10 Lectures for a Course on Terrorism

10 Lecturers for a Course on Terrorism Lecture 1 "Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda." - I.F. Stone    "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone   "The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising." - I.F. Stone In the second full week of November 2013 several reports and documents appeared with relevance and application to the study of terrorism and criminal justice. One was a story about US funding of a terrorist organization in Afghanistan, another was about the stockpiles of chemical weapons kept by the US military, and the third was a federal appeals court opinion that upheld the sentence of a defendant for aiding terrorism by translating documents on the internet. They show that the US government supports terrorism, keeps banned weapons, and punishes Constitutionally protected activities (speech and press) when those activities conflict with US policies of the moment. Their significance lies in their representativeness—that is, during any given week the astute observer can find similar reports and documents. What they show is that official US government statements, pronouncements, policies, and the establishment press that reports the same—the New York Times, Washington Post, broadcast news media like BBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and all their affiliated sources present a mirror image of what is going on in the United States and the world. The journalist I.F. Stone famously put it like this: “Governments lie,” and that was in the 1950s! A major area of prevarication has been about terrorism. Governments not only lie, they govern, some more effectively and efficiently and others less so. All governance entails control. Specifically, governments control populations. There are only a few ways to control large assemblages of persons. They are: 1. Through force, 2. Through fear, 3. Through deception, and 4. Through economics. Many people, especially students, directly experience the last, through economics, as their debt piles up every year they are in school. Traditionally debt has been a main instrument of control. Control through force is the least efficient. This is what colonial-imperial governments repeatedly discover, as did the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. Domestically it is finally coming to be recognized as inefficient as states loosen their grip on incarcerated people because state budgets can no longer afford locking up so many people. State Terror of the 1930s In Diels view, violence and terror were valuable tools for the preservation of political power. During a gathering of foreign correspondents at Putzi Hanfstaengl’s home, Diels told the reporters, “The value of the SA and the SS, seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread terror. That is a wholesome thing.” Larson, Erik. 2011. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. NY: Crown Publishers, p.118. Diels was a high level bureaucrat in the Nazi government. He was a main official in charge of getting Germans to support the government and concomitantly remove those Germans who did not at least tacitly support the regime. State Terror Today Control through fear and control through deception often go together. When governments announce that people should be afraid of some third parties—terrorists, communists, criminals, and so on—when in fact those third parties pose little or no threat to a population, the government is using fear and deception. The deception and fear tactic contains two dangers. First, it promotes authoritarian reactions among people who thereby become complicit in their own lack of freedom, as in Germans’ submission to the Nazi regime’s Gestapo or Americans’ submission to 21st century Gestapo tactics in airports by the TSA. The other danger is that it detracts attention from real dangers. So, Americans are supposed to be fearful of non-existent terrorists on airplanes or guerrilla fighters resisting foreign invasion half a world away as in Afghanistan, but not be afraid of toxic wastes from US based industries or the global disaster of climate change largely caused by big businesses. This course presents materials that submit government lies to critical analysis.  Lecture 2 Most of the public talk of terrorism today in the second decade of the twenty-first century goes back to 9/11. But US law first criminalized terrorism in the 1980s. Federal statutes made foreign terrorism a crime. After the Oklahoma City bombing, domestic terrorism became a crime. More of this course is needed to understand what happened after 9/11. This course was born on 9/11. It was conceived in the spring of 2001. I was teaching a course on organized crime and students in the course urged me to develop a course on terrorism, and so I did. By September of that year I began writing a course proposal. On the morning of September 11 I had finished, and took it to campus to submit it to the course approval committee. When I got to campus, pictures of planes flying into a skyscraper in Manhattan were on all the TVs. I’ve been teaching this course or related courses ever since. By the evening of September 11, 2001 government officials were announcing that they had identified individuals who had hijacked the planes, and so they were pretty sure they knew who was behind the events. I didn’t believe them then and I still don’t. The US government just doesn’t move fast enough to state with certainty that it knows who did anything, let alone a few individuals who must have been incinerated during the plane crashes. Moreover there is no record of the now well-accepted 19 hijackers on the planes. Still, no record exists. Also, I know that a plane flew into one of the Twin Towers because I saw the video recording. The rest—the plane flying into the Pentagon and the plane crashing in Pennsylvania—were and are known only because government officials say so. Other than the plane (probably the second plane) flying into the twin towers, I have no empirical evidence of the rest of the official version of the events. By empirical, I mean directly accessible to my senses. Of course, there are many things I think are true even if I have no empirical evidence. Nonetheless, the rest of the official story of 9/11 seems dubious to me, because of what happened afterward. Simply put, what happened afterwards is that the United States went to war on the rest of the world: the so-called global war on terror. Of course it did not wage war on the whole world, only on certain parts of it. Those parts had several things in common. First, they were strategically placed, mostly in the Middle East but elsewhere too. Second, they were inhabited by non-Europeans. Third, they contained strategically important natural resources, mainly oil. So, I remain an agnostic about the most important claims surrounding 9/11, especially who did it, who planned it, how, and why. I think that one of the least likely possibilities is that US government officials planned it, because I do not think the US government was or is capable of doing it—that is, it is not sufficiently competent. There was a term that came out of the Second World War, the last one the US won. The term is SNAFU. It referred to the way the US military operated. Nothing improved since 1945. I do believe that the US government and the ruling class used the occasion of 9/11 to extend their power, control, and wealth. In that respect, 9/11 resembles the Reichstag fire of 1933 that allowed the Nazis to consolidate their control in Germany. In fact I thought the same on September 11, 2001. So, I remain skeptical. I urge you all to do the same.  Lecture 3 By Thanksgiving 2001, it was clear that the United States government planned to attack and probably invade Afghanistan. I could not imagine why. The official story was that the de facto government of the country, The Taliban, refused to hand over Osama bin Laden to US authorities. It did not make sense. First, only a few countries recognized The Taliban as the legitimate government in Afghanistan. The United States was one of them, but the rest of the world by and large did not. So, The Taliban was close to being a puppet government of the United States. Second, although the US claimed Osama bin Laden had “masterminded” 9/11, it offered no proof. The Bush regime rejected out of hand The Taliban’s request that the US give some proof of bin Laden’s culpability. Bush refused. Even if all US claims about Osama bin Laden were true, the idea that the United States would attack and wage war against a foreign country merely to capture a single alleged criminal did not ring true. So, I did a little research. I found that Afghanistan sits athwart strategic routes of massive oil and natural gas deposits surrounding the Caspian Sea, estimated as the second or third largest deposit of light crude oil in the world, and possibly the largest of natural gas. Afghanistan could control supply routes, pipelines, to the south, the Indian Ocean, and to China. The latter has importance in the US strategy to encircle China to control its access to energy resources. The story in detail can be found in the book, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden, by Wayne and Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie Madsen (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002. ISBN: 1560254149, 9781560254140). Also in November 2001, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT ACT (Patriot Act), a four thousand page law that doubtless had been in preparation for years. Many members of Congress, probably almost all, said they had not read it before they voted to pass it. It effectively has made the United States into a national security police state surpassing Nazi Germany in that regard. How can we understand these developments as of 2016 in the context of our study of terrorism and criminal justice? In terms of law and especially criminal law, ‘terrorism’ is an empty word. That is, it means whatever those who have power want it to mean. So, using the term ‘terrorism’ is a measure of power. Power comes in the form of the ability to direct physical force (basically police and military), money, and ownership. In this sense, using ‘terrorism’ to attach it to someone or entity (group, organization, agency, etc.) is a tautology. If one uses it, then one can use it. Try calling a cop a terrorist and see how far it gets you, even though it might be objectively accurate. That is because police and military organizations are the main instruments of terrorism, as they always have been. That brings up a more interesting use of the term in the context of revolutionary terrorism. Revolution overthrows law. It overthrows relations of power. Revolution takes power away from the few and puts it into the hands of the many. Revolution is democracy in action. ‘Terrorism’ as a word entered the English language as a pejorative term for the French Revolution and its revolutionists. Edmund Burke, a monarchist and liberal (which really means conservative) used it to denigrate the French Revolution in part as a British nationalist and in part as a member of the ruling class. Of course Burke himself was not noble, but England had long ceased to be ruled by nobles. By the 1790s it was thoroughly bourgeois (capitalist), and Burke was a member of the haute bourgeoisie (upper capitalist class). So, he called the leaders of the French Revolution terrorists. Let us take a different viewpoint, a French viewpoint from the perspective of ordinary people. La Terreur ‘Terrorism’ first entered the English lexicon with Edmund Burke’s anti-democratic fears of the French Revolution. Burke (1790, 1791) Burke, Edmund. 