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Section 54 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 July 24 Thursday.
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This morning I got a real shock when I read something impossible in the newspaper. It concerns the growing reach of the American Empire, which is starting to look increasingly like that of Imperial Rome.
The day began innocently enough. I watched some news on CNN, which was dominated by some talking heads which were so vigorously unsatisfied with the attitude of Iran, which (so far) has not handed over the Al Qaeda figures it is alleged to have in custody.
The actual facts of the situation seem to be murky, and it seems to be the case that, while much is rumored, little is known for certain. However, it wasn't the facts (whatever they may be) which interested me. Rather, what I found anthropologically intriguing was the attitude of the talking heads.
Actually, I was a little amused at the indignation of the talking heads, who seemed to take it for granted that the Iranian government should automatically yield up to the United States any suspects it happens to be holding, no questions asked.
The thought that went through my mind was something along the lines of, "Hey, it's only little itty-bitty banana states that do that sort of stuff, not real grown up countries."
A little later, then, I got a genuine shock when I was reading the International Herald Tribune on the train and found, on page 8 of today's edition (as published in Japan) a little snippet in an opinion piece by William Pfaff headlined "When time-honored ties become a short leash". The piece is about the Blair-Bush relationship and contains the following:-
The Blair government has just agreed to extradite British subjects to the United States on demand, without need for prima facie evidence.
This evening I checked on the Internet and found that this is in fact the case. The British have signed a treaty with the Americans allowing Britons to be extradited to the United States without any evidence of guilt needing to be produced.
Apparently this treaty still needs to be approved by the United States Senate, so it's not yet a done deal. But I was genuinely shocked that the British government would do any such thing. After all, in my mind, that's not what grown-up nation states do.
One click led to another and I very shortly found myself reading about one of the British prisoners whom the Americans are holding captive right now. This is a Muslim guy called Moazzam Begg, and there's a lot of stuff about him on the Internet.
Apparently he went to Afghanistan while the Taliban were in control, and his story is that he went there to do relief work. This story seems not unreasonable, in that he took along his wife and his three children. Your average hard core terrorist would have done the smart thing and left his family at home in Britain.
Then, after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Americans bombed Afghanistan. And so, in early October of 2001, Moazzam Begg took his wife and three children to Pakistan. Once again, the actions match the story. The hard core fighters didn't run away - they stayed to fight it out.
Running away was the sensible thing to do (and is certainly what I would have done under the circumstances) and it's what aid workers naturally do when whatever miserable country they happen to be working in suddenly gets turned into a war zone.
What happened then was that in February 2002 Moazzam Begg was kidnapped in Pakistan, shoved into the boot of a car and driven away. Fortunately, he had his cell phone with him, so he was at least able to make a call from the boot of the car to let his family know what was happening.
Now why was he kidnapped? Apparently because his name (or a name identical to his) showed up on a Taliban document, raising the possibility that he is guilty of nothing more than having the same name as someone who (apparently) had some kind of financial dealings with the Taliban.
However, whether guilty or innocent, Moazzam Begg has already been punished, even before his trial (which has not yet happened.) To start with, he was locked up for a year - a year! - in a cellar at Bagram airbase near Kabul.
This is what the American Empire is doing right now: grabbing possible suspects without being too fussy about whether they are guilty or innocent, throwing them into dungeons, denying them lawyers, denying them consular visits, and denying them contact with their families, denying them even the right to make phone calls.
A phrase from the Vietnam War era keeps going through my head:-
"Kill them all and let God sort them out!"
In the legal field, it's on this kind of ruthless "might is right" basis that the Bush regime seems to be choosing to operate.
So I'm really amazed that, at this time of all times, the British government should sign an unequal treaty designed to allow America to seize whichever British subjects it happens to have its eye on, with no requirement for any kind of evidence of guilt to be presented.
The treaty, of course, does not give Britain reciprocal rights.
Section 54 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 July 25 Friday.
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Today's interesting newspaper photo shows the fierce firefight in which the valorous American military ultimately succeeded in killing Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein.
The photo is on page three of the International Herald Tribune (as published in Japan) and it is captioned "A missile striking the house where Uday and Qusay Hussein were surrounded during the battle in Mosul."
Now, photos can be deceptive, and this one, of course, only shows one side of the house. But what we see doesn't exactly look like a firefight.
