New York Times

David Johnston

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand.

The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.

The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.

Mr. Holder was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials.

In examples that have just come to light, the C.I.A. report describes how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a prisoner with imminent death.

Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said Sunday that the Justice Department recommendation to reopen the cases had not been sent to the intelligence agency. He added: “Decisions on whether or not to pursue action in court were made after careful consideration by career prosecutors at the Justice Department. The C.I.A. itself brought these matters — facts and allegations alike — to the department’s attention.”

The report by the Justice Department’s ethics office has been under preparation for more than five years, and its critique of legal work on interrogations provoked bitter complaints from Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey as he was leaving office as the Bush administration’s final attorney general.

The Justice Department’s report, the most important since Mr. Holder took office, was submitted by Mary Patrice Brown, a veteran Washington federal prosecutor picked by Mr. Holder to lead the Office of Professional Responsibility earlier this year after its longtime chief, H. Marshall Jarrett, moved to another job in the Justice Department.

There has never been any public explanation of why the Justice Department decided not to bring charges in nearly two dozen abuse cases known to be referred to a team of federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., and in some instances not even the details of the cases have been made public.

Former government lawyers said that while some detainees died and others suffered serious abuses, prosecutors decided they would be unlikely to prevail because of problems with mishandled evidence and, in some cases, the inability to locate witnesses or even those said to be the victims.

A few of the cases are well known, like that of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in 2003 in C.I.A. custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after he was first captured by a team of Navy Seals. Prosecutors said he probably received his fatal injuries during his capture, but lawyers for the Seals denied it.

Over the years, some Democratic lawmakers sought more details about the cases and why the Justice Department took no action. They received summaries of the number of cases under scrutiny but few facts about the episodes or the department’s decisions not to prosecute.

The cases do not center on allegations of abuse by C.I.A. officers who conducted the forceful interrogations of high-level Qaeda suspects at secret sites, although it is not out of the question that a new investigation would also examine their conduct.

That could mean a look at the case in which C.I.A. officers threatened one prisoner with a handgun and a power drill if he did not cooperate. The detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was suspected as the master plotter behind the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole.

All civilian employees of the government, including those at the C.I.A., were required to comply with guidelines for interrogations detailed in a series of legal opinions written by the Justice Department. Those opinions, since abandoned by the Obama administration, were the central focus of the Justice Department’s internal inquiry.

 It has been known that the Justice Department ethics report had criticized the authors of the legal opinions and, in some cases, would recommend referrals to local bar associations for discipline.

But the internal inquiry also examined how the opinions were carried out and how referrals of possible violations were made — a process that led ethics investigators to find misconduct serious enough to warrant renewed criminal investigation.

The Economist

Torture still casts a long shadow in the battle between spies and terrorists

JACK BAUER famously does whatever it takes to save America from disaster, be that disaster nuclear, biological or computer attack. Week after week, the hero of “24” acts brutally, and endures brutality, for the greater good. It is a sign of the times that this year’s season opened with Bauer being hauled before a congressional committee to face the charge of committing torture. He was unrepentant.

This television character, who first appeared in 2001, has been oddly at the heart of the arguments over the conduct of America’s “war on terrorism”. Critics in the American army have complained that he encourages young soldiers to abuse prisoners. Supporters, such as Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice, praised him for the episode in which he saved Los Angeles from nuclear attack, even though it meant staging the mock execution of a family to get a Middle Eastern villain to talk. “Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so,” said the judge.

In contrast with Europeans, who strongly reject the use of torture, the American public is pretty evenly divided about its use to extract information from terrorists. But President Barack Obama, for one, is clear. No sooner had he been sworn into office than he banned torture, rescinded legal opinions allowing simulated drowning and other harsh methods, ordered all American agencies to comply with the army’s field manual on interrogation, announced he would close the prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year and ordered a series of policy reviews on detention and interrogation. “From Europe to the Pacific”, Mr Obama said in May, “we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.” Dick Cheney, George Bush’s vice-president, sneered at such talk as “recklessness cloaked in righteousness”.

Many people thought that Mr Obama’s election would finally settle the controversies about counter-terrorism’s “dark side” (as Mr Cheney once put it); a darkness that concealed secret prisons, abusive interrogation and “rendition” to countries that practise torture. The distorted DIY legal framework that treated suspected terrorists as neither criminals nor prisoners-of-war, leaving them in an unprotected grey zone between civil and military law, would, many liberals hoped, be put right.

In April, against the wishes of current and former CIA directors, Mr Obama released four secret memos from the Department of Justice, written in 2002 and updated in 2005, that made legal the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as the use of the “waterboard” (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, “walling” (hurling a prisoner against a partition wall), “stress positions” and strange practices like placing a “high-value prisoner” in a cramped box with an insect to exploit his phobia about bugs. It revealed that one prisoner, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the operational head of the September 11th 2001 attacks on America, was waterboarded 183 times.

Mr Obama said that he did not want to prosecute those who operated within these rules. He knows that if he takes action against interrogators he could be accused of seeking scapegoats; if he goes after the CIA chiefs he would be charged with undermining America’s security; and if he investigates leaders of the Bush administration he would look as if he were conducting a witch-hunt against his political rivals. “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” he argued.

Yet the past casts a long shadow. Some of Mr Obama’s supporters want a “truth commission” to establish what happened and, perhaps, recommend prosecutions. Congress is incensed that the CIA did not tell it of a secret programme (which may have had to do with the assassination of terrorists), apparently under orders from Mr Cheney, bringing the former vice-president a step closer to formal investigation. The attorney-general, Eric Holder, is thought to be about to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate those interrogators who exceeded the already lax limits set by the so-called “torture memos”.

Even before this, CIA officials had been hiring lawyers in anticipation of trouble. Some of Mr Obama’s favourite spooks have been unable to take up senior appointments because of their association, sometimes only peripheral, with the interrogation programme. John Brennan, a veteran CIA figure, was withdrawn from consideration as the agency’s director and was given a job in the White House instead. Philip Mudd, a respected intelligence man currently on secondment to the FBI, pulled out of his nomination to the senior intelligence post in the Department of Homeland Security. The Obama administration may have chosen these men but it put little effort into backing its choices.

The big chill

How will all this affect future intelligence operations? There is a distinct chill. Some reckon that the CIA and other agencies face their worst crisis since the post-Watergate inquiries in the 1970s uncovered evidence of spying on Americans and plots to assassinate foreign leaders. “There is undoubtedly some nervousness,” says one senior source. “It does not stop you taking action, but it makes you think twice and talk to your lawyer.”

Britain’s close relations with America are causing it similar problems. Its intelligence agencies are being dragged into the legal limelight, not for torturing suspects but for allegedly colluding in their maltreatment by others—whether they are Americans, Pakistanis or Moroccans. One member of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, is under police investigation.

Increasingly lawyers are being brought in to scrutinise British intelligence before it can be passed on. Will handing over the name of a suspect to America lead to him being killed by an unmanned aircraft in Pakistan? Will sharing a telephone number with, say, Egypt’s spies, lead to the arrest and torture of somebody who should instead be merely watched? Will submitting questions to be asked of a man held in a foreign prison mean that British agents will be held responsible for his treatment?

Agents have become warier of questioning detainees abroad for fear that they will be blamed for any abuse they may have suffered. The number of requests by officials in MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence service) for the legal cover known as “Article 7”, in which the foreign secretary approves actions that are illegal in Britain, has shot up.

Many of the woes of British agencies are embodied in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian asylum-seeker in Britain, who gave up his drugs habit after rediscovering Islam. He went to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to see an Islamic state at work. There he underwent some form of military training—to help the resistance in Chechnya, he says, not to fight the Americans. He was arrested trying to leave Pakistan in 2002 on a forged passport. He was beaten in prison, where he was seen by members of the FBI and MI5. He was then taken by the Americans to Morocco, where he says he was tortured by a questioner called Marwan, who took a sharp blade to his chest and penis while asking questions that had plainly been fed to him by MI5.

The British authorities say that once Mr Mohamed had left Pakistan, they did not know his whereabouts or conditions of detention; all questions were submitted through the Americans. Much of America’s programme of secret detention and interrogation was formally hidden from allies. The top-secret “torture memos” were classified “NOFORN” (no foreign nationals). But stories of prisoners being abused by the Americans were already circulating in 2002. Indeed some British officials had expressed concern at what they saw.

