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July
11, 2003
David
Lindorff
An Iraq War & Occupation Glossary
July
10, 2003
Ron
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Sean
Donahue
Bush and the Paramillitaries: Coddling Terrorists in Colombia
Yemi
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Who Outted Bush in Afrika?
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Ali
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US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated
Joanne
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Federal Courts, Not Military Commissions
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Electronic Iraq
July
9, 2003
David
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Is the Media Finally Turning on
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10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons
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Z.
Why Speak Out?
Lee Sustar
The Great Medicare Fraud
John
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The Worst Kind of Lie
Gary Leupp
"Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq
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July
8, 2003
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Cassel
Bully on the Bench: the Pathological
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Alan
Maass
Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor
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Floyd
Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag
Linda
S. Heard
America's Kangaroo Justice
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Cloughley
They Tell Lies to Nodders
Charles
Sullivan
Bush the Christian?
Saul
Landau
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age
Website
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Occupation Watch
July
7, 2003
William
Blum
The Anti-Empire Report
Harvey
Wasserman
The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head
Ramzy
Baroud
Peace for All the Wrong Reasons
Simon
Jones
What Progressives Should Think About
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Lesley
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Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July
4 / 6, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
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Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
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Standard
Schaefer
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Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
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Madsen
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John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
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Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
Poets'
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Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
The Lipstick Librarian
July
3, 2003
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Meaning of Gettysburg
Thomas
W. Croft
There Was a Reason They Called It the Casino Economy
David
Lindorff
Outlawing Subversives: Hong Kong
and the US
John
Chuckman
Lessons from the American Revolution
Jackson
Thoreau
New Far-Right Scheme: Impeach Supreme Court Justices
Stan
Goff
"Bring 'Em On?": a Former
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to Attack US Troops
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July 2, 2003
Diane
Christian
Good Killing and Bad Killing
Richard
Falk
After Iraq, Does UN War Prevention Have a Future?
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
Justin
Podur
Uribe's Onslaught Across Colombia
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
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Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
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Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
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Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
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Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
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Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
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Bush and Kindergarten
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Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
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Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
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June
27, 2003
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Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
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David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
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Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
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John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
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Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
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Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
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June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
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Bacher
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Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
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Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
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Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
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You Are Being Watched:
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June
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Supreme Indemnity
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Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
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John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
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Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
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Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
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Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
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The Pitstop Ploughshares
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Corrie
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Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
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Uzma
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Arrogant
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The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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|
July
12, 2003
Background of a Crisis
Civil
Liberties After September 11
By TOM STEPHENS
The shock and horror following the deadly terrorist
crimes of September 11, 2001 led to major legal changes in America
that undermine fundamental civil liberties and constitutional
rights. In swift succession, government security and intelligence
agents have been granted broad powers: to spy on citizens and
others lawfully in this country, without evidence of any crime;
to keep previously public information and legal proceedings secret;
to engage in ethnic profiling, including indefinite detention
without criminal charges; to conduct secret searches and wiretaps,
without probable cause; to monitor People's internet and library
use; and to collect personal records.
Many of these changes came first in the
infamous "USA PATRIOT Act" (Uniting And Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept
and Obstruct Terrorism) in October 2001. But many others came
in the form of less publicized executive orders, administrative
law memos, and even unwritten executive branch directives and
guidelines. More recently, the passage of the "Homeland
Security Act" created a gigantic new federal department
charged with defending the "homeland" from terrorism,
and exempted from collective bargaining rights and civil service
protections for more than 170,000 employees. Lurking in the wings
is Attorney General John Ashcroft's proposed "Domestic Security
Enhancement Act of 2003" (aka "Patriot II"), leaked
to the public on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, after the Justice
Department had repeatedly denied the existence of any such draft
legislation. Among other things, if enacted "Patriot II"
would provide for the unprecedented revocation of the citizenship
of anyone deemed to provide material support to an organization
the government labels as "terrorist."
