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Terrorism - Counterinsurgency
Roundtable on Targeted Killing: The Need for Judicial Review of US Targeted Killing Practices
![[Al-Aulaqi v. Obama. Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_awlaqicourt.jpg "[Al-Aulaqi v. Obama. Image from unknown archive]")
[This is the fourth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] In a speech at Yale Law School in February 2012, the US Defense Department’s General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, outlined several legal principles that form the basis for the Obama administration’s national security policy against al-Qaeda and “associated forces.” Echoing the position the administration has consistently argued in court in cases raising ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: Lawfare and Targeted Killing Revisited--A Response
![[An envisioning of lawfare. Image from Harper’s.]](/content_images/3/sm_war_crimes_lawfare_image.jpg "[An envisioning of lawfare. Image from Harper’s.]")
[This is the sixth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] The speech that Attorney General Eric Holder delivered on 5 March 2012 in which he outlined the Obama administration’s position on the legality of the targeted killing program exemplifies what I have described as “state lawfare.” One aspect of state lawfare, I argue, is the effort by officials “to frame otherwise clearly illegal practices as legal by ...
Keep Reading »Murdoch's Homeland
![[Image from Showtime,]](/content_images/3/sm_Homeland.jpg "[Image from Showtime,]")
Terrorists have backstories, and American politicians play dirty in the “war on terror”. These revelations are what propel the Showtime’s hit series, Homeland, seemingly setting it apart from other pop culture representations of post-9/11 America. “How do you tell a thriller in the post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib, and post-Guantanamo world?” asks Howard Gordon, one of the show’s creators. “Homeland will challenge people’s notions of what a hero and a villain are. The show lives in that complexity and lives in that uncertainty.” Throughout its first season, viewers wondered if the central character, Nick Brody, is a patriotic war hero who bravely survived eight years as a ...
Keep Reading »"Have a Nice Day, Buddy:" What The Actions of a Few US Marines Say About Us All
![[Left: US Marines urinating on dead Afghans. Image from AFP. Right: Afghan civilian dead on the road. Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Screenshot2012-01-12at4.54.26PM.png "[Left: US Marines urinating on dead Afghans. Image from AFP. Right: Afghan civilian dead on the road. Image from unknown archive]")
Golden, like a shower, said one of the US marines as he urinated, along with three of his fellow officers, on three dead Afghans. Over the last forty-eight hours this grizzly spectacle has resuscitated the horrific images of US soldiers’ torturing and sexually humiliating men from Abu Ghraib prison to Guantanamo Bay. Then as now, brown bodies are the raw material through and upon which US soldiers realize their darkest fantasies and their deepest secrets. The pornography that popularized the “golden shower” and the Islamophobia that fuels the War on Terror inspire these scenes. In them, US soldiers feminize Muslim men and demonstrate their power over them. US soldiers ...
Keep Reading »Letter from Istanbul Bakirkoy Women's Prison
![[Ayşe Berktay. Image from WTI archive]](/content_images/3/sm_ayse.jpg "[Ayşe Berktay. Image from WTI archive]")
[An October 2011 report on the so-called “KCK operations,” carried out in Turkey by Prime Minister Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party for the past two years, noted that the Erdoğan government has been using the judiciary, the police, and the media to penalize all civic activism in support of rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. Since 2009, as many as 7748 people have been taken under custody on the alleged grounds that they are associated with the KCK—an organization claimed to be the urban branch of the armed organization known as the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party)—while 3895 people have been arrested and imprisoned without even the ...
Keep Reading »Primo Levi in the Year of Assassinations
![[Primo Levi. Image from southdakotapolitics.blogs.com.]](/content_images/3/sm_primolevi.jpg "[Primo Levi. Image from southdakotapolitics.blogs.com.]")
Next year will mark twenty-five years since the great Jewish-Italian writer Primo Levi either fell or jumped to his death down the stairwell of his Turin apartment. This year has given us two important cultural products that engage with Levi the chemist, writer, and Auschwitz survivor—a collection of essays published by Fordham University Press, Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism After the Fall, and the staging of The Mark of the Chemist, a theatrical reading of his writings at the Centro Primo Levi in New York. The re-visitation of Levi’s moral philosophy could not come at a more crucial time than this, a year of trophy assassinations when, more ...