1790 (1989). Reflections on the Revolution in France. In The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, volume 8. Edited by P. Langford. London: Clarendon Press. ——— 1791 (1989). A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. In The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, volume 8. Edited by P. Langford. London: Clarendon Press. characterized the Jacobin ascendancy as a reign of terror. The origin of the word reveals its affinity with a fear of popular uprisings and revolutionary governments. Historical and contemporary surveys of terrorism emphasize its political character. ‘Terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ were and are value laden epithets used by established elites. Only when the political right, the Girondins, gained control of the revolutionary French government July 27, 1794 (Thermidor) did the democratic leaders, Louis Saint-Just and Maximilien Robespierre find themselves criminalized and executed by a second, reactionary terror. It began with the treason of the king and queen, along with their closest, aristocratic supporters. They conspired with European monarchies to invade France and restore them to the throne. Invaded, the people of France made a fateful decision. They constituted themselves as a nation, and as a nation, they declared themselves in danger. Defense of the nation meant that the treasonous conspirators were not criminalized. They became enemies, and not enemies of the state, but enemies of the people. An outcome of the French Revolution, possibly the most important, was the identification of the populace as the nation, with the state merely as a tool or apparatus for executing the will of the nation—hence the modern nation-state. The Terror, la Terreur also called “the Reign of Terror” by Anglophones, is a mirror image of the elimination of traitors to the people and counter-revolutionaries. Executing Louis Bourbon, his queen, Marie Antoinette, and later, myriad aristocrats and their minions did not parallel what the monarchical state did to those who challenged its sovereign power. Consider for instance Michel Foucault’s memorable opening description in Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault, Michel. 1975 (1997). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, second edition. New York, NY: Vintage Books. in which he recounts the lengthy execution and torture of Damians, the regicide March 2, 1757. Those who dared to challenge the throne suffered horribly. In contrast, the revolutionary tribunal dispatched enemies of the people by the most humane method available, the guillotine. The latter seemed necessary. What else could one do with treasonous nobility? They could not be left to stir up counter revolution either inside or outside the country. Although criminal punishment always contains a degree of vengeance, the removal of French aristocrats was not vengeance but war. The revolutionary tribunal no longer obeyed rules of vengeance, but rather those of war. In this logic, the person judged was no longer assumed to belong to a common social group, he was no longer an adversary to convince or re-educate, but rather an irreconcilable enemy to be struck down rather than banished. The suspect’s alterity had become radical. (Wahnich 2003:70) Wahnich, Sophie. 2003 (2012). In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution. Translated by David Fernbach with a Forward by Slavoj Zizek. New York, NY: Verso. Moreover, the revolutionary tribunal acted to preserve the people’s virtue.: “the exercise of terror cannot be dissociated from ‘morality in action’” (73). Recall Robespierre’s address to the Convention. Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, . . . the first rule of your political conduct must be to relate all your operations to the maintenance of equality and the development of virtue. With virtue and equality, therefore, you have a compass that can guide you in the midst of the storms of all passions and the whirlpool of intrigues that surround you. (73) Here Wahnich calls on Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Critique of Violence” Benjamin, Walter. 1921 (1978). Critique of Violence, in Walter Benjamin Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott; edited by Peter Demetz. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. where he contrasts mythical violence with divine violence. “[T]he Terror sought to give the anger of the people, as divine anger, forms that were neither discretionary nor arbitrary” (74). They were, instead, necessary. The virtue sought in the terror was revolutionary virtue. It was the enactment of democracy, since the French Revolution, especially during the ascendancy of the Jacobins, was the first democratic revolution. The American, of course, was a bourgeois revolution. Among other things, indeed, preeminently, revolutions must establish a new symbolic order, because people move by symbols. The construction of revolutionary values could thus merge . . . with wellsprings of the citizens as political actors. These wellsprings were no longer to be individual private virtue, but rather public virtue as socially manufactured for each person in a society finally constituted. (76) The French Revolution had to employ the Terror for the people to achieve virtue collectively. This is where this first democratic revolution departs from the classical idea of virtue first espoused by Plato and Aristotle, who not coincidentally, were both anti-democrats. They saw only individual virtue, which the polis should nurture and provide a suitable venue for its individual development. Once established as revolutionary democracy, not to employ the Terror would betray humanity. Again, Robespierre spoke in the constitutional debates of spring 1793. The men of all countries are brothers, and must help one another as citizens of a single state. Whoever oppresses one nation declares himself the enemy of all. Those who wage war on a people, in order to halt the progress of liberty and destroy the rights of man, must be pursued everywhere not as ordinary enemies, but as assassins and rebel brigands. (87) Wahnich, Sophie. 2003 (2012). In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution. Translated by David Fernbach with a Forward by Slavoj Zizek. New York, NY: Verso. As Luke Howie (2012) Howie, Luke. 2012. Witness to Terror: Understanding the Meaning and Consequence of Terrorism. New York, NY: Palgrave. has pointed out, there is no terror without fear. What always remains at issue is who fears whom. The French Terror made the ruling class afraid. This same ruling class had oppressed the people for twelve centuries. Today, Robespierre’s adjuration of 1793 is even more apposite. Global humanity exists in the twenty-first century in a sense far more concretely than it could in the eighteenth century. The ruling class always fears the masses, and so it takes enormous measures to surveille them, distract them, and control them. Surveillance of their communications allows surveillance of ideas, and cyber surveillance allows interruption of ideas, hence theft of consciousness.  Lecture 4 The previous Lecture 3 recounted the French people’s war against their long time oppressors, the ruling class of France. This lecture and the next will look at the war carried out by today’s ruling class. This lecture concerns the ruling class war of terror against people outside the United States. A news analysis article (122013 Washington’s Wedding Album from Hell) is appended at the end of the lecture as an illustration of a small part of this war of terror. It focuses on US attacks of wedding parties. Such attacks and similar ones against funerals and other public rituals get the typical US media treatment if they are mentioned at all. The establishment media characterizes these mass murders as mistakes. Of course, they are too numerous and frequent, downright common, to really qualify as mistakes. So, I draw the obvious conclusion: they are not mistakes. They should be understood as intentional and part of the overall strategy of the war. A terror war is most effective when it uses unexpected attacks. Unpreparedness makes for the most terror. That is because unexpected violence is not only traumatic but has a special message attached to it by its perpetrators: “We can get to you at any time, when you least expect it.” This is apparent in some of the most thorough going terror campaigns such as the terror against the freed slaves in the American South who were subject to Night Riders (KKK and similar organizations), lynching, and arbitrary assault by Whites, both official and civilian. The goal in terror wars is not victory but control. Control here means to pacify, not conquer. States cannot conquer populations, only other states. That is why the US military will not and cannot gain victory in its current operations—there is no one to surrender. Their purpose is to spread terror and use terror to pacify. Pacification entails suppression of resistance and dissent. That is why US operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries appear as combinations of military and police operations. Everyone must submit. That is the lesson from attacking weddings. Ceremonies like weddings and funerals are rites of passage. Their repeated re-enactment according to traditional rules reaffirms the prevailing social order of a society. A main function is to ensure social stability. Targeting their performance undermines social solidarity and adherence to the norms and values of a society. Attacking such ceremonies increases the anomie of the targeted society, and of course, thereby makes resistance less likely and less effective as the targeted societies’ social solidarity loosens. US attacks are meant to terrify and subjugate populations. They are not accidental but part of a policy of pacification. The US Army used the same strategies in its prolonged, genocidal campaigns against societies of native peoples in North America, augmented by large detention centers, latterly called “reservations.” The news item is below.  