Slavoj Žižek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2004

Slavoj Žižek

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

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

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

New York Times

William Glaberson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the recent events also underscored the challenges that remain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Times

Mark Danner

On a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

•

Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds — he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture — Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”

He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific…. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:

“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week.”

•

Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

“On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks…. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.”

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

“After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists.”

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.

“Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets…. I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.”

•

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep — “the first proper sleep in over five days” — and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:

“I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ‘.pl.’”

He was stripped and put in a small cell. “I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor,” he told the Red Cross.

“Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

“If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe.”

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the “alternative set of procedures” used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:

“The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the “alternative set of procedures” as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

“After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well…. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request” — he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling — “but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month…. I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.”

•

Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other “high-value detainees” whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be “brought to justice,” as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured — and have already done so at Guantánamo — means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which “torture doesn’t work.” The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits — in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda — the president’s approval of use of an “alternative set of procedures” might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

Mark Danner, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College, is the author of “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.” This essay is drawn from a longer article in the new issue of The New York Review of Books, available at www.nybooks.com.

a or a schoolboy the back lighting enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells in short the principle of the dungeon is reversed daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the more effectively than darkness which afforded after all a sort of protection there is no need for arms physical violence material constraints just a gaze an inspecting gaze a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over and against himself a superb formula power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost mirror with memory memory without a mirror if instead of being hanged by the neck you’re thrown inside for not giving up hope in the world your country and people like a stone at the bottom of a well four o’clock no you no six seven tomorrow the day after and maybe who knows I love my country I have swung on its plane trees I have stayed in its prisons nailed to the sky this is the price and the promise of citizenship for as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the and of the people upon which this nation relies these things are true they have been the quiet force of throughout our infernal possessing now neither the quality nor the quantity of humanity labyrinth of thoughts empty labyrinths madness as a domain of knowledge at each stage of his imprisonment he had known or seemed to know whereabouts he was in the windowless building possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure the cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level the room where he had been interrogated by was high up near the roof this place was many metres underground as deep down as it was possible to go (con)naissance extraordinary rendition I have seen hell labyrinth of blindness and is god innocent innocuous innocent malignant malicious I never borrowed a kettle from you blind eyewitness I returned it to you intact the kettle was already broken when I got it from you under the snow and lava a swimming pool with no bottom let flowing water bring to you the king is but an earthen bowl on the potter’s shelf and victories are told on the ruined walls of the king of kings I carved your name on my watchband with my fingernail where I am you know imprison in prison inprison I don’t have a pearl-handled jackknife they won’t give us anything sharp two gentlemen meet on a train and one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other he asks his companion what is in that unusual package you are carrying there prisoner a prisoner B screen memory the other man replies that is a macguffin what is a macguffin asks the first man the second says a macguffin is a device used for killing leopards in the scottish highlands naturally the first man says but there are no leopards in the scottish highlands well says the second then that’s not a macguffin is it world’s embrace blind witness omnipresent omniscient a prison where the walls are made of glass the guards are watching the inmates, the inmates are watching the guards a dark room single bright lamp in the middle a chair underneath interrogation/inter-rogation/interrelation dis-closure carrying the sky entropy what does solitude taste like pure presence is fetish in a wilderness of mirrors what do you look at subversive mirror simpl(ifi)e(d) drinking emptiness symbol of wholeness I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh because its wounds are not upon the surface and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear therefore the more I denounce it as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay art ceases to be based on ritual and begins to be based on another practice politics the worst thing in the world said varies from individual to individual it may be burial alive or death by fire or by drowning or by impalement or fifty other deaths there are cases where it is some quite trivial thing not even fatal dark moments, such as everyone has when you think you’ve achieved nothing at all when it seems that the only trials to come to a good end are those that were determined to have a good end from the start and would do so without any help while all the others are lost despite all the running to and fro, all the effort, all the little, apparent successes that gave such joy

New York Times

Mark Mazzetti and William Glaberson

WASHINGTON — President Obama signed executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

The orders, which are the first steps in undoing detention policies of former President George W. Bush, rewrite American rules for the detention of terrorism suspects. They require an immediate review of the 245 detainees still held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to determine if they should be transferred, released or prosecuted.