As sweeping, important, and frankly scary
as this contemporary American crisis of civil liberties clearly
is, in order to more fully understand what is happening it should
be seen as one aspect of a much broader series of interlocking
crises. In mutually reinforcing combination with legal attacks
on our fundamental constitutional rights, we face related spasms
of conflict in an extremely large number of areas of our society
involving resources, rules, and conflict resolution, including:
Resources:
Economy
Energy
Ecology
Rules:
Corporate political domination
Imperialism
Democracy
Conflict resolution:
Militarism
Clash of cultures and terrorism
Spirituality
The constitutional structure of our government
and our society is theoretically based on the idea that we should
have fair and fairly applied rules. A government of laws means
that we as citizens have a meaningful vote and voice in how we
function as a society, allocate our resources and resolve our
inevitable conflicts. However, the pervasive environment of fear
following 9-11, fuelled by a corporate media explosion of narrow-minded
nationalist "patriotism," has undermined many rules
that were developed and applied throughout previous eras of US
history, at great cost and through difficult popular struggles.
This ongoing process, especially in today's context of hard economic
times, inherently and quite intentionally favors the growth and
domination of unaccountable power, as the formal legal "reforms"
reinforce the mob mentality of revenge and racism to produce
a powerful backlash against any form of dissent or resistance.
This maelstrom of conflicts has many
sources. Primarily, the Bush administration has consistently
demonstrated loyal support for the interests of multinational
corporate power, and drawn support in turn from Christian fundamentalist
political forces that base their appeal on apocalyptic messages
of "rapture" and "end times." The financial
interests of the administration's corporate supporters, coupled
with the intolerance of its religious base, make for a fanatical
and poisonous challenge to democracy. The same forces have simultaneously
shown utter indifference to the cruel economic consequences and
the environmental devastation caused by single-minded pursuit
of their political agenda. The result is the economic, political,
and spiritual context of the civil liberties emergency we face
today.
The current, unelected and illegitimate
US government is using fear and extreme nationalist/ fundamentalist
fervor, in an attempt to prevent growing international social
movements from overturning the legitimizing institutions of corporate
globalization upon which much of its power depends. Those institutions
include globally dominant American political, economic and military
power, as well as international bodies like the World Trade Organization,
the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, which can
be counted on to act in the interests of US corporate power.
In the name of "fighting terrorism," and in reaction
to vocal, worldwide demands for global justice, peace and democracy,
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and their corporate and ideological
supporters are pursuing a strategy of US empire-building through
military force. They are counting on the fear of terrorism, war,
and economic privation to whip people into line behind their
leadership.
Despite the monumental challenges facing
dissent and opposition, and the enormous concentrated power of
the US government together with its multinational corporate allies,
this widespread and multifaceted crisis actually presents opportunities.
There is a simple and very clear alternative to Bush's imperialist
"war against terrorism." As Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. said in announcing his then-controversial opposition to the
Vietnam war, "justice is indivisible. And injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere. I will not stand idly by when
I see an unjust war taking place . . ." Paradoxically, because
of the incredible breadth and depth of these interrelated crises,
as well as the savage attacks on constitutional liberty mounted
by the government, we can begin to see the possibility of an
organized social response, in the form of a newly internationalist,
anti-imperialist peace, justice and democracy movement, and in
the tradition of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations,
and the civil rights revolution of the 20th century. The US government's
actions seriously threaten its own legitimacy and that of the
corporate economic system it serves. In order to find a way out
of the current trap between terrorism and war, we must get as
many People as possible to see not only what this illegitimate
US government is doing to violate People's fundamental legal
and economic rights both at home and abroad, but why they are
doing it, and also that there are clear alternatives to their
undemocratic policies.
Civil Liberties in
the War Against Terrorism; The Legal Background
This is a good time to return to basic
first principles. Explicit recognition of the danger of violating
individuals' fundamental legal and human rights during wartime
is at least as old as the United States Constitution itself,
the body of the written document that established the powers
of the US government, even before it was amended by the Bill
of Rights. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution says "The
Privilege of the Writ of Habeus Corpus shall not be suspended,
unless when in cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety
may require it." Habeus Corpus is the Latin name of an ancient
legal remedy for wrongful imprisonment that was available under
English Common Law, which is the source of US law. In the US,
filing in federal court for a "Writ of Habeus Corpus"
has long been the procedure to challenge the legality of convictions
in state courts. Historically, because the Constitution itself
preserves the Privilege of Habeus Corpus, except in cases of
"Rebellion or Invasion," since the Civil War the government
has at least had to claim it was following the law, when it arrested,
detained or imprisoned People for reasons of state during wartime,
as it has over and over again. Preserving this basic legal right
of individuals to be free from unlawful imprisonment, except
only during the most extraordinary national emergencies, even
greater than "war" or hostile attack, was written into
the text of the US Constitution, in addition to the specific
individual rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Those who
preach "support the troops and the president," and
unthinkingly condemn dissent from illegal wars of aggression
as akin to the crime of treason, have forgotten, or never learned,
this basic American truth.
