LENIN'S TOMB

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

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

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Britain in Bahrain posted by Richard Seymour

"The secret police – the Bahrain national security agency, known in Arabic as the Mukhabarat – has undergone a process of "Bahrainisation" in recent years after being dominated by the British until long after independence in 1971. Ian Henderson, who retired as its director in 1998, is still remembered as the "Butcher of Bahrain" because of his alleged use of torture. A Jordanian official is currently described as the organisation's "master torturer"."

Labels: bahrain, british empire, counterinsurgency, middle east, revolution, torture

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Statement of the Revolutionary Socialists Egypt posted by Richard Seymour

The iron heel of US imperialism is coming down hard on Egypt. The army command which America funds, trains and instructs is now mobilising rapidly to consolidate a dictatorship under the leadership of Omar Suleiman. US warships are making their way to Egypt. This is not, military commanders insist, to prepare for military intervention. I would assume they are being truthful. An open invasion is neither necessary nor useful for the regime. The warships would be for contingency, and to remind people who the boss is. The main way in which the counter-revolution is being organised is through the efforts by the military to create a fait accompli, a far more sophisticated operation than Mubarak's crude use of armed gangs on horseback.

Since no one wants the torturer Suleiman, the question now, as this statement from the Revolutionary Socialists Egypt argues, is whether the soldiers can be broken from their bosses.

Statement of the Revolutionary Socialists Egypt:

Glory to the martyrs! Victory to the revolution!

What is happening today is the largest popular revolution in the history of our country and of the entire Arab world. The sacrifice of our martyrs has built our revolution and we have broken through all the barriers of fear. We will not back down until the criminal 'leaders' and their criminal system is destroyed.

Mubarak's departure is the first step, not the last step of the revolution

The handover of power to a dictatorship under Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafiq and other cronies of Mubarak is the continuation of the same system. Omar Suleiman is a friend of Israel and America, spends most of his time between Washington and Tel Aviv and is a servant who is faithful to their interests. Ahmed Shafik is a close friend of Mubarak and his colleague in the tyranny, oppression and plunder imposed on the Egyptian people.

The country's wealth belongs to the people and must return to it

Over the past three decades this tyrannical regime corrupted the country's largest estates to a small handful of business leaders and foreign companies. 100 families own more than 90% of the country's wealth. They monopolize the wealth of the Egyptian people through policies of privatization, looting of power and the alliance with Capital. They have turned the majority of the Egyptian people to the poor, landless and unemployed.

Factories wrecked and sold dirt cheap must go back to the people

We want the nationalization of companies, land and property looted by this bunch. As long as our resources remain in their hands we will not be able to completely get rid of this system. Economic slavery is the other face of political tyranny. We will not be able to cope with unemployment and achieve a fair minimum wage for a decent living without restoring the wealth of the people from this gang.

We will not accept to be guard dogs of America and Israel

This system does not stand alone. Mubarak, as a dictator was a servant and client directly acting for the sake of the interests of America and Israel. Egypt acted as a colony of America, participated directly in the siege of the Palestinian people, made the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace freezones for warships and fighter jets that destroyed and killed the Iraqi people and sold gas to Israel, dirt cheap, while stifling the Egyptian people by soring prices. Revolution must restore Egypt's independence, dignity and leadership in the region.

The revolution is a popular revolution

This is not a revolution of the elite, political parties or religious groups. Egypt's youth, students, workers and the poor are the owners of this revolution. In recent days a lot of elites, parties and so-called symbols have begun trying to ride the wave of revolution and hijack it from their rightful owners. The only symbols are the martyrs of our revolution and our young people who have been steadfast in the field. We will not allow them to take control of our revolution and claim that they represent us. We will choose to represent ourselves and represent the martyrs who were killed and their blood paid the price for the salvation of the system.

A people's army is the army that protects the revolution

Everyone asks: "Is the army with the people or against them?". The army is not a single block. The interests of soldiers and junior officers are the same as the interests of the masses. But the senior officers are Mubarak’s men, chosen carefully to protect his regime of corruption, wealth and tyranny. It is an integral part of the system.

This army is no longer the people’s army. This army is not the one which defeated the Zionist enemy in October 73. This army is closely associated with America and Israel. Its role is to protect Israel, not the people. Yes we want to win the soldiers for the revolution. But we must not be fooled by slogans that ‘the army is on our side’. The army will either suppress the demonstrations directly, or restructure the police to play this role.

Form revolutionary councils urgently

This revolution has surpassed our greatest expectations. Nobody expected to see these numbers. Nobody expected that Egyptians would be this brave in the face of the police. Nobody can say that we did not force the dictator to retreat. Nobody can say that a transformation did not happen in Middan el Tahrir.

What we need right now is to push for the socio-economic demands as part of our demands, so that the person sitting in his home knows that we are fighting for their rights. We need to organize ourselves into popular committees which elects its higher councils democratically, and from below. These councils must form a higher council which includes delegates of all the tendencies. We must elect a higher council of people who represent us, and in whom we trust. We call for the formation of popular councils in Middan Tahrir, and in all the cities of Egypt.

Call to Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution

The demonstrations and protests have played a key role in igniting and continuing our revolution. Now we need the workers. They can seal the fate of the regime. Not only by participating in the demonstrations, but by organising a general strike in all the vital industries and large corporations.

