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Tunisian Children Pay for Jihadist Parents’ Sins

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

“I lost them forever. I can’t get my grandchildren back from Syria.”

Tahia Sboui cries as she talks about her son’s children living in a Syrian camp after their father, a Tunisian Islamic State (IS) fighter, was killed. He had been fighting in Boukamal, a city in eastern Syria.

Sboui, who lives in Kairouan in central Tunisia, tells the distressing story of how she fought for months to bring her grandchildren home but ultimately lost contact with them.

Sboui’s grandchildren are among the estimated 200 Tunisian children and 100 Tunisian women detained in refugee camps and prisons in Libya, Syria and Iraq, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). A recent HRW report says these IS family members are being held in squalid—and sometimes violent—conditions and that “Tunisia officials have been dragging their feet on helping bring [them] home.”

The Tunisian women and children are part of a larger problem that began in 2016 as IS started to suffer military defeats in the region. Currently, an estimated 2,000 children and 1,000 women from 46 nations are detained in Iraqi and Libyan prisons and in Syrian camps. Repatriating these detainees has been painfully slow—hampered by fear of terrorism at home and by a complex web of international relations.

Pleading Over the Phone

A year ago, Sboui received a phone call. At the other end of the line was a young woman speaking in a Syrian dialect. The woman told Sboui that she was the first wife of Sboui’s son, Awas, and that she was with his five children in a camp in northern Syria. Three of the children were hers; the two others were the children of Awas’ now-deceased second wife, a Tunisian. (Awas had two wives at the same time.) The 18-year-old Syrian woman pleaded for Sboui’s help to move to Tunisia with the children, ages 7 months to 4 years (pictured below).

Awas had left Tunisia in 2012 to fight in Syria, and Sboui was surprised to learn he had married two women and had five children. The call began a long struggle as she tried to get Tunisian authorities to repatriate the youngsters. She made contact with the Tunisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it didn’t provide help.

Her other son went to Turkey to ask for help at the Tunisian Consulate in Istanbul. The consulate said it could not enter Syrian territories and that he had to arrange for the children and the woman to enter Turkey. Awas’ brother sent money to his sister-in-law to pay smugglers to bring her to the Turkish border, but when the woman and children arrived there, Turkish authorities sent them back to the camp in Syria.

In the meantime, one of the five children died in the camp. (Sboui says her grandchild was malnourished and suffered from disease, but she doesn’t know what caused the death.)

The grandmother blames the Tunisian authorities for not cooperating. “We told the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that we [the father’s family in Tunisia] … welcome them and [will] take care of them, but it refused to help us,” she says.

Sboui is very angry. In 2012, she had warned government authorities that her son was leaving Tunisia to join IS in Syria (via Libya), and she is upset they didn’t stop him at the Libyan border. “My son was killed with his second wife” in the Boukamel fighting, she says. “I’m the only family that remains to those children, [their only chance] to live in a safe place.”

Moncef Abidi, who lives in Kef in northwestern Tunisia, also is trying to bring home relatives following IS defeats. His sister Wahida and his 4-year-old nephew Baraa are imprisoned in Mitiga Prison in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. The prison is under the control of the Special Deterrence Force, a radical Islamist militia organization. “The last call that I got from my sister was three months ago,” Abidi says. “She was asking me to help her to come back with her sick child, even if she will be imprisoned in Tunisia.”

In 2012, Wahida’s husband took her to live in Libya, and he joined IS two years later. According to Abidi, his sister didn’t know her husband was an IS fighter, and when she discovered it and wanted to go back to Tunisia, he “threatened to take away their son.”

In 2016, Wahida, her husband and other IS fighters were running away from an armed confrontation and were caught in a U.S. raid. Wahida’s husband was killed, and she and Baraa were hurt. The boy’s injuries were especially severe—a bullet entered his back and exited through his stomach.

Wahida and Baraa. (Zineb Benzita)

The Special Deterrence Force moved Wahida to Mitiga, where she was imprisoned with 14 other IS women and 22 of their children, says Mohamed Ikbal Ben Rejab, president of the Rescue Association of Tunisians Trapped Abroad (RATTA). This nongovernmental organization works to help Tunisian citizens abroad and repatriate them into Tunisian society.

