“War on Terror” Targets Everyone

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 827, 28 May 2004.

The monsters who just wantonly blew away over 40 men, women and children at a wedding party in Iraq near the Syrian border are the same U.S. forces who authorized vicious tortures and killings around the world. Daily new Internet pictures from Abu Ghraib reveal fresh glimpses of hell, a combination of the techniques of Southern racist terror with pornographic humiliation and the CIA’s “scientific” infliction of pain. Now that some of the photos are out, the capitalist media admit that the White House and Pentagon had their bureaucrats and lawyers advise on just how much murderous terror they could get away with.

This world of fear is what the government wants to apply to any “dissenters” here at home. Since September 11, 2001 the U.S. government has cynically manipulated the population’s horror at the heinous attack on the World Trade Center to massively intensify an assault on civil liberties and vastly expand police powers. Untold thousands have been swept up in racist roundups of mainly Near Eastern, South Asian and Muslim people, detained without charges, tortured and abused in prisons across America. Thousands more have been deported, often to torture and death. The anti-terror laws are now being used to prosecute people who have nothing even allegedly to do with “terrorism.” This May a Mexican street gang in the Bronx was indicted on 70 counts, including murder and robberies, under New York’s new anti-terror law; the Bronx district attorney said the terror stipulation was justified while noting the statute is “to protect society against acts of political terrorism.”

This April the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in three important “war on terror” cases challenging some of the government’s most aggressive efforts to shred civil liberties. The stakes in these cases are high, for what the government is asserting is nothing less than its right to disappear citizens and strip them of their formal and fundamental democratic rights. There has always been a wide gulf between formal bourgeois legality and the race- and class-biased repression and violence that are routine to capitalist rule. If the government does away with even the formal nods to democratic rights, then “justice” in this country is going to resemble the rule of reactionary juntas and dictatorships propped up by American imperialism around the globe. If they can effectively abolish citizenship rights, then the plight of immigrants here and foreign victims of U.S. policies will be even worse.

On April 28, appeals were presented on behalf of two American citizens held indefinitely as “enemy combatants” without charges or a hearing. One of these prisoners, Yaser Esam Hamdi, was detained in Afghanistan in late 2001. The other, Jose Padilla, was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago O’Hare airport on a material witness warrant and then turned over to military authorities. This year, on April 20, lawyers presented the appeal of foreign nationals arrested in Afghanistan and dragged to the hellhole U.S. military camp in Guantánamo, Cuba, where over 600 are now detained. The Guantánamo prisoners are seeking the right to challenge their captivity in American courts through a habeas corpus petition. With supreme arrogance, the government asserts that American courts have no right to review a presidential decision, and that the U.S. has no jurisdiction over Guantánamo prisoners because the American army base is on Cuban territory! We Trotskyists suggest then that the Cuban government assert its authority over this imperialist beachhead on the Cuban deformed workers state. U.S. out of Guantánamo! Free all the detainees, from Guantánamo to Iraq to the U.S.!

The Padilla Case: Evisceration of Citizenship

“Today the government asks this court for a broad ruling that would allow the president unlimited power to imprison any American anywhere at any time without trial simply by labeling him an enemy combatant,” warned Padilla’s attorney, Jennifer Martinez, in the Supreme Court hearing. On April 9, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee filed a brief of amici curiae (friends of the court) on Padilla’s behalf, just as we did in July 2003 when his case was argued in the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York. Our brief argues that this case “tests the very existence of the fundamental rights and privileges of citizenship embodied in the Bill of Rights and secured on the battlefield of the Civil War and in class and social struggle over the past hundred and more years. If the imperial President is upheld, Padilla’s detention threatens to become the Dred Scott case of our time, a declaration that ‘Citizens have no rights that the government is bound to respect’.”

Born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican background, Padilla grew up in Chicago and as a young man converted to Islam, changed his name to Ibrahim and moved to Egypt, where he now has a wife and two children. In May 2002 he was traveling back to Chicago to visit his family, but was seized at the airport on vague claims that he is associated with Al Qaeda, and involved in a “plot” to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the U.S. No charges have been presented against Padilla, and government officials have admitted that it is a “weak case.” Yet Padilla has been denied any ability to challenge his detention, and has not been allowed to see a lawyer since he’s been in military detention except for one visit a month ago, with military brass watching and taping the whole discussion so that no confidential legal defense could be discussed.

Meanwhile, as the New York Times (13 May) reported, Padilla’s name was extracted under “intensive questioning” (a euphemism for torture) of a man captured by the CIA. Authorized “intensive questioning” techniques include strapping down a prisoner and pushing him underwater until he nearly drowns. As the Times noted, “These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules...that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.”

