Showing posts with label obama watch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obama watch. Show all posts
Friday, January 29, 2010
obama pwned on palestine: a play-by-play
Annoying thing about town hall meetings with the president: sometimes someone asks a real question. In this case, that someone was University of South Florida student activist Laila Abdelaziz, who had the great honor of delivering Obama one of the more embarrassing moments of his presidency.
You know (I sigh with a bit of nostalgia), there was a time when a presidential fumble like this wouldn't have even registered. But now that Americans have become used to a commander in chief who can, you know, conjugate verbs and stuff, it's almost painful to watch Obama tie himself in knots trying to defend US support for Israel. Nevertheless, he manages! And it ends up going something like this:
[rush transcript]
0:00: Young woman of color who says she campaigned for me? This can't possibly go wrong!
0:05: Human rights, sweet, I got this.
0:12: Oh crap.
0:27: $!#@%&, I didn't practice this one.
0:30: Stall by talking about "the Middle East in general." Cause they're all really the same over there, right?
0:35: Stall some more by talking about that dude's beads. Wow, I got 20 seconds out of that?! Win!
0:55: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries." Oh jeez, I sound like Bush. Well, at least I've made the point that any conflict in the Middle East is the result of age-old intractable religious strife, not colonialism or imperialism. Man, that part of the world's just fucked up.
1:17: ISRAEL IS ONE OF OUR STRONGEST ALLIES. I know that one! Whew, back on track.
1:27: Israel is a democracy!!!!!!!!!!!!
1:30: Israelis are like us, unlike those crazy Arabs surrounding them.
1:52: Did I mention they're surrounded by crazy Arabs?
2:03: The Palestinians deserve our attention, not because they're, you know, people, but because they're DANGEROUS to the US and to Israel, ONE OF OUR STRONGEST ALLIES.
2:23: Oh and btw Palestinians are uneducated.
2:29: Shit is really complicated over there, so don't expect anything to improve any time soon, and HEAVEN FORBID don't try to understand it yourself. But both sides are equally at fault. And by that I mean mostly the Palestinians.
2:42: [lay out peace plan that Israel has ensured will never come to pass]
3:00: Both sides must compromise. Palestinians: you first.
3:10: Palestinians must stop resisting occupation and ethnic cleansing. Israel must "acknowledge their grievances" (no actual action required).
3:50: [required to say something nice about Netanyahu here under terms of Netanyahu-Obama "I totally pwned you on that settlement thing" agreement]
4:03: Abbas, our unelected puppet in the West Bank, has to deal with Hamas, the people the Palestinians actually elected to lead them, and it's causing some kinks in the pipeline of the Palestinians completely negotiating away the last shreds of their dignity.
4:30: In conclusion, ISRAEL IS ONE OF OUR STRONGEST ALLIES. Next question, please.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
srsly? a note?
"US ups pressure on Israel to end Gaza blockade" reads the headline.
Sweet! I think. Perhaps the Obama administration actually *is* doing something other than spouting some pretty words in Cairo about a new US policy for the Middle East. Dare I hope that the massive international outcry against the slaughter in Gaza has had some effect?
Of what did this pressure consist? Stopping arms shipments to Israel while they're being investigated over possible war crimes in Gaza, as most international law experts agree the USG should be doing under the terms of the Arms Export Control Act? Withholding foreign direct investment until Israel stops demanding collaboration with its secret police in return for medical treatment outside Gaza?
Nope. They sent a note.
Um...a note? Reeaaaallly?
Okay, okay, it was an official, signed-and-sealed "diplomatic note." But still...WTF?
And what was the content of this note? "Um, could you please, maybe, like, open the borders of Gaza just a crack, maybe let them have a little more food and medicine, and perhaps--if it's cool with you--some concrete to rebuild the 20,000 buildings you damaged or destroyed five months ago? But, like, totally only if you want to and it doesn't impact your security, cause God knows what those diabolical Palestinians can cook up with coffee, crayons and cement."