Baraa spent four months in a hospital and underwent five surgeries. The boy needs additional medical care that isn’t available in Libya. “His situation is critical,” Abidi says. “It’s unacceptable to let him [remain] in prison.”

Problems With Repatriation

Some countries are moving forward to repatriate IS family members—Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Egypt and Sudan have made the most progress, according to HRW. Other countries, from the U.S. to Tunisia, have done very little.

Tunisia has had one of the highest rates of nationals going to Syria, Iraq and Libya to join terrorist groups. From 2011 to 2013, Ennahdha, the Muslim Brotherhood party that held power in Tunisia, facilitated the process of sending fighters through Libya and Turkey to Syria. Tunisian authorities estimate the country’s number of jihadists at 3,000, but other sources report more than 6,000, including 1000 women.

After IS defeats in Syria and Libya, some Tunisian fighters and family members started to return home. Some came back on their own, while Turkish authorities handed over others to Tunisian authorities. Most of the fighters are in prison or under police supervision. Officially, the number is 800, but it could be higher because all of them haven’t been declared to the Tunisian authorities. Among them, 25 women and 30 children came back from Syria, according to a source in Tunisia’s Ministry of the Interior. (The source spoke to this reporter but asked to remain anonymous.)

Since 2017, Libyan authorities have put pressure on Tunisia to repatriate the women and children imprisoned in Libya, but the two countries haven’t reached an agreement, according to Ikbal. He says Tunisian authorities want to allow children back without their mothers, while the Libyan government wants Tunisia to take back all its citizens—and even 80 corpses of Tunisian IS fighters. (Other countries have recently made moves to repatriate children while leaving their mothers behind.)

For its part, the Tunisian government is reluctant to repatriate IS women for fear of social disruption at home. “We are afraid that they will bring terrorist ideas with them,” says the source at the Interior Ministry.

That source adds that Tunisia doesn’t have a structure in place to rehabilitate radicals once they return.

In 2014, Moncef Marzouki, then the president of Tunisia, suggested rehabilitating some returnees, but the idea was abandoned due to social opposition. Popular sentiment at the time held that the jihadists were dangerous and should be imprisoned. Government action—plus a community support system—is essential for a rehabilitation plan to succeed, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. However, it’s not clear whether the public would support that kind of effort at present.

Khaoula Ben Aicha, a member of Tunisia’s legislature, is actively involved in the move to repatriate Tunisian IS children. She gives another explanation of the impasse between Libya and Tunisia, one based on international politics. “Tunisian authorities don’t want to deal with Libyan militias [such as the Special Deterrence Force] that are imprisoning children, because it will be considered as a form of recognition to them,” she says. But “children [should] not continue to pay for this situation.”

The political situation with Syria is complex, as well. Like many countries, Tunisia doesn’t have official relations with the Syrian government, and the camps housing IS families are controlled by Kurdish authorities—not by a formally recognized government.

Pressure Leads to Some Action

Under pressure from Libyan authorities and concerned Tunisian citizens, the Tunisian government has sent three delegations to Libya since April 2017. Negotiations resulted in the repatriation of Tamime, a 4-year-old orphan, in October 2017 and two other children at the end of 2018.

Tunisian authorities acted in these cases after major efforts on the part of the children’s families.

Tamime’s grandfather, Fawzi Trablesi, went to Libya four times and engaged in direct negotiations with representatives of the Special Deterrence Force. “It was difficult to repatriate him,” Trablesi says. “But now he’s here, and I’m very happy that he will be raised in Tunisia within his family.”

In the case of the two other children—siblings ages 7 and 10—their family hired a Libyan lawyer to negotiate with Libyan authorities.

Last January, another delegation went to Libya to take the DNA of six orphans who had been cared for by the Libyan Red Crescent since December 2016. The DNA tests established that the children were Tunisian. By law, a child born to a Tunisian mother in another country is a Tunisian citizen.

