May 21, 2009 at 7:00 P.M. There will be a panel discussion concerning "Torture and the People's Right to Know" at Revolution Books, 26th Street, between 6th & 7th Avenues.
June 21, 2008 at 2:21 P.M. after three scans, I am still warned that risks cannot be removed from my computer. Written work is subject to vandalism. I experience great difficulty in accessing my sites. I am struggling to continue writing. Many essays and images at my msn group have been damaged. (Please see "Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "It is Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
June 20, 2008 at 2:31 P.M. 3 new computer security risks cannot be repaired by my security system. I am instructed to "reboot" and restart my computer. I can never be certain of getting back to these sites after these attacks. I will do my best to continue writing. I cannot say how many essays have been altered or damaged. 13 new risks were found today; 2 were fixed. At 4:56 P.M. 12 new security risks were identified; 2 were fixed. I will try to restart my computer, again.
June 19, 2008 at 10:46 A.M. I am unable to access my MSN group. There have been new obstacles and frustrations in attempting to reach that site today. Essays may have been damaged, again. I will persist in my efforts to write today. At 2:28 P.M., after running a new scan, I received a red notice purporting to come from my security service that "manual assistance is needed to remove new security threats." 12 viruses were detected today, so far. I will run new scans later this afternoon. With or without assistance, new security risks cannot be removed from my system.
I am unable to post new images with these essays or with my profile. At 3:39 P.M. 11 viruses/security risks appear to have been added to my computer. http://adware180.solutions/ appears as a security risk-spyware that cannot be removed, providing reporting information concerning the contents of my computer and web sites visited by myself or members of my family, including a child. Damage to my writings is unknown at this time. I will try to keep writing, several images accompanying essays at Critique have been blocked.
Adam Liptak, "Justices Void Ex-Detainee's Suit Against 2 Officials," in The New York Times, May 19, 2009, at p. A16.
Scott Shane, "Ethics Complaint Is Filed Against Lawyers for Bush Over Torture Policy," in The New York Times, May 19, 2009, at p. A16. (Dismissed?)
Linda Greenhouse, "Justices, 5-4, Back Detainee Appeals For Guantanamo," in The New York Times, June 13, 2008, at p. A1.
"Justices 5, Brutality 4," in The New York Times, June 13, 2008, at p. A28.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London & New York: Verso, 2004), pp. 50-100.
Peter Marin, "The New Narcissism," in Harper's, Oct. 1975, pp. 45-47 (Vietnam), in E. Dvorkin, J. Himmelstein, H. Lesnick, eds., Becoming a Lawyer: A Humanistic Perspective on Legal Education and Professionalism (St. Paul: West Pub. 1981), pp. 178-179.
"Habeas corpus" means that government is required to "produce the body," that is, to justify depriving a person of his or her liberty and other fundamental rights, offering the accused or confined person an opportunity to respond to charges in order to win release from confinement.
Last Thursday the Supreme Court of the United States decided that this fundamental legal protection -- a basic right under English law found in the American Constitution -- must apply to Guantanamo detainees. Detaining so-called "terrorists" or "suspected terrorists" outside U.S. geographical boundaries, on the rationale that this places detainees beyond the protections of the law, will not be permitted to preclude application of basic rights and procedural protections.
The Court's majority decision effectively declared Guantanamo, Cuba: "an extention of U.S. territory." This judicial decision may be invoked, someday, to justify an invasion of Cuban sovereign territory -- something Miami-based Right-wing groups yearn for -- but (for now), it has the effect of requiring that all fundamental legal protections must be afforded to "persons" detained "indefinitely" in a hellish legal limbo. Fueled by an obvious and intense dislike for Mr. Bush and his policies, a Times editorial concluded:
"The Court ruled that the detainees being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have that cherished right, and that the process for them to challenge their confinement is inadequate. It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Mr. Bush's attempts to turn Guantanamo Bay into a Constitutional-rights-free-zone."