It was under torture, Mr Mohamed says, that he admitted to meeting Osama bin Laden and to taking part in plots including the detonation of a dirty bomb. This is what he would be accused of when he got to Guantánamo Bay in 2004, via a secret prison in Afghanistan. But, like many others, Mr Mohamed was released in February this year without charge.

By then Mr Mohamed’s lawyers, among them Clive Stafford Smith, founder of a legal charity called Reprieve, had been in full swing on both sides of the Atlantic. They sued the British government to release documents that might prove Mr Mohamed’s innocence, obtaining a High Court judgment that was critical of MI5 and led to the police investigation of one of its officials, known only as “Witness B”. In a parallel case in America, Mr Mohamed and other Guantánamo inmates are suing Jeppensen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which allegedly provided aircraft for the CIA’s rendition programme.

Mr Mohamed’s release has not stopped the litigation in either America or Britain. Both governments argue that the lawsuits should be thrown out because state secrets cannot be divulged. Indeed, the Obama administration has warned Britain that intelligence-sharing would be jeopardised if secret information provided by the CIA were to be revealed in British courts. Similarly, officials in Britain are alarmed by what may be disclosed in America.

Waterboarding the agencies

These days it is the intelligence agencies that find themselves under interrogation. Each snippet they provide produces requests for more information. And the courts, suspicious of what the agencies may be hiding, are demanding ever more disclosure. One source of information has been the succession of freedom-of-information requests for official documents, including the “torture memos”, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Legal campaigners are waging an information-gathering effort that earns the grudging respect of intelligence operatives. “They are chasing the paper trail and winning,” says one. “They are chipping away at state-secret privilege [the doctrine that courts can dismiss lawsuits if classified information will be released]. They could disclose an awful lot of information—names of interrogators and medical personnel. If secrets start seeping out, countries that have been sharing information may be disinclined to do so.”

The controversies show the extent to which torture and other forms of harsh interrogation—even though they may have been abandoned—cloud the legitimate work of counter-terrorism. American sources say that in the latter years of the Bush administration, European agencies, worried that they might be caught up in America’s abusive practices, became reticent about sharing intelligence. Today, America’s partners may hold back out of fear that America will not be able to protect their information. Officials lament that the machinery of Western intelligence-sharing is becoming “gritted up”—though information about “life-threatening” plots is still swapped briskly.

Intelligence-sharing is vital. America, with its vast resources, has become the main repository of information on global terrorism. Though Britain has well-regarded intelligence services, it obtains more than half its reports on terrorism from other agencies, principally American. And about half of America’s intelligence reports on al-Qaeda until 2006, says a former senior official, came from detainees.

The Justice Department’s memos were prompted by the arrest in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, a man with close links to al-Qaeda. The CIA wanted clearance to exert greater pressure on the first of its “high-value detainees”—even though FBI investigators would later claim that Mr Zubaydah was already talking freely.

Degrees of pain

The memos gave the CIA licence to use “enhanced” techniques derived from American training advice to pilots and other personnel on how to withstand torture if they should fall into enemy hands. They are shocking for their bureaucratic punctiliousness. They parse the degrees of pain that would constitute forbidden torture (“an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury”). They set out in incongruous detail the limits of abuse.

A prisoner could be deprived of sleep, but for no more than 180 hours before being allowed to rest for eight. He could be stripped naked but only if the room was warmer than 68°F (20°C). He could be doused in water but it had to be potable. He could be waterboarded with cold (saline) water poured onto his face but each application should not last more than 40 seconds, there should be no more than six applications per session, no session could last more than two hours and there could be only two sessions in 24 hours.

The ACLU’s next target is a comprehensive and still largely secret internal CIA report written in 2004 by John Helgerson, then the agency’s inspector-general. This is believed to be particularly damning, providing evidence of abuse that went well beyond the permitted guidelines. Compared with the antiseptic legal memos, writes Jane Mayer, the author of a book called “The Dark Side”, the Helgerson report is a “Technicolor horror show”, including accounts of people who died in custody. A version of the report, so heavily redacted with black deletion marks as to be barely comprehensible, was released in 2008. A more complete version is expected in the coming weeks, although the Obama administration has asked for delays.

Crucially, the report is critical of the value of the information obtained through harsh interrogation. It apparently concludes that there is no evidence that such intelligence prevented any imminent attacks. But this argument was strongly contested by the Bush administration.

Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director from 2006 until earlier this year, wrote in April that enhanced interrogation had led the agency from one big fish to another. Abu Zubaydah, he says, was forced to give information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh (one of the planners of the September 11th attacks); he, in turn, helped lead to the capture of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (which, the memos claimed, foiled a “second wave” plot to crash an aircraft into Los Angeles). Mr Hayden said that of the thousands of people captured as “unlawful combatants”, fewer than 100 were held under the CIA’s interrogation programme and fewer than one-third of those were subjected to the “enhanced” techniques set out in the memos. Just three people were waterboarded. This, however, ignores all manner of abuses committed in military prisons.

That there was no follow-on attack on America after September 11th was thanks in large measure, argues Mr Cheney, to the Bush administration’s policies, including the enhanced techniques. Though he denounced the release of the memos that allowed these methods, he now wants further documents to be published that would, he says, demonstrate their success.

People familiar with the inner workings of intelligence suggest a more ambiguous story. Intelligence, they argue, is about piecing together fragments of information and building up spider diagrams of connections between suspects. “Intelligence is grains of sand; you don’t usually get the whole beach,” says one veteran.

It is true that in 2001, a time when the CIA and other agencies were woefully ignorant of al-Qaeda’s methods, the prisoners captured after the overthrow of the Taliban were the first rich source of information to help “map the enemy”, as one intelligence source puts it. But, says a former counter-terrorism official, the most valuable information from Mr Zubaydah’s capture came not from his interrogation but from his address book. With Mr Mohammed, says another analyst, the most important factor in stopping further attacks on America was not what the terrorist said under duress, but that he had been captured in the first place.

Intelligence officials maintain that detainees under interrogation provided as many, perhaps more, specks of information as other sources of intelligence on terrorism, including signals and agents. The question that nobody can answer is how much of this could have been obtained without torture.

Bleak choices

The danger for Mr Obama, as he seeks to overhaul the intelligence system, is that a fresh attack on the American mainland would immediately expose him to the accusation of being soft on terrorism. In May Congress revolted against any attempt to move detainees from Guantánamo to American soil before a plan for the disposal of its 229 prisoners had been drawn up. Yet three task-forces examining the matter, including future policy on detainees, have delayed issuing their reports because of the complexity of the problem.

Mr Obama has decided to keep the reviled military commissions, albeit with reforms. And he may yet seek a form of indefinite detention for some prisoners, with judicial and congressional oversight. Lurking in the background are the lesser-known problems of America’s prison at Bagram, its main base in Afghanistan, where detainees are being held with much less scrutiny than those at Guantánamo.

Holding terrorism suspects has become a huge headache for America. One fear is that if, in future, it tracks down important al-Qaeda figures, it may prefer one of two bleak options: either turn them over to countries with far fewer qualms—or just drop a bomb on them. Jack Bauer would be delighted.

The Economist

Torture, long a moral stain, is now hindering intelligence services’ attempts to fight terrorism

SPEND time with spies on either side of the Atlantic—and you will discover that they are worried. That is partly because their profession, already sullied in recent years, may be hit by more bad news. In Europe the ordeal has already begun: an officer in Britain’s MI5 is under police investigation, and prosecutors in Italy, Germany and Spain are looking at cases linked to the CIA’s actions. In America, the centre of the problem, the spooks are preparing themselves for an onslaught that could be as bad as anything since the Church commission in the 1970s. There are hints of criminal investigations against CIA officials and a battery of lawsuits—to extract information and to claim compensation. But for the leading spymasters, there is an even bigger worry: they are finding it increasingly hard to do their jobs properly (see article).

 The reason for all this? Torture. In the aftermath of the attacks on September 11th 2001, it became widely fashionable—in allegedly liberal parts of American academia as well as Dick Cheney’s office—to argue that torture was a necessary part of democracy’s defence. In fact, those who fought against that pernicious argument, including this newspaper, possibly underestimated our case. For all its short-term uses (both claimed and, alas, real), torture has always been illegal and immoral, and ultimately counter-productive too. Long before Abu Ghraib, it was obvious that it would create terrorists as well as help capture them. But the extent to which torture would corrode the West’s security networks that are supposed to fight terrorism is only now becoming clearer.