According to the recent HRW report, international law dictates that everyone “has the right to a nationality,” and the document adds that the “Tunisian Constitution prohibits denying or revoking citizenship or preventing citizens from returning home.” However, HRW points out that the Tunisian women and children detained in other countries are unable to return home without help from their government.

Libya and Tunisia agreed that the orphans would be transferred to Tunisia in February, but the transfer hasn’t taken place yet. Tunisian authorities acted because the Libyan Red Crescent warned them it could no longer take care of the children.

“It was a good initiative [by] Tunisian authorities, but it is not enough,” Ikbal says. “It is necessary to repatriate all the Tunisian children abroad.” RATTA, one of the few groups working on this issue, has stepped up activities since 2017. Its efforts to pressure the Tunisian government range from press conferences to sit-ins.

Human rights activists feel Tunisian IS children and mothers should be repatriated together, even if the mothers are imprisoned when they return home. “Legitimate security concerns are no license for governments to abandon young children and other nationals held without charge in squalid camps and prisons abroad,” according to Letta Tayler, senior HRW researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism. Quoted in the organization’s report last month, Tayler added: “Tunisian children are stuck in these camps with no education, no future, and no way out while their government seems to barely lift a finger to help them.”

Sboui, the grandmother who tried to bring her son’s children back to Tunisia last year, has no hope of seeing them again. Her former daughter-in-law has remarried and cut off communication with her former husband’s family.

“For me, I lost them forever,” Sboui says.

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Published on March 18, 2019 15:42

White Nationalists Have Infiltrated the Military, Report Reveals

Patrick Casey came to the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on a mission. Casey, executive director of Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group that was involved in the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, believes diversity is harmful to the United States and aims to create a “white supermajority.” He told NBC in an interview at CPAC that his organization aims “to take over the GOP as much as possible.”

If Identify Evropa hasn’t taken over the GOP as Casey hoped, his organization, HuffPost reports Monday, has made inroads into another key institution: the military. Seven members have been identified as Identity Evropa members, according to HuffPost’s investigation.

HuffPost identified these members through leaked online chat logs from a server on Discord, a chat app popular among alt-right groups, which Identity Evropa members have used to communicate with each other for years. The independent media group Unicorn Riot first published the logs last week.

In its investigation, HuffPost found that “Two Marines, two Army ROTC cadets, an Army physician, a member of the Texas National Guard and one member of the Air Force all belong to … Identity Evropa.”

After Unicorn Riot released the chat logs, another anti-fascist collective, Identify Evropa, reviewed them and used biographical details from the posts, which were written under pseudonyms, to begin to determine their actual identities.

HuffPost then used that research to continue its own, and verified the identities of seven service members. Their messages, HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias writes, “indicate that they hold deeply racist and anti-Semitic views and participate in Identity Evropa propaganda campaigns, posting stickers and flyers in cities and on college campuses.”

One of the military personnel revealed by HuffPost was Stephen T. Farrea, 29, who, as a military spokesperson confirmed, is a corporal in the Selected Marine Corps Reserve. He posted under the name SuperTomPerry-RI and frequently referenced his Marine Corps position. Among his racist comments were statements including “Portsmouth my town 95 percent white very nice,” and that he was looking forward to posting “It’s OK to be white” flyers.

According to HuffPost, “Last week, he attended an Identity Evropa gathering in Kentucky,” also attended by Jason Laguardia, a lance corporal who posts on Discord under the name Jason-CT. Laguardia often posts “pictures of Identity Evropa flyers and stickers … throughout Connecticut and New York City.”

This revelation isn’t the first indication of concern over the presence and power of white nationalists in the U.S. armed forces.

As Mathias writes:

In February, federal authorities arrested Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson, a white nationalist who prosecutors allege was stockpiling weapons to massacre leftists and reporters in a violent plot to establish a “white homeland.”
Last year, a series of investigative reports by ProPublica and “Frontline” found multiple members of violent neo-Nazi groups among the ranks of the military.

