Chris Hedges's Blog, page 147

‘You Are Failing Us’: Plans, Frustration at U.N. Climate Talks

UNITED NATIONS — Scolded for doing little, leader after leader promised the United Nations on Monday to do more to prevent a warming world from reaching even more dangerous levels.

As they made their pledges at the Climate Action Summit, though, they and others conceded it was not enough. And even before they spoke, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg shamed them over and over for their inaction: “How dare you?”

Sixty-six countries have promised to have more ambitious climate goals, and 30 swore to be carbon neutral by midcentury, said Chilean President Sebastian Pinera Echenique, who is hosting the next climate negotiations later this year.

Businesses and charities also got in on the act, at times even going bigger than major nations. Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced Monday that his foundation, along with The World Bank and some European governments, would provide $790 million in financial help to 300 million of the world’s small farmers adapt to climate change. The Gates foundation pledged $310 million of that.

“The world can still prevent the absolute worst effects of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing new technologies and sources of energy,” Gates said. “But the effects of rising temperatures are already under way.”

As the day went on Monday and the promises kept coming, the United States seemed out in the cold.

Before world leaders made their promises in three-minute speeches, the 16-year-old Thunberg gave an emotional appeal in which she scolded the leaders with her repeated phrase, “How dare you.”

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here,” said Thunberg, who began a lone protest outside the Swedish parliament more than a year ago that culminated in Friday’s global climate strikes.

“I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and yet all you can talk about is money,” Thunberg said. “You are failing us.”

Later, she and 15 other youth activists filed a formal complaint with an arm of the U.N. that protects children, saying that governments’ lack of action on warming is violating their basic rights.

Outside experts say they heard a lot of talk Monday but not the promised action needed to keep warming to a few tenths of a degree. They say it won’t produce the dramatic changes the world requires.

“Sometimes I feel that Greta is still out in front of the Swedish parliament out on her own,” said Stanford University’s Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, which targets carbon emissions across the world.

Bill Hare, who follows national emissions and promises for Climate Action Tracker, called what was said “deeply disappointing” and not adding up to much.

“The ball they are moving forward is a ball of promises,” said economist John Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Center for Global Change. “Where the ‘ball’ of actual accomplishments is, is another question.”

Of all the countries that came up short, World Resources Institute Vice President Helen Mountford said one stood out: the United States for “not coming to the table and engaging.”

“What we’ve seen so far is not the kind of climate leadership we need from the major economies,” Mountford said. She did say, however, that businesses, as well as small- and medium-sized countries had “exciting initiatives.”

Nations such as Finland and Germany promised to ban coal within a decade. Several also mentioned goals of climate neutrality — when a country is not adding more heat-trapping carbon to the air than is being removed by plants and perhaps technology — by 2050.

U.S. President Donald Trump dropped by the summit, listened to German Chancellor Angela Merkel make detailed pledges — including going coal-free — and left without saying anything.

The United States did not ask to speak at the summit, U.N. officials said. And Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had told countries they couldn’t be on the agenda without making bold new proposals.

Even though there was no speech by Trump — who has denied climate change, called it a Chinese hoax and repealed U.S. carbon-reduction policies — he was talked about.

In a jibe at Trump’s plans to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said countries “must honor our commitments and follow through on the Paris Agreement.”

“The withdrawal of certain parties will not shake the collective goal of the world community,” Wang said to applause. Also Monday, Russia announced that it had ratified the Paris pact, which it had signed already.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the U.N.’s special climate envoy, thanked Trump for stopping by, adding that it might prove useful “when you formulate climate policy,” drawing laughter and applause on the General Assembly floor.

Thunberg told the U.N. that even the strictest emission cuts being talked about only gives the world a 50% chance of limiting future warming to another 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.72 degrees Fahrenheit) from now, which is a global goal. Those odds, she said, are not good enough.

“We will not let you get away with this,” Thunberg said. “Right now is where we draw the line.”

As this all played out, scientists announced that Arctic sea ice reached its annual summer low and this year the ice shrank so much it tied for the second lowest mark in 40 years of monitoring.

Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, said she represents “the most climate-vulnerable people on Earth.” Her tiny country has increased its emissions-cut proposals in a way that would limit warming to that tight goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

“We are now calling on others to join us,” Heine said.

Several leaders talked about getting off coal, but Climate Action Tracker’s Hare said it wasn’t enough and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said if the world can make driverless cars, it can tackle climate change.

“There simply can be no more coal power plants after 2020 if we are serious about our future,” she said.

Speaking for small nations that are already being eaten away by sea level rise and blasted by stronger storms, Mottley said, “We refuse to be relegated to the footnotes of history and be collateral damage.”

“The nations of the world are not fighting a losing battle, but the nations of the world are losing this battle today,” Mottley said. “It’s within our battle to win it. The only question is: Will it be too late for the small nations of the world?”

Guterres opened the summit Monday by saying: “Earth is issuing a chilling cry: Stop.”

He told the more than 60 world leaders scheduled to speak that it’s not a time to negotiate but to act to make the world carbon neutral by 2050.

“Time is running out,” he said. “But it is not too late.”

 

A Veteran in a World of Never-Ending Wars and IEDs

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on TomDispatch. 

Recently, on a beautiful Kansas Saturday, I fell asleep early, exhausted by the excitement and ultimate disappointment of the Army football team’s double overtime loss to highly favored Michigan. Having turned against America’s forever wars and the U.S. military as an institution while I was still in it, West Point football, I’m almost ashamed to admit, is my last guilty martial pleasure. Still, having graduated from the Academy, taught history there, and spent 18 long years in the Army, I find something faintly hopeful about a team of undersized, overmatched, non-National Football League prospects facing off against one of the biggest schools in college football.

I awoke, though, early the next morning to the distressing — if hardly surprising — news that President Trump had spiked months of seemingly promising peace talks with the Taliban, blocking any near-term hope for an end to America’s longest, most hopeless war of all. My by-now-uncomfortably-familiar response was to go even deeper into a funk, based on a vague, if overwhelming, sense that the world only manages to get worse on a near-daily basis. For this longtime skeptic of U.S. foreign policy, once also a secret dreamer and idealist, that reality drives me toward political nihilism, a feeling that nothing any of us can do will halt the spread of an increasingly self-destructive empire and the collapse of democracy at home.

Looking back, I can trace my long journey from burgeoning neoconservative believer to Iraq War opponent to war-on-terror dissenter to disenfranchised veteran nonbeliever. Thinking about this in the wake of Army’s loss and those cancelled Afghan peace talks, during a typically morose conversation with Tom, of TomDispatch, I realized that I could tell a story of escalating military heresy and disappointment simply from the three years of articles I’d written for his website. It mattered little that, at the time, I imagined them as anything but the stuff of autobiography.

If all this sounds gloomy, writing itself has been cathartic for me and may have saved me on this strange journey of mine. So, join me on a little autobiographical fast march through a world increasingly filled with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, as seen through the eyes of one apostate military veteran. Maybe some of you will even recognize aspects of your own life journeys in what follows.

“Hope and Change” in Iraq

In October 2006, when Second Lieutenant Sjursen arrived in Iraq, Baghdad was still, at least figuratively, aflame. It took only a few months of repetitious, useless “presence patrols,” a dozen IED strikes on my scout platoon, the deaths of three of my troopers and the maiming of others, as well as ubiquitous civilian deaths in marketplace bombings, to free me from a sense that the war in Iraq served any purpose whatsoever. Hearing again and again, even from long oppressed Shia Iraqis, that life under Sunni autocrat Saddam Hussein had been better, it became increasingly apparent that the U.S. invasion, launched by the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on thoroughly bogus grounds in the spring of 2003, had shattered their nation and perhaps destabilized a region as well.

Just 23 years old (and, by my own estimation, immature at that), I — and a surprising number of my junior officer peers — started cautiously acting out. I grew my hair longer than regulations allowed and posted World War I-era antiwar poems by British veterans like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen on my locker. I eventually even began “phoning in” my patrols, while attempting to avoid dicey, ambush-prone neighborhoods whenever possible.

