One of the things which should make us all the more alarmed about the current trend of our government is the number of previously conservative thinkers who have warned against an approaching "end of the American Republic". Several have written books about it, as was noted in the article, "Constitution in Peril", in the October 8, 2007 issue of Newsweek. One of these thinkers is Chalmers Johnson, who has written a trilogy of books on this theme, the latest being Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. I remember Johnson well as a conservative commentator on the KQED program, World Press. Some reviews of his book say that he had gone over to the Left, but this is not necessarily so, for the people running this government today are not conservatives, of the old or new variety-- they are fascists, and they would alarm any genuine conservative as they alarm Leftists. Conservatives are people who, for instance, do not believe that the Constitution can be construed as permitting abortion or gay marriages. They are not people who believe it should be put through the paper shredder, as our government does. That view is outside the range of respectable opinion in a democracy, as our government's actions over the past seven years are outside the range of acceptable behavior in a democracy. So I have respect for Johnson's views, whether he is still a conservative or not.
Johnson does not believe, as I do, that the attacks of 9/11 were staged by our government. Yet he shares my deep concern about the future of this nation. In the final chapter of Nemesis, written in 2006 but obviously before the Military Commissions Act was signed into law, thus lending further credence to his views, he notes the increasing impotence of both Congress and the Supreme Court in the face of the imperial executive. As he says, "The separation of powers the Founders wrote into our Constitution as the main bulwark against dictatorship increasingly appears to be a dead letter, with the Congress no longer capable of asserting itself against presidential attempts to monopolize power. Corrupt and indifferent, the Congress, which the Founders believed would be the leading branch of government, is simply not up to the task of confronting a modern Julius Caesar... If the legislative branch of our government is broken-- and it is hard to imagine how it could repair itself, given the massive interests which feed off it-- the judicial branch is hardly less limited today in terms of its ability to maintain the balance. Even the Supreme Court's most extraordinary power, its ability to nullify a law as unconstitutional, rests upon precedent rather than constitutional stipulation, and lower courts, increasingly packed with right-wing judges, have little taste for going against the prevailing political winds... Could the people themselves restore constitutional government? A grassroots movement to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial complex, and establish public financing of elections may be theoretically possible, but it is unlikely given the conglomerate control of the mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing our large and diffuse population." (pp. 267-269). He concludes that either a military or civilian dictatorship will be established, or the country will go bankrupt through "military Keynesianism", a view which accords with Douglas Valentine's that the Bush administration wants a depression in order to increase panic and tighten governmental control over the population. In any case, "If we choose to keep our empire... we will surely lose our democracy." (p. 279)
Another individual who was presumably conservative for most of his career yet who has spoken out against present trends is Ray McGovern, a retired CIA intelligence analyst who worked for the Agency for 27 years. In an interview with Alex Jones, reproduced on PrisonPlanet.com, McGovern said, "Well it does seem that those who have his (Bush's) ear are hell bent upon giving away or providing wider responsibilities to our military. Witness what they are talking about now, with giving the military responsibility for catastrophes such as hurricanes... Our military has been built up as an instrument of power but it has never existed with this kind of potency before, because there are laws against using the military in law enforcement capacities..." Jones says that McGovern then went on to talk about terrorism and amazingly, to suggest that if there was another attack on the U.S. it would mean a martial law state. He said that in that case, we should not accept what the government tells us because it could be them carrying out the terrorism. "We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was a terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them-- or seemingly allowing them-- to get what they want." Speaking of the McCain Anti-Torture Amendment, which was pending when this interview was given, he said, "At this very moment we have a president about to veto a ban on torture. Even at the height of the British Empire, torture was still outlawed because it was recognized as the pinnacle of human rights violations. What more does this Administration have to do before we remove it from power?"
Well as we know, the Administration finally approved the McCain Amendment after it was, as the Center for Constitutional Rights and Alfred McCoy noted, eviscerated by Lindsay Graham's denial of legal redress (see Nemesis, p. 267). The government's repressive measures grow ever more alarming. And this may be the very year that martial law is declared and the American Republic comes to an end. In the first place, the detention centers being built by Kellogg, Root and Brown (a subsidiary of Halliburton) are undoubtedly nearing completion. For another, it is an election year. Although we have become effectively a one-party system, something I learned painfully last month when I read that my local Representative, Nancy Pelosi, had accepted waterboarding as a legitimate procedure when she was briefed three years ago by the CIA, the government may wish to forestall the possibility of anyone who could alter its policies ever getting into the White House. Finally, this is the year the Supreme Court is due to at last hand down its first decision in a case involving the Military Commissions Act. This is a no-win situation. If it allows the MCA to stand, then it will no doubt be implemented, which is about as bad as a declaration of martial law. But although, as I have noted in a previous blog, the counsel for the petitioners argued the appeal ineptly, the Supreme Court could still decide to strike it down as unconstitutional. In that case, having lost their chief instrument for the establishment of a totalitarian regime, the government will most likely resort to its only alternative, the staging of a fake "terrorist attack" and consequent declaration of martial law. We are at the crossroads. If such an event should occur, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this is not Al Quaeda versus the American people, this is the U.S. government out to subjugate its own population. And "We the People" (note that this is the opening phrase of the U.S. Constitution) must rise up to defend ourselves and take back our democracy from a government which has become the number one enemy of both life and liberty which exists upon this earth.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
SCALAR TECHNOLOGY AND TORTURE
It may surprise some people, but there is a new weapons technology which has the potential to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. It is based upon the discoveries and inventions of Nikola Tesla in the early Twentieth Century, and is called Tesla or scalar wave technology. It was first brought to the attention of the American public by retired Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Bearden, consulting engineer to the Defense Department. When the Soviet Union was still in existence, he claimed that it had a dangerous lead in this technology, and that the U.S. had better catch up or be annihilated (see his book Oblivion). There was some truth to his claim, although he greatly exaggerated the extent of the Soviet lead and threat it posed to the United States. After all, the Soviet Union was the only nation to take Tesla's ideas on weaponry seriously during his lifetime , and there is some evidence that the Soviets were ahead in the field by the mid-twentieth century (see Tesla: Master of Lightning, by Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, p. 131, and Inside the Company: A CIA Diary by Philip Agee, pp. 90-91). Bearden's theories were dismissed as something from the lunatic fringe, but however paranoid he was about Soviet capabilities, he was quite prescient concerning the capabilities of scalar weapons. In fact, in the nineteen-eighties, an American scientist named Bernard Eastlund began to patent a number of scalar inventions with military applications which were ultimately used to establish the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) in Alaska. The potential for HAARP to cause dangerous disruptions in the earth's environment is very real but cannot be discussed here: for further information, readers should consult Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, Angels Don't Play this HAARP. What makes scalar technlogy relevant to the concerns of this column is, first of all, that scalar weapons can be used to achieve global conquest through total "spectrum dominance", so that if the United States becomes a totalitarian state, it will be unassailable. Secondly, these weapons also have quite a frightening potential as instruments of torture.
Opponents of Star Wars have long been warning against the dangers inherent in space weapons, which can enable whatever nation has supremacy to control the whole planet. But they have not yet caught up with the dangers posed by the use of scalar weapons in space-- and elsewhere. For instance, Bruce Gagnon and his Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space have for many years been fighting actively against this very real threat. Recently, he sent me an e-mail circular which quoted the U.S. Directed Energy Program as saying in 2007 that their scientists and engineers had continued "to improve the nation's ability to use directed energies, such as high-energy lasers, high-powered microwaves and to precisely project these directed energies at the speed of light anywhere, at any time, to detect, track and deter or use lethal force to destroy any threats to the U.S. and the Warfighter." He interpreted this to mean that "the Pentagon is making progress with their testing program to fire lasers from earth to space, through space, and from space to the planet below." But he is wrong. Because the really significant and alarming word in the quotation is "microwaves". It is microwaves that HAARP is using to "lift" the lower regions of our magnetosphere, in an attempt to influence the weather for military purposes, and much more. Lasers may have been a mere decoy target from the first. As a webpage on Nikola Tesla's inventions asks, the only defense against scalar weapons is a Tesla Shield. "Therefore, those persons wishing to use scalar waves on an unsuspecting population would rather that they were unaware of this technology, and thereby unable to protect themselves from it by the use of the same technology. Is that the reason that the Pentagon does not discuss scalar wave technology, but rather maintains that they are going to use impractical laser technology instead?" ("Scalar Waves and Tesla Shields").
