29 September, 2006

Congress & Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception

On Capitol Hill, the Senate has agreed to give President Bush extraordinary power to detain and try prisoners in the so-called war on terror. The editors of the New York Times described the law as tyrannical. They said its passage marks a low point in American democracy and that it is our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The legislation strips detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their own detention or treatment. It gives the president the power to indefinitely detain anyone it deems to have provided material support to anti-U.S. hostilities. Secret and coerced evidence could be used to try detainees held in U.S. military prisons. The bill also immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for torturing detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year.

The Senate passed the measure sixty five to thirty four. Twelve Democrats joined the Republican majority. The House passed virtually the same legislation on Wednesday. Legal groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, are already preparing to challenge the constitutionality of the law in court." (Democracy Now! 09.29.06)

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, building on Hannah Arendt's insight that the Enlightenment's notion of the "Rights of Man" pretends to apply to all peoples but in practice applies only to "citizens" granted those "rights" by the State, argues in his work that the "state of exception" (or emergency) not only tends to become the norm but suggests how democracy can tend to converge towards totalitarianism.

The creation of a place (the camp) outside the law and not subject to legal procedures or citizens’ protections, and a population to fill it (the Jews), defines for Agamben the truest manifestation of the "state of exception" in which a modern state achieves full reach and authority over its whole territory and citizenry. Normally, "state of exception" is a rarely used piece of legal terminology, the German equivalent of what in England and America is called a "state of emergency," or, in France, a "state of siege"—that is, a crisis of public order in which a duly constituted authority (president, parliament, or monarch) suspends the law to save the political system itself. But "state of exception" had a particular significance in Hitler’s interruption of German law during the Nazi period, and Agamben follows the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s argument, in his Political Theology of 1922, that sovereign power is in fact only ever really constituted by its ability to decide the state of exception. Agamben generalizes the condition still further. Power over "bare life"—attained by a state’s ability to designate certain places and populations as an exception to the rest, thus solidifying control over everyone—comes to be, for Agamben, the permanent precondition of all modern sovereignty.
(Mark Greif, "Apocalypse Deferred: Georgio Agamben's State of Exception")

from Agamben's "We Refugees":

It is time to stop looking at the Declarations of Rights from 1789 to the present as if they were proclamations of eternal, metajuridical values that bind legislators to respect them, and to consider them instead according to their real function in the modern state. In fact, the Rights of Man represent above all the original figure of the inscription of bare natural life in the legal-political order of the nation-state. . . . Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth (that is, of the bare human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty. This is the (not even very obscure) sense of the first three articles of the Declaration of 1789: only because it wrote the native element into the core of any political association (arts. 1 and 2) could it firmly tie (in art. 3) the principle of sovereignty to the nation (in accordance with its etymon, natio originally meant simply "birth"). The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation, such that there can be no distinction between the two moments. Rights, that is, are attributable to man only in the degree to which he is the immediately vanishing presupposition (indeed, he must never appear simply as man) of the citizen.

. . . It would be well not to forget that the first camps in Europe were built as places to control refugees, and that the progression - internment camps, concentration camps, extermination camps - represents a perfectly real filiation. One of the few rules the Nazis faithfully observed in the course of the "final solution" was that only after the Jews and gypsies were completely denationalized (even of that second-class citizenship that belonged to them after the Nuremberg laws) could they be sent to the extermination camps.

Thus the attention in Congress to precise legalities of the "rights" to be applied or not to "enemy combatants." Outside the State, outside the legal protections (habeas corpus) of the State, outside the processes the State uses to put to death its citizens.

. . . it’s a terrible bill. It removes as many checks and balances as possible so that any president can basically set the law, determine what laws they’ll follow and what laws they’ll break and not have anybody be able to question them on it.

In this case, the particular section I was speaking about at that point was the so-called habeas protection. Now, habeas corpus was first brought in the Magna Carta in the 1200s. It’s been a tenet of our rights as Americans. And what they're saying is that if you’re an alien, even if you’re in the United States legally, a legal alien, may have been here ten years, fifteen years, twenty years legally, if a determination is made by anybody in the executive that you may be a threat, they can hold you indefinitely, they could put you in Guantanamo, not bring any charges, not allow you to have a lawyer, not allow you to ever question what they’ve done, even in cases, as they now acknowledge, where they have large numbers of people in Guantanamo who are there by mistake, that they put you -- say you’re a college professor who has written on Islam or for whatever reason, and they lock you up. You’re not even allowed to question it. You’re not allowed to have a lawyer, not allowed to say, “Wait a minute, you’ve got the wrong person. Or you’ve got -- the one you’re looking for, their name is spelled similar to mine, but it’s not me.” It makes no difference. You have no recourse whatsoever. (Sen. Leahy)
Agamben again:

Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterium of political legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.

We should not forget that the first major organization of terror after the war, the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS), was established by a French general, who thought of himself as a patriot, convinced that terrorism was the only answer to the guerrilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way it was understood by theorists of the "science of police" in the eighteenthe century, reduces itself to police, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappears. In the end security and terrorism may form a single deadly system, in which they justify and legitimate each others actions.
("On Security and Terror")

"And then, if you are lucky enough to be tried, and I say "lucky enough," because, for example, the 460 people the Center represents at Guantanamo may never get trials. In fact, only ten have even been charged. Those people, they’ve been stripped of their right to go to court and test their detention by habeas corpus. They’re just -- they’ve been there five years. Right now, under this legislation, they could be there forever.

"Let me tell you, this bill will be struck down and struck down badly. But meanwhile, for two more years or whatever it’s going to take us to litigate it, we’re going to be litigating what was a basic right, as the senator said, since the Magna Carta of 1215, the right of any human being to test their detention in court." (Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights)

One can only hope the Supreme Court proves him right. When the extra-ordinary becomes ordinary, the exception becomes the rule:

. . . the state of exception or state of emergency has become a paradigm of government today. Originally understood as something extraordinary,an exception, which should have validity only for a limited period of time, but a historical transformation has made it the normal form of governance.

. . .I spoke rather of the prisoners in Guantánamo, and their situation is legally-speaking actually comparable with those in the Nazi camps. The detainees of Guantanamo do not have the status of Prisoners of War, they have absolutely no legal status. They are subject now only to raw power; they have no legal existence. In the Nazi camps, the Jews had to be first fully "denationalised" and stripped of all the citizenship rights remaining after Nuremberg, after which they were also erased as legal subjects.
(interview with Agamben)

". . . Agamben makes the consequences of his analysis for the present moment quite explicit. The growth of the state of exception has "perhaps only today reached its full development." It is comparable, in the democracies, to the Nazi and fascist security of wartime Germany and Italy. Guantanamo Bay is indeed a "camp" in the Agambenian sense, it reduces the detainees to "bare life," and it is comparable legally only to the Nazi concentration camps." (Greif)

The place—both logical and pragmatic—of a theory of the state of exception in the American constitution is in the dialectic between the powers of the president and those of Congress. . . .

The textual basis of the conflict lies first of all in Article 1 of the constitution, which establishes that "the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it" but does not specify which authority has the jurisdiction to decide on the suspension (even though prevailing opinion and the context of the passage itself lead one to assume that the clause is directed at Congress and not the president). The second point of conflict lies in the relation between another passage of Article 1 (which declares that the power to declare war and to raise and support the army and navy rests with Congress) and Article 2, which states that "the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States."
. . .

It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the New Deal was realized by delegating to the president (through a series of statutes culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16, 1933) an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the country—a fact that is in perfect conformity with the already mentioned parallelism between military and economic emergencies that characterizes the politics of the twentieth century.

The outbreak of World War Two extended these powers with the proclamation of a "limited" national emergency on September 8, 1939, which became unlimited on May 27, 1941. On September 7, 1942, while requesting that Congress repeal a law concerning economic matters, the president renewed his claim to sovereign powers during the emergency: "In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.…The American people can…be sure that I shall not hesitate to use every power vested in me to accomplish the defeat of our enemies in any part of the world where our own safety demands such defeat." The most spectacular violation of civil rights (all the more serious because of its solely racial motivation) occurred on February 19, 1942, with the internment of seventy thousand American citizens of Japanese descent who resided on the West Coast (along with forty thousand Japanese citizens who lived and worked there).