And a 2017 poll conducted by the Military Times found that nearly 25 percent of service members surveyed said they encountered white nationalists within their ranks. That poll found that 30 percent of troops said they saw white nationalism as a bigger threat to national security than the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Identity Evropa was founded by an ex-Marine. HuffPost spoke with multiple experts who expressed concern over the impact of white nationalists in the armed forces. Military personnel, active duty and veterans alike, said Kathleen Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” have “played an instrumental role in moving weapons, training and tactics from military to civilian spaces” and, she continued, “dramatically escalated the impact of white power violence on civilian populations.”

Daryle Jenkins, an Air Force veteran and founder of One People’s Project, an anti-racist group, told HuffPost he was concerned about the safety of nonwhite, Christian service members who must serve alongside white nationalists who might, as he explained, “undermine and threaten their fellow soldier[s].”

These revelations come on the heels of concerns over white nationalists in government. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, told The New York Times in January, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., once allegedly described himself as “David Duke without the baggage,” as the Times reported in 2014.

Following the release of the chat logs and HuffPost requests for comment, “The military is determining whether they violated rules regarding discrimination and extremist activity,” Mathias writes. Scalise and King remain in Congress.

Read HuffPost’s full article, with the list of service members and their Discord posts, here.

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Published on March 18, 2019 15:29

Washington Post Fact-Checker Creates His Own Reality

Because we have a president who says anything that pops into his mind and expects it to be accepted as the absolute truth, fact-checking has become a popular news genre for certain journalists. Sometimes, those people could look within to focus more on fact-checking themselves before fact-checking others. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, for example, has somehow made a career for himself rating politicians’ statements based on the unscientific and unquantifiable method of “Pinocchios.” Even the idea that falsehoods exist on a scale seems not particularly journalistic.

On Monday, Kessler gave 2020 presidential candidate and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) two Pinocchios for a statement that was correct, and that Sanders’ staffers then backed up with evidence.

Sanders said during a speech last week:

Not one major Wall Street executive went to jail for destroying our economy in 2008 as a result of their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior. No. They didn’t go to jail. They got a trillion-dollar bailout.

Kessler accuses Sanders of using “slippery and exaggerated” rhetoric, while somehow insisting that everyone benefited from handouts to Wall Street: “Not only was Wall Street bailed out, but also the whole U.S. economy — at a profit of more than $200 billion for U.S. taxpayers.”

“If anything, Sen. Sanders has underestimated the size of the post-crisis bailouts,” a spokesperson for Sanders’ campaign told Kessler.

Wapo's @GlennKesslerWP asks: Did Wall Street get a ‘trillion-dollar bailout’?

Answer: Yes, the peak was $1.2 trillion on 12/5/08: https://t.co/l0Xf5ft7kR

Also, Fed/government lent, spent or guaranteed a peak of $12.8 trillion in March 2009: https://t.co/PD8xObhaYu
— Bob Ivry (@bobivry) March 18, 2019

In the article, though, Kessler cites a report from the Government Accountability Office that said post-financial crisis loans from the Fed “peaked at more than $1 trillion.”

Glenn's latest is quite a ride. pic.twitter.com/6p8HeQiHZX
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) March 18, 2019

Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ Senate staff director, explained that the number was referring to loans from Federal Reserve to banks after the financial crisis:

Sorry, Wall Street got a MULTI-trillion bailout.

The Fed "provided more than a trillion dollars in emergency loans to the financial sector"

"the shocking actual size of the bailout: $14.4 trillion"

"bottom line: a Federal Reserve bailout commitment in excess of $29 trillion" pic.twitter.com/Hd8DHjDnfE
— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) March 18, 2019

Kessler evidently sees these facts but doesn’t allow them to register in his mind: “We will note,” he writes, “that although the Sanders campaign pointed to these reports of the Fed lending trillions of dollars during the crisis, he does not make such claims in his speech,” attempting to draw a definitional distinction between a “trillion dollar bailout” and a “trillion dollar bailout from the Federal Reserve,” as opposed to spending from, say, the Treasury Department. He cited a 2011 article about then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who said that bailout reports were not accurate, but even there Bernanke said the Fed’s bailout was around $1.5 trillion.