The technology being used in HAARP-- specifically Eastlund's patents-- is now owned by Raytheon. This is significant. For Raytheon has recently developed a weapon for crowd control called "Silent Guardian", which produces a type of scalar wave and which it is planning to, and probably already has deployed in Iraq. As Michael Hanlon, reporter for the Daily Mail says,"A square transmitter as big as a plasma TV screen is mounted on the back of a jeep. When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation-- similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker-- that are tuned the precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile. Because the beam penetrates the skin only to a depth of 1/64 of an inch, it cannot... cause permanent, visible injury." But that's just the problem. Even the victims of the Inquisition's slow fires knew that eventually they would be consumed and their agony end. Hanlon points out that these devices could be used as "efficient torture weapons.' Having tested a small box which emits such heat waves, he says, "I couldn't hold my finger next to the device for more than a fraction of a second... but what if my finger had been strapped to the machine? We use the word 'medieval' as a shorthand for brutality. The truth is, the new technology makes racks look benign." ("Run Away the Ray-Gun is Coming: We Test the U.S. Army's New Secret Weapon," http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html.) Needless to say, when used as intended for crowd control, this weapon can make all organized demonstrations of opposition to our government-- including peaceful ones-- impossible. Raytheon says that Silent Guardian is "being used only by the North American military and its allies" and not countries with "questionable human rights records". But no nation has a worse record on human rights than the United States. As Alfred McCoy says, "In its pursuit of torturers around the globe for the past forty years, Amnesty International has been, in a certain sense, following the trail of CIA programs (A Question of Torture, p. 11) And nothing could be better suited to salving the conscience of the torturer: just put someone in a room with the device, turn it on, leave and let them roast.
According to an estimate based by Chalmers Johnson on one of Bush's speeches, there are now some 3,000 inmates in 24 secret CIA detention and interrogation centers worldwide (Nemesis, p. 124). Many of these may be completely innocent, having been handed over for a bounty or as the result of a personal grudge, as happened often during the CIA's Phoenix program. We cannot know, as none have had access to a lawyer, the press, or a fair trial. The CIA has admitted that it is still torturing them despite the fact that most no longer have any intelligence value, if indeed they ever did (see Newsweek October 8, p. 66). Are these people being used as guinea pigs in tests of these new scalar torture devices? I call upon organizations concerned with the protection of human rights, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to look into this. I also call upon all those with influence within foreign governments to warn them of this danger, so that they can protect themselves. I call upon members of our intelligence and armed services to make such information available to the press and foreign nations. There is no people on earth, including the American people, which is safe from the United States government. Only those who are fully informed will be able to protect themselves, and it is our duty as moral human beings to make sure that every person-- American or foreigner-- and the government of every nation which might be attacked by the U.S. government, is fully informed. Our government wants us to be in the dark, but let us tell it loud and clear: We know, we are going to make sure the entire world knows, and we are not going to let you get away with it.
Opponents of Star Wars have long been warning against the dangers inherent in space weapons, which can enable whatever nation has supremacy to control the whole planet. But they have not yet caught up with the dangers posed by the use of scalar weapons in space-- and elsewhere. For instance, Bruce Gagnon and his Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space have for many years been fighting actively against this very real threat. Recently, he sent me an e-mail circular which quoted the U.S. Directed Energy Program as saying in 2007 that their scientists and engineers had continued "to improve the nation's ability to use directed energies, such as high-energy lasers, high-powered microwaves and to precisely project these directed energies at the speed of light anywhere, at any time, to detect, track and deter or use lethal force to destroy any threats to the U.S. and the Warfighter." He interpreted this to mean that "the Pentagon is making progress with their testing program to fire lasers from earth to space, through space, and from space to the planet below." But he is wrong. Because the really significant and alarming word in the quotation is "microwaves". It is microwaves that HAARP is using to "lift" the lower regions of our magnetosphere, in an attempt to influence the weather for military purposes, and much more. Lasers may have been a mere decoy target from the first. As a webpage on Nikola Tesla's inventions asks, the only defense against scalar weapons is a Tesla Shield. "Therefore, those persons wishing to use scalar waves on an unsuspecting population would rather that they were unaware of this technology, and thereby unable to protect themselves from it by the use of the same technology. Is that the reason that the Pentagon does not discuss scalar wave technology, but rather maintains that they are going to use impractical laser technology instead?" ("Scalar Waves and Tesla Shields").
The technology being used in HAARP-- specifically Eastlund's patents-- is now owned by Raytheon. This is significant. For Raytheon has recently developed a weapon for crowd control called "Silent Guardian", which produces a type of scalar wave and which it is planning to, and probably already has deployed in Iraq. As Michael Hanlon, reporter for the Daily Mail says,"A square transmitter as big as a plasma TV screen is mounted on the back of a jeep. When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation-- similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker-- that are tuned the precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile. Because the beam penetrates the skin only to a depth of 1/64 of an inch, it cannot... cause permanent, visible injury." But that's just the problem. Even the victims of the Inquisition's slow fires knew that eventually they would be consumed and their agony end. Hanlon points out that these devices could be used as "efficient torture weapons.' Having tested a small box which emits such heat waves, he says, "I couldn't hold my finger next to the device for more than a fraction of a second... but what if my finger had been strapped to the machine? We use the word 'medieval' as a shorthand for brutality. The truth is, the new technology makes racks look benign." ("Run Away the Ray-Gun is Coming: We Test the U.S. Army's New Secret Weapon," http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html.) Needless to say, when used as intended for crowd control, this weapon can make all organized demonstrations of opposition to our government-- including peaceful ones-- impossible. Raytheon says that Silent Guardian is "being used only by the North American military and its allies" and not countries with "questionable human rights records". But no nation has a worse record on human rights than the United States. As Alfred McCoy says, "In its pursuit of torturers around the globe for the past forty years, Amnesty International has been, in a certain sense, following the trail of CIA programs (A Question of Torture, p. 11) And nothing could be better suited to salving the conscience of the torturer: just put someone in a room with the device, turn it on, leave and let them roast.
According to an estimate based by Chalmers Johnson on one of Bush's speeches, there are now some 3,000 inmates in 24 secret CIA detention and interrogation centers worldwide (Nemesis, p. 124). Many of these may be completely innocent, having been handed over for a bounty or as the result of a personal grudge, as happened often during the CIA's Phoenix program. We cannot know, as none have had access to a lawyer, the press, or a fair trial. The CIA has admitted that it is still torturing them despite the fact that most no longer have any intelligence value, if indeed they ever did (see Newsweek October 8, p. 66). Are these people being used as guinea pigs in tests of these new scalar torture devices? I call upon organizations concerned with the protection of human rights, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to look into this. I also call upon all those with influence within foreign governments to warn them of this danger, so that they can protect themselves. I call upon members of our intelligence and armed services to make such information available to the press and foreign nations. There is no people on earth, including the American people, which is safe from the United States government. Only those who are fully informed will be able to protect themselves, and it is our duty as moral human beings to make sure that every person-- American or foreigner-- and the government of every nation which might be attacked by the U.S. government, is fully informed. Our government wants us to be in the dark, but let us tell it loud and clear: We know, we are going to make sure the entire world knows, and we are not going to let you get away with it.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
HOMELAND SECURITY: THE THREAT
For the past couple weeks, I have been having a running argument with one of the most prominent and respected intellectuals on the Left. I had sent him a copy of the article I am trying to publish, "Torture and the Emerging Totalitarianism", and he praised it. Therefore I naturally assumed that he would agree with me that the threat to liberty and human rights that we are facing today is worse than anything that this nation has faced in the past. But to my dismay, he did not. Indeed, he seemed positively complacent about the vast new powers our government is now assuming. As he said in one of his e-mails, he had encountered far worse repression in the past, specifically in 1968, when he had "faced a probable long prison sentence until the trials were called off after the Tet Offensive." I could scarcely believe his naiveté. If the trials he was referring to had taken place, and he had indeed been sentenced to prison, he would have, like Socrates (see the previous blog) been a victim of the injustice of his fellow men, not the laws. What he called "repression" is in fact something that defenders of liberty have been fighting for since Magna Carta. As he plainly stated, he was to be tried, apparently in a courtroom whose proceedings would have been relatively open. He would have been defended by a lawyer of his own choosing, and his supporters would have known what was going on, and been able to demonstrate in his favor. If he was sentenced, it would have been to a specific number of years in prison, and he could have appealed. His case might indeed have become a cause célèbre on the Left, with signs popping up everywhere demanding "Free__________!" (remember "Free Angela"?) This is because our leaders were at that time merely trying to misuse the law to persecute him and people like him. They were not trying to gut the Constitution. Today everything is different, and far, far worse.