Tomgram: Engelhardt, Washington's Wedding Album From Hell By Tom Engelhardt Posted on December 20, 2013, Printed on December 20, 2013 http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175787/ [ “Bride and Boom!” We’re Number One... In Obliterating Wedding Parties By Tom Engelhardt The headline -- “Bride and Boom!” -- was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half.  Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post.  The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud.  As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.” It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners -- “terror” or “al-Qaeda suspects” -- in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them.  Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers.  Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege.  The media would descend.  The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House.  You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days. And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that. But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones?  No such luck, so if you’re a Murdoch tabloid, it’s open season, no consequences guaranteed.  As it happens, “Bride and Boom!” isn’t even an original.  It turns out to be a stock Post headline.  Google it and you’ll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for “the first bomb-making husband and wife,” two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a “bride,” decked out in a “princess-style wedding gown,” with her “groom.” Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male “terrorists” in a “nutty nuptial party.”  Ba-boom! As it happened, the article by Andy Soltis accompanying the Post headline last week began quite inaccurately.  “A U.S. drone strike targeting al-Qaeda militants in Yemen,” went the first line, “took out an unlikely target on Thursday -- a wedding party heading to the festivities.” Soltis can, however, be forgiven his ignorance.  In this country, no one bothers to count up wedding parties wiped out by U.S. air power.  If they did, Soltis would have known that the accurate line, given the history of U.S. war-making since December 2001 when the first party of Afghan wedding revelers was wiped out (only two women surviving), would have been: “A U.S. drone... took out a likely target.” After all, by the count of TomDispatch, this is at least the eighth wedding party reported wiped out, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began and it extends the extermination of wedding celebrants from the air to a third country -- six destroyed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and now the first in Yemen.  And in all those years, reporters covering these “incidents” never seem to notice that similar events had occurred previously.  Sometimes whole wedding parties were slaughtered, sometimes just the bride or groom’s parties were hit. Estimated total dead from the eight incidents: almost 300 Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemenis.  And keep in mind that, in these years, weddings haven’t been the only rites hit.  U.S. air power has struck gatherings ranging from funerals to a baby-naming ceremony. The only thing that made the Yemeni incident unique was the drone.  The previous strikes were reportedly by piloted aircraft. Non-tabloid papers were far more polite in their headlines and accounts, though they did reflect utter confusion about what had happened in a distant part of distant Yemen.  The wedding caravan of vehicles was going to a wedding -- or coming back.  Fifteen were definitively dead.  Or 11.  Or 13.  Or 14.  Or 17.  The attacking plane had aimed for al-Qaeda targets and hit the wedding party “by mistake.”  Or al-Qaeda “suspects” had been among the wedding party, though all reports agree that innocent wedding goers died.  Accounts of what happened from Yemeni officials differed, even as that country’s parliamentarians demanded an end to the U.S. drone campaign in their country.  The Obama administration refused to comment.  It was generally reported that this strike, like others before it, had -- strangely enough -- upset Yemenis and made them more amenable to the propaganda of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. In the end, reports on a wedding slaughter in a distant land are generally relegated to the inside pages of the paper and passing notice on the TV news, an event instantly trumped by almost anything whatsoever -- a shooting in a school anywhere in the U.S., snow storms across the Northeast, you name it -- and promptly buried and forgotten. And yet, in a country that tends to value records, this represents record-making material.  After all, what are the odds of knocking off all or parts of eight wedding parties in the space of a little more than a decade (assuming, of course, that the destruction of other wedding parties or the killing of other wedding goers in America’s distant war zones hasn’t gone unreported).  If the Taliban or the Iranians or the North Koreans had piled up such figures -- and indeed the Taliban has done wedding damage via roadside bombs and suicide bombers -- we would know just what to think of them.  We would classify them as barbarians, savages, evildoers. You might imagine that such a traffic jam of death and destruction would at least merit some longer-term attention, thought, analysis, or discussion here.  But with the rarest of exceptions, it’s nowhere to be found, right, left, or center, in Washington or Topeka, in everyday conversation or think-tank speak.  And keep in mind that we’re talking about a country where the slaughter of innocents -- in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities, workplaces and movie theaters, parking lots and naval shipyards -- is given endless attention, carefully toted up, discussed and debated until “closure” is reached. And yet no one here even thinks to ask how so many wedding parties in foreign lands could be so repeatedly taken out.  Is the U.S. simply targeting weddings purposely?  Not likely.  Could it reflect the fact that, despite all the discussion of the “surgical precision” of American air power, pilots have remarkably little idea what’s really going on below them or who exactly, in lands where American intelligence must be half-blind, they are aiming at?  That, at least, seems likely. Or if "they" gather in certain regions, does American intelligence just assume that the crowd must be "enemy" in nature?  (As an American general said about a wedding party attacked in Western Iraq, “How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”) Or is it possible that, in our global war zones, a hint that enemy “suspects” might be among a party of celebrants means that the party itself is fair game, that it’s open season no matter who might be in the crowd? In this same spirit, the U.S. drone campaigns are said to launch what in drone-speak are called "signature strikes" -- that is, strikes not against identified individuals, but against "a pre-identified 'signature' of behavior that the U.S. links to militant activity."  In other words, the U.S. launches drone strikes against groups or individuals whose behavior simply fits a “suspect” category: young men of military age carrying weapons, for instance (in areas where carrying a weapon may be the norm no matter who you are).  In a more general sense, however, the obliterated wedding party may be the true signature strike of the post 9/11 era of American war-making, the strike that should, but never will, remind Americans that the war on terror was and remains, for others in distant lands, a war of terror, a fearsome creation to which we are conveniently blind.  Consider it a record.  For the period since September 11, 2001, we’re number one... in obliterating wedding parties!  In those years, whether we care to know it or not, “till death do us part” has gained a far grimmer meaning.  Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. [Note on American air power and wedding parties: TomDispatch has attempted over the years to record and point out the cumulative nature of these “incidents.” Check out, for instance, “The Wedding Crashers,” or a 2012 piece, “It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There.” What follows, gathered by TomDispatch’s Erika Eichelberger, are links to the other seven wedding massacres with brief descriptions of what is known: December 29, 2001, Paktia Province, Afghanistan (more than 100 revelers die in a village in Eastern Afghanistan after an attack by B-52 and B-1B bombers); May 17, 2002, Khost Province, Afghanistan (at least 10 Afghans in a wedding celebration die when U.S. helicopters and planes attack a village); July 1, 2002, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan (at least 30, and possibly 40, celebrants die when attacked by a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter); May 20, 2004, Mukaradeeb, Iraq (at least 42 dead, including “27 members of the [family hosting the wedding ceremony], their wedding guests, and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony” in an attack by American jets); July 6, 2008, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan (at least 47 dead, 39 of them women and children, including the bride, among a party escorting that bride to the groom’s house -- from a missile attack by jet aircraft); August 2008, Laghman Province, Afghanistan (16 killed, including 12 members of the family hosting the wedding, in an attack by “American bombers”); June 8, 2012, Logar Province, Afghanistan (18 killed, half of them children, when Taliban fighters take shelter amid a wedding party. This was perhaps the only case among the eight wedding incidents in which the U.S. offered an apology).] Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story. Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt © 2013 TomDispatch. