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BOOKS RELATED  Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror
by Gilbert Achcar Buy This Book RECENT
ESSAYS ON: The War on Terrorism & the New Police State
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Essays on the War on Terrorism and the New Police State |
Abu Ghraib and Insaniyat The issues that I will cover in this article and the cases I would like to describe make for uncomfortable reading. But I believe that it is important to record the torture at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq and to deconstruct the culture that accommodated and legitimated it, because what happened cannot be relegated to a mere footnote in the history of the region. I feel the same about Halabja and the chemical warfare employed by Saddam Hussein with the sponsorship of the international community, which is why I covered it in my other writings.1 I do not want to be misunderstood as arguing that the cultural context I will explain here is all-encompassing, that the U.S. presence in international society is singularly destructive, and that the West as an idea is nothing but intoxicating.2 What I say is much more confined. I am arguing that Abu Ghraib could not have happened without a particular racist current in the United States, that the individuals who committed the atrocities against the detainees were not isolated, and that they were part of a larger constellation with its own signifying ideational attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs. Those are the general claims that I would like to qualify in the following paragraphs. December 2007 Enemy Combatant or Enemy of the Government? By introducing the concept of war into national law, the latest U.S. anti-terrorist law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), produces a turning point in the legal and political organization of the Western world. It puts an end to a form of state that succeeded in establishing peace internally and excluding hostility as a concept of law.1 It is the constituent act of a new form of state that establishes war as a political relation between constituted authorities and national populations. By means of the fight against terrorism, the concept of war is introduced into criminal law. The integration of hostility into the legal order is first carried out by administrative acts relative to foreigners and justified in the name of the state of emergency. The MCA incorporates the concept of war into the law permanently. At the same time, it modifies its area of application and its content. It allows the president of the United States to designate citizens and political opponents as enemies. September 2007 A System of Wholesale Denial of Rights As in the past, Americans owe Jean-Claude Paye a debt of gratitude. From his position, as a sociologist in Brussels, he has proven that he can see what is happening in George Bushs and Dick Cheneys America, more clearly perhaps than many who live in the United States. As Paye notes, there are two important aspects to the regime created by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA) and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA). The MCA recognizes a distinction between enemy combatants who are citizens of the United States and those who are aliens. Alien enemy combatants are, as Paye notes, subjected entirely to the regime of military commissions and denied access to civil courts except under limited circumstances. Citizen enemy combatants have access to civil courts, but find their rights constricted in other ways. September 2007 The Twilight of Personal Liberty: Introduction to ‘A Permanent State of Emergency’ “The law is a mask that the state puts on when it wants to commit some indecency upon the oppressed.” I put these words into the mouth of a character in my play “Haymarket: Whose Name the Few Still Say with Tears.” Jean-Claude Paye has once again done us a service by showing how those words can come true. In theory, the bourgeois democratic state, as defined in the American constitution, was to operate under two basic principles. The first of these was separation of powers. Legislative and executive action would be held to a standard of legality by the action of unelected and therefore presumably independent judges. The second principle, elaborated more fully in the Bill of Rights, is that certain invasions of individual personal liberty are forbidden, and that the judges will provide a remedy against those who commit such invasions. November 2006 A Permanent State of Emergency The function of criminal law has been altered within the context of the anti-terrorist struggle. Normally, criminal law treats prosecuted persons as individuals. The criminalization of terrorist organizations and the criminalization of participation in or support for such organizations create offenses of collective responsibility. The object is to attack actual or potential organizations. It is no longer just the act of committing a crime or even the intention of doing so that is prosecuted. Merely belonging to a group that is considered terrorist by the government is sufficient for punishment. November 2006 Universal Rights and Wrongs: Roper v. Simmons, Torture and Judge Posner The title of a talk should arouse curiosity and even skepticism. The title must give the speaker enough leeway to change the content at will. After all, I chose this title with only a vague idea of what I might actually say. Oh, I knew then and know now the subjects I will discuss. I have studied, written and practiced about them for more than forty years. May 2006 The New Crusade:
America’s War on Terrorism The world changed on September 11. That’s not just media hype. The way some historians refer to 1914–1991 as the “short twentieth century,” many are now calling September 11, 2001, the real beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s too early to know whether that assessment will be borne out, but it cannot simply be dismissed. February 2002 REVIEW
OF THE MONTH There is little we can say directly about the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.—except that these were acts of utter, inhuman violence, indefensible in every sense, taking a deep and lasting human toll. Such terrorism has to be rid from the face of the earth. The difficulty lies in how to rid the world of it. Terrorism generates counterterrorism and the United States has long been a party to this deadly game, as perpetrator more often than victim. November 2001 Terrorism and Human
Rights The idea of terror comes to our tradition in images of fear. As the Psalmist wrote: My heart is in anguish within me, November 2001 |
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The United States is a Leading Terrorist State: An
Interview with Noam Chomsky Q: There is rage, anger and bewilderment in the U.S. since the September 11 events. There have been murders, attacks on mosques, and even a Sikh temple. The University of Colorado, which is located here in Boulder, a town which has a liberal reputation, has graffiti saying, “Go home, Arabs, Bomb Afghanistan, and Go Home, Sand Niggers.” What’s your perspective on what has evolved since the terrorist attacks? November 2001 |
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U.S. Hegemony and the Response to Terror The September 11 attacks call for a very different commentary from that which has dominated the media, whose main concern is to justify the use that the hegemonic establishment of the United States wants to make of the events. November 2001 |
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Terrorism and the War Crisis Whatever might be terrorism’s deep origins, whatever the economic and political factors involved in it, and whoever might be most responsible for bringing it into the world, no one can deny that terrorism is today a dangerous and ethically indefensible phenomenon, which must be eradicated. November 2001 |
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Limbs of No Body: The World’s Indifference to the Afghan
Tragedy If you read my article in full, it will take about an hour of your time. In this hour, fourteen more people will have died in Afghanistan of war and hunger and sixty others will have become refugees in other countries. This article is intended to describe the reasons for this mortality and emigration. If this bitter subject is irrelevant to your sweet life, please don’t read it. November 2001 |
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