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

Nation-Building Fuckups

From Fintan O'toole in the NYRB on two books recently written about the US and Afghanistan:

The overlap between the failures of America’s own democracy and of its mission in Afghanistan is nowhere clearer than in the creation of a kleptocracy. One of the most basic functions of a democratic system is ensuring accountability for the use of public money. The Americans knew when they entered Afghanistan that corruption was already widespread. Their main response was to feed it with billions of taxpayers’ dollars. This was not naive or innocent. It too was policy. It was based on an article of faith for conservative Americans: trickle-down economics. If, in the US, you believed that it did not matter if some people became filthy rich by dubious means because some of their wealth would leak out to ordinary folk, why not apply that to Afghanistan?

In his SIGAR interview, Boucher said that it was better to funnel the vast sums of US aid to Afghan power brokers who “would probably take 20 percent for personal use” than to give it to “a bunch of expensive American experts.” He said, “I want it to disappear in Afghanistan, rather than in the Beltway. Probably in the end it is going to make sure that more of the money gets to some villager, maybe through five layers of corrupt officials, but still gets to some villager.”

Particularly striking here is Boucher’s assumption that genteel corruption is as endemic in Washington as the more flagrant kind is in Afghanistan. A democracy that cannot create accountability for the use of public money at home could not do so in a faraway society. This was also, for the entire project of building an Afghan democracy, ruinous. The villager who gets the last drops of aid after most of it has been filtered through five layers of corrupt officials knows all too well that he or she is not an equal citizen.

What was corrupted in all of this was the sense of an ending. “What,” as Major Joseph Claburn rather plaintively asked in 2011, “does it look like when it comes time for us to leave?” Because the ends being pursued were so ill-defined, the idea of an ending could not be fixed either. Twice—in 2003 and in 2014—the US officially declared an “end to combat operations” in Afghanistan. On neither occasion was this real or truthful or reflected on the ground. Finality, for the US, was something to be declared, not to be accomplished. Those who do not know what the last stage of their mission is will be outlasted, as America has been by the Taliban. It is an iron law that what cannot be concluded will be abandoned. That has been Afghanistan’s bitter fate.

Biden’s fate is to be the one who gave up the pretense of endless progress. It fell to the mournful man of compassion and empathy to deliver a heartless coup de grace. And even that parting shot was botched. It is a bleak commentary on the whole twenty-year episode that the US, on its departure, was almost as much in the dark as it had been on arrival, and no less concerned to keep up appearances. On July 23 Biden told his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani that the critical question was the “perception” that “things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.” He suggested that “there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”

Less than a month before Ghani fled from Kabul, the US could not break the long-established habit of valuing a positive story more than the realities revealed by its own intelligence reports. This attitude extended even to the plight of Afghans whose lives were known to be in danger because they had worked with the Americans. The White House delayed for months the process of getting them to safety because it wanted to maintain the fiction that Afghan government forces would hold out against the Taliban. The great cloud of unknowing enveloped even the obvious truth that the circular progression of the war was about to close in on itself, forming a great hollow 0.

What is also unknown is how much this failure of American democracy will recoil on the politics of the homeland. Defeat in war has been, for some nations, the beginning of radical political change. It prompts reflection on the nature of the political order that has failed so badly. But the problem with the defeat in Afghanistan may be that, for America, it does not matter enough to make such self-examination imperative. Malkasian concludes that “the bigger story is probably how little the war featured in national life. Failure or success, Afghanistan was unimportant. Less than 0.3 percent of the population, including diplomats and contractors, served there.”

This is not a national trauma like Vietnam. There will be no great Maya Lin memorial to the Americans who gave their lives, still less to the 200,000 or so Afghans and Pakistanis who died. (Whitlock writes that the US started to count Afghan civilian deaths only in 2005, but then abandoned the database “for unspecified reasons.”) The shame and terror of the botched withdrawal has already become mere fodder for the tribal warfare of American politics, with Donald Trump recasting his own abject surrender to the Taliban—when he went over the heads of the supposedly sovereign Afghan government to negotiate an unhindered withdrawal—as Biden’s fault, and moreover as the “dumbest move ever made in US history.”

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A Harbinger of Fascism

From the NYRB, Mitchell Abidor writes about Sade and Epstein:

It is impossible not to think of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices when reading Sade. In The 120 Days of Sodom, the age of the girls delivered to the libertines “was fixed between twelve and fifteen and anything above or below was ruthlessly rejected.” And in Aline and Valcour, two libertines “keep a seraglio of twelve young girls… of whom the oldest is not yet fifteen, and is replaced at the rate of one a month.”

