Tony Greenstein on “The Most Important Half-Hour of My Life”

Anti-Zionism as “Terrorism”

AUG 28, 2026

Until today I’d never heard of Tony Greenstein and his battle against being falsely accused by the British government of recruiting for and supporting Hamas. Why the accusation? What motivated it? It may not surprise you that he was quickly found innocent by a jury of his peers, because when you read what he actually wrote, you’ll clearly see none of what he said was pro-Hamas or pro-terrorism. As to why the accusation and what motivated it, Greenstein’s statement to the jury explains it quite well. In fact, his speech is brilliant and should be carefully read by all lovers of liberty and justice for all.

Here is Tony Greenstein’s speech. I first saw it at ColdType; I copied the text from Greg Hadfield’s site on Medium.

1. WHY I AM SPEAKING TO YOU MYSELF

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

First, a word about why I have chosen to address you in person rather than through my barrister, Lawrence McNulty. My decision implies no criticism of Lawrence. It is simply this: when my liberty is at stake, I wish to speak to you directly rather than through someone else. It is my words that are on that indictment. When someone is accused of meaning something he never meant, he should be the one to tell you what he meant.

I am not a barrister. I hope you will bear that in mind. However what I will do is speak from the heart. I am seventy-two years old. I have been arguing in public for more than fifty years, and this may be the most important half hour of argument in my life.

The prosecution say that I invited people to support an Islamic group called Hamas while accepting that I didn’t support Hamas myself. Think about that for a moment. Why should I invite people to support a group that I don’t support and never have supported? It is illogical.

According to the Prosecution’s opening statement, although I did not mention Hamas by name in my X posts, my “reference to support for the ‘Gaza ghetto uprising’ — in that specific context, on that specific date — can only have meant support for Hamas”.

In order to sustain their case the Prosecution fixated on one sentence in a blog of 10 pages, concerning the congratulation of Hamas for a well planned and audacious attack. In other words if you ever say anything about any group then you are a supporter if not a recruiting sergeant.

In fact my blog is cut off in the Bundle. At 1060 words. In fact it went on for some 1935 words, including a leading article from an Israeli paper, Ha’aretz and two contributions from American Jewish political scientist, Norman Finkelstein. That is in addition to 2000 words in the comments.

Even on the one piece they produced they had to ensure that you didn’t see all of the evidence. Let alone produce uncut the 15 or so blogs that demonstrated that I didn’t support Hamas and never had.

According to the Prosecution logic Kemi Badenoch supporting Starmer’s decision not to make British bases available for the war against Iran means she supports the Labour Party.

It is like being told that the Pope has supported abortion by helping out women who have had abortion. The fact that you support one action of a group does not mean that you therefore support the group itself. That logic escapes the Prosecution, although it should be obvious that supporting one action of a group doesn’t mean supporting the group itself.

2. WHO I AM

Before I make my case, you are entitled to know a little of my background. Firstly I am a parent, with 4 children, 3 sons and a daughter. Although I am separated from my wife, Fiona she was in the public gallery yesterday with our 35 year old son, Daniel who is severely autistic. Fiona and myself are Daniel’s carers.

I went to Brighton Polytechnic in 1974 where I obtained an honours degree in Applied Sciences. In 1996 I obtained an MA in Colonial History from Birkbeck, London University and between 2000/2 I obtained a law degree from Sussex University and the following year a Legal Practice Certificate from the College of Law in Guildford.

Apart from being a blogger I have written for, among other papers and web sites The Guardian, New Statesman, Tribune Magazine (Orwell), Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Middle East Monitor, Open Democracy and many others

I was born in 1953, in the shadow of the Holocaust. The Holocaust had ended only eight years before. My father’s parents came to England from Poland and left the rest of the family behind. Nearly all of them died in the Holocaust in Treblinka extermination camp. My father mentioned it just once in his whole life. Just one sister, who jumped off a deportation train, is known to have survived. Over three million of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews were murdered.

My father was Rabbi Solomon Greenstein. In 1936 he stood at Cable Street, where the working people of the East End — Jews and dockers together — stopped Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts from marching through a Jewish neighbourhood. That is the house I was raised in. Not a house of quietism. A house where you stood in the road.

So I am extremely aware of the trauma caused by the Holocaust. It is not history to me. It is the empty chairs at my family’s table. But what I have always fought against was those who used the murder of 6 million Jews in order to justify the murder and genocide of others. That is why authored Zionism During the Holocaust.

I was brought up as a religious Zionist. In 1967, when Israel captured what is now known as Gaza and the West Bank, I shared in the joy of fellow Jews. None of us knew then what horrors would be visited on the indigenous Palestinians who lived there.

Then, at the King David School in Liverpool, I was asked to take part in a school debate on whether Zionism was Right or Wrong and because nobody else would take that side I agreed to play devil’s advocate. In the course of researching the topic I suddenly realised that I had grown up with a series of fabrications and lies. The refugees of 1948 had not left voluntarily on the orders of the Arab regimes. They had been expelled at the point of a gun, and after a series of massacres. The documents that proved it were classified and are still classified.

