Jairus Grove — Living on the Wrong Side of the Redline

Jairus Grove

Director, University of Hawai'i Research Center for Futures Studies 

Associate Professor of International Relations

Department of Political Science

University of Hawai'i at Manoa

On Valentine’s day 2018, Admiral Harry Harris revealed that an evacuation plan for Non-essential personnel and military dependents was being developed for South Korea. A few weeks earlier the public was given a brief preview of this policy when almost-U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Victor Cha, announced that he was dismissed by the Trump administration in part because of his resistance to undertaking an evacuation. In his words, an evacuation would provoke North Korea and hasten the pace of invasion plans by the White House. Admiral Harris’ testimony before congress confirmed Cha’s incredulity regarding such a plan as he described the unrealistic logistics of moving thousands of American military dependents and potentially hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens residing primarily in Seoul. Adm. Harris’ testimony is not encouraging, particularly in light of Trump’s ominous foreshadowing of a world-threatening “phase II” if another round of sanctions do not produce complete nuclear disarmament on the part of North Korea.


From the island of Oahu the response is: what about us? Seoul is 5 to 10 minutes from North Korean retaliation but Honolulu is only 15 minutes further away by ICBM. Where is our evacuation plan? The already unimpressive track record of U.S. nuclear interceptors has been joined by another very public failure of an interceptor test here in Hawai’i. Add to this the lingering collective dread after our mistaken missile alert on January 13th of this year, and we want to know where our military-assisted evacuation plans are. Unlike South Korea which has thousands of bomb shelters, Honolulu has no approved public bomb shelters. This is a fact reinforced by recent statements by state civil defense authorities recommending that we all shelter in place despite the fact that most Honolulu homes are of wooden construction and do not have basements. We have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and we have received a taste of what it is like to wait for unstoppable death with those we love most.


What makes our collective vulnerability all the more terrifying is the palpable panic on the faces of our active duty service personnel in our communities, classrooms, and families. They are being told to prepare themselves to die for their country in Korea, are being issued a new generation of body armor, trained for tunnel warfare, and tasked to move the last of the necessary tactical equipment to South Korea. States move B-2 bombers to Guam to send a signal to North Korea. They move body armor to Seoul to prepare for invasion. Here in Hawai`i, we take the Trump administration at its word when they say there is no ‘bloody nose strike’ in the works. That is because we know a full scale attack is being planned. If this seems unthinkable on the mainland, consider how often you have said Donald Trump’s behavior was unthinkable just before he proved you wrong.


If all of this seems alarmist, just read the news. Another career diplomat and one of the last veteran experts on North Korea, Joseph Yun, is unexpectedly retiring this Friday. The administration’s active pursuit of war is further corroborated by leaks inside the DoD that war planners were purposely slowing down the development of new scenarios for invading North Korea out of fear that it would empower Trump to enact one of the scenarios. To further complicate the possibility of peace, North Korea has responded to the weak U.S. offer of post-Olympic talks by staying that diplomacy cannot happen if nuclear disarmament and North Korean vulnerability are not negotiable. Further, the U.S. administration is trumpeting the U.N. announcement that North Korea is aiding Syria’s chemical weapons development; this is an accusation hauntingly reminiscent of the ramp up to invade Iraq. And as Honolulu Star-Advertiser journalist, William Cole, has confirmed, Fort Schafter here in Honolulu is furiously at work on a plan to evacuate the dependents of military and diplomatic personnel from South Korea. The graveness of the situation has been publicly underlined by statements from Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Tammy Duckworth who both believe that war is an imminent threat to U.S. citizens. Finally, the troops, air power, naval power, and the munitions to supply them have all already been moved to the theatre of our impending war. To bring it all to a point, and repeat the tragic history of the 2003 Iraq invasion, February 28th, the Wall Street Journal published John Bolton's editorial "The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First." The only thing left standing between the U.S. and war is a decision by President Donald Trump.


The wrong people have been making the decisions over war and peace for too long and with tragic consequences. We have a generation of soldiers with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and permanently life-altering wounds because President George W. Bush decided to prosecute a war of opportunity in Iraq. If President Donald Trump were to make a similar decision on the Korean peninsula, the consequences for the United States would be incomparably catastrophic. Figures reported by Adm. Harry Harris as well as regional expert and CSIS director Ralph Cossa estimate that more than 200,000 U.S. civilians would be in harm’s way in South Korea, 162,000 in Guam, and another 1.4 million Americans would be targeted in Hawai’i. The overwhelming majority of all of these populations live just a few miles from the most probable military targets. Seoul, all of Guam, Pearl Harbor, Fort Schafter, are all densely populated civilian areas that would be engulfed in fire.


Those on the periphery would face nuclear fallout of a kind for which we have no models to predict the consequences. We have never fought a nuclear war with weapons in the range of a hundred kilotons. The only thing we can know for certain is that a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and North Korea would kill millions in the first hours of combat. What happens next, a potential strike on the mainland with biological or chemical weapons? The sudden discovery that North Korea does have the potential to reach the U.S. mainland with nuclear ICBMs? With both sides fighting for their very survival and the potential to draw in China and Russia, the gamble on the Korean peninsula risks not only the first global nuclear war but the first time as many as four nuclear powers could be engaged simultaneously.


Even in the best case scenario, that is, unprecedented accuracy and execution, 100 percent of U.S. missile interceptors would be spent before a small fraction of the potential nuclear missiles were launched by any of these powers. Many will certainly scream that this is exactly why we need a more robust national missile defense and they may be right. Unfortunately, this war is going to be fought in the next few months and in addition to the major technological breakthroughs that will need to occur at a pace we cannot control, even the construction and deployment of existing technology will take years. A future defense system cannot save my children in Hawai’i and it will not save yours on the mainland either.


