Antifa (n.)

Talking about “Antifa” makes one Not Even Wrong. Antifa-with-a-capital-A does not exist. Saying “member of Antifa” reads like “member of Conservatism”. Clueless.

Yes, a large, loose antifascist movement exists. As do many antifascist organizations. As do militant antifascists. As do everyday antifascists. They may refer to themselves as “antifa”. I do. But no “Antifa” organization exists.

Militant antifascists oppose the far right through direct action. They may doxx far right actors, or counter far right groups’ street actions. This reflects not opposition to far right ideas, but defense from threats from far right action. No threat, no militancy.

Militant antifascists sometimes use a tactic called “black bloc”. On the street one refers to “the black bloc” as one says “the medics”. Saying “The Black Bloc” reveals the same cluelessness as saying “The Medics”.

Militant action reflects only a small part of the antifascist movement. It does far more research, commentary, and advocacy than direct action. Antifascist action includes publishing this blog post.

The antifascist movement studies fascism and the broader far right, distinguishing those from ordinary conservatism. We oppose all violent far right movements & actors, and say “fash” as term of art including all of them, not only avowed fascists.

Yes, many anarchists participate in the antifascist movement. As do socialists. As do social justice advocates. As do vegans. Overlapping but not equivalent. Antifascism means opposition to the far right. No more, no less.

No Antifa political agenda exists because no Antifa organization exists. No antifascist political agenda exists beyond opposition to the far right. Not anarchism. Nor socialism. Nor communism. Nor social justice. Nor the Democratic Party.

Resources

The Great Antifa Hoax

There you have it. U.S. law enforcement has now been directed to go after whomever it wishes to pursue on the basis of a made-up crime tied to an “organization” — if that be the word — that is effectively little more than a nuisance to local cops and actually does some good when it comes to exposing neo-Nazis. And they are doing so with a near-complete lack of transparency regarding their choice of targets and the methods they choose to pursue them. “Antifa,” in this context, Thomas Brzozowski noted, functions as little more than merely “a stand-in for a set of ideas that … the administration is broadly characterizing as effectively progressive, radical, [and] left-wing.” The government is right to investigate crimes. But now, it will be investigating and potentially prosecuting beliefs—and only one kind of beliefs at that.

Anti-Fascists Say They Are Protecting Communities From Right-Wing Violence, Not Fomenting “Terror”

“Antifa,” a label which many right-wing commentators tend to apply to anything vaguely left-wing, has become a boogeyman in recent years as large anti-fascist demonstrations have confronted white nationalists and Trump allies. Because of the virulent anger “antifa” inspires on conservative social media, Trump is able to score points with his base by erroneously blaming anti-fascists and escalating the language he uses to describe them.

Yet “‘antifa’ isn’t an actual organization. It’s a set of shared ethics and tactics used by activists to describe the work we do to protect our communities,” says an anti-fascist activist who goes by the moniker “AntiFash Gordon,” and is known for exposing neo-Nazis online.

U.S. Pushes Allies to Chase a New Terrorism Target: The Far Left

“They are trying to invent antifa as an international threat to tie it to groups and individuals in the United States,” said Tom Joscelyn, a counterterrorism expert who helped write the congressional report on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “It suggests that the administration is further down the path of twisting the counterterrorism machinery of the U.S. government to going after domestic political opponents than people realize.”

Andy Ngo’s Unmasked: The Next Phase Of The Grift

While Ngo’s claims about antifa’s ubiquity are absurd enough, they’re only the starting point for even more bizarre comparisons. He suggests that there have been several “antifa” mass shootings, including on the list of perpetrators people who have no discernable relationship to antifascism. Yet that, of course, is not the point. Antifa for Ngo comprises everyone from actual leftists to liberals he dislikes. Anyone with an ideology that fits into this conception must be unstable and prone to violence. Antifa is a priori violent; all leftism is antifa and all leftism causes violence.

