a worthy cause

Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right of Return Coalition, is actively seeking donations to support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, whose headquarters in Gaza City were badly damaged in Israel's most recent assault on Gaza.

The GCMHP provides an invaluable service to Gazans living under occupation. While many international humanitarian groups, such as Doctors Without Borders and the ICRC, have been working bravely in Gaza for many years to provide physical health services, there are very few resources to deal with the mental health of a population living under the constant threat of siege, economic blockade, air strikes, home demolitions, poverty, arrest, detention, and torture.

The GCMHP provides counseling and other mental health services, with a special emphasis on children (half the population of Gaza is under 16), women, and torture survivors. Their work is not just a critical social service--it is in itself a nonviolent form of resistance to occupation.

Donations to help the GCMHP rebuild their headquarters can be made online through the Al-Awda website.

review: waltz with bashir

I saw Waltz with Bashir on January 11, and have been trying to review it ever since. There is so much to say about this movie, and yet the only advice I can give is to see it for yourself--for crap's sake, on the big screen. If there's any movie to be experienced like a "seamless dream," to use a popular phrase here at USC, it's this one.

Waltz with Bashir is a movie about war, trauma, guilt, and most particularly about memory and its distortion under the impact of these forces. It is a rather traditional talking-head documentary transformed into a hallucinatory acid-flashback masterpiece through the inspired use of animation. It is at once a compelling statement on the universal horrors of modern warfare, and a specific and searing investigation of one particular war, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which the filmmaker Ari Folman fought at the tender age of 19.

The film starts with a vivid post-traumatic dream described by one of Folman's old war buddies--a dream attached to a snippet of a war story with its own waking-nightmare creepiness. In response, Folman realizes, seemingly suddenly, that he can remember nothing of his own experiences in Lebanon. But that night he has a flashback: three soldiers, himself included, emerging naked out of the sea outside Beirut, the night sky illuminated by the eerie orange glow of slowly falling flares.

The flashback, as it turns out, is not a real memory at all, but a kind of cipher from Folman's subconscious, which sends him on a quest to interview other old friends and comrades, hoping their memories will help unearth his. As they talk, Folman animates their war stories--some surreal and perhaps even fantastical, others etched with brutal verite detail--including some events in which he was a participant but cannot remember at all.

At the rotten center of his investigation is the question of the Israeli army's involvement in one of the most ghastly chapters of a long and brutal civil war: the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982. The killing was done by the Phalangists, a far-right Lebanese Christian militia (named after the group that brought fascism to Spain), but the Israeli army encircled and guarded the camps, and illuminated the night sky with bright orange rocket flares for three days while somewhere between 700 and 3,500 men, women and children were killed. An accurate figure will probably never be known, partially because large numbers of women and children were brought out of the camps in trucks and never seen again.

At one point, Folman describes how Israeli troops were stationed in concentric rings around the camps while the massacre was taking place. And the film operates much like this: circling closer and closer to the horror at its center, forcing us to see a little more with each step closer we get. It begins with dreams and hallucinations, but the closer we get to the truth inside Folman's head, the more realistic the images become--until the end of the film, when we are left staring straight into the brutal, naked reality of the things he tried so hard to forget.

The very end of the film features an artistic choice which is quite jarring and about which critics seem to disagree. I won't spoil it here, but will merely say that I think it's inspired and completely in keeping with the aesthetic, political and personal trajectory of the film. It features images that I had never seen, despite having been familiar with these events for years, and after the film I found myself asking why.

This film made me think a lot about how specific images of war are ingrained in the collective consciousness of nations. I am sure Americans will look at this film and see the Vietnam War: a confusing, chaotic and ill-defined conflict, in which young soldiers resort to massive firepower against an unseen guerrilla enemy and unspeakable atrocities are never very far away. Several reviews have already compared the film to Apocalypse Now. Many of the war stories told by Folman's friends have a surreal, dreamlike quality that reminded me strongly of The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's haunting Vietnam War memoir.

But Israelis in the 1980s looked at the war and saw something else. Just one generation removed from the Holocaust (Folman's parents survived Auschwitz), their collective memory was still raw with images of a different war. When Folman looked at Palestinian refugee camps, he couldn't help seeing "the other camps," as his friend subtly remarks. A Palestinian boy with his hands in the air reminds him of the iconic image from the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto that anyone who's seen Schindler's List or read a high school history textbook can probably recall.

There is a difference, of course, in the scale of the atrocities--but not in the sharpness of the guilt. The questions Folman begins to ask himself as the film progresses are an eerie echo of the questions asked by post-Holocaust generation in Germany to their parents. Where were you? What were you doing? Did you know what was happening, and if you could have done something to stop it, why didn't you?

