In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.
The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.
I suppose it is a feature of these dark times that we are left to rely on J. Edgar Hoover's handiwork for protection from state oppression. Especially telling is the fact that US military interrogators worked with Chinese investigators in Gitmo to torture Chinese Muslims. No word if the PRC guys were put off that Soviet-style sleep deprivation tactics were used in their Sino-American Clandestine Torture Summit rather than Maoist techniques. The media have been known to put China's human rights contempt in the front of their coverage, but US collaboration in and notetaking on the same is seventeenth page news.
The big eye-opener here is that the FBI agents in Guantanamo weren't hippie peaceniks hoping to bring an end to the War, they were criminal investigators accumulating evidence of serious crimes. In the end, the Times reports:
The report says that the F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were all made aware of the F.B.I. agents’ complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result.
Radical environmentalists seem to be seen as a more serious threat than US officials torturing in the name of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution.
Finally, the article demonstrates the cynical destruction of the English language for totalitarian purposes:
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, noted that abuses at Guantánamo were the subject of a 2005 Defense Department investigation that found no evidence of torture, though it did fault some interrogation tactics and called the Qahtani interrogation degrading and abusive.
The military's distinction between "torture" and "degrading and abusive" interrogation tactics begs the question: what is torture if not degrading and abusive interrogation? It seems that the government is committed to making the word torture meaningless, and thus it would be impossible for the US to torture--as impossible as it would be for them to ballywonk or zurk or any other word without meaningful definition. Alternately, they might redefine it as "something the US doesn't do." By definition we don't torture so sleep deprivation (the central torture tactic in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's terrifying expose of Stalinism), waterboarding (a primary tool of the Spanish Inquistion) or sexual humiliation (a favorite of Saddam Hussein) are only torture when others do them. This is the classic rationale of doublethink and the DoD's innocent quote demonstrates the depth of commitment to repression in our national state.
Moving forward, page A6 has a fascinating critical look at "second generation" agrofuels. This article--like almost everybody else--calls them "biofuels," but activists in the global South have taken to calling them agrofuels. All fuels--coal, petroleum, natural gas--are made of biological materials, agrofuels can be distinguished by the fact they are produced from agricultural products rather than drilled or mined for. Second generation agrofuels are produced from reeds and grasses as opposed to staple crops such as corn, palm and sugar. The global famine caused in part by Western liberalism's posthaste embrace of agrofuels is leading Western energy firms to consider shifting to plants such as giant reed and jatropha--non-food crops. The only hitch in their giddy up is that:
Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.
Hard to believe plants sold by their advocates as easy to grow in vast quantities anywhere might be weeds, no? It is still unclear how many desperate straw grasps from global capitalism we will endure before we recognize that the problem isn't that there isn't enough fuel or not clean enough fuel, but overconsumption. These grasps cost human lives: thousands certainly in the current famine (exceptional hunger in a world where thousands starve to death every day to begin with) and more if disastrous predictions about invasive species' threat to food supplies in poor countries were to come true. They cost lives, but they pay profits for capitalists convinced that the eternal economic growth is possible or desirable. Having ignored warnings about the first generation agrofuels' threat to food costs, they don't want to hear the expert predictions on second-generation products.
“With biofuels, there’s always a hurry,” said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Plantations are started by investors, often from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don’t want a negative assessment.”
To this industry figures such as EuropaBio's Willy De Greef have this black comfort:
Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group... said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.
Inevitably? As in guaranteed to take place? I am curious what De Greef's source of such confidence might be. Unforseen, ignored or covered up threats to human life have arisen from every new energy innovation, and capitalism's pursuit of ever greater wealth explodes these threats with its consumption culture. The rapacious burning of wood, coal, petroleum and the first generation of agrofuels have all resulted in ecological crises that have killed multitudes of people. Now the "secretary general" of the newest energy concern lets us know this time will be different. We'll be waiting with baited breath.
This article ends with a scent of a solution, at least one of its dimensions.
That assessment, he added, must take a broad geographical perspective since invasive species don’t respect borders.
A global resistance is called for, anything less is simply insufficient. Blessedly, we live in the first moment of human history wherein such a coordination is possible. We in the US also live in this era's great global power and have an opportunity to decapitate the beast of world corporate capitalism. But as we tarry the US wanes, our torture-buddies in China begin their ascent replacing liberal capitalism with command capitalism, borders become increasingly anachronistic and people die. Good thing the revolution starts in September!
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