v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Mug Shots

Ben Durham Works

From The Village Voice:

Knowing nothing about the subjects (except that they're criminals—allegedly) allows our sinister fantasies to come out to play. Jack (2012), a white guy with a goatee, looks like an Appalachian tweaker. Kwame (2012), a black man, lifts his chin in defiance of the cop behind the camera. Heather (2012) is blond and pretty, but the photographer seems to have caught her as she passed out; still, she looks like she should be sitting at the gallery reception desk, not in a cell.

The works themselves are gorgeously precise. Durham manages to capture facial expressions as well as contours and texture with his streams of gibberish, an effect that echoes Paula Scher's maps built of words. Inscribed into the thick surface of the paper, which Durham makes himself, the writing achieves a tactile quality. At close range, the portraits take on the texture of a shaggy rug.

Durham's texts have a bittersweet subtext: Nicole Klagsbrun plans to close the doors of her gallery at the end of the exhibition. Klagsbrun could have gone out any way she wanted, but in choosing Durham, a sobering young artist whose work is concurrently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., she has signaled that she wants to depart gracefully—and quietly. "He first brought his work to me on a truck from rural Kentucky," she says. "Now he's being embraced by the art world."

Bradley Manning-On Target

 

From Glenn Greenwald's Guardian column yesterday:

Manning's heroism has long been established in my view, for the reasons I set forth in that Op-Ed. But this was bolstered today as he spoke for an hour in court about what he did and why, reading from a prepared 35-page statement. Wired's Spencer Ackerman was there and reported:

"Wearing his Army dress uniform, a composed, intense and articulate Pfc. Bradley Manning took 'full responsibility' Thursday for providing the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks with a trove of classified and sensitive military, diplomatic and intelligence cables, videos and documents. . . .

"Manning's motivations in leaking, he said, was to 'spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general', he said, and 'cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.'

"Manning explain[ed] his actions that drove him to disclose what he said he 'believed, and still believe . . . are some of the most significant documents of our time' . . . .

"He came to view much of what the Army told him — and the public — to be false, such as the suggestion the military had destroyed a graphic video of an aerial assault in Iraq that killed civilians, or that WikiLeaks was a nefarious entity. . . .

"Manning said he often found himself frustrated by attempts to get his chain of command to investigate apparent abuses detailed in the documents Manning accessed. . . ."

Manning also said he "first approached three news outlets: the Washington Post, New York Times and Politico" before approaching WikiLeaks. And he repeatedly denied having been encouraged or pushed in any way by WikiLeaks to obtain and leak the documents, thus denying the US government a key part of its attempted prosecution of the whistleblowing group. Instead, "he said he took 'full responsibility' for a decision that will likely land him in prison for the next 20 years — and possibly the rest of his life."

This is all consistent with what Manning is purported to have said in the chat logs with the government snitch who pretended to be a journalist and a pastor in order to assure him of confidentiality but then instead reported him. In those chats, Manning explained that he was leaking because he wanted the world to know what he had learned: "I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." When asked by the informant why he did not sell the documents to a foreign government for profit - something he obviously could have done with ease - Manning replied that he wanted the information to be publicly known in order to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms". He described how he became deeply disillusioned with the Iraq War he had once thought noble, and this caused him to re-examine all of his prior assumptions about the US government. And he extensively narrated how he had learned of serious abuse and illegality while serving in the war - including detaining Iraqi citizens guilty of nothing other than criticizing the Malaki government - but was ignored when he brought those abuses to his superiors.

Manning is absolutely right when he said today that the documents he leaked "are some of the most significant documents of our time". They revealed a multitude of previously secret crimes and acts of deceit and corruption by the world's most powerful factions. Journalists and even some government officials have repeatedly concluded that any actual national security harm from his leaks is minimal if it exists at all. To this day, the documents Manning just admitted having leaked play a prominent role in the ability of journalists around the world to inform their readers about vital events. The leaks led to all sorts of journalism awards for WikiLeaks. Without question, Manning's leaks produced more significant international news scoops in 2010 than those of every media outlet on the planet combined.