Torture throws sand into the gears of intelligence. At first harsh interrogation may well yield information, both valuable and valueless. But over time it chokes the defences of democratic societies, because their courts and political systems cannot digest it. The work of Western intelligence is becoming gummed up with legal protocol. More information has to be vetted by lawyers before being passed on. America has warned Britain that intelligence-sharing will be curtailed if its secrets are divulged in court. Equally, many worry about what will emerge in American proceedings. The first lesson of the September 11th attacks was that intelligence agencies have to work more closely; “need to know” had to yield to “need to share”. These days, alas, it has become “need to get a lawyer”.

Would you tip off Pakistan?

Fighting a global network like al-Qaeda requires a global network of intelligence agencies. The information they swap should remain confidential, so as to protect sources and (legitimate) methods. But if judges, elected politicians and voters do not have confidence in their spooks, the system unravels.

The task is to restore trust. But how? In America Barack Obama moved quickly to ban the most abusive methods of interrogation and promised to shut the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay. He released four Bush-era memos which had twisted legal doctrine until it proved that CIA interrogators could simulate drowning, among other techniques, without turning themselves into torturers.

Mr Obama’s stand against torture is a start. But the president and senior Republicans should reconsider their resistance to a “truth commission”, which could offer some immunity from prosecution to those who speak openly. An investigation would disrupt the intelligence services—but less than lengthy court battles, which would fail to stop revelations yet still leave a suspicion that wrongdoing remains hidden.

The third step is to be readier to prosecute terrorists for their crimes. The struggle against terrorism will be long; in a democracy methods have to be sustainable. Legal process is not a luxury for good times, but a tool to rob terrorists of legitimacy and show that locking them up is justified. That way those who share the terrorists’ religion or race are less likely to be silent accomplices. More could act as sources themselves.

Fighting terrorism will always be messy. Sometimes you have intelligence about an attack, but not enough evidence confidently to make an arrest; yet you don’t have the luxury of being able to wait. Western spies inevitably have to work with the secret police of Pakistan, Egypt and others who often abuse prisoners, but also have more access to jihadists than the West ever could. Here, co-operation is a matter of wary judgment, not absolutes. For the West to refuse to deal with such countries would be as wrong as for it to put its agents in rooms where electrodes touch flesh. In between, lies the murky territory in which the West must not only trade intelligence, but must also seek assurances that people are not being abused. Ultimately, if those assurances are broken, the West will have to limit its co-operation with abusive intelligence agencies—even if that might make information harder to get. Do not forget, though, that al-Qaeda has been unable to attack America since 2001 and Europe since 2005. That is in large part thanks to legitimate intelligence co-operation, not torture.

1513

Niccolo Machiavelli

[...]

Now the main foundations of all States, whether new, old, or mixed, are good laws and good arms. But since you cannot have the former without the latter, and where you have the latter, are likely to have the former, I shall here omit all discussion on the subject of laws, and speak only of arms. 

[...]

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are at once useless and dangerous, and he who holds his State by means of mercenary troops can never be solidly or securely seated. For such troops are disunited, ambitious, insubordinate, treacherous, insolent among friends, cowardly before foes, and without fear of God or faith with man. 

[...] 

And if it be said whoever has arms in his hands will act in the same way whether he be a mercenary or no, I answer that when arms have to be employed by a Prince or a Republic, the prince ought to go in person to take command as captain, the Republic should send one of her citizens, and if he prove incapable should change him, but if he prove capable should by the force of the laws confine him within proper bounds. 

[...]

For the gains resulting from mercenary arms are slow, and late, and inconsiderable, but the losses sudden and astounding.

Today’s Zaman News

Erkan Acar

A security analyst has said Ergenekon, a political crime gang accused of preparing to topple the government, must have links to the police to be able to operate.

Önder Aytaç, an instructor at the Police Academy in Ankara, said Ergenekon’s links to the police should be exposed in order to truly fight the illegal network.

He said such illegal structures have legs in the military, the police, the judiciary, corporations and the media. “The first basic course new police officers take in the United States shows a video about organized crime networks. It notes that such structures need to be in touch with the police to find breathing room.”

An investigation into Ergenekon, which has been accused of orchestrating various murders and attacks with the intention of creating chaos that would trigger a coup, revealed the names of a number of retired military officials who are suspected of being involved in the gang. One of them is retired Gen. Veli Küçük, the suspected leader. Aytaç said according to the Ergenekon indictment, which was made public in July, Küçük spoke over the phone with a high-ranking Justice Ministry official. Aytaç also said anybody who has been involved in dirty business among the police would be known by others and that what he or she had done could not be forgotten.

“You cannot erase the security forces’ memory. It’s like a computer’s memory. For example, if a police chief received a complaint about someone for being a homosexual in 1988 and if a similar report was written again 10 years later, everyone would know that the second report was written by the same person who wrote it in 1988. So someone in the police, if involved in a crime gang would be spotted easily by others.”

Aytaç said police had filed some assassinations as “unresolved” even though their perpetrators are known publicly. He claimed that the police know who is behind the murders of investigative journalist Uğur Mumcu, journalist Ahmet Taner Kışlalı and Professor Bahriye Üçok, all of them killed by bombs.

“I gave courses to 240 bomb specialists in Turkey. They say similar explosives are being used in similar assassinations. If the government can support an investigation into many of those cases, they would be solved,” Aytaç said.

‘Turkey is different today’

According to Aytaç, today’s Turkey is different from that of the 1960s, the ‘70s and the ‘80s because “more average Anatolians” have started to own the country through investing in their lives. “The children of Anatolians started to become judges, prosecutors, police chiefs, lieutenant colonels and colonels. They side with democracy.”

According to Aytaç people are more scared to be involved in illegal structures because of YouTube and small technological devices that make monitoring and recording easy. In addition, he said the media is more diverse as opposed to the period of Feb. 28 [1997, often referred to as the post-modern coup] and the coup in 1960.

“But we have people in the media linked to Ergenekon. There may be more revelations about this. This is a fight between good and evil,” he said.

Aytaç also said people are more conscious and do not believe in everything they hear and see.

“When there is an explosion or when there is an assassination or when there is a religious leader provoking the public, people ask who the forces behind them are,” he said.

Referring to Grand Unity Party (BBP) leader Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, who was involved in ultra-nationalist gangs previously, Aytaç said: “He says they were trying to save the country but following the Sept. 12, 1980 coup, the state cracked down on them along with leftists. He says he would never do what he had done before.”

The investigation into Ergenekon began in the summer of 2007, when the police discovered a house in İstanbul being used as an arms depot. As the investigation expanded, another house in the central Anatolian city of Eskişehir was discovered to have held a large number of explosives, weapons and ammunition.

During a raid of the home, police found lists of people compiled by various intelligence agencies that categorized them according to their political affiliation. Many such lists were prepared by the military’s intelligence departments in 1999 and 2000 as part of the Feb. 28 process, which started in 1997 when the military overthrew the government in an unarmed intervention.

More than 40 people are currently under arrest, accused of having links to the Ergenekon gang.

Suspects will start appearing before the court as of Oct. 20 and will face accusations that include “membership in an armed terrorist group,” “attempting to destroy the government,” “inciting people to rebel against the Republic of Turkey” and other similar crimes.

BBC News, Istanbul

Sarah Rainsford

It is a story that has set Turkey abuzz with rumour and speculation.

At its heart is an ultra-nationalist gang known as Ergenekon, exposed when 33 of its alleged members were seized in a police raid in late January.

The claims widely reported in the Turkish press ever since read like a thriller.

They allege the gang was plotting to bring down the government.

It is claimed their plan was to assassinate a string of Turkish intellectuals, including Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, fomenting chaos and provoking a military intervention in 2009.

“ When the Cold War ended those structures [illicit paramilitary gangs] went out of business, but they still existed ”

Cengiz Candar

Turkish newspaper columnist

A “menu” of targets had already been drawn up and a hitman hired when the police swooped, according to the daily Hurriyet.

Sabah newspaper linked the gang to the recent murder of three Protestant Christians and Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

Those details – apparently leaked by police – have never been officially confirmed.