Gunnels, for his part, is speaking with authority here, because he was on Sanders’ staff in 2011, when the Fed’s transactions became public. “Our jaws are literally dropping as we’re reading this,” he said at the time. “Every one of these transactions is outrageous.”

But Kessler can’t quite accept it, arguing that “Whether the Fed efforts should be added to these numbers is a matter of debate. We would not include them — and apparently neither would Sanders. Otherwise, he would be claiming a $30 trillion bailout, not a $1 trillion bailout.”

Who’s looking slippery now?

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Published on March 18, 2019 15:05

Over 1,000 Feared Dead After Cyclone Slams Into Mozambique

JOHANNESBURG — More than 1,000 people were feared dead in Mozambique four days after a cyclone slammed into the country, submerging entire villages and leaving bodies floating in the floodwaters, the nation’s president said.

“It is a real disaster of great proportions,” President Filipe Nyusi said.

Cyclone Idai could prove to be the deadliest storm in generations to hit the impoverished southeast African country of 30 million people.

It hit Beira, an Indian Ocean port city of a half-million people, late Thursday and then moved inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi with strong winds and heavy rain. But it took days for the scope of the disaster to come into focus in Mozambique, which has a poor communication and transportation network and a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy.

Speaking on state Radio Mozambique, Nyusi said that while the official death toll stood at 84, “It appears that we can register more than 1,000 deaths.”

U.N. agencies and the Red Cross helped rush emergency food and medicine by helicopter to the stricken countries.

Nyusi, who cut short a visit to neighboring Swaziland over the weekend because of the disaster, spoke after flying by helicopter over Beira and the rural Manica and Sofala provinces, where he reported widespread devastation.

“The waters of the Pungue and Buzi rivers overflowed, making whole villages disappear and isolating communities, and bodies are floating,” Nyusi said.

Emergency officials cautioned that while they expect the death toll to rise significantly, they have no way of knowing if it will reach the president’s estimate.

The Red Cross said 90 percent of Beira was damaged or destroyed. The cyclone knocked out electricity, shut down the airport and cut off access to the city by road.

The scale of the damage in Beira is “massive and horrifying,” said Jamie LeSueur, who led a Red Cross team that had to assess the damage by helicopter because of the flooded-out roads.

More than 215 people have been killed by the storm in the three countries, including 89 in Zimbabwe, according to official figures. And hundreds more were reported missing.

Mozambique is a long, narrow country with a 2,400-kilometer (1,500-mile) coastline along the Indian Ocean. It is prone to cyclones and tropical storms this time of year.

In 2000, Mozambique was hit by severe flooding caused by weeks of heavy rain, a disaster made much worse when a cyclone hit. Approximately 700 people were killed in what was regarded as the worst flooding in 50 years.

Mozambique won independence from Portugal in 1975 and then was plagued by a long-running civil war that ended in 1992. Its economy is dominated by agriculture, and its exports include prawns, cotton, cashews, sugar, coconuts and tropical hardwood timber.

More recently it has been exporting aluminum and electric power, and deposits of natural gas were discovered in the country’s north.

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Published on March 18, 2019 11:16

Corporate Media Has Learned Nothing From Iraq

Intercept: NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda

Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept, 3/10/19) exposes the media’s role in parroting the U.S. government’s pro-war propaganda against Venezuela.

Readers will likely know by now, that the late February story, complete with vivid video footage, about the forces of elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro burning trucks that were trying to bring the besieged country food and medicine was false. Weeks later, the New York Times (3/10/19) reported that the humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduro’s forces, but instead by anti-Maduro protestors who threw a Molotov cocktail. The Times outlined how the fake story took root, passing from US officials to media that simply reported their claims as fact with no investigation—and does any of this sound familiar?

Folks like CNN‘s Marshall Cohen noted the Times debunking as if it were just an interesting development—a “classic example of how misinformation spreads,” Cohen said in a tweet. Except, as The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald pointed out (3/10/19), it was Cohen’s own network, CNN, that led the way in spreading the lie around the world.