President Bush's decision to refer to himself constantly as the "Commander in Chief of the Army" after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible.

(Excerpt from pages 11-22 of State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2004 by the University of Chicago)


"[T]o risk advancing a prophecy here—the coming politics will no longer be a struggle to conquer or to control the state on the part of either new or old social subjects, but rather a struggle between the state and the nonstate (humanity). . . . This is the lesson that could have been learned from Tiananmen, if real attention had been paid to the facts of that event. What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May, in fact, was the relative absence of specific contents in their demands. (The notions of democracy and freedom are too generic to constitute a real goal of struggle, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yaobang, was promptly granted.)" (Agamben, Means Without End, quoted by Greif)

In 2004, Agamben turned down a teaching post at NYU in opposition to the US-Visit (US-Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) program. He explains in "No to Bio-Political Tattooing" that:

Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold ["the progressive animalization of man which is established through the most sophisticated techniques"]. The security reasons that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us: they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.
. . .

These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.

Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.

Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.

I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.

~

so to be reminded once again of Puddin'head Wilson: It was wonderful
to find America but it would have been more wonderful to miss it

this unified mankind
- for that's who's there, quantity or lump, at the end of a materialist's or an idealist's history - conceived, Mayer writes, as a homgenized humanity. Woe to outsiders

so that was it, was it? an Enlightenment that promised equality to men and
women, including homosexuals!
   an age in the hole, running three
centuries, surely allows one to say, 'Listen you assholes, a metaphysical
wipeout
means you've lost your top soil'

(Robin Blaser, from "Even on Sunday," The Holy Forest - he can be heard reading the poem on this Naropa recording)

28 September, 2006

"of politicians . . ."

of politicians, legislators, un-

acknowledged limits


of prosperity
after the event

a signal crystal


clear disaster it

signals, signed


a bill occurs

obscure and pregnant


conflict


or who survives

27 September, 2006

lethal injection hearings

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who is conducting a four-day hearing exploring the inner workings of lethal injection, began the proceedings by emphasizing that the case is not a referendum on the death penalty. Fogel is considering death row inmate Michael Morales' argument that California's lethal injection procedures violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. "It's inaccurate to say an execution has to be painless," Fogel said. "The question is whether the degree of pain is so severe that it raises constitutional issues under the Eighth Amendment.'' . . . the case [is] one of a mounting number of legal challenges to lethal injection unfolding across the country. Fogel has effectively put executions on hold in California while he considers the Morales case, which began in February when the judge postponed the killer's execution.
. . .
"I would not use that protocol on veterinary patients,'' [Dr. Kevin] Concannon said.

The veterinary profession has outlawed the use of one of the three drugs used in California executions, pancurium bromide, which paralyzes the muscles, because of concerns that it can conceal a painful death. Opponents of lethal injection say the method does not eliminate the possibility that an inmate will suffer excruciating pain because the combination of drugs used in executions may mask any suffering. A total of 37 of 38 states with the death penalty use lethal injection.

In California, prison officials first administer sodium thiopental, a sedative, to render the inmate unconscious, then the pancurium bromide and finally potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The state recently changed its procedure to call for a continuous infusion of the sedative throughout an execution in hopes of ensuring unconsciousness.

. . . William Ebling, a researcher in pharmaceuticals, testified that the state's use of sedatives does not take into account differences in how an inmate's body may react, and therefore there is a risk of "having a painful execution.'' San Jose Mercury News
~

Mark Heath, a New York anesthesiologist and frequent expert witness for death row inmates around the country, spent three hours on the witness stand, outlining for a federal judge the reasons that California's execution system is broken. From poor training of execution team members to evidence of foul ups in executions, Heath said some of the problems are "almost hard to believe. It'll forever be an unknown in California whether they've reliably performed a humane execution,'' Heath testified.

Heath's testimony came in the second day of a unprecedented hearing unfolding this week in federal court in San Jose, where U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel is considering death row inmate Michael Morales' challenge to California's use of lethal injection. . . . Based on logs kept from executions, Heath suggested there is evidence that in some instances execution team members have failed to properly sedate an inmate before administering the final and fatal doses of drugs. . . .

Critics of lethal injection say that if an inmate is not fully unconscious from the first drug, the second drug can mask the excruciating pain of the third and fatal drug, potassium chloride. Morales' lawyers argue that the state only uses the second drug because it keeps an inmate from involuntary movements that might make an execution more unpleasant to witness.
. . .
Heath, in his testimony, pointed to a series of recent depositions taken of former San Quentin execution team members who acknowledged that they didn't even know all three drugs used in executions, and in some instances hadn't read the state's guidelines, known as Protocol 770, for executing inmates.

In addition, Heath said the execution team members were not properly trained to administer the sedatives, heightening the risk that prisoners have not been fully unconscious during executions. He also testified that the state's system is so sloppy that officials can't even account for all the sedatives checked out from San Quentin's pharmacy for executions.
. . .
There are more than 650 inmates on death row in California.    San Jose Mercury News

"all languages are multilingual"

via Living in Peru:

12 native Peruvian languages in danger of disappearing

During the last decades 30 of the 100 existing native languages in Peru are extinct and today 12 more are in danger of disappearing, warned James Roberts, director of Peru's Summer Institute of Linguistics.

"The decrease in native Peruvian languages is mainly due to the influence society has on the various ethnic groups living in rural areas and the fact that the population within each group is getting smaller", Roberts said. In ethnic groups with a population less than one thousand people, only the parents speak the native language because the children learn Spanish. "If authorities and parents continue to send their children down this educational path, it is likely that their linguistic identity will be lost after one or two generations", he warned.

In addition to Quechua and Aymara, the common indigenous languages spoken mainly in the Peruvian Andes (departments of Cusco, Ancash, and Ayacucho), there are several other languages spoken in Peru's Amazon rain forest. Some non-quechua languages that could soon be extinct are Sharanahua, Yaninahua, Kashinahua, and Kapanahua in the department of Ucayali, as well as Orejón, Sequoia and Arabela spoken in Loreto.

45 percent of Peru's population is indigenous and 25 percent speaks a maternal language other than Spanish.

(Source: La Republica)

~

Teaching overwhelmingly in English, as mandated by 1998's Proposition 227, has had no impact on how English learners are faring in California, a state-mandated study released Tuesday has found. The ballot measure, approved by 61 percent of the state's voters, promised that immigrant children and others who don't speak English at home would assimilate much faster if all their classes were taught in English. . . . About 8 percent of current California students are in bilingual programs, down from 27 percent before Proposition 227 went into effect in fall 1998. [San Francisco, CA - 02.22.06]

The Senate voted on Thursday to designate English as the national language. In a charged debate, Republican backers of the proposal, which was added to the Senate's immigration measure on a 63-to-34 vote, said that it was equivalent to establishing a formal national anthem or motto and that it would simply affirm the pre-eminence of English without overturning laws or rules on bilingualism. . . . the Senate also approved a weaker, less-binding alternative declaring English the "common and unifying" language of the nation, on a 58-to-39 vote. . . . Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said the Inhofe amendment was racist. "Everybody who speaks with an accent knows that they need to learn English just as fast as they can," he said. [Washington, DC, 05.18.06]

Iowa Congressman Steve King finally hit paydirt. The Republican from Iowa has had little success getting his colleagues to sign onto bills of his that allow judges to carry firearms, or to spend $100 million on a fence along the U.S. border with Mexico, or to cut the salaries of United State Supreme Court justices. But he's found willing signatories to his bill that would mandate that English is the official language of the United States. [09.13.06]

One local county has already made the decision to make English it's official language for county documents and two Idaho candidates running for congress have taken a stance on the issue. . . Several parents in Canyon County say they're angry that when their children go to school the pledge is not only being said in English, it's being said in Spanish and French, too. "They can practice lots of different things in Spanish. I don't have a problem with them learning Spanish but the Pledge Of Allegiance is one of the things we should just leave to English only," said Fred Ellis, a concerned parent. . . . Canyon County commissioners have already . . . made English the official language on all county documents. As commissioner Robert Vasquez puts it, "This is America. We all speak English and we have for 220 years." [Boise, ID - 09.14.06]