The lawyers of several of the accused told the BBC only that their clients have been charged under Article 313 of the penal code for inciting armed revolt against the government.

Those still detained include retired Brig Gen Veli Kucuk, an alleged mafia boss and an ultra-nationalist lawyer who provoked numerous prosecutions against prominent Turkish writers and intellectuals – including Mr Pamuk – for “insulting Turkishness”.

‘Deep state’

A brief statement at the outset linked the arrests to a raid in Istanbul last June. A large cache of hand grenades and explosives was discovered; then and a number of former military personnel detained.

“ The Turkish military is not a criminal organisation ”

Gen Buyukanit

Turkish army chief-of-staff

There have been no further formal statements about the gang, or their plot. But that has not stopped the Ergenekon affair making top “news” for almost two weeks.

From the start, this operation has been portrayed as a blow against the “deep state” – which explains the excitement.

It is a term widely used to describe renegade members of the security forces said to act outside the law in what they judge to be Turkey’s best interests.

The phenomenon, much-discussed but never proven, is said to stretch back to Cold War times, when illicit paramilitary gangs were supposedly set up in collaboration with Western intelligence agencies to prevent the spread of communism.

“When the Cold War ended those structures went out of business, but they still existed,” claims newspaper columnist Cengiz Candar, who has no doubt a “deep state” exists.

“Then the threat changed. The target became Kurdish insurgents or Asala,” an Armenian militant organisation that targeted Turkish diplomats, he says.

For ultra-nationalists today the threats to Turkey include EU accession, Armenian genocide allegations and any talk of a peace deal to end the 24-year-old Kurdish insurgency.

‘Under watch’

In 1996, many Turks’ suspicions of a “deep state” were confirmed when a car crashed in the town of Susurluk. Inside were a senior police chief, a prominent politician and a wanted assassin.

“Susurluk revealed weird connections between state officials and those who operate outside the limits of the law. It happened at a time when we had a lot of extra-judicial killings in Turkey,” Mr Candar explains.

“But the investigation stopped just as there was speculation it was reaching very sensitive spots, even the military establishment. That only confirmed the existence of these networks in the public consciousness.”

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan clearly has his own suspicions.

He used the same “deep state” terminology to describe the police operation against Ergenekon.

“These gangs are not new in our country. Our aim is to get rid of them. We see gangs in the most important institutions. People who once worked in these institutions join these organisations,” Sabah quoted Mr Erdogan saying, immediately after the initial arrests.

Praising the police raids, he added: “There is a deep Turkey working against the deep state. This prevents them [the gangs] being as active as they once were.”

If the prime minister has proof linking Ergenekon members to active security officials, it has yet to be revealed.

“I think the government moved now to dirty these peoples’ names and reputations. It’s a warning that they’re under watch,” believes Irfan Bozan, who is following the story for the privately-owned NTV 24-hour news channel.

Army rebuttal

Mr Bozan also raises the possibility the operation is part of a continuing power struggle between a government led by devout Muslims and a staunchly secular military.

“At first it does look like an attempt to crack down on the deep state at last. But this is not a real challenge to those forces. This is an attack on those who are anti-government,” Mr Bozan suggests.

Still, the chief-of-staff of Turkey’s army was concerned enough by the suggestion the military might be tied to Ergenekon to issue a public rebuttal.

“The Turkish military is not a criminal organisation,” Gen Buyukanit told journalists last week, apparently washing his hands of the accused.

 ”Military members who commit crimes are punished by the courts. It is wrong to try to link such incidents to the military as a whole,” he said.

As the prosecutors gather their evidence the country is gripped, awaiting the next revelation, the next headline and the denouement.

After years of “deep state” rumours, many see the Ergenekon case as a real test of the government’s will to dig deep and expose any ties between illicit gangs and the state. If they do really exist.

Slavoj Žižek

Alain Badiou identified as the key feature of the XXth century the “passion of the Real /la passion du reel/”1: in contrast to the XIXth century of the utopian or “scientific” projects and ideals, plans about the future, the XXth century aimed at delivering the thing itself, at directly realizing the longer-for New Order. The ultimate and defining experience of the XXth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to the everyday social reality — the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality. Already in the trenches of the World War I, Carl Schmitt was celebrating the face to face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression, from the Lacanian Real — the Thing Antigone confronts when he violates the order of the City — to the Bataillean excess.

As Badiou demonstrated apropos of the Stalinist show trials, this violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite, in the obsession with pure appearance: in the Stalinist universe, the passion of the Real (ruthless enforcement of the Socialist development) thus culminates in ritualistic stagings of a theatrical spectacle in the truth of which no one believes. The key to this reversal resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious, since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, “really-existing men” are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new — the Stalinist revolutionary definition of man is a circular one: “man is what is to be crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man.” We have here the tension between the series of “ordinary” elements (“ordinary” men as the “material” of history) and the exceptional “empty” element (the socialist “New Man,” which is at first nothing but an empty place to be filled up with positive content through the revolutionary turmoil). In a revolution, there is no a priori positive determination of this New Man: a revolution is not legitimized by the positive notion of what Man’s essence, “alienated” in present conditions and to be realized through the revolutionary process, is — the only legitimization of a revolution is negative, a will to break with the Past. One should formulate here things in a very precise way: the reason why the Stalinist fury of purification is so destructive resides in the very fact that it is sustained by the belief that, after the destructive work of purification will be accomplished, SOMETHING WILL REMAIN, the sublime “indivisible remainder,” the paragon of the New. It is in order to conceal the fact that there is nothing beyond that, in a strictly perverse way, the revolutionary has to cling to violence as the only index of his authenticity, and it is as this level that the critics of Stalinism as a rule misperceive the cause of the Communist’s attachment to the Party. Say, when, in 1939-1941 pro-Soviet Communists twice had to change their Party line overnight (after the Soviet-German pact, it was imperialism, not, Fascism, which was elevated to the role of the main enemy; from June 22 1941, when Germany attacked Soviet Union, it was again the popular front against the Fascist beast), the brutality of the imposed changes of position was what attracted them. Along the same lines, the purges themselves exerted an uncanny fascination, especially on intellectuals: their “irrational” cruelty served as a kind of ontological proof, bearing witness to the fact that we are dealing with the Real, not just with empty plans — the Party is ruthlessly brutal, so it means business…

So, if the passion of the Real ends up with the pure semblance of the political theater, then, in an exact inversion, the “postmodern” passion of the semblance of the Last Men ends up in a kind of Real. Recall the phenomenon of “cutters” (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the virtualization of our environs: it stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of the body. As such, cutting is to be contrasted with the standard tattoo inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject’s inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order — with the cutters, the problem is the opposite one, namely the assertion of reality itself. Far from being suicidal, far from signalling a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to firmly ground our ego in our bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing. The standard report of cutters is that, after seeing the red warm blood flowing out of the self-inflicted wound, the feel alive again, firmly rooted in reality. So, although, of course, cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is nonetheless a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown. On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol… Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real — in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one. However, at the end of this process of virtualization, the inevitable Benthamian conclusion awaits us: reality is its own best semblance.

And was the bombing of the WTC with regard to the Hollywood catastrophe movies not like the snuff pornography versus ordinary sado-maso porno movies? This is the element of truth in Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s provocative statement that the planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: one can effectively perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of the XXth century art’s “passion of the real” — the “terrorists” themselves did it not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but FOR THE SPECTACULAR EFFECT OF IT. The authentic XXth century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate “effect,” sought after from digitalized special effects through reality TV and amateur pornography up to snuff movies. Snuff movies which deliver the “real thing” are perhaps the ultimate truth of virtual reality. There is an intimate connection between virtualization of reality and the emergence of an infinite and infinitized bodily pain, much stronger that the usual one: do biogenetics and Virtual Reality combined not open up new “enhanced” possibilities of TORTURE, new and unheard-of horizons of extending our ability to endure pain (through widening our sensory capacity to sustain pain, through inventing new forms of inflicting it)? Perhaps, the ultimate Sadean image on an “undead” victim of the torture who can sustain endless pain without having at his/her disposal the escape into death, also waits to become reality.

