This is a follow up to John’s Thug Nation observation.
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He’s right, of course: we’ve allowed our fears, and the cynical manipulation of those night sweats, to lead us to surrender rights and values that a decade ago we might have thought untouchable.
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It is funny – in a tragic kind of way — that someone like the odious Ken Cuccinelli can claim that a mandate to purchase health insurance is an assault on liberty, while actual, unequivocal, physical and mental tyranny passes without comment.
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Which is not to say that I am unsurprised that the Big Lie party plays in that particular sandbox. Rather, it is the fact that we don’t deny such folks the regard of civil society just shows how far we’ve sunk.
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That is: horrible as the story of Private Bradley Manning’s incarceration is, it should come as no surprise to anyone.
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I say so so baldly because of a meaningless coincidence. Just yesterday, I happened to finish Dave Eggers’ remarkable book Zeitoun, a work I recommend to anyone reading this.
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There, Eggers tells the story of one family’s experiences during Katrina. The title character, Zeitoun, a Muslim from Syria moved to New Orleans, where he met and married Kathy, a convert to Islam, and with her, put together a successful business as a painter, contractor, and property owner/manager.
When Katrina came, Kathy and their children left the city before the storm, eventually reaching friends in Phoenix. Zeitoun stayed, feeding abandoned dogs, rescuing those he could with a canoe he’d bought at a yard sale, checking on his property around town – until he was arrested without warning or explanation, denied a phone call, and disappeared into a makeshift prison system set up by FEMA, in which all normal recourse to courts and process disappeared.
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Here is Eggers’ description of the first makeshift outdoor prison in which Zeitoun found himself, set up withing a couple of days after Katrina hit in the New Orleans train and bus station:
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…The parking lot, where a dozen buses might normally be parked, had been transformed…
Chain-link fences, topped by razor wire, had been erected into a long, sixteen-foot-high cage extending about a hundred yards into the lot. Above the cage was a roof, a freestanding shelter like those at gas stations. The barbed wire extended to meet it…
It looked precisely like the pictures … [Zeitoun had]seen of Guantánamo Bay. Like that complex, it was a vast grid of chain-link fencing with few walls, so the prisoners were visible to the guards and each other….
The space inside [each] cage was approximately fifteen by fifteen feet, and was empty but for a portable toilet without a door. The other object in the cage was a steel bar in the shape of an upside down U….
[Prisoners] could stand in the middle of the cage. They could sit on the steel rack. They could sit on the ground. But if they touched the fence again there would be consequences….The men were not given sheets, blankets or pillows…They asked [the guard] where they were supposed to sleep. He told them that he didn’t care where they slept, as long as it was on the pavement, where he could see them.
It gets worse from there. With Zeitoun’s arrest, the rest of the book reads as if Kafka met Cormac McCarthy in some dive in the French Quarter.
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As Eggers documents, Zeitoun was both a witness to straight physical torture, and, if being forced to dig out an infected splinter with the shards of a broken Tobasco bottle counts, was a victim of it too.
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The kind that leaves less marks — that too. Certainly, if you run the simplest of tests: what would one say of such treatment if it were documented in Iran, say, or North Korea, then what Zeitoun suffered- along with hundreds of others, American citizens and legal residents — was a gross violation of basic human rights.
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And all of this was done through a “system” that most closely resembled the arbitrary exercise of the state monopoly on violence we associate with tinpot dictatorships.
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Which is to say is that the transformation of America into anything but a shining city on a hill has been unfolding for a while.
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It was happening right in front of us back their in the Big Easy, when an incompetent and often criminal administration sought to mask their grotesque failures in fights against a mythical terrorist threat along the levies.
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It was happening before that, when the GOP fought the 2002 election on the “with us or with the terrorists” platform.
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It is sure as hell with us now.
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I drove home tonight through the pleasant neighborhood in which I am privileged to live. I looked at the quiet streets, the trees, the lights in ground floor windows as folks got ready for dinner. And I thought of a friend of mine who lives a few blocks from me, a rich guy, who told me recently that he was moving a significant chunk of his money to Canada – that he actually went to Montreal in person to open the account – because as an old Jew whose dad had raised him in the memory of the ‘30s and ‘40s, there was the whiff of those times coming round again.