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175787/  Lecture 5 This lecture discusses the use of terror to pacify the US population. Imperialism faces in two directions, one outward and the other inward. Its outward face looks to control foreign territories and pacify their populations. Its inward face scrutinizes domestic populations to forestall uprisings and insurgencies. Domestic pacification uses several methods employed by a variety of state apparatuses. Although the US has deep, complicated, and long standing ideological state apparatuses such as schools, the state apparatuses more obviously and directly connected with pacification use surveillance and policing. Control personnel have to keep track of what people are doing, saying, and by inference, thinking. The policing apparatuses use physical force to ensure acceptance of control procedures. For example, the control procedures at airports use surveillance, the various kinds of searches, backed up by armed personnel. Surveillance and force operate in tandem. The ideological apparatuses portray policing as devoted to the safety of the population, but policing has never enhanced the safety of any population in any society in history. It has always been used to control and pacify for whatever ruling class was in power. In 1971 a group of people burglarized an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, taking records and documents which revealed a systematic, illegal campaign by the FBI against people and groups seeking economic, political, and social reform. Under the rubric COINTELPRO, the FBI suppressed dissent. This so-called law enforcement agency also assassinated movement leaders (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Black Panthers, Chicago 4 December 1969, among others) and framed numerous people, only some of whom gained release from prison after twenty years or more. By the way, those murdered and framed by the FBI were almost all Black, not coincidentally. So, first, the NSA and related scandals revealed by Edward Snowden are not new. Moreover, they weren’t new in 1971. The FBI and J. Edgar Hoover always used their police powers to repress politics they found offensive—like racial and social equality. See the Palmer Raids (Google) for background. The FBI finally made their main mission explicit; they no longer pretend to be a law enforcement agency as their main mission. The main difference between 1971 and today is that FBI (and other police apparatuses like NSA) criminality is now legal. The ruling class changed the laws while most people weren’t looking. Oppositional social movements are crushed before they get a chance to become mass movements. They are crushed by surveillance, infiltration, agent provocateurs, and the usual police tactics when necessary. The last time a social movement was not still born was Occupy Wall Street, which began to turn into a mass movement. In summer 2011 people came together with little planning and no organization. That is why the apparatuses of pacification could not crush it, because they did not recognize it as a threat, at least at first. For a few months it vocalized the needs of people in the United States. By late fall it was crushed with extreme police violence in Zucotti Park in New York, Oscar Grant Square in Oakland, and wherever else it had sprung up. It was crushed because it was becoming effective in generating a mass movement. One of the issues Occupy articulated should be near and dear to all students. Young people who are college students today face lifetimes of debt slavery. Of course not every single one, and not the children of the one percent, but most students. It is the kind of debt that will probably outlive the indebted. It remains immovable because its beneficiaries are the finance industry. No reforms will change that, unless reform means a new form of government, and the only way that will happen is through revolution. So, that is why the US domestic population has to be pacified—to forestall revolution. NSA’s international spying isn’t aimed at gathering intelligence about military enemies, because the United States doesn’t have any; it is aimed at industrial espionage to assist US based companies in their business competitions. This is something that foreign governments and of course foreign businesses know, but the Americans, who pay for all of it, largely do not know. As for domestic spying on Americans, the only thing that is new is that NSA got into the act only after 9/11, but at that point it merely joined the plethora of other alphabet agencies (CIA, FBI, DEA (formerly FBN), etc.) that had been doing it for decades. Domestic spying by these police apparatuses always aims at pacification not law enforcement. If the goal were law enforcement, as the FBI did in fact carry out against the so-called American Mafia gangsters, the police have no problem getting warrants based on probable cause. Legitimate investigations of probable criminal activity do not involve mass surveillance, agent provocateurs, and dubious sting operations which are really entrapments. The goal of these apparatuses is to prevent another Occupy Movement. Black Liberation and Civil Rights The history of these two movements is instructive in the use of terror for pacification. First, note that they are two different movements, despite the ideological manipulation that has conflated them. Without getting into too much detail, Black liberation pertained to the Black Power movement and was exemplified by organizations such as the Black Panthers. The Panthers were once identified by J. Edgar Hoover as “public enemy number one.” Civil rights pertained to racial equality. Black liberation sought structural social change, which entailed displacement of the White ruling class. Civil rights pertained to expanding the labor force in order to lower wages. A main focus of civil rights was equal employment opportunity, which allowed millions of Black workers to compete with White workers. The overall objective was lowering wages. It was this objective that allowed the success of civil rights, however limited and short lived. Civil rights became a successful movement because the US ruling class was split. Although an over simplification, the following conveys an accurate picture. Beginning in the post-WWII period real wages rose because workers had some control over the labor market, through their unions and various kinds of political influence. During this period, there remained a split between the agricultural South and the industrial North and West. The ruling class associated with the industrial North and West supported labor market racial equality (and later gender equality) to enlarge the labor market so they could pay lower wages. In fact this is what happened, as real wages (adjusted for inflation and cost of living) have been falling since 1973. At the same time, the ruling class of the agricultural South and some other sub-regions in the Midwest and West preferred keeping the traditional inequalities in their social structures. The famous clashes of the early 1960s civil rights movement testify to the resistance of the White ruling class traditionalists. Before the early 1960s, Black liberation had been suppressed through terror. Lynching remained prominent up to WWII, and continued at a much reduced level into the 1950s. Increasingly, after the war, pacification of the Black population relied on legal lynching. The infamous imagery of the iconic Southern sheriff represents this trend. Once the civil rights movement began loosening the grip of these terror tactics, Black liberation began to emerge. It represented a real threat to the US social structure and the ruling class. That is when COINTELPRO was used against it. By about 1970-71, despite such repressive terror tactics, Black liberation gained traction, especially as it was allied with the more radical elements of White supporters and the anti-Vietnam War movement. This is when Nixon turned to new police methods to suppress them. Those methods involved crowd control techniques to break up mass protests and the War on Drugs. Black liberation lasted for less than ten years before it was crushed by terrorism. Nixon’s plan for pacification of the US population formed the basic template for later developments. Despite some successes of limited liberal reformism in the 1970s, the basic Nixon strategies won out, with a watershed in the reactionary turn of the Reagan 1980s. Moreover, it does not just rely on federal apparatuses, but local police agencies, including campus police, are increasingly militarized. What followed for the rest of the twentieth century and up to today is merely a tightening of those strategies. The War on Terror is just the most recent incarnation.  Lecture 6 In one of his novels from the inter-war period, Eric Ambler had one of his characters say “people think armies make wars. They don’t. Banks make wars.” All wars, or all armed conflicts if you prefer something more general, begin with a goal of material gain—wealth. There are intermediate objectives along the way: control of trade routes, control of natural resources, control of populations, and so on. Note the recurrence of the word ‘control’. Control of something is an objective along the way to garner wealth. Wars are group efforts. Individuals don’t make wars; they have conflicts, sometimes violent ones, occasionally lethal one, but they don’t make wars. For a while, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly countries conducted wars. So, the First World War was an armed conflict between England, France, and Russia (mainly), the Allies, on one side versus Austria-Hungary and Germany, the Central Powers, on the other. Toward the end, Russia dropped out and the United States joined in. Each country was led by a state apparatus. The state apparatuses mobilized the resources of their respective countries. Historians and others still puzzle over why the war happened. There seemed to be no fundamental, intrinsic antagonism, or even multiple antagonisms. Nonetheless, states mobilized their populations to use industrial techniques to slaughter each other. Interestingly, it was the last major armed conflict in which most casualties were military personnel, not civilians. Sometimes, not always, one can figure out the causes of something by the effects. Using that heuristic, WWI looks like the final mopping up triumph of the political ascendance of the bourgeois (capitalist) class. After the war the last vestiges of aristocratic political rule disappeared. Capital stood astride the globe as the only economic system with a peculiar form of state capitalism clothed as socialism in the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union). Bourgeois political institutions took over as variations of representative forms of government. So, one can look at the First World War as a way to solidify global control by capital. The centers of capital were in Western Europe, the United States, Japan, and those outlying settlement countries of the British Empire—Australia and Canada. The rest of the world—Africa, Asia, and Latin America—were in some form of colonial bondage to the centers of capital. The colonial powers maintained their control mostly by economic means, but sometimes resorted to force when faced with serious resistance. They used terror tactics, what later came to be called counterinsurgency. Of course, in the usual turn about, they called those who resisted their control terrorists. Globalization did not start at the end of the twentieth century. It started at the end of the nineteenth century, and the intervening wars, world, cold, and otherwise were the decision points of shaking out control. A more easily conceivable analogy would be the drug gang wars of the 1980s in the United States. By the middle of the 1990s a few gangs established hegemonic control in various