Drone Lyrics US Terrorism and Digital Biopower

Erin A. Corbett

Drone Lyrics

2014-2015 Committee Chair: Stephen Dillon Committee Member: Lorne Falk

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family and friends for all of their support and excitement. Even though you still have to write down the title of my self-designed major in order to remember it, I thank you for that extra effort.

Many thanks to my committee, Stephen Dillon and Lorne Falk for believing in my project and taking me on as an advisee. Your guidance and the time you have offered me throughout this project have helped me create this work, and I cannot imagine what it would look like without all of your support.

Thank you to each professor at Hampshire College who has helped mold my critical lens and my studies over the past four years. You have impacted my studies, my interests, and most importantly my mind.

For you—

Contents

Introduction: Digital Disposability and the Global War on Terror 1 VULNERABILITY The Drone, the Apparatus, the Human 14 Drone Imagery in the Digital Era 18 Marriage Industrial 22

IMAGINED IDENTITIES Invisible 28 Charlie Hebdo: The Case for Satire or Racism? 32 Free Speech to Terror Threat 36 Terror of “Illegality” 41

SPECTACLES Transportation Security 46 Intentional Language 51 Veterans Day and American Exceptionalism 55

BEYOND THE FRAME On Framing the Other 62 First Worldism 67 “They had lives beyond the violence by which they are known” 71

EROTICISM On the NSA, Privacy, and the Home 76 Blaming the Victim 80 On Nicknaming Predators 86

THE BODY The Case for Reproductive Justice 91 Jane Doe 95 Whiteness and Police Violence in the Land of the Free 101

Conclusion: An Era of Digital Biopower 106

Bibliography 115

Introduction Digital Disposability and the Global War on Terror

Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American male, was killed by a US drone in Yemen on September 30, 2011. That was the day after I turned 18. I had no idea who he was at the time. Anwar’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman—a US citizen born in Denver—was killed just two weeks later on October 14, 2011 in a CIA drone strike in Yemen. That was the day before my friend Mirwan’s birthday. At the time, I had no idea who Abdulrahman was either. I can tell you now what I was doing at the time, I can tell you about my birthday and Mirwan’s birthday. I can also tell you that I had no idea about the existence of Anwar and Abdulrahman.

To this day, the only government statement about Abdulrahman’s death was made by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs who said: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.1

Gibbs’ statement refuses to give reason for Abdulrahman’s death, treating him as disposable because of his association to al Qaeda via his father. As if all individuals are blamed equally for the actions and associations of their parents. The fact that Abdulrahman was killed by his own government is a tragedy. He was essentially blamed for

1 Obama’s Top Adviser Robert Gibbs Justifies Murder of 16 Year Old American Citizen, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MwB2znBZ1g&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

his own death, stripped of his rights as a citizen, and stripped of his humanity. The fact that his death was never worthy of mourning or of a legitimate reasoning is another tragedy, a further manifestation of violence by erasure.

In the summer of 2013, I started reading Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield,2 and learned of the assassinations of Anwar and Abdulrahman. It took me two years to know who they were. The cases of Anwar and Abdulrahman are two examples of the names that will not be reported by the mainstream media. We are not supposed to mourn them. Anwar and Abdulrahman—individuals who are supposed to be treated as innocent until proven otherwise—were extralegally killed and never offered their constitutional rights. We must keep this in mind, especially as we are frequently reminded of this country’s supposed commitment to democracy, liberty, and justice.

Abdulrahman was only sixteen when his life was taken. This kind of violence is not isolated to his case alone, but is known to individuals around the world. These imperial acts of State-sanctioned violence in the institutionalized Global War on Terror occur regularly and are unknown to people who do not go looking for the names of the dead— individuals whose lives are treated as disposable. These violent acts prompt me to wonder whose lives matter, whose lives do not, and why?

As a cisgender, white, heterosexual female, I have never myself been a victim of racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, or Islamophobic violence. I say this, as I must acknowledge my privilege and positionality as I write about systems of violence that I have never and will never experience. I will never understand racism against my body. I will never experience violence based on my sexual identity. I will never know the experience of a black woman, man; a brown woman, man; an un/documented immigrant; a Muslim woman, man; a queer or trans woman, man; non-binary gender individuals; and everyone

2 Jeremy Scahill published Dirty Wars on April 23, 2013 with Nation Books as The Nation Magazine’s National Security Correspondent. The book is accompanied by a documentary and is an investigation into the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the assassinations of Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

2 in between. I will never experience the violence inflicted against those at the intersections of these identities. I will never experience the stigmas associated to these identities, some of which are labeled across a number of my friends. I have remembered and reflected on my positionality throughout my process of researching and writing this project. I have often questioned my place in writing these essays, and my access to the knowledge that I have.

However, it is also because of my positionality that I feel I have to write about the violence inflicted by the US with impunity. I have to talk about these systemic injustices because I cannot drown in the comfort of whiteness and not seek to change the systems that create vulnerable circumstances for communities from Chicago to the West Bank to Waziristan. My first week at Hampshire College, I remember someone speaking to my F11 class, and reminding us to step outside of our comfort zones. At the time, I thought of this notion specifically in a social context. I see now that it is much more than that. I have learned throughout my time at Hampshire, and especially over this past year, how important it is to step outside the comfort of my privilege and to be okay with discomfort.

American Predators

3 Rewind to November 2008.

3 Wendy Piersall, Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/wendypiersall/

I remember the excitement leading up to President Obama’s 2008 election and his campaign as the face of change. When he was elected on November 4, 2008 the city of Chicago—where I’m from—lit up with hope, excitement, and inspiration. Grant Park filled with 240,000 people to welcome our new president. I could feel the energy of my city as we welcomed Obama, a fellow Chicagoan.

That night, he told the nation: It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America.4

The following day, the RedEye, a free daily political and culture magazine featured a spread of Obama with the word “History” sprawled across. Copies ran out faster than ever. I did not manage to get my hands on one, but I remember a woman on the CTA red line offering me her extra copy on my way home from school. I remember her telling me to hold on to it, and that she would give it to me as long as I did not throw out this important piece of history.

At the time, the Global War on Terror entered its eighth year with no foreseeable end, but Obama made promises to get our troops out of Iraq, to end the war, to close Guantánamo Bay. He was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. He signed an executive order to close Guantánamo Bay on January 22, 2009. On January 23, 2009, he authorized his first drone strike.

Now it is March 2015. I sit in my college library writing these words, thinking about where this presidency has led us and how far we have come in the Global War on Terror. Six years later the US is back in Iraq; Guantánamo Bay Prison remains open with 122 detainees still to be released, some coming forward about the torture they endured during

4 Obama, Barack. Transcript: “This Is Your Victory,” Says Obama. Election Speech. Chicago, IL, 2008. http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/obama.transcript/.

4 their detention. There have been some 715 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan. I say “some” because they are not accurately reported by any government agency, at least not publicly. I say “some” because when these strikes are reported, we are led to believe that all those targeted and killed are terrorists. I say “some” because the drone program was covertly operated in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia until December 2009, when (formerly) The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill first investigated the story.5

The only source that I trust for accurate information on drone strikes, victims, and numbers is the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent non-profit news organization established in April 2010. Their investigation into the covert drone war has revealed that under Obama’s presidency there have been over 3,000 deaths, including 500 civilians, though many of the individuals killed by drones have yet to be identified. It is important to keep in mind the difficulties and inaccuracies of these numbers when we are not supposed to know how many people, militants, civilians, children, men, and women have been killed by drones.

Drones—or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)—are not a new technology. Their existence dates as far back as 1849 when the Austrians attacked Venice with unmanned balloons carrying explosives. The first pilotless aircrafts were used during World War I. Drones are not new, but for the purposes of this project, I will examine their use since the beginning of the Global War on Terror.

The drone program rapidly picked up under the Obama administration. He authorized more strikes during his presidency than were authorized by George Bush. Whether you identify as a Republican or a Democrat, you should consider how one president’s foreign policies are often an extension of the former president’s. Most of Obama’s drone strikes have taken place in the Northwest tribal region of Pakistan, (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) as “signature strikes.” Signature strikes are strikes that target “military-aged” males (13 or older) based on lifestyle: an individual who is either engaged in or associated with

5 Scahill, Jeremy. “The Secret US War in Pakistan.” The Nation Magazine, December 21, 2009.

5 suspicious activity, even if his identity is unknown. This logic prompted me to wonder what determines suspicion, and who decides that an individual is criminal when their identity is unknown? How has the label of “terrorism” become especially associated with brown-skinned men and Muslims, and what is the role of imagined geographies and identities and a fast-paced digital image making culture in the creation of a new kind of “disposability” of human life? How have different technologies fostered abstract human-to- human relationships, which have now translated to the ways modern war is waged?

The value of intersectionality

This collection of short essays pairs events that have taken place as a result of the War on Terror—often within the news cycle of this past year—with different theoretical thinkers. In the beginning of this project I wrote lyric essays, combining a poetic style with memoir, research, and analysis. In their final stages, I still consider these pieces as lyrics, specifically because they demand work of you, my reader, to draw the connections between them. Each essay touches on a different experience of State violence and topics include sexual violence, police brutality, transphobia and carceral violence, imperialism and war recruitment, immigration, torture, indefinite detention, the global surveillance web and disparities in access to reproductive health and rights. Each piece references other pieces in order to draw connections between seemingly disparate violent State actions and institutions. In this sense, this project is intersectional on two levels.

First, intersectionality as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw,6 signifies the intersections between oppressive institutions such as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and xenophobia. Intersectionality refers to the importance of viewing identities as layered. For instance, in the case of a woman of color, her experience of racism may be sexualized, and her experience of sexism may be racialized. It is crucial to view all aspects of an

6 Kimberlé Crenshaw is a professor of Law at the University of California, LA. She focuses on Critical Race Theory and gender.

6 individual’s identity as intersecting because in some cases, one is likely to be exposed to multiple layers of oppression at the same time. To make this clearer, I refer to my essay “Jane Doe,” which is about a trans Latina minor who was unjustly incarcerated in a men’s facility in Connecticut. Her identity as both transgender and as Latina creates an intersection of institutional racism, sexism, and transphobia. In the following essays, I draw connections between oppressive institutions that operate on the body of individuals and populations.

Second, I apply this theory of intersectionality to US State violence and militarism in order to show the connections between varied instances of systemic violence about which I write. By juxtaposing drone strikes with detention at Guantánamo Bay, or NSA surveillance with sexual violence domestically and internationally, I argue that no single act of State violence is inseparable from another. All continued systems of violence from anti-black racism, anti- queerness, xenophobia, and sexism find their roots in colonialism. The same technologies of violence and oppression used against individuals in the US simultaneously operate at the international level. This constitutes a global military apparatus, a violent capitalist military entity—rooted in centuries of colonialism—that recruits all of the above systems in order to operate. The War on Terror is a contemporary extension of colonialism and imperialism.

I draw connections between different experiences of State violence such as sexual violence, reproductive violence, police violence, American exceptionalism, the NSA, Guantánamo Bay prison, and the drone that both solidifies these connections as it simultaneously obscures them. The drone is the new State apparatus that creates an even larger and perceived distance between the war “here” and the war “there,” both connecting us to them, as the operator is here and the target is there, while also making the distance more important as those unaffected by its violence often do not see the War on Terror. Individuals are not supposed to find the connections between the war on black and brown communities in the US and the war on Muslims everywhere. I read in a recent article by Mahroh Jahangiri on Feministing:

7 We are feeling horror, and we are going, Whoa Ferguson looks like the West Bank/Tahrir/ Baghdad, and we are recognizing that our police officers shouldn’t be using weapons made for soldiers and America shouldn’t look like Iraq or Palestine.… Palestine should not look like today’s Palestine nor Iraq like today’s Iraq. And the reason they do is not because they were born that way but because the military complex that does everything possible to destroy black communities here also kills people with impunity in Iraq and Palestine and everywhere else.7

Rather than stand by and watch the one-sided drone violence, I want to remind my reader of the people on the receiving end of all forms of State violence. Individuals who are gendered, sexualized, and racialized, who are labeled as thugs, criminals, terrorists, illegals, and whose humanities are erased by the power of the institutions that render them disposable via digital technologies like drones, Twitter, and fast paced online media outlets. The War on Terror is not across a border or an ocean. It is happening right here at home in the US. Drone operators kill Pakistanis, while police kill black people, and we must not see these violent acts and erasures of human life as unconnected.

The form of this collection fosters these connections, calling on my reader to make associations as you read. This body of work is partitioned into six sections: Vulnerability, Imagined Identities, Spectacles, Beyond the Frame, Eroticism, and The Body. Each section features essays, which are connected with one another by theme, but also are connected to essays across the themes, as each story speaks to another. This form allows you to start with any essay you want. The collection can be read in any order.

Imagined identities and digital disposability

7 Jahangiri, Mahroh. “The Problem with Calling for Demilitarization ‘of the Police.’” Feministing, March 2015. http://feministing.com/2015/02/26/the-problem-with-calling-for- demilitarization-of-the-police/.

How imagined is the terrorist identity? The term “imaginative geographies” coined by Edward Said in his famous Orientalism was used as a framework for critiquing what one might refer to today as Islamophobia, the hatred or fear of Muslims.8 Said uses the term “imagined” to describe Western perceptions of the East as a tool for the conquest of land in the Middle East. While deeply historically rooted in colonialism, I suggest that Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and homophobia all inform the imagined identity of whom the terrorist refers to in this moment.

I argue that identities of victims of the War on Terror are imagined, just as geographies of colonial conquests were imagined. These individuals are imagined and dehumanized as the objects of white Western fear and vulnerability, thus contributing to a treatment of human life as disposable. Throughout this collection, you will find stories about a number of individuals who have experienced State violence and with no legal repercussions. These individuals are deemed threatening due to their identities as Muslims, as immigrants, as targets of drone strikes, but also as black men, women, and gender non-conforming persons, trans persons, detainees who have been victims of torture and indefinite detention, and individuals with intersecting identities—essentially all those outside the status quo of white heteropatriarchy.

These identities are produced as different in order to secure the order of white heteropatriarchal supremacy. Dominant powers actively “other” those who fall outside the lines of conformity, of normality in order to maintain a capitalist, racist, sexist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, ablest White Supremacist State. The mere existence of individuals who are gendered, sexualized and racialized on the basis of their difference is deemed a crisis to State order. As “othered” individuals are deemed threatening to the status quo, apparatuses such as the military industrial complex, the

8 Edward Said, in his 1978 book Orientalism, used the terminology of “imaginative geographies” to critique what he called Orientalism—a way of seeing that imagines Arab people and cultures as backwards and uncivilized.

9 prison industrial complex, and the global police State maintain a project of whiteness, which ultimately treats racialized individuals as disposable.

How does a pervasive technological era foster this culture of disposability? Throughout my collection, I refer often to the drone as an apparatus that maintains abstract human-to- human relationships by existing between two individuals who are either acting violently or receiving violence. The drone erases the vulnerability of humanness, targets specific bodies deemed threatening by their very existence, and quarantines those individuals via the maintenance of a geographic distance between the operator and the target. Drone imagery, grainy and displaying individuals as shadows, furthers this abstractness.

I argue that because digital image culture and online media is central to the fast pace of our lives in this moment—the constant need to document ourselves on social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat—and the pace at which we consume this digital media allows people at the individual level to treat the deaths of threatening Others as disposable. The ease at which we are able to document and delete our lives online, our images, to create new identities for ourselves, and look at others’ photos and created identities, abstracts our relations with others. We are essentially creating disposable identities online for others to gaze upon. For instance, my Facebook is easily created, my online persona crafted very intentionally, looked at by friends, family, other activists, peers, my boss, and it is just as easily deleted.

The drone exists in this fast-paced digital culture as another technological tool—one of warfare—that fosters both the disposability of human life and the erasure of human vulnerability. Some are increasingly concerned about abstracting social relationships between one another due to the rise of technology. Individuals no longer have to meet face to face in order to stay connected. We are connected to one another all the time, but often at the expense of intimate relations with others. At this time, individuals are more and more accustomed to the simplicity that technology offers, so why not apply this same simplicity to modern warfare?

The problem with applying abstract human interactions to warfare lies in the dynamic of power that it creates. If being connected to others constantly comes at the expense of intimacy, then what does that look like in wartime when the enemy is already deemed disposable and subhuman? In this context, the increased use of drones removes a layer of vulnerability on both sides of the war. On the one hand, operators are not vulnerable because they never have to come face to face with the target of a drone’s missiles. On the other hand, the target is viewed as disposable and their life is not valuable.

That the drone exists in a time of fast paced digital image making and sharing, when online personas are created and deleted so easily, speaks to a growing culture of disposability. Everyone with access to a phone, computer, and Internet is able to consume violence and forget about it immediately after they step away from technology. US persons are not dying when drones are used for operations abroad, Americans are removed from war, and the victim of the drone is disposable. In this context, the drone upholds US power and dominance because Americans are not coming home in coffins. The disposability of the Other is almost inevitable for those who do not seek to humanize individuals most affected by State-sanctioned violence, and while this is not new, the speed and frequency of the drone makes this relation to Others all the more abstract.

Methods and timeline

This collection focuses on current events that have taken place in the months and years following 9/11 and the start of the War on Terror. Nevertheless, I choose to stay away from the language of “post-9/11” as this creates the illusion that we are past 9/11, as the US continues to give other countries their own 9/11 regularly—from Palestine to Syria to Iraq to Yemen to Pakistan. Many of the essays in this collection cover events from the past year within the news cycle, such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the protests in Ferguson, the incarceration of Jane Doe. There is a sense of notable urgency in the timeliness of these

11 events, which is linked to the speed at which drones are used and authorized by technology and the global surveillance network, but also the frequency at which they are used in the service of the larger War on Terror.

Each piece pairs an experience of State violence with a theoretical thinker. Many of my sources have been news publications, like The Nation, The Intercept, TomDispatch, Salon, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Feministing, Vice News, Russia Today, The Guardian, Jacobin, The New Yorker, Democracy Now!, The New York Times, Wired and others. Almost each case of violence about which I write is juxtaposed with theoretical thinkers including, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Johan Steyn, Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, Leo Chavez, Lisa Cacho, Lisa Guenther, Nicholas de Genova, Susan Sontag, Angela Davis, Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai, Dean Spade and Craig Willse.

While I have not and am unable to document every single thing that has taken place at the hands of the US since 9/11, these essays represent a number of violent cases that have been experienced by more individuals than those about whom I write in any particular essay. For instance, charging innocent Muslims with material support to terrorism, placing individuals in solitary confinement without trial, and torturing people in extralegal prisons, are not isolated to the one instance about which I document, but have been multiplied the world over

VULNERABILITY

September 22, 2014 The Drone, the Apparatus, the Human

What does a drone look like? What does a drone sound like? What’s in a name?

I started my Google search this afternoon with just one word: Drones. There were a number of results, which I organize into two categories: weaponized and surveillance drones, and toy drones. I searched for drones specifically in the context of the United States military. The pervasive theme that came through in many of the photos was that of the person and of humanness, which was strange to me at first considering the erasure of human life on both ends of drone violence.