We must demand the democratic control of war and peace now. Unlike the floundering development of the national missile defense system, the technology for U.S. war control was deployed March 4th, 1789. The U.S. constitution gives the war powers to Congress, a body held accountable by citizen voters, not an electoral college. The U.S. Congress can make peace with North Korea and begin the process of normalizing relations so that real diplomacy can begin for a lasting peace. The lesson of the Cold War is that diplomacy and the institutionalization of enmity saves lives. Nuclear hotlines, arms control treaties, and diplomacy save lives. Deterrence did not save us from the Soviet menace; deterrence held each of the parties at bay until co-existence could be successfully negotiated.


What we face on the Korean peninsula is even more terrifying than the Cuban Missile Crisis. What Trump is planning for North Korea would be the equivalent of President Kennedy thinking he could preemptively invade the Soviet Union, safely destroy or secure all of their missiles, and all before a retaliatory response could be mustered. Add to this insane scenario that we live in a world with China and Russia both better equipped than the Soviet Union of 1962 and you begin to get a glimpse of the hubris of our current administration. A decision of this magnitude should not be made in the oval office. If democracy has any value at all, if the right of representation has ever mattered, it is at the moment in which the decision could mean the end of our world as we have known it.


What would democratic control look like? To begin with, Congress should reciprocate North Korea’s public declaration not to use nuclear weapons offensively. At the same time that Congress declares our own nuclear no-first use policy, it should direct Strategic Command that the President only has retaliatory nuclear authority. It must be made clear that this includes the use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons and nuclear bunker busters. Defanged of a nuclear first strike, Trump’s ability to escalate the conflict too quickly for Congress to act becomes equal parts impractical and unthinkable. The next step should be a concerted effort to normalize relations with North Korea and support the bilateral dialogue between North and South Korea. You cannot successfully negotiate with another country while you also have a stated policy of overthrowing the government of that country’s regime. Mutual recognition of sovereign equality is a precondition to any real discussion. If these efforts fail, if North Korea truly is undeterrable and launches their weapons, thereby committing national suicide, the U.S. is no worse off than it would be minutes after a preemptive invasion. We must exhaust real diplomacy or face a world in which sacrificing a few million Americans at a time is a rational foreign policy objective. Maximal Pressure is not a strategy for peace. It is a prelude to war and it must be stopped. Our President will not protect us. Our lives are in our hands and it is time to fight for survival.


Suggested Reading and Public Evidence of Claims Made

Admiral Harry Harris Before Congress on Effort to Evacuate U.S. Citizens from South Korea
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/02/18/fort-shafter-developing-evacuation-plan-americans-south-korea.html

Tammy Duckworth Urges Evacuation of South Korea
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/duckworth-trump-north-korea/551381/

Lindsey Graham and Others Urge Evacuation of South Korea
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/04/asia-pacific/leading-u-s-senator-urges-pentagon-evacuate-military-families-south-korea-threat-war-grows/

U.S. Sends Hundreds of Thousands of Bombs to Guam for War with North Korea
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/us-sends-hundreds-thousands-bombs-guam-north-korea-threat-22804

Hawaii and Guam Will Be Targeted and Escalation Will Not Be Controllable
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/12/north-korea-strike-nuclear-strategist-216306

U.S. Envoy to North Korea, Joseph Yun, Unexpectedly Retires
http://www.latimes.com/sns-bc-us--united-states-north-korea-20180227-story.html

Victor Cha Dismissed In Part Because of Discussion Over North Korea Strike and Evacuation
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/victor-cha-giving-north-korea-a-bloody-nose-carries-a-huge-risk-to-americans/2018/01/30/43981c94-05f7-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.f4cb2e977efc
 
DOD Fears Too Many Options for War Will Increase Trump’s Confidence to Go To War
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/us/politics/white-house-pentagon-north-korea.html

Trump Has Sole Authority to Launch Nuclear Attack 
https://www.thenation.com/article/in-the-united-states-just-1-person-has-the-power-to-kill-millions-of-people/

How a War With North Korea Would Unfold. Millions Dead.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/this-is-how-nuclear-war-with-north-korea-would-unfold/2017/12/08/4e298a28-db07-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html?utm_term=.12a5b4245077

B2 Nuclear Stealth Bombers Deployed to Guam
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/01/11/b-2-spirit-stealth-bombers-200-airmen-deploy-to-guam/

F-35’s Stealth Fighters Deployed to Okinawa
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/10/24/national/politics-diplomacy/u-s-deploy-powerful-f-35a-stealth-fighters-okinawas-kadena-air-base-north-korean-threat-grows/

Three Aircraft Carrier Groups Deployed to North Korean Theatre
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/12/politics/us-navy-three-carrier-exercise-pacific/index.html

U.S. To Deploy Missile Capable Drones to South Korea
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/14/us-to-deploy-missile-capable-drones-across-border-from-north-korea

U.S. Soldiers Training for Tunnel Warfare
http://www.newsweek.com/us-war-north-korea-tunnels-775209

CIA Head Predicts North Korean Nuclear Capability will Reach Mainland U.S. in Months not Years.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/20/cia-head-nkorea-months-from-perfecting-nuclear-capabilities.html

Trump Threatens Destructive Phase II if Sanctions Do Not Work
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/us/politics/trump-north-korea-sanctions.html

Trump Sabotages Tillerson’s Diplomatic Efforts
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/us/politics/trump-tillerson-north-korea.html

U.S. Quietly Deploys Soldiers and Pilots to South Korea for War
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/us/politics/military-exercises-north-korea-pentagon.html

U.S. Missile Interceptor Fails Off Coast of Hawaii
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/us/politics/missile-launch-test-failed.html