The film is pretty unequivocal about the assertion that the Israeli army knew a massacre was taking place. "Didn't you think about the fact that the trucks kept going out full and coming back empty?" Folman asks one eyewitness. A reporter present at the time recalls how he called Ariel Sharon, then the Defense Minister, who seemed unconcerned about the matter. (An Israeli commission established to investigate the massacre found Sharon "personally responsible" for not trying to stop it...although this did not prevent him from being elected Prime Minister in 2001.)

About his own role, Folman is a bit more vague. He thinks he was in the second or third ring out from the camps, but we never get a definitive answer, nor do we leave the film being really certain of what he does or doesn't remember. Perhaps this is because he himself is not certain. "Did you fire the flares?" a friend asks. Folman doesn't answer, and (unless I missed it) the accompanying image is unclear. Does he not remember, or not want to remember?

Whatever the answer is, the mere act of being near the camps was enough to make him feel like a Nazi, a shame that sealed his memory closed for nearly 30 years. It was this same shame, I would imagine, that led 400,000 Israelis--ten percent of the population--to protest Israel's involvement in the massacre in Tel Aviv in 1982. For a nation whose population has been almost universally supportive of every war waged in the country's short but bellicose history, such an explosion of outrage was shocking. But the hypocrisy was just too stunning to ignore.

Today, as Gaza is pounded into submission, the silence inside Israel is deafening. Certainly, the situations are not completely analogous. One event was a deliberate and calculated massacre of non-combatants, carried out with the sadistic horror-movie fury that only fascism can unleash. The other is merely a casual slaughter of civilians who happen to be trapped in a huge open-air prison with a small number of fighters that Israel may or may not particularly care about killing, so long as they are punished for existing. (Actually, when you put it that way, the differences seem pretty slim, don't they?)

But I can't help wondering, as generations grow up and the nightmare events that are supposedly the justification for Israel's existence in the first place recede further and further into the past, if people are starting to forget. Not forget in the historical sense--there are museums and foundations aplenty to make sure that never happens--but in the instinctive, human sense, the sense that sees another person oppressed, suffering, and thinks "That could be me."

I suppose the mere existence of this film shows that such sentiment cannot be totally dead. There is some instinct that compels us to seek out and understand the truth, even when reality is so painful that we can only bear to look at it through the lens of art.

oscar noms: ur doin it right!

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Not only have some excellent high-profile films been rewarded, but a few lesser-known indie gems got a well-deserved nod.

I was happy to see that Milk scored Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay nods, along with well-deserved nominations for Sean Penn as Best Actor and Josh Brolin in the Heath Ledger...er, Best Supporting Actor category. More surprising were the Best Screenplay and Best Actress (Melissa Leo) nods for the highly-regarded Frozen River, from first-time writer/director Courtney Hunt.

And while the Best Actor category was filled with the predictable slate of Penn, Frank Langella, Mickey Rourke and Brad Pitt, my heart leapt a bit to see Richard Jenkins up there for The Visitor--a simply fantastic movie in which Jenkins is adorable, moving and perfectly cast.

I was also pleased to see Man on Wire, which is great, in the Best Documentary category, and Waltz with Bashir, which is a masterpiece, in Best Foreign Film. (It recently won the category at the Golden Globes.) There was even a Best Screenplay nod for the underrated In Bruges!

All in all, it's shaping up to be an awards season in which I will actually give a shit.

obama and the real america

I know, this blog has been all doom and gloom lately, all Gaza and torture. And I have been hatin' on Obama a bit. (Still mad about the Rick Warren thing, btw.) But today is Inauguration Day, and even those of us who have low expectations for the amount of change to come are sure as hell happy to see Bush go.

It's only been eight years, but I think you'll agree that it feels like a lot longer. The year 2000 seems incredibly far away now. Back then, I was a freshman at Columbia University, one of our new president's alma maters. Ralph Nader's 2000 election campaign (along with the Second Intifada in Palestine, which started three weeks into my first semester) was in many ways my introduction to politics. I've never been an activist without Bush in office. It's a bit weird.

Thinking back to that time, a few memories jump out. Certainly, the Nader "super rally" that filled Madison Square Garden is one of them. We were all the way in the nosebleed seats since we'd been tabling outside until the last possible minute, and to this day I can't remember what Nader actually said. But I remember that Ani DiFranco played "Fuel" and Eddie Vedder sang "The Times, They Are A-Changin'," and it felt like maybe they really were.

I remember, quite distinctly, holding a sign at a small, silent vigil for Palestine on the Sundial (where all protests take place at Columbia) while a Zionist student spat at us while he passed. He didn't quite have the balls to spit *on* us, but we got the message. I was seething with rage because I wanted to yell at him, but I couldn't since it was a silent vigil. I decided silent vigils were stupid.

