New York Times

Agence France-Presse

SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian government might accept some detainees who are released from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for resettlement at the request of the United States, but only after a rigorous case-by-case assessment, an Australian newspaper reported on Saturday.

“Australia, along with a number of other countries, has been approached to consider resettling detainees from Guantánamo Bay,” a spokesman for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the newspaper, The Weekend Australian.

“Any determination for an individual to come to Australia would be made on a case-by-case basis,” the spokesman was quoted as saying. “All persons accepted to come to Australia would have to meet Australia’s strict legal requirements and go through the normal and extremely rigorous assessment processes.”

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility after taking office next month, which has raised the question of what to do with the remaining 250 inmates who are being held without charge or trial.

Some of the prisoners are no longer considered a threat by American authorities and will be resettled.

The prisoners come from various countries, mostly in the Middle East, and some may want to return home. Others, however, face arrest in their homelands and could be subject to torture or lengthy incarceration.

European nations have reacted cautiously to the idea of resettling former Guantánamo Bay inmates, with some countries seeking a concerted European effort and others already opposing the idea.

The Netherlands has ruled out accepting any former inmates, despite broad European support for Mr. Obama’s promise to shut down the military detention center.

Portugal and Germany have said in recent weeks that they might accept detainees, but France was cautious, welcoming the camp’s shutdown but calling for a common European position before it would commit to participating.

Two Australians who had been held at Guantánamo have already returned home.

One, David Hicks, was held for five years before being convicted last year of providing material support for terrorism. He was sent home to Australia to serve nine months in jail before his release. The other Australian, Mamdouh Habib, was released from Guantánamo Bay without charge in 2005.

George W. Bush 

transcribed speech

Fort Bragg 

Thank you. Please be seated. Good evening. I’m pleased to visit Fort Bragg, “Home of the Airborne and Special Operations Forces.” It’s an honor to speak before you tonight.

My greatest responsibility as President is to protect the American people. And that’s your calling, as well. I thank you for your service, your courage, and your sacrifice. I thank your families, who support you in your vital work. The soldiers and families of Fort Bragg have contributed mightily to our efforts to secure our country and promote peace. America is grateful, and so is your Commander-in-Chief.

The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. The war reached our shores on September the 11th, 2001. The terrorists who attacked us — and the terrorists we face — murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent. Their aim is to remake the Middle East in their own grim image of tyranny and oppression — by toppling governments, by driving us out of the region, and by exporting terror.

To achieve these aims, they have continued to kill — in Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Bali, and elsewhere. The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken. After September the 11th, I made a commitment to the American people: This nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will defend our freedom. We will take the fight to the enemy.

Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington, and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. The commander in charge of coalition operations in Iraq — who is also senior commander at this base — General John Vines, put it well the other day. He said: “We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.”

Our mission in Iraq is clear. We’re hunting down the terrorists. We’re helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We’re advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren.

The work in Iraq is difficult and it is dangerous. Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country. And tonight, I will explain the reasons why.

Some of the violence you see in Iraq is being carried out by ruthless killers who are converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom. Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who’ve come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and others. They are making common cause with criminal elements, Iraqi insurgents, and remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime who want to restore the old order. They fight because they know that the survival of their hateful ideology is at stake. They know that as freedom takes root in Iraq, it will inspire millions across the Middle East to claim their liberty, as well. And when the Middle East grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the terrorists will lose their sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for turning that region into a base for attacks on America and our allies around the world.

Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate. Hear the words of Osama Bin Laden: “This Third World War is raging” in Iraq.¹ “The whole world is watching this war.” He says it will end in “victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.” The terrorists know that the outcome will leave them emboldened, or defeated. So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take.

We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who exploded car bombs along a busy shopping street in Baghdad, including one outside a mosque. We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who sent a suicide bomber to a teaching hospital in Mosul. We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who behead civilian hostages and broadcast their atrocities for the world to see.

These are savage acts of violence, but they have not brought the terrorists any closer to achieving their strategic objectives. The terrorists — both foreign and Iraqi — failed to stop the transfer of sovereignty. They failed to break our Coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies. They failed to incite an Iraqi civil war. They failed to prevent free elections. They failed to stop the formation of a democratic Iraqi government that represents all of Iraq’s diverse population. And they failed to stop Iraqis from signing up in large number with the police forces and the army to defend their new democracy.

The lesson of this experience is clear: The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom. The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September the 11th, if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi, and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like Bin Laden. For the sake of our nation’s security, this will not happen on my watch.

A little over a year ago, I spoke to the nation and described our coalition’s goals in Iraq. I said that America’s mission in Iraq is to defeat an enemy and give strength to a friend — a free, representative government that is an ally in the war on terror, and a beacon of hope in a part of the world that is desperate for reform. I outlined the steps we would take to achieve this goal: We would hand authority over to a sovereign Iraqi government. We would help Iraqis hold free elections by January 2005. We would continue helping Iraqis rebuild their nation’s infrastructure and economy. We would encourage more international support for Iraq’s democratic transition, and we would enable Iraqis to take increasing responsibility for their own security and stability.

In the past year, we have made significant progress. One year ago today, we restored sovereignty to the Iraqi people. In January 2005, more than 8 million Iraqi men and women voted in elections that were free and fair, and took time on — and took place on time. We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their country. Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder. Our progress has been uneven, but progress is being made.

We’re improving roads and schools and health clinics. We’re working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity, and water. And together with our allies, we’ll help the new Iraqi government deliver a better life for its citizens.

In the past year, the international community has stepped forward with vital assistance. Some 30 nations have troops in Iraq, and many others are contributing non-military assistance. The United Nations is in Iraq to help Iraqis write a constitution and conduct their next elections. Thus far, some 40 countries and three international organizations have pledged about 34 billion dollars in assistance for Iraqi reconstruction. More than 80 countries and international organizations recently came together in Brussels to coordinate their efforts to help Iraqis provide for their security and rebuild their country. And next month, donor countries will meet in Jordan to support Iraqi reconstruction.

Whatever our differences in the past, the world understands that success in Iraq is critical to the security of our nations. As German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said at the White House yesterday, “There can be no question a stable and democratic Iraq is in the vested interest of not just Germany, but also Europe.” Finally, we have continued our efforts to equip and train Iraqi security forces. We made gains in both the number and quality of those forces. Today Iraq has more than 160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of missions. Iraqi forces have fought bravely, helping to capture terrorists and insurgents in Najaf and Samarra, Fallujah and Mosul. And in the past month, Iraqi forces have led a major anti-terrorist campaign in Baghdad called Operation Lightning, which has led to the capture of hundreds of suspected insurgents. Like free people everywhere, Iraqis want to be defended by their own countrymen, and we are helping Iraqis assume those duties.

The progress in the past year has been significant, and we have a clear path forward. To complete the mission, we will continue to hunt down the terrorists and insurgents. To complete the mission, we will prevent al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends. And the best way to complete the mission is to help Iraqis build a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.

So our strategy going forward has both a military track and a political track. The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists, and that is why we are on the offense. And as we pursue the terrorists, our military is helping to train Iraqi security forces so that they can defend their people and fight the enemy on their own. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

We’ve made progress, but we have a lot of — a lot more work to do. Today Iraqi security forces are at different levels of readiness. Some are capable of taking on the terrorists and insurgents by themselves. A large number can plan and execute anti-terrorist operations with coalition support. The rest are forming and not yet ready to participate fully in security operations. Our task is to make the Iraqi units fully capable and independent. We’re building up Iraqi security forces as quickly as possible, so they can assume the lead in defeating the terrorists and insurgents.

Our coalition is devoting considerable resources and manpower to this critical task. Thousands of coalition troops are involved in the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces. NATO is establishing a military academy near Baghdad to train the next generation of Iraqi military leaders, and 17 nations are contributing troops to the NATO training mission. Iraqi army and police are being trained by personnel from Italy, Germany, Ukraine, Turkey, Poland, Romania, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Today, dozens of nations are working toward a common objective: an Iraq that can defend itself, defeat its enemies, and secure its freedom.

To further prepare Iraqi forces to fight the enemy on their own, we are taking three new steps: First, we are partnering coalition units with Iraqi units. These coalition-Iraqi teams are conducting operations together in the field. These combined operations are giving Iraqis a chance to experience how the most professional armed forces in the world operate in combat.

Second, we are embedding coalition “transition teams” inside Iraqi units. These teams are made up of coalition officers and non-commissioned officers who live, work, and fight together with their Iraqi comrades. Under U.S. command, they are providing battlefield advice and assistance to Iraqi forces during combat operations. Between battles, they are assisting the Iraqis with important skills, such as urban combat, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance techniques.

Third, we’re working with the Iraqi Ministries of Interior and Defense to improve their capabilities to coordinate anti-terrorist operations. We’re helping them develop command and control structures. We’re also providing them with civilian and military leadership training, so Iraq’s new leaders can effectively manage their forces in the fight against terror.

The new Iraqi security forces are proving their courage every day. More than 2,000 members of Iraqi security forces have given their lives in the line of duty. Thousands more have stepped forward, and are now training to serve their nation. With each engagement, Iraqi soldiers grow more battle-hardened, and their officers grow more experienced. We’ve learned that Iraqis are courageous and that they need additional skills. And that is why a major part of our mission is to train them so they can do the fighting, and then our troops can come home.

I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I. Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake. Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done. It would send the wrong message to our troops, who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve. And it would send the wrong message to the enemy, who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed, and not a day longer.

Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don’t you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are, in fact, working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders.