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Strange logic of our Government Lawyers

From The New Republic:

Our country's constitutional culture is made up of the stories we tell each other about the kind of nation we are. When we tell ourselves how strong our commitment to free speech is, we grit our teeth and tell of Nazis marching through Skokie. And when we think of how much we value our watchdog press, we tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg. Decades later, we sometimes forget that Ellsberg was prosecuted, smeared, and harassed. Instead, we express pride in a man's willingness to brave the odds, a newspaper’s willingness to take the risk of publishing, and a Supreme Court’s ability to tell an overbearing White House that no, you cannot shut up your opponents.

Whistleblowers play a critical constitutional role in our system of government, particularly in the area of national security. And they do so at great personal cost. The executive branch has enormous powers over national security and the exercise of that power is not fully transparent. Judicial doctrines like the “state secrets” doctrine allow an administration to limit judicial oversight. Congress’ oversight committees have also tended to leave the executive relatively free of constraints. Because the materials they see are classified, there remains little public oversight. Consider the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the interrogation torture practices during the immediate post 9/11 years: Its six thousand pages, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, are “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate.” But they are unavailable to the public.

Freedom of the press is anchored in our constitution because it reflects our fundamental belief that no institution can be its own watchdog. The government is full of well-intentioned and quite powerful inspectors general and similar internal accountability mechanisms. But like all big organizations, the national security branches of government include some people who aren't purely selfless public servants. Secrecy is necessary and justified in many cases. But as hard-earned experience has shown us time and again, it can be—and often is—used to cover up failure, avarice, or actions that simply will not survive that best of disinfectants, sunlight.

That’s where whistleblowers come in. They offer a pressure valve, constrained by the personal risk whistleblowers take, and fueled by whatever moral courage they can muster. Manning's statement in court yesterday showed that, at least in his motives, he was part of that long-respected tradition.  But that’s also where the Manning prosecution comes in, too. The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.

Hard cases, lawyers have long known, make bad law. The unusual nature of Manning's case has led some to argue that his leaks are different than those we now celebrate as a bedrock component of accountability journalism: Daniel Ellsberg leaked specific documents that showed massive public deception in the prosecution of the Vietnam War. Deep Throat leaked specific information about presidential corruption during the Watergate investigation. Manning, though, leaked hundreds of thousands of documents, many of which were humdrum affairs; perhaps, some have argued, the sheer scope raises the risks. But in the three years since the leaks began, there has still been no public evidence that they in fact caused significant damage. The prosecutors say they will introduce evidence of harm in secret sessions; one of these bits of evidence is reportedly going to be that they will show that several of the files published were found on Osama Bin Laden's computer. Does that mean that if the Viet Cong had made copies of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg would have been guilty of “aiding the enemy?”

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The Threat Close to Home

From FP, Stephen M. Walt writes:

Which sparked the following question: why is the United States getting hot and bothered about the events in Mali (troubling though they are), while the problems caused by the violent drug organizations in Mexico fly mostly below the radar? As I learned at yesterday's seminar, the drug war in Mexico was never mentioned during the presidential debates, even though over 60,000 Mexicans have been murdered over the past six years and even though this violence has killed several hundred Americans in recent years too. Prominent senators like John McCain keep harping about violence in Syria and the need for greater U.S. involvement; why doesn't violence that is closer to home and that affects Americans more directly get equal or greater attention?   To say nothing of the effects that Mexican meth and other drugs have on the United States itself.

It's a serious question: why do some fairly distant and minor threats get lots of play in our discourse and command big-ticket policy responses, while more imminent threats get downplayed? Here are some possible reasons.

First, direct and deliberate threats to attack the U.S. or Americans abroad generate more attention than threats that might kill even more people inadvertently. Groups like al Qaeda deliberately target Americans (and others); by contrast, drug gangs mostly want to make money and the harm they do to others is a by-product of their criminal activities. You know: it's just business. An understandable, if not entirely rational, reason to see them as less threatening. 

A corollary reason is the fear of "Islamism" and the impact of the al Qaeda brand. We wouldn't be nearly as worried about "Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" if it had stuck to its original name ("the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat"). No matter what your actual agenda is, putting on the al Qaeda label is a good way to guarantee you get a lot of attention from Uncle Sam.

