The Group of 20 Summit protests in Pittsburgh this past September were a threshold event. Not only were protesters detained and beaten by the police, but they were also subjected to new military-grade technologies that have pushed the boundaries of what kinds of actions are permissible for controlling large crowds of protesters, unruly or not.   This fact, however, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media for several reasons. First of all, the commercial media ignores stories it can’t spin into easy and familiar narratives of good and bad, right and wrong. The story of the G20 protests and the subsequent police brutality that took place during those protests does not match the facile optimism of political campaign speeches, upbeat advertising, and entertainment spectacles. Instead, these corporate media outlets spin simplistic stories that redefine disorders as isolated disruptions or exceptional “tragedies.” Another alternative interpretation of these national “tragedies” and disruptions is possible by connecting together what they have in common. The actions of security forces in Pittsburgh in 2009, New Orleans in 2005, and the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 all reveal the increasingly militant policies of the homeland security state since September 11. By tracing police actions back to those policies it’s possible to more substantively interpret the meaning of the Pittsburgh protests and what they mean for the future of crowd control.

The policies of the new homeland security state reflect a consensus between law enforcement officials and the military about the use of new technological weapons against citizens and non-citizens. The Pittsburgh security forces used non-lethal weapons to disperse crowds, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, or the LRAD. This large sonic gun radiates short bursts of sound waves that are audible over very long distances. Firing it up-close creates a very loud and powerful noise that is capable of causing hearing loss and great levels of pain.  These LRAD devices have previously been used in Iraq for similar purposes. It was also used as a defensive weapon on the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit in 2005 off the coast of Somalia to fend off a group of pirates. The pirates left the ship alone despite having rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. And now the use of the weapon domestically against non-violent crowds of American citizens is taking place, arguably not only a violation of their civil liberties but also a violation of basic human rights.

The device is meant to inflict “non-lethal injury.” In this sense it echoes the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the military uses to torture enemy combatants in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. Like the Taser gun, which has become so popular with local police departments, the LRAD is yet another law enforcement weapon that’s supposedly non-lethal but also relatively unstable in live trials. Like Predator spy planes that shoot Hellfire missiles at suspected targets in Pakistan, the Taser and the LRAD are weapons that fundamentally change the new laws of security powers. These weapons modulate wide ranges of before unheard of force in order to subdue individuals and crowds.

Equally problematic is the increase in the use of the riot act to criminalize the use of social networking technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Local authorities in New York took major steps to circumscribing the effects of public protests in 2004 through mass arrests, but they went a step further in Pittsburgh by targeting the use of communications devices by protesters. Elliot Madison’s arrest by the Pennsylvania State Police in Pittsburgh for Tweeting the location of the police to protesters is symptomatic of a campaign to prevent crowds from intelligently organizing. The subsequent search of Madison’s apartment by an FBI counter-terrorism unit confiscated pictures of Marx and Lenin as evidence. A grand jury trial is still open. The police are using the 1968 Riot Act as legal precedent. This is an orchestrated attack on legitimate forms of political dissent.

These actions send a chilling message to potential political activists and every day citizen protesters, that public authority will use any means necessary to control individuals and crowds. This includes authorizing the use of violent new instruments of control. Each new tool reflects a unique technological breakthrough in the science of controlling human bodies efficiently. These on-going assaults are tolerated because of little compromises that individuals make about the social contract and the ethical responsibilities one has toward suffering. Each little compromise has required a denial that returns as a form of fear and anxiety in much of the American public. Not coincidently, the American public has reacted passively against these new technologies of immobilizing bodies. Anxiety paralyzes one’s ability to think clearly about the real movements in American politics.

These real movements reflect essential changes in the technology of crowd control. Companies that provide emergency training for local authorities use computer simulations that simulate natural disasters, fires, terrorism, and civil disturbances. A simulation video advertised on YouTube boasts that every block in New York has been digitally reproduced for that training. The expression of these policies in physical confrontations reveals an organized, methodical, and potentially dehumanizing approach toward all bodies present in declared “emergency” and “disaster” zones. In much of the military literature, for instance protests are also classified as civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are, in turn, defined as man-made disasters. As a result, strategic responses to natural disasters and protest disasters are very similar. They involve suspending civil liberties for the purposes of protecting public order and private property. Crowds of the population are ‘managed,’ whether they have gathered to loot, commit violence, or just to protest.

They are also managed if they become displaced by climate catastrophes or economic incentives. In 2006, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR received a $385 million contract for temporary detention and processing centers. At the time, this contract reminded some independent journalists of the REX-84 “readiness exercise” that Oliver North spearheaded during the Reagan administration. The exercise imagined that 400,000 migrants from Mexico entered the US and became an uncontrollable population. The plan called for all 400,000 to be detained. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be responsible for storing them. As immigrants, they would not be subject to constitutional protection.

Like the KBR centers contracted in 2006, the camps would detain, house, and process bodies. The United States has powers to create domestic internment camps just as all other state governments do. The World War II Japanese internment camps provide evidence that the United States can detain tens of thousands of bodies after declaring an emergency.

In 1982, former FEMA head Louis Giuffrida drafted an executive order for continuity of government planning in the event of nation-wide insurgency of African-American militants. The order called for “martial law” and “suspension of the Constitution.” The REX-84 camps and the Japanese interment camps are large-scale precedents for Guantanamo Bay. State authority rests on emergency powers in all three cases. They are large-scale precedents for the 2,000 protesters detained at Pier 57 during the 2004 New York Republican Convention.

Populations often express themselves through specific, collective identities. One such form of identity is crowds. Crowds are inherently unstable and very powerful. They thus make the state vulnerable. Protests and protesters acquire disproportionate power when they form crowds. Crowds can make demands that elections cannot. Crowds can use force that cannot be undone. Crowds can shift political sentiment for authority by exposing the erosion of power, by embarrassing authorities, or by being subjected to police brutality. Crowds can visually demonstrate the violence of the state against certain ideas. As crowds, they have the power to draw emotions and media to ideas and bodies possibly subject to censorship or derision.

The collective power of assembled bodies can overwhelm repellent police technologies, including lethal weapons. Crowds can overwhelm state forces through the sheer power of numbers. A crowd as organized and energized as an Ohio State Buckeye football crowd could easily occupy the state capitol building in Columbus. This is why crowd control was essential for the protection of President Obama in Pittsburgh. This is also why movements that encourage various kinds of crowds have successful records against state forces. An example might be the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 and the Berlin Wall crowds in 1989.

In response to the power of these crowds, states can declare and enforce martial law. During martial law, executive authority resides under the direction of local civil authorities. This is the single most important aspect of understanding martial law. Elements of the military maintain “liaisons” with federal, state, and municipal authorities. The 2005 Department of Defense “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support” explicitly refers to the military support the Pentagon may lend local police authorities. Since the executive who declares emergency powers is local, to understand martial law one must not focus on Presidential executive powers. The Homeland Security press release by the Secret Service during the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit described the participating security bodies as a combination of “local, state, and federal security,” along with “public safety and military partners.”

In the context of American constitutional law and Department of Defense policy, martial law emergency powers always reside with local civil authorities. Martial law is not about negotiating checks and balances of federal powers, however. Martial law emergency powers are part of a capillary, distributive system of emergency powers in the United States and can be called into being wherever crowds form. Senator David Vitter acted as a liaison between Karl Rove and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco after Hurricane Katrina, for instance, and told Blanco the Bush administration wanted her to declare martial law or “as close as we can get.” This exchange lays bare where the powers reside.

This is the case because presidential authority is legally limited. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act withdrew northern troops from the south by limiting the powers of the executive to command military troops within US borders. The president could nonetheless still declare a state of national emergency and declare nationwide martial law. Doing so, however, would draw a great deal of negative attention and media. Martial law powers are much more flexible—and thus more tactically useful—because they rely on local authorities. Department of Defense military forces, when used domestically, would be renamed Defense Support of Civilian Authorities (DSCA). These forces are also referred to as Civil Support. These Civil Support forces would engage “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, or other disorders prejudicial to public law and order.” These unlawful assemblages—crowds—might be dispersed through the simple act of a local authority. Crowds trigger these authorities to invoke emergency powers that are inseparable from the powers of martial law.

In the last two decades many of the laws surrounding crowd control came to define the actual apparatuses of federal emergency powers. Crowd control laws are important because they address how security forces can interact with real bodies. This then clarifies the real expressions and fears that motivate state power.  The REX-84 exercise is an example of state policies that envisage large-scale responses to massive population control problems. It is no accident that new crowd control methods were included in the new civil liberties policies following September 11. Airport security grew. Bridge security grew. Vast detention centers opened in Afghanistan and Iraq. A special torture camp opened in Cuba. The CIA “black sites” prison system continued to expand.

These are all human rights crimes. In the United States, human rights and civil rights are two separate discourses. It may be effective to wind them together more. Since 9/11 civil liberties have come under intense assault. Political dissent in the United States has essentially been effectively criminalized, becoming in the eyes of the law just one more form of emergency that must be met with controlling force. Civil disturbance manuals used by the army claim that disturbances arise from “highly emotional social and economic issues,” where “economically deprived” residents are ready to release frustrations. This link between civil disturbance, economic conditions, and emergency powers received some surprising attention last October, when California representative Brad Sherman claimed some legislators were threatened with the specter of martial law unless the bailout bill passed.

It is here that crowds, the forces of crowd control, and our Constitution clash. The civil liberties that have come under the most assault are freedom of speech and assembly. These liberties conflict with policies about crowds and civil disturbance. Since crowds threaten public order because of their power, the response of security forces reverts back to policies and laws that govern civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are emergencies, and as such emergency powers are in effect. Defining protests as emergencies allows police conduct that should be understood as unacceptable violations of the constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly. When all protest and all mass spontaneous gatherings are seen as emergencies, then the ability to actually practice any reasonably effective form of mass political action becomes nearly impossible, limited only to police and city authorized marches and rallies.

The permanent state of emergency, like the permanent war on terror that the Bush Administration envisioned, is here, stretching from Kabul to Pittsburgh. It is meant to test the boundaries of what kinds of abuse a population will tolerate against its fellow humans and fellow citizens. This represents a new fashion of policing undisciplined and unpopular ideologies. It seems to make no difference whether one is a Muslim, a terrorist, an anarchist, a communist or just a protester—one’s body is inevitably subject to all kinds of forms of temporary state control. For radical Muslims this state control can last for years of indefinite detention; it can also include torture. For illegal immigrants it might last months and sometimes years. Judging by Pittsburgh and the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, it can last for a few days against American citizens.

Sadly, it is hard to direct public attention to these policies. The police commit routine violations of the law without punishment because they have acquired a patriotic armor. The same is true for American soldiers. The police and the military elicit intense forms of devotion from wide intersections of classes and ethnicities. Focusing on the individual actions of police officers is not important anyway. One need not fear criticizing any individual police officer or soldier. This only mystifies the problem. The problem is one of policy.

The fact is that under both the constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights citizens have the right to assembly. But peaceful assembly is also a human right. Any new security policy must reflect these rights. Crowd formation is inevitable. No government can ultimately control collected human bodies and organized crowds. Policies must reflect this reality. Crowds too control the terms of “consent” inherent in all representative government. Recognizing this will make it easier to evolve the political systems in new ecological and economic eras. Decaying political forms will erode in power. The corporate-funded two-party system relies on an infinite-growth economy that relies on fossil fuels for food and labor production. The post-petroleum era will require much more local forms of production. The groups that will dominate this era will form new kinds of crowds. They must to be allowed to emerge.

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In early January the BBC reported that Mohammad Bouazazi, a Tunisian college graduate who illegally sold fruits and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid, had died from his self-inflicted burns. He had set himself on fire by dousing his body with petrol when poli

ce confiscated his produce. He didn’t have the proper permits. Public protest had been rare in Tunisia before. When he died, the BBC reported that “a crowd estimated at 5,000 took part in his funeral.” The crowd chanted the same message together, out loud: “Farewell, Mohammad, we will

avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused

your death weep.”

As the crowd marched toward the governor’s office, a cordon of police blocked them, and opened fire. The police also shot at protestors in Menzel, another town, after members of the crowd lobbed Molotov cocktails at them. Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali reacted by condemning the demonstrations and appointed a new youth minister to help solve the rising unemployment problem. But first he tried to destroy the revolution by declaring a state of emergency, and authorizing the police to fire on the crowds. Al-Abidine resigned nine days later and left the country. Reuters reported that he fled because the crowds in Tunis “were not satisfied with his promise” to step down in 2014.

The revolution in Tunisia made visible decades of seething frustrations within its population. And while all local and national revolutions occur differently, they share many of the same qualities. To be successful, crowds require masses of bodies all emotionally invested with the same singular affective sensations. The intensity of experiencing emotions publically in a crowd drowns out the fear of death. The crowds share the same social emotions—the same affects—by relentlessly attaching those shared passions to symbols, bodies, and words. The affective experience of sharing one’s body with the crowd has the effect of framing the entire world in the present moment. This is what distinguishes the time of the crowd from the planning of the movement.

The intensity of the crowd excites the body to act without fear and it is this fearlessness that allows crowds to defy the police, and to walk towards gunfire. This is what makes the police useless, and when the police are useless, the state has no protection. Shared excitement in a crowd can be transmitted to others—what the Financial Times and others call “contagion.” This ex

citement is the ultimate weapon against the state. The final confrontation between state police and huge, emotionally excited crowds is a structural feature of radical political change. Crowds are the agents of revolution. They have radical political power.

The Tunisian opposition did not drive Ben Ali from power, despite years of resistance and organizing. Neither did Mohammad Bouazazi overthrow the Tunisian government. The BBC and others attribute that agency to the people, whom they simply call “crowds.” In a paradigm that can only imagine individuals, the vocabulary and analysis of crowds is under-theorized. But crowds are agents in themselves. They are physical assemblages wired to diffuse networks. They emerge from digital communications but their power is necessarily and entirely physical. This is because bodies must come together and act to assert radical political power. The movements that create crowds are well understood because one can trace documents, paper, Facebook pages. It is much harder to archive crowds. They are temporary organisms, and they have distributed intelligence. Perhaps each crowd has its own name, like a star. Perhaps the crowd at Mohammad Bouazazi’s funeral should be called “01092011-Garaat Bennour-Sidi Bouzid.”

Crowds speak together: “we will avenge you!” They move together in the same direction. They gather courage from those that died before them. Imagining the source of their common feeling excites them. Each act against them intensifies their feelings. It is not the time of dispassionate argument. It is not the time of voting and electoral manipulation. It is not the time of economic stability, of regular paychecks. It is not the time of comfort. It is the time of solidarity, the time of action. Crowds create the world for which they were waiting. They create their own sense of time, severing the past from the present, and connecting the present to the future. This is done by physically acting in ways that define the speech acts that end the past and call the future into the present. They do not transfer that power to another—to a president

, to a party, to an army. Crowds are their own armies.