Another extremely ominous case brought by the government seeks to shut down free speech, using the USA-Patriot Act, which was passed with bipartisan support after the September 11 attacks. Sami Omar al-Hussayen, the father of three children, has been in prison for over a year. He is a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Idaho, where he led a candlelight vigil the night of September 11 to condemn the World Trade Center attack. Now al-Hussayen, a leader of the university’s Muslim Student Association, is accused of “terrorism” based solely on the fact that he set up some Islam-oriented Internet Web sites and e-mail discussion groups on which people posted arguments for—and against—“jihad.” It is not even clear, or relevant in the government’s view, whether al-Hussayen even knew these postings were being made.

Such attempts to prove guilt by Internet association could target anyone who ever logged on to any site with any link to anything, whether the content is known or not. The USA-Patriot omnibus witchhunting act outlaws “material support” to “terrorists,” but this “crime” is so vaguely defined that it could include giving money to a bake sale to fund health clinics in Turkey or Sri Lanka, if the recipients were affiliated with groups such as the Kurdistan Workers Party or the Tamil Tigers, both designated “terrorist” by the U.S. government. The U.S. government’s “terrorist” label is to be applied as broadly as suits its nefarious purposes.

“War on Terror”: Phony War

The SL and PDC’s brief on behalf of Jose Padilla to the Supreme Court argues, “It is in fact no war by any military definition. There is no shooting war and no battle between state powers. The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil.” With the Soviet Union gone, the U.S. rulers had to invent a new enemy to replace the fight against “godless communism.” As U.S. vice president Cheney said, “When America’s great enemy suddenly disappeared, many wondered what new direction our foreign policy would take.... The threat is known and our role is clear now” (New York Review of Books, 26 September 2002). The new bogeyman was international “terrorism.”

That the “war” is only a pretext was vividly exposed during the April 20 Guantánamo argument, when Solicitor General Theodore Olson, in response to a question from Justice John Paul Stevens, acknowledged that “the existence of the war is really irrelevant to the legal issue.” According to Olson, the government would deny the detainees access to the courts even if “the war had ended.”

If the administration has its way, it would eviscerate 200 years of American constitutional law giving the courts judicial oversight of executive branch decisions. Our legal brief argued, “The Executive asserts that it has the unchallengeable authority to decide who is a terrorist and subject such persons to martial law, demanding absolute and complete deference by the judiciary. This demand of unfettered power by the Executive is a move toward bonapartism, a police state, and requiring a compliant judiciary.” The war against terrorism literally means the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere, including in the United States. Our brief states, “Following the Executive’s own logic, Padilla could have been shot to death in the Chicago O’Hare airport, just as well as being taken into custody.”

Even members of the Supreme Court were taken aback by the Bush administration’s assertion of sweeping executive power. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked, referring to the torture or shooting of detainees, “What inhibits that if the law is what the executive says it is?” Only a day or two later, the hideous tortures at Abu Ghraib became public knowledge.

Snapshots of Domestic Repression

Padilla’s lawyer told the Supreme Court that the administration’s efforts to impose martial law on a U.S. citizen would be okay—if only Congress passed a law allowing it! “Were this court to rule that Congressional action was required,” she added, “I have no doubt that Congress would step into the breach very quickly to provide whatever authorization the executive branch deemed necessary” (New York Times, 29 April). The SL and PDC amici brief argued just the opposite point, that “more fundamentally, Congress is no more empowered than the Executive to order that citizens be disappeared without due process of law” (emphasis added).

The capitalist politicians, Democrat and Republican, in Congress have their own long history of authorizing the detention of leftists, immigrants and ethnic minorities in times of war. In 1942, when Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt issued his notorious order to imprison Japanese Americans in concentration camps for the duration of World War II, Congress immediately ratified that order. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Congress spearheaded the McCarthyite witchhunt, including passing the Internal Security Act which created an elaborate system for registering “subversive” organizations and deporting immigrants found to have been Communists at any time in their lives.

The 1950 Emergency Detention Act also provided for detention of suspected “subversives” in “times of emergency.” The government’s roundup lists of “subversives” included nearly 30,000 people! In 1983 the FBI’s Domestic Security/ Terrorism Guidelines falsely implied that the Spartacist League was a terrorist organization. We fought back, sued the FBI and won, forcing the FBI to acknowledge that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or terrorism. We said at the time that we had no illusions this would stop the dirty tricks and terror for which the U.S. government is known worldwide. Today, the Justice Department has a new “criminal information” database called Matrix, whose developers sold it based on a list of 120,000 people with a “high terrorism factor”—a purely speculative list which, however, the government “apparently acted on,” according to the New York Times (21 May).