Weaponized drones are those used for unmanned airstrikes, but also for surveillance. They are used for border enforcement at the US-Mexico border; they are Reaper drones and Predator drones. They have been used in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq. They are large in size, and often shown in photos carrying missiles, and they look scary because of the connotation associated with their use: someone is going to die. They have a specific shape that can be physically characterized as representative of “white Western phallic power,”9 as I discuss further in another essay.10

There is the toy drone. They are small and colorful: blue, orange, pink, red. Some have spidery legs. They might have cameras attached to them. They can be controlled from electronic devices like your phone or a remote control. The toy drone is produced as a commodity—it is a consumer good. It is a toy, the new model airplane. Your nephew might buy one, you might buy one, your filmmaker friend might buy one. Its uses vary from filming football games and fireworks, to spying on Dianne Feinstein, for cop-watch as one

9Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002). p. 137. 10 For more, read essay “On Nicknaming Predators,” page 86.

14 of my peers discusses,11 or for shooting a pornographic film. Nevertheless, the consumer drone is a distraction from drone use in the Global War on Terror, and it does not want to be called a drone because that would refer its owner back to those Reapers.12 Instead, we call them Quadcopters, Parrot Rolling Spiders, or Phantoms.

The common theme among the various drones I found in my online search is the human. There is the human who approves the kill list, the human operating the drone, the human on the other end of the drone, but also the human who has the power to use the tool as a creative medium, or for subversive purposes against the State. In all cases, there is an implied human interaction with the “apparatus.”

Giorgio Agamben designates “Apparatus” as that in which—and through which—one realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being.13 For this reason, apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification because they must produce their subject. Agamben discusses the cell phone as an apparatus that “has made the relationship between people all the more abstract.”14 Through this framework, I understand the drone as an apparatus that facilitates a break in human-to-human relations.

Drones hovering over individuals—in Pakistan, for instance—produce their subject. The person below the drone responds to its sound and its existence by navigating their environment in specific ways. The drone hovering above a crowd of people in itself assumes that the individuals on the ground are a threat, are militants—it would not be there if they were not threatening subject-objects. The people below are subjects produced by the presence of the machine, while they are simultaneously objectified. They are objects

11 Larson, Alec. “Doing Cop-Watch with Drones.” Doing Cop-Watch with Drones. Accessed April 17, 2015. https://thealeclarson.wordpress.com/. 12 I have written about the commodification of drones in an ethnographic paper on student “slactivism” against drone warfare and in a shorter article. You can read this at The Black Sheep Journal, “Why aren’t student activists talking about drone warfare?” 13 Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 1-24. 14 Ibid, 16.

15 of surveillance, of disciplining. They are respondents to the gazing apparatus, which I explain in more depth in a later essay.15

Returning to the many actors involved in a drone strike, the apparatus is what connects all of these individuals. By Agamben’s definition, “apparatus” is the network that is established between a heterogeneous set of elements, that always has a concrete strategic function and is located in a power relation. It appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge. In this case it is the drone itself that creates the intersecting, abstract relationship between the many individuals involved in their use.

Agamben explains that surveillance by means of video—or in this case drone imagery— transforms the public space into the interior of an immense prison. Drones take the “public” out of public space and are used to maintain order. In this case, surveillance by the drone creates a specific and appropriate context in which people mobilize and navigate the space that the machine inhabits.

We must keep in mind the abstract human-to-human relationship here because drones need people to maintain them, they need people in order to function properly, they need people to operate them, they need people to properly geolocate them, and they need people to determine which people are going to be targeted by the machine’s missiles. While the drone only makes human-to-human relationships all the more abstract, people are essential to its continued operational functioning.

The drone exists in a digital age where people focus more on devices and less on one another, a maintenance of docile yet seemingly free bodies. Drones do not see the vulnerability of their targets; they do not have feelings, or minds that consider morals or ethics. They do not see the humanness of their targets. The more they are used, the less their operators will see that the people they kill are human. Actors of the State who

15 If interested, please see essay “On the NSA, Privacy, and the Home,” page 76.

16 participate in the drone program, as well as those who standby and watch without questioning it are themselves becoming drones. Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, there are individuals who purchase consumer drones— the Quadcopters and the Phantoms—and use them for subversive purposes against the State. They use them for cop-watch, or to create artivism16 to spread awareness about drones’ violent uses. There are those with computational ability who have hacked the devices. As Wired reported in 2011, a computer virus hit a US drone fleet, exemplifying just how much this machine’s ability to work both depends on human maintenance, but can also be hindered by human interjections.17

In our increasingly digital society, we must continue to remember the vulnerability of human life. Drone warfare only assists in its continued erasure.

16 Artivism refers to activism through creative and artistic means. 17 Shachtman, Noah. “Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet.” WIRED, October 7, 2011. http://www.wired.com/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/.

17 September 16, 2014 Drone Imagery in the Digital Era

I was reading The Intercept last week and saw an article about US CENTCOM18 posting videos of their airstrikes in Iraq and Syria to their YouTube channel.19 CENTCOM then Tweeted the link.20

I watched the footage, and found it shocking that it was even allowed to be posted online, specifically because so much is hidden from US persons in the name of national security.

Both the Department of State and CENTCOM have taken to Twitter to post and link to videos of airstrikes. I do not believe, however, that this type of video would ever be posted about a drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia, maybe because these countries are

18 US Central Command (CENTCOM) is one of the unified commands in the United States military. It covers the “central” area of the globe, which is made up of 20 countries: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. 19 Currier, Cora. “Have You Watched This Airstrike in Iraq?” The Intercept. Accessed April 18, 2015. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/watched-airstrike-iraq/. 20 U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). "Have you seen the latest airstrike videos from operations against #ISIL in #Iraq? http://t.co/G4ID0NAJ0H". 05 Sep 2014, 7:22AM ET. Tweet.

18 outside of US military jurisdiction. This means that the United States is not in a declared war with Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia.

I wonder about the difference in context between the operations against ISIS and those against individuals in countries with whom the US is not at war. For instance, are drones so condemned in Pakistan that US departments do not brag about their use in Pakistan on social media? Or has hunting ISIS become a sport worth watching on Twitter, the next round of Americans uniting against terrorism? Twitter is clearly a social site for propaganda.

What is the significance of showing drone imagery? What do drone images mean to viewers? Image culture is a pervasive part of our technological world—for those who have access to it. Individuals are constantly documented in public spaces with security cameras that generally go unseen. However, we also send quick, frequent Snapchats and post all of our photos to social media websites like Facebook and Instagram. We are constantly documented while simultaneously documenting ourselves as part of a culture of fast image making and sharing. How is watching a quick video of a drone or airstrike any different? Perhaps it is part of what defines this digital culture of images.

There is still something to those drone images. There is something unreal about them. The grainy texture, the abstraction of people to heat signatures, and the aerial perspective all maintain a structure of power that distances the viewer from the viewed. There is the apparatus—the drone itself—and the frame. There is the interaction between the viewer and the object, which is the operator to the drone, and then the drone to the receiver of violence, or the person being killed. There is never any relation between two humans. The operator is never face-to-face with the object of his gaze. There is a kind of dehumanization that results from this relationship, a de-subjectification of the human on the other end of the apparatus, who essentially becomes an object of voyeuristic gazing.21

21 To read more on this topic, see essay “On the NSA, Privacy, and the Home,” page 76.

19 Giorgio Agamben explains “apparatus” as a set of practices and mechanisms that aim to face an urgent need and obtain an effect that is more or less immediate.22 He explains it as a network that is established between a heterogeneous set of elements, with a strategic function that is always located in a power relation. It can be technological, juridical, military, or all three in many cases, as each informs the other. Agamben uses Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault to position the apparatus as a set of practices, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, and control a population. They aim to create—through a series of practices and discourses—docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and “freedom” as subjects in the very process of their desubjectification.23 It is within this theoretical framework that I situate the drone as an apparatus of the State, one that controls and governs bodies through a panoptic gaze; one that produces specific subjects while simultaneously desubjectifying those same bodies in the process of removing their humanness.

One of the most effective aspects of using the drone—effective in its use as an apparatus that maintains State power—is in that very erasure of the human-to-human relationship. Judith Butler considers Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the “face” to explain the ways in which individuals make moral claims upon one another.24 The face conveys vulnerability; it is what one cannot kill. Levinas writes, “To be in relation with the other face to face is to be unable to kill.”25 The face represents the human and our vulnerabilities. Butler explains then how the face serves a contradictory double purpose—one of humanization, while simultaneously of dehumanization.

When considering the (de)humanization of individuals then, Butler explains that those who gain self-representation are human, whereas “those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than

22 Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 1-24. 23 Ibid. 24 Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life” in Precarious Life The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (New York; London: Verso, 2004) 128-151. 25 Ibid, 138.

20 human, or not regarded at all.”26 Butler emphasizes the fact that there is actually a loss of the human once it is captured in the frame, by the image. To relate this back to the apparatus, or drone imagery, and to the face-to-face interaction that it replaces, the frame through which the image is transmitted disconnects the operator from the humanness of the individual on the receiving end of violence. There is no face, and so there is no human. There is no self-representation for the target, and so this individual is not human; he is less than human. There is no vulnerability in the face that does not exist.

To return to the question of US government departments sharing footage and imagery of airstrikes in Iraq: this allows an audience to watch a sort of “hunting” as a sport or a game and to forget about the humanness. The capability of a US audience “here” to watch footage of the strikes going on “there” raises the question of interactivity with the subject or object of the hunt. Those being hunted are not human.

26 Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life” in Precarious Life The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (New York; London: Verso, 2004) p. 141.

21 October 15, 2014 Marriage Industrial

I read in an August 1, 2014 article of The New York Times: The next time you go to a wedding, be sure your hair is done, your lipstick is on, and your Jockeys aren’t sticking out of your pants. You never know if a drone is lurking in the sky about to zoom in and take your picture. No, not those heavily armed aircraft that the United States military uses to patrol the skies over Afghanistan and beyond. (Emphasis added)27

As if to brush off what those heavily armed aircraft are capable of. Referring to every other country—Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine—both “patrolled” and bombed by drone missiles as “beyond” erases the struggles of those living below their gaze.

On June 21, 2014 Sean Patrick Maloney got married in Cold Spring, New York. Among attendees was a drone used to photograph the ceremony. No need to worry—no one was harmed in the process, except for maybe Maloney’s re-election campaign as a Democratic representative after potentially violating Federal Aviation Administration regulations for having a drone at his wedding.28

When a drone flies over a wedding in Yemen, it is not because a wedding photographer was hired to take photographs. As many as 12 civilians were killed in a December, 2013 drone strike in Yemen. Democracy Now! reported, “A US drone targeted vehicles that were part of a wedding procession going toward the groom’s village outside the central Yemeni

27 Rohrlich, Marianne. “Bird? Plane? No, It’s the Wedding Photographer.” The New York Times, August 1, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/fashion/weddings/bird-plane-no-its-the- wedding-photographer.html. 28 Ibid.

22 city of Rad’a.”29 Of the 12 men killed in the attack, all were civilians, all were between the ages of 20 and 65, and 15 others were wounded.

The wedding attendees in Yemen witnessed a tragedy—the loss of life during a celebration of new life. The wedding attendees in Cold Spring, New York only worried about whether their hair and makeup was “picture perfect.”

December 12, 2013 a US drone launched 4 Hellfire missiles at a wedding procession.

12 people were killed.

Hussein Muhammad Saleh al-`Amri, 37

Muhammad Ali Mes`ad al-`Amri, 34

Ali Abdullah Muhammad al-Tisi, 36

Zaidan Muhammad al-`Amri, 34

Shaif Abdullah Mohsen Mabkhut al-`Amri, 22

Hussein Muhammad al-Tomil al-Tisi, 65

Motlaq Hamoud Muhammad al-Tisi, 41

Saleh Abdullah Mabkhut al-`Amri, 30

`Aref Ahmad Muhammad al-Tisi, 28

Saleh Mes`ad Abdullah al-`Amri, 30

Mes`ad Dhaifallah Hussein al-`Amri, 25

Salem Muhammad Ali al-Tisi, 31

29 “Turning a Wedding Into a Funeral: U.S. Drone Strike in Yemen Killed as Many as 12 Civilians.” Democracy Now!. Accessed April 18, 2015. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/21/turning_a_wedding_into_a_funeral.

23 “We were in a wedding, but all of a sudden it became a funeral. …We have nothing, not even tractors or other machinery. We work with our hands. Why did the United States do this to us?”

—Abdullah Mabkhut al-`Amri, 60, groom.30

In a piece titled, “Marriage Will Never Set Us Free” Dean Spade and Craig Willse31 write about civil marriage as an institution of social control that governments use for the regulation of sexuality and family formation. They specifically write about marriage in the context of queer rights and unpacking the rhetoric that same-sex marriage will free individuals who identify as queer.

The writers frame marriage as “a technology of social control, exploitation, and dispossession wrapped in a satin ribbon of sexist and heteropatriarchal romance mythology.”32 The authors then outline marriage as a tool of anti-black racism, of colonialism, of xenophobia and immigration enforcement, of gendered social control, and about the protection of private property.

In the article, Spade and Willse write:33 Same sex marriage advocacy has been harmful just like other political strategies that seek inclusion in a violent state apparatus—such as the fight for gay and lesbian [and women] military service. Inclusion strategies like these valorize the things they seek inclusion in.

Both the institutions of marriage and the military are apparatuses of power and social control that operate within systems of whiteness, colonialism, racism, sexism,

30 Tayler, Letta, and Human Rights Watch (Organization). A Wedding That Became a Funeral: US Drone Attack on Marriage Procession in Yemen, 2014. p. 11. 31 Dean Spade is an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law and founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Craig Willse is an assistant professor of cultural studies at George Mason University and a faculty advisor for Students Against Israeli Apartheid. 32 Spade, Dean, and Craig Willse. “Marriage Will Never Set Us Free.” Organizing Upgrade, September 6, 2013. http://www.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/modules-menu/beyond- capitalism/item/1002-marriage-will-never-set-us-free. 33 Ibid.

24 heteropatriarchy, and xenophobia. When a US drone crashes a wedding in Yemen, this is about the State continuing to determine who is allowed to marry. This operates within a frame of controlling racialized and sexualized bodies.

As I have written elsewhere,34 US military operations in the Global War on Terror—such as torture practices and the use of drones—have consisted of racializing Muslims, and sexualizing them as “faggots” in order to feminize and render them powerless. In this manner, the intentionality of a drone at a wedding in Yemen is a display of institutional racial, gendered, sexual, xenophobic, and colonial social control.

A May 13, 2013 drone memo, in accordance with the laws of war, states four standards for the use of a militarized drone:35 1. No civilian casualties: targeted strikes are only made when there is “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” 2. Ensure target is present: The White House Fact Sheet said there must be a “near certainty” that the target is present. 3. Capture target when feasible: “Our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute” rather than kill, Obama said. 4. Target must pose an imminent threat: Obama said the US only carries out strikes against those who pose a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people.”

It is uncertain who the target of the wedding strike was, but 12 civilians were the victims. None of the wedding attendees were engaged in military operations, but even if they were, would this warrant assassination?

I presume that the quick and easy use of drones will only encourage the US to steer away from following the four standards of use of a militarized drone, especially because targets are treated as both less than human, and as disposable. How many people killed in US drone strikes have passed the standards of the screening process outlined in the above memo?

34 See “On Framing the Other,” page 62 and “On Nicknaming Predators,” page 86. 35 Tayler, Letta, and Human Rights Watch (Organization). A Wedding That Became a Funeral: US Drone Attack on Marriage Procession in Yemen, 2014. p. 26.

IMAGINED IDENTITIES

November 13, 2014 Invisible

On May 31, 2014, Bowe Bergdahl was released to the United States in exchange for five Taliban prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay Prison. Bergdahl is a US Army soldier who was held captive by the Haqqani network—a Taliban-aligned Islamist insurgent group—in Afghanistan since June 2009. After the swap, much of the focus shifted to the legality of the exchange, with many claims that the Obama administration broke the law by not notifying Congress of the decision at least 30 days in advance.

The five Taliban prisoners were released to Qatar.

Many critics held the notion that the swap was dangerous—an incentive to capture more Americans in order to facilitate the release of more prisoners.

Consider some numbers, though: 779 men and boys have been detained at Guantánamo Bay Prison since 2002.36 Hundreds were sold to the US by local authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan for a bounty.37 122 men remain at Guantánamo. 50 of those remaining have been cleared for release, many for several years. 150 million dollars a year is what the Defense Department pays to run the facilities.38

36 Kurnaz, Murat. “Former Gitmo Detainee: ‘It Is Time to Prosecute Those Responsible for My Torture.’” The Nation, November 12, 2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/190433/former- gitmo-detainee-it-time-prosecute-those-responsible-my-torture. 37 Ibid. 38 “Guantanamo Bay Naval Station Fast Facts - CNN.com.” CNN. Accessed April 18, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/09/world/guantanamo-bay-naval-station-fast-facts/index.html.

28 Individuals were illegally captured, some kidnapped in night raids and rendered to Guantánamo; some were sold to the US for a bounty, as indicated above; detainees have been subject to inhumane treatment once in detention, often only to obtain false confessions and information. Some were stripped of their citizenship before being sent to Guantánamo. All are stripped of their humanity. None are offered a writ of habeas corpus.39 They are rightless and treated under law as stateless.

Why were so many people worried about the legality of Obama’s swap and not about the extralegal practices that have taken place at the prison since its opening in January 2002? Are these men, many of whom have been cleared for release or have yet to be tried, exempt from the right to be human solely because they are detained under the title of “terrorists”?

Murat Kurnaz, a recently released Guantánamo prisoner told The Nation:40 At Guantánamo, I learned what fellow human beings are capable of doing to each other even as they pledge allegiance to the world’s oldest democracy. At Guantánamo, I learned that there are places in this world where innocence and human rights don’t matter.

Johan Steyn explains this lack of human rights as a norm for even the most liberal democracies throughout history.41 In the case of the War on Terror Steyn discusses the legal status of Taliban affiliates detained at Guantánamo as not covered by the Third Geneva Conventions, specifically because they were not wearing uniforms on the

39 Habeas corpus, in Latin, literally means, “that you have a body.” “A writ of habeas corpus is used to bring a prisoner or other detainee…before the court to determine if the person’s imprisonment or detention is lawful. In the US system, federal courts can use the writ of habeas corpus to determine if a state’s detention of a prisoner is valid. A habeas petition proceeds as a civil action against the State agent…who holds the defendant in custody. It can also be used to examine any extradition processes used, amount of bail, and the jurisdiction of the court” (From Cornell University of Law Wex Legal Dictionary, http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/habeas_corpus) 40 Kurnaz, Murat. “Former Gitmo Detainee: ‘It Is Time to Prosecute Those Responsible for My Torture.’” The Nation, November 12, 2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/190433/former- gitmo-detainee-it-time-prosecute-those-responsible-my-torture. 41 Steyn, Johan. “Guantanamo Bay: The Legal Black Hole.” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 53, no. 1 (January 2004): 1–15.