And yet, despite a growing sense of darkness, I’d yet to lose all hope. At home, the Democrats (many of whom had once voted for the Iraq War) won back Congress in November 2006, largely thanks to a sudden burst of antiwar, anti-Bush rhetoric. In 2007, I began using my limited Internet time to ingest transcripts of every speech by or article about an upstart young African American Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama. Unlike anointed frontrunner Hillary Clinton, he seemed inspirational, an outsider, and — as an Illinois state senator — an early opponent of the very invasion that had landed me in my macabre predicament. I quickly decided he was my man, buying into his “hope and change” rhetoric, while dreaming of the day he’d end my war, saving countless lives, including possibly my own.

Sadly, if predictably, despite the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and monthly U.S. military fatalities that regularly hit triple digits, nothing could stop the Bush administration from continuing to escalate the war. I remember the moment in April 2007 when I heard that, thanks to President Bush’s announced troop “surge” in Iraq, my squadron was designated to stay three months past our scheduled year-long deployment. It felt like a gut punch. Steve, my fellow lieutenant, and I chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes in silence, while leaning against the brick wall of our Baghdad barracks. Then we faced the music and broke the news to our distraught soldiers.

In that bloodiest year of the war, my squadron would lose another half-dozen men in combat, while nearly 1,000 U.S. servicemen and women would die. Yet that famed, widely hailed surge would, of course, ultimately fail. Not that most policymakers thought so at the time. The Bush-anointed, media-savvy new commander in Iraq, Army General David Petraeus, sold a temporary drop in violence to a fawning Congress, including most of those Democrats, as a profound success. It scarcely mattered that the announced purpose of the surge — to create space and time for a political reconciliation between Iraqi sects and ethnicities — failed from the start. My long-shot dream that an “antiwar” Congress would cut off funds for the conflict remained just that.

Still, landing at my home base in Colorado that New Year’s Eve, I remained almost unnaturally hopeful about Barack Obama as a potential savior. By April 2008, promoted to captain and sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for advanced schooling, I found myself secretly canvassing for him across the Ohio River in Indiana, which had just gained swing-state status. If only he could best Republican candidate John McCain, I thought, he might rapidly end what he had once called “the dumb war.” Given my single-minded focus on that possibility, I managed to ignore the way candidate Obama simultaneously called for an escalation of what he termed “the good war” in Afghanistan. Never mind, Obama won in November 2008. I spent Election Day drinking blue martinis and cheering him on with fellow dissenting officers. That night, holding my newly born infant son, I cried tears of joy as the election returns poured in.

Serving Empire Abroad, Feeling Empire Close to Home

The next few years would be filled with disappointment, disenchantment, and disbelief as I followed America’s wars and the state of the world from a desktop computer in my new, highly immersive job with the 4th Cavalry on the squadron operations staff in Fort Riley, Kansas. I watched President Obama shed his dove credentials, unleash across the Greater Middle East exponentially more drone assassination attacks than the Bush administration, fail to close Guantanamo, and triple troop numbers — besting even Bush — in his own “surge” in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Pentagon would utilize a newly established U.S. military command, AFRICOM, to quietly expand deployments across another continent.

I was now in command of a company (we in the cavalry called it a “troop”) of some 100 scouts. In February 2011, Obama’s ongoing surge 2.0 diverted my unit from a potentially cushy “turn-out-the-lights” Iraq deployment to a fierce fight on the Taliban’s home turf in Kandahar, Afghanistan. That awful mission, as I told a Reuters reporter on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — to the frustration of my colonel — seemed to me futilely unrelated to the events of September 2001. (I was chosen for the interview as a New York native.)

In that ultimately futile deployment, my troop of scouts lost three more lives and several more limbs. That May, Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in Pakistan and my mother promptly asked if I’d now get to come home early. No such luck.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration further shattered the Greater Middle East and beyond through a string of military interventions. During my year-long deployment in Afghanistan, Washington helped turn Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya into a failed state of battling warlords and Islamists through an ill-fated regime-change operation; inched its way toward an intervention in the Syrian civil war that would, in the end, counterproductively back jihadis; and stood aside as the Saudis invaded Bahrain to crush Arab Spring protests in a little country that just happened to be home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

I’d entered Afghanistan already opposed to that war and with few illusions that my own unit — or the U.S. military more generally — could alter the outcome there, let alone “win.” As that tour of duty wound down, I considered leaving the military once and for all. Still, I hedged. From remote southern Afghanistan, I had just enough fax-machine access to apply for a position teaching history at West Point, an assignment that could first get me two blissful years earning a master’s degree at a civilian university free of charge with full military pay and benefits. Surprisingly, I was accepted into that selective program and decided to stay in the Army indefinitely.

Grad school in the hippie enclave and university town of Lawrence, Kansas, in 2012 was all I’d hoped for, and more. Shedding my uniform, I felt strangely at home and thrived. I might have remained a student forever. Still, as I studied, I watched my former world continue to worsen.

During my two years at the University of Kansas, the Obama administration changed course, backing an Egyptian military coup against that country’s first democratically elected president; National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a massive illegal domestic surveillance program that was monitoring nearly all Americans; Army leaker Chelsea Manning, brought to trial by Obama’s Justice Department, was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison under the archaic World War I Espionage Act; and the newly branded Islamic State (formed in U.S. prisons in Iraq) exploded across Iraq and Syria. Soon, the president, having pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, found himself launching a new air war in Syria as well as relaunching an old one in Iraq, and then sending troops into both countries.

All the while, the war in Afghanistan raged on without end or a hint of progress. Not yet emotionally prepared to speak, I suddenly wrote a short, angry, letter to hawkish Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, which would, over the next two years, turn into an anti-Iraq war memoir focused on the myth of the success of the surge. Predictably, hardly anyone noticed. Rather than feeling elated over having my book published, I only became more cynical about our ability — any of us — to alter the hapless path on which imperial America seemed so fully embarked.

Life goes on, however, and from 2014 to 2016, I had, I thought, the best job in the Army: teaching U.S. history to “plebes” (freshmen cadets) at West Point. Despite my own heartache, my by-then crippling PTSD, and the barely suppressed mental-health crisis that went with it, I held onto one hope: that, if I could enthusiastically impart a more accurate and critical history of the nation to my students, I just might influence a new generation of more independent-thinking officers. My former cadets are now all lieutenants and though some do attest to the influence of my class, most are serving the empire as middle managers across a vast global chain of American bases.

The news only grew more distressing during my brief foray at West Point. By then, the Pentagon was supporting an ongoing Saudi war in Yemen that included regular terror bombing and a starvation blockade of the country. It would kill tens of thousands of civilians, starve perhaps 100,000 children to death, and unleash a cholera epidemic of epic proportions. Meanwhile, the president reversed a promise to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by December 31, 2014, and that war went right on. In those same years, the U.S. military “footprint” across Africa expanded exponentially, as (in a pattern already seen in the Greater Middle East) did a proliferation of Islamist militias on that continent.

Then, empire — as it always does — came home, this time in the form of increasingly militarized and Pentagon-equipped policing in neighborhoods of color across the nation. Thanks to YouTube and social media, pervasive instances of police brutality and the killing of unarmed, mostly young black men streamed into public consciousness. It was all brought home to me when a black man, Eric Garner, was choked to death by a white New York City police officer on a troubled street corner in my home borough of Staten Island, for the alleged crime of selling loose cigarettes. As a student of civil rights history, an aspirant activist, and the lead instructor (oddly enough) in African-American History at West Point, I felt galvanized into action.

The result: I found myself teaching cadets by day, then changing into jeans and a hoodie and driving 90 minutes to Staten Island, protest sign in tow. There, I would attend Eric Garner rallies and shout at the police. Hours later, I would trek back to the military academy, rinse and repeat. It felt good to be out on the streets, but, of course, it changed nothing. America’s warrior cops still operate with near impunity, using U.S. military counterinsurgency tactics (sometimes with Israeli Defense Force training) in communities of color as if they were occupied enemy territory.