These crowds might resemble the crowds at a rock concert or sports match. They all talk together. Their chants are like music; sometimes they sing. They react to symbols and rhetoric that collapse the complexity of events into simpler emotional signs. At an NFL game, it doesn’t matter how many times Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers has previously thrown a successful pass. Each time he accomplishes this it’s time to cheer, and nothing else matters except cheering. All the electronic screens in the stadium flash with stimulation. Green Bay fans know each other by their green shirts. They reinforce the intensity of victories and losses through physical proximity and the replication of the same sign: the Packers symbol, the cheesehead. They come to the stadium to be together, to share the common feelings, and to participate in an event. But political crowds aren’t mere spectators: they are themselves the participants.

Crowds represent the shadow public power in every state. They are everywhere, and everywhere their potential is political. Everywhere they must be managed. The Super Bowl goes to great lengths to associate its signs and symbols with those of the United States military. As with rock concerts and sports games, it is necessary to create and control crowds to win political elections. Elections necessitate the redistribution of crowd enthusiasm from democratic audiences into individuated tasks, like passing out leaflets or making phone calls. Voting is the ultimate way to channel the power of crowds. Voting summons crowds only to siphon them off, one by one. It transforms crowds back into individuals, who then transfer their power to representatives. These representatives then crowd together in highly organized political rituals, appropriating and consolidating that original power for themselves. Public opinion polls constantly measure shadow public power for how it feels. Lawyers and judges debate how “fair” trials can be when people “feel” bias toward events and persons. Emotional excitement is necessary to win campaigns and sometimes even court cases. But public emotions must be produced, managed, and measured constantly. They must be redirected. In this sense much of what we call politics is not “rational,” but highly affective.

And so the present wave of revolutionary insurgencies against Middle East despots has revealed a political truth for authoritarian states and democracies alike: crowds have radical power. They can overthrow governments. They are the visible force of radical social movements. They are the ever-present alternative to institutional politics. Radical political change is difficult w

ithout them. Crowds do not assemble to vote so that change can be institutionalized. This fact that crowds are a force in and of themselves explains, perhaps part of the failure of the Iraq War protests in 2003. Crowds cannot simply protest and go home. Crowds must understand that their power comes from their capacity to escalate and intensify their demands. The Iraq War crowds failed because ultimately the people participating could live with the war. Crowds only work when people decide they can’t live with the status quo.

Crowds emerge when authorities lose legitimacy. The Iraq War signaled the end of any legitimacy the George W. Bush administration may have had after 9-11, but it also showed that the United States is not a united state.  It is fragmented. Political parties depend on mobilizing broad sections of the population into narrow, winner-takes-all electoral victories. Americans don’t change this system because they make decisions everyday that suggest that they can live with it. They also believe, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that the next regime will somehow be different.

Crowds can also drain legitimacy from authorities through their presence. The Madison crowds at the state capitol protesting Governor Walker’s union-busting bill, for instance, visibly demonstrated their opposition. These crowds made the law appear non-democratic even when it was passed through the use of “democratic” procedures. Crowds act on the legitimacy of their own authority. Their presence repeals the consent at the heart of representative or authoritarian government. They strip the law of its legitimacy by exposing the illegitimacy of state power. They create new social conditions. The law must follow the crowds, or else the state must disperse the crowds, arrest the crowds, fire on the crowds. Crowds strip away the consent of the governed. Govenor Walker’s smartest tactic was not calling the National Guard against the Madison crowds.

Crowds author revolutions, and revolutions usher in new states. Violence is the ultimate sign of this authorship. Violence is powerful and is inevitably managed by both sides. Nonviolent protest ultimately depends on the presence of crowds and state violence to succeed in its goals. Individual nonviolent protest is not nearly as effective as state violence directed against large crowds. To succeed, nonviolent crowds must go where they are not allowed. When they arrive at that point the police will

be forced to either confront them or let them pass. If the police turn on the crowd they will create martyrs and turn popular sympathies against state power.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham campaign in 1963 is a good example. In Birmingham in 1963 King arrived in the city to organize non-violent, direct action protests against the city’s segregation policies. King wanted to draw national attention. King said that the purpose of direct action was to “create a situation so crisis-packed that it opened the door to negotiation.” When the initial crowd didn’t strongly materialize and with the campaign in doubt, King invited young students to join a new march. To prepare the children, King’s contemporaries described how his speeches inspired the students by taking the fear out of the room. He made them unafraid to march.  They went to demonstrate and were hosed a

nd beaten. Media coverage of the event led television audiences to feel sympathy for the crowds. As national audiences “felt” the coverage, King immediately began to organize the March on Washington. The next year the Voting Rights Act was passed. The crowds in Birmingham and the crowds in Washington forced a crisis of legitimacy for the United States federal government.

Ultimately, all conflicts between states and crowds come down to a biopolitical confrontation: each ultimately manages life or death decisions. Governments must decide whether crowds are “the people” or whether they’re enemies of the state and crowds must decide whether or not overthrowing a regime is worth the sacrifice of their bodies and lives. Even in extreme totalitarian or authoritarian states, where freedoms are few, crowds can at least control their own bodies. They can decide to live or die.

They do not have the technological advantage. Before the Libyan rebels found weapons they were crowds who only had the power of their potential sacrifice. As in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere, they had only their bodies to sacrifice. Dying in the crowd and for the crowd is not suicide, however. It is martyrdom. Martyrdom excites new crowds because it removes the fear of death – it manages it, displaces it, and produces shared feelings more powerful than the fear of death. In Iran, Neda Soltani became a martyr. In Tunisia it was Mohammad Bouazazi.

Even Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim had his own martyr. Ghonim was the Google programmer that briefly provided American television networks with a focus during their coverage. He networked with others before the revolution by creating a Facebook page for Khaled Said, who was a businessman killed last year by Egyptian police. Murdering someone to protect state interests is so outrageous that it inspires more crowds by intensifying the passions that allow them to come together.

During an interview with

Dream 2 television, Ghonim said, “I’m not a hero…the heroes, they’re the ones who were in the street, who took part in the demonstrations, sacrificed their lives, were beaten, arrested and exposed to danger.” He was then shown video of Egyptians dying in the crowds. He wept openly and left the studio. His tears inspired more Egyptians to enter the crowd. The significance of his tears is partly how they amplified the emotions of the Tahrir crowd at a crucial moment. They legitimized the actions of the crowd. The crowd transformed. Sometimes what matters isn’t that the crowd sustains the same emotion, but that it receives constant amplifications, stimulations, and sensations. Bodies must be excited.

The passions of life and death legitimize the right of the crowd. The radical power of the crowd operates through natural right. Right is co-extensi

ve with power. This power is the law; the crowd enforces its own law as it creates it. Its law is not text, but instead it is affective, rhetorical, and corporeal.

They are only social agents potentially capable of acting outside the law. Crowds are the weird mirror of the police. Yet the police act on behalf of the state. So the crowd is really the antipode of the state. They are inverse to one another, in dialectal tension. Crowds and authoritarian states both act on the margins of the law because they both actively create it. Crowds are criminal in the same way state authorities are criminal; because their right is co-extensive with their power, they create the law in real-time. Yet the state operates outside the law because it claims to be the law. It conducts its desires through discipline and physical force. Crowds produce political change in the state through jurisgenerative acts. Crowds depend on producing passions that nullify old laws and create conditions for new ones. By creating new passions they create public feelings that expose old laws for unjust ones.

The crowd is always marching toward state capitols and the police are always meeting them there. The crowd is the only social agent capable of threatening the body of the executive. Only the crowd can take over his office. The assassin is not a social agent. The crowd is powerful precisely because its agency is distributed. You can isolate individuals in a crowd, but you cannot put a crowd on trial. This is also why crowds are somewhat beyond and beside the control of the law.

In dictatorships, the despot makes the law of the land. In an authoritarian democracy such as the United States, the President can wield “executive power” over and beyond the Constitution and Congressional law. He seems only partly bound by the threat of judicial sanction. This threat contains the distant kernel of punitive justice. Bill Clinton testified for lying about an affair, but Bush did not even have to testify under oath for the 9-11 commission. Those surrounding the executive have paid fines, gone to jail, testified under oath. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was indicted for Iran-Contra but later was pardoned by George H.W. Bush. Ford pardoned Nixon before he could even be tried. Presidential pardons perform the radical power of the executive.

Digital networks and social media may allow for communication and organization, but American technology corporations are not responsible for dem

ocratic movements. They may provide mediums that help crowds communicate, but the companies themselves are not aligned with democracy. Google openly works with the NSA and the CIA. All the telecommunication companies, except the soon to be merged T-Mobile, work directly with the NSA and other intelligence agencies. The US military actively creates fake Facebook accounts for multiple purposes, with Facebook’s implicit consent.

It is worth noting that the US government understands the radical potential of American crowds. In 2007 George W. Bush passed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, which activates the US military for any “incident” that overwhelms local or state police. The act specifically states that the military will be used to “suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such…a condition…so hinders the execution of the laws.” This act, of course, is an attempt to control crowds, not terrorism.

Bush also gave life to new “executive” powers that President Barack Obama has not yet rescinded. In Presidential Directive NSPD 51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20, Bush said that any “catastrophic emergency,” defined as “any incident” that resulted in a “disruption” to government function or the economy, could result in power solely residing in the executive.  This power presumably includes suspension of the Constitution and martial law. This “incident” could presumably include a general strike. These laws marshal the full force of state power against the radical power of crowds. It will be a fateful irony if the continued consolidation of American power into the office of the President, together with the consistent collaboration with non-democratic corporations, produced a dysfunctional American democracy that necessitated the intervention of the very crowds these laws so obviously fear.

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Rumors in the Middle East are something of an informal news agency—and with formal news agencies being so often state-owned and state-fed, rumors are often taken to be more credible than printed or televised news. Last Thursday, for example, everyone believed Mubarak would announce that he was stepping down later that night because the rumor mill had been unequivocal about that fact.  As the Guardian’s blog put it: “It now seems clear that Mubarak is about to go (especially since the information minister is denying it).”  But, for once, evidence in support of the rumors was actually coming from Egyptian State TV. Thursday evening, Nile TV was showing a clip of Tahrir Square thundering with the single word “Irhal,” or “leave.”  There was an interview with a protester accusing both houses of parliament of being fraudulently elected; another proclaimed that calls for patience were ridiculous given that the regime should have changed a long time ago.  President Barack Obama’s comments in support of a transition to democracy were broadcast live with translation. This was revolution.  On State television.

Several hours later, Mubarak came on television and shocked the anticipant crowds with the announcement that he planned to stay as president until September.  As if to punctuate his declaration of power, Nile TV’s cameras on Tahrir Square were shut down.  The quiet studio discussions taking place about the merits of Mubarak’s speech were chilling given the eruption of fury all over Egypt, and nowhere more powerfully than just outside the doors of the state television’s building, which is located on Tahrir Square.  Egyptian state television had again become the eye of a storm, an island of calm amidst swirling winds of anger.

The government-controlled channels and newspapers have always been creative when it comes to reporting facts—made world famous last year with the “expressive” picture published in Al Ahram of President Hosni Mubarak leading Obama, Netanyahu, Abbas and King Abdullah of Jordan walking in the White House where in reality he was trailing behind the group.  Its reports about the protests, however, crossed the line from plain false to incendiary.  In the beginning of the mobilization, the pro-democracy movement was portrayed as malcontent youth illegally and violently demonstrating for economic and social improvements.  The chaos on Cairo streets wasn’t shown on official channels; pictures of a quiet bridge on the Nile were aired around the clock while commentators and officials explained that the situation was under control by a government sensitive to its people’s needs.  There was never any mention of the rallying cry of the tens of thousands of protesters: “The People Demand the Fall of the Regime.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that on the first Friday of the uprising, when the crowd size swelled and the police were overcome, protesters went directly from burning the headquarters of the ruling party to the state television building.  But whereas state security had abandoned the National Democratic Party’s headquarters, dozens of anti-riot police were positioned in front of the state television’s building, defending it with rubber bullets and teargas grenades against angry youth throwing Molotov cocktails, pieces of pavement or any other object at hand.  After half hour of fighting, a police vehicle enters the street at full speed, nearly running over the demonstrators.  The regime fought fiercely for the ability to portray events as it wished them to be perceived by the Egyptian public—and it won.

With the government securing its direct line of communication to the Egyptian public, they lashed back. No longer able to completely ignore or diminish what had become a popular revolt, their tactics changed.  On the following Sunday, the government shut down Al Jazeera’s offices, banned their transmission, and revoked their reporter’s press cards and accreditations. Using the emergency law, they also forced Egyptian mobile companies to send various messages calling on the Egyptian people to defend the homeland against “traitors and criminals.”  With Internet being cut for more than five days, Egypt’s government wanted to control as much as they could the flow of information reaching the public.

State channels began to describe protestors as foreigners or Egyptian traitors acting as foreign agents and sought to delegitimize competing media coverage, principally Al Jazeera, by arguing that foreign reporters were conspirators in a dangerous plot to bring chaos to Egypt. Exploiting the easiest target, accusations were soon made in Egyptian state media that Israeli spies have infiltrated the city, disguised as Western journalists.  Testimonies of Egyptians having been pressured and trained by Jewish groups in the U.S. to foment a Facebook revolution were aired over and over.  The faces of those “witnesses” were blurred and their names withheld but the message was clear: Israel and the West are behind the chaos, which is the word repeatedly used to describe the uprising.  Given that Israel’s government and the US administration are the closest allies of Mubarak’s Egypt, the accusation might sound absurd.  But it worked.

What followed was a campaign of extraordinary violence against protesters and journalists perpetrated by plain-clothed secret police, paid thugs and vigilantes inspired to action by these reports.  It must have come as quite a surprise, particularly given Israel’s support of Mubarak in blatant defiance of the international community and the lip service heads of state are expected to pay to democratic ideals, when American, European, and Arab journalists were attacked by gangs shouting “Yehudi!” (“Jew”).

In the days that followed, Egyptian television broadened the circle of conspirators working to bring down the Egyptian government to include Iran, Hamas, Qatar, and all of the West.  Attacks against reporters and foreigners became increasingly xenophobic instead of anti-Semitic, perhaps even a revenge ploy against the West’s abandonment of their longtime ally.  As a French journalist of Arab origin and with an Israeli first name, the sudden unity of my various identities would have been funny had it not been incredibly scary.

But even in Egypt it’s the twenty-first century, and the government’s effort to monopolize the flow of information couldn’t last.  Mobile phones and Internet connection were restored, Al Jazeera found a way to continue broadcasting, and state-owned media started to crack under the weight of its lies.

The deputy head of state-controlled Nile TV, Shahira Amin, quit her job, and publicly announced on Al Jazeera:  “I resigned because it (Nile TV) is being used as a propaganda machine.” A few days later the channel’s presenter, Soha al-Naqqash, followed suit. Even Al Ahram, the state-controlled newspaper with the highest circulation, challenged the party line when, on February 7, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Osama Saraya hailed the “nobility” of what he described as a “revolution” and demanded that the government embark of irreversible constitutional and legislative changes.

Still, there were no close-up images of Tahrir Square broadcast, and no mention of the demand roaring all across Egypt: Irhal! Leave!  Rather, there were people calling in weeping and begging for the “youth” to stop the chaos, so the economy could get back to normal.  To get news of the protests, Egyptians had to watch foreign media, playing into the government’s claims that it was a foreign conspiracy.

