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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Years Later: Human Rights Watch Announces That Bush and Cheney Tortured Prisoners, So What Gives?

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

Years Later: Human Rights Watch Announces That Bush and Cheney Tortured

What Gives?

Statutes of limitations for torture not resulting in death have passed. The DOJ has refused to prosecute 99 of 101 cases of torture-to-death that it looked at. Obama has long since publicly told the DOJ not to prosecute the CIA for torture. Obama’s torture of Bradley Manning has been widely ignored. Rendition has been established as normal. Torturers have published confessional/bragging memoirs. Habeas corpus has been formally ended. The Bagram-Gitmo archipelago is here to stay. Torture continues in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere. Assassinations have been established as the truly big new fashion. Harold Koh has replaced John Yoo as the Guy Who Will “Legalize” Anything. We’ve got more illegal wars going at once than ever before. Congress has practically dropped the pretense of a rule of law. The President can’t clear his throat without opposing “relitigating the past,” as if on the planet he comes from it is common to litigate the future. And Human Rights Watch has chosen this moment to announce that Bush and Cheney might just have been responsible for torture?

Overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration obliges President Barack Obama to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Obama administration has failed to meet US obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, Human Rights Watch said.

Hey, thanks, Sherlock. What was your first clue?

I’m glad someone still cares. But why not care a little faster? This report ends by reviewing foreign efforts to step in where the U.S. justice system has failed, and U.S. efforts — successful thus far — to prevent that.

If Human Rights Watch turns against illegal wars someday, we can perhaps expect a review of the bombing of Libya several years after it ceases. And we’ll be better off, I guess. But why not speak up at the time? If Bush and Cheney belong in prison, why would it have been so unacceptably impolite to impeach them and remove them from office?

David Swanson is an anti-war activist. Read other articles by David.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Afghanistan, Guantanamo, GWB, Obama, Torture.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Toxic Culture: A unified theory of mental pollution.


Apocalyptic Boredom

Toxic Culture

A unified theory of mental pollution.

Toxic Culture: A unified theory of mental pollution.


How do we fight back against the incessant flow of logos, brands, slogans and jingles that submerge our streets, invade our homes and flicker on our screens? We could wage a counteroffensive at the level of content: attacking individual advertisements when they cross the decency line and become deceptive, violent or overly sexual. But this approach is like using napkins to clean up an oil spill. It fails to confront the true danger of advertising – which is not in its individual messages but in the damage done to our mental ecology by the sheer volume of its flood.

The first step to confronting advertising is to stop seeing it as a form of commercialized communication and start considering it to be a kind of pollution. Think about the long-term mental consequences of seeing a Nike swoosh dozens of times a day from birth until death, for example, or whether repetitive exposure to American Apparel’s patriarchal imagery might damage our psyches. Questions like these get at the heart of advertising and lead us to mental environmentalism.

Concern over the cumulative psycho-social effects of advertisements is as old as advertising itself. The French novelist Émile Zola, to provide a notable early example, wrote what may be the first mental environmentalist short story, Death by Advertising, in 1866. He returned to the theme in 1883 with the celebrated novel Au Bonheur des Dames, a deeper look at advertising’s role in inducing a consumerist mindset. Throughout the next hundred years, mental environmentalist sentiments popped up in unexpected places such as Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay “On Photography” where she wrote that “industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

Although always a dispersed movement, since 1989 Adbusters: The Journal of the Mental Environment, has served as its center, and many of mental environmentalism’s most important documents have appeared in these pages. A key formulation was Bill McKibben’s 2001 article from Adbusters #38, in which he explained how “mental environmentalism may be the most important notion of this new century.” But it was Kalle Lasn’s seminal 1999 book-length manifesto, Culture Jam, which not only offered the mental environmentalist critique in its fullness but also elevated it into a formula for revolutionary social change. “We will jam the pop-culture marketeers and bring their image factory to a sudden, shuddering halt,” Lasn declared. “On the rubble of the old culture, we will build a new one with a non-commercial heart and soul.”

