A Hammer Always in Search for a Nail

Ding-dong, the terrorist is dead, yells the town crier. Another notch in the belt of the defenders of freedom in the twenty year old War on Terror. Another name crossed out on the infamous kill list. A big name. Al-Qaeda ideologue, strategist, and leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is dead.

And it won’t make a lick of difference.

I’ve come to understand that people have forgot the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the watershed moment that sparked this War on Terror we’ve had running for two decades now. Not so much those that were around, it was our Kennedy assassination after all, but most younger than I don’t understand what happened. They have taken the fallout as a status quo. Simply how the world works now. They don’t bother to know how a militant fundamentalist group opposing US imperialism hijacked four commercial airliners, slammed one into the Pentagon, one each into the two World Trade Center towers, and lost one supposedly on its way to the White House. It was a shock to the US. To the western world at large. A “fuck you” the size of the Pearl Harbour sneak attack that sparked the country’s involvement in World War II. And the US couldn’t handle it. So the War on Terror – a dirty, dirty war as portrayed by Jeremy Scahill – was started to compensate for their bruised ego, because I can’t fathom how exported death and untold destruction could ever bring back the 2’977 dead of the 9/11 attacks.

The US revenge machine produced a list. A list of justice. A list spanning decades, generations, and continents. During the Iraq invasion, a list of 52 people, from 2’s to aces, clubs to hearts, circled US army camps. But a list of 52 evolved, just as the US invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein for his alleged support of the 9/11 attacks and possession of WMDs evolved into an occupation of Afghanistan and a war on the world. A list of 52 became a hundred. A hundred became two hundred. Two hundred became legion. Every head struck from the list grew two new in its place. Failure, if your intent was to fulfil retribution. Success, if your intent is never ending war.

In 2011, then-US president Obama, ten years after the War started, could proudly announce that they had struck al-Qaeda poster-child Osama bin Laden from their swollen and swelling list of vengeance. Just ahead of a general election. In 2019, the Orange Hydra could stutter out at a press conference that the ISIS leader, and former Abu Ghraib prisoner, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been slain. Another big name off the list, also just ahead of a big US election. And now, Biden can mumble congratulations to himself and his administration for striking off another big name.

But the list never ends. US vengeance has become not an act, but a way of life. A murderous – a lucrative way of life. And with the death of al-Zawahiri I am prone to ask how many names will be added to the list to fill his void.

/Sebastian Lindberg 2/8-2022

The Nature of a Nation

Russia sues Google, Twitter and Facebook for not erasing support of the charged, poisoned, and Gulag-jailed Putin-critic Navalny. Meanwhile, Turkey arrests ten former naval officers over an open letter criticising Erdogan’s “crazy plan” concerning the Bosphorus strait.

It’s interesting what you can tell about a nation from what it considers a threat to national security. A term that’s been thrown around a lot since 9/11 shifted the Overton window and mutated world politics. You hear it all over the world, be it by US lawmakers and executives or east-European despots or the vicious autocrats in Beijing. It seems you can’t throw a dart at a world map without hitting a nation that’s under “threat” from one type of dissident or another.

It’s an easy label to use to pry open a can of whoop-ass on whatever cause or group you might want to smack down hard on. Just like we feared back in 2001 when the “war on terror” became a buzz word in US politics to validate whatever military intervention imaginable.

“But terrorists are bad, m’kay? They’re a threat to our way of life and liberty.”

Yeah, sure… Though it depends on what you call terrorism, or who gets associated with the stigma, doesn’t it? Back in 2017, the federal police of the USA warned about the rising national threat of “black identity extremists”. Which must have been a helpful report and label to have floating around law enforcement corridors once the BLM protests and riots of Portland et. al. cropped up following the racially charged murder of George Floyd. And when the racist angle didn’t fly any more, the government instead swung around to blaming the old boogeyman “the anarchist” to validate shooting demonstrators point blank between the eyes with “non-lethal” ammunition or arresting reporters.

Meanwhile, in China in 2014, eight madmen started slashing away at people in a train station in Kunming. Thirty one people died, and 140 people were injured, but no terrorist movement took responsibility for the attack. Yet, CCP officials decided that it was the Uighur’s fault (despite that Kunming is nowhere near or relevant to Xinjiang). The Chinese Communist Party didn’t waste a second to declare a “people’s war on terror” of their own. Six years later, reports abound of genocide, concentration camps, forced labour and sterilization, and pretty much every play from Nazi Germany except for (perhaps) gas chambers. Accusations which the CCP vehemently deny, and Chinese internet trolls rabidly counter attack from across the Great Firewall.