The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with cameras following him permanently. Among its predecessors, it is worth mentioning Philip Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied… The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia. And the same “derealization” of the horror went on after the WTC bombings: while the number of 6000 victims is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see — no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of the dying people… in clear contrast to the reporting from the Third World catastrophies where the whole point was to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail: Somalis dying of hunger, raped Bosnian women, men with throats cut. These shots were always accompanied with the advance-warning that “some of the images you will see are extremely graphic and may hurt children” — a warning which we NEVER heard in the reports on the WTC collapse. Is this not yet another proof of how, even in this tragic moments, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the real horror happens THERE, not HERE? /”2

So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality — in the late capitalist consumerist society, “real social life” itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in “real” life as stage actors and extras… Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the “real life” itself, its reversal into a spectral show. Among others, Christopher Isherwood gave expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel room: “American motels are unreal! /…/ they are deliberately designed to be unreal. /…/ The Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate.” Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of the “sphere” is here literally realized, as the gigantic metal sphere that envelopes and isolates the entire city. Years ago, a series of science-fiction films like Zardoz or Logan’s Run forecasted today’s postmodern predicament by extending this fantasy to the community itself: the isolated group living an aseptic life in a secluded area longs for the experience of the real world of material decay. Is the endlessly repeated shot of the plane approaching and hitting the second WTC tower not the real-life version of the famous scene from Hitchcock’s Birds, superbly analyzed by Raymond Bellour, in which Melanie approaches the Bodega Bay pier after crossing the bay on the small boat? When, while approaching the wharf, she waves to her (future) lover, a single bird (first perceived as an undistinguished dark blot) unexpectedly enters the frame from above right and hits her head.3 Was the plane which hit the WTC tower not literally the ultimate Hitchcockian blot, the anamorphic stain which denaturalized the idyllic well-known New York landscape?

The Wachowski brothers’ hit Matrix (1999) brought this logic to its climax: the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the “real reality,” he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins — what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Was it not something of the similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the “desert of the real” — to us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes in the catastrophe big productions.

When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how the unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other defining catastrophe from the beginning of the XXth century, that of Titanic: it was also a shock, but the space for it was already prepared in ideological fantasizing, since Titanic was the symbol of the might of the XIXth century industrial civilization. Does the same not hold also for these bombings? Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested — just recall the series of movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. Therein resides the rationale of the often-mentioned association of the attacks with the Hollywood disaster movies: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.

One should therefore turn around the standard reading according to which, the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite on the contrary, it is prior to the WTC collapse than we lived in our reality, perceiving the Third World horrors as something which is not effectively part of our social reality, as something which exists (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen — and what happened on September 11 is that this screen fantasmatic apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e., the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality). The fact that, after September 11, the opening of many “of the blockbuster” movies with scenes which bear a resemblance to the WTC collapse (large buildings on fire or under attack, terrorist actions…) was postponed (or the films were even shelved), is thus to be read as the “repression” of the fantasmatic background responsible for the impact of the WTC collapse. Of course, the point is not to play a pseudo-postmodern game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle, reading it as a catastrophy version of the snuff porno movies; the question we should have asked ourselves when we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: WHERE DID WE ALREADY SEE THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN?

 It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the “center of financial capitalism,” but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact of the bombings can only be accounted for only against the background of the borderline which today separates the digitalized First World from the Third World “desert of the Real.” It is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.

Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the bombings, not the real-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the master-criminal in most of the James Bond films, involved in the acts of global destruction. What one should recall here is that the only place in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity is when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal’s secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (distilling and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New York…). When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the production in a factory? And the function of Bond’s intervention, of course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the “disappearing working class.” Is it not that, in the exploding WTC towers, this violence directed at the threatening Outside turned back at us?

The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians. The letters of the deceased attackers are quoted as “chilling documents” — why? Are they not exactly what one would expect from dedicated fighters on a suicidal mission? If one takes away references to Koran, in what do they differ from, say, the CIA special manuals? Were the CIA manuals for the Nicaraguan contras with detailed descriptions on how to perturb the daily life, up to how to clog the water toilets, not of the same order — if anything, MORE cowardly? When, on September 25, 2001, the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar appealed to Americans to use their own judgement in responding to the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon rather than blindly following their government’s policy to attack his country (“You accept everything your government says, whether it is true or false. /…/ Don’t you have your own thinking? /…/ So it will be better for you to use your sense and understanding.”), were these statements, taken in a literal-abstract, decontextualized, sense, not quite appropriate? Today, more than ever, one should bear in mind that the large majority of Arabs are not fanaticized dark crowds, but scared, uncertain, aware of their fragile status — witness the anxiety the bombings caused in Egypt.

Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the “civilized” West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the “barbarian” Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than real: in Africa, EVERY SINGLE DAY more people die of AIDS than all the victims of the WTC collapse, and their death could have been easily cut back with relatively small financial means. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Ruanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York rapist gangs and a dozen or so snipers blindly targeting people who walk along the streets, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.

When, days after September 11 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting one of the WTC towers, all of us were forced to experience what the “compulsion to repeat” ans jouissance beyond the pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again, the same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest. It is when we watched on TV screen the two WTC towers collapsing, that it became possible to experience the falsity of the “reality TV shows”: even if these shows are “for real,” people still act in them — they simply play themselves. The standard disclaimer in a novel (“characters in this text are a fiction, every resemblance with the real life characters is purely contingent”) holds also for the participants of the reality soaps: what we see there are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for the real. Of course, the “return to the Real” can be given different twists: one already hears some conservatives claim that what made us so vulnerable is our very openness — with the inevitable conclusion lurking in the background that, if we are to protect our “way of life,” we will have to sacrifice some of our freedoms which were “misused” by the enemies of freedom. This logic should be rejected tout court: is it not a fact that our First World “open” countries are the most controlled countries in the entire history of humanity? In the United Kingdom, all public spaces, from buses to shopping malls, are constantly videotaped, not to mention the almost total control of all forms of digital communication.

Along the same lines, Rightist commentators like George Will also immediately proclaimed the end of the American “holiday from history” — the impact of reality shattering the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus on textuality. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with real enemies in the real world… However, WHOM to strike? Whatever the response, it will never hit the RIGHT target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot but strike the eye: if the greatest power in the world will destroy one of the poorest countries in which peasant barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate case of the impotent acting out? Afghanistan is otherwise an ideal target: a country ALREADY reduced to rubble, with no infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for the last two decades… one cannot avoid the surmise that the choice of Afghanistan will be also determined by economic considerations: is it not the best procedure to act out one’s anger at a country for which no one cares and where there is nothing to destroy? Unfortunately, the possible choice of Afghanistan recalls the anecdote about the madman who searches for the lost key beneath a street light; when asked why there when he lost the key in a dark corner backwards, he answers: “But it is easier to search under strong light!” Is not the ultimate irony that the whole of Kabul already looks like downtown Manhattan?

To succumb to the urge to act now and retaliate means precisely to avoid confronting the true dimensions of what occurred on September 11 — it means an act whose true aim is to lull us into the secure conviction that nothing has REALLY changed. The true long-term threat are further acts of mass terror in comparison to which the memory of the WTC collapse will pale — acts less spectacular, but much more horrifying. What about bacteriological warfare, what about the use of lethal gas, what about the prospect of the DNA terrorism (developing poisons which will affect only people who share a determinate genome)? In contrast to Marx who relied on the notion of fetish as a solid object whose stable presence obfuscates its social mediation, one should assert that fetishism reaches its acme precisely when the fetish itself is “dematerialized,” turned into a fluid “immaterial” virtual entity; money fetishism will culminate with the passage to its electronic form, when the last traces of its materiality will disappear — it is only at this stage that it will assume the form of an indestructible spectral presence: I owe you 1000 $, and no matter how many material notes I burn, I still owe you 1000 $, the debt is inscribed somewhere in the virtual digital space… Does the same not hold also for warfare? Far from pointing towards the XXIth century warfare, the WTC twin towers explosion and collapse in September 2001 were rather the last spectacular cry of the XXth century warfare. What awaits us is something much more uncanny: the specter of an “immaterial” war where the attack is invisible — viruses, poisons which can be anywhere and nowhere. At the level of visible material reality, nothing happens, no big explosions, and yet the known universe starts to collapse, life disintegrates… We are entering a new era of paranoiac warfare in which the biggest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. Instead of a quick acting out, one should confront these difficult questions: what will “war” mean in the XXIst century? Who will be “them,” if they are, clearly, neither states nor criminal gangs? One cannot resist the temptation to recall here the Freudian opposition of the public Law and its obscene superego double: are, along the same line, the “international terrorist organizations” not the obscene double of the big multinational corporations — the ultimate rhizomatic machine, all-present, although with no clear territorial base? Are they not the form in which nationalist and/or religious “fundamentalism” accommodated itself to global capitalism? Do they not embody the ultimate contrafiction, with their particular/exclusive content and their global dynamic functioning?