And not simply by parroting official claims. On February 24, the network told viewers that “a CNN team saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks.” It was then we got to Mike Pence claiming that “the tyrant” Maduro “danced as his henchmen…burned food and medicine”; Marco Rubio’s comment that “each of the trucks burned by Maduro carried 20 tons of food and medicine. This is a crime and if international law means anything, he must pay a high price for this”; Mike Pompeo’s fist-shaking, “What kind of a sick tyrant stops food from getting to hungry people?”

It isn’t merely that corporate media will never, in a million years, go back to each of these people and demand to know why they won’t insist on the same sort of response, now that it appears it was Maduro’s opponents who were to blame. It’s more that the very news dissemination process here superficially being indicted will not itself be reconsidered.

Max Blumenthal (Grayzone Project, 2/24/19) questioned the US government’s claim that Maduro burned the aid trucks weeks before the New York Times.

After all, this false story arrived embedded within another false story: that the Venezuelan government is blocking needed humanitarian aid to the country. The Venezuelan government has and does allow aid into their country—from countries that are not actively and vituperatively threatening to overthrow the elected president with an external coup. Groups from the Red Cross to the UN have challenged the US’s earnest claims of humanitarian concern. NPR (2/16/19) acknowledged that US moves are not simply humanitarian, but “also designed to foment regime change in Venezuela—which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it.”

That, plus the evidence that it was in fact opposition protesters that burned the trucks, would suggest a real flipping of the current script, and with it some consideration of how that script got written in the first place. But, as happened with those raising questions about evidence of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction—or the Cuban airfield in Grenada, or Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators, or North Vietnam firing on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin—the outlets that vigorously pushed the false story will not extend any new skepticism toward the official sources that sold it to them. Nor will they offer any new respect—or platform—to the people (like Max Blumenthal, like Boots Riley) who questioned the claim…not weeks later, but in real time.

Those official sources will still be central and those asking questions will still be marginal. Those who cannot believe that the US government is working, with corporate media support, to set up a false storyline to push the public to support another war on another country might at this point ask themselves: If they were doing that, how would that look different than what we’re seeing now?

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Published on March 18, 2019 09:18

Silicon Valley’s Farm Bot Is as Dystopian as It Sounds

How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen… Angus? Not the cattle breed, but the 1,000-pound “farmer of the future.”

Angus is a robot, toiling away on an indoor hydroponic farm that’s soilless as well as soulless. Programmed by a multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley start-up named Iron Ox, Angus’ homestead is an 8,000-square-foot concrete warehouse in a San Francisco suburb.

The farm bot is more of a heavy lifter than a heavy thinker, wheeling around the warehouse to lift, move, and hand off large pallets produce to another robot that, so far, hasn’t earned a name. The human overseers of this robotic animal farm don’t wear John Deere caps, but clean-room hair nets, apparently to prevent anything organic from contaminating the edibles or the bots.

Started by a Google engineer, Iron Ox hopes to install duplicates of its faux farm in metro areas across the country. “If we can feed people using robots,” he says, “what could be more impactful than that?”

How about this: Reconnecting our food system to nature, a democratic economy, and humans?

The roboticists brag that local warehouses can provide fresher lettuce than the mega farms ship from thousands of miles away. But local farmers markets already do that, and the consumer dollars stay in the community, rather than being siphoned off to Iron Ox and the Wall Street financiers of Angus robots.

The robotic indoor farm hucksters quietly concede that their real business plan depends on “sidestepping” the cost of human labor and local farm owners. Instead of democratizing our food economy, their scheme concentrates food profits in a handful of absentee syndicators, rich investors, and technology giants.

Deep in his digital brain, even Angus must know that this is stupid.

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Published on March 18, 2019 08:26

Being Better Than Republicans Is Not Good Enough

This piece originally appeared on Truthout.

