...E quando ci domanderanno che cosa stiamo facendo,
tu potrai rispondere loro: Noi ricordiamo.
Ecco dove alla lunga avremo vinto noi.
E verrà il giorno in cui saremo in grado di ricordare
una tal quantità di cose che potremo costruire
la più grande scavatrice meccanica della storia e scavare,
in tal modo, la più grande fossa di tutti i tempi,
nella quale sotterrare la guerra.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Obama
Obama acceptance speech in full
A speech by the new president-elect
of the United States of America, Barack Obama
Obama gave his victory speech to an emotional crowd in Chicago
Link to video
Barack Obama
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday November 05 2008 05.24 GMT
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.
I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation's next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House. And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.
To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics – you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to – it belongs to you.
I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington – it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory.
I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers – in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.
Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House – a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:
Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/05/uselections2008-barackobama
President Obama: This Proud Moment
By William Greider
The Nation, November 4, 2008
We are inheritors of this momentous victory, but it was not ours. The laurels properly belong to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all of the other martyrs who died for civil rights. And to millions more before them who struggled across centuries and fell short of winning their freedom. And to those rare politicians like Lyndon B. Johnson, who stood up bravely in a decisive time, knowing how much it would cost his political party for years to come. We owe all of them for this moment.
Whatever happens next, Barack Obama has already changed this nation profoundly. Like King before him, the man is a great and brave teacher. Obama developed out of his life experiences a different understanding of the country, and he had the courage to run for president by offering this vision. For many Americans, it seemed too much to believe, yet he turned out to be right about us. Against all odds, he persuaded a majority of Americans to believe in their own better natures and, by electing him, the people helped make it true. There is mysterious music in democracy when people decide to believe in themselves.
Waiting for the results, we all felt nagging tension, even when we were fairly sure of the outcome. I heard from a newspaper friend, a wise old reporter who never gave in to Washington cynicism. "This election eve night," he wrote, "I feel myself tingling about the prospect of a nation which used to lynch blacks during my lifetime electing a black man president. I so hope it happens, believe it would electrify the world. I think he is the bravest man in the world, perhaps the most foolish one as well.... I worry about him like a Jewish mama."
We heard from another family friend, an African-American woman who teaches law in North Carolina. She reported weeping involuntarily when she saw Obama's picture. Did she know why? She said she saw her adolescent son's face in Obama's. Great moments in history give emotional definition to our lives and we carry those feelings forward with us, our own private meaning of events.
In this way, Obama redefined the country for us, but our responses involved generational differences. For younger people, white and black, his vision seemed entirely straightforward. It is the country they already know, and they expressed great enthusiasm. Finally, they said, a politician who recognizes the racial differences that are part of their lives and no big deal. For young blacks and other minorities, Obama's place at the pinnacle of official power lifts a coarse cloak that has blanketed their lives and dreams-the stultifying burden of being judged, whether they succeed or fail, on the basis of their race.
For others of us at an advanced age, Obama's success is more shocking. We can see it as a monumental rebuke to tragic history-the ultimate defeat of "white supremacy." That vile phrase was embedded in American society (even the Constitution) from the outset and still in common usage when some of us were young. Now it is officially obsolete. Racism will not disappear entirely, but the Republican "Southern strategy" that marketed racism has been smashed. Americans will now be able to see themselves differently, North and South, white and black. The changes will spread through American life in ways we cannot yet fully imagine. Let us congratulate ourselves on being alive at such a promising moment.
About William Greider
National affairs correspondent William Greider has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not, Secrets of the Temple, Who Will Tell The People, The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster) and-due out in February from Rodale-Come Home, America.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/greider_election
An Interview I Would Love To Read
By Michael Albert
ZNet, November, 05 2008
Imagine it is January 2, 2011.
Imagine that Barack Obama has been President of the U.S. for two full years.
Finally, imagine also that the following interview with Obama takes place on prime time TV, as a way of situating what has occurred over those two years and also to foreshadow what is forthcoming.
And since this is all make believe, let's make believe the interviewer's name is Barb Walt.
I believe what follows is not an absolutely impossible scenario for all times, though I don't believe it will happen in the next two years. I don't believe Barack Obama will take office with the views that I here place in his mouth or with the courage to act on those views I attribute to him. But I could be wrong, and of course I hope I am, and more importantly, it could happen another time.
I know that a great many people, unlike me, believe that Obama is absolutely sincere about empowering the working people, women, minorities, and young people of America, even at the expense of those with wealth and power.
Against all evidence of Obama's own words, of the forces he is beholden to, of the inclinations of the "experts" he is welcoming into his administration, of the system preserving pressures he feels every day, and of past U.S. history - many people have an elated feeling that this man will transform the country. I fervently hope they are right, but think they are wrong. I offer this essay to indicate what I think would justify their outlook.
Obama will be transformative, or not.
That's a given, like it will rain tomorrow or not.
So...
Either: like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Barack Obama will be a man elected into office with major elite backing, who when he became President was only a sincere reformer, but who was then polarized by elite resistance and inspired by popular activism, to become much more.
Or: unlike Chavez but like every past American President, Obama will not evolve into holding more radical views, will not stand up to conforming pressures, and will not learn from activists, but will instead oppose us.
Since many Obama voters anticipate the former outcome, the imagined interview below reveals what it might be like if things turn out as they hope. It describes what having a radicalized president with great courage might be like.
But if the future holds no interview remotely like the one below, and no Obama transformation remotely like the one described, and no President-inspired uprising like that reported, and if instead Obama becomes an eloquent mainstream solidifier of elite stability, then it will mean Obama has fallen way short of his supporters' hopes, and it will mean it is incumbent on all who wanted a much more transformative outcome to keep pushing Obama's administration and to keep building the activist means to move forward even as Obama becomes more of an obstacle than an aid to the task.
Which way will it turn out?
Will Obama galvanize efforts to transform society including becoming a movement builder against elite opposition?
Or will Obama settle into office as a system sustainer, defending elite agendas with only modest (albeit important) variations from recent administrations?
We will see.
Below, we see what the transformative scenario might look like. My point is that we should push as hard as we are able to make the transformative path real, but we should also persist in our movement building even if Obama is more obstacle than ally.
Barb: Mr. President...
Barack: Barb, please, don't call me that - call me Barack. I think that "Mr. President" stuff is a throwback to Royal pomp. We should get beyond that...
Barb: Okay, sorry, Mr., er, Barack. To get started - I would like to understand your plans and hopes now, but also where you and the country have been over these past two years, and where you are now going. Can you start by telling us your broad goals as they were when you took office, two years ago?
Barack: Sure, Barb, I can summarize my aims as they were then...
Barb: Good, let's consider it a historical record. After the summary we can address recent changes. How about we start with health care?
Barack: It was my feeling when I took office that a society that doesn't provide health care for all citizens is dysfunctional. I mean, what would you say about a family that took care of some sick members, but told others, too bad, make do?
And if everyone in a family wanted to take care of all members, except an old curmudgeon granddaddy who said screw those who can't pay, clearly that old fuddy duddy's perverse opinion would be ignored, right?
So, by analogy, I felt we should treat all citizens like members of a diverse family, with everyone entitled to health care. And I felt if we raised the moral tone of the country, the curmudgeons opposing universal health care would be ignored.
I also knew health costs were climbing so fast the financial crisis we recently endured would be minor compared to the distributional crisis that would ensue if we left the health system in its prior condition. So I intended to ensure full coverage, but at a cost within our social means, by having everyone together take on the responsibility.
I intended to increase the number of caregivers, reduce their incomes to a sensible level, and in particular, put a low lid on pharmaceutical companies, health care facilities, or other involved firms profiting off disease.
I thought we should have vastly more clinics, too, because how else would people, and especially the poor, have easy access to timely and excellent care.
And, I have to say, I also always wondered, what the hell is the purpose of the incredible pressure that is put on interns? What logic justifies the debilitating hours they are forced to work? I thought that was no way to provide health care, much less to train capable, sensitive doctors, and you know, Michelle in her hospital work, had similar impressions, but I didn't know what we might do about it.
Barb: What about employment?
Barack: My view about jobs was why should someone who wants to work not be able to? Why should one person be working full time, or even very long hours at multiple jobs, and others not working at all? Why not share however much work needs doing more equally, to everyone's gain?
I also thought if someone doesn't have the literacy or other training needed to do work, that would be a fair reason for their not having a job except that almost always a training or knowledge deficit isn't a revelation about the job applicant, but about a society that denied a capable person of the learning he or she should have had. So I felt that we should redress educational denials rather than penalize their victims with unemployment.
I also wondered why some people suffered very harsh and demanding work conditions, even degrading, dangerous, and damaging conditions - while other people enjoyed much better and sometimes even uplifting conditions. And the former even got less pay. In other words, why did some people work so long and so hard for so little, while other people got off much easier and were paid way more? Was this moral? Was it good economics? I had my doubts.
So, I wanted, even two years ago, full employment plus being sure that people had education and training to enable them to do their jobs well and, down the road, perhaps we could also take a look at how and what people got paid for their efforts.
Barb: Public schooling?
Barack: I wanted the next generation to get an excellent education in a nurturing, supportive, and enjoyable environment. And I wanted the people responsible for conveying that education well provided for, both with equipment and wages. I didn't want kids bored and intimidated at school, but, instead, inspired and uplifted. No more warehousing; I wanted real teaching.
I knew that richer districts historically had better schools, due to the tax base difference, and I was dead set against that. What sense did it make to have a gap in income between neighborhoods made larger as time passed, rather than being diminished as time passed?
So even on taking office, I rejected saddling youth in poorer neighborhoods with deficits while youth in richer neighborhoods enjoyed advantages. I wanted to universalize the best education.
I also thought we ought to do something for older folks who wanted to make up for prior gaps in their schooling. To have a society with as much functional illiteracy as we had, some say well over 50% of us can't read a book, was wrong, and should be redressed as a high priority.
While we are on education, I also thought we should make higher education accessible to all who could make good use of it, and simultaneously enrich higher education to graduate the most enlightened and skilled generation we could.
I thought, like many other problems, that our lagging science and our general educational malaise was simply a function of the decades of slash and burn market fundamentalism since Reagan, and certainly those policies did greatly aggravate the situation, but I also had an inkling of a larger insight because I didn't understand how even Republican market worshipers could not be horrified by the horrendous results of their policies. It was one thing to be wrong, fair enough. But how could they persist despite seeing the horrible schooling that resulted?
Barb: What about your initial take on the legal system?
Barack: Here I knew from lots of personal experience, mine and Michelle's, that the legal system was a mess. Lawyers and prosecutors, in civil and criminal cases, were engaged in a kind of demented dance, driven more by cronyism, favors, crowded dockets, and prejudice, than by seeking justice, much less rehabilitation, and the price for this dysfunctional chaos was almost always paid by poorer and weaker defendants, not by those with wealth and power.
The criminal justice system was harsh, uncaring, racist, classist, brutal, often without even a semblance of logic. Everyone knows it. In fact, the prison system seemed to me to be almost a school for crime, not a means of redressing and reducing crime. But I didn't have much notion what to do about it, except, on one front.
Thus, even two years ago, I knew that having the gargantuan levels of arrests that we did, largely for victimless crimes, was horrible for those criminalized and also wasted huge resources in a gargantuan prison system that was eating funds that could go to education, housing, etc. I thought we should look at European procedures and by emulating them we could avoid imprisoning people for victimless crimes, at no loss in justice or prevention.
I knew prison guard unions would oppose reducing incarceration rates, unless we provided new jobs, so we would have to do that too, of course. But I admit I dismissed as paranoid the grass roots formulations I constantly ran into that said, wait, the harsh criminal justice system in poor neighborhoods aren't just irrational bureaucratic gargoyles. They impose control and repression that prevents the poor from rising and taking a greater share of society's wealth. Later, I learned from the poor, rather than considering them ignorant.
Barb: Legislation?
Barack: I had no really significant notion of how to do law making differently, even after having served in the Senate, but I did know we had to attain much higher popular participation in lawmaking and redress the power imbalance between normal citizens and lobbyists for the rich and powerful.
We needed some way that everyday folks could have more say, more oversight, more comprehension, but I didn't have good ideas about what the steps toward that might be.
Barb: Distribution of wealth?
Barack: Perhaps you remember this becoming a mantra for McCain near the end of the campaign? I found it a bit absurd, I have to admit, and yet in retrospect McCain did have a point, though it was a point I didn't yet see clearly.
I mean, even worse than my not knowing precisely where my views were going to wind up, and therefore not initially accepting and embracing the idea of redistribution - you probably also notice that during the campaign I didn't talk about my views as I am relaying them to you now. Why was that? Was I a typical political liar not revealing myself fully?
Barb: I admit, I was going to ask you about lying, as you put it, a bit later, after surveying the rest of your initial views...
Barack: Well, I think I should answer that now, and the answer is yes, in some sense I was a political liar. But what choice was there? If I had expressed all the above views which I felt at the time as I am expressing them for you here tonight, however moderate and sensible they were, I would have been skewered into little pieces by CNN and FOX and all the rest of the media.
I knew that much, even before the past two years experience taught me more about the lengths to which various elite sectors will go to prevent changes. I thought then, however, that having to remain quiet about a big part of my beliefs was just a residue of the way media and elections work. It was something to fix later - but certainly not something I could overcome during the campaign itself.