The most important legal protections
of individuals' civil and human rights in America are in the
Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution
that were adopted in 1791, as well as the 14th Amendment, adopted
after the Civil War in 1868. These include:
The First Amendment Right to Advocate
for Change: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress
of grievances."
The Fourth Amendment Right to be Free
from Unreasonable Search and Seizure: "The right of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported
by Oath or Affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The Fifth Amendment Right to Remain Silent
when Questioned by the Police and Due Process: "No person
... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against
himself. Nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law "
Fourteenth Amendment: "All persons
born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens
of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person
of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws."
In addition to the above fundamental
constitutional rights under US law, in order to see the outlines
of the full crisis of civil liberty, and its entanglement in
larger crises of resources, rules, and conflict resolution, some
mention should be made of economic rights developed in the second
half of the 20th century under the accepted customary principles
of international human rights law. The UN's 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), are based on the "recognition
of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights
of all members of the human family" as "the foundation
of freedom, justice and peace in the world." These seminal
documents, which were largely based on initiatives of the Roosevelt
administration during WWII, are systematically violated throughout
the world today. And this situation is inevitably becoming much
worse with the spread of warfare. The US Government has rejected
implementation of the economic rights set forth in Articles 22
through 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calling
them merely "aspirational," and failed to ratify the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
However, these stirring legal and moral documents remain as widely
recognized statements of fundamental human rights that are broader,
deeper and more meaningful to the masses of the world's People
than the civil and political rights guaranteed in the US Bill
of Rights.
The Threats to Civil
Liberties in the "War on Terrorism"
From the so-called "USA PATRIOT"
Act in October 2001 to the confusing aftermath of the invasion
and occupation of Iraq in the economically shaky summer of 2003,
Bush and Ashcroft's political police have been extremely busy
carving out a "terrorism exception" to all the above
legal protections of human freedom. The legal issues raised by
these events will be working their way through the court system
for a long time, and involve far too many complexities to comprehensively
analyze here. Even now, almost two years into the Bush administration's
crusade for imperial domination of the Middle East and Asia,
we cannot possibly know what the ultimate results will be for
American liberty. Most of the basic outlines of the huge problem
have emerged in a number of battles in courts, legislatures and
local government campaigns.
Start with the USA PATRIOT Act itself.
It essentially consists of a grab-bag of police powers that had
been sought and rejected long before September 11, 2001, but
got a fresh look after the intelligence and security agencies
of the Bush administration were caught napping by al-Quaida.
Rather than engaging in any honest or serious study of what went
wrong, this sweeping deconstruction of American constitutional
rights was rushed through Congress in the immediate aftermath
of the unimaginable tragedy, with no time for most legislators
to even read its provisions, much less deliberate on their wisdom,
before voting on it. In particular, there has never been any
demonstration that this statute would cure any of the specific
law enforcement problems that enabled the 9-11 attacks (such
as lax airport security and the failure to keep track of known
terrorist suspects who entered the USA after they were identified
at an alleged planning meeting). Rather, it was a case of "do
something, anything," regardless of the monumental human
and civil rights issues at stake. When a bipartisan group of
Representatives offered an alternative bill that received some
actual debate, it was almost immediately voted down in favor
of the administration's propagandistically named "PATRIOT
Act" wish list.
What did this panic button legislation
do? There are four major inroads it made into previously well-established
legal rights. The first is secrecy; it provides for secret "sneak
and peak" searches, secrecy of government and legal case
information, secret evidence, and secretly collected personal
information. On June 18, 2003, the US Circuit Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia, in a split 2-1 decision, upheld
the government's power to withhold information about those thousands
of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians it secretly detained for months
in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. As the great Sixth Circuit
Appellate Judge Damon Keith famously said in another case involving
secret immigration hearings, "Democracies die behind closed
doors." This broader scope of permissible government secrecy,
especially under the paranoid and militarily driven Bush administration,
is one example of a broad legal and political issue that will
have to be fought out for many years in the US Supreme Court,
and in the streets, legislatures, and town halls, if the American
people are ever to have any chance again of having accurate information
about the actions of our government.
