The Economist

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

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

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

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 No sooner had he been sworn into office than he banned torture, rescinded legal opinions allowing simulated drowning and other harsh methods, ordered all American agencies to comply with the army’s field manual on interrogation,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

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

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

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

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

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

The big chill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waterboarding the agencies

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

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

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

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

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

Degrees of pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bleak choices

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

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

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

The Economist

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

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

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

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

Would you tip off Pakistan?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

New York Times

Noah Feldman

Cambridge, Mass.

Has the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism, or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?

We got a clue last week when the Justice Department filed an important document “refining” the government’s position in lawsuits over those held at Guantánamo Bay. Hailed by supporters as a leap forward, yet criticized by human rights groups as being little different from what came before, the filing reveals a distinctive approach to constitutional law. Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.

Perhaps what’s most important here is what Mr. Obama’s lawyers do not say. The Bush White House long insisted that the president had inherent power as commander in chief to do whatever it took to defend the country — including overriding American and international law. The Obama filing, however, is silent on the topic of inherent executive power. Indeed, the magic words “commander in chief” never even appear.

Technically, the Obama lawyers have not abandoned the argument for broad presidential power, just implied that such authority is unnecessary to get them what they want.

Yet omitting the claim to unfettered executive authority shows respect for Congress and international standards. In effect, the Obama administration is saying to the courts that if the detainees cannot be held as a matter of federal or international law, judges should release them. This approach is brave — so brave it might even prove foolhardy if the courts, sick of nearly a decade of detention, decide to clear the decks.

The filing argues that the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress after 9/11 — the contemporary equivalent of a declaration of war — gives the president the powers any sovereign would have under the general principles of the international law of war. Relying on international law to make sense of Congress’s grant of power has deep roots in our constitutional tradition.

In the context of America’s present global military posture, however, the rediscovery of this notion is little short of astonishing. The laws of war, mostly designed for old-fashioned struggles between sovereign states, often do not fit today’s circumstances. The Bush administration saw this mismatch as an occasion to treat the Geneva conventions as “quaint” (in the words of Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel).

The Obama lawyers, however, seem to believe that the international law of war is flexible enough to serve their interests — and even to expand the president’s power to detain suspects beyond the strict language used by Congress when it gave President Bush authority to carry out his war on terrorism.

Here is where the law gets complicated: In 2001, Congress told the president he could make war on anyone who had “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration, though, went further; it claimed the power to detain any “enemy combatant,” defined to include “anyone who is part of or supporting Taliban or Al Qaeda forces or associated forces.” In an unfortunate legal overreach, one administration lawyer said the government could detain a “little old lady in Switzerland” whose donation to an Afghan orphanage ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda.

In place of the “enemy combatant” definition, the Obama administration now claims the right to detain anyone who “substantially supported” terrorists. Thankfully, the Obama standard would free the little old Swiss lady. But the words “substantial support” do not come from international law any more than Bush’s “enemy combatant” did.

The administration lawyers suggest in their brief that “substantial support” of terrorists could be defined by some unspecified analogy to the laws of detention in traditional armed conflict. Yet the details are left to the imagination; and when push comes to shove, this language might well include all the Guantánamo detainees, including those who never belonged to a terrorist group.

The upshot is that the Obama approach is potentially broad enough to continue detaining everyone whom the Bush administration put in Guantánamo in the first place. The legal theories are subtler, and the reliance on international law may prove more attractive to our allies. But President Obama is stuck with the detainees Mr. Bush left him, and some may pose a real danger. Faced with this conundrum, and pressed for answers by judges who are rightfully impatient, the administration is hurrying to reframe existing powers in new legal doctrines.

The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantánamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.

Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing writer to The Times Magazine.

New York Times

Agence France-Presse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hürriyet (Newspaper)

Yusuf Kanlı

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

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

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

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

A bad record

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

Crime is crime

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

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

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

American Isolation & The Middle East

a talk by Ammiel Alcalay

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE WAR ON TERROR

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

p a l m P R E S S

Printed in an edition of 300 in January, 2003.

Copyright © 2003 by Ammiel Alcalay.

All rights reserved.