The invention of Antifa

Given the long history of anti-anarchist sentiment, the Trump administration’s conjuring of Antifa last fall was an act of necromancy: the return of an ancient American antagonist to front-page news. Allegations of anarchist conspiracy still have the power to quicken the pulse of opportunistic prosecutors, who have made, among other things, the presence of anarchist zines in the homes of the Prairieland defendants central to their case in Texas. The defendants’ friends and families gathered each day outside the courthouse with a boxload of these “terrorist” materials on display: One such zine, prominently displayed, was entitled “Things to Consider When Loving Your Neighbor.” Their other “terroristic” activities outside the courthouse included poetry readings, picnics, and anti-repression workshops.

Final solution

Last week I tweeted a link to an article in The New Yorker.

The Government Has No Plan For Reuniting the Immigrant Families It is Tearing Apart

In the past two months, under the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy, the government has taken some two thousand immigrant children away from their parents.

I captioned it thus:

I am sure they will come up with a solution, finally

A few people have warily told me that the comparison to the Nazis’ genocidal Final Solution is too rhetorically strong. I understand why they would say that; we should keep our powder dry on accusations of genocide.

Let me expand on my allusion.

There are two major schools of how the Nazis came to the point that they were building murder factories.

One is that their leadership fundamentally had mass murder in mind all along, and it only took them time to secure sufficient control that they could implement their designs. Many scholars hold to this view, and it was my own for a long time.

But many others have another read, and seeing events in the US unfold in the last year has me leaning more to it.

The other thesis says that the Nazis effectively painted themselves into a corner.

Here I’m going to speak a bit in the voice of Nazis, with the expectation that the reader will understand that I am very clear that Nazis and their line of thinking are evil.

They want to rid the nation of undesirables — Jews, communists, homosexuals, Roma, et cetera — and they hoped that just making life difficult enough for them would mean that the undesirables would emigrate and the problem would solve itself. But that doesn’t work, or at least not fast enough. So the Nazis start rounding people up to keep them from poisoning the society: kill off a few along the way, throw some in jail. But we are talking about a lot of people, so that doesn’t scale well. The Nazis start building specialized facilities, to pack undesirables in a few areas while figuring out what to do. Hence “concentration camps”: concentrating unwanted people out of the way, in a camp. They use the people in the camps as slave labor, because so long as you are going to the trouble to manage a facility full of monsters you cannot expose to the populace, you might as well, right?

But again, this doesn’t scale well. And by this time the Nazis are hard at work conquering Eastern Europe, so the they end up with even more Jews and communists and other undesirables on their hands. All of this gets to be more elaborate and expensive to run. Concentration camps prove not to be much of a solution, they are themselves a problem. They drain resources that should be devoted to winning the war and building autobahns and monumental architecture and developing scientific wonders and so forth. The attempt to get Jews to emigrate has already shown that repatriating millions of people to some other country is no kind of solution, either. Heck, other countries have been sending shiploads of Jewish refugees back for years and you’re stuck in this stupid war because the British stubbornly refuse to help you to claim the space you need. Maybe you can quarantine all those undesirables on the island of Madagascar when you’re done conquering Africa, but the war is taking a long time, and even that is not a real solution; then you have an island full of Jews plotting to overthrow you.

Golly, you just hadn’t thought it through.

These partial, temporary solutions are no good. You need a final solution.

And there you are.

Knowing this, reading this article about the lack of a plan gave me a chill. The architects of this policy aren’t thinking ahead. What do they do when they have camps and prisons with millions of undesirables? What do they do next?

We know where this leads.

Running for gangster-in-chief

Donald Trump, answering a question at last night's debate:

Mr. Trump, just yesterday, almost 100 foreign policy experts signed on to an open letter refusing to support you, saying your embracing expansive use of torture is inexcusable. General Michael Hayden, former CIA director, NSA director, and other experts have said that when you asked the U.S. military to carry out some of your campaign promises, specifically targeting terrorists' families, and also the use of interrogation methods more extreme than waterboarding, the military will refuse because they've been trained to turn down and refuse illegal orders. So what would you do, as commander-in-chief, if the U.S. military refused to carry out those orders?

They won't refuse. They're not going to refuse me. Believe me.

But they're illegal.