The other critical element of our strategy is to help ensure that the hopes Iraqis expressed at the polls in January are translated into a secure democracy. The Iraqi people are emerging from decades of tyranny and oppression. Under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Shia and Kurds were brutally oppressed, and the vast majority of Sunni Arabs were also denied their basic rights, while senior regime officials enjoyed the privileges of unchecked power. The challenge facing Iraqis today is to put this past behind them, and come together to build a new Iraq that includes all of its people.

They’re doing that by building the institutions of a free society, a society based on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and equal justice under law. The Iraqis have held free elections and established a Transitional National Assembly. The next step is to write a good constitution that enshrines these freedoms in permanent law. The Assembly plans to expand its constitutional drafting committee to include more Sunni Arabs. Many Sunnis who opposed the January elections are now taking part in the democratic process, and that is essential to Iraq’s future.

After a constitution is written, the Iraqi people will have a chance to vote on it. If approved, Iraqis will go to the polls again, to elect a new government under their new, permanent constitution. By taking these critical steps and meeting their deadlines, Iraqis will bind their multiethnic society together in a democracy that respects the will of the majority and protects minority rights.

As Iraqis grow confident that the democratic progress they are making is real and permanent, more will join the political process. And as Iraqis see that their military can protect them, more will step forward with vital intelligence to help defeat the enemies of a free Iraq. The combination of political and military reform will lay a solid foundation for a free and stable Iraq.

As Iraqis make progress toward a free society, the effects are being felt beyond Iraq’s borders. Before our coalition liberated Iraq, Libya was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons. Today the leader of Libya has given up his chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Across the broader Middle East, people are claiming their freedom. In the last few months, we’ve witnessed elections in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. These elections are inspiring democratic reformers in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our strategy to defend ourselves and spread freedom is working. The rise of freedom in this vital region will eliminate the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder, and make our nation safer.

We have more work to do, and there will be tough moments that test America’s resolve. We’re fighting against men with blind hatred — and armed with lethal weapons — who are capable of any atrocity. They wear no uniform; they respect no laws of warfare or morality. They take innocent lives to create chaos for the cameras. They are trying to shake our will in Iraq, just as they tried to shake our will on September the 11th, 2001. They will fail. The terrorists do not understand America. The American people do not falter under threat, and we will not allow our future to be determined by car bombers and assassins.

America and our friends are in a conflict that demands much of us. It demands the courage of our fighting men and women; it demands the steadfastness of our allies; and it demands the perseverance of our citizens. We accept these burdens, because we know what is at stake. We fight today because Iraq now carries the hope of freedom in a vital region of the world, and the rise of democracy will be the ultimate triumph over radicalism and terror. And we fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand. So we’ll fight them there; we’ll fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.

America has done difficult work before. From our desperate fight for independence to the darkest days of a Civil War, to the hard-fought battles against tyranny in the 20th century, there were many chances to lose our heart, our nerve, or our way. But Americans have always held firm, because we have always believed in certain truths. We know that if evil is not confronted, it gains in strength and audacity, and returns to strike us again. We know that when the work is hard, the proper response is not retreat; it is courage. And we know that this great ideal of human freedom entrusted to us in a special way, and that the ideal of liberty is worth defending.

In this time of testing, our troops can know: The American people are behind you. Next week, our nation has an opportunity to make sure that support is felt by every soldier, sailor, airman, Coast Guardsman, and Marine at every outpost across the world. This 4th of July, I ask you to find a way to thank the men and women defending our freedom — by flying the flag, sending a letter to our troops in the field, or helping the military family down the street. The Department of Defense has set up a website — AmericaSupportsYou.mil. You can go there to learn about private efforts in your own community. At this time when we celebrate our freedom, let us stand with the men and women who defend us all.

To the soldiers in this hall, and our servicemen and women across the globe: I thank you for your courage under fire and your service to our nation. I thank our military families — the burden of war falls especially hard on you. In this war, we have lost good men and women who left our shores to defend freedom and did not live to make the journey home. I’ve met with families grieving the loss of loved ones who were taken from us too soon. I’ve been inspired by their strength in the face of such great loss. We pray for the families. And the best way to honor the lives that have been given in this struggle is to complete the mission.

I thank those of you who have re-enlisted in an hour when your country needs you. And to those watching tonight who are considering a military career, there is no higher calling than service in our Armed Forces. We live in freedom because every generation has produced patriots willing to serve a cause greater than themselves. Those who serve today are taking their rightful place among the greatest generations that have worn our nation’s uniform. When the history of this period is written, the liberation of Afghanistan and the liberation of Iraq will be remembered as great turning points in the story of freedom.

After September the 11th, 2001, I told the American people that the road ahead would be difficult, and that we would prevail. Well, it has been difficult — and we are prevailing. Our enemies are brutal, but they are no match for the United States of America, and they are no match for the men and women of the United States military.

May God bless you all.

Hürriyet (Newspaper)

Yusuf Kanlı

While still serving in office, when he was presented with a complaint that some security personnel engaged in the fight against the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, terrorism were subjecting people to summary execution, the most senior politician of the country, former President Süleyman Demirel was reported to have said, “The state cannot murder its citizens.” The parliamentary Human Rights Commission of the time reportedly did not take such reports seriously either, saying the claims were products of some foul imagination.

With a pragmatic and rather ignorant approach it could be argued that if there is a secessionist terrorist campaign continuing since 1984 and the security forces have been trying to battle that threat to national security, territorial and national integrity of the country, because of the continued impact of the continued difficult conditions and atmosphere of confrontation on the psychology of the security forces there might be some elements both in police anti-terror task force and in the military to get involved in some summary executions, which is outlawed in the country.

That will be, of course, a rather simplistic approach incompatible at all with either the notion of supremacy of law, sacredness of life or the principle that the most fundamental one of individual rights is the right of living.

Yet, revelations by “informants,” the accuracy of which cannot be verified so far, continue stressing that some civilians, as well some village guards suspected of abetting, supporting, providing information to the separatist gang or engaged in some illicit trade, such as drug trafficking, were “executed” by security personnel. There are claims that bodies of some of the victims of such summary executions were thrown in wells, or are buried secretly at locations far away from view.

A bad record

It is a fact also that as part of policy at the time, villagers were uprooted from their homes, forced to migrate and hundreds of villages were burnt. It is a fact that not only at the Diyarbakır Prison where inmates were forced to eat human excrement, villagers were forced to eat excrement in village squares in full view of other villagers. It is a fact that many people were “convinced” under torture to testify and claim responsibility for many crimes that they did not hear about until the start of their interrogation. It is a fact that this country has lost over 40,000 people in PKK related violence, most of them civilians. It is a fact that over the past almost three decades of PKK related violence, over 17,000 people were declared missing and presumed dead. It is a fact that there are cemeteries in many areas in southeastern Anatolian provinces for victims of terrorism or terrorists whose bodies were not claimed by the families or simply whose identities could not be established. The state cannot murder, but it is a fact that once there was a prime minister, a blonde lady, who was saying “to kill for the state and being killed for the state are equally sacred for us.” That is, there were people who were killing people assuming that they were killing for the state or for the defense of the state.

Crime is crime

Irrespective by who, in what outfit, where, how and in what psychological condition such crimes were committed, there can be no excuse. A crime is a crime, no one should try to ignore or present such crimes as certain acts that might be overseen because of “conditions” or some other pretext. All such claims have to be taken very seriously, investigated and whoever was responsible for them should be brought to justice. This is a duty for the state, the government, security forces and of course the Turkish judiciary.

Such investigations should not be mixed up with politically tainted probes such as Ergenekon, prejudices should be avoided and the utmost care should be attached to verification of the claims backed by hard evidence, as it would not be a surprise for anyone to eventually figure out that at least some of the claims might be baseless and aimed at nothing more than to harm the image of the state and the security forces.

It was shocking for me to read this week the latest “Wells of Death” book by eminent journalist Saygı Öztürk on the Şemdinli events. Öztürk skillfully documented how the gang staged some heinous acts and then successfully placed the blame on the security forces. Such investigations have to be continued with that awareness and should go deep and draw out what indeed might have happened. That is, such investigations should not be allowed to become propaganda tools of the separatist gang or their domestic and foreign political agents.

American Isolation & The Middle East

a talk by Ammiel Alcalay

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE WAR ON TERROR

This talk was given on November 7, 2002 at Cornell University.

p a l m P R E S S

Printed in an edition of 300 in January, 2003.

Copyright © 2003 by Ammiel Alcalay.

All rights reserved.

Thanks to Joel Kuszai, Factory School, and Jennifer Savran at LunaSea Bindery and Press, Ithaca, NY. A recording of this talk is available in the Digital Audio Library at www.factoryschool.org

Author’s Note

I would like to express heartfelt thanks to Barry Maxwell and Shelley Wong for inviting and hosting me; everyone at the Cornell Forum for Justice and Peace for supporting and sponsoring my visit; Deborah Starr for serving as an interlocutor, and Jane Sprague for offering to publish this talk and then actually carrying through with her offer. The talk is a literal transcription, with some changes here and there to make things clearer. The Q & A session following the talk has been edited down and added to for clarity and continuity.