Second, we are more likely to respond to threats when we think there is a simple, cheap, and obvious military response. This is partly because the U.S. military is well-funded, omnipresent, and good at blowing things up, which gives presidents more confidence that they might actually accomplish something they can brag about later. By contrast, we ignore or downplay problems when we know in advance that we don't know how to fix them. Trying to address the drug violence in Mexico in a serious way would require the United States to do more to reduce our society's appetite for drugs, or make the trade less lucrative by decriminalizing it (ok for pot, big problem for meth). And we can't just subcontract the response to the military, because our relationship with Mexico also involves lots of other agencies (State, Justice, INS, DHS, etc., etc.). If you're a politician and you don't have any answers, you won't bring up the issue yourself and you'll hope to God that nobody else does either.

Third, some threats get attention because somebody has done a good job of marketing on their behalf. I get several unsolicited emails a day from various Syrian rebel groups, each of them providing information designed to encourage greater U.S. participation. This is of course nothing new: the government of Kuwait hired a PR firm to make the case for U.S. action in the first Gulf War, and the British government waged an aggressive propaganda campaign to foster U.S. involvement in World War I. Threat assessment is never as apolitical as the Ideal Strategist would like; sometimes it comes down to which side has better threat-mongerers.

Fourth, we hyper-ventilate over Mali and downplay Mexico because the latter is close by and we have lot of positive relations there that could get disrupted if we went all-out after the drug lords. Sending drones and special forces into places like Yemen or Mali doesn't threaten a lot of other vital relations with those countries (e.g., US trade with Yemen in 2012 was only $500 million), but interfering in Mexico could jeopardize our $450 billion-plus trade relationship and cause other political problems, especially given the prior history of U.S. interference there.

All of which reminds us that there's a big error term in how great powers (and especially the United States) identify and prioritize threats. We'd like to think it was based on rational assessment of cost, benefits, risks, and opportunities, but that seems to be true only in the most crude sense. U.S. leaders did (eventually) recognize the geopolitical threats posed by Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union, just as we now worry about what a rising China might portend for the future. But at the margin, our ability to prioritize lesser threats properly is pretty paltry. How else to explain why we get in a lather when North Korea tests a missile -- something we've done hundreds of times -- while downplaying more immediate problems much closer to home?

Science and Guns

Philosopher Gary Gutting writes at the NYT:

The N.R.A. hasn’t been winning only because it’s persistent to the point of fanaticism or because it has a powerful political organization.  It also wins because it has a strong argumentative advantage in the political debate about gun control.

It has been able to neutralize empirical cases for control. In contrast to the debate over global warming, opponents of gun control aren’t easily cast as scientific know-nothings.  On the contrary, they often plausibly present themselves as tough-minded empiricists offering facts to counter liberal emoting.

They can do this because — amazingly — there is no current scientific consensus about guns and violence. The most thorough and authoritative analysis is the 2004 report by a panel of leading experts, “Firearms and Violence,” sponsored by the National Research Council. Its startling conclusion was that we simply don’t know enough to make scientifically grounded judgments about which approaches — from gun-control measures to permission-to-carry laws — are likely to work. The panel’s primary recommendation was simply: “If policy makers are to have a solid empirical and research base for decisions about firearms and violence, the federal government needs to support a systematic program of data collection and research that specifically addresses that issue.”  Or, as an expert quoted in the Times article on the report said, “The main thrust of it is, we don’t know anything about anything, and more research is needed.”

In the years since the 2004 report, research on firearms has, despite the panel’s recommendation, significantly decreased. According to a 2011 Times article, researchers in the field report that “the amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result.”

It’s not that scientists are uninterested in gun research or don’t know how to study guns’ connection to violence.  It’s rather that the N.R.A. has blocked most efforts at serious gun research, going so far as to restrict access to the highly informative data available from Justice Department traces of guns used in crimes.  As The Times reported, “Scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the National Rife Association has all but choked off money for such work.”

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Accountability

From The Carter Center:

“The killing of an American peace activist is unacceptable,” said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. “The court’s decision confirms a climate of impunity, which facilitates Israeli human rights violations against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territory.”

Approximately 94 percent of Israeli military investigations of soldiers suspected of violent criminal activity against Palestinians and their property end without indictments, according to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din. 91 percent of investigations into crimes committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the Occupied Territory also end without indictment. In this case, the district court judge ruled that the drivers of the bulldozer could not see her, despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary.

In response to the verdict, Rachel Corrie’s parents Cindy and Craig stated “We are deeply saddened and troubled by what we heard today in the court of Judge Oded Gershon. This was a bad day, not only for us, but for human rights, for humanity, the rule of law, and the country of Israel…Rachel was a human being who deserved accountability, and we as her family deserve that too.”