Under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, for the first time, a person like my debating opponent could be declared an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" (hereafter referred to as a UEC) at the mere whim of the Executive. Although the act speaks only of alien UECs being tried by Military Commissions, there can be no doubt that any American can be labelled a UEC under this law. If anything, American UECs have fewer rights under the MCA than alien ones: for at least aliens get some sort of trial, if not exactly a fair and open one, whereas nothing is said about what will happen to American UECs. What does this mean? When my debating opponent was charged with a crime-- whatever that was (he was not specific), he became a criminal suspect. The status of "criminal suspect" carries with it certain rights, which have been enshrined in both American and English law for hundreds of years-- the right to demand a writ of habeas corpus if one is imprisoned, the right to have a lawyer, the right to be tried fairly and openly, and if convicted, to be sentenced, if the charge is not a capital one, to a fixed number of years in prison. Also the types of abuses he could have suffered in prison were limited by the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. All this is not to say that his sentence would have been just or that he would not have suffered, only that things are incomparably worse today. For under the Military Commissions Act, the status of such a person would be one which carries with it no rights whatsoever. The MCA does not state explicitly that habeas rights would be denied to American UECs, only alien ones. But it does not have to. In fact, by making them UECs rather than criminal suspects, it removes all the time-hallowed rights my opponent would have enjoyed in 1968. Nor would he have been able to claim the protection of the Geneva Conventions, for the term "unlawful" is designed to deny him that right, as they only apply to lawful combatants.
My debating opponent said that he agrees with me where the MCA is concerned, "but fortunately it has not deterred many people". This proves that he does not understand its implications. The MCA is not there simply to deter, but to be used. And when it is fully implemented, as it has not yet been, it will transform our country from a democracy to a totalitarian state. What form will that state take? Three years before the signing of the MCA into law, Douglas Valentine, author of a scholarly tome on the Phoenix program in Vietnam, foresaw its implications in the very structure of Homeland Security. In an essay entitled, "Homeland Security: When the Phoenix Comes Home to Roost," he says, "Homeland Security is the Trojan horse through which Bush will unleash his ideological storm troopers on America... Creating the Homeland Security apparatus is the largest re-organization of the U.S. government in fifty years. According to Lawrence Korb, one of the nation's leading national security experts, it might even 'bankrupt' the country. Which may be another of its unstated purposes, for Bush will need a series of national emergencies, a depression as well as pre-ordained terrorist attacks, to perpetrate his de facto military dictatorship." He quotes former CIA director William Colby as asserting concerning the Phoenix program, "The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to ensure that people would comply." Likewise, with Homeland Security, "terror is the organizing principle of society." As an American state is equivalent to a Vietnamese province, it is significant that equivalents of the Provincial Interrogation Centers which were so notorious during the Phoenix program are being prepared in 56 localities, the supernumerary ones probably destined for the most potentially troublesome states, such as New York and California. Under Homeland Security as under Phoenix, "Innocent people who found their names... on the blacklist could be killed, kidnapped and tortured indefinitely on the false accusation of on anonymous informant... no specific charge will be required: a Homeland Security cadre will simply accuse his neighbor, the one whose dog poops on his lawn, of disturbing the public order. And off the unlucky fellow goes to the local Guantánamo."
Concrete evidence that he is right surfaced on February 4, 2006, when the New York Times announced that the Army Corps of Engineers had awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary "immigration" detention centers to Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's old company Halliburton. "KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster, or for new programs which require additional detention space." Each detention center could hold up to 5,000 people. Challenged by an advocate for immigrants, the spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement Jamie Zuieback reassured her that the contract was not actually intended for the detention and removal of illegal immigrants. "It's not part of day-to-day law enforcement," she said. She added that she could not provide additional information about the company's statement that the contract was also meant to support the "rapid development of new programs." By now, there is a new U.S. Command for the Continental United States, CINC-NORTHCOM, which would permit U.S. military forces to operate in the streets of U.S. cities. Then-defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the creation of the new command "the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1948." Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, says, "Almost certainly this is a preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for mid-Easterners, Muslims, and probably dissenters."
So if all we do is wait for the next staged terrorist attack, we will be swept away. What we can do to deter this threat is something I cannot say with certainty, but what is certain is that complacency will get us nowhere. If people such as my debating opponent, who is one of the most courageous and perceptive intellectuals in America today, will not face the extreme danger we are in, then fascism will win without a struggle. And who will be left to liberate the inmates of our concentration camps as we liberated those of the Nazis?
Under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, for the first time, a person like my debating opponent could be declared an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" (hereafter referred to as a UEC) at the mere whim of the Executive. Although the act speaks only of alien UECs being tried by Military Commissions, there can be no doubt that any American can be labelled a UEC under this law. If anything, American UECs have fewer rights under the MCA than alien ones: for at least aliens get some sort of trial, if not exactly a fair and open one, whereas nothing is said about what will happen to American UECs. What does this mean? When my debating opponent was charged with a crime-- whatever that was (he was not specific), he became a criminal suspect. The status of "criminal suspect" carries with it certain rights, which have been enshrined in both American and English law for hundreds of years-- the right to demand a writ of habeas corpus if one is imprisoned, the right to have a lawyer, the right to be tried fairly and openly, and if convicted, to be sentenced, if the charge is not a capital one, to a fixed number of years in prison. Also the types of abuses he could have suffered in prison were limited by the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. All this is not to say that his sentence would have been just or that he would not have suffered, only that things are incomparably worse today. For under the Military Commissions Act, the status of such a person would be one which carries with it no rights whatsoever. The MCA does not state explicitly that habeas rights would be denied to American UECs, only alien ones. But it does not have to. In fact, by making them UECs rather than criminal suspects, it removes all the time-hallowed rights my opponent would have enjoyed in 1968. Nor would he have been able to claim the protection of the Geneva Conventions, for the term "unlawful" is designed to deny him that right, as they only apply to lawful combatants.
My debating opponent said that he agrees with me where the MCA is concerned, "but fortunately it has not deterred many people". This proves that he does not understand its implications. The MCA is not there simply to deter, but to be used. And when it is fully implemented, as it has not yet been, it will transform our country from a democracy to a totalitarian state. What form will that state take? Three years before the signing of the MCA into law, Douglas Valentine, author of a scholarly tome on the Phoenix program in Vietnam, foresaw its implications in the very structure of Homeland Security. In an essay entitled, "Homeland Security: When the Phoenix Comes Home to Roost," he says, "Homeland Security is the Trojan horse through which Bush will unleash his ideological storm troopers on America... Creating the Homeland Security apparatus is the largest re-organization of the U.S. government in fifty years. According to Lawrence Korb, one of the nation's leading national security experts, it might even 'bankrupt' the country. Which may be another of its unstated purposes, for Bush will need a series of national emergencies, a depression as well as pre-ordained terrorist attacks, to perpetrate his de facto military dictatorship." He quotes former CIA director William Colby as asserting concerning the Phoenix program, "The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to ensure that people would comply." Likewise, with Homeland Security, "terror is the organizing principle of society." As an American state is equivalent to a Vietnamese province, it is significant that equivalents of the Provincial Interrogation Centers which were so notorious during the Phoenix program are being prepared in 56 localities, the supernumerary ones probably destined for the most potentially troublesome states, such as New York and California. Under Homeland Security as under Phoenix, "Innocent people who found their names... on the blacklist could be killed, kidnapped and tortured indefinitely on the false accusation of on anonymous informant... no specific charge will be required: a Homeland Security cadre will simply accuse his neighbor, the one whose dog poops on his lawn, of disturbing the public order. And off the unlucky fellow goes to the local Guantánamo."
Concrete evidence that he is right surfaced on February 4, 2006, when the New York Times announced that the Army Corps of Engineers had awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary "immigration" detention centers to Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's old company Halliburton. "KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster, or for new programs which require additional detention space." Each detention center could hold up to 5,000 people. Challenged by an advocate for immigrants, the spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement Jamie Zuieback reassured her that the contract was not actually intended for the detention and removal of illegal immigrants. "It's not part of day-to-day law enforcement," she said. She added that she could not provide additional information about the company's statement that the contract was also meant to support the "rapid development of new programs." By now, there is a new U.S. Command for the Continental United States, CINC-NORTHCOM, which would permit U.S. military forces to operate in the streets of U.S. cities. Then-defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the creation of the new command "the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1948." Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, says, "Almost certainly this is a preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for mid-Easterners, Muslims, and probably dissenters."