A petition to ban illegal immigrants from living and working in Cape Coral is now in the hands of the Cape Coral City Council. . . . Taking a stand against illegal immigration is why Tony Maida and Mary Ann Redman founded the group called Americans Standing Tall. Monday night they presented a petition with more than 1000 signatures to the Cape Coral City Council. "My first thought was it had Archie Bunker written all over it," said councilmember Tim Day. The petition proposes the city council name English the official language of Cape Coral. [Cape Coral, FL - 09.19.06]

The Metro Council passed a significantly neutralized version of a an ordinance declaring English the official language of the city and mandating official city communication, at least some of it, be done in English. The passage was only preliminary, however — the legislative body must still vote on the measure two more times before it can become official . . . The substitute English-language legislation Crafton introduced would exempt Metro from having to communicate in English “when necessary to protect or promote public health, safety or welfare” or “except when required by federal law,” according to the language of the bill. The change was, in part, a reaction to a memorandum by the Metro Legal Department saying the bill could violate the U.S. Constitution and the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. [Nashville, TN - 09.20.06]

Recall petitions need to be printed only in English, even when some voters are not proficient in the language, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The federal Voting Rights Act requires ballots and other government-produced election material to be published in other languages if more than 5% of the voters speak a different language. But in a case involving the Santa Ana Unified School District, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the requirement did not apply to recall petitions written and circulated by citizens. . . . The judges also said that translating recall petitions into different languages in a place such as Orange County, which has a large and diverse population, would be costly and have a "chilling effect on the petition process." Judge Stephen Reinhardt concurred with the majority opinion written by Judge William C. Canby Jr. but said Congress should change the law to include recall petitions under the Voting Rights Act. In a sharply worded dissent, Judge Harry Pregerson wrote, "English-only petitions would perpetuate the very injustice the Voting Rights Act seeks to eliminate" and said the majority interpreted the law too narrowly. [Los Angeles, CA - 09.20.06]
A bid by a town to ask voters to make English its official language has ended because the state's highest court refused to hear its case. The state [NJ] Supreme Court late Monday declined to hear a dispute over Bogota's plan to ask voters in November whether to name English the borough's official language. "Justice prevailed," said John Carbone, the attorney for Bergen County Clerk Kathleen Donovan, who contended the ballot question was improper because the town did not have the authority to designate an official language. Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, who spearheaded the referendum effort, said he was disappointed by the high court's decision. "I think it's an absolute disgrace," Lonegan said. "This is a real attack on America.". . . The English-language dispute began when Lonegan demanded that a McDonald's in the town remove a Spanish billboard and replace it with an English one. [Trenton, NJ - 09.26.06]
Juliana Spahr:

First, some truisms:

All languages are multilingual, full of words and concepts from afar, developed by the language habits of different places constantly rubbing up against each other.

All poetries, thus, are multilingual.

Some poetries though are more aware of being multilingual than others.

Then some obvious observations, when one talks about the US and languages, it quickly becomes obvious that it is impossible to say anything coherent. The US does not have an "official" language. Over 176 languages are indigenous to the US, although many of these are extinct. And around 162 languages are spoken in the US. (All these numbers vary from source to source.) But the collection of words and syntaxes that gets called English has an unchallenged dominance. It is the defacto language of the US, the language most often used by the government. And the US’s consistent underfunding of language acquisition programs in its schools makes this unlikely to change any time soon.

Despite English’s assured status as the de facto language of the US, there regularly are groups of people who are prone to hysterical anxieties that English is at risk. In the 90s, for instance, an "English Only" movement got a lot of media coverage (although variations on English only have been around for some time and never seem to completely go away). This movement argues that English is at risk in the US and attempts to provoke legislative changes that will make English the "official" language of the US. English only advocates have had some success. English is the official language of a number of states, although most of these states still produce government documents in other languages. But still, a number of states remain officially bilingual.

I start with these truisms and observations because I am often told when outside the US that Americans only speak English. That is true of many Americans . . . but it is not true by any means of all Americans.

A similar sort of contradiction in action is true of US literatures. While it is true that most of the classes in "American literature" and most of the anthologies that define "American literature" present only work written in English, the US has a long tradition of literatures written in other languages. And, as all places, a lot of literatures that mix different languages.

So, by way of introduction to the US poetries that lie outside of the "English only" mainstream, I want to make a somewhat false distinction. I want to claim that there are two forms of multilingual writing in the US: a multilingualism that uses the languages of empire and a multilingualism that uses at risk or marginal languages. . . .

That other multilingualism of US poetry, poetry that uses at risk or marginal languages, is a somewhat more specific project, one that is frequently rooted in identity. In this tradition, the poet writes in English but includes the languages of their immigrant or indigenous history. Much of this work tends to be explicitly political and uses clear and conventional language despite its multilingualism. . . .

The Chicano poet Alurista is frequently credited with beginning this tradition. He writes in Spanish and English starting in the 60s (and this is another one of those moments where US language politics gets complicated; Spanish and English are both colonial languages in the Americas but because of the Mexican-American war and the always complicated relationship between Mexico and the US at the border, the Spanishes of the Americas have marginal—although not really at risk—histories in the US and are often seen as second class languages; thus these Spanishes have their own movement of "linguistic independence" in the US).

While work written in English with Spanish is by far the most represented combination of languages in this multilingualism of at risk or marginal languages, there is an emerging tendency to use indigenous languages. Hawaiian sovereignty activist, poet, and essayist
Haunani-Kay Trask, for instance, writes an English that includes Hawaiian in her Night is a Sharkskin Drum. She is notorious for the political intensity of her work which frequently criticizes the cliché of Hawai‘i as a multicultural paradise full of racial equality and points out that how Hawai‘i is still a colonized nation. The inclusion of Hawaiian is clearly presented as a political gesture. And Trask takes great pains to keep her work clear and accessible admist the multilingualism. Hawaiian words are prominently italicized and Night is a Sharkskin Drum has a seven page glossary at the back. There is little interest in the ambiguity or crosslingual punning that so defines the multilingualism of the languages of empire. Some other writers who do this sort of work are Robert Sullivan (a Maori writer currently writing in Hawai‘i) who mixes Maori and Englishin Star Waka and Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa (a writer of African-American and Kirabati descent with multiple Pacific affiliations who is currently writing in Aotearoa/New Zealand) who uses English and Gilbertese in parts of Searching for Nei Nim‘anoa.

Now that I’ve set up these categories, I of course immediately should point out how they do not work all the time. Some of the most provocative multilingual work is happening outside of these categories. Rodrigo Toscano and Edwin Torres are two interesting examples of writers who do not fit well. Both mix an American Spanish into their English. Both are born in the US; Toscano is of Mexican heritage and Torres of Puerto Rican. So both use the language of their heritage identity, as do many of the writers of a multilingualism of at risk or marginal languages. But the work they write is way more disjunctive, arrhythmic, syntactically unusual than most of this work tends to be. And they both avoid the direct statement that characterizes the marginalized or at risk multilingualism.

James Thomas Stevens and Rosmarie Waldrop are two other exceptions to these two categories. Both write interestingly similar books in the 90s that mix Narragansett among their English. Stevens, the author of Tokenish, is a Mohawk poet. His turn to Narragansett could be read as a turn to a heritage language in that it is another indigenous language but when it comes down to it, that is probably not a fair reading of this complicated move. Waldrop, author of A Key into the Language of America, is a German immigrant to the US. Both write poems that are more in the disjunctive, arrhythmic, syntactically off than in the clear, political speech tradition. Both works are, I think, indicative of how complicated language choices can be for US poets, how full of multiple alliances. . . .

Undeniably, though, a lot of US poetries in the last half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first century are refusing to translate. My guess is that this refusal to translate has a lot to do with reactionary English only movements. Although English Only itself did not manage to make English the official language of the US, this movement was part of a larger anti-immigration sentiment that did have and continues to have some success in restricting immigration. As I write this large amounts of people, mainly in the west near the border with Mexico, are protesting various proposals before congress right now to arrest illegal immigrants and to further fortify the US/Mexico border. Just as it is impossible to read the multilingualism of modernism as at all separate from imperialism, I also think it is impossible not to read the multilingualism of contemporary US poetries as divorced from the language debates of the 90s. Multilingual word play in US poetries is a formal device that is unusually loaded with politics right now. It seems as if it can never avoid argument because merely to include another language in one’s work, any other language, is a pointed statement in the time of English only politics. But also, I see the proliferation in multilingual poetries, in addition to the obvious mimetic claims that some poets make, as indicative of how US poets are beginning to ponder more on the difficult role that US cultural products play in globalization. Stevens’s and Waldrop’s turns to the dead language of Narragansett in their works (no mimesis there) reads less to me as a desire to preserve Narragansett and more as a desire to think about how clearly the last thirty or so years have demonstrated the close ties between the English language and globalization.