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

Author’s Note

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

The Cornell Forum for Justice and Peace:

www.geocities.com/cfjusticepeace/

Palm Press, 9 Puhalka Road

Newfi eld, NY 14867

Poetry, Politics and Translation:

American Isolation & The Middle East

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In conflict resistless each toil they endur’d,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q & A Moderated by Deborah Starr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Break in the Tradition of Criminal Law.

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

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

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

A Manifestation of Imperial Power.

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

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

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

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

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

The USA Patriot Act as Suspension of Foreigners’ Rights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The State of Emergency, European Union Style.

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

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

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

Anticipating a New ‘Social War’.

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

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

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

The End of the Separation of Powers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Specific Role of the United States of America.

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

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

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

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

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

The State of Emergency.

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

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

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

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

The Relevance of Carl Schmitt.

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

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

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

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

State of Emergency or Dictatorship?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

(1)

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

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

(3) Carl Schmitt ‘Political Theology’

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

 ”Infinite Justice”. This was the initial name given to the Pentagon’s offensive against that fuzzy-contoured enemy, referred to by the term of ‘terrorism’. As we know, the name was quickly changed. It had been, as we were told, a case of language excess on the part of a president still inexperienced in the art of nuances. If he had wanted bin Laden “dead or alive”, it was obviously due to having seen too many Westerns at too young an age.

 Such an explanation left no one convinced. That’s because the ‘dead or alive’ principle isn’t the one from Westerns. On the contrary, it’s quite common to find sheriffs risking their skin to save assassins from a lynch mob, and hand them over to Justice afterward. Infinite Justice, as opposed to the Far West’s whole morality, means justice without limits. It’s justice that ignores all of the categories by which its practice is traditionally circumscribed: distinguishing legal punishment from the vengeance of individuals; separating the law from politics, ethics or religion; separating police forms by which criminals are hunted down from the military forms by which armies engage in battle.

 From that point of view, there was no language excess. ‘Nuances’ would be inappropriate indeed. These traces are precisely what characterize the retaliatory operations undertaken by the USA. They involve eliminating the differences that separate war and the police from all the legal forms by means of which we’ve sought to specify and limit the action of war onto justice. We’re no longer talking about ‘dead or alive’, except to say that nobody knows whether the accused is dead or alive. Yet no one knows exactly what the charge is under which the American military is detaining, with the intension of trying, prisoners who benefit neither from POW status nor from the ordinary guarantees granted to defendants with proceedings brought against them. ‘Infinite justice’ states exactly what’s at stake: the assertion of a right identical to the omnipotence hitherto reserved for the vindictive God. All traditional distinctions end up by being abolished with the erasure of international forms of law.

 To be sure, this erasure is already the principle of terrorist action, to which political forms and the norms of law are also indifferent. But ‘infinite justice’ is not only the answer to the adversary’s provocation, thus being compelled to share the same field as him. It translates as well the strange status that the erasure of the political nowadays grants to law, within nations and amongst them.

 Reflecting on the current state of law reveals an extraordinary inversion of things. In the 1990’s, the undoing of the Soviet empire and the weakening of social movements in major Western countries were usually celebrated as utopias being liquidated from real and social democracy to the benefit of the rules of the State of Right. Whereupon unleashed ethnic conflicts and religious fundamentalism ended by contradicting this simple philosophy of history. But identifying Western triumph as the State of Right’s has also proved to be problematic. That’s because at the very heart of Western powers and in their modes of foreign intervention, the relation between right and fact has evolved in such as way as to tend increasingly toward erasing the boundaries of law.

 In these countries, we’ve seen two phenomena emerge. On the one hand, there’s an interpretation of law in terms of the rights granted to a whole series of groups. On the other, legislative practices have aimed at harmonizing the letter of the law entirely with new lifestyles and workstyles, new forms of technology, and the family or social relationships.

This is how the political forum, shaped in the gap between the law’s abstract literalness and the polemics over its interpretations, has been found to have shrunken as much. Thus celebrated, the law increasingly tends to be the record of a community’s lifestyles. Ethical symbolization has substituted the political symbolization of power and its limits, and the law’s ambivalence. What’s now familiar to us is a relation of consensual inter-expression between the fact of a society’s state and the norm of the law.