"Oh, and by the way--we're not telling you to dismantle those settlements in the West Bank which many international bodies have ruled are illegal. But maybe you could, like, just slow down with the rampant theft of Palestinian land. Just a little. If it's cool with you. Pretty please."
But apparently even this utterly weak-ass bullshit was enough to send Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's fascist foreign minister, into fits of "AAAHHH-rabble-rabble-rabble!" when he met with Hillary Clinton. I guess he needed a break in between his efforts to stop Palestinians from commemorating the anniversary of their own ethnic cleansing.
Sweet! I think. Perhaps the Obama administration actually *is* doing something other than spouting some pretty words in Cairo about a new US policy for the Middle East. Dare I hope that the massive international outcry against the slaughter in Gaza has had some effect?
Of what did this pressure consist? Stopping arms shipments to Israel while they're being investigated over possible war crimes in Gaza, as most international law experts agree the USG should be doing under the terms of the Arms Export Control Act? Withholding foreign direct investment until Israel stops demanding collaboration with its secret police in return for medical treatment outside Gaza?
Nope. They sent a note.
Um...a note? Reeaaaallly?
Okay, okay, it was an official, signed-and-sealed "diplomatic note." But still...WTF?
And what was the content of this note? "Um, could you please, maybe, like, open the borders of Gaza just a crack, maybe let them have a little more food and medicine, and perhaps--if it's cool with you--some concrete to rebuild the 20,000 buildings you damaged or destroyed five months ago? But, like, totally only if you want to and it doesn't impact your security, cause God knows what those diabolical Palestinians can cook up with coffee, crayons and cement."
"Oh, and by the way--we're not telling you to dismantle those settlements in the West Bank which many international bodies have ruled are illegal. But maybe you could, like, just slow down with the rampant theft of Palestinian land. Just a little. If it's cool with you. Pretty please."
But apparently even this utterly weak-ass bullshit was enough to send Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's fascist foreign minister, into fits of "AAAHHH-rabble-rabble-rabble!" when he met with Hillary Clinton. I guess he needed a break in between his efforts to stop Palestinians from commemorating the anniversary of their own ethnic cleansing.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
obama and the torture memos
I thought I had missed my chance to write a timely blog post when I was too busy to post something on the Obama administration's release of the "torture memos" back in April. But if the past eight years of the War on Terror--oops! I mean, "overseas contingency operation"--have taught us anything, it's that you never have to wait that long for torture to be back in the headlines again.
The latest installment of the story involves the Obama administration's attempts to stop the release of additional photographic evidence of "detainee abuse" (torture) from Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama initially told the ACLU he would approve the release of the photos...then changed his mind after seeing them. Which begs the question: what the hell is in these photos?
Reading these latest articles, I immediately thought of the memorable interview Errol Morris gave at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, after the premier of his Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure--in which he mentioned that the photographs that have now become perhaps the most iconic images of the War on Terror actually documented only a small slice of what went on in the notorious prison. Morris reminded the audience that there were far more sinister folks running around Abu Ghraib than 22-year-old Lynndie England. This shady cast of characters included military intelligence, private contractors, and CIA interrogators like Mark Swanner, who, evidence strongly suggests, was directly responsible for the death of at least one detainee.
There is another little-noted factoid about the toture memos that bears emphasis, which is that they provide concrete evidence of the link--documented by a few enterprising reporters as early as 2007--between the CIA, private contractors, and a military training program called SERE.
SERE--which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape--is a specialized "school," or training unit, offered to US Army, Navy and Air Force personnel who are deemed to be at high risk for capture in enemy territory. The training course consists of some standard military wilderness survival drills, but the part that becomes relevant in this discussion is the "resistance" component, in which soldiers are subjected to what is basically a mock torture scenario, based on the experiences of American POWs in the Pacific theater of WWII and in the Korean War.
