on Martin Luther King were the friends and family members of regular Americans. They had churches they attended and preachers they honored.
Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism
The definitions of “terrorism” and “weapon of mass destruction” are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.
Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of “normal” violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term “terrorist” is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn’t normally consider terrorists
.. After the Boston Marathon bombings, one commentator described our use of the term this way: “What the United States means by terrorist violence is, in large part, ‘public violence some weirdo had the gall to carry out using a weapon other than a gun.’ … Mass murderers who strike with guns (and who don’t happen to be Muslim) are typically read as psychopaths disconnected from the larger political sphere.”