The Missile Defense System is Speculative at Best
https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/trumps-overconfidence-in-us-missile-defense-could-lead-to-a-deadly-war-with-north-korea/

North Korea Possesses Significant Biological and Chemical Weapons Threat
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/north-koreas-biological-weapons-program-known-and-unknown

Hawaii Residents Told To Shelter In Place
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/13/us/hawaii-false-alarm-react/index.html

University of Hawaii System Sends Out Email That There Are No Bomb Shelters
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/university-of-hawaii-sends-ominous-email-warning-in-the-event-of-a-nuclear-attack/

U.S. Congress Estimates 390,000 Veterans with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury From Iraq and Afghan Wars.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-resolution/215/text

Signs of an Impending Korean War
http://www.atimes.com/mistakable-unmistakable-signs-impending-korean-war/



Russia Will Interpret a Nuclear Attack on its Allies as A Nuclear Attack on Russia
 https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/01/europe/putin-nuclear-missile-video-florida/index.html

Japan Intercepts Russian Bombers
https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/japanese-fighter-jets-intercept-nuclear-capable-russian-bombers-near-us-base/

Bolton Makes A Public Case for Striking First
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legal-case-for-striking-north-korea-first-1519862374

Steven Johnston — Paris’s Everyday Heroes

Steven Johnston
is the author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics.

In response to mass murder in Paris, Jeb Bush would launch a third family war in the Middle East. Donald Trump would register all Muslims in the United States and monitor mosques. Paul Ryan and Chris Christie would prevent any and all Syrian refugees from entering the country. Republicans gravitate to horrific moments such as these, especially when they happen elsewhere, because it enables them to articulate and legitimize their reactionary vision of the United States and concentrate politics on a terrain they think they can dominate: national security. Republicans are always prepared to talk tough and demand immediate, decisive action, but they have no real plan to defeat the Islamic State. 
In issuing calls for action, Republicans act like the good patriots they believe themselves to be. When their country is in trouble, when the nation is under attack, something must be done. It is time to act. Patriots can, do, and must act—where action is defined exclusively in security and military terms. They cannot do otherwise. What they usually want to do when faced with external danger is unleash the nation’s awesome military arsenal. They want to launch strikes. They want to punish enemies. They want to kill those who kill us. They are willing to kill—and have many die—to defend their country and its principles, burdens unduly assigned according to class. 

 Republican apparatchiks know that when they advocate for war neither they nor their families will be put in harm’s way. This testosterone-driven response presumes, among other things, that the world is susceptible to American intervention and control—of just the right kind. If danger persists, it is because those who exercise power lack the competence to wield it properly and effectively. America creates its own reality and the world falls into place. Predictably, this ontologically narcissistic neoconservative approach to international politics helped create the conditions that led to the rise of the Islamic State in the first place. More of the same cannot eliminate it. To defeat the Islamic State means redressing those conditions, but the coalition of forces America and France would like to assemble to escalate the war on terrorism would see that approach as a threat to their power and interests (unlike perpetual war). 

Those who oppose a foreign policy rooted in hyper-aggressive state violence open themselves to criticism, ridicule, and worse. To question strong action when the country is threatened supposedly separates true patriots from the rest. It means that you are not prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, namely, life, to defend your country, its principles, and way of life. This is the political slander of choice during wartime. It is designed to silence and marginalize, even humiliate those who do not worship at the grave of military zeal.
Is there only one way to understand what it means to take decisive action as a citizen when the polity is under lethal threat? How might a democratic people with a tragic sensibility approach the political dilemmas foregrounded by the Paris slaughter? For one thing, they might take some cues from Parisians. On the Sunday following the attacks the people of Paris were back in public drinking wine at cafes, eating at restaurants, watching films, listening to music, walking in the streets. They did not ask what new steps, what enhanced security measures, the government might take to protect them as they did these things. They took it upon themselves to resume a way of life they prized not just despite but also because of the dangers involved. These citizens were in effect risking their lives for the sake of their country and what it represents at its best. They were enacting and defending their freedoms. They chose to take a different kind of risk, but it too was a defense of their way of life. In doing so, they converted everyday spaces into new nonviolent, nonpatriotic monuments and memorials—to life. 

 Citizens who refuse to sacrifice liberty for security do not take the politically easy way out, panic, and identify themselves with state power and its violent manifestations. It’s not just that the specter of terrorism is cultivated by constituencies that exploit it for political gain and ambition. It’s that freedom entails conditions one of which, in these times, is the responsibility to discipline what Hobbes called a continual fear of violent death. This kind of citizen action is every bit as valuable (and brave) as soldiers willing to don a uniform, strap on a gun, and head to front lines that, ironically, no longer actually exist. Military personnel have no monopoly on courage. If anything, unarmed civilians willing to affirm their way of life given the contingencies of wholesale slaughter might be more admirable. William James once wrote that it did not take any particular bravery for young men to rush into battle, even if they might well be killed, as long as there were plenty of other young men willing to do likewise accompanying them. James’s claim was not meant to denigrate military service, but to give it some much needed perspective and reduce its status and standing in democracy. 

 In the aftermath of a deadly attack, there is always temptation to demand that the state do more to protect its citizens. This is perhaps an understandable reaction, but it should not be the default position from which decisions flow. There seems to be a sense that the French state failed in its fundamental duty to guarantee the lives of its people. Even if the French state did fail, the first question to ask is not what greater powers can be given to the government’s intelligence and security services. The focus of inquiry should be to determine whether or not the state utilized the powers it already possessed to their fullest extent. Given what is known, for example, about inter-agency cooperation in every government, the answer is likely to be no. Aggrandizing government power and militarizing the state do not simply translate into greater security. 