The regime can afford to wait out the sit-ins and demonstrations for days and weeks, but it cannot last beyond a few hours if workers use strikes as a weapon. Strike on the railways, on public transport, the airports and large industrial companies! Egyptian Workers! On behalf of the rebellious youth, and on behalf of the blood of our martyrs, join the ranks of the revolution, use your power and victory will be ours!

Glory to the martyrs!

Down with the system!

All power to the people!

Victory to the revolution!

www.e-socialists.net

Labels: dictatorship, egypt, middle east, revolution, socialism, torture, US imperialism

Friday, February 04, 2011

US backs Egypt's chief torturer posted by Richard Seymour

The New York Times reports that the US is negotiating with the Egyptian military to force Mubarak, preserve the regime, and put the Vice President and former chief of military intelligence, Omar Suleiman, in charge as transitional president. The US trusts him, of course, because in addition to torturing Egyptians he helped run the CIA's kidnapping and torturing ring, known as 'rendition'. The New Yorker summarises:

While he has a reputation for loyalty and effectiveness, he also carries some controversial baggage from the standpoint of those looking for a clean slate on human rights. As I described in my book “The Dark Side,” since 1993 Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.
As laid out in greater detail by Stephen Grey, in his book “Ghost Plane,” beginning in the nineteen-nineties, Suleiman negotiated directly with top Agency officials. Every rendition was greenlighted at the highest levels of both the U.S. and Egyptian intelligence agencies. Edward S. Walker, Jr., a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, described Suleiman as “very bright, very realistic,” adding that he was cognizant that there was a downside to “some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way.”

So, if we can summarise. The US backed Mubarak for more than three decades after the assassination of Sadat, supplied him with billions in aid, military equipment, torture equipment, tear gas, etc. They trained the army, forging close ties with the military top brass. The IMF vended largesse, with the usual strings attached. Beginning with Sadat's 'Open Door' policies and the peace treaty with Israel, Egypt was transformed from a nationalist, corporatist, anti-imperialist polity, into a neoliberal comprador regime. A new fraction of rentiers emerged as the financial sector grew and private sector capitalists were given greater opportunities to profit from public investments. Every crisis of the system, whether it was produced by a financial crash, a slump in oil prices, the upending of BCCI, or the long-term collapse of fruit and vegetable exports, was an occasion for further austerity, cutting 'profligate' state spending. When revenues from the nationalised petroleum company and the Suez canal bolstered state revenues, the credit for growth was allocated to the IMF and its free market wizardry. The result was that wealth was perpetually transferred to an increasingly aloof ruling class, affiliated to the regime. When Mubarak slaughtered opponents, as during the anti-Islamist counterinsurgency in 1992-97, which included the famously brutal wipe-out in a working class quarter of Embada in 1992, the US sent more money, more weapons. The CIA forged ties with the security apparatus, . Mubarak's regional importance for the US was heightened during the 'war on terror', and especially when he agreed to help impose the Quad's blockade on Gaza. The flow of weapons, money and diplomatic support was not interrupted by a wave of protests arising from the Second Intifada in 2002, or from mass strike action radiating from Mahalla in 2007, both of which Mubarak's police cracked down on viciously. But then the global capitalist system went haywire, sinking into its worst crisis for decades, which struck at the heart of the fragile accumulation regimes pursued by north African states. The protests against the regime did not begin when Tunisia went up, but it was a catalyst for a drastic escalation of the revolt. And in the last couple of weeks, the accumulated grievances and agitation of decades has exploded in an astounding revolt which has withstood waves of massacres from armed police, looting and chaos by officers out of uniform, terror by mounted and armed terror gangs (again, largely populated by Mubarak's police force) . The US responds with concern, calls for protesters to make nice, and pays tribute to Mubarak's courageous work in the fictitious 'peace process'. Officials urge Mubarak to embark on political and economic reforms to placate the opposition. For well over a week, throughout all the bloodshed, Hillary Clinton insists that the US has no plans to revise aid to the regime. US officials fearmonger about the Muslim Brothers, asserting that there must be a managed, 'orderly transition', but do not call for Mubarak to step down. The Egyptian army, presumably under instructions for the US, protects the regime, and allows it to try every measure to crush the revolt. It also moves to secure the Rafah crossing, so that no one gets any ideas. Egyptians form people's committees to manage local resistance. Workers form new trade unions, and embark on a general strike. They fend off wave after wave of assault. The US begins to hint that Mubarak should step aside and appoint a transitional government to replace him. And, unsurprisingly, it emerges that they've been negotiating to impose a trusted regime hard man. And if Egyptians won't accept Suleiman, as they almost certainly won't? Watch this space...

Labels: 'war on terror', dictatorship, egypt, Israel, middle east, palestinians, revolution, torture, US imperialism

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Hounded until his death posted by Richard Seymour

Faraj Hassan was not a criminal. He was an asylum seeker from the Libyan dictatorship. In late 2001, he fled the country and stayed temporarily in Italy, before travelling to the United Kingdom. He applied for asylum, and was granted temporary residence by the Home Office. A month after his arrival, in May 2002, he was illegally detained. Police initially tried to say that he was an illegal immigrant. When he presented his documents, they nonetheless insisted on taking him into custody. He was kept in jail, both in London and in Leicester, while the police prepared a prosecution. They alleged that he had attempted to blow up a church while in Italy. They never presented him with any evidence for this allegation. In 2003, he was charged under the Terrorism Act 2000, which awarded the state powers that it had not used since the Irish struggle. In the context of the 'war on terror', these became part of a legal apparatus that specifically oppressed Muslims.