The second area transformed by the USA
PATRIOT Act is the criminalization of dissent. This was already
well underway before 9-11, in the series of massive confrontations
between the global justice movement and the institutions of corporate
globalization, becoming impossible to ignore in Seattle in November
of 1999, and continuing through Genoa in July of 2001. After
the global shock of 9-11, guilt by association, deportation and
exclusion of foreigners based only on membership in suspect groups,
increased penalties for donating money for humanitarian purposes
through the wrong organizations, and the overnight creation of
a new category of "domestic terrorist" groups, took
on a vigorous new life in prosecutor and police circles. The
potentially tragic consequences for First Amendment freedom of
association, as well as Fourteenth Amendment equal protection
and due process, are increasingly apparent to those who sincerely
care about such issues.
A third major area is the balance of
powers upon which the American model of constitutional liberty
theoretically rests. As limited as it sometimes is, and increasingly
has been in the reactionary climate of the last 20 years or so,
the authority of courts as a check on unaccountable power has
traditionally been the last resort for protecting American freedom.
The USA PATRIOT Act limits courts' authority to issue warrants,
limits appeals, and limits the basis for constitutional challenges
to executive branch overreaching. Congress of course, simply
abdicated its power, leading directly to the establishment of
executive branch supremacy in the crisis. Some of the first major
tests of this fundamental rebalancing of government powers came
in the Habeus Corpus cases filed on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals held, in another split
2-1 decision, that they are outside federal judicial jurisdiction,
and thus effectively without enforceable legal rights. Additional
tests will come in the cases of Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla,
US citizens declared "enemy combatants" by the executive
branch, and denied even the right to representation by lawyers.
The chilling implications of such precedents hardly need elaboration
for anyone concerned about maintaining a reasonable balance of
power between the various branches of government, and between
individual liberty and the power of the state.
The fourth major area of legal rights
affected by the USA PATRIOT Act is in the lowering of protections
against criminal investigation. The long-established distinction
between law enforcement and intelligence operations has been
eliminated in cases involving suspected or alleged terrorism,
opening the door to systematic abuses like those committed during
the 1960s in the notorious COINTELPRO program (such as the cold-blooded
police murder of young Chicago Black Panthers Fred Hampton and
Mark Clark, among a long list of other political police state
violations), and J. Edgar Hoover's hounding of Dr. King. The
requirement of probable cause for initiating an investigation,
tapping phones, monitoring internet and e-mail use, and other
intrusive police actions has been eliminated in such cases, opening
the door wide to police confrontation and harassment of dissidents,
and leading to continually escalating politicization of "law
enforcement" in the name of fighting terrorism.
As noted briefly at the outset, this
civil liberties crisis does not end with the USA PATRIOT Act.
A series of executive orders, Department of Justice Regulations,
and government memos have allowed the executive branch to extend
its power even further, without effective challenge by the coordinate
branches of government or the People. On September 21, 2001,
the Chief Immigration Judge issued a memo closing certain immigration
hearings to the public. On October 31 the Justice Department
issued regulations for detaining people in Attorney General Ashcroft's
sole discretion, a provision that was severely abused in practice
by extended periods of detention. Prosecutors and prison officials
began to monitor attorney/client communications without judicial
authorization, and commenced a prosecution of Attorney Lynne
Stewart for her statements and actions in representing a convicted
terrorist, sending a clear message to other lawyers about the
consequences of defending fundamental rights in this context.
The previous Freedom of Information Act presumptions were reversed,
so that if any reason was articulated to withhold documents,
they would not be provided. All of this was accomplished without
any judicial or legislative action at all, by the mere stroke
of a bureaucratic pen.
The case of military commissions established
by executive order for those arrested abroad deserves a brief
discussion. The original proposal for such tribunals was completely
lawless. It provided for execution without appeal, without a
unanimous decision of military judges, and without any right
to counsel of one's choice. The most severe deficiencies in these
regulations were modified after a public outcry, the first example
of any effective opposition to Ashcroft and Bush on civil liberties
issues after 9-11. However the military commissions set up retained
the option to use secret evidence, and with the ruling that the
camps in Guantanamo Bay are outside federal courts' power, the
imminent prospect of secret military trials and summary executions
there cannot be ruled out.