In contrast, the family of James Miller, an Emmy Award-winning British filmmaker killed by Israeli forces in Rafah two months after Corrie’s death, ultimately received over $2 million in damages from the Israeli government. The government of the United Kingdom had threatened to seek the extradition of the Israeli soldiers in question.

“I hope that the U.S. government will use all reasonable means to ensure that the rights of American citizens are protected overseas and that justice is done for the Corrie family,” said former President Carter.

People of conscience

From Gideon Levy of Haaretz:

The message from the Rachel Corrie verdict is clear: Israel doesn't want people of conscience at a time when it is doing mischief. They are risking their lives.

The spring of 2003 was an atrocious spring. An intifada was raging in the streets of Israel; explosives were going off next to the Gaza-Egyptian border, along the Philadelphi Route, and in Rafah, bulldozers mowed down hundreds of Palestinian homes, many of them belonging to innocent people. A few months earlier, a young American woman had arrived in Rafah from Olympia, Washington.

Rachel Corrie had met a youth of Palestinian origin at her school and through him was exposed to the suffering of his people. At the age of 23, she decided to take some action. She joined the International Solidarity Movement and left for Gaza. During her first few weeks she witnessed the acts of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, reported them to her family and friends, and decided to act as a human shield.

At that same time, two British citizens also arrived in Gaza - Tom Hurndall, another peace activist, and James Miller, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who came to make a film about what was happening in Gaza. He called it "Death in Gaza." Within a number of weeks, all three of them had been killed by the IDF.

Corrie was run over trying to save a house, with her own body, while a bulldozer tried to "expose" it. Miller was killed by a sniper when he came out of a house holding a white flag. After the first shot hit him, he still managed to shout out to the soldiers, "We are British journalists" - as can clearly be heard in the video filmed there in the dark; and then, in response, a second sniper shot was fired and killed him. Hurndall was killed while trying to serve as a human shield for a group of children that had entered an area where there was shoting. A British jury established that Miller had been murdered intentionally, but only the soldier who killed Hurndall was tried and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, then released after six years. No one was tried for the killings of Corrie and Miller.

These three international activists were courageous people of conscience which any moral society would be proud of - shining examples of young people who are involved and care. While their friends spent their time at parties and doing nothing especially important, they came to the site of a humanitarian disaster. They did not endanger the soldiers of the IDF in any way but the army didn't want them there. They got in the way of the army, in their attempt to prevent war crimes with their own bodies and to document them with their cameras. For those very same reasons that the IDF did not want them there, they had to be there.

Two days ago, a Haifa court ruled that Corrie was responsible for her own death. That was a sad day for justice and for international law, and as her parents said; it should also be a sad day for Israel. It is the IDF's duty, we must recall, among other things, to defend civilians in an occupied area. Even if the driver of the bulldozer and the soldier sitting next to him did not see Corrie, and did not deliberately run over her, as the court found, the IDF did not do enough to prevent her being killed.

The spirit of the commander that could be sensed then (and now ) indicated that those volunteers must be chased away from the area. This ill wind also blew this week during the court ruling; its chill made its way to the solidarity movement and in this way indirectly sanctioned the killings.

Corrie has become an international icon. It's a shame there aren't more Israeli youngsters like her. Her organization is not pro-Israel - far from that - its members are often dogmatic but that is their prerogative. The least that can be expected from Israel after she was killed, intentionally or by accident, was to bring those involved to trial, at least for negligence, to apologize and to pay compensation. In the case of Miller, perhaps the most obvious case of intentional killing, Israel paid a huge sum in compensation but, as was said, no one was brought to trial.

This week, the judge in Haifa added his verdict to a long and embarrassing list of court rulings aimed at sanctioning almost every kind of improper act committed by the IDF. The message is clear: Israel doesn't want people of conscience at a time when it is doing mischief. They are risking their lives.

And the message to the soldiers is: It is permitted to kill them; nothing bad will happen to you. When the IDF acts in this way, it is perhaps possible to understand it, but when the judicial system sanctions this, it is depravity. Behold, Rachel, behold - your death was not in vain. It at least revealed , once again, that the Israeli judicial system is a partner to the foul deeds.

