God has a habit of popping up in many public aspects of American politics. The modern American political landscape is dominated by the prayer breakfast. The evangelical voting bloc may not be as unified as it once was, but it remains all-powerful. Why else would the two presidential candidates subject themselves to questioning by the pastor of an Orange County 'megachurch'?
More on this in New Zealand's magazine Scoop:
God and Politics at Saddleback
by Binoy Kampmark
How are the two putative candidates in the US Presidential race treating the evangelical vote thus far? In one answer: seriously. If the evidence is anything to go by, the evangelical vote will still prove thumping come November. Figures vary, but something in the order of 25 percent of American voters see themselves as evangelicals. Hence the presence of both Senators John McCain and Barack Obama at pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch in Orange County, California on August 16.
On paper, both have their problems with that niche constituency. The conservatives doubt McCain’s credentials and have done so from the start. Threats about boycotts and staying home in November have died down. There are even murmurings from such personalities of the Christian right as James C. Dobson that ‘the possibility’ of endorsement was there. But the embers of suspicion, stoked by such conservative heavyweights as Rush Limbaugh, still pulsate on the electoral landscape.
Some evangelical voters wonder whether lurking beneath Obama’s eloquent confidence is a Muslim, closeted and waiting to spring. Grant Swank, a pastor from Windham Maine wrote to the organization Renew America praising McCain for being ‘into a reality kick to expose B. Hussein Obama’ (August 2) as a follower of the Prophet Mohammed. An Obama White House was a ‘spiritual danger’, and would signal doom for evangelicals.
On the other hand, there are some in the evangelical community who like Obama on many other things – his progressivism on climate change and social welfare speak about the changing nature of that constituency in the United States. Warren, a Southern Baptist, reflects that shift in part. Bar the abortion issue, a critical one that the Illinois senator is having troubles combating, he gather votes from that direction.
As strange as it might have been for those outside the US to observe, the meeting at Saddleback caused disagreement and discomfort amongst some American commentators. Kathleen Parker of the Chicago Tribune (20 August) was particularly critical about this tele-evangelical probing, two presidential candidates submitting to a ‘religious interrogation by an evangelical minister – no matter how beloved’. Again, that slippery term ‘un-American’ was raised. The only true victor, she suggested, was Warren, who effectively jettisoned the core principle of separating church and state. Thomas Jefferson, she concludes, would not have been impressed, let alone impressive at Saddleback.
Ditto David Waters, a commentator on religious affairs. That two candidates for the highest office in the country were appearing together in the same church was less troubling than a self-appointed campaign moderator in the form of pastor Warren. He was reminded about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted in his collection of sermons Strength to Love: ‘The Church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.’ Warren’s church had been effectively endorsed by both sides of politics. Campaign advertisements will be issuing from the Saddleback forum shortly.
Warren’s position on the meeting was not left in any doubt, explaining in a message to religious commentators Sally Quinn and John Meachum that topics like ‘the war, the border, the price of oil and reaction to campaign statements’ were but ‘short-term issues.’ What mattered to him was the ‘core convictions’ of the candidates would shape ‘America’s role, direction and future.’
The Press-Enterprise (20 August) of Riverside, California took a somewhat different tack on this alleged violation of the church-state divide. Being at Saddleback was simply another mechanism for vote grabbing. Politicians adjust their pitches depending on what audience they address at the time. There was, in effect, ‘nothing wrong with quizzing candidates on range of questions linked to values and faith.’ Any event that enlightened the electorate should be endorsed. William Kristol of the New York Times (17 August) was even warmer. Warren, he extolled, should well be the moderator of one of the presidential debates in the fall.
Policy researcher Alvaro Vargas Llosa then added a historical slant to the entire episode. In a piece in the New Republic (20 August), he chose to see the debate as a template of American battles between theocratic urges (the Pilgrims) and secular pursuits (Jamestown). The battle between secularism and piety that commenced in American life in the seventeenth century constantly recurs. Little, it seems, had changed.
Perhaps the only true victor in this display was Warren, whose taste for the public show remains powerful. The extent of his influence in American public life, and that of the evangelical voting bloc, has been reaffirmed. Both candidates, by merely being there, acknowledged that without equivocation.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Inviting Ugly Ducklings to Town
Councillors in provincial towns tend to have problems getting into the news. So, when the Mayor of the Queensland mining town of Mount Isa John Molony decided to vent his views on beauty and women, he made a splash. He was proud - he had even displaced the Olympics as 'front page' news.