SERE has been around since the mid-1950s, and has been the subject of a few scandals itself, including one at Fairchild AFB in Washington state. After the First Gulf War, the SERE curriculum was modified to include something called "sexual assault resistance training" (ugh.) But, this being the US military, apparently some of the scenarios weren't quite "simulated" enough.
Of course, it can be argued that the very existence of something like SERE in itself encourages torture, by reinforcing a reductive, "it's us or them" mentality among US soldiers. Why not torture? is the implicit logic. After all, they would do the same to us. It can also be argued that programs like SERE are of little to no use to military personnel, and are really just another form of the ritualized brutalization that passes for "training" in the US military.
But in any case, it was not long after 9/11 that two former SERE instructors--who had conducted many "mock" interrogations but never any real ones--decided the time was ripe to go into business for themselves. James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two military psychologists with no combat experience, had the brilliant idea to "reverse-engineer" the SERE training program. Instead of (supposedly) teaching miltary personnel to resist torture, they would teach them to inflict it. They formed a security company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, and began working for the CIA as private contractors as early as 2002--training civilian (CIA) and military personnel who later served at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram AFB and other torture hotspots around the world.
And so it was that the Mitchell-Jessen theory of interrogation--based on the idea that the best way to obtain information was to induce "sheer terror" and "learned helplessness," in which the subject of the interrogation is reduced to feeling complete and utter dependence on the interrogator for everything--became the norm practiced in almost all theaters of the War on Terror for the next seven years.
(Side note: if you ever wondered how so specific a tactic as waterboarding entered the US torture lexicon, here is your answer. It was used by the Japanese on American POWs in WWII, and later adopted as a standard part of the SERE POW "training" regimen. In fact, we even executed some Japanese army officers as war criminals for it--despite what the National Review may claim to the contrary.)
Many articles that have discussed the Mitchell-Jessen connection, including this one from the New York Times, have implied that the CIA looked to these crackpot psuedo-psychologists because it simply had no other choice. According to this narrative, "the agency had almost no experience interrogating the kind of hostile prisoners it soon expected to hold." It turned to Mitchell and Jessen in desperation, out of a sincere desire to protect the American people, and without full knowledge of the macabre nature of the SERE program.
That is a nice way of letting the Agency off the hook, but it's frankly just bullshit. In fact, I would venture to guess that the Mitchell-Jessen school of torture seemed acceptable to CIA personnel because it so closely paralleled the techniques described in the Agency's own torture manuals from the 1960s through the 1980s (which of course, they "don't use" anymore.)
There is a striking similarity between Mitchell's idea of "learned helplessness" and the "debility-dependency-dread" model outlined in documents like the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual - 1983, which was used to train many a Latin American death squad, including Honduras's Battalion 316. That document is itself sometimes a word-for-word copy of an earlier CIA interrogation manual, code-named KUBARK, which was written in the early 1960s.
Why do SERE and CIA interrogation tactics look so similar? Because both were developed from the same source material: the experiences of the early Cold War, particularly the Korean War, and the numerous questionable behavior modification and social psychology experiments that were all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s, from the Milgram experiment to CIA brainwashing attempts involving LSD and electricity. This same crud--a mix of fifty-year-old pychobabble and an unwavering belief in the efficacy of overwhelming force--has been floating around both the US military and the US intelligence community for decades. It's never really gone away; it's just been waiting for a revival of direct US imperial intervention to raise its head again.
And as for those torture photos, the ones Obama didn't want to release? Well, they probably looked something like this. (WARNING: Graphic content, NSFW, etc.--but really, what did you expect?)
The latest installment of the story involves the Obama administration's attempts to stop the release of additional photographic evidence of "detainee abuse" (torture) from Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama initially told the ACLU he would approve the release of the photos...then changed his mind after seeing them. Which begs the question: what the hell is in these photos?