So instead of telling the whole truth, as I have with you, tonight, back during the campaign I felt if I was going to get elected, while I shouldn't overtly lie, still, I did have to be very judicious about how I expressed myself, always guarding against being misrepresented or even pilloried for views most people would support given time to think them through.
So, I was judicious, and some would say, not without justification, duplicitous. I am not proud of that, though I think a good case can be made that in context it was the right choice. After all, if I had presented my full views like I have been doing to you, tonight, then McCain would have won and the country would be in a very different place now.
But as to McCain's charge about redistributing wealth, that was incredible. After all, the Republicans had spent decades redistributing wealth upward from working people to owners, and that kind of redistribution was fine with McCain.
I thought instead that we had to give people who had only meager possessions more stake and more comfort, rather than taking wealth from them to give people who already had yachts and mansions even more yachts and mansions.
So yes, I felt that taxing the wealthy was part of what was needed, not least to redress what had occurred for a few decades. I didn't think of it as redistribution - though of course it is.
Barb: Wages?
Barack: To me it was obscene for wealthy businesses to pay paltry wages to hard working folks on grounds that the workers don't have the power to take more.
If I own some factory and I can get away with paying my workers less, I will. That's obscene. What I didn't really understand two years ago was that it wasn't just a personal failing of the owner, but was instead systemic. Even a nice and caring owner, and there are plenty of those, had to cut salaries or get out competed.
So, yes, I knew two years ago that I wanted working people to get higher wages for their labor.
Barb: Working conditions?
Again, what possible morality could justify a financially solvent company maintaining horrible conditions, or even opting to make conditions worse, just to cut costs so that owners could do even better?
To me, that was vulgar, but even with my heart in the right place, I was missing that market competition makes it necessary to do this kind of thing to ward off competitive failure, so that it was market competition, not the mindset of the employers, that was the root of the problem.
So, two years back I knew I wanted to promote laws, union activism, etc., to improve people's lives at work, but I had nothing more than that in mind.
Barb: The general direction of the economy? Were you a socialist two years ago?
Not even close. I felt that since its inception the American political tradition had been reformist, not revolutionary. And that meant to me that for a political leader to get things done, he or she should ideally be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I was just a sincere advocate for the rights and conditions of the worst off folks in society. I wasn't about eliminating private ownership of workplaces - that never crossed my mind.
I did think markets needed stringent regulation to avoid doing great harm, so I wanted, to shift away from market fundamentalism and toward stewardship by government, but I wasn't even anti capitalist. In fact, I thought anti capitalists were unrealistic, childish, utopian. Worst of all they were not relevant to our unemployed citizens, or those who have bad jobs, or lack health care, or who breath toxic emissions. It was only later that I came to see things differently, as I guess we are going to come to...
Barb: Yes, we will, but first, what about War and peace?
Such matters seemed pretty simple to me. I mean, I always thought it was ironic for McCain and Palin to say I was untested or inexperienced regarding international relations. Is the horrendous prior behavior that McCain called "experience," a positive credential? The real issue was orientation.
Am I sane, or not? If I am, then I care about human likes and potentials, and I want peace - and I want it so much that I will go the extra step, indeed a thousand extra steps, to try to get it.
Well, wait, I guess honestly, I have to admit that that is more me now, then it was me back during the election, or at least my public face back then. Because while running I was hawkish about Afghanistan wasn't I, and even about Pakistan. I think it was part of getting elected, and at the moment to deliver the scary message well, I made myself believe it.
When I took office, however, I did want to initiate negotiations with countries who at that time I thought represented potential and even real problems for us, including North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and the Mideast writ large, China, and Venezuela, though in the campaign I did mostly just talk tough about Venezuela and especially Afghanistan. And when I got elected I did believe we could negotiate sensible relations, at least, and maybe more. Why not?
Barb: But you didn't see the U.S. as a problem state itself, internationally?
No, not at all.
I thought we made mistakes, sure, even big mistakes, but I didn't think of us as being a problem rather than a solution - even though I would have agreed we were ham-handed at times. In fact, I think I was incapable of thinking that our motives might not be worthy. That came later...
Barb: What about gender issues?
You know, there is a sense in which I was just a person who cared about people. I know that sounds trite, but it was true. I wasn't focused on changing basic structures. I just wanted to push policies and provide an example that would elevate people who needed relief.
So, regarding women, I wanted absolute and full equality, fairness in all sides of life, and also dignity, including no more minimization and objectification - and I wanted the same for people with diverse sexual preferences, gays, lesbians, and others.
Thus, I intended to push for serious and effective day care, child leave, and other programs that women seek and need. But I also wanted to provoke a widespread discussion in society, not unlike what happened in the early days of the women's movement, addressing the causes of women suffering psychologically and materially, and then trying to overcome those causes.
Barb: Issues of race?
Of course no one should suffer in any way, personally or institutionally, due to their race, religion, or any other cultural community they may be part of.
So my views regarding race when I got elected were like my views regarding gender - I wanted to eliminate archaic laws and provisions that interfered with people's options due to cultural biases.
I also wanted to redress residual inequalities between communities so that all communities would have comparable per capita assets and conditions, of course. I thought affirmative action made sense, but not reparations, at least not at the outset.
Barb: Ecology?
Honestly, I wasn't much of a student of ecology. I didn't know much, and I still have a lot to learn.
I did know, however - indeed, how could any sane person not know - that it made no sense to squander resources frivolously, it made no sense to ruin the environment we lived in, it made no sense to ignore climate change and suffer incalculable consequences later.
So I wanted to elevate ecological attention and program to a priority, but I felt we needed to first figure what our ecological program ought to be.
Barb: Okay, when you were elected, two years ago, what was your expectation about fulfilling your aims? What obstacles did you expect to encounter? Did you think you would overcome them?
During the campaign we built an immense apparatus for reaching out to people all over the country and I thought we would use that, and use my access to media and to the public through speeches, etc., to clarify what we sought to do, and to amass huge support for it, and to then implement it.
I knew that many programs would encounter serious opposition. Many wealthy people would oppose paying more taxes, or would oppose having programs that took from the social product on behalf of working people for social services like education and health - though, honestly, I didn't entirely understand why.
I also knew that many people with strong ideological commitments would oppose my plans around health, science, regulating markets, etc.
But with the tremendous outreach team we had developed in the campaign reconceived to be an activist apparatus for discovering, arousing, and fighting for people's desires, and with me and other administration members appearing actively on the media and having my own show as well to talk directly to the public, I thought that despite inevitable opposition, the massive ground swell of clarity, excitement, energy, and desire we would unearth and inspire, would be enough to carry the day. Indeed, I thought we would make quick progress.
After all, we had already done the impossible, in the election. This seemed like an easier task, with the White House in hand, not a harder one.
Barb: In hindsight, now, what do you think people expected you to actually do when you took office?
It depends who you are talking about. I think the public, the broad public was a mixed bag on this.
Many working people and especially young people believed and certainly hoped I would do much of what I have mentioned here, and were happy when they began to realize I wanted to do even more.
Many other people, however, doubted anything much would be done, but at least I wouldn't be McCain or Bush.
For people who voted against me, on the other hand, I think there was confusion, doubt, and sometimes fear and hatred, but I thought we could mostly defuse it and turn it around.
Elites I guess I thought similarly about, but I quickly discovered, instead, that they thought, and this was whether they voted for me or against me, that I would do nothing much different than had been done before. And not only did they think that would be true, they were intent to make it true.
Barb: What did you in fact seek to do, and what did you encounter as a result? How were you surprised? What did it do to your views?
Well, if you remember, the first thing I did was to announce some new cabinet positions - ecology and science. And then I announced a massive campaign around education and health care - with a massive literacy campaign and many new community clinics - and then I started announcing many economic regulations, and urging a campaign for few work hours, and I began undertaking international negotiations. It was just what you would expect, I guess, in light of the things I said above about my views at the outset.
What I encountered, however, came as a big surprise. On the one hand, as you know, there was an incredible outpouring of popular energy and excitement which latched onto what was offered and pushed for much more, as well. These millions of people - the women and men energetically fighting to end the war, to enlarge democracy, to improve people's lives - not only impressed me, they pushed me, they made me study their sentiments, and made me react to their choices.
But on the other side, the negative response was even more incredible, and at least to me, more surprising, especially the speed and vigor with which I was publicly pilloried, both to my face, at first, in my offices, and then once that failed, all over the media. I was attacked, and attacked, and attacked, as were the emerging movements, too.
At first it was pretty slow and private as people came to see me and talked with me - senators, big industrialists, and so on - but what happened at these sessions was, well, I said back to them, hey, wait a minute. I told you broadly all during the campaign what my priorities were. And yes, my views go somewhat further than what I said in the campaign, but not much. So what's the problem for you? And I also told them, one after another, that I didn't get into office to do nothing. I intended to bring changes, just like I said I would. I am no revolutionary, not even a radical, I told them, but we need to act on many fronts, for many constituencies.
Well, once this was conveyed, then the newspapers and talk shows and networks that these folks govern ratcheted up the attacks. And it really went over the top, it went ballistic, you remember, when I met with Chavez and reported that instead of feeling he was some horrible enemy, like I had convinced myself during the campaign, I found that I liked a whole lot of what the Venezuelans were doing, and even wanted to learn from their efforts. At that point, all hell broke lose. The media got really aggressive from then on.
It was incredibly fortunate that we did have a powerful campaign apparatus that we could shift into combating all the lies and calumny these elites were pouring out and, even more important, that the public, all over the country, showed so much support for our new programs.
Indeed, I have to admit, I doubt I would have had the courage or the insight to keep on, except for the huge numbers of folks who took to the streets and went house to house, and otherwise worked tirelessly to keep pushing the debate forward against the elite assault on us. How could I possibly let them down?
Well, okay this went on as everyone knows for months and months, and it still continues, and instead of abating, or becoming civil, it has escalated, and it still is. The more I do in accord with serving the population, the more the elite owned media and talk show hosts and pundits and other politicians attack me in all kinds of ways.
And for your question, from all that, plus the lessons I was finally listening to that movement organizers were teaching, I learned that our society is fundamentally flawed in that it produces people who act as these hostile talk show hosts, newspaper publishers, senators and corporation owners and executives did, and it not only produces them, it elevates them to great power and wealth - indeed, it connects their power and wealth and their attitudes - making each the condition of the other. And so I began to change my views, and from then on the change in my thinking went very quick, I admit, once it got going.
I began to realize that we had bad schools because 80% of each new generation learning mostly to endure boredom and to take orders kept people at the top insulated and advantaged.
I realized that we had bad health care and harsh legality because it weakened most working people, and allowed those above to dominate and claim more for themselves.
I won't go through everything I learned - but suffice it to say that the irony was that while the owners and the rich labeled me a revolutionary danger when it wasn't true - back at election time - in a very real sense their behavior helped cause me to become what they feared.
They taught me, by their horrible antics, along with the even more important positive example of the activists who stood up to them, the need to replace failed institutions and not just failed policies.
So, yes, they turned me from a reformer into a revolutionary. I abhor violence and chaos, of course. But I am committed to involving the population in taking control of its own destiny.
And with that shift, I and all the people in our administration began to think, okay, what do we need to construct in place of the old offending and offensive institutions - in place of private ownership of workplaces, market competition, distant and alienated government - to make a really humane society?
And that's where we are. Our views are changing and growing. We are still learning, especially from grass roots movements, that we are in a vast project or experiment or campaign or struggle - it doesn't matter what label you use for it - to arrive at a shared vision for our society and to implement it.
Barb: Okay, more specifically, how have your aims changed, as a result of the hostility you faced and lessons from the mass movements, regarding the economy?
Well, right now I am seeking a law forbidding capital export and relocation without community and worker permission to do so, and also a law delineating punishments for employers who impede nationally mandated economic reforms. The idea is to increase worker power, while also making worthy reforms.
For each law, additionally, I want the maximum penalty for owners who violate it to be nationalization of their businesses under the management of currently employed workers.
I am also working explicitly toward reducing inequality, reorienting productive potentials to meet social needs, and enlarging economic democracy in all parts of the economy - workplaces and allocation - all as immediate aims.
For example, to foster equality of wealth and income, I am advocating a sharply progressive property, profit, inheritance, and income tax, with no loopholes, as well as a dramatically-increased minimum wage coupled with a new profit tax that would be specifically coupled to inequities in each firm's pay scale.
Due to the new minimum wage law, minimum pay would rise dramatically. Due to a new pay equity tax, industries with a more equitable pay scale would have more after-tax profits even as income inequities among employees would decline. Heavier property and other wealth-oriented taxes would provide means to pay for other socially valuable programs as well as dramatically diminish differences in wealth. Not only could more equitably structured and democratically run firms use their extra funds to further improve work conditions and increase their social contribution, they could generally out-compete less socially responsible firms.
I now call all these innovations redistributive and I repeatedly explain why redistribution from the rich to the poor is both morally justified and socially essential. Indeed, as you know, I call it "reclamation of stolen or at least misplaced riches."
I have also embarked on a comprehensive full employment policy, including a 25% shorter work week but with no reduction in pay for those earning less than $70,000 a year, a 25% pay reduction for those earning up to $150,000 a year, but a 50% pay reduction for all those earning higher still, and a comprehensive adult education and job training program, and a comprehensive social support system for those unable to work, whatever the reason.