29 battlefield. The Third Geneva does not protect individuals who are not representing or represented by a State, so by not having uniforms they are unprotected by the law.

Steyn goes on to demonstrate the literal Legal Black Hole that is Guantánamo with a number of examples. Just three days after the attacks on 9/11, President Bush declared a state of emergency and under his jurisdiction all individuals who were captured and detained at Guantánamo were denied prisoner of war status. This is especially important to keep in mind in terms of detainees’ access to legal rights. Steyn explains that the purpose of holding individuals at Guantánamo was to have them beyond US soil and beyond rule of law, with no access to habeas corpus “to determine whether their detention is even arguably justified.”42 The fact that all detainees were stripped of prisoner of war status, partnered with the declaration of a state of emergency, only solidified the case to deprive them of any rights whatsoever.

Guantánamo is no exception to the rule of US wartime hysteria. It is the rule. It is a continuation of United States policy that is applied in the name of national security. Consider the detention of 112,000 Japanese living on the West Coast—at least 70,000 were American citizens—during World War II.43 They were targeted and detained solely because of their race. The legal black hole that is Guantánamo is also not specific to conditions at the prison; it is the framework for the institution that is America’s Global War on Terror.

Consider: On January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama was inaugurated. On January 22, 2009, he signed an executive order to close Guantánamo within a year.44 On January 23, 2009, he authorized his first drone strike.

42 Steyn, Johan. “Guantanamo Bay: The Legal Black Hole.” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 53, no. 1 (January 2004): 9. 43 For more, read essay “Veterans Day and American Exceptionalism,” page 55. 44 You can read the Executive Order -- Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities at “Closure Of Guantanamo Detention Facilities.” The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/node/702.

30 October 30, 2014 marked the 401st CIA drone strike in Pakistan, and the 350th under Obama—a strike that killed 4-7 in a house in South Waziristan—as compared to Bush’s 51 approved CIA strikes between 2004 and 2009. I know about these strikes because I actively seek them out. But these are the lives we are not supposed to care about. They will not be reported. They will not be televised.

Since October 30, there have been five more strikes:45 Nov. 4, 2014: 10 people are killed in Radda (Yemen) Nov. 5, 2014: 5 bodies are “obliterated beyond recognition” (Yemen) Nov. 6, 2014: 2 men riding a motorcycle are killed (Yemen) Nov. 11, 2014: a drone is fired at a house killing 4-7 (Pakistan) Nov. 12, 2014: 7 people are killed while gathered under a group of trees (Yemen)

Keep in mind that Yemen and Pakistan are both outside the jurisdiction of United States military operations, meaning the United States is not explicitly at war with either. Such is the black hole of legality in a time of wartime hysteria, one that becomes the norm, and one that is institutionalized and capitalized on via the War on Terror.

Today is November 13, 2014, and Guantánamo Bay prison is still open.

While the detention rate at Guantánamo has remained somewhat static over the past few years—with releases every so often—the number of drone strikes has skyrocketed under the Obama administration.46 The new policy seems to be less incarceration and more assassination of brown people, an extralegal policy that is equally murky in its jurisdiction.

Both indefinite detention and drone use are extralegal forms of racialized violence that exist within a legal black hole. A black hole that maintains State power.

45 The following figures are written as recorded by the Metadata+ iPhone application. 46 For information on detainees released from Guantánamo Bay, visit http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees.

31 January 28, 2015 Charlie Hebdo: The Case for Satire or Racism?

Why is it that when an attack occurs in a Western nation and the perpetrators are perceived as Muslim, it is “terrorism” by default? Why is it that such acts of violence are so quickly attributed to religion and religious extremism—namely Islam? The West often gives to Muslims and violent acts perpetrated by Muslims the names of “barbarism,” “evil,” “insanity,” but what does such terminology imply? This terminology invokes a narrative that those acting in such a way are subhuman.

This narrative of terrorism, as determined by the West, fails to account for any social, historical, political, and economic context, which might prompt retaliatory actions by anyone in opposition to imperial occupation. I find myself wondering how people in Western nations can continue to ask, “How could they hate us?” especially as the US continues to destroy families, homes, and lives in countries about which it knows very little. What is a War on Terror and how does this language determine the way we are meant to think about who is on the receiving end of violence?

After the attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, I was confronted with a number of related thoughts. First, as someone who hopes to work in journalism, I thought about the way in which this attack was framed as an attack on free speech. And yet, I was provoked to think twice as hard about the attacks on my free speech that my own government commits in the form of online surveillance, or the collection of metadata, ultimately prompting moments of self-censorship where I might take a second to think further about the consequences of posting my words online.

Second, I thought about the line between satire and racism. Satire is the use of humor or irony to criticize a political vice. As a literary and performance movement, satire for social commentary emerged in the 16th century in Europe and has been used since then as a way

32 to expose and criticize those who hold power. I take issue with labeling the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as political satire because the targeted Muslim population is already stigmatized as being in relation to terrorism. Had the cartoons represented Judaism, they would not have been viewed as satirical.

One reason for this is the Gayssot Act, voted for in July 1990, which criminalizes the denial of crimes against humanity, including speech denying the Holocaust. The purpose of this law was the repression of racism and anti-Semitism. If we are to consider France’s history of brutal colonization of Muslim countries, such as Lebanon,47 Syria, Morocco, and Algeria as well as the legacy of xenophobia towards Muslims in France that continues today, we should be careful to think of Charlie Hebdo’s racist caricatures as “only satire.” Charlie Hebdo was not using humor to criticize a political vice in this context.

Glenn Greenwald tackled the question of racism, satire, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia well in a piece he wrote for The Intercept in response to the many posts in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo following the attack.48 He explained how it is a question of free speech and not hate speech when the population who is represented in “satirical cartoons” is one that a larger public shares similar sentiments towards: of fear, of hate, of disgust. How many of the Charlie Hebdo free speech defenders would claim that white supremacist organizations like the KKK, or Christian fundamentalists are also terrorists? What constitutes terrorism and what is deemed a “justified” act of violence?

These questions lead me back to today’s narrative of terrorism that focuses on religious radicalism, namely Islam. Immediately following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, those reporting about and speaking of the attack attributed it to barbaric Muslims fighting in the name of Islam. Framing this attack in such a way, however, leaves out the history of

47 Lebanon’s religious population is more diverse, with a Muslim majority (54%) following a large population of Christians (40%). 48 Greenwald, Glenn. “In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons.” The Intercept. Accessed March 5, 2015. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/solidarity- charlie-hebdo-cartoons/.

33 oppressive policies and practices, imperialist conquests and occupations of the Middle East by the Western world. France is no exception. Speaking about the attack as an act of Muslim barbarism also paints a narrow picture of a population—there are over 1.8 billion Muslims in the world and they are not all terrorists.

Muslims fighting back in many different contexts is associated with terrorism. Chris Kyle, the unfortunately romanticized Navy SEAL about whom the film American Sniper is based describes his first kill of a woman carrying a grenade as Marines attacked her village:49 I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting. Savage, despicable, evil—that’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy savages.

Is it savage to fight a military occupation of your village?

Consider another recent event. On December 16, 2014, nine gunmen affiliated with the Taliban entered a school in Peshawar (Pakistan) and murdered 145 people, 132 of which were children. People around the world were outraged, saddened, and heartbroken over this attack, and this emotional response is not misplaced. However, it would seem commensurate to also mourn the lives of innocent children—labeled as alleged militants— who are lost to US drones in Pakistan on a more regular basis. This is sadly not the case. When the Taliban kills young children this violence is not justified, but when the US engages in the same violence it is somehow overlooked.

The US strategically named its war a “War on Terror.” First, terror has no geographic locus so there is “justifiable” reason to occupy any country. Second, referring to the enemy as “terror” means that anytime anyone fights back it is automatically an act of terrorism.

49 Allton, Janet. “Noam Chomsky Blasts ‘American Sniper’ and the Media That Glorify It.” Truthout, January 27, 2015. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28764-noam-chomsky-blasts- american-sniper-and-the-media-that-glorifies-it.

34 With Western nations engaged in this so-called war, I am always baffled when these same nations are confused when those with whom they are at war fight back. This is a war. When victims of mostly one-sided violence fight back, their actions are “terrorism,” because of how this war has been named. They are terrorists because of the identity they are given. And such is the paradox of a war without end, or endless until the “enemy” ceases to fight back. In fact, at the pace the US has been taking lives of people who cannot fight back for the past thirteen years, can this even be called a war?

I am not condoning the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. They were tragic. This was an act of violence that cannot be justified, and there is nothing respectable about targeting and murdering a group of journalists. I am also not suggesting that there are not terrorist organizations in this world that cause tragedy and pain. But these terrorist organizations most frequently target people in the countries they are already in: the Taliban in Pakistan, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and so on. There is no global outrage over that violence.

Think about other acts of violence inflicted on these same populations—people who are deemed exploitable, vulnerable, and disposable—by the United States and its allies in the name of fighting terrorism. Think about the emergence of groups like al Qaeda and ISIS and how they come to be. I want us to break away from concluding that all Muslims are bad because Islam is framed as a violent religion.

I also urge us all to continually look for the names and lives of those who will not be in the 24/7 news cycle—for instance, the 10 people killed by a drone in a country with which the US is not even at war.50

50 To read more about this drone strike, see “First Worldism,” page 67.

35 February 5, 2015 Free Speech to Terror Threat

“[T]his trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim civilians, which is that Muslims should defend their lands from foreign invaders—Soviets, Americans, or Martians. This is what I believe. It's what I've always believed, and what I will always believe.” — Tarek Mehanna in a written statement from a federal prison51

Tarek Mehanna is a US citizen. He was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Massachusetts. He is a pharmacist. He is the son of Egyptian immigrant parents and is now 33 years old. Mehanna is deeply committed to his Muslim faith. He has been critical of US foreign policy and has vocalized his belief that Muslims in countries being occupied and ravaged by the US have the right to defend themselves against violence. He translated religious texts online and subtitled publicly available “jihadi” videos.52 He briefly traveled to Yemen for two weeks in 2004 for language and religious instruction.

In 2005, the FBI began monitoring Tarek Mehanna. When they approached him directly, he refused to be an FBI informant. In 2008, he was charged with providing false information to the FBI. In 2009 he was charged with material support to terrorism as a result of translating the jihadi materials. After a six-week trial in April 2012, he was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for terrorism related activities. There is nothing that links him specifically to terrorism.

CNN recently tried to explain the difficulties in labeling certain crimes as “terrorism” in the wake of the execution of three Muslim students by a white male in North Carolina.

51 “Another Miscarriage of Justice: The Sentencing of Tarek Mehanna.” MuslimMatters.org. Accessed April 18, 2015. http://muslimmatters.org/2012/04/16/35976/. 52 Akbar, Amna. “How Tarek Mehanna Went to Prison for a Thought Crime.” The Nation, December 31, 2013. http://www.thenation.com/article/177750/how-tarek-mehanna-went-prison- thought-crime.

36 They wrote: The feds have a very specific definition of when something is an act of domestic terrorism. It has to have three characteristics: an act that takes place in the United States, that's dangerous to human life, and is intended to intimidate civilians or affect government policy by "mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping."53

Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for terrorism related activities and met none of the above qualifications of this “very specific definition.” It is easy to convict an individual of terrorism when they fit the image of the War on Terror’s “terrorist,” or when the State is able to build a narrative of the individual who might fit the profile. The general population is so afraid, so docile, and so loyal to the State that they are perhaps less likely to fight for the fair treatment of all US citizens—Muslims included—and to comply with the State to ensure their own safety.

Tarek Mehanna is currently in a Communication Management Unit (CMU). In 2006 and 2008, the Bureau of Prisons created two Communication Management Units—one in Indiana and the other in Illinois. Their sole purpose is to limit the communication of terrorist inmates by harsh regulation of visitation, mail, and phone calls. Visitation is limited to two hours twice per month with no contact—visitors must be in a separate room than the detainee.54 Mail from anyone except for lawyers and courts is read, copied, and evaluated before the detainee is allowed to view it.55 Phone calls are allowed once weekly for fifteen minutes and only in English unless permission is granted ten days in advance.56

53 Brumfield, Ben. “Chapel Hill Slayings: When Is a Crime a ‘Hate Crime?’ - CNN.com.” CNN, February 13, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/12/us/chapel-hill-shooting-hate-crime- explainer/index.html. 54 Van Bergen, Jennifer. “Documents Show New Secretive US Prison Program Isolating Muslim, Middle Eastern Prisoners.” The Raw Story, February 16, 2007. http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Documents_show_new_secretive_new_US_0216.html. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

37 Seventy percent of prisoners in Communication Management Units are Muslim, according to a piece by Molly Crabapple.57 And so it seems that, yet again, terrorism is synonymous with Islam, or the fear of Muslims. Mehanna is guilty of exercising his free speech and his religion—believing that Muslims have the right to fight foreign occupation, and practicing his Muslim faith—rights that are granted to him by the Constitution of the United States of America. In fact, these rights are protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution. As a US citizen, Mehanna’s conviction is in direct violation of his rights. Why is it that more people did not and have not jumped to defend the free speech of Tarek Mehanna?

Judith Butler discusses the suspension of the law as an instrument of power.58 She explains how, under the rubric of “terrorism,” an individual is not granted legal rights. The law—in this state of exception during wartime hysteria—becomes a model to be consulted, but never a mandatory framework for action.59 In other words, the law exists as a suggestion. Butler poses the question then, are these illegal combatants or is this illegal detention? While she theorizes on indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay Prison, there is a connection between the suspension of legal rights of detainees at Guantánamo and those in CMUs.

Tarek Mehanna’s words, thoughts, and opinions are unpopular to the US status quo. His faith is unpopular. But he was imprisoned for what is a “thought crime.” Mehanna never engaged in any act of violence and that is important to keep in mind. No one—regardless of politics, religion, or race—should be criminalized for their speech. However, in this case, the many layers of Mehanna’s identity intersect to create what is the “perfect threat,” or an example of what is a “bad Muslim,” one that serves a dual purpose, first for the State’s management of a larger population, and subsequently for discipline at the level of the

57 Crabapple, Molly. “The United States Wants the World to Forget These Prisoners.” Creative Time Reports, July 21, 2014. http://creativetime.org/reports/2014/07/21/molly-crabapple-us- wants-world-to-forget-communications-management-unit-prisoners/. 58 Butler, Judith. “Indefinite Detention” in Precarious Life The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (New York; London: Verso, 2004): 50-100. 59 Ibid.

38 individual. Tarek Mehanna is one example of how power is both acted on and through an individual for this dual purpose of governing. He is religious, but he is Muslim. He is politically vocal, but in a way that is not popular in the “post-9/11” white heteronormative US narrative.60 He is racialized as a subject to be feared.

How is it that this innocent person would be selected as a subject that power is acted upon—but also through—so harshly? Michel Foucault explains governmentality as a set of practices by which subjects are governed.61 In this case, the subjects to be governed are the masses, a larger population of individuals. This is the first purpose of Mehanna’s criminality. Governmentality is the “ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific…power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.”62 So if we are to focus on simply the target and the instrument, we can understand governmentality as the exercise of power over a population that is controlled by mechanisms of security, which will trickle down to a sort of self-disciplining at the individual level. This is the second purpose of Mehanna’s criminality.

In other words, Tarek Mehanna is the image of a subject to be feared by, broadly, white America. His identity—and that he openly acts within this role—as an Egyptian Muslim who is critical of the United States is what makes him threatening. Thus, by criminalizing him as a “terrorist,” the State is able to maintain control of a population of Americans who are disciplined by fear of what is produced by the State as “other.” Further, at the individual level, Mehanna’s criminality serves as an example to American Muslims of what could

60 I have written about US responses to 9/11 as aggressive militarized heterosexual patriotism. For instance, this is particularly relevant to images of Osama bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building directly after 9/11, the sexual abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the American occupation of Iraq, and more recently the use of drones as a tool of “white Western phallic power” (Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai). For more, read essay “On Nicknaming Predators,” page 86. 61 Foucault, Michel. “1 February 1978.” In Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978, Picador., 87–114. New York, NY: Picador Reading Group, 2009. 62 Ibid, 108.

39 happen should one act in a similar way. His imprisonment and criminality essentially create a mechanism of self-disciplining so as not to become a criminal “other.” What we have here is Tarek Mehanna’s dual purpose for the State’s management: first to instill fear of the Other and then fear of identifying with what is “other.”

The apparatuses of security that control populations are a set of tactics or instruments, and I consider the following as some of these apparatuses: the law, the police, the prison, the military, and the media. I suggest that these apparatuses of security control different—but sometimes overlapping—mass populations and that together they function to secure State power over the masses. These mechanisms of security are partially what create the relationship between State power and populations or individuals to be governed. In other words, the relationship between the State and the people is the law, those who uphold the law, those upon whom the law is exercised, and those who communicate these ties.

However, different populations are acted upon more harshly than others, as the case of Tarek Mehanna illustrates. The law is never objectively enforced on an individual, and race is one technology that determines or distinguishes between how populations will be governed. Mehanna is the perfect example of what could happen should individuals— deemed threatening by the State—exercise their rights. He is Egyptian, Muslim, loudly critical of the US, and the intersections of his identities are what make him a threat.

40 February 20, 2015 Terror of “Illegality”

Yestel Velazquez picked up his truck from an auto shop in Kenner, Louisiana. He told The Nation’s Zoë Carpenter about the men “in plainclothes and bulletproof vests that said Police…getting out of the [unmarked] cars.”63 He was lined up with employees and customers at the auto shop—all of them Latino—and was told to press his fingertips to a machine. Yestel was arrested and detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center in Basile, Louisiana. His only crime was having been deported once. As of August 2014, he was granted a one-year stay, telling Carpenter:64 [If I was deported] they would be tearing [my family] apart and frustrating the lives of our children… We came to work, and we don’t ask for handouts. We’ve done the work that nobody wants to do. There may be people out there who are against us, but they don’t know who we are. They should know we are hardworking people—and families.

Yestel is one of many victims of racial profiling in Louisiana. New Orleans police have often created probable cause to call in ICE officers and conduct stop and frisk style raids in Latino neighborhoods. Carpenter reports, “Immigrants reported that agents were entering their homes without permission…. Agents rounded up whole groups of people at Bible study groups, soccer fields and other public spaces in Latino neighborhoods—and used the fingerprinting machines to figure out who had a criminal record.”65 This is one piece of the preventative counterterrorism puzzle in the United States’ institutionalized Global War on Terror.

In New Orleans, this program is known as the Criminal Alien Removal Initiative (CARI). Created in 2012, CARI is supposed to focus government resources on the removal of

63 Carpenter, Zoë. “How the Government Created ‘Stop-and-Frisk for Latinos.’” The Nation, September 3, 2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/181477/how-government-created-stop-and- frisk-latinos. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid.

41 undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. However, it has become a series of tactics to increase the number of deportations—a quota system of racially profiling Latinos and taking their prints in hopes of finding individuals with criminal records. This is not the only program of the sort. For instance, ICE is also running a National Fugitive Operations Program to reduce the “fugitive alien” population across the country. Fugitive alien is defined as “an alien who has failed to leave the United States based upon a final order of removal, deportation or exclusion, or who has failed to report to ICE after receiving notice to do so.” The Fact Sheet detailing the program has since been removed.