The Cornell Forum for Justice and Peace:

www.geocities.com/cfjusticepeace/

Palm Press, 9 Puhalka Road

Newfi eld, NY 14867

Poetry, Politics and Translation:

American Isolation & The Middle East

It’s a pleasure to be in a forum where one can talk about, talk across a variety of ways of thinking about things and doing things in what clearly is a kind of activist political context. So I’m very happy to be able to explore some recent work and ideas and see where it takes us. I’m going to preface my talk, which is going to be very broad and may jump from place to place – and because we’re not a huge group I’d even entertain brief interruptions for clarifi cations, if need be, so don’t feel that I’m just speaking at you. I want to start out with a couple of quotes, one being George Bush senior at his inaugural, when he said:

“The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.” A very important statement I think. First of all, the idea of memory which I’ll be coming back to, certainly in my own case, in my own work. And another quote I just saw very recently, having to do with the appointment of poet Dana Gioia to head the NEA. The New York Times wrote, without irony, “He is a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush and his father before that. His poetry is not political.” And it struck me – one can always seek proof texts, you just need to open the paper to find them. Part of what I want to talk about is how we got to a place where sentences like that can appear in the paper of record without irony. What does it mean when the “political” is only that which is not predominant? So I want, through a very long involved story, to somehow try to take us through that question. Part of it has to do with what has 3 come to be called American Exceptionalism. I think that if any of you read the recent Perry Anderson piece in the New Left Review, you would have found an excellent, very succinct definition of American Exceptionalism. We are on a very large continent with oceans on either side, with a migrant population that doesn’t have any real cultural memory rooted to the places they’re in. And he laid out, actually, a very concise geographical and social /political definition which I found very useful.

In my own case, as a fi rst generation American, I do have a certain lien on some other world, growing up with other languages and this has always been, in my own life, and in my own mind and in my own relationship to writing and to poetry and to poetics, this has always been an issue. What is it that I can recognize in a text that comes from some other part of the world that embodies some kind of collective memory, some kind of collective moment? And what is it in American texts that almost does the opposite? That almost declares its solitude. That declares its aloneness. And that’s something that has been, in my own work, a very deep issue and part of the work that I’ve done is fi guring out how to make this journey, how to bridge these gaps, how to find, in some sense, texts that have not yet been written by Americans because that moment hasn’t come and introduce them into the American language in order to challenge writers to try to fi nd those places in themselves that they haven’t yet gotten to. And I think that’s something that certainly has happened with some of the texts in Keys to the Garden and certainly with the works of Semezdin Mehmedinovic, the Bosnian poet, who I think expresses things that could certainly be expressed in this country but in many cases have not yet been expressed quite that way. I’ll get to that later.

So that’s one part of the story. Now, another part of the story is that there is a remarkable, remarkable divorce between the intellectual life of the United States and the intellectual life of the so-called Middle East. I mean, it is a remarkable, remarkable lack of – first of all, there’s ignorance, there’s a lack of any sense of empathy, solidarity, sympathy, etc. Particularly given the fact that the intellectual class of that part of the world is, as a class, an oppressed class, a species in danger. And it’s remarkable in thinking about that, when one, for instance, uses the rhetoric of human rights, and thinks about a report on human rights, one’s first reaction is to be angry, shocked, etc. at the extent of the repression by the regime in question rather than to think of that as an index of the extent of resistance that is being carried out. And particularly in the Middle East, this is something that is actually quite shocking, I think, in terms of the total lack of communication, of interconnectivity between those individuals, groups, etc. in that part of the world and people here. And again, I’m referring particularly to intellectuals, writers, academics, cultural fi gures, and so on. So that’s another thing that I want to hold in abeyance. 

Two of the examples that I’m going to be looking at and thinking about have to do with the lenses, the filters through which we have seen that part of the world. The two that I want to concentrate on in a little bit of detail are Algeria and Israel – Algeria of the decolonization period in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, up until the mid-60s and its relationship to African American culture here, particularly, and a sense of internationalism that no longer really exists in that form. And Israel of the very radical shift, post June War, post 1967 in which, slowly, as we get into the late 1960s, early 1970s, practically everything that we know about the Middle East is filtered through the normative narrative of Israel and Zionism. I want to examine a little bit what the meanings of those shifts are and some of the very interesting and odd and, from this perspective, remarkable facts from that period, especially in relationship to Algeria.

As an aside, now that I’ve mentioned it, now that I’ve opened up Algeria, I’ll just do a tiny bit of earlier history, having to do with the relationship of the United States of the post Revolutionary period, 1780s, 1790s, to Algeria and Morocco, then called the Barbary States. You may or may not be aware of this, but Morocco was the second country to recognize the United States, after France. But the United States did not send an envoy for a number of years to reciprocate and the Moroccans at a certain point started to get bugged about this and they began capturing some ships, taking some captives and Algeria also, at a number of points, declared war on the United States and basically this all had to do with sea rights and triangulated confl icts with France and so forth. In 1800, while there were about one million enslaved Africans in the United States, there were about 700 American captives in Algeria. The interesting thing about this is that a number of those people, upon return, wrote captivity narratives and a number of those captivity narratives were essentially abolitionist and anti-slavery tracts. Because what they were doing was comparing the conditions that they lived in under “slavery” in Algeria to the conditions that were dominant in the United States for enslaved peoples.

There’s quite a remarkable history to this, and some evidence that Frederick Douglass read, that some of those texts were published in something called “The Columbia Orator.” And just as one last aside to this, I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard or listened to an earlier version of what becomes our National Anthem by Francis Scott Key written to honor Decatur after Tripoli is vanquished in 1805. It’s quite chilling in this context, in the present context. I’ll just read you two of the last stanzas.

“In conflict resistless each toil they endur’d,

Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war’s desolation:

And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscur’d, By the light of the star-spangled fl ag of our nation, Where each fl aming star gleam’d a meteor of war, And a turban’d head bowed to the terrible glare. Then mixt with the olive the laurel shall wave, And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave. Our fathers who stand on the summit of fame, shall exultingly hear, of their sons, the proud story, How their young bosoms glow’d with a patriot fl ame, 6 How they fought, how they fell, in the midst of their glory, How triumphant they rode, o’er the wandering fl ood, And stain’d the blue waters with infi del blood;

How mixt with the olive, the laurel did wave, And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.” Somewhat chilling, I think, in the present context. Another issue overlays all of this which seems to me also relevant to the further part of the story, and that is the following: it seems to me that in the present U.S. academy, the predominance of a certain kind of French theory is also part of a story, but only a small part of the story, because, it seems to me that the way theory is being presented in the U.S. academy, under the guise of a politicization of studies, has actually depoliticized the context of that theory, much of which arises out of debates over decolonization, arises out of debates over identity, over otherness, over the body, the body literally being the body that can be tortured, and if one goes back to earlier sources, and earlier texts and looks at how these things were being discussed and being debated in the 1950s it’s an intellectual history that is starting, interestingly enough, to come back, slowly. And I think a very important one. And I think that in many cases, a lot of the kind of texts people are reading are simply the wrong texts. I think that one needs to fi nd another catalog of texts that will open up issues that are much more relevant to the political world and to political life and to the way the world has been apportioned since the Second World War.

The academic politics of it has to do with what I think of as cultural space. Cultural space can only be occupied by so much, once it’s fi lled, it’s fi lled, and if something is there, other things can’t get in and one of the reasons for the predominance of this kind of theory is that it excludes the theoretical aspects of American poetry, of American poetics, of American writers and what it does is it relegates writing to the creative department, to the non-thinking department. And that has been tremendously 7 detrimental to coming to ways of defi ning ourselves and some of the people that I’ll talk about further, particularly Charles Olson, who I’ll spend a little bit of time on, presents in many ways a much more radical project of knowledge – what is the knowledge that one should know and how should one get to it – than a lot of what is being presented now as theoretically radical. So those are the things that I’m laying out. I want to go back and do a little bit of actual tracing of some of these histories and see where the twain meets and where it separates. Out of curiosity, just in this room, how many people are familiar with or have read the work of Robert Duncan? How many people have read or are familiar with the work of Michel Foucault? I see, point proven.

In 1944, Robert Duncan wrote a text called “The Homosexual in Society” which was published in Dwight McDonald’s “Politics” and at the same time that he had written that text, he had sent a long poem, I think an elegy, to the Kenyon Review, which was then edited by John Crowe Ransom, and in the interim, between the time that Ransom was supposed to answer him, Wallace Stevens had sent in “Aesthetique du Mal” and in this interlude of time, Ransom also read “The Homosexual in Society” and had a fi t and wrote back to Duncan and said, “I read the poem as an advertisement for a notice of overt homosexuality and we are not in the market for literature of this type. I cannot agree with you that we should publish it…I cannot agree with your position that homosexuality is not abnormal.” And basically what this did for Robert Duncan is it removed him from any possibility of entering a normative literary canon, practically still, I would think, because there is no Collected Poems of Robert Duncan, there is no Collected Prose of Robert Duncan, and so on and so forth. Now in that text, “The Homosexual in Society,” there’s a remarkable sentence where Duncan is writing about – again, I was looking for precedence, uses of language, where are things coming from – it’s a 1944 text, and Duncan writes, he’s 8 talking about his own very rarifi ed, private world of a group of homosexuals and he’s discussing this in relationship to Hart Crane and the fate that Hart Crane has had at the hands of critics, and Crane’s own attitude toward his sexuality. Duncan writes:

“Where the Zionists of homosexuality have laid claim to a Palestine of their own, asserting in their miseries, their nationality; Crane’s suffering, his rebellion, and his love are sources of poetry for him not because they are what make him different from, superior to, mankind, but because he saw in them his link with mankind; he saw in them his sharing in universal human experience.”

So at this date, he’s making a distinction between a universal and a particular. And this is part of the whole story that I want to trace: how do we get from ideas of universalism, ideas of an internationalism or of possible internationalism to ideas of very narrowly construed, narrowly confi gured ethnic or national identities? And then, even once those expand, they still become based on that; in other words, even when you have a plurality of ethnicities or national identities, they’re still based on a narrowly construed notion of what an identity is.

