[Further notes on life in these “wartime” United States: On July 21, Greenpeace issued a release which read in part: “On July 18, Greenpeace, Inc. was served with a criminal indictment by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida. Greenpeace has been charged with boarding a ship before arrival and conspiracy, which exposes the organization to a maximum penalty of five years’ probation and a fine of $10,000.
“These charges stem from a peaceful protest by Greenpeace activists in the Port of Miami in April 2002 against the illegal importation of Brazilian mahogany. In June 2002, six activists entered guilty pleas and were sentenced to a fine and time served. This is the first time that the United States Government has indicted the organization for protest activities.
“‘What we are faced with today is an indictment of civil liberties, not simply an indictment of Greenpeace,’ said John Passacantando, Executive Director of Greenpeace, Inc. ‘The government is effectively trying to stop organizations like ours from engaging in peaceful protests – even protests geared towards stopping illegal activities that are destroying our global environment.'”]
Today, the Washington Post has a long piece by Paula Span on the Padilla case (Enemy Combatant Vanishes Into a ‘Legal Black Hole’). Remember Jose Padilla, now in the Bermuda Triangle of American justice? He was arrested by the FBI at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002 and held as a “material witness” in a supposed al Qaeda plot. A court was to hear motions for his release on June 11. His court-appointed lawyer Donna Newman says, “If we succeeded, he would have been released.”
But on June 10, John Ashcroft called a distinctly over-the-top news conference in the heartland of the former Great Satan, Moscow, to announce “the capture of ‘a known terrorist'” in an alleged plot to explode a “dirty bomb” in an American city. Ashcroft added that the president “had determined that Padilla was ‘an enemy combatant who poses a serious and continuing threat to the American people’ Padilla had therefore been transferred to Defense Department custody and sent to a Charleston, S.C., naval brig, where he has been unable to communicate with anyone except his guards and interrogators ever since.”
The piece is a fine portrait of Newman who stumbled into a heroic defense of the constitution and the rights of citizens against the well-armed might of the Ashcroft Justice Department, but the heart of a case, which has been written about before but can’t be returned to too often, is the single word “wartime.” Span writes, under the subhead, “The Nazi Precedent,”
“In arguing that Padilla and Hamdi were being treated appropriately, government lawyers relied on a World War II precedent called Ex Parte Quirin. The case involved German saboteurs who landed in New York and Florida and buried their uniforms but were captured before they could act. At least one was an American citizen. The Supreme Court upheld their designation as unlawful combatants, claims to citizenship or arrest on U.S. soil notwithstanding. All were convicted; six were executed.”
“These charges stem from a peaceful protest by Greenpeace activists in the Port of Miami in April 2002 against the illegal importation of Brazilian mahogany. In June 2002, six activists entered guilty pleas and were sentenced to a fine and time served. This is the first time that the United States Government has indicted the organization for protest activities.
“‘What we are faced with today is an indictment of civil liberties, not simply an indictment of Greenpeace,’ said John Passacantando, Executive Director of Greenpeace, Inc. ‘The government is effectively trying to stop organizations like ours from engaging in peaceful protests – even protests geared towards stopping illegal activities that are destroying our global environment.'”]
Today, the Washington Post has a long piece by Paula Span on the Padilla case (Enemy Combatant Vanishes Into a ‘Legal Black Hole’). Remember Jose Padilla, now in the Bermuda Triangle of American justice? He was arrested by the FBI at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002 and held as a “material witness” in a supposed al Qaeda plot. A court was to hear motions for his release on June 11. His court-appointed lawyer Donna Newman says, “If we succeeded, he would have been released.”
But on June 10, John Ashcroft called a distinctly over-the-top news conference in the heartland of the former Great Satan, Moscow, to announce “the capture of ‘a known terrorist'” in an alleged plot to explode a “dirty bomb” in an American city. Ashcroft added that the president “had determined that Padilla was ‘an enemy combatant who poses a serious and continuing threat to the American people’ Padilla had therefore been transferred to Defense Department custody and sent to a Charleston, S.C., naval brig, where he has been unable to communicate with anyone except his guards and interrogators ever since.”