And the orders bring to an end a Central Intelligence Agency program that kept terrorism suspects in secret custody for months or years, a practice that has brought fierce criticism from foreign governments and human rights activists. They will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects, government officials said.

But the orders leave unresolved complex questions surrounding the closing of the Guantánamo prison, including whether, where and how many of the detainees are to be prosecuted. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured.

The new White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, briefed lawmakers about some elements of the orders on Wednesday evening. A Congressional official who attended the session said Mr. Craig acknowledged concerns from intelligence officials that new restrictions on C.I.A. methods might be unwise and indicated that the White House might be open to allowing the use of methods other than the 19 techniques allowed for the military.

Details of the directive involving the C.I.A. were described by government officials who insisted on anonymity so they could not be blamed for pre-empting a White House announcement. Copies of the draft order on Guantánamo were provided by people who have consulted with Mr. Obama’s transition team and requested anonymity for the same reason.

In remarks prepared for delivery at his confirmation hearings to become director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, Dennis C. Blair, a retired admiral with a long background in intelligence, endorsed the new approach and promised to enforce it rigorously. “It is not enough to set a standard and announce it,” he said.

“I believe strongly that torture is not moral, legal or effective,” he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Any program of detention and interrogation must comply with the Geneva Conventions, the Conventions on Torture, and the Constitution. There must be clear standards for humane treatment that apply to all agencies of U.S. Government, including the Intelligence Community,” his written statement said.

As for closing Guantanamo, he said that would take time but must be done because it has become “a damaging symbol to the world.”

“It is a rallying cry for terrorist recruitment and harmful to our national security, so closing it is important for our national security,” Admiral Blair’s statement said.

“The guiding principles for closing the center should beprotecting our national security, respecting the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law, and respecting the existing institutions of justice in this country. I also believe we should revitalize efforts to transfer detainees to their countries of origin or other countries whenever that would be consistent with these principles. Closing this center and satisfying these principles will take time, and is the work of many departments and agencies.”

The executive order on interrogations is certain to be received with some skepticism at the C.I.A., which for years has maintained that the military’s interrogation rules are insufficient to get information from senior Qaeda figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Bush administration asserted that the harsh interrogation methods were instrumental in gaining valuable intelligence on Qaeda operations.

The intelligence agency built a network of secret prisons in 2002 to house and interrogate senior Qaeda figures captured overseas. The exact number of suspects to have moved through the prisons is unknown, although Michael V. Hayden, the departing director of the agency, has in the past put the number at “fewer than 100.”

The secret detentions brought international condemnation, and in September 2006, President Bush ordered that the remaining 14 detainees in C.I.A. custody be transferred to Guantánamo Bay and tried by military tribunals.

But Mr. Bush made clear then that he was not shutting down the C.I.A. detention system, and in the last two years, two Qaeda operatives are believed to have been detained in agency prisons for several months each before being sent to Guantánamo.

A government official said Mr. Obama’s order on the C.I.A. would still allow its officers abroad to temporarily detain terrorism suspects and transfer them to other agencies, but would no longer allow the agency to carry out long-term detentions.

Since the early days after the 2001 attacks, the intelligence agency’s role in detaining terrorism suspects has been significantly scaled back, as has the severity of interrogation methods the agency is permitted to use. The most controversial practice, the simulated drowning technique known as water-boarding, was used on three suspects but has not been used since 2003, C.I.A. officials said.

But at the urging of the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 authorized the agency to continue using harsher interrogation methods than those permitted for use by other agencies, including the military. Those exact methods remain classified. The order on Guantánamo says that the camp, which received its first hooded and chained detainees seven years ago this month, “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.”