Hassan was also presented with an Italian extradition warrant alleging that he was the leader of an international terrorist gang. The warrant was suspended, and he was found not guilty in absentia by the court in Milan. But he was nevertheless imprisoned in - variously - Leicester, Belmarsh, Wormwood Scrubs, Brixton and Long Lartin for four years on the basis of evidence which no one, neither Hassan nor his lawyer nor a jury nor the public, was ever allowed to see. Hassan detested Belmarsh in particular, describing it as "institutionally racist" due to the victimisation of Muslim prisoners, who are mainly held in a separate, highly securitised wing of the prison.

In 2007, he was released under a control order. A control order is a comprehensive deprivation of liberty, a sanction imposed by the Home Secretary on the pretext that its subject is a terrorist threat. It restricts where you can go, what you can own, what means of transport you can use, who you may associate with, what form of employment you may have (if any). In practise for Hassan it meant that he was prevented from having much of a life. He could not work, he could not take the bus to the supermarket, he could not travel to visit his brother.

Furthermore, on the basis of his imprisonment, the European Union applied a sanction permitted under UN law, that being the freezing of a person's funds. He was not allowed access to his money, so was wholly dependent on vouchers supplied through the Home Office. Challenging this EU penalty through the European Court of Justice, he was told by the court that he must avail himself of the opportunities for judicial remedy in UK domestic law if he meant to challenge the good faith of the British authorities. He and his solicitors did so. In 2009, Hassan was released from the control order. This was because the Law Lords had at last ruled that the use of secret evidence was illegal. Secret evidence had meant that the state did not have to meet internationally recognised standards of evidence before depriving a person of his or her liberty. It meant that any old dreck could substantiate a terrorism charge and warrant detention in Her Majesty's toughest prisons. Without the veil of secrecy, the basis for the government's prosecution and control order collapsed.

Hassan fully availed himself of his freedom to start campaigning for others who were unjustly or illegally detained. He spent Sunday night lobbying with others outside the US embassy, in solidarity with Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who is believed to have spent five years in one of America's secret detention facilities, and was recently jailed in the US for allegedly shooting at US military personnel while detained by Afghan police in Ghazni, Afghanistan. She was shot in the abdomen by a US soldier, allegedly in defence, held in a medical facility in the US, tried despite obviously suffering from poor mental health, and convicted despite a lack of forensic evidence and contradictory statements from prosecution witnesses. Having spent the night with a protest at the US embassy, Hassan rode his motorcycle home yesterday morning, and was killed when a red minicab crashed into him.

He was only twenty two when he was first arrested, and he died before he reached his thirties. For most of his adult life, he was being persecuted by the British state and the international legal system on the basis of phoney charges, secret evidence, and the onerous laws that facilitate the political oppression of Muslims in the United Kingdom. He was a casualty of a perilous intersection between good old British racism, the increasing authoritarianism of the state in late capitalism, and the global system of surveillance, kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial killings that US has promulgated under the mandate of the 'war on terror'.

Labels: 'war on terror', civil liberties, internment, islamophobia, prisons, racism, repression, torture

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

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

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Rhetorical question posted by Richard Seymour

"How much moral moxie does it really take to come out, guns blazing, against torture? I mean, you don’t have to be a saint or anything to enlist in a campaign to ban pulling off the fingernails of defenseless prisoners, you just have to be halfway normal."

Labels: 'war on terror', liberals, torture

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Obama: wise potentate? posted by Richard Seymour

Glenn Greenwald points out that Obama's position on state secrecy and torture not only adopts the most authoritarian and extreme positions of the Bush administration, but goes farther by claiming a radical kind of 'sovereign immunity' to ensure that torture victims get no redress and no one ever finds out about it. He also notes that the Department of Justice under Eric Holder now wants total immunity from wiretapping prosecutions. (Greenwald is, though, unduly pleased by the criticisms of Obama that are coming from his 'progressive' supporters. Leave it to Dennis Perrin to notice the cravenness of liberal opinion when it comes to his Highness.) In a typical irony, as Bruce Fein points out, Obama's quest for "czarlike powers" in the 'war on terror' is being resisted legally by a judicial appointee of the Bush administration. So, the Obama doctrine is coming into full focus: no one would want such powers if they didn't intend perpetual war. The administration has taken some constructive positions on Cuba, pledged to close Guantanamo (not Bagram or the secret prisons, obviously), and been slightly less eager to bait Iran than the Bush administration. Reports of differences with Israel are probably exaggerated, but among Obama's advisors are realpolitikers who think it high time the nutty little client-state had its wings clipped, so I wouldn't rule out some change there. However, the administration is doing all this because it is intent on freeing up its hand for a more aggressive policy in southern and central Asia.