The Story as We Know It

From Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Markets all over the world freaked out over the prospect of having ignorant European voters meddling in the recovery process the geniuses of the high finance world had already painstakingly laid out for them. The model for economic progress in the financial bubble era, after all, is supposed to go something like this:

1. Let banks inflate massive asset bubbles with the aid of cheap or even free government cash, and tons of leverage;
2. Before it all explodes, carve out gigantic sums for bonuses and compensation for the companies that inflated those bubbles;
3. After it explodes, get the various governments to bail those companies out;
4. Pay for it all by slashing services to what’s left of the middle class.

This is the model we used in America. We had a monster asset bubble based on phony mortgages, which Wall Street was allowed to inflate to spectacular dimensions with minimal reserve capital, huge amounts of leverage, and tons of fraud for good measure. When that bubble exploded, we first rescued the banks who inflated the thing in the first place, and then our plan for paying for it mostly revolved around folks like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie, who made great political hay by trying to take an ax to "entitlements" like health care and retirement benefits.

They're replaying the same script in Europe, sort of. The causes of crises in places like Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy vary somewhat and are less simple to define, but a common denominator in all of them is weak growth mixed with giant budget deficits.

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Shredded Social Contract

From The Guardian:

In Cartagena, Molina successfully launched this dialogue, with leaders of the Organisation of American States agreeing to carry out a technical study on current drug policy that will be used to recommend alternatives. But it wasn't just those in favour of policy alternatives doing the talking; president Obama and Canada's prime minister Harper have also, in their own slow and disingenuous ways, begun to acknowledge reality. Although Obama has been clear that he opposes all forms of decriminalisation and legalisation, he admitted that drug reform was a debatable issue, stating: "I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are doing more harm than good in certain places." Perhaps even more telling was Harper, who conceded at a press conference that the drug war was "not working".

What these kernels of reason suggest is that even for ideologues, the topic of reform has become unavoidable and that the political currency of polarisation is officially bankrupt. If we view Cartagena within the framework of a traditional war, what we have witnessed is the first draft of an armistice. The problem with the drug war, and the reason why it has taken so long for reformers to gain any traction, is that it has remained a niche issue due to its deeply classist nature. In a global context, developing nations endure the violence while the developed subsidise it, through both consumer demand and law enforcement funding. Within the developed countries a similar formula is reproduced; with poor neighbourhoods and demographics taking the place of their nation-state equivalents.

The corrosive results of this arrangement are obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. Public funds are diverted away from more worthy projects into the criminal justice system. Police are made to spend their days toiling as bagmen and bullies while other, more morally reprehensible crimes go unnoticed. Entire postal codes lose faith in their governments and many become completely alienated from those same police who are meant to protect them. Throughout the western hemisphere and Europe, the public's view of government has been subject to a lingering decay. The American public's trust in their government has never been lower, the same goes for Mexico, and last year's riots in England demonstrated exactly what happens when a nation operates on a shredded social contract.

The colonization of the Americas

From the New York review of Books blog:

Immigration detention, which is run primarily through DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE), is the fastest-growing system of incarceration in the United States. In 2006, approximately 250,000 people passed through it. This October the Obama administration, evidently determined to prove itself a strict enforcer of immigration law, announced it had deported nearly 400,000 people through the DHS system in fiscal year 2011. Immigration detention is considered civil or administrative confinement, rather than criminal or punitive, but in practice this is a thin distinction. Almost all immigration detention facilities were originally built as prisons and jails, and the atmosphere inside them is very much what is euphemistically called “correctional.”

Immigrants in civil detention actually have fewer legal rights than their criminal counterparts. Unlike people charged with crimes, detained immigrants do not have a right to a government-appointed attorney, and because few can pay for one, only about sixteen percent have legal representation. And DHS not only oversees the detention of immigrants, it decides their legal status and whether or not they are to be deported. If this were taking place within the criminal justice system, it would be as if the jailors of a man awaiting trial were then to serve as his judge and jury.

Terrified of deportation and separation from their families, immigrants in detention are often extremely reluctant to file grievances against facilities run by the very people who can expel them from the country; and there is little question that deportation is sometimes used as retribution against immigration detainees who complain, and sometimes as a way of forestalling investigations into abuses. And it’s clear that facilities holding people who do not feel able to complain are particularly fertile grounds for abuse, as are institutions that can easily deport witnesses against them.

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