The full piece is available in 'Ugly Ducklings in Queensland - Molony on Women,' Crikey, 18 August, 2008.
The full piece is available in 'Ugly Ducklings in Queensland - Molony on Women,' Crikey, 18 August, 2008.
Friday, August 8, 2008
The Conviction of Salim Hamdan
The global war on terror, clumsily titled GWOT, was never a good idea in the first place. If all the United States can obtain after its blustery rhetoric on winning this 'war' is the conviction of a driver and bodyguard of the still absent Osama bin Laden, there is perhaps little reason to keep it going. Be gone, insidious, fascist-like realisations such as the Office of Homeland Security, a beast that has more in common with National Socialist idealogues than the Founding Fathers.
A commentary is available at Counterpunch, 7 August 2008, on the recent conviction of the Yemeni national by military commission:
Driving Bin Laden: Will Cheney's Chauffeur Be Next in the Dock?
By BINOY KAMPMARK
Driving bin Laden in the 1990s has proven hazardous for Yemeni citizen Salim Hamdan, who has been convicted by a jury of American military officers after a two-week trial by military commission at Guantánamo Bay. The accusations leveled at Hamdan centred on the transport of missiles for Al Qaeda and the aiding and abetting bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. Eight counts of supporting terrorism and two counts of conspiracy were filed by the prosecution.
The verdict then. Hamdan was found guilty on five counts of aiding terrorism by serving as bin Laden’s armed bodyguard and driver in Afghanistan whilst knowing that he was intent on attacking the United States. Hamdan was cleared of the important charge of conspiracy after some eight hours of jury deliberations.
The trial has done little to restore confidence in many legal circles, and done much to confirm what many already knew: the Gitmo commissions are in desperate need of abolition. Hamdan’s story provides the template of the Bush Administration’s law-averse politics and the ‘war on terror’. Captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 with two surface-to-air missiles in his car, he found himself in shackled detention in Guantánamo Bay in May 2002. In July 2004, the ill-fated Hamdan was charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism.
During the proceedings, the US Department of Justice prosecutor John Murphy addressed the officers by describing Salim Hamdan, the equivalent of a celebrity obsessed delivery boy on mission, as one of a band of ‘enthusiastic, uncontrollably enthusiastic warriors’. Finding this barely believable, the defense lawyer Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer called the charge a case of ‘guilt by association’, a case of a low-level employee who worked for low wages between 1997 and 2001. Not a single witness contradicted Hamdan’s claims that he had never been a member of Al Qaeda or responsible in any way for the terrorist attacks.
Mizer’s legal nose detected pure political expediency here – drumming up the cases, for instance, was one way of boosting electoral prospects for 2008. In late March this year, he alleged in a military commission brief that Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England put to lawyers how they needed to ‘think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election.’ Mizer also argued that ‘unlawful command influence’ was at play here, making it impossible for Hamdan to have something remotely resembling a fair trial.
Somewhat damningly, there was no rebuttal from the Pentagon, let alone investigation into the motives suggested by England’s statement. The case was allowed to go trial.
Notwithstanding his detention at the base, Hamdan’s life as an appellant has been colourful. His lawyers filed a habeas petition arguing that his status as prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention had to be legally determined in a court of law before he could be tried by a military convention. In 2006, the Supreme Court (Hamdan v Rumsfeld) unnerved by an attempt by the White House to exile them from the process of hearing the case, concluded that the inherent powers of the executive or an act of Congress could not be said to expressly authorize the Guantánamo Bay military commissions.
In what was a healthy slap in the face of policy makers, it was held that the Geneva Convention, as part of the ordinary laws of war, had to be enforced by the Supreme Court. The commissions had to comply with the ordinary laws of the United States and the laws of war, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Defense lawyer who spearheaded the appeal, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift suffered a career death in thanks, overlooked for promotion in discharging his brief for Hamdan.
Despite the fantastic insistence by the White House that the commissions abide by a framework of international law, mandated by the Supreme Court, the system continues to possess defects that render it incurable. The case still reeks of that fetid air of torture (what Bush has called ‘an alternative set of procedures’) and the entire process behind extracting confessions within the Gitmo system.
Evidence was admitted by the commission that would never had seen the light of day in a civilian or standard US military court, another elastic addition to the undermining of law by the Bush Administration. Allegations that the CIA had engaged in brutal conduct against Hamdan on route to detention were not heard. Crucial parts of the trial were also held in secret.