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Travelling along these streets, there’s no visible sign that my friend might be right, that the banks may continue to go sour; that some crazy act in New York or Chicago or Dallas might set off another round of Hunt The Other; that passports might not work so well; or, as Eggers writes of Zeitoun, that men and women in black vests may burst into your own building and heave you down a hole into which you simply disappear.
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But it could happen here. To anyone, to any of us. We know it can. It already has.
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Images: Fra Angelico, St. Lawrence before Emperor Valerianus, 1447-1450
Gustave Doré, Newgate Exercise Yard, 1872
Master E. S., Temptation of Despair, c. 1450.
AAA Bonds
The semi-secret use of unjust force against ordinary non-criminals is something that the United States government has carried out repeatedly since its birth. This may be perceived as a radical point of view, but factually, it’s indisputable.
I do believe that there are times when that tide flows in, and when it ebbs back – and I believe that it had been flowing back pretty constantly from World War II until Reagan took office. Now, it has returned with full force, along with new technology (both mechanical and social) that makes it that much easier to implement.
Omnes Omnibus
Fear affects people in different ways. Some looked for someone or something to protect them, and they did not care what price they needed to pay. Some saw in the fear of others an opportunity to remake a society they saw as too free, too libertine, too mixed, too something, or some combination of these into the society they wanted. Some saw the fear of others as an opportunity to profit. Still others saw the fear as something they would have to live with and that they would have to accept it if they wanted to keep their freedom.
jwb
I’m with the guy who put the money in the Canadian bank—though I feel (world) war coming rather than (or along with) pogroms. I really do fear that this time we’ll get to play the villain in history.
asiangrrlMN
This makes me so goddamn sad. We’re not any safer for treating Manning like this. He is not learning anything for it–and he hasn’t even been charged. The way we treat our prisoners in general in this society is shameful–this is just a worsening of that mindset.
slag
I couldn’t even make it all the way through What is the What because it was too depressing. No way I’d be able to read Zeitoun. No way.
I’m with asiangrrlMN. It’s all just too goddamn sad.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@jwb:
Well there may be a bright side to ending up in a nuclear war; hopefully nuclear winter would cancel out global warming.
Regarding the topic:
The funny name and skin color is what caused his misery and I place the blame for this squarely where it belongs, on his parents shoulders. If they would have had a white kid and gave him a good name like Bill Johnson then this wouldn’t have happened.
What were they thinking?!
Karen
Put in the name “Susan Lindauer” and that will show you another example of how anyone can be imprisoned because of the Patriot Act. And this is someone whose father was in the GOP in Alaska. At the time she was my landlord and started serving her sentence a month after I moved into her house though I didn’t know it at the time. If you put her name into google you’ll see lots of links. I worked at AEI from 1997 – 1998 and learned that the right wing “conspiracy” was a reality. But from 2005-2007 I learned that “paranoia” doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get you. Maybe that’s why I am not as disillusioned with Obama. Things are happening under his watch. But I know how much worse things will get if Sarah Palin becomes President. Or honestly, any neocon.
Lavocat
Scary stuff. It always seems to be ethnic minorities who sense a change in the wind. I’ve had a few ethnic friends as me if I had a Plan B or a Plan C and I didn’t have a clue WTF they were talking about. They told me I was clueless because I was a white male professional who has been trained to not only trust the system but to believe that he is part of the system.
What I sense the most is that our system has completely rotted from the inside out. At some point, probably very soon, this utter and complete rot is going to become painfully obvious to even the most ignorant and denialist among us.
And when that happens, all bets will be off.
I also note what seems to be far more people with firearms lately – and the means to make them fully-automatic. I don’t recognize this country as the one I was born in anymore. It is as foreign to me now as the soulless, corporate policies that drive our foreign and domestic agendas.
When did life in America become nothing more than the pursuit of wealth and power? When did we all lose our souls?
Calouste
@Lavocat:
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1776?
Dennis SGMM
Many of us saw this coming when it suddenly became okay for the government to do nearly anything to suspected terrorists. It’ s the nature of governments to gradually expand the classes of people to whom it’s okay to do anything. The government’s overweening expansion of its mandate to do anything to people combined with that same government being for sale to the highest bidders does not bode well.
Karen
@Lavocat:
I think the real question is when wasn’t it?
