Extradition posted by Richard Seymour

I have been meaning to write up the case of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmed for a while.  This important documentary, featuring Talha's brother Hamja, lays out the facts:

Labels: 'terrorism', 'war on terror', guantanamo, human rights, rendition, torture, US imperialism

Obama's tortured logic posted by Richard Seymour

Yours truly on Obama and his torture policies.

Labels: abu ghraib, bagram, barack obama, guantanamo, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, torture

In the gulag for reading satire posted by Richard Seymour

Binyam Mohamed was kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and locked up in Kabul, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay for almost seven years because he read a satirical article on the internet.

Labels: 'war on terror', bagram, cia, guantanamo, rendition, torture

On 'totalitarian jurisprudence' posted by Richard Seymour

James Petras writes that:



KSM spent six months in Guantanamo and the rest of the time in various locations hitherto undisclosed. The US deliberately made a song and dance about its internment camp in Guantanamo, where its procedures were slightly less filthy than on the offshore prison ships. He was tortured and, when he confessed, he decided to confess to everything: his confession was false, in other words, which is almost invariably true of confessions obtained by torture. Nevertheless, the assertion that KSM is a "self-confessed" mastermind of 9/11 is quite popular. Forget what you think about KSM for a second. The issue is exactly what Petras says it is: not whether KSM may be a bad man, or whether he committed other crimes, or whether he may be found guilty of this one by some other means, but whether we should adopt the increasingly fashionable practise of deeming someone guilty by virtue of their having confessed under obvious duress. Because once we do that, we do it for everyone - the tricky thing about law is precisely its universalising dimension.

And we might add that, whatever you think about Slobodan Milosevic, the same applies to his trials. A show trial is a show trial, regardless of his evident (amateur) gangsterism. And when Radovan Karadzic testifies before an ICTY court, it will still be preposterous even if you assume that he is guilty of everything they say he is. Even if they extract the full evidence of his having ordered and directed the planned extermination of Bosnian Muslims, cut short only by belated Western intervention, it will still have been a farce. All that said, and I think it an obvious spiel, you would be doing well to find more than 0.01% of the media coverage that will say anything remotely like it. The regnant assumptions are indeed the 'totalitarian' ones that Petras refers to: if the Fuhrer wants it, two and two make five. All they desire is the confession, to expiate their misdeeds, prove their virtue, keep the vassals playing ball, and ultimately show who is boss.

Labels: 'war on terror', guantanamo, khalid sheikh mohammed, law, radovan karadzic, slobodan milosevic, torture

Kisses from Gitmo posted by Richard Seymour

Torture kitsch from the new American resort, 'Taliban Towers' in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:

Labels: capital, guantanamo, torture, US imperialism

Kangaroo courts at risk in Guantanamo posted by Richard Seymour

Bush's policy of military tribunals for detainees in Guantanamo - we would be barbaric to say 'suspects', since most of them don't appear to be suspected of anything specific - has hit a welcome legal blockage. The ruling dismissing charges in Omar Ahmad Khadr's case, which stated that the whole procedure is flawed, came from a US army colonel appointed to oversee one of the tribunals. That means it's serious, or so I'd guess. The "flaw" is that "Congress authorized charges only against detainees who had been determined to be unlawful enemy combatant". However, "the military here has determined only that Khadr was an enemy combatant. Military lawyers said the same flaw would affect every other potential war crimes case here." None of the detainees have been found to be "unlawful" enemy combatants. I expect that Camp Delta (née X-Ray) will be wound up at some point in the distant future, since it is not the main focus of detention policy, despite being the most visible. All evidence to date points to it being an indefinite holding pen for small fry, and people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as a very visible form of intimidation. When the US doesn't kill any senior Al Qaeda leaders that it can find, it claims to detain them in unknown locations apart from Guantanamo. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, spent only six months in Guantanamo - reportedly - and his location is kept secret, even now that he has confessed to everything from the murder of Thomas Becket to the framing of Martha Stewart.) Of course, one shouldn't underestimate the ability of the Bush administration to organise a reversal. An earlier ruling from a US district court insisting that detainees should be protected by the constitution if there was any doubt as to their 'unlawful' status was thrown out by a three judge panel including one John Roberts, whom Bush appointed to the Supreme Court the following week. The Republicans are particularly adept at this kind of thing. Yet, the networks of secret prisons and rendition points are probably far more valuable to them than the gulag in Guantanamo, which even the bumpkin billionaire Thomas Friedman thinks is an "embarrassment".

Labels: 'war on terror', george w bush, guantanamo, US imperialism

Bush the 'fascist'? posted by Richard Seymour

Naomi Wolf, a Clintonite feminist, on Bush's ten steps toward fascism. I don't doubt the existence of fascist potencies in the United States, but to speak of it as a clear and present danger is misleading, to put it blandly. If you ask me, it's part of this 'Anyone But Bush' politics that is destroying the American left and drawing the antiwar movement into the frigid Democratic Party graveyard. The politics of MoveOn.org, Howard Dean's fan club, and such alignments, are to divert mass disaffection with Bush's wars into the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Wolf rightly criticises Bush's openly repressive measures, including the Patriot Act. However, there is no mention Democratic complicity. There is no effort by the Democrats to reverse these measures at all (indeed, most Democratic senators have consistently supported its re-authorisation, often at the behest of the most 'liberal' senators such as Diane Feinstein), no effort to counter the crackdown on immigrants, and more basically the plan for 'withdrawal' from Iraq is - despite appearances - a plan for escalation. The Democrats will certainly, if they get Clinton elected, manage an eventual, prolonged withdrawal to the comfort of the fortified military bases if they are forced to, but what's going to happen to the troops? They're going to Afghanistan. And as for the prospects of a strike on Iran? Leading Democrats are all for it.

In the middle of all the heat on the Iraq war, debate over the 'war on terror' (or the policies implemented under its rubric) has been occluded. What the US is doing to the horn of Africa has been practically unnoticed, and Afghanistan is rarely debated (although most Americans now oppose that venture too). So, the mainstream of the Democratic Party, so often depicted as to the left of a cautious public, actually enforces a consensus on a range of issues where there is in fact broad dissent. There will certainly be no debate on Palestine, and the evidence is that Clinton will be a great deal worse on this question than Bush. This is going to become the decisive problem in American politics, since Bush will be out in 2008, and there will probably be a Democratic president with allies in both houses. The Republican Party is being splintered by Bush's intransigence on a whole range of issues, and we have had the corrollary spectacle - perhaps a first in American politics - of a number of conservatives moving to the left. The era of a Rovean 'permanent Republican majority' is finished.

Bush's catastrophic regime will be gratefully terminated, but talk of him being a 'fascist' is, in my view, an ideological secretion of the 'Anyone But Bush' alignment that seeks to suck all of the popular movements that have sprung up, all of the hope in American politics, under the canopy of the DLC. And that is lethal.

Labels: 'war on terror', fascism, george w bush, guantanamo, imperialism, iraq, patriot act