Progressives often applaud the idea of “speaking truth to power.” But this concept is hazardous. If taken literally and deployed as a single-minded strategy, it can divert attention from the crucial need to take power away from those who abuse it. Political movements don’t get very far if they depend on appealing to the moral scruples of the powerful.

While noting that “power without love is reckless and abusive,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” All too often, progressive activists don’t realize their own potential power when they rely on ethical arguments to persuade authorities. Appealing to the hearts of people who run a heartless system is rarely effective.

Humane principles are low priorities in the profit-driven scheme of things, as the devastating impacts of economic inequality and militarism attest. By and large, rapacious power already knows what it’s doing — from Wall Street and the boardrooms of mega-corporations to the Pentagon and the top echelons of the “national security” state.

Speaking truth to power is fine, but it’s far more important — and potentially transformational — to focus on public education efforts, agitation and organizing that speaks truth about power while challenging it. Only by mobilizing to take power can we realistically hope to overcome and dismantle the dominant power structures.

In 1967, when Dr. King was describing “love without power” as “sentimental and anemic,” the most meaningful efforts to express love for Vietnamese people involved striving to stop the U.S. government from killing them. Speaking truth to powerful elites could be helpful, but for Americans the moral imperative was to speak truth to each other in a process of trying to end the war.

In 2019, the U.S. war system is bombing many countries while predatory economic policies are ravaging uncounted lives across the United States and much of the globe. Urging humanistic change without developing credible threats to take power is too much like supplication.

Many progressive activists have been recognizing the limits of reliance on lobbying or traditional street protests. Those activities are always necessary, and their importance should not be underestimated. Still, they’re insufficient without credible threats of primary challenges to oust elected officials. Enhanced ongoing leverage is one of the many benefits as the left builds electoral muscle.

Inspiring daily leadership is now coming from such new members of Congress as Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. Even more important is the fact that the activists who got them elected have shown what can be done when movements get serious and methodical about gaining power.

At federal and state levels, where ballots routinely include partisan labels, such victories have occurred within Democratic primaries. Instead of being disempowered by the labels, progressives have been learning how to win elections in spite of corporations’ odious sway over the Democratic Party.

The empowered grassroots organizing that made possible the elections of Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley last year has inspired many thousands of activists fighting for economic justice, human rights and a sustainable planet. Those four women — and other recent progressive arrivals in Congress, such as Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna — are forming the nucleus of a House power bloc in synergy with like-minded forces around the country.

Four-term Rep. Mark Pocan, who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus with Jayapal, aptly put it this way: “People in D.C. think we’re the center of the universe, but we’re not — the people who elect us are the center of the universe. It’s when you have that kind of activism in the districts, you’re really going to be impactful.” The way to maximize impact is to step up progressive capacities across the United States, inside and outside of electoral arenas.

Winning elective power can and must be part of social movements that are engaged in wresting power away from dominant authorities in an array of walks of life — while nurturing alternative institutions. Progressive power of enduring value grows from deep roots in communities, with huge potential to weaken the undemocratic power of the current oligarchy.

It’s understandable that many on the left have been uneasy about power and uncomfortable with really trying to gain it. After all, prevalent power is so often oppressive and illegitimate. And efforts to galvanize progressive power have too often devolved into toxic opportunism and co-option. But chronic misuses of power don’t negate the practical possibilities of power created in solidarity, with the goal of advancing humane values.

“Power is always dangerous,” Edward Abbey asserted. “Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.” Yet democratic consolidations of power offer the opportunity to throw a monkey wrench into self-marginalizing orthodoxies that dismiss all power as inherently pernicious. While harmful power is contemptuous of democracy, legitimate power requires it.

Imperative transformations go way beyond who’s in elective office. Routinely, economic power boils down to political power; the structures of corporate domination and undemocratic governance are enmeshed in the same overall system. Out of necessity, a wide range of progressive movements now challenge how institutions are structured to perpetuate elite power and mass disempowerment.

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose,” Dr. King wrote. “It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.”