26 September, 2006

two by Laura Moriarty - "the tale is told but doesn't solve itself"



THE MISSILE


The protected zone
Like a diagram of a pine cone
Removed from life
Lightning
Seems alive

The quiet voice
The trees of an imaginary paradise
Dropping down

Or not fallen
Like people who are innocent
To the ground

To the air or back down
What lasts is what we have

What we have done

~


THE CATASTROPHIST


There is no electricity to run the machines in the hospital

Or to heat or cook

She begins to think of tropical storms

Redfield cyclones can be seen on the wall

She breathes an infinitely small mass of air

The map is in motion

What can be done about the weather or lack of it?

What can the machines tell us?


from Symmetry (Avec Books, 1996) by Laura Moriarty


~

I first read & loved this book in 1999, long removed at that point from the first Gulf War during which many of these poems seem to have been written. Others would have (& still do) recommend themselves, but given the current Situation, these two jumped out. Archivist at SF State's Poetry Center for many years, Moriarty currently works at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, CA and can be found at the group blog, A Tonalist.


"The tale is told but doesn't solve itself." (from "Night 2")

23 September, 2006

news 'n bits - facts on the ground - dollars in a pocket

"Lost in a Bermuda Triangle of Injustice: The Facts on the Ground," by Tom Engelhardt:


While the emptying of Abu Ghraib made the news everywhere, the filling of Camp Cropper made no news at all. And yet it turns out that Camp Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents, has now become a $60 million "state-of-the-art" prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since 2004, was just completed and hardly a word has been written about it. We really have no idea what it consists of or what it looks like . . .

While Iraq and future Iraq policy are constantly in the news, almost all the American facts-on-the-ground in that country – of which Camp Bucca is one – have come into being without consultation with the American people or, in any serious way, Congress (or testing in the courts).

Camp Bucca is a story you can't read anywhere – and yet it may, in a sense, be the most important American story in Iraq right now. While arguments spin endlessly here at home about the nature of withdrawal "timetables," and who's cutting and running from what, and how many troops we will or won't have in-country in 2007, 2008, or 2009, on the ground a process continues that makes mockery of the debate in Washington and in the country. While the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the construction of an ever more permanent-looking American landscape in that country has proceeded apace and with reasonable efficiency.

First, we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent." (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of American towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent U.S. prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what's probably the largest, best fortified "embassy" in the solar system with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

. . . that secret CIA detention system, which seems to consist of makeshift or shared or borrowed facilities around the world, sits in place, ever ready for use. It's not going anywhere and in the most basic sense it probably cannot be shut down. Nor it seems are the almost 14,000 prisoners we hold in Iraq, the 500 (or more) in Afghanistan, and the nearly 500 in Guantanamo going anywhere. Even with Abu Ghraib empty and the secret prison system officially emptied, nearly 15,000 prisoners are being held by the U.S. essentially incommunicado, most beyond the eyes of any system of justice, beyond the reach of any judges or juries. In many cases, as in the case of Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi photojournalist, who has been held, probably at Camp Cropper, without charge or trial "on suspicion of collaborating with insurgents" for the last five months, even that most basic right – to know exactly why you are being held, what the charges are against you – is lacking.

Whatever arguments may be going on in Washington over which "tools" or "interrogation techniques" the CIA is to be allowed to use or over exactly how the 14 al-Qaeda detainees just transferred to Guantanamo will be tried, this set of facts-on-the-ground adds up to our own global Bermuda Triangle of Injustice into which untold numbers of human beings can simply disappear. The "crown jewel" of our mini-gulag is, of course, Guantanamo. And again, whatever the fierce arguments here may be about Guantanamo "methods" or what kinds of commissions or tribunals (if any) may finally be chosen for the run-of-the-mill prisoners there, one fact-on-the-ground points us toward the actual lay of the land. A little publicized $30-million maximum-security wing at Guantanamo is now being completed by the U.S. Navy, just as at the American prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, there has been an upgrade.

. . . [the] military . . . is quite literally incapable of existing today without its private contractors like Halliburton's KBR, nor could its wars be carried on without the proliferation of hired guns -- mercenaries -- that are now a given in any such situation. This transformation of the military into first an all-volunteer, then an increasingly privatized as well as outsourced, and now an increasingly mercenary institution is another fact-on-the-ground, another building block to our future.
. . .
Around all such "facts," of course, ever more entrenched and ever more expansive sets of interests arise: companies to organize the private contractees, or to deal with the outsourcing, or to handle contracts and construction work, not to speak of whole worlds of consultants, specialists, and lobbyists. This is a reality which no future administration, nor any better empowered Congress, would be likely to reverse, no less erase any time soon. No matter how the details of the argument about NSA spying turn out, for example, it's essentially a given that the National Security Agency will continue to grow and make itself ever more available in ever more ingenious ways, trolling ever more extensively in communications of every sort. These are the facts being established on the ground.

. . . "Seven years ago," writes Paul Harris of the British Guardian, "there were nine companies with federal homeland security contracts. By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are 33,890" . . . to divide a terrorism/security pie that has, since 2000, resulted in about $130 billion in contracts and now, according to USA Today, is a $59 billion a year business globally -- one based on that surefire bestseller, fear, whose single major customer is, of course, the DHS.

. . .Already at least 90 officials have left the Homeland Security Department to become lobbyists or consultants in the business that surrounds it, including Tom Ridge, the first head of the department. After only five years, the homeland-security business, according to USA Today, has already eclipsed "mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue."
~

"Bagram remains one of the most shadowy corners of America's secretive detention network. An estimated 500 prisoners - mostly Afghans but also Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians - are held in a legal vacuum outside the scrutiny of human rights groups. In comparison Guantánamo Bay, where he was transferred weeks later, was a 'guest house', he said. 'They didn't beat me, they didn't torture me, and they treated me like a human being.'" Guardian

~

Iraq and the IMF: Economic Warfare:

This week, the International Monetary Fund will be holding its annual meeting in Singapore. No doubt, the economic restructuring and forced leveraging of Iraq will be a key component of talks surrounding the meeting. In these past few months, free trade zones have been established along the borders with Syria and Iran; foreign investment laws have been vetted and approved; and laws governing investment in the oil sector have been drafted and introduced. Iraq continues to move forward in implementing conditions imposed upon it through the Stand By Arrangement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in December of 2005. While the command economy established under Saddam Hussein's regime was unsustainable, it is also highly probable that the benefits of the economic restructuring under way at present will accrue to the benefit of an elite segment of Iraq and of the international community. It is improbable that ordinary Iraqi citizens will be the beneficiaries of these changes.

The terms of the I.M.F. arrangement, and its impact upon ordinary Iraqi citizens, is becoming increasingly clear. The economic war against Iraq continues unabated.

Fuel subsidies have steadily declined over this past year, with a concomitant increase in the prices which Iraqi citizens pay for fuel. The I.M.F. requires that the fuel prices paid by Iraqis continue to be increased, as the subsidies are further reduced. By the end of the year, the official price for regular gasoline and diesel fuel is to cost twice as much as it did when the S.B.A. came into effect in December 2005. Kerosene is to cost 4x times as much.
~

Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily: U.S. Resorting to 'Collective Punishment'

~

Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South, by Mike Davis:

Over the last decade, the U.S. State Department estimates that the number of Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (or one-quarter of all U.S. expatriates). Remittances from the United States to Mexico have risen dramatically from $9 billion to $14.5 billion in just two years. Though initially interpreted as representing a huge spike in illegal workers (who send parts of their salaries across the border to family), it turns out to be mainly money sent by Americans to themselves in order to finance Mexican homes and retirements.