This was the pivotal moment of my life. From then on I became a Jewish anti-Zionist. And I learnt something my school had never taught me: that anti-Zionism had been the majority trend amongst Jews until the second world war. It is a Jewish tradition, as old as Zionism, and I stand in that tradition. Today 44% of young British Jews describe themselves as non- or anti-Zionist. We are not a curiosity. We are a tradition, coming back.

And I have lived that tradition the way most of our Jewish ancestors did. For fifty years I have opposed fascist groups on the streets. Because racism and fascism led to the holocaust. I was also a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

I am a Jewish socialist. The Palestinian organisation whose politics I have supported for decades is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — secular, socialist, founded by a Christian Palestinian, George Habash.

Hamas is an Islamist movement. Its full name is the Islamic Resistance Movement. Ask yourselves — is a Jewish secular socialist who has spent twenty years criticising political Islam and Hamas a plausible recruiting sergeant for it?

And as you weigh that question, understand what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Someone who has spent fifty years fighting fascism on the streets of this country. I never imagined it could happen here in the mother country of democracy that I would be facing 14 years imprisonment for writing a blog and tweeting under the Terrorism Act 2000.

3. HOW THIS CASE CAME TO YOU

At half past six on 20th December a dozen counter-terror police raided my home, seized my electronic devices, and arrested me — on the basis of a single tweet posted a month previously. We live, ladies and gentlemen, in dystopian and Orwellian times.

When I applied for the return of my devices, the officer in charge explained in a witness statement why they were keeping them. They needed, he said, to fully understand my “mind set and ideology” from my internet search history, and from how, “and indeed if”, I talk about Hamas with others away from the public domain.

Is it really the job of the police to act as amateur psychologists, inquiring into people’s minds?

There might be a justification for all this if they thought I was going to set off an explosive device. But that is obviously not the case. It was the police themselves who gave me bail the same day, with three relatively trivial restrictions — which, on appeal, Westminster magistrates watered down further. Clearly, they did not think I was a terrorist.

But the Terrorism Act has been creating a whole new category of terrorist. On the Home Office’s own figures, arrests under the Terrorism Acts have leapt in 2024 from around two hundred to more than three thousand in 2025 — a more than tenfold increase.

And the profile of the average terrorist has changed too. It used to be a 31 year-old man. It is now more likely to be a 59 year-old woman. You may ask yourselves whether the word “terrorist” has quietly been given a new meaning — and whether I am standing in front of you because of it.

And when they interviewed me, I did not hide behind “no comment.” as my solicitor advised me. I answered every question for over an hour, and came back three months later, voluntarily, and did it again. When they asked me directly whether I supported Hamas against the Israeli army, I gave them an answer I will repeat again, because it is my whole case:

“I would probably support the devil against the Israeli army. That doesn’t mean I support the devil in itself.”

And if the devil exists it exists amongst those who prohibit anaesthetics entering Gaza so that children have to endure amputations without the benefit of pain relief. The devil exists amongst those who deliberately starve children to death because they rationalise that those children will only grow up to be terrorists. It exists among those who bomb tent encampments and literally burn children and their parents alive. It exists amongst those who call Palestinians “human animals” the same phrase used by Himmler, the head of the SS about Jewish children in a speech on October 4, 1943 to senior SS Generals.

In a situation where there is a conflict, you support the oppressed rather than the oppressor. That is not support for an organisation. That is a moral position — one, I might add, with a rather long Jewish pedigree.

4. WHAT YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO DECIDE

Her Honour will direct you on the law, and what she tells you about the law you must take from her, not from me. But you know by now what the prosecution must make you sure of, and it is worth setting out plainly, because everything I say from here on hangs from it.

They must make you sure of three things. That Hamas was proscribed on 7 October 2023 — that is agreed, and always was. That my words in fact invited support for Hamas. And that I knew, at the time, that that is what I was doing.

Three things. All three. Sure of each.

Now notice what is not on that list.

It is not on that list whether you agree with my opinions about Israel and Palestine. It is not on that list whether you find those opinions congenial, or offensive — some of you may find that they are. And it is not on that list whether Hamas ought to be proscribed. That is the government’s decision. It is not mine, and it is not yours.

The charge is not holding an opinion. The charge is inviting other people to support an organisation, Hamas. Those are two different things — and every single question in this trial lives in the distance between them.

Hold on to that distinction, because I am now going to show you what I actually wrote.

5. WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE

This case hinges on three short posts and one article. That is the entire alleged crime. So let us read it — carefully, the way the prosecution hopes you won’t.

First. Hamas is not mentioned. Not in the first tweet. Not in the second nor the third. Not once. The prosecution invite you to supply the name yourselves — because I did not supply it.

What I wrote was “the Gaza Ghetto Uprising.” And I chose the word ghetto deliberately, but not for the reason the prosecution imply.