Off the Rails, Once and For All

Leaving West Point’s (relatively) progressive and intellectual history department in June 2016 for Fort Leavenworth’s stiflingly conventional Command and General Staff College in Kansas would prove deeply unsettling. Little did I know, though, that, as I began protesting America’s forever wars (my wars, so to speak) ever more volubly, my once-promising military career would soon be over. Army doctors determined that my emotional wounds qualified me for an early medical retirement. By February 2019, I found myself writing up a little antiwar storm and experiencing in-patient PTSD treatment in Arizona. I was, in other words, on my way out the door, an ignominious — if fitting — end to a career only months longer than America’s second Afghan War.

In those years, U.S. foreign policy should have gone into in-patient treatment, too. It had, in fact, spun out of control. In a through-the-looking-glass series of moves, our military continued to bomb seven countries, deployed troops to Syria, reentered Iraq, began expanding and modernizing its already vast nuclear arsenal, launched a new Cold War with Russia and China, and moved into the 18th year of its war in Afghanistan.

And did I mention that Donald Trump, corrupt real estate magnate, playboy and reality TV star turned “populist” xenophobic hero, was elected president of the United States? He then ditched a promising Obama-era deal to deter Iran’s nuclear program, eschewed any American contribution to the global campaign against the existential threat of climate change (which he had previously called a “Chinese hoax”), and spiked the Cold War Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty, leading atomic scientists to tick the “doomsday” clock a stroke closer to midnight.

He or his top officials also militarized the southern border, separated children from immigrant parents, and stuck kids in cages. He cheered on white supremacist rallies; encouraged those militarized cops to “not be too nice” to suspects and perhaps even to slam their heads into patrol car doors on their way to the station; threatened a “fire and fury” nuclear war against North Korea before falling “in love” with that country’s ruler; indicted, for the first time in American history, a publisher, Julian Assange, for posting leaked files; officially recognized the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, while expressing approval for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to annex portions of the Palestinian West Bank outright; and… and… but I lack the energy to go on.

Which brings me back to Army’s heartbreaking (if inconsequential) loss in that football game and Trump’s recent decision to cancel ongoing peace talks with the Taliban (maybe the only hope left of getting our troops out of Afghanistan). That, of course, was the one constant of this tale of mine: that never-ending American war in Afghanistan. By September 2019, matters had so deteriorated that I was left with but one pathetic hope: that Donald Trump might, somehow, some way, sometime, be the one to end that absurd, Orwellian forever war.

And then, of course, he called off those peace talks and — a last gut punch — justified his decision by citing a Taliban attack that killed yet another American soldier. In the process, he ensured that yet more troopers like me (some of them undoubtedly born after the 9/11 attacks took place) will needlessly die in a war without end. Now, an alleged Iranian-sponsored attackon the Saudi oil industry may well scuttle any hopes for a long-shot peace deal with Tehran. War there, of course, could kill many more U.S. troops.

As for me, I have a feeling that I’ll wake up tomorrow to some new bit of bad news and begin repeating my now-endless refrain: Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse …

Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVetand check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris Henriksen.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Trump Is Taking His War on Women Worldwide

Not content to merely police women’s bodies in the United States, the Trump administration has gone global with their war on reproductive rights. According to The Guardian, which has seen the document, U.S. officials wrote a letter to United Nations member states asking that they join an allegedly “growing coalition” of countries determined to end abortion.

“As a key priority in global health promotion,” the letter states, “we respectfully request that your government join the United States in ensuring that every sovereign state has the ability to determine the best way to protect the unborn and defend the family as the foundational unity of society vital to children thriving and leading healthy lives,” It was apparently signed by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to The Guardian.

The letter suggests that previous multinational agreements on health care have been misinterpreted as pro-choice:

We remain gravely concerned that aggressive efforts to reinterpret international instruments to create a new international right to abortion and to promote international policies that weaken the family have advanced through some United Nations fora.

Evidence of this is found in references throughout many multilateral global health policy documents to interpret ‘comprehensive sexuality education’ and ‘sexual and reproductive health’ and ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ to diminish the role of parents in the most sensitive and personal family-oriented issues. The latter has been asserted to mean promotion of abortion, including pressuring countries to abandon religious principles and cultural norms enshrined in law that protect unborn life.

The Guardian points out that this letter was similar to a May letter delivered to the World Health Organization, and signed by the U.S., Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Haiti, Ghana, Nigeria and Iraq, which stated that any references to reproductive health “cause confusion and misunderstanding.”

This is the latest step in the Trump administration’s attempts to restrict reproductive rights. While still campaigning for president in October of 2016, Trump told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that he would “automatically” nominate anti-abortion judges.

Three days after being inaugurated, Trump announced he was reinstating, through executive order, a policy known as the global gag rule, which bars foreign non-governmental organizations from receiving American funding if they perform abortions. In March 2019, as The New York Times reported, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced an expansion of the rule, barring funding to foreign NGOs that lobby for abortion.

They did the same for U.S. organizations that provide referrals for abortions, denying funding to organizations who previously received it under a family planning program called Title X. Planned Parenthood, NPR reported, left the program in August, “rather than comply with new Trump administration rules regarding abortion counseling.” This only scratches the surface of the state-level abortion restrictions the Trump administration also supported.

The Trump administration didn’t respond to The Guardian’s request for comment. Advocates for reproductive justice are concerned.

“This letter just shows how they are trying to erode international consensus and roll back the clock for women and girls,” Shannon Kowalski, director of advocacy and policy at the International Women’s Health Coalition told The Guardian, adding, “It’s not just abortion that they care about, they care about women’s ability to exercise autonomy over their bodies and about denying them critical access to the services they need.”

The statement is scheduled to be presented at a meeting on health care coverage during Monday’s session of the U.N. General Assembly.

 

Making Torture American Again, With Help From Hollywood

Regardless of their take on the volatile topic of torture, there appears to be rare agreement among an array of experts, activists, proponents and critics about one of the most reliable ways it has been successfully defended in recent decades. The so-called ticking time bomb scenario has done the trick so often and so well—for leaders of countries, militaries, small armies of Hollywood producers—that it has taken on the enticing shine of a particularly hot political commodity: the foregone conclusion disguised as a given.

The scenario lays out the premise that if a man-made catastrophe were about to take place and the criminal mastermind behind it had been captured, torture would suddenly become not only a prudent option but a moral obligation. The naïve and precious idealism of deluded liberal elites would give way to tough-guy pragmatism, considering how countless lives could be spared by what would be, in less extreme circumstances, the highly abhorrent and unethical treatment of an isolated person or group. As anyone who has seen “24,” any of Liam Neeson’s alpha-dad-on-a-rampage movies, or this 2001 Dick Cheney interview knows, ours is a mean world, and sometimes you need to cross over to the dark side to protect the ones you love.

There are just a few problems with this argument, to say the least. Author and scholar Alex Adams confidently takes a jackhammer to a series of key premises on which it rests in her new book, “How to Justify Torture: Inside the Ticking Bomb Scenario,” beginning with the one that claims torture works, like it or not. For a quick refresher, here’s a clip of former Vice President Cheney, still insisting on its efficacy in this 2014 episode of “Meet the Press,” although he also insists on using the term “enhanced interrogation” instead of torture when it comes to the United States’ post-9/11 tactics:

Those visiting the Washington, D.C., area can now pop by the International Spy Museum to weigh in on what they think torture is and to see artifacts from the Bush-Cheney era, such as this waterboarding kit:

(Jacquelyn Martin / AP)

Adams is clear on these distinctions, and she also has a firm grip on how the ticking time bomb scenario has had a good amount of help in the justification department from Hollywood. From “Dirty Harry” to “Batman Begins,” “24”‘s Jack Ryan to French cinema, Adams’ book tracks the pop-cultural narratives around torture that have functioned, intentionally or no, to make the practice acceptable in the eyes of the global public.

Here it should be noted that there reportedly was also a torture scene in the recent children’s feature “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu.” (We thought we knew you, Pikachu.)