What the American response asserts is the unmediated likeness of law and fact in the way a community lives. Yet this is also what the American Constitution’s dominant representation symbolizes: the ethical identity between a particular lifestyle and a universal system of values. As we know, ‘ethos’ means sojourn and lifestyle before referring to a system of moral values. The recent manifesto issued by American intellectuals in support of George W. Bush’s policies highlighted this point well: the United States are first and foremost a community united by common moral and religious values, an ethical community more than one of law and politics. The Good, by which the community is founded, is therefor the identity between law and fact. And the crime perpetrated against thousands of American lives can be immediately considered a crime perpetrated against the Empire of Good itself.

 Yet for some time already this rise of ethics to the detriment of justice has characterized the forms by which the Western powers have intervened abroad. Blurring the limits between fact and law has taken on another face, one opposite and complementary to consensual harmony, i.e. the face of the humanitarian and ‘humane interference’.

 The ‘right of humane interference’ has enabled the protection of some populations of the former-Yugoslavia from ethnic liquidation. However, this was carried out at the cost of blurring symbolic boundaries as well as State borders. It has not only consecrated giving up a structural principle of international law, i.e. the principle of non-inference–whose virtues were admittedly ambiguous. It especially introduced a destructive principle of limitlessness regarding the very idea of the gap separating law and fact, which otherwise endows the law with its status.

Back in the days of the Vietnam War or of the coups American power engineered more or less directly in various regions throughout the world, there existed an explicit or latent opposition between the great principles as asserted by the Western powers and the practices subordinating those principles to their vital interests. The anti-imperialist mobilizations of the 1960’s and 1970’s had denounced this split between the founding principles and real practices. Nowadays the polemics over means and ends seems to have vanished.

 The principle behind this disappearance is represented by the absolute victim, a victim of infinite evil, forcing a response of infinite reparation. This ‘absolute’ right of the victim has come to full fruition in the framework of ‘humane’ war. It was backed up during the last quarter century by the major intellectual movement that worked on theorizing infinite crime.

We’ve undoubtedly not heeded the specific features enough of what could be called the second denunciation of Soviet crimes and the Nazi genocide. The first denunciation had aimed at establishing the reality behind the facts while also reinforcing the determination of Western democracies to struggle against an ever-present and ever-threatening totalitarianism. The second kind, developed during the 1970’s as a record of communism, or in the 1980’s when returning to the way in which the European Jewry was exterminated, has acquired a whole new meaning. Not only have the crimes been transformed into the monstrous effects of regimes that have to be fought against, but into the forms whereby an infinite, unthinkable and irreparable crime was made manifest_the work of an Evil power exceeding all legal and political measure. Ethics has become the way to think this infinite evil, which has created an irremediable break in history.

The ultimate consequences of the excess of ethics over law and politics is the paradoxical constitution of an individual’s absolute right whose rights have, in fact, been absolutely negated. This individual actually appears as the victim of an infinite Evil against which the fight is itself infinite. This is the point at which the one defending the victim’s rights inherits absolute right.

The unlimited feature of the wrong perpetrated against the victim justifies his counsel’s unlimited right. American reparation for the absolute crime perpetrated against American lives has brought the process to its culmination. The obligation of attending to the victims of absolute Evil has become identical to the fight without limits against this evil. And this is identified with deploying unlimited military power, acting like a police force in charge of restoring order to every part of the world where Evil can find shelter. This military power is also a legal one, exercising the mythical power of Vengence in hot pursuit of Crime against all alleged accomplices of infinite Evil.

As the saying goes, unlimited right is identical to non-right. Victims and culprits alike fall into the cercle of ‘infinite justice’. These days this translates into the total indeterminacy of the law as it deals with the status of the American army’s prisoners and the way of qualifying the facts held against them.

 Hegel had already sunk into the night of the Absolute in which “all cows are gray”. The lack of ethical distinction, in which politics and the law drown nowadays, has transformed the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay into captives of the same type of infinite, with gray being switched to orange.

Legal and political symbolization has been slowly substituted by another ethical and police symbolization of the lives of so-called democratic communities and of their relations with another world, identified by the sole reign of ethnic and fundamentalist powers. In the one corner, the world of good: that of consensus eliminating political litigation in the joyous harmonizing of right and fact, ways of being and values. In the other: the world of evil, in which wrong is made infinite, and where it can only be a matter of war unto death.

 Translated for CounterPunch by Norman Madarasz

 http://www.counterpunch.org/ranciere0430.html