Reading these latest articles, I immediately thought of the memorable interview Errol Morris gave at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, after the premier of his Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure--in which he mentioned that the photographs that have now become perhaps the most iconic images of the War on Terror actually documented only a small slice of what went on in the notorious prison. Morris reminded the audience that there were far more sinister folks running around Abu Ghraib than 22-year-old Lynndie England. This shady cast of characters included military intelligence, private contractors, and CIA interrogators like Mark Swanner, who, evidence strongly suggests, was directly responsible for the death of at least one detainee.
There is another little-noted factoid about the toture memos that bears emphasis, which is that they provide concrete evidence of the link--documented by a few enterprising reporters as early as 2007--between the CIA, private contractors, and a military training program called SERE.
SERE--which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape--is a specialized "school," or training unit, offered to US Army, Navy and Air Force personnel who are deemed to be at high risk for capture in enemy territory. The training course consists of some standard military wilderness survival drills, but the part that becomes relevant in this discussion is the "resistance" component, in which soldiers are subjected to what is basically a mock torture scenario, based on the experiences of American POWs in the Pacific theater of WWII and in the Korean War.
SERE has been around since the mid-1950s, and has been the subject of a few scandals itself, including one at Fairchild AFB in Washington state. After the First Gulf War, the SERE curriculum was modified to include something called "sexual assault resistance training" (ugh.) But, this being the US military, apparently some of the scenarios weren't quite "simulated" enough.
Of course, it can be argued that the very existence of something like SERE in itself encourages torture, by reinforcing a reductive, "it's us or them" mentality among US soldiers. Why not torture? is the implicit logic. After all, they would do the same to us. It can also be argued that programs like SERE are of little to no use to military personnel, and are really just another form of the ritualized brutalization that passes for "training" in the US military.
But in any case, it was not long after 9/11 that two former SERE instructors--who had conducted many "mock" interrogations but never any real ones--decided the time was ripe to go into business for themselves. James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two military psychologists with no combat experience, had the brilliant idea to "reverse-engineer" the SERE training program. Instead of (supposedly) teaching miltary personnel to resist torture, they would teach them to inflict it. They formed a security company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, and began working for the CIA as private contractors as early as 2002--training civilian (CIA) and military personnel who later served at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram AFB and other torture hotspots around the world.
And so it was that the Mitchell-Jessen theory of interrogation--based on the idea that the best way to obtain information was to induce "sheer terror" and "learned helplessness," in which the subject of the interrogation is reduced to feeling complete and utter dependence on the interrogator for everything--became the norm practiced in almost all theaters of the War on Terror for the next seven years.
(Side note: if you ever wondered how so specific a tactic as waterboarding entered the US torture lexicon, here is your answer. It was used by the Japanese on American POWs in WWII, and later adopted as a standard part of the SERE POW "training" regimen. In fact, we even executed some Japanese army officers as war criminals for it--despite what the National Review may claim to the contrary.)
Many articles that have discussed the Mitchell-Jessen connection, including this one from the New York Times, have implied that the CIA looked to these crackpot psuedo-psychologists because it simply had no other choice. According to this narrative, "the agency had almost no experience interrogating the kind of hostile prisoners it soon expected to hold." It turned to Mitchell and Jessen in desperation, out of a sincere desire to protect the American people, and without full knowledge of the macabre nature of the SERE program.
That is a nice way of letting the Agency off the hook, but it's frankly just bullshit. In fact, I would venture to guess that the Mitchell-Jessen school of torture seemed acceptable to CIA personnel because it so closely paralleled the techniques described in the Agency's own torture manuals from the 1960s through the 1980s (which of course, they "don't use" anymore.)
There is a striking similarity between Mitchell's idea of "learned helplessness" and the "debility-dependency-dread" model outlined in documents like the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual - 1983, which was used to train many a Latin American death squad, including Honduras's Battalion 316. That document is itself sometimes a word-for-word copy of an earlier CIA interrogation manual, code-named KUBARK, which was written in the early 1960s.