. . . according to the Wall Street Journal, "The land rush is occurring at the beginning of a demographic tidal wave. With more than 70 million American baby boomers expected to retire in the next two decades… some experts predict a vast migration to warmer -- and cheaper -- climates. Often such buyers purchase a property 10 to 15 years before retirement, use it as a vacation home, and then eventually move there for most of the year. Developers increasingly are taking advantage of the trend, building gated communities, condominiums, and golf courses."

The extraordinary rise in U.S. Sunbelt property values gives gringos immense economic leverage. Shrewd baby-boomers are not simply feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly speculating in Mexican resort property, sending up property values to the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into slums or forced to emigrate north, only increasing the "invasion" charges. . . .

The gringo footprint is largest (and brings the most significant geopolitical consequences) in Baja California, the 1,000-mile long desert appendage to the gridlocked state-nation governed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Indeed, Baja real-estate websites ooze almost as much hyperbole as those devoted to stalking the phantom menace of illegal immigrants -- just in a far more upbeat tone when it comes to the question of immigrant invasions.

In essence, Alta (Upper) California is beginning to overflow into Baja, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social marginalization and ecological devastation in Mexico's last true frontier region. All the contradictions of post-industrial California -- runaway land inflation in the coastal zone, sprawling suburban development in interior valleys and deserts, freeway congestion and lack of mass transit, and the astronomical growth of motorized recreation -- dictate the invasion of the gorgeous "empty" peninsula to the south. To use a term from a bad but not irrelevant past, Baja is Anglo California's Lebensraum.

. . . the first two stages of informal annexation have already occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing the West Coast's major shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would undercut the power of longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.

. . . One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape as they do the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula's small towns and fishing villages.

Thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north, however, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation.
~

New Alliance to Fight Water Privatization in El Salvador

~

Evo Morales, interviewed on Democracy Now!

We said we were going to nationalize the gas and oil sector. We did, without expropriating or kicking out any of the companies. We said it’s important to have partners, but not bosses. And we did it. The investor has the right to recuperate their investment and to a reasonable profit, but we can’t allow for the sacking of the country and only the companies benefiting, not the people.

. . . after the supreme decree that did the nationalization, we were guaranteeing greater security, because the new contracts were going to be transparent and ratified through congress, because previously the contracts were kept under wraps, secret, and never ratified in congress. And we also showed technically, financially, with numbers, that the company was going to be able to recover their investment and would have a reasonable profit. They weren’t going to have as much profit as before, because the largest oil fields – excuse me, from the largest gas fields, the companies only gave 18% of royalties to the state and took 82% in profit. But now, with the new law we’ve changed that around, now 82% for the government, for the state, and 18% for the companies. They’re staying. There’s no problems. And from that large field that Petrobras is managing, we’ve already seen $150 million coming into government coffers now.

. . . I want to take advantage of this opportunity to call on the people of the United States to help us in our efforts to extradite two [inaudible] people who practiced genocide, who were corrupt under previous administrations and who today are free here in the United States. . . . Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, former president, who in 2003 was responsible for the death of over a hundred people killed by gunfire, along with his minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain. We’re trying now to use all of the instruments at our disposal to extradite him, but it’s not moving forward. It’s running into some resistance here in the United States. A government that says it fights against terrorism, for human rights, against corruption, it’s not conceivable that this person would still be here. So we ask the people, the government and all the institutions of human rights to help with this.
~

Venezuela's foreign minister said he was illegally detained for 90 minutes by officials at a New York airport and accused them of treating him abusively by trying to frisk and handcuff him. . . . "We were detained for an hour and a half, threatened by police with being beaten,'' Maduro told reporters at Venezuela's mission to the U.N. "We hold the U.S. government responsible.'' . . . Maduro said when one official ordered him to go to another room for a strip-search, he refused. He told CNN en Espanol that the official pushed him and yelled at him. He told reporters the situation only worsened when he explained he was the Venezuelan foreign minister and showed his diplomatic passport. Maduro said authorities at one point ordered him and other officials to spread their arms and legs and be frisked, but he said they forcefully refused. He said officers also threatened to handcuff him. Guardian
~

"We face a world whose divisions threaten the very notion of an international community upon which this institution stands . . ." Kofi Anan, last speech to the general assembly as UN secretary general

~

Carl Estabrook in "The Darfur Smokescreen" points out that:


The liberal position is hardly distinguishable from

(a) the Bush administration's position on Darfur, and
(b) the Clinton administration's position on Kosovo.

In both cases the cry of genocide and "humanitarian" intervention is used to cover the USG's imperial machinations to reduce a state (respectively Sudan and Serbia) that was unreliable from the US/Israeli POV.
~

Darfur: An Open Discussion About Intervention, Regime Change and the Politics of Genocide:

Five different perspectives on the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region explore the ethical and political questions behind popular calls for humanitarian intervention and regime change in Sudan. Panelists include Co-Director of the IAC in New York, Sara Flounders; Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Elliot Fratkin; investigative journalist, Keith Harmon Snow; researcher on war crimes, Dimitri Oram; and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Enoch Page; and concludes with a panel discussion. This event on the crisis in Darfur was held on July 6, 2006 at Smith College in Massachusetts.
Part 1
Part 2

~

Sara Flounders: Why Sudan rejects UN troops:


The U.S. has maintained that it is essential that UN forces replace the African Union troops because the latter are underfunded, understaffed and under-equipped for the "peacekeeping" role they were assigned to play. However, it is NATO, dominated by the U.S., which was suppos ed to provide logistics, airlifts, equipment and supplies for the African Union force.

The rally is a conscious attempt to divide the movement against the U.S. war in Iraq, further demonize Arab and Muslim people, and to try to sell a new war as a humanitarian effort.

Some of the groups expressing great concern for refugees in Darfur were silent or were active supporters of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon that created over 1 million refugees. They were among the strongest supporters of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. President George W. Bush met with Save Darfur Campaign organizers at the White House and praised their efforts.

Although the Save Darfur Campaign lists many religious and civil rights endorsers, the campaign is an initiative of the most right-wing evangelical Christians and major Zionist organizations.

There's one topic that all the forces claiming concern for the people of Sudan never mention: the role of imperialism in keeping Sudan poor and underdeveloped. Sudan has vast resources and mineral wealth. Washington's policy toward Sudan has revolved around inflaming national and regional antagonisms in both the south and the west so U.S. corporations could take control of developing the rich oil, gold, uranium and copper deposits that could make Sudan prosperous.
~

Amira Hass: In the Name of Security: What Israeli Police Documents Reveal About the Occupation of Palestine:


Cohen's research relies mainly on police documents from the period, which . . . relate, for example, that the provision of weapons to collaborators by the local authorities was a way of rewarding them. However, the security forces' liaison committee mentioned in 1949 that 'the distribution of weapons to an element or members of one group is likely to be useful to us; it will create the desired tension among the various parts of the population and enable us to control the situation.' The security agencies, Cohen reveals on the basis of written documents, occasionally even initiated internal conflicts.

Indirectly, this book by a former journalist says that one does not have to rely on written documents - which will be made public in another 50 years - in order to believe a political analysis that differs from that of the rulers. Hence, it was not simply shortsightedness and neglect that caused the Palestinian territories to be flooded with weapons during the 1990s. It was not "security" that led to the creation of a class of new mukhtars from Fatah, who received special privileges that were denied to other Palestinians and that deepened internal tensions. It was not "shortsightedness" that led to the weakening and political trivialization of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as chairman of the Palestinian Authority, just as it was not simple naivete that omitted the main point from the Oslo Accords: the goal of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. . . . the Israeli security services are careful to act within the framework of a clear political paradigm: maximum weakening, in every possible way, of the Palestinian national collective, so that it will not be able to realize its goal and establish a state worthy of the name, in accordance with international resolutions.
~

Dahr Jamail: AP Propaganda About Iraq:


[Norman] Solomon, a nationally-syndicated columnist on media and politics who is also the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts, had this to say about why AP might get away with this type of "reportage" as consistently as it does: "AP is providing the kind of coverage that it and other mainstream US media outlets have provided in the past. The coverage does not seem conspicuously shoddy to most readers because it fits in with previous shoddy reportage. [Echoing Gertrude Stein's 1935 remark that "what the newspaper says about anything, it always every time it mentions anybody or anything it has to say the same thing using the same words otherwise it would be a shock to the newspaper reader who has gotten used to this formula about this thing"] From all appearances, this AP article is based on statements from four sources - and each of them is in line with US government policies. There's one tribal leader from Ramadi who is seeking large quantities of material aid from the US and the Iraqi government; there are two spokespeople for that Iraqi government; and there's a general from the US military. That all four would present a similar picture of events is not surprising. But for an article to rely on only those sources is stenography for one side of the conflict - which should not be confused with journalism."
. . .
It is important to note that the board of directors of AP is composed of 22 newspaper and media executives that include the CEOs and presidents of ABC, McClatchy, Hearst, Tribune and the Washington Post. Two of the directors are members of very conservative policy councils that include the Hoover Institute. The Hoover Institute is a Republican policy research center that has been referred to as "Bush's brain trust." Its fellows include Condoleezza Rice and Newt Gingrich, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow, along with George Shultz.

