This article first appeared online in The New Yorker.
Amy Davidson talks to Seymour M. Hersh, Jon Lee Anderson, and George Packer about Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and whether America is stronger now.
Amy Davidson: Sy, in your first article after 9/11 - just a few weeks after - you quoted a senior C.I.A. official who, you wrote, "confirmed that the intelligence community had not yet developed a significant amount of solid information about the terrorists' organization, financing, and planning." He said, "One day, we'll know, but at the moment we don't know." Has that day arrived?
Seymour M. Hersh: No, not in my view. He also said at the time that there was a debate about whether the attacks were a long-planned, deep-cell operation, and we were going to be looking at cell operations like this throughout the country - major embedded groups of Al Qaeda, what you will. The other possibility was that the nineteen hijackers were the equivalent of a pickup basketball team that made it to the Final Four. His guess was the latter. I think that's true. I think the nineteen guys, however skilled, were more lucky than anything else, because of our lack of preparation. But we really know very little about how that operation worked, even now.
Davidson: Why is that?
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Beyond the misiones and the Bolivarian process (el proceso Bolivariano) of empowering working people and the poor, two of the most significant initiatives of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela have been the restarting of closed factories under workers’ co-management with the state, and the rapid expansion of the cooperative sector of collectively-owned and collectively-operated enterprises. For it is these transitions in the social relations of production that will play a pivotal role in determining the future of the Venezuelan state – whether it develops along a capitalist, state capitalist, statist, socialist, or some as yet undetermined path. Case studies of five worker-controlled factories in Venezuela were presented in a documentary film by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, 5 Fábricas – Control Obrero en Venezuela (81 minutes, Spanish, 2006). While these factories illustrate some optimistic beginnings, it is necessary to view them in historical context in order to understand their socio-economic potential.
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This article, which first appeared in 2001 following the September 11th attacks, is reproduced here in its entirety for the 5th anniversary of the attacks. Its strategic perspective for the left is even more important today.
A leader in the revolutionary left in the US should feel like a fox in a chicken coop.
Increasingly large capitalists (Walmart, Enron, Wall-Street) are being exposed as so destructive to our society. The Bush administration creates global chaos and suffering. Attacks on democratic rights are expanding.
Thoughtful people in all strata of our society realize that there are dangerous trends that need to be met with positive alternatives. Young people, and leaders from all sectors, are open to new ideas including the notion of system change.
In other parts of the world resistance has and is being converted to system change. We see this taking place particularly in South and Central America as countries shift to the left.
In our own country, though, the social movement remains marginal despite deepening anxiety among the majority of our 