territories and cities. The global version marks the history of the world since the 1870s. The 1870s also was the beginning of the period of neocolonialism and monopoly capitalism. Over the next thirty years the states in the capitalist center extended their respective hegemonies over Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Britain and France led in Africa and Asia with a few areas such as Dutch Indonesia and the Belgian Congo in separate hands. The United States increasingly exercised hegemony in Latin America, at first in concert with but later displacing Britain. The point of all this history is to provide context for understanding terrorism as a tactic of control associated with imperialism. Neocolonialism was a new kind of imperialism in which states like Britain and France provided the shock troops for pacifying territories on behalf of their nations’ businesses. Instead of businesses competing directly, they had their governments compete. It is one thing to compete for territory, land itself, but land tends to be occupied by inhabitants, usually long standing inhabitants—the so-called natives. Colonialism for business exploitation usually entails displacing the inhabitants, despoiling the land, water, flora, and driving off the non-human animals. Sometimes the natives are used for labor, typically the most dangerous kinds. Terror is the way to accomplish these things as the inhabitants have to be pacified. This is what Smedley D. Butler wrote about in his War Is a Racket (Recommended Reading folder). What he described occurred in the first third of the twentieth century. It had been going on long before then. It is what is happening now. Imperialism, hegemony, control, and the exercise of state power always have ideology close at their side. The current ideology portrays those who resist Western domination as religious fanatics—jihadists, militants, and insurgents. They are portrayed as relatively primitive, less civilized, and savage. The colonizers of North America said the same about the native inhabitants and for the same reasons. The colonizers wanted to mete out their terror and pacify anyone who resisted. Although the term had not yet made into English (Edmund Burke introduced it with reference to the French Revolution), natives who resisted what became a genocide were deemed terrorists. One thinks of King Philip (Metacomet, sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy), Techumseh, Black Hawk, Crazy Horse, and others who were of course all terrorists according to the conquering colonial ideology. Never mentioned is Sequoyah (Ssiquoya, Se-quo-ya), a native inhabitant, who achieved what no other human being has ever done, but hardly anyone knows who he is today because of the conquerors’ ideology. The problem with the concept of terrorism is that its perpetrators turn the term against those whom they terrorize. Consequently, those who resist terror are labeled terrorists. Terrorism relies on gaining control over populations through fear. A common tactic by leaders of states is to promote some group into a force to be feared. The leaders enlist all the ideological apparatuses of the state to construct a fear. For Hitler it was communists, for Stalin it was capitalists; the leadership in the United States have created fears of communists and criminals before they turned to terrorists. Earlier in American history, the colonial leaders pointed at the Indians as people to be feared, and later, Whites were made to fear Blacks. A little remembered aspect of Southern culture is that there was a constant and pervasive fear of slave uprisings. After the Civil War, Jim Crow was built on racial fears of the freed slaves. This is worth contemplating. White society feared its slaves. In fact, that kind of situation—the rulers fear the ruled; the exploiters fear the exploited—is a model for the construction of terrorism as a force and ideological weapon. Such ideological constructions offer two advantages to the ruling class. First, it misdirects a population’s experiences of terrorism, perpetrated by the ruling classes. People are exploited and punished to keep them in line and get them to do the bidding of their rulers—go to work, pay taxes, obey the laws, and so on. Obedience is exacted through fear. That is, ruling classes terrorize populations. People know they are being terrorized, but ideological construction can make them blame their terror on groups other than the ruling classes. That is the misdirection advantage. The other advantage is that the ideological construction tends to make people seek protection. People look to the state apparatuses of force, led by police and military, to protect them from the terrorists. The rulers construct something to be feared, and then offer protection from it. A recent and obvious example is Al Qaeda. This organization of a couple hundred individuals was constructed by the CIA. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Al Qaeda has become a global force. The presence of Al Qaeda anywhere in the world provides the rationale for invasions by the US military. ISIS is merely an offshoot of Al Qaeda operating in the Syria-Iraq-Lebanon region. State ideological apparatuses, which at this time include the establishment press, continue to promote Al Qaeda as a threat to populations. At this writing, Al Qaeda is used as an excuse for US military presence in the Middle East, North Africa and East Africa. Al Qaeda also serves to tighten the surveillance and police state that is part of the US government. Total electronic surveillance coupled with militarized policing has become the norm in the United States, as it also continues to be expanded throughout the world. Protests are crushed using those very forces. Understanding terrorism means turning upside down everything that the ruling ideology has constructed. It means jettisoning all the obvious assumptions. It means defying authorities. And of course, it means risking oneself.  Lecture 7 Torture is a form of terrorism. Like all forms of terrorism, states, through their apparatuses and personnel, are the main and most systematic practitioners of torture. The United States is and always has been a torturing nation. This is true despite its reliance on Britain for its political and legal models. Britain was the first country to abolish judicial torture. Moreover, as I point out in my article, “Torture and the Fifth Amendment” in the Recommended Reading folder, early US jurists and politicians formally excluded torture from the legal system. What this story neglects is that the United States is also a racist nation—fundamentally, historically, and structurally. Most of the torturing by state authorities and their functionaries, along with that by private persons, but condoned by the state such as racial lynching, has been directed against racial minorities. The same pattern has carried over to US military operations against foreign territories. The Second World War shows the pattern. In the European theater, US military organizations and personnel generally did not torture prisoners of war. In the Pacific theater, on the contrary, personnel routinely tortured Japanese prisoners. Although the practice remained outside official US military policies, the military leaders tacitly condoned it. Torture serves several purposes. Getting information or interrogation is one of them. The FBI avoids torture to get information because they think it is less effective. They are probably correct. Tortured people often give misinformation or information they think the interrogator wants to hear. The official policy of the US military is against torture, in part for the same reason as the FBI, but also for tactical considerations. Military leaders mainly want to win engagements. They win when the enemy surrenders. Enemy personnel are less likely to surrender if they believe they face torture if captured. The main directors of torture, even in military situations, have been conducted or directed by the CIA, which is a civilian agency. The CIA has a long history of developing and using torture for interrogation. Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Usually authorities conduct interrogation torture behind closed doors. They prefer to keep the torture semi-secret. They see an advantage in letting it be known that torture is a possibility, because if people think they might be tortured, they might give up information out of fear, and without torture actually being used. Therefore, secret torture often turns out to be leaked to the press. This leads to a second reason for torture, which is the most directly related to terrorism: torture for display. More or less public torture serves to frighten people so they are more likely to submit to control. The act of torture need not be carried out in public. It can occur away from view, but it is best if the torture victim carries visible signs of the torture—scars, missing body parts, and so on. Most of the CIA directed torture is such as not to leave such signs so it should be considered primarily as torture for interrogation. They may want people to know about it, but they also want deniability. Punishment is a third reason for torture. Of course there are several reasons for punishment such as revenge and general deterrence. Revenge uses the psychology of basic behavioral reactions. When attacked, animals, including humans, have in their instinctual behavioral repertoire an aggressive defense. When hit, one hits back. Another part of revenge plays a higher level psychology. It relies on symbols and group identification. When the group with which one identifies is attacked, an individual will use violence to defend the group, as a basic emotional response. That is, people want revenge against enemies at a visceral level, not through rational calculation. Political appeals such as those by George W. Bush for using torture in the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq relied on this visceral approval. Torture as punishment is also what lies behind the brutality by guards in US prisons (Torture Inc.). A regime of torture needs torturers, and most torturers have to be socialized into the role. Student torturers have to overcome the normal human empathy which makes people hesitate to inflict suffering on the fellow human beings. An important part of socializing away the empathy involves the dehumanization of the torture victim. This helps explain why racially based torture has been so common throughout US history. Racial minorities are portrayed as sub-human. The current racialization of Muslims reflects this just as did the Nazi racialization of Jews. Although torture by domestic police and prison guards continues throughout the United States, and anecdotally seems to be increasing, torture has become most prominent in the war on terror. That misnamed war, in this regard similar to the so-called