Since Zola, however, mental environmentalism has been stuck in a philosophical morass. To claim that advertising is metaphorically mental pollution is one thing, namely an easily dismissible rhetorical flourish. To say that advertising is literally a kind of pollution and that TV commercials and highway billboards are more closely related to toxic sludge than to speech is another matter entirely. And while mental environmentalists have always tried to make the latter argument, they have more often been forced to retreat to the former. Where is the evidence that advertising is a species of pollution? Isn’t it obvious that a corporate slogan is nothing but glorified, commercialized speech?

Into this difficult question has stepped one of the greatest living philosophers, the eccentric Michel Serres, who has written the inaugural philosophical work of the mental environmentalist movement. Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? is a radical reconception of pollution that cements its primal relation to advertising. The big idea of this recently translated book is that animals, humans included, use pollution to mark, claim and appropriate territory through defiling it, and that over time this appropriative act has evolved away from primitive pollution, urine and feces, to “hard pollution,” industrial chemicals, and finally to “soft pollution,” the many forms of advertising.

“Let us define two things and clearly distinguish them from one another,” Michel Serres writes, “first the hard [pollutants], and second the soft. By the first I mean on the one hand solid residues, liquid gases, emitted throughout the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamis of writings, signs, images and logos flooding rural, civic, public and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising. Even though different in terms of energy, garbage and marks nevertheless result from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate, and are of animal origin.”

Michel Serres is the first to philosophically ground mental environmentalism upon a unified theory of pollution that explains how advertisements are actually a breed of industrial pollutant. Lacking this, mental environmentalists have hitherto skirted this central problem by taking up Zola’s contention that advertising is blameworthy for its role in making us into consumers. “The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment,” Kalle Lasn and I wrote in Adbusters #90. “A factory dumps pollution into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV station or website pollutes the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences.” While this argument was true in Zola’s time and remains so today – and Serres too makes a similar point in his book – Serres has done something even more profound. He has shown why one cannot be an environmentalist without also being a mental environmentalist. In closing the gap between physical and mental toxins, Serres has closed the gap between physical and mental ecology.

Consider how, in the following quote from Serres, the critique of advertising resonates viscerally when the relation between advertisements and pollutants is not mere metaphor. “The captain who unloads waste in the high seas has never seen, or rather has never let, the countless smiles of the gods emerge; that would be too demanding, or even creative. Shitting on the world, has he ever seen its beauty before? Did he ever see his own beauty? And so, he who dirties space with billboards full of sentences and images hides the view of the surrounding landscape, kills perception, and skewers it by this theft. First the landscape then the world.”

The Earth is being claimed by corporations. Whether it is by appropriating the ocean with their oil spills or by seizing public spaces with their advertisements, corporations use hard and soft pollution to steal what is ours. Seen in this light, the fight against advertising is the defining struggle of our era, a unifying clash to prevent a legal fiction from usurping the common heritage of all beings. The stakes are high. Aware of the severity of the situation, Serres exhorts us to action, to dramatic social revolution along mental environmentalist lines.

“It makes me suffer so much that I need to say it over and over again and proclaim it everywhere; how can we not cry with horror and disgust confronted with the wrecking of our formerly pleasant rural access roads into the cities of France? Companies fill the space now with their hideous brands, waging the same frenzied battle as the jungle species in order to appropriate the public space and attention with images and words, like animals with their screams and piss. Excluded from those outskirts, I no longer live there; they are haunted by the powerful who shit on them and occupy them with their ugliness. Old Europe, what ignorant ruling class is killing you?”

Micah White is a senior editor at Adbusters

Mein Kampus: Neoliberalism sucks the brains out of a generation.


Apocalyptic Boredom

Mein Kampus

Neoliberalism sucks the brains out of a generation.


Doug and Mike Starn / Take Off Your Skin, It Ain't No Sin, 2007


A cultural shift is happening on university campuses across North America. Students are lining up for mental health services faster than they can be treated. This shift is defining a generation and marks a profound change in the mental environment on campuses today. There was a time not so long ago when students used to reach out for help with a particular life crisis: a broken relationship, the death of a loved one, difficulty with a major decision. Today, however, students are complaining that their life is the crisis, an all-pervasive sense of bleakness about themselves and their future that didn’t exist a generation ago. This transition from the incidental to the total is nothing short of a socialized paradigm shift, one that has transformed higher learning from a space of exploration and freedom to a prison of the mind. Fueled by stress, anxiety, pressure and competition, many of today’s students are struggling not only to learn but also to survive.