What is especially important in these programs is the emphasis on the “fugitive.” Defined as a person who has escaped or is in hiding to avoid arrest or persecution, the term fugitive incites the image of a violent criminal. “Fugitive” is hardly a proper term to define individuals coming across the US border to seek work or escape violence in their home countries, victims of economic policies that have created for them precarious situations.

Who funds the CARI and Fugitive Ops programs? On November 25, 2002, the United States formed the Department of Homeland Security in response to attacks on September 11, 2001. The DHS formally opened its doors on March 1, 2003.66 With a budget of $39.7 billion for fiscal year 2015, the purpose of the DHS is to prepare for and prevent domestic national emergencies, specifically those related to terrorism. The most recent bill, detailed in a Press Release dated March 3, 2015 states, “Congress has done a good thing. It has fully funded homeland security.”

It continues:67 Sunday marked the 12th anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security. Today, as we pursue our vital missions, we are reforming the way we manage the Department, we are filling all the senior-level vacancies, we are improving our

66 Statement by Secretary Jeh C. Johnson On The Passage Of A Full-Year Appropriations Bill For DHS. Press Release. Department of Homeland Security, March 3, 2015. http://www.dhs.gov/news/2015/03/03/statement-secretary-jeh-c-johnson-passage-full-year- appropriations-bill-dhs. 67 Ibid.

42 responsiveness to Congress, we are strengthening border security, we are advancing cybersecurity, we are rebuilding the Coast Guard fleet, we are improving the immigration system…

In March 2003, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service dissolved and its functions—inspecting those arriving in the US, detecting illegal entry, and reviewing applications for citizenship—were transferred to three new services operating under the DHS. We now have US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

It is important to consider the significance of merging immigration services and homeland security—a department whose purpose very much revolves around preventative counterterrorism measures. What does it mean for immigration to operate under such an umbrella? Leo Chávez refers to this as the “Latino Threat Narrative,” explaining how both prior to and since the start of the War on Terror, Mexicans and Latinos have been a threatening subject to Americans, first as exploitative racialized labor, and second as “illegal aliens” wanting to live off of government services.68 Nevertheless, the Mexican or Latino identity as one that is threatening has specifically become connected to a constructed criminality of the “illegal alien” subject, by pairing the language of undocumented with what is illegal.69

In the years following 9/11, the juxtaposition of the “illegal alien” as criminal with the terrorist enemy has created a sort of umbrella of criminality where the removal of undocumented immigrants now falls under antiterrorism measures. One such example is a bill passed on December 16, 2005 titled Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act [H.R. 4437]. The very idea that the “illegal alien” would be in association with “terrorism” produces a new threatening subject out of the Latino immigrant.

68 Chavez, Leo. “The Latino Threat Narrative.” In The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Second Edition, 23–47. Stanford University Press, 2013. 69 Ibid.

Nicholas de Genova attributes this association of undocumented immigrants as potential terrorists to what he calls “post-9/11 nativism.”70 However, this rhetoric serves to render vulnerable and precarious a population of migrants who are often viewed strictly as disposable labor. For instance, de Genova explains how undocumented immigrant labor is exploited; the US imports people as cheap labor, and disposes of them as “illegal aliens” when they are no longer needed.71

Yestel Velazquez is one of many who fit within this narrative. As Carpenter wrote, “Some 33,000 Latinos came [to New Orleans] after Katrina to help rebuild the city. A large number stuck around, nurturing families and starting small businesses… [But] as the pace of construction slowed, undocumented workers became even less welcome.”

Undocumented immigrants do not need to be seen or thought of as terrorists because there is another population that serves that purpose. However, as de Genova writes, “it is sufficient to mobilize the metaphysics of antiterrorism to do the crucial work of continually and more exquisitely stripping these ‘illegal’ workers of even the most pathetic vestiges of legal personhood.”72

70 De Genova, Nicholas. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and the Metaphysics of Antiterrorism: ‘Immigrants’ Rights’ in the Aftermath of the Homeland Security State.” Border Battles: The U.S. Immigration Debates, Social Science Research Council, July 28, 2006. http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/De_Genova/. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid.

SPECTACLES

April 4, 2015 Transportation Security

Since the start of the War on Terror, the way we travel has changed immensely, from taking the subway to flying across the country. What used to constitute a mundane travel experience has now become for everyone a spectacle of assimilation in order to remain unseen by the gaze of power. Some are luckier than others. Our skin and our passports determine the outcome of our travel experiences in the airport. We are trained to be on watch, and say something if we see something. In a country obsessed by race, terrorism, and national security, what constitutes suspicion?

Throughout this whole project, I am speaking for other people who have had their voices taken from them. Here is a place I will not do that.

I spoke about this with a friend.

***

My name is Dina. I am I guess a female person of color, a brown person, depending on a person’s understanding of it. I have Moroccan citizenship, so my passport is Moroccan. Female, brown, Moroccan.

It’s kind of cliché to say that race is a social construct, but it is. And depending on what culture, it’s not just a social construct; it’s a cultural and historical and geographical construct. So depending on where you’re located, you’re perceived differently. Since I came to the US I’ve been perceived as a brown person of color. Growing up, I was mostly perceived as white. Some of the environments I grew up in, I was not just identified as white, but as a pale white and people often didn’t believe that I was Arab because of that. People thought that I was Iranian, or from different groups because of that.

I’ve only had one experience at an airport in the US, by which I mean, I’ve traveled in and out of the US more than once, but it’s always the same thing. It’s always the same experience. And it’s the experience of being stopped every single time, for a number of completely weird, random reasons. For instance, “You’re the 100th person today.” Even

46 though it’s 10PM and I definitely wasn’t the 100th person that day. But someone told me that. Or, “Your bag is too heavy”—no, no “your bag is too full.” What else? “Your laptop looks weird,” someone told me once.

So it’s like, they could really be trying harder with their reasons… And so, every time, I’m stopped and my bags are checked and I’m asked questions, but it’s always very quick. It’s always like a five minute—not five minute—like a twenty-minute thing. They open up my bags, remove every single thing, ask me about it, ask me where I’m coming from, where I’m going, who am I, am I a student, what do I study? Sometimes I’m patted down or they do the scanner when they’re not doing it to people in the other line. And that’s it. That’s basically what happens.

I consider myself lucky actually, because I know so many people—friends of mine—who are from the same, I guess, racial group or ethnic group, who have experienced much worse. So I feel lucky that I have never been taken to another room, or it has never really been a big impediment, a big obstacle that I have experienced. It’s always annoying, it’s frustrating, it’s maddening. But on a practical level, it has never been a really big thing, which doesn’t mean that it’s not wrong, or that it’s okay because it definitely isn’t.

Every single time I’ve traveled in or out of the US, my bags get checked so I get that little piece of paper in my suitcase that says TSA has gone through my suitcase, and I used to think that that’s something that happened to everyone. I used to think that they opened every person’s luggage, until someone told me that no, it wasn’t a normal experience. Someone told me that I’m probably on someone’s list or something.

And I feel like it’s a bit surprising, because although I am Moroccan, I don’t have an Arab last name. Actually no, it’s not surprising. When I first thought about the fact that they checked my luggage, I was surprised because I thought that not having an Arab last name meant that I didn’t have any of the main check things that would make them look at me for more than a second. But now when I think about it, that’s not the only reason they

47 would be checking me. There are other reasons they would check me, check my luggage, like the fact that I’m from Morocco.

And even though it’s a country that doesn’t have the same implications and same religions as some countries in the Middle East that are labeled as terrorist countries—although Morocco is not in the Middle East, by the way—it’s still a country that does raise flags in the US, which reminds me of something else. My experiences at airports outside the US have been normal. I’ve only been stopped once in the UK and it’s because I had this powdery dessert thing from Morocco that looked very suspicious, and I knew it looked very suspicious. So I’ve only really been stopped in the US.

I definitely think my experience is different because of my gender. And this is a conclusion I came to I think maybe my second year in the US, and it was partly prompted by a more critical analysis of racial profiling and prejudice. Also I think one of the big things was watching The Reluctant Fundamentalist73 and realizing that I am not the face of terrorism because I am a woman. I remember thinking of that as some kind of privilege. But it’s not a privilege, that’s not what that is because not being discriminated against shouldn’t be a privilege. But my gender allows me—at least in this context—to evade further discrimination.

I don’t perform, or try to embody a different identity at the airport. I become very aware of my identity, of my accent, of traits that make me look Arab in the US—not that make me Arab, but that make me perceived as Arab in the US. I don’t try to change them, although it has been awhile since I’ve traveled outside of, or into the US. I also think that generally the way that the US perceives Arabness and traits that are Arab is not actually accurate. So in terms of clothing, it’s like, my clothing is “normal.”

73 The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a 2012 film starring Riz Ahmed, Liv Schreiber and Kiefer Sutherland. It is the story of a young Pakistani man who comes to the US in pursuit of a successful corporate career. “He finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family’s homeland.”

48 Sometimes I feel like, now, because I am more aware of these issues, part of me wants to rebel, maybe try to look more like what they would expect me to look like just as a statement. I probably wouldn’t do it because I am aware of the consequences and the real- life ramifications of doing something like that. This is not a game. And the consequences could be very severe. So I just act normally, but I become more aware and conscious of my surroundings.

When I say normal, I mean normal by my standards. I dress the way I would every other day. And when I say that the perception of Arabness is inaccurate, what I mean is that when I look at characterizations of Arabness or when I look at how someone who is Arab is perceived in the media, in terms of clothing, or facial characteristics, none of it is accurate. And it goes for things like even how the language is perceived.

I was talking about language with someone, and they were talking about how Arabic is a very rough and aggressive language, which is not true. But the way Arabic is presented to a lot of people in the media is often through videos of terrorist attacks or something like that and in those moments, the tone of voice is very aggressive or it sounds rough and that’s how people understand Arabic to be. But actually it’s a really beautiful and smooth language.

Arab is a huge identity. My experience is my own.

There are a lot of ways to be Arab.

But sometimes I wonder if my experience is more discriminatory than I realize because it’s what I’m used to, because it’s such a normalized discriminatory practice.

This image is a scan from a New York City Subway map.

50 December 4, 2014 Intentional Language

“… I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines […] but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy […] language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses….” — Giorgio Agamben74

Tuesday, December 9, 2014 is the day that the CIA’s torture report will finally come out after months of waiting, censoring, and more waiting. The report was due to be released in April of this year but has been pushed back all this time. It has been redacted from 6,000 pages into a 480-page executive summary.

The Senate Intelligence Committee who investigated CIA practices in order to produce this report is only publishing “what the CIA did in its black sites; whether it misled other officials; and whether it complied with orders,” Dan Froomkin writes for The Intercept.75 He continues, “That is somewhat like investigating whether a hit man did the job efficiently and cleaned up nicely.”

According to a Russia Today article from this morning, the CIA’s torture report will not use the word torture.76 (While the report did, in fact, use the word “torture,” it also referred to brutal torture tactics as “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.”) As Josh Rogin and Eli Lake wrote for Bloomberg View, “Although the summary report is said to not use the word

74 Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 14. 75 Froomkin, Dan. “12 Things to Keep in Mind When You Read the Torture Report.” The Intercept, December 12, 2014. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/02/x-things-keep-mind- ever-get-read-torture-report/. 76 “CIA Torture Report to Be Published on Monday without the Word ‘Torture.’” Accessed April 13, 2015. http://rt.com/usa/211487-cia-senate-torture-redactions/.

51 ‘torture,’ officials said it would describe practices that any layman would understand as torture.”77

How does one not use the term “torture” in a report on torture? Is it enough to assume that readers will understand certain practices as torture if these practices are referred to as something other than torture? To not explicitly use this term is an attempt to erase the fact that these practices are, in fact, torture. To not use explicit language to define the practices detailed in the report is an intentional effort to control how individuals respond to the report.

Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture.

I went straight to Dianne Feinstein to find out how this was possible:

She never got back to me.

If the Senate Intelligence Committee releases a report on the CIA’s practices in black sites—practices at Abu Ghraib included—if it has been referred to for so long as the “Torture Report,” how can you call it anything but that?

Waterboarding, stress positions, temperature manipulation, threats of harm to loved ones, sleep deprivation, sensory bombardment, sexual humiliation.

77 Rogin, Josh, and Eli Lake. “Inside the Battle Over the CIA Torture Report.” BloombergView, December 3, 2014. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-03/inside-the-battle-over- the-cia-torture-report.

52 These are forms of psychological warfare, or Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Definitely not torture. The language of EITs rather than torture is intentional—it diverts attention away from the word torture, from the practice of torture, from being responsible for torture. The United States has a problem with language.

I spent last summer in Washington, DC and never wanted to leave my house again after I walked around the Smithsonian area—a nationalist, US exceptionalist, patriot’s dream. From the National Archives to the American History Museum, it is a hub for romanticized historical narratives of the United States fighting for freedom, liberty, and justice (oil). Everywhere you turn—if you are not immune to it—you see the words “Freedom,” “Democracy,” “Equality,” “War,” “Justice,” “Heroes.” American flags hang everywhere.

These words are meant to keep you disciplined and orderly. Giorgio Agamben, calling on Michel Foucault, designates as “apparatus” the use of language to control the behaviors, opinions, and discourses of a given society.78 To be confronted so frequently in the United States with terms such as freedom, democracy, equality, allows a given population to create, uphold, and believe in an exceptional narrative of this country.

As US Executive Order 12333 notes:

No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.79

A recent New Yorker article written by a paramilitary officer with the CIA talks about just that.80 The writer, Elliot Ackerman, talks about his first day on the job, stationed in Eastern Afghanistan. He writes about his colleagues who “sat at a bank of computers, planning out Predator drone strikes.”81 He writes, “Dossier upon dossier cluttered their

78 Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 1-24. 79 Executive Order 12333, Part 2.11 Prohibition on Assassination. 80 Ackerman, Elliot. “Assassination and the American Language.” The New Yorker, November 20, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/assassination-american-language. 81 Ibid.

53 desktops—Taliban senior leaders, Al Qaeda operatives, each one targeted for killing. For assassination.”82

For Agamben, the strategic function of an apparatus is always located in a relation of power, appearing at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.83 The apparatus is a technology, which occupies the State, Sovereignty, Law and Power.84

The apparatus seeks to govern and control the behaviors and thoughts of its subjects. It aims to create docile yet free bodies—objects of discipline, yet free subjects, individuals who believe they are free because they are told so through an apparatus of language. Waterboarding is no longer torture if you are repeatedly told it is something else. A drone strike is not assassination if you are told it is just, safe, humane. The United States is a democracy because you have the privilege of voting—even if your vote will not elect a representative who is already bought out by his opponent. You are supposed to believe you have freedom, democracy, and equality so that you do not question when armed forces are sent to destroy racialized and sexualized foreign peoples to protect these values.

When the word torture is avoided in the report on torture, it is because the State needs to maintain a romanticized narrative. The United States cannot torture because if it did, then it would be no better than the enemy. It is for this reason that drone strike victims are consistently referred to in headlines as “alleged militants” without knowledge of their identities. If the media refer to them as militants, then no one will question their deaths.

Does equality exist only in relation to violence?

The United States has a problem with language—but it is intentional.

82 Ibid. 83 Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 3. 84 Ibid 6,7.

54 November 12, 2014 Veterans Day and American Exceptionalism

Yesterday was Veterans Day. My Facebook flooded with countless posts about thanking our troops, about loved ones who once served, about our heroes. I have thought a lot about the ways so many people offer so much gratitude to the United States military. Some thank the troops for protecting our rights, for fighting for continued freedom and democracy.

Some thank the troops for not having school, for instance my brother:

Of course his messages were in good fun, he was not serious about my “Communist mind games” or his being “too American.” Still I could not help but read into the irony of his messages and the larger American ideals they implied.

55 There are tensions in praising our troops and our veterans. There is on the one hand, the exploitation of individuals who go to war and do the dirty work of our political leaders. On the other hand, there is the fact that these individuals, though pawns of war, are still willingly participating in a colonizing project.

It is true that many individuals who are targeted by recruiting centers or who enlist to go to war are doing so because they may feel it is their only option: economic, social, or otherwise. Some of the most exploited people are targets of military recruitment at a young age. For instance, in the early 2000s, Chicago spent $2.8 million on Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) high school programs and an additional “$5 million on two military academies.”85 Chicago is home to the “largest JROTC program in the country and the ‘most militarized school system in America.’”86 These programs most often target poor, black, and Latino youth in the city.

Even the plot description for the 2014 movie Camp X-Ray87—the story of a young Military Police officer (played by Kristen Stewart) who befriends a detainee at Guantánamo Bay— describes joining the military as her way of escaping her small town. Joining the military is an escape.

I must acknowledge that my discomfort with “troop praising” and with US hegemony and militarism is rooted in the privilege I have had of attending an institution—though not without my own sacrifices—that allows me to think critically about systems of State power. At the same time, I cannot help but come back to the docility and language of exceptionalism of the larger US public. I come back to those who are drowning in their comfort and privilege. I come back to the dire need to step outside of our comfort zones in order to make change. I think about the fact that more of us need to look beyond what

85 Ayers, William. “Hearts and Minds: Military Recruitment and the High School Battlefield.” The Phi Delta Kappan 87, no. 8 (April 1, 2006): 594–99. 86 Ibid. 87 Camp X-Ray is a 2014 drama starring Kristen Stewart, Peyman Moaadi, and Lane Garrison that I tried (and failed) to watch.

56 seems like the reality of this world, simply because your reality may not be so bad. I think about something a friend asked me recently, “What’s worse? Being so ignorant that you know nothing about the world? Or knowing so much and still not doing anything about it?” I am faced with what seems to me a paradox because it is certainly not enough not to know, but knowing is also not enough.

To return to the question of thanking our troops and our veterans, and the implication that they are heroes who “serve our country,” what does serving our country truly mean? How is this obsession with protecting US freedom and democracy a means of maintaining State control and order of the population? By making “we the people” believe “we” have freedom and a democracy, with rights that do not exist “over there” Americans are conditioned to participate in a unified docility and support “freedom fighters” in nations that need liberation.88 What one refuses to see, or fails to see in this structure is that politicians do not send people to fight for freedom and democracy. They send pawns to do the dirty work in a game of global imperial occupation. In this context, are there any heroes?

The term hero signifies “a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities: a war hero.”89 First, the definition points specifically to a male figure as the hero, which builds into the narrative of the patriarchal masculinist protectionism of the United States at war. Iris Marion Young refers to the security state and legal structure of the United States in response to 9/11 as an account of masculinist protection. She explains the ways in which war and security operate through a gendered lens where the masculine protector—in this case the United States—puts the protected in a “subordinate position of dependence and obedience.”90 Further, she discusses the mobilization of the rhetoric, since the Bush administration, of obeying the

88 The obsession with American freedom and American democracy asserts loyalty to the colonizing project. The US must assist “backwards” nations around the world to instill democratic institutions—this is often the discourse that is mobilized by the State. 89 New Oxford American Dictionary, desktop version. 90 Young, Iris Marion. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.” Signs 29, no. 1 (September 1, 2003): p. 2.