There is a partial truth in the notion of the “clash of civilizations” attested here — witness the surprise of the average American: “How is it possible that these people display and practice such a disregard for their own lives?” Is the obverse of this surprise not the rather sad fact that we, in the First World countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one’s life? When, after the bombings, even the Taliban foreign minister said that he can “feel the pain” of the American children, did he not thereby confirm the hegemonic ideological role of this Bill Clinton’s trademark phrase? It effectively appears as if the split between First World and Third World runs more and more along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent Cause. Two philosophical references immediately impose themselves apropos this ideological antagonism between the Western consummerist way of life and the Muslim radicalism: Hegel and Nietzsche. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. (One cannot but note the significant role of the stock exchange in the bombings: the ultimate proof of their traumatic impact was that the New York Stock Exchange was closed for four days, and its opening the following Monday was presented as the key sign of things returning to normal.) Furthermore, if one perceives this opposition through the lenses of the Hegelian struggle between Master and Servant, one cannot avoid noting the paradox: although we in the West are perceived as exploiting masters, it is us who occupy the position of the Servant who, since he clings to life and its pleasures, is unable to risk his life (recall Colin Powell’s notion of a high-tech war with no human casualties), while the poor Muslim radicals are Masters ready to risk their life…

However, this notion of the “clash of civilizations” has to be thoroughly rejected: what we are witnessing today are rather clashes WITHIN each civilization. Furthermore, a brief look at the comparative history of Islam and Christianity tells us that the “human rights record” of Islam (to use this anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in the past centuries, Islam was significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. NOW it is also the time to remember that it was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in the Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek legacy. While in no way excusing today’s horror acts, these facts nonetheless clearly demonstrate that we are not dealing with a feature inscribed into Islam “as such,” but with the outcome of modern socio-political conditions.

On a closer look, what IS this “clash of civilizations” effectively about? Are all real-life “clashes” not clearly related to global capitalism? The Muslim “fundamentalist” target is not only global capitalism’s corroding impact on social life, but ALSO the corrupted “traditionalist” regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. The most horrifying slaughters (those in Ruanda, Kongo, and Sierra Leone) not only took place — and are taking place — within the SAME “civilization,” but are also clearly related to the interplay of global economic interests. Even in the few cases which would vaguely fit the definition of the “clash of civilisations” (Bosnia and Kosovo, south of Sudan, etc.), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible.

Every feature attributed to the Other is already present in the very heart of the US: murderous fanaticism? There are today in the US itself more than two millions of the Rightist populist “fundamentalists” who also practice the terror of their own, legitimized by (their understanding of) Christianity. Since America is in a way “harboring” them, should the US Army have punished the US themselves after the Oklashoma bombing? And what about the way Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson reacted to the bombings, perceiving them as a sign that God lifted up its protection of the US because of the sinful lives of the Americans, putting the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, and rampant sexuality, and claiming that America got what it deserved? The fact that very same condemnation of the “liberal” America as the one from the Muslim Other came from the very heart of the Amerique profonde should give as to think. America as a safe haven? When a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings, one can no longer walk safely on the city’s streets, the irony of it was that, well before the bombings, the streets of New York were well-known for the dangers of being attacked or, at least, mugged — if anything, the bombings gave rise to a new sense of solidarity, with the scenes of young African-Americans helping an old Jewish gentlemen to cross the street, scenes unimaginable a couple of days ago.

Now, in the days immediately following the bombings, it is as if we dwell in the unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic impact, like in those brief moment after we are deeply cut, and before the full extent of the pain strikes us — it is open how the events will be symbolized, what their symbolic efficiency will be, what acts they will be evoked to justify. If nothing else, one can clearly experience yet again the limitation of our democracy: decisions are being made which will affect the fate of all of us, and all of us just wait, aware that we are utterly powerless. Even here, in these moments of utmost tension, this link is not automatic but contingent. There are already the first bad omens, like the sudden resurrection, in the public discourse, of the old Cold war term “free world”: the struggle is now the one between the “free world” and the forces of darkness and terror. The question to be asked here is, of course: who then belongs to the UNFREE world? Are, say, China or Egypt part of this free world? The actual message is, of course, that the old division between the Western liberal-democratic countries and all the others is again enforced.

The day after the bombing, I got a message from a journal which was just about to publish a longer text of mine on Lenin, telling me that they decided to postpone its publication — they considered inopportune to publish a text on Lenin immediately after the bombing. Does this not points towards the ominous ideological rearticulations which will follow, with a new Berufsverbot (prohibition to employ radicals) much stronger and more widespread than the one in the Germany of the 70s? These days, one often hears the phrase that the struggle is now the one for democracy — true, but not quite in the way this phrase is usually meant. Already, some Leftist friends of mine wrote me that, in these difficult moments, it is better to keep one’s head down and not push forward with our agenda. Against this temptation to duck out the crisis, one should insist that NOW the Left should provide a better analysis — otherwise, it concedes in advance its political AND ethical defeat in the face of the acts of quite genuine ordinary people heroism (like the passengers who, in a model of rational ethical act, overtook the kidnappers and provokes the early crush of the plane: if one is condemned to die soon, one should gather the strength and die in such a way as to prevent other people dying).

When, in the aftermath of September 11, the Americans en masse rediscovered their American pride, displaying flags and singing together in the public, one should emphasize more than ever that there is nothing “innocent” in this rediscovery of the American innocence, in getting rid of the sense of historical guilt or irony which prevented many of them to fully assume being American. What this gesture amounted to was to “objectively” assume the burden of all that being “American” stood for in the past — an exemplary case of ideological interpellation, of fully assuming one’s symbolic mandate, which enters the stage after the perplexity caused by some historical trauma. In the traumatic aftermath of September 11, when the old security seemed momentarily shattered, what more “natural” gesture than to take refuge in the innocence of the firm ideological identification? 4 However, it is precisely such moments of transparent innocence, of “return to basics,” when the gesture of identification seems “natural,” that are, from the standpoint of the critique of ideology, the most obscure one’s, even, in a certain way, obscurity itself. Let us recall another such innocently-transparent moment, the endlessly reproduced video-shot from Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Piece at the height of the “troubles” in 1989, of a tiny young man with a can who, alone, stands in front of an advancing gigantic tank, and courageously tries to prevent its advance, so that, when the tank tries to bypass him by turning right or left, them man also moves aside, again standing in its way:

“The representation is so powerful that it demolishes all other understandings. This streetscene, this time and this event, have come to constitute the compass point for virtually all Western journeys into the interior of the contemporary political and cultural life of China.”5

And, again, this very moment of transparent clarity (things are rendered at their utmost naked: a single man against the raw force of the State) is, for our Western gaze, sustained by a cobweb of ideological implications, embodying a series of oppositions: individual versus state, peaceful resistance versus state violence, man versus machine, the inner force of a tiny individual versus the impotence of the powerful machine… These implications, against the background of which the shot exerts its full direct impact, these “mediations” which sustain the shot’s immediate impact, are NOT present for a Chinese observer, since the above-mentioned series of oppositions is inherent to the European ideological legacy. And the same ideological background also overdetermines, say, our perception of the horrifying images of tiny individuals jumping from the burning WTC tower into certain death.

So what about the phrase which reverberates everywhere, “Nothing will be the same after September 11″? Significantly, this phrase is never further elaborated — it just an empty gesture of saying something “deep” without really knowing what we want to say. So our first reaction to it should be: Really? Is it, rather, not that the only thing that effectively changed was that America was forced to realize the kind of world it was part of? On the other hand, such changes in perception are never without consequences, since the way we perceive our situation determines the way we act in it. Recall the processes of collapse of a political regime, say, the collapse of the Communist regimes in the Eastern Europe in 1990: at a certain moment, people all of a sudden became aware that the game is over, that the Communists are lost. The break was purely symbolic, nothing changed “in reality” — and, nonetheless, from this moment on, the final collapse of the regime was just a question of days… What if something of the same order DID occur on September 11?