Douglas McCorkindale, also on the board of directors at AP, is on the board of Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contract company. One does not require crystals to see that the board of AP displays a clear tilt toward right-wing conservative views, and comprises representatives of a huge corporate media network of the largest publishers in the US.
~

"Caracas, Venezuela, September 16, 2006 - The South American Television Network Telesur announced the creation of a news agency to rival Reuters and the Associated Press, this Thursday. “This represents a new step that Telesur is taking towards the democratization of information and towards the inclusion of more voices in the spectrum of international initiatives,” said Izarra." link

~

Dave Lindorff on prepositioning to attack Iran: War Signals?:


[Ray] McGovern, who had first told a group of anti-Iraq War activists Sunday on the National Mall in Washington, DC, during an ongoing action called "Camp Democracy," about his being alerted to the strike group deployment, warned, "We have about seven weeks to try and stop this next war from happening."

22 September, 2006

Habeas Corpus - "the only writ named in the Constitution" - under attack in Congress

Talk about a return to the Middle Ages. While the Senate openly removes habeas protections for anyone designated an "enemy combatant," the backdoor assault on the Great Writ that began with the 1996 "Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act" (AEDPA) continues apace, with Arizona's John Kyl (who aspires to the Senate judiciary chair) again leading the charge. This isn't likely to be spelled out in the pages of the NY Times.


from the Justice Project:


Habeas Under Attack Again


Last week, criminal justice advocates mobilized against a potentially devastating blow to habeas corpus rights. Despite widespread opposition to the Streamlined Procedures Act and other legislation that would effectively repeal the "Great Writ" of habeas corpus, members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees worked behind closed doors last week to attach such measures to a Department of Defense (DOD) Authorization Bill.


Some 300 pages of non-germane language, including habeas repeal measures, could be tacked on to the DOD bill -- the primary purpose of which is to provide resources for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much of this maneuvering has been taking place though back door channels, and regular order, which assures that both chambers of Congress have a fair opportunity to consider the legislation, has been skirted. Alarmingly, the texts of some of the measures have not been seen by many members and their staff nor by the public. This method of passing unpopular measures has, unfortunately, worked in the past. Last year, during eleventh hour Patriot Act reauthorization discussions, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) inserted two provisions that significantly limit the ability of the Great Writ to enforce important Bill of Rights protections.


In recent years, thanks in part to the work of The Justice Project and our supporters and allies, Congress overwhelmingly supported the passage of the bipartisan Innocence Protection Act to correct some of the problems in the criminal justice system that lead to wrongful convictions. The habeas repeal provisions worked on this week would undercut much of that progress and increase the risk that innocent people will remain in prison or even be executed.


Habeas repeal provisions have been opposed (pdf) by the Conference of Chief Justices, which includes the highest judicial officers from each of the fifty states and all US territories, the Judicial Conference of the United States (the principal policymaking body with regard to the US Courts), over thirty former judges, and more than sixty former prosecutors from across the political spectrum, because there is no evidence that this legislation is needed.


The Justice Project and our allies remain on the offensive; habeas repeal language could easily be attached to a number of pieces of legislation in these final few days before Congress recesses for the midterm elections or in a potential lame duck session later this fall. Residents of the following states can contact their Congressional representatives (who hold leadership positions or sit on committees considering these measures) through our website and encourage them to oppose changes that limit our habeas protections: CA, DE, MA, MI, PA, TN, WI and VA. Also, some districts in IL, OH and NC.


Habeas Repeal Measures Increase Threat of Wrongful Convictions


Although there is widespread opposition to the Streamlined Procedures Act and other legislation that would effectively repeal the "Great Writ" of habeas corpus, members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees continue to work behind closed doors to pass these reforms. Efforts are currently afoot to attach widely criticized habeas measures and 300 pages of other non-germane matters to a Department of Defense Authorization bill that is presently in conference and will be finalized in the coming days. This closed-door strategy is nothing new: in the past, Congress permitted widely opposed habeas legislation to bypass normal review. During eleventh hour Patriot Act reauthorization discussions, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) inserted two provisions that significantly limit the ability of the Great Writ to enforce important Bill of Rights protections.


Now, the DOD Authorization bill -- the purpose of which is to provide resources for forces in Afghanistan and Iraq -- is being weighed down and slowed by controversial and wrong-headed crime legislation that has otherwise been unable to garner majority support in both houses of Congress. Members of both parties who have fought on principle to resist these regressive changes to habeas should continue to do so and not be made to appear anti-patriotic when they rightfully object to this unnecessarily bloated DOD bill.


Regular order -- which assures that both Chambers of Congress have a fair opportunity to consider the legislation -- has been skirted; indeed, the texts of some of the added measures has not been seen by many members and their staff nor by the public -- there is only one proper course of action -- remove the non-germane matters from the bill.


In recent years, Congress overwhelmingly supported the passage of the bipartisan Innocence Protection Act to correct some of the problems in the criminal justice system that led to wrongful convictions. The habeas repeal provisions would undercut much of that progress, and increase the risk that innocent people will remain in prison or even be executed.


On June 12, 2006, the United States Supreme Court’s 5-3 decision in House v. Bell reaffirmed how critically important it is that access to habeas corpus remain available to state prisoners in this country. Indeed, if habeas "reforms" that have been introduced in Congress were the law, Mr. House almost certainly would have been out of court without anyone considering the merits of his arguments. Errors routinely occur during the trial phase and state courts often fall short in their responsibility to correct these errors; by cutting federal courts out of the review process, as Congress is attempting to do, these errors will go uncorrected, increasing the likelihood that innocent people will languish in prison, or even be executed.


The Streamlined Procedures Act and the habeas provisions found in the Patriot Act and other drastic habeas repeal measures are opposed by a broad array of groups and individuals including the Conference of Chief Justices, the Judicial Conference of the United States, more than 60 former prosecutors, 30 current and former judges, and a number of leading conservatives. In the past months, the U.S. Conference of State Chief Justices passed a resolution opposing the legislation and urging that additional study and analysis of current laws governing habeas corpus petitions be undertaken. In September, the Judicial Conference of the United States -- an entity created by Congress in 1922 to "serve as the principal policy making body concerned with the administration of the United States Courts" -- similarly urged further study before any changes are made to the writ of habeas corpus.



The Streamlined Procedures Act:


Is opposed by a broad array of groups and individuals, including the Conference of Chief Justices, the Judicial Conference of the United States, more than 60 former prosecutors, 30 current and former judges, and a number of leading conservatives. In the past months, the US Conference of State Chief Justices passed a resolution opposing the legislation introduced by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) and urging that additional study and analysis of current laws governing habeas corpus petitions be undertaken. In September, the Judicial Conference of the United States -- an entity created by Congress in 1922 to "serve as the principal policy making body concerned with the administration of the United States Courts" -- similarly urged further study before any further changes to habeas are made.


Would generate numerous complicated legal issues and years of litigation and delay. Contrary to the title of the legislation, the Streamlined Procedures Act would generate years of delay in the resolution of prisoner appeals because it would overturn a series of Supreme Court decisions, disregard long-established principles of federalism, and invite constitutional challenges on the theory that it impairs the independence of the federal courts. In 1996, Congress amended the habeas corpus statute by enacting the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The AEDPA contained numerous provisions that have required years of review by the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts to authoritatively interpret. If passed, the Streamlined Procedures Act would pose similar problems for the courts.