Activists at Paris Climate Negotiations Being Assaulted by French Police.

 More importantly, it’s important to question the assumption that the French intelligence services missed something and that they failed to detect a conspiracy before it unfolded. No state can surveil a population so that it is rendered utterly transparent. Such powers do not exist and they should not be sought. If gun-toting fanatics, whether foreign or homegrown, are determined to murder large numbers of citizens in a democracy, they will succeed sooner or later, at least on occasion. It takes little imagination or thought to execute people in crowded public spaces. Killers can take advantage of a democracy’s openness to inflict terrible carnage. This is a fact of democratic life, something the Marco Rubios of the world do not understand and cannot face. Defeating terror and terrorism requires acknowledging that it cannot always be prevented, which makes it more likely that you will not destroy yourself as you engage your enemies. 

The state is more than willing to “ask” its citizens to assume the dangers inherent in military service. It will honor and salute soldiers who die for the state. It will build monuments and memorials, write songs, and conduct rites for them. Why, then, isn’t the state willing to ask citizens to accept that there are risks inherent in the daily living of a democratic life? Perhaps because it does not feel like we would be doing anything, or that drinking a glass of wine at a café does not amount to a heroic act. As Parisians have taught us, nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to legend, the military does not make the democratic freedoms we enjoy possible. The people themselves do.

Executions: Theirs and Ours

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age. Elisabeth Buell is an Art History major at the University of Rhode Island.

There is something about decapitation that catches the world’s attention. In the last few months a number of persons from countries around the world—including journalists and humanitarian activists—were beheaded by representatives of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Leaders from many nations have condemned these acts as “barbaric.” A revealing choice of words. In the original Greek it meant all those who were not Greek. It came to be a general term of abuse applied to many outsiders and even to insiders who challenged the status quo. Today, however, no one has asked why this particular form of brutality is especially repellant. Perhaps its moral turpitude lies in its being their preferred form of violence rather than ours. Nor have Western spokesmen acknowledged that decapitation did not begin with ISIL. The focus—though justified—on these brutal executions only makes it easier for the US and its allies to persist in their own particular form of violence, thereby aiding ISIL’s recruiting drives.

To British Prime Minister David Cameron, "[t]he murder of David Haines is an act of pure evil. My heart goes out to his family who have shown extraordinary courage and fortitude. We will do everything in our power to hunt down these murderers and ensure they face justice, however long it takes."

To term this act a pure evil is to suggest that it has appeared out of the blue, without history, motive, or background that might give it meaning or increase its likelihood. Yet the Judaic-Christian tradition, to which leaders like Cameron appeal, is often ambivalent on the subject of decapitation.  In one of the most famous oil on canvas works from the Baroque period, Judith Decapitating Holofernes (c.1620), Artemesia Gentileschi depicts the dramatic moment from the book of Judith in the Old Testament Apocrypha when Judith, with the aid of her maidservant Abra, saves the Jewish people from annihilation by decapitating the Assyrian general Holofernes.  The artist focuses on the most dramatic and bloody moment in Judith’s biblical narrative. In addition, as feminist art historian Mary Garrard points out, her depiction of Judith and Abra with powerful and assertive hands unveils Judith as capable of the same agency and action in the world as is attributed to men. Both artistic decisions were upsetting in her era and the painting to this day retains its ability to shock and to empower women in desperate circumstances.

One question Judith leads me to ask is whether ISIL’s decapitations are a response to the genocidal impulses of the US and its allies? We can hear some readers protesting that Jihadi John, the most prominent ISIL executioner, or other ISIL executioners, are no Judiths.  French president François Hollande termed one beheading “cowardly” and “cruel,” He then went on to confirm that airstrikes would continue against ISIL in Iraq. These airstrikes, however, have never and probably never can achieve the precision promised. How great is the moral distance between intentional murder and use of a technology that one knows or should know will kill many innocent bystanders? Airstrikes, drones, not to mention sanctions, have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraq men, women, and children. “Precision airstrikes” is about as much as a misnomer as “humane executions.” Often directed by manned or unmanned aircraft miles above ground, these strikes hardly seem courageous. Are the arms and legs of a wedding party scattered about by bombs from the sky or slow death from starvation less horrific than an ISIL decapitation? Artemesia’s rendering of Holofernes pictures her as being sprinkled with the blood of her victim, suggesting to us that even the most righteous resistance leaves some blood on the hands of the agent. That possibility seems entirely absent in the rhetoric and practice of today’s anti-terror warriors, who operate within hermetically sealed capsules thousands of miles from the carnage they inflict.

That ISIL has chosen to mete out the death penalty, often without anything remotely resembling a fair trial, surely merits condemnation. Yet once again, who is the US to raise this objection? The US has a sorry history of lynching to which it has never owned up. And today it continues a war of criminalization—and executions-- against minorities, who continue to be exploited within the US judicial system.  In the international context, Cameron’s and Obama’s self-righteous tirades hide the West’s sanctioning of torture, authorized up to the highest levels of government.

That state governments here in the US do not make a public spectacle of executions is also—pardon the phrase—a double-edged sword. Former UK Security Minister Alan West said that Jihadi John is a "dead man walking" who will be "hunted down like Osama Bin-Laden."  West’s reference to dead man walking reminds us not only of the life many US convicts live on death row but also of the tortured death many may face as states now wrestle with the formulation of the lethal cocktails to be administered behind closed walls. Public execution may have served at least one purpose, exposing the brutality of capital punishment in all its manifestations.