We don’t yet know what consequences in economy, ideology, politics, war, this event will have, but one thing is sure: the US, which, till now, perceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of things only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative is: will Americans decide to fortify further their “sphere,” or to risk stepping out of it? Either America will persist in, strengthen even, the deeply immoral attitude of “Why should this happen to us? Things like this don’t happen HERE!”, leading to more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside, in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the long-overdued move from “A thing like this should not happen HERE!” to “A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!”. Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE. In short, America should learn to humbly accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation.

The WTC bombings again confront us with the necessity to resist the temptation of a double blackmail. If one simply, only and unconditionally condemns it, one cannot but appear to endorse the blatantly ideological position of the American innocence under attack by the Third World Evil; if one draws attention to the deeper socio-political causes of the Arab extremism, one cannot but appear to blame the victim which ultimately got what it deserved… The only consequent solution is here to reject this very opposition and to adopt both positions simultaneously, which can only be done if one resorts to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions, each one is one-sided and false. Far from offering a case apropos of which one can adopt a clear ethical stance, we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning: from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not innocent — to adopt such an “innocent” position in today’s global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction. The same goes for the more ideological clash of interpretations: one can claim that the attack on the WTC was an attack on what is worth fighting for in democratic freedoms — the decadent Western way of life condemned by Muslim and other fundamentalists is the universe of women’s rights and multiculturalist tolerance; however, one can also claim that it was an attack on the very center and symbol of global financial capitalism. This, of course, in no way entails the compromise notion of shared guilt (terrorists are to blame, but, partially, also Americans are also to blame…) — the point is, rather, that the two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. The fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself and of its other, of the forces which resist it on “fundamentalist” ideological grounds.

Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative — the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride — is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the US got what they deserved, what they were for decades doing to others) really any better? The predominant reaction of European, but also American, Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the “feminist” point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed (“castrated”). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding one of the holocaust revisionism (what are the 6000 dead against millions in Ruanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that CIA (co)created Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument AGAINST attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely their duty to get us rid of the monster they created? The moment one thinks in the terms of “yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but one should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism,” the ethical catastrophy is already here: the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity will ALL victims. The ethical stance proper is here replaced with the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable. In short, let us make a simple mental experiment: if you detect in yourself any restraint to fully empathize with the victims of the WTC collapse, if you feel the urge to qualify your empathy with “yes, but what about the millions who suffer in Africa…”, you are not demonstrating your Third World sympathize, but merely the mauvaise foi which bears witness to your implicit patronizing racist attitude towards the Third World victims. (More precisely, the problem with such comparative statements is that they are necessary and inadmissible: one HAS to make them, one HAS to make the point that much worse horrors are taken place around the world on a daily basis — but one has to do it without getting involved in the obscene mathematics of guilt.)

It must be said that, within the scope of these two extremes (the violent retaliatory act versus the new reflection about the global situation and America’s role in it), the reaction of the Western powers till now was surprisingly considerate (no wonder it caused the violent anti-American outburst of Ariel Sharon!). Perhaps the greatest irony of the situation is that the main “collateral damage” of the Western reaction is the focus on the plight of the Afghani refugees, and, more generally, on the catastrophic food and health situation in Afghanistan, so that, sometimes, military action against Taliban is almost presented as a means to guarantee the safe delivery of the humanitarian aid — as Tony Blair said, perhaps, we will have to bomb Taliban in order to secure the food transportation and distribution. Although, of course, such large-scale publicized humanitarian actions are in themselves ideologically charged, involving the debilitating degradation of the Afghani people to helpless victims, and reducing the Taliban to a parasite terrorizing them, it is significant to acknowledge that the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan presents a much larger catastrophy than the WTC bombings.

Another way in which the Left miserably failed is that, in the weeks after the bombing, it reverted to the old mantra “Give peace a chance! War does not stop violence!” — a true case of hysterical precipitation, reacting to something which will not even happen in the expected form. Instead of the concrete analysis of the new complex situation after the bombings, of the chances it gives to the Left to propose its own interpretation of the events, we got the blind ritualistic chant “No war!”, which fails to address even the elementary fact, de facto acknowledged by the US government itself (through its postponing of the retaliatory action), that this is not a war like others, that the bombing of Afghanistan is not a solution. A sad situation, in which George Bush showed more power of reflection than most of the Left!

No wonder that anti-Americanism was most discernible in “big” European nations, especially France and Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One often hears the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second-rang (ex-)world powers, countries like United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal of “Americanization” in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe. The results of this refusal are often comical — at a recent philosophical colloquium, a French Leftist philosopher complained how, apart from him, there are now practically no French philosophers in France: Derrida is sold to American deconstructionism, the academia is overwhelmed by Anglo-Saxon cognitivism… A simple mental experiment is indicative here: let us imagine someone from Serbia claiming that he is the only remaining truly Serb philosopher — he would have been immediately denounced and ridiculed as a nationalist. The levelling of weight between larger and smaller Nation-States should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European post-Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of the wounded Narcissism of the European “great nations.” Here, a good dose of Lenin’s sensitivity for the small nations (recall his insistence that, in the relationship between large and small nations, one should always allow for a greater degree of the “small” nationalism) would be helpful. Interestingly, the same matrix was reproduced within ex-Yugoslavia: not only for the Serbs, but even for the majority of the Western powers, Serbia was self-evidently perceived as the only ethnic group with enough substance to form its own state. Throughout the 90s, even the radical democratic critics of Milosevic who rejected Serb nationalism, acted on the presupposition that, among the ex-Yugoslav republics, it is only Serbia which has democratic potential: after overthrowing Milosevic, Serbia alone can turn into a thriving democratic state, while other ex-Yugoslav nations are too “provincial” to sustain their own democratic State… is this not the echo of Friedrich Engels’ well-known scathing remarks about how the small Balkan nations are politically reactionary since their very existence is a reaction, a survival of the past?

America’s “holiday from history” was a fake: America’s peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere. These days, the predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which stroke from the Outside — and, again, apropos this gaze, one should gather the strength and apply to it also Hegel’s well-known dictum that the Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around itself. There is thus an element of truth even in the most constricted Moral Majority vision of the depraved America dedicated to mindless pleasures, in the conservative horror at this netherworld of sexploitation and pathological violence: what they don’t get is merely the Hegelian speculative identity between this netherworld and their own position of fake purity — the fact that so many fundamentalist preachers turned out to be secret sexual perverts is more than a contingent empirical fact. When the infamous Jimmy Swaggart claimed that the fact that he visited prostitutes only gave additional strength to his preaching (he knew from intimate struggle what he was preaching against), although undoubtedly hypocritical at the immediate subjective level, is nonetheless objectively true.

Can one imagine a greater irony than the fact that the first codename for the US operation against terrorists was “Infinite Justice” (later changed in response to the reproach of the American Islam clerics that only God can exert infinite justice)? Taken seriously, this name is profoundly ambiguous: either it means that the Americans have the right to ruthlessly destroy not only all terrorists but also all who gave then material, moral, ideological etc. support (and this process will be by definition endless in the precise sense of the Hegelian “bad infinity” — the work will never be really accomplished, there will always remain some other terrorist threat…); or it means that the justice exerted must be truly infinite in the strict Hegelian sense, i.e., that, in relating to others, it has to relate to itself — in short, that it has to ask the question of how we ourselves who exert justice are involved in what we are fighting against. When, on September 22 2001, Derrida received the Theodor Adorno award, he referred in his speech to the WTC bombings: “My unconditional compassion, addressed at the victims of the September 11, does not prevent me to say it loudly: with regard to this crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless.” This self-relating, this inclusion of oneself into the picture, is the only true “infinite justice.”

In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus Christ. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, “Love thy neighbor!” means “Love the Muslims!” OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.

