American Politics Journal

Baying for Blood
Our non-war will lead to non-victory
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Nov. 30, 2001 -- MT. SHASTA, CA (ZeppNews/APJP) -- It was fun, in a grotesque sort of way, in watching the numbers change as Osama bin Ashcroft tried to remember exactly how many political prisoners he had accumulated since the big round up which began a day or two before the World Trade Center attacks. Was it 1,100? 550? After considerable hemming and hawing, he finally decided he had 603 locked up, plus one dead. The numbers shifted like a sleazy Florida election, meaning what right wingers wanted them to mean, nothing more and nothing less.

OK, so we had 603 people locked up awaiting trials that haven't been planned yet on charges that haven't been made. Five hundred and fifty, Ashcroft informed his servile reporters, were visa violators. An undisclosed number were terrorists. But Ashcroft insisted they were terrorists, and in post junta-America, that's all that's needed. 104 people have actually been charged with federal crimes in the probe.

One of the most staggering moments, one which showed how steeply America has declined into becoming just another weak, brittle dictatorship, came when on courageous reporter dared to ask Ashcroft who some of these "detainees" were. Ashcroft replied that the names were being withheld for the protection of those detained.

You can do a lot with that argument. "No, Ma'am, I'm sorry, but we can't tell you what we did with your husband or where he is. He's facing serious charges, but we can't say what they are. It's for his own protection. If people knew what we charged him with, they might break into our maximum-security jail and hurt him."

Even Stalin's regime didn't try telling whoppers like that one.

"We will use every constitutional tool to keep suspected terrorists locked up,'' Ashcroft was quoted as saying, apparently hoping that nobody would notice that he had, to date, used no constitutional tools to keep them locked up.

The saddest part is the assumption that regular citizens would be so willing to hurt people just on the government's say-so. All that would be needed, in Ashcroft's estimation, would be his unsupported claim that someone was a terrorist, or knew terrorists, or came from a country that was next door to a country that harbored terrorists, and the lynch mob would be out with their torches and pitchforks, baying for blood.

You have to believe that the American people are weak, gullible, frightened, vicious children to sustain a belief like that.

As long as a huge majority blindly support creatures like Putsch and Ashcroft and their assault on civil freedoms, the belief has some justification. I suspect that a lot of flag-wavers yelling for terrorist blood right now are going to be deeply ashamed of themselves one day. The better ones will. Some will never understand how deeply they betrayed their country and themselves in the name of patriotismm and because they took their fear and tried to pretend it was courage.

Right wingers, eager to topple the hated United States and replace it with a gleaming fascist dream called "America" (which resembles the United States only without rights or freedoms for the Wrong Types of people) have been eager to support the bizarre notion that we've developed a sudden right to lock people up without trial or even without charges. This is the same crowd, mind you, that spends much of its time whining about how dangerous government is and how we need to get it off our backs. They are talking about a bizarre 1942 Supreme Court ruling, Ex Parte Quirlin, which stated that the government had the right to impose military trials on terrorists from countries with which we were at war who were caught conspiring to harm the United States. Of the nine accused, six were hanged, and three were imprisoned. One of them was imprisoned despite the fact that upon landing on our shores, he turned about and turned himself and his comrades over to the FBI, who would never have caught them otherwise. In fact, he had to go back a couple of times with evidence that he really was a Nazi saboteur who was part of a team intent on committing terrorist acts against America. The FBI didn't believe him at first. In the end, he spent four years in jail and was then deported to Germany, and J. Edgar Hoover was given a Congressional Medal of Honor for rooting out Nazi spies. It isn't the sort of incident that self-respecting patriots would want to brag about, even if the six who were hanged probably had it coming. (We'll never know: the evidence -- if any -- was destroyed after the trials).

Ex Parte Quirlin stipulated that we must be at war with a particular country before we can impose military trials on their nationals caught messing with us. Who are we at war with? Terrorism? Fine. Where's the formal Congressional declaration of war?

There isn't one, of course. How could there be? The people who committed the ghastly crimes of September 11th didn't come from any of the countries Putsch wants to target for his own purposes. They came from countries we are afraid to mess with: Saudi Arabia and Egypt. We can't mess with them because they have the economic resources to cause us inconvenience. And we sure need that Saudi oil to keep our SUVs going.

We can't declare war because the terrorists mostly come from countries we don't want to mess with, and in some cases, the governments don't support anyway.

By way of example, all of the people involved in the actual hijacking and crashing of jets on 9/11 were either Egyptian (4) or Saudi (15). None were from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, or any of the other nations we deem "terrorist."

We know that terrorist cells were and probably still are active in Florida, Canada, and Germany. Putsch isn't going to bomb Montreal, Tampa Bay, or Berlin, even if he could find them.

So we attack weak and defenseless countries, slaughtering thousands and putting millions at risk of starvation, just so we can improve leverage in the area and convinced all the frightened people clinging to Putsch's pant legs that Something Is Being Done about terrorism.

That puts us squarely in the snake pit of what Afghanistan laughingly calls "politics." Politics in Afghanistan is a blood sport, one far beyond what right wingers like to call "hard ball." As Afghani members of the Taliban surrender, they are allowed to keep their rifles and sidearms, and some took up fighting for the Northern Alliance (the White House tried redubbing it "The United Front", but except for the servile CNN, nobody was buying that as a name for a coalition that exists only to battle one another) while others picked one of several dozen other factions extant in Afghanistan's twenty year free-for-all civil war. When they are allowed to keep their weapons, it's a bit difficult to understand just what is the exact nature of "defeat" that the Taliban has actually suffered.

Non-Afghani Taliban fighters and supporters are being tortured, raped and massacred on a large scale. Thousands have died. When was the last time you saw American citizens supporting allies that raped, tortured and murdered people who we weren't even at war with? Somehow I doubt this will be in the history books of the future. Like My Lai and No Gun Ri, it will be one of those things that we would just as soon forget, and as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, the administration, sensing it needs new victims in order to keep the bloodlust support strong, is eyeing Somalia, Sudan, and Iraq as next potential targets for our glorious "War on Terrorism." Putsch and his right wing cowboys have the strange notion that if we are frightful and repressive enough, we can get rid of terrorists. This is what happens when you have a moron in the White House whose reading curriculum consists of "A Very Hungary Caterpillar." Terrorists are otherwise known as "freedom fighters," and they tend to increase their numbers when a repressive force -- particularly an INVADING repressive force -- try cracking down. History is full of examples, including the colonies of America in the 1770s.

Are the dim right wing cowboys who overthrew our government last winter prepared to take on the whole world? Do they really think they can put an end to terrorism when places that have been fighting terrorists, in some cases for hundreds of years, like England, Germany, and Israel, couldn't? Israel decided to crack down, with the result that not only are they subject to more terrorist attacks than ever before, but they've lost much of the support of their allies. What makes Putsch and his crew think America will do any better?

Will we have to lose a city in a nuclear flash? Or will we simply get bogged down in dozens of little wars across much of Africa and Asia, draining our resources and watching as terrorists decide that the best way to get rid of the Americans is to get rid of the oil?

The most striking thing of all is the discontinuity between what the average American thinks we're fighting for, and what this administration is fighting for. We have evidence that the plans to attack Afghanistan existed in July -- two months before WTC. While I doubt this administration expected anything that horrific to occur, it's been a huge break for them in their efforts to move in on the middle east and simply rape the place of its oil.

But that is a "war" we cannot hope to win.

But what will it take to make people realize that this isn't a war? It's an opportunistic power grab.

And it will cost us dearly.