57 commands of our leaders in exchange for protection. Young writes, “central to the logic of masculinist protection is the subordinate relation of those in the protected position—in return for male protection, the woman concedes critical distance from decision-making autonomy.”91 Thus, the US public is in the position of a subordinate woman—if one is to use the model of the heteronormative family—who responds to her male protector, the US government, with loyalty and obedience, giving up her autonomy.

Second, the characteristics associated with a hero in the stated definition are “courage” and “noble qualities,” or admiration. These build into the narrative that a hero is someone doing something “good” or “right.” When Americans “thank our troops,” or enshrine them as heroes fighting for freedom, what “we” are saying is that the project of imperialism and war is good—this project that has killed millions, American, Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni, Syrian, Libyan, Palestinians; that has helped US political leaders occupy and bomb 14 Islamic countries since 1980;92 that has left people homeless; that has fractured lives leaving many with lost loved ones; that has cost “the most powerful army on Earth … trillions of dollars fighting some of the poorest people in the world.”93

The rhetoric of thanking the troops and veterans for “all they have done for us” builds into the narrative of exceptionalism and victimhood that has been mobilized since the start of the War on Terror, prompting some to ask, “Why do they hate us?” This dichotimization of “they” and “us” serves to demonize and dehumanize an evil Other who committed an act of terrorism against the United States, seemingly for no reason—the United States is a victim of terrorism undeserving of the attacks on 9/11. This narrative of victimhood fails

91 Ibid, 4. 92 Greenwald, Glenn. “How Many Muslim Countries Has the U.S. Bombed Or Occupied Since 1980?” The Intercept, November 6, 2014. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/06/many- countries-islamic-world-u-s-bombed-occupied-since-1980/. 93 Fanning, Rory. “Thank You for Your Valor, Thank You for Your Service, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You...” TomDispatch, October 26, 2014. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175912/tomgram%3A_rory_fanning,_why_do_we_keep_than king_the_troops/.

58 to contextualize the historical involvement of the US in the social, economic, political, infrastructural, and institutional development of the Middle East and North Africa region.

The notion that the attacks on the World Trade Center were unwarranted terrorist attacks fails to recognize that the World Trade Center was the hub of global capitalism and neoliberalism. Salon writer, Patrick L. Smith notes some of the companies that were present in the towers like Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, and Marsh & McLennan.94 He asks, “What does it mean to work in these companies?” and further explains how these banks and corporations are part of our international system, and how the language of US victimhood after 9/11 fails to account for the choices this country has made.95 Smith writes, “The choice of the World Trade Center as a target was explicitly an attack on [the] roles” like banking that are directly related to capitalism.96

For these reasons, calling our troops “heroes” is blinding, and demonizes and dehumanizes those who are occupied by and targets of US violence. If the US military is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, it must be because the enemy is also there. It is so that the good guys can obliterate the bad. If you do not believe this to be true, then you too are an enemy (of the State).

Forget all the years leading up to 9/11 and US-backed coups against democratically elected governments. Forget how the Western world imposed capitalism and neoliberal policies on the “Global South” in order to maintain its hegemony. Forget all of the military aid and financial assistance that Western nations have provided—in their scramble for domination—to other violent regimes. Forget the Western hand in the Middle East and North Africa since the late 18th Century.

94 Smith, Patrick L. “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: The Misleading History and Messages of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.” Salon, June 9, 2014. http://www.salon.com/2014/06/09/american_exceptionalism_and_american_innocence_the_misle ading_history_and_messages_of_the_911_memorial_museum/. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid.

59 If you think a little bit further about who our troops are, you might think past those who were born in the United States. You might think of undocumented immigrants who are easily exploitable for military recruitment because enlisting will make them one step closer to citizenship.97 You might even consider those who the US has trained to serve as pawns for Western development.

Rory Fanning asks, What about all those foreign soldiers we’ve trained to fight our wars for us in places like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Shouldn’t they be thanked as well? And how about members of the Afghan Mujahedeen that we armed and funded in the 1980s while they gave the Soviet Union its own “Vietnam” (and who are now fighting for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or other extreme Islamist outfits)?98

Take a moment to think about the United States outside the frame of victimhood. Instead of asking “how could they do this to us?” ask why a system of white supremacy continues to terrorize and colonize other people.

97 To read further, see “They had lives beyond the violence by which they are known,” page 71. 98 Fanning, Rory. “Thank You for Your Valor, Thank You for Your Service, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You...” TomDispatch, October 26, 2014. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175912/tomgram%3A_rory_fanning,_why_do_we_keep_than king_the_troops/.

BEYOND THE FRAME

December 2, 2014 On Framing the Other

“Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being?”

— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Torture of Others99

Just over ten years ago, the photos of the abuse and torture of individuals at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq came out as a shock to the world. Images of naked men piled on top of one another; forced to perform sexual acts on one another in front of American military police (MP); some hooded and wired with electrodes; MPs posed in the photos with smiles on their faces.

I wonder now if these photos actually shocked the world, or if it was their mass dissemination that did. Susan Sontag wrote on the apathetic response to such images as characteristic of the United States as a country “in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun” and that these photographs illustrate the “culture of shamelessness [and] the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.”100 She argues that although photographs may momentarily move a viewer, they do not allow the building up of an interpretation; the viewer is no longer shocked or enraged by a photo due to the consumerist culture of shock value as entertainment.

The frame creates a separation between the image and the reality of the event; the image itself is an interpretation and State and military regulatory regimes are embedded in the frame. The individuals in the photographs are racialized, sexualized, and criminalized, a specific identity associated with them, which is meant to reinforce sentiments of patriotism

99 Sontag, Susan. “Regarding The Torture Of Others.” The New York Times, May 23, 2004, sec. Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html. 100 Ibid.

62 in the US through the emasculation of the “terrorist” subject. The viewer’s apathetic response is not specifically related to a cliché of shock value or to a normalized culture of violence, but partially to the viewer’s privilege of separating the image from the event itself, and also due to the value given to some lives over others.

After 9/11 the brown male was widely associated with terrorism, though this framing was pervasive even before, as the racialization and sexualization of brown and black bodies dates back to the beginning of white settler colonialism. The association of the subjects in the images from Abu Ghraib to that which is to be feared allows the consumer of the image to read the lives in the images as ungrievable, by dissociating the subject with humanness. Their lives are not supposed to matter to “us.”

From the photos of Abu Ghraib to imagery from unmanned drones, the dehumanization of the subjects cannot be explained so simply by a normalized culture of violence alone. The lack of empathy towards Muslims who have been victims of rendition, detention, torture, and assassination lies in the separation of the image from reality and how the viewer is supposed to read the violence that is documented in the photos.

The brown body has become—or has continued to be—a target of violence and hate. The Muslim, the Middle Easterner, the Arab, the South Asian, and those perceived to be, have been targets of brutality both abroad and at home, enforced on the basis of collective action and unity. These actions operate and are normalized within a framework of necessity and crisis, one where “this is necessary for national security.”

Equally important is the way the photographs of Abu Ghraib Prison perhaps shock the viewer only because they are a reflection of “our” actions, rather than of violence against an Other.101 There was, in response to the photos, a sort of misplaced vulnerability, ownership, and victimhood. The viewer who is confronted with the photographs sees

101 For more on this, read the essay “Whiteness and Police Violence in the Land of the Free,” page 101.

63 himself. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even stated, “the photographs [from Abu Ghraib] would not just show something atrocious, but would make our capacity to commit atrocity into a defining concept of American identity.”102 He feared that viewers would see the images as disturbingly characteristic of what it means to be American, when in reality the discourse around these photos, for the State, should be that the practices at Abu Ghraib were an exception.

Responding in such a way diverts public attention away from the atrocious treatment of the “terrorists,” and towards something more self-reflective so as to avoid public outrage by insisting that these actions are the exception to the rule. The discourse shifts away from Iraqis as victims of sexual violence, to “This is not what America is about,” to protect the exceptional white national fiber of the United States. Diverting attention away from the acts committed against “them,” creates a dehumanizing affect.

The imagery captured by drones serves a similar purpose. In both cases, the images represent an individual who is simultaneously subjectified and objectified, who is not grievable, who is dehumanized by both the frame and the literal distance between “us” and the Other. The viewer is taught to understand the “visual dimension of war in relation to whose lives are grievable and whose are not.”103 For these reasons, shock and disgust in response to such grotesque acts of violence are diverted away from the actual event that the photos represent.

Whose life or death incites empathy to the First World viewer and whose does not? The discourse, context, and power embedded in the frame allows one to see the individuals photographed not as people, but as nothing more than “terrorists” getting what they deserve. It is the removal and absence of humanity from the photograph that allows the viewer to not be haunted by the death or suffering of the object of violence.

102 Butler, Judith. "Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag." Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. (63-100): 72. 103 Ibid, 74.

64 There is an 8,000-mile distance between drone operators and the objects of their surveillance, a screen between the two, symbolic of the frame that separates an image from its event, a break in reality and a representation of the subject itself.104 Similar to the question of grievability, “droning doesn’t objectify people because it needs them to act, to be subjects…just ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ kinds of subjects.”105

The creation of certain subjects plays a role in the empathy that is to be evoked through the images. Drones create a specific criminal subject simply by hovering over the population that they surveil and discipline. The individuals subject to its surveillance become criminalized subjects simply by existing below the gaze of the drone, thus representing a specific image to the First World viewer who, in this case, is the drone operator. Just as a United States military presence in a foreign country allows one to believe that the enemy must be there, the presence of a drone hovering over a community serves the same purpose. The individuals below it must be criminal subjects simply because they are being watched.

While this is a different kind of imagery than the photos that came from Abu Ghraib, in both scenarios, both the literal frame and the context of the War on Terror create dissociation between the subject and a living human being. There is an inherent dehumanization and thus disposability of both subjects due to the terrorist identity that is ascribed to the brown body in both sets of imagery and photos.

The State works to enforce a certain discipline and obedience over the bodies of the population that it manages, and this must be considered in regards to what the frame itself represents. The role of these images of war106 is to assert a self-disciplining of the viewer—

104 For more on the frame, read “The Drone, the Apparatus, the Human,” page 14. 105 robinjames. “Drones, Sound, and Super-Panoptic Surveillance » Cyborgology.” The Society Pages: Cyborgology, October 26, 2010. http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/10/26/drones-sound-and-super-panoptic- surveillance/. 106 And of those posted by government departments on Twitter. See “Drone Imagery in the Digital Era,” page 18.

65 but also of the actively viewed subjects of drone technology—by emphasizing the difference between the viewer and those in the photographs.

The culture of brutality and violence that is often attributed to the entertainment industry is not enough to warrant a lack of empathy when the viewer is confronted with images of others suffering. But rather, the apathetic response of the viewer is based on the fact that the images are already themselves interpretations of an event, one that the viewer is able to separate from reality because of the identity given to the subject of the photograph.

66 September 24, 2014 First Worldism

“What are the cultural barriers against which we struggle when we try to find out about the losses that we are asked not to mourn, when we attempt to name, and so to bring under the rubric of the ‘human,’ those whom the United States and its allies have killed?” — Judith Butler107

How does one acknowledge and understand that those killed by the United States—people whose deaths become nameless and faceless—actually form the basis of one’s own First Worldism? For instance, I can choose to ignore those deaths, to not know the names and faces of those individuals, and the fact that I am removed from that violence is the break between my reality and the reality of another person. It is a barrier against which I struggle when trying to find out about losses I am not supposed to care about. My choice whether or not to see the death of another by the State, in some ways, constitutes proof of my experience and existence as “human.” I am allowed to be.

Butler questions the cultural barriers that keep us from mourning the losses of those we are told not to mourn, the barriers that keep us from naming and humanizing those whom the US has killed. It is a barrier that I am attempting to break down in my own work. We, in the West are expected not to mourn the individuals killed in US drone strikes. We are expected not to question the indefinite incarceration of individuals at Guantánamo Bay Prison, whether they are guilty or innocent. We are supposed to turn a blind eye to CIA torture because it supposedly saved lives—the lives of Westerners, which matter more than those of exploitable and oppressed people around the world.

Butler asks, “Is the prohibition on grieving the continuation of the violence itself?”108

107 Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 19–49. (London, New York: Verso, 2004.): 46 108 Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life” in Precarious Life The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (New York; London: Verso, 2004): 148.

67 The names, faces, numbers of people killed by US drones have never been transparently documented and presented to the public by the US government. This is an erasure of human life, which is ultimately a further manifestation of State violence.

Thanks to the hard work of reporters at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism we know:

2002-2014, Yemen: 371-541 individuals have been killed. 2004-2014, Pakistan: 2,410-3,902 individuals have been killed. 2007-2014, Somalia: 18-33 individuals have been killed.109

These deaths are not circulated by the mainstream media because we are not supposed to grieve the lives of the 4,400+ individuals who have been killed by the US in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia since covert drone operations began in 2002. Yet, here I am on September 24 reading through names of innocent civilians, alleged militants, and the unknown. I read their names, I am sometimes able to see their faces, I read about their families, and I work against the sociopolitical barrier that has been built since 9/11 in the name of national security. It is the same barrier that dichotomizes life as “us” versus the Other. The Westerner is human, but “they” are not.

I woke up this morning with an alert from Metadata+, an iPhone application created by Josh Begley, a research editor at The Intercept, that logs every known drone strike, the time, the location, the number of people killed, and then shows me on a map.110 I received a notification from the iPhone application, and then from Twitter. I reTweeted it to my followers. I closed Metadata+. I closed Twitter. I got up. I made a cup of coffee. I watched Bob’s Burgers. This moment in my life describes a cultural barrier against which I struggle while trying to bring under the rubric of human those whom the United States and its

109 Serle, Jack, and Abigail Fielding-Smith. Monthly Updates on the Covert War, US Drone War: 2014 in Numbers. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 7, 2015. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/01/07/us-drone-war-2014-in-numbers/. 110 Begley uses information from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

68 allies have killed. It is also an important example of the digital disposability in which this project is framed.

That’s it. This is the buzz about the drone strike in Pakistan on September 24, 2014.

On September 24, 2014, Erin Corbett woke up at 10:25AM with notifications from Metadata+ and @dronestream.

I can open a notification, close it, and forget about it. That is part of my cultural barrier about which Judith Butler speaks. It is my Western privilege. I have access to this nameless and faceless death via a social media tool that I can choose to check or not to check. However, I have to actively look for this information because CNN will not sensationalize this news for 24 continuous hours.

The important word here is “choice.” My knowing of these deaths in Pakistan is a choice.

On September 24, 2014 10 people were killed in Datta Khel, Pakistan.

Who were they?

69 “Datta Khel is a town in N. Waziristan, FATA,111 Pakistan. Datta Khel is on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”112

111 FATA refers to Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, a tribal region located in Northwestern Pakistan. 112 “Datta Khel.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, November 25, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datta_Khel&oldid=635348675.

70 January 29, 2015 “They had lives beyond the violence by which they are known”

Last night as I started reading Michel Foucault’s “Lives of Infamous Men” for a class, there was one aspect of this essay that stood out to me. He wrote of people whose existences were only known to him by their misfortune, people who “belonged to those billions of existences destined to pass without a trace,” except for their relation with power by which they are known.113

I realized that the people I write about—existences destined to pass without a trace—are only known to me by their struggle against State power and the violence inflicted on them by that power. Had they not had such violence inflicted upon them, I would have no idea who they are. Foucault cites his purpose of collecting these narratives in order to give individuals a place and a date, for his reader to know that “behind these names that no longer say anything, behind these quick words which may well have been false, mendacious, unjust, exaggerated, there were men who lived and died….”114

I thought of the innocent people in Pakistan and Yemen who are represented by short and quick pieces of news as “alleged militants” or “suspected terrorists.” I thought about the fast pace at which they are killed, reported, and forgotten, and what little importance they are given in the media. My access to the names and lives of specific individuals who have been killed in Pakistan is complicated. Not all victims of US drone strikes have been identified. Is it because the voices, faces, and lives of the dead are a threat to State power? I ask these questions and think about their meaning in the context of US violence. How do the deaths of drone strike victims—both those identified and unidentified—serve the purpose of the State?

113 Foucault, Michel. “Lives of Infamous Men.” In Power, Essential Works of Foucault 1954- 1984, 3:157–75. Paul Rabinow, Series Ed., n.d.: 161. 114 Ibid, 160.

71 I do not want the people I am writing about to be remembered only by the violence they have suffered. They had lives beyond their deaths, and their voices are important. Lisa Cacho questions the value given to individuals in life and in death. She specifically writes about undocumented immigrants who enlist in the US military, and explains in that context how “the dead are the ultimate docile bodies”115 because the media will represent them in a way that serves the narrative of power. Using the example of the second US soldier killed in the war in Iraq, Jose Antonio Gutierrez, Cacho explains how the media portrayed him as unselfishly choosing to serve in the military, while sacrificing higher education.116 In reality, Gutierrez enlisted in order to obtain US citizenship and become a more competitive college applicant. Whether it is in the context of joining the military or of being allowed to enter the US specifically to rebuild it, (un)documented immigrants have been treated and devalued as exploitable labor throughout US history.117

Think about the example of Gutierrez in relation to the innocent victims of drone strikes. Cacho makes a point of distinction between media representation of Gutierrez and his self- representation, pulling on Sharon Holland to conclude that the State’s most threatening enemy is the voice of those lost to its violence.118 Should they speak for themselves—outside of a label of “terrorist” in the case of drone victims, or “patriot” in the case of noncitizen soldiers—they become a threat to the narrative of national security and enmity through which the institutionalized War on Terror operates.

115 Cacho, Lisa Marie. “Grafting Terror onto Illegality.” In Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminaliztion of the Unprotected, 97–114. New York: New York University Press, 2012: 109. 116 Ibid. 117 Read more on this in the essay “Terror of ‘Illegality,’” page 41. 118 Cacho, Lisa Marie. “Grafting Terror onto Illegality.” In Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminaliztion of the Unprotected, 97–114. New York: New York University Press, 2012: 110.

72 This morning I write this as I read through The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s “Naming the Dead” project.119 I look through the names of reported civilians in North Waziristan. I read about Bibi Mamana.

Bibi Mamana was killed on October 24, 2012. She was a 67-year-old Pakistani, and a midwife in her village. She delivered hundreds of babies in her community. She was killed while gathering wood for Eid al Adha and tending to livestock. Not much is known about her life, but “her death is well documented.”120

Her grandson, Zubair ur Rehman told ABC News Australia: Before the strike I would hear the drones 24 hours a day and it was a normal part of my life and I never feared them and I had never seen them do anything wrong…. But after the strike I am scared. I do not want to go outside to play football or cricket. I cannot even go outside to walk because I constantly fear the sound of the drone.121

Even though I want to know who these people are outside of the context of violence, it is ultimately through that relationship that I have access to their existences. Who would Bibi Mamana be to me had she not been killed by the US, guilty of gathering wood? How is it that her death is “well documented”? By whom, in what way, and again, how might this documentation serve the purpose of the State?