Terrorists and War Criminals among Us

Steven Johnston
is author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

In July 2010 the Department of Homeland Security launched its “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, a public awareness initiative designed to make American communities—from small towns to remote counties to big cities—alert to the problems of terrorism and terrorism-related crime. Citizens were to be educated regarding the importance of reporting suspicious conduct (rather than ideas or beliefs) to local law enforcement authorities, the new front line of American national security. The program started in New York City and its public transit network, but soon spread across America to include sporting leagues, venues, and events, colleges and universities, virtually any public site or happening. “If You See Something, Say Something” seems to be a cause for civic pride, a national surveillance and reporting system that brings Rousseau’s republican dream to life: we become natural born spies of one another in the name of the common good, especially freedom.

Source: http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something™

Insofar as the Department of Homeland Security insists that civil rights and liberties are respected and protected and that the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign empowers people to participate meaningfully in their own defense, rather than subject these claims to much-deserved skepticism, let’s take the Department at its word and put it to the test. After all, there are terrorists, including war criminals, walking freely among us. We know who they are and where they live. They make intermittent public appearances. At least one of them has confessed his crimes proudly and openly, as if taunting the government for not taking action against him. They are responsible for the deaths of many tens of thousands of people, including thousands of American citizens.  They employed the traditional weapons of terrorists the world over: bombs and bullets. They ordered their enemies tortured. What’s more, they feel no shame or remorse and would, if given the opportunity, do it all over again.

Not surprisingly, the list of America’s Most Wanted Terrorists and War Criminals reads like a who’s who of the George W. Bush regime. Beginning with former president Bush himself, it should include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. The list is bipartisan. Barack Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Eric Holder, among others, should be named for their unique drone-related contributions since 2009. And since this is not a recent phenomenon in American politics, the list should cite Henry Kissinger for his exemplary conduct of the American War in Vietnam.

Since Dick Cheney made and continues to make himself the public face of imperialism and torture in America, perhaps the first trial rightly belongs to him. This is not to deny that George W. Bush, then president, bears ultimate responsibility for the crusades that produced a gratuitous war of conquest in Iraq and a gulag archipelago of torture across the globe. It is to give Cheney credit for converting the Vice Presidency of the United States, historically an institution of irrelevancy, into an effective political office—for evil.

Following the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of the executive summary of its torture report, Cheney has consistently defended the indefensible: “Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogations.”

Cheney’s combination of American exceptionalism and impotent rage mean that he can’t help saying more than he intends. It’s not just that American citizens weren’t the only ones killed on September 11, 2001 (people from more than 90 other countries were murdered as well). It’s not just that because America was a victim on September 11 it cannot be a victimizer but only a hero, as Libby Anker argues in her brilliant new book, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. It’s that in denying the commission of a crime, he actually confesses to it. He’s right that there’s no comparison between the September 11 attacks and America’s so-called enhanced interrogations: one constitutes mass murder; the other constitutes mass torture. No doubt Cheney, at least in part, offers his “denials” in public because of his legal vulnerability. The Bush Administration (the CIA in particular) was desperate to find some legal rationale for the torture it wanted to inflict on al Qaeda prisoners and it finally found willing participants in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. People like Cheney were worried that one day they might be held to account for their crimes and need some kind of legal cover, however thin, to protect them.

That day remains a distant prospect, but it should be kept in sight. As John McCain has argued, the Bush Administration’s torture crimes pertain to American identity. They must be brought to light in order to make sure they never happen again. Torture is not something that we do. McCain, however, failed to demand the prosecution of the perps from the Bush regime. Simply put, transparency is not enough. In this regard, it’s worth remembering the recent announcement that Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s lieutenant, likely died in Syria several years ago. Though convicted in absentia in France, he was never brought fully to justice for his crimes against humanity, spending a lifetime evading his death sentence. America routinely insists that other countries and peoples confront their problematic, even criminal histories, and willingly lends its considerable resources in this global endeavor. It’s time for the United States to follow its own advice and turn inward. It’s also clear that democratic citizens, here and abroad, will have to force it to do so.

Now that Cheney has not only confessed his crimes, but vowed that he would commit them again without hesitation (this is called recidivism), it’s time to implement Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something” program. We know where Dick Cheney and his fellow criminals live (Cheney lives in Jackson, Wyoming, whose citizens should consider themselves on notice). Their schedule of public appearances is published well in advance. After all, much money can be made playing the patriot game in the United States articulating and defending an unrepentant will to power in domestic and international politics. If you live near one of these terrorists or war criminals and see them at the local Starbucks; if they are slated to appear at a local bookstore to promote their sorry apologias; if they are traveling abroad and you see them in an airport or at a popular tourist spot; identify them and make a citizen’s arrest. Ask, even demand, that your friends, that is, your fellow citizens, join and assist you. Hold them until local law enforcement officials arrive. You don’t need to lay hands on them. Prevent them from leaving by forming a chain around them. Or, in the United States anyway, put the Second Amendment to good use; render the right to bear arms something other than a consumer fetish. These criminals have violated national and international statutes; the idea of a citizen’s arrest is for people to play their part in making sure that no one is above the law and that it is respected and enforced, perhaps especially when those charged with this sacred duty fail—and fail repeatedly—to meet their obligations, including the President and his Attorney General. American citizens long ago took back their streets (and skies) from al Qaeda. It’s time to take back not only our streets but also our Constitution from the terrorists and war criminals among us.

This project can be considered a corollary not only to the Patriot Act-free zone movement embraced by hundreds of towns, cities, and states across the country but also to the new civil rights movement of democratic citizens to take control of their streets and cities, and thus their way of life, from the police following the slayings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, among countless others, and subordinate it to the people themselves. This nationwide campaign has been met with massive state opposition, especially in the aftermath of the murder of two New York City police officers on December 20. Bill de Blasio’s craven, manipulative effort to exploit a heinous crime and disrupt, perhaps cripple a legitimate politics of resistance serves as an untimely reminder that rights and liberties, including the right not to be tortured, subjected to assassination by the president, or targeted by police because of the color of your skin, are not given but taken.