The piece is a fine portrait of Newman who stumbled into a heroic defense of the constitution and the rights of citizens against the well-armed might of the Ashcroft Justice Department, but the heart of a case, which has been written about before but can’t be returned to too often, is the single word “wartime.” Span writes, under the subhead, “The Nazi Precedent,”
“In arguing that Padilla and Hamdi were being treated appropriately, government lawyers relied on a World War II precedent called Ex Parte Quirin. The case involved German saboteurs who landed in New York and Florida and buried their uniforms but were captured before they could act. At least one was an American citizen. The Supreme Court upheld their designation as unlawful combatants, claims to citizenship or arrest on U.S. soil notwithstanding. All were convicted; six were executed.”
The Post piece points out that the Nazi saboteurs were at least provided with lawyers (though for a military proceeding) and that the basic reason for not letting Padilla see a lawyer has evidently been to put pressure on him in isolation.
“‘It appears that they’re using some form of mental coercion,’ was Newman’s interpretation. Prolonged isolation can in itself violate a prisoner’s rights under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, said a spokesman for Amnesty International. The organization condemned Padilla’s treatment on the one-year anniversary of his solitary confinement, and Amnesty International groups in 49 countries have launched letter-writing campaigns to the U.S. government in his behalf.”
The “pivotal question,” writes Span is: “Can an American citizen, arrested on U.S. soil, be held incommunicado in a military prison indefinitely — without being charged with a crime, without access to a lawyer?”
It is an important question, a crucial one for the state of citizenship in our country, but is it really the “pivotal” one? I think not. To my mind, the pivotal question is, as the Nazi analogy indicates, are we at war because the president states that we are? Certainly, by the standards this administration has cited, we’ve been “at war” with hardly a break since 1941 — through World War II obviously, but also through the Cold War. And former CIA director Woolsey, while running various prewar errands for our ruling neocons, did indeed declare us to be in “World War IV” (the Cold War being the third) and offered his fervent hopes that it wouldn’t last quite so long.
We also have prosecuted two small colonial-style wars, which resembled slaughters, abroad, one a couple of months long against the Taliban regime of Afghanistan (and their al Qaeda allies), the other of three weeks (after months of softening-up bombings) in Iraq. But the war that has been “declared,” that has put us into “wartime,” is neither of these but a vaguer “war against terrorism,” though as the situation in Iraq grows ever more taxing and intractable real war, metaphorical war, and wartime have increasingly been mixed into a single confused stew of imagery. Yesterday, testifying before Congress, Paul Wolfowitz said again, “In fact, the battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terror.” And today, in his news conference, the president, while taking pro forma “responsibility” for the now famous sixteen words in his State of the Union speech also pushed hard at melding the two, swearing that the United States and its allies will “complete our mission in Iraq, We will complete our mission in Afghanistan … We will wage the war on terror against every enemy that plots against our people.”
And yet, though Congress abdicated to the president, giving him more or less everything he wanted in the way of war-making powers, it did not declare war. Only the president has done so. Or more accurately, he has told us so. If you think about our post-9/11 lives in this country, in no other way are there signs of what might pass for war. In World War II terms, for instance, no mobilization, no war bonds, no victory gardens, and certainly, no sacrifices voluntarily offered up by the public, though much, from rights to funds, taken away under the rubric of “wartime”. If anything, one of the wars, in Iraq, has been fought to ensure that, at the level of consumption, no Humvee or SUV tank should ever lack for reasonably cheap gas. (And no war was declared, nor were we imagined to be in “wartime” when the World Trade Center was attacked the first time in 1993, or the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or two embassies in Africa.)
All this may sound familiar enough, but as in the Post piece, so in Congress, and among the Democratic opposition, and (generally speaking) in the media, the claim that we are in “wartime” is seldom challenged or even much discussed until someone ends up in court — and then, given the right-wing bent of most of our judges, it’s too late. But have we been at war or in wartime since our president declared us so just after September 11, 2001? No, of course not — or rather mainly in the overheated brains of our leaders, most of whose “wartime” experiences (Colin Powell excepted) took place in movie theaters watching on-screen versions of World War II heroics.