The shocking abuse of immigrants has
barely been mentioned so far. In the aftermath of the al-Quaida
attacks on New York and Washington, DC, the immigration authorities
(subsequently reorganized into the Department of Homeland Security,
as if "immigrant" were another word for "terrorist")
went into high gear. They interviewed thousands of Arabs and
Muslims, including interrogation about visa status that in some
cases led to deportation. They asked questions about religious
and political beliefs. They discovered no significant information
about terrorism whatsoever in this orgy of racial profiling.
The government abused the material witness statute to detain
innocent immigrants, who may have had some incidental contact
with either the 9-11 hijackers or some other suspects, for prolonged
periods. Most notoriously, approximately 2000 People were swiftly
"disappeared" in secrecy, and the government refused
to release information about them to their families or attorneys.
This was the program recently upheld by the DC Circuit Court
of Appeals. And the government aggressively moved to "seize
and freeze" the assets of numerous suspected "terrorist
organizations," without any distinction between legal functions
and other parts of related organizations engaged in fighting
anywhere in the world, especially of course in the Middle East.
In the broadest sense, what is happening
is a comprehensive government campaign of spying on groups and
organizations, without probable cause to believe they are engaged
in any criminal activity, targeting people because of their beliefs,
speech and associations. Even the issue of torture has been raised,
with psychological pressure placed on family members, physical
mistreatment of immigrants in custody who were never even charged
with any crime, deportation to other countries that are known
to practice torture systematically, and respectable academic
discussions of hypothetical circumstances--such as where it might
lead authorities to a "ticking bomb"--when torture
could allegedly be justified. The Independent newspaper in the
United Kingdom recently published a shocking investigative report
on the use of what authorities call "torture lite"
at the US Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Techniques (at least
some of which were previously perfected in US "supermax"
prisons), such as binding prisoners in awkward and painful positions,
forcing them to wear hoods, sleep deprivation, 24-hour lighting,
and withholding painkillers are being systematically used at
an unspecified number of secret CIA detention centers for terrorist
suspects. What may be even more shocking is the fact that US
officials are more or less openly bragging about it. "If
you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time,"
one reportedly told the Independent, "you probably aren't
doing your job."
This situation would be extremely frightening
if the above civil liberties issues were the only government
abuses ongoing in the "war on terrorism." But that
is far from the case. Consider the following related power projections:
Homeland Security Act: Approximately 170,000 government employees with
responsibilities for areas such as customs and immigration--but
not the CIA or the FBI--have been reorganized into a vast new
bureaucracy under Secretary Tom Ridge. These employees have been
deprived of union, collective bargaining and civil service protections,
as though the right of workers to organize for their protection
and economic benefit were a form of terrorism that threatened
national security. This authoritarian organizational culture
is modeled on that of the FBI, where before 9-11 agents were
afraid to rock the boat and challenge their superiors' lax follow-up
on the emerging terrorist threats, including the failure to even
try and get a warrant to search the contents of terror suspect
Zacharias Moussaoui's computer. This kind of barely hidden agenda
leads many commentators to conclude that the so-called "war
on terrorism" is really more of a "war on workers"
that suits the Bush administration's political desires at the
expense of national security.
National Security Strategy: In September 2002 the administration announced
its National Security Strategy, an official policy document that
it is legally required to transmit to Congress. This is an unprecedented
and brazen assertion of the US government's intention to unilaterally
and pre-emptively strike anyone, anywhere, any time that it claims,
in its sole discretion, not only that the designated enemy poses
any threat to America or anyone else, but if it even poses the
possibility of ever becoming a rival of American power. The document
incredibly states that the tragic events of 9-ll opened "vast
new opportunities" for reshaping the world, and posits the
existence of only one successful model of a nation and a society:
the corporate free trade version. Such sweeping departures from
previous official doctrines like self-defense and deterrence
(no matter how often these doctrines were actually violated in
practice) could not be pursued without the use of massive force
for its demonstration effects. Therefore we had the run-up, invasion
and now brutal occupation of Iraq, while Afghanistan descends
yet again into the chaos that spawned al-Quaida, and on the home
front Ashcroft continues to ask for more power to violate legal
rights domestically, as he even further intensifies moves to
deport thousands of undesirable immigrants.