Epstein’s plane was flippantly and familiarly known as the Lolita Express; in one reported incident, a twenty-three-year-old woman brought to him was rejected as too old. Like Sade, Epstein had hirelings to procure his victims. The financier’s procuresses lived well, as did those in Sade’s work, who in 120 Days received “thirty thousand francs—all expenses paid—for each subject found to their liking (it is extraordinary how much all this cost).”

The libertines in Sade, to quote Barthes, also “belong to the aristocracy, or more exactly (and more frequently) to the class of financiers, professionals, and prevaricators.” And like the victims of Epstein, those victimized and assaulted by Sade’s characters in his fiction, as by Sade himself in real life, “belong to the industrial and urban sub-proletariat.” The power differential that plays such an important part in the contemporary scandals is limned in the biography and writing of Sade. It was Camus who summed up the Sadeian universe as one of “power and hatred,” a term just as aptly applicable to Epstein’s world.

Epstein’s Caribbean island, to which young women were flown, his ranch, and his townhouse are a contemporary version of the castles in which Sade’s fictional and actual victims were assaulted. Just as in the case of Sade, where the will of the victims was ignored, their lives reduced to obeying the libertines’ orders, Epstein’s girls were at times referred to as his friend Ghislaine Maxwell’s “slave[s].” As the victims in the pages of Sade hear: “no one knows you are here… you’re already dead to the world and it is only for our pleasures that you are breathing now.”

According to court documents, Epstein “required different girls to be scheduled every day of the week,” just as 120 Days records the drawing up of a timetable to detail which victim will perform which act on which day. Epstein’s regimen recalls Sade’s character in Les Infortunes de la virtue who explains that “I make use of women from need, the same way one makes use of a chamber pot for a different need.”

Epstein carried on with virtual impunity until the final reckoning, like the libertine in Sade’s 120 Days who would “commit excesses that would have sent his head to the scaffold a thousand times were it not for his influence and his gold, which saved him from this fate a thousand times.” Sade’s books are a guidebook to, and prophecy of, the Epstein case.

In one important way, though, this looking-glass is reversible: it is Epstein who illuminates Sade and allows us to read the French aristocrat with a different eye. Sade lived his drives, and when imprisoned, he turned them into literature. That literature is still read and is still the subject of serious study. Some recent books, for example, have viewed Sade through the lens of queer theory, examining his vision of sex and death, once again placing him within the framework of Enlightenment thought.

But we might justly ask: Had Jeffrey Epstein lived and become a writer, would his literary output have enthralled us?

There is no indication that Epstein ever committed to paper his ideas and fantasies, as Sade did so obsessively. Sade, after all, viewed himself not just as a libertine, but as a philosopher of libertinism (one of his works was titled Philosophy in the Boudoir). His flights of fancy served to relieve the privations of his confinement, perhaps, but they were also the basis for an encompassing worldview like few others.

Unlike Sade, Epstein did not elevate his tastes into a principle. And that Epstein left no account suggests a consciousness of the legal jeopardy any such record would create. But if Epstein had done so, would anyone have dared write of him, as Breton did of Sade, that he was someone “for whom the freedom of morality was a matter of life and death”? For both men, the freedom of morality was, in actuality, a freedom from morality, a license to inflict pain on others.

There are two nouns Sade uses heavily in his novels that sum up the Sadeian universe: victime and scélérat, victim and villain. This is the only moral division of any significance in his works—and it perfectly summarizes the worlds of both Sade and Epstein. “Laws are null and void as concerns scoundrels,” wrote Sade, “for they do not reach he who is powerful, and he who is happy is not subject to them.” Both men acted and lived in accordance with that dictum.

If Beauvoir was right and Sade forces us to question “the true relationship between man and man,” then Epstein’s predations present us with an unalloyed vision of precisely how money and power twist those relations. To change that requires an utter rejection of Sade’s philosophical system, as succinctly expressed in a line from Justine: “My neighbor is nothing to me; there is not the least little relationship between him and me.”

We need not burn Sade, but neither should we praise him. His spirit still wanders among us, and we must use him to see why we have our Epsteins.

War Crimes are Crimes

 

From The Atlantic, Graeme Woods writes about the recent Trump decision to pardon American war criminals:

Two men accused of war crimes received presidential pardons on Friday, and a third had his demotion reversed. Donald Trump has earned jeers from predictable quarters: men and women in uniform who see these pardons as cheapening their oaths and dishonoring their service; fans of human rights and justice for victims; and, of course, people who simply dislike the president and consider his decisions defective by default.

Trump’s loudest defender is a Fox News correspondent, Pete Hegseth, who lobbied for these interventions and received advance word of them from Trump himself. Hegseth, a decorated veteran, argued that these men were betrayed by elements of the Department of Defense who hobble our “warfighters” with burdensome legal obligations. “If they make one tiny mistake,” Hegseth said on the air, “then a lawyer in the Pentagon is going to Monday-morning quarterback them.” The recipients of these pardons are “military heroes, accused or convicted of war crimes,” he claimed, correcting himself seconds later. “So-called war crimes.”