Indian wars of the nineteenth century, regularly has produced reports of torture. Torture occurs in the context of US and British military operations, whether or not military personnel carry out the torture. That is, the torturers may be US and British intelligence personnel or civilian contractors. Torture associated with US functionaries also has connections with counterinsurgency. ‘Counterinsurgency’ first appeared in 1962 in the London Times with reference to military suppression of anti-colonial resistance groups. The US and British state apparatuses have adopted the term to refer to any organized efforts against their control or the interests of those they protect—namely British and US businesses and their associates. People and groups who opposed the British and US invasion of Iraq fall under the rubric of ‘counterinsurgents’. The US military to say whether their personnel use torturous interrogation as described in the Army and Marine Corps Field Manual on counterinsurgency. The field manual, ironically, is not the official field manual. The so-called Army Field Manual is a trade book, published by the University of Chicago Press (2006) as part of a Pentagon public relations program. Its Appendix M does describe acceptable interrogation techniques that constitute torture. Asked whether the US military used these techniques, the Pentagon was not forthcoming. Albert Sheer, “Open Letter by the Special Rapporteur on Torture.” Jurist (June 25, 2015). http://jurist.org/forum/2015/06/albert-scherr-special-rapporteur.php Based on their history, going back to the counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, they did and do use them. They just do not use them against populations they deem qualified as White. The Vietnam War was a counterinsurgency campaign. On its surface, it made no sense. Political rhetoric of the time referred to Vietnamese leaders such as Ho Chi Minh as part of a global communist threat. The United States had few if any national interests there. US involvement followed on the unsuccessful support of France’s reassertion of colonial control after the Second World War. Anti-colonial forces, which were the same forces that had fought the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, defeated French military forces, after which the United States took over the French role. The problem faced by the US in its opposition to the Vietnamese anti-colonial forces was the latter’s overwhelming popularity in the country. That the US opposed those forces militarily virtually guaranteed a US military defeat. Nonetheless, the US pursued a counterinsurgency strategy, which included liberal use of gratuitous torture, along with assassinations, and in the later stages of the war, saturation aerial bombing and the use of outlawed weapons such as poison gas, toxic chemicals like Agent Orange, and anti-personnel incendiary weapons. What the US military leaders failed to grasp and the US political leaders ignored was that they were not fighting an army, but were fighting a population. That is Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nyugen Giap, and other Vietnamese said that they could lose every battle and still win the war. They were correct. Torture played a role. Every time the US forces or their puppet (ARVN) tortured someone, added to their eventual defeat. Major General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps and two-time Medal of Honor winner, called these kinds of operations a racket. He likened US military forces to button men for the mob. He pointed out that such actions, especially counterinsurgency operations, merely enforced the interests of big businesses against people who resisted their rackets. He wrote about it in 1935. War Is a Racket. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html Nothing much has changed. Counterinsurgency is the enforcement of state supported organized crime. Torture is a tactical part of it, just like it is for mobsters in the United States and the world over. Major General Smedley Butler & The Fascist Takeover Of The US. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMEI8bnbw1o Torture is a crime in both US law and international law, but counterinsurgent forces regularly commit it.  Lecture 8 A news items prompts this lecture: 011114 Toll of US Sailors http://www.opednews.com/articles/Toll-of-U-S-Sailors-Devas-by-Harvey-Wasserman-Fukushima_Radiation-140111-539.html). The item relates how US sailors on a rescue mission to the Fukushima meltdown disaster suffered radiation sickness. The point of the lecture hangs on the difference between risk and threat, and how that difference is misunderstood when it comes to terrorism. The Fukushima disaster is a potentially lethal threat for millions of people. The risk was run by the owner-operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant: TEPCO, a Japanese electric power company. TEPCO does not face the threat even though it took the risk. As a noun, the Oxford English Dictionary gives the first definition: “(Exposure to) the possibility of loss, injury, or other adverse or unwelcome circumstance; a chance or situation involving such a possibility. Freq. with of.” The dictionary cites the first usage as follows: “1621   T. W. tr. S. Goulart Wise Vieillard xviii. 176   The couetous Marchant to runne vpon all hazards and risques for a handfull of yellow earth.” From its first recorded usage in English, the word ‘risk’ has referred to the risks in business. This applies exactly to Fukushima. It was a business risk run by TEPCO, which presumably made a cost-benefit analysis and evidently decided the risk of loss of money was worth the costs of lives, how many remain unknown, but possibly millions. We can talk about the victims of a threat, like Fukushima, global warming, toxic waste dumping, or natural disasters, which usually are worsened by policies and practices related to business. The last point comes from the fact that injury, death, and loss of property are usually worsened by previous cost cutting measures by businesses. To turn this discussion back to terrorism; terrorists, whether US military drone operators or small groups who send out suicide bombers risk loss of the drone or loss of the suicide bomber without success in blowing up the target(s). The threat is faced by people in the vicinity of the target. Apply this understanding to the currently most famous terrorist incident, 9/11. According to the official story, the risk taken by the terrorists paid off fairly well. Of four planes, three found their targets. One crashed in a field. At the same time, look at the risk from the other end, those who made the targets. One was the World Trade Center, a center and preeminent symbol of world capitalism, and the other was the Pentagon, the center and preeminent symbol of US militarism. Those behind establishing these bastions (look up this word in the OED), took the risk that someone might attack them. The ancient Greeks had a word for this: ‘hubris’. This is another good word to look up; Wikipedia has an interesting entry. The victims of the attacks were the ones who faced the threat, and incidentally themselves took the risk of working in these bastions of hubris. With the preceding deepened understanding of the differences between risk and threat, think about the threats we human beings face today and who is taking the risks on our behalf. The risk of being struck by lightning in a lifetime are one in three thousand. The risk of being the victim of a terrorist attack are about one in ten million. Annualized, a person is four times more likely to be struck by lightning than victimized in a terrorist attack. Of course, the odds rise if you happen to live in one of the target areas of US drone attacks in Afghanistan, Yemen, or similar places. People survive lightning strikes, as they do terrorist attacks. They also survive radiation exposure from meltdowns of nuclear power plants, toxic waste dumping, and contaminated food; all of which derive from business risks. Business risks are and have been for the last fifty years at least the main origin of health and safety hazards. Hazards are latent or potential threats. Unlike terrorists, businesses that create hazards try to keep it quiet. Terrorists seek publicity because their attacks against a few people are meant to coerce the rest of a population to go along with what the terrorists want. For instance, when the US kills a few people with drone attacks in Afghanistan, the goal is to get the rest of the Afghans to accede to US imperial interests. When businesses create hazards, they usually don’t want people to know about it for fear that public outcry would force the business to stop making hazards. This applies to the Fukushima TEPCO situation. TEPCO wanted to conceal the risks it was taking which created hazards for fear that if the risks became public, the company would have to spend money to improve safety with a resulting decline in profits. I want to bring this kind of situation into a more immediate perspective. In the last few decades, the US food supply has had hazards multiply. Focusing on the meat and poultry industry illustrates how it happened. US-produced meat and poultry have three sources of hazards: 1. microbial contamination like e coli and salmonella; 2. antibiotics given to livestock; and 3. hormones given to livestock. The increased hazards from microbial contamination derive from both the raising of the animals and the conditions of their slaughter and packaging of the meat. The hazard from antibiotics has increased since the 1980s and directly contributed to the evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes which cause human diseases. Hormones given to livestock, also increasingly since the 1980s, have produced discernible effects in the US population, although the degree of threat has not yet become clear. One example is the continued lowering of the age of menarche among girls. These three hazards all come from business practices in the agricultural industry, called in the shorthand, factory farming. An introduction to these matters is found at www.themeatrix.com, and the documentary film, Food Inc. (dir. Robert Kenner, 2009). A fourth effect of industry practices is more mediated and more pervasive; therefore it is less easily observable. The same practices that increase harmful bacteria and load food with antibiotics and hormones accompany careless, brutal, and abusive treatment of the livestock. Such treatment contributes to psychopathic tendencies in our culture. Psychopathy is marked by lessened or absent empathy. For example, ordinary psychopathic criminals feel no guilt or remorse for harming their victims because the criminals do not empathize with the victims as fellow creatures. Cows, pigs, and chickens are not fellow human beings, of course, but they are sentient. They feel pain and fear. These animals cannot imagine their own deaths, but they do feel. Factory farming methods encourage a generalized psychopathic value system that effectively says that people can ignore the pain and suffering of others. It contributes to a drone attack mentality throughout US culture in which the suffering of others can be ignored so long as they are sufficiently distant. The great irony of all the above is that those who decry such factory farming methods, on whatever grounds—deterioration of food safety or abuse of domestic animals—are identified by federal and state laws as terrorists, the same as so-called environmental terrorists. Will Potter’s Green Is the New Red (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011), gives an over view of this. It is not so much blaming the victim, since we are all the victims, but blaming the whistleblowers, accusers, and resisters. Upon historical reflection, the serious student may conclude that those who are called terrorists are those who expose and resist terror. The tactic is part and parcel of a larger strategy of accusing an opponent for one’s own crimes.  