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Yeah, I don't want to over state the case. Still, I think it is essential to emphasize what places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are (straight up police state gulags), in the face of what appears to me to be a kind news media and public ignorance or lack of understanding---perhaps denial.
My view of what Abu Ghraib is, comes from reading, perhaps too much reading of Hanna Arendt. In two works, Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt lays out how a police state works, how its so-called system of laws and criminal justice are transformed into systems that are remarkably similar to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and how they were legally justified as necessary for state security.
She goes on to explain that the purpose of this sort of system begins with trumped up politically motivated public campaigns that define groups of people as enemies of the state---in principle and in advance of any individual criminal acts. So the system performs the preventative function of rooting out of enemies within the state and in the case of the Nazis, was changed and added to, to become processing centers for relocation, work camps, exile, and then ultimately into the Final Solution. While it is unlikely, people should notice that there is nothing to prevent the US military from bussing the Abu Ghraib detainees out to the desert where construction and digging equipment have dug nice long trenches...
In terms of Iraq and Afghanistan, whether the US goes or stays, it is essential that the US system at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo be completely exposed for what it is, and labeled as a totalitarian police state gulag. The whole system and its bureaucracy has to be publicly and legally dismantled and prohibited both here and there.
I would advocate that the US political officials who designed and implemented this system be publicly excoriated in open Congressional hearings. The message would be simple: `this shit doesn't wash, no matter what the excuse'. There is no such thing as national security threats that rise to the level that require these sorts of measures, period. And of course I would link the whole Abu Ghraib business to the Patriot Act. This act needs to be dismantled along with all its auxiliary laws and all the institutional paraphernalia---the entire cottage industry of private security contractors---that has grown up around terrorism `prevention', i.e. Bush's War on Terrorism.
The reason for all this public denouncement is that while the US runs this sort of system, it is not that likely that it can be transformed into a full blown extermination system. But if left intact and handed over to others in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere it can be very easily be transformed by one political faction to terrorize its opposition, and become a fixed feature of totalitarian state rule, along with death squads. There's a long history of that sort in the Arab and Muslim world and a lot of it is traceable to former colonial police administrations or western styled secret police like the Iranian Stazi and whatever Saddam called his version.
``So the Bush-believing torturers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, and elsewhere have basically been enacting a kind of morality play, the purpose of which is to convince themselves that the dogmas Bush and they believe in are true, and that their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and wherever else they have in mind to sally forth into, are really appreciated and welcomed...'' JJ
Yeah there is something to this, but I can't quite figure out the pathology operating here. It might be that because Bush et al. can't get the real perpetrators and can't acknowledge decades of US complicity in oppression of the Muslim and Arab worlds and the now realized fears of reprisal that have naturally followed (i.e terrorism), they have set up a system to scourge people at random as members of a boogie-man class. I just don't know.
CG``...You could even go so far as to say that it was a kind of exorcism ceremony, to drive the devils of terrorism (what Bush keeps calling "the evil-doers who hate freedom") out of the world. So far, we haven't heard anything about what specific pieces of information they got by these endeavors..'' Jon Johanning
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Yeah, I don't want to over state the case. Still, I think it is essential to emphasize what places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are (straight up police state gulags), in the face of what appears to me to be a kind news media and public ignorance or lack of understanding---perhaps denial.
My view of what Abu Ghraib is, comes from reading, perhaps too much reading of Hanna Arendt. In two works, Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt lays out how a police state works, how its so-called system of laws and criminal justice are transformed into systems that are remarkably similar to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and how they were legally justified as necessary for state security.
She goes on to explain that the purpose of this sort of system begins with trumped up politically motivated public campaigns that define groups of people as enemies of the state---in principle and in advance of any individual criminal acts. So the system performs the preventative function of rooting out of enemies within the state and in the case of the Nazis, was changed and added to, to become processing centers for relocation, work camps, exile, and then ultimately into the Final Solution. While it is unlikely, people should notice that there is nothing to prevent the US military from bussing the Abu Ghraib detainees out to the desert where construction and digging equipment have dug nice long trenches...
In terms of Iraq and Afghanistan, whether the US goes or stays, it is essential that the US system at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo be completely exposed for what it is, and labeled as a totalitarian police state gulag. The whole system and its bureaucracy has to be publicly and legally dismantled and prohibited both here and there.
I would advocate that the US political officials who designed and implemented this system be publicly excoriated in open Congressional hearings. The message would be simple: `this shit doesn't wash, no matter what the excuse'. There is no such thing as national security threats that rise to the level that require these sorts of measures, period. And of course I would link the whole Abu Ghraib business to the Patriot Act. This act needs to be dismantled along with all its auxiliary laws and all the institutional paraphernalia---the entire cottage industry of private security contractors---that has grown up around terrorism `prevention', i.e. Bush's War on Terrorism.
The reason for all this public denouncement is that while the US runs this sort of system, it is not that likely that it can be transformed into a full blown extermination system. But if left intact and handed over to others in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere it can be very easily be transformed by one political faction to terrorize its opposition, and become a fixed feature of totalitarian state rule, along with death squads. There's a long history of that sort in the Arab and Muslim world and a lot of it is traceable to former colonial police administrations or western styled secret police like the Iranian Stazi and whatever Saddam called his version.
``So the Bush-believing torturers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, and elsewhere have basically been enacting a kind of morality play, the purpose of which is to convince themselves that the dogmas Bush and they believe in are true, and that their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and wherever else they have in mind to sally forth into, are really appreciated and welcomed...'' JJ
Yeah there is something to this, but I can't quite figure out the pathology operating here. It might be that because Bush et al. can't get the real perpetrators and can't acknowledge decades of US complicity in oppression of the Muslim and Arab worlds and the now realized fears of reprisal that have naturally followed (i.e terrorism), they have set up a system to scourge people at random as members of a boogie-man class. I just don't know.
CG