Dr. Erika Horwitz, associate director of health counseling services at one of Canada’s largest undergraduate universities, Simon Fraser, said the hypercompetitive environment at universities where students are pitted against each other in a perceived zero-sum game for fewer and fewer jobs, is pushing a generation of youth to the edge.

“The current ideologies of success and beauty are unprecedented … students are coming in at increasing rates, saying they can’t cope.”

The upward trend of psycho trauma on North American campuses is documented each year in the Association of University and College Counseling Center Directors Annual Survey. Their results are alarming. More than two-thirds of student health centers say they don’t have enough resources and counselors to deal with the growing numbers of clients. Thirty-four percent of centers have ongoing waitlists. The number one reason for visits is anxiety, at 40 percent, followed closely by depression at 38 percent. On top of this, dual diagnosis is rapidly rising with most students coming in with deadly mixes of anxiety, depression, body image disparities and suicidal thoughts. And all directors agree that the numbers are going up.

These results indicate what happens when the dominant economic ideology of the age, neoliberalism, creeps into the mentality of science and arts. The campus isn’t a place to study Heidegger anymore. Nor is it a place to query the relative nature of the Bohr atom. It is a place to get a leg up on the competition, and competition is fierce. This is a place to cheat when you can, to choose easy courses with easy professors, to trade learning for sycophancy, to deliberately ask one question per class, regardless of interest, for that extra participation grade and to escape into private and isolated worlds when the curve determines only 20 percent are allowed to get that coveted A. In a generation, the message has changed. This is not a place to find your self anymore; this is not a cultural rite of passage; this is a cultural requirement. From students’ first application signature to the day they toss their cap and gown, the new message is clear: a four-year BA will not be enough; one foul grade could ruin your chances at graduate school and consequently your life. This message is snuffing out our brightest minds.

Darren Fleet

Monday, July 4, 2011

America, Get Over Yourselves on July 4

CommonDreams.org

This July 4, I wish we, as a nation, would get over ourselves.

We are not God’s chosen people.

God did not make us a shining city on a hill.

There is no God, and we have no special right to lord ourselves over the planet.

“Manifest Destiny” and other narcissistic ideas have swollen our heads.

President Obama was way off the mark when he recently said, “We must embrace America’s singular role in the course of human events,” he said.

We don’t have a singular role, not now, much less over the long course of human events.

When you examine the actual role the United States has played, it’s not one that has showered us with glory: from slavery and the genocide against Native Americans early on to brutal imperial wars over the last century and more. Starting with the Spanish-American War and the subjugation of the Filipinos and then through dozens of invasions and usurpations in Latin America all the way to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, U.S. foreign policy has piled the corpses high.

And the best aspects of the United States—not the fighter jets that fly over the celebrations today, nor the size of our economy, nor the “great American spirit,” nor our prowess in sports, nor any other excuse for the adolescent chanting of “USA, USA”—are the ones that are most in decay today: the promise of democracy, and the protection of our civil liberties.

With the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court last year, which enables corporations to spend unlimited funds to elect or defeat candidates for office, any hope for real political democracy has faded. It’s a decision that has made a joke of the cherished idea of one person, one vote. And the Supreme Court just added to the joke with its decision last month to outlaw Arizona’s clean election law and to scorn any attempts to “level the playing field.” Even before these decisions, our politicians were for sale, rent, or time-share, and the concerns of a majority of citizens—for a living wage, for universal health care—would routinely fall to the ax of corporate power.

And if you broaden the concept of democracy to include economic democracy or a fair economy, we, as a nation, have drifted back into the Gilded Age, where the top 1 percent owns an astronomical amount of the nation’s wealth and income and where economic policy is geared toward letting them grab more and more.

As far as our civil liberties go, the government has taken many of them away. The First Amendment is in shambles, as the FBI and other law enforcement have been infiltrating domestic nonviolent protest groups, and the FBI has just loosened its rules for doing so. The Fourth Amendment is all but deleted, as the Supreme Court, in one decision after another, has given police more leeway to barge into our homes without warrants. The USA Patriot Act and the revisions to the National Security Act legalize additional intrusions by the Executive Branch. And the Military Commissions Act gives the President the authority to declare any person in the United States an “enemy combatant” and then throw that person behind bars.