For some liberals, social democrats and Greens, Afghanistan was always the 'good war'. It was the good war because it overthrew a hated dictatorship, because it deposed sectarian religious rule, because it liberated women from misogynistic terror, and because it was the proper war of revenge against 'Al Qaeda'. Of course, these excuses for imperial violence are outrageous and ignorant, hedged by simplistic notions about the sociological potency of overwhelming violence, and rooted in uninterrogated assumptions about America as a force for good in the world. Alongside the ersatz emancipationism is an eliminationist approach to designated foes: 'Al Qaeda' are 'evil' and thus must be physically destroyed, (along with tens of thousands of people who are either bombed, shot, starved to death, tortured to a pain-wracked end, or poisoned by Dyncorps). This is mindless of the way in which enemies are created when you start bombing from 20,000 feet. After all, it isn't as if this war has escalated because the Taliban has a huge standing army, or even much social weight. What is called the Taliban is a loose network of groups that are galvanising substantial sectors of the population and, as a result, making military gains. Nonetheless, this perpetual war machine has been mantled in doctrines of 'civilization' (and clashes thereof), which have experienced renewed intellectual glamour in the aughties. Even the most violent exterminationist actions are deemed plausible if what is at stake is nothing less than the future of a 'civilization'.

Today, many pro-Obama liberals are still up for it, despite the fact that the previously low-level battle for control of Afghanistan has morphed into a regional war that could take the US into direct conflict with Pakistan. Obama is dropping the handsome puppet Karzai like so much worthless stock and preparing opinion for a security-state in Afghanistan, the better to deepen the war in the south and east of the country (more US troops are being sent to these regions) and intensify the onslaught in Pakistan. Already, Obama's drones are outkilling Bush's drones, with a reported ratio of fifty dead civilians for every one dead 'Al Qaeda' target. The idea that this is just a war against some small bands of Islamist fighters is nonsense. The main social forces in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan’s provincial capital, Quetta, are hostile to the quasi-colonial rule of the Punjab elite, and to its supplications on America's behalf. The NWFP and FATA are ethnic Pashtun, largely, like much of the population across the barely existing border, in southern Afghanistan. The vast majority of those who suffered from Pakistan's own 'war on terror' were non-combatants. Still, Pakistan's elected crime families show no sign of being able to deliver what Obama wants. They cut a deal with its foes a long time ago for fear of losing much of the country, and the government is now embroiled in a bitter row that has seen Nawaz Sharif expelled from the goverment and try to place himself as a figurehead of the lawyers' movement - Sharif, of all people, who has no reason to support a genuinely independent judiciary. Now, since the US military leadership is raising hellfire about some kind of 'Al Qaeda'-led nuclear-tipped state of supreme evil emerging if things continue as they are (a complete fantasy), one expects a US-backed military coup any month now.

And why not? The US has depended on the Pakistani army for fifty years and isn't about to stop now. Ironically, it is the army and its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) that has historically built up the jihadi networks that it has recently been battling, and which remains the main source of institutional support for these outfits. It was the army that protected its Taliban clients by facilitating the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, while allowing the Talibs to retreat to its north-western territories. It is also alleged that the army has maintained and protected groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) long after their legal sell-by date in 2002. True, the Pakistani ruling class has been in a bind since 2001. Prior to that eventful year, the traditional backing for reactionary Islamist groups was highly congruent with its status as a US ally. It has been a dilemma ever since, in which billions of US dollars are at stake. The army has twice struck against the Islamists, once with the Musharraf-ordered attack on the Red Mosque, and again under US pressure with the failed 'Operation Lion Heart'. Each time it has done so, it has damaged its relationship with those jihadi groups and stimulated the insurgency. So, the army's usefulness to the US is severely compromised by its need to retain good relations with America's erstwhile foes. On the other hand, who else could the US turn to? The army remains the most powerful social force in Pakistan. It is not just a powerful security and intelligence apparatus but, as Justin Podur points out in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, a potent capitalist in its own right with control over corn flakes, real estate, cement, mineral mining, etc. The corrupt political class is no match for the military, and the civil society has only periodically been able to challenge its dominance. Short of an invasion, the Pakistani army are the only game in town.

An invasion of Pakistan, though, is not out of the question. While Obama has discounted such an approach for now, he did indicate his willingness to countenance an invasion in 2007, and he has already embraced the Bush strategy of 'preemptive warfare'. All dynamics in the present war would tend to indicate US boots on Pakistani soil and, according to the Pakistani government, unofficial incursions have already taken place. Given intense competition with Russia over those central Asian energy supplies, given the possible break-up of the NATO alliance if this war fails, and given the need for the US ruling class to shore up its global dominance as its financial system collapses and economic competitiveness takes a dive, the further militarisation of American power seems inevitable. The accumulation of executive power could be a prelude to a more ambitious phase of American expansionism than we have yet seen.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, barack obama, executive power, liberals, pakistan, torture, us economy, US imperialism

Thursday, February 26, 2009

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

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Strange freedom posted by Richard Seymour

As you will undoubtedly have heard, the Iraqi journalist who lobbed heavy duty leather shoes at Bush has been beaten and tortured in custody. Hardly a novelty in the 'new Iraq', where torture has reached such a scale that the UN described it as being worse than under Saddam Hussein. In light of which, this Times leader column seems not merely inapposite but actually grotesque. It claims that the protest "demonstrated how far Iraq has come", and that Iraqis "have learnt to enjoy freedom of expression." It would be redundant to go through all the ways in which this disgusting reverie constitutes both a moral and intellectual insult. But one has to wonder: if a Times journalist was bleeding internally, with broken ribs and a smashed arm after suffering a severe beating by police, would its leader column be waxing wistful and ironical about 'imperfect' freedom?