Omar Suleiman, the newly appointed vice president, made a speech after Mubarak announced his ambiguous intentions to stay on until September.  He told the protesters, the “youth” as he insists on calling them: “Go home.  Stop watching satellite television.”  It was a pathetic attempt to return the flock to the shepherd of state media.  Like Mubarak’s patronizing speech opening that he is “speaking as a father to his children,” Suleiman’s constant reference to the “youth,” despite the fact that the people camped out on Tahrir Square for the past three weeks are of all ages, reflects the government perception that the Egyptian people are children not mature enough to be privy to “adult conversation.”  The confusion regarding what Mubarak and Suleiman meant by their speeches on Thursday night, I believe, is attributable to the force of habit.  They are not in the habit of discussing the details of government affairs with their people; in fact, the need to even address the situation altogether seemed to be an intrusive task.  For years, the media’s task was to document National Democratic Party achievements—a new road, a new hospital, the 93% victory in November’s parliamentary election.  It was a stage where the government performed and the Egyptian people were spectators.  The idea that the media could be used as a window for Egyptians into the lives of other Egyptians or the outside world; that the government should be spectators to the actions of the people; or that the people deserved a credible window into the affairs of the government, was as foreign as the so-called “traitors and criminals” the state run media claimed were a threat to the nation.  The alternative media—satellite news, blogs, Facebook, twitter—that allows people to contribute to and comment on available information, circumventing the government, or even demanding explanations from the government, did in fact force an element foreign to the ruling regime onto the playing field: the Egyptian people. Even if the staunchly undemocratic Mubarak and Suleiman were suddenly convinced to hold transparent elections, the opacity of their speeches made it clear they did not believe in transparent government.

As of this writing—actually, during this writing—Mubarak formerly relinquished his position as president.  The cameras of state-controlled television were again showing images of Tahrir Square and the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians celebrating this moment.  The same presenters who called the protesters foreign spies happily showed clips of these same people singing the national anthem and screaming their joy into the channel’s microphones.  After Mubarak’s speech on Thursday, thousands of protesters surrounded the state television building demanding that it be turned over to them, the voice of the people.  Until Mubarak’s resignation was announced the following day, no one was able to enter or leave the building; the people working for state media were literally trapped in their own lies.  Yet, throughout, their pro-Mubarak broadcasting continued uninterrupted.  At about 6:00 PM, however, after Suleiman’s pithy announcement of Mubarak’s resignation, patriotism suddenly meant holding the protesting youth on the nation’s shoulders and declaring them heroes.  Presenters are hailing the “New Egypt.”  Callers are praising God and expressing their great relief at the end of the dictatorship.  Yes, it’s a revolution: the Egyptian people are watching genuine images of the Egyptian people on Egyptian television.  But there’s a warning here, too.  The seamless about-face of the coverage speaks to the profoundly corrupt position of state-controlled media.

Over the past eighteen days, the internet-savvy youth and foreign news channels managed to defeat the lies of the state-controlled television.  But where it took a million people to overthrow the regime, it will take many more of Egypt’s 80 million citizens to build a genuine democracy.  With Mubarak gone and the army in power, the question is: who is directing the puppet theater of state media?

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The final week of November brought with it the scandal of the year, as Julian Assange and his whistle-blowing organization, WikiLeaks, began releasing a document cache of American embassy cables written from all points across the globe.  The latest document drop was less noteworthy for the gossipy contents of what it exposed than for the response it elicited.  Very suddenly, the news was dominated by debates over whether Assange was a superhero defending truth and transparency or a confrere of Osama bin Laden and Adolph Hitler. Lost in the mix have been calm considerations of the significance that WikiLeaks’ has for the current state of American life.  The Advocate decided to carve out some space, free from hysteria, to allow for some immediate reactions to the latest WikiLeaks episode. The three essays that appear below take stock of what WikiLeaks may mean for social movements and media in the United States moving forward, indeed what they mean for American democracy itself.

WikiLeaks and
American Democracy

GEOFF JOHNSON

“How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.” —Karl Kraus

As of this writing the international hyper-pro-transparency media organization WikiLeaks continues to release hundreds of thousands of secret American diplomatic cables. Only a tiny fraction are now available online. Either the world will never be the same or the release is an event of relatively little consequence, or perhaps something in between. Discussion about, and interest in, the latest WikiLeaks document dump has been extraordinary. Since the first cables came out a week ago on November 28, they have dominated the headlines not only in the United States but in many other parts of the world. Several newspapers—The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and Le Monde—were granted access to the cables in advance of their release and have been steadily publishing articles about them ever since.

WikiLeaks did not, in fact, make The New York Times privy to these cables as they had with previous leaks. Many have speculated that the decision stemmed from WikiLeaks founder/guru Julian Assange’s anger over a previously published story about his role within the organization. As a result, the Times had to have the entire trove passed to them from The Guardian. The Times should be commended for choosing to publish some of the cables knowing full well they would be criticized for doing so, but there have also been clear limits to the paper’s approach. Editor Bill Keller appeared on the BBC and explained how his paper showed each cable they were considering publishing to the American government, often removing material that the government told them “could harm national security.” The somewhat nonplussed BBC host then asked Keller, “just to be clear…are you saying that you sort of go to the government in advance and say:  ‘What about this… is it all right to do this and all right to do that,’ and you get clearance, then?”

Unsurprisingly the reporting on the released cables done by the Times has differed from that of the British Guardian (for example) when it comes to the American national security state. One of the more explosive revelations from the cables involved American diplomats who were ordered to collect intelligence on their foreign counterparts abroad and at the United Nations. The Times reported in a rather wishy-washy manner that the directive “appear[s] to blur the traditional boundaries between statesmen and spies” yet downplayed one of the more titillating details, namely that some diplomats were tasked to collect “biometric information” (for the Times, what exactly this meant went unsaid). In contrast, The Guardian opened its story by simply declaring “Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations…” They then explained that the biometric data “included DNA, fingerprints and iris scans” and suggested that “the leak of the directive is likely to spark questions about the legality of the operation…” In general, the Guardian article included more detail and context while painting a far more severe picture of what the U.S. was doing with its apparent spy program—The Guardian also linked directly to the cable in question whereas the Times did not.

Shifting from the journalistic to the political reaction, conservative American pundits and politicians were predictably apoplectic and have raced to outdo one another in calling for the head of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen. Former senator/possible presidential candidate Rick Santorum told an audience in New Hampshire that Assange should be prosecuted as a terrorist, while The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol asked why we could not “use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators…” Sarah Palin tweeted about “Wikileaks’ treasonous act” (sic) before taking to Facebook to label Assange “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” that the government should pursue “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” At the conservative website townhall.com, John Hawkins argued that Assange “is not an American citizen and he has no constitutional rights. So, there’s no reason that the CIA can’t kill him.”

Liberal pundits took umbrage with these sorts of remarks, understandably, yet many liberals also reacted to the latest leak in a negative or, at best, indifferent fashion. A standard response among many was to argue that there was nothing new in the documents and that the whole affair was rather boring. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones suggested, within hours of the release, that he’d read about most of these stories already and asked someone to “pass the smelling salts.” Peter Beinart of The Daily Beast called the leak “fun, in a voyeuristic sort of way, revealing, but not about important things…” Jon Stewart, in a semi-serious aside during an episode of The Daily Show, downplayed the significance and seemingly suggested that Americans are so accustomed to hearing bad things about our government that this new material won’t even make a dent in our collective cynical consciousness. As Stewart concluded, “unless in these WikiLeaks we’re going to find out that the aliens from Area 51 killed Kennedy, stop with the drama.”

The notion that the leaks basically amount to a big nothing really does not stand up to scrutiny, even now in the early stages. Of course it is true that, as with any large trove of diplomatic documents, there’s a lot of irrelevant and/or gossipy material. But a number of fascinating, important, and at times disturbing stories are already emerging (in addition to the State Department spying story mentioned above). For example: the Obama administration’s policy of “engagement” with Iran seems to have been pursued with the assumption that it would fail and that more confrontational measures would be required; the Washington has used hardball tactics to force some countries to sign-on to the controversial “Copenhagen accord” on climate change; President Hamid Karzai routinely pardons Afghan drug dealers; the Honduran coup of 2009 was illegal in the opinion of the US Ambassador there; and the British government, whilst pursuing an official inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War, had already assured the United States that said inquiry would not embarrass the Americans. Some of these “secrets” were previously suspected or even assumed, but others are entirely new revelations.

While a number of liberals have downplayed the significance of the document dump, others decry WikiLeaks and see their actions as a direct threat to the interests of Americans. Actually some are both downplaying and decrying. Peter Beinart—who also suggested that the document dump revealed nothing really important—warned that it “will do real harm.” Josh Marshall, editor of the popular progressive web site Talking Points Memo, felt the leak might be “more like an attack on the US government itself than an effort to inform American citizens about what their government is doing on their behalf.” Later Marshall referred, apparently only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to his “working assumption that Julian Assange may actually be a James Bond villain in training.” Mark Schmitt, executive editor of The American Prospect, referred to WikiLeaks as “radical troublemakers” and argued that the leak “really isn’t” related to the public interest. Joe Klein of Time wrote that Assange is a “criminal…who should be in jail” and that “if a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in ‘freedom’ stands as a human disaster” (this from a man who supported the Iraq invasion and who continues to support the war in Afghanistan).

Arguably it’s these reactions from liberal pundits that are most revealing as we assess the effect of “cablegate” on the American political conversation. That the American right would hyperventilate over an organization like WikiLeaks is a given. The consensus of the liberal commentariat and blognoscenti is more of an open question, but it’s clear that many are somewhat or very hostile to what WikiLeaks is doing—why? Dave Weigel, an astute libertarian-leaning reporter who covers politics for Slate, noted in a bloggingheads.tv conversation that what bothers many about WikiLeaks is the organization’s ideology: “The problem is that they clearly are doing it to weaken America’s role in the world and to make it impossible, or at least very difficult, for America to prosecute wars…” Weigel suggested that WikiLeaks would have more support if they released material that “screws over the Russians” or put out internal memos from the Colombian rebel group FARC. Similarly, Marshall argued that the release of the diplomatic cables “makes sense if you think of the US government or its foreign policy apparatus as being basically a corrupt enterprise or one involved in systematic wrongdoing across the board. But if you don’t, it seems much more questionable.”

And therein lies the rub: while they certainly don’t agree with conservatives or the foreign policies of George W. Bush, under no circumstances do the elite liberal political and journalistic classes view the American “foreign policy apparatus as being basically a corrupt enterprise or one involved in systematic wrongdoing.” Indeed it is impossible to join the elite liberal class if one holds such a belief. Reporters—and conservatives are right about this—are indeed more liberal than the average American. But, as Karl Kraus’s epigram quoted at the top would suggest, all reporters (and “pundits”) are deeply caught up with the machinations of the state—particularly when it comes to foreign affairs—regardless of their political beliefs. Liberal journalists and pundits who are DC insiders trade on their access to secrets—indeed it is via this access that they have jobs in the first place. In a sense they have a vested interest in the status quo, whereby policy elites “leak” small details to reporters and the punditocracy who then pass these morsels on to the general public. No liberal who wants continued access to Washington insider information could brazenly champion what WikiLeaks is doing—it would suggest that he or she cannot be trusted with off-the-record comments.

There is obviously something profoundly undemocratic about this state of affairs. In order for a democracy to function, it is necessary for the citizenry to have significant access to information about matters of state. Particularly when it comes to American foreign relations and American overseas adventures, the citizens of this country are very much—too much—in the dark (obviously this is generally true of every country). WikiLeaks or any similar organization thus carries with it a democratizing potential whereby information that has been unnecessarily locked away becomes available to the average citizen. On the whole though, liberal and conservative elites are united in their belief that this ought not to happen, and thus WikiLeaks is either demonized or shrugged off as fairly insignificant. Even some liberals, such as Jon Stewart, who are presumably more skeptical of American foreign policy than the average Beltway insider, don’t particularly know how to react to an organization that has the potential to provide the kind of information that could, theoretically, inform a movement that would seek to utterly transform American foreign policy. Stewart’s scathing, ironic style is absolutely topping when it comes to eviscerating the powers that be, but it has no idea how to respond to the possibility of acting in a manner that would challenge America’s imperial presence in much of the world, something which is at least made more possible by a transparency organization like WikiLeaks.

In a piece that’s obviously sympathetic to WikiLeaks and Assange, it’s important to point out that the latter is not a saint and the former is certainly not a perfect organization. Assange reportedly has a rather imperious style and also seems to place himself front-and-center far more than he should in a supposedly “anarchist” (media quote) organization that relies on loosely affiliated networks for its very survival. The sexual assault charges against him in Sweden could be very real and worthy of prosecution, completely fabricated, or something in between—at this point we have no real information. WikiLeaks itself admittedly did a poor job redacting all of the names of persons at risk from an earlier release relating to the Afghanistan War (though they do seem to have made improvements in this regard). These caveats are ones which defenders of WikiLeaks (and transparency) should not fail to make. In the long-run, however, the “WikiLeaks story” is not about Assange or his organization—it’s about new technologies and new networks that allow for the global dispersal of information that hitherto would have been viewed only by a select few.

Of course human society would not be able to function if we lived in a world with total or even near-total transparency. Individuals, families, organizations, and, yes, corporations and governments indeed have a legitimate interest in keeping secrets. In the year 2010, however, the amount of secrecy at the highest corporate and governmental levels is completely unacceptable and shows no real signs of improving anytime soon. The door to the room(s) where critical decisions about the future of humanity are made is tightly locked and most citizens of earth have no access to the key. WikiLeaks is an admittedly blunt instrument for prying that door open—if only a crack—and for simply drawing attention to the fact that there are so many “secrets” locked away which could and should be out in the open. For those of us who believe that access to information is key to any movement seeking a more democratic society, WikiLeaks and similar organizations will no doubt be important allies for many years to come.

Singing the Bradley Electric: Whistleblowing and Social Movements in the 21st Century

Much virtual ink has been spilled in response to the recent massive “Cable Gate” scandal, as Wikileaks continues to distribute over 250,000 top-secret documents from more than 250 US embassies around the world. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in particular, is in the global spotlight for these unprecedented revelations. As a result, he faces open death threats by US politicians and media personalities, sexual assault allegations for having unprotected but consensual sex with two women in Sweden, and a veritable manhunt led by INTERPOL and various governments who want him imprisoned and silenced.

In a December 4 El Pais interview, Assange explained that death threats from some “right-wing sites” have targeted not only him, but his children. Nevertheless, Assange assured the continuation of Wikileaks’ work despite a multitude of efforts to shut out the organization from the web. In a statement that suggests how mightily these kinds of leaks may be challenging extant government and business power, he asserted, “If there is a battle between the U.S. Army and the preservation of history, we have ensured that history will win.”

The situation appears much more tenuous, though. The World Wide Web is, after all, made of innumerable sinews, nodal points, and infrastructures, but these can be swiftly swiped asunder. Since “Cable Gate,” major U.S. companies like Amazon and Paypal have decided to deny web hosting and donation services agreements with Wikileaks. A virtual cat-and-mouse game has Wikileaks now necessarily changing its website access location up to several times a day across countries.