On this Independence Day and for many a year, we’ve lost any clue about what it means to be independent: to be self-governing, and free from repressive rule.

If we have forsaken the ideals of America, the least we could is not to destroy the Earth in the process.

That means, first and foremost, not to blow it up with nuclear weapons. We and the Russians have 95 percent of the nukes in the world, and we need to move quickly to global nuclear disarmament.

And secondly, that means not to destroy the planet by poisoning the atmosphere. Global climate change is real, it’s here, and we’ve got to deal with it. The United States has been the biggest culprit in creating this crisis, and now we are the biggest laggard in responding to it.

The atmosphere is not our dumping grounds.

And just because we fly the red, white, and blue doesn’t make us exempt from doing the right and the urgent thing.

Matthew Rothschild

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

America the Vulnerable: Government Does Nothing as Right Wing Violence Surges

AlterNet.org


Home-grown terrorism is on the rise, but the Department of Homeland Security is scaling down intelligence units that might catch the next Timothy McVeigh before it's too late.

Photo Credit: A.M. Stan
This March, federal prosecutors charged six members of an antigovernment group called the Alaska Peacemakers Militia with plotting to wage a campaign of murder and kidnapping against court officials and state troopers. They had already amassed an arsenal of weapons, including hand grenades, assault rifles, and a .50-caliber machine gun.

That's exactly the kind of violence that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned law enforcement agencies about two years ago in a report about the growing threat of terrorism from right-wing extremists.

But after that 2009 report was leaked to the media, conservative groups and politicians complained — quite wrongly — that it unfairly tarred those on the political right as violent extremists. The American Legion, for example, didn't like the report's assertion that extremists would be interested in recruiting veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, even though it was completely accurate.

Rather than defend the report, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano quickly disavowed it — and criticized it as shoddy work that had not been properly reviewed within the agency.

Bowing to misguided political criticism was bad enough. Now we know that the DHS went much further: It gutted the unit that developed intelligence on the activities of non-Islamic domestic extremists — making it much harder to catch the next Timothy McVeigh before he strikes.

Daryl Johnson, the former DHS analyst who was the principal author of the controversial 2009 report, told the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in an explosive interview for our quarterly journal,Intelligence Report, that the unit he once headed now has a single analyst where there were once six. Further, Johnson said, the DHS instituted restrictive policies that have effectively ended the issuing of any of the dozens of important reports it previously prepared for law enforcement each year.

The fact is, the 2009 report accurately portrayed the dramatic rise in right-wing extremism. Independently, but around the same time, the SPLC had documented a dramatic surge since President Barack Obama's election in the anti-government "Patriot" movement, which includes armed militias and so-called "sovereign citizens."

As we noted in a letter to Secretary Napolitano, the DHS report was spot on in forecasting rising incidences of violence and terrorism from far-right radicals. In May 2009, just one month after the report's release, an anti-abortion zealot murdered Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, inside his church. That June, a well-known neo-Nazi shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The next year, in March 2010, nine members of a Michigan militia were charged with seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction in an alleged plot to murder police officers and spark a war against the U.S. government. In May of last year, a father-son team of sovereign citizens, people who believe the government has no authority over them, killed two police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas, and badly wounded two more.

This pattern continues right up to the present. In January of this year, a neo-Nazi was arrested on his way to the Arizona-Mexico border and later charged with possessing homemade explosives. In March, a neo-Nazi activist was arrested for planting a sophisticated backpack bomb along a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade route in Spokane, Washington.

There's no question that we're seeing an explosion of right-wing extremism. In fact, the antigovernment atmosphere and toxic rhetoric is remarkably similar to the mid-1990s militia movement. It culminated with McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 innocent people.

In his interview, Johnson said that his "greatest fear is that domestic terrorists in this country will somehow become emboldened to the point of carrying out a mass-casualty attack, because they perceive that no one is being vigilant about the threat from within. This is what keeps me up at night."

Daryl Johnson is right. This is an issue of national security, not politics. That's why the SPLC has asked the DHS secretary to re-examine the resources devoted to monitoring homegrown extremism. We can only hope that it doesn't take another catastrophic attack for the department to take this threat seriously.

Mark Potok is the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report.