A mixed verdict doesn’t necessarily make it a just one. Nor does being a driver make one a member of a terrorist network, let alone complicit in terrorist attacks, but wobbly reasoning continues to remain the province of the illegal and specious.
A commentary is available at Counterpunch, 7 August 2008, on the recent conviction of the Yemeni national by military commission:
Driving Bin Laden: Will Cheney's Chauffeur Be Next in the Dock?
By BINOY KAMPMARK
Driving bin Laden in the 1990s has proven hazardous for Yemeni citizen Salim Hamdan, who has been convicted by a jury of American military officers after a two-week trial by military commission at Guantánamo Bay. The accusations leveled at Hamdan centred on the transport of missiles for Al Qaeda and the aiding and abetting bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. Eight counts of supporting terrorism and two counts of conspiracy were filed by the prosecution.
The verdict then. Hamdan was found guilty on five counts of aiding terrorism by serving as bin Laden’s armed bodyguard and driver in Afghanistan whilst knowing that he was intent on attacking the United States. Hamdan was cleared of the important charge of conspiracy after some eight hours of jury deliberations.
The trial has done little to restore confidence in many legal circles, and done much to confirm what many already knew: the Gitmo commissions are in desperate need of abolition. Hamdan’s story provides the template of the Bush Administration’s law-averse politics and the ‘war on terror’. Captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 with two surface-to-air missiles in his car, he found himself in shackled detention in Guantánamo Bay in May 2002. In July 2004, the ill-fated Hamdan was charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism.
During the proceedings, the US Department of Justice prosecutor John Murphy addressed the officers by describing Salim Hamdan, the equivalent of a celebrity obsessed delivery boy on mission, as one of a band of ‘enthusiastic, uncontrollably enthusiastic warriors’. Finding this barely believable, the defense lawyer Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer called the charge a case of ‘guilt by association’, a case of a low-level employee who worked for low wages between 1997 and 2001. Not a single witness contradicted Hamdan’s claims that he had never been a member of Al Qaeda or responsible in any way for the terrorist attacks.
Mizer’s legal nose detected pure political expediency here – drumming up the cases, for instance, was one way of boosting electoral prospects for 2008. In late March this year, he alleged in a military commission brief that Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England put to lawyers how they needed to ‘think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election.’ Mizer also argued that ‘unlawful command influence’ was at play here, making it impossible for Hamdan to have something remotely resembling a fair trial.
Somewhat damningly, there was no rebuttal from the Pentagon, let alone investigation into the motives suggested by England’s statement. The case was allowed to go trial.
Notwithstanding his detention at the base, Hamdan’s life as an appellant has been colourful. His lawyers filed a habeas petition arguing that his status as prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention had to be legally determined in a court of law before he could be tried by a military convention. In 2006, the Supreme Court (Hamdan v Rumsfeld) unnerved by an attempt by the White House to exile them from the process of hearing the case, concluded that the inherent powers of the executive or an act of Congress could not be said to expressly authorize the Guantánamo Bay military commissions.
In what was a healthy slap in the face of policy makers, it was held that the Geneva Convention, as part of the ordinary laws of war, had to be enforced by the Supreme Court. The commissions had to comply with the ordinary laws of the United States and the laws of war, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Defense lawyer who spearheaded the appeal, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift suffered a career death in thanks, overlooked for promotion in discharging his brief for Hamdan.
Despite the fantastic insistence by the White House that the commissions abide by a framework of international law, mandated by the Supreme Court, the system continues to possess defects that render it incurable. The case still reeks of that fetid air of torture (what Bush has called ‘an alternative set of procedures’) and the entire process behind extracting confessions within the Gitmo system.
Evidence was admitted by the commission that would never had seen the light of day in a civilian or standard US military court, another elastic addition to the undermining of law by the Bush Administration. Allegations that the CIA had engaged in brutal conduct against Hamdan on route to detention were not heard. Crucial parts of the trial were also held in secret.
A mixed verdict doesn’t necessarily make it a just one. Nor does being a driver make one a member of a terrorist network, let alone complicit in terrorist attacks, but wobbly reasoning continues to remain the province of the illegal and specious.
The passing of Solzhenitsyn
The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn produced a series of muddled commentaries. Some felt that he had indeed been a fan of democracy, and that he was somehow completely opposed to Vladimir Putin. In truth, he was nothing of the sort. Natonalism and religious fervour are two ingredients that often detract from any practical notion of democracy.
Longing for the passing of a Russia run by serf-loving Czars was far more in keeping with his style. He detested Bolshevik totalitarianism because it was unduly reductionist and atheist. This does not detract from his monumental work on the Soviet penal system which will stand as the fearless critique of a brutal regime.