More perniciously, in a modern day example of “Digital McCarthyism,” .. soldiers, federal employees, the Library of Congress staff, and even Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs students are now denied online access to the leaked documents, or intimidated with enduring penalties if they seek out the information. (Apparently, it’s no matter that these cables have been published in four major newspapers worldwide!) When asked in a December 3community Q&A with The Guardian about what would happen if he—technically or physically—were “taken out,” Assange pointedly replied, “Will we survive? That depends on you.”

This 21^st century question—how to protect an online whistleblower, and cyber-activism in general—has been hurled into central view with this hourly developing story. A global Wikileaks volunteer support network has cropped up online, many notable left-wing journalists closely analyze the story, and everyday public discussion now seems to lean on the side of scrutinizing the government surveillance, trickery, and criminal acts that these leaks uncovered. This widening computer-oriented resistance, and how it is fiercely muzzled, demonstrates that the Wikileaks phenomenon unambiguously deserves both our study and solidarity.

***

However, all the online clamor has so far focused much less on the critical situation of one twenty-three-year old American intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning. He is arguably the sole source of this massive embassy cables leak, as well as the other two most significant Wikileaks exposés to date, “Collateral Murder” and “Afghan War Diary.” Manning is currently detained under solitary confinement in a military prison at Quantico, Virginia, and will be tried on charges that are punishable by fifty-two years in prison, or even a death sentence for engaging in “treasonous” activity.

While Manning was stationed in a tiny US intelligence outpost in Iraq from 2007 to 2010, he had “unprecedented access to classified networks fourteen hours a day, seven days a week for eight-plus months.” The primary means through which Manning downloaded this trove of confidential data was SIPRNet, what the US Department of Defense (DoD) describes as “a system of interconnected computer networks used by the [DoD] and the US Department of State to transmit classified information… in a ‘completely secure’ environment.” This Tower of Babel story in reverse—whereby US security forces decided to coalesce vast amounts of confidential data together so everyone could “speak the same language,” resulted in its vulnerability from within.

SIPRNet, a top secret version of the US military’s internet system, turned out to be openly rollicking with skeletons. Manning wrote in personal chats (that have since been publicly printed) that over time, in performing daily intel work, he discovered “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” Glenn Greenwald wrote on Salon.com of the “incident which first made him seriously question the US war in Iraq: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi ‘insurgents’ who had been detained for distributing ‘insurgent’ literature which, when he had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than ‘a scholarly critique against PM Maliki’:

‘I had an interpreter read it for me… and when I found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… I immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…’”

In inimitable cloak-and-dagger form, Manning began to download caches of incriminating data onto CDs marked “Lady Gaga” at his work desk while he would lip-sync her songs. Being a critical-minded and isolated gay man in an obdurate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military, it’s possible that Manning knew of Lady Gaga’s outspoken public arguments against DADT and homophobia in general. For him to sing “Telephone” while zipping vast state secrets should be memorialized as an especially plucky coup de grâce. . Interestingly, Manning described that at the base, “everyone just sat at their workstations… watching music videos / car chases / buildings exploding… and writing more stuff to CD/DVD… the culture fed opportunities… it was a massive data spillage… facilitated by numerous factors.”

In this light, the government’s flailing histrionics that Bradley Manning and Wikileaks, and really any whistleblower, are destroying the delicate efforts of international diplomacy and the war on terror is spuriously contrived. National Security constructed its own edificial problems (both online and off), engaged in what we now know are countless illegal acts of war and international espionage, and will go to great lengths to curtail any voices who bear witness to these truths. Ronald Deibert writes in “Black Code Redux: Censorship, Surveillance, and the Militarization of Cyberspace” that in order to avoid an “electronic Pearl Harbor,” the US government created in 2006 its first “National Military Strategy for Operations in Cyberspace.” China and Russia have followed suit, with China since 2006 conducting simultaneous military and cyberspace operations exercises.

Back in 2008, President Barack Obama used these words on the campaign trail to castigate George W. Bush’s administration for illegally spying on civilians through cooperating phone companies: “We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk … Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal.” Yet a June 2010 New York Times article revealed the 180-degree pivot towards a major clamp-down on dissenting insiders like Manning: “In seventeen months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions.”

In an interview with Anthony Arnove, Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner had this to say about the current administration’s failed goals amidst widening suppression:

“Obama, within two days of being in office, signed an executive order, which is essentially a presidential order, which said that Guantánamo would be closed in a year… Obama’s commitment has been abandoned. And he made a number of other promises that have not been met about secret detention sites, military commissions, and the like… We now have the spectacle of a Democratic president selling out the Constitution and with it the lives of innocents at Guantánamo and the freedom of future generations as these special laws become the laws for all of us.”

In spite of these empty promises, the public flashes of insight through these major leaks about how brittle U.S. State Secrets can be is a reminder that such a developing “National Security State” is not invincible. If one person, Bradley Manning, single-handedly provided a whistleblowing organization like Wikileaks three of the largest confidential revelations since Daniel Ellsberg (who has publicly supported Manning’s defense) released The Pentagon Papers in 1971, then more potential cyber-resistance is possible from inside US soldiers’ barracks, and in miraculously, miniscule and covert ways. The Guardian editor Steve Leigh informed Amy Goodman on a recent Democracy Now! interview that when the UK newspaper was delivered the embassy cable leaks, “it was on a thumb drive, a tiny little thumb drive, you know, and it had 1.6 gigabytes of material, which contains 250 million words.” This profoundly juxtaposed scale of declassification that can fit into the fifth pocket demands a fresh inquiry into “hacktivism” and whistleblowing in this wholly new political “age of mechanical reproduction.”

***

Virtual protest indeed comes with its own contradictions. Online petitions, boycotts, and “e-sit-ins” are faceless, hyper-individualized actions constrained by the very materials being used to speak out. More broadly, Wikileaks alone can’t topple authoritarian structures, and it’s unclear how long Julian Assange and Co. can endure this international ensnaring operation. Moreover, in order to reach a wide audience, the leaks currently must go through newspaper conduits, which can sometimes temper the evidence being disclosed. For example, The New York Times’ current special feature on the embassy cable leaks is called “State’s Secrets: A cache of diplomatic cables provides a chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world.” Now that doesn’t sound too inflammatory and eye-catching, does it? Such papers as The New York Times and Washington Post within the past few years have deliberately not printed controversial information that would have affected politics-as-usual (on Bush’s illegal wire-tapping and the CIA’s secret prisons, respectively).

A movement outside the virtual, that also tactically embraces the virtual, is necessary. Learning how to adeptly combine both technology and physical action, as seen in the efforts of Buddhist monks in Myanmar and British kids against budget cuts, will create a synergy that allows both forms to flourish in exciting, unexpected ways in this rapidly changing political landscape. Cell phones can cover protests and be uploaded onto Youtube in seconds. Twitter and Facebook blasts can mobilize tens of thousands of people in a few days’ notice to join a rally, as happened on the day California voted to pass the anti-gay Proposition 8 in California. Uncovering evidence on the powers-that-be is a skill that can be learned, improved, and shared. In the U.S. military, such other intel analysts as Adrienne Kinne have publicly come out against the information they handled that proved U.S.-orchestrated torture and civilian deaths, and the chorus of anti-war soldiers’ voices in general is getting louder.

As for Bradley Manning, who Assange has called “an unparalleled hero,” he has a vigorous defense campaign underway at www.BradleyManning.org, led by Courage to Resist and Iraq Veterans Against the War. Soldiers and community members are holding protests outside the Virginia military base, and encourage people from various social movements to take up his defense as a locus for future whistleblower protections. A movement to unconditionally release Manning, and prosecute the real criminal actions detailed in his leaks, is not only possibly but necessary in this high-stakes moment. Contemporary technology has created the ability for the whole world to watch what happens to those who demand that truth and justice be vindicated. Many things are possible right now, but not if we wait for political transformation to (slowly) upload itself. Manning himself mused earlier this year:

“god knows what happens now—hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms—if not, than [sic] we’re doomed—as a species—I will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens—the reaction to the video [“Collateral Murder”] gave me immense hope; CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed; Twitter exploded—people who saw, knew there was something wrong . . .—I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

In the process of making more informed decisions and actions, we must also rethink the rules of the terrain in general. How far do we have the right to criticize our government? How extensively can we exercise activities to assure and protect that right? What opportunities do current technologies afford new groups of activists? More fundamentally, which side are we on in this history that Assange hopes will carry the true record of events? If we engage in criminal acts to overturn tyrannical rule, is this defensible? What are the limits of our moralities when tested in real-life events? Are various forms of civil disobedience justified, and if so, then, how can we go about utilizing them?

The late Howard Zinn asked such questions in his 1968 pamphlet Disobedience and Democracy, in which he argued that social movements should reconsider the core radical assertions and possibilities expressed during this country’s founding: “The government is not synonymous with the people; it is an artificial device, set up by the citizens for certain purposes. It is endowed with no sacred aura; rather, it needs to be watched, scrutinized, criticized, opposed, changed, and even overthrown and replaced when necessary.” Apparently we have much more idea- and action-browsing to do, and the courageous performances of such young folks as Bradley Manning can help chart that future course.

WikiLeaks and the Ethics of Secrecy

MICHAEL BUSCH

But focusing on the WikiLeaks figurehead achieves nothing from what I can tell aside from feeding Assange’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for attention, and providing a platform for conservative blowhards like Long Island congressman Peter King to score stupidly cheap points in what has evolved into a full-scale Republican siege on Barack Obama’s White House. And while these debates have succeeded in fueling a political environment that has increasingly taken on the feel of a Hollywood spy thriller, they have simultaneously excused Americans from having to thoughtfully consider the state of our nation during a period of multiple crises. Instead, we are being encouraged to retreat behind the battlements of grossly oversimplified ideological stances and told to watch the show.

Beyond the sensationalism, however, serious issues about American political life do exist at the heart of the WikiLeaks scandal. Among them can be found critical questions concerning the role and ethics of secrecy in an open democracy.

On the issue of state secrets, the driving narratives of debate can be roughly plotted along a spectrum: the leftmost point argues that the leaked cables expose the improprieties of empire and therefore all classified information should be brought to light by whatever means possible; the opposite point on the right asserts that government action in the name of the national interest should necessarily be hidden and protected; and then there’s the center, which shrugs the whole thing off by noting that there’s really nothing much in the cables—aside from petty gossip—that merits all this fuss.

All three miss the point. To begin with, it’s simply not the case that the business of American governance necessitates secrecy in order to be effective. The Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) belies this myth. To be sure, our democratic laws recognize that certain information—that which constitutes a clear and present danger to the most sensitive national interests or threatens individual privacy, civil, and human rights, for example—should not be issued into the public domain. And for this reason, claims that all information should be entirely free and unregulated ought to be handled with caution, deriving as they do from an outlook that demands the privileges of transparency without accepting the responsibilities that attend it.

Still, the argument that government wrongdoing, when shielded by the cloak of secrecy, constitutes a flagrant abuse of administrative power enjoys the powerful wind of democratic principles at its back. Not only that, but like Glenn Greenwald, I’d push it a bit further and argue that the second-hand gossip and banality that fills the vast majority of leaked cables thus far is precisely at issue in this discussion, insofar as it also represents the misuse of government secrecy powers. If the various categories of confidentiality that the State Department uses to classify different levels of sensitive information are to have any meaning at all, they must be rigorously respected and adhered to. Otherwise, civil servants risk undermining good-faith claims—whether right or wrong—to government secrecy in truly extraordinary situations that may warrant it. The WikiLeaks cables demonstrate that they do not, and that even harmless information is highly restricted, which is deeply troubling.

Beyond these considerations, however, the WikiLeaks phenomenon has also defrocked the media of its claim to guardianship over the public good. The argument can be made—and it should—that tools such as the FoIA offer institutional channels through which the public can responsibly access exactly the sorts of documents WikiLeaks has brought to light. The trouble with this argument, of course, is that the media—which has traditionally possessed the resources to maximize these tools to greatest profit—has shirked its responsibility as a mechanism by which the public can hold its government to account. As the media terrain itself rapidly shifts, and economic incentives follow, fewer and fewer resources are devoted to the deep investigative reporting that has helped police government behavior in the past but—with the exception of a notable few holdouts—has largely vanished today.

In many respects, the disappearance of investigative reporting is as much a product of what journalists themselves see as their public function as it is of technological shifts or the public’s waning interest in any nugget of information that exceeds 140 characters. The new model of political reporting has come to privilege the armchair over shoe leather as its primary accoutrement, as exemplified by the attitude of media elites such as The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who asks “What’s so bad about sitting around?” To be certain, Chait is right that “You can learn a lot sitting behind a desk, mining the papers for interesting factual nuggets, reading political commentary from every perspective, poring through books and reports, and using the Nexis database to compile enormous stacks of newspaper stories.”

But Chait’s larger point is discouraging. “Part of the problem is that journalism terminology glorifies “shoe-leather reporting,” whereby you pound the pavement so often you wear out the soles of your shoes. I’m not saying that every news story could be reported without leaving one’s desk. (Bernstein: “Woodward, look! I found a clip from 1971 in which President Nixon tells the Omaha World-Herald he plans to order his goons to break into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel!” Woodward: “I’ll cancel that meeting with Deep Throat.”) I’m simply saying that, sometimes, laziness can be the better part of valor.”

I’m not so sure, simply because it seems to have developed into a newsroom pathology. Ironically, the WikiLeaks documents have done almost nothing to shock reporters back into action, but instead have reinforced their very reluctance to leave the news desk, chained as they are to their chairs in expectation of the next batch of cables. Indeed, most of the “reporting” on the Wikileaks document dump has come to constitute a sort of Cliff’s Notes guide to the embassy cables rather than serious reportage or analysis.

And this is precisely it. The lion’s share of disdain swirling around the WikiLeaks scandal has been directed at the government and Julian Assange. But amidst this comic book-worthy showdown, the media has largely given itself a free pass, which in many respects strikes me as the crux of the matter. If powerful media outlets were doing a better job at monitoring government action at home and abroad, there would likely be no WikiLeaks (or at least not the WikiLeaks that we’ve grown to love/hate), nor would governments enjoy carte blanche to get in the lazy habit of classifying everything they do as confidential or using the shield of “state secrets” to obscure government malfeasance.

So it makes sense that as the unparalleled tradition of American investigative reporting gives way to the relentless waves of new information pouring into the American psyche with each new tweet, WikiLeaks has appeared on the scene to fill the gap. Whether Assange and company see themselves as heirs to this tradition is doubtful. As the Vancouver Sun, in an excellent analysis of blogger Aaron Bady’s work on Assange’s political philosophy, notes, the WikiLeaks leader “is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms,” but instead is seeking to disrupt modes by which government secrecy operates in order to change the very nature of governance itself.

Still, it seems as if WikiLeaks itself has come under the power of a strangely market-driven demand for democratic transparency in the absence of healthy media and in the face of increasingly secret government behavior. Despite the hacker ethic—that all information must flow unfettered into the public domain—supposedly driving the WikiLeaks phenomenon, there is evidence that WikiLeakers are making efforts at vetting the flow of information to meet classic reporting standards that avoid violating the harm principle outlined in the FoIA and thus contributing to a healthier democracy at the end of the day. It strikes me that this is both encouraging and to be encouraged.