I also remember the first week of the spring semester, in which we filled five buses in five days to go protest Bush's inauguration.

It's strange to see so many people pouring into DC again, but filled with hope instead of anger. Two million people, many estimate, plus untold numbers watching around the country. I was in Washington for the March for Women's Lives, when the crowd was somewhere around a million, and this crowd definitely looks bigger to me.

To me, President Obama is far more interesting for who he is than for his actual politics. All cynicism aside, anyone must admit that Obama has connected to something in the American collective psyche, and it can't all be due to image control and clever use of Facebook. For the first time...maybe ever, millions of Americans have a president with whom they feel they can identify.

For many years (well, at least the past two elections) politicians from both parties have insisted that they are appealing to "real Americans" in the "real America" that's out there somewhere.

Democrats and Republicans alike seem to agree on what this "real America" consists of: white residents of small towns in "the heartland," a vague area that seems to be defined only as being not the Northeast, California or Chicago. These "real Americans" are simple people with simple values--they like beer, they go to church (Protestant Christian of some sort) on Sunday, and they are not particularly well-educated or even well-traveled.

But wait! The actual real America--the one that can vote--just elected a dude named BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA. A bi-racial child of a white mother (born in Kansas only through the viccissitudes of the US Army) and Kenyan father. A self-identified Black man who spent his formative years being raised by a white family in Hawai'i--one of only four states in the US where whites do not comprise a majority of the population*, and the US state with the highest percentage of both indigenous people and people of mixed race. A son of a twice-divorced career woman who also had a child with an Indonesian man, a daughter who married a Canadian of Malaysian Chinese descent. Obama himself married a woman with a much more clasically African-American heritage: a descendant of slaves whose family migrated from South Carolina to Chicago.

This was a guy who lived in Jakarta after the brutal coup by the US-backed dictator Suharto, whose followers killed half a million people to take power; who lived in the New York City of Rent, when it was still possible to see a Broadway show for $3 (!); who lived in multi-ethnic Honolulu, Los Angeles and Chicago--all by the time he turned 25. (The New York Times ran a splendid editorial the other day in which six writers talked with surprising passion and detail about each of those places during those times.)

I grew up in Baltimore, a majority Black city (although you certainly wouldn't know it from my neighborhood or my high school.) I've lived in New York and Los Angeles since then. Growing up with only one kind of person around is as alien a thought to me as growing up in Jakarta or Honolulu is to some other people.

I recently watch an all-around fantastic movie called The Visitor. Look it up if you haven't seen it. The movie is based on a chance encounter between a middle-aged Connecticut college professor and the immigrant couple who have been illegally living in his vacant Manhattan apartment. (They are wise enough to know that leaving a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village vacant is a crime for which squatting is an entirely appropriate punishment.)

The professor, of course, studies globalization. "That's us!" the young man, Tarek, exclaims excitedly. "Syria and Senegal," he says, gesturing to himself and his girlfriend. When Tarek's mother shows up later in the film, she introduces herself to an Egyptian coffee shop owner as "Palestinian, from Damascus." In the US, she lives in Michigan--which, coincidentally, has the nation's second-largest Arab population after California.

What is the point of all this? It's not that the politicians' homogenous, white, Christian, small-town America isn't real--although it's certainly not the way the majority of Americans have lived for nearly 100 years, and is perhaps based on the disproportionate weight given to the American South in US politics. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with beer-drinking white Christians from small towns--although I would argue that isolation and homogenaeity have a conservatizing effect. It's just that the "other" America--urban, mobile, multi-ethnic; an America of multiple, overlapping and not always obvious identities, is at least as real as the "real America" the politicians talk about.

These are the people who, I would wager--whether they are African-American or not--saw a bit of themselves reflected in Barack Obama. And it seems to me that these other Americans, whose power has long been ignored, are the millions who came out into the street on election night and inauguration day.

*For the record, the other states with a minority white population are California, New Mexico, and (surprise!) Texas.

israel meets the "hope and change deadline" (probably)

A few days ago Jon Stewart joked about how Israel was rushing to get any last-minute bombing in before the "hope and change deadline" of Inauguration Day. "It's like a civilian carnage Toyotathon!"

Damn, he was right.

Israel Hopes to Complete Gaza Troop Pull-Out by Tuesday

While Obama has made it abundantly clear just how much he loves Israel (there was even an amusing moment in one of the presidential debates where he and Hillary argued over who loved Israel more), the Israeli government seems to think that he may approach foreign policy with a bit more...finesse, shall we say. And that could mean no more smashy-smashy for at least a little while.