Attitudes, assumptions and understanding largely determine the potential for desperately needed changes in governance — from city halls and state legislatures to Congress and the White House. What’s at stake is far more than who wins elections; actual democracy requires gaining accountability from the winners when they’re in office.

“Speaking truth to power” doesn’t do much unless people can consolidate power to serve the interests of the many instead of the privileged few. Exercised from the bottom up, power has the potential to make democracy real.

Right now, ending GOP rule is necessary — and also insufficient. Being “better than Republicans” is a low bar that most Democratic candidates clear with ease. But quests for social justice, human rights, environmental protection, civil liberties and peace will require high standards that only grassroots power can achieve.

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Published on March 18, 2019 04:06

Chelsea Manning and the New Inquisition

The U.S. government, determined to extradite and try Julian Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange and WikiLeaks did in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning from what The New York Times and The Washington Post did in publishing the same material. There is no federal law that prohibits the press from publishing government secrets. It is a crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of Manning, who on March 8 was sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about this issue.

If Manning, a former Army private, admits she was instructed by WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain and pass on the leaked material, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents. The prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama administration, which under the Espionage Act charged eight people with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had been severed.

Manning, who worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009, provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000 documents copied from military and government archives, including the “Collateral Murder” video footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed civilians that included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in 2010 and found guilty in 2013.

The campaign to criminalize whistleblowing has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to those who have the skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden did, needed to hack into or otherwise obtain government electronic documents. This is why hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power, especially those activities that violate the law. Movement toward this goal is very far advanced. The failure of news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt them. The corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The target is the press itself.

“If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose,” I wrote after I and Cornel West attended Manning’s sentencing in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. “He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 ‘violent deaths’ in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.”

Manning has always insisted her leak of the classified documents and videos was prompted solely by her own conscience. She has refused to implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, although President Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence after she served seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer questions before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks. While incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods in solitary confinement and torture. She twice attempted to commit suicide in prison. She knows from painful experience the myriad ways the system can break you psychologically and physically. And yet she has steadfastly refused to give false testimony in court on behalf of the government. Her moral probity and courage are perhaps the last thin line of defense for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is deteriorating in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012.

Manning—who was known as Bradley Manning in the Army—has undergone gender reassignment surgery and needs frequent medical monitoring. Judge Claude M. Hilton, however, dismissed a request by her lawyers for house arrest. Manning was granted immunity by prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia, and because she had immunity she was unable to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination or to have her attorney present. The judge found her in contempt of court and sent her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton, who has long been a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has vowed to hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning said any questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with the grand jury.

“All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in 2010—answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in 2013,” she said on March 7, the day before she was jailed.

“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury,” she said later in a statement issued from jail. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.”

“The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events,” she went on. “I stand by my previous public testimony.”

Manning reiterated that she “will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”

The New York Times, Britain’s The Guardian, Spain’s El País, France’s Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel all published the WikiLeaks files provided by Manning. How could they not? WikiLeaks had shamed them into doing their jobs. But once they took the incendiary material from Manning and Assange, these organizations callously abandoned them. No doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized against the two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press and cement into place an American version of China’s totalitarian capitalism. President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, referring to them as the “enemy of the people.” Any legal tools given to the administration to shut down these news outlets, or at least hollow them of content, will be used eagerly by the president.

The prosecutions of government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of the communications of Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are parts of an interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian systems. The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism exposed as a con, have had enough of us examining and questioning their abuses, pillage and crimes.

“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” Assange told me during one of our meetings at the embassy in London. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”

“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”

The long term is not so sanguine. Assange, along with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—wrote a book titled “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to create a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.”

“All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment, from birth to death,” Assange says in the book. “I think that can only produce a very controlling atmosphere.”

“How can a normal person be free within that system?” he asks. “[He or she] simply cannot, it’s impossible.”

It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, the authors argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the abuses of power. But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become more sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and perhaps impossible to use.

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”

That is where we are headed. A few resist. Assange and Manning are two. Those who stand by passively as they are persecuted will be next.

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Published on March 18, 2019 00:01

Manning and the New Inquisition