America has always been a country where the wealthy have all the power. We’re just hearing more about it now because the poor aren’t the only ones affected anymore. Now that the middle class has been shrinking and are becoming the poor, it’s suddenly a problem we hear about. Apparently though, it’s not enough of a problem for politicians or the media to care about.
monkeyboy
Part of the problem in the US is the number of gun owners. Ask them why they own guns and they say it is for “protection”. But protection against whom? Well maybe home invaders.
There is a continuum from owning one gun to being a survivalist who stockpiles guns, ammo, and food under the thinking that that society may break down soon. The guns are necessary to protect their wimmen and stockpile against the rampaging ravenous hordes who didn’t have the culture or insight to plan ahead.
The old threat this is based on is Injuns, though I imagine the modern survivalist while engaged in target practice imagines shooting Negros or Mexicans instead.
The whole Injun threat was ridiculously overblown – I doubt if more than 100 white civilians in the whole history of the USA were killed by bands of Injuns.
This survivalist myth dominated much of the reporting and response to Katrina. If you believed that society might break down into violent anarchy the best response was to act if it had. That is why the cops shot the blacks who were trying to walk over a bridge out of NO – plus they thought they had a legitimate reason to shoot them some Negros.
It is really unfortunate that the people who most prepare for apocalyptic disaster are the ones you least want in power during any disaster – however they as private citizens or law enforcement are the most compelled to act on their fears.
aimai
Great post, Tom. Thanks for that. However, I”m getting through these dark times by reading history–lots of it. Right now I’m bouncing back and forth between The Good War and a new book called “The Rise and Fall of the British Empire” which is just a pretty good all rounder covering…well, the Rise and Fall of the BE.
My point, and I do have one, is that there is nothing new under the sun. We tortured and imprisoned people in WWII, and WWI. We had zoot suit riots, we shot our own African American soldiers when they even thoght about protesting segregation in a training camp in Pennsylvania. The corruption and incompetence, racism, xenophobia, innocence, ignorance etc… of everyone from Congress to the Air Force to the civilian work force was stupdendous.
I’m not making myself feel any better, am I? Ask your friend to save me a seat in Canada.
aimai
Odie Hugh Manatee
A good bud of mine has a small armory of rifles and pistols that he has bought over the years and he’s a solid liberal. Why the guns? He’s ex-military and once he learned about weapons he kept at it after leaving the service. He does his own loads and really gets into the science of guns and rifles. He says that one of the unfortunate things about being a liberal gun owner is that the ranges he goes to are well stocked with crazies, few liberals he knows go shooting. He just keeps his mouth shut about politics but he says that some of them are pretty wild-eyed nuts, people who he wouldn’t want to be around when push comes to shove.
If the wingers and rapture nuts go gonzo he’s one person I’ll be quick to hook up with.
abo gato
Odie, thanks for your name, it made me laugh after reading this post. I really, really needed that.
DBrown
This type of behavior was far, far worse during reconstruction of the South after the civil war – the powers that now control the GOP starting to take control of that party then (1870-1880) as they murdered and reenslaved Blacks.
Today, a small amount of that same terror is being applied to whites thanks to 9-11 and people think that is ok. However, it will get far, far worse once peak oil starts to take hold. The wealthy will control all real power then and their new slaves (whites too stupid and afraid to care) will enforce their orders.
We are screwed once the oil starts to run out because this country has been built (first) on slavery, and then cheap energy (oil today.) The next ten years will be our descent into darkness. The seeds are growing fast.
c u n d gulag
@aimai:
You’e right. A lot of idiot Americans think this country was and still is as pure as the driven snow (which, if driven by a snowplow, ain’t that pure, but I digress).
Yeah, we did a lot of bad shit to people. Including medical experiment that Dr. Mengele might be proud of – The Tuskegee Experiment, and who know what others.
But, before, all of this was fairly well hidden, ar at least they tried.
I remember how shocked I was when I was about 13 or so, in the early ’70’s, and read a NY Times article about torture in S. Vietnam, and the horrors inflicted on captured Viet Cong (I remember one guy was described as being shackled and hanging from a wall, having flayed flesh, no tongue, and a shrunken eye pulled out and hanging from its socket). From what I remember, the article went on to say all of this was under US supervision, but justified it by saying that what the North did to captured ARVC soldiers was far worse.