In the foreground are a dozen or so American warriors standing fully upright with legs apart. Only one rifle can be seen, and it's pointing straight down at the ground. The soldiers are bunched together so closely that they could touch each other. It's hard to say how far away the house is, but perhaps it's a hundred meters away (about a hundred yards.) A swirling cloud of smoke and dust is rising from the front of the house.
According to an article on the same page ("U.S. is uneasy about showing grisly photos"), the American military fired (count them) one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten missiles at the house. The article reads as if the source of this snippet of information is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, "commanding general in Iraq":-
Sanchez said he believed Uday and Qusay probably died when soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division launched 10 TOW (tank-on-wire) missiles at the house during the third and final phase of an attack lasting more than three hours.
(From an IHT article originally published in The New York Times and credited to Neil MacFarquhar and Neela Banerjee.)
Presumably, then, that the photo depicts the "third and final phase" of the attack, which appears to me to be the "now let's make damn sure there's nobody left alive in there" phase.
On the same IHT page there's an article by Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger which contains a quote from one of America's most quotable men, Mr "Stuff Happens" Donald Rumsfeld:-
"If a person is determined to fight to the death, then they may very well have that opportunity," the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said Wednesday. "It was not a choice that the United States or the coalition made: it was a choice that the people inside that building made."
Later in the Schmitt/Sanger article (which is headlined "Military defends fighting rather than holding out for capture") there are various rationales for the decision to launch an all-out attack rather than opting for a siege. Some "military officials" said the sons might have escaped - through a secret tunnel, perhaps. On top of that:-
A prolonged siege could have given guerrillas time to fire on the 200 American forces surrounding the house, officials said. And, finally, administration officials said, capturing the sons alive could have provided the guerrillas with symbols of U.S. occupation and a rallying point for resistance.
There are two interesting points here.
The first point concerns the meaning of the words "could have given guerrillas time to fire". From a military perspective, this has a certain logic to it. If there were only two hundred American troops on the ground at the house in Mosul, then it's not unreasonable to think that a determined attack by Saddam supporters could have done them some serious damage.
It's an axiom of policing that the fewer cops you have the more you get pushed in the direction of police brutality. The official American strategy for policing Iraq seems to be "let's keep the occupation force on the lean side," and this automatically pushes the individuals involved in the direction of extreme responses.
That's the first point. Underresourcing the occupation forces automatically generates a situation in which the most effective tactics are those which are fastest, most brutal and most decisive. This situational logic holds good regardless of whether the individual members of the military are wise or unwise, valorous or cowardly, patient or impatient, angels or demons.
"Stuff happens," as Rumsfeld tells us, but it doesn't happen without a reason.
The second interesting point is that the sons might have been politically inconvenient if captured alive.
I don't think that many people are going to weep for Uday and Qusay Hussein. Even so, I think it's a little alarming that the American Empire has now added "you're politically inconvenient" to its list of reasons for killing people.
Section 54 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 July 26 Saturday.
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By now, it's clear that the American authorities have abused the civil rights of quite a few lowly individuals in the course of the "war on terror." My guess is that most inhabitants of the First World aren't too fussed about this, because the victims of the abuse have been, for the most part, brown people with funny names (and, in some cases, beards as well.)
Because of my own situation as a member of a very distinct and obvious minority (conspicuously foreign people living in Japan) I rather tend to sympathize with the oppressed. Although I don't personally suffer from any prejudice (at least, not that I notice) it's very easy for me to imagine what my life would be like if I did.
However, that aside, the abuse should be worrying even Jane Doe and John Smith, because the habit of abusing power is not self-correcting. If there is no feedback mechanism operating to check the abuse of power (and, in America, with its compliant media, there doesn't really seem to be any such mechanism) then the problem tends to get worse, not better.
Two incidents recently have highlighted this. Neither incident seems to have anything to do with the "war on terror," but both fit the picture of a society which is moving in the direction of authoritarianism.
The most recent of these two incidents is summed up by the first paragraph of an article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, an article datelined Washington and headlined "Lawmaker apologizes in tears for police call". The article, which was originally published in The New York Times, appeared on page four of yesterday's International Herald Tribune (as published in Japan), and the first paragraph reads like this:-
Representative Bill Thomas, a Republican and one of the most powerful committee chairmen in Congress, broke down in tears on the House floor as he confessed to a hushed assemblage that he had summoned the Capitol Police last Friday not only to restore order, but also to break up a meeting of Democrats.