What about her teenage grandson, Zubair, whose everyday experiences have come to be determined by the drones that hover over him? He expressed fear of being outside of his home since his grandmother’s death. He did not want to risk playing football (soccer), or taking a walk.

119 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Naming The Dead. Database. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, n.d. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/namingthedead/the- dead/?lang=en. 120 This is the language used in her dossier in the project. See: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Naming The Dead. Case Study. Bibi Mamana. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, n.d. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/namingthedead/people/nd526/?lang=en. 121 Brown, Rachael. “ADF Refuses to Reveal Extent of Involvement in US Drone Strikes.” Text. ABC News, November 1, 2013. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-01/australia-wont-reveal-if- pine-gap-used-in-drone-attacks/5064460.

73 I have a 12-year-old brother who plays football. He spends a lot of time outside. He has never worried about the sound of an aircraft above him. He never fears that he will not survive a football game because a Hellfire missile might kill him, leaving him unrecognizable. In fact, I am sure that if I asked my brother what a drone is, he would not even know.122

As much as I do not want the people I read about to be remembered strictly by the violence they have suffered, as much as I wish I could represent them in a way that leaves out this relationship or struggle with violence, it is because of violence that I know who they are. As much as I wish it did not, in many of these cases, the violence is what defines their existence, at least to those who will never know them. Perhaps this is what is most tragic about their existence within the precarious.

Jose Antonio Gutierrez and Bibi Mamana speak to the disposability of human life, not all humans, but those who are devalued by the State. Think about the struggle against power of “the most inessential existences,”123 people who are “unworthy of the memory of men,”124 and whose lives are ultimately unmournable.

I know who they are because of violence, and it is for this reason that “they don’t have and will never have any existence outside the precarious.”125

122 This is a cultural barrier that informs my brother’s existence as human and as within the “First World.” To read more on this notion, please see the essay “First Worldism,” page 67. 123 Foucault, Michel. “Lives of Infamous Men.” In Power, Essential Works of Foucault 1954- 1984, 3:157–75. Paul Rabinow, Series Ed., n.d.: 162. 124 Ibid, 164. 125 Ibid, 162.

EROTICISM

November 30, 2014 On the NSA, Privacy, and the Home

On November 20, 2014, a US drone fired missiles at a house in Pakistan and killed six people.126 This was not the first or the last drone strike on a home; it has been a trend— specifically in Pakistan—since the strikes started again this past June.127 Other strikes on homes in Pakistan include: September 6, 2013; October 31, 2013; November 29, 2013; June 18, 2014; July 10, 2014; July 16, 2014; August 6, 2014; October 30, 2014; November 11, 2014.

In Laura Poitras’128 2015 Academy Award winning documentary CitizenFour, National Security Agency (NSA) leaker and whistleblower Edward Snowden talks about having had access to drone surveillance streams in foreign countries. He and others at the NSA were able—from their desks129—to access a list of streams displaying footage from a drone that was usually circling someone’s home. He explained how they could choose a date and country to watch footage.

126 Screenshot from Metadata+ iPhone application by Josh Begley. 127 The President did not authorize any strikes in Pakistan between December 25, 2013 and June 11, 2014—the longest period without a strike in Pakistan during his presidency. 128 Laura Poitras is a journalist and filmmaker and a co-founding editor of The Intercept. 129 Read more about the NSA’s role in the drone program at https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role.

76 Casually watching footage of someone’s home from your computer screen while at work is voyeuristic, but also points to the question of who is allowed privacy in their home. A voyeur is someone who a) gains sexual pleasure from watching others who are in the nude or engaging in sexual activity b) enjoys seeing the pain or distress of others.130 Watching a drone’s surveillance feed suits both definitions because the home is the lieu of privacy. I have written in other pieces about how eroticism and sexuality have been central to the War on Terror, from sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib to the language of rape to describe a drone strike. Gazing on an individual’s home is another layer of sexualization of the terrorist subject.

Michel Foucault theorizes on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon,131 an architectural figure of surveillance where a supervisor is located in a central tower and prisoners are in cells that surround the tower. The supervisor can see all, but the prisoners can see nothing. They are seen but cannot see. The prisoner is gazed upon as an object of information. Foucault explains that the major effect of such a technology of order and control is that “the Panopticon [induces] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”132

Foucault points to the gaze as the maintenance of order, discipline, and efficiency of power, where the inmate, or the subject-object of the gaze is in a power situation in which “they are themselves the bearers.”133 In other words, Panopticism creates a situation of self- disciplining, as power is not exercised from the outside, but internalized in order to be seen as a “good” disciplined subject. In the case of the drone, its gaze and the sound it produces in the sky, all the while not knowing where it is or when it may strike, creates specific subjects who self-discipline in order to not be seen as threatening.

130 New Oxford American Dictionary, desktop version. 131 Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 195–229. New York: Vintage Books, n.d. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid.

77 I would normally attribute this concept to the discussion of public space, rather than the private space (e.g. the home). However, I assert that based on statements from individuals living under drones, the home, which is supposed to be a lieu of safety from the drone’s gaze and the drone’s missiles, is no longer.134 In this case, Panopticism creates a disciplining of subject-objects who take to their homes to 1) avoid the gaze, and 2) avoid the public sphere, maintaining discipline within a realm that should be safe from violence exercised on the outside. The public sphere is the “outside” and the home is the site of internalized discipline. When the home becomes the location of a drone’s gaze and subsequent strike, neither the public nor the private is safe for an individual.

An individual’s private life takes place in the comfort and privacy of their home, which for many is an escape from the outside and public world. However, when an aircraft hovers over your home and films you without your knowledge or consent, you lose that privacy. The issue of privacy similarly causes distress to US persons in the wake of a growing domestic market of consumer drones. The only difference is that their homes are not demolished by missiles. Nevertheless, the loss of privacy assumes that privacy belonged to an individual in the first place, and housing discrimination and lacking privacy has been an issue confronting people of color in a number of contexts for decades in the US.

Ellen Pader uses the example of “housing discrimination on the basis of familial status and national origin”135 in the US, asserting that housing regulations at the local, state, and federal levels legally allow for the ridding of “ethnic populations that the dominant power structure does not like.”136 She uses cases in LA and Chicago where specific “sociopolitical regulations [have limited] a family’s ability to afford decent housing in a location of their choice.”137 Some of the regulations she discusses are the “appropriate” use of specific spaces

134 Salama, Vivian. “Death From Above: How American Drone Strikes Are Devastating Yemen.” Rolling Stone, April 14, 2014. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/death-from-above-how- american-drone-strikes-are-devastating-yemen-20140414. 135 Ellen Pader, “Space of Hate: Ethnicity, Architecture and Housing Discrimination,” in Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 54, Issue 881. (2001-2002) 881-883. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid.

78 and rooms in the home, the number of individuals allowed to reside in a same location based on these regulations, and the framing of these regulations as important for the safety, well-being, and privacy of the individuals living in a common space.

The language of “appropriate” and what is “reasonable” refer back to a Eurocentric ideal of what is “right” and what is “wrong” for specific cultural and ethnic communities. The regulation of the private space of communities of color by the State is a manifestation of both housing discrimination and a lack of privacy in the home. The use of drones is an example of violence used to regulate the private and public sphere of people of color in foreign countries.

Drone use to kill an individual in a foreign country who may one day cause harm to US persons, even though they have not, has quickly increased since the first extralegal covert strike in Yemen in 2002. While they are also used for surveillance, the connotation of US drones is to someone being killed by their missiles. Therefore, the connection between what a drone does and what it means for someone to stream its footage from their office is the fact that this drone may not kill someone today, but it could.

On those days, drone operators—not in the NSA’s offices—refer to it as a “Sky Raper.” What comes out of this is a network of surveillance, apparatus, sexuality, and pain, which ultimately point to the voyeuristic nature of the gaze of those who choose to watch drone footage, versus those who are paid to do so.

The capability to watch the homes of others from your work means that the home is no longer a private space or “safe haven” for an individual. But the public space is not public either because the drone’s occupation of the public privatizes that space. Its existence and presence makes both the private and the public spheres inaccessible and unsafe.

Privacy no longer exists and the apparatus whose presence alone determines that all subjects are “bad” regulates both public mobility and the private space.

79 October 1, 2014 Blaming the victim

Today I discovered a “Drone Survival Guide” after doing a Google search for “drones.”138 I downloaded it from the Internet.

At first glance, I thought the guide was interesting as a form of resistance to drone warfare. It provides the reader with ways to avoid the gaze of a drone, including where and how to effectively hide from a drone. After giving it more thought, I decided that this guide actually perpetuates the acceptance of drone violence.

Yes, at some level, it provides a creative way to spread awareness about an urgent issue. It offers useful information about the different types of drones that exist and which nations possess each type. These are things that I did not know before. For instance, I did not know that there are at least 23 models that exist beyond Predator and Reaper drones. I did not know there were drones bigger than Predators and Reapers. I did not know that Reapers were not only owned by the United States, but also by France, Great Britain, Italy, Australia, and the Netherlands.

With the visual guide comes a written guide, partitioned into three sections:139

21st CENTURY BIRDWATCHING – provides a brief history of drones as the new predators in the sky, because they represent digital silhouettes of birds.

HACKING DRONES – by jamming or intercepting the data link of the satellite transmission used to control the drone, one can interfere with its controls. The data link is sometimes encrypted but not always. For instance, Wired wrote in 2011 of a computer virus that hacked a US drone fleet.140

138 http://www.dronesurvivalguide.org/ 139 Ibid. 140 You can read more about this in “The Drone, the Apparatus, the Human,” page 14.

80 HIDING FROM DRONES – provides a list of 7 ways to hide from drones, from day camouflage,141 to heat camouflage,142 to not using wireless communication such as mobile phones or GPS-based communication, which may compromise an individual’s location.

However, this last method—of not using wireless communication—is one that is already used by people who know the NSA “geolocates” their SIM cards. Brandon Bryant, ex-drone operator, told The Intercept “targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system…. Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. ‘They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave.’”143

144

All of the above methods of thwarting drone technology proved interesting to read, and it seemed as though the guide served as a form of resistance to this contentious technology. However, I take issue with a guide that informs people that they should hide from drones, rather than addressing that their use is the real problem. This guide can easily become a

141 Hiding in the shadows of buildings or trees, which does not actually work. See essay “Invisible,” on page 28. 142 Using emergency blankets made of Mylar—originating in the 1950s, it is a form of polyester resin that makes heat-resistant plastic films and sheets—to hide an individual’s heat signature from infrared detection. Drones do not see people. Drones see heat. 143 Scahill, Jeremy, and Glenn Greenwald. “The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program.” The Intercept, February 10, 2014. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the- nsas-secret-role/. 144 Screenshots taken from the drone survival guide.

81 tool of victim blaming, especially because it does not address the power dynamics of drone warfare. Victims of drone strikes already tend to be blamed for their deaths because they were in the wrong place, had the wrong associations, or were born to the wrong parents.

“Hiding From Drones” touches on an individual’s mobility, precisely the freedom of an individual to move through various spaces without risk. The guide implies that in order to not be killed, individuals should hide in the shadows of trees or buildings, which changes the way a person navigates their surrounding space. The gaze of the drone polices the bodies of people below it in the public sphere. I draw a connection here between individuals navigating spaces below the constant presence of a drone and the female body that is also policed in public and private spaces by the male gaze.145

What the drone guide does not account for are the power dynamics at play when placing responsibility on a community being targeted to avoid being killed. The distribution of power is disproportionately in the hands of drone operators who see all, and who press the end button. There is no way to avoid being seen or killed when you are targeted on the ground, even if you are under a tree. For instance, on November 12, 2014, 7 people were killed while gathered under a group of trees in Yemen.146

The way this guide places on targets the responsibility to not be killed is similar to the way rape prevention tactics place responsibility on women to not become victims of sexual assault. For instance, women are told not to walk alone at night, are told not to be drunk and unaware of our surroundings, are told not to dress like sluts. Neither this discourse nor the methods offered in the Drone Survival Guide address the root of the problem. Both perpetuate larger patriarchal power dynamics—the US as a white supremacist colonizer, and the sexually entitled male.

145 I acknowledge that issues of access to public space and mobility are felt by black and brown men as well, especially in heavily policed areas. While I touch on this issue in “Terror of ‘Illegality’” on page 41 and “Whiteness and Police Violence in the Land of the Free,” on page 101, I only wish to touch on female body experience in this piece as the heteropatriarchal male gaze is central to the way women of all different body types navigate spaces. 146 Recorded by the Metadata+ iPhone application.

82 Iris Marion Young argues that female body comportment and movement exist in relation to the navigation of a surrounding space.147 She pushes beyond the biological differences of the masculine and feminine body to locate the subjectivity of the feminine body in its social surroundings stating, “The culture and society in which the female person dwells defines woman as Other, as the inessential correlate to man, as mere object and immanence. Woman is thereby both culturally and socially denied the subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity that are definitive of being human and that in a patriarchal society are accorded the man.”148

Woman is an object. Woman has no subject. Woman exists in relation to man.

Think about this in the context of mobility and the navigation of space. Young argues that a woman’s comportment and movement is a response to social and historical experiences in spaces. She explains that the feminine bodily experience is self-referred to the extent that the feminine subject posits her motion as the motion that is looked at, thus subject of the patriarchal gaze.149

An example of the ways women navigate spaces in relation to the gaze of men is the issue of street harassment. I have experienced this all my life, growing up in Chicago, but have felt this in New York City, Washington, DC, and even small town Amherst, Massachusetts. My experiences have never ended in physical violence, though a man once raised his hand to me when I told him not to touch me, and another followed me for blocks on his bike yelling obscenities at me when I said nothing. It seems there is no right way to escape or handle a situation of male dominance, even in midday in a public space.

147 Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” In On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” And Other Essays, 27–45. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005. 148 Ibid, 31. 149 Ibid, 39.

83 In a 2014 National Street Harassment Report, “Stop Street Harassment,”150 Latino and black respondents reported higher percentages of street harassment, both verbal and physical, than white respondents. In both cases, black respondents reported the highest percentages of abuses. Further, individuals identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender reported higher levels of harassment than heterosexual respondents, and I assume those at the intersection of both racism and trans/homophobia most likely experience these abuses at the highest rates.

“The body frequently is both subject and object for itself,” writes Young, just as the drone as an apparatus of State control simultaneously subjectifies and objectifies racialized Others.151 Young discusses the female body as a thing “which exists as looked at and acted upon,”152 similarly to individuals in Waziristan who navigate spaces in response to the same patriarchal gaze—one operated by the hypermasculine US military.

For black, brown and white women, trans, lesbian, bisexual women, how we navigate spaces is based on living in our bodies as both subject and object—

Some of us are racialized— Some of us are sexualized— Some of us are both—

I am the subject of my body because I am the subject of my movement and bodily experience, but an object because heteropatriarchy defines me as nothing more. This relationship of subject, object, and heteropatriarchy exists in the same way with a gazing drone operated by a hypermasculine military dominance. There is a threat of being seen, a

150 Read the full report: http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2014- National-SSH-Street-Harassment-Report.pdf 151 Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” In On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” And Other Essays, 27–45. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005: 38. 152 Ibid.

84 threat of invasion of bodily space, the most extreme of which is rape.153 The public space is privatized.

In theory, a Drone Survival Guide sounds like an interesting idea. In actuality it does not acknowledge the power dynamics between the watcher and the watched. The watcher sees all, and the watched is the object of surveillance. It also places responsibility on the object of the gaze to avoid drone violence. Rather than acknowledging the US as a problematic white colonial military entity, or questioning the fast paced disposability of a drone’s missiles, or calling for the abolition of drones, the Drone Survival Guide emphasizes the fault of drone victims for being victims.

153 For more on this, please read “On Nicknaming Predators,” page 86.

85 November 5, 2014 On Nicknaming Predators

I have been asked by a number of people about naming drones. “Do drone operators name their drones?” “Do drone operators give their drones nicknames?” “If you bought a drone, would you name it?” “What would you name your drone?”

Multiple people have asked me these questions since the start of my project—my advisors, my peers, my friends—and I had not given the matter much thought until I was asked. How would I even answer whether or not drone operators name their drones? I do not know any drone operators.

The answer found me soon after. In an article published on The Intercept by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, the two speak with a Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)154 ex-drone operator named Brandon Bryant about the NSA’s role in the US drone program. Bryant explains how Predator and Reaper drones are often given nicknames, including “Lightning” and “Sky Raider,” and then clarifies that the “Sky Raider” is also referred to as “Sky Raper.”155 He says it is “‘because it killed a lot of people.’ When operators were assigned to ‘Sky Raper,’…it meant that somebody was going to die.’”156

I have heard the term “rape” used as slang to imply that someone was going to put forth great effort to defeat or accomplish a task. I first think of the nickname in this context. By nicknaming a drone “Sky Raper,” operators—who are actors of the State—own the use of

154 JSOC’s primary job is to identify and eliminate terror cells worldwide. 155 Scahill, Jeremy, and Glenn Greenwald. “The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program.” The Intercept, February 10, 2014. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the- nsas-secret-role/. 156 Ibid.

86 rape for domination and to defeat a target, while simultaneously participating in the normalization of rape as a larger systemic issue. The drone that takes this name is literally a weapon of war, operated by US persons in the War on Terror.

Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that rape is pervasive both within the US military and within US society, but also that sexual violence has been used by US persons in this war and as a tactic of power in prisons, such as Abu Ghraib. Not only are operators suggesting that it is appropriate to use rape as a weapon against individuals in a time of war, they are also making light of sexual violence more generally.

Based on a Department of Defense report157 on sexual violence, Time wrote158 that in fiscal year 2014 there were 5,983 reported sexual assaults within the US military, though only an estimated 25 percent of victims filed complaints. These numbers prove a serious issue. Further, each year there are roughly 293,000 victims of sexual assault in the United States, while only 32 percent of assaults are reported.159 These numbers alone should alert you to a problem of sexual violence in this country. The sexual domination of women, men, and gender non-conforming individuals alike is a pervasive problem within the patriarchal structure of the US.

Sexual violence has been used as a tool of war for centuries, from Antiquity to the start of the colonial era to the War on Terror. It is a mechanism of asserting power and dominance over the body of a precarious Other. While sexual violence has historically been associated with fear of the hypersexualized black or brown male—a racial and sexual monster of the 18th and 19th centuries160—we must consider this same racialization and sexualization of

157http://sapr.mil/public/docs/reports/FY14_POTUS/FY14_DoD_Report_to_POTUS_Full_Report 158 Thompson, Mark, and N. B. C. News. “Military’s War on Sexual Assault Proves Slow Going.” Time, 05:32, -04-19 13:26:06 2015. http://time.com/3618348/pentagon-sexual-assault- military/. 159 How Often Does Sexual Assault Occur?. RAINN (Rape, Abuse. Incest National Network), n.d. https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/frequency-of-sexual-assault. 160 Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002): 117–48.

87 brown-skinned men as part of the sexually aggressive white patriarchal response of the United States since 2001.