Now that’s one part of it. The second part, it seems to me, may be of more significance, and to get to it I want to say a few things about Charles Olson, and particularly his relationship to Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound, as I’m sure you know, is really the only American that I’m aware of who was charged with treason in the Second World War. And Ezra Pound, literally, while he was being interrogated in Pisa, in May of 1945, the CIA was recruiting ex- Nazis by the truckload to engage in a variety of nefarious and not so nefarious operations in this country. But Pound was turned into an example of some kind and was put on trial and was eventually considered unfit for trial and was incarcerated in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington. While he was in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, Charles Olson, who had by then done a lot of work on Melville, still – for all intents and purposes – a yet “undiscovered” American writer, except for the work of Raymond Weaver and a few others, preceding Olson. Charles Olson began visiting Pound at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital and there’s a remarkable record of those visits in a book edited by Catherine Seelye, I believe. How many people have read or encountered the work of Charles Olson? Same as those who know Robert Duncan, that’s good. Olson had been quite high in the Democratic Party. At a certain point, he completely quit politics after the death of FDR, in disgust and in premonition of what was to come, in sensing, really, the Cold War. And he looked at Pound with a combination of a young writer with great admiration and somebody coming from an immigrant working class background who was disgusted with Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism. So Olson was really trying to, in his best writings about this period and about Pound, Olson was trying to fi gure out how Pound approached authority, with authority. And how the real issues that should have been brought up by Pound’s trial were not even touched, were not even broached. And he wrote a text called “This is Yeats Speaking,” in which he puts himself in the voice of W.B. Yeats and he questions, he writes:

“The soul is stunned in me, O writers, readers, fighters, fearers, for another reason, that you have allowed this to happen without a trial of your own…There is a court you leave silent – history present, the issue the larger concerns of authority than a state, Heraclitus and Marx called, perhaps some consideration of descents and metamorphoses, form and the elimination of intellect… What have you to help you hold in a single thought, reality and justice?”

This, I think, is the question that Olson opens up in 1945, 1946 and essentially, also, is at the root of his defi nition of the postmodern. Olson is the one, in a letter to Robert Creeley, who fi rst uses the term ‘postmodern’ in the sense that we might think of it, although as far as I know the fi rst use of it is chronological, by Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History. I don’t know why exactly, it seems like an arbitrary date, but he dates the 11 postmodern at 1870, I think, for some reason, I don’t know the exact reference, but I remember him coming up with that. But, in Olson’s case, it’s a different thing, and I want to get to that but fi rst a few other things. I think this is a very important moment, because I think it’s a moment that, fi rst of all, Pound gets the Bollingen Prize in 1949 and that prize is championed by, amongst others, John Crowe Ransom who had rejected Duncan and placed Duncan outside the pale. Here, I think you really have, very ironically, through the body of Ezra Pound, a total divorce between aesthetics, art and politics, so that the debate around whether to give Pound the prize or not is about, well, the poetry is so great, the poetry is transcendent, it goes beyond any of the politics. So the politics then becomes, curiously, expendable. It doesn’t matter what his politics are and I think that’s partially how we get to a sentence like the one that I led the talk off with, that “his poetry is not political.”

Now, Olson, let me just give you a couple of things for Olson. I’ll do this slightly chronologically, so I’m going to start with – again in one of these notes, following visits to Pound, Olson writes, this is 1945, he says:

“If we the people shall save ourselves from our leaders’ shame, if we the people shall survive our disgust, if we the people shall end our own confusion, we must see this big war for the lie it has become. Make no mistake, it is a lie. Unwrap the charters and pacts, recognize the deals, stomach the people’s hope for security, tighten the soil over the men, always little men who are dead. Call the big war what it is – a defeat for the people.” Olson was trying to look through the case of Pound to see how Pound’s mistaken authority could be summoned as a position of authority to bring up other possibilities of the possibility of authority. And he is somebody who clearly leaves offi cial life, somebody who had access to power, who could have made a career out of politics, who could have made a career out of Washington, etc. But he simply chose, right at the beginning of the 12 cold war, like, I believe, many of the other important American poets and writers, to opt out, to go underground and to work basically in isolation. None of the poets associated with this group or associated with what has come to be called the New American Poetry have really any academic affi liation professionally of any kind to speak of, until the mid-60s, and that is pretty tenuous as well, so the whole, kind of, schema of professionalization that we might be used to now was so completely alien, so completely removed from the reality of these people and Olson’s attitude towards those seats of power are very clear. In his last letter to Pound in 1948, when he wrote:

“BUT you have to deal with us Olsons… your damn ancestors let us in (AND AS ABOVE I DON’T THINK THE BATHTUB WAS SO CLEAN WHEN THEY DID). We’re here. And to tell you your own truth, you damn well know anglosaxonism is academicism and shrieking empire. LIFE out of Yale, CULTURE out of Princeton, and the BOMB out of Harvard.” There’s a very clear kind of agenda there. Now, two more things about Olson and then I’m going to move geographically elsewhere, but it’s related. When he comes to defi ne the postmodern, and this use of the word comes in a letter to Robert Creeley dated August 20, 1951, he writes:

“my assumption is any POST-MODERN is born with the ancient confi dence that, he does belong. So, there is nothing to be found. There is only (as Schoenberg had it, his Harmony) search) tho, I should wish to kill that word, too – there is only examination.”

Olson also writes a text called “Proprioception”, which is a term that comes up through phenomenology and through Merleau-Ponty and is a term that has a tremendous amount of signifi cance in the debate around Algeria, in the idea of otherness; it comes 13 up in Frantz Fanon through different manifestations, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The further thing on Olson’s defi nition of the postmodern, which I think, again, curiously, very curiously, has resonance with, if anybody is familiar with Marshall Hodgson’s defi nition of the technical age, both in his posthumously collected essays and in The Venture of Islam, where he speaks about the technical age and the idea of different velocities of technology, how that affects people. I won’t go into that, but if you are at all familiar with it, you will recognize some of it in this description by Olson. He writes, actually part of this is in a letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict whom he had known from the Offi ce of War Information, working under the Roosevelt administration:

“The EXPANSION of peoples, materials and sensations that the AGE OF QUANTITY involves itself in, DEMAND a heightening of that servant of clarity, the CRITICAL FUNCTION, wherever: that is, the above increases in the quantity of experience is also an increase in the sources of confusion, and so, to cut them down requires more labor than previously…that the job now, is to be at once archaic and culture-wise – that they are indivisible.” And then, in another letter to Creeley, August, 1951, he writes, “I am led to this notion: the post-modern world was projected by two earlier facts- a) the voyages of the 15th and 16th Century making all the earth a known quantity (thus, geographical quantity absolute); and (b) 19th Century, the machine, leading to (1) the tripling of population and (2) the same maximal as the geographic in communications systems and the reproductive ones. In other words, that, the QUANTITATIVE, which, as I guess you know, has been the rock I have been trying to crack, is so embedded that one should not be surprised that it has forced all old functions to behave anew.”

And then in another letter to Ruth Benedict, he writes: “It is my feeling that the record of fact is become of fifi rst importance for us lost in a sea of question…In New History, the act of the observer, if his personality is of count, is before, in the collection of the material. This is where we will cut the knot…I think if you burn the facts long and hard enough in yourself as crucible, you’ll come to the few facts that matter, and then fact can be fable again.”

And I think this is remarkable stuff in its applicability to, certainly, to the present situation that we’re in, in terms of how do you categorize information, how do you deal with knowledge, how do you defi ne knowledge, how do you fi nd it, how do you transmit it, how do you make, as he says, “fact fable”, how do you turn it into a narrative so that it can move somewhere? The last thing on Olson, which is quite remarkable, is that in 1951 he applied for a Fulbright to Iraq, and I’m convinced that if he had lived in a world where he could’ve gotten a Fulbright to Iraq, the cultural history of the last fi fty years might have looked a little bit different. In his proposal, he writes; this is to the Fulbright committee in 1951:

“My desire is to go to IRAQ to steep myself, on the ground, in all aspects of SUMERIAN civilization (its apparent origins in the surrounding plateaus of the central valley, the valley city-sites themselves and the works of them, especially the architecture and the people’s cuneiform texts).

The point of a year of such work at the sites and in collections is a double one: (1) to lock up translations from the clay tablets, conspicuously, the poems & myths (these translations & transpositions have been in progress for four years); and (2), to fasten – by the live sense that only the factual ground gives – the text of a book, one half of which is SUMER. (The other half is the MAYA, and the intent, in putting these two civilizations and especially their arts together, is to try and make clear, by such juxtaposition, the nature of the force of ORIGINS 15 The further intent is that such a study throw a usable light on the present, the premise of such a study of origins being, that the present is such a time, that just now any light which can lead to a redefi nition of man is a crucial necessity, that it is necessary if we are to arrive at a fresh ground for a concept of “humanism”.” And then he writes, he was being followed around, by the way, by the FBI, at Black Mountain and so forth, where he was teaching at the time, and he writes, again, to Creeley: “I imagine I did say to you that I doubted State wld take a risk on me at such outposts of the empire as Istanbul or Teheran, simply, that in such places, they can’t afford more than pink-cheeked servants.”