The backtracking wasn’t necessary: The actions these men were accused of most definitely qualify as war crimes. Killing three guys on a motorcycle when they are far away and carrying nothing more deadly than a cucumber—that’s a war crime. Killing old men and little girls with a sniper rifle is a war crime. Killing a prisoner with a hunting knife is a war crime. Waiting for an unarmed man to walk past you, then shooting him, is a war crime. Many of these actions, in addition to being unambiguous war crimes, just sound murderous and wicked on their face, which is probably why Hegseth almost never mentions them. He never goes into detail about the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was acquitted of murder but convicted of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter. His demotion, since reversed, was his only real punishment—but his fellow warfighters found his ways so sickening that they reported him to their commanders and conferred about how to manage the apparent psychopath in their midst. “The president believes it should be commanders on the ground making these decisions,” Hegseth said. “And ultimately the benefit of the doubt should go to the guys pulling the trigger, especially when [critics] view these killings as politically incorrect.”

 

Pieces Falling Together

From TalkingPoints.com blog:

As I signaled last night, the seemingly accidental redaction error in the Manafort legal filing combined with the news published mid-evening by The New York Times is one of the biggest revelations in more than two years of the Trump/Russia scandal. It’s bigger than the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, though the two cases can’t be fully understood without reference to each other. Just as importantly, these new revelations combined with earlier reports effectively end the debate about whether there was ‘collusion’ between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. There was. It wasn’t marginal. It was happening at the very top of the campaign. The campaign manager was secretly funneling campaign data and information to a Russian oligarch closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, someone who had no possible use for such information other than to use it in the Russian efforts to get Donald Trump elected President.

Let’s review the key details.

According to the Manafort court filing, the Special Counsel’s Office charged that Manafort had lied about sharing “polling data” about the 2016 campaign with his former Ukrainian deputy Konstantin Kilimnik, a man who US intelligence believes is himself tied to Russian intelligence. Given that Manafort had also told Kilimnik to offer briefings on the campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, it was a reasonable surmise that handing over the polling data was meant for Deripaska as well. Then yesterday mid-evening, The New York Times confirmed as much.

Here are the two crucial paragraphs (emphasis added).

Both Mr. Manafort and Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, transferred the data to Mr. Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, according to a person knowledgeable about the situation. Most of the data was public, but some of it was developed by a private polling firm working for the campaign, according to the person.

Mr. Manafort asked Mr. Gates to tell Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and who has claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money from a failed business venture, the person said. It is unclear whether Mr. Manafort was acting at the campaign’s behest or independently, trying to gain favor with someone to whom he was deeply in debt.

It seems like there’s a good chance this information stems from Rick Gates, if not from Gates himself. However that may be, Manafort allegedly gave instructions to hand the data to Deripaska. The first paragraph suggests a bit more detail. It says both men – Manafort and Gates – “transferred data to Mr. Kilimnik.” This suggests that there were multiple transfers, that both men were transferring data and that it was presumably an on-going process of transfer. It’s possible that that sentence is just clumsily worded and it actually refers just to both men being involved in a single transfer. Manafort gives the data to Gates with instructions to give it to Kilimnik with instructions to give it to Deripaska. But that’s doubtful. What’s crystal clear is that the transfer to Kilimnik came with explicit instructions to give the information to Deripaska. And that’s enough.

Deripaska is close to Putin and he has zero use for campaign data about a US election, other than to use it for the then on-going Russian campaign to elect Donald Trump. Remember too that Manafort was in dire financial straits and Deripaska was hunting him down to collect a $19 million debt. Just last week Time tracked down the man Deripaska tasked with getting his money from Manafort. “He owed us a lot of money,” Victor Boyarkin told Time. “And he was offering ways to pay it back … I came down on him hard.”

This is all pretty clear cut. We’re not talking about vague conversations in which quid pro quos or campaign cooperation could have happened. It did happen. Manafort appears to concede passing on the campaign data. The Times appears to have reliable sourcing confirming that the data came with the explicit instructions to pass it to Deripaska.

But none of this can be fully understood without murkier but now quite significant information first reported more than a year ago. Signals intercepts from mid-2016 about Manafort allegedly working with Russian intelligence to help the Trump campaign was one of the key factors that kicked off the investigation during the election. This goes back to the very beginning. Here’s a key paragraph from an August 2017 report from CNN.

CNN has learned that investigators became more suspicious when they turned up intercepted communications that US intelligence agencies collected among suspected Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort, who served as campaign chairman for three months, to coordinate information that could damage Hillary Clinton’s election prospects, the US officials say. The suspected operatives relayed what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians.