More, beyond seeking these immediate improvements in material equity, I now advocate that workers should have work conditions and responsibilities suitable to their personal development and to their responsibility to contribute to society's well being.
I continually emphasize that attaining equity of life circumstances has to mean not only attaining equity of wealth and pay, but also equity of conditions while at work. Of course this takes time, but there is no reason to put off improving the balance, no reason not to start increasing education, not to start redefining our division of labor.
Indeed, with this principle as a touchstone, I now urge the creation of workers' councils in private and public workplaces throughout the country, as workers choose, but empowered by federal mandate to develop job redefinition programs and to win increasing say over the pace and goal of work.
All these values, I repeatedly say, require new underlying logic and structure - I am very clearly anti capitalist now, and anti market, and urge the definition of new, self managing, cooperative, and equitable approaches to economic life.
Regarding investment priorities, I am now proposing tax incentives for socially useful production and tax disincentives for wasteful and luxury and socially harmful production. This would limit excessive and also ecologically damaging advertising or packaging and other antisocial behavior. It would help foster production to meet real needs and potentials.
Indeed, my administration intends to regulate, punish, and even legislate out of operation any business or industry deemed by an independent citizens bureau followed by a supporting public plebiscite to be destructive of the public good.
Even more, we are building means for federal and state budgets to be overseen by the public that the expenditures affect, not by political or economic elites that mishandle them.
Of course, the biggest single material change in economic priorities that I am undertaking is a 90 percent cut in the defense budget. To make this worthwhile and not a shock for society, I am proposing that existing military bases be converted to centers for ecological clean-up, to centers to build and house new schools and social centers for local communities, to workplaces to produce low income housing or new means of clean transportation or energy production. Federal funding for these bases would persist, while resident GIs, or others seeking new employment, are, if they so desire, retrained to work in as well as to democratically administer the converted bases. These new projects will move a huge percentage of our social capacity from wasteful military violence to socially valuable production and will also be exemplary in every other respect.
Regarding economic democracy and participation, I am overtly and aggressively assisting the formation of consumer and worker organizations to watchdog product quality, to guard against excessive pricing, to advise about product redefinition for durability, ecological sustainability, and value to the user, and to participate in plant and industry decisions with open books and full investigative rights.
And beyond all these first steps, I am also continually clarifying that my ultimate economic goal, and I think what ought to become society's ultimate economic goal too, is the full democratization of economic decision making and the initiation of a national public project to develop new institutions for determining work, consumption, and allocation in a non competitive, cooperative, and self managing way.
In short, I am now intent on explaining that the basic problem with our economy is that capitalist institutions make capitalists prefer war production, persistent unemployment, stunted education and health care, repressive legality, homelessness and impoverishment to having a working class that is secure and informed and therefore able to demand a bigger piece of the pie as well as more control over what kind of pie is baked. I am working to propose and win uncompromising changes that redress existing grievances, create conditions more just and humane, and also establish a new balance of power conducive to winning more fundamental changes in the future.
Barb: What about education, as another example?
I have come to realize due to the incredible hostility of my elite critics and the lessons of education and community activists, that while it is often claimed that schools are failing, it really depends on how you look at them.
Existing schools actually succeed at developing, on the one hand, future executives, professionals, intellectuals, and managers by providing them with an empowering environment, diverse skills development, wide-ranging knowledge, an expectation of fulfillment in life, and, it has to be said, a degree of callousness and paternalism and authoritarianism toward those below.
On the other hand, schools also serve to create future workers by providing them the dregs of literacy and maximum training in enduring boredom and obeying orders. From the point of view of elites, these outcomes aren't sign of failure but of success. Elites like the picture. I find it vile. That's why they went ballistic when I began to even moderately change the situation and that's how I learned the need for much more change.
To my new thinking, we have to understand that to make educational change we need to change the context that schools prepare people to enter so that good education for all makes good sense. We need to realize that this requires an economy promising full employment at jobs that require and utilize people's full capabilities, including their highly developed facility at decision-making, their ample knowledge about society, and their expectations of success and participation.
With those changes underway, we also need to develop a popular movement to seek specific pedagogic changes. To enumerate these pedagogic changes, I am advocating that we have a national debate conducted in schools, with teachers, parents, and students, about curriculum reform, improved teaching methods and teacher-student relations, improved resources for schools, and increased community involvement.
I am already seeking to reduce class size to a maximum of 20 students per teacher in all schools. I am seeking to equalize resources per student across all schools, including architecture, computers, books, and food—and to guarantee education (through college) to anyone who wants it.
I am seeking to provide funds to staff all schools at night for community meetings and remedial and adult education, not just for literacy campaigns, but now also for larger and richer and more diverse adult education as well. And finally, I am advocating and working for education funding to come from new corporate profit taxes to guarantee that regions attain educational parity.
Barb: How about foreign policy?
Well, of course, as everyone knows, I got us out of war in Iraq and have been negotiating a reduction of tensions and an increase in mutual aid in many other places, as well. But on a more broad scale, it is sad but true, as I have come to understand while being bludgeoned by rich people's media and taught by poor people's movements, that U.S. foreign aid has heretofore correlated directly with human rights abuses. The more abuses a country practiced, the higher our aid was. More, this was not due to diplomatic stupidity. The practitioners of our policies were not dumb.
So why did we have such horrible policies? Well, the sad truth is that our policy makers viewed aid as a way to maintain a flow of riches and wealth out of other countries and into ours. Call it empire, if you like. It has been around a long time. Indeed, the U.S., had to overcome the British version at our birth, but then, regrettably, we became purveyors too.
Since this rip-off by our country, or more accurately, by our country's richest and most powerful members, of the assets of other countries requires that the local populations in those other countries submit, of course wherever we give aid, indigenous populations are repressed. That's the quid pro quo. That's largely what the aid buys.
The idea is that in return for our "largesse" in providing the tools of repression and authoritarian rule, and propping up vile leaders beholden to us, those elites get to take home an ample bounty of wealth, and our elites get to take home even more. And if something goes wrong, meaning if the populations of other countries try to get out from under our thumb, well, okay, we call in the Marines. And that isn't a slam at the Marines, it is a slam on our system, and on the people who give the orders.
So I think instead of emphasizing empire our foreign policy needs to respect the integrity of other nations and to reflect, as well, a human-serving domestic economy rather than an incredibly hierarchical one. My overall program internationally, and I certainly admit that my aims change as I learn more, now emphasizes:
· Cessation of all arms shipments abroad. And of course cessation of all our overseas military interventions and actions.
· Cessation of any aid abroad that is likely, by any means, find its way into the hands of police or other potentially repressive agencies in other countries.
· Elimination of all overseas military bases, with half the funds saved from closings returned to the U.S. for solving domestic problems; and half applied to aid to underdeveloped countries in the form of no-strings attached infrastructure improvements, job and skills training, equipment grants, food aid, and privileged buyer status for many goods on the international market.
· Implementation of trade agreements which instead of taking advantage or our greater power and size, apportion the benefits of exchange among ourselves and those we trade with so that the weaker party gets more of the benefits - and the wealth gaps narrow - rather than the stronger party taking more, and the wealth gaps widening. Call it internationalism, if you want, or just plain old morality, either way, it is morally sound despite that it is the antithesis of market exchange.
Barb: We don't have enough time to run through everything, I guess, but what about health and ecology?
Well, in brief, a civilized health program for our society must involve three main components: prevention, universal care for the ill, and cost cutting. So, in light of lessons I have learned from health movements and workers, I am currently working hard on...
· Improved preventive medicine, including increased public education about health-care risks, a massive campaign around diet, increased cleanliness in hospitals, and large-scale provision of community centers for exercise and public health education.
· Universal health care for the ill, including the government providing comprehensive coverage for all citizens.
· Reassessment of training programs for doctors and nurses to expand the number of qualified health workers and to better utilize the talents of those already trained.
· Civilian review over drug company policies with a stringent cap on profits and remuneration for officials, with violations punished by nationalization - and review of the medical impact of all institutions in society—for example, the health effects of work conditions and product choices, with an eye toward improvements.
I am also seeking sharp limits on the incomes of health professionals and on the profits that pharmaceutical and other medical companies could earn, and of course this is in accord with our new ideas about incomes generally.
To get rich, I have come to realize, is vile. It means one is taking way more than what one's effort and sacrifice in contributing to the economy warrant - but to get rich off illness, that is especially pernicious. And insofar as we need large scale funding for our health programs, it will come from punitive taxes on unhealthful products such as cigarettes, alcohol, and unsafe automobiles, etc.
As to the ecology, as you know I am establishing a department of ecological stewardship to develop a list of necessary clean-up steps, as well as a policy to preserve the ecology and prevent further global warming.
Beyond this, I argue that funds for clean energy development and deployment, for all kinds of conservation, etc., should come from a tax on current polluters and on prior beneficiaries of unclean industrial operations.
It used to be that for a company if it could produce more cheaply by polluting and not cleaning up the mess and it was not just wise but even essential to do so. Others would pay the costs imposed by the pollution, and you would save. If you didn't do it, and your competitors in the market place did do it, they would outcompete you with their savings. This is the connection, or one of the connections, between market exchange, profit seeking, and ecological degradation. And so one of our big tasks is to make all these connections clear and to develop insight and activism focused not just on single issues, but on the whole overarching logic of society.
The critical innovation in our approach to ecological sanity is therefore to open a national public debate about the relation between our basic economic and social institutions and the environment. We want to involve the population in clarifying that we need institutions attuned to ecological costs and benefits and that we must experiment with non-market approaches to allocation, rather than trying to police the inevitable ecological disasters that markets routinely produce.
Bard: Okay, what about Race and Gender?
Well, part of it is obvious and basically what I felt on being elected and what I began doing then. But even beyond ensuring that there aren't vile characterizations and media manipulations, and beyond ensuring that there is proportional representation at all levels of society for the various groups, and beyond redressing, as well, the material and situational residues of past injustices, I have come to realize there is more we have to do.
So to accomplish the above, we have education programs, caucuses giving minorities and women oversight and a room of their own, affirmative action and taxes and reparations and even the new Women's Bank and Minority Bank to undo past accumulated imbalances, and facilitate new projects, etc.
But I am also eager to initiate, which is why we have the new cabinet positions for gender and sexuality and for race and culture, widespread and deep going discussions aimed at finding the structural relationships inside families and in schooling and in sexual interactivity, and in cultural communities and especially in their interrelations, which tend to produce the distorting and unjust views and practices that we call sexism and racism. I want not only to have programs to redress the symptoms, but also to get at the deepest causes.
In that, my aim for racism and sexism is a bit like it is for the economy. We don't just say let's get wealth gaps narrowed, we also say, let's remove the institutional relations that produce the gaps in the first place, and I think we need to do the same for race and gender, and for politics, too, for that matter - which is why we are embarking on building neighborhood, county, and region based assemblies for direct democratic control over society - and why we intend that in time these will be the seat of political power, not mayor's offices, governor's offices, or even my office, for that matter.
Barb: Okay, I know we should go on with this a lot longer, but even our extended time slot is almost up, so to summarize how would you say your overall current program contrasts, broadly, to two years ago?
When I took office, I thought I was going to easily implement modest programs to better the situation of society's less well off sectors and to improve our health, education, etc.
As you know and as we discussed, I ran into a minefield - really a shit storm - if you will pardon my language - of quite vicious elite opposition.
This was a real eye opener for me, but instead of succumbing, I decided to fulfill my promises.
Of course the situation got more embattled, but it taught me that making society better is not a matter of tweaking this or that lever. It is about completely changing the levers.
So, again, when I took office my program was about alleviating pain, improving institutional efficiency, and generally making the system work better. But now though my program still seeks innovations to better the lot of those worst off and to improve education, health, etc., it is also about enfranchising workers and consumers and empowering all citizens regarding all the decisions that affect them.
So now it is not about making the existing system work better but is instead about discovering what new structures and relations we need to put in place to remove the obstacles that impede the fullest liberation of our talents and the most complete fulfillment of our needs.
We can't have a social system that produces the behavior I encountered for trying to meet my rather moderate election promises. We can't have a system that makes people so anti social and so greedy, so ignorant and so violent, and that then gives precisely those people most control. We can't have a system that robs so many people of their human possibilities.
So now my program is about real change, just like I said in the campaign, but thanks to the opposition I encountered and what it taught me, and thanks even more to the huge numbers of people who allied with my efforts and fought and keep fighting against all obstacles, it is about change that goes way beyond what I was talking about in the election - change in basic relations, in property, in decision making, in the norms governing who gets how much product, how we legislate, how we adjudicate, how we raise the next generation, and so on.
Barb: What about your approach to winning these changes, how is it different now, than before?
Before I thought winning change was about convincing politicians and prominent citizens of the wisdom of my programs. Now I know that it is about amassing popular power, not just votes but sustained activism, sufficient to force our outcomes on the rich and powerful, who are fighting viciously against them.
Before I thought I was the key to it all, honestly with everyone calling me Mr. President, and all. Now I know that while I am important to the process, the real key is public awareness, public insight, public energy, public militancy, public organization, and public action. It isn't me who is taking over and running organizations throughout society in new ways - it is the public.