The order calls for a cabinet-level panel to grapple with issues including where in the United States prisoners might be moved and what courts they could be tried in. It also provides for a new diplomatic effort to transfer some of the remaining men, including more than 60 that the Bush administration had cleared for release.

The order also directs an immediate assessment of the prison itself to ensure that the men are held in conditions that meet the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva Convention. That provision appeared to be a pointed embrace of the international treaties that the Bush administration often argued did not apply to detainees captured in the war against terrorism.

The seven years of the detention camp have included four suicides, hunger strikes by scores of detainees, and accusations of extensive use of solitary confinement and abusive interrogations, which the Department of Defense has long denied. Last week a senior Pentagon official said she had concluded that interrogators at Guantánamo had tortured one detainee, who officials have said was a would-be “20th hijacker” in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The report of Thursday’s announcement came after the new administration late Tuesday night ordered an immediate halt to the military commission proceedings for prosecuting detainees at Guantánamo and filed a request in Federal District Court in Washington to stay habeas corpus proceedings there. Government lawyers described both delays as necessary for the administration to make a broad assessment of detention policy.

The cases immediately affected include those of five detainees charged as the coordinators of the 2001 attacks, including the case against Mr. Mohammed, the self-described mastermind.

The decision to stop the commissions was described by the military prosecutors as a pause in the war-crimes system “to permit the newly inaugurated president and his administration time to review the military commission process generally and the cases currently pending before the military commissions, specifically.”

More than 200 detainees’ habeas corpus cases have been filed in federal court, and lawyers said they expected that all of the cases would be stayed.

Mr. Obama had suggested in the campaign that, in place of military commissions, he would prefer prosecutions in federal courts or, perhaps, in the existing military justice system, which provides legal guarantees similar to those of American civilian courts.

Some human rights groups and lawyers for detainees said they were concerned about the one-year timetable. “It only took days to put these men in Guantánamo; it shouldn’t take a year to get them out,” said Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which has coordinated detainees’ lawyers.

But several groups that had criticized the Bush administration’s policies applauded the rapid moves by the new administration. Mr. Obama’s actions “reaffirmed American values and are a ray of light after eight long, dark years,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and William Glaberson from New York. Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.

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.

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.

June 11th, 2009

Revelations of barbarism performed in the name of the War on Terror by those working for the United States government has breached new boundaries of selfhood in our liberal democracy. Of course, tortures have been a staple of humanity, whether performed within the public sphere of the state or the private intimacies of a domestic domain. But the media proliferation of these acts haunts our consciousness in a distinctive 2009 way. Five years since the Abu Ghraib photographs came to light, there is another battle with a different President to release similar images that could be called Abu Ghraib Two. Although the sources for these techniques are varied, the abuses that continue in United States prisons must certainly be one such “inspiration.” Just this past year, New York State has finally passed legislation to reduce–but not to completely eliminate–the common punishment of placing severely mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement in six by nine foot “boxes,” with the possibility of an enhanced penalty of reducing all nourishment to only a food called “the loaf,” flour mixed with vegetables such as cabbage or potatoes. Such practices may be allowed to continue until this law takes full effect in July 2011 [1].

As the options for abuse of those deemed our possible enemies has become ever more visible in the United States, we learned in mid-May that a majority of citizens no longer support a women’s right to terminate a pregnancy. Or so it seemed during the several day minor media blitz featuring one Gallup Poll. Whether this is a true indicator of public opinion on the sovereignty of the self for women is suspect, given that this was one poll (with a pool of some 1,000 participants) and its prominence was no doubt linked to pro-choice President Obama’s commencement speech at Catholic Notre Dame that same week [2]. A more disturbing assault of women’s bodies was the 2007 Supreme Court decision, Gonzalez v. Carhart, that deemed criminal the use of the late term abortion procedure “Dilation and Extraction,” even if it was diagnosed as necessary for the women’s health or to save her life [3]. Although D&X total only .17% of all abortions in the U.S, this decision marks an alarming precedent in that the Supreme Court places the health and life of the woman as a secondary consideration. As I prepare this essay to go to press, I have just learned that George Tiller—one of the few doctors in the U.S. who provided third term abortions for women whose life or health was at risk—has just been shot dead while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church [4].