This is, to put it mildly, pretty damning information. But anyone familiar with intelligence work will quickly note that it can’t necessarily be taken at face value. Intelligence operatives will sometimes intentionally feed false information over channels they know are monitored. In other cases, people will boast about things that simply aren’t true. Maybe someone is friends with Manafort and wants to puff up their importance with their Russian intelligence handlers or associates. So they say that Manafort is coordinating with them when he’s not. These are real possibilities.

So while the evidence is important and looks bad, it has to be interpreted with caution. But now we appear to have clear cut evidence from the other side that Manafort was doing precisely what was claimed: passing on confidential campaign data to a high-level Russian oligarch who Manafort knew from long experience was closely tied to Putin and the Russian intelligence services. There’s really no question about whether there was collusion. We have it right here in front of us.

120 Years of being a US Colony

From Workers.org an anniversary that was not touted by the media:

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico during the Spanish-U.S. war, which ended with the U.S. capturing Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and Guam.

July 25, 1898, was the day when U.S. ships, commanded by General Nelson A. Miles under orders of President William McKinley, landed in Guánica on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico. However, little is said about May 12 of that year, when 11 U.S. military ships bombed San Juan on the northern coast. This fact is important to remember, since the apologists for colonization want to dismiss the violent nature of the U.S. invasion.

It was clear from the start what the U.S. had in store for Puerto Rico. This was exposed in a speech Gen. Miles gave in Ponce, just three days after the invasion.

“To the Inhabitants of Puerto Rico: In the prosecution of the war against the kingdom of Spain by the people of the United States, in the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity, its military forces have come to occupy the island of Puerto Rico. They come bearing the banner of freedom, inspired by a noble purpose to seek the enemies of our country and yours, and to destroy or capture all who are in armed resistance.” (Author’s emphasis) (enciclopediapr.org)

This ongoing destruction, in the form of persecution, torture, long imprisonment, repression and assassination of independence movement representatives, has been well documented throughout the history of the occupation of Puerto Rico.

Anniversaries of invasion

Since that July 25, several events have occurred on this disastrous anniversary, beginning with the July 25, 1952, proclamation of a “new” constitution by the first elected Puerto Rican governor under colonial rule, Luis Muñoz Marín. What had been an official holiday commemorating the U.S. invasion was then called “Constitution Day.”

But this farce, called the “Free Associated State” (Estado Libre Asociado) or Commonwealth, was another U.S. strategy.

The U.S. was in the middle of the Cold War and had to appear as a democratic nation. When it explicitly had a colony, it had to give yearly reports to the U.N. and was seen as an imperialist nation. Therefore, the ELA was established to give the illusion of a certain “sovereignty” in Puerto Rico.

This was the reason that Rafael Cancel Miranda, Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores and Andrés Figueroa Cordero went to the halls of the U.S. Congress in 1954 and fired at the ceiling to call attention to this farce.

Another crucial July 25 was the Massacre of Cerro Maravilla. In 1978, two young independentistas, Arnaldo Darío Rosado and Carlos Soto Arriví, were ready to call attention to the country’s colonial status on its 80th anniversary. But they were deceived by an undercover police agent, part of the repressive apparatus involving the FBI against the independence movement. When they arrived at Cerro Maravilla, they were killed in cold blood.

Now, on this July 25, 2018, Puerto Rico is facing the most important legal challenge to its political status. What is happening now is the culmination of the process of destruction of a people that began on the day of the U.S. invasion in 1898.

In 2016, the U.S. Congress, under President Obama, imposed the PROMESA Act to make Puerto Rico pay an illegitimate public debt of $74 billion. Since then, the Fiscal Control Board — whose seven unelected members were nominated by the same Congress — has been dictating severe austerity measures aimed at dismantling the economic and social base of Puerto Rico. The imposition of this board is like wolves taking care of sheep, since board members represent the economic forces that caused this debacle.

This July 25, the federal court assigned to cases involving PROMESA, under U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, will begin to hear several cases relating to the constitutionality of PROMESA and its Fiscal Control Board. In effect, it will deal with the island’s colonial status.

Whatever happens, one thing is indisputable: The colonial situation has now been exposed and is no longer simply an issue of the “independentistas.” In fact, the outcome of the hearing might just reaffirm the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 2016 Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle case. The court ruled then that “the sovereignty of Puerto Rico resides in the U.S. Congress” or, more clearly, that Puerto Rico is not a Free Associated State with any sovereign power, but an actual colony of the United States.

 

Catch & Detain

From Early Modern Prisons blog, Rachel Weil writes:

Being detained, whether for hours or months, can be described as a minor inconvenience or life-damaging trauma. Much hinges right now on how we as a society choose to understand the purpose of detention and its relationship to punishment. Yet, we have a surprisingly long history of confusion on just these questions.