And it’s for this reason that the government’s ham-fisted response to the WikiLeaks phenomenon is so shocking. Of course the political establishment is licking its wounds at having had its sense of entitlement to secrecy stripped away with each new batch of cables leaked to the public. I don’t find this surprising in the least. The astonishing part to my mind is that the government, confronted with an American public that has grown increasingly distrustful of it by the year, continues to adhere to the very practices that further pull the carpet of positive public opinion out from beneath its own feet. In an age in which political power clearly resides with those seeking to pull the curtains away to dispel the gloom of secrecy, political elites in the United States would prefer to keep us all in the dark.

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From the looks of it, you might think that Foreign Policy—the once venerable journal of international political analysis—had come under the editorial guidance of Marvel Comics.  The magazine’s latest cover features a Hitler-mustachioed Robert Mugabe, a vacant-eyed Kim Jong Il, and three other dastardly-looking dudes you’ve likely never heard of standing shoulder-to-shoulder under the banner “The Committee to Destroy the World,” and looking distinctly like a group of neighborhood toughs getting ready to kick your ass.  A smaller headline in the corner informs readers that this is “The Bad Guys Issue,” while another hints that zombies are also threatening world peace, leaving one to assume that the existential threats facing international relations demand a lot more in the way of Captain America and his Avengers and a lot less Ban ki-Moon and the League of Ineffective Bureaucrats.

But no.  As it turns out, the layout guys were just excited about the publication of this year’s Failed States Index, FP’s annual list of the world’s most mismanaged countries, with attendant essays on why it is that the predominantly brown-peopled parts of the world can’t seem to escape their apparently inexhaustible capacity for barbarism and how we in the west—who have our own houses perfectly in order—can save them.

Yet while readers won’t find any superheroes dispatching the forces of evil from North Korea, Zimbabwe or Sudan in the new issue of Foreign Policy, they might notice that the magazine’s comic book-style does indicate a retreat from serious political analysis of perhaps the stickiest problem in international relations. What are failed states, anyway?  What distinguishes them from weak states, hollow states, collapsed states, or any of the other states victimized by adjectivitis? You won’t find answers in Foreign Policy!  Instead, the journal presents a list of sixty “unhappy” countries, ranked according to twelve “indicators of failure”—demographics, refugees, illegitimate governments, brain drain, public services, inequality, group grievances, human rights, economic decline, security forces, factionalized elites, and external intervention—some of which are self-evident, others less so, but none fully explicated.

In years past, FP’s Failed States Index—while still riddled with methodological, definitional, philosophical, and other problems—at least possessed the virtue of introspection.  Noting, for example, that Mugabe’s Zimbabwe ranked second only to Somalia in the 2009 Index as the world’s most miserable state, Robert Rotberg—perhaps the leading theorist of failed states—argued that the “failed states” concept was a blunt analytical tool in need of significant refinement if two such disparate situations could be so neatly lumped together on paper.  “Zimbabwe is the second most failed state, just ahead of Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” he pointed out, before stating the obvious that because “Zimbabwe has no discernible civil warfare,” and the “state has not lost its monopoly control of violence…[it] should not be considered failed.”  Not only that, but Rotberg conceded that “other results are equally confusing,” leading him to the conclusion that “a more objective system of rankings” was necessary.

Not so this year.  Foreign Policy has seemingly boiled down the world’s problems to a small band of “bad dude dictators and general coconut heads,” “senile autocrats,” “suave bandits,” “eccentric buffoons,” “quacks,” and “tin pot despots,” leading its writers variously to the groundbreaking conclusions that “bad guys matter,” “failed states matter,” that “actually, it’s mountains” that complicate the development of the world’s most fragile states, and that the traditional bogeymen of American conservatism—China, France, and the United Nations—are in fact responsible for the propagation of dictatorship throughout the world, just as we suspected.  And this is to say nothing of the fact that the editors chose to give one of the last words in their “bad guys” issue to Paul Wolfowitz…

All of which is bad enough.  But even more troubling is the journal’s seeming headlong plunge into paternalist arrogance and a macho glorification of war touring that seems designed more for thirteen year old boys than a mature audience of informed readers—the magazine’s traditional base.  Even a cursory glance at the slew of adjunct essays to this year’s Index gives a flavor of the way in which the journal has chosen to present and analyze world events.  Take, for instance, the lede of an essay on Central America: “Every time I go to Guatemala, I find a dead body.”  Or the badass self-regard of an essay entitled “Mogadishu Was a Blast”: “One night we invited a new friend in Mogadishu to visit us in Kandahar.  His response: ‘Visit you in Afghanistan?  You’re crazy!  It’s too dangerous.’” And then there’s this slice of condescension in an essay on troubled Central African Republic: “A charming tic of Central Africans is a tendency to label things as literally as possible.”  If it’s true that a dissertation examining the language employed by global northern analysts of global southern politics waits to be written, prospective researchers would do well apparently to supplement their diet of Nicholas Kristof op-eds with recent issues of Foreign Policy.

This is not to say, of course, that the current issue, or FP more generally, constitutes an unalloyed bad.  To be sure, despite its problems, the Failed States Index offers a jumping off point for productive discussion of the reality of failed states and vulnerable populations that are adversely affected by social collapse.  And the journal should be applauded for its attempts at introducing a broader audience of readers to the world of international politics.  Moreover, good things are happening at the magazine.  The recent overhaul of what had been the moribund FP website produced a sleek, constantly updated, and informative homepage that has established itself as required reading for those interested in international politics, and provided a home for Stephen Walt to write the smartest, most level-headed blog on global affairs currently going.

But the latest edition does suggest that in its efforts to sell copies of the magazine, the editorial team at Foreign Policy has allowed the complexities of international relations to be taken hostage by writers who would have you believe that our world is being overrun by a team of supervillians, that the Global South is largely a jungle of bloody chaos that victimized helpless and hapless indigens, that state failure is bad for locals but cool to witness if you have the luxury of getting out, and that anything less than the steady, civilizing hand of Western power is sure to doom the most vulnerable of us around the world.

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On March 31, speaking before the International Donors’ Conference for Haiti, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed the United States’ commitment to “help Haiti and to help the leaders of Haiti lead a recovery effort worthy of their highest hopes.” At the conclusion of the conference participants from the international community had pledged $5.3 billion to Haiti over the next two years and more than $9 billion for the next three years and beyond. It seemed that the international community had come to a rarely-achieved consensus and was united in its effort to help Haiti. In reality, what we saw on March 31 was a maneuver by the United States and the international community to strengthen its grip on the country. The battle for post-earthquake Haiti is underway.

It is illuminating to note what sort of future the international community envisions for Haiti. Some elements of the recommended “New Future for Haiti” are not so new, such as the central role planned for the low-wage, labor-intensive assembly industry. Such sweatshop-driven economic development was also the centerpiece of the US-imposed plan in the 1970s and 1980s and it failed to lift the majority of Haitians (even those with the manufacturing jobs) out of poverty. Other key elements include a rebuilt tourist industry which will create service jobs for Haitians and redeveloped agricultural production, some of which will supply international investors like the 25,000 farmers who will be growing mangoes for Coca-Cola.

Holding the purse strings for this grand redevelopment plan will be the World Bank. Though the international community is willing to concede that there should be some Haitian involvement, a majority of the representatives on the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti will be foreigners. In accepting this aid and reconstruction plan, Haiti Liberte journalist Kim Ives argues, Haitian President Rene Preval has “turned over the keys to Haiti to a consortium of foreign banks and governments.”

What’s more, members of Haiti’s grassroots and civil society organizations have been shut out of this discussion. Outside of the United Nations building on March 31 protesters drew attention to the exclusion of the popular movement in the planning of Haiti’s future. Likewise, earlier in the month grassroots organizations were excluded from an international donors’ meeting in Santo Domingo. The exclusion of the popular organizations should not come as a surprise, however, since they are calling for an economic model that breaks Haiti’s pattern of economic dependence on foreign powers and proposes to substitute a sustainable and decentralized Haiti with Haiti’s popular organizations playing a leading role.

Members of Haiti’s popular movement recognize that this is a struggle over the future of Haiti and we should too. Americans should remember that this is not the first time, even in recent history, that the United States has publicly claimed friendship with Haiti while simultaneously attacking the Haitian people.

Less than a year after Jean-Bertrand Aristide was first elected Haiti’s president he was removed from office in a coup, after which CIA-backed death squads systematically targeted members of the peoples’ movement. Publicly the United States condemned the coup and claimed to be horrified by this disregard for democracy, but behind the scenes it refused to enforce an embargo that would have cut off aid to the coup regime. Finally, in September, 1994, proclaiming “American steadfastness” and support for Haitian democracy, President Bill Clinton gave Aristide a military escort back to the country, but not before they had settled on a few conditions. As the terms of his return to the Presidency, the United States and other international “friends of Haiti” insisted that Aristide accept a neoliberal future for the country that included cutting public jobs and privatizing public services, eliminating tariffs and price controls, and generally making Haiti more hospitable to foreign capital. Then, as now, the real purpose of the much-heralded American support for Haiti was to benefit the wealthy and powerful of the international community.

The International Donors’ Conference and the Haitian popular organizations have presented two conflicting visions for the future of Haiti. Will the Haitian economy remain largely dependent on foreign investment for industry, agri-business and tourism and will Haitian grassroots organizations continue to be excluded from meaningful participation in the operating of the country? Or will the popular movement have a say in reconstructing a Haiti that is independent, sustainable, and concerned first-and-foremost with the well-being of the Haitian people? Seeing these visions side-by-side lays bare the reality that there is a battle underway for post-earthquake Haiti. Which side are you on?

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Like many present-day lawmakers in the United States, the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi gave at least some thought to the question of how to pay for health care. One section of the famous Code of Hammurabi detailed what the fall 2009 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly cheekily referred to as a “fee schedule” for doctors in the 18th century BCE. For successfully employing a “bronze lancet” to treat a severe wound, Babylonian doctors were entitled to a set remuneration. If the patient were a “gentleman” he was to pay ten shekels of silver. The son of a poor man would owe just five (thus fees were in part tied to one’s ability to pay), and a gentleman whose servant needed care was to pay the doctor two shekels (an early version of our present day employment-based health insurance system?). These latter provisions might strike us as almost modern, but the code took a more draconian stance when it came to dealing with medical malpractice. Doctors who killed or maimed a patient while operating did not end up in court facing a civil suit as they might today; they simply had their hands cut off.

Nearly four thousand years after Hammurabi’s laws were first carved into stone, physicians have considerably more to work with than bronze lancets when it comes to medical technology, but the United States has yet to figure out a decent way to ensure that everyone has access to medical care and a means to pay for it. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act recently passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama purports to be the beginning of a long-term solution to that problem, and it comes after a year-long fight that sucked nearly all of the oxygen out of mainstream political debate in this country.

The terms of the health care discussion, such as it was, were heavily circumscribed from the outset. While a single-payer system—some version of which has been adopted in basically every other fully industrialized nation—has polled extremely well in public opinion surveys for years, anything akin to “Medicare for all” was deemed “politically impossible” from the outset (the obvious reason being that it was anathema to the enormously profitable and powerful insurance industry and its political backers, generally went unspoken). During his major address to congress on health care last September, Obama “triangulated” in a highly cynical fashion when he likened single-payer to absurd conservative proposals that would end employer-based insurance and force individuals to buy insurance on their own, labeling both interesting but impractical ideas. Despite its popularity and the fact that a House single-payer bill has been co-sponsored by over ninety members of congress in recent years, the corporate media provided little reporting or commentary on this option.

While single-payer advocates were not even offered a seat at the negotiating table, major stakeholders in the current for-profit health care system were central players from the beginning as the Obama administration sought to avoid the ire of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that had helped derail health care reform in 1993-94. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade group of the health insurance industry, was in regular touch with the administration and promised to work for reform but sat on the fence for months before deciding to oppose the Democratic proposal. This decision angered the Obama administration and led to a war of words between the White House and the insurance industry. In the end, however, the two main demands of the industry (everyone would be required to buy health insurance, no government-run “public option” to compete with private insurance) were met by the legislation signed by the president.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies’ trade group PhRMA, led by former Republican congressman Billy Tauzin, struck a deal with the White House last summer under which Big Pharma would agree to $80 billion in cost-cutting measures in the years ahead. In exchange the White House promised that it would not seek to lower prescription drug prices, an issue on which Obama had campaigned in 2008. PhRMA eventually supported the reform legislation with an expensive ad campaign, even reviving the fictional couple “Harry and Louise” whose commercials had helped to derail the Clinton reform effort but who now argued that we could “get the job done this time.”

In the Senate, control of the legislation was initially handed over to the conservative Democrat from Montana, Max Baucus, who had received over $1.4 million in campaign contributions from the health and insurance sectors during the 2008 election cycle. Baucus and five other members of the Senate Finance Committee (including three Republicans) were tasked with working out a compromise bill. The GOP made the (rather obvious) calculation that it was not in their political interests to help Obama pass a massive, bipartisan makeover of health care and as such embarked on a course of staunch opposition while paying lip service to the idea that they were negotiating. Several months were lost in the process, and during the summer recess a popular backlash against the supposed government “takeover” of health care exploded on the political scene, with the half-term ex-governor of Alaska arguably driving the discussion more than the president. The backlash—which undoubtedly was given excessive attention by the media—consisted of a potent mix of genuine, grassroots, anti-government conservatism (and libertarianism) and corporate astroturfing led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s group Freedom Works. The Obama administration was clearly caught off guard and never really regained control of the debate.

This loss of control was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the discussion of the public option, a fairly limited and inadequate reform which would have been available only to a small percentage of the population (and only if they wanted it), but which was quickly spoken of by the right as though it were culled from the pages of Mein Kampf. Many of Obama’s supporters on the left, meanwhile, came to view the public option as the holy grail of reform, taking little notice of the fact that it was never described with any real specificity and could well have proved a failure if implemented and significantly set back the cause of single-payer to which most progressives are committed. Adding to the confusion, mainstream media outlets generally represented the proposed public option as unpopular despite the fact that surveys routinely showed that more than 50 percent of the country supported it. Obama obligingly mouthed his support for the public option to avoid angering his liberal base more than necessary, but it seems likely he abandoned the idea of including it in the legislation early on, perhaps as part of a quid pro quo with industry groups.

Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the January special election to fill the late Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat seemed to kill the possibility of reform, but ultimately the Democratic leadership—fully recognizing that failure to finish any legislation would have been politically disastrous—was able to craft a route to passage based in large measure on the original, moderate Senate bill reported out of Baucus’s finance committee. Liberals cheered, hailing the bill as the greatest domestic policy achievement since Medicare and Medicaid, while many conservatives suggested that the bill was essentially the beginning of the end of freedom in the United States

In reality it’s extremely difficult to say what the effects of reform will be on public policy and on American politics in the long run. In terms of what the policy will actually do there are several issues at play. Measures which will significantly expand the number of people who have access to Medicaid, allow young people to stay on their parents’ plans until age twenty-six, and end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions (among others) are unambiguously beneficial assuming they are actually implemented as advertised. Despite threats of repeal if and when the Republicans retake the government, and forthcoming constitutional challenges by conservative attorney generals in a dozen or so states, it seems extremely unlikely that the law will be taken off the books by Congress or the courts, and as such a number of provisions will likely begin to have a demonstrably positive effect even before the 2012 election.