As Adams pointed out in a recent interview with Truthdig Executive Editor Kasia Anderson, the pleasure we take in consuming entertainment is important in the normalization process. Torture lurks in the realm of the taboo, which is always good for a thrill. Hollywood producers like thrills, as do audiences. It’s no mystery how and why the theme continues to play out on screens of all sizes.

Not too long ago, talking about how politics and entertainment are intertwined used to be harder to do, especially before the election of a certain reality TV star to the world’s most powerful office. Now, though some pointed sniffs may still echo through certain vaunted halls of The Academy when the notion is raised of taking entertainment seriously as a source of political inquiry, it seems more apparent, the stakes far more drastic than even subscribers to that idea had imagined. Adams knows, as she elaborates in the interview below, that though it’s not so simple as to say “Dirty Harry” made a Dick Cheney or a Donald Trump possible, there are connections that we ignore at our peril.

KASIA ANDERSON: What, in your estimation, is the relationship between torture on the part of a state against its enemies and how the government of that state treats its citizens?

ALEX ADAMS: This is a complex and interesting question. One of the ways that the U.S., for instance, has justified its torture regime in Guantanamo and the network of CIA black sites is the reclassification of the people it incarcerates at these sites as “detainees” and “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners. These categories are radical legal innovations, created solely in order to strip these prisoners of their availability to the protections of international law. Prisoners are subject to the Geneva Conventions, and the U.S. argues that detainees and enemy combatants are not. To be blunt, through these redefinitions the U.S. administration has created a class of “torturable” inmates. Now, to consider citizens: Citizens of a state are insulated against torture in part because citizenship itself is a body of protections that ensures the safety of the person holding that citizenship, those documents and that status; citizenship and noncombatant status protect us from the violence of war. However, once we are classified as a threat, or as a criminal, or, rather, as someone who it is in some way legitimate for the state to go after, then there is the potential for us to forfeit these protections and be subject to gross infringements of human rights. I’m sure your readers can join the dots here: Think about the state of incarceration in the U.S., which is characterized by slave labor and hideous conditions of confinement, or police brutality, and state surveillance of minority groups in the U.S. and Europe. That is, to sum up: We are all potentially torturable, and because of racism ingrained at all social and institutional levels, some of us are more torturable than others.

Wars, in particular colonial wars, are often laboratories of social control. In the U.S., for instance, there have been calls for white nationalist terrorists to be treated the same way as Muslim terrorists. What this would trigger, however, would be the use, on U.S. soil and against U.S. citizens, of counterterrorist practices that have been denounced across the globe as war crimes. So there’s always the potential for the war to come home.

KA: Why—or maybe the question is how—do you think that there has been such a pronounced uptick in the post-9/11 era of instances of torture being depicted in entertainment and popular cultural products? It’s not like there was a master memo that circulated through Hollywood.

AA: You’re right that we can’t attribute the rise in the prominence of torture representations to a centralized or deliberate plan. But looking back, we can make patterns from the chaos. There was a general climate of outrage and revanchism, and one of the ways that this manifested was in the torture program, and in more general calls for torture, which were part of this general atmosphere. After 9/11, there was a lot of grief, a lot of rage, there were calls for invasion, calls for the use of nuclear weapons, calls for peace; one strand of this was the call for and the practice of torture. There have been an extraordinary amount of cultural explorations of the war on terror, of colonial violence and so on, characterized in a huge multitude of ways. What I’ve done in the book is isolate one element of this and charted its extraordinary development. It’s also worth noting that there were—and are still—a lot of representations critiquing torture, exposing it and condemning it. The ticking bomb scenario is part of a wide and varied debate about torture, which is still taking place today. Amazon is releasing “The Report” soon, for instance, which I’m really looking forward to seeing.

I like your remark about the lack of a master memo, and, of course, you’re right. But on the other hand, if we look at the controversy surrounding a movie like ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ for instance, we can see that the military [does] attempt to influence Hollywood storytelling for nakedly ideological purposes. It’s difficult to articulate this point without sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but there are documented cases in which torture narratives have been literally ghostwritten by the CIA.

KA: I know this may not happen currently as much as it may have when you began your work, but what do you tell people who may discount the importance of entertainment and popular culture as “mere fluff,” or somehow separate from real life?

AA: You’re right to note that the connection between popular culture and political discourse is easier to discuss these days, but there was a time when people would feel entitled to summarily dismiss concerns about the political nature of literature, film and popular culture. People in general are more amenable to the idea now, but it still needs to be stressed: The fact that something may be enjoyable or recreational in no way diminishes the extent to which politics are embedded into it. At the most fundamental level, stories are socializing tools which morally and philosophically educate or stimulate us; we accept this about children’s fiction or about polemic art forms like caricature, so why shouldn’t we accept it about fiction or literature or culture more generally?

There are some important caveats to this, of course. Sometimes people object to this position because it can sometimes be articulated in a patronizing manner; that is, that you mean that people are passively or stupidly brainwashed or indoctrinated by cultural discourse. Of course, that isn’t accurate: Audiences don’t have to accept anything they see uncritically, and I’m not just talking about people who have arts degrees. Any ordinary audience will be able to watch or read something critically; in general, most audiences today have a very sophisticated level of visual and cultural literacy. Something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe couldn’t exist without the presumption that most ordinary consumers of visual media are able to handle huge amounts of aesthetic and affective and political material competently, adaptably and intelligently.

The other caveat here is the censorship angle: Sometimes people think that by objecting to something in a movie or a novel you are calling for it to be banned, or that you’re saying that it is literally dangerous or toxic in a contaminating way. You see this in free speech debates, but also in the way that people sometimes blame movies and video games for sex murders or gun crime. Now, I think that the popular culture I critique in the book does circulate unsavory ideas that should be resisted, but I’m not calling for censorship or literally blaming the CIA torture program on “24.” The claim that culture is political is, for me, quite a simple claim: Parliaments, philosophy seminars and talk shows aren’t the only places where we have public debates about moral, ethical and political debates. Sometimes we have them in the cinema or on Netflix.

KA: Following on that last question, how would you characterize the unique qualities of popular culture and entertainment (I don’t use these interchangeably, by the way, but am putting them together for the sake of brevity here) as ideological conduits? For example, it seems like popular culture and entertainment are effective sites for strengthening an argument, whether about torture or another topic, in part because they are not always consumed the same way more overtly political or “serious” texts are.

AA: Yes, I agree. One of the major reasons that popular culture is politically effective is that it is pleasurable, recreational. We are happy when the family is reunited, we enjoy seeing the villains come to a sticky end, we are inhabited by a sense of justice or outrage or horror (when the cultural objects are doing their job properly). The ways in which these pleasures are associated with particular narratives or events or characterizations does a great deal of work—strengthening or undermining stereotypes, for instance, or developing and renegotiating ideas of justice. I’ve written elsewhere about humor as a form of political communication, and I think it’s a really strong example of what we’re discussing here: When we laugh, we understand and we agree. This is a really effective, because personal, way of generating agreement, because seriousness is so often dry or boring or otherwise off-putting. So yes, I think that the pleasurable character of these forms of cultural discourse is central to why they’re effective.

KA: What is the promotion and/or common sense-ification of torture about at this moment? Does it have a function now that differs from, say, how—and perhaps why—it was supported right after 9/11?

AA: You’re right to draw this distinction. There was an extent to which the earliest post-9/11 torture narratives could be understood as a reaction to a particular moment, but now, 18 years on, there is something about the repetitive and normalized nature of these scenarios that suggests something else. The idea that torture is simply effective and righteous because it can save the day is embedded into multiple forms of cultural production—it’s not just thrillers or action movies; torture is everywhere. I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently there’s a torture scene in “Pokémon Detective Pikachu.” So today I would say that the problem is more that we have a normalization, a banalization of torture. It’s common sense—“If it was my daughter, of course I would torture someone to save her.” I remember when people were warning that torture would become normalized. They were right.