The particular evil of detention is its ambiguity. On the one hand, there is a long tradition in Anglo-American legal culture of sharply distinguishing detention and punishment. The medieval English jurist Henry Bracton was often quoted as saying that that a prison ought to be kept for confinement and not for punishment.  Yet, in practice there have always been elements of pain and punishment in detention that muddy the distinction: the reason that people are entitled to a speedy trial, for example, is that detention is really too much like punishment.

Because detention is technically not the same thing as punishment, though, it flies under the radar of both law and scholarship. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the history of punishment, the rise of the penitentiary, and the catastrophic effects of late-20^th century sentencing policies. But no one has written a history of detention as such. The legal parameters of detention are also hazier than those of punishment. We make laws about what kinds of punishments are appropriate for what kind of crimes, but detaining is seen as an administrative matter rather than a question of justice. Decisions that have huge human consequences – say, the use of cages and Walmarts, or flying kids to NY State while their parents are jailed in Texas, or refusing entry into appropriate asylee-reception centers — –can all be justified as matters of space, efficiency, convenience. It is telling that a Bush administration pilot program in “getting tough” by prosecuting immigrants in criminal court was dubbed “Operation Streamline,” the name deceptively suggesting that the prime consideration was efficiency. [2]

The confusing relationship of detention and punishment has a long history which has yet to be written. I can only gesture here some broad outlines. The medievalist Jean Dunbabin provides a useful typology distinguishing three kinds of detention: punitive detention, coercive detention, and custodial detention. Based on that, we can say that punitive detention (detention for purposes of punishment) was relatively rare before the 19^th century. In the medieval and early modern periods, punishment took other forms like hanging, branding, transportation or monetary fines.  Jails were used for custodial detention, to hold people in advance of trial, or while they awaited punishment, but were not in themselves considered a legitimate form of punishment. Prisoners of war and persons rounded up as political suspects during national security crises were also held in jail, but again, the point was to detain in custody rather than to punish.  At the very worst, jailing could be considered a form of coercive detention, designed to be unpleasant enough to force someone to do something they would not otherwise do. Imprisonment for debt was the most common example of coercive detention in the early modern period. [3]

All detention was unpleasant, even for the members of the jail population not involved in any criminal proceedings.  Even when prison itself was not considered a punishment, keepers had a wide latitude to commit violence in the name of making sure they did not run away (since keeping them from running away was the whole point of putting them in prison). Then, as often the case now, prisons were privately run by keepers who racked up fees for room, bedding, fuel, food and drink.

Nonetheless, unpleasant as custodial and coercive detention were, the objects of such detention were not considered criminals. This in turn gave them a sense of entitlements. For one thing, it was accepted that debtors (though not necessarily persons awaiting trial) should be allowed to see or even live with wives and children. Many prisons, had longstanding systems of inmate self-government, which put debtors in charge of the collection and distribution of charity among themselves. Prisoners agitated for the right to import food and drink from outside (better and cheaper than what the keeper served). They deluged magistrates with petitions about plumbing problems, visiting hours, the quality of the beer sold at the prison tap, and the need for a light on the stairwell, or an extra grate where prisoners could stand and beg passersby for money. The existence of so many complaints of course testifies to the badness of conditions, but it also testifies to the fact that detained people expected better. The understanding that detention was one thing and punishment another also gave prisoners a language in which to make claims. When a group of petitioners from the Chelmsford County Gaol in Essex asked judges in 1767 to “enforce the laws in our favor…that your petitioners may rejoice, so far as the nature of confinement will admit,” they acknowledged the legitimacy of their confinement but also expressed a sense of entitlement to some limited “joy.”[4]

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Clear Turning Point

From New York Magazine:

President Trump is still trying to avoid responsibility for his administration’s brutal policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, but a new report confirms that Trump and his advisers had been considering the extreme measures for as long as they’ve been in power. According to the New York Times, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller was “instrumental” in convincing the president to enact the policy, which applies a zero tolerance approach to prosecuting undocumented immigrants caught entering the U.S. — even if that means taking children away from their parents in the process. And while some members of the Trump administration have reportedly been uneasy over the policy and subsequent fallout, Miller is not one of them. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” Miller told the Times, “The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

Trump administration officials continue to defend the policy as nothing more than enforcement of the law, but in the minds of Miller and other immigration hardliners in the White House, the heartlessness of the policy, as well as all the publicity that indifference gets, are exactly the point. That’s because their goal is deter other immigrants from attempting to enter the U.S. in the first place, even though the effectiveness of such tactics is often difficult to discern.

Despite the fact that Trump had repeatedly demonized and dehumanized immigrants on his way to the presidency, he rejected the policy plan at first, but the true-believing Miller — who was also instrumental in pushing the administration’s Islamophobic travel ban — never gave up. Finally, sometime this spring, Miller convinced the president to endorse the idea. As a result, nearly 2,000 children were taken away from their parents and placed in makeshift government shelters in less than a month and a half under the new policy, and that number has undoubtedly gone up in the weeks since (and separations could soon double in some areas).