Lecture 9 The title of this course implies that there is some close connection between criminal justice and crime. A recommended reading is a book by Mark Hamm who argues that the best way to combat terrorism is to treat it as ordinary crime—that is, pursue people who break ordinary criminal laws in pursuit of terrorist objectives. Hamm never addresses the status of terrorism as a crime itself. US law has created criminal terrorism, but then US has in the past created laws that forbid disagreement with government policy (Sedition Act), laws against organizing workers (anti-syndicalism laws), laws against people with different skin colors associating with each other (anti-miscegenation laws), and so on. There is no international law, treaty, or convention against terrorism because international jurists cannot find a consistent legal logic or definition to support such criminalization. There is a close connection between terrorism and criminal justice, but it is not what common beliefs imply. To give a preview of the following argument, real terrorism is not against the law because the real terrorists are the law makers. Although history does not show persistent it does have social patterns which repeatedly yield similar phenomena separated in time. In the early years of the Gilded Age of America, The great captains of industry, or robber barons, of the age—Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Edward Henry Harriman, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt among the best known—faced immediate challenges. The new industrial working class remained relatively undisciplined. To control them and their labor, their bosses often resorted to the armed forces of the state to subdue their recalcitrant work force. Ideas of socialism, anarchism, and the like percolated among certain intellectuals such as John R. Commons and Thorstein Veblen and flowed into the pamphlets and discourse among the toiling classes. Battles lines were clear if shifting. Allan Pinkerton, eponymous founder of the detective agency, a notorious union busting and strike breaking organization of thugs, blamed the rail strike of 1877 on communists inspired by the communards. Pinkerton, Allan. 1878. Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives. G. W. Carleton & Co.: New York. Harper’s Weekly characterized the strikers as terrorists: THE reign of terror inaugurated by the railroad strikers in Baltimore on the morning of the 16th of July, is unexampled in the history of strikes in this country. Scenes of riot and bloodshed accompanied it such as we have never before witnessed in the uprising of labor against capital. Commerce has been obstructed, industries have been paralyzed, hundreds of lives sacrificed, and millions of dollars' worth of property destroyed by lawless mobs. The story of theft and fire and slaughter is but imperfectly told in the brief space at our command, but the illustrations by our artists present a pictorial view of the chief scenes in this terrific conflict, more vivid and striking than any thing that could be conveyed in mere words. Harpers Weekly. 1877. The Great Strike. April 11. Online at http://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/sk7711.Html. Harpers depictions by artists gave way to television images of planes striking skyscrapers in 2001. The point, however, is the same. Terrorism and criminal justice suffer from the same problem. To conceive of criminal justice means understanding it as a process. It also means conceiving of crime, law, and justice agencies—police, courts, penal apparatuses like prisons, and so forth— as moments in the same process. What was a penal institution becomes a crime tomorrow, what was legitimate becomes illegal, what was government action becomes a crime and vice versa; crime becomes government. Each takes a particular form according to its moment in history as well as its moment in the process. The dialectic is both historical and systematic. In this respect criminal justice resembles capital, which also takes different forms: commodities, money, finance capital, production capital (machinery), and so on. Criminal justice studies confront several obstacles to empirical investigation. First, definitions of crime vary, at least among criminologists. Second, there is no measure of crime. Surrogate measures like the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) measure something else—UCR measures police activity. Another measure counts reports of victimizations, the National Crime Victimization Report (NCVS). Neither UCR nor NCVS measures crime, probably because, in part, crime is but a moment in a process and has a vague ontological status—that is, it is hard to say what crime is, or when it comes into being. Without a meaningful definition of crime, criminality becomes hard to pin down, effectively becoming what workers in criminal justice apparatuses say it is. What cops, courts, and corrections personnel treat as crime is crime, and those whom they identify as criminals are criminals. Criminalization, then, describes the process by which these personnel designate crime and criminals, according to control policies and practices. This pragmatic approach has the virtue of analyzing things as they are instead of how some criminologists wish they would be. Various kinds of activities fall into the crime category depending on political and bureaucratic agendas. The history of the criminalization of drugs illustrates the point. As David F. Musto recounts, a number of pharmaceutical products became criminalized in the early twentieth century, culminating in the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Musto, David F. 1999. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, 3rd edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Technically a tax law, it regulated commerce in opiates and coca. Later the same legal logic extended to marijuana, and in 1970, a comprehensive federal law established a schedule of substances ranging from simple labeling requirements to lengthy prison sentences for possession, sale, and manufacture in the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Control Act of 1970. The 1970 law was part of the war on drugs prosecuted by President Richard M. Nixon, arguably as part of his political strategy of social control against those who opposed his general political agenda and that of those for whom he acted, largely moneyed interests. Subsequent drug wars under a succession of US presidents have served purposes similar to Nixon’s drug war: control of certain segments of the US population. A hoary legal maxim, nullum crimen sine lege, no crime without a law, comes into question only when state powers face a challenge, such as the imposition of international human rights laws. Nuremberg set the precedent. The Western allies, although less sanguinely, the USSR, wanted to try the Nazi and Japanese leaders for crimes. With much tortuous legal argument and fanfare they succeeded. Unforeseen consequences arose. The so-called Nuremberg Doctrine held state leaders accountable for atrocities against people—that is, the business as usual operations of state apparatuses that treat people as subjects, themselves, came under legal scrutiny. Granted, it took almost six decades for realization in the form of the Rome Statute and International Criminal Court, but still heads of state and other political and bureaucratic personnel began to face criminal laws in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The actual history has instructional value. Unlike state-propagandistic ideologies that assume that laws come first and then people violate them, international human rights laws display the reality: namely, the law criminalizes what goes against the interests of those who own and control state powers. Most notably, international tribunals that try state actors focus on leaders who challenge Western capitalist interests—in the former Yugoslavia, in the Congo, and other places in Africa, and so on—exemplified by Charles Taylor, former president of Sierra Leone who was sentenced to 50 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Law criminalizes. Instead of the maxim, no crime without a law, it should read, no law without a crime. The crime, of course, violates the interests of the law makers who inevitably turn out to be the powerful. The control of human becoming , and the control of ‘crime’ in particular, have, historically, often betrayed a desire to reduce that which is typically human, i.e., indeterminacy, and replace it , wholly or partially, with mechanical (if A-A’-A” then B’-B’-B”) predictability. The ultimate dream of rulers or governors of course is the impossible, i.e. to close the gap or hole of indeterminacy at the heart of human existence and of human beings completely. Lippens, Ronnie. 2009. A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Criminology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, p. 70. Keeping history in mind, it appears that the ontological status of law derives from the means states use to maintain control, and ultimately, the means used by elites to use states to further their interests. Realistic history shows that law codifies what challenges, threatens, or benefits the powerful, the owners and controllers, and it functions to maintain state organizations. Unfortunately for criminology’s aspirations toward an academic discipline, it has disregarded realistic history and the dialectic between law and crime. It is a pretender discipline that actually provides intellectual foundation for elite ideologies, because it fails to examine the ontology of law and crime for ideological reasons. Instead, criminology treats law as a transcendent. It assumes what it should take pains to demonstrate. Terrorism and criminal justice turn out to be the study of the same thing, elite control.  