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“The terrs have won”
The last time I visited the U.S. was in fall 2000. A friend in Santa Barbara had invited me to his wedding. Before I have visited the U.S. some 25 times and have been to about 20 states on business and private trips.
But since the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, I instituted a private little boycott and vacated elsewhere. Some American friends thought it was a stupid thing for me to do and laughed at me. Eventually they came to Europe to see me.
I recently was invited again, I declined to come and yesterday I sent this link.
In court documents filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to foreigners captured and held in the United States.
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That law is being used to argue the Guantanamo Bay cases, but Al-Marri represents the first detainee inside the United States to come under the new law. Aliens normally have the right to contest their imprisonment, such as when they are arrested on immigration violations or for other crimes.
"It’s pretty stunning that any alien living in the United States can be denied this right," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney for Al-Marri. "It means any non-citizen, and there are millions of them, can be whisked off at night and be put in detention."
While I would like to visit the U.S. again, if some nerd within the U.S. government feels like constructing some writings in this little blog as "supporting terrorists", that visit could turn out be longer than expected and quite restricted location wise. It could even turn out to up to my death and there would be absolutely no way to challenge such an outcome.
Unlikely? Sure. Impossible? Not anymore. Just sad, very sad. But why should I take that risk when there are a million other places to go?
The friend answered today: "Ok, the terrs have won."
I’ve yet to have a proper explanation why they aren’t considered pariah state, and, more to the point, why every single American going abroad isn’t arrested and given the choice either to be jailed until the US regime changes, or until the poor guy just renounces its citizenship and publicly burns his passport.
To begin with: if you burn your passport and renounce your citizenship, it makes no difference. In fact, it just gives the U.S. government something they can come after you for. Next time you set foot in a country with extradition and are recognized, they’ll bring you back and try you for tax evasion over the years you didn’t pay taxes as a “citizen” should. There are some cases of this on the books, even pre-Bush. Dual citizenship is fine with Uncle Sam (as opposed to Uncle $cam, our local link artiste) but just try to renounce your U.S. citizenship and see where it gets you. And these days, they probably wouldn’t even wait if they decided they wanted to get you — you’d be extraordinarily rendered so fast your head would spin. (And for that matter, suppose that U.S. citizens were held outside the country like that — if 1% of us were taken like that, it would be 3 million people, more or less. What country is so eager for immigrants that it would accept them?)
But on the broader question: America isn’t condemned, I think, because in the minds of the leadership of most countries, and their money- and power-holding elites, and probably a substantial portion of the citizens as well, what America does around the world is something which has to happen, and although the leaders would like a bigger piece of the pie, they’re content to allow America to take the lion’s share of the profits as long as America takes the blame as well, which it does at the moment. Not all of European leadership actively supported the demolition of Iraq, for example, but the ones that didn’t were still thinking, deep down, “cheap oil for the west and one less tyrant, and I don’t have to lift a finger. I can live with this.” Of course, it didn’t work out that way, but that’s just as good for these people — now they can take credit with their populations for not having wasted any troops on a lost cause, just as, in the event of cheap oil, they would have taken credit for an economic boom.
Consider how Blair and Merkel are content to be American sock-puppets, and think how long it has taken for serious opposition to come up against either one. It isn’t just American voters who object more to losing than to going to war, or who don’t mind killing some brown folks to improve the economy. Europeans are just a bit more farsighted about what it would take to win, and realized that Bush didn’t have it lined up. If it had been an effectively-planned, well-manned operation, our European antiwar posters on this board would be a tiny, tiny minority in countries which were celebrating the smooth operation in Iraq and talking about Iran like crazed neocons. As it is: which governments put up serious opposition to CIA renditions and secret prisons within their borders? How long did it take for them to even admit they were taking place?
And then, of course, there’s the problem of dollar-linked currencies and investments. Some countries can’t put up any serious resistance to American economics, because if America goes down the tubes, it will take their economies with it. And as for the Euro — an awful lot of these American multinationals have major European funding behind them. As long as that’s true, the Powers That Be in Europe sure aren’t going to push too hard to stop American finance. And the current American (Bush-related) slump means that withdrawing the investments would mean huge losses. And if they withdraw, someone might ask some nasty questions about why they waited so long. Better to just keep quiet and hope Bush can be contained for a few more years and somebody sane gets back in.
Boycott America if you must, but the more horrible companies will just move their headquarters to other countries that want the business and keep on with business as usual, maybe even use legal action to get their names removed from the boycott lists, and by the time that the greater mass of boycotters realize they’ve been had, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.
Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Nov 15 2006 18:35 utc | 74
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