Aside from the plain cruelty of separating children from their parents, health professionals are warning that the entire experience puts children’s physical and mental health at risk. In particular, the amount of stress the children encounter as a result of being taken from their parents and thrust into a strange new environment — like one where the kids are denied physical contact — could be toxic, disrupting their developing brains and leading the long term health problems. The situation is especially dangerous for children under 10, and even more so for children under 5. With these risks in mind, about 4,600 mental-health professionals and 90 organizations have called on the Trump administration to end the separation policy.

The shelters are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, but even presuming that workers at the shelters are doing the best they can to care for the children, the system is being pushed to its capacity. More than 11,400 migrant kids are currently in federal custody, including both minors who arrived at the border unaccompanied by an adult and children who have been separated from their parents. More than 2,400 of these children have arrived since the beginning of May. As a result of the rapid influx, HHS has already had to stand up at least one temporary shelter to provide more housing. A new Trump administration policy mandating the fingerprinting of family members in the U.S. who come to take custody of children living in the shelters will undoubtedly lead to more children being left in government custody — if their only relatives in America are also undocumented.

As outrage intensifies over the separations, President Trump has insisted he’s powerless to change the policy, in an attempt to hide his real agenda. “I hate the children being taken away,” Trump claimed on Friday, and he has continued to repeat the lie that Democrats are the ones responsible. In fact, as reported by the Washington Post, Trump believes that continuing to enforce the policy amid the uproar provides him with political leverage over Congress and could help him force Democratic lawmakers to meet his demands on border security and restrictions on legal immigration. Put another way, the president of the United States is effectively holding thousands of migrant children hostage — and likely causing them irreparable harm in the process — in the hope it will better his chances at enacting the nativist political agenda he campaigned on.

Trump and Miller are not alone in their support for the separations, either. Some administration officials, like Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have reportedly opposed the border separation policy, but whatever internal opposition there has been within Trumpworld, it has only been expressed in private. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, on the other hand, is a full-fledged supporter of the policy. Kelly infamously showed little regard for what happened to the children after they were taken from their parents during in an NPR interview in May. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who implemented the new rule, has gone so far as to claim that the administration’s lack of compassion for immigrant families is supported by the Bible — a notion which was promptly rejected by prominent Christian leaders like like Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

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Occupation & Displacement by Europeans

From Jonathan Cook:

On Monday and Tuesday, Palestinians will commemorate the anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, their mass expulsion and dispossession 70 years ago as the new state of Israel was built on the ruins of their homeland. As a result, most Palestinians were turned into refugees, denied by Israel the right to return to their homes.

Israel is braced nervously for many tens of thousands to turn out in the occupied territories this week to protest against decades of its refusal to make amends or end its oppressive rule.

The move on Monday of the US embassy to Jerusalem, a city under belligerent occupation, has only inflamed Palestinian grievances – and a sense that the West is still conspiring in their dispossession.

The expected focus of the protests is Gaza, where unarmed Palestinians have been massing every Friday since late March at the perimeter fence that encages two million of them.

For their troubles, they have faced a hail of live ammunition, rubber bullets and clouds of tear gas. Dozens have been killed and many hundreds more maimed, including children.

But for more than a month, Israel has been working to manage western perceptions of the protests in ways designed to discredit the outpouring of anger from Palestinians. In a message all too readily accepted by some western audiences, Israel has presented the protests as a “security threat”.

Israeli officials have even argued before the country’s high court that the protesters lack any rights – that army snipers are entitled to shoot them, even if facing no danger – because Israel is supposedly in a “state of war” with Gaza, defending itself.

Many Americans and Europeans, worried about an influx of “economic migrants” flooding into their own countries, readily sympathise with Israel’s concerns – and its actions.

Until now, the vast majority of Gaza’s protesters have been peaceful and made no attempt to break through the fence.

But Israel claims that Hamas will exploit this week’s protests in Gaza to encourage Palestinians to storm the fence. The implication is that the protesters will be crossing a “border” and “entering” Israel illegally.

The truth is rather different. There is no border because there is no Palestinian state. Israel has made sure of that. Palestinians live under occupation, with Israel controlling every aspect of their lives. In Gaza, even the air and sea are Israel’s domain.

Meanwhile, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their former lands – now in Israel – is recognised in international law.

Nonetheless, Israel has been crafting a dishonest counter-narrative ever since the Nakba, myths that historians scouring the archives have slowly exploded.

One claim – that Arab leaders told the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to flee in 1948 – was in fact invented by Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. He hoped it would deflect US pressure on Israel to honour its obligations to allow the refugees back.