You know how politicians used to talk about a war on drugs, a war on terrorism. Well, I don't like addictions and I sure as hell don't like terrorism - including inflicted by the US on others - but I also don't like rich, comfortable, powerful people who want to keep a tight grip on most of society's wealth and power. Those people need to lose if real freedom and real justice are to blossom. If it is a war that those people want, a war that they thought they could intimidate me with - fine, we will proceed, and it will be a war of justice against greed, of equity against inequality, of solidarity against antisociality, of self management against autocracy. If they know no other language than battle, then even though we want communication and reason, we can battle too, and we will.
Barb: To finish, do you still believe we can have a just, equitable, really participatory society? What is your long run goal?
Yes, I believe it more than ever. In fact, for the first time, I am really coming to understand what such words mean.
I have learned we can't have a really participatory society, though, if we maintain a few people owning all workplaces and other economic assets. We can't have it if we maintain elitist decision-making and cultural exclusion or sexism. We can't have capitalism, I now realize, or patriarchy, or racism, and equity or solidarity. We can't have capitalism and have democracy much less real participation and self-management. The rich and powerful, trying to intimidate me, instead taught me the need for fundamental change by the way that they rejected even small incursions on their wealth and power.
And I also know that we can't have participation, real democracy, with government structures that have no roots in the population, but that exist over and above the population. These things I now know, but they don't cause me to think that a better life, a better world, is impossible. On the contrary, they illuminate the path to that better life and better world.
Are the obstacles to real change larger than I thought they were, larger than I understood them to be? Yes, they are.
But I have also seen poor people, working people, women and men of all races, come to political life, come to activist life, all over our country, these past two years, and as large and intense as the forces of reaction and hostility have been, I have seen that the popular forces that can become aroused and involved for peace and justice are far larger - and we are arousing them and they are getting active. And so we will win.
We have seen such an incredible outpouring of humanity and caring, of sharing and organizing, of innovation and creativity, of learning and doing, and especially of mutual aid in just these two years - just think what we can all together accomplish with more time and with the accelerated momentum that comes with a steady accrual of gains that both improve people's lives and, with each step, give us more means to go still further.
So yes, I think we can have an economy in which workers and consumers cooperatively self manage economic life without familiar hierarchies of wealth, power, and circumstance, and indeed without class divisions of any kind.
And yes, I think we can continue the long journey of overcoming racial and gender beliefs, structures, and even residual imbalances and hierarchies - both ideological and material - in a society that has ways of living in families, and of birthing and nurturing the next generation, and of celebrating identity, and that has mutual beliefs, and shared language, cuisine, and all the other components of culture - thereby arriving finally at a society that does not mistreat anyone, explicitly or implicitly, for race or gender, or sexuality.
And yes, I think we can have a political system that accomplishes adjudication of disputes, legislation of shared norms, and implementation of collective projects with every citizen having a self managing participatory say in the outcomes, without elitism, without alienation, without injustice.
Yes, I do believe all that.
I am not the same man who ran for office against John McCain two years ago and won. I said then I was not a perfect person and would not be a perfect President. That was true, truer than I knew, even. But I am someone who can learn, and I will not bow to greed and viciousness.
Many deep interpersonal values are the same for me now, as two years ago, yes, but the view of the world that I have, the view of what we need to do, both short term and long term, and the view of the steps required and the tasks we have to undertake that I now have, those have all altered greatly.
I have learned much. What before seemed to me largely irrelevant, now seems to me the core of our future - explicit desires to transform society's central institutions, explicit desires for revolution in ideas but also in social relations. And what before seemed to me essential, which was convincing elites by reasoned appeal, done largely behind closed doors over the heads of the public, now seems to me both a fruitless pursuit and a horribly repulsive one. The task I see and feel is to address, learn from, and accompany the broad public and its popular movements into a new society that we will all enjoy together.
Barb: Thank you, Mr. President.
Barack: You are very welcome Barb, but mostly the thanks go from me to the public, for waking me up and for making possible the incredible social project we now undertake. And please, it is Barack...
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19345
Postato da: treball a 05/11/2008 12:51 |
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news, testi, good news, elezioni, repetita iuvant, social, international, occidente, usa today
Yes, We can
Why We Vote
This article appeared in the November 17, 2008 edition of The Nation.
The Nation, Editorial
October 29, 2008
This past week, a flier of unknown origin was circulated in Hampton Roads, Virginia, bearing the seal of the state Board of Elections and instructing Democrats that, because of an emergency order of the state General Assembly, they were to vote on November 5... the day after election day. Across the country GOP lawyers are working overtime to erect barriers to keep people from voting, and the McCain campaign and its surrogates have spent weeks smearing ACORN for engaging in the audacious and outrageous act of... registering poor people. That the group submitted 400,000 registrations that were flawed-making the total more like 900,000 than the oft-cited 1.3 million-should not overshadow the fact that it has been part of a much larger and apparently effective drive to expand the electorate. So as we (finally) approach election day, we find ourselves in a familiar situation: the left wants the maximum number of eligible citizens to vote, and the right does not.
Progressives have long stood for a wider franchise that includes the propertyless, women, African-Americans and young adults. The same is not true of conservatives: from Edmund Burke, who worried about the "cruel oppressions" the many have-nots might visit upon the few haves, to activist Paul Weyrich, who admitted in 1980 that "I don't want everybody to vote.... As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down."
For several decades, starting around 1964, conservatives were winning this battle. Turnout declined from 63 percent in 1960 to just over 51 percent in 2000. Last election we witnessed enough of an increase to detect the rumblings of a reawakening. Now we appear to be in the midst of a full-fledged democratic renaissance. By every measure-from the number of small donors and volunteers to the number of those who cast their votes early-participation is at its highest level in a generation.
Particularly poignant is the role black voters are poised to play as they head to the polls. All across the South, men and women once barred from the ballot-forced to brave dogs, insults and terrorism simply to add their names to the voting rolls-will, on November 4, be able to cast their ballot for an African-American man to be president of the United States. Imagine the emotion of 109-year-old Amanda Jones, whose father was born into slavery, when she voted early this year in Texas.
Along with the ugliness, this election has produced a tremendous number of grace notes: the recent report of employees at an Indiana call center walking out rather than read anti-Obama talking points; the McCain supporters who confronted and shunned an Islamophobe outside a rally (captured on YouTube); and the story (reported on Politico) of how a McCain backer in line to vote early in Hamilton County, Ohio, lent his NASCAR jacket to three elderly Jewish women after overhearing that they would not be allowed to enter the polling place wearing their Obama gear. While chatting with the women, who spoke of the alliance of Jews and blacks during the civil rights struggle, the man was seized with the desire to be on the right side of history; when it was time for him to cast his ballot, he voted for Obama as well.
This last story gets at something profound about why we go to the trouble of voting. We vote in order to change the country, to exercise our rights, to make our voices heard and a hundred other clichés as shopworn as they are true. But we also vote because it places us in direct fellowship with other citizens; we vote because it is a secular sacrament, an act of civic solidarity. Because it is the ultimate declaration that we are, indeed, all in this together.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/editors
Postato da: treball a 04/11/2008 12:53 |
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a factor of 32
What’s Your Consumption Factor?
By JARED DIAMOND
The New York Times
January 2, 2008, Los Angeles
To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.
To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.
If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.
The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.
The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.
People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.
People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy. And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Each such transfer of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in multiplying their consumption by 32.
Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the world’s fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.
Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.
If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).
Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.
We Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.
The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?
No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.
Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.
Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields — even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.
The same is true of forests: we already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, we could extract enough timber to meet the world’s wood and paper needs. Yet most forests are managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields.
Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.
Fortunately, in the last year there have been encouraging signs. Australia held a recent election in which a large majority of voters reversed the head-in-the-sand political course their government had followed for a decade; the new government immediately supported the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Also in the last year, concern about climate change has increased greatly in the United States. Even in China, vigorous arguments about environmental policy are taking place, and public protests recently halted construction of a huge chemical plant near the center of Xiamen. Hence I am cautiously optimistic. The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html?ref=opinion
Il fattore 32
JARED DIAMOND
La Repubblica, 03.01.2008
Per i matematici il numero 32 è interessante poiché è 2 elevato alla quinta potenza: 2 per 2 per 2 per 2 per 2. Per gli economisti il numero 32 è ancora più particolare, poiché quantifica la differenza di stile di vita tra il mondo sviluppato, il Primo Mondo, e quello in via di sviluppo, il Terzo Mondo. Rispetto a quest’ultimo, infatti, il tasso medio con il quale nel primo si consumano risorse quali petrolio e metalli, producendo rifiuti come plastica e gas serra, è di circa 32 volte più alto in America settentrionale, Europa occidentale, Giappone e Australia. Questo “indice 32” ha grandi ripercussioni.
Per comprenderle si considerino le preoccupazioni legate alla popolazione mondiale. Oggi la Terra è abitata da più di 6,5 miliardi di persone ed entro la prima metà di questo secolo il loro numero dovrebbe salire a 9 miliardi circa. Alcuni decenni fa, erano in molti a ritenere l’aumento della popolazione terrestre la più grande sfida alla quale l’umanità avrebbe dovuto far fronte. Oggi, invece, ci rendiamo conto che essa è tale soltanto nella misura in cui la gente consuma e produce.
Se paradossalmente la maggior parte dei 6,5 miliardi di esseri umani vivesse, per così dire, in una sorta di immensa cella frigorifera, non metabolizzasse e non consumasse, non comporterebbe di conseguenza alcun problema dal punto di vista delle risorse. Ciò che invece conta davvero, oggi, sono i consumi mondiali complessivi, la somma di tutti i consumi a livello locale, il prodotto della popolazione locale moltiplicato per l’indice di consumo pro-capite.
Si calcola che il miliardo di persone che vive nei Paesi sviluppati abbia un tasso relativo di consumo pro-capite di 32. La maggior parte degli altri 5,5 miliardi di abitanti del pianeta costituisce il mondo in via di sviluppo, e ha un tasso relativo di consumo inferiore a 32, quasi sempre vicino a 1 circa.
La popolazione, specialmente quella del mondo in via di sviluppo, sta crescendo, e alcune persone continuano a ritenerlo un problema: osservano, per esempio, che la popolazione di Paesi come il Kenya sta aumentando rapidamente e questo costituirebbe qualcosa di molto preoccupante. Da un certo punto di vista è così, perché è un problema per i 30 milioni di keniani, ma non lo è per il mondo nel suo complesso, perché i keniani consumano molto poco (e il loro indice di consumo pro-capite è di 1). Il vero problema di questo mondo è che ciascuno di noi 300 milioni di americani consuma quanto 32 keniani insieme. Con una popolazione che è dieci volte superiore a quella del Kenya, gli Stati Uniti consumano risorse nella misura di 320 volte quelle consumate dai keniani.
( …* )
Le persone che consumano poco vorrebbero godere di uno stile di vita caratterizzato da alti consumi. I governi dei Paesi in via di sviluppo hanno fatto del miglioramento degli standard di vita un obiettivo primario della loro politica nazionale. Decine di milioni di persone del mondo in via di sviluppo cercano di procurarsi per conto loro e a modo loro lo stile di vita del mondo sviluppato emigrando, specialmente negli Stati Uniti, in Europa occidentale, in Giappone e in Australia. Ogni singolo trasferimento di un individuo in un Paese dagli alti consumi aumenta l’indice globale di consumo, anche se la maggior parte degli immigrati non riesce immediatamente a moltiplicare il proprio indice di consumo di 32 volte.
Tra i Paesi in via di sviluppo che stanno cercando di aumentare i tassi di consumo pro-capite interni, spicca la Cina che ha l’economia a più rapida crescita del pianeta e conta una popolazione di 1,3 miliardi di cinesi, il quadruplo degli abitanti degli Stati Uniti. Il mondo già adesso ha penuria di risorse, e ne avrà ancora meno se la Cina riuscirà a raggiungere i tassi di consumo degli americani. Già ora la Cina è in concorrenza con gli americani per i mercati globali del petrolio e dei metalli.
I tassi di consumo pro-capite in Cina sono tuttora di 11 volte inferiori a quelli statunitensi. Supponiamo però che possano raggiungere i livelli americani, e per semplificare un po’ le cose, supponiamo anche che nel frattempo nulla accada ai consumi globali, ovvero che nessun altro Paese aumenti i propri consumi, che la popolazione nazionale (ivi compresa quella cinese) resti immutata e che l’immigrazione abbia fine. Ebbene, anche così, qualora la Cina riguadagnasse completamente il divario nei consumi pro-capite, il mondo raddoppierebbe il suo indice di consumo. I consumi di petrolio aumenterebbero del 106 per cento, per esempio, mentre il consumo globale di metalli salirebbe del 94 per cento.
Se anche l’India come la Cina dovesse riguadagnare il divario nei consumi, l’indice di consumo globale triplicherebbe. Se poi l’intero mondo in via di sviluppo all’improvviso dovesse a sua volta farcela a riguadagnare tale divario, il tasso globale consumo dovrebbe essere moltiplicato per 11. Sarebbe come se la popolazione del pianeta raggiungesse di colpo i 72 miliardi di abitanti (mantenendo immutati rispetto a quelli attuali i loro indici di consumo).