National Energy Policy: One of the earliest acts of the Bush administration,
even before 9-11, was to craft a corporate oil, gas and coal-based
energy policy, with a nuclear option, and virtually complete
rejection of any renewable energy sources or conservation measures.
This broad and essential policy thrust of an oil-industry-based
government lay behind the projection of military power into Afghanistan
(for gas pipeline routes) and Iraq (for oil reserves) after 9-11.
It also links the crises of terrorism and civil liberties to
the crises of the environment and the economy, which are so tightly
bound up with oil supply and use, the great geopolitical "game"
for control of energy sources, and the global ecological damage
caused by over-reliance on fossil fuels to stimulate economic
growth.
Federalist Society: The corporate forces dominating foreign policy,
energy policy, tax policy, and the rest of the Bush administration's
agenda have not hesitated to attack the independence of the legal
system. On the contrary, Bush's nominees to powerful lifetime
posts as federal judges, wielding the judicial power of the United
States under Article III of the Constitution, have been drawn
not from the ranks of the relatively conservative American Bar
Association, as in previous administrations, but rather from
the ultra-right wing ideologically driven Federalist Society.
Dogged right wing opposition to judicial nominees during the
Clinton administration, together with the relatively moderate
politics of those nominees, already unbalanced the federal courts
significantly to the right. The executive branch is now aggressively
moving to increase this systematic bias on the federal bench.
While Democrats in the Senate have filibustered a handful of
the most extreme nominees, a large number of other, equally reactionary
but somewhat less blatantly biased judges have been confirmed.
This little-understood reactionary transformation of the federal
courts will affect the administration of justice in the US for
at least a generation, as the legal issues raised by the civil
liberties crisis after 9-11 work though the system.
The original federalist himself, principal
author of the Constitution James Madison, described the situation
we face when he wrote that "the fetters imposed on liberty
at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for
defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad."
My colleague Kit Gage, who contributed seminal ideas on the basic
dangers outlined here, expanded on our duties under these circumstances:
"As long as due process is denied,
people will not be able to defend themselves; and when the government
is allowed the opportunity to use evidence of dubious quality
free from challenge, it will do so. As the government adds new
regulations, memoranda and laws to its capacity, those concerned
with government overreaching need to be prepared to educate people
about the implications of these changes and respond to change
and any new legal needs. The effort is broad, legal, political,
media and education across lines of ethnicity, religion and politics,
and it is nationwide. The organizing should not be defensive.
We are raising fundamental issues of governance and constitutional
rights. We are participating in shaping the direction this country
takes, domestically and abroad. There is no greater responsibility
and challenge as US people. We dare not repeat the mistakes
of McCarthyism, of COINTELPRO. The closer international connections
in the world today make it imperative that the US allow political
dissent to exist and continue to bring about gradual change to
our government and in the world. The alternatives to that change
we can better imagine today than ever."
Why is all this Happening?
While the crises of resources, rules
and conflict resolution playing themselves out today across the
nation and around the world were enabled by the 9-11 attacks,
their roots go back much further. As the leading American dissident
Noam Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out, the essential policies
of the Bush administration on energy, taxes, the environment,
social welfare and the economy are wildly unpopular, and the
state needs to use repression to implement them. In trying to
understand what lies behind the crisis of civil liberties that
is symbolized by Attorney General Ashcroft's increasingly hysterical
power grabs, it may help to keep in mind at least six factors
that the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policies
have in common:
1. Hostility to Democracy: The US recently passed the two million mark
of incarcerated prisoners, a percentage of its population that
has no comparison anywhere else in the world, and no parallel
to any other supposed democracy in history. Disproportionately
minorities, these people are increasingly disenfranchised, often
for life, by state laws against ex-felons voting. Meanwhile,
the administration that "won" election largely by preventing
African Americans from voting in Florida is propping up any undemocratic
regime around the world that, for its own reasons, pledges to
support its "war on terrorism:" Pakistan, Indonesia,
the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, Russia, China, Saudi
Arabia, and Egypt are all US allies whose authoritarian government
structures are totally ignored and thus effectively supported
by US foreign policy. 2.Disproportionately Targeting People of
Color: Whether through the white supremacist gulag of the US
prison system, the cruelties of Welfare and Medicare "reform,"
the legal race war labeled a "war on drugs," the post-9-11
attacks on Arabs, Muslims, and South Asian people, or the invasions
of Afghanistan, Iraq, and perhaps Syria or Iran next, US government
hostility to people of color is becoming legendary throughout
the world. 3.A New Stage in the "Race to the Bottom"
of Social, Environmental and Economic Standards: Following up
on the worldwide frauds and abuses of corporate globalization,
the increasing militarization of the "war against terrorism"
is devastating minority and working class communities at home
and abroad, as they attempt to find some basis for economic development,
in a world now reorganized to serve US domination of energy-producing
regions through military force. Paul Street describes perfectly:
"a vicious policy circle that feeds
on itself in the fashion of a classic self-fulfilling prophecy.