KA: How would you read Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s recent praise of Colonel Carlos Alberto Ustra, as well as Donald Trump’s campaign promises regarding bringing waterboarding back (and then some)?

AA: I would say that one of the distinguishing characteristics of fascists is their enthusiasm for appearing tough, their utter lack of understanding of what is at stake in torture, and their moronic cruelty.

I think, regarding Trump in particular. one of the interesting things about the way he would frame his remarks about torture is by positioning torture as “anti-PC.” That says a lot about the way that he uses the language of the far right. Further, even though he’s incoherent, it’s dangerous to assume that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. One of the major tactics of his fascism is to make everyone who is reasonable rush to provide coherent rebuttals to his ludicrous statements; while he’s doing that, he’s busily prosecuting his horrendous agenda. Sartre said it in “Anti-Semite and Jew”: The fascist knows he is not talking in good faith, but he laughs while he forces us to rebut ever more absurd allegations. Likewise, Bolsonaro will make some flippant remark, and while we’re screaming about it he’ll burn down the Amazon.

But at the same time, I think they mean it when they say things like that about torture. When a fascist tells you who he is, believe him the first time.

We’re Inching Closer to Earth’s Deadliest Tipping Points

Urgent action on climate change will be costly. But inaction could be four or five times more expensive, according to new climate accounting: extremes of global heat are on the increase.

Submarine heatwaves happen three times more often that they did in 1980. Ocean warming events can devastate coral reefs and trigger even more damage from more intense acidification and oxygen loss in the seas, with disastrous consequences for fishery and seafood.

The ecosystems on which all living things – including humans – depend are shifting away from the tropics at up to 40kms a year. Extremes of torrential rainfall, drought and tropical cyclones are becoming measurably more intense.

And all this has happened because global mean surface temperatures have risen in the last century by about 1°C, thanks to ever more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a consequence of profligate use of fossil fuels to drive human expansion.

“People from small island states and low-lying countries are in the immediate crosshairs of climate change. I am very concerned about the future for these people”

Forecasts suggest humans could tip the planet to a rise of 1.5°C as early as 2030. This is the limit proposed by 195 nations in Paris in 2015 when they promised to keep global heating to “well below” 2°C by the end of the century.

And now researchers once again warn in the journal Science that even the seemingly small gap between 1.5°C and 2°C could spell a colossal difference in long-term outcomes. Right now, the planet is on track to hit or surpass 3°C by 2100. The case for drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is now more compelling and urgent than ever.

“First, we have under-estimated the sensitivity of natural and human systems to climate change and the speed at which these things are happening. Second, we have under-appreciated the synergistic nature of climate threats – with outcomes tending to be worse than the sum of the parts,” said Ove Hoegh-Goldberg of the University of Queensland in Australia, who led the study.

“This is resulting in rapid and comprehensive climate impacts, with growing damage to people, ecosystems and livelihoods.”

Harder to forecast

And Daniela Jacob, who directs Germany’s Climate Service Centre, added: “We are already in new territory. The ‘novelty’ of the weather is making our ability to forecast and respond to weather-related phenomena very difficult.”

The two scientists were part of a much larger world-wide team of researchers who looked at the risks that arrive with rapid change: damage to forests, farms and wildlife; to coastal communities as sea levels rise and storms multiply.

Their message is clear. There would be huge benefits to containing average global temperature rise to no more than 1.5C above the long-term average for most of human history.

“This is not an academic issue, it is a matter of life and death for people everywhere.” said Michael Taylor, dean of science at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

Weak commitments

“That said, people from small island states and low-lying countries are in the immediate crosshairs of climate change. I am very concerned about the future for these people.”

So far, the commitments made by most nations are simply too feeble. That risks condemning many nations to chaos and harm, and, as usual, those most vulnerable would be the poorest.

“To avoid this, we must accelerate action and tighten emission reduction targets so that they fall in line with the Paris Agreement. As we show, this is much less costly than suffering the impacts of 2°C or more of climate change,” said Professor Hoegh-Goldberg.

“Tackling climate change is a tall order. However, there is no alternative from the perspective of human well-being − and too much at stake not to act urgently on this issue.”

Travel Chaos, Jobs Lost as U.K. Firm Thomas Cook Collapses

LONDON — Hundreds of thousands of travelers were stranded across the world Monday after British tour company Thomas Cook collapsed, immediately halting almost all its flights and hotel services and laying off all its employees.

Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority confirmed Thomas Cook, a 178-year-old company that helped create the package tour industry, had ceased trading. It said the firm’s four airlines will be grounded, and its 21,000 employees in 16 countries — including 9,000 in the U.K. — will lose their jobs.

The collapse of the firm will have sweeping effects across the entire European and North African tourism industry and elsewhere, as hotels worried about being paid and confirmed bookings for high-season winter resorts were suddenly in doubt.

Overall, about 600,000 people were traveling with the company as of Sunday, though it was unclear how many of them would be left stranded, as some travel subsidiaries were in talks with local authorities to continue operating.

The British government said it was taking charge of getting the firm’s 150,000 U.K.-based customers back home from vacation spots across the globe, the largest repatriation effort in the country’s peacetime history. The process began Monday and officials warned of delays.

A stream of reports Monday morning gave some sense of the extent of the travel chaos: some 50,000 Thomas Cook travelers were stranded in Greece; up to 30,000 stuck in Spain’s Canary Islands; 21,000 in Turkey and 15,000 in Cyprus alone.

An estimated 1 million future Thomas Cook travelers also found their bookings for upcoming holidays canceled. Many are likely to receive refunds under travel insurance plans.

The company, which began in 1841 with a one-day train excursion in England and now has business in 16 countries, has been struggling financially for years due to competition from budget airlines and the ease of booking low-cost accommodations through the internet.

Thomas Cook also still owned almost 600 travel shops on major streets in Britain as well as 200 hotels, adding real estate costs to its crushing debt burden.

“The growing popularity of the pick-and-mix type of travel that allows consumers to book their holiday packages separately, as well as new kids on the block like Airbnb, has seen the travel industry change beyond all recognition in the past decade, as consumers book travel, accommodation, and car hire independently,” said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets.

Things got worse this year, with the company blaming a slowdown in bookings on the uncertainty over Brexit, Britain’s impending departure from the European Union. A drop in the pound made it more expensive for British vacationers to travel abroad.

Terror attacks in recent years in some markets like Egypt and Tunis also hurt its business, as did heat waves in Northern Europe.

The company had said Friday it was seeking 200 million pounds ($250 million) to avoid going bust and held talks over the weekend with shareholders and creditors in an attempt to stave off collapse.

CEO Peter Fankhauser said in a statement read outside the company’s offices before dawn Monday that he deeply regrets the shutdown.

“Despite huge efforts over a number of months and further intense negotiations in recent days, we have not been able to secure a deal to save our business,” he said. “I know that this outcome will be devastating to many people and will cause a lot of anxiety, stress and disruption.”

Britain’s aviation authority said it had arranged an aircraft fleet for the complex repatriation effort, which is expected to last two weeks. British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said dozens of charter planes, from as far as Malaysia, had been hired to fly customers home free of charge. He said hundreds of people were staffing call centers and airport operations centers.

Julie Robsson, a 58-year-old retiree from Yorkshire, was among those waiting Monday on the Spanish island of Mallorca for a replacement flight to Manchester, England.

She said while was satisfied with the information she received from British authorities, the Thomas Cook representative had not appeared at her group’s hotel since the first rumors of financial difficulties emerged last week.

“I’m quite sad because it’s an old company. The prices were all reasonable. The planes were clean,” Robsson said.

Unions representing Thomas Cook workers reacted with anger.

“The staff have been stabbed in the back without a second’s thought,” said Brian Strutton, head of the British Airline Pilots’ Association.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, traveling to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, said the government was right not to bail out the company, arguing that travel firms should do more to ensure they don’t collapse. He said bailing out Thomas Cook would have established “a moral hazard” because other firms might later expect the same treatment.

“We need to look at ways in which tour operators one way or another can protect themselves from such bankruptcies in the future,” Johnson said.