While a wise student of politics would note that the Democrats have historically been no better for the Palestinians than the Republicans, there is no doubt that the Bush administration's extra-aggressive foreign policy style has set a particularly bad example, which Israel has followed with glee.

Someone once described Bush's foreign policy as "if you don't like the way the game's going, flip the chess board over." Israel has taken the opportunity to do some board-flipping of its own:

Battle of Jenin, April 2002: Israel surrounded the camp (one of the few places where different factions of the resistance coordinated with each other and sometimes fought together) and flattened a 100m by 200m section of it. The UN confirmed 52 dead, but allegations of houses being bulldozed on top of people and mass graves holding perhaps hundreds continued to circulate. Unfortunately Israel refused to allow a UN fact-finding mission to investigate the matter, so the truth may never be known.

"Second" Lebanon War, July-August 2006: in which Israel blew up the parts of Beirut that had been rebuilt after it blew them up the first time in the 1980s

Current Gaza War, December 2008-January 2009 (?): you know the score

It's worth noting that each of these incidents did very little to destroy the infrastructure of any of the organizations of Palestinian resistance that Israel was supposedly targeting. Any smart military strategist would probably have realized that going in. So what's the point of a war that can't be won? Punishment.

facebook and statistics

If you're my friend on Facebook, you know that I've been running an app that updates my status daily with the number of dead and wounded in Gaza.

I do realize Facebook politics has its limits. But after some consideration, I decided I liked the idea of everyone I know on Facebook being reminded of what's going on in Gaza whether they wanted to be or not. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was pretty great. The Palestinians can't ignore it, so why should you be able to, former-coworker or friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend?

There are two thing this little app calls to attention. First, a third of the dead in Gaza are children. Why is that? Well, primarily it is because Israel is targeting civilians, or at least not bothering to avoid hitting them. Second, it is because, like all parts of the world with low life expectancy, children make up a disproportionate percentage of the population in Gaza. In fact, half the population is under 16. Families have an average of five children, because they know it's likely that not all of them will survive to adulthood.

The second thing came to my attention today, when I noticed that the number of dead had jumped by nearly 100 while the number of wounded was unchanged. Why would that be? The most logical answer seemed to be that fighting had ceased enough for families to return to their houses and begin digging the bodies of their dead relatives out of the rubble. I updated my status, rather casually, to say something of the sort.

No sooner had I done that than I looked on the New York Times website and found this. I immediately regretted the correctness of my guess. Even by Gaza standards, this article is so heaped with one horror after another it almost becomes comic, in a black, Catch-22 kind of way. I actually laughed at one point, when the paper quoted one resident as saying, "Even our dead have no land," because it's true, and horrible, and he was saying it because he had to dig up the grave of a relative buried years before to put a fresh body on top, because there wasn't enough room in the cemetery for all the dead, including 28 members of the Samouni family.

I wanted to put all this in my Facebook status, but it wouldn't fit.

the torture debate: my substantially-more-than-two cents

Note to readers: I started out several days ago writing a post about the Bush administration's admission that at least one prisoner at Guantanamo Bay was tortured. I wanted to write something about how so much of the discussion of torture in the mainstream media misses what I feel are the main points. In writing this post, I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject, so this post is VERY lengthy. However, I hope you will be patient and read to the end, since I'd sincerely like to know your thoughts.

For what seems like the millionth time since 9/11, torture is back in the news again. Not one day after I published my first post about the potential closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, this appeared.

First of all, does anyone but me find something a little bit shady about a senior Pentagon official admitting the US used torture at Guantanamo...five days before Bush is about to leave office? After years of denying allegations of torture in Afghanistan, Iraq, secret CIA prisons, and Guantanamo, isn't this a bit of a "mumblemumble oh yeah, we tortured that guy. RUN AWAY!!!!!" from the Bush team?

A cynical mind might think this was a calculated move to give the incoming administration just one more problem to deal with, along with the state of the Oval Office desk. But whatever the reasons, the Bush administration has officially used the t-word in connection with at least one prisoner at Guantanamo Bay--Mohammed al-Qahtani, the so-called "20th hijacker." In an interview with all-purpose crusading journalist Bob Woodward, Susan J. Crawford, the top official in charge of deciding whether Gitmo detainees go to trial, said that her review of Qahtani's case led her to conclude his treatment "met the legal definition of torture."

While the first reaction of many people who are familiar with the US's human rights record was probably "well, DUH!", this admission is interesting because it touches on several aspects of the torture debate that have bugged me for quite some time.