Alcuni ottimisti affermano che saremmo in grado di tirare avanti con un mondo popolato da 9 miliardi di abitanti. Tuttavia, non ho mai incontrato nessuno pazzo abbastanza da sostenere che altrettanto potrebbe accadere con 72 miliardi persone. Ciò nonostante, spesso promettiamo ai Paesi in via di sviluppo che se solo adotteranno buone politiche — per esempio istituendo governi onesti e praticando l’economia del libero mercato — saranno anch’essi in grado di godere dello stile di vita del mondo sviluppato. Questa promessa è impossibile da mantenere, è una beffa crudele: già ora incontriamo difficoltà non indifferenti a sostenere uno stile vita da Primo Mondo per un solo miliardo di persone.
Noi americani forse pensiamo ai crescenti consumi della Cina in termini di problema, ma i cinesi stanno soltanto cercando di raggiungere il tasso consumo che noi già abbiamo. Sarebbe del tutto inutile dire loro di non farlo.
L’unico altro approccio che Cina e altri Paesi in via di sviluppo potranno accettare è quello finalizzato a rendere gli indici di consumo e gli standard di vita più equi in tutto il mondo. Ma il mondo non ha abbastanza risorse per consentire alla Cina, per non parlare del resto mondo, di aumentare i propri tassi di consumo e portarli nostri livelli. Questo sta forse a significare che siamo inesorabilmente diretti al disastro?
No, potremmo riuscire a raggiungere una certa stabilità e a far sì che tutti i Paesi convergano verso tassi di consumo considerevolmente inferiori a quelli oggi più alti. Gli americani a questo punto potrebbero obiettare: non esiste proprio che noi sacrifichiamo i nostri standard di vita a vantaggio del resto della popolazione mondiale. Nondimeno, sia che lo facciamo per libera scelta, sia che lo facciamo obtorto collo, molto presto noi stessi avremo indici di consumo inferiori agli attuali, in quanto quelli nostri sono attualmente insostenibili.
Veri e propri sacrifici, in ogni caso, non saranno necessari, perché gli standard di vita non sono strettamente collegati agli indici di consumo. Buona parte dei consumi americani vanno sprecati e contribuiscono in minima parte o per nulla affatto alla qualità della vita. Per esempio, i consumi di petrolio pro-capite in Europa occidentale sono la metà di quelli americani, eppure lo standard di vita dell’Europa occidentale è più alto da molti punti di vista e rispetto a molti ragionevoli parametri a quello statunitense, ivi compresi l’aspettativa di vita, la salute, la mortalità infantile, l’accesso all’assistenza sanitaria, la sicurezza finanziaria dopo il pensionamento, la durata delle ferie, la qualità delle scuole pubbliche e il sostegno alle arti. Chiediamoci: siamo sicuri che il nostro spreco — più che uso — di benzina in America contribuisca positivamente a ciascuno di questi fattori?
Anche molti altri aspetti dei nostri consumi costituiscono uno spreco. La maggior parte delle zone sfruttate per la pesca sono tuttora soggette a criteri operativi non sostenibili e molte sono ormai prive di pesci o fruttano a livelli bassissimi, anche se sappiamo molto bene come dovremmo gestirle in modo tale da preservare l’ambiente e tutelare la popolazione di pesci. Se gestissimo tutte le aree di pesca in modo sostenibile, potremmo pescare pesce dagli oceani a livelli record e continuare a tempo indefinito.
La stessa cosa vale per le foreste: sappiamo come utilizzarle per ricavare il legname in modo sostenibile e se lo facessimo in tutto il mondo potremmo ottenere sufficiente legname in tutto il mondo da far fronte alla richiesta globale di carta e legno. E invece, la maggior parte delle foreste è gestita in modo non sostenibile, così che il legno ricavato diminuisce sempre più.
Proprio come è assolutamente sicuro che nell’arco di buona parte della nostra vita consumeremo meno di quanto consumiamo adesso, è altrettanto sicuro che gli indici di consumo di molti Paesi in via di sviluppo un giorno saranno un po’ più vicini ai nostri. Si tratta di trend auspicabili, non di prospettive terrificanti. Oltretutto, noi già adesso sappiamo come incoraggiare questi trend. La cosa principale a essere venuta meno finora è la volontà politica.
Per fortuna l’anno scorso ci sono stati alcuni segnali incoraggianti. In Australia di recente c’è stata una consultazione popolare con la quale la stragrande maggioranza degli elettori ha invertito la politica dello struzzo praticata dal governo per un decennio e la nuova classe politica in carica ha immediatamente aderito al Protocollo di Kyoto per ridurre drasticamente le emissioni di gas serra.
Sempre l’anno scorso le preoccupazioni legate al cambiamento del clima sono cresciute moltissimo negli Stati Uniti. Anche in Cina sono attualmente in corso accesi dibattiti sulla politica ambientale più auspicabile, e le proteste dell’opinione pubblica in tempi recenti hanno ostacolato la costruzione di un grande impianto chimico nei pressi del centro di Xiamen. Da tutto ciò io ricavo motivo per dichiararmi cautamente ottimista. Il mondo ha seri problemi di consumi, ma se lo vorremo, potremo risolverli.
copyright The New York Times, 2008
Traduzione di Anna Bissanti
( * ) parte mancante nella versione de La Repubblica.
Postato da: treball a 03/01/2008 18:55 |
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The Black Sites
A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s
secret interrogation program.
by Jane Mayer
The New Yorker, August 13, 2007
In the war on terror, one historian says,
the C.I.A. “didn’t just bring back the
old psychological techniques—
they perfected them.”
In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of eight United States Attorneys had just been exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. (Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic militants.) The Administration planned to release a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”
Pearl was taken aback. In 2003, she had received a call from Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s national-security adviser, informing her of the same news. But Rice’s revelation had been secret. Gonzales’s announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. “It’s not enough for officials to call me and say they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.)
The circumstances surrounding the confession of Mohammed, whom law-enforcement officials refer to as K.S.M., were perplexing. He had no lawyer. After his capture in Pakistan, in March of 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency had detained him in undisclosed locations for more than two years; last fall, he was transferred to military custody in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There were no named witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid information about what form of interrogation might have prodded him to talk, although reports had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him. At a hearing held at Guantánamo, Mohammed said that his testimony was freely given, but he also indicated that he had been abused by the C.I.A. (The Pentagon had classified as “top secret” a statement he had written detailing the alleged mistreatment.) And although Mohammed said that there were photographs confirming his guilt, U.S. authorities had found none. Instead, they had a copy of the video that had been released on the Internet, which showed the killer’s arms but offered no other clues to his identity.
Further confusing matters, a Pakistani named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had already been convicted of the abduction and murder, in 2002. A British-educated terrorist who had a history of staging kidnappings, he had been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the crime. But the Pakistani government, not known for its leniency, had stayed his execution. Indeed, hearings on the matter had been delayed a remarkable number of times—at least thirty—possibly because of his reported ties to the Pakistani intelligence service, which may have helped free him after he was imprisoned for terrorist activities in India. Mohammed’s confession would delay the execution further, since, under Pakistani law, any new evidence is grounds for appeal.
A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. A longtime friend of Pearl’s, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, “The release of the confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales’s resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now? They’d had the confession for years.” Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani’s Karachi house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, “I don’t think this confession resolves the case. You can’t have justice from one person’s confession, especially under such unusual circumstances. To me, it’s not convincing.” She added, “I called all the investigators. They weren’t just skeptical—they didn’t believe it.”
Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed—and whose lead role investigating the murder was featured in the recent film “A Mighty Heart”—said that he has interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them named Mohammed as playing a role. “K.S.M.’s name never came up,” he said. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, “My old colleagues say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not K.S.M. who killed Pearl.” A government official involved in the case said, “The fear is that K.S.M. is covering up for others, and that these people will be released.” And Judea Pearl, Daniel’s father, said, “Something is fishy. There are a lot of unanswered questions. K.S.M. can say he killed Jesus—he has nothing to lose.”
Mariane Pearl, who is relying on the Bush Administration to bring justice in her husband’s case, spoke carefully about the investigation. “You need a procedure that will get the truth,” she said. “An intelligence agency is not supposed to be above the law.”
Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were detained in “black sites”—secret prisons outside the United States—and subjected to unusually harsh treatment. The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.
The C.I.A.’s director, General Michael Hayden, has said that the program, which is designed to extract intelligence from suspects quickly, is an “irreplaceable” tool for combatting terrorism. And President Bush has said that “this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives, by helping us stop new attacks.” He claims that it has contributed to the disruption of at least ten serious Al Qaeda plots since September 11th, three of them inside the United States.
According to the Bush Administration, Mohammed divulged information of tremendous value during his detention. He is said to have helped point the way to the capture of Hambali, the Indonesian terrorist responsible for the 2002 bombings of night clubs in Bali. He also provided information on an Al Qaeda leader in England. Michael Sheehan, a former counterterrorism official at the State Department, said, “K.S.M. is the poster boy for using tough but legal tactics. He’s the reason these techniques exist. You can save lives with the kind of information he could give up.” Yet Mohammed’s confessions may also have muddled some key investigations. Perhaps under duress, he claimed involvement in thirty-one criminal plots—an improbable number, even for a high-level terrorist. Critics say that Mohammed’s case illustrates the cost of the C.I.A.’s desire for swift intelligence. Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the top defense lawyer at the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, which is expected eventually to try Mohammed for war crimes, called his serial confessions “a textbook example of why we shouldn’t allow coercive methods.”
The Bush Administration has gone to great lengths to keep secret the treatment of the hundred or so “high-value detainees” whom the C.I.A. has confined, at one point or another, since September 11th. The program has been extraordinarily “compartmentalized,” in the nomenclature of the intelligence world. By design, there has been virtually no access for outsiders to the C.I.A.’s prisoners. The utter isolation of these detainees has been described as essential to America’s national security. The Justice Department argued this point explicitly last November, in the case of a Baltimore-area resident named Majid Khan, who was held for more than three years by the C.I.A. Khan, the government said, had to be prohibited from access to a lawyer specifically because he might describe the “alternative interrogation methods” that the agency had used when questioning him. These methods amounted to a state secret, the government argued, and disclosure of them could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” (The case has not yet been decided.)
Given this level of secrecy, the public and all but a few members of Congress who have been sworn to silence have had to take on faith President Bush’s assurances that the C.I.A.’s internment program has been humane and legal, and has yielded crucial intelligence. Representative Alcee Hastings, a Democratic member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “We talk to the authorities about these detainees, but, of course, they’re not going to come out and tell us that they beat the living daylights out of someone.” He recalled learning in 2003 that Mohammed had been captured. “It was good news,” he said. “So I tried to find out: Where is this guy? And how is he being treated?” For more than three years, Hastings said, “I could never pinpoint anything.” Finally, he received some classified briefings on the Mohammed interrogation. Hastings said that he “can’t go into details” about what he found out, but, speaking of Mohammed’s treatment, he said that even if it wasn’t torture, as the Administration claims, “it ain’t right, either. Something went wrong.”
Since the drafting of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross has played a special role in safeguarding the rights of prisoners of war. For decades, governments have allowed officials from the organization to report on the treatment of detainees, to insure that standards set by international treaties are being maintained. The Red Cross, however, was unable to get access to the C.I.A.’s prisoners for five years. Finally, last year, Red Cross officials were allowed to interview fifteen detainees, after they had been transferred to Guantánamo. One of the prisoners was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What the Red Cross learned has been kept from the public. The committee believes that its continued access to prisoners worldwide is contingent upon confidentiality, and therefore it addresses violations privately with the authorities directly responsible for prisoner treatment and detention. For this reason, Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington, said, “The I.C.R.C. does not comment on its findings publicly. Its work is confidential.”
The public-affairs office at the C.I.A. and officials at the congressional intelligence-oversight committees would not even acknowledge the existence of the report. Among the few people who are believed to have seen it are Condoleezza Rice, now the Secretary of State; Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; John Bellinger III, the Secretary of State’s legal adviser; Hayden; and John Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel. Some members of the Senate and House intelligence-oversight committees are also believed to have had limited access to the report.
Confidentiality may be particularly stringent in this case. Congressional and other Washington sources familiar with the report said that it harshly criticized the C.I.A.’s practices. One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.
Concern about the legality of the C.I.A.’s program reached a previously unreported breaking point last week when Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the intelligence committee, quietly put a “hold” on the confirmation of John Rizzo, who as acting general counsel was deeply involved in establishing the agency’s interrogation and detention policies. Wyden’s maneuver essentially stops the nomination from going forward. “I question if there’s been adequate legal oversight,” Wyden told me. He said that after studying a classified addendum to President Bush’s new executive order, which specifies permissible treatment of detainees, “I am not convinced that all of these techniques are either effective or legal. I don’t want to see well-intentioned C.I.A. officers breaking the law because of shaky legal guidance.”
A former C.I.A. officer, who supports the agency’s detention and interrogation policies, said he worried that, if the full story of the C.I.A. program ever surfaced, agency personnel could face criminal prosecution. Within the agency, he said, there is a “high level of anxiety about political retribution” for the interrogation program. If congressional hearings begin, he said, “several guys expect to be thrown under the bus.” He noted that a number of C.I.A. officers have taken out professional liability insurance, to help with potential legal fees.
Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., denied any legal impropriety, stressing that “the agency’s terrorist-detention program has been implemented lawfully. And torture is illegal under U.S. law. The people who have been part of this important effort are well-trained, seasoned professionals.” This spring, the Associated Press published an article quoting the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Silvestre Reyes, who said that Hayden, the C.I.A. director, “vehemently denied” the Red Cross’s conclusions. A U.S. official dismissed the Red Cross report as a mere compilation of allegations made by terrorists. And Robert Grenier, a former head of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, said that “the C.I.A.’s interrogations were nothing like Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. They were very, very regimented. Very meticulous.” He said, “The program is very careful. It’s completely legal.”
Accurately or not, Bush Administration officials have described the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo as the unauthorized actions of ill-trained personnel, eleven of whom have been convicted of crimes. By contrast, the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush. The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency’s director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, “Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level—meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan—even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added—was signed off by the C.I.A. director.”
On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to create paramilitary teams to hunt, capture, detain, or kill designated terrorists almost anywhere in the world. Yet the C.I.A. had virtually no trained interrogators. A former C.I.A. officer involved in fighting terrorism said that, at first, the agency was crippled by its lack of expertise. “It began right away, in Afghanistan, on the fly,” he recalled. “They invented the program of interrogation with people who had no understanding of Al Qaeda or the Arab world.” The former officer said that the pressure from the White House, in particular from Vice-President Dick Cheney, was intense: “They were pushing us: ‘Get information! Do not let us get hit again!’ ” In the scramble, he said, he searched the C.I.A.’s archives, to see what interrogation techniques had worked in the past. He was particularly impressed with the Phoenix Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after September 11th, some C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model. A. B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the C.I.A. from 2001 to 2004, said that the agency turned to “everyone we could, including our friends in Arab cultures,” for interrogation advice, among them those in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of which the State Department regularly criticizes for human-rights abuses.
The C.I.A. knew even less about running prisons than it did about hostile interrogations. Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of European operations at the C.I.A., and the author of a recent book, “On the Brink: How the White House Compromised U.S. Intelligence,” said, “The agency had no experience in detention. Never. But they insisted on arresting and detaining people in this program. It was a mistake, in my opinion. You can’t mix intelligence and police work. But the White House was really pushing. They wanted someone to do it. So the C.I.A. said, ‘We’ll try.’ George Tenet came out of politics, not intelligence. His whole modus operandi was to please the principal. We got stuck with all sorts of things. This is really the legacy of a director who never said no to anybody.”
Many officials inside the C.I.A. had misgivings. “A lot of us knew this would be a can of worms,” the former officer said. “We warned them, It’s going to become an atrocious mess.” The problem from the start, he said, was that no one had thought through what he called “the disposal plan.” He continued, “What are you going to do with these people? The utility of someone like K.S.M. is, at most, six months to a year. You exhaust them. Then what? It would have been better if we had executed them.”
The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”
The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”
Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)
Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”
As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that “if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”
Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that “they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that “after the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”
The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”
The U.S. government first began tracking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1993, shortly after his nephew Ramzi Yousef blew a gaping hole in the World Trade Center. Mohammed, officials learned, had transferred money to Yousef. Mohammed, born in either 1964 or 1965, was raised in a religious Sunni Muslim family in Kuwait, where his family had migrated from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan. In the mid-eighties, he was trained as a mechanical engineer in the U.S., attending two colleges in North Carolina.
As a teen-ager, Mohammed had been drawn to militant, and increasingly violent, Muslim causes. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of sixteen, and, after his graduation from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, in Greensboro—where he was remembered as a class clown, but religious enough to forgo meat when eating at Burger King—he signed on with the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, receiving military training and establishing ties with Islamist terrorists. By all accounts, his animus toward the U.S. was rooted in a hatred of Israel.
In 1994, Mohammed, who was impressed by Yousef’s notoriety after the first World Trade Center bombing, joined him in scheming to blow up twelve U.S. jumbo jets over two days. The so-called Bojinka plot was disrupted in 1995, when Philippine police broke into an apartment that Yousef and other terrorists were sharing in Manila, which was filled with bomb-making materials. At the time of the raid, Mohammed was working in Doha, Qatar, at a government job. The following year, he narrowly escaped capture by F.B.I. officers and slipped into the global jihadist network, where he eventually joined forces with Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. Along the way, he married and had children.
Many journalistic accounts have presented Mohammed as a charismatic, swashbuckling figure: in the Philippines, he was said to have flown a helicopter close enough to a girlfriend’s office window so that she could see him; in Pakistan, he supposedly posed as an anonymous bystander and gave interviews to news reporters about his nephew’s arrest. Neither story is true. But Mohammed did seem to enjoy taunting authorities after the September 11th attacks, which, in his eventual confession, he claimed to have orchestrated “from A to Z.” In April, 2002, Mohammed arranged to be interviewed on Al Jazeera by its London bureau chief, Yosri Fouda, and took personal credit for the atrocities. “I am the head of the Al Qaeda military committee,” he said. “And yes, we did it.” Fouda, who conducted the interview at an Al Qaeda safe house in Karachi, said that he was astounded not only by Mohammed’s boasting but also by his seeming imperviousness to the danger of being caught. Mohammed permitted Al Jazeera to reveal that he was hiding out in the Karachi area. When Fouda left the apartment, Mohammed, apparently unarmed, walked him downstairs and out into the street.
In the early months of 2003, U.S. authorities reportedly paid a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for information that led to Mohammed’s arrest. U.S. officials closed in on him, at 4 A.M. on March 1st, waking him up in a borrowed apartment in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The officials hung back as Pakistani authorities handcuffed and hooded him, and took him to a safe house. Reportedly, for the first two days, Mohammed robotically recited Koranic verses and refused to divulge much more than his name. A videotape obtained by “60 Minutes” shows Mohammed at the end of this episode, complaining of a head cold; an American voice can be heard in the background. This was the last image of Mohammed to be seen by the public. By March 4th, he was in C.I.A. custody.
Captured along with Mohammed, according to some accounts, was a letter from bin Laden, which may have led officials to think that he knew where the Al Qaeda founder was hiding. If Mohammed did have this crucial information, it was time sensitive—bin Laden never stayed in one place for long—and officials needed to extract it quickly. At the time, many American intelligence officials still feared a “second wave” of Al Qaeda attacks, ratcheting the pressure further.
According to George Tenet’s recent memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” Mohammed told his captors that he wouldn’t talk until he was given a lawyer in New York, where he assumed he would be taken. (He had been indicted there in connection with the Bojinka plot.) Tenet writes, “Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.” Opponents of the C.I.A.’s approach, however, note that Ramzi Yousef gave a voluminous confession after being read his Miranda rights. “These guys are egomaniacs,” a former federal prosecutor said. “They love to talk!”
A complete picture of Mohammed’s time in secret detention remains elusive. But a partial narrative has emerged through interviews with European and American sources in intelligence, government, and legal circles, as well as with former detainees who have been released from C.I.A. custody. People familiar with Mohammed’s allegations about his interrogation, and interrogations of other high-value detainees, describe the accounts as remarkably consistent.
Soon after Mohammed’s arrest, sources say, his American captors told him, “We’re not going to kill you. But we’re going to take you to the very brink of your death and back.” He was first taken to a secret U.S.-run prison in Afghanistan. According to a Human Rights Watch report released two years ago, there was a C.I.A.-affiliated black site in Afghanistan by 2002: an underground prison near Kabul International Airport. Distinctive for its absolute lack of light, it was referred to by detainees as the Dark Prison. Another detention facility was reportedly a former brick factory, just north of Kabul, known as the Salt Pit. The latter became infamous for the 2002 death of a detainee, reportedly from hypothermia, after prison officials stripped him naked and chained him to the floor of his concrete cell, in freezing temperatures.
In all likelihood, Mohammed was transported from Pakistan to one of the Afghan sites by a team of black-masked commandos attached to the C.I.A.’s paramilitary Special Activities Division. According to a report adopted in June by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, titled “Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers of Detainees,” detainees were “taken to their cells by strong people who wore black outfits, masks that covered their whole faces, and dark visors over their eyes.” (Some personnel reportedly wore black clothes made from specially woven synthetic fabric that couldn’t be ripped or torn.) A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.
A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.
A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”
In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”
According to sources, Mohammed said that, while in C.I.A. custody, he was placed in his own cell, where he remained naked for several days. He was questioned by an unusual number of female handlers, perhaps as an additional humiliation. He has alleged that he was attached to a dog leash, and yanked in such a way that he was propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say that he also claimed to have been suspended from the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching the ground. The pressure on his wrists evidently became exceedingly painful.
Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.
According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”
Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.
In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”
Mohammed is said to have described being chained naked to a metal ring in his cell wall for prolonged periods in a painful crouch. (Several other detainees who say that they were confined in the Dark Prison have described identical treatment.) He also claimed that he was kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room, where he was doused with ice water. The practice, which can cause hypothermia, violates the Geneva Conventions, and President Bush’s new executive order arguably bans it.
Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like the soundtrack from a horror film,” to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”
Professor Kassem said his Yemeni client, Kazimi, had told him that, during his incarceration in the Dark Prison, he attempted suicide three times, by ramming his head into the walls. “He did it until he lost consciousness,” Kassem said. “Then they stitched him back up. So he did it again. The next time, he woke up, he was chained, and they’d given him tranquillizers. He asked to go to the bathroom, and then he did it again.” This last time, Kazimi was given more tranquillizers, and chained in a more confining manner.
The case of Khaled el-Masri, another detainee, has received wide attention. He is the German car salesman whom the C.I.A. captured in 2003 and dispatched to Afghanistan, based on erroneous intelligence; he was released in 2004, and Condoleezza Rice reportedly conceded the mistake to the German chancellor. Masri is considered one of the more credible sources on the black-site program, because Germany has confirmed that he has no connections to terrorism. He has also described inmates bashing their heads against the walls. Much of his account appeared on the front page of the Times. But, during a visit to America last fall, he became tearful as he recalled the plight of a Tanzanian in a neighboring cell. The man seemed “psychologically at the end,” he said. “I could hear him ramming his head against the wall in despair. I tried to calm him down. I asked the doctor, ‘Will you take care of this human being?’ ” But the doctor, whom Masri described as American, refused to help. Masri also said that he was told that guards had “locked the Tanzanian in a suitcase for long periods of time—a foul-smelling suitcase that made him vomit.” (Masri did not witness such abuse.)
Masri described his prison in Afghanistan as a filthy hole, with walls scribbled on in Pashtun and Arabic. He was given no bed, only a coarse blanket on the floor. At night, it was too cold to sleep. He said, “The water was putrid. If you took a sip, you could taste it for hours. You could smell a foul smell from it three metres away.” The Salt Pit, he said, “was managed and run by the Americans. It was not a secret. They introduced themselves as Americans.” He added, “When anything came up, they said they couldn’t make a decision. They said, ‘We will have to pass it on to Washington.’ ” The interrogation room at the Salt Pit, he said, was overseen by a half-dozen English-speaking masked men, who shoved him and shouted at him, saying, “You’re in a country where there’s no rule of law. You might be buried here.”
According to two former C.I.A. officers, an interrogator of Mohammed told them that the Pakistani was kept in a cell over which a sign was placed: “The Proud Murderer of 3,000 Americans.” (Another source calls this apocryphal.) One of these former officers defends the C.I.A.’s program by noting that “there was absolutely nothing done to K.S.M. that wasn’t done to the interrogators themselves”—a reference to SERE-like training. Yet the Red Cross report emphasizes that it was the simultaneous use of several techniques for extended periods that made the treatment “especially abusive.” Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been a prominent critic of the Administration’s embrace of harsh interrogation techniques, said that, particularly with sensory deprivation, “there’s a point where it’s torture. You can put someone in a refrigerator and it’s torture. Everything is a matter of degree.”
One day, Mohammed was apparently transferred to a specially designated prison for high-value detainees in Poland. Such transfers were so secretive, according to the report by the Council of Europe, that the C.I.A. filed dummy flight plans, indicating that the planes were heading elsewhere. Once Polish air space was entered, the Polish aviation authority would secretly shepherd the flight, leaving no public documentation. The Council of Europe report notes that the Polish authorities would file a one-way flight plan out of the country, creating a false paper trail. (The Polish government has strongly denied that any black sites were established in the country.)
No more than a dozen high-value detainees were held at the Polish black site, and none have been released from government custody; accordingly, no first-hand accounts of conditions there have emerged. But, according to well-informed sources, it was a far more high-tech facility than the prisons in Afghanistan. The cells had hydraulic doors and air-conditioning. Multiple cameras in each cell provided video surveillance of the detainees. In some ways, the circumstances were better: the detainees were given bottled water. Without confirming the existence of any black sites, Robert Grenier, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, said, “The agency’s techniques became less aggressive as they learned the art of interrogation,” which, he added, “is an art.”
Mohammed was kept in a prolonged state of sensory deprivation, during which every point of reference was erased. The Council on Europe’s report describes a four-month isolation regime as typical. The prisoners had no exposure to natural light, making it impossible for them to tell if it was night or day. They interacted only with masked, silent guards. (A detainee held at what was most likely an Eastern European black site, Mohammed al-Asad, told me that white noise was piped in constantly, although during electrical outages he could hear people crying.) According to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he was shackled and kept naked, except for a pair of goggles and earmuffs. (Some prisoners were kept naked for as long as forty days.) He had no idea where he was, although, at one point, he apparently glimpsed Polish writing on a water bottle.