I remember that article to this day because I thought we not only didn’t do shit like that, but we would never condone it in any way, shape, or form.
So, now it’s pretty much out there in the open. And we sit and do little to nothing.
We are literally one bad terror attack from being openly like the old USSR, or worse, and where maybe even modern China may prove to have a better human rights record than we will in the long run.
We were never what people thought we once were. But I’ll take that to what we’ve become.
We must continue to work for peace, and to improve this nation, despite the fact that it is in its ‘Death Spiral.’
Bill ORLY
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Your friend sounds like me. I shoot competitively and grew up in the gun culture (town where Remington Arms was based). I think the NRA is solely to blame for the grafting of gun nuts to hardcore right-wingers. I’m solidly pro-gun (with no problem with some regulations around these) but refuse to give one Amero to those fuckers. I’m realizing that I might have to take an NRA class if I want to form a training company, and it’s causing me great angst.
I have some conservative ideals, but am a DFH in most regards. Thankfully my shooting club tends to be relatively quiet in its politics, so I don’t have to grit my teeth too frequently. My close shooting friends are aware of my political failings and respect them. We occasionally get heated in the garage whilst drinking beer, but it’s civil and we still speak to each other afterward.
RAM
For the last 10 years, I’ve watched my country descend from an imperfect democracy to an authoritarian oligarchy. I voted for Obama because he said he opposed that behavior. Unfortunately, he has continued the worst aspects of what started during the Bush years and even seems to have refined it, vigorousy pursuing leakers and whistleblowers to the detriment of the nation.
I’m not sure this trend can be stopped because politicians seem incapable of telling the truth about their actual views on freedom, the Constitution, and civil rights. Republicans have always lied about their real views; now it seems Democrats are doing that, too, more and more often. Obama certainly snookered me.
So where to turn?
El Cid
It was an all too common contrast among South American (US-backed, of course) dictatorships and juntas that the actual jailing and torture and assassinations of dissidents was necessary and functional to preserve societal order — and not just among the actual rulers, and not just ruling elites, but great sections of the middle classes as well.
While those advocating policies and liberties favoring the working and poor classes were seen as and as advocating policies and ideologies which were dangerous, seditious, and capable of destroying society.
In Eduardo Galeano’s words (paraphrased fm memory) about the Pinochet dictatorship balancing murderous repression with high praise from its US free-market advisers,
‘People were in prison so that markets could be free.’
Paul in KY
@c u n d gulag: Taking a few of them (VC or some poor bastard they thought was VC) up in a helicopter & having them sit in the open door. The interrogator goes to the first one & asks questions. If no satisfactory answers, out the door he goes. Repeat on next one till you get the answers or they’re all gone.
100% happened over there multiple times. I’ve even seen some pictures a fellow officer’s brother shot when he was in Vietnam.
Spreading truth & democracy, etc. etc.
c u n d gulag
@Paul in KY:
I don’t doubt it for a second. I remember reading about that somewhere.
If anyone wants to read a great autobiography about the Vietnam War, read “About Face,” by Col. David Hackworth. He was one of, if not the, most highly decorated soldiers in American history and one of the first active military people who served there to turn against the war. And he was a critic of the military for the rest of his life, an entertaining and informed one.
Sadly , Hack died just as we started to get into Iraq, or he would have gone after the Bush Cabal with metaphorical guns blazing.
A great biography of another military Vietnam critic is “A Bright Shining Lie,” about Lt. Col. John Paul Vann.
Also, in my first comment, it should read ARVN, not ARVC, for the S. Vietnamese Army.
chris
As Canadian I have to ask, why Canada?
The US has been quietly buying the place forever. Now with our very own wingnut government, it’s not so quiet anymore.
http://creekside1.blogspot.com/2010/12/son-of-spp-sequel.html
And, of course, when y’all run short of oil and water you’ll just walk in and take it. So maybe your friend should move his money somewhere safer?
Paul in KY
@c u n d gulag: Thanks for the tip on the book. I enjoyed reading Col. Hackworth’s columns.
Steve M.
The most important thing to me about Greenwald’s post s that he said (I’m paraphrasing), This is as bad as Supermax prison conditions. In other words, the problem isn’t merely that we’re torturing Manning, it’s that we’ve been torturing common criminals for years, and hardly anyone thinks it’s a problem.