Let me just tell you:

You look at the Middle East, they're chopping off heads. They're chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else that happens to be in the way. They're drowning people in steel cages. And he ... now we're talking about waterboarding. This really started with Ted, a question was asked of Ted last — two debates ago — about waterboarding. And Ted was, you know, having a hard time with that question, to be totally honest with you. They then came to me, “What do you think of waterboarding?” I said, “It's fine. And if we want to go stronger, I'd go stronger, too” because, frankly ...

APPLAUSE

... that's the way I feel. Can you imagine, can you imagine these people — these animals over in the Middle East that chop off heads — sitting around talking and seeing that we're having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding. That's my opinion.

But targeting terrorists' families?

APPLAUSE

And — and — and — I'm a leader. I'm a leader. I've always been a leader. I've never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they're going to do it. That's what leadership is all about.

Even targeting terrorists' families?

Well, look, you know, when a family flies into the World Trade Center, a man flies into the World Trade Center, and his family gets sent back to where they were going — and I think most of you know where they went (and, by the way, it wasn't Iraq) — but they went back to a certain territory. They knew what was happening. The wife knew exactly what was happening. They left two days early, with respect to the World Trade Center, and they went back to where they went. And they watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center, flying into the Pentagon, and probably trying to fly into the White House (except we had some very, very brave souls on that third plane). All right?

APPLAUSE

Let's review:

• Trump expects his orders as President to be followed without question, without regard for law
• This reflects his understanding of “leadership” because of his essential qualities as a “leader”
• He plans to order waterboarding and worse forms of torture
• He plans to intimidate people by murdering their families
• This bloodthirstiness distinguishes him as a better candidate for President than Ted Cruz
• A Republican debate audience applauds this

He imagines the Presidency he seeks as like being a mafia capo, fighting the “animals” in the Middle East by ordering his obedient minions to commit brutality.

May the gods have mercy on these United States, though I gather that the American god is not merciful but just.

Freedom archipelago

From the Associated Press:

The case marks the first time that Europe’s role in the CIA’s controversial rendition program, which was in operation at the height of then-President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, has reached the European Court of Human Rights.

All the prisons were closed by May 2006. Interrogations at sea have replaced CIA “black sites” as the U.S. government’s preferred method for holding terrorism suspects and questioning them without access to lawyers.

Thank goodness we have ended the shameful American practice of secret torture prisons on land. Oh, except that one, though I guess it doesn't count because it isn't secret.

The blood of White people

Andrew O'Hehir has an good screed in Salon, How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain, which says that the events around the Boston bombing indict pretty much every sector of the Republic as having failed in the wake of 9/11: the press, the government, the commentariat, the polity, the whole thing. Not anything anyone who's reading me doesn't know, but still: a good screed. So check it out.

I want to focus on how, near the end, this jumped out at me:

In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil, or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing.
....

The supposed tradeoff for that sacrifice was that we would be protected, at least for a while, from the political violence and terrorism and low-level warfare that is nearly an everyday occurrence in many parts of the world. According to the Afghan government, for example, a NATO air attack on April 6 killed 17 civilians in Kunar province, 12 of them children. We’ve heard almost nothing about that on this side of the world, partly because the United States military has not yet admitted that it even happened. But it’s not entirely fair to suggest that Americans think one kid killed by a bomb in Boston is worth more than 12 kids killed in Afghanistan. It’s more that we live in a profoundly asymmetrical world, and the dead child in Boston is surprising in a way any number of dead children in Afghanistan, horrifyingly enough, are not. He lived in a protected zone, after all, a place that was supposed to be sealed off from history, isolated from the blood and turmoil of the world. But of course that was a lie.

Well of course it was a lie. Again, not anything anyone who's reading me doesn't know.

But while I understand why O'Hehir is saying that Americans don't really think our children's lives are more important than other children's lives, we sure act like it. And that reminded me of a blog post from Mia McKenzie of Black Girl Dangerous that I've been meaning to blog about, Hey, White Liberals: A Word On The Boston Bombings, The Suffering Of White Children, And The Erosion of Empathy.