Making War on Citizens at the National September 11 Museum

Steven Johnston

Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

The National September 11 Museum, which opened to controversy in May, functions as an affective and political continuation, even intensification of the National September 11 Memorial. It is not a freestanding institution. Philip Kennicott, architecture critic of The Washington Post, considers the Museum a “supplement” to Michael Arad’s Memorial pools, but destructively so: it “overwhelms—or more literally undermines—the dignified power of [the] memorial by inviting visitors to re-experience the events in a strangely, obsessively, narcissistically repetitious way.” This is what makes the Museum, in my judgment, a continuation of the Memorial. That is, the Museum, which is located directly beneath Ground Zero, does belowground what the Memorial does aboveground: it makes war on citizens. The Memorial creates this effect more subtly as the reflecting pools’ waterfalls mimic the collapsing towers. Here there is no debris left over; the water crashes down and disappears into a void where it is recirculated to provide the material for subsequent collapses. The Museum, on the other hand, recreates the horrors of September 11 in intimate, assaultive detail and does so primarily by targeting individuals—their memories, their experiences, their traumas. This approach to commemoration crystallizes America’s understanding of itself as an unrivaled source of right and good in the world and nothing more than an innocent victim on September 11, 2001. It thus obscures, among other things, the violence and tragedy constitutive of its imperial democracy. Nevertheless, it was precisely the institutional structures of this violence and tragedy that were attacked on September 11. To explicitly acknowledge this, of course, would be to acknowledge al-Qaeda’s success on September 11, thereby showing respect for an enemy, an act of which America, not alone among democracies, is incapable.



What, more specifically, does it mean for the National September 11 Museum to make war on citizens? The idea here is not to kill them, of course. Wars are much broader in scope and their violence assumes myriad forms. The idea is to overpower them with an awesome display of architectural and archaeological engineering, a display that perversely matches, even surpasses, al-Qaeda’s 2001 assault. It’s as if the world’s leading democracy, feeling insecure not just about its porous borders but also its very identity, needed to prove itself equal, even superior to its deadliest enemy regardless of the cost. What Terry Smith has written of the World Trade Center’s and al Qaeda’s masterminds could be said of the Museum’s: ”To attempt creation or destruction on such an immense scale requires both bombers and master-builders to view living processes in general, and social life in particular, with a high degree of abstraction. Both must undertake a radical distancing of themselves from the flesh and blood of mundane experience ‘on the ground.’” This claim might seem counter-intuitive with the Museum, given its emphasis on the individual, but it simultaneously addresses everyone and no one, hence its air of abstraction. Emanating from its own cavernous vacuum, the Museum seems determined to induce a certain emotional-political sensibility, to break the morale of visitors and any possible resistance they might offer to its impressive and appalling death-laden design itself in service of a nationalist politics. I’m tempted to say it may not even matter if anyone visits the Museum.  For the United States, it’s enough that it was built.



Visitors enter the Museum on the same level as the Memorial. To access the Museum proper, one first takes a long descending escalator ride past one of the massive steel tridents that formed part of the World Trade Center façade. It is the first official ruin one sees, a sign both of mass murder and indestructibility. It also serves, along with the other ruins, to make a point of political pride. The towers collapsed, but total destruction was not and could not be achieved. These are exceptional artifacts. The enemy did not succeed as it might first appear. The Museum begins officially, if you will, at the bottom of the escalator. The contentious gift shop is located on this level; it contains souvenir items—coffee mugs, T-shirts, key chains, hors d’oeuvres plates—which can serve as daily reminders of horror and death.



The Museum’s inexorable descent to bedrock seven storeys below ground level, which somehow renders a sense of return to the surface and life problematic, if not quite doubtful, is reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on the National Mall, except this descent takes place on a much grander scale and entirely indoors. Instead of virtually walking into a tomb from outside, as in Washington, D.C., one is always already in a tomb at the National September 11 Museum. This tomb is filled with thousands and thousands of the still-unidentified remains of the day’s victims. After all, the site is both a cemetery and the official repository of the dead. The tomb is also littered with ruins and debris from the day’s attacks: an antenna from the roof of one of the towers; the motor from one of the elevators; the last steel beam to be removed from the clean-up site; a fire truck badly damaged during rescue efforts; twisted steel remnants from the floors that were struck. These substantial items look tiny in the immense surroundings of the underground tomb, which include the original slurry wall that held back the Hudson River to the west. The visitor is made to feel puny.



Puniness apparently reaches its climax next to the north Memorial pool, the bottom of which can be circumnavigated underground. Here one encounters a small information sign. It reveals that some 1,200 feet above this very spot, “hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center” and “tore a gash in the building more than 150 feet wide.” What is the visitor to do now? How is the visitor to react after reading this matter-of-fact fact? Look up and imagine the day’s terrible events, the towers suddenly collapsing above and down upon him, and winding up beneath 110 floors of compressed rubble? The inclusion on site of a composite of several floors of one of the towers flattened and fused gives one answer. It’s not enough to imagine the death of others; one must also imagine one’s own. Vulnerability, susceptibility, contingency define life here.

 

In the Museum’s Memorial Exhibition, which highlights the identities of those killed in the day’s attacks, the memorialization circle is closed. On a “Wall of Faces,” there is a portrait photograph of each and every victim. This complements the names inscribed in the Memorial directly above. On so-called touch screen tables, visitors can call up the name of any victim and learn more about her. Inside this memorial hall there is an inner chamber with benches lining the walls. The name of everyone killed is sequentially projected onto opposing walls, followed by biographical information, and, where possible, audio-visual reminiscences from family or friends. Visitors sit respectfully in the chamber and watch the alphabetical parade of names relentlessly pass by, as if afraid to leave, which would seem rude given the solemnity of the space. The attacks that are recreated by the Memorial waterfalls produce their offspring here.