Keep Reading »Turkish Politics, Kurdish Rights, and the KCK Operations: An Interview with Asli Bali
![[Arrested individuals being transported to their hearing in Diyarbakir as supporters look on. Image from hurriyetdailynews.com]](/content_images/3/sm_kckpicture.jpg "[Arrested individuals being transported to their hearing in Diyarbakir as supporters look on. Image from hurriyetdailynews.com]")
Turkey recently has witnessed a massive police operation against activists, advocates, academics, and publishers who are pro-Kurdish on the grounds of alleged links to the outlawed “Union of Communities in Kurdistan” (sometimes also referred to as the Kurdish Communities Union), known by its Kurdish-language acronym, the KCK. In the following interview, Aslı Bali provides some context for the “KCK Operations,” with particular reference to the role of the Justice and Development Party—known by its Turkish-language acronym, the AKP—and what these operations reflect about the broader struggle for civilian rule and democratization. The interview was conducted via Skype on 2 ...
Keep Reading »The "Very Scary" Iranian Terror Plot
![[US Attorney General Eric Holder speaking about alleged terror plot. Image from Salon.com]](/content_images/3/sm_scaryiran.jpg "[US Attorney General Eric Holder speaking about alleged terror plot. Image from Salon.com]")
The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds Force sending marauding bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism—against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel—is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it. But since the US Government rolled out its "most serious officials" with "very serious faces" to make these accusations, many people (therefore) do believe it. After all, US ...
Keep Reading »ACLU Statement on Killing of Anwar Al-Aulaqi
![[Anwar Al-Aulaqi. Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Anwar-al-Aulaqi.jpg "[Anwar Al-Aulaqi. Image from unknown archive]")
[The following statement was issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on 30 September 2011.] NEW YORK – U.S. airstrikes in Yemen today killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi, an American citizen who has never been charged with any crime. ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said, "The targeted killing program violates both U.S. and international law. As we've seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts. The government's authority to use lethal force ...
Keep Reading »Interview with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Lisa Hajjar on Obama's own 'Gitmo,' Bagram, and US Detention Policy
![[Lisa Hajjar at UCSB.]](/content_images/3/sm_Lisa.jpg "[Lisa Hajjar at UCSB.]")
This interview was conducted with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Lisa Hajjar during the week marking the ten year anniversary of the 11 September attack in the United States. Interviewed by Jess Ghannam of KPOO's "Arab Talk," Lisa begins with a survey of the landscape of US detention policy of the last ten years. While some aspects of torture and abuse have changed under the Obama administration, more has stayed the same, including indefinite detention, denial of habeas, use of military commissions, and the fact that there has not yet been a definitive end to US torture. Following this is a more in depth discussion of Bagram and detention operations in Afghanistan. The ...
Keep Reading »Documentary Video Clip (DVC) Section: Clip from "Arabs and Terrorism"
We are hereby launching our DVC section, Documentary Video Clips, courtesy of Jadaliyya’s sister organization, Quilting Point (QP), which is also run by the Arab Studies Institute. Quilting Point is a Documentary/Film Production Collective that was established in 2003, and produced 4 research-based documentaries, About Baghdad (2004), What is said about . . . Arabs and Terrorism (2006), The Other Threat: Arab and Muslim Immigrants in Europe (2007), and Notes on the War (2007). The DVC series will involve posting weekly clips from our various documentary projects. Clips will be released in conjunction with particular events, or simply as a way of making them available to ...
Keep Reading »Listen
Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice. Compiled and edited by Alia Malek. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books/Voice of Witness Series, 2011. Listen: I didn’t know I wasn’t an American until I was sixteen and in handcuffs. (Adama Bah) This time I got pulled out of the car by officers, thrown onto the hood of the car, and handcuffed. My kids were screaming in the backseat, everybody in the car was just screaming and crying. I said to the officers, “I was born and raised in this country! I was in the military!” For some reason I kept thinking this meant something to somebody. (Zak Muhammad Reed) I have not touched my father since December 2007. If I had known, I ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: The Secret Bureaucracy of Targeted Killing
[This is the fifth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] Three US citizens were killed in Yemen in 2011 by drone strikes carried out under the auspices of the government’s targeted killing program. They were neither charged with any crime ...
Keep Reading »What Is Cultural Terrorism?
As a well disciplined anthropologist I have learned to be weary of the word “culture.” In fact, it is difficult for me to write the word without using scare quotes. But after Lebanese boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists scored an important victory last month, the word has been everywhere in my online universe. Following BDS actions that highlighted Lara Fabian's recent Israeli Independence Day (which marks the Palestinian naqba) performance, Fabian cancelled her planned concert at the ...