New Jersey is already a "Constitutional-rights-free-zone," where persons are secretly monitored at a distance, where unelected "big shots" (like Mr. Norcross) "influence" public policy, deciding by whom and how that policy will be carried out. In New Jersey, privacy and free speech rights of targeted citizens are violated, routinely, as evidenced by my continuing struggle against censorship and vandalism.
The New York Times has expressed no outrage about N.J.'s appalling reality close to the newspaper's offices, evidently, because it is the work of local Democrats -- some of whom may have "friends" employed by the newspaper. I agree with the Court's decision concerning Guantanamo detainees and with the Times editorial board on this habeas corpus issue:
"The Court ruled that the military tribunals that are hearing the detainees' cases" -- the Administration's proposed alternative to habeas corpus in a federal court -- "are not an adequate substitute. The hearings cut back on basic due process protections, like the right to counsel and the right to present evidence of innocence."
Shockingly, 4 justices dissented from this modest conclusion:
"Chief Justice Roberts thinks the detainees receive such 'generous' protections at their hearings that the majority should not have worried about whether they have habeas rights."
Mr. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion for the majority of the Court concluded with these stirring words:
"We hold that the petitioner may invoke the fundamental procedural protection of habeas corpus. The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers [intended] that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that great law."
The Framers could not have anticipated, however, something which is only made possible with the arrival of new technologies -- like the Internet, electronic monitoring at a distance, secret observation (what I face, every day), hypnosis, drugging and other forensic psychological methods placed, secretly, at the service of the State -- forms of detention that are non-physical. "Hands-off" torture techniques and forms of surreptitious imprisonment -- without specific duration -- where conviction of a criminal offense is unnecessary have become increasingly common, but have not yet been tested before this Supreme Court. "Surveillance and control," according to Foucault, "is the face of power in our time."
Professor Judith Butler speaks of "indefinite detention," analogizing the situation of so-called "terrorists" or detainees, along with others who are deemed "abnormal," to the plight of "gender-criminals." Before you gloat, as a Right-winger and fundamentalist foe of civil liberties, remember that the category of "abnormal" -- like racial categories in the past that we still struggle against today -- will morph and grow, devouring increasing portions of the political and ideational landscape and including more victims every day. Eventually, the only people who will not be deemed "abnormal" will be Dick Cheney and his family members.
The decision to reject a detainee's law suit against former Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and the ethics complaints filed against Bush's torture lawyers may indicate a desire to put the torture debacle behind us with some pro forma sanctions and rhetoric about having learned our lessons. This is not sufficient to diminish the monstrous guilt of the American legal system, our continuing hypocrisy and mendacity with regard to human rights issues. New Jersey's festering toilet of evil requires federal action.
The atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as well as the legal abyss created in America's Constitutional understandings will not be alleviated with token gestures, platitudes, or more empty rhetoric. We have become the opposite of a society identified with the rule of law for the global community. Mr. Obama's decision not to release the 2000 pictures of heinous tortures by U.S. service men is the first serious mistake of his presidency. History will not be kind concerning this issue, especially to the first African-American President of the United States. Among the things depicted in those photos is the enslavement and murder of human beings, which are crimes we should be against in America.
"Abnormal" is an amorphous category that, like the blob that came from outer space in a classic fifties' sci-fi movie, keeps getting bigger and bigger. To grant secret power to government is one thing, to get power back from government -- after an "emergency" has disappeared -- is something else, something which is usually much more difficult to achieve. "Abnormal," in fact, becomes an increasingly inclusive and demonized category with a logic of its own. Involuntary confinement of persons without criminal convictions -- persons usually, deliberately, brought to a high state of frustration through "inducement techniques" -- is used to "justify" the permanent torture, both psychological and physical torture, of these unfortunate victims of unchecked government power:
"We have to hesitate at this analogy [between terrorists and abnormals] for the moment, I think, not only because, in a proto-Foucauldian vein, it explicitly models the prison on the mental institution, but also because it sets up an analogy between the suspected terrorist or the captured soldier and the mentally ill. When analogies are offered, they presuppose the separability of the terms that are compared. But any analogy also assumes a common ground for comparability, and in this case the analogy functions to a certain degree by functioning metonymically. The terrorists are like the mentally ill because their mind-set is unfathomable, because they are outside of reason, [witches?] because they are outside of 'civilization,' if we understand that term to be the catchword of a self-defined Western perspective that considers itself bound to certain versions of rationality and the claims that arise from them."