It won’t end now. It won’t end anytime soon. It might conceivably end if we ever have a perfect benign storm: simultaneously, an extremely low crime rate, a thriving middle class that feels secure, and a high-profile Supermax torture victim who’s (a) incontrovertibly innocent and (b) mediagenic and appealing (and — somehow — able to become a figure profiled by the media). Then again, we’ve had a number of Death Row inmates exonerated by DNA evidence and we still don’t have anything resembling a national groundswell on, say, allowing inmates to appeal whenever physical evidence might reasonably prove them innocent.
Mnemosyne
@Steve M.:
Exactly. Things like Abu Ghraib are different from what happens in American prisons every day only by a matter of degree, not kind. Charles Graner was a corrections officer in civilian life, and he brought a lot of those “skills” to Abu Ghraib.
The security state is not just the federal government, and it was already in place long before Abu Ghraib. The only difference is that it’s been brought to our attention.
c u n d gulag
@Steve M.:
Remember when we, as a society, were against “cruel and unusual punishment?”
Now we revel in it.
Look at TV, with reality shows and “24.” Look at our movies, and listen to our music.
We are a morally bankrupt nation. And a good share of this falls on those oh-so moral Christians.
‘Torture only happens to me. Other people deserve it.’
mutt
I’m glad to see this so deservedly well written about.
Ive a friend who spent 25 years in max & supermax prisons- not for his long string of broken laws but the politics behind them.
Ive kept a lot of his prison writings on line. Here is pieces written in various supermax joints, where the rigimes was as Brad Mannings, for years at a time…..here, in the USA.
http://home.earthlink.net/~neoludd/prison.html
Karen
@Steve M.:
Or we have law enforcement so eager to close cases and toss people in jail that the forensic reports were falsified to ensure this. And even when that’s been proven and the DNA tests have vindicated the innocence of the prisoner, police will STILL not release the prisoner.
Mnemosyne
@Karen:
It’s not just the police — it’s the courts, too. Even when they have evidence of actual prosecutor misconduct, courts are very reluctant to overturn a previous verdict. As one of the judges on the Texas Supreme Court said in a Frontline interview, “Just because you’re innocent doesn’t mean you get a new trial.”
c u n d gulag
@Mnemosyne:
Did I miss something?
Did Kafka come to Texas and father some children?
Mnemosyne
@c u n d gulag:
He did, and her name is Sharon Keller:
If you really want to wake up in a cold sweat, Keller was proposed as one of Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court. Of the United States. Now that was a bullet dodged.
ETA: One would hope that someone who’s been to law school and worked as a judge would understand something as basic about our system as “it’s up to the prosecution to prove that the defendant committed the crime, not up to the defendant to prove his/her innocence,” but apparently not.
ino shinola
In the weeks after 9-11, I remember the birth of a sense horrible resignation. There was no doubt in my mind that the howling demons that have periodically possessed us since Jamestown would have free rein for awhile. All this talk about liberty and opportunity is real nice, but right now we’ve got some brown people to kill. I just buckled up for the ride. And things have gone pretty much as expected.
There have been 2 events since then that gave me a little bit of hope. One was Katrina. I remember sitting at a stoplight in tears. Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” may have been on my stereo, it was on a constant loop in my brain. I remember thinking, hoping, that this was surely a disgraceful enough episode to make the country reconsider the course we’ve taken. Surely this is too much even for our Wall Street overlords to let slip into the netherworld of lapsed news cycles.
The other event was the financial collapse. This has to be pivotal enough that even our corporate lackeys in Washington will at least consider a change of course. I remember a conversation with two enthusiastic young people who had been in the park in Chicago on election night. I told them I was optimistic, that if it hadn’t been for the collapse, Obama would be just another Democrat paralyzed by the right-wing noise machine.
In late 2008 benign, aw-shucks-let’s-just-get-along-and-things-are-gonna-be fine neglect wasn’t a possibility I even considered.
Our demons continue howling, we’ve got brown people to kill.
c u n d gulag
@Mnemosyne:
“We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can’t come back later and change their minds. . .”
And after all of that work by the white people, how do you let the nigger go?
We are one fucked up nation. Absolutely fucked up.