So if all we do is wait for the next staged terrorist attack, we will be swept away. What we can do to deter this threat is something I cannot say with certainty, but what is certain is that complacency will get us nowhere. If people such as my debating opponent, who is one of the most courageous and perceptive intellectuals in America today, will not face the extreme danger we are in, then fascism will win without a struggle. And who will be left to liberate the inmates of our concentration camps as we liberated those of the Nazis?
THE LIMITS OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: A Review
I recently re-read The Death of Socrates by Plato. It is very inspiring, especially now, when many of us may be facing the same situation he faced--though with a crucial difference. Whatever distortion of the real Socrates may have been introduced by Plato or other writers, enough comes through to paint a portrait of the first true individualist in history-- the first person to be guided by his own individual conscience to do what was right, regardless of the consequences. Reading the Apology, one thrills to Socrates' intransigence in the face of the Athenian jury, his preference for death over dishonor, and his abiding faith in that divine inner voice which always impels him to do right. Confronted with a man who accuses him of foolhardiness in behaving in a manner which could bring him the death penalty, he says, "You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action: whether he is acting justly or unjustly, like a good man or a bad one" (p.54, Penguin Edition). And, "I know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths." (p. 56) Explaining why he will not plead for his life by weeping and parading his family before the jurors, he says, "I would rather die as a result of this defense than life as a result of the other sort!" (p. 66) What noble courage, and how needed in the crisis we face today!
Crito, however, presents an apparent contradiction, so much so that the editor of this volume thinks it may not have been written by Plato at all, Plato being a man who, whatever his own prejudices (and it is generally recognized that he tended toward conservatism) at least knew the real Socrates personally. But here again the real Socrates can be glimpsed, for as the editor points out, it is an historically established fact that Socrates did not flee when he had the chance from the sentence of death imposed by the Athenian court, and drank the hemlock. In so doing, he became the founder of the tradition of civil disobedience which was formulated later by Thoreau, and carried on in the twentieth century by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. among others. And his argument is persuasive. His friend Crito urges him to flee, saying that most people will think that he really was guilty if he does not, and being Socrates he says, "Why should we pay so much attention to what most people think?" (p. 81). He argues against his friend's proposed course of action, saying, "The really important thing is not to live but to live well." (p. 87) Then he engages in a symbolic dialogue with the Laws of Athens, which can be thought of as comparable with the U.S. Constitution. It is clear that he is grateful to Athens for having given him the opportunity to be a dissenter. The crucial facts are that the Laws of Athens gave him the right to attempt to persuade his fellow Athenians by permitting him free speech. And even when he was arrested for his teachings, he was allowed to speak in his own defense at his trial. Although the verdict was unjust, it was not the Laws of Athens which were responsible, but human folly. As he has the "Laws" say to him: "You leave this place, when you do, as a victim of a wrong done not by us but by your fellow men." No better argument for government under law has ever been made.
However, the tradition of civil disobedience which Socrates founded is only meaningful in a democracy, where people have the right to dissent and to be tried fairly and publicly if they are arrested and charged with a crime. And it is rapidly becoming obsolete, for this country is being transformed from a democracy into a totalitarian state. Since President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act on October 17, 2006, we have been facing a crisis more severe than any other in our history, the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 itself not excepted. Congress has had over a year to amend or repeal the act and has failed. If the Supreme Court, now almost half-filled with "rubber stamp" justices, does not strike down the MCA, one will not be able to engage in dissent without being labeled an "Illegal Enemy Combatant" at the mere whim of the executive branch, imprisoned and even tortured indefinitely, without being formally sentenced or tried. Most dissidents-- even Noam Chomsky as I recently discovered-- have not faced this fact yet, nor gotten beyond civil disobedience as the answer to repression.
However, a tradition exists which teaches us how to react in such a situation. This tradition goes back not to Athens but to medieval England, to the feudal notion of the relationship between lord and vassal as a contract. If the lord broke his end of the contract, then the vassal could revolt, staging what was called a diffidatio. Thus did the English barons revolt against King John, forcing him to sign Magna Carta. In the seventeenth century, this time-hallowed tradition was transformed into the social contract theory of John Locke, who gave citizens the right to revolt if the government's infringements of personal liberty were sufficiently grave. Finally, it was taken up by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders of the American Republic, and set forth in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence. Speaking of the American colonists, Jefferson said, "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security." Faced with the prospect of living under a government which is rotten through and through, and which would have made his dissenting individualism impossible, I'm sure Socrates would have agreed.
Crito, however, presents an apparent contradiction, so much so that the editor of this volume thinks it may not have been written by Plato at all, Plato being a man who, whatever his own prejudices (and it is generally recognized that he tended toward conservatism) at least knew the real Socrates personally. But here again the real Socrates can be glimpsed, for as the editor points out, it is an historically established fact that Socrates did not flee when he had the chance from the sentence of death imposed by the Athenian court, and drank the hemlock. In so doing, he became the founder of the tradition of civil disobedience which was formulated later by Thoreau, and carried on in the twentieth century by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. among others. And his argument is persuasive. His friend Crito urges him to flee, saying that most people will think that he really was guilty if he does not, and being Socrates he says, "Why should we pay so much attention to what most people think?" (p. 81). He argues against his friend's proposed course of action, saying, "The really important thing is not to live but to live well." (p. 87) Then he engages in a symbolic dialogue with the Laws of Athens, which can be thought of as comparable with the U.S. Constitution. It is clear that he is grateful to Athens for having given him the opportunity to be a dissenter. The crucial facts are that the Laws of Athens gave him the right to attempt to persuade his fellow Athenians by permitting him free speech. And even when he was arrested for his teachings, he was allowed to speak in his own defense at his trial. Although the verdict was unjust, it was not the Laws of Athens which were responsible, but human folly. As he has the "Laws" say to him: "You leave this place, when you do, as a victim of a wrong done not by us but by your fellow men." No better argument for government under law has ever been made.
However, the tradition of civil disobedience which Socrates founded is only meaningful in a democracy, where people have the right to dissent and to be tried fairly and publicly if they are arrested and charged with a crime. And it is rapidly becoming obsolete, for this country is being transformed from a democracy into a totalitarian state. Since President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act on October 17, 2006, we have been facing a crisis more severe than any other in our history, the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 itself not excepted. Congress has had over a year to amend or repeal the act and has failed. If the Supreme Court, now almost half-filled with "rubber stamp" justices, does not strike down the MCA, one will not be able to engage in dissent without being labeled an "Illegal Enemy Combatant" at the mere whim of the executive branch, imprisoned and even tortured indefinitely, without being formally sentenced or tried. Most dissidents-- even Noam Chomsky as I recently discovered-- have not faced this fact yet, nor gotten beyond civil disobedience as the answer to repression.
However, a tradition exists which teaches us how to react in such a situation. This tradition goes back not to Athens but to medieval England, to the feudal notion of the relationship between lord and vassal as a contract. If the lord broke his end of the contract, then the vassal could revolt, staging what was called a diffidatio. Thus did the English barons revolt against King John, forcing him to sign Magna Carta. In the seventeenth century, this time-hallowed tradition was transformed into the social contract theory of John Locke, who gave citizens the right to revolt if the government's infringements of personal liberty were sufficiently grave. Finally, it was taken up by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders of the American Republic, and set forth in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence. Speaking of the American colonists, Jefferson said, "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security." Faced with the prospect of living under a government which is rotten through and through, and which would have made his dissenting individualism impossible, I'm sure Socrates would have agreed.
Friday, January 11, 2008
ORWELL WAS BOTH RIGHT AND WRONG
George Orwell's classic 1984 is a work which has probably exercised more influence upon me than any other. I read it first in high school and a couple more times when I was in my twenties. Then I blissfully forgot about it through my college years and later, immersed as I was in pre-modern historical issues, while the trends he predicted were inexorably moving toward their realization. Since 9/11, having been forced to recognize what century I'm living in, I have re-discovered its relevance.
