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.
Monday, January 19, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
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.
Friday, January 2, 2009
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.
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.
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