Would lead to more errors and unfairness in the justice system. The current system of indigent defense in the United States -- in which defenders are chronically underfunded and have far too many clients -- often fails to guarantee defendants a fair trial and state courts fall short in their responsibility to correct the errors that occur during the trial phase. By cutting federal courts out of the review process, these errors will go uncorrected, calling into question the integrity of the criminal justice system. Additionally, while finality is important to the victims of crime and to the public in general, no one wants an innocent person to be convicted of a crime, especially when the punishment is death, and when it may well mean that the real perpetrator remains free to commit more crimes.


Would increase the likelihood that an innocent person will be executed. The rising number of innocent prisoners being freed from jails around the US in recent years has revealed serious flaws in our criminal justice system. Congress has worked to correct some of these problems with last year's enactment of the Innocence Protection Act, but the Streamlined Procedures Act would undercut much of that progress. When an innocent person is convicted of a crime it is most often because the defendant received ineffective assistance of counsel or an act of police or prosecutorial misconduct occurred in the case. Innocent prisoners need to be able to challenge their cases by filing habeas corpus petitions that can then clear the way for them to prove their innocence.


Despite this widespread opposition, habeas repeal measures are being attached to other bills making their way through Congress, including the Patriot Act and the Omnibus Crime Bill. You can help by taking action today!


Status of the Legislation in the Senate:


The Senate Judiciary Committee held its second hearing on the bill on Wednesday, November 16th. A hearing on the legislation took place on July 13 featuring witnesses including former US Solicitor General Seth Waxman, innocence expert Barry Scheck and death penalty attorney and law professor Bryan A. Stevenson arguing that the bill would increase the likelihood of innocent people being executed. The witnesses also noted how the legislation undermines recent bipartisan action by Congress to address inaccuracy in the criminal justice system, through the Innocence Protection Act, and conflicts with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.


Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa. has amended the legislation twice addressing some of the concerns about the original bill; however, the amended version remains a serious threat to fairness and accuracy in the criminal justice system.


Status of the Legislation in the House:


The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security held its second hearing on the House version of the bill, HR 3035, on Thursday, November 10th. At the hearing, Washington, DC attorney Ruth E. Friedman, a former senior counsel at the Equal Justice Initiative, commented that the legislation was written based largely on anecdotal information about cases in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Friedman noted, "Unlike any prior reform or revision, this legislation would strip the federal judiciary of jurisdiction to consider claims of serious constitutional error arising from state court convictions. In so doing, it would dismantle years of Supreme Court jurisprudence and wreak havoc on the administration of criminal justice. HR 3035 would deal this crippling blow to habeas corpus without any evidence of a need for such extreme measures." Read Friedman's full testimony (pdf).


Legislation Summary:

Section-By-Section--
Full Text of S 1088, including Sen. Specter's substitute language
Full Text of HR 3035


Lives at Stake:


Here is a sampling of the innocent people who might have been executed or left to languish in prison if the Streamlined Procedures Act were law while their cases were under review.


Here are more examples of cases involving egregious prosecutorial misconduct and other injustices that the Streamlined Procedures Act would leave untouched.


Opposing the Streamlined Procedures Act:


View a list of organizations and individuals opposing the legislation.

~


In the Federalist Papers No. 84 by Hamilton, we find the following statement of the Founders' original intent: "The most considerable of the remaining objections [to the 1787 Constitution] is that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights." Hamilton then gives an answer to these objections. He says that the structure of the government itself providing only for enumerated powers and for checks and balances is one of the answers to these objections. Beyond that, he answers the objections as follows:


Independent of those [answers] which relate to the structure of the government, we find the following: . . . . Section 9 [Article I] clause 2 - "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it . . . ." [T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital: . . . "confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and, therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government." And as a remedy for this fatal evil he [Blackstone] is everywhere peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the act, which in one place he calls "the Bulwark of the British Constitution."


The writ of habeas corpus is the only writ named in the Constitution. So great was its importance for the preservation of liberty that the members of the Constitutional Convention equated it, along with the structural provisions, with a Bill of Rights. Had not some state ratification conventions insisted on a Bill of Rights, the federal courts would have had to create an unwritten Bill of Rights using the writ of habeas corpus and the doctrine that the elected branches are limited to the enumerate powers named in the Constitution. Because of the importance of the clause forbidding the suspension of the writ, the Supreme Court has refused to allow Congress, the executive or the lower courts seriously to reduce its coverage and protections. For example, in INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289, 300 (2001), the Supreme Court refused to adhere to an interpretation of an immigration statute and AEDPA that "would give rise to substantial constitutional questions" under the Suspension Clause. (dissent by Circuit Judge MERRITT, Davis v. Straub [pdf])

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[update] from an email:

on incumbent Arizona Republican Senator John Kyl:

" . . . We know first-hand of his tireless efforts to greatly limit federal corpus remedies. In the mid-1990's, he vigorously sought to preclude any meaningful review of constitutional claims brought in habeas corpus proceedings. Current Chairman Arlen Specter, supported by Judiciary Committees Democrats, stopped those efforts. In the spring of 2005, Senator Kyl quietly introduced the ill-named Streamline Procedures Act, a bill that would virtually repeal habeas corpus review except for those who rarely need it -- those who are demonstrably factually innocent. This bill was forcefully opposed by a broad and deep coalition that spanned the political spectrum: the Federal Judicial Conference, all 50 state supreme court Chief Justices, the ABA, numerous former judges and prosecutors, some conservatives, and many moderate and liberal organizations. This opposition stopped SPA in the Senate Judiciary Committee late last year.

"But true to form, Senator Kyl did not give up. He sought instead to attach SPA provisions to legislation that would pass, and present no opportunity for debate. At the eleventh hour during Patriot Act reauthorization negotiations last December, he succeeded in placing two highly controversial SPA provisions into the reauthorization conference report. They have since become law. Also late last year, he drafted and played a key role in passage of the Detainee Treatment Act, a bill that removed much of the federal judiciary's habeas corpus jurisdiction for those detained at Guantanamo Bay. And he continues to place other controversial SPA provisions in legislation that likely will pass. Habeas corpus and other important constitutional safeguards will not be safe as long as he remains in the Senate.

"If Kyl is reelected, and the Republicans keep Senate control, he will become the Chair of the Judiciary Committee in 2009, or earlier if the Republican Conference decides to oust its current chair, Senator Specter. As chair, Senator Kyl would have the power to ensure that SPA and other extreme measures that limit the power of the federal judiciary to enforce constitutional rights become law of the land."

19 September, 2006

imperialism studies


"Imperialism 101 - The US Addiction to War, Mayhem and Madness, Part I" by Stephen Lendman:

. . . What once was hidden behind a politically correct facade and would never be admitted publicly is now seen as something respectable and even an obligation to advance "western civilization." How low we've sunk in coming so far. But how different is today from the past? Not much for those who know the country's true history that's quite different from the proper and polite version of it taught in school at all levels. Expansionism and militarism have always been in our DNA since the early settlers first confronted the nation's original inhabitants and then over the next few hundred years slaughtered about 18 million of them to seize their land and resources. We may even have put language in our sacred Declaration of Independence to give us a birthright to do it. In it we called our native people "merciless indian savages," and with that kind of framing gave ourselves a moral justification to remove them. It's a code based on the notion of might makes right and what we say goes.

. . .in our imperial wisdom, we came, stole, and conquered "for their own good" and in the process left lots of bodies around to prove our good intentions. . . .

Woodrow Wilson was another of the "noted" presidents we now revere as one of our greatest who came to office with noble promises of wanting to reform national politics and have an enlightened presidency only to fall far short. While proclaiming all nations had the right of self-determination, he believed that America had a duty to see they all had the kind we practiced even if we had to bring it to them at the point of a gun. The result during his tenure was the military occupation of Nicaragua, Haiti (beginning 20 oppressive years) and the Dominican Republic. He also had his problems with Mexico and did what any good US president would do. He sent in the Marines to invade the country, seize and occupy Veracruz, the country's main seaport, manage to resolve that dispute and then do it again with Army regulars under General John Pershing (the Dwight Eisenhower of WW I in charge of the American Expeditionary Force sent to Europe) to hunt down Pancho Villa as payback for Villa's cross-border incursion into the US killing 19 Americans. Pershing didn't find him but nearly began a full-scale war with Mexico trying before Wilson decided the whole adventure was a bad idea and called it off.