Your constant prioritization of the lives of white people over the lives of people of color is taking a serious toll on my psyche and those of many in my community. And by that I don't mean what you might expect. Most of us already know that racism and its BFF white privilege have detrimental effects on people of color. Racial oppression leads to any number of unhealthy conditions, including high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, diabetes and even asthma. But what I’m talking about is something different. Something I’m going to call DSWP: desensitization to the suffering of white people.

O'Hehir is nosing around the foothills of that mountain whose slopes McKenzie is climbing — because after all, when he says “Americans” he's mostly talking about a mediasphere of White people — and I have to admit that there are moments where I feel like I'm drifting toward the altitude where McKenzie finds herself with the DSWP. White people beating their breasts about their misfortunes is starting to feel very, very unseemly to me ... and I am a White person.

This means that this is an even worse moment for the Republic than O'Hehir says, does it not?

Terrorists

Tim Wise helpfully provides a list of White terrorists.

For future reference.

Torture, again

The UK Guardian article Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres is a cavalcade of horror. It pains me to excerpt it; almost every sentence is stunning.

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

....

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

Petraeus is implicated. Military advisors who helped set up the death squads in El Salvador back in the ’80s are implicated. The leads came from the WikiLeaks documents that put Bradley Manning in prison. Torture victims were shown on a reality TV show in Iraq.

I had this stupid fantasy that I'd be able to retire my tag for the horror on this blog thanks to Obama. How naïve I am.

We need to be sending people to the The Hague for this.

War fever

Via a chilling post by Corey Robin at Jacobin, I find Dan Savage (yes, that Dan Savage) telling us to Say “YES” to War on Iraq”.

War may be bad for children and other living things, but there are times when peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is one of those times.

But wait! Taking out Saddam means dropping bombs, and dropping bombs only creates more terrorists!

That's the lefty argument du jour, and a lot of squish-brains are falling for it, but it's not an argument that the historical record supports.

Trivia fact: The historical record now shows that Dan Savage was wrong, and those “squish-brains” were right.

It would be nice if in our political culture, we had more people who react to old quotes like this as Ta-Neisi Coates does, recognizing how poisonous and pervasive it was.

Not to restate my post from yesterday, but what stands out for me 10 years later is how people whose entire branding was “seriousness” and “tough-minded” pragmatism were just flagrantly, catastrophically, perhaps unconscionably wrong .... It's not just being wrong about the war (which is bad.) It's the being wrong while blustering.

Digby describes how this felt for those of us who were against the war.

A whole bunch of America sat there watching these sycophantic performances with our jaws agape, wondering if we had lost our minds. Bush was barely articulate, as usual, mouthing the worst kind of puerile platitudes (when he was coherent at all) while the press corps slavered over him as if he were Cicero. Bush, the clearly in-over-his-head man-child was molded into a hero and cheered by the media as he led this country into the dark, morass of an illegal war in the middle east. It was the most disorienting thing I've ever experienced in my life.

In the earlier post which Coates links in his quote above, he offers a mea culpa for having been a war supporter himself.

I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every “sensible” and “serious” person you knew — left or right — was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.

And yet it seems that not only do we not learn the lesson, we don't even learn the lesson about the judgment of the people who supported or opposed the war in Iraq. A common lament in the lefty blogosphere is that in order to be regarded as a Serious Person whose judgment should be respected in American political media (and in many kitchen-table conversations) one has to have been for the war on Iraq — this is to say, wrong — rather than against it. The Balloon Juice Lexicon explains that this pattern is so pervasive that Serious Person has emerged a useful term of art among lefty bloggers for analyzing a lot of commentary, not just about the war.

Serious Person— Also frequently appearing as “Very serious person,” this is applied to a person held in great esteem by The Village, who is repeatedly entirely wrong about everything, usually with tragicomic results. Conversely, those who have pretty much been right about everything the last twenty years are referred to as “not serious.” Serious persons believe the only solution to any foreign policy issue is bombing brown people (preferably Muslim, when at all possible), and the only solution to domestic affairs is cutting entitlements and demanding that the poor and working poor “sacrifice.” Noted examples of serious persons include Tom Friedman, Ken Pollock, the Kagans, Dick Cheney, and Frank Gaffney. Usually has an open lifetime invitation to appear on Hardball or to pen nonsense for the Washington Post editorial page.