Let me explain, for those of you who do not know the history. In the second world war, the Nazis walled the Jews of Warsaw, half a million of them into a ghetto — a sealed district, starved and diseased, from which the trains left for the Treblinka death camp. And in 1943 the young Jews who remained did something nobody expected. With a handful of smuggled pistols, against tanks and the SS, they rose. They knew they could not win. They rose because it was better to die resisting than to be led away quietly. It is one of the proudest moments in Jewish history.

The last surviving commander of that uprising was a man named Marek Edelman. And in his old age, Edelman wrote to the Palestinian resistance and addressed them as fellow fighters — much to Israel’s annoyance. When he died, Poland gave him a state funeral, a fifteen-gun salute, the President gave the oration. Israel did not send the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy. Edelman wasn’t a Zionist.

Edelman, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, described Gaza as a ghetto. I have used his comparison for years before October 2023. Two million people, most of them refugees or the children of refugees, sealed into a strip of land under blockade for 16 years, where the majority are children who have never once been allowed out. When I wrote “ghetto,” I meant a ghetto. My blog supported the Uprising just as I would have supported the slave uprisings of the 19th century. That is a political opinion. It was a political opinion on 7 October 2023, and it is a political opinion now.

And here is the crazy thing. Read section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and ask what it would have made of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. If this Act had existed in 1944, they could have been classified as terrorists. So could the French Resistance. That is how widely this law is drawn — and it is worth remembering when you consider who it is now being pointed at. The definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000 is no definition at all. It has been widely criticised, both by the Supreme Court in Gul and also by the Independent Reviewer of terrorism David Anderson QC as he then was.

Second. “PLEASE SHARE.” The prosecution say those two words are the invitation. Members of the jury, I have written a blog for 18 years. “Please share” means: read my article, pass it on, argue with it. Asking people to read what you have written is not asking them to support an organisation. If it were, every writer in this country would be standing where I am standing. My purpose was not to invite support for anyone. If I had wanted people to support a particular group I would have said it. I often ask for support for things such as the Al Tafawk kindergarten in Jenin. Nothing in the wording suggests that. The posts were advertising my blog. That is what writers do.

And here is what that “recruitment campaign” achieved. 56 views. 73 views. 58 views. Four shares between them. The prosecution’s case that this was an invitation to the public to support a proscribed organisation — is a fantasy that they have created out of nothing.

Third — the sentence the whole case rests on.”Whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well planned and audacious attack.”

Note the words: “whatever criticisms.” Those are not the words of a recruiter. A recruiter does not open with the criticisms of the thing he is recruiting for. Those are the words of someone who has spent fifteen years making those criticisms in public — and I will show you the receipts in a moment.

And “well planned and audacious” — that is a description, not an endorsement. October 7 was well planned, and it was audacious. Israel had constructed a five billion dollar electronic fence, complete with drones, sensors and automatic machine guns, and it was breached in minutes. Retired generals said the same thing on television that week. Nobody raided their homes at dawn.

As for “Hamas should be congratulated” it is so obviously a figure of speech, not meant literally, that I am surprised that the prosecutor doesn’t blush every time she argues this.

And I will tell you what else I wrote that day, in the same article and its comments. I wrote that the retribution of Israel would be bloody and savage. I wrote to a commenter: “Graham, believe you me, I am apprehensive of the days ahead and Israel’s potential for genocide.” Apprehensive. Those are not the words of someone celebrating. They are the words of someone who feared exactly what was coming — and who, you may think, has been proved catastrophically right.

But you would not have read the latter comment because the version of the blog in your Bundle is only half the original (1060 words as opposed to 1935 words). The comments underneath were another 2,000 words and they too were not in your bundle. Why? Because it is clear that the conversation didn’t mention anyone joining Hamas. Anyone with eyes to see would understand that the blog was not an invitation to join Hamas.

It takes a certain malevolence to read that into the blog. And let it be clear that support for an action of a proscribed group is not the same as support for the group itself. expressing an opinion or belief that is shared by or coincides with the aims of a proscribed organization is not the same thing as expressing support for the organization itself That is or should be common senses. It is also good law as in the case ABJ decided recently in the Supreme Court.

So ask yourself the only question that matters. Where, in any of this, is the invitation? Did I ask anyone to join anything? Did I ask for money? Did I ask a single human being to take a single action — other than to read an article?

You may take those three posts and that article into your deliberation room and read them from beginning to end as many times as you like. You will not find it. It is not there. ‖

6. TWENTY YEARS OF MY OWN HEADLINES

The prosecution must also prove that I knew I was inviting support for Hamas. So let me show you what I have actually written about Hamas, over twenty years, under my own name. These are the titles of my articles:

We Support the Palestinian People of Gaza — not Hamas. March 2009.

Islamic Fascists Attack Children’s Summer Camp in Gaza. May 2010.