Why do SERE and CIA interrogation tactics look so similar? Because both were developed from the same source material: the experiences of the early Cold War, particularly the Korean War, and the numerous questionable behavior modification and social psychology experiments that were all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s, from the Milgram experiment to CIA brainwashing attempts involving LSD and electricity. This same crud--a mix of fifty-year-old pychobabble and an unwavering belief in the efficacy of overwhelming force--has been floating around both the US military and the US intelligence community for decades. It's never really gone away; it's just been waiting for a revival of direct US imperial intervention to raise its head again.
And as for those torture photos, the ones Obama didn't want to release? Well, they probably looked something like this. (WARNING: Graphic content, NSFW, etc.--but really, what did you expect?)
Sunday, February 22, 2009
obama on the war path
Anyone who expected the War on Terror to look different under an Obama administration is probably in for a rude awakening. Especially if they live in Afghanistan.
When Obama declared this week that he will be sending an additional 17,000 US troops to Afghanistan, it should have come as no surprise to folks who have been watching his administration's moves closely. After all, one of his first actions in office was to authorize a missile strike on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that killed a number of civilians, including 3 children. Since the beginning of Obama's term, at least four such "precision" strike have been launched, including one that killed 30 people.
And, while Obama signed an order to close the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay amidst great fanfare, he predictably left intact the Clinton-era policy of extraordinary rendition, assuring that the US can continue to carry out its practices of torture and indefinite detention without trial pretty much anywhere else in the world. Places such as Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, where the Obama adminstration recently upheld the Bush administration's claim that detainees have no legal rights to appeal their detention. Wait a minute...Bagram Air Force Base...wasn't the infamous US detention center there recently the subject of an award-winning documentary on the US's human rights abuses? Oh, yeah, it was.
Of course, Obama also pledged to conduct a review of conditions at Gitmo to ensure they met the standard of humane treatment outlined in the Geneva Conventions. This review was completed on Friday--a turnaround time of less than a month! If only all government functions were so speedy! The conclusion? Conditions at Guantanamo are COMPLETELY HUMANE, including the incredibly violent, invasive, and medically unnecessary practice of force-feeding hunger-striking detainees through a finger-sized tube inserted through the nose without anesthesia.
Incidentally, one of the prisoners subjected to the brutal force-feeding technique was this guy, who, after a SEVEN-YEAR nightmare tour of the US's global torture network, is returning to the UK...without a single charge being filed against him.
When Obama declared this week that he will be sending an additional 17,000 US troops to Afghanistan, it should have come as no surprise to folks who have been watching his administration's moves closely. After all, one of his first actions in office was to authorize a missile strike on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that killed a number of civilians, including 3 children. Since the beginning of Obama's term, at least four such "precision" strike have been launched, including one that killed 30 people.
And, while Obama signed an order to close the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay amidst great fanfare, he predictably left intact the Clinton-era policy of extraordinary rendition, assuring that the US can continue to carry out its practices of torture and indefinite detention without trial pretty much anywhere else in the world. Places such as Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, where the Obama adminstration recently upheld the Bush administration's claim that detainees have no legal rights to appeal their detention. Wait a minute...Bagram Air Force Base...wasn't the infamous US detention center there recently the subject of an award-winning documentary on the US's human rights abuses? Oh, yeah, it was.
Of course, Obama also pledged to conduct a review of conditions at Gitmo to ensure they met the standard of humane treatment outlined in the Geneva Conventions. This review was completed on Friday--a turnaround time of less than a month! If only all government functions were so speedy! The conclusion? Conditions at Guantanamo are COMPLETELY HUMANE, including the incredibly violent, invasive, and medically unnecessary practice of force-feeding hunger-striking detainees through a finger-sized tube inserted through the nose without anesthesia.