America's commitment to imperial militarism and corporate-financial
globalization produces instability, poverty, and violence around
the world, providing endless pretexts for the illusory "corrections"
provided by more US empire. Domestic mass incarceration furthers
the impoverishment, demoralization, and destabilization of America's
most disadvantaged communities and families, creating conditions
and expanding recruits to inner-city crime and providing pretext
for more destabilizing intervention on the part of the criminal
punishment system."
4.Costly and Inequitable Government
Financial Crises: The profound
economic consequences of the Bush administration's pro-corporate
domestic and foreign policies are making themselves felt. The
occupation of Iraq was transformed into a guerilla war within
a month of Bush's strutting declaration of victory aboard an
aircraft carrier. It may last several years, and require hundreds
of thousands more troops, in order to achieve its apparent objective
of converting Iraq into an oil colony. The economic and political
consequences of such a retrograde "victory" are potentially
catastrophic, in terms of US prestige and the international legitimacy
of democracy. At the outset of this tortuous road, state and
local governments are already screaming in financial pain and
on the brink of bankruptcy, caused by the combination of costly
prison and "homeland security" policies with serial
tax cuts for the richest Americans. The most intense burdens
of these policies and their public fiscal consequences in terms
of loss of essential human services such as health care, education
and housing are felt precisely by those who are least able to
bear them: the working poor, unemployed, uninsured, and even
homeless millions of People in the richest society on Earth,
together with their teeming super-exploited brothers and sisters
of the Third World. 5.Corporate Corruption: First came Enron
in the traumatized last months of 2001 and the beginning of 2002.
Incredibly, the corporate scandals did not end there, as one
major household name after another revealed accounting scams,
securities frauds, and shady economic and political connections
to the seats of government power. The gigantic bankruptcy of
Worldcom dwarfed Enron's previous record, but did not prevent
the telecom giant from receiving a $45 million no-bid contract
to rebuild Iraq's wireless communications systems. The energy
reconstruction boodle handed out to the most well connected corporate
giants in Iraq--primarily Dick Cheney's Halliburton and Reagan
administration Secretary of State George Schulz's Bechtel--makes
a mockery of all the government's stated reasons for attacking
Iraq, from phantom weapons of mass destruction to liberating
oppressed People suffering under the long-time US client dictator
Saddam Hussein. It's about corporate profits in the oil bidness.
Perhaps this shameless administration and its corporate media
cheerleaders can maintain the veneer of respectable policy and
assertive national pride long enough to win the 2004 election,
even in the face of this rotting ethical cesspool of obvious
corruption and self-dealing, even as the Iraqi and Afghan occupations
look more like imperial quagmires with every passing day. If
so, the very idea of responsive and meaningful democratic government
in the US is a sick joke.
6.Corporate Globalization: Whatever its rhetoric about unity, security,
pride, patriotism, and whip smart military/intelligence toughness,
the new "war against terrorism" is at bottom a continuation
by other means of the imperial project of corporate globalization
that has been misleadingly labeled "free trade." As
the world of the Seattle uprising at the end of the 20th century
recedes into the past, the 21st century increasingly threatens
the prospect of lawlessness. The dominant institutional arrangements
require constant and intense struggles between the powerless
and the powers for resources, governed by no meaningful or democratically-arrived-at
rules, and where the frequent, unrestrained use of brutal military
and police force is the most common denominator of domestic and
international governance. One of the world's most eloquent insurgents,
the famous Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista Liberation
Front in Chiapas, Mexico, recognizes and names a world run by
the transnational "society of power," where:
"there previously was a legal and
institutional system which regulated the internal life of the
Nation States and the relationship between them (international
legal structure), today there is nothing. The international legal
system is obsolete, and its place is being occupied by the spontaneous
'legal' system of Capital: the brutal and merciless competition
through any means, among them, war. What are the public security
programs of cities but the protection of those who have everything
in the face of those who have nothing? 'Mutatis mutandis,' national
security programs are no longer national, confronting other nations,
but they are against everything, everywhere. What nuclear war
did not do, the corporations can. Destroy everything, even that
which gives them wealth. Now, globalization, the greatest fraud
in the history of humanity, does not even have the decency to
try and justify itself. Thousands of years after the emergence
of words, and, along with them, reasoned argument, force has
again come to occupy the decisive and deciding position."