 

The Memorial Exhibition aspires to pay tribute to the day’s victims. To challenge this aspiration seems almost offensive by the time you reach the Museum’s nadir, especially if you have seen the room in the Historical Exhibition which catalogues and documents those who jumped from the Towers on September 11. Still photographs capture these horrific scenes, estimated at some 50 to 200, accompanied by recollections of people who witnessed the suicides but could not look away, for that would be to abandon people (though strangers) at the worst moment of their lives. It’s a gut-wrenching alcove, one of several with a box of tissues at the ready, and with a bench just outside it so people can sit and compose themselves afterwards.

What is the point of this death-driven redundancy? Edward Rothstein speculates that the Museum “is the site of their murder. And the attention to individuality presumably highlights the scale of the terrorist crime.” It also serves, as Rothstein notes, to distract. The Museum signifies avoidance, even denial of America’s contradictory role in the world and its contributions to the circumstances that make 9/11 all too conceivable rather than unthinkable. The Museum thus contributes to the impoverishment, through privatization, of public space. Leaving the National September 11 Museum, the single, solitary brick from Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, Afghanistan, liberated by the American assassination team that eradicated him from the face of the earth, and proudly on display at bedrock, may be the Museum’s representative artifact. There are two possibilities, the brick suggests: challenge the American-led global order of things and you will be reduced to this; or, align yourself with the American-led global order of things, which also reduces you to a brick, a mere pillar of America’s global war on terror.

Obama’s Catastrophic Drones

Thomas Dumm
Amherst College

Recent revelations concerning the American drone campaign in Southwest Asia and the Arabian peninsula might lead one to think that the worst aspect of the campaign is the imprecision of the drone attacks, the ancillary damage in the form of innocent lives lost. But leaving aside the horror of a policy of assassination from the sky, this use of drones illuminates a core paradox in the “war against terror.”  

Terrorism, catastrophe, these are big words to throw around. Perhaps it makes sense to begin with a provisional definition of terrorism. I would suggest that we understand terrorism to be the tactical use of violence or the threat of violence in order cause psychological trauma on a specifically targeted population. The purpose of terrorism can vary almost infinitely, from forcing a state to meet a particular political demand, to gaining vengeance against a religious opponent, to – although this is actually more the stuff of graphic novels and superhero movies than reality – expressing a nihilistic urge to destroy for its own sake. Because there is usually a focused end to acts of terror, formal rationality can be used to understand acts of terror. Indeed, one can apply game theoretical models to the efficacy of terrorism, as has been shown by the prominent economist Darius Lakdawalla. 

The effectiveness of terrorism is to be measured not only by the specific destruction those who engage in it wreak – the physical injuries and deaths to those immediately victimized – but more fundamentally instead by how it traumatizes its targeted audience. Terror in this sense is communicative violence, designed specifically to frighten people so as to get them to alter their behavior in ways the terrorist wants. Measuring the efficacy of terrorism then becomes something qualitative – it requires that we be able to describe and interpret the effects of the act or acts of terror on people’s behavior. It requires that we think imaginatively concerning how terrorism does what it does to those who are its victims. 

Sometimes the motives of terrorists can be discerned by knowing who they are. In at least one case, that is easy, because of the extraordinary visibility of the terrorist in question.  I am referring here to the state terrorist, the actor that only pretends not to use the technique of terror in the flimsiest gesture toward human rights. The state terrorist is so prevalent an actor largely because the very function of the state, to paraphrase Max Weber, is to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. State actors very often go too far and engage in illegitimate acts of violence, rationalizing their actions as necessary for the survival of the polity they putatively serve. Because they have the tools of violence ready at hand, it is easy for them to act. Because of the vast instruments of destruction that powerful states have on hand, we can state very simply: States terrorize and the more powerful the state the more terrorizing. 

The United States of America is the most prominent practitioner of state terrorism today. One need only read the headline on the front page of the October 22, 2013 issue of the New York Times [PDF] – “Civilian Deaths in Drone Strikes Cited in Report: U.N. Set to Debate Issue: U.S. Sees Triumph, but Pakistanis Say They Live in Terror.” Or read the first quotation in that article, from a denizen of the border town in Pakistan that has been the object much drone activity: “The drones are like the angels of death,” said Nazeer Gul, a shopkeeper in Miran Shah. “Only they know when and where they will strike.” 

This article appeared only a few days after the historian Nasser Hussain published “The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike,” on the Boston Review website. Hussain notes the division of experience of drone operators – sight, not sound – and those who live under the threat of drones – sound, not sight. To hear the constant buzzing of a drone overhead day after day, which may only be surveilling an area, but may be preparing to drop a bomb on a target, is obviously terrifying for those who suffer it. Hussain writes, “[O]ne man described the reaction to the sound of the drones as a ‘wave of terror’ coming over the community.” In another testimony, Hisham Abrar stated, “when children hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time.” 

Hussain refers to this as “anticipatory trauma.” Such trauma is deeply associated with the development and intensifying deployment of air power in the twentieth century, noted some time ago by the French war and media theorist Paul Virilio. Think of  the V-1 and V-2 bombs used by the Nazis to terrorize London. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now,” is how Thomas Pynchon described this in the opening lines of Gravity’s Rainbow.  