Orwell's achievement was so great because he based his work on James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution . It was Burnham who first predicted that the societies of the future would be ruled by faceless bureaucrats, not the showy military "man on horseback" or the charismatic demagogues our Founding Fathers feared. If only they could have read his book! For without his insights-- which were not yet possible in the eighteenth century-- the Founders constructed a nation which they thought was protected from both these types, but which was in fact defenseless against the new type of ruler. They foresaw the Imperial Presidency and the influence of Big Money. But they did not foresee, nor provide any protections, against the type of institution which would make the victory of these evils possible, despite all their precautions. They did not foresee that when dictatorship came to the United States, it would come under cover of a largely anonymous and unelected civilian bureaucracy. The prototype of that bureaucracy was born in this country in 1947, two years before Orwell's death, as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Over the past sixty years, it has been increasing its power and practicing the techniques of despotic control in Third World countries. And now, following a spectacular "terrorist attack" wich was probably staged by itself (see Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11: Synthetic Terror and David Ray Griffin, 9/11 and the American Empire: The Intellectuals Speak Out)it is bringing those techniques home. Of course it is not alone-- we now have a vast intelligence bureaucracy, both military and civilian, which, supported by the big corporations, actually rules this country. Presidential elections have become a mere game like the world series, with no relevance to our future-- whoever wins the policies will remain the same, for they are not made by the president, but rather the president is made by and must answer to an elite more powerful than the nominal head of the executive branch. Homeland Security is the vehicle by which an that elite plans to seize total control over this nation: if one wants to know the terrifying details of what it has in store for us, one should read Douglas Valentine's essay, "When the Phoenix Comes Home to Roost", available over the net.
Where Orwell was wrong, as Bertrand Russell pointed out long ago, was in concluding that the worst threat to freedom would come from the Left. Despite its many atrocities and initial success, Communism was not a good vehicle for an enduring totalitarianism for three reasons. First of all, it possessed an unworkable economic system which was bound to fail in the end. This economic system rested in turn on a misperception of human nature, an ignorance of the ineradicable influence of greed. It also underestimated the appeal of power for its own sake, and failed to see that its leaders would be corrupted by excessive power whether or not they had renounced the struggle for economic gain (which in fact they rarely did). But its most serious misjudgement was its inability to grasp the power of tribalistic loyalties, be they racial, ethnic, religious or whatever, over human behavior. The most admirable aspect of Communism was its belief in the brotherhood of Man-- at least the working man-- as expressed in the Internationale. But this was also its greatest weakness. For in fact humans, like all social animals, are programmed to fight for their own group against all other groups. that is why the form of totalitarianism with the most promise for the future is fascism. Today's fascism-- a peculiarly American brand-- does not express itself, as Mussolini's and Hitler's did, by endless parades of goose-stepping soldiers. But the ubiquitous flags with which Albert Speer adorned Nazi rallies are there, every time I walk down my own suburban street. They are hung out not by order of the state, but by individuals who, having been born into a democracy, have freely given their support to policies which are slowly but inexorably killing that democracy. They indicate the extent of public support for the torture and the murder of people who are not "like us"-- not "Americans" as the average American defines that term.
From writing my biography of Albert Speer, I have come to see how effectively the primitive tribal instincts of the average man and woman can be manipulated by a dictatorship to support a policy of brutality and genocide. I have seen how an elite, concerned above all with the perpetuation of its own power, can convince people to surrender their own freedom for the sake of a chimerical "security" and superiority over groups they conceive of as foreign (even if, like German Jews and American Muslims, they are little different from themselves). For three years I immersed myself in the writing of this book, little noticing what was going on around me, although the staged attacks of 9/11 had occurred during those years. When I emerged from my ivory tower, I was shocked to find that the very thing I had been writing about was happening here, that our government was appealing to the lowest common instincts of the man and woman in the street, the hatred of the "other", in exactly the same way the Nazis had, although the trappings were different, less militaristic and more suited to American tastes. After all, we like to think of ourselves as nice guys. We would never accept a doctrine which openly preaches the idea of a master race conquering all the others, and our elite is shrewd enough to know that's it's a good idea to have friends among every ethnic group, if nothing else so that it will have someone to blame for so-called "terrorist attacks". It is also shrewd enough to know that it must accept a certain number of people who are not white, Anglo-Saxon or male into its ranks, and so it has. But in fact, its tribalism is every bit as vicious as that of the Nazis, even though the American nation can hardly be conceived of as a Volk, an ethnically homogenous group. The reaction of the American public to the continuing disclosures of the use of torture-- even in cases where the acquisition of intelligence is not the goal-- has been a mixture of superficial indignation and indifference, or perhaps something worse than indifference. Our ruling elite knows human nature so well that it is possible to buy T-shirts proclaiming "I'd rather be torturing detainees" over the net. And when I go out in public with my button displaying the famous "hooded man", with the caption "Got Freedom?" as a protest against torture, I have not once received either a supportive compliment or an expression of discomfort at this symbol of suffering.
How many of these people displaying flags or stickers saying "We support our troops" give a thought to the real victims? How many Americans who read 1984 (probably as an assignment in college, for why else would they read a work of serious political criticism?) recognize in Winston the real counterpart of the thousands now imprisoned by our government in its so-called "War on Terror"? How many realize that the methods that the CIA and its clones are using against foreigners will soon be turned against American Muslims and dissidents? As Judge Howe says in the film Judgement at Nuremberg, "A nation is not a rock. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult." When it came to slavery, the closest analogy to the present gulag of secret prisons, the American people showed what they stood for. They were willing to fight a bloody Civil War to end it. But something has happened to us since then. For most Americans will not even lift a voice of dissent against the outrages of today, let alone take up arms. We have become a nation of moral cowards. As for me, I can hardly sleep at night when I think of the agonies of the victims and hear their screams in my nightmares. I cannot help but think of the words which Orwell put into the mouth of O'Brien when he was torturing Winston, which express so well the mentality of our ruling elite: "Power is not a means, it is an end... Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. The old civilizations were founded upon love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement... If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stepping on a human face-- forever."
I love the American Constitution and the ideals upon which this nation was founded. But when I walk down the street and see all those flags and stickers, can I be blamed for seeing the swastika banners with which Nuremberg was draped during Nazi rallies? Is it surprising that the sight of the Stars and Stripes, once so dear to me, now makes me sick? For what Jefferson said concerning slavery holds true here as well: "God has no attribute which can take side with us in this contest."
Orwell's achievement was so great because he based his work on James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution . It was Burnham who first predicted that the societies of the future would be ruled by faceless bureaucrats, not the showy military "man on horseback" or the charismatic demagogues our Founding Fathers feared. If only they could have read his book! For without his insights-- which were not yet possible in the eighteenth century-- the Founders constructed a nation which they thought was protected from both these types, but which was in fact defenseless against the new type of ruler. They foresaw the Imperial Presidency and the influence of Big Money. But they did not foresee, nor provide any protections, against the type of institution which would make the victory of these evils possible, despite all their precautions. They did not foresee that when dictatorship came to the United States, it would come under cover of a largely anonymous and unelected civilian bureaucracy. The prototype of that bureaucracy was born in this country in 1947, two years before Orwell's death, as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Over the past sixty years, it has been increasing its power and practicing the techniques of despotic control in Third World countries. And now, following a spectacular "terrorist attack" wich was probably staged by itself (see Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11: Synthetic Terror and David Ray Griffin, 9/11 and the American Empire: The Intellectuals Speak Out)it is bringing those techniques home. Of course it is not alone-- we now have a vast intelligence bureaucracy, both military and civilian, which, supported by the big corporations, actually rules this country. Presidential elections have become a mere game like the world series, with no relevance to our future-- whoever wins the policies will remain the same, for they are not made by the president, but rather the president is made by and must answer to an elite more powerful than the nominal head of the executive branch. Homeland Security is the vehicle by which an that elite plans to seize total control over this nation: if one wants to know the terrifying details of what it has in store for us, one should read Douglas Valentine's essay, "When the Phoenix Comes Home to Roost", available over the net.
Where Orwell was wrong, as Bertrand Russell pointed out long ago, was in concluding that the worst threat to freedom would come from the Left. Despite its many atrocities and initial success, Communism was not a good vehicle for an enduring totalitarianism for three reasons. First of all, it possessed an unworkable economic system which was bound to fail in the end. This economic system rested in turn on a misperception of human nature, an ignorance of the ineradicable influence of greed. It also underestimated the appeal of power for its own sake, and failed to see that its leaders would be corrupted by excessive power whether or not they had renounced the struggle for economic gain (which in fact they rarely did). But its most serious misjudgement was its inability to grasp the power of tribalistic loyalties, be they racial, ethnic, religious or whatever, over human behavior. The most admirable aspect of Communism was its belief in the brotherhood of Man-- at least the working man-- as expressed in the Internationale. But this was also its greatest weakness. For in fact humans, like all social animals, are programmed to fight for their own group against all other groups. that is why the form of totalitarianism with the most promise for the future is fascism. Today's fascism-- a peculiarly American brand-- does not express itself, as Mussolini's and Hitler's did, by endless parades of goose-stepping soldiers. But the ubiquitous flags with which Albert Speer adorned Nazi rallies are there, every time I walk down my own suburban street. They are hung out not by order of the state, but by individuals who, having been born into a democracy, have freely given their support to policies which are slowly but inexorably killing that democracy. They indicate the extent of public support for the torture and the murder of people who are not "like us"-- not "Americans" as the average American defines that term.