Lecture 10 We live in a looking glass world. In it, we see things upside down and backward. Nonetheless, like Alice when she went through the looking glass, there is a logic to it. It seems rational, it appears to make sense. But it only makes sense by distortion, removal, and invention of facts. In 1965, John LeCarre published The Looking Glass War (NY: Putnam), a spy novel in the Cold War. The Cold War was supposed to be one with two sides: East versus West, communist versus capitalist, and as always in wars, good versus evil. Supposedly, it mattered which side one was on. This and some of LeCarre’s subsequent novels showed that it wasn’t so easy to tell the sides. I have a book that came out in 2014, Dialectics in Social Thought: The Present Crisis (NY: Palgrave Macmillan). Dialectics is a way of thinking about things that oppose one another. It shows how opposites necessarily interact, just like the sides in the Cold War. Thinking dialectically allows us to see through the oppositions, to understand them as part of a larger whole, and therefore reveals ways to get out of the oppositional trap. Present terrorism studies and criminal justice studies do not employ dialectical thinking and so remain forever trapped. In this lecture I want to discuss ways to get out of the trap for both these fields of study. First, criminal justice studies got into their trap because of the circumstances of the birth of the discipline. Criminology had been around for a long time before criminal justice emerged in the 1970s. The study of crime goes back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Criminology has been a part of sociology in the United States since the early Chicago School that began with the twentieth century. The study was of crime as a social phenomenon. Especially following the Second World War, scholars and experts in criminology, penology, and criminal law advised policy makers and informed the public at large. Something changed beginning in the late 1960s and became clear by the early 1970s. By ‘becoming clear’ I mean that new ideas got translated into new policies that took a very different direction than what US society had been following up to that time. The effects were easy to see: geometric growth in prison populations and ramped up growth of police forces, both public and private. Another important factor was the growth of federal criminal laws and the concomitant growth of federal law enforcement—FBI, DEA, and the like. An obvious consequence of growth in laws, police, and punishment means a growth in crime and criminals. Of course, it’s only obvious when people think dialectically. Dialectical thinking rejects linear causality. It says, in effect, that it is pointless to ask whether more laws and police cause more crime and criminals or whether it was vice versa. Either way, dialectics says it’s the wrong way to analyze it. Whether or not there was more or less crime before or after 1970 or 1980 is impossible to answer, not the least because there is no measure of crime—just measures of police activity like the UCR or reports of certain kinds of victimization like the NCVS. In such circumstances the perception of the amount of crime can only be anecdotal, not systematic or scientific. Anecdotal evidence reflects how people feel about crime. Do they feel more or less safe? Such feelings, however, are subject to manipulation by various interests and authorities. What we do know about the late 1960s into the 1970s is that it was a time of social ferment and upheaval in which authorities and established interests were threatened. The civil rights movement as a movement, that is, as a socially organized campaign for change in the structure of racial relations, began in the post-WWII era. Tactics and strategies changed and varied depending on the period—mid-1950s, early 1970s, or the like—and what sector of the movement was leading it—middle-class reformers, Black nationalists, radicals, and so on. Nonetheless, the movement threatened a pillar of US society which was founded on racially based exploitation. At its most basic level, the civil rights movement sought liberation. By the mid-1960s the quest for racial liberation was joined by a quest for liberation from militarism and imperialism, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and a variety of cultural and lifestyle liberation movements, which are neatly summed up by “sex, drugs, and rock n roll.” The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the formation of other liberation movements such as women’s liberation and gay liberation. Taken together, these movements threatened the foundation of society. They particularly threatened those few elite members of society who were at the top of the social pyramid—the ruling class. Moreover, the form these movements used typically involved mass social protest. Mass social protest is by definition disorderly. So, society as a whole appeared less orderly. This is where policing comes in. The primary role of police in any society throughout history is to keep order, which means at base, to maintain the prevailing social order. Those at the top must be protected from those at the bottom. Notice that it is not the other way around. The police do not protect those at the bottom from those at the top. The same holds true between all the in-between strata of the social hierarchy—it is not just the 1% versus the 99% (although it is that). It is the 20% versus the 80%, the .001 versus the 99.999%, the 40% versus the 60%, and so on. Those people a rung above worry about those a rung below, and those above rely on the police to protect them. Poor people are made to appear dangerous while rich people are made safe. This is part of the looking glass world. Therefore, when it comes to criminal laws, law enforcement, and punishment; relations among people are class relations. A person higher in the social pyramid uses the law against a person in a lower position, and therefore their relationship is a class relation in which the criminal law is a contributing force. The academic discipline of criminal justice largely ignores these realities. It more than ignores them. It occludes them. That is because the academic discipline of criminal justice was created as part of the ideological state apparatus to reinforce the class and status hierarchy at a time when those at the top were threatened. Without getting into the finer historical details, the story goes like this. By the latter 1960s, the threat of social upheaval was obvious. Various committees, commissions, and think tanks began to study what could be done to quell the disturbance. Among them was the Presidents Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which LBJ formed in 1965 (see also the Law Enforcement assistance Act of 1965) and which issued its report in 1967. Among its recommendations was one to give federal funds to improve law enforcement. Congress established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. In addition to giving federal funds for expanded police personnel, equipment including computers for record keeping, and training and equipment for crowd control (read as suppressing public protests), it provided money for education and training of police personnel. At first it targeted police personnel who took courses at community colleges. Following a kind of Parkinson’s law, such police training programs swiftly grew into four year degree programs and then into graduate up to doctoral programs in the new field of criminal justice. That is how the academic discipline of criminal justice was born. It came from attempts by the ruling class to control social and political protests and threats to the social structure. Right from the beginning it was designed to hide this fact. It used several tried and true tactics in its mission. It neglected its own history, presenting itself as having sprung from purely intellectual concerns and the need to study crime and policing. Its research methods emphasized increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques which by their definition are highly abstract—that is, withdrawn from reality. In general and overall, it did what philosophers call begging the question: it assumed what it needed to prove. Most importantly, it assumed the criminal law as an absolute and then investigated deviations from it. Look at criminal justice textbooks and you will find definitions of ‘crime’ like “acts in violation of the law.” Such definitions are not only tautological, they divert attention from questioning the law itself. When not in the looking glass world we see that law and crime engender each other and they interrogate each other. Looked at that way, changes the kinds of questions usually addressed in criminal justice. Instead of asking who commits crime and why, how can we control crime, and so on; we would ask what kinds of societies have laws that make certain things illegal, under what social structures are some people criminalized and why, etc. Questions such as these could turn criminal justice into an academic discipline. The same strategy can be applied to the study of terrorism. If I point a gun, bomb, missile, or drone at you, I terrorize you to get you to do what I want. If I blow you away with such weapons, I get observers to do what I want for fear I will do it to them. All states, from ancient empires to today are organizations of control. That is their nature. Ultimately, they all rely on terror to sustain their control. States use two strategies to control: force and persuasion. The states establish apparatuses to carry out these strategies. Police and militaries are apparatuses of force. Academies, universities, academic disciplines, foundations, and various kinds of corporate entities, RAND for example; are apparatuses of persuasion. All academic efforts operate within a prevailing ideology. An ideology is a world view that sets forth the terms by which to judge what is true and false. Therefore, educational organizations are ideological state apparatuses. Think about your own elementary schooling. You not only learned things like how to read and calculate, but you also learned how to judge things in the world. You learned the prevailing ideology. Just as you learn to button your shirt, ride a bicycle, or get in line, you also learn the prevailing ideology. The state ideological apparatuses make sure that people can only think about terrorists who are not part of the state that controls their lives. They learn that only the enemies of that state can be terrorists. But force can be resisted. We can just say no. Ideology can be resisted too. It is not total mind control. We can think outside ideology. We can think critically. We can ask, who are the real terrorists, state appratchiks or those who resist them? We can think dialectically.