More on this at the New Zealand magazine Scoop (5 August 2008):
Occupant of the First Circle – the Death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Tuesday, 5 August 2008, 1:35 pm
By Binoy Kampmark
In A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a microstudy of Russia’s penal system is delivered to the reader with unrelenting power. The subject is accused of espionage and sentenced to rot in the Soviet gulag. The author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died of heart failure in his home near Moscow on Sunday, is the most known exponent of Russian gulag literature. But for all his clarity on the subject, something enhanced by his time as a prisoner, Solzhenitsyn mirrored the tormented eccentricities of his country, one that Winston Churchill described in 1939 as a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma.
In The First Circle Solzhenitsyn focuses on the intricate trappings of the prison system. Not all zeks (or prisoners) lived the tawdry, grotesque lives of Ivan Denisovich. Others were modestly privileged in serving the state and could even be rewarded. The workers of the Mavrino Institute were still in Dante’s First Circle of Inferno, but it was a privileged one, with ample bread and butter. The story is sketched within the framework of how a voice is identified and developed for state purposes.
No one is immune from the leviathan that may intervene and crush a subject at any given moment, whether through an innocent remark made in public, or even a telephone call. Innokenty Volododin, State Counselor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thinks he has taken precautions in warning a scientist of an impending trap implicating him as a traitor. But his call of warning is noted by a devilishly ingenious machine which examines the particles of human speech to build a picture of the voice, a sort of speech biometric. He is arrested and sent to Lubyanka prison.
In 1970, the Nobel Prize committee merited Solzhenitsyn with their award. He refused to leave for Stockholm, fearing expulsion from the Soviet Union. This did not prevent it from eventually happening in 1974. He was exiled first to Switzerland, then the United States, where he finalized the last two volumes of his monumental study of the penal system Gulag Archipelago. The three-volume study, crafted with clinical precision between 1973 and 1978 committed to print what his novels had already shown: how diverse, scientific and perversely modern the Soviet Union’s brutal prison program between 1918 to 1956 had been.
While brilliant in his literary oeuvre, Solzhenitsyn proved erratic in his philosophical appraisals. He embraced a volatile blend of nationalism and religion that resembled the viewpoints of the authors behind Vekhi (Landmarks), a 1909 collection of essays calling for a religious-nationalist revival in Russia. While he agreed with much about what fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov said, he could not agree with the latter’s impression in the 1970s that nationalism was ‘a sort of peripheral nuisance’. ‘Does not national variety enrich mankind as faceting increases the value of the jewel?’ he wrote in a collection edited essays From Under the Rubble. His writings on this subject were dismissed, as writer John Bayley put it, as those of a ‘fuddy duddy’ lamenting the ‘disappearance of Holy Russia’.
Democrats found him particularly indigestible. While bemoaning robber baron capitalism, his views remained fundamentally illiberal, hostile to both scientific socialism and liberal democracy. In a 2003 interview with biographer Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn branded humanism as ‘irreligious anthropocentrism’, a breeder of ‘intellectual chaos.’
On his return to Russia in 1994, he was happy to pronounce judgment against Russia’s fledging democracy to members of the Duma. His fondness for Czarist Russia, on the other hand, never abated, being reaffirmed in one of his last works, Two Hundred Years Together. Being a whitewash of the dynastic regime (it was, we are surprised to read, not anti-Semitic), it was also a honed strike on Russia’s Jewry. They, he argued, had to be accorded their fair share of blame for the country’s misfortunes.
Being in the West did not necessarily endear him to it. In 2006, he speculated in that long vein of Russian fears and suspicions that a plot of encirclement had been hatched in Washington and Europe’s capitals. Russia, despite posing ‘no threat’, was being threatened by an ever expansive NATO, thereby ‘encircling Russia from the South’ (29 April).
His embrace by President Vladimir Putin signaled the ultimate demise of democratic impulses in Russia – neither personality had much time for a political philosophy both found distasteful, preferring a nationalistic medium to convey the greatness of Russia’s revival. With cruel irony, the ex-KGB man and the chief interrogator of the Stalinist gulags had more in common than they realized. Both were cogs at different ends of the totalitarian machine, occupants of the First Circle. As for Stalin’s crimes, they have, under Putin, assumed an air of benign necessity. History, it seems, has stolen its ironical march on Solzhenitsyn.