These selective and disparate examples of assaults on the limits of our bodies and sense of self may push the boundaries of definitions of “intimacy” and “normalization of body intrusion in public space” that are the themes of this inaugural issue. But they are just several of so many such indicators that comprise what could be described as a generalized consciousness of our selves as physical, physic and emotional beings during what until recently was called the age of the War on Terror.

Given these dramatic, on-going and highly visible incursions into our intimate, personal “space,” a visit to the Museum of Modern Art offers a dramatically different experience of our bodies and our selves, one that is perhaps best described as delusional.

In 2004 the Museum opened its redesigned building, which was directed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi [5]. As a counter to what was seen by some as Frank Gehry’s hyperbolic Bilbao and a trend for “intrusive” museum buildings, Taniguchi reportedly summarized his vision with this line:

“If you raise a lot of money, I will give you great, great architecture. But if you raise really a lot of money, I will make the architecture disappear” [6].

And for most reviewers of the New MoMA, the architecture did seem to disappear, as the title of John Updike’s much read New Yorker article, “Invisible Cathedral,” attests. But despite of the glass façade facing the garden, and the glimpses of the city seen through apertures and windows, the most overpowering vista—seen in enhanced scale—throughout the building were brilliantly white walls. The dominance of this feature secured the sense of separation of the museum interior from anything exterior to it. These massive white walls also provided a seemingly neutral decontextualized terrain for everything installed within them. This was exemplified by the predicament of Monet’s Water Lillies. Previously installed in a domestic scale, semi-circular interior, this installation was one of the treasures of the “Old MoMA.” For the inaugural show, Monet’s masterwork was hung in MoMA’s massive atrium, and was singled out by even those who wrote glowingly about the new museum design as an aesthetic disaster–one of the more oft-quoted descriptions was that the majestic mural looked like a “big, soiled Band-Aid” [7]

What was made to disappear was not the museum building with its aggressive walls of whiteness, but all that would counter such a sanitized realm, which was matched by the museum programming. It is a generalization, but nonetheless true: the works exhibited were dominated by preference for abstraction and neutral tones. This was particularly the case with the painting and sculpture galleries, with those devoted to design offering one of the few oases of color, emotion and diversity within this desert of the monochrome. Despite the fact the United States had been obsessed by what was being called the War on Terror, there was no reference to the existence of such conflicts, except for one José Clemente Orozco’s 1940 mural, Dive Bomber and Tank installed in a hall. The New MoMA’s inaugural installation was representative of major Manhattan museums inability to present almost any programming dealing with war for most of the past six years that we have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan [8]. At MoMA, programming has been dominated by exhibitions with innocuous themes, and one-person shows, which until recently were almost all only given to artists who are men. The lack of diversity that marked the New MoMA’s canon was seen in the seven works squeezed into the multimedia galleries, which were to represent all the video, digital, film, and media works of the past half century. But this lack was even more disturbing in terms of gender. Too many of the galleries had no, or few, works by women. The famous sculpture garden included not one entry by a woman artist.

Although there have been a few shows devoted to women artists since the museum’s re-opening, and there have been some interesting departures from MoMA’s monochromatic/monographic standard by the design and architecture department [9], a visit to the museum in mid-May affirmed that little has changed since 2004. The thematic exhibitions included such pressing concerns as: Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded; The Printed Picture; Compass in Hand [10]; and Into the Sunset: Photographs of the American West. Certainly, exhibitions with formalist, vague, lacking-a-great-idea themes, such as Staged Pictures: Drawings for Performance can have a fantastic single image, as did this show, which also included several fascinating videos of original theater performances to illuminate the drawings. But the featured—literally “top tier”—temporary exhibitions in the large scale sixth floor galleries were devoted to a Martin Kippenberger’s show (that had just closed) and one called Tangled Alphabets, an exhibition of the work of Leon Ferrari and Mira Shendel. Given the Museum’s history and the pairing of these two artists’ work, I and another critic, who had just seen the show, could not help but wonder that if Schendel had not been a woman, and if these were not Latin American artists, perhaps they would have been assigned a one person retrospective. Finally, there was a change in the sculpture garden installation. They added another artists work, Franz West. So there continues to be no works by women in the MoMA sculpture garden.