2004

Slavoj Žižek

In a TV interview, Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a ‘vale of tears’: after the breakdown of socialism, one cannot pass directly to the abundance of a successful market economy – the limited, but real, socialist welfare and social security systems have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessarily painful; the same goes for Western Europe, where the passage from the post-World War II welfare state to the new global economy involves painful renunciations, less social security, less guaranteed social care. For Dahrendorf, the problem is best encapsulated by the simple fact that this painful passage through the ‘vale of tears’ lasts longer than the average period between (democratic) elections, sot that the temptation to postpone difficult changes for short-term electoral gain is great. For him, the paradigmatic constellation here is the disappointment of large strata of post-Communist nations with the economic results of the new democratic order: in the glorious days of 1989, they equated democracy with the abundance of Western consumerist societies; now, more than ten years later, when this abundance is still lacking, they blame democracy itself. Unfortunately, he focuses much less on the opposite temptation: if the majority resists the necessary structural changes in the economy, would one of the logical conclusions not be that, for a decade or so, an enlightened elite should take power, even by non-democratic means, to enforce the necessary measures, and thus to lay the foundations for a truly stable democracy? Along these lines, Fareed Zakaria points out how democracy can ‘catch on’ only in economically developed countries: if developing countries are ‘prematurely democratized’, the result is a populism which ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism – no wonder today’s economically most successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule. 

This inherent crisis of democracy is also the reason for the renewed popularity of Leo Strauss: the key feature which makes his political thought relevant today is the elitist notion of democracy, that is, the idea of a ‘noble lie’, of how elites should rule, aware of the actual state of things (the brutal materialist logic of power, and so forth), while feeding the people fables which keep them satisfied in their blessed ignorance. For Strauss, the lesson of the trial and execution of Socrates is that Socrates was guilty as charged: philosophy is a threat to society. By questioning the gods and the ethos of the city, philosophy undermines the citizens’ loyalty, and thus the basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is also the highest, the worthies, of all human endeavours. The resolution of this this conflict was that the philosophers should – and in fact did – keep their teachings secret, passing them on by the esoteric art of writing ‘between the lines’. The True, hidden message contained in the ‘Great Tradition’ of philosophy, from Plato to Hobbes and Locke, is that there are no gods, that morality is unfounded prejudice and that society is not grounded in nature. 

But does Strauss’s notion of esoteric knowledge not confuse two different phenomena: the cynicism of power, its unreadiness to admit publicly its own true foundations, and the subversive insights of those who aim at undermining the power system? For example, under Really Existing Socialism, there was a difference between a critical intellectual who, in order to get his message across, had to hide it in the terms of official ideology, and the cynical high-ranking member of the nomenklatura who was aware of the falsity of the basic claims of the ruling ideology. Or, in Christianity, there is an abyss which separates a Renaissance atheist trying to pass his message on in a coded way from the Renaissance pope making fun of Christian belief at a private orgy. Recall the passage from Roudinesco quoted above, directed against those who perceive gay communities as the model for totalitarian collectives which exclude otherness: 

For now, the only apocalypse that seems to threaten Western society – and Islam as well – is radical Islamic fundamentalism disposed to terrorism. Islamic threats are made by extremist bearded and barbaric polygamists who constrain women’s bodies and pit invectives against homosexuals whom they hold responsible for weakening the masculine values of God the father.

2004

Slavoj Žižek

We al know what the Hitchcockian “MacGuffin” is: the empty pretext which just serves to set the story in motion, but has no value in itself; in order to illustrate it, Hitchcock often quoted the following story. 

Two gentlemen meet on a train, and one is truck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, ‘What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?’ The other man replies, ‘That is a MacGuffin.’ ‘What is a MacGuffin?’ asks the first man. The second says, ‘A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.’ Naturally the first man says, ‘But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.’ ‘Well,’ says the second, ‘then that’s not a MacGuffin, is it?’

Do not the “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” fit the profile of the MacGuffin perfectly? (Incidentally, one of the most famous Hitchcockian MacGuffins is a potential weapon of mass destruction – the bottles with “radioactive diamonds” in Notorious!) Are they not also an elusive entity, never empirically specified? When, a couple of years ago, the UN inspectors were searching for them in Iraq, they were expected to be hidden in the most disparate and improbable places, from the desert (a rather logical location) to the (slightly irrational) cellars of the presidential palaces (so that, when the palace was bombed, they would poison Saddam and his entire entourage?), allegedly present in large quantities, yet, as if by magic, manually moved around all the time y teams of workers. The more these weapons were destroyed, the more omnipresent and omnipotent their menace seemed, as if the destruction of the greater part of them supernaturally augmented the destructive power of the remainder. As such, by definition, they can never be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous … Now that none have been found, we have reached the last line of the MacGuffin story: ‘ “Well,” said President Bush in Septmber 2003, ‘ “then that’s not a MacGuffin, is it?”‘

New York Times

William Glaberson

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration released six Guantánamo detainees to other countries on Thursday, including four Chinese Muslims whose cases drew wide attention as the president has struggled to meet his goal of closing the prison by January.

The day’s events were the biggest steps the administration has taken toward that goal. But the moves did not address central questions, including whether political pressure had made the administration back away from meeting the demand of some countries that the United States accept some prisoners for resettlement to gain their cooperation in accepting others.

The Chinese prisoners, from the largely Muslim Uighur region of western China, arrived in Bermuda early in the day and expressed relief at their first taste of freedom in more than seven years.

“Today you have let freedom ring,” one of the Uighur men, Abdul Nasser, said in a statement thanking the Bermudans. In a long legal fight, a federal appeals court had ridiculed as inadequate the government’s evidence against one of the men and the Bush administration had conceded that none of the 17 Uighurs held at Guantánamo were enemy combatants.

Two other detainees, an Iraqi and a Chadian, were released Thursday to their countries. There were indications that the United States was close to releasing a few other detainees as well.

On top of Thursday’s departures there were numerous other signs of the aggressive diplomacy on Guantánamo that has taken place largely out of public view since President Obama was inaugurated.

European countries moved Thursday toward cooperating with one another to work with the Obama administration in evaluating other detainees for possible resettlement there. There have also been recent signs that the administration is increasingly hopeful of persuading Saudi Arabia to accept some of the 96 Yemeni detainees who remain at the prison camp.

Earlier this week the Pacific nation of Palau said it, too, would accept some of the Uighur prisoners, though it was not clear if it would take all of the 13 remaining men.

The developments amounted to more movement than there had been in a long time on closing the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a seemingly intractable issue for two administrations, said Ken Gude, a specialist on detention issues at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

“This is ‘closing Guantánamo.’ This is what it looks like,” Mr. Gude said.

President George W. Bush long said he wanted to close the prison but could not overcome the considerable difficulties of where to send the men and how to assure American security.

On his second day in office, Mr. Obama committed to closing the prison within a year. After the releases on Thursday, there were 232 detainees.

But the recent events also underscored the challenges that remain.

After the departures from Guantánamo became public on Thursday, American critics of the administration accused the president of releasing terrorists.

In addition, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of China, which has long demanded the return of the Uighurs, called the four men in Bermuda terrorist suspects and asserted that the United States was ignoring international law by failing to turn them over to China. American officials have said for years that they could not return the Uighurs to China for fear of persecution or execution.

Bermuda’s acceptance of the men even brought unusual turbulence between it, a British territory, and Britain itself. The British government, which has control over Bermuda’s foreign policy, issued a terse statement indicating that Bermuda’s premier, Ewart F. Brown, did not advise it that Bermuda was planning to take the detainees.

The British statement said it would “carry out a security assessment of the men.” The statement added, “We have underlined to the Bermuda government that it should have consulted the U.K.”

Lawyers for the Iraqi who was released, Jawad Jabbar Sadkhan al-Sahlani, said he was an innocent man caught in the net of Guantánamo, an assertion that focused attention on disputes over the isolated prison that the Obama administration is trying to push into the past.

The criticism from at home and the intensity of the reactions abroad illustrate the challenges the Obama administration faces in closing Guantánamo, detention policy experts said.

They said the recent moves raised new questions about the administration’s strategy for closing the prison. Indications that the administration had negotiated with other countries to accept perhaps all of the 17 Uighurs made it appear that it had backed down in the face of intense political pressure in Congress and around the country from what had seemed to be its plan to resettle some of the Uighurs in the United States, the experts said.

Sarah E. Mendelson, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that there had been an understanding across the political spectrum that the Uighurs, enemies of China whose terrorism ties were sharply disputed, were the least controversial detainees to bring into the United States for potential release.

If the Obama administration has no plans to accept any detainees, Ms. Mendelson said, other countries are likely to ask, “Why are you asking us to do this if you are not willing to?”

Andrew Jacobs contributed reporting from Beijing, Judy Dempsey from Berlin and Sharon Otterman from New York.