"Scream for Freedom"

The above picture, entitled "Scream for Freedom," is a reproduction of a cartoon drawn by Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for news agency al-Jazeera, while he was imprisoned in the Guantánamo prison facility.  It's a reproduction because the original cartoon drawn by al-Hajj's own hand has been banned from publication in the United States.  Al-Hajj had to describe the drawing to a Canadian artist, who was able to re-produce it from his detailed description.  Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing - remember to cherish it always.

Al-Hajj was just released from prison today, having been incarcerated at Gitmo for seven years.  He was, like all detainees in the prison, labelled an "enemy combatant," but never charged.  That's right: he was in prison for seven years and was never charged with a crime.

He was, however, encouraged to spy on al-Jazeera, and most of his questioning did not refer to his own purported "terrorist links" (he was accused of having al-Qaida training and supplying some Chechnyan rebel groups) but rather to the actions of the Qatar news network, according to al-Jazeera itself.  I hesitate to use al-Jazeera as my only source on this, and I think we should take the network's assertions with a grain of salt, considering the fact that al-Hajj is their employee.  I actually have no choice, however: BBC and CNN only give al-Jazeera's account, and FoxNews doesn't have a clue that this has happened at all (or, more likely, doesn't want us to have a clue).

I think there is plenty of information out there, from the New York times to Slavoj Zizek, about the chargeless detention of these executively labeled "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo; I don't feel there's anything for me to add.  Just be aware that this guy was a cameraman and had a legitimate work visa with a respectable international news agency; he now has gone on hunger strike and been force-fed, interrogated regularly, acquired a kidney infection and throat cancer, and has not seen his young son since he was a toddler.  He's 38.  And he was never charged with any crime.

And second, what about his drawing?  Banned in the United States?  Let me just say this: if America is so afraid of a cartoon of Guantánamo being released, then our government had damn well better clean up whatever the hell is going on in there, because this whole situation is worthy of absolutely nothing better than a fascist state.  I'm thoroughly disgusted.

Agamben, terrorism, and the power of designation

I was recently reading a quotation from the Sri Lankan singer M.I.A., who is the daughter of a Tamil revolutionary named Arul Pragasam, or "Arular." I'm almost completely unfamiliar with the ethnico-political strife in Sri Lanka, so I don't mean to pass any sort of judgment on the actions of this individual or anyone else, but I found the M.I.A. quotation to have some pertinence to the current state of the world. Here it is:

You can't separate the world into [...] good and evil. But America has
successfully tied all these pockets of independence struggles, revolutions, and
extremists into one big notion of terrorism. (Wikipedia)

I think that's a fairly astute commentary on the global, indeed catholic, nature of the "War on Terrorism" (better yet: "War on Terror" - the precursor to the "War on Nightmares"?) which has been "declared" in the usual unconstitutional manner of the past half-century: by executive fiat. It seems that executive fiat is also sufficient to designate almost anyone in the world a terrorist, even if the entity in question is a democratically elected government (I thought terrorists were de rigeur stateless).

The problems here are manifold, but not perhaps the exact problems you would imagine. I doubt if the U.S. Government has called very many genuinely good, harmless people "terrorists." Nor am I afraid that will happen soon. What it does, however, is create a monolith out of a whole lot of different kinds of people, and the temptation to do so is easily explained. Just watch any film or musical set in a high school: individuals are difficult to deal with as long as they remain such, but relatively easy once they become "jocks," "cheerleaders," or "terrorists." We're fighting terrorists. They are terrorists. Okay, we're fighting them.

Alas, just as not all jocks are poor students and not all cheerleaders blonde, not all "terrorists" are cut from the same cloth. Just look at the way in which the media has recently been forced to mention something called the "Mehdi Army" led by Moqtada al-Sadr, and the existence of people called "Sadrists" and even a "Sadr City" in Baghdad. Surprise! Someone is fighting us, and it isn't al-Qaeda. They're not even Sunni Muslims, as al-Qaeda members tend to be; they come from the Shi'a majority in Iraq. This isn't "terrorism," it's internecine strife, and I wonder whose fault it is that said strife is exploding now?

Another example is the Palestinians. Again, I in no way mean to condone any of the civilian attacks performed by PLO members in any way. However, what they're trying to do is break away from a fundamentally hostile nation who continues to provoke them by expanding settlements in territory that was supposedly going to be "not Israel's" in the two-state solution. So, while we applaud the breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia, we continue to be rather unhelpful in the quest of Palestinians to actually have a state that is not riddled with checkpoints or paved over with illegal Israeli settlements, and that designation "terrorist" seems to have a lot to do with it.