Hamas — Speaking with a Forked Tongue. December 2010.

The Lousy Hamas Government. February 2011.

Hamas Prevents Palestinian Students Studying Abroad. August 2011.

Hamas’s Attack on NGOs Resembles That of Israel. August 2011.

Hamas Pays the Price of Forced Islamicisation. April 2013.

How Israel Helped Create Hamas. July 2014.

Hamas Does Its Best to Make Palestinian Lives a Misery. February 2018.

Abbas and Hamas — Abuse and Torture of Palestinians. October 2018.

Ten years of headlines. I called them Islamic fascists. In print. In public. Under my own name. Do the titles of those blogs indicate support for Hamas?

And these are only some of them. You can be sure that if my writings helped the prosecution in any way, they would have given them to you to read rather than objecting to them.

I have spent my political life supporting the secular, socialist tradition of Palestine. So when the prosecution tell you that on the morning of 7 October 2023 I woke up and decided to become a recruiter for the Islamic Resistance Movement, you are entitled to ask: on what planet? ‖

7. WHY, THEN, AM I HERE? — ONE LAW FOR SOME

So if the words don’t say it, and the record contradicts it, you are entitled to ask the obvious question: why is this prosecution happening at all?

Let me answer it with a comparison, and you may draw your own conclusions.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria — was a proscribed organisation in this country until October of last year. While it was still proscribed, and while its leader, who became Syria’s President, still had a ten million dollar bounty on his head, eminent British public figures — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, and Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP — travelled to Damascus to conduct a friendly, filmed interview with him. This is a regime whose forces have killed thousands of Christians, Druze and Alawites because of their religion. They came home and were effusive in their opinions about him, to audiences of hundreds of thousands.

Nobody raided their homes at half past six in the morning. Nobody seized their devices to investigate their “mind set and ideology.” A decision was taken not to trouble them.

Now, when a law is implemented against certain people and not others, that goes against the first principle of the rule of law. Either laws are applicable to all, or to none. To apply them only to those whose opinions the government of the day disagrees with — that is the hallmark of a police state, not a democracy.

And you do not have to take the point from me on trust, because the same double standard is written on a larger canvas. Parliament made genocide and war crimes offences under the International Criminal Court Act 2001. Yet successive British governments have gone on supplying arms to what most of the world regard as a genocide in Gaza, and yet no minister has ever stood where I am standing.

This is not a new story. Nelson Mandela — whose statue stands today in Parliament Square, facing the Houses of Parliament — was described by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as a terrorist, and the movement he led as a terrorist movement. If this Act had been in force in those decades, that movement would have been proscribed — and anyone in Britain who wrote “we should congratulate them” would have been at risk of standing exactly where I am standing now. Mandela himself said:

“The West sees liberation movements as terrorist movements — and that is why I am accused of supporting terrorism.”

Now let me be precise about what I am saying, because it is not what the prosecution may pretend I am saying. I am not comparing any organisation to Nelson Mandela. The comparison is not between organisations at all. It is between governments — then and now — and how easily they attach the word terrorist to whoever opposes the policy of the day. Today, Mandela is widely admired. The label of terrorism should be applied to those who are terrorists not those who are not. ‖

8. THE STATE HAS ALWAYS PROSECUTED OPINIONS

Judges have always insisted that the trials before them are not political. They said it at the trial of Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912. Chief Prosecutor and Attorney General Sir Rufus Isaacs, emphasised that:

‘Suffrage is not the issue, it is the criminal behaviour of the suffragettes and their incitement to partake in militant activity at which 54 windows were broken.’

That was also the view of the Judge, Mr Justice Coleridge, who handed out a sentence of 9 months to be served in the second division of prison, despite the plea of the jury for clemency.

The Home Secretary immediately stepped in to have Pankhurst transferred to the First Division of prison — a division reserved for political prisoners. A century ago the state admitted what today it denies: that some prisoners were political.

And consider what this country has done, within my lifetime, with laws that prosecuted people for what they were and what they said. The law of blasphemous libel — repealed. The law of gross indecency, which criminalised sexual conduct between men and destroyed Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing was also repealed, and more than repealed: under the Alan Turing Law of 2017, every conviction was wiped out, as if it had never existed. Parliament itself has accepted that there are times when it has made mistakes, and the law of the day was wrong.

The Editor of Gay News, Dennis Lemon, was the last person sentenced to 6 months imprisonment suspended in July 1977 for blasphemous libel for suggesting Jesus was gay. The Judge at his trial, Alan King Hamilton, stated that homosexuality was responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire. The judge at Oscar Wilde’s trial bemoaned the fact that he could only sentence him to 2 years in prison.

Judges have nearly always been the fiercest opponents of free speech. The reason is simple. As the Law Society Gazette pointed out on 25 June 2019 ‘Senior judges “most socially exclusive” of all professionals, 75% are Oxbridge educated and 65% having gone to private school.

When the state prosecutes opinions, it always says it is prosecuting something else. And usually it eventually, apologises but usually too late.