That is one part of the story – now, to get to another part of the story: I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Algeria of the 1950s and 60s and thinking about it in relation to political and intellectual responses by the parties with more power, i.e. the French, although in some sense this is a mistake because both the Algerians and the Vietnamese ultimately had more power, they won. But, in terms of how these things are perceived across time, I wanted to compare the responses in the seats of power, in the metropoles, to these confl icts and in relationship to what was going on, particularly in Algeria, less in Vietnam, I was more concerned with the American response in Vietnam. And a couple of things struck me. Number one, the move – particularly in the United States, in Black, African American communities – from a possibility of internationalism to the constraints of what becomes an increasingly nationalist agenda, goes hand in hand with that of many other communities in the United States. And I was looking for indexes of this, you know, sign posts, of this, obviously the Red Scare, particularly on the West Coast and the industrialization of the cities and the kind of increasing economic constraints on Black communities, had a lot to do with the ability to participate in, let’s say, a trade unionism that was international in scope. Now, what you have, in some oddly ironic sense, as one of the 16 last gasps of a certain kind of internationalism, comes through the Black Panther Party and through its identifi cation with liberation movements, Third World movements, African liberation and so forth and obviously with different segments of the leadership going into exile in Algeria.

And I began to look at a journal published by Abdellatif Laabi, a Moroccan poet and former political prisoner, published originally in Morocco in French and called Souffl es, which started coming out in 1966 and came out from 1966 until 1972. In 1972 it was shut down by the authorities, about 200 people involved in it were imprisoned for long periods of time, Abdellatif himself was imprisoned for eight and a half years. The group included a very famous political prisoner, Abraham Serfaty who is a Moroccan Jew, and part of the political opposition. As I was looking through old issues of Souffl es, I saw, in 1969, that Abraham Serfaty hosted a delegation of the Black Panther Party to Morocco and Algeria. This is at the same time that COINTELPRO was running various campaigns to represent the Black Panther Party as being anti-Semitic and this, to me, is a huge irony: this future Jewish political prisoner in Morocco is hosting the Black Panther Party at the same time that COINTELPRO’s smear campaigns are running in the United States. These, I think, are very, very crucial splits and breaks but there is almost a complete lack of consciousness about them now. As I was doing more and more work on Algeria, I began to see that there was a cut-off point. If you look, from about 1956, ’57, ’58, ’59, ’60, ’61, ’62 up until about 1965, there’s quite a bit of material that’s appearing in the United States, it’s being translated, primarily from French, regarding the Algerian question. I mean, there are obvious things like Albert Camus, but it goes much further. There’s a book, for instance, a very important book by Henri Alleg, called The Question. Henri Alleg was a European Jew, and the editor of an Algerian daily, who was captured and tortured in 1957 in al-Biar, in one of the infamous torture chambers in Algiers and that book – the fi rst book banned in France since the late 18th century – was 17 published immediately in the U.S. That was then followed by a number of books by Germaine Tillion. Germaine Tillion is 96 years old and a fascinating fi gure. She was an anthropologist, a student of Marcel Maus, and then she went off to do her fi eld work in Kabylia in the Aures mountains in the 1930s. Then she joined the resistance and, as the leader of a resistance group, she was put up for the death sentence on, I think, something like fi ve different occasions. She ended up in Ravensbruck, imprisoned, and surviving that, went on to do her doctorate under the great Orientalist Louis Massignon, known for his incredible work on al-Hallaj. Germaine Tillion is somebody who served as a liaison between Sadi Yacef who was one of the original FLN leaders and the French government, and she actually arranged several ceasefi res. So, her books were coming out in English. The work of Pierre Bourdieu came out in English, on Algeria, and he did a lot of important work on Algeria. Pierre Vidal Naquet, the classicist, wrote a book called Torture: Cancer of Democracy, and that came out. The works of Frantz Fanon started coming out and actually Wretched of the Earth, which sold only 3,000 copies in France, went through fi ve editions in the fi rst year in English in the United States.

So those things were part of the landscape, part of intellectual discourse. A book about an Algerian prisoner, Djamila Boupacha, came out and that was co-written by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi . Gisele Halimi is a very prominent French human rights lawyer and feminist and is a Tunisian Jew, and I found out, while I was doing some research on her, that she recently signed on to become Marwan Barghouti’s lawyer, a very prominent case in Israel. In this whole scheme of things, I fi nd it very interesting to watch the fates of different people, people who have continued to maintain certain principles or certain stands on things and people who have changed those positions. I think for us, particularly at this moment, it’s a very crucial thing to recuperate those fi gures who have fallen by the wayside and are not part of general intellectual discourse and to look at them 18 as models, as possibilities and in fact, along those lines, I was on my way up here this morning from New York and I was reading last week’s Le Monde Diplomatique in which there was a long front page piece by Maurice Maschino about the neo-conservative tendencies amongst French intellectuals. Maurice Maschino was a draft resister to the Algerian war and ended up going into exile in Tunisia. He was one of the fi rst people who was writing reports from Tunisia in 1956, ’57 and, as he writes now, the points he takes issue with the neo-cons on, in quite a militant way, have to do with racism, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, sanctions on Iraq, all of the issues that seem to come up in one way or another amongst people who fi nd their way into the mainstream. So I think it’s very, very crucial to think about trying to recuperate some of these moments. Archie Shepp playing at the 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algeria with thirty Tuareg musicians, way before the marketing of “World Music,” a moment in which there is still some presence of the possibility of another kind of world. As we get into the late 60s you have to keep in mind that we’re talking about a time when the U.S. Army was basically in open mutiny in Vietnam and if you look at facts and fi gures of that period they’re quite shocking. In Congress, they talk about, using offi cial Congressional fi gures, they talk about ten to fi fteen percent of the troops using heroin. You’re talking about whole units, during Moratorium Day in 1970, just going on strike, demonstrating against the war while being in the middle of it. You’re talking about offi cial documents from the Naval War College discussing the relationship of the Civil Rights movement to what’s going on in the Army to what’s going on in U. S. cities. A hundred and twenty-fi ve cities have uprisings and riots. 1968, ’69, ’70 are very, very, very, very tumultuous years in this country. Especially after having spent so much time with friends who lived through the siege of Bosnia, I’m coming to think more and more that, sometimes, even if you live through something, you don’t really understand what it was about until long afterwards. And I think it’s very, very, very important to go back to those last years in which the war in Vietnam effectively ends but soldiers are still there , ’67, ’68, ’69 to see how people organized around them, what kinds of things were effective, how people operated and the level, it’s shocking to me, the level of erosion in dissent, I mean, you’re talking about, in 1969, 1970, you’re talking about some 550 underground newspapers in this country with a circulation of about 5 million. A magazine like Ramparts had a circulation of 300,000 in 1967 and 1968. The kind of headlines coming out on some of the underground papers that were coming out are absolutely shocking in our present context. 144 underground papers on U.S. military bases, with headlines like “Don’t desert, go to Vietnam and kill your commanding offi cer.” This was really open and general rebellion and it’s all the more shocking to encounter these kinds of things in the present context, it’s almost unimaginable but extremely valuable for our understanding, to understand what dissent can mean and what assertiveness can mean and how it can be tied, how political thought, action, and what placing the body, literally, in line, can mean and how that can be tied to the imagination, to the imaginative faculties, to the creative possibilities and how constrained we are, how constrained things have become in so many ways.

A lot of it really begins with how we ourselves decide to articulate ourselves. How does one open up if you are in a space that you yourself control, whether it’s an academic setting like this or whether it’s some other setting one fi nds oneself in. How does one begin to slough off the decorum a little bit and start to open up different possibilities, think about different relationships, different contexts, and what that might mean even in a small community?

Q & A Moderated by Deborah Starr

Deborah Starr: You’ve certainly given us a lot to think about because what you’re doing, to a great extent, is shifting the narrative of how we got to this point of confl ict and that also shifts its meaning. Also, you’ve given us a sense of the need to recover some of these lost narratives and alternative sites of resistance as you situated them initially in contrast to privileged sites of radicalism, particularly within the academy. I would be curious to hear you articulate a little bit more why you think that Israel has become the screen through which everything Middle Eastern is fi ltered at this point. Although it is usually articulated through the kind of political science or international relations discourse, it seems to me there may be some connection between the kinds of attacks taking place now on alternative views of the Middle East in the U.S. academy, as represented by something like Campus Watch, and the kinds of things refl ected in Olson when he spoke of “LIFE out of Yale, CULTURE out of Princeton, and the BOMB out of Harvard.”

Ammiel Alcalay: Let me respond, quickly, to the question about the U.S. and Israel and that filter. From a personal point of view, I spent about eight years, off and on, living in Jerusalem and it’s a place where I really learned about America because of the rapidity with which I witnessed nativity being eroded in the process of transformation as people were forced or squeezed off the land to become laborers or refugees. I grew up in New England so I grew up in and with all these place names, of peoples who are pretty much no longer there, or at least not there to the extent they might once have been. It really made me think and internalize, at a more conscious age, certain things that had been very much a part of me but the experience of Jerusalem, ironically, drove those things home for me.

Another thing is, Mahmoud Mamdani, the great Ugandan scholar, thinker and activist, recently spoke at a teach-in at CUNY, and he talked about his and the relationship of other anti-apartheid activists towards the other colonial settler states in Africa, primarily Liberia. He said that it took them a long time to realize that the returning African Americans had a civilizing mission of sorts in going to Liberia, and he was refl ecting on this precisely in relation to the question you’re asking regarding Israel. Beyond the kind of geo-political, military, economic and other more obvious aspects of the relationship the U.S. has to Israel, what else is there and how does that get manifested? And he began to expand on this and I thought it was a very fruitful direction to think in, because, besides the pop imagery, the settler and westward expansion and so on, and the presence of references to Native Americans in Palestinian literary discourse, for example, I think that there is more to it than that. On the political level, the relationship between U. S. foreign policy and Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is such a crucial, crucial public litmus test of what can and cannot be done, globally. I fi nd some of the parallels to Algeria quite mortifying in the sense that, if one thinks about movements now to legalize torture in the United States, from a legal perspective, Israel is the state that we have the closest public, open relationship with and claim follows our tradition as a democratic country. This is not something the United States would have claimed in terms of its client states in Latin America, it would not have made these claims for other places in the world, but this claim is made towards Israel where torture is institutionalized policy and is essentially upheld pretty regularly in the courts. This creates very real political precedence.