Update: More freedom of expression - US Troops Open Fire On Fallujah Students at Shoe Rally.

Labels: george w bush, iraq, journalist, protest, saddam hussein, torture

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

A brave stance against 'liberal guilt' posted by Richard Seymour

It began by laying bare the supposedly brutal treatment of Republican prisoners at The Maze. I'd been under the impression that standards at this facility were carefully maintained, if only because the cunning Brits were keen to fend off international protests about their dubious judicial arrangements. This wasn't, however, my problem. That lay elsewhere. Far from being shocked at seeing the inmates roughed up a bit, I found myself wishing they'd been properly tortured, preferably savagely, imaginatively and continuously.

Labels: british occupation, film review, northern ireland, oirientalism, torture

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

On 'totalitarian jurisprudence' posted by Richard Seymour

James Petras writes that:

The Financial Times (FT), once the liberal, enlightened voice of the
financial elite (in contrast to the aggressively neo-conservative
Wall Street Journal) has yielded to the totalitarian-militarist
temptation. The feature article of the weekend supplement of August
16/17, 2008 – “The Face of 9/11” – embraces the forced confession of
a 9/11 suspect elicited through 5 years of hideous torture in the
confines of secret prisons. To make their case, the FT published a
half-page blow-up photo first circulated by former CIA director
George Tenet, which presents a bound, disheveled, dazed, hairy
ape-like prisoner. The text of the writer, one Demetri Sevastopulo,
admits as much: The FT owns up to being a propaganda vehicle for a
CIA program to discredit the suspect while he stands trial based on
confessions obtained through torture.

From beginning to end, the article categorically states that the
principle defendant, Khalet Sheikh Mohammed, is the “self-confessed
mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the US.” The first half of
the article is full of trivia, designed to provide a human-interest
feel to the courtroom and the proceedings – a bizarre mixture
discussing Khaled’s nose to the size of the courtroom.

The central point of departure for the FT’s conviction of the suspect
is Khaled’s confession, his ‘desire for martyrdom’, his assumption of
his own defense and his reciting the Koran. The crucial piece of the
Government’s case is Khaled’s confession. All the other ‘evidence’
was circumstantial, hearsay and based on inferences derived from
Khaled’s attendance at overseas meetings.

The FT’s principle source of information, an anonymous informant
“familiar with the CIA interrogation program” states categorically
two crucial facts: 1. How little the CIA had known about him before
his arrest (my emphasis) and (2) that Khaled held out longer than the
others.

In other words, the CIA’s only real evidence was extracted by torture
(the CIA admitted to ‘water boarding’ – an infamous torture technique
inducing near death from drowning). The fact that Khaled repeatedly
denied the accusations and that he only confessed after 5 years of
torture in secret prisons renders the entire prosecution a case study
in totalitarian jurisprudence.

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

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

What are the odds? posted by Richard Seymour

At last, the truth will emerge. With Radovan Karadzic's capture and imminent trial, by a US-sponsored junket known as the ICTY, we will get to know the full facts about mass rape and genocide. Or will we? Forget for a moment the effrontery of a 'court' that effectively acts on behalf of the occupiers of Iraq dispensing wisdom on war crimes. And let's leave aside the fact that - whether or not Karadzic is guilty, as I think he is, of war crimes - trials of this nature are farcical and tend not to disclose much in the way of official responsibility. The more obvious point is that the verdict was reached, so far as official liberal opinion was concerned, some time ago. And that verdict has it that the Bosnian war was purely the result of a Serb nationalist pact of aggression against the remaining components of Yugoslavia, and that Radovan Karadzic, as a 'mastermind' of the war, strove to exterminate Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

Vulliamy's article puts it like this:

After 13 years on the run, Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, is on his way to The Hague to face charges of genocide and masterminding the bloodiest carnage to blight Europe since the Third Reich. ... And that man looking like Santa Claus was him, Karadzic! The man who arranged the mass murder of 100,000 people and the enforced deportation of two million? All those incinerated homes, the mass rape camps, the mass deportations at gunpoint.

This, to be frank, crazed nonsense is unlikely to be met with as much derision as it deserves to be, if any at all. Let me enumerate the falsehoods: Karadzic is certainly likely to be charged with genocide, now that the ICTY has ruled that Srebrenica was a genocide and Karadzic is believed to have ordered that attack, but he is not going to be charged with 'masterminding' the war; Karadzic may be accused of 'arranging' the mass murder of 8,000 Muslim males, but I know of no serious source that holds him responsible for 'arranging' the mass killing of 100,000 people, which is on current estimates close to the total number who died in the war on all sides, civilian and military; at the end of the war, a total of 2.2 million Bosnians of all kinds were displaced, one million of those internally, but it is absolutely not the case that Karadzic 'arranged' the 'enforced deportation' of two million people. These are just matters of fact about which Vulliamy is either deceived, or dissembling. How is it even possible to have a sensible discussion about this if the facts are so obscured by propaganda that - and I bet you this is true - hardly any Guardian reader will notice that the prize-winning senior foreign correspondent Ed Vulliamy is just ranting out of his blowhole? How is it possible that anything that did emerge from a trial would be weighed, if not dispassionately, then at least with an attempt at honesty?