Even had the refugees chosen to leave during the heat of battle, rather than wait to be expelled, it would not have justified denying them a right to return when the fighting finished. It was that refusal that transformed flight into ethnic cleansing.

In another myth unsupported by the records, Ben Gurion is said to have appealed to the refugees to come back.

In truth, Israel defined Palestinians who tried to return to their lands as “infiltrators”. That entitled Israeli security officials to shoot them on sight – in what was effectively execution as a deterrence policy.

Nothing much has changed seven decades on. A majority of Gaza’s population today are descended from refugees driven into the enclave in 1948. They have been penned up like cattle ever since. That is why the Palestinians’ current protests take place under the banner of the March of Return.

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Mishra's Critique

 

From London Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra gets down to the real issues:

In the sentimental education of Coates, and of many liberal intellectuals mugged by American realities, Obama is the culmination of the civil rights movement, the figure who fulfils the legacies of Malcolm X as well as Martin Luther King. In Jay Z’s words, ‘Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on slavery and genocide. There is no doubt that compared to the ‘first black president’, who played the dog whistle better than the saxophone, a hip-hop enthusiast and the son of a Kenyan Muslim represented a genuine diversification of America’s ruling class. Obama offered his own ascent as proof that America is an inclusive society, ceaselessly moving towards a ‘more perfect union’. But such apparent vindications of the American dream obscured the limited achievement of the civil rights movement, and the fragility of the social and political consensus behind it. The widespread belief that Obama had inaugurated a ‘postracial’ age helped conceal the ways in which the barefaced cruelties of segregation’s distant past had been softening since the 1960s into subtle exclusions and injustices.

A ruling class that had been forced to make partial concessions to the civil rights movement subsequently worked, as Nixon blurted out, to ‘devise a system’ to deal with the black ‘problem’ without appearing to do so. With the wars on crime, drugs and welfare queens, the repertoire of deception came to include coded appeals to a white constituency, the supposedly ‘silent majority’. But the cruellest trick used by both Republicans and Democrats was the myth that America had resolved the contradiction at the heart of its democracy. For the conviction that African-Americans were walking and running and would soon start flying, enabled by equal opportunity, paved the way for an insidious ideological force: colour-blind universalism. Its deceit was summed up best by the creepy Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia: ‘In the eyes of the government, we are just one race here. It is American.’ The rules of colour-blind equality and the ‘level playing-field’, as they came to be outlined in the 1980s and 1990s, created a climate in which affirmative action came to look like reverse racism: unacceptably discriminatory against whites. With structural injustice presented as a thing of the past, what appeared to deform the lives of black people was their culture of single-parent households, scant work ethic, criminality and welfare dependency. This widespread attitude was summed up by a New Republic cover in 1996 urging Clinton to slash welfare: it showed a black woman, or ‘welfare mom’, bottle-feeding an infant while smoking. Blacks, in this politically bipartisan view, needed to get with the American programme just as various immigrant communities had done. As the original exponent of centrist liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, charged, they had become too prone to ‘nourishing prejudice, magnifying difference and stirring up antagonism’ – in other words, blacks were guilty of identity politics.

The detractors of ‘identity liberalism’ are still prone to the fantasy that the end of de jure racial inequality ushered in a new era of opportunity and mobility for African-Americans. In reality, even the black people admitted into the networks of prosperity and privilege remained vulnerable compared to those who had enjoyed the inherited advantages of income and opportunity over several generations. This became gruesomely evident during the financial crisis of 2008, when African-American families, deceived into home-ownership by banks peddling subprime loans, found themselves in economic freefall, losing half their collective wealth. When Coates and Obama simultaneously emerged into public view in 2008 the political and ideological foundations of racial progress ought to have looked very shaky. But this structural weakness was obscured by the spectacular upward mobility of an Ivy League-educated black lawyer and constitutional scholar.

There were signs during Obama’s campaign, particularly his eagerness to claim the approbation of Henry Kissinger, that he would cruelly disappoint his left-leaning young supporters’ hopes of epochal transformation. His actions in office soon made it clear that some version of bait and switch had occurred. Obama had condemned the air war in South Asia as immoral because of its high civilian toll; but three days after his inauguration he ordered drone strikes in Pakistan, and in his first year oversaw more strikes with high civilian casualties than Bush had ordered in his entire presidency. His bellicose speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize signalled that he would strengthen rather than dismantle the architecture of the open-ended war on terror, while discarding some of its fatuous rhetoric. During his eight years in office, he expanded covert operations and air strikes deep into Africa; girding the continent with American military bases, he exposed large parts of it to violence, anarchy and tyrannical rule. He not only expanded mass surveillance and government data-mining operations at home, and ruthlessly prosecuted whistleblowers, but invested his office with the lethal power to execute anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world.