Yet that idea of “wartime” is crucial to so much of what this administration has gotten away with, including the strip-mining of America, and the assault on poor and middle class lifestyles and lives. It’s under the guise of “wartime” that the Bush administration essentially hijacked the American people for its global mission.
Let me offer my own metaphor to oppose the Bush one — since “wartime” is, as now being used, essentially a metaphor. You might say that in Florida in November 2000, this administration-in-formation rushed the cockpit of the American electoral jet and took the controls by force — the force of a chad, if nothing else. Then, just after 9/11, realizing their opportunity and already being at those controls, they made the decision to crash the American plane into Iraq.
Increasingly, it does look like the American people were hijacked and flown on what may indeed turn out to have been an imperial suicide mission, while al Qaeda’s acts that might have dealt more modestly but quite effectively were largely swept aside and critics who suggested another approach to “war” and “wartime” pilloried. Take a look, for instance, at the curious Bush censorship of those 28 pages of the Congressional report on 9/11 on Saudi Arabia if you want to get a sense of paths not pursued (and do check out Robert Scheer’s splendid column on the subject from the Los Angeles Times included below).
I claim nothing original about all this. Others have said it earlier and more eloquently. It just so happens that I was once again struck by how the idea of “wartime” covered such a host of sins and by the extent to which, at some level, it’s come to be accepted as an operative metaphor for our moment. Of course, it has also begun to merge with an actual war for which victory was declared but which now refuses to end, and that only deepens the confusion. I do believe the concept of “wartime” has proved “pivotal” for this administration. Were it to fall away in a heap of half-truths, quarter-truths and outright lies, our leaders would be stripped of much of their rhetorical clothing and perhaps of public trust.
What you can say for this administration is that it had a distinctive vision of global domination. Remember the elder Bush’s lack of the “vision thing,” well not a problem for these guys. But now that that vision has landed in the mud of a resistant world, I suspect these guys, who rolled the dice and took the great Iraqi gamble, are winging it, simply making it up as they stumble along.
Will there be a crisis in military recruitment by the end of 2004 as disgruntlement with long tours of duty in Iraq and elsewhere comes home to roost in an overstretched military? (“You could begin to see the unraveling of the Army,” says retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments — Eric Rosenberg, the State.) Well, we’ll make a bigger military (forget where the money’s coming from), or maybe we’ll just close our eyes and hope it goes away.
Or what about Afghanistan, the land that time (and everything else) forgot? It was never much more than a symbolic jumping off spot for war in Iraq and we never put genuine muscle into “reconstructing” it. But now, lo and behold, the poppies are blooming, the warlords are frolicking, and the Taliban are resurgent. Ahmed Rashid, the reliable journalist and author of the book Taliban, reports that “al Qaeda is offering bounties for killing or capturing US troops” in Afghanistan, a horrific spin on our own bounties in Iraq. “Over 120 Afghan soldiers and civilians,” he reports, “have been killed in Taliban attacks since the start of the year,” the Taliban is resurgent in Pakistan too. He reports chillingly that “Taliban leaders are openly giving press conferences and talking to reporters on mobile phones. Pakistan denies it is helping the Taliban, but Islamabad has done nothing to stop Islamic radical activity despite repeated requests by President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders to take action.” (Taliban stepping up attacks against targets in Afghanistan)
Human Rights Watch has just issued a new report (“Killing you is a very easy thing for us”) warning, according to Human Rights News (www.hrw.org),
“that violence, political intimidation, and attacks on women and girls are discouraging political participation and endangering gains made on women’s rights in Afghanistan over the last year. ‘Human rights abuses in Afghanistan are being committed by gunmen and warlords who were propelled into power by the United States and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001,’ said Brad Adams, executive director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. ‘These men and others have essentially hijacked the country outside of Kabul. With less than a year to go before national elections, Afghanistan’s human rights situation appears to be worsening.'”
