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March 29, 2011 Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Intolerance "R" Us
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As
of Wednesday, I’ll be off the grid for a week. Back April 8th.
TomDispatch will be unaffected and will post as usual thanks to
associate editors Nick Turse and Andy Kroll. But for those writing in
with comments, requests, or anything else, I probably won't be
particularly available. For all letter writers, rest assured that I
read everything sent in to TomDispatch with genuine interest. I also
try my best to answer as many emails as I can. Even in the best of
times, however, I’m regularly swept away and sometimes just don’t have
the time to respond. I’m always sorry when that happens. Even when I
don’t, many thanks for the encouragement, kind words, criticism,
corrections, and comments of all sorts. Tom]
Back in the 1990s, if I had told you that the U.S. would be fighting, or escalating, or winding down at least three major conflicts in Muslim lands (or if you want to count Pakistan separately from Afghanistan, and toss in periodic air strikes in Yemen, as many as five), would you have believed me? Not likely. Permanent war? Well, permanent, for sure, but war, maybe not always. The Obama administration now prefers the term “kinetic military action” for its air campaign in Libya and in a sense, its officials are not wrong to reject the term “war.” After all, Americans (and their allies) in the air are, as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, quite invulnerable, barring equipment malfunction, and let’s face it, the definition of “war” has never involved only one side being in any danger whatsoever. Still, sometimes even with conflicts raging, it’s the littler things out of the war zones that leave a sour taste in the mouth. There’s Guantanamo, for instance, which a new, more constitutional administration was going to close within a year of taking office back in January 2009, and which couldn’t be more open or thriving -- with the president only recently okaying the resumption of military trials there. Like the Department of Homeland Security (and that very word “homeland”), Guantanamo has been woven too deeply into the American way of life to possibly go away. It’s as American as... well, not apple pie, but maybe “kinetic military activity.” And speaking of that infamous prison, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald recently pointed out, Dr. Larry James was previously best known as “the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004. “ Quite a CV, and now it seems he’s just been appointed to a White House Task Force, with a mouthful of a name, “Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family." Somehow, that word “enhancing” reminds me of something. Could it be the Bush-era euphemism for torture, “enhanced interrogation techniques”? Oh, and in the category of chipping away at all-American rights, there’s the recent news that the Obama Justice Department has granted FBI interrogators the “right” to essentially suspend the Miranda warning for terror suspects for an undetermined period of time. This may prove only a minor alteration in present Miranda standards, but when you notice that all the small alterations are going in one direction, after a while you start thinking: tsunami. If you happen to be a glutton for punishment, one way to keep up on this topic is to sign on (as I have) for “ Today’s Terrorism News,” put out by New York University's Center for Law and Security run by Karen Greenberg, TomDispatch regular and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days. And talk about gluttons for punishment, Greenberg recently sat through every day of the only terrorism trial of a Guantanamo prisoner to take place on American soil; she’s produced some of the most significant books, including The Torture Papers, on the Bush administration’s world of offshore injustice, and she’s kept an eagle eye on American liberties as they slowly wash down the drain of fear and bureaucratic aggrandizement. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which she discusses the new sense of empowerment among torture supporters in America, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom America’s Growing Intolerance |