(This paragraph contains a word which is new to me, "assemblage." I doubted that this was a real English word until I checked with The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (fourth edition) which gives, as one possible definition, "A collection of people or things; a gathering.")
The incident involved some Democrats who, on the morning of Friday 18, walked out of a meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee. They were "upset that Republicans had rewritten a pension bill in the middle of the night" and they went and holed up "in an adjacent library".
And Bill Thomas apparently went and called the cops.
There are more details in an article by Christopher Caldwell of the Financial Times (a reputable British newspaper which is online at ft.com.) In the article, Caldwell tells us that the Democrats were asked "to vote on a 91-page bill they had not had a chance to read."
Democrats refused. One of them derided a Republican colleague as a "wimp" and a "fruit cake" - the latter a particularly American insult that carries overtones of effeminacy and mental imbalance - while his Democratic colleagues took refuge in a nearby library. When the Democrats did not emerge to vote, Mr Thomas sent the Capitol police force in to threaten them with arrest.
This reminded me of another recent incident in which the ruling Republicans called in the cops in an attempt to put pressure on rebellious Democrats. I seemed to remember that this involved Texas, so I went hunting for the details on the Internet and very soon found them.
There's an online source called HoustonChronicle.com (www.chron.com), and this currently features an article dated July 25, 2003, and headlined "Democrats may be free to flee".
This article is by R.G. Ratcliffe and tells us that "Democratic state senators contemplating a walkout to block congressional redistricting might be constitutionally protected from arrest by state police if they flee the Capitol, a lawyer has advised the senators."
Apparently the state of Texas has its very own Senate. I say "apparently" because I'm a bit fuzzy on the details of how exactly the Americans govern or misgovern themselves. Peeking into a reference book I find that, yes, not only does Texas have its own Senate, but it also has a state motto ("Friendship"), a state flower (the bluebonnet, whatever that is), a state tree (the pecan) and a state song ("Texas, Our Texas").
It seems that under the procedural rules of the Senate of the state of Texas (which apparently is located in the state capital, Austin) a bill cannot be passed unless two thirds of the senators cast some kind of vote. So, if enough senators go missing (that is, if enough senators are simply not available to vote) then a bill cannot be passed. As the Ratcliffe article tells us:-
Fifty-five state House Democrats blocked redistricting in last spring's regular session by fleeing the Capitol to break quorum.
("Redistricting" seems to mean "redrawing electoral boundaries," and presumably the redistricting in question was not in the interests of the Democrats.)
When the Democrats ran away, the Republicans sent the cops after them. The article tells us that:-
House Speaker Tom Craddick cited House rules in ordering the search for the missing state representatives in May. House Sergeant at Arms Rod Welch deputized the Texas Department of Public Safety to conduct the manhunt
The article in HoustonChronicle.com is focused on the question of whether it is or is not legal to do this. However, my own interest in this situation is what it tells us about the political climate in the United States.
Obviously, two incidents do not make a pattern. It would be premature to say that "a pattern is emerging demonstrating that an increasing readiness on the part of America's ruling regime to use police power against political opponents." Consequently, I won't say any such thing.
However, both the incidents discussed above - the incident in which an attempt was made to get the police to break up a meeting of dissident Democrats, and the incident in which the cops were called upon to chase fugitive Democrats - did in fact involve attempts to use police power against political opponents.
To my way of thinking, these incidents are the opposite of reassuring. The Democrats are being politically inconvenient? Okay, let's call the cops. Uday and Qusay are politically inconvenient? Okay, let's pump ten TOW missiles into their building. We feel a bit uneasy about brown people with beards? Okay, let's throw them all in jail and worry about the guilt and innocence thing later.
It may not look exactly like a coherent pattern yet, but it's starting to look that way.
The point about the Democrats is this: they're not politically marginalized brown people with beards. Rather, they're privileged people (white people for the most part, at a guess) who are located right in the heart of the power structure. Even so, their political enemies felt free (in both incidents) to call in the cops when the Democrats became politically inconvenient.