Incidentally, one of the prisoners subjected to the brutal force-feeding technique was this guy, who, after a SEVEN-YEAR nightmare tour of the US's global torture network, is returning to the UK...without a single charge being filed against him.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
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.
Monday, December 22, 2008
obama watch: slap in the face in 3, 2, 1...
I have a confession to make.
I am guilty of the greatest sin of a student of history: forgetting the lessons of the past. I was seduced--reluctantly, half-heartedly, and when I absolutely should have known better. I was charmed, at least a bit, by image and illusion, into forgetting a bitter reality that eight years of activism have proven to be true again and again.
On election night, I watched thousands of ecstatic African-Americans...nay, ecstatic Americans...pour into the streets of New York, Washington, DC and other cities, overwhelmed with joy. And it melted even my cynical fuck-the-two-party-system heart. This was a historic moment, to be sure. A great barrier had fallen, and I'll admit that even I was at least partially taken in by the messianic Obama glow. Despite the warning cries of the little Marxist on my shoulder (I think it might be Peter Camejo) I started, almost, to believe that this guy was at least somewhat genuine. I know, I know! As a revolutionary socialist and a long-term third-party organizer, I of all people should know better. What can I say? The Obama phenomenon (Obamenon?) is powerful indeed. I daresay very few on the left escaped that tractor beam.
Thankfully, history saw fit to correct my momentary delusion, and hastily indeed. Obama is not even in office yet, and already he's working overtime to tarnish that shiny halo as much as possible. The sparkle started to fade with his first appointment, power Zionist Rahm Emanuel, and took a big hit when Obama decided to retain Iran-Contra-entangled former CIA director Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's heir apparent, as Secretary of Defense, and appoint mysoginist globalization guru Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council.
My fellow degenerates, we have now reached 100% disilluionment. What was the slap in the face that shook me out of the temporary hypnosis that foolishly made me believe we could expect any genuine change from the two-party system? Why, of course, Obama's choice to appoint anti-gay, anti-abortion evangelical zealot Rick Warren to give the invocation on Inauguration Day.
Who, might you ask, is Rick Warren? He is not just your average crazy Christian. He is the pastor of Saddleback Church, the Orange County megachurch that provided a significant portion of the money and foot soldiers behind Prop 8.
Your next question, quite justifiably, might be, why? Why, out of all the thousands of religious leaders in the US, did Obama decide to pick this guy? Because he's only too eager to pander to the Christian right? Because he doesn't care nearly as much about the activist base that propelled him to victory as they do about him? Because he thinks that progressives will continue to fogive him because they're so happy to be rid of Bush? Or D, all of the above?
Obama might feel like a rock star right now, but if you ask me, he is playing with fire. When you build up people's hopes and dreams and then dash them, when you hold out the promise of a better world and then snatch it away, people tend to get angry. Professional liberals are already in a tizzy of hurt and confusion over how Obama's administration is shaping up. And recent events--from the surge of Prop 8 protests, to the Republic factory occupation, to the current occupation of the New School--have shown how quickly the deep anger churning under the surface of US society can flare up.
If Obama is not careful, I think there is a good chance he will be remembered not as a Lincoln or a Kennedy, but as much more like another liberal who rode to victory on a wave of dicontent with war, racism and inequality--Lyndon B. Johnson--who, coincidentally, holds the record for the largest inagural crowd in history. 1.2 million people descended on Washington to watch him take office in January 1965, aglow with his promises of a War on Poverty. Instead, Johnson delivered a war in Vietnam and an increasingly violent crackdown on the protest movements of the '60s--in many cases, on the very people who had helped him get elected just a few years earlier. The result was four years of rage--and the Democrats' loss in 1968, as their young, progressive base came to the realization that they change they wanted was something that politicians were neither interested in nor capable of delivering.
Of course, no one can predict what an Obama administration will bring, and it's useless and simplistic to try to fit the template of history past onto the current situation. Indeed, in many ways, the world we live in today is far more volatile than America in the 1960s. I am indeed hopeful for the years ahead. I think change is on the horizon. But not at all--indeed, least of all--because of who is in the White House.