Despite the fact that artists have always addressed key issues of their time, with some exceptions, the Museum continues to fail to present a range of programming that is more than one person shows and innocuous thematic exhibitions. This failure to represent a diversity of art and culture is manifest in the entire gesamptkunstwerk that is MoMA. Mirroring the bland programming and ahistorical themes that constitute the selections and exhibitions, the installations and architecture present an exaggerated version of the standard “white box” interior. The new building and installations perpetuate the modern art museum’s convention of installing artworks isolated on neutral-toned walls. But what is particularly important to this discussion is that such spaces create a de-contextualized environment not only for the works of art, but for the viewers. These displays enhance viewers’ sense of ahistorical autonomy, and metaphorically foster an experience of independence, and even “free will.” As is the case with Taneguchi’s design, since the development of these types of installations earlier in the twentieth century, what were originally beige neutral colors have become bright white, and the scale of the walls have increased in sized. In keeping with these developments, the New MoMA, with its immense, self-referential, ultra white interiors, and matching neutral, apolitical, non-diverse, decontextualized programming offers an isolationist, escapist, and delusionally empowering experience for viewers.

Endnotes

[1] The enactment of this law will not take effect until a special facility is built, with the latest date for enactment is July 1, 2011. For an explanation of these details see: see DOCS Today: New York State Department of Correctional Services, vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 2008, http://www.docs.state.ny.us/PressRel/DOCSToday/ Spring2008edition.pdfA (June 1, 2009). A compilation of fact sheets and articles related to what is called the SHU Bill can be found at the Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (MHASC) website, http://www.boottheshu.org/ (June 1, 2009).

[2] The exact figure was 1,015, see Linda Saad, “More Americans Pro-life Than Pro-choice,” for First Time,” GALLUP, http://www.gallup.com/poll/118399/more-americans-pro-life-than-pro-choice-first-time.aspx (May 27, 2009).

What was important here was the prominence of this information within the mainstream media, and the fact that related information, like the fact that one third of women in the United States have had an abortion by the age of 45 is rarely mentioned in such discussions in the mainstream press, see “Overview of Abortion in the U.S.,” Guttmacher Institute, http://www.guttmacher.org/media/presskits/2005/06/28/abortionoverview.html (June 1, 2009).

[3] Judge Ruth Bader Ginzburg wrote the dissenting opinion, which she read from the bench. This is unusual for Supreme Court justices to do so and emphasizes the strength of her dissent. As is well known, Ginzburg is the only woman on the Supreme Court. For a discussion that references the unusualness of Ginzburg’s reading out loud, see “After Gonzales v. Carhart: The Future of Abortion Jurisprudence” (event transcript) The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, June 14, 2007, http://supreme.justia.com/us/550/05-380/ (May 31, 2009).

For case see, Gonzalez v. Carhart 550 U.S. 124 (2007), Findlaw,

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=05-380

[4] To cite just one example, see “Monica Davey and Joe Stumpe, “Doctor Who Performed Abortions Is Shot Dead, The New York Times, May 31, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html?ref=global-home (May 31, 2009).

[5] I have written more extensive analyses of MoMA’s new design and the history of museum practices. Several texts that related especially to this essay are: “What’s so new about MoMA?” Sunday Opinion Section: Newsday, January 23, 2005, A. 41; “Grand Illusions: The “New” Museum of Modern Art,” Curating Subjects, editor, Paul O’Neil, Amsterdam and London: de Appel and Open Editions, 2007; and “Preface”, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, designLocus of Seoul, Korea, Spring 2007, originally published by the MIT Press in English in 1998.