I raise all this not because Karadzic is entitled to any defense from me (I am sure he is more than adequately protected by his amulets). So much is obvious. And I don't raise it because even my reasonably well-grounded suspicions about his culpability are not enough to persuade me that the facts should be settled by a lawless court which refuses to investigate the crimes of its sponsors. I raise it because, well, here we are in the middle of an epic and ongoing war crime with death rates, torture chambers, and mass rapes that are certainly much worse in their totality than anything that happened in Bosnia. All of this is the direct responsibility of the American state, which unarguably launched a war of aggression without any provocation whatsoever. And, somehow, the volume is decidedly muffled. While there are great independent journalists exposing much that is going on, the field is not exactly crowded. The liberal journalists and opinionators who were so vocal in advocating for Izetbegovic, so eager to bear witness, are hardly visible. And where they have not just enthusiastically backed the enterprise, they are at the very least circumspect on the matter of the evident criminality of the war's planners and prosecutors. Even those who are not backers of the war in Iraq constantly apologise for the United States government (usually referred to by the abstraction, 'America'), constantly seek consolation amid its crimes, and assert repeatedly that it still does some good in the world. Well, forgive me, but if that's the trend, shouldn't you be ashamed to talk about Bosnian war criminals? If you find yourself struck by a curious aphasia on the matter of trying to prosecute not only American officials but British ones too, what right have you got to exult about the capture of one lowly thug by the agents of the world's biggest thugs? If you can't match with honest reporting the level of hysteria and propaganda that you generated over Bosnia and then Kosovo, is there no point at which abashment sets in? I ask merely for information.

Labels: 'war on terror', bosnia, genocide, iraq, radovan karadzic, torture, US imperialism, yugoslavia

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Empire of sadism posted by Richard Seymour

Stories like this are news because they supposedly represent an aberration from the norm in which good-hearted British soldiers extend the best care to the natives. But look at what happened:

The victim ... says he was rounded up with a friend while trying to steal milk cartons from a food distribution centre. He was whipped, beaten and forced to strip naked.

"They made us sit on each other's laps," he said. "They were enjoying humiliating and abusing us, I wished I was dead at this moment. Then they made me sit with Tariq... where I was forced to put Tariq's penis in my mouth. The other two were made to do the same."

The opportunity for sexual sadism in this case was supplied by the ordinary run of martial law that has been imposed on Iraq. Had it been left at a whipping and beating for the crime of stealing milk, it may not have ever been reported. This sort of daily, often quite arbitrary, violence by forces who accept the minimum possible responsibility for their behaviour is just so much background noise to the war against barbarism/extremism/terrorism/savagery/etc. It just blends into the screams from the torture chambers and the crunch of metal against bone as troops shoot up cars at checkpoints or lob missiles into houses. The fact that this is perfectly ordinary behaviour by imperialist troops, under whatever authority and of whatever nationality, is always missed. Whether in Kosovo, Somalia or Haiti, whether the military mission is conducted under the NATO brand or the UN brand, there always emerges some sickening stories of systematic physical and sexual abuse of the supposed recipients of humanitarian largesse. This is not mentioned, I suspect, because most journalists wouldn't notice the connection. And though I could not help but think of a colonial officer whipping 'coolies' for similarly petty offenses (or none at all), that comparison depends on a limited background knowledge of the British empire which is generally absent in our culture. To the extent that empire did become a fashionable topic in television programmes and books in recent years, it was almost invariably to celebrate its achievements and obscure its crimes. Recent BBC series have sometimes discussed British atrocities only to cast them in light of a 'clash of civilizations' in which the anti-colonial forces were always even more savage.

Which prompts another point. Those who rightly point out the utter weirdness, the sheer lunacy, of some of the products of the industry devoted to attacking Islam, ought by now to have got the message. There can be no let up in production, no matter how absurd it is. To render these crimes tolerable requires a culture in which Amis could write and publish The Second Plane without producing an avalanche of laughter and derision. It requires a culture acclimatised to absurdity, and of constant genuflection to chimerical 'Western values', defined in opposition to putative Islamic/Islamist/Islamofascist/Islamototalitarian/etc. As an instance of the latter, take Hitchens' crude sophistry during his recent torture spiel:

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

This isn't an argument for torture (at least inasmuch as it isn't an argument), but it is an apologia. It says there is something understandable and perhaps forgiveable about subjecting a terrified prisoner to slow drowning. It says that there is something identifiable as a 'civilization' at stake (the American empire); that these men whom Hitchens so admires are the bearers of the 'values' of that civilization (what Thomas Jefferson said); that the people they put through this procedure behave in much worse ways and that anyway they bear opposing 'values' or perhaps none at all (in the fashion of Kaplan's 'new barbarism' thesis); and that to accuse the US (the Bush administration, the state and the military apparatus) of torture is to posit a 'moral equivalence' (cf Jeanne Kirkpatrick) that only the lame and the diseased (lame liberals, diseased intellectuals) would venture. All this on the basis of eleven seconds of a carefully planned and, er, watered down performance. For this impressionistic layering of pseudo-axioms to work, the barbarity of the other chaps has to have been asserted frequently and forcefully enough as to provide an automatic context. Intellectual coherence is a subordinate concern for the muses of empire; as with advertising, the efficacy of the impressions themselves is key. It is not an accident, as people used to say, that the pattern of these arguments closely follows the pattern of advertising, that mass industry devoted to mass ignorance and irrationalism, whose credo is that Toxic Sludge is Good For You.