On the way up here, I was reading Pierre Vidal Naquet ’s Torture: Cancer of Democracy, and it struck me that in all of the publicity, in all of the different and superb work done, both by Israeli human rights groups like Betselem, and other, older Palestinian groups like Palestinian Human Rights Database, and others, I am as yet unaware of anything looking at this issue both conceptually and institutionally, in a larger sense, outside of the specifi cs of the 22 cases. A lot of the case by case work curiously reinforces the roles everyone is in, victim, perpetrator, state institution, and so on, and legitimizes the state as the body that can both condone and condemn. This relates to a point I brought up before: when we look at a situation using the discourse of human rights, we emphasize the repression without necessarily thinking of the amount of resistance. When people look at instances of human rights abuse and torture in Israel, they are not considering its function and structure – psychologically, socially, politically, economically – within the state itself. And I don’t mean just the corrupting nature of the practices, which is how it is generally considered when considered at all, but more in the kind of terms that we might think of criminalization, imprisonment, racism, and militarization in this country, with all the economic implications. To not think about these kinds of things critically is very detrimental but it has to be taken beyond the accusatory level to try and conceptualize things in order to fi gure out where the right pressure points are to exert change.

Audience: After September 11, I saw a headline, that said “Why?” But it was rhetorical – Americans don’t want to know why, and it was amazing how quickly the discussion about why disappeared, and I tend to be pretty vocal in my condemnation of U.S. policy, particularly in the Middle East, but Israelis don’t ask why, I mean, a suicide bomber goes into a shopping mall or something and blows himself up, they don’t ask why, they know why. So, as much as there are parallels between Israel and the United States, there are some differences and do you think, I mean, how is it that this discussion never gets going?

Ammiel Alcalay: In direct response to this, I’ll read you a quote by Melani McAlister, from her book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000. Ina chapter on the Iran hostage crisis, she offers one of the best descriptions I’ve seen of this difference you bring up: “Terrorism’s presence on the world stage enabled a narrative 23 that constructed the United States as an imperiled private sphere and the Islamic Middle East as the preeminent politicized space from which terrorism affected its invasions. For more than a decade that narrative had worked to produce a type of American identity, defi ned by the production of individuals who were “free of politics”. Within this world of vulnerable families and lovers, terrorism threatened precisely what had to be threatened in order to establish the disinterested morality of the state’s militarized response in the international arena.”

In the Israeli case, I think there’s a different dynamic at work, and I don’t think it’s just a question of not asking why. To begin with, there’s an absolutely different level of consciousness – things that one can speak about in Israeli discourse are much harder to speak about in American discourse. There is a presence there, people understand what is at stake, whichever side of the political spectrum you may fall on. But I think that there is also a combination of cynicism, racism, and, ultimately, dehumanization there which expects “those people” to commit those kinds of acts. So that a different kind of why can be asked, or not asked, than the one not asked here.

Audience: I would like to suggest that apart from the memory of a certain tradition of internationalism which often is organized around offi cial states or liberation movements, there is a counter memory which in fact provides perhaps the best link we have at the present moment. You seem to say that internationalism disappeared or became invisible and I think this is not quite accurate. Because, in fact, it didn’t disappear, it became invisible to certain ways of remembering. To give the example of the Black Panthers or Archie Shepp in 1969 in Algiers, when you used the phrase ‘the last gasp of internationalism,’ I don’t think you meant it but the Panthers were exhausted and other things were forming and continue: divestment and the anti-apartheid movement, committees for the Portuguese colonies, the world social forum, Jubilee 2000, and a whole range of other things happening at the unoffi cial level which have kept internationalism very much 24 alive. The task of the movement is also to recover this counter movement showing that internationalism didn’t simply die out, it just took other routes which are not terribly diffi cult to recover. Ammiel Alcalay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I agree absolutely, there was only so much I could get to and I think the key thing is to articulate the continuities, to fi nd them and to articulate them and to conjoin them. You can see now, for example, a lot of material available on the Zapatistas. So, yes, thanks very much for bringing that up.

Audience: So much of our discussion, at least at the Cornell Forum, has had to do with a sense of a certain political impasse that we’re at right now and the diffi culty of really getting a discourse of political dissent going and I thought that what you really addressed in your remarks is the problem of our also lacking a mode of cultural criticism, a cultural kind of frame, and you really got to the very heart of it, to address how that itself might be part of the political impasse. I wondered if you might just talk a little bit more about why you were particularly interested in Charles Olson’s notion of the postmodern, because I think you’re suggesting an alternative conception of post-modernism which might be more politically viable than what we have now. Ammiel Alcalay: Absolutely. I think that what we’ve gotten is what I would call industrialized postmodernism, where it’s kind of on the assembly line. I feel that a lot of the theoretical language and the way it’s taught and how it’s used is really colonizing, it’s a subjugation of the material that it’s supposed to be examining. Olson’s interest in archeology was not happenstance, it was to allow the objects to determine the theory, it was, as he said, to ‘be on the ground,’ to examine the stuff in its place and see what emerges from it. I fi nd much of what we’re doing now is very much the opposite and what that does is to entrench power, at various levels, disciplinary power and categories of thinking – it encloses people and encloses thought. In other words, once you sanction and legalize a certain kind of border crossing, it 25 domesticates the concept and precludes a truer border crossing that would really disrupt ways of thinking and approach. What you say points to a very real problem. There’s some terrifi c political work and analysis going on, but the cultural connection is really buried much deeper and is more marginalized. It’s almost as if the people who are doing politics think, well “that’s later, we can’t really deal with that now, this is more important.” I think that’s very counter-productive, because it needs to be done holistically. It needs to really move completely together.

The atrocities of September 11, 2001 caused an unprecedented acceleration in the transformation of the corpus of criminal and criminal procedure laws in Western countries. In the months following the outrage, and sometimes within days, governments have enacted measures curtailing public and private liberties. In our opinion, a real break is taking place, because it is the very existence of the rule of law as we know it which is at stake.

These laws fit very much within a tendency that privileges procedure above law and equity in the dispensation of justice. Here, we are particularly concerned about the precedence being taken by emergency procedures. This break is so profound as to cause an upheaval of the norm as it prevailed up to now, causing the exception to become the rule. We conclude that emergency procedures are in the process of replacing the constitution as the ruling paradigm of politics.

A Break in the Tradition of Criminal Law.

Anti-terrorism legislations, whether ancient or modern, always aim to legitimise exceptional criminal procedures at all levels of the judiciary process, from the inquiry itself up to and including the final judgement. We are talking here special methods of investigation such as surveillance, mail interception, telephone tapping and electronic monitoring. These measures can nowadays be implemented even in the absence of an infraction. Suspicion of terrorist activities now also warrants exceptional preventive detention or administrative custody, even of simple witnesses, as in the United States. Anti-terrorism legislation also condones curbing communications between an accused person and her or his attorney, and, on a more general plane, allows for the setting up of specific emergency jurisdictions.

In Spain, a person accused of terrorist activities does not have the right to a lawyer of her/his own choosing. In Germany, various derogations have been enacted to customary rules regarding searches, entering property, identity checks, and arrest and imprisonment. At the level of court procedure, rules have been set to alter the nature of competent jurisdictions and to curtail the rights of the defence. Defence attorneys can for instance been denied access to procedures in the event of ‘circumstances leading to the belief’ that they may act in such a way as to thwart the instruction. The same rule allows for the lawful breach of the confidentiality of the correspondence between attorney and client.

As for its consequences for the criminal process, the new anti-terrorist laws are very much in conformity with more ancient jurisdictional tendencies. They do however vastly extent their scope. Indeed they aim not so much to restrict the fundamental liberties of certain categories of the population, but rather to encompass it as a whole. They establish a permanent and generalised surveillance and control of individuals and will preventively attack and arraign any process of class re-composition by criminalising social movements beforehand.

A Manifestation of Imperial Power.

An important feature of these recent anti-terrorist laws is that, contrary to previous legislation, they no longer stem from relatively autonomous national initiatives, but are being put forward by international bodies such as the G8, the European Council, or the European Union. This results in this type of legislation being implemented in a whole set of countries, including those which have never faced any sort of terrorist menace.

The more recent legal measures against terrorism anticipate rather than answer terrorist actions. They come in fulfilment by national states of their international obligations, and have been more specifically brought about by the demands of the United States of America. The place taken by the United States in the whole process is in fact very characteristic of the current situation, the fight against terrorism being very much constitutive of its Imperial leadership.

Taking lawful interception of (electronic) communication as an example, it is the FBI that has to a very large extent set its specifications. Regarding computer criminality, the FBI also has a lot of leverage in directing the police of most foreign states. The level of influence the United States are able to exert in shaping the anti-terrorist legislation of other governments confirms their forward role in the process of the modernisation of power on the global scale.

But anti-terrorist measures also expose another role played by the United States, viz. that of their direct super-power domination over other states.