Distrust in institutions

In The Map Of Droneworld, Charles P. Pierce at Esquire describes how horrifyingly corrosive of democracy the use of drones by the US has been.

Along the way, he makes this cutting observation.

It is now beyond cliche to observe that government secrecy “breeds distrust” in our institutions. What is never mentioned is that, if you breed enough distrust in the institutions — or, more to the point, if the activities of the institutions breed distrust in themselves — the trust people once placed in them has to go somewhere. And, generally, it goes into dreams and schemes and circus clowns that the people dream up themselves.
....
Government secrecy and deception blurs the line between genuine fears over the decline of civil liberties, and the wild-assed fantasies of the black-helicopter crowd. If you want to see the true destructive power of Droneworld in this country, look deeply into the Id of the democratic political imagination. There are angry, feral creatures in there, stalking the ruins, howling for blood.

Bingo. And even scarier than the drones themselves, which is plenty scary.

The Bear Jew

I think Inglorious Basterds is a demonstration of Tarantino's genius and relevance. It's a great film, period. There's a lot to be said about the picture and maybe someday I'll say it but at the moment I'm thinking about the scene which I think is the heart of the film: Eli “Hostel” Roth as Sgt. Donny Donnewitz, “The Bear Jew”, threatening the German captives with his baseball bat.

It's a powerful scene in part because it very deliberately plays with the relationship between the cinematic violence as a source of cathartic pleasure, cinematic violence as source of cathartic horror, and the enjoyment of cinematic violence as a politically troubling aspect of culture. The sequence very deliberately takes an audience back and forth between pleasure at let's beat up the Nazis and discomfort with the callous nihilism that implies. The scene is by turns scary, exciting, and disgusting, shifting tones more quickly and more often than I would have believed possible. Amazing enough that it takes us from horror, to excitement, to horror again ... but it actually brings us back to pleasure and excitement again repeatedly, dragging us back there from disgust, and then once more back to disgust, again and again. Tarantino manipulates the hell out of the audience with an unmistakable purpose. Watching it made me discomforted by my own reactions.

Which is the point.

Not for nothing does that scene end on a horrifying note. Is this what you want? Tarantino asks us. Because I will give it to you. The movie in the movie theatre at the end makes the indictment of the audience's complicity even more explicitly, but it's there throughout the film.

This gets an added frisson from knowing that Tarantino and Roth have both made careers of making films that appeal to our bloodthirstiness.

---

So we were talking about movies over lunch at work the other day.

I'd been talking about how Punch-Drunk Love makes explicit the strange rage and frustration which drives Adam Sandler's screen persona, and then a bit later was describing my theory about Basterds. Some wag suggested that Tarantino should have cast Sandler instead of Roth as Donnewitz ... but as we talked about it, we concluded that this wasn't just a silly idea, it would have worked.

Well guess what? In an interesting interview, Eli Roth let slip that this actually was the original plan.

---

FILM CRIT HULK says something a little bit similar (at astonishing length) about Kingsman: The Secret Service.

---

Over on Twitter, I returned to this topic, saying —

This thread and replies are fascinating because I both understand this reading and think it is profoundly wrong

Something I really appreciate about Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained is that they are a very rare species of Hollywood cinema that understands that half-measures in the face of fascism don't work and doesn’t try to equivocate about the morality of its political violence

tl;dr Nazis and slave-owners getting absolutely Itchy & Scratchy wrecked is good

Like, Quentin isn’t a Marxist or anything but it’s hilarious when people call him a reactionary. Absolutely no conservative on planet Earth would take this much joy from depicting jackboots and slavemasters getting turned into torrential streams of uncanned Chef Boyardee

Basterds and Django call shenanigans on cathartic movie violence. Both say hey, in the world we portray in movies, slavery and WWII would have been over quickly with victories over evil. So movie logic is bullshit.

I don’t see how one can watch the Bear Jew sequence in Basterds and read the movie as just a cathartic good time killin’ Nazis. It drags us back and forth over the line of I Want To See It Happen / Oh Gods No I Don’t.

