Guantánamo by the Bay

Bagram. Photo by Tribune Express, Pakistan.

NPR did a story on the California prison hunger strike and the conditions in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison; they never mentioned Guantánamo, or detention in the former GWOT (now Overseas Contingency Operations (or OscOPs as I like to call them) in general, but they didn't need to; the parallels are pretty eerie.

The prisoners are held in the SHU, many of them, for specious reasons; for trivial breaches of discipline, or because they are profiled in, or because they were reported by another prisoner who gains an advantage from reporting them. Conditions amount to torture, and there's no hope of getting out.

The SHU is for holding "the worst of the worst"—ever heard that expression before? But

the California Code of Regulations, Title 15, Section 3315, outlines two dozen “Serious Rule Violations” that can result in placement in the SHU. These include “Possession of five dollars or more without authorization,” “Tattooing or possession of tattoo paraphernalia,” “Participation in a strike or work stoppage,” and “Self mutilation or attempted suicide for the purpose of manipulation.” Approximately 50 percent of California SHU inmates may have committed no offense at all; instead, they are held in solitary due to the gang “validation” process, in which inmates deemed to be active gang members are sent to six-year terms in the SHU. Gang validation can take place based in large part on anonymous accusations. Commonly, these anonymous charges come from validated inmates in the SHU, for whom the only hope for early release has been summarized as “Parole, Snitch, or Die.” Prisoners have also earned points toward gang validation simply by possessing the book The Art of War or making reference to prison activist George Jackson.

Remember how they condemned the suicides at Guantánamo as acts of "asymmetrical warfare"? Those cowardly detainees taking advantage of the jailers' tender feelings and purposely making them feel sad?

And then Governor Jerry Brown, assuming the position of Mohamed Karzai, tried telling the federal government to go away and stop interfering because

"We've gone from serious constitutional problems to one of the finest prison systems in the United States," Brown said at a news conference, where he announced that he had signed a proclamation declaring an end to a state of emergency in state prisons.

Declare victory and go home

Via Pulp Serenade.

Apparently it was that old-school Republican New Dealer George Aiken of Vermont—the oldest Republican in the Senate, though not yet the Dean all round—that said that, or rather:

Actually, what he said was that "the United States could well declare unilaterally ... that we have 'won' in the sense that our armed forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam," and that such a declaration "would herald the resumption of political warfare as the dominant theme in Vietnam." 

This was in October 1966, a year that began with Operation Masher (some bright spark eventually noted that that did not sound very nation-building-ish and it was changed to the prettier "Operation White Wing") and the Fulbright hearings, where the Senators were told,

"If there is a God, and he is very kind to us, and given a million men, and five years, and a miracle in making the South Vietnamese people like us, we stand an outside chance—of a stalemate"

and was culminating, as Aiken spoke, with Operation Prairie (for a nation-building exercise in which every valley would be exalted, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain?):

Operation Prairie continued well into October with continuous heavy contact between Marines and the 324B Division, causing the enemy well over 1000 men killed. The north Vietnamese were prevented from establishing a major operating base in northern Quang Tri, although intelligence sources indicated that the 341st NVA Division had replaced the 324B Division in the area.

I imagine that even as early as that, if President Johnson had followed Aiken's advice, the declaration of victory would have been, even in Aiken's cautious sense, a lie. I even thought so then, though, truth to tell, it was only out of some proto-hippie intuition; I was a pretty profoundly ignorant kid.

And now we're getting do-overs, first in Iraq, then in Afghanistan. It's pretty horrifying, of course; the death doesn't stop. I've been reading the beginnings of the analysis unfolding at Down with Tyranny and a couple of great links. I gather there are some people on the side of peace who are upset with Obama because when he says we have "achieved our objectives" it isn't true. Well, duh.

Operation Prairie. Photo by Larry Burrows.

Honni soit qui Mali pense

Timbuktu. Photograph by Naftali Hilger, laif/Redux, from National Geographic.

Like everybody else, I've read my share of explanations over the past dozen years of why our Overseas Contingency Operations are taking place, but I don't think I ever learned as much as I did from a few paragraphs in this morning's Times about an ostensibly quite different adventure, the ongoing French invasion of Mali:

For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic militancy in the region by conducting its most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara,

But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials.

“It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the defections.

Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones have tried to make sense of the mess, but American officials and their allies are still scrambling even to get a detailed picture of who they are up against.

Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe, the French have entered the war themselves.

1. The purpose of the OsCOps (as I propose they should be called; previously I tried OsCO) is to prevent terrorist attacks "as far away" (from, for example, Mali) "as Europe"—or North America (from, for example, Yemen). This does not include the crazed original invasion of Iraq, or if it did they were even crazier than we thought, but it evidently includes Iraq now, with whatver ongoing OsCOps are still being staged there, after Proconsul Bremer and General Franks had finished constructing a local Al Qa'eda within the country. President Obama may be regarded as telling the truth about this (or may not, I just want to note the possibility).

2. They are not a War (GWOT) because they are not a war, but rather counterterrorism, which seems to be a particular kind of counterinsurgency in which the insurgents are terrorists, or Terrorists. The Terrorists are, if they exist, Jihadists, that is a branch of Sunni Islam which is more or less Salafist in theology and terroristic in politics; we know they have existed in the past because we helped create them, in Afghanistan during the counter-counterinsurgency of the 1980s, but we don't know if those currently active are true Terrorists or merely terrorists. Keep in mind that some of this is really true: there have been real suicide attackers and real attacks, notably right here in New York City.

3. But OsCOps don't actually work very well, even if they did in Malaya and British East Africa 60 years ago (it certainly wasn't so great in Algeria, or Vietnam). Troops you train may be secret enemies, and the weapons you give them can be turned against you. Villagers can turn a blind eye when the bad guys murder hundreds of people at a shot, but if you mistakenly drop a bomb on a single funeral party they'll never forgive you. Why? Because they can visualize the funeral party. Because you obviously don't belong, and they're only hired friends; didn't your mother teach you that you can't buy friendship? Because killing somebody with a bomb launched from a computer console 10,000 miles away is cowardly (according to their exotic native culture). They don't respect you.

4. President Obama and his Gray Eminence Cardinal Brennan do not find this easy to understand. Although Aristotle and St. Thomas never laid out the rules for a Just Counterinsurgency, it seems obvious to them that it is juster than a just war. Far fewer people get hurt, and they get something back, like roads, and girls' schools, and village councils. Democracy! Actually Obama understands it better than any US president since Eisenhower, but he can only understand it one country at a time, so as we start packing up in Afghanistan—Yay!—things in Somalia and Yemen start getting worse. And Mali? Who knew!? But Obama didn't start it:

American officials defended their training, saying it was never intended to be nearly as comprehensive as what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We trained five units over five years but is that going to make a fully fledged, rock-solid military?” asked an American military official familiar with the region.

(They don't say it straight out, but luckily we're good at arithmetic, like 2013 minus 5.)

I'm sorry, emoprogs, but Obama is probably the very best we can do.