If you take all the polemical output devoted to running down Muslims, portraying them as uniquely weird and in need of torture and extermination ("there is no talking to some people"), and reduce it to its Thirty-Nine Articles, you might well end up with a series of advertising slogans. "Waterboarding is Good Gor You!" "Mass Murder Keeps America Safe!" "We Must Not Be Afraid to Assert the Superiority of Western Values!" And so on.

Labels: american empire, british empire, imperial ideology, islam, islamophobia, torture

Thursday, July 03, 2008

What happens if you embarrass the IDF? posted by Richard Seymour

This:

Getting Mohammed to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has perfidious control over Gaza's borders, and only with a Dutch embassy escort was he allowed out. Last Thursday, on his return journey, he was met at the Allenby Bridge crossing (to Jordan) by a Dutch official, who waited outside the Israeli building, unaware Mohammed had been seized by Shin Bet, Israel's infamous security organisation. Mohammed was told to turn off his mobile and remove the battery. He asked if he could call his embassy escort and was told forcefully he could not. A man stood over his luggage, picking through his documents. "Where's the money?" he demanded. Mohammed produced some US dollars. "Where is the English pound you have?"

"I realised," said Mohammed, "he was after the award stipend for the Martha Gellhorn prize. I told him I didn't have it with me. 'You are lying', he said. I was now surrounded by eight Shin Bet officers, all armed. The man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: 'Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.' He said, 'This is nothing compared with what you will see now.' He took his gun out, pressing it to my head and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said, 'Why are you bringing perfumes?' I replied, 'They are gifts for the people I love'. He said, 'Oh, do you have love in your culture?'

"As they ridiculed me, they took delight most in mocking letters I had received from readers in England. I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror."

An ambulance was called and told to take Mohammed to a hospital, but only after he had signed a statement indemnifying the Israelis from his suffering in their custody. The Palestinian medic refused, courageously, and said he would contact the Dutch embassy escort. Alarmed, the Israelis let the ambulance go. The Israeli response has been the familiar line that Mohammed was "suspected" of smuggling and "lost his balance" during a "fair" interrogation, Reuters reported yesterday.

Labels: idf, Israel, journalist, palestine, torture

Thursday, June 12, 2008

42 Days Later posted by Richard Seymour

42 days. But only 37 rebels. And nine crucial votes from the hard right DUP. Without the support of Peter Robinson and his dour, petit-bourgeois party of Orange ascendancy, the government could not have won this vote today. They say the DUP has been bought - no doubt, but how much would you have to give these fuming reactionaries to get them to back extended internment? And though the government won the vote, I have not yet detected a coherent argument for a 42 day detention limit. Bear in mind the obvious harms that result from detention without trial already. One example emerged very recently when Rizwan Sabir and Hicham Yezza were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000. Sabir spent six awful days in custody over a piddling issue that ought to have been resolved without any police involvement. With the promulgation of spying on campuses and in workplaces, it is almost certain to be the case that innocent people are banged up. And incidentally, even those who aren't innocent don't need to be detained without trial. The main argument of New Labour has been that this is what the police want. In truth, not not all senior police officers agree with the policy. And at any rate, it is not unknown for the police to want to expand their powers: it doesn't necessarily follow that they should get what they want. One argument, offered by an RUSI commentator, goes roughly like this: the police need 42 days to build a case, otherwise they will have to bring it to prosecution before all the facts are assembled, and then a guilty person may walk free. This is frankly insulting to one's intelligence. The police should already have substantial evidence before they arrest someone, and it isn't good enough to say 'we couldn't let them continue with their plans and place people at risk'. If there are known plans, the police and intelligence services can clearly act on it when the threat becomes obvious. There is also a subsidiary argument, presented as the main one, which is that the current arrangements are a shambles because they lack accountability - quite, but that doesn't make the argument for lengthening the duration of detention without trial.

We, of course, are at a decided disadvantage. We are not privy to the minute details of policing, or counter-terrorism operations. Consequently, we are encouraged to take the police's word for it on such matters, and this is why New Labour is insistent on citing police opinion. Nonetheless, we have ample evidence to go on. Internment is not only harmful to those it targets - it doesn't work. The vast majority of those arrested are never tried for anything, and most of those who do face trial are brought to court for non-terrorist offenses. This was the case when it was used against the IRA in the 1970s, and it is the case today. When internment was introduced in Northern Ireland, it was actually against the advice of Whitehall advisers and the head of the army in the occupied territory - not because they had moral qualms, they just knew it wouldn't work. The government pressed ahead, regardless, and produced what is now widely regarded as one of the worst policies of the - oh god save us all - 'Troubles' (like, kneecappings and bombings just left us all a bit troubled by the experience).