Freedom of speech in this country was not granted to us from above, and it did not arrive with the European Convention. It was won through political struggle — at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, where cavalry rode down women and children; by the Chartists at Newport who were brutally slaughtered for peacefully demanding democratic reforms in 1839. People died for the right I exercised on 7 October 2023: the right to publish an opinion the government doesn’t like.

Benjamin Franklin warned: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” George Orwell — a man who knew something about both socialism and dystopia — put it in one sentence:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

And if you want the alternative philosophy — the philosophy of this prosecution — it was stated with admirable honesty by the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin:

“There is freedom of speech — but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

Ladies and gentlemen, you may think that sentence sums up a dawn raid over a tweet rather well. I was arrested, not for anything I did, but for what I said. This case is not about terrorism. It is about freedom of speech.

This is why the government’s own Independent Reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson KC, was critical of the new terrorism laws. I quote from his 2014 Report on Terrorism Legislation :

a) To afford over-broad discretions to Ministers, prosecutors and police is undesirable in itself. As the Supreme Court maintained in R v Gul, 91 it leaves citizens in the dark and risks undermining the rule of law.

b) To render people subject to the terrorism laws whom no sensible person would think of as terrorists risks destroying the trust upon which these special powers depend for their acceptance by the public.

I have committed no violence. I have threatened noone. I have incited nobody. Nobody in this courtroom suggests otherwise. I wrote an article.

And for that article, I face a maximum sentence of fourteen years in prison. Fourteen years. For three posts and a blog. Ask yourself what kind of country are we becoming to send a seventy-two-year-old Jewish grandfather — a carer — to prison for fourteen years over three tweets and a blog article? ‖

9. YOU — THE LAMP THAT SHOWS THAT FREEDOM LIVES

Which brings me, finally, to you, members of the Jury.

Let me be clear about what I am asking of you, and what I am not. I am not asking you to set aside the law. Her Honour will direct you on the law, and you should follow her directions. I am not asking you to agree with my politics. You may think I am wrong about everything I believe, and it would change nothing about your task.

The role of the Judge is concerned with the law. The role of juries is to ensure justice is done. That is why successive governments have slowly whittled away at the right to trial by jury. The previous Justice Secretary David Lammy wanted to abolish them for half of those who are now entitled to a jury. I have no doubt that although Andy Burnham has stopped these proposals they will return.

Because here is what the law itself gives you. You are the sole judges of the facts, of the context, and of the meaning of words. Not the prosecution. Not the police analyst who selected the phrases. Twelve ordinary people, precisely because ordinary people know what words mean. The prosecution does not get to dictate that “please share my article” means “support Hamas.” That question belongs to you, and to nobody else in this building.

That is not an accident of our constitution. It is the whole point of it. Lord Patrick Devlin — one of the greatest judges this country produced — said:

“Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.”

The jury, he said, is “an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man’s idea of what is fair and just.”

Dame Heather Hallett, who sat on the Court of Appeal for 14 years, 2005–17, gave the 2017 Blackstone Lecture on the role of the jury. She is Chair of the COVID Inquiry and previously of the inquiry into the terrorist atrocity on 7.7: She said:

A jury may refuse to convict in spite of the law and the evidence because it concludes that the law is an unjust law. The jury passes its verdict on the law. Secondly, it ensures that the prosecution and the judge are on trial.

There is a plaque inside the entrance to the Old Bailey. It commemorates the most famous legal case of all — Bushell’s. The jury in 1670, refused to convict two Quakers, William Penn and William Mead, for the crime of unlawful preaching. For that refusal the jurors were locked up for two nights without food, water, fire — or a chamber pot. They did not budge. And out of their stubbornness, in Bushell’s case, came the right that you now hold: the right of a jury to deliver its verdict according to its conscience and its convictions, and to answer to no one for it.

I am asking you to do something far more modest than those twelve did. I am asking you to read three posts and an article, in their full context, with your own common sense — and to answer honestly the only two questions in this case. Were those words an invitation to support Hamas? And was I, a Jewish socialist with twenty years of published criticism of Hamas, knowingly recruiting for them?

And understand that your answer will not stay in this room. If these three posts are terrorism, then the word has a new meaning for everyone in this country. Every student who shares an article. Every pensioner who retweets the wrong opinion. Every writer, every blogger, every one of your neighbours with a social media account and a view about a war. Can it really be the law of England that any of them — that any of you — will be condemned to fourteen years of prison for a tweet? You have the power, today, to answer that question. Whatever you answer is, it will be remembered long after this trial is forgotten.

If you are left in doubt as to whether I was genuinely inviting people to support a proscribed organisation — you must acquit. That is not politics. That is the law. ‖

10. FINALLY

I told you at the beginning what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Let me end with why it should matter to you.

I was born eight years after the gates of the camps were opened. It was British soldiers who opened the gates at Belsen. Whatever quarrels I have had with British governments — and you have heard today that I have had many — I have never once doubted what that meant.