In fact, immediately following 9/11, posters depicted Osama bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building with the caption, “The Empire Strikes Back… So you like skyscrapers, huh, bitch?” as discussed by Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai.161 Puar and Rai explain how “the US state, having experienced castration and penetration of its capitalist masculinity, offers up narratives of emasculation as appropriate punishment for bin Laden, brown-skinned folks, and men in turbans.”162 The link between this sexually violent response and the name “Sky Raper” is important to remember, especially when “Sky Raper” is used to describe a weaponized drone that kills a lot of brown people.

Puar and Rai attribute this sexually violent response to the 9/11 attacks to a constructed psyche of the terrorist as one of failed heterosexuality, thus prompting a response of aggressive heterosexual patriotism.163 In other words, by describing the attacks on 9/11 as an unwanted penetration of an American capitalist masculinity—or a sexual violation—the US must respond with a militarized hypermasculinity.164

Puar explains then that the sentiments of US victimhood after the attacks were “attached to gendered, sexualized, and racial codings of [the body of the monster-terrorist as queer.]”165 Within this narrative, the US must retaliate to the attack on its capitalist masculinity by emasculating the terrorist—whose failed psyche is essentially tied to queerness as sexual deviancy—and “turn him into a fag.”166

161 Ibid. 162 Ibid, 126. 163 Ibid, 117. 164 Puar, Jasbir K. “The Sexuality of Terrorism.” In Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 37–78. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. 165 Ibid, 46. 166 Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002): 126.

88 I want to make the existing gendered, sexualized and racial codings of brown skinned people clearer with the example of sexual violence against prisoners held at Abu Ghraib Prison. After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Amnesty International published a report documenting abuses—including sexual violence such as rape and sodomy—by the US military at Abu Ghraib.167 Photos were later widely disseminated displaying naked men piled on top of each other, or forced to perform sexual acts on one another in front of American military police.168 These men were emasculated in the process of their sexual humiliation.

These actions of rape, sodomy, and forcing individuals to perform sexual acts on one another illustrate the use of sexual violence for patriarchal domination of other people. These abusive acts also serve to demonstrate exactly what Puar and Rai discuss as the othering and quarantining of subjects classified as “terrorists” and the queerness (as sexual deviancy) that is tied to the terrorist figure as a mechanism to weaken the terrorist subject.

To bring this back to the “Sky Raper,” consider the drone as operating as a tool for sexual abuse of brown skinned people within the institution of the Global War on Terror. The Predator or Reaper to which this nickname is given represents and can be physically characterized as the “white Western phallic power”169 that Puar and Rai describe. The drone is a tool used by the US—with a distance between the operator and the target, which enforces the power of the West—to ultimately emasculate and sexually violate the quarantined (due to geographic distance) gendered, sexualized, and racialized terrorist- monster.

167 Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq, March 2006. http://www.amnestyinternational.be/doc/IMG/pdf/MDE140012006_IRAK.pdf 168 You can read more specifically about these abuses in the essay “On Framing the Other,” page 62. 169 Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002): 137.

THE BODY

January 27, 2015 The Case for Reproductive Justice: From Police Violence to US Drones, Racist State Violence is an RJ Issue170

“The reproductive justice framework—the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments—is based on the human right to make personal decisions about one’s life, and the obligation of government and society to ensure that the conditions are suitable for implementing one’s decisions is important for women of color.” (SisterSong)171

The other day someone on Facebook sent me an article from LifeNews about how “black lives matter, even in the womb,” stating that abortion kills 19 times more black people than murder.172 The individual sent me the article in response to a number of posts I had made about the language of pro-life versus pro-choice after reading about this year’s March for Life.

I posted about the right to personhood as unattainable to all women; I argued that pro-life should be inclusive of lives beyond the unborn, such as black lives, brown lives, indigenous lives, immigrant lives and LGBTQ lives. A movement that supports the right to life should value the lives and personhood of those who are frequent victims of state violence. I explained that pro-choice does not take into account the privilege that comes with being able to make choices.

The article from LifeNews reinforced the notion that “fetal personhood” is more important or valuable than the bodily autonomy, life, health, and rights of black women. This

170 This piece was published on Feministing, Corbett, Erin. “From Police Brutality to US Drones, Racial State Violence Is an RJ Issue.” Feministing, February 19, 2015. http://feministing.com/2015/02/19/from-police-brutality-to-us-drones-racial-state-violence-is-an- rj-issue/. 171 http://sistersong.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=141 172 Barkoukis, Leah. “Black Lives Matter: Abortion Kills 19 Times as Many Blacks as Murder.” LifeNews.com, January 27, 2015. http://www.lifenews.com/2015/01/26/black-lives-matter- abortion-killed-19-times-as-many-blacks-as-murder/.

91 framing is symptomatic of a larger trend where the abortion debate too often leaves out an intersectional discourse and framework, focusing solely on a woman’s choice. But the language of “choice” implies a certain privilege, that a woman can make such a choice without any regard to external social and economic circumstances. The language of choice also leaves out a discussion around fundamental human rights that people need to survive. Access to clean water is one example, which was brilliantly framed by Cortney Bouse and Elizabeth Mosley at RH Reality Check as an issue of racial inequality and reproductive justice in Detroit.173

Abortion is a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy. That’s it. This should not be compared to the murder of an unarmed black male, female, or gender non-conforming individual by a white police officer. That is an act of racial violence by the State. Access to abortion and to reproductive health care is an issue of justice. This framework emphasizes the structural inequalities—economic, social, racial, and gendered—that often determine a woman’s choice and right to have a child, to not have a child, or ability to raise a child.

The systemic murder of black youth by police is just as much a reproductive justice issue as access to reproductive health care. The right to have children, not have children, and raise your children in a safe and healthy environment, without fear of losing your child to an act of racial violence is central to reproductive health care. The systemic murder of black youth in this country is a reproductive justice issue where the State is essentially managing a specific population’s ability and right to raise their children.

Police violence and reproductive justice exist in an international climate, one that connects to the War on Terror and the use of drones. US drones have killed thousands of people in Pakistan, whose lives are basically erased by the mainstream media. Since September 11, 2001, the United States has engaged in a number of counterterrorism strategies, what are

173 Bouse, Cortney, and Elizabeth Mosley. “‘Water, Water Everywhere’: Racial Inequality and Reproductive Justice in Detroit.” RH Reality Check, July 22, 2014. http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/07/22/water-water-everywhere-racial-inequality- reproductive-justice-detroit/.

92 known as “preventative” measures against a racialized and criminalized population of Muslims and those who are perceived as Muslim. As a result, racist violence around the world from Ferguson to New York, to North Waziristan, has increasingly been overlooked by national security apologists.

Since 2004, there have been 410 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Between 2,426 and 3,926 deaths have been reported, 714 of which have been identified.174 The individuals who are killed are often portrayed, if at all, as “alleged” or “suspected militants,” even though most of their identities are unknown. This sort of reporting criminalizes the unknown victim of violence—one whose life becomes devalued and erased by the mere fact that he was supposedly, without evidence, a “terrorist.” And this is, yet again, a matter of managing a population and of reproductive justice.

When a 12-year-old boy is killed in Yemen, and we are supposed to believe that drones are targeting militants, when his death is not reported, when we are not supposed to grieve his death, the colonial mentality is apparent.175 Mohammed Saleh Qayed Taeiman’s life is not supposed to matter to us because of the racialized and criminalized identity that was given to him in this narrative of fighting terrorism.

It is the same colonial mentality that drives a similar response of devaluing the lives of black youth lost to police violence such as Mike Brown, John Crawford, Aiyanna Jones, Rekia Boyd and others. It is the same kind of racist state-sanctioned violence that prompted people around the world to respond in solidarity to the events in Ferguson with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

174 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Naming The Dead. Database. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, n.d. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/namingthedead/the- dead/?lang=en. 175 “Child or Militant? 6th-Grader Killed in US Drone Strike in Yemen (VIDEO).” Russia Today, February 7, 2015. http://rt.com/news/230131-yemen-child-killed-drone/.

93 Police violence against black communities in the United States, and the military violence of drones targeting Muslims in Pakistan and Yemen are both acts of state violence and racism that occur regularly. Both are reproductive justice issues because in both cases the State is determining who can have and raise a child in a healthy and safe environment. Guilty until proven otherwise should not be a legitimate policy, and race must not dictate life and death.

We must resist the violence against all innocent Muslims with the same vigor as we do the violence against all unarmed black people. We must realize that both cases are central to reproductive justice.

94 March 3, 2015 Jane Doe

“Trans people are patriarchy’s constitutional crisis. Our very existence presents the gender order with an unfixable problem that is impossible to discipline back into its neat boundaries, save through the most extreme of actions.”

— Katherine Cross at Feministing176

In June of 2014, I read about Jane Doe, a sixteen year old trans Latina who was transferred from child protective services to solitary confinement at York Correctional Facility in Connecticut. Jane Doe was placed in the State prison system after allegedly becoming violent with members of the Department of Children and Families (DCF). She was never convicted of a crime, nor offered her right to due process.

Jane Doe claims to have acted in self-defense mode towards the adults at the department, triggered by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After being a victim of sexual assault, of physical violence, and misgendering since the age of five, Jane Doe is a victim and her unlawful detention is an extension of violence.177 She was incarcerated with the threat of being transferred to a men’s detention facility. She spent 22-23 hours a day in solitary confinement.178 She was moved to a boy’s facility on July 13, 2014 where she was placed back in solitary confinement.179

Jane is trans. Jane is a girl. Jane is Latina. Jane is sixteen. Jane is a minor.

176 Cross, Katherine. “Trial By Press Release: Jane Doe and Connecticut’s Carceral Crisis.” Feministing, July 17, 2014. http://feministing.com/2014/07/17/trial-by-press-release-jane-doe- and-connecticuts-carceral-crisis/. 177 Read her affidavit: Jane Doe v. Connecticut Department of Corrections, (n.d.): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1113035-4-14-14affidavit-redacted-reduced.html. 178 “Justice4Jane.” Justice For Jane. Accessed April 19, 2015. http://justice4jane.tumblr.com/?og=1. 179 Ibid.

95 In February, I attended a talk by Angela Davis at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Speaking about abolition feminism, she defined it as the need to view the abolition of oppressive systems and institutions as a feminist issue, to find the commonalities between struggles of settler colonialism that continue to this day. Davis drew connections between police brutality in the US and Israeli apartheid, anti-black racism and the assault on Muslims in the Global War on Terror.

She also spoke to the ways in which intimate partner violence and State violence against women work hand in hand to criminalize certain bodies. Davis gave the example of Marissa Alexander, a black woman who was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison after firing warning shots when her husband attacked her and threatened to kill her. Davis detailed how Alexander’s victimization, first in the home, and second by the State is a manifestation of State violence that racializes and criminalizes certain individuals. She also pointed to the fact that recently before Alexander—a black woman—was sentenced to 20 years for acting in self-defense, a jury acquitted George Zimmerman—a white-passing male— after shooting and killing 17 year old Trayvon Martin, a black teenager. Zimmerman claimed self-defense as well, raising a question of who is allowed to defend themselves, and against whom. Both took place in Florida. Both individuals deemed criminal are black. One is also a woman.

The story of Jane Doe fits within this narrative. An individual who does not conform to the binary gender order, she is a threat to the patriarchal structure of the US. She is trans. She is Latina. She is a minor. She is unruly because of her intersecting identities. She was treated as disposable after allegedly acting violently towards the DCF, after suffering violence herself for years. Her incrimination by the State without charge or trial is similar to Marissa Alexander’s treatment as a black woman whose experiences of domestic partner violence were extended by the State when she was criminalized for being a victim of abuse. Marissa Alexander and Jane Doe exist under the same system as threatening and disposable bodies.

96 A recent piece by Truth-Out detailing the experiences of women in solitary confinement described the conditions as follows: [W]omen in these units spend 22 to 24 hours in their cells. They are allowed out of their cells for showers up to three times each week and for one hour of exercise and recreation per day inside a different cage outdoors. This isolation exacerbates any existing mental health problems and, even for those without preexisting conditions, can cause severe psychological and emotional trauma.180

The report describes how women who are on medication often have their prescription dosages fractioned after being placed in solitary. The report explains how solitary is full of individuals who other incarcerated women can actually hear screaming to get out. The report details how women in solitary were often denied sanitary pads, and forced to beg for them.181

The list of unacceptable institutional transgressions goes on.

Solitary confinement is being imprisoned in isolation with no human contact, except for with members of prison staff. Lisa Guenther writes that an individual in prolonged isolation experiences radical physical, emotional, cognitive, and social deterioration.182 The purpose of solitary is the demolition of individual personhood, to break down an individual psychologically without physically being able to locate the damage on the body, to remove and rehabilitate a threatening subject.183

It is a form of psychological warfare. Prolonged solitary confinement causes “anxiety, nervousness, headaches, insomnia, chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, and fear of nervous breakdown.”184 Beyond that, effects also include “confused thought

180 Law, Victoria. “Women in Solitary Confinement.” Truthout, January 18, 2015. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28570-women-in-solitary-confinement. 181 Ibid. 182 Guenther, Lisa. “Person, World, and Other: A Husserlian Critique of Solitary Confinement.” In Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minnesota University Press, 2013. 183 Ibid. 184 “Torture: The Use of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons.” Center for Constitutional Rights. Accessed March 5, 2015. http://ccrjustice.org/solitary-factsheet.

97 processes, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, and chronic depression.”185 Being contained in isolation in a small cell with fluorescent lighting and sensory deprivation produces insanity in subjects.186

Solitary confinement is a form of torture. Michel Foucault suggests that “it is no longer the body, it must be the soul” that needs correction or breaking down, as the body performs the crime that is birthed in the mind.187 He further explains that death is a torture, but only if it is a death that does not withdraw the right to live and that maintains life in pain. I refer back to Guenther who describes how the circumstances in which the individual exists in solitary confinement deteriorate both the body and the mind, but also create a situation of social death. The individual is completely removed from socialization, which is necessary to feeling and remembering one’s own humanness. To remove “oneself” from the Other creates the self as an abstract subject that is no longer acting in relation to the surrounding world. We as humans are, according to Edmund Husserl, constantly defined and defining ourselves in relation to another, because the first objective person in my world is the Other.188 The Other assures me of my existence, that I am alive.

Jane Doe is a minor. She is a child. What does it mean to remove an adolescent from society? Jane Doe has been treated and criminalized as an adult, and this is directly related to the need of the State to dehumanize her, to racialize her, and to produce her identity as both trans and Latina as one that is threatening. She was sixteen at the time of her incarceration in a women’s facility and she was sixteen when she was first placed in solitary confinement. Socialization between individuals is important to the molding of the psyche of the self, but especially in the adolescent stage of development. By keeping Jane Doe in

185 Ibid. 186 Guenther, Lisa. “Person, World, and Other: A Husserlian Critique of Solitary Confinement.” In Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minnesota University Press, 2013: (37). 187 Foucault, Michel. “The Body of the Condemned.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 3–31. New York: Vintage Books, n.d.: 16. 188 Guenther, Lisa. “Person, World, and Other: A Husserlian Critique of Solitary Confinement.” In Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minnesota University Press, 2013.

98 solitary confinement, the State has essentially taken from her that fundamental necessity of human interaction.

Foucault describes the breaking down of the mind as a management of the body at the level of the individual; the management of the body by taking away what the body needs in order to shape the mind.189 In effect, this management molds the mind, as the mind needs certain things in order to function properly, one being socialization. In the case of Jane Doe, it is literally the condemnation of her trans and Latina body that is deemed a necessary site of management and discipline.

Torture circumvents the rules of war and emergency, but it happens in a state of emergency when extralegal practices are normalized. The rhetoric that “this is necessary for national security” maintains the docility of those who idly watch and standby as cases of individuals like Jane Doe continue to occur. Solitary confinement is a practice used in the institutional War on Terror and the “post-9/11” legal system. Alleged terrorists have frequently been placed in solitary confinement—referred to as Special Administrative Measures (SAMs)190— and the notion that trans individuals are threatening to State order, threatening identities in the same way as the identity of the terrorist, operates under this same extralegal logic.

As Angela Davis clearly stated in her talk, the War on Terror provides a framework where counterterrorism strategies have essentially utilized and recruited anti-black racism, creating a lethal form of contemporary racism against all subjects deemed threatening. Jane Doe is one example of many who have been victimized by racial State violence in this way.

189 Foucault, Michel. “The Body of the Condemned.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 3–31. New York: Vintage Books, n.d. 190 Read more on SAMs here: Kebriaei, Pardiss. “The Torture That Flourishes From Gitmo to an American Supermax.” The Nation, January 30, 2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/178172/torture-flourishes-gitmo-american-supermax.

Representation by Molly Crabapple, June 2014, mollycrabapple.com

100 December 1, 2014 Whiteness and Police Violence in the Land of the Free

When you look up the term terrorism, you might find a definition like this one:191

When you look up who the terrorist is, you might find:192

When you look up the act of terrorizing, you will see:193

These definitions leave out the racial framework in which they exist, and the power dynamics that determine who is allowed to fit the description of these definitions, and who never will. Since the War on Terror began, the label of “terrorist” is most frequently (and basically always) attributed to religious extremism—namely all Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim.

191 New Oxford American Dictionary, desktop version. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid.

101 There is, of course, an implicit racialization of those who occupy the identity of the “terrorist.” Who defines terrorism and what does the definition imply? The discourse of contemporary terrorism operates in a narrative of US victimhood, where the United States (a white Western nation) is a victim of the violent attacks of an Other who hates “us” because of “our” freedoms. Yet, the US is never referred to as a terrorist State, when it too uses violence and intimidation in the pursuit of its political goals.

That the US State is in the position to define who and what is terrorism implies the insidious nature of its power. Is it not terrorism when the United States sends drones to kill people in countries where there has never been a formal declaration of war? Is it not terrorism to fund the Israeli apartheid and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza? Is it not terrorism to rape and murder Iraqi civilians during a war that ultimately accomplished nothing besides the production of more terrorism? Is it not also terrorism to come to a “new world,” ethnically cleanse the indigenous population who lives there, and then take and settle on their land? Is it not terrorism to then build a nation on that land with black slavery, and then terrorize, incarcerate, and murder black people with impunity for centuries thereafter?

This country was founded on settler colonialism and built on racial capitalism. Today, there is no explicitly declared war on minority populations in the US, yet people of color are treated as disposable, many of whose lives are systemically taken by police regularly. The extrajudicial killing of black and brown people in this country by State actors is an issue of State terrorism. The US should not be exempt from being named under such a label.

Mike Brown. Tamir Rice. Tanisha Anderson. Aura Rain Rosser. Roshad McIntosh. Darrien Hunt. Dante Parker. Akai Gurley. Ezell Ford. Eric Garner. Kajieme Powell. Vonderitt D. Meyers, Jr. John Crawford III. Cary Ball Jr.

These are the names of (only some) of the unarmed black people who have been shot and killed by the police (without repercussion) since the murder of Mike Brown on August 9, 2014. Yet, countless black lives have been taken by the police both before Mike Brown,

102 and unfortunately most likely after the publication of this essay. In fact, young black males risk being shot and killed by police at 21 times the rate of young white males.194 According to a recent Gallup poll, 13 percent of Americans believe racism is the most important problem facing the US.195 While this number represents a small portion of the country, this is the highest it has been since the Rodney King verdict in 1992.196

The value of human life should not be debatable. Black people have been victims of centuries-long violence by the State, including police and the criminal justice system, and as this violence continues, many white people look to justify this violence because the victim is brutalized under a label of criminality.