I’ve included below an Asia Times piece by Ramtanu Maitra, “Why the US needs the Taliban,” a fascinating review of and speculation on the various conundrums our rush to war against the Taliban has now brought us up against as we are forced to make choices in a complex world of crisscrossing alliances and interests which bear little relation to the Bush “vision” of a wartime world.
Is there anyplace where that “vision” remains unsullied? The answer is yes –outer space where our lead in the militarization of the heavens remains at present untouchable, where there is as yet no quagmire and the mud has yet to be lofted — so a piece from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (but picked up off www.globalsecurity.org) makes clear (see below). Off in space, our mullahs can dream mad dreams not unlike John Poindexter’s Pentagon-funded market in murder, but unlike Poindexter’s dreams, theirs can’t yet be shot down.
Oh yes, and just for a laugh, on the road to the actual war we fought in Iraq, here, thanks to someone’s sharp eye at www.cursor.org, is National Security Adviser Condi Rice’s explanation for why time was already “running out” on Saddam Hussein last January (Why We Know Iraq Is Lying):
“Iraq’s behavior could not offer a starker contrast [to the Ukraine’s or Kazachistan’s efforts at disarmament]. Instead of a commitment to disarm, Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons, led by Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay, who controls the Special Security Organization, which runs Iraq’s concealment activities. Instead of implementing national initiatives to disarm, Iraq maintains institutions whose sole purpose is to thwart the work of the inspectors. And instead of full cooperation and transparency, Iraq has filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie.
“For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United Nations in Iraq’s accounting for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons.”
Oh yes, and that was written by Rice for the New York Times on January 23, 2003, just a few days before the State of the Union speech which contained those sixteen words she kinda didn’t notice. Maybe she didn’t notice the seventeen in her op-ed either. (And, by the way, if you want to grasp what that “yellowcake” Saddam wasn’t buying actually was and why it would have done him less than no good but did the Bush and Blair administration all the short-run good in the world, take a look at Edward Jay Epstein’s explanation.) Tom
Read Between the Lines of Those 28 Missing Pages
Even censored, 9/11 report shows the focus was on the wrong nation
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times
July 29, 2003Love the truth; it ultimately bows to no master. Even for the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful propaganda machine, deceptions inevitably unravel.
In the last week we’ve moved from the 16 deceitful words in George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech to the 28 White House-censored pages in the congressional report that dealt with Saudi Arabia’s role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the United States.
Yet even in its sanitized version, the bipartisan report, long delayed by an embarrassed White House, makes clear that the U.S. should have focused on Saudi Arabia, and not Iraq, in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
As we know, but our government tends to ignore, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia; none came from Iraq
To read more Scheer click here
Why the US needs the Taliban
By Ramtanu Maitra
Asia Times
July 27, 2003Since Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf made his much-acclaimed visit to Camp David and met US President George W Bush on June 24, new elements have begun to emerge in the Afghan theater. US troops in Afghanistan are now encountering more enemy attacks than ever before, and clashes between Pakistani and Afghan troops along the tribal borders have been reported regularly.
On July 16, speaking to Electronic Telegraph of the United Kingdom, US troop commander General Frank “Buster” Hagenbeck, based at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, reported increased attacks over recent weeks on US and Afghan forces by the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other anti-US groups that have joined hands. He also revealed some other very interesting information: the Taliban and its allies have regrouped in Pakistan and are recruiting fighters from religious schools in Quetta in a campaign funded by drug trafficking.
To read more Maitra click here
U.S. the leader in war plans for space
Gaining the ultimate high ground
By Jack Kelly
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
July 28, 2003When the Bush administration announced in 2001 that it would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so it could build a national defense system designed to shoot enemy missiles out of the sky, critics warned it would start an arms race in space. Supporters, certain the United States would win, essentially said, “Let the race begin.”
Two years later, the United States has bolted from the starting blocks and is so far ahead that it is hard to make out any potential competitors in the rearview mirror.
Pentagon scenarios for war in space go far beyond shooting down missiles that threaten the U.S. homeland. They call for airborne and orbiting weapons that could attack targets anywhere on Earth at virtually any moment. They call for weapons that could defend U.S. space armaments or satellites while blinding or destroying those of any potential adversary.