Longing for the passing of a Russia run by serf-loving Czars was far more in keeping with his style. He detested Bolshevik totalitarianism because it was unduly reductionist and atheist. This does not detract from his monumental work on the Soviet penal system which will stand as the fearless critique of a brutal regime.
More on this at the New Zealand magazine Scoop (5 August 2008):
Occupant of the First Circle – the Death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Tuesday, 5 August 2008, 1:35 pm
By Binoy Kampmark
In A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a microstudy of Russia’s penal system is delivered to the reader with unrelenting power. The subject is accused of espionage and sentenced to rot in the Soviet gulag. The author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died of heart failure in his home near Moscow on Sunday, is the most known exponent of Russian gulag literature. But for all his clarity on the subject, something enhanced by his time as a prisoner, Solzhenitsyn mirrored the tormented eccentricities of his country, one that Winston Churchill described in 1939 as a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma.
In The First Circle Solzhenitsyn focuses on the intricate trappings of the prison system. Not all zeks (or prisoners) lived the tawdry, grotesque lives of Ivan Denisovich. Others were modestly privileged in serving the state and could even be rewarded. The workers of the Mavrino Institute were still in Dante’s First Circle of Inferno, but it was a privileged one, with ample bread and butter. The story is sketched within the framework of how a voice is identified and developed for state purposes.
No one is immune from the leviathan that may intervene and crush a subject at any given moment, whether through an innocent remark made in public, or even a telephone call. Innokenty Volododin, State Counselor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thinks he has taken precautions in warning a scientist of an impending trap implicating him as a traitor. But his call of warning is noted by a devilishly ingenious machine which examines the particles of human speech to build a picture of the voice, a sort of speech biometric. He is arrested and sent to Lubyanka prison.
In 1970, the Nobel Prize committee merited Solzhenitsyn with their award. He refused to leave for Stockholm, fearing expulsion from the Soviet Union. This did not prevent it from eventually happening in 1974. He was exiled first to Switzerland, then the United States, where he finalized the last two volumes of his monumental study of the penal system Gulag Archipelago. The three-volume study, crafted with clinical precision between 1973 and 1978 committed to print what his novels had already shown: how diverse, scientific and perversely modern the Soviet Union’s brutal prison program between 1918 to 1956 had been.
While brilliant in his literary oeuvre, Solzhenitsyn proved erratic in his philosophical appraisals. He embraced a volatile blend of nationalism and religion that resembled the viewpoints of the authors behind Vekhi (Landmarks), a 1909 collection of essays calling for a religious-nationalist revival in Russia. While he agreed with much about what fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov said, he could not agree with the latter’s impression in the 1970s that nationalism was ‘a sort of peripheral nuisance’. ‘Does not national variety enrich mankind as faceting increases the value of the jewel?’ he wrote in a collection edited essays From Under the Rubble. His writings on this subject were dismissed, as writer John Bayley put it, as those of a ‘fuddy duddy’ lamenting the ‘disappearance of Holy Russia’.
Democrats found him particularly indigestible. While bemoaning robber baron capitalism, his views remained fundamentally illiberal, hostile to both scientific socialism and liberal democracy. In a 2003 interview with biographer Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn branded humanism as ‘irreligious anthropocentrism’, a breeder of ‘intellectual chaos.’
On his return to Russia in 1994, he was happy to pronounce judgment against Russia’s fledging democracy to members of the Duma. His fondness for Czarist Russia, on the other hand, never abated, being reaffirmed in one of his last works, Two Hundred Years Together. Being a whitewash of the dynastic regime (it was, we are surprised to read, not anti-Semitic), it was also a honed strike on Russia’s Jewry. They, he argued, had to be accorded their fair share of blame for the country’s misfortunes.
Being in the West did not necessarily endear him to it. In 2006, he speculated in that long vein of Russian fears and suspicions that a plot of encirclement had been hatched in Washington and Europe’s capitals. Russia, despite posing ‘no threat’, was being threatened by an ever expansive NATO, thereby ‘encircling Russia from the South’ (29 April).
His embrace by President Vladimir Putin signaled the ultimate demise of democratic impulses in Russia – neither personality had much time for a political philosophy both found distasteful, preferring a nationalistic medium to convey the greatness of Russia’s revival. With cruel irony, the ex-KGB man and the chief interrogator of the Stalinist gulags had more in common than they realized. Both were cogs at different ends of the totalitarian machine, occupants of the First Circle. As for Stalin’s crimes, they have, under Putin, assumed an air of benign necessity. History, it seems, has stolen its ironical march on Solzhenitsyn.
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