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News Analysis Rewording the "war on terror"
August 3rd, 2005 -- Noah Feldman once sat in Baghdad’s Green Zone, advising the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council on the finer points of constitution-drafting. Today he is a law professor and author of a much-acclaimed book on “the ethics of nation-building”. He has nothing directly to do with the present constitutional exercise in Iraq. Still, he has his opinions — these from a recent interview on National Public Radio. On whether the permanent constitution, due to be submitted on 15 August, will resolve the stickiest issues facing a federalist Iraq, Feldman, it turns out, is a realist. The issues — Kurdish autonomy, religious and minority rights, restitution — will not be resolved. But does that really matter? After all, Feldman told his host on NPR, America’s founding fathers skipped over the issue of slavery while drafting their constitution, a compromise that “bought 70 years for the new republic”. Seventy years, that is, until the civil war that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and left its slave population “emancipated” but far from equal. Indeed, it would take a century more, to say nothing of lynchings and rapes and institutionalized hate, for American blacks to earn the legal right to drink from a “white” water fountain. Pentagon woes For critics of the Iraq occupation, Feldman is a hapless target. Like so many of his peers there, he seems the very model of an earnest young civil servant — never quite one of the bureaucratic hierarchy but always willing to rough it up for a year in the Republican Palace. What his efforts have come to is a question best directed to Donald Rumsfeld, whose last weeks have seen much of the groundwork and vision of the “war on terror” come undone. First, there were the bases. Rumsfeld made much of his efforts to counter Chinese pressure on the Central Asian republics that are hosting US military aircraft. When these efforts ended with one republic, Uzbekistan, giving Washington the boot on 31 July, Rumsfeld could only say that the move was anticipated. But there are as yet no suitable alternatives to the base at Khanabad in Uzbekistan. Of the three bases established in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, it serves the most aircraft in the area and ferries the most supplies to key cities like Mazar-i Sharif. Then there was the rhetoric. After four years of the “war on terror”, the White House has instructed its senior defence officials to expunge the phrase from their vocabulary, replacing it with a “global struggle against violent extremism”. Why? Because calling that struggle a “war” would suggest that the military was somehow responsible for winning it. The language “is not a shift in thinking, but a continuation of the immediate post-11 September approach”, a spokesman for the defence secretary said in July. But if Rumsfeld’s new emphasis on speeding up troop withdrawals from Iraq is any indication, we may yet see a change of tactics from Washington. To borrow Roosevelt’s slogan, the Bush Administration may be preparing for an era of speaking loudly and carrying a smaller stick. Just as he spoke openly about reducing troops in Iraq beginning next spring, President George W. Bush bypassed the Senate confirmation process on 1 August to appoint John Bolton ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton is expected to make good on his threats to harangue UN members, taunting them with accusations of inefficacy and outing the tyrants among them. Hunger strike at Guantanamo But this will be no straightforward task given the Pentagon’s continued station atop the 800lb gorilla that is American foreign policy. At the world body, talk of democracy and human rights will no doubt continue to be heard in the context of Guantanamo, Abu Ghurayb and Bagram — the military’s black-hole prisons. At Guantanamo, there are disturbing reports that a hunger strike continues at the detention facility. On 22 July, the Pentagon confirmed that some 50 prisoners had been on hunger strike for three days. But the number of protesters and length of the strike contradicted reports from two Afghan men who were released from the detention facility two days earlier. The men claimed that 180 prisoners had been on hunger strike for more than a fortnight, a number that has yet to be independently confirmed. Despite President Bush’s apparent invitation for independent observers to “inspect any time, any day” the Guantanamo facility, the White House has yet to respond to formal inspection requests from human rights groups. In a 29 July letter to the president, Human Rights Watch’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, wrote that lack of transparency about the conditions of detainees at Guantanamo “suggests that the United States has something to hide” (see p. 19). The White House rejects the charge, pointing to a recent visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But Roth points out that, “under their rules of confidentiality, the ICRC does not discuss its concerns publicly”. Others who have been escorted to the facility, including some reporters and US legislators, have been barred from interacting with detainees or seeing much of anything beyond prop-filled chambers. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch and other humanitarian groups have yet to be invited to Guantanamo, making first-hand updates of the hunger strike impossible to obtain. The most reliable sources could be the military police guarding the facility, but a record of harsh recriminations has kept any would-be whistle-blowers silent. In 2004, a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo was publicly accused of downloading pornography on a government-owned computer. The charge was part of an apparent smear campaign led by Pentagon officials who suspected the imam of smuggling classified information off the base. More recently, a former Central Intelligence Agency official who coordinated the failed American siege of Tora Bora has accused government officials of suppressing publication of his book on the episode. Gary Bernsten claims that Agency reviewers have refused to sign off on the manuscript, an ordinarily pro forma procedure, especially for subjects that have already been widely debated in public. Rather than rehash the debate on whether American planners were right to “outsource” the attack on Tora Bora, Bernsten’s book is meant to expose “who stepped up” to the challenge of capturing Usama bin Laden and who did not. Among others, the manuscript “highlights the actions of four brave Muslim American men who went with” Bernsten to Afghanistan, according to a 28 July Associated Press report. Patriots act Still reeling from the fall-out from last month’s terror attacks in London, Muslim groups here have issued a “fatwa” forbidding Muslims from cooperating “with any individual or group that is involved in any act of terrorism or violence”, and calling cooperation with law enforcement a “civic and religious duty”. The Fiqh Council of North America, led by the communications-savvy Council on American-Islamic Relations, was responding in part to renewed accusations that Muslim-American leaders have not done enough to condemn terror acts and their sponsors. Yet the fatwa is far from a new overture. CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, whose group has consistently condemned attacks on civilians in their immediate aftermath, said the condemnation is similar to earlier statements by his group and others. The difference this time is that the “fatwa” buzzword might draw wider acknowledgement from the Muslim community’s detractors. Some ultra-conservative commentators are unlikely to be won over, however. Michael Graham, host of a Washington-area radio programme, has repeatedly labelled Islam “a terrorist organization” that is “at war with America”. That his comments have come on the air have not moved the radio station’s managers to censure Graham or even to apologize on his behalf. More worrisome, say observers, is that the station’s “demographic” — Washington-area residents — is among America’s best educated; where conservative talk radio is most popular, including in the so-called “red states” of southern and middle America, there are few checks against Graham’s brand of hate-mongering. If there is a new threshold for what Americans are willing to tolerate on their airwaves and from their public officials, it may have been passed in late July in the form of a Congressional bill making permanent many of the most chilling provisions of the USA Patriot Act. By a vote of 257-171, the US House of Representatives, whose bills must be ratified by the Senate before becoming law, voted to enshrine 14 out of 16 of the Patriot Act’s provisions, while extending the remaining two for ten years. The move came after heavy pressure from President Bush, who has been warning for several weeks of the act’s looming expiration. The White House says US law enforcement would be ham-strung without the act’s provisions, which were written as temporary measures in the days and weeks after the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington. But civil rights groups remain unconvinced that the act’s provisions are playing an appreciable role in uncovering terrorist plots. They point to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most high-profile “catches” as proof that the government’s power over civil liberties far outpaces its methods. In one case, a teenage Bangladeshi girl was detained in New York City and subsequently deported on suspicion that she aspired to be a suicide bomber. The most actionable “evidence” came not from secret wiretaps or house searches but from the impressions of an FBI agent who interviewed the girl and her peers. For now, the Senate version of the House bill has been softened somewhat, reducing the extension on the two temporary provisions from ten to four years. Those provisions, covering government search orders and “roving wiretaps”, are no more worrisome to the American Civil Liberties Union than the other 14. In the Senate version of those provisions, “the FBI can issue its own internal search orders, without judicial review, to obtain credit reports, communications service provider records and so-called ‘financial records’”, said Lisa Graves, the ACLU’s senior counsel for legislative strategy. “The bill provides a right to challenge this, but still contains an automatic, permanent secrecy order that will be difficult to contest.” Although the bill was approved without debate on the Senate floor, its provisions are likely to continue to face challenges in the American court system. In a Los Angeles court, for example, Judge Audrey B. Collins recently called sections of the Patriot Act “impermissibly vague” and cautioned against contradicting the US Bill of Rights. In a Virginia court, the government was dealt a setback in its successful prosecution of an area “jihad network.” District Court Judge Leonie M. Brinkema cut by 20 years what she called the “really draconian” sentences of two Muslims convicted of training to commit terrorist acts in the US. What all this means in the “global struggle against violent extremism” will no doubt have less to do with semantics than real power and the real lives which inevitably suffer its excesses. In Iraq, where these excesses are felt most, Noah Feldman’s realism may be all too foreboding. One can only hope the budding Iraqi republic might buy at least a few years of relative stability once its occupiers have sailed back to their own shores. |
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