In the C.I.A.’s program, meals were delivered sporadically, to insure that the prisoners remained temporally disoriented. The food was largely tasteless, and barely enough to live on. Mohammed, who upon his capture in Rawalpindi was photographed looking flabby and unkempt, was now described as being slim. Experts on the C.I.A. program say that the administering of food is part of its psychological arsenal. Sometimes portions were smaller than the day before, for no apparent reason. “It was all part of the conditioning,” the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said. “It’s all calibrated to develop dependency.”
The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”
“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”
The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”
Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said, “It all comes down to individual moral barometers.” Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for “enemy combatants,” it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.
A C.I.A. source said that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding only after interrogators determined that he was hiding information from them. But Mohammed has apparently said that, even after he started coöperating, he was waterboarded. Footnotes to the 9/11 Commission report indicate that by April 17, 2003—a month and a half after he was captured—Mohammed had already started providing substantial information on Al Qaeda. Nonetheless, according to the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, he was kept in isolation for years. During this time, Mohammed supplied intelligence on the history of the September 11th plot, and on the structure and operations of Al Qaeda. He also described plots still in a preliminary phase of development, such as a plan to bomb targets on America’s West Coast.
Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. Bruce Riedel, who was a C.I.A. analyst for twenty-nine years, and who now works at the Brookings Institution, said, “It’s difficult to give credence to any particular area of this large a charge sheet that he confessed to, considering the situation he found himself in. K.S.M. has no prospect of ever seeing freedom again, so his only gratification in life is to portray himself as the James Bond of jihadism.”
By 2004, there were growing calls within the C.I.A. to transfer to military custody the high-value detainees who had told interrogators what they knew, and to afford them some kind of due process. But Donald Rumsfeld, then the Defense Secretary, who had been heavily criticized for the abusive conditions at military prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, refused to take on the agency’s detainees, a former top C.I.A. official said. “Rumsfeld’s attitude was, You’ve got a real problem.” Rumsfeld, the official said, “was the third most powerful person in the U.S. government, but he only looked out for the interests of his department—not the whole Administration.” (A spokesperson for Rumsfeld said that he had no comment.)
C.I.A. officials were stymied until the Supreme Court’s Hamdan ruling, which prompted the Administration to send what it said were its last high-value detainees to Cuba. Robert Grenier, like many people in the C.I.A., was relieved. “There has to be some sense of due process,” he said. “We can’t just make people disappear.” Still, he added, “The most important source of intelligence we had after 9/11 came from the interrogations of high-value detainees.” And he said that Mohammed was “the most valuable of the high-value detainees, because he had operational knowledge.” He went on, “I can respect people who oppose aggressive interrogations, but they should admit that their principles may be putting American lives at risk.”
Yet Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and later the State Department’s top counsellor, under Rice, is not convinced that eliciting information from detainees justifies “physical torment.” After leaving the government last year, he gave a speech in Houston, in which he said, “The question would not be, Did you get information that proved useful? Instead it would be, Did you get information that could have been usefully gained only from these methods?” He concluded, “My own view is that the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”
Without more transparency, the value of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program is impossible to evaluate. Setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, “All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.” When pressed, one former top agency official estimated that “ninety per cent of the information was unreliable.” Cables carrying Mohammed’s interrogation transcripts back to Washington reportedly were prefaced with the warning that “the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.” Mohammed, like virtually all the top Al Qaeda prisoners held by the C.I.A., has claimed that, while under coercion, he lied to please his captors.
In theory, a military commission could sort out which parts of Mohammed’s confession are true and which are lies, and obtain a conviction. Colonel Morris D. Davis, the chief prosecutor at the Office of Military Commissions, said that he expects to bring charges against Mohammed “in a number of months.” He added, “I’d be shocked if the defense didn’t try to make K.S.M.’s treatment a problem for me, but I don’t think it will be insurmountable.”
Critics of the Administration fear that the unorthodox nature of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program will make it impossible to prosecute the entire top echelon of Al Qaeda leaders in captivity. Already, according to the Wall Street Journal, credible allegations of torture have caused a Marine Corps prosecutor reluctantly to decline to bring charges against Mohamedou Ould Slahi, an alleged Al Qaeda leader held in Guantánamo. Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. analyst, asked, “What are you going to do with K.S.M. in the long run? It’s a very good question. I don’t think anyone has an answer. If you took him to any real American court, I think any judge would say there is no admissible evidence. It would be thrown out.”
The problems with Mohammed’s coerced confessions are especially glaring in the Daniel Pearl case. It may be that Mohammed killed Pearl, but contradictory evidence and opinion continue to surface. Yosri Fouda, the Al Jazeera reporter who interviewed Mohammed in Karachi, said that although Mohammed handed him a package of propaganda items, including an unedited video of the Pearl murder, he never identified himself as playing a role in the killing, which occurred in the same city just two months earlier. And a federal official involved in Mohammed’s case said, “He has no history of killing with his own hands, although he’s proved happy to commit mass murder from afar.” Al Qaeda’s leadership had increasingly focussed on symbolic political targets. “For him, it’s not personal,” the official said. “It’s business.”
Ordinarily, the U.S. legal system is known for resolving such mysteries with painstaking care. But the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program, Senator Levin said, has undermined the public’s trust in American justice, both here and abroad. “A guy as dangerous as K.S.M. is, and half the world wonders if they can believe him—is that what we want?” he asked. “Statements that can’t be believed, because people think they rely on torture?”
Asra Nomani, the Pearls’ friend, said of the Mohammed confession, “I’m not interested in unfair justice, even for bad people.” She went on, “Danny was such a person of conscience. I don’t think he would have wanted all of this dirty business. I don’t think he would have wanted someone being tortured. He would have been repulsed. This is the kind of story that Danny would have investigated. He really believed in American principles.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer
Postato da: treball a 10/08/2007 16:30 |
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testi, fear, asia, international, occidente, collateral damages, usa today, human rights
A Feast of Bullshit and Spectacle
The Great American Media Mind Warp
By Joe Bageant, AlterNet
Posted on August 9, 2007
On televisions you see police cars surround the car of a "terror suspect." ... When you learn he is a neurosurgeon whose wife and baby were in the car with him, you might think he probably just pulled over when the police seemed to want him to, but only if you were still capable of using your own brain. After all, his name is Mohammed and his wife wears a headscarf. ... So maybe you'll just ignore what your brain was trying to say, which is that neurosurgeons have a lot invested in their careers. ... But the media are so hard to ignore. Even when you make a point of ignoring them, they are always there, flickering around the edges, burning impressions you can't quite get rid of. ... But it was all so tidy and comfortable in that TV/mainstream news site world. Meanwhile, though no evidence of guilt has been offered, the discussion zooms ahead. Why can't everyone else see it?
- Jennifer, in Los Angeles
Needless to say, the Middle Eastern doctors accused of terrorism in Scotland may be guilty as hell. Mohammed Asha may be another one of your standard terror wogs who, as we all know by now, relish the idea of prison or perhaps blowing up his wife and baby up for Allah.
But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today's system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things - the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process.
All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind's interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.
The American media hologram forms our subconscious opinions immediately and without our rational participation. Particularly when it comes to generating terrorist outlaws. For example, despite what we were told and most of us believe, Timothy McVeigh was a patriot and was a more literate and intelligent person than most Americans; in truth, he more resembled Tom Paine than a terrorist. Chew on that one for a while ... or read Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Again, nothing significant is as presented by the American media. Watch television in countries with supposedly primitive media, and after a while you will be shocked at the technologically mediated and shape-shifted image of the world presented to Americans - how the hologram makes incongruous parts suddenly fit together and make sense in its own parallel universe.
For instance, a while back I saw a video clip of an ethanol-fueled automobile driving past waves of grain with the Rockies in the background and a rippling American flag ghosted into the sky. These four elements of the clip, food grain fields, the automotive industry, the natural beauty of the Rockies and the national emblem have not much to do with each in the natural world, but they have everything to do with one another in the context of corporate empire. Together, they indicate the national ethos. We accept such an image as naturally as the baby accepts the tit, and the idea of burning the earth's food to create gasses that will turn the snowcapped mountains into desertified mountains is greeted happily as something newer and better than the old system of destroying the atmosphere and environment. Mentally we can identify separate elements, isolate things into categories. But the hologram nevertheless remains seamless in its interconnection of all things that benefit the corporate state generating it. Parsed, divided and isolated, any part contains the entire logic (or governing illogic) of the whole - consuming.
In effect, the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel, the shopping channel, and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction. The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance. In the absence of the sacred, buying becomes a spiritual act conducted in outer space via satellite bank transfers. All things are purchasable, and indeed, access to anything of value is through purchase. Even mood and consciousness, through psychopharmacology, to suppress our anxiety or enhance sexual performance, or cyberspace linkups to porn, palaver and purchasing opportunities. But most of all, the hologram generates and guides us to purchasing opportunities.
Propaganda is dead
Through advertising and marketing, the hologram combs the fields of instinct and human desire, arranging our wants and fears in the direction of commodities or institutions. No longer are advertising and marketing merely propaganda, which is all but dead. Digitally mediated brain experience now works far below the crude propaganda zone of influence, deep in the swamps of the limbic brain, reengineering and reshaping the realms of subjective human experience.
Yet we are the hologram, because we created it. In a relentlessly cycling feedback loop, we create and project the hologram out of our collective national psyche. The hologram in turn manages our collective psyche by regulating our terrors, cravings and neurological passions through the production of wars, whores, politics, profits and manna. Like legions of locusts, we pray before its productive engines of commerce and under the shifting aurora borealis of the hologram's drama and spectacle. It is us. We are it. The psychology of the individual becomes irrelevant as the swarm relentlessly devours the earth.
Meanwhile, those bloody terrorist wogs are still up to no fucking good, that's for sure. They're everywhere these days, so somebody needs to keep an eye on that Palestinian meat dealer down the street. As one reader responded, "The terrorists all look normal. That's the first thing you hear when one of them is caught. 'Oh, but he looked so normal,' his neighbors say. You'd never have guessed." Now when so many apparently normal people, students, doctors, merchants, teachers, family men with ordinary lives find themselves being accused of wickedness and evil, some even locked away in secret prisons and tortured, maybe it's time to start looking at the accusers more closely. When we do that, familiar terms come to mind, terms such as mass psychosis, along with some less familiar ones such as political psychosis.
Happy in the heart of darkness
Terrorists aside, the hologram offers us, and we have come to accept, plenty of now standard-issue American fears, such as identify theft and child molesters. My home in Winchester, Va., is located on a corner where neighborhood kids catch the school bus under a large maple tree. Thus some neighbors have asked me to keep an eye on the kids during the mornings. In addition, I leave the back door unlocked so they can run inside and call home should a predator accost them under that maple tree. Matters are not made any better by the fact that a guy in the apartment building across the street is on the Internet sex offenders list. Nobody is safe in a country where, according to at least one "study," about 40 percent of adult men have sexual fantasies about children." It's a damned sick country. Hence the hundreds of child protection organizations, TV shows and pieces of legislation, all of which constitute a billion-dollar industry in this country. Just what are the chances of the kids at the bus stop being abducted by a stranger for sexual abuse or ransom? The truth is that a child is far more likely to be struck by lightning or slip on a rug, breaking his or her neck and dying instantly, than being kidnapped by a malevolent stranger. Last year there were only 115 cases of kidnappings for the purpose of ransom or abuse (Hampel, 2007). About 200,000 kids are snatched away from one parent by the other in the never-ending custody wars that clog the courtrooms and buy summer homes for lawyers. But the odds of pedophilic monsters or ransom artists grabbing your kid are not even worth worrying about, considering that there are nearly 300 million people in this country.
As for the registered sex offender across the street, I came to learn that he is a pothead and a pain in the ass as a neighbor. But he's not a child molester. He got on the list for mooning while drunk one night, which should be a lesson for anyone considering hanging his or her butt out a car window after a rock concert.
Still, it's a sick damned country all right. The government says so. The news says so. Cold Case Files says so. The Today show says so. Oprah says so. Without a Trace says so. In other words, the hologram says so. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, and while millions watch the cathartic media projection of their deepest nightmares, several dozen children died of famine or disease outside the hologram.
Mommy, there's a robot in my pants
If the big picture is ominous, the little picture is comedic kitsch. In the 1970s the hologram offered us "killer bees," a curiously "Africanized," aggressive species that "bred with every other kind of bee" as it moved up from the South - remember that seeping red area on the U.S. map indicating the spread of the insect in its killer apiary jihad to sting a nation to death? In truth, the bee's sting was no more toxic than any other bee's.
In the '80s and '90s we had the decade-long day care sexual abuse hysteria in a dozen states wherein children were reportedly used for prostitution and pornography, tortured or, as in Kern County, made to watch snuff films. According to testimony, they were crawling through hidden tunnels toward Satanic worship chambers while witches soared overhead in hot air balloons at the McMartin Preschool in California, and they were being abused by clowns and a robots in a secret room at the Fells Day Care Center, even as peanut butter was being spread on children's genitals at the Wee Care Nursery School in New Jersey. Numerous people spent years in prison before their cases were finally overturned, and they were set free to enjoy their bankruptcy. Again, no one stopped to look at the accusers more closely, or ask, "Does anyone else on the jury think this is too goddamned weird to be plausible? Aw, come on, folks - robots and clowns?" Such is the power of the media hologram. The most expensive jury trial in American history was about subterranean devil worship and witches in hot air balloons.