The first component of this relationship is the privilege that has ‘de jure’ been granted to American citizenship, by attaching to it rights that are denied to other nationalities. This is particularly evident in the case of the differential legal treatment meted out to US citizens and foreigners. In terrorism cases and those related to organised crime, American courts also claim universal jurisdiction and extra-territorial competence.

The USA Patriot Act as Suspension of Foreigners’ Rights.

The USA Patriot Act of 26 October 2001 empowers the General Attorney of the United States to order the arrest and imprison any foreigner suspected of threatening national security. Such measures were further extended by the ‘Military Order’ of November 31 of the same year, authorizing to charge non-American terrorism suspects before special courts and to keep them in indefinite custody.

These two measures create zones of lawlessness. They suspend or even abolish the fundamental rights of suspects. Suspects are then totally in the hands of the executive, and no judicial control whatsoever applies to them. Thus, prisoners captured during the Afghan conflict are now shepherded in Guantanamo Bay and do not qualify for Prisoners of War status as defined by the Geneva Convention. This suspension of rights not only takes place within US territory, but also abroad, since the capture itself took place in Afghanistan, and, in the absence of a formal declaration of war, was conducted as a police sweep rather than as a military operation.

Aiming at the total abolition of protection under due process of law for arrested foreigners, such measures result in pure lawlessness towards non-American citizens. At the same time, this discriminatory mechanism doubles up with a suspension of international law, where American citizens get a privileged treatment that immunises them against arraignment before the International Penal Tribunal in The Hague when they are engaging in ‘international peace maintenance operations’.

This suspension of the due process of law is emblematic of a pure relation of power. It constitutes the legal manifestation of the application of pure violence. Furthermore it is also paired, through its inclusion in domestic American law, and through its acceptance by the United Nations or through bilateral extradition agreements, with a hegemonic function, and with the recognition by other states of the particular and dominant status that the United States claim for themselves with regard to international law.The USA Patriot Act Two as a Generalised Suspension of the Rule of Law.

Still unsatisfied with the exceptional legislation already in place, the Bush administration has drafted a new anti-terrorism law, the ‘Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003’ (1), which further aggravates the legal deviations of the ‘USA Patriot Act’. This new text is already known as ‘Patriot II’. Building upon the first Patriot Act, it extents existing discriminatory measures against non-citizens and further enhances the powers of the executive at the expense of the judiciary. This project is a big step forward towards the establishment of emergency rule. It generalises the system of suspension of the rights of American citizens suspected of collaboration with entities deemed to be terrorist organisations. Exceptional procedures thus become the norm.

The new act provides for an easier surveillance of American citizens by the government, and for interception and monitoring of their communications, electronic or otherwise, without judicial review. Simply applying to citizens procedures designed to fight a foreign power will suffice. Such actions need only be deemed to take place within a vaguely phrased monitoring and intelligence acquisition drive directed against ’agents of a foreign power’.

The originality of the new project as compared to its predecessor lies of course in the latitude given to the executive to subject American citizens to the kind of exceptional legislation henceforth restricted to foreigners, with the possibility of depriving them of their American citizenship as ultimate element of this emergency procedure.

Indeed, the draft legislation provides for depriving American citizens of their nationality, in case they aid or abet an organisation branded as terrorist by the Attorney General of the United States. This provision represents a clear break with previous legislation which made a sharp distinction between what applies to nationals and to non-citizens. It will result in Americans being henceforth subjected not to the law of the land, however restrictive it has become with respect to individual liberties, but to the sole whim of the executive.

Even if the draft still formally distinguishes between citizens and non-nationals, this has become meaningless in practice, since the legal protection granted to US citizens can be taken away by a mere administrative decision. For those advocating the new legislation, it would be the suspect (herself or himself) who would evidence the wish to lose citizenship by supporting a group deemed to be terrorist. The idea being that ‘one can infer her or his intention by her or his actions’, even if the person has never manifested such an intention, or applied for relinquishing American citizenship.

The State of Emergency, European Union Style.

On December 6, 2001, the European justice and interior ministers convened and adopted a ‘framework declaration’ in order to harmonise existing national legislation concerning terrorist activities. The nature of incriminating evidence in this regard is entirely political: it derives from the intentions of its author.

The crime of terrorism applies when the authors ‘actions‘ are deemed to have the destruction of the political, economic or social structures of a country as its aim’, or when ‘its aim is to gravely destabilise a country’. Concepts as ‘destabilisation or destruction of economic/ social/ political structures of a country’ makes it possible to mount a frontal attack against social movements. Similar arguments were used in the beginning of the 80s by the government of Margaret Thatcher to apply the then existing anti-terrorist legislation to the miners’ strike.

The accusation of terrorism also applies to activities ‘that intend to unduly force public bodies or an international organisation to either act or refrain to act in a particular manner’. Since every social movement tends to frighten some part of the public and to force authorities to act or not to act in a certain way, the interpretative scope of such a legislation is extremely wide indeed. Such qualifiers as ‘unduly’ and ‘gravely’ do not provide for any kind of objective definition of the incriminated actions. It will be up to the authorities to judge whether they were subjected to intolerable pressure. More generally terrorism is defined in such a way as to leave it to governments to decide who and whatever does fall in that category.

Anticipating a New ‘Social War’.

In such a context, it is easy to envisage how rallies, strikes, squatting or ‘hijacking’ public spaces, occupying infrastructure installations, or disrupting mass transit, all with the intention to put pressure to the government to enact social policies or to stop the dismantlement of the same, can easily be assimilated to terrorist acts.

Similar actions, aimed at the policies of international bodies or organisations, could meet the same treatment. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), whose objective is the complete removal of all rules that impede a total liberalisation of services, is an example of the complete dismantlement of state regulation. A spirited opposition movement fighting for the maintenance of public services, or for the regulation of certain sectors of the economy, could thus easily be branded as terrorist.

The new criminal legislation corresponds with the second phase of the establishment of an integrated structure of power at the global level: Empire. The first phase consisted in the political organisation of the global market, and the liberalisation of the movements of goods and finance capital. Labour force management remained at this stage the resort of the national states. The negotiations about liberalising investments, and about the GATS, are initiating a second phase of the process, that of globalisation of management of the workforce and of its reproduction parameters. The dismantling of the existing political set-up is the precondition for the shift in its organic composition.

The End of the Separation of Powers.

The ‘USA Patriot Act’ is still based on a dual judicial system: on the one side, some legal protection for US citizens, even if increasingly restricted; on the other, abolition of rights for non-nationals. This dual system disappears under the ‘Patriot II’ draft, since it enables the executive to strip American citizens of their nationality and to transfer them from a system of legal protection to an environment where the rule of law does not obtain.

The fight against terrorism thus marks a fundamental break in the Western political structure, which was traditionally based on a dual system: rule of law inside the national territory, and ‘’pure violence’’ abroad.

Patriot II, if adopted, will mean the legal implementation of the state of emergency, i.e. the enshrinement of lawlessness within the law.

In an article in the French daily ‘Le Monde’, Giorgio Agamben argued that the exercise of political power in the Western world was predicated on the articulation of two relatively distinct systems, that of the juridical order and that of pure violence. ‘’The Western political system appears to be a double mechanism, based on the dialectical workings of two heterogeneous and apparently antithetical components: law and pure violence. As long as both components remain separated, this dialectic can function, but as soon as the state of emergency becomes the rule, the political system itself becomes a system of death;’’ (2) That is exactly what is happening right under our eyes, as emergency rule becomes Imperial law.

There is clearly a double phenomenon at work, viz. a suspension of the rule of law, and a shift within the law of criminal procedure. Even if the suspension of the rule of law is more apparent in the United States, a similar development is taking place in European countries, as emergency legislation is being implemented.

At this juncture, the consolidation of Imperial rule demands that the restrictions on public liberties be enshrined in criminal law. Its current transformation shows that we are witnessing the end of the dual system of rule of law and pure violence.

But then, this double structure was closely related to the societal make-up of the nation-state, which applies the rule of law within what it considers to be its border, and abolishes it towards its exterior. Empire, as the new form of exercise of power at the global scale has no exterior, and hence every movement, every political or military action takes place within its borders. The distinction between internal and external, and between rule of law and pure violence, typical of the nation-state, no longer makes any sense.

The Specific Role of the United States of America.

The United States take a specific place within the imperial structure because of their position of dominance also expresses itself in the ability to project their national power on the rest of the world, which even though they may consider it as their back garden, is still an ‘abroad’ for them. The difference in legal status between US citizens and foreigners, and the suspension of the latter’s rights, bear witness to the singular position of the USA within the Imperial constellation.

Just like any nation-state, the United States have implemented a dual judicial system, based on the rule of law for citizens and on a state of non-law for foreigners. Traditionally, as with other nation-states, such a distinction between two legal dispensations articulates itself around the concept of border.

However, to the American government, ‘border’ does not mean a geographical feature. The primacy of American citizenship, the duality in the dispensation of justice is not a matter of a given territory, but concerns the planet as a whole. At stake is not only to enforce the immunity of American citizens with regard to international tribunals, which are supposed to be common jurisdictions, but also to force other states to allow American authorities the right to judge the citizens of these very countries through purpose-created emergency courts.

The most recent agreements signed between the USA and the European Union represent the recognition by the latter of the American privilege to legislate in the matter of suspension of customary law and to build up a new judicial world order based on emergency legislation. These agreements are the conclusive piece of a process whereby European jurisdictions are being materially incorporated in the system of suspension of rights devised by the United States. As a consequence, European countries have accepted, under conditions framed and imposed by the United States, to deliver their own citizens in the hands of American authorities as and when those brand them as terrorists.