But anticipatory trauma is not limited to air power. Think of another twentieth century development, death camps, powerfully analogized by Art Spiegelman in his epic, Maus, when Art asks his psychotherapist, a survivor, what Auschwitz felt like. “What Auschwitz felt like. . . hmmm, BOO! “ “YII!” screams Art, in response. “It felt a little like that,” says the therapist, “but ALWAYS! From the moment you got to the gate until the very end.”

Hussain’s final point in this essay is perhaps his most important, namely, that far from being an efficient means of fighting against terrorists, the infrastructure for drone warfare is vast, extremely costly, and requires a permanent imperial presence throughout the world to work at all.  Aside from the political economic implications concerning the costs of empire, we might also infer that any country that would construct such a costly infrastructure, would also be tempted to use it more than once. 

If we compare the state terrorist – let us call him Obama, to the abject terrorist – let us call him Ishmael -- who lacks the vast resources of a state, no matter how well sponsored he might be by a state, we may realize just how efficient the non-state terrorist is in comparison to the state terrorist. Consider the number of American on American soil killed by terrorists directly or indirectly inspired by Al Qaeda and others since 9/11: the number is 19. At the time of the Boston Marathon bombings, John Cassidy of the New Yorker contrasted this level of violence with other violent deaths in the U.S. in one year. “In 2010, to take a year at random, there were 11,078 firearm homicides in the United States, and 19,392 firearm suicides. In the same year, there were 544 homicides by suffocation and 89 by fire, plus 79 intentional poisonings and 52 intentional drownings.”  

Americans over the past 12 years since 9/11 have had a much greater chance of dying from lightning strike – an average of about 79 per year -- than from an act of terror. Yet the amount of money and treasure in the form of lives lost in the “war on terror” has been close to 2 trillion dollars and counting, 4,326 American deaths in Iraq and another 2,012 and counting, in Afghanistan. These figures do not include those killed by American and coalition forces, estimated in Iraq to be about half a million; for Afghanistan figures are much harder to come by, and claims of deaths by NATO versus the Taliban makes counting very difficult. 

With this in mind, if we use the most common dictionary definition of catastrophe – “an event causing great and often sudden damage: a disaster” -- then the event of 9/11 was indeed a catastrophe. But for whom? That might not be the right question, if we think that the event of a catastrophe is something beyond human agency, indiscriminating in the damage it causes. The criterion of “beyond human agency” also suggests that if human action is involved, there is no catastrophe. But even here I would suggest that 9/11 was a catastrophe, partly because of the event and even more fundamentally because the war on terror that emerged from that event has been has, by almost any measure, not been rational response to that attack, one with predictable and clear consequences, but a continuing, uncontrolled human disaster, even as humans have been involved in perpetuating it. From the beginning, there is abundant evidence that those who initiated this war were drawn by unconscious but powerful psychological forces to do what they did. Here I am not only referring to the Oedipal drama enacted on the world stage by George W. Bush, the paranoia of the neoconservative policy-makers, from Cheney to Rumsfeld to Wolfowitz, but to something more deeply buried in what we might call the structural unconscious of the American state.

Here is where I believe there is an unspoken and troubling linkage between the state terrorist and what we might call the abject terrorist. What is going on in the relationship of the state terrorist and the abject terrorist is a form of projection by the state terrorist – attributing to those who you have treated with great and fatal injustice those very qualities of lying, sneak attacking, massacring, etc., when they respond in kind. (This phenomenon has been noted as occurring in the United States as early as Herman Melville’s analysis of the metaphysics of Indian hating in his 1857 novel The Confidence Man.)

But there is more than simple projection at work here. There is an uncanny identification that intensifies and deepens the fear of the state terrorist for the abject terrorist. For Freud, the uncanny is often represented in the figure of the döppelganger, the double.  In his study The Uncanny, referring to E.T.A. Hoffman’s novel, The Elixirs of the Devil, Freud suggests that doubles appear as identical to each other. “This relationship,” he writes, “is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of those persons to the other – what we would call telepathy – so that the one becomes co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and experience.” Freud suggests that this is a very old and primitive psychic structure, finding one of its earliest human expressions in religious belief, a way of fending off the fear of death by positing an immortal soul that accompanies the body. The residue of this primitive phase of our mental development, he suggests, accounts for its uncanny power. “The double,” Freud writes, “has become an object of terror, just as the gods become demons after the collapse of their cult . . .” 

I would suggest that when thinking of terror and catastrophe, the catastrophe of terror is that one cannot get rid of one’s döppelganger without getting rid of oneself. In other words, state terrorists are deeply bound up with abject terrorists, unable to continue to exist without the presence of this other, constantly inciting them to act so as to be able to react. Steven Johnston noticed this creepy phenomenon in his analysis of the film The Dark Knight Rises in an earlier Contemporary Condition post. But this phenomenon was probably most explicitly expressed in the film in that trilogy, The Dark Knight, when the Joker, responding to the ever humorless Batman’s suggestion that he might want to kill him: “I don’t want to kill you! You complete me!” 

That would seem to be the submerged element of the catastrophe we are living through right now. A compulsion to kill, yes, but also a compulsion to continue this telepathic relationship, asymmetrical as it may be, between the state terrorist and its double. In short, as the inheritor of the collective wounded outrage of the state terrorist, the current inhabitant of the White House is every bit as haunted as was his predecessor, and every bit as complicit in ongoing murder of innocents in the name of American innocence.

[Note: An earlier version of this post was presented as part of a symposium on “Terror and Catastrophe,” at Robert Frost Library, Amherst College, on October 23, 2013. Other contributors included Andrew Poe, Adam Sitze, both members of the Amherst College faculty, and Simon Stow, of William and Mary. The panel was sponsored by Amherst College’s Copeland Colloquium, which is devoted in 2013-14 to the theme of “The Catastrophic.”]