I do not say that to ask for your sympathy. I say it because my family’s history taught me one thing above all others. The moment that matters is never the loud one. It is the quiet one — when ordinary, decent people are asked to go along with something that does not sit right with them, and they do, because it is easier, because the language is technical, because someone in authority has assured them that it is necessary. I ask you to ensure that no one else goes through what I have experienced.

Not merely a case like this hanging over my head for 3 years, but the harassment that I have experienced from the State. Five times in the past two years I have been debanked for what is called ‘regulatory reasons’. First was Nationwide Bank which I had been with for a quarter of a century, then HSBC which closed an account my wife and I opened for our son, Daniel’s disability benefits. Then First Direct which I had been with 33 years, just 3 fewer than the bank itself existed. Then this year Santander and Kent Reliance building society.

It is clear that some agency of the state — the NCA most likely — fed false and malicious information to the banks and under money laundering legislation they are not allowed to tell me.

Lord Lane, Lord Chief Justice of England from 1980 to 1992, put it best of all in a House of Lords debate on April 7 1989:

“Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn’t stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband — it creeps up insidiously… step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realises that it is gone.”

You are twelve ordinary people, and this is one of the quiet moments. You are not being asked to make a protest, or to change any law. You are being asked to look at three short messages and one article, and to answer, on your conscience: was that an invitation to support Hamas — and did I know that that was what I was doing?

Although I am on trial today, it is really freedom of speech in this country that is on trial. The pretext for this attack is terrorism. However that is all it is. A pretext. I will finish with a quote from one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, who said:

‘Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither’.

Thank you members of the jury.

*****

Coda: Sadly, I doubt the British government cares that they lost this case. The intent was (and is) to silence anyone with the temerity to take a public stance against mass murder in Gaza. Tony Greenstein’s prosecution was about setting an example, and even though he was acquitted, the long and laborious fight he had to wage to clear his name will likely deter others from expressing “unpopular” opinions about Zionist Israel. All credit, then, to those who refuse to be deterred—who refuse to be silenced despite threats of prosecution.

Trump Wishes Peace to Iran while Accusing Democrats of Enabling Attacks on U.S. Troops

Trump US Iran, Washington, USA - 08 Jan 2020 — Trump boasting of big missiles while denouncing Democrats

W.J. Astore

I watched Trump’s speech today to the nation on Iran. It had the usual boasts about the U.S. military and its “big” and “lethal” missiles, the usual bombast, the usual lies. But this passage of his speech truly struck me as beyond the pale:

Iran’s hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013, and they were given 150 billion dollars, not to mention 1.8 billion dollars in cash. Instead of saying thank you to the United States, they chanted Death to America.

In fact, they chanted Death to America the day the agreement was signed. Then Iran went on a terrorist spree funded by the money from the deal and created hell in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.

That’s right: the missiles used against U.S. forces last night we’re paid for by the Obama administration. Not only that: Iran went on a “terrorist spree” funded by the “foolish” Iran nuclear treaty, spreading “hell” throughout Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I’m sure glad Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United States, and other military actors in the region never spread any “hell,” despite all those Hellfire missiles launched from American drones.

So here’s a new claim for you. If the U.S. military is losing in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, the culprit is clear: the Obama administration and by extension the Democrats, the appeasers who funded Iran and made possible all of its “terrorist” activities.

Best of all, Trump wished peace and prosperity to the Iranian people, but you heard nothing about working peacefully and in prosperous ways with the Democrats.

Clearly, Trump sees the real enemy of America: Obama and the Democrats.

The U.S. Military is Everywhere

Stephanie Savell, Costs of War Project, originally published in the February issue of Smithsonian magazine

W.J. Astore

Most Americans would say we have a military for national defense and security. But our military is not a defensive force. Defense is not its ethos, nor is it how our military is structured. Our military is a power-projection force. It is an offensive force. It is designed to take the fight to the enemy. To strike first, usually justified as “preemptive” or “preventive” action. It’s a military that believes “the best defense is a good offense,” with leaders who believe in “full-spectrum dominance,” i.e. quick and overwhelming victories, enabled by superior technology and firepower, whether on the ground, on the seas, in the air, or even in space or cyberspace.

Thus the “global war on terror” wasn’t a misnomer, or at least the word “global” wasn’t. Consider the article below today at TomDispatch.com by Stephanie Savell. Our military is involved in at least 80 countries in this global war, with no downsizing of the mission evident in the immediate future (perhaps, perhaps, a slow withdrawal from Syria; perhaps, perhaps, a winding down of the Afghan War; meanwhile, we hear rumblings of possible military interventions in Venezuela and Iran).

Here’s a sad reality: U.S. military troops and military contractors/weapons dealers have become America’s chief missionaries, our ambassadors, our diplomats, our aid workers, even our “peace” corps, if by “peace” you mean more weaponry and combat training in the name of greater “stability.”