From writing my biography of Albert Speer, I have come to see how effectively the primitive tribal instincts of the average man and woman can be manipulated by a dictatorship to support a policy of brutality and genocide. I have seen how an elite, concerned above all with the perpetuation of its own power, can convince people to surrender their own freedom for the sake of a chimerical "security" and superiority over groups they conceive of as foreign (even if, like German Jews and American Muslims, they are little different from themselves). For three years I immersed myself in the writing of this book, little noticing what was going on around me, although the staged attacks of 9/11 had occurred during those years. When I emerged from my ivory tower, I was shocked to find that the very thing I had been writing about was happening here, that our government was appealing to the lowest common instincts of the man and woman in the street, the hatred of the "other", in exactly the same way the Nazis had, although the trappings were different, less militaristic and more suited to American tastes. After all, we like to think of ourselves as nice guys. We would never accept a doctrine which openly preaches the idea of a master race conquering all the others, and our elite is shrewd enough to know that's it's a good idea to have friends among every ethnic group, if nothing else so that it will have someone to blame for so-called "terrorist attacks". It is also shrewd enough to know that it must accept a certain number of people who are not white, Anglo-Saxon or male into its ranks, and so it has. But in fact, its tribalism is every bit as vicious as that of the Nazis, even though the American nation can hardly be conceived of as a Volk, an ethnically homogenous group. The reaction of the American public to the continuing disclosures of the use of torture-- even in cases where the acquisition of intelligence is not the goal-- has been a mixture of superficial indignation and indifference, or perhaps something worse than indifference. Our ruling elite knows human nature so well that it is possible to buy T-shirts proclaiming "I'd rather be torturing detainees" over the net. And when I go out in public with my button displaying the famous "hooded man", with the caption "Got Freedom?" as a protest against torture, I have not once received either a supportive compliment or an expression of discomfort at this symbol of suffering.
How many of these people displaying flags or stickers saying "We support our troops" give a thought to the real victims? How many Americans who read 1984 (probably as an assignment in college, for why else would they read a work of serious political criticism?) recognize in Winston the real counterpart of the thousands now imprisoned by our government in its so-called "War on Terror"? How many realize that the methods that the CIA and its clones are using against foreigners will soon be turned against American Muslims and dissidents? As Judge Howe says in the film Judgement at Nuremberg, "A nation is not a rock. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult." When it came to slavery, the closest analogy to the present gulag of secret prisons, the American people showed what they stood for. They were willing to fight a bloody Civil War to end it. But something has happened to us since then. For most Americans will not even lift a voice of dissent against the outrages of today, let alone take up arms. We have become a nation of moral cowards. As for me, I can hardly sleep at night when I think of the agonies of the victims and hear their screams in my nightmares. I cannot help but think of the words which Orwell put into the mouth of O'Brien when he was torturing Winston, which express so well the mentality of our ruling elite: "Power is not a means, it is an end... Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. The old civilizations were founded upon love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement... If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stepping on a human face-- forever."
I love the American Constitution and the ideals upon which this nation was founded. But when I walk down the street and see all those flags and stickers, can I be blamed for seeing the swastika banners with which Nuremberg was draped during Nazi rallies? Is it surprising that the sight of the Stars and Stripes, once so dear to me, now makes me sick? For what Jefferson said concerning slavery holds true here as well: "God has no attribute which can take side with us in this contest."
CONTRA DERSHOWITZ
In recent years there has been a growing awareness of the fact that our government uses torture on a routine basis. Advocates of torture have defended the practice with statements such as the following, by Jane Harman of the House Intelligence Committee, "If you're serious about trying to get information in advance of an attack, interrogation has to be one of the main tools. I'm okay with it not being pretty." Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has gone further. He argues that in a "ticking bomb scenario", government agencies should have access to a "torture warrant" which would allow them to torture openly and with accountability (his preferred method is sticking needles under the fingernails). As he says, "If anybody has any doubt that our CIA, over time, has taught people to torture, has encouraged torture, has probably itself tortured in extreme cases, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn." And furthermore, he adds, "Don't you think that if we ever had a ticking-bomb case, regardless of your views or mine, that the CIA would actually either torture themselves or subcontract the job to Jordan, the Philippines or Egypt... to do the torturing for us?" Human rights advocates have responded in a predictable manner which misses the main problem with Dershowitz's argument. As Vincent Warren, Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, maintains, torture is "illegal, immoral and does not work." In a debate with Dershowitz, Ken Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, said that the prohibition on torture is "one of the basic, absolute prohibitions that exist in international law. It exists regardless of the severity of the security threat." In fact, both sides are arguing about hypotheticals and ignoring the reality. For they both assume that torture has been used by our government, and was designed, for the purpose of extracting information which could save lives. In actual fact, although Dershowitz is right that torture has been used-- and much more extensively than he maintains-- by agencies such as the CIA, it has not been used, nor was it intended to be used, in order to extract information. The specific techniques in common use, called "Psywar", are demonstrably useless for that purpose. But they are useful for a much more sinister one-- the erection of a totalitarian state.
The suspect in the so-called "War on Terror", whether he is guilty or innocent, is from day one treated as a subhuman being. He is immediately hooded to induce sensory deprivation, and taken to a prison in a secret location, where he may be subject to further sensory deprivation by confinement in a darkened, soundproof cell. He may be isolated from other prisoners, shackled to the floor, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures, deprived of food and water, subjected to a capriciously changing routine, stripped naked, not allowed to urinate or defecate or forced to do so in the sight of others, made to stand in "stress positions", and subject to sexual assault, electrical shocks and waterboarding. All this happens before he is "interrogated", as reputable individuals-- for instance FBI agents who were excluded from the process at Guantanamo-- can attest. All these methods have been shown to produce psychosis-like results. By the time the suspect encounters the "interrogator", he is no longer able to trust any promises of better treatment for cooperation which may be offered. He may have lost his will to live. Indeed, he may no longer be in his right mind, and completely unable to respond to such questions as "Where is your training camp located? What sort of terrorist activities is your organization planning?"-- if indeed, he ever knew the answers to begin with. This is not a matter of excessive force so much as the wrong kind of force employed to produce results which cannot possibly yield "actionable intelligence".
As Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his excellent book, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, most of the methods of torture in common use by the U.S. government today have their origins in the CIA. If one examines their history, one finds a CIA hierarchy enthralled with the success of such totalitarian spectacles as the Stalinist show-trials and North Korean "brainwashing", and trying to work out its own methods of producing the same results with the aid of unscrupulous psychologists and psychiatrists. These methods rely a great deal upon psychological stresses, although they have always been accompanied by physical coercion. If one examines the various methods explored by the CIA in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, culminating in the Kubark Manual of Interrogation (1963-- "Kubark" was the CIA cryptonym for its own headquarters), one can see how antithetical they are to the goal of obtaining intelligence. The simplest of these methods is sensory deprivation. In 1951, with CIA backing, Dr. Donald Hebb did a study of the effects of such such isolation. He found that after just four hours of total sensory deprivation, subjects "could not follow a connected train of thought." They progressively lost touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations and other pathological effects."
Other techniques explored by the CIA have been electroconvulsive treatment or ECT, familiar to us as a treatment for depression (remember the skeleton in Eagleton's closet?), which has been widely criticized by mental health activists because of the fact that it can cause amnesia, hypnosis, which heightens a subject's suggestibility to delusions introduced by the hypnotist, and above all LSD, which contrary to widespread belief, was not unleashed on American society by Timothy Leary but rather Allen Dulles. This experimentation involved the use of unsuspecting human guinea pigs and led to at least one death. It is a well-known fact that LSD can produce hallucinations and ultimately, psychosis. Amnesia, delusions, hallucinations, psychosis-- how do these help an interrogator get at the truth? If anything, they would seem impediments. CIA methods are so exclusively oriented toward "breaking" a subject-- that is to say, destroying him psychologically-- that a 1983 training guide for the Honduran government advises the so-called interrogator to do things which are directly antithetical to the acquisition of intelligence, such as "asking nonsensical questions" and incredibly, "rewarding non-cooperation"! If Dershowitz thinks that the CIA can be confined to torturing only for information in "ticking bomb scenarios" by a "torture warrant", or that it will subject any of its highly illegal activities to the rule of law, I have a bridge to sell him in Brooklyn.