[6] This was a often quoted line in the press, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli repeated it in a New York Magazine article, Alexandra Lange, “This New House,” October 11, 2004, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/10057/index4.html (May 26, 2009).

[7] Peter Schjeldahl, “Easy to Look At,” The New Yorker, December 6, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206craw_artworld (May 26, 2009).

[8] Exceptions were the Whitney Museum’s 2003 The American Effect (which looked at international attitudes toward the U.S.) and a small 2004 permanent collection show Memorials of War. More recently in 2009, MoMA held an exhibition in the mezzaine reading room, The Museum and the War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for “The Cause,” presenting archival materials (correspondence, press clippings, and photographs) related to MoMA’s WW II exhibitions.

[9] One such exception was Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, Paola Antonelli, with Curatorial Assistant, Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini 2005 exhibition

Safe: Design Takes On Risk.

[10] The full title is for Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection.

Mary Anne Staniszewski

Mary Anne Staniszewski, Ph.D. is Acting Head of the Department of the Arts at Rensselaer. Her books include, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (Penguin USA) and The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (The MIT Press) Staniszewski is currently writing a multi-volume “portrait” of the U.S., featuring the themes of race; sex (gender); and life and death.

Original context

EDITORIAL

New York Times

 In a long series of valedictory speeches and interviews, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been crowing about Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and abusive interrogations, claiming they met the highest legal standards and that no prisoner had been tortured. Fortunately, the truth broke through the noise, in the words of some of the very people ordered to carry out the policies.

 In an interview in The Washington Post, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who runs the military tribunals at Guantánamo, said that harsh interrogation methods had endangered the life of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national accused of planning to take part in the 9/11 attacks. Authorized by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they included sustained isolation, nudity and prolonged exposure to the cold.

 “We tortured Qahtani,” Judge Crawford said, adding that she was therefore unable to prosecute a man who seemed to pose a real threat to the United States.

Judge Crawford was not the only one speaking out. Major David Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who was assigned to defend another Guantánamo prisoner, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that he and all the other defense lawyers in the system consider the tribunals “unfair, rigged” and unconstitutional. He noted that his client’s prosecutor resigned to protest the lack of evidence in the case.

That is the real nature of Mr. Bush’s grotesque legacy: abuse and torture at an outlaw prison where hundreds of men — many of whom did nothing — have been held for years without real evidence or charges. And truly dangerous men were treated so badly that it may be impossible to bring them to justice.

It will be hard enough to close down Guantánamo as Barack Obama has vowed to do, but the legal burdens Mr. Bush is dumping on his successor are much greater.

The appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, railroaded through Congress, must be repealed. Interrogation rules that respect American values and laws and the Geneva Conventions must be set for all government agencies, including the intelligence agencies.

And there is the profound question of whether the new administration should prosecute those who tortured and abused prisoners — and those who ordered them to do it. Judge Crawford’s legal finding that torture occurred adds a new complication, since a treaty obliges the United States to investigate such allegations.

We have heard a lot of talk about how the country needs to look forward and not backward. We certainly would like to forget the horrors of the last eight years. But you cannot fix something before you know exactly how it is broken. The clandestine system Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have built will not give up its secrets easily.

To ensure that the abuses stop, Mr. Obama and his administration will have to work hard to find out all that has happened. They will have to locate and override all of the policy memos, directives and executive orders that have redefined and condoned torture and other abuses. Guantánamo is the place to begin.

 The timetable: Mr. Obama is expected to announce as early as Wednesday that he is beginning the process of shutting Guantánamo. We hope he sets a target date. That may make it easier to persuade other governments to agree to accept some prisoners — one of the difficult challenges ahead. But we do not agree with critics who insist that date must fall within his first 100 days.