Another standard media holograph favorite is the case of The Missing Pretty White Girl, in which a young white woman is either missing, murdered or maybe faking her own abduction. The hologram's finest hour may have been when it blended nationalism with armed feminine sexuality fantasy via the brave blonde, Jessica Lynch, in a projection of her going down with automatic rifle blazing, then daringly rescued - oh, poor, wounded, little bird of our desire - by GI Joe action figures. If she had been an overweight lesbian, she'd still be in that hospital, and if she had been black, the media wouldn't have bothered to take the lens covers off the cameras. If the syndrome's appointed white girls turn out to be murdered, then we get the memorial websites, charity foundations and maybe some sort of law passed, based upon the circumstances of the case, and named for the victim. However, you'll never see one called Tawanda Robinson's Law. Hologram don't sell no dark meat. Make a YouTube video, bitch!
And when the hologram gets hold of a real event, whoopee! We get portrayal of a nation marked by school shootings (school shootings of teachers and fellow students took place in the 1800s too, they just didn't have the firepower we have today, not to mention the media), campus shooters or the estranged killer husband or wife (a timeless favorite). None of the above are lurking around every corner, or any corner so far as I can tell. Then too, I don't get out much.
Let us now be administrated
It never ceases to amaze how the hologram can sell even our own identities back to us in such tantalizing fashion. Regardless of politics, no one escapes it: "Ladies, buy your wardrobe at Target, and you too will be a slim, sexy humanitarian like Susan Sarandon." My eyeballs are in my lap every time that woman twists her stuff against the orange Target backdrop in the TV ad, while my wife growls from her armchair, "Buy me a quarter-million-dollar eye job, chin and butt tuck, and I'll shake all the damned booty you want, buster." I'm seriously considering her offer.
Of course the entire American consumer shiteree is unsustainable. One day soon it will go bust, and the hologram will sell us the bust as a lifestyle. Renunciation of consumer goods and a monastic lifestyle will become a fad and then a major trend in America. Then it will be co-opted by the system and made expensive. The ozone hole will be so big we'll all be pedaling teensy cars that come with iron lungs as standard equipment. Renunciation will become a status symbol. All the beautiful people will be doing it.
Not that it will be the first time a worthwhile idea got at least some small traction in the savagery of the American marketplace. Healthful organic foods and hemp fiber clothing were once merely a holistic hippie thing, but we've see them endure, even grow. And become expensive, of course. (Organic foodwise, I just bought a quart bottle of lemon berry juice with echinacea for nearly eight bucks, though I doubtlessly screwed up it's healthful benefits by mixing it with cheap Aristocrat vodka - $9 a half gallon. I named the drink "The Echinacean Whore.") And hemp fiber clothing is a low-cost, practical solution to dozens of ecological problems. Just the other day I saw a $60 pair of hemp fiber, bibbed play shorts for the morally superior baby. Market capitalism can co-opt virtually any low-cost alternative and sell it right back at ridiculous prices.
Ah, for the good old days before the hologram and its hyperstimulation of "consumer affluence," the days of "America's teeming masses," that sweat-soaked, beer-farting mob of ordinary working Americans who didn't have a pot to piss in by today's standards, much less a credit card, but still knew bullshit when they saw it. Guys that looked like William Bendix and were unapologetic about earning their bread by their mitts and never heard of the word lifestyle. Women in curlers who would have laughed Martha Stewart off the map. Them was Americans, bub!
Now, as walking advertisements for Nike and the Gap or Jenny Craig, and living by the grace of our Visa cards, we have become the artificial collective product of the corporately "administrated" modern state economy. Which makes us property of the government. One that is currently coughing blood in its last gasps, helped along toward its end by the rich white boy hubris of a gang of cowboying petro-crooks: "Put some purty muzak on the fog machine, Dick. We don't want the herd to stampede while we're packing up the loot. And, fer god sake, turn down that Baghdad gunfire noise in the hologram." Deploying 250 million televisions which absorb 11 years of the average America's lifespan, the hologram regulates the nation's neurological seasons. Football season is delivered with its competitive passions, political election seasons, Christmas shopping season, but especially marketing seasons. It regulates the national mood, stirring our patriotic passions during wars and anxious vigilance against the threat of unseen terrorists who look absolutely normal. Together, we live within a media-generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. It shows us how successful people supposedly behave, invest, and relate to each other. Through crime shows, it demonstrates what happens to us if we don't behave. It shows us who we should hate (Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, for starters). Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall.
Well, we can't have that happen, can we? So let us all close our eyes and let the one voice speak to the many. Take a deep breath, and exhale very slowly. ... Let the soft electrical buzz engulf your mind, let that auroral drapery of flickering light play across the inside of your eyelids.
"This is the hologram speaking ..."
Joe Bageant is author of the book Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/58437/
Postato da: treball a 09/08/2007 21:55 |
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testi, televisioni, social, resistenze, international, occidente, usa today, mad planet
The Child Soldiers of Staten Island
While Hollywood swoons over
teen guerrillas, the real lost boys are hidden in plain sight.
Alissa Quart
Mother Jones, July , 2007
This is the year child soldiers went pop. They were the centerpiece of Blood Diamond, in which Leonardo DiCaprio played a child-soldier-rescuing diamond trader. African kids with guns made appearances in The Last King of Scotland and in the latest James Bond movie. Lost introduced a subplot in which the series' West African strongman was revealed to have been a child soldier. Indie actor Ryan Gosling is reportedly set to direct his own script about child soldiers, perhaps inspired by War/Dance, a Sundance award-winning documentary that Variety called "Spellbound with orphans."
In February, a handsome 26-year-old named Ishmael Beah published A Long Way Gone, a bloody, moving memoir of how he went from being a guerrilla in Sierra Leone to getting adopted by an American woman and finally attending Oberlin College. The New York Times Magazine put him on its cover; Starbucks sponsored his 10-city book tour and prominently displayed his memoir in its outlets. Time sneered that we'd hit the "cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier."
This sudden fascination with photogenic survivors such as Beah seemingly reassures us that Africa's young fighters can be redeemed if only they step forward to share their stories or win the heart of a kindly Westerner. But most former child soldiers remain in the shadows, whether they're in West Africa or Staten Island, home to as many as 8,000 Liberian immigrants, and consequently what might be the largest concentration of child soldiers in the United States.
According to Staten Island community activist Rufus Arkoi, around one-fifth of the hundreds of young refugees he has met while working as a youth counselor and soccer coach were once boy soldiers. "They are reliving in their minds the violence and the roles they played. They think about the craziness they did," he says. "They talk easily to me—we are very friendly. Otherwise, they keep the acts they have committed to themselves."
Take Jonathan, a 20-year-old who lives in the borough's Clifton section. Jonathan joined his grandparents in the United States in 1998, one of thousands of young war refugees who, with the help of aid organizations and the U.S. government, were brought to New York and granted political asylum during and after Liberia's long civil war. He may or may not have fought in the conflict; he won't say. In fact, he doesn't want his real name used because of the stigma of just being a Liberian refugee.
Jonathan has gone from whomever he was as a boy to graduating from high school and getting a reasonably paid job as a loader at a giant retail store. "My dad is in Michigan. My mom is in Africa," he explains as we walk down a cold, bare thoroughfare.
Strikingly handsome in a camouflage hoodie, he repeatedly touches the cell phone hanging off his jeans as if it were a talisman. "I help my grandparents," he says. "I give them $100 a week of my pay because I live with them and I'm the only one working." For these reasons, he is viewed as a success story in the Liberian community, although he doesn't feel like it. "Around others, I smile and I act happy," he tells me. "But I am not happy."
Jonathan is clearly struggling to keep from drowning in a flood of bad memories. The trauma remains so intense that when, after some prodding, he finally does talk about the atrocities he witnessed—of men being tied up, guns pointed at people's heads, gunshots like "firecrackers, so bright"—his speech becomes very rapid, almost unintelligibly so.
"I've seen horrible things," he says. "I get up in my sleep. As time went on, when I came here, I stopped having those dreams."
staten island's Liberian immigrants are concentrated in a bleak set of housing projects in the borough's Clifton, Concord, and Stapleton neighborhoods. Swelled by a wave of war refugees in the 1990s, this enclave is now the largest Liberian community outside Liberia. The community is the product of a reverse migration of sorts. What would become the Republic of Liberia was settled by black Americans in the early 19th century as part of a white abolitionist effort to send freed slaves "back to Africa."
In 1989, rebel leader Charles Taylor invaded the country, launching the conflict that would brutalize Liberia for the next 14 years. During the war, government and rebel forces "recruited" 1 out of every 10 children—roughly 20,000 in all. According to Amnesty International, as many as 40 percent of all fighters were under 18. Conscripted into groups such as Taylor's infamous Small Boys Units when they were as young as 10, they were handed Kalashnikovs, sent to fight on the front lines, and forced to commit atrocities such as killing friends and relatives.
The American media paid little attention to oil-poor Liberia's disintegration, except to occasionally portray its young soldiers as an anarchic freak show—drugged; gun-toting; wearing wigs, dresses, and masks; self-christened with noms de guerre such as Sugar Water and Quick to Fire. The Washington Post described a "surreal" and "bizarre" conflict whose cross-dressing teen guerrillas carried "teddy bears or plastic baby dolls in one hand and AK-47s in the other."
For the young Liberians who came of age amid this ferocious fighting, coming to America was an escape, but also an ordeal. The war left many without the education and resources necessary to fit in and succeed, explains Jacob Massaquoi, cofounder of the African Refuge, part of a small nonprofit that provides drop-in counseling for immigrant kids and families. "They have come from a very communal world to a socially isolated one."
Some teens found that the survival skills they'd learned in the bush could help them assimilate—into gang culture. Their reputation for fearlessness preceded them. They smoked marijuana like cigarettes, formed gangs, and acquired new and better guns, Arkoi says.
"Many of the Liberian kids are not being raised by their parents—either they are in foster care or being raised by uncles or grandparents—and the gangs have become like their family," says Sergeant Debbie Edwards, a community affairs liaison for the New York City Police Department. "We want to take these kids back."
George, a 15-year-old boy who came here in 1999, says he usually holes up in his aunt's apartment in the Stapleton projects after school to avoid "getting in trouble" with the kids who "stand there all day, dealing."
"If I go out, I could get hit by a bullet," he says. "I often hear shooting. There's real fighting—crazy, getting high."
In June 2005, a 20-year-old named Mustafa Fully killed an electrician in a drive-by shooting in front of a local deli. Fully, who some in the community believe was once a child soldier, is now in prison awaiting sentencing for second-degree murder. (Through his lawyer, Fully declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Last Christmas, a party for a large crowd of Liberian youth ended in a fistfight. According to a witness, one angry partyer was restrained as he screamed, "I fought in the war, and no one has the right to tell me what to do!"
The stigma of violence hangs over these young men, particularly among the members of their insular community who, a few years ago, might have been terrorized by the kids who are now their neighbors. "People resent them. They are wicked, people think," Arkoi says. "My wife says, 'Let's move. These are bad kids.' People are scared because of what they did. They don't want to have anything to do with them." Chea Dixon, a 25-year-old security guard who firmly tells me he "never held a gun" in Liberia, says he steers clear of other young men who "don't know the difference between right and wrong."
Paradoxically, the community's shared history makes discussing the past harder. "I don't tell people personal things about myself," says George. "I don't know how people are going to react."
Many of the young men I spoke with said simply that they were "in the war," murking up what they may or may not have done—or what was done to them. Not only is telling soldier from victim often impossible, but both groups suffer many of the same problems—growing up amid bloodshed, leaving their families behind at a young age, trading Third World poverty for First World alienation.
George is typical: He was separated from his parents by the war and then placed in refugee camps before being resettled in New York. "Mostly I think about my mother," he says quietly. "I didn't grow up with her. I haven't seen her very much."
Massaquoi says that the former fighters he knows dislike the label "child soldiers"; he insists that they be called "young victims of war." As Jack Saul, a Columbia University psychologist who helped found the African Refuge, explains, "Those who were child soldiers and those who were not were both victims."
in january, Jonathan took some of his American friends to the cineplex to see Blood Diamond. Set during Sierra Leone's civil war, which raged alongside Liberia's, the film tells the story of a brutish white Zimbabwean mercenary, played by DiCaprio, who in the end is won over by a doe-eyed child soldier and uses a giant, rose-colored diamond to reunite the boy with his family.
This triumphal ending of wealth and reunification didn't echo Jonathan's experience. "Black American kids will never understand," he says with a sigh. "They were asking me in the movie theater, 'Is that what's going on back home? That's crazy. Why did you stay?' What was I going to do? I couldn't walk to New Jersey!"
Nevertheless, the movie gave him a way to reveal a glimpse of the personal history he otherwise cannot bring himself to discuss. "It's a good movie about my memories," he says. "But I don't want to talk about it. I don't like talking about back home. I don't go so deep."
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2007/07/witness.html
Postato da: treball a 08/08/2007 16:12 |
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