More threatening to the future of the legislation will be business efforts to fight its implementation through legal channels while also fighting a continued public relations war via advertising. According to the Wall Street Journal, the US Chamber of Commerce is planning on spending $50 million attacking health care reform and attempting “to unseat vulnerable Democrats who voted for it.” The Chamber also plans to take legal action if and when they disagree with implementation of the law. Critics have remarked that the legislation is full of loopholes, and much of the uncertainty about the law going forward stems from the fact that the meaning of some of the key provisions will likely be decided in the courts. We’ve already seen a preview of this lawyerly strategy when the insurance industry briefly tried to argue (perhaps correctly) that the law did not actually require them to provide coverage to children with preexisting conditions this year, as had been assumed. The industry quickly backed down from that argument after an outcry, but it’s a safe assumption that high-priced corporate attorneys will be looking for any legal loopholes that, for example, allow insurance companies to cover individuals poorly or not at all.

In spite of industry concerns, the conventional wisdom is that most health care companies will benefit from the new law. The New York Times reported on April 9 that the legislation will likely prove to be a boon for health care stocks, as companies like CVS Caremark and Quest Diagnostics are expected to profit handsomely from increased prescription drug sales and medical tests respectively. Insurance companies may face more difficulties once they have to cover people with pre-existing conditions at which point, as one health analyst told the Times, we’ll have to see if “they price these things so that they can avoid losing money” (that seems likely!). Despite their earlier opposition, AHIP has now, according to Time magazine, signed on in support to make “sure the new law succeeds beyond most expectations,” though AHIP and its health care industry members no doubt define “success” differently than do many of the supporters and intended beneficiaries of the bill.

In political terms, the health care debate has energized both the new Tea Party Movement and the Democratic base. Given the moderate if not conservative nature of the reform—which, as Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich has pointed out, is similar in certain respects to proposals made by Richard Nixon—it says a great deal about politics in the age of Obama that many liberals are now mobilizing around what they see as an enormous policy success while the Tea Party and the GOP are mobilizing to roll back the rising tide of fascism, or something. Regardless, for the next few years if not beyond we shouldn’t be surprised to see continued, intense grassroots energy directed at health care reform from both the right and liberal-left.

To what ends that energy will be directed is arguably a more difficult question. Perhaps in part because of the fierce intensity of the debate, many pundits speak and write as though the current battle lines for the health care debate will persist indefinitely. However, if history is any guide when it comes to major social legislation, that likely will not be the case. When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it was not particularly popular with FDR’s labor base (which was largely indifferent to the very idea of social insurance) nor with the Republican opposition (some of whom made reference to a threat to “the integrity of our institutions” and warned of “the lash of the dictator”). The act held to the racial and gender strictures of its time and excluded the majority of African Americans and women from the old-age insurance portion of the plan (the NAACP actually testified against the bill). Over time, however, Social Security became more inclusive, and was not only accepted by the next Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, but was expanded significantly by his administration, and labor unions and other progressive groups would come to defend Social Security as the bulwark of the (admittedly limited) American welfare state.

The story with Medicare is somewhat similar in terms of shifting politics. In the early 1960s, future Republican standard bearer Ronald Reagan railed against Medicare on behalf of the American Medical Association and argued that it was a stepping stone to socialism. He had changed his tune, however, by the time of the 1980 election when incumbent Jimmy Carter tried unsuccessfully to make an issue of his past statements in opposition to the by-then-popular program. George W. Bush and a Republican congress added an outlandishly expensive prescription drug benefit to Medicare in 2003, and in August of last year Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele argued in a Washington Post op-ed that “we need to protect Medicare…” Many progressives of the mid-1960s viewed Medicare and Medicaid as poor substitutes for their real goal of a national health insurance plan, but now “Medicare for all” is the rallying cry for many on the left.

A consideration of even the most basic variables demonstrates how difficult it is to predict the future politics of Obamacare. While the legislation is not in fact a government takeover of health care, it is perceived that way by many (on both sides of the debate). Will this perception continue to hold in the future? How popular will the reform be in five to ten years, and which aspects will be popular and which less so? If many view the program as successful (or as a failure), will it be because of a belief that the government took a larger role in the health care system, or because they left the private system largely as is, merely tweaking around the edges? If health care costs continue to go up, as is likely, will that be blamed on the federal government, the states, the insurance companies, or some combination thereof? We cannot know the answers to these questions at this point, but it’s entirely possible that liberals will be lamenting the failure of reform ten years from now while conservatives will have decided it wasn’t so bad. Or not.

For those of us on the left, it’s impossible to be happy with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or the way the process unfolded, though one can hardly be surprised by the outcome. The legislation seems to have further entrenched the role of for-profit insurance in the health care system which, in the long run, will inevitably continue to drive up costs as corporate profits are prioritized over people. The industry bought political access and helped write the bill to significantly suit its own interests, and single-payer advocates had no real opportunity to articulate the case for a European or Canadian style system in the course of a lengthy national health care debate the likes of which may not come again for many years.

On the other hand, the new law does seem to codify (at least in theory) the principle that access to affordable health care is a right, not a privilege, of all Americans. This legislation will almost certainly not deliver on that promise, and a decade or two from now it’s quite likely that Congress and a new president will be discussing health care all over again as costs spiral wildly out of control. At that point, having perhaps internalized the notion that everyone deserves to have coverage, even more Americans (and more legislators) might be open to the idea that a single-payer system is most efficient at containing costs while still providing everyone with access to care. Even if we get to that point eventually—a very big if—drug and health insurance companies will rake in a whole lot of shekels in the meantime, and tens of thousands will die because they could not afford to pay the man or woman with the bronze lancet that could have saved their life.

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The rapid national organization of the Tea Party has become one of the most extraordinary developments in American politics since the election of Barack Obama. Depending on one’s perspective, it is either a diverse movement or a confused one. In truth it is both, but only because it is a cover for more than one movement. What we may be witnessing is a momentary intersection of two nascent movements, a populist one and a fascist one. Which of these movements will prevail will depend on what happens to the US economy in the near future. The future power of the Tea Party will crystallize, disintegrate, or morph in direct relationship with the so-called “real” economy of “Main Street.” The economic recovery will have to feel real to ordinary US citizens to succeed. So far it hasn’t. If there is no real recovery on Main Street, if ordinary Americans do not begin to feel like things are getting better in ways that really matter to them; if its middle-class majority becomes convinced that liberal capitalism has permanently malfunctioned then it is quite possible that the fascist elements of the Tea Party will coalesce into more extreme forms of antagonism.. It appears we are at that threshold now.

 In a recent New Yorker, Ben McGrath implies the Tea Party is nothing more than a hodge-podge of paranoid, right-wing populists. Likewise, Jonathan Raban’s expose in The New York Review of Books describes the convention in Nashville as a “loose congeries of unlike minds” united only by a common “contempt” of Obama. Both articles observe that many of the members subscribed to a wide range of counter-narratives concerning American power, such as the “birther” insistence that Obama isn’t an American, or the “truther” insistence that there are serious holes in the story of the 9/11 commission. There are evangelical wings and libertarian advocates. And then there is the surprising fact that the Tea Party movement is so old, and the unsurprising fact that it is so white.

The Tea Party’s suspicion of Washington, Obama, and the liberal media, however, is justified. The current financial crisis has conclusively exposed the real ties between Wall Street and Washington. The resolute self-censorship of the mainstream media to investigate that relationship has severely degraded many people’s faith in corporate journalistic integrity. This goes not only for CNBC, which championed the financial insanity during the bubble, but also for liberal publications like the New York Times and The New Yorker. Both the Times and FOX News are equally as likely to derisively dismiss interpretations from the right or left that don’t fit their ideological lens as a form of conspiracy theory. The recent crisis has opened an enormous rift between information that appears to explain the world and the information in the mainstream media, which seems merely to describe it. The abject failure of the mainstream media to investigate the potential conflicts in the relationships of the power elite on Wall Street and in Washington continuously opens a vacuum that progressives and conservatives must fill with their own research.

As Ben McGrath and others have noted, the Tea Party does a lot of its own research. Liberals dismiss their ideas with the same group-think arrogance found in the Tea Party itself, but one must at least give the Tea Party some credit for originality. The recent explosion of so-called conspiracy theory is not the product of the Internet’s ability to provide cheap access to fringe thinking. It is due to the degraded ambitions and responsibilities of mainstream American journalism and its complicity within the tiers of power it follows. Mainstream journalism actively participates in the simultaneous silencing of alternative media and the promotion of bounded debates that exclude openings outside the political mainstream. The resentment of Tea Party members for this silencing parallels progressive resentments of the same institutions. This silencing is a form of corporate censorship, not unlike that which the Chinese regime uses to edit Google searches. The difference is that the Chinese government uses censorship to edit stories, suppress information, and punish journalists for publishing anywhere. In the US, one can publish one’s thoughts online, for free. They are just not honored by those in power, and thus only “believed” by a small circle of one’s readers. Censorship in the United States instead takes the form of active derision, humiliation, and snobbery towards individuals promoting alternative narratives about the world. The Tea Party exists because of this information vacuum, however, and not simply because gullible people are excited by novel accusations and wacky ideas. This vacuum also serves the purpose of matching information to the emotions of one’s life, which is a necessary link one must make in order to explain the world to oneself.

The self-censorship within the corporate mainstream media is all the more problematic because the narratives they’ve inherited from their own political wing—their White House—just aren’t selling. What David Brooks, David Axelrod, Timothy Geithner and the Times fail to understand is that Obama’s pragmatic ideology is not one of compromise, but a compromised ideology. Obama’s intellectual principles have traded originality for power. From the beginning of his 2008 presidency campaign, he defined himself by his slip-shod fidelity to being “smart” without being “ideological.” His refusal to address the real ideological underpinnings of his own worldview has thus turned into his greatest weakness. He has no organizing principle for the world, and that’s why he’s become the perfect cipher for the real tiers of American power working around him. The most insidious part of Obama’s presidency is his blindness to his own beliefs. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but his lack of originality—his failure to think outside the box—stems directly from the fact that he doesn’t believe he’s in a box to begin with.

His decisions have thus become a synthetic gumbo of liberal policy decisions without the benefit of a liberal ideology—no Great Society, no Works Progress Administration. Obama’s form of pragmatic liberalism denies itself as liberalism, and thus Obama and his supporters constantly claim the righteous high-ground of compromise; all they want, they say, is smart power. What they don’t realize is that the real ideological and economic foundations of liberalism are dead. The collapse of the US economy is not only the fault of the Republicans, but is equally the fault of Obama and Bill Clinton, and Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer. Democrats have used US power in past decades as a platform for neo-liberal free-market policies like NAFTA and deregulation, as well as neo-conservative foreign policy adventures like Iraq. For Obama, things working right means a surge in Afghanistan, business-as-usual bonanza bonuses for the banking barons, and no single-payer or even public option healthcare system. It shouldn’t continue to surprise progressives that Obama doesn’t seem passionate about gay marriage, troop withdrawals, or financial reform.

In the face of Obama’s ineffectual leadership, it’s not surprising that Scott Brown was able to pull independent votes in the Massachusetts special election. Obama was correct to surmise that the populist tides that carried him into office also carried Brown into his. This populist tide also fertilized the Tea Party. It exists because the past financial collapse has killed liberalism—itself a contradictory mish-mash of capitalist exploitation and partial government programs. It’s dead because the United States has recently either escaped or forestalled economic collapse, but many regions in the United States are still experiencing the full shock of that catastrophe. Entire communities are socially and economically dead. For all practical purposes, these regions are currently sitting on the edge of the extreme social decay that follows economic depression. They are merely surviving while financial markets cautiously resume the practices of lending, leverage, and bonuses that contributed to the origins of the crisis. The economy has not recovered so much as it’s been revived, but the corpse that’s talking on CNN still looks, to everyone, like Frankenstein’s monster.

The Federal Reserve, not the Treasury Department, electrified this monster back into existence. The Fed’s policies absorbed and soaked up the worst of the credit crisis through quantitative easing, money printing, and the trillions of dollars of toxic securities it purchased. Those actions make the bailout seem trite. They have received very little attention in the mainstream media, although organizations like GATA (Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee) and websites like Zero Hedge have filed lawsuits and uncovered documents to pinpoint vast schemes of corruption, influence, and manipulation at the Fed now and in previous decades. The Fed serves as the lynchpin of liberalism because it creates money. By softening the effects of recessions through monetary expansion—that is, by creating credit bubbles—it reduces the possibilities for social revolt against the ruling elite. This is because middle-class wealth depends on an addiction to that credit and money. It thus prevents the social consequences of financial risk. Run by a cabal of banks, the Fed usurps the constitutional mandate for the Treasury to print money and instead prints it for the government, all the while controlling interest rates. During recessions and depressions it follows the Keynesian proscription to “spend” out of a recession. This is the world Obama wants to find pragmatic solutions to sustain.

The true litmus test of liberalism for a wobbly progressive is an opinion about the Fed, because a real liberal has either never questioned it or flat-out supports it. The failure of progressives to imagine a financial system post-liberalism is one of its main intellectual weakness, and thus one of the reasons for the continued success of the Tea Party. The Tea Party libertarian argument for free-markets without the Fed is not identical to the free markets proposed under the banner of neo-liberalism. The Tea Party’s argument against government spending includes a sustained critique of the Fed, embodied by Texas representative Ron Paul. This is one of the reasons why the Tea Party appeals so well to populist sentiment: it has actually persuaded working and un-employed Americans that another economic system is possible, even if that other system is a species of capitalism. But non-liberal capitalism is a de-centralized, utopian idea. It bears as much relation to contemporary financial capitalism as Chinese communism does to the Soviet kind.

This is where the Tea Party might one day intersect with the progressive green movement. Both movements could favor de-centralized economies that exchange commodities and non-fiat currency between local producers and consumers. Without the Fed’s cheap money, economies wouldn’t grow as fast. This slower growth would have great benefits ecologically. Thus the Tea Party and the greens may imagine similar alternatives to corporate globalization, in that neither imagines the enormous institutions necessary to support corporate forms of growth and support – primarily the state itself. There is thus a fascinating logic in the desire to shrink government, were it to actually work: since the state is the central agent of support for capitalist firms, there’s a chance a weak state might lead to weaker corporations. On the other hand, it might lead the way to ever more horrible forms of corporate control. This is the conversation that should be taking place right now between progressive greens and Tea Partiers. If they can find a consensus around environmental pollution, they might unite in their mutual opposition to mass industry, consumption by debt, and centralized economies run by corporate lobbyists. This conversation isn’t happening, of course. And so the points of commonality between the Tea Party and certain progressive and green skepticism around Obama and liberalism may never grow into an even wider populist tent.