As Robin D.G. Kelley wrote in a November 11, 2014 CounterPunch article:197 State violence is always rendered invisible in a world where cops and soldiers are heroes, and what they do is always framed as ‘security,’ protection, and self-defense. Police occupy the streets to protect and serve the citizenry from (Black) criminals out of control…. A lunge or a glare from a Black person can constitute an imminent threat.

For black and brown people, skin color in itself is what makes one an imminent threat. Judith Butler develops this as a theory of white paranoia.198 White paranoia is the normalized and engrained racism of the white individual who interprets blackness as threatening, even when the black body is the victim of brutality. I want to bring three elements of Butler’s essay to the front. First, she explains the rhetoric of “He had

194 Read the full report at ProPublica. Gabrielson, Ryan, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara. “Deadly Force, in Black and White.” ProPublica, October 10, 2014. http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white. 195 McCarthy, Justin. As a Major U.S. Problem, Race Relations Sharply Rises. Social Issues. Gallup, December 19, 2014. http://www.gallup.com/poll/180257/major-problem-race-relations- sharply-rises.aspx. 196 Read about Rodney King here: http://www.biography.com/people/rodney-king- 9542141#acquittal-and-resulting-riots. 197 Kelley, Robin D.G. “Resisting the War Against the Black and Brown Underclass: Why We Won’t Wait.” CounterPunch, November 25, 2014. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/25/75039/. 198 Butler, Judith. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, 15–22. Psychology Press, 1993.

103 threatened [the police], and now he is being justifiably restrained” and “If they cease hitting him, he will release his violence, and now is being justifiably restrained.” 199

She describes the institution of policing as “structurally placed to protect whiteness against violence,” and the violence that is threatening to that whiteness is the black male body. She situates this within Frantz Fanon’s description of a “historico-racial schema,”200 adding that police violence cannot be read as violence because the black male body—even when it is the subject of police aggression—is always the site and source of danger regardless of ever having acted violently. White paranoia means that Mike Brown’s body, Eric Garner’s body, Akai Gurley’s body is always performing as a violent, imminent threat within the white racist imaginary.201

Second, Butler points to the intrinsic homophobia that occupies white paranoia, noting that a brutalization of the black male body is performed as a desexualization or emasculation “for a conjectured or desired sexual aggression.”202 This is located within Fanon’s description of the white male’s racist fear of the black male body that offers a possibility of a “sexual exchange.”203 She situates the question of homophobia in the example of Rodney King who was beaten by officers of the LAPD in 1991. He is on the ground. They shout racial and sexual slurs against him. There is then a fear that a physical distance will be crossed, and as Butler notes, “the virgin sanctity of whiteness will be endangered by that proximity.”204

I refer back, for a moment, to “On Nicknaming Predators,” and the use of sexual violence for domination of dark-skinned Others. In the case of the black male, there is a constant fear of castration or penetration of whiteness by a hypersexualized black male, one who

199 Ibid, 16. 200 Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 2008. 201 Butler, Judith. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, 15–22. Psychology Press, 1993: 19. 202 Ibid, 21. 203 Ibid, 18. 204 Ibid.

104 needs to be emasculated and feminized in order to render him powerless. This functions similarly to the emasculation of the perverse brown male at Abu Ghraib prison, or victims of drone strikes in Pakistan. There is, in both cases (police violence and military violence) a need to protect whiteness from a castration by a black or brown Other, by stripping the “deviants” of their masculine power. This is part of the historico-racial schema by which homophobia time and again inserts itself into the white racist imaginary.

The last piece of racial police violence that Butler refers to is the danger of the black male who is subject to violence. She explains how the white viewer of this brutalization is able to identify with the vulnerability of the black body, but only by repurposing and claiming that vulnerability as their own. In other words, the viewer thinks, “That could have been me if that individual was not subdued.” One is supposed to identify with the vulnerability as the vulnerability of whiteness, so as to “refigur[e] [the black male] as the threat… the danger that they believe themselves always to be in, by virtue of their whiteness.”205 She explains that this last piece completes the circuit of white paranoia. I want to refer this again back to the example of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, whereby many Western LGBTQ organizations spoke out to both claim the sexual violence of Iraqis as homophobic, but also to repurpose it as their own victimhood and vulnerability, steering away from the victimhood of those who suffered the abuses.206

Both police and the military are State actors that protect and project larger institutions of oppression, in the interests of protecting white supremacy. To deny that racism is still a problem in this country is to perpetuate it. The actions of the police or the military against black and brown bodies is, in fact, an undeclared war against black and brown communities, a sheer disregard for human life, so long as the targeted subject is one to be feared within the white imaginary.

Racial State violence is terrorism.

205 Ibid, 19. 206 For more, read “On Torture: Abu Ghraib,” by Jasbir Puar.

105 Conclusion An Era of Digital Biopower

“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects.” — Tracy Siska207

On February 18, 2015, I read an investigative report by Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian about a Chicago police detective who was sent to Guantánamo Bay Prison to assist in the US government’s torture program. Detective Richard Zuley helped export brutal interrogation tactics notoriously used on “Chicago’s poor and non-white citizens.”208 Ackerman’s report details Zuley’s tactics, which included “prolonged shackling, family threats, demands on suspects to implicate themselves and others.” This account of torture in the Chicago police department was not surprising to see, considering the city’s history of police brutality and torture in the 1970s and 1980s.

In May 1972, Jon Burge became a Chicago police detective and was assigned to an area on the South Side of the city. Prior to serving for the Chicago police, Burge was a military police investigator in Vietnam, where he is believed to have learned some of the torture tactics he used on black men in Chicago. From the early 70s to the early 80s, Burge ran a torture regime on Chicago’s South Side. Black men were tortured with beating, electric

207 Siska is a criminologist and civil rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project. Ackerman, Spencer. “Bad Lieutenant: American Police Brutality, Exported from Chicago to Guantánamo.” The Guardian, February 18, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/american- police-brutality-chicago-guantanamo. 208 Ibid.

106 shock to their genitals, burning, and suffocation with plastic bags. Between 1981 and 1988, Burge tortured and commanded the torture of over 110 black men. In October 2006, he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice after lying under oath when he denied that he had committed these acts. Twenty black men remain in prison as a result of coerced confessions.209

Just a few weeks before I learned about Richard Zuley, I read about Guantánamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Slahi is a Mauritanian who has been detained at Guantánamo since August 4, 2002 for allegedly being a member of al Qaeda. I learned about Mohamedou Slahi in The Guardian on January 16, 2015 after he was able to publish a handwritten 466-page account of his rendition to Jordan, his transport to Bagram, Afghanistan, and his treatment at Guantánamo Bay, where he remains.

Slahi and Zuley connect at Guantánamo in 2002, and Zuley’s interrogation plan is signed off for use by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Zuley “would tell the detainee that the US had his mother in custody… [and if] Slahi didn’t start talking, Zuley said he would have her brought into Guantánamo’s all-male prison environment, which his lawyers consider a rape threat.”210 Rape, for Zuley and the US government, is a weapon of war, which is connected to sexual violence as a pervasive issue in the United States, used by police officers and within and by the US military as a tool of dominance.

A few days go by. It is February 24, 2015 and another investigative report by Spencer Ackerman surfaces about a CIA-style black site in Chicago.211 Chicago police rendered individuals (most often poor, black and brown) to an abandoned warehouse in Homan Square where they would be denied access to their constitutional rights. Just like the

209 You can read more in depth on Chicago’s torture regime by visiting chicagotorture.org. 210 Ackerman, Spencer. “Bad Lieutenant: American Police Brutality, Exported from Chicago to Guantánamo.” The Guardian, February 18, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2015/feb/18/american-police-brutality-chicago-guantanamo. 211 Ackerman, Spencer. “The Disappeared: Chicago Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden ‘Black Site.’” The Guardian, February 24, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site.

107 United States’ global black sites, individuals were disappeared and brutally interrogated at the facility with no record to their families or lawyers as to where they were taken.212

The Intercept’s Juan Thompson wrote on February 26, 2015 about detainee Kory Wright. Wright was taken to Homan Square on his 21st birthday in 2006 shortly after a drug deal.213 He was zip-tied to a bench for six hours with no access to a restroom, telephone, or water. Wright told Thompson, “I tried to tell them it was my birthday… and I think I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. [A Chicago police officer] got the nerve to go get his friend, and they, like, sung happy birthday… I see [Homan] everyday. I shudder.”214 A friend of his was taken to the warehouse in the same police raid, where he was tortured by officers who beat his face and genitals.

***

The following images are screenshots from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.215 The report details torture tactics used at CIA black sites, Guantánamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib.

212 Ibid. 213 Thompson, Juan. “Chicago’s ‘Black Site’ Detainees Speak Out.” The Intercept, February 26, 2015. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/26/exclusive-chicago-black-site-detainee-speaks/. 214 Ibid. 215 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. Executive Summary, April 3, 2014. http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf.

108 The practices at CIA black sites detailed above are similar to those used by Richard Zuley in both Chicago and Guantánamo. From Chicago, to Guantánamo, to Abu Ghraib, to CIA black sites in Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there is rendition, which first emerged in the second half of the 20th Century as a network of international kidnapping to bring individuals to the US for trial. In the example of Chicago’s Homan Square, rendition is kidnapping an individual and holding them at an off-the-books detention facility with no public record.

In 1995, the rendition program became one of “extraordinary rendition” under Bill Clinton. Individuals were kidnapped and sent to other countries where they were detained and tortured, rather than being brought to the US. Between 1995 and 2001, the CIA carried out 70 renditions, and an estimated 150 more since then.

There is a transcontinental network of torture, using shared carceral technologies. As Jasbir Puar writes on the images that were disseminated from Abu Ghraib Prison:216 We have proof, finally of what we suspect might be true, not only in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay but in our very own detention centers and prisons.217

As Tracy Siska argues, the real danger in allowing practices of brutal human violation, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, and ultimately rape, to happen at Guantánamo Bay is that they always creep back into other aspects of our lives.218 However, these practices are not just allowed, they are structural and necessary to the project of empire. Torture against black bodies has been a technology of dominance used by the United States since slavery. This included whipping, lynching, and rape. The US military engaged in torture during World War II and the Cold War. It is not a new practice, and while Siska’s point is

216 I wrote about these in earlier essays. Please see “On Framing the Other,” page 62. 217 Puar, Jasbir K. “On Torture: Abu Ghraib.” Radical History Review 93, no. 2005 (2005): 13– 38: 31. 218 Ackerman, Spencer. “Bad Lieutenant: American Police Brutality, Exported from Chicago to Guantánamo.” The Guardian, February 18, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2015/feb/18/american-police-brutality-chicago-guantanamo.

109 valuable, to suggest that the danger in allowing these practices “there” is that they may end up coming “here” is to focus only on the latter. Torture should not be valid policy against black and brown people anywhere. Nevertheless, these examples of brutality across continents exemplify the global police State of an institutionalized colonial project, or the Global War on Terror.

Torture is but one of the State-sanctioned tactics used to discipline black and brown bodies. Drones are another shared carceral technology. They are used by the US in Pakistan and Yemen, by the US at the militarized border with Mexico, increasingly by US police departments, by Israel to patrol and bomb Palestinians. Rubber bullets are used by Israel, but also used in Ferguson, Missouri. US Special Operations forces raided the home of a family near Gardez in Afghanistan,219 and SWAT teams in Massachusetts raid the homes of black and brown families.220

The War on Terror is thirteen years old, yet the tactics used in this war have been around for centuries. The War on Terror now constitutes the lives of people everywhere. It constitutes the State; how we travel; how we remember; how we use the Internet; how we learn; with whom we interact; how we think of Muslims; how we think of, treat, and discipline the Other. But at the same time, the War on Terror is an institutionalized continuation of practices that are as old as colonialism.

The War on Terror has continued a legacy of colonization in Middle Eastern countries, while recruiting gendered, racialized, and sexualized technologies of power. Torture, rape, genocide, and occupation have all crept into this global operation, and a new era of biopower has surfaced.

219 Jr, Richard A. Oppel. “U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women.” The New York Times, April 4, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/asia/05afghan.html. 220 “Our Homes Are Not Battlefields: Reversing the Militarization & Federalization of Local Police in Massachusetts,” June 23, 2014. http://www.privacysos.org/swat.

110 Consider: 2,996 people were killed in Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

1 million people have been killed in Iraq, or 5% of Iraq’s population.221 There are also 3 million refugees from the 2003 Iraq war.222

220,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan.223 Sometimes the US pays for damages, like the $20,000 given to a family after a US convoy hit them and killed their 5-year-old daughter.224 The US State is good at putting a dollar sign on human life, even the lives of our own, like the $10 billion in property damage in New York City.

50,000 people were killed in Libya in 2011.225

779 people were detained at Guantánamo Bay Prison since it opened in 2002. 122 men remain there today.

The 1033 excess military program has transferred $5 billion worth of military equipment to local police departments.226 Speaking of which, the New York Police Department is now considering weaponized drones of its own to fight terrorism.227 As many as 30,000 non- military drones are expected to fly over US skies by the end of the decade.228

The Department of Homeland Security’s fiscal year 2015 budget is $39.7 billion.

George Bush approved 51 CIA drone strikes. Barack Obama has approved upwards of 350. Between 2004 and 2012, 2,318-2,912 people were killed in US drone strikes in Pakistan. 714 of them have been identified. 424 people have been killed in US drone strikes in Yemen.

221 “Causing Genocide to Protect Us from Terror,” March 20, 2015. http://rt.com/op- edge/245217-us-war-terror-casualties-genocide/. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid. 224 Currier, Cora, Josh Begley, and Margot Williams. “Our Condolences, Afghanistan.” The Intercept. Accessed April 19, 2015. https://theintercept.co/condolences/. 225 “Causing Genocide to Protect Us from Terror,” March 20, 2015. http://rt.com/op- edge/245217-us-war-terror-casualties-genocide/. 226 “Our Homes Are Not Battlefields: Reversing the Militarization & Federalization of Local Police in Massachusetts,” June 23, 2014. http://www.privacysos.org/swat. 227 “Report: NYPD Considering Armed Drones,” November 12, 2014. http://privacysos.org/node/1584. 228 “FAA Takes Major Step in Expanding Drone Use in America.” Accessed April 19, 2015. http://rt.com/usa/faa-drone-aircraft-us-335/.

111 In 2015, there are US Special Operations missions in 150 countries.229 There are 196 countries in the world.

These numbers prompt the questions, who is the enemy in this Global War on Terror? And is this a war? The issue of language is important to think about, as the language used by the State is a mechanism of power used to discipline a larger population. In this case, the enemy is black or brown men, women and children; the enemy is an individual who identifies as LGBT; the enemy is a Muslim, and war is actually genocide.

Michel Foucault defines “biopower” as a “technology of power over the population, over men insofar as they are living beings.”230 Biopower is the power to make live and to let die, the intervention in an individual’s life—to make them live by controlling the “series of random events that can occur in a living mass.”231 The most important element of biopower is the racial element which determines who will live, whose lives matter, invariably and historically at the expense of an Other. In order to eliminate accidents or random events that can occur to a living mass—in this context, terrorism—biopower is improving the lives of white Western populations at the expense of brown and black lives. It is a continuation of upholding white dominance and supremacy.

While I have examined the case of digital disposability, which makes this time unique in comparison to the centuries of colonialism that came prior, I extend this frame to the context of what I call digital biopower. In this digital era, biopower as a technology has become more effective in its project not only by the State that makes some live and lets Others die, but also in its ability to quickly lead a living mass to join in the discourse of

229 Turse, Nick. “The Golden Age of Black Ops.” TomDispatch, January 20, 2015. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175945/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_a_shadow_war_in_15 0_countries/#more. 230 Foucault, Michel, Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald, and David Macey. “17 March 1976.” In “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, 239–63. Macmillan, 2003.: 247 231 Ibid, 249.

112 who must live and who is allowed to die. Biopower in the case of digital disposability is operated by the State, and followed by the masses.

An individual can read on their Facebook page about an instance of State violence, a lost life, and decide whether or not they believe that life has value. With digital technology, the project of disciplining a population who must live is effective and fast with the easy and widespread dissemination of disposable online information. While biopower is not new, the way it operates at this time, in the case of the Global War on Terror, is certainly different and an efficient mechanism of digital State power. Digital biopower is what allows the millions of lost lives in foreign countries, the lives of brown people, Muslims, and the comparatively low loss of American lives in the same span of time, to remain unchecked. Digital biopower is what allows US persons to read online about a large population of brown people killed abroad, and not care about it because those lives were taken in order to ensure the safety of Americans. When few American lives have been lost since the war in Iraq, and millions of people in the Middle East and South Asia were killed at that time and have continued to be killed since then, we should ask, is this War on Terror really a war?

The stories shared in these essays—stories of people around the world—are connected by technologies of dominance. They are not new. They are not specific to any single nation. However, the carceral technologies outlined throughout this collection, for instance the global network of torture between Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and black sites from Syria to Chicago; the drone as a modern global technological apparatus of power between Pakistan, Yemen, Israel, and the US; and the growing global surveillance network are all a display of power that now operates in a digital time, one that increases the efficiency of State mechanisms of discipline, control, order, and thus easily deciphers whose lives matter.

In this project, I have shared the stories of a number of individuals who have experienced violence by the State acting with impunity. From the lost lives of Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, to black women, men, LGBT identifying individuals in the US, to the unjust incarceration of individuals deemed constitutional crises, this project offers a counter-

113 narrative to the State’s discourse that the fast and easy erasure and disposability of human life is necessary to national security. I have detailed stories of some of the individuals affected by the War on Terror in order to remind you that they too are human. We must all remember to consciously humanize those who the State, digital culture, and the drone work to dehumanize. I wrote these essays to inform my reader of the State apparatus at play, and that awareness coupled with the humanizing of victims leads me to a call for abolition. We must question the State and its motives. We must continue to read about the lives lost in the War on Terror. And we must abolish the military industrial and prison industrial complex that allows this apparatus to operate. We must call for an end to the racist capital system that fuels this global military nexus. And we must do so together.

On April 12, 2015, Ibrahim was killed by an American drone in Yemen after spending five years at Guantánamo.232

On April 25, 2015, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo published a story for the New York Times about the drone program. They detailed how some of the CIA officers who crafted the drone program were also involved in the CIA’s detention and torture program.233

232 This is the most recent drone strike as of the final version of this project. The information above is written as recorded in the Metadata+ iPhone application. For more information on the drone strike that killed Ibrahim al-Rubaish, please see http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/04/senior-al-qaeda-leader-yemen-killed-strike- 150414154922747.html 233 Read the interview with NYT Executive Editor, Dean Baquet: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2015/04/interview-with-dean-baquet-executive-editor-of-new-york- times-on-publication-decisions-about-intelligence-secrets-and-more/

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