On the other side of the dominion of the People’s Republic, Hong Kong was wracked with pro-democracy demonstrations because of draconian, communist national security legislation that would violate the semi-autonomousness of the previous British protectorate. Protests which only galvanized Beijing to put even further legislation in place to tighten its iron grip on the city-state. All in the name of national security and unity.

But far be it for Europe to miss out on the fad of paving the road to hell. In Spain, the historically distinct region of Catalonia desires independence. In 2017, they ran a regional referendum for independence, which passed. To the great chagrin of the crown and parliament in Madrid. More than 90% of the votes wanted to break free from Spain. And Spain didn’t like the sound of that. In news reports, the rest of the world could see federal paramilitary officers blocking voting machines with bloody violence. We could see elderly patriots bleeding from the scalp, proud to have voted in a democratic election of self-governance, which the federal government called an illegal separatist stunt. A separatist stunt that threatened “national security”, and thus permitted violent federal action against anyone and everyone.

You can tell a lot about a nation from what they consider a threat. Whether it’s being an oppositional politician, or simply homosexual for that matter, in neo-imperialist Russia. Or if you want self-determination and self-governance in Spain. If you openly argue against the Sultan of Turkey. If you’re of the wrong ethnicity or if you want democracy in China. Or if you’re simply black and fed-up with (sometimes lethal) police discrimination in the USA.

If you ever want to take a measure of a nation, just take a look at what it calls terrorism. What actions and human desires it brands as heretical or dissident or a threat to national security. Whether its racial divergence, dissidence, self-determination, self-realisation, whether its sexual liberation or religious freedom. Just look at what a nation finds abhorrent, at what it levels fearful violence against, and you shall know its true colours.

/Sebastian Lindberg 6/4-2021

A Clean House?

Trump just flipped off the International Criminal Court, ICC for short. Which is not to be confused with the International Cricket Council, which is a very different thing. They are the safeguards against crimes against humanity, the supposedly real-life Justice League. The International Criminal Court that is; not the International Cricket Council, because that’d be silly. And the Orange Hydra just flipped them off last Thursday, and his foreign policy-guy, Pompeo(us), threatened sanctions against individuals within the court.

So what?

So… war crimes are bad, m’kay? Although it might take some philosophical wrangling to come to the conclusion that there can be agreed-upon rules to something so barbaric as war, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to agree that some jerky stunts are just simply BM and shouldn’t be condoned. Firing at people with 50 cal., using chemical weapons, targetting civilian populations, rape-and-pillage tactics, all a real bad look for humanity at large. Certainly behaviour that run tantamount to whatever we consider the civilized human creature to be. And just after the “War to end all wars”, and then one that came right after that, we all sat down and agreed on what methods of mass murder we would keep and which we would punt into history. Seemed like a good plan. Everyone agreed. And that was that.

Well, at least right up unto the point where people started doing all the real bad things again, not being satisfied to stick with the just-sort-of-bad things we agreed to keep doing to each other. And thus, the ICC was founded. To round up whatever cretins broke our rules of war, try them, and sentence them.

Turns out, there are few certain someones in the world that never ratified the ICC’s authority back in the day. The US is one such nation, despite the fact that the US was instrumental in forging the ICC in its work with the Nuremberg trials, which may have been the watershed moment for an international court of law. But the US has never subjected themselves to the court they helped start.

So, why is this a problem now, that the Orange Hydra has to address it? Well, one might assume that he’s trying to rally support from his military, a military increasingly disgusted with their commander in chief, as it’s being deployed in Sith-like style against its own population. Or maybe he’s just using the controversy to shift focus away from his sinking domestic political ship. Or maybe it’s the fact that an ICC prosecutor and investigator is getting mighty curious about the US activities in Afghanistan post-9/11. Either case, just as the ICC are finally beginning to investigate Team America, World Police, for war crimes, Trump tries to levy economic sanctions against affiliated individuals.

What’s the defence? Well, according to the Orange House, the ICC has become politicized. That the Court subverts American sovereignty (despite the fact that alleged war crimes were committed in a dubious invasion against a foreign sovereignty). That the ICC is just intended to mete out justice in failed states; states that cannot be trusted to keep their own house clean. Basically, the Orange House is levelling the same kinds of criticisms against the ICC like any authoritarian bully would, echoing the tantrumtastic mewlings that you might expect from countries such as China, North Korea, or Russia.

Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, early 2000’s: A US-run detention camp in the forge-hot aftermath of 9/11, where prisoners were tortured, raped, sodomized, and murdered by the US servicemen and women stationed there. A travesty after which 17 soldiers and officers where removed from duty and court-martialed. Two of which were sentenced to prison. But only after the conditions at Abu Ghraib broke publicly. Even though internal memos surfaced, that had been reviewed by the contemporary US president Bush Jr. that explicitly described and sanctioned above mentioned “enhanced interrogation methods”.

A little township, Yemen, 2011: Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki is killed by a US drone strike. Cause of death is listed as “AGM-114 Hellfire”. Just another name stricken from the dreaded kill-list that the US had begun after 9/11, but which only grew and grew with each military assassination. All done under the cover of the unassailable “War on Terror”. What was so different with al-Awlaki? He was a US citizen. Born in 1971, Las Cruces, New Mexiko. He was never tried in a court of law. He was never judged by his peers. The US government has never provided proof of al-Awlaki’s relationship with any terrorist organization. And the national hero Barack Obama personally signed the kill order, despite years of judicial protests that killing a US citizen without a trial would disqualify the very tenets that the nation was built on. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed. 6 years later, Obama’s successor, Donny Trump, would order the murder of al-Awlaki’s then 8-year old daughter. Another name scratched off the infamous kill-list.

Balad, Iraq, 2005: 19 year-old LaVena Lynn Johnson, private first class of the US Army, was found dead in her tent at the army barracks. The coroner’s report stated that she had a broken nose, black eye, loose teeth, a gun-shot wound, and her genitals had been burned away with corrosive chemicals. The US Department of Defence ruled LaVena’s death as “suicide”, closed the case, and moved on with their day.

America. Would you say that you keep a clean house?

/Sebastian Lindberg 15/6-2020

When Her Majesty Demands Betrayal

November ended with the War on Terror taking another civil liberty casualty; namely the right for any journalist to protect their sources. On the 30^th, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unequivocally that the Vice journalist Ben Makuch would release his recorded communications with the presumed-late IS fighter Farah Shirdon.

The Court admitted the so called ”chilling effects” this may have on the press and on journalistic integrity, but the very Canadian ”sorry” before committing a constitutional aberration isn’t worth much. For what they’re doing here, by demanding that a journalist gives up its contacts, is to wilfully dismantle the most sacred journalistic duties that a reporter has. Namely to never give up ones sources.

This is not the first time in recent memory that journalism has been assaulted in the so called ”democratic” western world. Nor is it the first time that the War on Terror, so very well sold part-and-parcel to western citizens, has encroached on previously unassailable civil liberties and constitutional rights.

I am not going to be quite so pretentious as to say that everyone should have seen this coming. All of the democratic world was stunned by what happened back in 2001. We all knew that Terror would become the new Black, and that the very foundations of our world would be rocked. But I did not imagine this. I was younger then. Maybe not as jaded. But I never imagined this. I never imagined the War on Terror being used to subvert and undermine the tenets of civilized society.

Yet, here we are…

Seventeen years later, and the War never ended. It was expanded. Even under the rule of some of the most popular and controversial world leaders that the West has had. With every demonized freedom fighter checked off of that ruinous ”kill list”, numerous others take its place. At this rate, the War will never end until humanity has. When every civil liberty we ever knew has been placed subsidiary to the Disposition Matrix. When no citizen’s right or privilege remains paramount to the need to kill the ”Enemies of the State”.

I bet Orwell is spinning in his grave.

The Press makes mistakes. Fake News is all the rage, and certain media outlets perpetrate the sins of untruthfulness in the face of the public. But the Press, with all its faults and all its pride, is necessary. Not just necessary, but vital, to the sanity and virtue of the world.

How do I know this? How can I prove the inherent value in journalism to the doubters? Well, without going into the academics of it, without boring you with an explanation as to the importance of forces in our society that are dedicated to uprooting the rot that Power seeds, let me simply point out this:

If not for the Press’ benefit to mankind, to the voter, the citizen, and the tax payer, why do you think that the first step that any despot takes is to discredit and dismantle the media?

Why else would every burgeoning autocrat be so hellbent on making the media, the press, journalism at large, and the tools of shining a public light on hidden truth, the ”Enemy of the State”. Because subverting those institutions, founded to shepherd the citizen through the weaves of bullshit that Power keeps spinning, is the beginning of the end of free thought.

/Sebastian Lindberg 3/12-2018