This may also never happen because there are very real problems with the Tea Party. The common dissatisfaction with Obama always seems hung on phrases that suggest violence. There is more xenophobia than conspiracy theory in the birther vitriol. At the Nashville conference, important Republican demagogues such as Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin were crowd favorites. Their style of charismatic, cartoonish patriotism make them leading political figures in what could become a newly indigenous American fascism.

In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton notes that Italian and German fascist movements blossomed during the collapse of their respective liberal capitalist states, and that both national movements came to power explicitly on anti-communist and anti-socialist slogans. They directed popular enthusiasm into dictatorships against the left, and mobilized passions already inflamed by the collapse of those capitalist economies. Crowds formed in order to inflict and threaten violence against specific targets, and legitimated it by simultaneously victimizing themselves and claiming ‘chosen-people’ status. The movement worked as an “anti-political politics,” or a politics that sought to use democratic techniques and extra-legal violence to destroy enemies of the people. Noam Chomsky uses similar language to describe the fanatic anti-political, anti-government perspective of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

What distinguishes the Tea Party thus far from these earlier fascisms is its failure, thus far, to explicitly self-identify as a racist movement, or as a group itself victimized by an enemy.  The vague idea of liberals or big government isn’t concrete enough to stir violence against groups, only institutions—like the IRS or the Pentagon or any federal agency. The fact that it is a white movement with some racists within it doesn’t make it a racist movement—not yet. Instead, angry whites dominate the group without elevating their whiteness as a condition of belonging. If it is racist, then, it advocates a weird kind of white power that other races are free to join. It has also failed to identify another “identity” group it holds primarily responsible for its problems. They rally against Mexican immigration without explicitly expressing disgust with Mexicans themselves. Tea Partiers have an obvious problem with “radical Islam,” but they aren’t organizing violence against Muslim-Americans. Different parts of the Tea Party seem angry at different enemies, and they project onto Obama a synthetic caricature of their fears. Even stranger, the Tea Party’s appeal as a fascist party has been clarified by its avowed declaration that Obama is a totalitarian, socialist, communist, and finally fascist dictator. It appears at times to be the very movement it proclaims to organize against.

The Tea Party is not yet the dependable vehicle of any coherent fascist policy, then, even as the politicians associated with it channel its emotions into threats of violence. Tea Party candidate for Texas governor, Debra Medina, was reported not to advocate “bloodshed” herself but rather to invoke it as “inevitable” if the constitution isn’t properly defended. In a stunning admission, she also told Glen Beck that she believed there were “good questions” about the role the Bush administration may have played in 9/11, and that the American people had not “seen all the evidence.” Her candidacy attracted attention and positive coverage from readers and listeners of Alex Jones’ “Prison Planet” and “Infowars” websites and radio shows. His popularity has also recently reached new heights; he was interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera’s FOX news program after the media tried to link John Patrick Bedell, the so-called Pentagon shooter, with the 9-11 truth movement. Jones is the  leading American skeptic of the 9/11 commission and, whatever his excesses and paranoia about issues like global warming, he is perhaps the most interesting figure in alternative media for bridging progressive and Tea Party politics together. He is also the greatest beneficiary of the mainstream media’s descent into corporate censorship, for better or worse.

But at this stage of its ascension, the movement’s failure to find a sustainable target for its anger has weakened the Tea Party. It will need a common enemy for the fascist wing to succeed and grow. This enemy cannot be Obama indefinitely. Still, their abject hatred of him is the closest the country has seen to a lynch-mob mentality in decades. Forty years ago, this same aggression would have led to open violence against African-Americans, especially in the south.

The reason the Tea Party has become legitimate for many Americans is because there is real anger right now. No one has been punished for the credit crisis except the middle and working classes. There is no sense that our laws apply to people in power. The elite have made statements expressing open contempt for ordinary Americans. Obama has appeared as a scapegoat for the right because the justice system hasn’t articulated a case against the real criminals, and because he has participated in that failure. His decision not to investigate the previous administration over torture and war crimes reveals a moral weakness under the deceptive guise of his “pragmatic” ideology. He wants to unite Americans but not address the forces that are tearing them apart. The truth is that Americans are divided more than ever by class, and those that are exploited deserve to feel angry. Geithner and Obama claim to have made the hard decisions in rescuing the economy, but they did so by saving the very institutions responsible for destroying it. In consequence, Obama’s desire for bi-partisan unity is as fatal an intellectual idea as it is a strategic one. He wants the parents to stop fighting so that they can keep beating the kids, or else to beat them softer and then give them health care.

Obama has surged twice in Afghanistan in the name of “nation-building” at a time when US infrastructure is falling apart at home. He rapidly expanded US drone strikes and covert operations in Pakistan in total violation of international law. He endorsed both real and proxy involvement of the US military in Yemen and Somalia. Even more ominously, his war strategy in Afghanistan continued even after a scandalously dubious election there, and just as Afghanistan’s now illegitimate President Hamid Karzai’s brother was exposed as a prominent drug trafficker on the CIA payroll. Everyday stories break about the clandestine involvements of the intelligence services and military contractors, and war with Iran seems increasingly likely. In combination with the role of the Fed, it’s clear that the US presidency doesn’t actually have the power necessary to change the country. Strangely, at the moment when executive power has never appeared stronger, a fascist wing of a populist movement has emerged because there is actually a power vacuum in the democratic machinery of this country. Fascist sentiments arise when government isn’t working. And if it continues not to work, one way or another there will be blood.

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A soft, steady rain pockmarks the mud brick foundation of the Citadel—according to some estimates the longest continually inhabited spot on earth, and the dominating feature of metropolitan Erbil in northern Iraq. The view from atop this massive mud mound is impressive: radiating out in all directions from the Citadel, modern-day Erbil spreads into the gloomy mist as far as the eye can see. But more remarkable still are the myriad cranes crowding out ancient minarets as the defining features of the Erbil skyline, and the buzz of jackhammers and other construction tools that even up high in the Citadel drown out the light patter of raindrops landing in puddles
at your feet.

This is the heart of the “other” Iraq, according to local enthusiasts, a Western-friendly enclave marked by peace, security, and the industrious pursuit of prosperity. Throughout the country’s Kurdish-dominated autonomous zone, all the hallmarks of successful state-building are seemingly on display to guests from abroad. From the laying of modern roads to the building of new schools and state-of-the-art skyscrapers, as well as the almost obsessive attentions of ubiquitous security forces, the north of Iraq stands in stark contrast to the chaos and uncertainty plaguing the county’s south. Yet while the gains in the north are impressive, at least on their face, I found while there that the region must still contend with a number of challenges that render its future far from certain. 

I had entered Iraq overland a week earlier through the border town of Zahko which hugs the Turkish frontier, where I hired Mohammed, a chain-smoking taxi driver, to bring me to the country’s northernmost city of prominence, Dohuk. The journey there begins with a chaotic tangle of dusty, dilapidated roads snaking through mountains and farmland drained of their color by the sun and drought. Any feelings of passing through the bleached landscape of an old photograph soon subside, however, on the approach to Dohuk. Here, the countryside gives way to the most extraordinarily emerald pastures—electric greens familiar to northernmost Syria—framed by the gentle slopes of a purple-tinted mountain range to the east. As he tore through at breakneck speed what seemed to be endless waves of lumbering lorries on their way to and from Turkey, Mohammed waved a cigarette out the window, smiling. “Iraq,” he said, clearly
pleased. “Beautiful.”

Dohuk itself offers a glimpse into the Iraq of neo-con wet dreams. The city boasts a rapidly developing infrastructure, street graffiti celebrating Eminem, an American style mega-mall, bustling markets, and the reputation as a safe weekend getaway for vacationing American GIs. Indeed, the groups of troops I saw there were treated like celebrities, unfailingly followed by a paparazzi of young men and women asking for photographs and contact info. Alarmingly, the downtown hotel I checked into featured a large portrait of George W. Bush in its foyer, and the hotel manager—an Adidas tracksuit-wearing, Raul Julia carbon-copy—feigned disappointment to learn I was not a distant relative of the former president.

Similar displays of explicitly pro-American sympathies are not as easily found south of Dohuk, but the trappings of a nascent prosperity have taken hold in urban areas throughout the Kurdish controlled north. The imperial splendor of the main road alone that leads into the regional capital Erbil—miles of magnificently massive, arching light posts hanging over the four-lane highway—its state of the art international airport, and the formidable bomb-blast walls surrounding the fancy, VIP-only Sheraton hotel, unquestionably announce the city’s ambitious pretensions to twenty-first century regional dominance.  

More impressive still, perhaps, the southeastern city of Sulimaniyah—long considered a free-spirited hotbed of liberalism and resistance to outside influence, not to mention a persistent thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein’s regime—has been tamed by the twin influences of Iranian investment and an American University. All over the city, construction teams frame high-rise office buildings, money-lenders hawk impossibly tall piles of Iranian rials, and young people practice their English in cafes advertising wifi, Red Bull, and “Kan Tucky Fried Chiken.”

Yet evidence supporting the arguments that Kurdish Iraq offers a model for the rest of the country to follow in order to achieve peace and stability are largely confined to urban centers, and belied by a number of sobering realities. Chief among them is the violent anarchy destroying any hope for a normal life in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. Both cities—the most ethnically and religiously diverse spots in the country—feature highly combustible mixtures of Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, and a slew of other religious minorities including Assyrian Christian and Yazidi groups. As it happens, both cities also sit astride massive oil deposits, and therefore, not surprisingly, have served as playgrounds for the sometimes violent power struggles between regional Kurdish authorities and the central government in Baghdad. These contests for control have left power vacuums filled by unbridled sectarian violence and mark the cities as virtual no-go zones for outsiders.

When I told the hotel manager in Dohuk that I planned on traveling to Erbil, he cautioned me that under no circumstances was I to leave the Kurdish-controlled roads as the route between the two cities passes through the Mosul suburbs. “You’ll be killed,” he said with a frightening matter-of-factness. And with reason: a full-blown ethnic cleansing continues apace throughout Mosul, where Assyrian Christian communities have been the most recent victims of death squad violence that some observers suggest may involve Kurdish security forces and police. A Human Rights Watch report from late 2009 warns that firm evidence pointing the finger of responsibility at any particular party is lacking, though the authors outline possible motivations for Kurdish complicity.

“Kurdish-dominated security forces were in charge of security in the area the attacks took place, [leading some to suggest] that the murder campaign was designed to undermine confidence in the central government’s security forces. From this perspective, the attacks created an opportunity for the [Kurdish authorities] to appear benevolent before the Christian community and the world by subsequently providing shelter, security, and financial assistance to those who fled the attacks into Kurdistan, strengthening the Kurdish hand in any upcoming referendum
or election.”

While Kurdish authorities have predictably denied these allegations and pinned blame on Shiite militias with ties to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, it increasingly appears that whomever lies behind the bloodshed serves as a proxy for interest groups situated in Baghdad. This suspicion was reinforced further when the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization with direct links to al-Qaeda—and known for its eager pursuit of publicity—denied any responsibility whatsoever for the recent spate of violence in Mosul.

Christians and other minority groups have also been the targets of choice in Kirkuk of late. While the violence there has not exhibited the same characteristics of systematized execution as in Mosul, the results have been no less horrific. Most recently, insurgent groups have carried out attacks on Christian businessmen, and have continued their practice of assassinating municipal security forces, routine violence which has claimed the lives of hundreds of police officers over the past few years. While the social disintegrations in Kirkuk and Mosul has until recently been confined to the city limits—and therefore has not been much of a concern to regional authorities or the American military—the cancerous destruction has recently spread to surrounding areas. Gangland-style takeovers of nearby villages has prompted fears that Kurdish security forces are losing territorial control to increasingly brazen local mafias and terrorist groups which, if true, casts the entire region’s future security in doubt. The seriousness of the this developing threat was underscored while I was there by the announcement of by General Raymond Odierno, commander of all American forces in Iraq, that he was ordering US troops to the area to help Kurdish security personnel reassert coercive authority
in the area. 

Yet beyond the headline-grabbing violence crippling Mosul and Kirkuk, the dispossession and violence allowed along Iraq’s rural borders with Iran and Turkey more immediately undermines confidence in the country’s future. A teacher working in the northern provinces who I meet in Erbil—who I’ll call Dadyar—dismisses the evident progress enjoyed by Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulimaniyah as nothing more than window dressing obscuring the reality of life for Kurds living far from any of the urban power centers. “All the construction, the tall buildings, the expensive shops, this is all for show,” says Dadyar with disgust. [The Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal] Talabani knows what investors want to see and he gives it to them. You visit the cities, you see one Iraq. But in the small villages, things are very different. It is bad.”

 Dadyar’s alternative perspective on Kurdish stability is endorsed by Michele Naar-Obed, a peace activist and diligent chronicler of deprivation in the Kurdish north. According to Naar-Obed, whom I meet in Sulimaniyah, life is a shambles. Vulnerable populations there have been largely ignored by Baghdad and regional authorities and forgotten by the West. She notes that nearly one million Kurds have been internally displaced since 1990, a situation that has not been adequately addressed, and with no immediate remedy forthcoming from the powers that be.

“As internally displaced people (IDPs),” Naar-Obed recently wrote, “they are not entitled to the same provisions and services from the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees as refugees [are afforded]. They are more dependent on their government to protect and provide for them,” a government that is more concerned with political bureaucratic infighting in Baghdad than in serving its most vulnerable citizens along the border, not to mention
hopelessly corrupt.

Naar-Obed acknowledges that in the Kurdish-controlled west, regional authorities have “built collective townships for the IDPs.” But “they have not been able to reclaim their lives and their livelihoods. They live in slums and have become dependent on government subsistence. They describe themselves as spiritually dead.” 

Meanwhile, as Turkish and Iranian entrepreneurs invest heavily in Iraq’s northern cities, their sponsoring governments continue quietly prosecuting low-grade sectarian wars against communities of borderland Iraqi Kurds. Recent months have witnessed repeated incursions into Iraqi territory by Turkish troops to the north (supposedly prompted by tips from American intelligence) and shelling by Iranian forces in the east (reportedly supported by Turkish surveillance aircraft).

The fear motivating Iranian, Turkish, and to a lesser extent, Syrian foreign policy towards Kurdish Iraq centers on the belief that Kurdish leaders are feverishly planning independence. To be sure, the inevitability of Kurdish succession from Iraq—and attendant uprisings by Kurdish populations throughout the region—has become conventional wisdom if not an outright article of faith among decision makers in Tehran, Istanbul, Damascus and Washington.

The haunting specter of an independent Kurdistan triggering not only a redrawing of the Middle Eastern map but also massive bloodshed in the process was provocatively and neatly anatomized by Jeffrey Goldberg in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Yet while Goldberg is undeniably correct that modern Middle Eastern borders are merely Western fabrications that poorly reflect real lines of political influence, the prospect of a region-wide liberation struggle for a Kurdish state is remote.

“Only fools and liars seriously talk about an independent Kurdistan,” says Hawar Salih as we drive through the gorgeous mountains surrounding the small town of Koyo. A dapper, American-educated scientist—and former bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture during the days of Saddam Hussein—Salih provides me with a brief lesson in the environmental destruction visited upon his country as a consequence of foreign-imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime following the American invasion in 1991. As the scarred and deforested mountain landscape zips by my backseat window, Salih nimbly avoids directly answering my questions about local politics. But when I touch on the subject of succession, he becomes unexpectedly animated.