We’ve become a one-dimensional country. All military all the time. W.J. Astore

Mapping the American War on Terror
Now in 80 Countries, It Couldn’t Be More Global
By Stephanie Savell

In September 2001, the Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror.” Though “global” has long since been dropped from the name, as it turns out, they weren’t kidding.

When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be. I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria — the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror — as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).

As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.

In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?

Combat or “Training” and “Assisting”?

The major obstacle to creating our database, my research team would discover, was that the U.S. government is often so secretive about its war on terror. The Constitution gives Congress the right and responsibility to declare war, offering the citizens of this country, at least in theory, some means of input. And yet, in the name of operational security, the military classifies most information about its counterterror activities abroad.

This is particularly true of missions in which there are American boots on the ground engaging in direct action against militants, a reality, my team and I found, in 14 different countries in the last two years. The list includes Afghanistan and Syria, of course, but also some lesser known and unexpected places like Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, and Kenya. Officially, many of these are labeled “train, advise, and assist” missions, in which the U.S. military ostensibly works to support local militaries fighting groups that Washington labels terrorist organizations. Unofficially, the line between “assistance” and combat turns out to be, at best, blurry.

Some outstanding investigative journalists have documented the way this shadow war has been playing out, predominantly in Africa. In Niger in October 2017, as journalists subsequently revealed, what was officially a training mission proved to be a “kill or capture” operation directed at a suspected terrorist.

Such missions occur regularly. In Kenya, for instance, American service members are actively hunting the militants of al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group. In Tunisia, there was at least one outright battle between joint U.S.-Tunisian forces and al-Qaeda militants. Indeed, two U.S. service members were later awarded medals of valor for their actions there, a clue that led journalists to discover that there had been a battle in the first place.

In yet other African countries, U.S. Special Operations forces have planned and controlled missions, operating in “cooperation with” — but actually in charge of — their African counterparts. In creating our database, we erred on the side of caution, only documenting combat in countries where we had at least two credible sources of proof, and checking in with experts and journalists who could provide us with additional information. In other words, American troops have undoubtedly been engaged in combat in even more places than we’ve been able to document.

Another striking finding in our research was just how many countries there were — 65 in all — in which the U.S. “trains” and/or “assists” local security forces in counterterrorism. While the military does much of this training, the State Department is also surprisingly heavily involved, funding and training police, military, and border patrol agents in many countries. It also donates equipment, including vehicle X-ray detection machines and contraband inspection kits. In addition, it develops programs it labels “Countering Violent Extremism,” which represent a soft-power approach, focusing on public education and other tools to “counter terrorist safe havens and recruitment.”

Such training and assistance occurs across the Middle East and Africa, as well as in some places in Asia and Latin America. American “law enforcement entities” trained security forces in Brazil to monitor terrorist threats in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, for example (and continued the partnership in 2017). Similarly, U.S. border patrol agents worked with their counterparts in Argentina to crack down on suspected money laundering by terrorist groups in the illicit marketplaces of the tri-border region that lies between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

To many Americans, all of this may sound relatively innocuous — like little more than generous, neighborly help with policing or a sensibly self-interested fighting-them-over-there-before-they-get-here set of policies. But shouldn’t we know better after all these years of hearing such claims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the results were anything but harmless or effective?

Such training has often fed into, or been used for, the grimmest of purposes in the many countries involved. In Nigeria, for instance, the U.S. military continues to work closely with local security forces which have used torture and committed extrajudicial killings, as well as engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Philippines, it has conducted large-scale joint military exercises in cooperation with President Rodrigo Duterte’s military, even as the police at his command continue to inflict horrific violence on that country’s citizenry.

The government of Djibouti, which for years has hosted the largest U.S. military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, also uses its anti-terrorism laws to prosecute internal dissidents. The State Department has not attempted to hide the way its own training programs have fed into a larger kind of repression in that country (and others). According to its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, a document that annually provides Congress with an overview of terrorism and anti-terror cooperation with the United States in a designated set of countries, in Djibouti, “the government continued to use counterterrorism legislation to suppress criticism by detaining and prosecuting opposition figures and other activists.”

In that country and many other allied nations, Washington’s terror-training programs feed into or reinforce human-rights abuses by local forces as authoritarian governments adopt “anti-terrorism” as the latest excuse for repressive practices of all sorts.

A Vast Military Footprint

As we were trying to document those 65 training-and-assistance locations of the U.S. military, the State Department reports proved an important source of information, even if they were often ambiguous about what was really going on. They regularly relied on loose terms like “security forces,” while failing to directly address the role played by our military in each of those countries.

Sometimes, as I read them and tried to figure out what was happening in distant lands, I had a nagging feeling that what the American military was doing, rather than coming into focus, was eternally receding from view. In the end, we felt certain in identifying those 14 countries in which American military personnel have seen combat in the war on terror in 2017-2018. We also found it relatively easy to document the seven countries in which, in the last two years, the U.S. has launched drone or other air strikes against what the government labels terrorist targets (but which regularly kill civilians as well): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. These were the highest-intensity elements of that U.S. global war. However, this still represented a relatively small portion of the 80 countries we ended up including on our map.