Okay, you may say, but these guys deserve it-- although of course you cannot know, any more than I can, whether or not they are really terrorists, because they've never had a fair trial of the sort we offered even to Nazi war criminals. Maybe you think they deserve it just because they're Muslims. But then be honest-- you're not after intelligence that can save human lives, you are out to punish and hurt them for your own gratification. If you are going to argue for a torture warrant, why not say why you really want it, and not hide behind the fallacy that you are concerned with the protection of human life?
The suspect in the so-called "War on Terror", whether he is guilty or innocent, is from day one treated as a subhuman being. He is immediately hooded to induce sensory deprivation, and taken to a prison in a secret location, where he may be subject to further sensory deprivation by confinement in a darkened, soundproof cell. He may be isolated from other prisoners, shackled to the floor, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures, deprived of food and water, subjected to a capriciously changing routine, stripped naked, not allowed to urinate or defecate or forced to do so in the sight of others, made to stand in "stress positions", and subject to sexual assault, electrical shocks and waterboarding. All this happens before he is "interrogated", as reputable individuals-- for instance FBI agents who were excluded from the process at Guantanamo-- can attest. All these methods have been shown to produce psychosis-like results. By the time the suspect encounters the "interrogator", he is no longer able to trust any promises of better treatment for cooperation which may be offered. He may have lost his will to live. Indeed, he may no longer be in his right mind, and completely unable to respond to such questions as "Where is your training camp located? What sort of terrorist activities is your organization planning?"-- if indeed, he ever knew the answers to begin with. This is not a matter of excessive force so much as the wrong kind of force employed to produce results which cannot possibly yield "actionable intelligence".
As Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his excellent book, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, most of the methods of torture in common use by the U.S. government today have their origins in the CIA. If one examines their history, one finds a CIA hierarchy enthralled with the success of such totalitarian spectacles as the Stalinist show-trials and North Korean "brainwashing", and trying to work out its own methods of producing the same results with the aid of unscrupulous psychologists and psychiatrists. These methods rely a great deal upon psychological stresses, although they have always been accompanied by physical coercion. If one examines the various methods explored by the CIA in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, culminating in the Kubark Manual of Interrogation (1963-- "Kubark" was the CIA cryptonym for its own headquarters), one can see how antithetical they are to the goal of obtaining intelligence. The simplest of these methods is sensory deprivation. In 1951, with CIA backing, Dr. Donald Hebb did a study of the effects of such such isolation. He found that after just four hours of total sensory deprivation, subjects "could not follow a connected train of thought." They progressively lost touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations and other pathological effects."
Other techniques explored by the CIA have been electroconvulsive treatment or ECT, familiar to us as a treatment for depression (remember the skeleton in Eagleton's closet?), which has been widely criticized by mental health activists because of the fact that it can cause amnesia, hypnosis, which heightens a subject's suggestibility to delusions introduced by the hypnotist, and above all LSD, which contrary to widespread belief, was not unleashed on American society by Timothy Leary but rather Allen Dulles. This experimentation involved the use of unsuspecting human guinea pigs and led to at least one death. It is a well-known fact that LSD can produce hallucinations and ultimately, psychosis. Amnesia, delusions, hallucinations, psychosis-- how do these help an interrogator get at the truth? If anything, they would seem impediments. CIA methods are so exclusively oriented toward "breaking" a subject-- that is to say, destroying him psychologically-- that a 1983 training guide for the Honduran government advises the so-called interrogator to do things which are directly antithetical to the acquisition of intelligence, such as "asking nonsensical questions" and incredibly, "rewarding non-cooperation"! If Dershowitz thinks that the CIA can be confined to torturing only for information in "ticking bomb scenarios" by a "torture warrant", or that it will subject any of its highly illegal activities to the rule of law, I have a bridge to sell him in Brooklyn.
Okay, you may say, but these guys deserve it-- although of course you cannot know, any more than I can, whether or not they are really terrorists, because they've never had a fair trial of the sort we offered even to Nazi war criminals. Maybe you think they deserve it just because they're Muslims. But then be honest-- you're not after intelligence that can save human lives, you are out to punish and hurt them for your own gratification. If you are going to argue for a torture warrant, why not say why you really want it, and not hide behind the fallacy that you are concerned with the protection of human life?
Thursday, January 10, 2008
THE CASE CURRENTLY BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT
On December 5 of this year, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments concerning an appeal of the consolidated cases of Al Odah v. the United States and Boudmediene v. the United States, both of which would have allowed detainees in the so-called "War on Terror" access to a writ of habeas corpus. Like many people, I had marked that date on my calendar well ahead of time, and given a sizable contribution to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has taken the place of the increasingly impotent ACLU in the fight for civil liberties, to help it prepare its defense. I expected a vigorous argument which would make it possible for the court to strike down the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), the most dangerous law ever passed in U.S.history, which-- ignoring the guarantee of habeas corpus in Article One, Section Nine of the U.S. Constitution-- would for the first time make it possible for even American citizens to be incarcerated indefinitely and tortured as "Illegal Enemy Combatants". But when I watched the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on that and the following days, I was badly disappointed. For the counsel for the petitioners had disastrously allowed the enemy to lay down the ground rules of the debate. Again and again, the "rubber stamp" Justice Antonin Scalia asked the appealing counsel, "Have habeas rights ever been extended to someone not on U.S. territory?" I don't know how the counsel for the petitioners answered in the courtroom, but the lawyer who appeared on the News Hour to discuss the case, who had evidently played a major role in previous victories for detainees' rights in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush , accepted that as the relevant question, arguing that Guantánamo was sovereign U.S. territory. His opponent argued that is was not, an argument that would surprise Fidel Castro! This was a disastrous mistake. In fact, the answer to Scalia's question is a resounding "Yes", precisely because habeas rights are extended to prisoners not on the basis of the location where they are being held, but rather their legal status.
Before 9/11, there were two categories of people who could legally be detained by the United States government. One was Prisoners of War, or POWs. The other was criminal suspects. The first enjoyed the protection of the Geneva Conventions, as the second enjoyed the right to a writ of habeas corpus-- these were rights which went automatically with their legal status. In a number of very famous cases, people were considered both POWs and criminal suspects: i.e., after World War II, German and Japanese leaders taken prisoner of war were also charged with war crimes. As someone who has written a biography of Albert Speer, I know that he was one of these people. He was originally taken prisoner of war in May, 1945, having more or less defected to the Western Allies in disgust over Hitler's intention to sacrifice the German people rather than surrender. For months he was interrogated in such a gentlemanly fashion that his own personal secretary was allowed to take the notes on which the summaries of the interrogations were based. Never was he asked questions pertaining to any war crimes he might have committed, the Allies having mistakenly concluded that he was a mere technician. And then, in September, 1945, while staying with other "mere technicians" at Kransberg Castle, he was shocked to hear over the radio that he was to be tried at Nuremberg. The Allies had finally awoken the possibility that he might be a war criminal. When he and other Nazi leaders were transferred to Nuremberg on October 6, 1945, an officer went from cell to cell delivering copies of the indictment. Along with them was a list a German civilian lawyers from which the defendants could choose their attorney if they did not have a choice of their own. Speer could not think of anyone, so he was assigned to Hans Flächsner. Speer had never been and never would be on sovereign U.S. territory. Yet from the start, he was treated as the Geneva Conventions require a POW to be treated-- indeed, much better than they require. As someone suspected of committing war crimes, he was given the rights guaranteed to criminal suspects. From the start of the trial, he was allowed to see the evidence against him and to prepare his defense along with his lawyer. And this was a high-ranking Nazi leader, associated with crimes which were far worse than any mere terrorist could have committed.