Most of Thomas Cook’s British customers are protected by the government-run travel insurance program, which makes sure vacationers can get home if a British-based tour operator fails while they are abroad.

An earlier repatriation exercise following the 2017 collapse of Monarch Airlines cost the British government about 60 million pounds ($75 million).

Thomas Cook’s collapse is a huge blow to many companies in vacation resorts that have long relied on it for business.

Spain’s Canary Islands, for example, are a favored year-round destination for Northern Europeans that is likely to take a hit to its high-season winter bookings. The association of hotels said it fears the economic impact and the Spanish government was holding meetings with regional authorities to assess the likely damage to local economies.

In Tunisia, the TAP news agency said the tourism minister intervened after reports emerged that some Thomas Cook tourists in Hammamet were locked into one hotel and “being held hostage” as the hotel demanded they pay extra, for fear that Thomas Cook would not pay its debts.

The government said Thomas Cook clients would not be prevented from leaving the country.

___

Jill Lawless in New York, Pan Pylas in London, Aritz Parra in Madrid and John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.

There’s No Chance Corporate Elites Will Fix Inequality

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a fast-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.

Likewise, today’s workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware, for the fast-talking CEOs of 181 union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporations are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight against … well, against them.

From Wall Street banksters to Big Oil polluters, these profiteers are suddenly trumpeting their future intentions to serve not just their own greed, but every “stakeholder” (which is what they call employees, customers, suppliers, et al).

But vague proclamations are cheap, and it’s worth noting that these new champions of the common good propose no specifics — no actual sacrifices by them or benefits for us.

A few media observers have mildly objected, saying it’s “an open question” whether any of the corporate proclaimers will change how they do business. But it’s not an open question at all.  They won’t.

They won’t support full collective bargaining power for workers, won’t join the public’s push to get Medicare for All, won’t stop using monopoly power to squeeze out small competitors and gouge consumers, won’t support measures to stop climate change, and won’t back reforms to get their corrupt corporate money out of our politics.

All told, they won’t embrace any of the big structural changes necessary to reverse the raw economic and political inequality that has enthroned their plutocratic rule.

In fact, their empty proclamation is what West Texas cowboys might call “bovine excrement,” meant to fend off the actual changes that real reformers are advancing. Corporate elites won’t fix inequality for us — they’re the ones doing it to us.

Ending the Afghan War Won’t End the Killing

I’ve never been to Afghanistan, but I am the mother of two young children. So when I imagine what life must be like there after 18 years of war, my mind conjures up the children most vividly — the ones who have been affected by the conflict — and their parents. I think of the 12-year-old boy who was carrying water to a military checkpoint in a remote part of that country, earning pennies to help sustain his family, whose legs were blown off by a landmine. Or the group of children at a wedding party, playing behind the house where the ceremony was taking place. One of them picked up an unexploded shell, fired from a helicopter, that hadn’t detonated in battle. It blew up, killing two children, Basit and Haroon, and wounding 12 others. What must it be like to care for a five year old — the age of my oldest child — who is maimed and who needs to learn how to walk, play, and live again with ill-fitting prosthetics?

A major legacy of the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan, which began in October 2001 and shows little sign of actually ending anytime soon, will be the “explosive remnants of war” — a term for all the landmines and unexploded bombs and other weaponry that have been left behind in the earth. This debris of America’s endless war, still piling up, is devastating in many ways. It makes it so much harder for an agricultural population to sustain itself on the land. It wreaks havoc on Afghans’ emotional wellbeing and sense of security. And it poses special hazards for children, who are regularly injured and killed by the left-behind explosives of an already devastating war as they play, herd livestock, or collect water and firewood.

Given the expected drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan — despite the recent breakdown in peace negotiations with the Taliban, President Trump continues to indicate that he may pursue such a path — and the possibility of an official end to the U.S. war there, this topic is both pressing and relevant to public debate in America. Offering aid and reparations for the horrific ongoing costs of explosive military waste should be a priority on Washington’s future agenda.

“The Human and Financial Costs of the Explosive Remnants of War in Afghanistan,” a new report issued today by the Costs of War project, which I co-direct, at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, offers a sense of the scale of the damage in Afghanistan. According to the report’s authors, Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki of James Madison University, at least 5,442 people have been killed and 14,693 people have been injured by devices embedded in or left on the ground since the start of the US-led war in 2001.

Of those victims, the great majority are boys and men. A casualty analysis by the Danish Demining Group in 2017 suggested that boys are particularly vulnerable because of their day-to-day activities and chores, but women and girls, too, are increasingly becoming casualties of unexploded ordnance, particularly when traveling. In 2017, the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan expressed concern about a “65% jump in the number of children killed or wounded by explosive remnants as fighting has spread to heavily populated civilian areas.”

The U.S. has provided significant financial support for humanitarian mine-clearing programs in Afghanistan. In recent years, however, that funding has been dropping. According to the United Nations Mine Action Service, Afghanistan has made some genuine progress toward its goal of freeing itself of landmines and other unexploded debris by 2023. Yet international financial support for such activities has dropped to 41% of what it was in 2011. Even if the Afghan War truly ended tomorrow, a sustained commitment of financial aid over many years would be necessary to clear that country of all the ordnance sewn into its soil as a result of the last 18 years of America’s war.

A Legacy of War

The new Costs of War report reveals that the leading weapons causing such damage have changed over time. Even before 2001, when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan, that country stood near the top of the list of those afflicted by abandoned landmines. The devices remained from the 1980s conflict between the Soviet Union and extremist Islamist rebels, the mujahedeen, backed by Washington and funded and supported by the CIA.

In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, international and Afghan clearance groups worked hard to clean up those minefields. Their efforts were, however, often thwarted by brutal new conflicts, including an Afghan civil war from 1992 to 1996 and the period from 1996 to 2001 in which the Taliban largely controlled the country. Still, over the past few decades, such groups managed to remove two million pieces of unexploded ordnance.

As the latest data indicates, landmines from the Soviet conflict have still been causing 7% of remnant-related casualties since 2010. Most of those hurt by explosive ordnance, however, are victims of the ongoing, complex armed conflict that emerged from the U.S.-led invasion — that is, a range of weapons used and left behind by American forces, Taliban fighters, and Islamic State-affiliated groups. These include grenades, projectile weapons, mortars, cluster munitions, and large bombs that failed to explode as intended, but are still live and prone to going off if touched or moved at a later date. Taliban and ISIS militants are also increasingly relying on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) set off by someone stepping on them or otherwise unwittingly activating them. If not triggered at the time of battle, they can kill or injure civilians long after, even in areas in which there is no longer active fighting.

Since 2015, casualties from explosive remnants of war and abandoned IEDs have been rising rapidly. One reason is an increase in fighting between the U.S.-backed Afghan National Security Forces and both the Taliban and ISIS, as well as intensifying conflict between these extremist groups themselves. According to report author Suzanne Fiederlein, improvised explosive devices are growing more common in Afghanistan and other conflicts across the Middle East, partly thanks to the Internet, which has spread knowledge of how to build them. Such information, she writes, is “commonly available now, not just on dark-web sites. Such knowledge is also linked to the manufacture of more sophisticated and complex devices, such as anti-handling devices (booby traps).”

In addition, since 2017, the U.S. has dramatically increased its airstrikes against the Taliban and other militant groups in Afghanistan, while the Taliban itself, as it gains ever more territory, has expanded its attacks on government targets as well as on Afghan and international security forces. In the past year, as U.S. and Taliban officials have engaged in peace talks, both sides have only ramped up their aggression further, assumedly in order to strengthen their hands in the negotiatons.

Finally, in recent years, as the American-led coalition has closed down bases in advance of a prospective U.S. military withdrawal, more and more Afghans have died or been injured by military waste exploding in abandoned areas once used by international security forces as firing ranges. From 2009 to 2015, the United Nations recorded 138 casualties from explosions in or around such former training facilities. Seventy-five percent of those victims were children.