Tarantino marshals every bit of cinematic vocabulary he can — framing, music, editing, et cetera — to give this guy a Stoic Heroic Sacrifice at the hands of cruel maniacs.

That's a Wehrmacht soldier who expresses his antisemitism directly. Tarantino gives us this not in defense of Nazis but in critique of cinema.

Understand, I love a cathartic good time killin’ Nazis. My favorite scene in all of cinema — Magneto confronting escaped Nazis in Argentina in X-Men: First Class — is exactly that. So I am not above enjoying Inglorious Basterds that way as well. It invites us to! But in service of trying to get us to examine why we like it.

Tarantino gives us a theater full of Nazis gleefully enjoying a movie depicting pointless nihilistic violence. He asks: “What the fuck is wrong with me and my audience?”

Not for nothing, the logic of cinema reverses at the end. The Action Heroes’ plan fails, while the the Nazis are defeated by ordinary people, a Black man and Jewish woman, by those ordinary heroes burning their back catalogue of films.

Django Unchained has its own ambivalence about the fantasy of cinema projected onto real historical horrors. Yeah, it feels great to unleash Black Cowboy Murder on slavers, and movie logic lets Django and Broomhilda get away. But slavery is not defeated, is it? Literally as I was walking out of the theater, it was clear to me that Django was not about slavery but about movies about slavery, about making it impossible to watch Gone With The Wind uncritically.

If you want a Tarantino film that actually grapples with the hard question of What Do We Do With Fascists, he did make one: The Hateful Eight ....

Drones

The long Esquire article The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama is an important piece of journalism. It's written as a letter to the President.

This is not to say that the American people don't know about the Lethal Presidency, and that they don't support its aims. They do. They know about the killing because you have celebrated — with appropriate sobriety — the most notable kills, specifically those of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; they support it because you have asked for their trust as a good and honorable man surrounded by good and honorable men and women and they have given it to you. In so doing, you have changed a technological capability into a moral imperative and have convinced your countrymen to see the necessity without seeing the downside. Politically, there is no downside. Historically, there is only the irony of the upside — that you, of all presidents, have become the lethal one; that you, of all people, have turned out to be a man of proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less popular than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen ... indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all.

I'll say it again: when Obama was elected I was prepared to be disappointed but I was not prepared to be horrified. Yet here we are.

Drone strikes

What Chris Bertram said. Ganked entire from Crooked Timber:

I’ve been reading some of Glenn Greenwald’s recent posts with increasing horror as he details the apparent willingness of the US drone campaign to attack events where non-combatants will certainly be present, such as funerals and to try to evade moral and legal responsibility by redefining “combatant” to include any military-age male in a strike zone. I’ve also been monitoring various liberal sites and blogs for signs of a reaction and not seeing much (please correct that impression in comments). Sites that obsess about non-combatant immunity if the people firing the rockets are from Hamas are silent. Blogs that take attitudes to historic human rights violations as a litmus-test of political acceptability, have nothing to say as a liberal American President bombs civilians on the territory of nominally friendly states. Fortunately, I’m not an American citizen, so I don’t have a moral decision to take about whether to vote for Obama or not this year. If I were, I don’t think it would be an easy decision to take. Romney is clearly remarkably close in political belief to Obama, but will be beholden to the crazy Republican right, as Obama is not. That provides people with a reason to vote for Obama. But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner doesn’t deserve the vote of anyone who cares about human rights, even if, pragmatically they might feel they have to give it to him.

I have nothing to add.

Iraq

Imagine my total lack of surprise at learning that the Bush administration apparently never debated the Iraq war, they just bulled their way into it.

In contrast to an extensive record of planning for actual military operations, there is no record that President George W. Bush ever made a considered decision for war. All of the numerous White House and Pentagon meetings concerned moving the project forward, not whether a march into conflict was a proper course for the United States and its allies. Deliberations were instrumental to furthering the war project, not considerations of the basic course. Moreover, the administration engaged in active measures to avoid scrutiny of its intentions, with the president repeatedly claiming there were no war plans "on his desk." The testimony of senior British military officers to the United Kingdom's Iraq Inquiry (the Chilcot commission), documented in the Archive's analyses, explicitly demonstrates that even America's closest ally was closed out of the CENTCOM planning until “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was far down the road.