I had thought of writing about this a few weeks ago, but what really spurred me on was a passage from Giorgio Agamben in his short essay "The Sovereign Police." He argues that the identification of the State with the Police is a pervasive but dangerous concept, seen perhaps most clearly in the "police actions" taken by the U.S. in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. Here's a pertinent quotation:

The investiture of the Sovereign as cop has another result: it entails a
criminalization of the adversary. Carl Schmitt has shown that in European
public law the principle according to which par in parem non habet
jurisdectionem (a peer among peers has no jurisdiction) precluded the
sovereigns of enemy states being judged as criminals [... but] we have seen with
our own eyes that [...] the enemy has come to be excluded from civil humanity
and declared a criminal from the firsdt; at that point it becomes legitimate to
annihilate the enemy through a "police operation" that is not in any way subject
to the rule of law" (Massumi, "The Politics of Everyday Fear," 63).

Police operations are not subject to the rule of law because they are seen as commensurate with it; hence American "policing" of the world against criminal "terrorism" can by all means employ such techniques as the appropriation of sovereignty from criminalized states, "special interrogation procedures" as seen in the recently declassified "torture memo," and even clumsy occupations that spark states of near-civil-war and prove lethal to a minimum of 90,000 citizens. The power of designation, it turns out, is a significant one indeed.

Election '08; or, the tricky correspondence of image and ethos

The New York Observer recently published an article contradicting, to some degree, the received wisdom among nearly all conservatives and a number of liberals: that Barack Obama is all flash with no content.

The article isn't a perfect defense of Obama's campaign style, and perhaps it would be unhealthy to spend too much sweat and tears defending anybody's political campaign. With the (possible) exception of that of the maverick Ron Paul, every political aspirant will de facto indulge in some image-mongering and dishonesty in the interest of saying things that will get votes, rather than lose them. This is just human behavior, and we see it in corporate meetings, at dinner parties, and on blind dates every day. Nobody is deliberately going to create a repulsive image for himself/herself.

However, it is fairly evident that Obama is coming in for more than the usual rueful/sarcastic "oh, those politicians (pat pat)" criticism. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that opposition media (and the Clinton campaign) are trying to torpedo his candidacy with this accusation of insubstantial posturing and hope-mongering. I won't linger on the depressing idea that "Hope" is evidently a commodity we can no longer deal in, or the implied preference for candidates who hawk More War, Tax Burdens for the Middle Class, Corporate Dominance of the Polity, Pervasive Surveillance, Torture, And So On. I'd personally take vacuous Hope any day.

I would like to linger a little, however, on this idea of "image" and how an image might relate to "ethos," which I here take to mean the "true truth" about a person and his/her views (insofar as that is even knowable). According to the New York Observer's article, "the style is indivisible from the substance" in the case of Obama. His "oratory" and "inclusivity [...] signify profound differences in approach and philosophy from Mrs. Clinton." Gasp. The idea! That an oratorical style might actually "signify" something! The point, as the article mentions and as we've all known for a long time now, is that the policy differences between Clinton and Obama are relatively insignificant. The angle from which they approach these views, and the image-construct via which they present them to the constituency, is where the difference lies. Hillary Clinton's approach has been far more "traditional" thus far, emphasizing (as has been repeated by pundits ad infinitum) long-term political conflicts and the division-lines between parties. Obama consciously seeks out common ground with Republicans and Independents, and even (notoriously) with "Axis of Evil" leaders like Hugo Chavez. Although his message about the state of America isn't always a sunny one, he offsets it with tremendous optimism, which has been the hallmark of many of our greatest 20th Century leaders.

I also want to emphasize that *all* of the '08 candidates, and all the candidates who have ever run for office in any public arena, have constructed images for themselves. Clinton, as the article points out, "proudly referred to herself as [...] 'battle-scarred.'" John McCain is the dogged, uncompromising veteran; John Edwards was the Common Man (who just happened to make millions as a lawyer, ehm); Mike Huckabee is still the divinely-inspired prophet who's cool enough to play the bass; Giuliani, in Joe Biden's wonderful quip, was "a subject, a verb, and 9/11." Some of these might be more ingenuous than others, but the point is that Obama is not the only candidate occluded in a mantle of hoopla and linguistic prestidigitation. Every candidate presents himself/herself in a manner that is delimited by a hundred factors, including genuine personality, well-paid image consultants and campaign managers, media bias, etc. Our job is to look at real statements from these candidates to determine how well they line up with the image. I suggest skepticism of these images, but we also must remember that they give some indication of each candidate's fundamental attitude. And after George W. Bush's attitude of insolence, arrogance, and confrontation, a more conciliatory approach looks more appealing than I can say.