Hope
This survey of the multifaceted global
crises of the 21st century may lead some to the edge of despair.
But that would be to repeat the mistake of the fundamentalists,
who base their actions and beliefs on the Israelites' violent
invasion and occupation of the Promised Land many thousands of
years ago. Deeper myths like that of David and Goliath, and the
anti-imperial message of the Tower of Babel story, may not fit
the Bush administrations' juvenile, ahistorical message. But
they capture the essence of politics in the real world of the
21st century. The assaults on civil liberties in the wake of
9-11 are intended to, and to some extent have had the effect
of, distraction from the key issues. Beyond and beneath the undermining
of basic human rights, we can see the outlines of the real fights
for natural and energy resources, different rules of international
and domestic conduct, and various means of conflict resolution,
from war to peace. The Bush administration's model is inequality
of resources, imperialism as the rules for social order, and
authoritarian conflict resolution, including even torture and
wars of aggression to achieve their domination. There simply
has to be a better alternative than this new American nightmare.
Simply put, we have to choose between the government of laws
enshrined in our national history, and that of unaccountable
power, currently arising out of the "war against terrorism."
While all of this demonstrates quite
conclusively that our prospects are for a very difficult time,
we should recall that our ancestors have been here before. In
the first great "red scare" of World War I, in the
forced relocation of Japanese Americans to concentration camps
during World War II, in the ideological depths of the Cold War,
McCarthyism, and COINTELPRO, we can clearly see the historical
precedents for the more recent "Ashcroft raids," the
Guantanamo Bay and Bagram torture complexes, and the multifaceted
legislative and executive assaults of today's "war against
terrorism." With the benefit of the examples of Dr. King's
movement, the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, the recent
Global Justice Movement, and its even more recent and much broader
sister Movement Against War in Iraq, we stand on a massive foundation
of moral and political activism for democracy and justice. The
first step is to see the vicious circle of abusive policies for
what it is. The second step is to withdraw our consent to its
continuing. The third is to persuade others to join us.
Again, Subcommandante Marcos has illuminated
the way with his evocation of the People's historic "No"
to aggression against Iraq:
"The 21st century began with the
globalized 'NO TO THE WAR' which gave humanity back its essence
and held it together in a cause. As never before in the history
of humanity, the planet was shaken by this 'NO.' From intellectuals
of all stature, to unlettered residents of the forgotten corners
of the earth, the 'NO' became a bridge which united communities,
towns, villas, cities, provinces, countries, continents. In manifestos
and demonstrations, the 'NO' sought the vindication of reason
in the face of force."
This vision of multinational Humanity,
Peace and Justice recalls, updates, and internationalizes the
great African-American poet Langston Hughes' evocation (also
recalled by Dr. King) of a new and alternative Patriotism, worshipping
not America's corporate military/prison industrial complex, whose
tanks and troops occupy Afghanistan and Iraq today, but rather
"the America that will be." This vision of transformative
politics is the only way out of the massive overlapping crisis
in which we find ourselves living. While intensely idealistic,
moral, and rooted in the age-old and universal aspiration for
social justice, such a vision must also be profoundly practical,
if it is to give life to popular movements that make history.
The links between the wider social, ecological, and political
crisis of our world today, and the civil liberties crisis inaugurated
by the obscenely mislabeled "PATRIOT" Act, can be most
clearly seen in the wisdom and the belated solidarity voiced
by Nazi victim Pastor Martin Niemoller:
"First they came for the Communists
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews and I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics and
I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, but by that time,
no one was left to speak up."
This time there is really no excuse for
not speaking up.
Tom Stephens
is a lawyer in Detroit, Michigan. He can be reached at lebensbaum4@earthlink.
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