But all this was prologue to what Wilson wanted most while claiming otherwise - getting the US into WW I to further our undeclared imperial ambitions. In 1916 Wilson was reelected on a platform promise of: "He Kept Us Out of War" - referring to the one raging in Europe since 1914. Of course, he had to promise that as the US public overwhelmingly wanted nothing to do with it. But he no sooner was reelected than he began making plans to get into it. He established the Committee on Public Information under George Creel which was able to turn a pacifist nation into raging German haters resulting in the Congress overwhelmingly declaring war on Germany in April, 1917. Once in the war, he managed to control most public anti-war sentiment with the help of the outrageous Espionage and Sedition Acts that outlawed criticism of the government, the armed forces or the war effort, imprisoned or fined violators and censored or banned publications daring to publish what the Wilson administration wanted suppressed. It all has a familiar ring to it. . . .

Our tradition of imperialism began at the republic's birth, but until the end of the "cold war" wasn't discussed in polite society or acknowledged publicly. But that changed in the 1990s, and now it's seen as something respectable, a matter of national pride and contributing to the advance of civilization. It shows in our new language that portrays us as agents of a humanitarian mission (a benign Pax Americana or modern "white man's burden") still hiding the cold reality that what we're really up to is keeping the world safe and profitable for corporate America. Those on its receiving end need no explanation, but the public at home does as it harms them too. They must be convinced that what's good for business also serves them, but it's never stated in those terms. It's always sold at home as an effort to achieve national security, make the world safe for democracy, or bring our form of rule to other parts of the world we decided need our version of it. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, just that we say it is and can convince people to believe it. Based on our track record, that's not a problem as time and again the public is willing to swallow most any reasons government officials tell them (reinforced, of course, by the corporate media trumpeting them like gospel) to get them to go along with the schemes they have in mind, no matter how outrageous they are. They're never told the truth because it's so unpalatable it's has to be suppressed, especially in time of war when it's the first casualty.

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Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster talks about his new book Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance:

MP3 stream, download mp3 file

. . . The U.S. government under the Bush administration, so the argument goes, has been taken over by a neoconservative cabal that has imposed a new policy of militarism and imperialism. For example, University of California at Los Angeles sociologist Michael Mann argues at the end of his Incoherent Empire (2003) that "a neoconservative chicken-hawk coup...seized the White House and the Department of Defense" with George W. Bush’s rise to the presidency. For Mann the end solution is simply to "throw the militarists out of office."

The argument advanced here points to a different conclusion. U.S. militarism and imperialism have deep roots in U.S. history and the political-economic logic of capitalism. As even supporters of U.S. imperialism are now willing to admit, the United States has been an empire from its inception. "The United States," Boot writes in "American Imperialism?," "has been an empire since at least 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory. Throughout the 19th century, what Jefferson called the ‘empire of liberty’ expanded across the continent." Later the United States conquered and colonized lands overseas in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the brutal Philippine-American War that immediately followed—justified as an attempt to exercise the "white man’s burden." After the Second World War the United States and other major imperialist states relinquished their formal political empires, but retained informal economic empires backed up by the threat and not infrequently the reality of military intervention. The Cold War obscured this neocolonial reality but never entirely hid it.

The growth of empire is neither peculiar to the United States nor a mere outgrowth of the policies of particular states. It is the systematic result of the entire history and logic of capitalism. . . .

. . .Even as a massive antiglobalization movement was emerging, notably with the protests in Seattle in November 1999, the U.S. establishment was moving energetically toward an imperialism for the twenty-first century; one that would promote neoliberal globalization, while resting on U.S. world dominance. "The hidden hand of the market," Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-prize-winning foreign policy columnist for the New York Times, opined, "will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without a McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps" (New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999). The "hidden fist," however, was only partly hidden, and was to become even less so in the ensuing years.

(from the "Introduction" to Naked Imperialism)

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Katrina: The Final Frontier, by John Feffer:

New Orleans was the first glimmer of what journalists and politicians would proclaim in the 1840s as America's "manifest destiny" to stretch from coast to coast. Over the course of the 19th century, in a pell-mell rush, the United States pushed its frontier westward, seizing a chunk of Mexico along the way for good measure.

By 1890, after much death and displacement of indigenous peoples, it was all over. The United States had reached its territorial limits. The frontier was suddenly no more.

Three years later, historian Frederick Jackson Turner transformed the closing of the American frontier into a provocative thesis on the national character of the United States. He contended that the frontier—its democratic nature, its seemingly unlimited resources, and the conflicts it generated—exerted an enormous influence on the American psyche. The end of the frontier would usher in a new era of competition within the United States. It was, to use Turner's words, the end of "the first period in American history."

Turner's frontier thesis of 1893 came at a propitious time, for as one door closed, another was opening. Although Turner did not consider imperialism, his address came just as a second period in American history was beginning in earnest: overseas expansion. Turner's conception of social evolution as a sequence—from hunter to rancher to farmer to urbanite—lent itself to a more general application. Having evolved toward a more perfect union, the United States was ready to spread not simply westward but globally.

Historian Brooks Adams supplied the missing link in this grand scheme with his 1895 argument that democracy could only be preserved through expansion abroad. Thus did the architects of the new American empire acquire a suitable ideology. After 1898, the world was our frontier, and we ventured outward to extend dominion over Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, followed quickly by Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico—all in the name of democracy. "There is in the ocean no constitutional argument against the march of the flag, for the oceans, too, are ours," declared imperial cheerleader Albert Beveridge before the Senate in 1900 in a paean both to the "self-government" that the United States was imposing on the Philippines and to what the Indiana senator declared elsewhere to be the "commercial supremacy of the Republic."

It took the insights of historian William Appleman Williams, in his famous 1955 essay "The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy," to trace this Turner-Adams hybrid ideology through Teddy's Roosevelt's directives, Wilson's 14 Points, and Truman's references to the "frontier of democracy." Just as Turner had declared the frontier closed in 1893, Williams declared America's new global frontier closed during the Cold War. Nuclear weapons, he argued, put very definite limits on territorial expansion and the promotion of democracy. An escalation of the conflict between Moscow and Washington, he wrote, "would make the world a frontier for fossils."

When the Cold War ended, approximately 100 years after the closing of the American frontier, a new set of options emerged. The possibility of an even-greater extension of U.S. influence—the unipolar moment—beckoned. Adams' notion of democracy through expansion became a hallmark of the neoconservative revolution. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, Washington has attempted to widen what it calls the "zone of democracy." Turner might not have approved of the presumption that the United States should impose its social system on others. But he would have applauded the pioneer spirit that has overtaken the White House.

What had begun in New Orleans—the westward push and the linking of territorial expansion to increased global interaction—has come to an end in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina marks the third and final closing of the American frontier. First we hit the Pacific Ocean. Then we butted up against the seemingly implacable power of the Soviet Union. And now we have reached the final frontier: the limits of the planet itself.

Climate Change

. . .
In the 1890s, Turner was fascinated by the dark heart of economics: scarcity. The frontier represented an abundance of land and resources; its closure suggested reaching not simply territorial limits but ecological ones as well. Today, Washington's putative expansion of democracy occurs hand in hand with an attempt to secure control over energy resources. Preserving access to Middle Eastern oil has come at the expense of serious energy conservation at home and any deliberate policy to control greenhouse gas emissions on either a national or global level.

This combination of democracy promotion and resource exploitation typifies a frontier ethos that has run amok. Climate change compels not simply a new U.S. approach to the environment but a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy as well.
. . .
Until Katrina, environmental limits had a speculative quality, for they were often expressed in terms of numbers (rising temperatures, mounting emissions, shrinking ozone). Debates raged in the popular press between apocalyptics and Pollyannas largely in the future tense. Katrina, however, was not hypothetical. Katrina was as real as it gets. Environmental limits set by climate change, like the territorial limits that brought continental expansion to an end, will ultimately render America's unipolar moment unsustainable.