This page called early and often for closing Guantánamo. But we recognize that this is going to be very hard work.

 Sorting out the inmates: Mr. Obama’s lawyers will have to review every file, most of which the Bush administration has refused to turn over to any authority, including Congress. We know from bitter experience that the Bush administration’s judgment is worthless when it comes to what these prisoners may have done, how they have been treated and what justice they should face.

Just last week, Mr. Cheney claimed that the interrogation of prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the planner of 9/11, who was tortured by waterboarding, allowed the United States to capture a “very impressive” list of Al Qaeda leaders in 2003. If that is true, Mr. Obama needs to know who they are, where they are, and what was done to them in the last five years.

A blueprint: Senator Dianne Feinstein, the new head of the Intelligence Committee, has a bill for closing Guantánamo that Mr. Obama should embrace. It sets a one-year deadline and requires that every prisoner either be charged and tried in United States federal court; transferred for trial by an international tribunal under United Nations authority; returned to the custody of the government of their homeland, if that government does not abuse and torture prisoners; held as a prisoner of war; or, simply, released.

The separate system of tribunals created by the military commissions act must be abolished. They are a mockery of American justice, and utterly unnecessary.

It was extremely encouraging to hear Eric Holder, Mr. Obama’s choice for attorney general, say at his confirmation hearing on Thursday that the new administration is open to trying prisoners in the United States. It is appalling that an attorney general nominee has to say he respects the law, but such is the Bush legacy.

The real bad guys: After the prisoners are sorted out, Mr. Bush’s egregiously bad judgment leaves all Americans with a huge problem. The abuses authorized by top Bush officials, and so gleefully defended by Mr. Cheney in particular in the last few weeks, create the possibility that men like Mohammed al-Qahtani and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will never be able to face justice in a real courtroom.

Mr. Obama’s team will have to come up with a solution that does not set such men free. We are not sure what it should be, but there is one unacceptable choice: creating a new detentions law that would allow them held without trial. That would merely compound Mr. Bush’s catastrophically bad choices.

Interrogations: The 2006 military tribunals law bound military interrogators to the Army field manual’s rules, which conform with the Geneva Conventions — unlike Mr. Bush’s policies. But, at Mr. Bush’s insistence, the bill carved out an exemption that allowed intelligence agencies to go on hiring civilian interrogators and to engage in practices that are clearly immoral and illegal. Ms. Feinstein’s bill would eliminate the loophole on how prisoners are treated and ban the use of civilian interrogators.

We were glad to hear Mr. Holder state that the Obama administration considers the Geneva Conventions binding. But we wish he had been more clear on a solution, beyond calling the Army field manual a “good start” for interrogation rules in C.I.A. prisons. We also were unclear from his answers whether Mr. Obama has decided, as he should, to ban civilian interrogators.

Mr. Holder unequivocally declared waterboarding to be torture, which his predecessors would not do. But this is not just about waterboarding. Other practices, like forced nudity, prolonged isolation, and extremes of heat and cold, are abuses under the same laws and treaties that prohibit torture. And Judge Crawford reminded us that torture is not necessarily just one terrible act. In the Qahtani case, she said: “This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive.”

C.I.A. prisons: We have never heard a convincing explanation for why the Central Intelligence Agency needs its own network of prisons beyond the reach of law, in undisclosed locations. If there is a good reason, we hope this administration will explain it. We are skeptical, and we urge Mr. Obama to support Ms. Feinstein’s bill, which would require the C.I.A. to report all detainees to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We recognize that this is a daunting agenda, and that to succeed, Mr. Obama’s White House, Justice Department and Pentagon will also have to rebuild demoralized legal divisions where professionals were replaced with apparatchiks whose mission was to twist the law to justify their masters’ decisions.

This work is essential to restoring the rule of law. It is essential to restoring this country’s reputation around the world. And it is essential to restoring Americans’ faith in themselves and in their government. That is the only way to move forward.