I am guilty of the greatest sin of a student of history: forgetting the lessons of the past. I was seduced--reluctantly, half-heartedly, and when I absolutely should have known better. I was charmed, at least a bit, by image and illusion, into forgetting a bitter reality that eight years of activism have proven to be true again and again.
On election night, I watched thousands of ecstatic African-Americans...nay, ecstatic Americans...pour into the streets of New York, Washington, DC and other cities, overwhelmed with joy. And it melted even my cynical fuck-the-two-party-system heart. This was a historic moment, to be sure. A great barrier had fallen, and I'll admit that even I was at least partially taken in by the messianic Obama glow. Despite the warning cries of the little Marxist on my shoulder (I think it might be Peter Camejo) I started, almost, to believe that this guy was at least somewhat genuine. I know, I know! As a revolutionary socialist and a long-term third-party organizer, I of all people should know better. What can I say? The Obama phenomenon (Obamenon?) is powerful indeed. I daresay very few on the left escaped that tractor beam.
Thankfully, history saw fit to correct my momentary delusion, and hastily indeed. Obama is not even in office yet, and already he's working overtime to tarnish that shiny halo as much as possible. The sparkle started to fade with his first appointment, power Zionist Rahm Emanuel, and took a big hit when Obama decided to retain Iran-Contra-entangled former CIA director Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's heir apparent, as Secretary of Defense, and appoint mysoginist globalization guru Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council.
My fellow degenerates, we have now reached 100% disilluionment. What was the slap in the face that shook me out of the temporary hypnosis that foolishly made me believe we could expect any genuine change from the two-party system? Why, of course, Obama's choice to appoint anti-gay, anti-abortion evangelical zealot Rick Warren to give the invocation on Inauguration Day.
Who, might you ask, is Rick Warren? He is not just your average crazy Christian. He is the pastor of Saddleback Church, the Orange County megachurch that provided a significant portion of the money and foot soldiers behind Prop 8.
Your next question, quite justifiably, might be, why? Why, out of all the thousands of religious leaders in the US, did Obama decide to pick this guy? Because he's only too eager to pander to the Christian right? Because he doesn't care nearly as much about the activist base that propelled him to victory as they do about him? Because he thinks that progressives will continue to fogive him because they're so happy to be rid of Bush? Or D, all of the above?
Obama might feel like a rock star right now, but if you ask me, he is playing with fire. When you build up people's hopes and dreams and then dash them, when you hold out the promise of a better world and then snatch it away, people tend to get angry. Professional liberals are already in a tizzy of hurt and confusion over how Obama's administration is shaping up. And recent events--from the surge of Prop 8 protests, to the Republic factory occupation, to the current occupation of the New School--have shown how quickly the deep anger churning under the surface of US society can flare up.
If Obama is not careful, I think there is a good chance he will be remembered not as a Lincoln or a Kennedy, but as much more like another liberal who rode to victory on a wave of dicontent with war, racism and inequality--Lyndon B. Johnson--who, coincidentally, holds the record for the largest inagural crowd in history. 1.2 million people descended on Washington to watch him take office in January 1965, aglow with his promises of a War on Poverty. Instead, Johnson delivered a war in Vietnam and an increasingly violent crackdown on the protest movements of the '60s--in many cases, on the very people who had helped him get elected just a few years earlier. The result was four years of rage--and the Democrats' loss in 1968, as their young, progressive base came to the realization that they change they wanted was something that politicians were neither interested in nor capable of delivering.
Of course, no one can predict what an Obama administration will bring, and it's useless and simplistic to try to fit the template of history past onto the current situation. Indeed, in many ways, the world we live in today is far more volatile than America in the 1960s. I am indeed hopeful for the years ahead. I think change is on the horizon. But not at all--indeed, least of all--because of who is in the White House.
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