Obama occasionally denounced the ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African-Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African-Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace. Nor did he wish to be seen as soft on immigration; he deported millions of immigrants – Trump is struggling to reach Obama’s 2012 peak of 34,000 deportations a month. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he had eloquently sympathised with the marginalised and the powerless. In power, however, he seemed in thrall to Larry Summers and other members of the East Coast establishment, resembling not so much the permanently alienated outsider as the mixed-race child of imperialism, who, as Ashis Nandy diagnosed in The Intimate Enemy, replaces his early feeling for the weak with ‘an unending search for masculinity and status’. It isn’t surprising that this harbinger of hope and change anointed a foreign-policy hawk and Wall Street-friendly dynast as his heir apparent. His post-presidency moves – kite-surfing with Richard Branson on a private island, extravagantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street and bromance with George Clooney – have confirmed Obama as a case of mistaken identity. As David Remnick, his disappointed biographer, said recently, ‘I don’t think Obama was immune to lures of the new class of wealth. I think he’s very interested in Silicon Valley, stars and showbusiness, and sports, and the rest.’

Embodying neoliberal chic at its most seductive, Obama managed to restore the self-image of American elites in politics, business and the media that had been much battered during the last years of the Bush presidency. In the updated narrative of American exceptionalism, a black president was instructing the world in the ways of economic and social justice. Journalists in turn helped boost the fantastical promises and unexamined assumptions of universal improvement; some saw Coates himself as an icon of hope and change. A 2015 profile in New York magazine describes him at the Aspen Ideas Festival, along with Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, assorted plutocrats and their private jets, during the ‘late Obama era’, when ‘progress was in the air’ and the ‘great question’ after the legalisation of gay marriage was: ‘would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state?’ Coates is awkward among Aspen’s panjandrums. But he thinks it is too easy for him to say he’d be happier in Harlem. ‘Truthfully,’ he confesses, ‘I’m very happy to be here. It’s very nice.’ According to the profile-writer, ‘there is a radical chic crowd assembling around Coates’ – but then he is ‘a writer who radicalises the Establishment’.

Peru Like U.S.

From LARB, Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno  writes about the similarities between Peru in the 90's and the US now:

When Fujimori was first elected, the country had been embroiled in an internal war with the Maoist Shining Path insurgency for over a decade, and tens of thousands — mostly poor indigenous people — had died or disappeared at the hands of either the guerrillas or the military. Lima, the capital, where I lived, had largely escaped the violence, but in the early 1990s, we were increasingly experiencing blackouts due to Shining Path’s bombings of electric towers.

The country was also in a deep economic crisis, with runaway “hyperinflation” that drove prices up, while the value of earnings and employment dropped precipitously.

The crises combined with general dysfunction: long lines to pay bills, rampant tax evasion, routine requests for bribes from police officers and other officials, not to mention poverty, lack of access to basic services, and deeply entrenched inequality. All of that had fueled widespread cynicism about government.

Fujimori presented himself as an outsider who was shaking things up, a strong leader who would impose order. Congress, he said, was obstructing him; the courts were no good either. Many Peruvians wanted to believe him — or at least hoped he would be better than the ineffective alternative.

So when, in 1992, tanks rolled into Lima and Fujimori announced on TV he was shutting down Congress, with military backing, many citizens supported him. I was appalled at the news. But within a few months, I started to come around.

One night in September 1992, I glanced out the window and saw the sky light up a reddish orange, before I heard and felt the boom of a car bomb set by Shining Path on Tarata Street, in a residential area. Twenty-five people died and about 150 were injured. My parents had been on that street just a few hours earlier. It was one of several Shining Path attacks in Lima that added to the sense of chaos and fear, and played in Fujimori’s favor.

That December, Fujimori appeared on television with a heavy-set bearded man in a striped prison suit, in a cage. It was Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader, whom police had finally tracked to a safe house in Lima and arrested. In the following weeks and months, the insurgency — which had an unusually top-down structure — largely fell apart as police arrested additional leaders.

When Fujimori held new elections for Congress in 1993, his party got a majority. He also put a new constitution in place.

In 1995, the economy seemed to have stabilized, though many suffered from the government’s harsh austerity measures, and the Shining Path seemed to be done with. Going along with the mood of many people around me, I credited Fujimori for the progress and voted for him. I looked away from his contempt for democratic institutions and paid little heed to news reports about killings of civilians and death squads.

That was a grave mistake. Fujimori had already taken apart the country’s system of checks and balances — he had a Congress and courts, but knew that he didn’t have to respect them. In the following years, when the Constitutional Court held that he could not run for a third term, he removed the justices who were in his way. It was a simple action that revealed the truly autocratic nature of a regime that claimed to be democratic. And when he started to lose control of Congress through elections, his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, paid members piles of cash to vote with him.

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