Although the government has primarily aimed its fire at Muslims and immigrants, the ultimate targets of the U.S.’s attempted detention measures will be the multiracial labor movement and black people. Ominously, in justifying its right to disappear Padilla, the government has cited the 1909 case called Moyer v. Peabody, involving the governor of Colorado’s declaration that a miners strike for the eight-hour day was an “insurrection.” Some 400 miners were forcibly deported from the state, and over 175 miners were thrown in local jails, including union leader Charles Moyer, who was held as a military prisoner for three months. In response to a petition for habeas corpus, militia general Sherman Bell declared, “Habeas corpus, hell! We’ll give ’em post mortems.”

What the government can get away with will be determined by class and social struggle. The rights of citizenship and other civil liberties that the government is trying to shred are the products of generations of revolutionary class struggle, including Cromwell’s struggle against the Crown in the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the bloody Civil War that overthrew slavery. The McCarthy-era “anti-subversive” detention laws were repealed in 1969 as the result of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the massive civil rights struggles which rocked this country.

U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

With the U.S. occupation of Iraq turning into a political nightmare for the Bush administration, increasing numbers of Americans are disaffected from the war and especially bitter about the lies that led to it. The bloody spectacle of U.S. troops firing on Muslim holy sites in Karbala and Najaf, the revelations of widespread killing and torture of helpless prisoners, must horrify and nauseate anyone not utterly poisoned by racist imperialist arrogance. The U.S. media and Congressional investigations play up the prosecution of low-level Abu Ghraib guards for the real purpose of the propaganda war: to hide the mass murder of civilians carried out by the U.S. in Iraq; as the London Independent (23 May) headlines, “Ordinary Iraqis Killed: 11,500 and Not Counting.” For a generation just coming to political consciousness—one that did not directly experience a full-scale, long drawn out U.S. imperialist war, like Vietnam—this is an eye-opener into the realities of the export of “democracy.”

The point that has to be driven home is that these people—the U.S. ruling class—knew exactly what they were doing when they set up the torture camps. Such places are the necessary creations of imperialist policy, as we pointed out in “U.S. Torture, Inc.” (WV No. 826, 14 May). Since then a host of journalistic exposés prove the torture policy goes all the way to the top of the government. Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article “The Gray Zone” (24 May) gets right to the point in its opening sentence: “The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.” Interrogation techniques included “physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners,” as Hersh noted.

As the neocons’ crazed dream of a quick victory on the cheap in Iraq collapsed in bloody chaos, the brutal torture increased: Major General Miller, who oversaw the Guantánamo hellhole detention center, was sent into Abu Ghraib, first to implement the torture program, and then later, when it looked like it was going to spiral out of control, to take direct charge. “His job is to save what he can,” one of Hersh’s “former intelligence official” sources said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.”

The Spartacist League forthrightly states that every blow against the imperialist occupiers is a blow struck against the enemy of workers and the oppressed all over the world. We take a side against the U.S. imperialist occupation without giving an ounce of political support to the reactionary clerics who appear to be leading much of the resistance. The key to defeating the U.S. occupation of Iraq is class struggle at home. What impedes this is not a shortage of discontent but the Democratic Party-loyal labor leadership and the reformist left.

While numerous trade unions have passed resolutions against the Patriot Act, paper tigers can’t defeat the government’s rampage. What’s urgently necessary is militant class struggle in defense of labor’s right to strike, in defense of immigrants and all the oppressed. The ILWU longshore union leadership, for instance, is mobilizing double the number of union organizers to get out the vote for Democratic Party hopeful John Kerry than it mobilized to galvanize labor support for the ILWU when it was locked out last year. It is precisely through the subordination of the labor movement to the Democratic Party that the trade-union tops shackle the working class to the capitalist rulers. The shredding of civil liberties by the Bush gang was prepared by the Clinton administration, with, for instance, the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (for a full assessment of how the Democrats primed the pump, see “Lies, Repression and Imperialist War,” WV No. 825, 30 April). Bush just had September 11 as his “godsend” to ram through a qualitative diminution of democratic rights. This year, from the “home front” to Iraq, John Kerry and the Democrats are running as the more responsible, efficacious and popular party of war and repression.

Opponents of U.S. Torture, Inc. in Iraq and the shredding of civil liberties at home must be won to the understanding that this social system based on the exploitation of labor for the profit of the capitalist class cannot be reformed. No number of peace crawls bleating “money for jobs, not for war” will change the priorities of imperialism. And the backhanded support to Democrat John Kerry pushed by even ostensible socialists pandering to the “anybody but Bush” sentiment is a recipe to perpetuate the whole system of capitalist rule, racism and war. Here in the heart of U.S. imperialism, the working class has a key task: to bring down the rapacious U.S. ruling class, which will enormously strengthen workers and the oppressed in every corner of the globe. The Spartacist League fights to build the multiracial revolutionary workers party that brings that consciousness to the working class and radical youth. There will be no justice served until all the war criminals and commanders, from the Pentagon chiefs and their political bosses to their underlings, are swept from power through a proletarian socialist revolution.