And let us not forget the global 'security' matrix into which this policy slots. The government has co-operated with torture flights, and has permitted extradition even where it is known that someone might end up in Guantanamo or some other hellhole. I read recently that the US was using a system of floating prisons, so that they can 'fuck' the prisoners - ie torture them - without anyone being around to hear the screams. The Tory opposition, of course, rests on an appeal to nationalism and on English traditions of liberty, a rhetorical tic that goes back to the 'Glorious Revolution'. And they are entirely opportunistic in their position, having spent years backing the government's worst measures. This is, however, a much deeper problem. The 'war on terror' has been resisted and opposed, sometimes quite effectively, but its assumptions are regnant in the political class, and it is as part of opposition to that war that we ought to defend civil liberties. The opposition parties say they expect the House of Lords to send the law back, but parliament will force it through. The only possible basis for beating this organisationally is within the milieu of the antiwar movement, not in any of the houses of parliament.

Labels: 'war on terror', civil liberties, islamophobia, torture

Friday, May 09, 2008

Two Kinds of Image Problem posted by Richard Seymour

This:

And this:

(Click on images).

Labels: haiti, iraq, orientalism, racism, the arab mind, torture, US imperialism

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

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

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The quality of their mercy. posted by Richard Seymour

It is not unusual for those recanting from Left-Wing or marxist positions to cite among their reasons for doing so that the Left is too dismissive of rights, insufficiently appreciative of the pacifying effect of liberal institutions, and particularly insensitive to the cruelty that rights-regimes try to curtail. This was Kanan Makiya's argument, and of course Alan Johnson recently repeated it in his list of observations about why he is no longer a marxist. The Eustonites - effectively, though not dearly, departed - made a great deal of their support for 'human rights for all', and again it was part of their belabouring of the Left that it had proven insufficiently appreciative of those rights.

So, a very simple question. Does apostasy improve one's commitment to such rights? Does liberalism? We can put this question historically. Were those who rallied round the Wilson administration in 1917-18 more or less concerned with individual liberty than before, especially those who sent up a hue and cry about Bolshevism? Were the Cold War liberals more sensitive to domestic curtailments of individual liberty and rights than their more radical forebears might have been? The ex-Trotskyists among them: were they more or less inclined to oppose McCarthyism, given their understanding of Stalinist repression? Was Camus a better defender of human rights in Algeria than Sartre? Are the 'war on terror' liberals more or less attentive to the issues of cruelty to prisoners, arbitrary detention, torture, evidence-based trials, the rule of law and so on, than their radical opponents? I think the answers to most of the mentioned examples are too obvious to meditate on. And while there is clearly no simple answer to the last one, there are a few relatively simple cases. One of the co-founders of the Euston Manifesto is an apologist for torture and a supporter of internment and/or deportation based on MI5 say-so. Another wants to withdraw from European human rights legislation and set up Diplock courts, after those used in Northern Ireland to try and imprison suspected Republicans. Do we need to rehearse the history of those Diplock courts, or the legacy of internment? Not "human rights for all", then. And this fits into a wider intellectual milieu, with people like Sam Harris defending torture, Michael Ignatieff warning that it may be the 'lesser evil' (retracting his criticism of the Qana massacre too), and Martin Amis flaunting his sinister balls. I can hardly be bothered to reproduce the kind of thing that Christopher Hitchens is likely to come out with these days, and at any rate he seems to have taken too literally Oscar Wilde's aphorism that "the wise contradict themselves."*

Perhaps a more frequent response than outright support for repression is a tactful silence or a drastically curtailed attention span. Yet it is hardly possible for anyone supporting the 'war on terror' and buying its quack ideology not to be an apologist for some atrocities here and some repression there. By contrast, the fiercest critics of the current global torture regime, the secret prisons, the crackdowns on civil liberties, the conscious murder of civilians in Iraq and Palestine and Afghanistan and Haiti and Somalia by our governments, the repression of asylum seekers (particularly of those who are 'detained' in 'decention centres' without having committed any crime), and so on, are indisputably those whose job it is to scorn 'bourgeois rights' and be all, you know, totalitarian. Now why might that be?

* The full epigram is: "The well-bred contradict others. The wise contradict themselves." Hitchens perhaps doesn't realise that by noisily contradicting others and unwittingly contradicting himself, he does not become both well-bred and wise.

Labels: 'war on terror', cruise missile liberals, deportation, detention without trial, eustonites, human rights, humanitarianism, internment, pro-war 'left', torture

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Ben Griffin gagged. posted by Richard Seymour

It is worth posting this before it is forgotten. The Ministry of Defense obtained a High Court injunction against former SAS trooper Ben Griffin last week. This follows a number of public statements by Griffin indicating that the British government is extensively involved in the torture department of the 'war on terror'. It seems obvious that the reason they are doing this is because a) his claims are accurate and b) he has substantial material to back it up, which is not now at liberty to divulge because of the injunction. This will be something to remember the next time someone blithers about the 'armed wing of Amnesty International'.

Labels: army, ben griffin, british troops, ministry of defence, torture