Keep Reading »Lawfare and Targeted Killing: Developments in the Israeli and US Contexts
Over the last decade, the term lawfare, an amalgamation of “law” and “warfare,” has been adopted and popularized among people engaged in monitoring, judging and debating the legality of a state’s wartime behavior vis-à-vis enemies on and off the battlefield. Today, the dominant theme in debates about lawfare turns on the contested legitimacy of litigation to challenge military and security policies and practices; and efforts to sue or prosecute state agents, government-funded contractors, and ...
Keep Reading »"Operational Accidents": On the Turkish State and Kurdish Deaths
Reading the press release issued by the Turkish Armed Forces on Thursday, 29 December 2011, it is impossible to get the sense that during the previous night, its warplanes struck and killed thirty-five citizens of Turkey, many of them high school students and all of them civilians. When referring to the young Kurdish villagers it killed, the Turkish Armed Forces merely noted that it received drone-generated intelligence showing a group of people advancing along Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq. The ...
Keep Reading »ACLU to Congress: Stop Targeting American Muslims and Protect Muslim Service Members
[The following statement was recently issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on 7 December, 2011.] Congress: Stop Targeting American Muslims and Protect Muslim Service Members Today the Senate and House Homeland Security Committees will hold a hearing on “Homegrown Terrorism: The Threat to Military Communities Inside the United States.” In their announcement of the hearing, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) once again singled out Islam and American Muslim ...
Keep Reading »AKP's Passion For Kurds: Either You Belong to Me, Or to the Courts
The collective imprisonment of political figures who are expressing the desires of the Kurdish people is an old reflex of Turkey’s state tradition. Collective arrests that started in 1959 with the imprisonment of forty-nine Kurdish intellectuals turned into collective executions in the 1990s and now—in proportion to the Kurdish people’s political development during the tenure of the AKP [the governing Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) of Prime Minister Erdogan]—they have taken ...
Keep Reading »LA Event -- Glenn Greenwald on How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful
The UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program, the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) invite you to attend With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful Glenn Greenwald Wednesday, 2 November 2011 10:00am to 11:30am UCLA School of Law Room 2326, Faculty Library In countless instances over recent years, prominent political and ...
Keep Reading »State Sanctioned Killings
It is now an undisputed fact, confirmed by President Obama: the United States has executed two American citizens far away from zones of actual armed conflict and without due process. More than anything, the targeted killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in Yemen represent serious challenges to the United States’ reputation for abiding by the rule of law. The killings further complicate US foreign policy in a region currently witnessing bloody revolutions and uprisings motivated by a desire for ...
Keep Reading »Study: U.S. Night Raids Aimed at Afghan Civilians
[The following statement was issued by Inter Press Service on September 21, 2011. It was recently published on commondreams.org] New Study Says U.S. Night Raids Aimed at Afghan Civilians WASHINGTON - U.S. Special Operations Forces have been increasingly aiming their night-time raids, which have been the primary cause of Afghan anger at the U.S. military presence, at civilian non- combatants in order to exploit their possible intelligence value, according to a new study published by the Open Society ...
Keep Reading »KPOO's "Arab Talk" Interview with Jadaliyya Co-Editor on Bagram, Obama's Other Gitmo, and US Detention Policy
This interview was conducted with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Lisa Hajjar during the week marking the ten year anniversary of the September 11 attack in the United States. Conducted by Jess Ghannam, of KPOO's "Arab Talk," the interview begins with a survey of the landscape of US detention policy of the last ten years. While some aspects of torture and abuse have changed under the Obama Administration, more has stayed the same, including indefinite detention, denial of habeas, use of military ...
Keep Reading »Ten Years, Over a Trillion Dollars Later: What and How Much Has Changed?
As the tenth anniversary of September 11th passes, one question that is likely crossing many people’s minds is: What has changed ten years on? As mundane and somewhat cliché as this question may be, it has many of us weighing the costs along with the benefits of America’s campaign against “terror.” Unfortunately, for a segment of the American population, the answer to this question never goes beyond the rallying cry of patriotic retaliation and the abstract safety of US homeland security and defense ...
Keep Reading »US Detention Post-9/11: Birth of a Debacle (Part 1 of 5 Part Series)
Days after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration started making decisions that led to the official authorization of torture tactics, indefinite incommunicado detention and the denial of habeas corpus for people who would be detained at Guantánamo, Bagram, or “black sites” (secret prisons) run by the CIA, kidnappings, forced disappearances and extraordinary rendition to foreign countries to exploit their torturing services. While some of those practices were cancelled ...
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There is one question that pundits and politicians keep posing to the Occupy gatherings around the country: What are your demands? I have a suggestion for a response: We demand that you stop demanding a list of demands.click | email | tweet
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