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We Are All Targets Now
The White House is further rewriting the torture and self-absolution legislation that is currently sailing through congress.
Now the real targets turn out to be you and me. The new version of the law would allow the CIA and the U.S. military:
indefinite detention of anyone who, as the bill states, "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or its military allies.
With a bit of phantasy, and this administration will come up with a lot of such, one can read quite some doings falling under this wording.
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A gift to Hizbullah to rebuild a hospital in south Lebanon? – Material support to hostilities …
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Donation of drugs to Iraqi hospitals under al-Sadr control? – Material support to hostilities …
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Writing a book arguing against the Worldbank? – Material support to hostilities …
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Commenting in a blog against the Saudi regime? – Material support to hostilities …
Also notice how the tense of the laws wording reaches into the past.
How about people who have acted in support of North Vietnam? Jane Fonda, welcome to Gitmo!
We further learn:
The definition applies to foreigners living inside or outside the United States and does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant.
So this will apply to every human being. And, of course, no complaining will be allowed:
Under a separate provision, those held by the CIA or the U.S. military as an unlawful enemy combatant would be barred from challenging their detention or the conditions of their treatment in U.S. courts unless they were first tried, convicted and appealed their conviction.
The White House frames this into the "terrorism" junk:
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "We are satisfied with the definition because it will allow us to prosecute the terrorists, and it also has important limitations that say a terrorist must have purposefully and materially supported terrorism."
But that is not what the law says. The law is about "hostilities against the United States and it military allies", not about "terrorism".
With this, the legal fishing net just got a lot larger and the meshes became smaller. Even us small fish may be caught in it.
(Bonus bullshit quote:
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) defended the provision, saying alien enemy combatants are not "entitled to rights under the United States Constitution similar to those accorded to a defendant in a criminal lawsuit."
Mr. Cornyn, maybe not to similar rights, but doesn´t this still apply: We hold these Truths to be self-evident …)
The one person I know who is heavily into S&M claims that it leads to less arguments and aggression in day-to-day life.
which is kinda what fascists claim about torture and repression, eh? that it leads to more order, i.e. less arguments and aggression, in everyday life? that the trains will run on time? no, I have no idea how to test the thesis… but seems to me there are two “innate” human reactions to the observation of suffering: one is empathy, disquiet, an urgent desire to remedy and comfort, rescue and heal; the other is a voyeuristic fascination, the satisfaction of not being the person being hurt, being safe, perhaps experiencing a thrill of dominance and sense of power over the other person’s humiliation or distress, all the satisfactions of bullying and ranking. at present the culture in every realm — “entertainment”, sexual fads, economic theory, vulgar theology, foreign policy — is fostering and promulgating the 2nd type of response at the expense of the first. which is why I wonder about chickens and eggs.
my buddy Goff writes about the training of SF medics on US bases; they practised on goats. the goats were traumatised in order to be practised upon, in other words they injured the animals and then treated them; a form of torture, despite the pragmatic goal of training. within a few weeks, Goff writes in a passage of memoir, the trainees hated the goats. they didn’t hate goats to start with, but after a few weeks of being made to hurt goats they started hating them, calling them names, making nasty jokes about them.
we could speculate until the cows (goats) come home about what this means — a moral defence mechanism to quiet the uneasy conscience? some kind of repudiation mechanism that enables us hyperconscious predators to eat our prey by vilifying it? — but it raises questions about the origins of race and gender hatred, oppression of lower castes in complex societies etc. we tend to assume that hatred of the despised Other comes first, and mistreatment/oppression results from it. but it may be that the structural relation of exploitation, force and fraud comes first and the hatred is a rationalisation added by the agile primate brain after the relation of force and fraud is established, cementing it into place, justifying it, rationalising or emotionalising it.
as citizens at the heart of Empire, living in a ruthless profit-driven system on land recently stolen by force and fraud from the original inhabitants, we must constantly be aware — despite denial mechanisms and ignorance — that others suffer to keep us fat and happy. that the goats are suffering for our training program. it makes a kind of sense that we learn to hate “losers” — the poor, the third world, the nonWhite, the female, all those Others whose disadvantage or immiseration benefits us directly or indirectly; that the machinery of voyeuristic satisfaction, schadenfreude and bullyism is more active in our brains than the machineries of reciprocal altruism and compassion. if we were not traumatising the goats daily, we might hate the goats less; we might not call them names and make ugly jokes about them.
much of what the PR agents of the culture are selling us in the last few decades is the disabling of our own empathy and a contempt for empathy and sincerity per se — “sissy” values for “bleeding heart liberals” out of touch with the ‘real’ world [the ‘real’ world being, presumably, the grotesque fantasy life of finance capital, infinite-growth economics and other millennialist cults?]… I keep asking myself whether the cult of the death of empathy is a byproduct of Empire, or a necessary condition consciously engineered by the architects of Empire, or what.
Posted by: DeAnander | Sep 29 2006 19:20 utc | 57
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