The big question now is this: are there going to be any more such incidents? Given that the tendency of America's rulers is toward increasing authoritarianism, my guess is that there will be. Next time, the targets will not necessarily be Democrats. The target might be a journalist, a newspaper, a radio station, a church, a charity, a school, a university - any of the many and varied entities which make up the political fabric.
And why do I care about what happens in America? After all, I'm a British-born New Zealander currently living in Japan, and American power is pretty remote, unless you count the American military helicopters that sometimes go flying overhead. (I live in the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa, which hosts a number of American military bases, which are occasionally subjected to more or less symbolic attacks by rather pathetic rockets launched by Japanese radicals - the rockets typically fail to make it across the fencelines into the bases concerned.)
Well, what happens in America matters to me because the Bush regime seems intent on increasing the reach of American power, meaning that, as liberty fails in America, it fails globally. As mentioned above, my thoughts on this were really focused by the news that Britain has recently signed an unequal treaty with the United States, a treaty under which the British government agrees to extradite people to the US without an evidence of guilt being presented.
As far as I am concerned, this treaty comes under the heading of the unthinkable. Even now, my initial sense of surprise has not dissipated. Given the lawless tendencies of the Bush regime, it seems highly inappropriate for the British government to be signing such a document now. (In fact, given that the treaty is unequal, I don't think that it would ever be appropriate to sign such a document.)
This treaty is part of the process whereby the Bush regime is undermining legal safeguards not just in the United States but globally. What we are seeing, then, is the globalization of the mentation of the bunch of "stuff happens" buccaneers who are presiding over the misrule of the universe from the precincts of the White House.
To come into effect, the UK-USA treaty still needs to be ratified by the United States Senate. Once it has been ratified, it will be hypothetically possible for the Bush regime to reach out its power and seize any escaping Democrat who has managed to slip through the police blockades and make it as far as Britain.
So far, we're not at that stage yet. And we may never get there. However, looking at the tendencies which are currently in play, that is the direction in which we are heading.
Section 54 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 July 27 Sunday.
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So. Have you heard the news about the dirty bomb? Someone stole a van containing fifteen kilograms of depleted uranium, and the police are on the hunt for it. After all, this stuff can be used to make a dirty bomb. Maybe the missing van - a white Citroen Berlingo diesel van - is in your neighborhood right now, at least if you live somewhere in England.
My authority for the statement above is a bit slender, resting on an Internet article that I found about a week ago on a British site,
www.sundayherald.com
The article, by Neil Mackay, is dated 13 July 2003, and talks of a "nationwide hunt" for the van, which was stolen from "an unnamed firm at Purfleet Industrial Estate," which is in Essex.
The theft of the van, which was stolen from an industrial estate, triggered a nationwide alert to all police forces, who are now searching for the van.
Depleted uranium is used to make tank shells and has been blamed for causing a wide variety of illnesses, including cancers and birth defects.
This was interesting to me because the American Empire has gone and used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium in warheads used in Iraq, and takes a "no problem" attitude to the contamination problems in the landscape which the surviving civilians are forced to inhabit. However, when just fifteen kilograms of this stuff goes missing in the UK, it's "nationwide hunt" time.
(A kilogram is 2.2046 pounds so fifteen kilograms is roughly thirty-three pounds.)
Now, the really weird thing is that there doesn't seem to have been any followup on this story. The story made it (temporarily) to the online site of the Hindustan Times, a paper in India. But, apart from that, silence. Maybe the van was found. Who knows? Or maybe this story is being followed by local newspapers (in Essex, perhaps) which don't have Internet sites.
Anyway, this stuff most definitely is dangerous, and if you happen to be on holiday in sunny Iraq then you should (at a minimum) make a point of staying well clear of any wrecked tanks, since tanks which have been smashed up by Anglo-American DU warheads.
One of my frustrations is that I have been unable to pull together a satisfactory page on depleted uranium, the main reason for this being that scientists have not yet got round to doing the necessary basic research. However, I have been able to pull together a page of sorts, which includes references to some rather ominous research which is currently in progress - the page is on this website, and the link is:-
depleted uranium
While I was thinking about DU, at one stage I started wondering what the reaction of the British or American authorities would be if some terrorist group went and dumped a hundred tons of this stuff into the Anglo-American landscape. I didn't think it would be a bland "no problem" reaction, and the official reaction to the missing fifteen kilograms of DU rather seems to support this hypothesis.
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