Living with Explosive Military Waste

It’s important to grasp just how long explosive remnants of war can remain active in a landscape after a conflict ends. If uncleared, they pose a danger to people living nearby or passing through for generations. In Belgium, for instance, more than a century later, significant numbers of explosive shells are still being removed from former World War I battlefields. Many countries struggle with this problem, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Korea, Laos, and Vietnam, but Afghanistan has been one of the hardest hit.

As of 2018, roughly 1,780 square kilometers of that country are considered contaminated by military waste. As the Costs of War report points out, this is “roughly ten times the area of Washington, D.C., but spread across a country almost as large as Texas.” Danger zones include farms and grazing land, roads that people regularly use to get to markets, schools, and hospitals, and lands surrounding militant strongholds, allied military bases, and those former firing ranges.

From the research I’ve done, it’s clear why people continue to use such contaminated lands. At the most basic level, it’s a story of inequality. Many Afghans undoubtedly know which areas pose a threat. In addition, risk education programs have made progress in getting teachers, midwives, and police officers to spread awareness of how to recognize and avoid such dangers. However, poverty often forces Afghans to make terrible and terrifying decisions about the risk of injury and death.

Dilemmas of this sort are commonly faced in places marked by such legacies of conflict. Anthropologist David Henig, for instance, describes how rural villagers in the Bosnia-Herzegovina highlands still knowingly enter contaminated forest areas to gather firewood. For them, living with the danger of landmines left over from the Bosnian War of the 1990s is a matter of economic survival. Many Afghans face a similar plight. I can only suppose that the boy who stepped on a landmine while carrying water for soldiers would not have been earning money in that fashion if his family had any other way to scrape together an existence.

While people learn to live with the presence of explosive waste in their landscapes, doing so exacts a grim toll. Imagine the fear and emotional distress you might feel at merely passing through places where a misstep could kill you, no less your children. Henig recounts how one Bosnian woman, returning from a mined part of the forest where she had filled her wagon with wood, broke down and cried, yelling feverishly, “Why, why do we have to do this?”

In Afghanistan, the Costs of War report points to the “deep psychological impact” of such long-lasting contamination: “For Afghans, the fear of being harmed by these weapons is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” People are terrorized and traumatized by the threat of explosions, and this continuous sense of foreboding must create an undertone of anxious melancholy that runs through every minute of the day.

Then there are the thousands of Afghans who live not only with the fear of such explosions, but also with the need to rebuild their lives after being maimed by one. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) physical rehabilitation program in Afghanistan manufactures over 19,000 artificial legs, arms, and other orthopedic devices each year. Groups like the ICRC and Handicap International post photos of children on their websites as they are being fitted with and trained to use prosthetic legs. In one, a boy of no more than five looks bleakly at the camera, his hands resting on two parallel bars at his sides, the stumps of his legs settled uncomfortably in new plastic devices. In another, Nilofar, a young woman in a wheelchair, prepares to shoot a basketball; hers is a remarkable story of recovery, of moving from complete paralysis, after a back injury due to an explosion, to partial mobility. Today she works for the ICRC’s Kabul Orthopedic Center as a data entry operator, a job that has given her an income, a sense of purpose, and renewed hope.

The United Nations Mine Action Service has called for more long-term support for survivors of such wounds. They need such care to learn to walk on and use prosthetic limbs, as well as to deal with the depression and other psychological effects that accompany such injuries. According to the ICRC, they also require “a role in society and to recover dignity and self-respect.” All of the more than 800 staff at the seven ICRC orthopedic centers across Afghanistan are former patients. But there are thousands of others and no one can doubt that, in a war seemingly without end, there will be thousands more.

Imperial Debris and U.S. Responsibility

Scholars have called landmines and other explosive remnants of war “imperial debris” — the detritus, in particular, of imperial America and its expansive global military footprint, including its forever wars around this planet. Even if U.S. troops are finally withdrawn, as Afghans encounter such debris from the war on terror and find their lives eternally shaped by it, the association with the American project in their country will remain alive for years into the future, as such weaponry keeps right on killing. In the process, it will undoubtedly seed hatred of the United States for generations to come.

Sadly, American funding for the humanitarian mine-clearing program in Afghanistan has been in decline since 2012. Afghanistan today has some of the best-trained demining technicians on the planet, but the scale of the problem is massive and the money available for it far too modest. The very goal of achieving mine-free status by 2023, a project once expected to cost $647.5 million, is likely unattainable, even if the fighting ends, because funding targets have fallen so far short of being fulfilled.

The U.S. has been the single largest donor to that program, making $452 million in contributions since 2002. Since 2012, however, it’s been another story, as Washington has dispatched much of its funding and resources for such programs to Iraq and Syria instead. In fiscal year 2018, the Mine Action Programme of Afghanistan raised just $51 million of its $99 million funding goal and only an estimated $20 million of that came from Washington, less than half what it gave between 2010 and 2012.

Americans have an obligation to clear explosive hazards in that country, a large portion of which are of U.S. origin. Given the taxpayer dollars Washington has already spent on or committed to the war on terror through fiscal year 2019 — $5.9 trillion, according to the estimate of the Costs of War project — what it’s donated to deal with imperial debris in Afghanistan is scarcely more than a drop in the bucket. A multiyear funding commitment to clear the explosive remnants of the war on terror there would be one small way to carry out a tiny portion of America’s responsibility to the Afghan people after so many years of destruction.

Someday, Afghanistan stands every chance of becoming America’s forgotten war. The conflict will be anything but forgotten in that country, however, and therein lies one of the saddest stories of all.

Will the Ukraine Scandal Be Trump’s Undoing?

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that in the course of his conversation in July with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump pressed him on eight separate occasions to investigate Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden.

Biden when vice president is known to have pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor whom the International Monetary Fund and the Obama administration felt to be ineffective in dealing with corruption. The prosecutor had once upon a time investigated a company on the board of which Biden’s son Hunter served. But by the time Biden exerted his pressure, that investigation was dormant and there were never any Ukrainian findings of corruption on the part of Hunter Biden.

This is a non-story, but Trump has a history of trumping up non-stories and using them to smear his opponents, as he and his surrogates did to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump’s pressure on Zelensky to investigate Biden constitutes asking a foreign country to intervene in a US election.

As the Law and Crime blog points out “It should be noted that the initial reporting on the whistleblower complaint said that concerns were raised about a ‘promise’ Trump made to a foreign leader.”

We do not know what Trump might have promised Zelensky, but if he did suggest an inducement to the Ukrainian government to cooperate with Rudy Giuliani in investigating Biden, then Trump was offering a bribe.

We know that Trump has leverage over Zelensky, since Ukraine is facing Russian occupation of Crimea and an ongoing intervention in eastern Ukraine, and Trump can either help Kyiv or leave it to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin.

In August Congress appropriated $250 million for Ukraine, but Trump stopped it from going to Zelensky. He recently reinstated it. All this is very mysterious. I had originally thought that Trump stiffing Ukraine was just one more of his weird attempts to appease Putin. But you have to wonder whether Trump’s denial of aid was further pressure on Kyiv.

So bribery is an impeachable offense.

The US Constitution, Art. 2, Section 4, says,

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors.

Philip Bobbitt, of the Columbia University Law School, pointed out a couple years ago at Just Security that bribery is actually two possible offenses here. One is to accept a bribe. The other is to offer a bribe.

Bobbitt argues that Trump appears to have offered Comey the possibility of keeping his job as FBI director if he would quash any investigation into Trump, and that this offer should be construed as a bribe.

It is probably far more consequential if Trump offered Zelensky a bribe, since his motive was to entangle a foreign country in interfering in the 2020 presidential election.

I think it could also be argued that Trump was soliciting from Zelensky a thing of value, i.e. oppo research of the sort political campaigns routinely pay investigative firms for.

The US civil code says,

” 52 U.S. Code § 30121. Contributions and donations by foreign nationals

U.S. Code

Notes

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(a) ProhibitionIt shall be unlawful for—

(1) a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make—

(A) a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.