Compare this to the treatment meted out to detainees in the so-called "War on Terror". Some may indeed be terrorists, some may merely have been insurgents defending their country from what they viewed as an invasion, some may be completely innocent of any wrongdoing. We do not know-- indeed no one knows-- because these people have never been allowed to hear or contest the charges against them. Most-- especially those in secret CIA prisons-- have never been given a lawyer to speak up for them. Only those who are resident at the highly visible Guantánamo, the most privileged among the detainees, have been allowed this right, although they have been grievously abused in other ways. Unlike the Nazi war criminals, who were accused of killing over six million people and causing incalculable suffering to millions more, no person accused of terrorist activity since 9/11 has ever been given a fair and open trial, except for Zacarias Moussaoui, a bit player at best. Yet from the time they are apprehended, terrorist suspects are treated in a manner which is entirely contrary to both the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution. The methods used to "break" them, using techniques developed over the decades by the CIA and referred to as "Psywar", are known to produce mental confusion, loss of contact with reality, and-- if they are inflicted over a sufficiently long period of time-- psychosis. Thus the purpose of inflicting them cannot possibly be the acquisition of "actionable intelligence". Indeed, in a recent and shocking Newsweek article, a CIA official admitted that the majority of detainees, who no longer have any intelligence value, are still being tortured for purely vindictive reasons (October 8 issue, p. 66). The number involved may amount to some 3,000 (a figure taken from one of Bush's speeches by Chalmers Johnson, see Nemesis, p. 126). In contrast to Speer, whom we know committed crimes of colossal proportions, these prisoners are being treated worse than animals, and we do not even know if they are guilty.
Why are these people being treated in this manner, if not to obtain information? Because our government has invented a new classification for people in U.S. custody, the "Unlawful Enemy Combatant". This classification was not invented in order to prevent violence or save human lives. There is no reason why someone given the protection of law such as Speer cannot be convicted and sentenced to a severe punishment: indeed, twelve of the defendants at Nuremberg, having been found by the court to be guilty, were executed. The only reason for the existence of this classification is to facilitate the erection of a totalitarian state. Indeed, if one reads Alfred W. McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, or A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America, or Douglas Valentine's The Phoenix Program, one will see that the CIA has been getting a lot of practice in defending dictatorships on foreign soil. And its methods, to use a term coined by McCoy, have "metastasized" to all potentially repressive agencies of the U.S. government-- the military, other intelligence agencies, and the FBI, which used to be a legitimate law-enforcement agency but is being made over into a clone of the CIA. Wherever the CIA has helped to keep repressive governments in power, the object of its torture has been the suppression of any and all dissent--even the peaceful and law-abiding sort-- by striking terror into the hearts of political opponents, and the acquisition of false confessions, which can be used to convince the majority of people that a real threat to their security exists. An example of how our government uses torture to get what it wants was the "confession" of Ibn Shaikh al Libi linking Saddam Hussein with Al Quaeda, which was used as a justification for the war in Iraq. Al Libi later recanted but it was too late: the United States was involved in a war which still drags on with apparent hopelessness.
The decision in the present case before the Supreme Court is expected to be handed down by June of this year. If it does not strike down the MCA as unconstitutional that will be as bad giving it its seal of approval, for to rule on a case involving a law without protesting that it is unconstitutional is to uphold it. In that case, all normal means of halting the emerging totalitarianism in this country will have been exhausted, for Congress has shown itself to be completely incapable of confronting the executive branch-- in more than a year since the MCA was signed into law, it has succeeded neither in repealing nor amending it. And what to do when all normal means of obtaining redress of grievances have been exhausted? That is up to the American people to decide, but before they do, they ought to take a look at Jefferson's words in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of our now-threatened Republic.
Before 9/11, there were two categories of people who could legally be detained by the United States government. One was Prisoners of War, or POWs. The other was criminal suspects. The first enjoyed the protection of the Geneva Conventions, as the second enjoyed the right to a writ of habeas corpus-- these were rights which went automatically with their legal status. In a number of very famous cases, people were considered both POWs and criminal suspects: i.e., after World War II, German and Japanese leaders taken prisoner of war were also charged with war crimes. As someone who has written a biography of Albert Speer, I know that he was one of these people. He was originally taken prisoner of war in May, 1945, having more or less defected to the Western Allies in disgust over Hitler's intention to sacrifice the German people rather than surrender. For months he was interrogated in such a gentlemanly fashion that his own personal secretary was allowed to take the notes on which the summaries of the interrogations were based. Never was he asked questions pertaining to any war crimes he might have committed, the Allies having mistakenly concluded that he was a mere technician. And then, in September, 1945, while staying with other "mere technicians" at Kransberg Castle, he was shocked to hear over the radio that he was to be tried at Nuremberg. The Allies had finally awoken the possibility that he might be a war criminal. When he and other Nazi leaders were transferred to Nuremberg on October 6, 1945, an officer went from cell to cell delivering copies of the indictment. Along with them was a list a German civilian lawyers from which the defendants could choose their attorney if they did not have a choice of their own. Speer could not think of anyone, so he was assigned to Hans Flächsner. Speer had never been and never would be on sovereign U.S. territory. Yet from the start, he was treated as the Geneva Conventions require a POW to be treated-- indeed, much better than they require. As someone suspected of committing war crimes, he was given the rights guaranteed to criminal suspects. From the start of the trial, he was allowed to see the evidence against him and to prepare his defense along with his lawyer. And this was a high-ranking Nazi leader, associated with crimes which were far worse than any mere terrorist could have committed.
Compare this to the treatment meted out to detainees in the so-called "War on Terror". Some may indeed be terrorists, some may merely have been insurgents defending their country from what they viewed as an invasion, some may be completely innocent of any wrongdoing. We do not know-- indeed no one knows-- because these people have never been allowed to hear or contest the charges against them. Most-- especially those in secret CIA prisons-- have never been given a lawyer to speak up for them. Only those who are resident at the highly visible Guantánamo, the most privileged among the detainees, have been allowed this right, although they have been grievously abused in other ways. Unlike the Nazi war criminals, who were accused of killing over six million people and causing incalculable suffering to millions more, no person accused of terrorist activity since 9/11 has ever been given a fair and open trial, except for Zacarias Moussaoui, a bit player at best. Yet from the time they are apprehended, terrorist suspects are treated in a manner which is entirely contrary to both the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution. The methods used to "break" them, using techniques developed over the decades by the CIA and referred to as "Psywar", are known to produce mental confusion, loss of contact with reality, and-- if they are inflicted over a sufficiently long period of time-- psychosis. Thus the purpose of inflicting them cannot possibly be the acquisition of "actionable intelligence". Indeed, in a recent and shocking Newsweek article, a CIA official admitted that the majority of detainees, who no longer have any intelligence value, are still being tortured for purely vindictive reasons (October 8 issue, p. 66). The number involved may amount to some 3,000 (a figure taken from one of Bush's speeches by Chalmers Johnson, see Nemesis, p. 126). In contrast to Speer, whom we know committed crimes of colossal proportions, these prisoners are being treated worse than animals, and we do not even know if they are guilty.
Why are these people being treated in this manner, if not to obtain information? Because our government has invented a new classification for people in U.S. custody, the "Unlawful Enemy Combatant". This classification was not invented in order to prevent violence or save human lives. There is no reason why someone given the protection of law such as Speer cannot be convicted and sentenced to a severe punishment: indeed, twelve of the defendants at Nuremberg, having been found by the court to be guilty, were executed. The only reason for the existence of this classification is to facilitate the erection of a totalitarian state. Indeed, if one reads Alfred W. McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, or A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America, or Douglas Valentine's The Phoenix Program, one will see that the CIA has been getting a lot of practice in defending dictatorships on foreign soil. And its methods, to use a term coined by McCoy, have "metastasized" to all potentially repressive agencies of the U.S. government-- the military, other intelligence agencies, and the FBI, which used to be a legitimate law-enforcement agency but is being made over into a clone of the CIA. Wherever the CIA has helped to keep repressive governments in power, the object of its torture has been the suppression of any and all dissent--even the peaceful and law-abiding sort-- by striking terror into the hearts of political opponents, and the acquisition of false confessions, which can be used to convince the majority of people that a real threat to their security exists. An example of how our government uses torture to get what it wants was the "confession" of Ibn Shaikh al Libi linking Saddam Hussein with Al Quaeda, which was used as a justification for the war in Iraq. Al Libi later recanted but it was too late: the United States was involved in a war which still drags on with apparent hopelessness.
The decision in the present case before the Supreme Court is expected to be handed down by June of this year. If it does not strike down the MCA as unconstitutional that will be as bad giving it its seal of approval, for to rule on a case involving a law without protesting that it is unconstitutional is to uphold it. In that case, all normal means of halting the emerging totalitarianism in this country will have been exhausted, for Congress has shown itself to be completely incapable of confronting the executive branch-- in more than a year since the MCA was signed into law, it has succeeded neither in repealing nor amending it. And what to do when all normal means of obtaining redress of grievances have been exhausted? That is up to the American people to decide, but before they do, they ought to take a look at Jefferson's words in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of our now-threatened Republic.
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