“If you think about it for even a moment, you can see why it makes no sense. If the Kurds declare the north as their own country, the Turks, Iranians and Syrians would suffocate the economy. Any Kurdistan would be completely landlocked and dependent on [its neighbors] for trade. The way it is now, the Kurds are officially Iraqis and so everyone is happy. And everyone is making money.”

This may be true for the moment, but many people I spoke with fear that any gains made in the north since the American invasion in 2003 could be undone by the rapidly approaching national elections. On March 7, Iraqis will go to the polls to elect local representatives and a new national government. Yet the initial celebration at Iraq’s supposed transition to democracy were quickly muted as the country’s prime minister that over 500 candidates for office nationally would be barred from running for office.

That the vast majority of these candidates are former Sunni Baathists was not lost on local populations, prompting Sunni leaders and informed observers to predict major unrest in the lead-up to election. A State Department official with considerable experience in Iraq spoke to me off the record about his pessimistic assessment of Iraq’s future. “To be honest, I’ve given up on the [Iraqi] Arabs. They haven’t demonstrated the ability or desire to move forward in a meaningful way. The Kurds are a different story. They’re organized and they’re attracting investment. But I don’t see any solutions in sight for the Arabs, and the elections are going to undo the progress that has been made. We’re going to see a lot more violence late in February.” He worried that a new outbreak of sectarian strife would threaten not only the central state, but the northern reaches of Iraq as well. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m getting the hell out of here. It’s going to be ugly.”

The violence began much sooner than he thought. Two days later, on January 25, a series of coordinated explosions ripped through three hotels in downtown Baghdad. Gunman stormed the Sheraton, Babylon, and Hamra hotels, killing security staff and clearing the way for a second wave of attackers who drove vans packed with explosives into the buildings, leaving nearly forty dead and another seventy people injured. The following afternoon, a car bomb detonated just outside the Interior Ministry’s capital headquarters taking eighteen lives and injuring over eighty Iraqis, most of them neighborhood locals.

Violent episodes continued to mount throughout the first weeks of February. One young woman marked the beginning of a new month by blowing herself up in the middle of a major transportation hub just north of Baghdad, taking the lives of over fifty people, most of them Shi’ite pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Karbala, and leaving another hundred people badly hurt. In an apparent retaliatory attack, a bomb detonated hours later in Baghdad’s mainly Sunni neighborhood of Daura. While the explosion thankfully left behind no dead bodies, it sent over a dozen civilians to the hospital.

Yet despite the steady bursts of violent destruction peppering the Iraqi map, the Kurdish north continues to enjoy relative stability. How long this peaceful status quo remains intact, however, is anyone’s guess. Some Kurds see the election as the most critical moment in Iraq’s history since the 2003 invasion. Numerous people I spoke with—Kurds, Arabs, and Americans alike—expressed fear that the clearly undemocratic nature of the election would give the US government an excuse to abandon their nearly eight year occupation of the country, which might entice unfriendly neighbors at home and abroad to invade and wreak havoc in Kurdish territory. On the flip side, a smooth electoral process may produce similar outcomes if the United States interprets the results as the culminating event in a job well-done shepherding Iraq toward a democratic future. Either way, March brings uncertainty. 

On the next-to-last last day of my time in Iraq, I met with a group of students in the central square of Sulimaniyah’s Grand Bazaar. The students were eager to know about life in the United States, and asked if I had travelled through any of Europe. I told them I had, and asked if any of them had as well. All shook their heads no. As it turned out, none had been beyond the Kurdish line of control within the country. Obtaining foreign visas and permission to leave were near impossible without significant financial means to which none had access. “Here is like a prison,” one student said. “A big, beautiful prison.” The observation initially struck me as a sad admission of the inherent trade-offs for peace in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. But what he said next made me appreciate the metaphor in a slightly different light. “We are forced to stay in, but the guards keep all the bad
stuff out.” 

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The Group of 20 (G-20) Summit protests in Pittsburgh this past September were a threshold event. Not only were protestors detained and beaten by the police, but they were also subjected to new military-grade technologies that have pushed the boundaries of what kinds of actions are permissible for controlling large crowds of protestors, unruly or not. This fact, however, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media for several reasons. First of all, the commercial media ignores stories it can’t spin into easy and familiar narratives of good and bad, right and wrong. The story of the G-20 protests and the subsequent police brutality that took place during those protests does not match the facile optimism of political campaign speeches, upbeat advertising, and entertainment spectacles. Instead, the

se corporate media outlets spin simplistic stories that redefine disorders as isolated disruptions or exceptional “tragedies.” Another alternative interpretation of these national “tragedies” and disruptions is possible by connecting together what they have in common. The actions of security forces in Pittsburgh in 2009, New Orleans in 2005, and the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 all reveal the increasingly militant policies of the homeland security state since September 11. By tracing police actions back to those policies it’s possible to more substantively interpret the meaning of the Pittsburgh protests and what they mean for the future of crowd control.

The policies of the new homeland security state reflect a consensus between law enforcement officials and the military about the use of new technological weapons against citizens and non-citizens. The Pittsburgh security forces used non-lethal weapons to disperse crowds, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, or the LRAD. This large sonic gun radiates short bursts of sound waves that are audible over very long distances. Firing it up-close creates a very loud and powerful noise that is capable of causing hearing loss and great levels of pain. These LRAD devices have previously been used in Iraq for similar purposes. It was also used as a defensive weapon on the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit in 20

A protestor at the Group of 20 Meeting in Pittsburgh, September 24, 2009. The Police Vehicle seen here is equipped with a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD)

05 off the coast of Somalia to fend off a group of pirates. The pirates were repelled despite having rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. And now the use of the weapon domestically against non-violent crowds of American citizens is taking place, arguably not only a violation of their civil liberties but also a violation of basic human rights.

The device is meant to inflict “non-lethal injury.” In this sense it echoes the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the military uses to torture enemy combatants in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. Like the Taser gun, which has become popular with local police departments, the LRAD is yet another law enforcement weapon that’s supposedly non-lethal but also relatively unstable in live trials. Like Predator spy planes that shoot Hellfire missiles at suspected targets in Pakistan, the Taser and the LRAD are weapons that fundamentally change the new laws of security powers. These weapons modulate wide ranges of before unheard of force in order to subdue individuals and crowds.

Equally problematic is the increase in the use of the 1968 Riot Act to criminalize the use of social networking technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Local authorities in New York took major steps to circumscribing the effects of public protests in 2004 through mass arrests, but they went a step further in Pittsburgh by targeting the use of communications devices by protesters. Elliot Madison’s arrest by the Pennsylvania State Police in Pittsburgh for Tweeting the location of police to protesters is symptomatic of a campaign to prevent crowds from intelligently organizing. The subsequent search of Madison’s apartment by an FBI counter-terrorism unit confiscated pictures of Marx and Lenin as evidence. A grand jury trial is still open. The police are using the Riot Act as legal precedent. This is an orchestrated attack on legitimate forms of political dissent.

These actions send a chilling message to potential political activists and everyday citizen protesters, that public authority will use any means necessary to control individuals and crowds. This includes authorizing the use of violent new instruments of control. Each new tool reflects a unique technological breakthrough in the science of controlling human bodies efficiently. These on-going assaults are tolerated because of little compromises that individuals make about the social contract and the ethical responsibilities one has toward the suffering of others. Each little compromise has required a denial that returns as a form of fear and anxiety in much of the American public. Not coincidently, the American public has reacted passively against these new technologies of immobilizing bodies. Anxiety paralyzes one’s ability to think clearly about the real movements in American politics.

These movements reflect essential changes in the technology of crowd control. Companies that provide emergency training for local authorities use computer simulations that construct scenarios of natural disasters, fires, terrorism, and civil disturbances. A simulation video advertised on YouTube boasts that every block in New York has been digitally reproduced for that training. The expression of these policies in physical confrontations reveals an organized, methodical, and potentially dehumanizing approach toward all bodies present in declared “emergency” and “disaster” zones. In much of the military literature, for instance, protests are also classified as civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are, in turn, defined as man-made disasters. As a result, strategic responses to natural disasters and protest disasters are very similar. They involve suspending civil liberties for the purposes of protecting public order and private property. Crowds are “managed,” whether they have gathered to loot, commit violence, or just to protest.

They are also managed if they become displaced by climate catastrophes or economic incentives. In 2006, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR received a $385 million contract for temporary detention and processing centers. At the time, this contract reminded some independent journalists of the REX-84 “readiness exercise” that Oliver North spearheaded during the Reagan administration. The exercise imagined that 400,000 migrants from Mexico entered the US and became an uncontrollable population. The plan called for all 400,000 to be detained. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be responsible for storing them. As immigrants, they would not be subject to constitutional protection.

Like the KBR centers contracted in 2006, the camps would detain, house, and process bodies. The United States has powers to create domestic internment camps just as all other state governments do. The World War II Japanese internment camps provide evidence that the United States can detain tens of thousands of bodies after declaring an emergency.

In 1982, former FEMA head Louis Giuffrida drafted an executive order for continuity of government planning in the event of nation-wide insurgency of African-American militants. The order called for “martial law” and “suspension of the Constitution.” The REX-84 camps and the Japanese interment camps are large-scale precedents for Guantanamo Bay. State authority rests on emergency powers in all three cases. They are large-scale precedents for the 2,000 protesters detained at Pier 57 during the 2004 New York Republican Convention.

Populations often express themselves through specific, collective identities. One such form of identity is crowds. Crowds are inherently unstable and very powerful. They thus make the state vulnerable. Protests and protesters acquire disproportionate power when they form crowds. Crowds can make demands that elections cannot. Crowds can use force that cannot be undone. Crowds can shift political sentiment for authority by exposing the erosion of power, by embarrassing authorities, or by being subjected to police brutality. Crowds can visually demonstrate the violence of the state against certain ideas. As crowds, they have the power to draw emotions and media to ideas and bodies possibly subject to censorship or derision.

The collective power of assembled bodies can overwhelm repellent police technologies, including lethal weapons. Crowds can overwhelm state forces through the sheer power of numbers. A group as organized and energized as an Ohio State Buckeye football crowd could easily occupy the state capitol building in Columbus. This is why crowd control was essential for the protection of President Barack Obama in Pittsburgh. This is also why movements that encourage various kinds of crowds have successful records against state forces. An example might be the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 and the Berlin Wall crowds in 1989.

In response to the power of these crowds, states can declare and enforce martial law. During martial law, executive authority resides under the direction of local civil authorities. This is the single most important aspect of understanding martial law. Elements of the military maintain “liaisons” with federal, state, and municipal authorities. The 2005 Department of Defense “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support” explicitly refers to the military support the Pentagon may lend local police authorities. Since the executive who declares emergency powers is local, to understand martial law one must not focus on Presidential executive powers. The Homeland Security press release by the Secret Service during the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit described the participating security bodies as a combination of “local, state, and federal security,” along with “public safety and military partners.”

In the context of American constitutional law and Department of Defense policy, martial law emergency powers always reside with local civil authorities. Martial law is not about negotiating checks and balances of federal powers, however. Martial law emergency powers are part of a capillary, distributive system of emergency powers in the United States and can be called into being wherever crowds form. Senator David Vitter acted as a liaison between Karl Rove and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco following Hurricane Katrina, for instance, and told Blanco the George W. Bush administration wanted her to declare martial law or “as close as we can get.” This exchange lays bare where the powers reside.

This is the case because presidential authority is legally limited. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act withdrew northern troops from the south by limiting the powers of the executive to command military troops within US borders. The president could nonetheless still declare a state of national emergency and declare nationwide martial law. Doing so, however, would draw a great deal of negative attention and media. Martial law powers are much more flexible—and thus more tactically useful—because they rely on local authorities. Department of Defense military forces, when used domestically, would be renamed Defense Support of Civilian Authorities (DSCA). These forces are also referred to as Civil Support, which would engage “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, or other disorders prejudicial to public law and order.” These unlawful assemblages—crowds—might be dispersed through the simple act of a local authority. Crowds trigger these authorities to invoke emergency powers that are inseparable from the powers of martial law.

In the last two decades many of the laws surrounding crowd control came to define the actual apparatuses of federal emergency powers. Crowd control laws are important because they address how security forces can interact with real bodies. This then clarifies the real expressions and fears that motivate state power. The REX-84 exercise is an example of state policies that envisage large-scale responses to massive population control problems. It is no accident that new crowd control methods were included in the new civil liberties policies following September 11. Airport security grew. Bridge security grew. Vast detention centers opened in Afghanistan and Iraq. A special torture camp opened in Cuba. The CIA “black sites” prison system continued to expand.

These are all human rights crimes. In the United States, human rights and civil rights are two separate discourses. It may be effective to wind them together more. Since 9/11 civil liberties have come under intense assault. Political dissent in the United States has essentially been effectively criminalized, becoming in the eyes of the law just one more form of emergency that must be met with controlling force. Civil disturbance manuals used by the army claim that disturbances arise from “highly emotional social and economic issues,” where “economically deprived” residents are ready to release frustrations. This link between civil disturbance, economic conditions, and emergency powers received some surprising attention last October, when California representative Brad Sherman claimed some legislators were threatened with the specter of martial law unless the bailout bill passed.

It is here that crowds, the forces of crowd control, and our Constitution clash. The civil liberties that have come under the most assault are freedom of speech and assembly. These liberties conflict with policies about crowds and civil disturbance. Since crowds threaten public order because of their power, the response of security forces reverts back to policies and laws that govern civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are emergencies, and, as such, emergency powers are in effect. Defining protests as emergencies allows police conduct that should be understood as unacceptable violations of the constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly. When all protests and spontaneous mass gatherings are seen as emergencies, then the ability to actually practice any reasonably effective form of mass political action becomes nearly impossible, limited only to police and city authorized marches and rallies.

The permanent state of emergency, like the permanent war on terror that the Bush administration envisioned, is here, stretching from Kabul to Pittsburgh. It is meant to test the boundaries of what kinds of abuse a population will tolerate against its fellow humans and fellow citizens. This represents a new fashion of policing undisciplined and unpopular ideologies. It seems to make no difference whether one is a Muslim, a terrorist, an anarchist, a communist or just a protester—one’s body is inevitably subject to all kinds of forms of temporary state control. For radical Muslims this state control can last for years of indefinite detention; it can also include torture. For illegal immigrants it might last months and sometimes years. Judging by Pittsburgh and the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, it can last for a few days against American citizens.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to direct public attention to these policies. The police commit routine violations of the law without punishment because they have acquired a patriotic armor. The same is true for American soldiers. The police and the military elicit intense forms of devotion from wide intersections of classes and ethnicities. Focusing on the individual actions of police officers is not important anyway. One need not fear criticizing any individual police officer or soldier. This only mystifies the problem. The problem is one of policy.

The fact is that under both the American Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights citizens have the right to assembly. Any new security policy must reflect these rights. Crowd formation is inevitable. No government can ultimately control collected human bodies and organized crowds. Policies must reflect this reality. Crowds too control the terms of “consent” inherent in all representative government. Recognizing this will make it easier to evolve the political systems in new ecological and economic eras.

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