Notice that this is not to discard the idea of "civilization" as contrasted with "terrorism." Rather, it is to insist that in our efforts to combat terrorism, we must remain within the boundaries of an increasingly threatened civilization. "Our" in this last sentence is intended to refer to humanity universally. This point was made eloquently in a televised debate during "Question Time" by David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives in Britain, in opposition to the views of "Labour" [yes, that's how they spell it] Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Much the same has been said by both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in America's political debate.
At issue in this struggle against terrorism is not a new crusade or a contest between religions, but whether reason and moral concern -- as opposed to indiscriminate violence -- will become the language in which grievances are articulated and resolved. Violence has yet to solve a single dispute. However, violence is really effective in creating new and long-lasting hostilities. From personal experience, I say the same of torture and censorship. The purpose of cruelty is the production of monsters rationalizing or justifying the cruelty used against them and generating more cruelty against others:
"Involuntary hospitalization is like involuntary incarceration, only if we accept the incarcerative function of the mental institution, or ... if we accept that certain suspected criminal activities are themselves signs of mental illness. Indeed, one has to wonder whether it is not simply selected acts undertaken by Islamic extremists that are considered outside the bounds of rationality as established by a civilizational discourse of the West, but rather any and all beliefs and practices pertaining to Islam that depart from the hegemonic norms of Western rationality." (pp. 72-73.)
The ultimate destination to which this "logic of control" leads is totalitarianism. The goal is to restrain millions of us who are not sufficiently "normal" or who think in "strange ways." Potential dangerousness includes every person in the country -- including Justice Kennedy -- as worthy of supervision and monitoring. I am sure that this totalitarian impulse is the greatest and most real threat to our Constitutional Democracy. This threat of totalitarianism originates right here in the USA.
What we must fear and guard against is the National Security State. We must guard against what is happening to us, culturally and politically. We are becoming an angrier, more xenophobic, paranoid and aggressive superpower, trampling upon the civil rights of persons and trashing international law in our pursuit of terrorists. Peter Marin warns in his classic essay on Narcissism:
"The real horror of our present condition is not merely the absence of community or the isolation of the self -- those, after all, have been part of the American condition for a long time. It is the loss of the ability to remember what is missing, the diminishment of our vision of what is humanly possible or desirable. In our new myths we begin to deny once and for all the existence of what we once believed both possible and good. We proclaim our grief-stricken narcissism to be a form of liberation; we define as enlightenment our broken faith with the world. Already forgetful of what it means to be fully human, we sip still again from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, hoping to erase even the memory of pain. Lethe, lethal, lethargy -- all of those words suggest a kind of death, one that in religious usage is sometimes called accidie. It is a condition one can find in many places and in many ages, but only in America, and only recently, have we begun to confuse it with a state of grace. ... "
What follows is intended as a caution and reminder for the next President of the United States. This warning comes from the powerless victims of the National Security State, the billions of funny little brown people in the world and those who are called "unethical" or "retarded" in New Jersey, like me:
"The question of the age, we like to think, is one of survival, and that is true, but not in the way we ordinarily mean it. The survival we ordinarily mean is a narrow and nervous one: simply the continuation in their present forms, of the isolated lives we lead. But there is little doubt that most of us will survive as we are, for we are clearly prepared to accept whatever is necessary to do so: the deaths of millions of others, wars waged in our name, a police state at home. Like the Germans who accepted the Fascists, we, too, will be able to carry on 'business as usual,' just as we do now. Our actual crisis of survival lies elsewhere, in the moral realm we so carefully ignore, for it is there that our lives are at stake ..." (pp. 178-179.) ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