If you know me well, you may be aware that I know more about torture than any normal person should reasonably want to know. This is because I have studied numerous revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars, occupations, colonialism and anti-colonial rebellion, the rise of fascism, dictatorships and their resisters, and the US intelligence establishment, and because I have a mind that retains the gory details and a level of curiosity about violence that is perhaps not entirely healthy.

The point of this is not to make myself sound unbalanced. It's merely to demonstrate that I feel at least as qualified to contribute to the torture debate as the next pundit. And there are a few things about the terms of the debate that seem utterly ridiculous to me.

#1. The hair-splitting over what's torture and what isn't.

Waterboarding isn't torture. Yes it is. No it isn't. And so on with a litany of other techniques. It all sounds a bit Orwellian after a while, like if you don't label something with this particular word, then that makes it okay. Regardless of whether you call it torture or not, I highly doubt any members of the Bush administration or Congress would be willing to subject themselves to the conditions in Guantanamo Bay...or Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, a CIA black site, etc.

But if you still want to get technical about the matter, okay, let's go. I can do technical.

The Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual - 1983 is the most current CIA interrogation manual to be declassified. Thanks to the National Security Archives, is now available online in its entirety here. This is as close to a codification of the US intelligence community's theories on interrogation and torture as one is going to get without a security clearance.

The CIA loves their euphemisms, and the HRETM83 doesn't really use the word "torture" all that much. What it does do is differentiate between "non-coercive" techniques--which are presumably legal, and include many tactics of basic psychological manipulation used by your average (non-torturing) civilian police department--and "coercive" techniques--which are either illegal or "to be used with caution," depending on who's asking.

Guess what? Turns out pretty much everything the Bush administration claims loudly is NOT TORTURE (waterboarding for sure, but also isolation, exposure to extreme temperatures and loud noises, sleep deprivation, stress positions, manipulation of routines to create disorientation, forced nudity, and the myriad ways of insulting prisoners' religion/politics/masculinity that interrogators have developed) is considered "coercive" by the CIA. And they know from coercive.

The Bush administration has chosen to adopt an extremely narrow definition of torture that only includes things that involve unbearable pain or life-threatening injury. But even they don't adhere to their own definition. To illustrate my point, here's a simple exercise you can try in the convenience of your own home:

1. Squat on the ground. (It's easier if you widen your stance enough that your feet are flat on the ground.)
2. Put your arms behind your back and clasp your right wrist with your left hand, or vice versa.
3. Close your eyes (since you'd be blindfolded or hooded in real life.)
4. Don't move.

This is one of the most commonly used "stress positions," which the Bush administration has said are not torture. If you're very out of shape like me, a minute in this position is challenging. Even if you're in excellent shape and reasonably flexible, I challenge you to make it past five minutes.

Now imagine four hours of this and tell me if you think it's torture or not.

In a similiar vein, journalist Christopher Hitchens recently tried another kind of not-torture, and he's got plenty to say on the subject.

#2. The "does torture work?" debate.

This is an entirely false and specious debate, in my opinion, because the answer entirely depends on what you mean by "work."

If you mean "does torture produce reliable intelligence?" the answer is most definitely, "sometimes."

There are plenty of examples from history in which torture has been used quite effectively to gather accurate intelligence in war, civil war, or counterinsurgency situations.

Probably the most famous is the "Battle of Algiers" in 1956-7, when the French military used a concentrated campaign of torture (along with aggressive military occupation, spying, and other counterinsurgency measures) to almost completely destroy the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algiers. Using extremely brutal interrogation methods, they wiped out the highly compartmentalized FLN cell by cell in a relatively short period of time. (Of course, Algeria won its independence in 1962 anyway, and the Battle of Algiers is now viewed as a classic example of "winning the battle but losing the war.")

Other examples come from various European fascist regimes and from the repressive military dictatorships of Latin America (all supported by the US), particularly Chile and Argentina, where torture by secret police forces was institutionalized for a decade or more. Chile is a particularly clear case since the repression was dedicated to successfully rolling back a popular revolution that came reasonably close to taking power. In a matter of months, an organized left that had sent a self-described socialist to the presidency and had roots in virtually every workplace, university, and working-class neighborhood was decimated to the point where the government could proceed with introducing some of the most anti-worker economic policies in the world (now known as neoliberalism) without a whiff of protest.

These examples all have something in common, which is that in each case, the government or occupying force (whether they acknowledged it or not) had a secondary goal in addition to gathering intelligence: to terrorize and pacify the population with examples of the extreme violence they could face if they resisted.

This is where torture really comes in handy. There's one thing everyone agrees torture is really great for, which is getting false confessions from innocent people. Torture worked great on the Death Row 10--Chicago police got many innocent men to confess to murders they didn't commit. I think quite a number of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and various US detention facilities around the world would also fall into this category.