(B) a contribution or donation to a committee of a political party; or

(C) an expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication (within the meaning of section 30104(f)(3) of this title); or

(2) a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national.”

So Trump may have broken two laws if the reporting on this incident is correct so far. One was to offer Zelensky a bribe, which is explicit constitutional grounds for impeachment.

The other was to solicit a campaign contribution of sorts from a foreign national. Surely that would fall under “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

We do not have enough facts to make this determination yet, and the executive is blocking Congressional access to the whistleblower complaint, so nobody who doesn’t work for Trump has the facts. But clearly people in the Trump administration are upset enough by all this to leak to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

On the face of it, articles of impeachment could certainly be drawn up on this basis if the charges were proved.

My guess? They won’t be. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want it because she doesn’t want Democrats to lose the Blue Dogs elected from conservative districts that barely voted Democratic but perhaps have a sneaking admiration for Trump. Mitch McConnell doesn’t want it because it could sink the Republican Party and put at risk the interests of the party’s main backers, the billionaire class.

 

Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites

Friday’s climate strike by students across the globe will have no more impact than the mass mobilizations by women following the election of Donald Trump or the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the Iraq War. This does not mean these protests should not have taken place. They should have. But such demonstrations need to be grounded in the bitter reality that in the corridors of power we do not count. If we lived in a democracy, which we do not, our aspirations, rights and demands, especially the demand that we confront the climate emergency, would have an impact. We would be able to vote representatives into power in government to carry out change. We would be able to demand environmental justice from the courts. We would be able to divert resources to the elimination of carbon emissions.

Voting, lobbying, petitioning and protesting to induce the ruling elites to respond rationally to the climate catastrophe have proved no more effective than scrofula victims’ appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch. The familiar tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists have been spectacular failures. In 1900 the burning of fossil fuel—mostly coal—produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. That number had risen threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the last decade the increase in CO2 was 100 to 200 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age. On May 11 the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded 415.26 parts per million of CO2 in the air. It’s believed to be the highest concentration since humans evolved. We will embrace a new paradigm for resistance or die.

The ruling elites and the corporations they serve are the principal obstacles to change. They cannot be reformed. And this means revolution, which is what Extinction Rebellion seeks in calling for an “international rebellion” on Oct. 7, when it will attempt to shut down city centers around the globe in acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. Power has to be transferred into our hands. And since the elites won’t give up power willingly, we will have to take it through nonviolent action.

Protests can be the beginning of political consciousness. But they can also be empty political theater. They can be used to celebrate our moral probity—advertisements, especially in the age of social media, for ourselves. They can be a boutique activism in which protesters allow themselves to be funneled through police barricades and arrests are politely choreographed, resulting in a few hours in jail and the credentialing of the demonstrators as radicals. They can be used to distance ourselves from a repugnant political figure such as Donald Trump, while leaving us silent and complicit when the same policies are carried out by a supposed progressive such as Barack Obama. This is a game the state has learned to play to its advantage. As long as we do not disrupt the machine, as long as we protest according to their rules, the elites will let us march through the streets of Washington in pussy hats or walk out of school for a day.

When power is threatened, as it was in the sustained protests during the Occupy encampments and at Standing Rock, the ruling elites react very differently. They employ the full weight of the surveillance state to demonize the protesters, arrest and detain the leadership and infiltrate agents provocateurs to carry out violent assaults to justify the use of the police and security forces to shut the protests down.

Preemptive efforts by the security forces to harass and thwart Extinction Rebellion’s planned October occupation of city centers, an action designed to negatively affect commerce and bring parts of major cities to a standstill, have already begun. Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, was arrested Sept. 14 and charged with attempting to cause a disruption at Heathrow Airport by using a drone. Hallam has called Heathrow—which climate activists say emits 18 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, more than the total emissions of 118 countries—“a crime against humanity.” He and other activists have vowed to halt the airport’s plans to build a third runway. Hallam’s case will be heard at the Isleworth Crown Court on Oct. 14, meaning he will not be released until after the Oct. 7 protests. In addition, other Extinction Rebellion organizers, including Andrew Medhurst, have been arrested in England, and police have seized their phones and computers.

It does not matter who is the public face of the corporate state. This is not about political personalities. It was Obama, after all, who oversaw a coordinated national effort to eradicate the Occupy encampments and place the water protectors at Standing Rock under siege. Obama’s environmental policies, despite his lip service to curbing global warming and his support of the nonbinding Paris climate accord—which the climate scientist James Hansen called a fraud—were appalling. U.S. oil production rose every year he was in office, an increase of 88%. It was the largest domestic increase in oil production in American history. Obama opened offshore drilling to American oil companies as if he were Sarah Palin. “American energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president,” Obama told an audience at Rice University last year. “And you know that … suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer … that was me, people.”

Democrats, like Republicans, serve corporate power. They will not end government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not impose carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit overconsumption. The technologies they invest in—fracking, hybrid cars, genetically modified food—are designed to maintain or expand consumption levels, not reduce them. They will not redirect the trillions of dollars and scientific and technical expertise from the military and corporations toward saving us from environmental catastrophe. The rhetoric and gimmicks they use to placate the public, from carbon credits to wind turbines and solar panels, are, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury.

The creation of ever more complex bureaucratic and technocratic systems in an age of diminishing resources is a characteristic of dying civilizations. Civilizations in their final phase frantically search for new methods of exploitation rather than adapt to a changing environment. They repress and exploit the lower classes with greater and greater ruthlessness to maintain the insatiable appetites among the elites for power, luxury and hedonism. The worse things get, the more the elites retreat into their private enclaves. The more out of touch the elites become, the more catastrophe is assured. This self-defeating process degrades the ecosystem until catastrophic systems collapse.

The ruling elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs, are not equipped to confront the existential problems caused by climate catastrophe. They are trained to maintain, no matter the cost, the systems of global capitalism. They are systems managers. They lack the intellectual capacity and imagination to search for solutions outside the narrow parameters of global capitalism.

Those living in the global south are already suffering and dying from the effects of global warming, for which the wealthy industrialized nations of the global north bear most of the responsibility. The richest 0.54%, or 42 million people across the world, are responsible for more emissions than the poorest half of the global population, or 3.8 billion people. These elites are sacrificing the poorest on the planet first as they work up the social and economic hierarchy to extinguish us all.

We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, our naive belief that with grit and determination we can solve all problems. We have to face the bleakness before us. We live in a world already heavily damaged by global warming, which will inevitably get worse. Refusal to participate in the further destruction of the planet means a rupture with traditional politics. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every nonviolent way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including becoming vegans, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation. And it means waves of sustained civil disobedience until the machine is broken.

The biosphere, including the Amazon rainforest, the oceans and the polar ice caps, is visibly deteriorating. Heat waves are crippling Europe, Australia and the American Southwest. Floods devastate the Midwest. Last week, southeast Texas suffered heavy flooding and deaths when it was hit by the seventh-wettest tropical cyclone in U.S. history, with some areas receiving more than 40 inches of rainfall within three days. Monster hurricanes ravage the Caribbean and the shores of the United States. Wildfires consume the forests of the West Coast. But despite the tangible signs of a climate emergency, the elites continue to assure us we can live as we have always lived.

The mathematical models for the future of the planet have three devastating trajectories: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive. This third scenario, which most scientists admit is unlikely, is dependent on a halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to destroy the animal agriculture industry—almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gases as the fossil fuel industry—and greening the deserts and restoring rainforests. We know what we have to do if our children are to have a future. The only question left is how do we empower leaders who will save us.

Climate scientists warn that we will soon reach a tipping point when the biosphere becomes so degraded no effort to save the ecosystem will halt runaway climate change. We may already be there. The tipping point, many believe, is a further increase in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius. At that point “feedback loops” will see environmental catastrophes exacerbate each other.

We must embrace a new radicalism. We must carry out sustained civil disobedience to disrupt the machinery of exploitation, even as we prepare for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes ahead. We must alter our lifestyles and consumption to cut our personal carbon footprints. And we must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of coping with the crisis before us.