Also in contrast to the military planning, there is no record that the Bush administration crafted any plan to attain its goals by means other than covert operations or war.

I have worked in organizations which made “decisions” that way myself.

Due process

Kevin Underhill at Lowering the Bar tries to joke about the Executive Branch claiming the right to assassinate US citizens.

In case you missed it, the Attorney General of the United States spent a little time yesterday discussing the circumstances under which the President could order your death without having a trial or even having charged you with any crime.

I just wrote that sentence myself, and I still keep re-reading it, thinking “that can't be true.”

He manages to get some witticisms in, actually. But. Not funny.

In addition to cracking wise, he has some smart analysis on the Forbes site.

Time to break out my “the horror” tag again. Brr.

What's wrong with the world

Here's a first draft for a short list of the central challenges for building a good society. It's why I'm skeptical of anarchists, for example.

• Critical thinking skills are difficult to teach and cognitively expensive to exercise
• Solutions don't scale, but our intuition expects them to
• Expertise means learning where common sense is wrong
• The Dunning-Kruger effect
• Most people are emotionally adolescent
• Most people are dumb
• A few people have severe psychological pathologies — psychopathy, narcissism, borderline personality disorder — which are highly destructive to the people and social order which encounter them

Listen to Thomas Jefferson

Bradley Manning

President Obama says he accepts the Pentagon's assurances that Bradley Manning's treatment in custody is right and appropriate:

No it isn't. Manning, who has yet to stand trial, has been locked up in a cruel insanity machine. He has been accused of helping leak documents that compromised not the security of our people but the dignity of our leaders.

I'll say it again: I was ready for Obama to disappoint me. I was not ready for him to horrify me.

Mengele

Physicians for Human Rights has a new report:

In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals’ involvement in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.

They were researching ways to torture better.

How I wish I were surprised.

Escalation

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

Kevin Drum says what I’ve been thinking about Israel’s attack on the ship bringing aid to Gaza.

It’s also a little hard to write about since I don’t have anything original to say. A million people have already said it. Fanatics on both sides have been in control of the region for years — the hardline Orthodox population relentlessly gaining influence in Israel and Hamas terrorists among the Palestinians — both convinced that they can win if they can only provoke enough insane overreactions from the other side. Which they do with depressing regularity. Hamas’s rocket attacks are indefensible, the Gaza embargo in return is indefensible, the blockade runners in their turn were plainly hoping to provoke an overreaction that would force Israel’s hand, and the Israelis then went insanely beyond anyone’s expectations by landing commandos on one of the ships and killing more than a dozen people while it was still far off in international waters. And now, there are rumors that the Turkish navy might escort the next ship that tries to run the blockade.

In David Petraeus’s famous phrase, How does this end?

Not well, obviously. I despair.

The horror continues

Via Digby, I learn that the International Committe of the Red Cross confirms that the US is operating the torture prison at Bagram which the US military has been denying. Jeff Kaye has horrifying details.

Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, are tossed into cold concrete cells, where the light is kept on 24 hours. Noise machines fill their cells with constant sound, and prisoners are sleep deprived as a matter of policy, with each cell monitored by a camera, so the authorities will know when someone is falling asleep and come to wake them.

Prisoners are beaten and abused. According to BBC’s article last month, one prisoner was “made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.”

As Auschwitz was a murder factory, that's an insanity factory. Even the US military admits that most of the people held there are not terrorists. And do I even need to tell you that no one there has stood trial?

We need to let those people free, make apologies and recompense to them and their loved ones, raze the prison to the ground, salt the earth where it once stood, and send everyone involved to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity, up to and including the President of the United States if he knew this was happening.

President Obama, I'm looking at you. I voted for you, and reason ^#1 was that I trusted you to do the right thing about this. I've been trying to believe that you've been slow to correct Guantánamo because institutional inertia has been stopping you. Fool me twice, and I won't get fooled again.