Frantz Fanon, who worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the Algerian war for independence, summed up the problem as this: "Those who know nothing will say anything, and those who know something will say nothing." In other words, use torture and you may or may not get some accurate intelligence, but you will almost definitely get some false intelligence.

This makes torture ideally suited for situations where some degree of false intelligence is inconsequential or even desirable. In civil war, police state or counterinsurgency situations, the oppressors may actually be okay with some "innocent" people being denounced as terrorists/traitors/insurgents/whatever, since this only adds to the climate of fear and the idea that anyone can be arrested and interrogated at any time, for a miniscule infraction or for nothing at all.

But the other half of Fanon's aphorism is important, too, because numerous examples from history show that the most effective weapon against torture (perhaps the only effective one) is political will. Those most likely to be capable of resisting torture are not those with the most physical strength or willpower in some abstract sense, but those who have a cause they firmly believe is worth fighting and dying for.

I have a little story to illustrate this point. It comes from an absolutely fantastic documentary, Vietnam: A Television History, which was made for PBS in the early 1980s. Filmed only a few years after the war ended, it included numerous interviews with combatants from all sides and is really worth checking out when you have eight hours to spare (although according to at least one review on Netflix, some material has been edited out of the DVD edition.)

At one point in this exhaustive chronicle of the war, we intercut between an American soldier and a female Vietnamese guerrilla who were both tortured as POWs. This section is interesting enough from a psychological perspective in terms of how people remember and communicate about trauma, because their stories are eerily similar. Both start by talking about how they were captured and then begin relating, in detail, what was done to them--pretty grisly in both cases.

The American ends his story by saying something like, "And finally they got me to a point where I told them more than name, rank, and serial number." The Vietnamese woman ends her story by saying something like, "But I would never tell them anything, no matter what they did, because I was fighting for my country and my freedom."

To me, this shows in a nutshell why the US, the greatest military power the world had ever seen, could not win the Vietnam War. It also demonstrates a fundamental law of repression: sometimes no amount of force is capable of crushing the desire for freedom.

If you apply this logic to the torture debate, you'll come to the same conclusion that many well-respected members of the intelligence community have: that the people against whom the Bush administration claims it is most necessary to use torture are the people against whom it is least likely to work. Let us accept for a moment the Bush administration's claim that it currently holds a number of "high-value" prisoners, hardened terrorists who wouldn't hesitate, if they got the chance, to blow the US to smithereens. These people, whether you agree with them or not, are extremely dedicated to a political cause--willing to leave home and undergo military training in remote and hostile locations, travel around the world, wait for long periods of time in sleeper cells, and often kill themselves to achieve the destruction of others.

And for every one of these "muscle hijackers" actually in US custody--people whose motives and methods most of us find abhorrent--I'm willing to bet there are three or four people whose motives and methods we might actually sympathize with: Afghanis or Iraqis who decided to defend their countries against foreign invasion by armed struggle, something many Americans feel they themselves would do if their country was invaded. Both of these types of people feel they are fighting for freedom against an oppressive imperialist force. And intelligence experts would probably tell you that torturing this kind of person has only a moderate chance of being productive, and a decent chance of actually hardening their resistance and being totally counterproductive.

But of course, this advice is never going to be taken by the US government, which brings me to the third ridiculous thing about the torture debate.

#3. The suggestion that you can have imperialism and war without torture.

All the debates around whether torture is justified, effective, necessary or right circle around a central supposition: that we can have it any other way. But those who think we can have a War on Terror, or a war in Afghanistan or Iraq or Palestine or anywhere else, without torture coming into the mix somewhere are fooling themselves.

Imperialism is the practice of powerful nations dominating weaker ones. (Yes, I know, it's also the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin wrote a book with that title, but this definition is sufficient for my argument.) In the past it took the form of direct colonialism; today, with a few exceptions, it is more indirect. The domination is economic most of the time and is often called corporate globalization. But it frequently escalates into military conflict as well, in which a rich nation with a large, well-equipped military pounds a poorer one into submission.

Torture is the replication of this relationship on the level of individuals. It is, by definition, a weapon of the strong against the weak. The torturer has the entire balance of force on his side. He has every weapon imaginable at his disposal: control of the environment; control of the prisoner's behavior (what he eats, what he wears, when he sleeps/showers/goes to the bathroom/does anything); and the ability to use physical force without being stopped. The prisoner has but one weapon available to him: his will to resist in the face of overwhelming violence.

This does not mean that anti-imperialist forces never use torture (Vietnam is a great example of that.) But it does mean that you can't wage an imperialist war without expecting these kind of things to happen, and the only way to stop them is to stop the war.