The United States take a pioneer role in the institution of this new judicial order, they decide what is a case of emergency, and in its wake, in which way the prevailing norm has to be altered, especially with regard to criminal law and criminal procedure. This undoubtedly marks the reinsertion of pure violence within the international order, and represent a constitutive act of their Imperial leadership.

The State of Emergency.

The fight against terrorism causes a re-structuring of political power by way of a strengthening of the powers of the executive. Through the enactment of framework legislation, which is then being applied by way of decrees and administrative circulars or even simple lists established by the justice ministry (such as lists of purported terrorist organisations), the executive fully functions as legislative power and instrumentalises completely the judicial apparatus.

Such arrangements are typical of a state of emergency. Since the state of emergency is usually considered a political phenomenon, defining the concept in precise legal terms it is not a simple matter. As described by Carl Schmitt, it ‘’wavers in an uncertain and ambiguous fashion at the cross-road between the political and the legal’’(3). Traditionally, declaring a state of emergency answers a necessity, as put forward by the actual power, to maintain public order in the face of extraordinary circumstances, usually within a context of civil strife. The fight against terrorism is routinely described in terms of a world-wide civil strife, a war on the long haul against an enemy in need of being constantly redefined. This situation, however, differs from the habitual state of affairs. The (global) power does not so much face actual disturbances, but strives to neutralise virtual threats.

Here, the discourse bandied by the global power harbours a paradox: judicial reform is motivated by a sudden emergency, but the emergency itself is said to be of long duration. Hence the state of emergency becomes a permanent fixture. It comes to be considered as the new form of the political order, with the aim to defend democracy and human rights. Or to put it differently, citizens must accept for a long time to come the curtailment of their concrete liberties in the defence of a self-proclaimed and entirely abstract democratic order.

The fact that most of these measures are enacted as laws also proves that the global power is going for the long haul. To achieve this, it is seeking a new legitimacy whereby the people must voluntarily abide by the dismantlement of their constitutional safeguards.

The Relevance of Carl Schmitt.

For Carl Schmitt, sovereignty does not lie in the ability to impose a norm, but in a decision-making potential that is free of any normative obligation. Rather than the legal norm, it is in extraordinary legislation, ‘’where the decision making process leaves the juridical norm behind’’ that the authority of the state shines at its best. ‘’The true sovereign is who is able to decide that a given situation is an extraordinary one’’.

Contrary to Max Weber, Schmitt does not locate the state’s sovereignty in its monopoly of domination of violence, but in its monopoly of decision-making. Whereas this definition appears to be somewhat reductive in the case of the nation-state, it does perfectly fit the Imperial structure. Schmitt circumscribes the political process starting from the ‘identify friend or foe’ concept. Such an approach tends to privilege external politics as against internal governance. Such an interpretation fails to account for the organic character of sovereignty in the nation-state, of the interdependency between internal and external sovereignty, and for the interplay obtaining between various institutions and loci of power. But in the wake of the deconstruction of the nation-state and of the re-integration of its structure within a form of imperial power, Schmitt’s analyses are gaining a renewed interest.

For Schmitt, the decision as to declare a state of emergency takes place within a judicial framework. The emergency situation is not one of chaos. When the state abolishes (constitutional) law, it is allegedly in order to safeguard it. Seen in this light, the decision as to declare an emergency is first and foremost, a decision regarding the circumstances in which the norm applies. ‘’A normal situation needs to be postulated, and then, the sovereign is who is able to decide in last resort whether a normal situation obtains or not’’. With Empire, the executive power of the United States of America plays the role of the sovereign as described by Schmitt. There is indeed an embedding of the emergency regulations within a juridical order, but it is an order devoid of concrete rights.

The issues that have been raised by Schmitt are becoming relevant again in the context of the current fight against terrorism. Here too this form of government is predicated on the long haul. These dispositions also generate a new juridical order, where extraordinary procedures occupy the centre stage, and where the exception becomes the norm. Whereas the fight against terrorism leads to a suspension of rights and produces a new juridical order, it also and at the same time produces a new enemy, both in a formal and in a material sense. Unlike martial law, this transformation of the juridical order does not aim to combat something that is external to the system, but something that is inherent to it. Hence we witness an inversion of the relationship between means and aims. The designated enemy; the terrorist organisation, becomes the very instrument of the transformation of the judicial system.

State of Emergency or Dictatorship?

Giorgio Agamben’s enquiry into the Roman ‘justicium’ enabled him to establish a distinction between dictatorship and state of emergency. The Roman dictator was a special magistrate, whose extensive powers were conferred by a specific piece of legislation, in conformity with the prevailing constitutional order. Within the Roman state of emergency, the extension of the powers conferred to magistrates was simply obtained by suspending those laws that limited them. ‘’The state of emergency was therefore not a dictatorship (…) but a space void of laws, a zone of anomia, where all prevailing legal dispensations, and especially those regarding the distinction between what is public and what is private, have been suspended’’.

Agamben considers that the current forms of deviation from the rule of law indeed qualify as a state of emergency, but a closer look suggests that things are less firmly determined.

What we do see is a world-wide instrumentalisation of the judiciary by the executive. The fight against terrorism allows for the prosecution of any person suspected to be member of an organisation listed as terrorist by the ministry of justice or even by a simple officer of police. The most advanced instance of such a conflation of powers happens in the United States, where the executive has claimed for itself the authority to nominate judges to sit in military emergency courts. The concentration of powers within the executive, as it also acquires those of the judiciary, transform the president into a magistrate with very extended competences bestowed to him by all sorts of specific laws, acts, and decrees.

In France, the so-called ‘Perben Act’ has extended the powers of the police and has altered the modalities of the inquiry by augmenting the allowable time of remand custody, and the possibilities of searches and of monitoring/ surveillance in the case of ‘organised crime’. A structure of pro-active investigations has been set up, whereby police is allowed to make use of special techniques, without notification to the person suspected.

The law also provides for guilty pleading, with a procedure dubbed ‘’arraignment under preliminary admittance of guilt’’(4). This system has become extremely common in the United States. Its principle is to achieve a decrease in the indictment through a restatement of the charges brought forward (for instance by re-qualifying murder as manslaughter), this in exchange for an admission of guilt. The method considerably reinforces the supremacy of the procedure above that of the law. It formally enforces a contract of sorts between two highly unequal parties and esablishes a deal-making procedure which is foreign to the principle of justice.

At the same time as ‘guilty pleading’ is being advocated, another form of plea bargaining has been officially sanctioned in France since 1999. Called ‘composition penale’ (‘accomodation in the matter of a criminal procedure’), it makes it possible for an accused to escape indictment. First restricted to offences carrying a prison sentence of less than three years, the limit has recently been pushed to five years. Consequently it is now made to cover a large range of white collar crimes also. Hence, offences connected with financial criminality may be dealt through plea bargaining and their authors can escape indictment.

And so we see the creation of a ‘modular justice’: on the one hand guilt till proof of the contrary for those designed as such by the police apparatus, while on the other, authors of financial and economic crimes can escape scot-free. This privilege has now been formally recognised. It has become the law of the land.

Through this law, the justice ministry also introduces itself into the working of the criminal procedure process by claiming a right to intervene in individual cases, further enshrining the end of the separation of powers. The minister of justice now appears as a magistrate with extraordinary powers conferred by statute law.

The enhancement of the powers of both police and prosecution, institutions which are closely linked to the executive, means a shift of competences which used to be of the exclusive domain of judges. These extraordinary measures clearly lead to an effective suspension of fundamental freedoms and alter the nature of the rule of law. Such dispositions, as put forward in acts and decrees championed by the executive, are part and parcel of a new juridical order, that of the ‘constitution-making dictatorship’.

These dispositions also represent the end-stage of Imperial politics, resulting in a form of governance which guarantees the political and military provisions of a global management of the work force, as set up through the WTO negotiations regarding foreign investments and the privatisation of public services. Seen in this light, the state of emergency appears as a transition phase in which the work force is ‘liberated’ from its social protection. To this end, the abolition of concrete political rights is a prerequisite. Once this process has been achieved, dictatorship will be the expression of a new juridical order, one of abstract rights, and of an universal work force shorn of its historic and political particularities dating from the epoch of the nation-states.

The main objective of the current anti-terrorism legislation is not, as was the case with a previous legal framework, to exclude the social struggle movements from the realm of politics and to subject them to criminal law. Rather, it is the political intention of their authors, viz. the destabilisation of the sitting government, which leads to their criminalisation.

Such laws do not institute an order without laws. On the contrary criminal law itself becomes a constitutive feature, which divides the political in two opposites: ‘ good and evil’. The jumbling together of the domain of politics with that of criminal law enables the executive to exercise a magisterial function, and to punish any opposition it does not wish to recognise.

The setting up of any particular form of government is therefore not dependent upon a formal coherence at the level of law making, but upon the immediate relation of power, and upon the capacity of the people to resist such arrangements. Under the state of emergency there is always a formal reference to the restoration of the rule of law. Such a future, however, is not on the agenda of the powers that be.

Notes

(1)

http://www.publicintegrity.org/dataweb/download/Story_0&_020703_doc_1.pdf

(2) Giorgio Agamben, ‘L’etat d’exception’, article in Le Monde, September 12, 2002. See also his book ‘Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Naked Life’ (1st Italian edition: 1994∞

(3) Carl Schmitt ‘Political Theology’

(4) Pascal Biche, ‘guilty pleading’, an American model of justice, article in Liberation, November 27, 2003.