By the way, the fact that anyone even thinks of resisting in the face of such an asymmetry of violence--and history is full of people who did--I think reveals something very fundamental and deep-seated about human nature. Perhaps this is why I continue to be fascinated by situations of torture and resistance despite my awareness that it's kind of morbid. Watching someone resist when resistance seems utterly impossible is exciting, and, I think, incredibly inspiring. It is the theme of a lot of my writing. I guess I think showing that particular dramatic moment is ultimately worth all the gory details in between.

i heart you jon stewart!

Jon Stewart may not always be the staunchest anti-Zionist out there, but every once in a while, he comes through.

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And, in yet another instance of fake news preceding real, even non-fake news articles have started referring to the "hope and change deadline" as it appears Israel may agree to a ceasefire in the next few days.

guantanamobama

Something tells me they don't get the irony.

So Barack Obama says he wants to close Guantanamo Bay. (The detention camp; the military base on Cuban soil will of course remain.) He said it a bunch of times on the campaign trail. But now that he's got the power to actually do it, turns out it's "more difficult than a lot of people realize."

The question, of course, is what to do with the approximately 250 prisoners currently under indefinite, legally murky detention there. The quandary Obama faces was quite interestingly debated by five legal experts in a recent New York Times blog post.

If Guantanamo is indeed shuttered, Obama has a few options on what to do with the detainees:

1. Agree to either release them or try them in US courts.
2. Ship them off to one of those secret CIA prisons we've heard about.
3. Ship them off to another country, where they could (a) continue to be interrogated by the CIA/military intelligence/other US shadow-people; (b) be tortured by the locals, possibly but not necessarily in combination with (a); (c) be released by sympathetic forces, or (d) all of the above.
4. Create some new legal justification for continuing to hold them indefinitely without due process under the guise of "administrative detention."

Almost everyone agrees that option #1 is extremely unlikely. Let's just assume for a moment that at least some of the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay are hardened terrorists genuinely dangerous to the US. (Of course, we don't really know that, but let's say so for the purposes of argument.) As several of these legal experts point out, many of these people could never be convicted of any crime under the US justice system, since any "evidence" of their hardened terrorist nature would be unusable because (a) public knowledge of its source would compromise ongoing US intelligence operations, (b) it was obtained under torture, or (c) it doesn't exist.

Options #2 and #3 are really the same option--various ways of sweeping under the rug the continued detention of a large number of people without trial. This would be somewhat like when the US military closed the infamous School of the Americas--only to immediately re-open it in the same location under a new name. "New name, same shame," we said then.

Option #4--which, frighteningly enough, a number of the legal scholars on the NYT blog advocate--is perhaps the most novel and scariest. This is to create some new legal category of "administrative detention," which would allow the US to legally hold so-called enemy combatants at will until the end of the conflict in which they were involved. Right away, this brings up two questions:

1. If we're supposedly engaged in an endless war on terror, when the hell is the end of the conflict? And who decides?
2. AAAAAHHH!

The little paranoid radical inside of me is screaming at this idea...since it sound very much like the kind of thing that could be quite easily used against all kinds of people, including American citizens in a period of civil unrest. It sounds like, oh, I don't know, "institutionali[zing] detention-without-trial," as Matthew Waxman says on the blog.

Indefinite detention without trial, charges, access to legal council or even the minimal humanitarian standards afforded to recognized POWs is not terribly common in democracies. It's much more frequently associated with police states, dictatorships, military juntas, etc. In Latin America it's even got its own euphemism--"disappeared."

Obama appears to have rejected this course of action, at least for now. This leaves some solution of the "new name/same shame" variety as the most likely option, in my opinion. Let us not forget that it was Bill Clinton who created the neat-o trick of extraordinary rendition in the '90s. This leaves me with the conclusion that Obama's promises to close Guantanamo will result in neither (a) a victory for human rights, (b) a measurable improvement in conditions for the remaining detainees, nor (c) a weak concession to the millions of people the world over who, quite rightly, hate the US government's guts. No, I'm pretty sure it will be (d) none of the above.

gaza: live blogging from hell

White phosphorous being dropped over Jabaliya, Gaza Strip.

A few days ago I stumbled onto a cluster of blogs written by English-speaking activists currently working in Gaza, mostly with the International Solidarity Movement. Of these, Eva Bartlett's In Gaza and tales to tell (the author is identified only as Sharon, from Sheffield in the UK) are the most frequently updated and filled with a truly amazing wealth of photos, video and stories that the world--Americans most of all--desperately need to see. I am so thankful to these activists, not just for their presence in Palestine, but for their commitment to documenting the atrocities going on there and showing them to the world.

I advise you to go read these blogs yourself, as I don't have the words to summarize the horrors contained therein. You'll hear tales of ambulance drivers being shot at while trying to retrieve dead bodies or evacuate the wounded. You'll see pictures of the tell-tale spidery white clouds of white phosphorous being fired, as it was in Lebanon in 2006. White phosphorous is a chemical weapon that will burn your skin down to the bone on contact. There are clear and well-documented reports of it being fired over Gaza City and the Jabaliya refugee camp, which has a population density seven times that of New York City--over 100,000 people in just 1.4 square kilometers. Of course, Israel claims they're only firing white phosphorous for illumination and to use as a smokescreen--not directly at people, which is illegal. But what do you really think is going to happen when you fire chemical weapons over a city seven times more crowded than New York?

One of the multiple reasons I haven't been writing much on this blog lately is that it's seemed pretty trivial to write about anything other than Gaza, and it's very hard for me to write about Gaza without feeling an intense rush of helpless, desperate rage and sadness.

Perhaps it's that the injustice that seems so clear and profound to me is poorly understood or not even seen by many Americans (through no fault of their own, thanks to our complicit media). Perhaps it's just very difficult not to feel powerless in the face of such overwhelming violence, and such intense commitment on the part of the US government, Republicans and Democrats alike, to continue funding and supporting that violence.

Of course, not helping matters is the relentless doublespeak in the US media, which repeatedly insists on comparing the sides as if they were, at best, equal, and equally at fault for the violence, when that's so clearly not true. Case in point: 24 hours into the ground offensive, one (ONE!!!) Israeli soldier had been killed. At this point the Palestinian death toll was well over 500.

Much has been made of the town of Sderot, which is two miles from the Gaza border and regularly sustains rocket attacks from Hamas. Barack Obama even visited there in July. Over 2,000 rockets have been launched at Sderot in the past four years. And how many people have they killed? Eight!

Now, before I'm accused of sounding callous, I'm sure it's no fun at all to be a resident of Sderot. No coincidence it's mostly populated with Israel's underclass--working-class North African immigrants, too poor to afford real estate outside the measly two-mile range of Palestinian rockets. Yes, I bet living under the constant threat of death from a hostile force at your border sucks a lot. Just ask a Palestinian.

Did you ever have a nasty older brother/sister/cousin who played this game when you were little? The little bugger starts poking you, hitting you, making faces, and finally annoys you to the point where you up and give them a good smack, or shove, or whatever. Then of course the kid screams, "Moooooom! She hit me!"

Israel is a bit like that. It has one of the most advanced military machines in the world, second probably only to the US. They have tanks, Apache helicopters, advanced artillery, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, and armored bulldozers for knocking down houses. They strangle the Occupied Territories constantly with blockades, checkpoints, a huge concrete wall, bypass roads that cut the land apart and that only Israelis can drive on, home demolitions, raids, airstrikes and "targeted killings." Hamas has rockets so ineffectual they have to fire 250 of them to kill one person--after which Israel will retaliate, kill a hundred Palestinians, and say they're defending themselves. Of course, it's tragic when anyone dies; it's a war and there's pain and suffering on both sides. Of course! But there are no cemeteries in Israel where children are being buried on top of their grandparents because there's no more room for new graves.

I spend several hours reading the news from Palestine last night, and I think I OD'd a bit. I woke up today in a very strange headspace. The author of tales to tell wrote this in one of her posts, about going on ambulance runs with the Red Cross behind or near Israeli army lines:

What I feel in walking this road with these good people is calm, and focused, and glad to be here. As my friends know to their sorrow, what I don’t cope with is supermarkets and four-by-fours and plastic. Even more, I don’t cope with the dissonance of trying to live in a Western society that pretends this reality, the reality of this road I am walking at this moment, does not exist. In the UK, in front of me is McDonalds, in my head are the tanks. It almost sends me crazy sometimes.

Although I haven't been to Palestine, I can identify with this sentiment. Today was my first day back to school, and it was very weird to be sitting outside on campus, eating a bagel and watching undergrads bike past in their tank tops and short shorts, people laughing and chatting on their cell phones in the beautiful California sunshine, while my head was filled with white phosphorous trails, the grinding of tank treads, the crack and clunk of rifle shots against an ambulance door, trying to imagine what that much blood smells like.

Curse my overactive imagination.

hello 2009!

You may have noticed a recent decline in my rate of posting, which is mostly due to preoccupation with holiday things, Christmas-cookie-induced writer's laziness, and the comparative scarcity of internet access at my parents' house.

But rest assured, I have a number of posts currently percolating, including reviews of the three movies and two plays I saw in my whirlwind NYC visit before Christmas. I may even post my New Year's resolutions, if I decide to make any that prove to be of any interest.