In part, that was because I realized that the U.S. military tends to advertise — or at least not hide — many of the military exercises it directs or takes part in abroad. After all, these are intended to display the country’s global military might, deter enemies (in this case, terrorists), and bolster alliances with strategically chosen allies. Such exercises, which we documented as being explicitly focused on counterterrorism in 26 countries, along with lands which host American bases or smaller military outposts also involved in anti-terrorist activities, provide a sense of the armed forces’ behemoth footprint in the war on terror.

Although there are more than 800 American military bases around the world, we included in our map only those 40 countries in which such bases are directly involved in the counterterror war, including Germany and other European nations that are important staging areas for American operations in the Middle East and Africa.

To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented “training and assistance.”

A Better Grand Plan

How often in the last 17 years has Congress or the American public debated the expansion of the war on terror to such a staggering range of places? The answer is: seldom indeed.

After so many years of silence and inactivity here at home, recent media and congressional attention to American wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen represents a new trend. Members of Congress have finally begun calling for discussion of parts of the war on terror. Last Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the Senate has passed legislation requiring Congress to vote on the same issue sometime in the coming months.

On February 6th, the House Armed Services Committee finally held a hearing on the Pentagon’s “counterterrorism approach” — a subject Congress as a whole has not debated since, several days after the 9/11 attacks, it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all used to wage the ongoing global war. Congress has not debated or voted on the sprawling expansion of that effort in all the years since. And judging from the befuddled reactions of several members of Congress to the deaths of those four soldiers in Niger in 2017, most of them were (and many probably still are) largely ignorant of how far the global war they’ve seldom bothered to discuss now reaches.

With potential shifts afoot in Trump administration policy on Syria and Afghanistan, isn’t it finally time to assess in the broadest possible way the necessity and efficacy of extending the war on terror to so many different places? Research has shown that using war to address terror tactics is a fruitless approach. Quite the opposite of achieving this country’s goals, from Libya to Syria, Niger to Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence abroad has often only fueled intense resentment of America. It has helped to both spread terror movements and provide yet more recruits to extremist Islamist groups, which have multiplied substantially since 9/11.

In the name of the war on terror in countries like Somalia, diplomatic activities, aid, and support for human rights have dwindled in favor of an ever more militarized American stance. Yet research shows that, in the long term, it is far more effective and sustainable to address the underlying grievances that fuel terrorist violence than to answer them on the battlefield.

All told, it should be clear that another kind of grand plan is needed to deal with the threat of terrorism both globally and to Americans — one that relies on a far smaller U.S. military footprint and costs far less blood and treasure. It’s also high time to put this threat in context and acknowledge that other developments, like climate change, may pose a far greater danger to our country.

Stephanie Savell, a TomDispatch regular, is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. An anthropologist, she conducts research on security and activism in the U.S. and in Brazil. She co-authored The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life.

American-Style Drone Warfare and How and When Humans Count

56829352 — Most drone-strike images show technology, e.g. drones, missiles, or targeting crosshairs with foreigners appearing as ant-like creatures in infrared cameras. Rarely do we see damage, and, rarer still, the shredded and blasted bodies of innocents

W.J. Astore

When do humans count in drone warfare, and when do they not?

I thought of this question as I read Christopher Fuller’s “See It/Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program.” Revealingly, U.S. pilots and crews who operate these drones, such as Predators and Reapers, reject the terminology of “drones” and UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or UAS (unmanned aerial system). They prefer the term RPA, or remotely piloted aircraft. They want to be known as the essential humans in the loop, they want to stand out, they want to count for something, and in fact the Department of Defense at various times has suggested a new “drone medal” to recognize their service.

Whereas American pilots want to stand up and be recognized as the pilots of their “remote aircraft,” the Pentagon doesn’t want to think about the targets of these drones as human beings. Civilian casualties are grouped and shrouded under the term “collateral damage,” a nasty euphemism that combines a banking term (collateral) with the concept of damage that hints at reversibility and repair. But collateral damage really means innocents blown up and blasted by missiles. Shouldn’t these humans count?

Another term that Fuller discusses is “neutralization.” The U.S. counterterrorism goal is to “neutralize” opponents, meaning, as Fuller notes, “killing, rendition, and imprisonment.” Again, with a word like neutralization, we’re not encouraged to think of those being attacked as humans. We’re just “neutralizing” a threat, right? A terrorist, not a fellow human being. Right?

Interestingly, the whole idea of terrorism is something they do, not us. Why? Because the U.S. defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” Note that word: subnational. By this definition, nations do not commit terrorism, which is handy for the U.S., which presents its drone attacks as defensive or proactive or preemptive.

Finally, the Pentagon and the CIA are at pains to assert they take the utmost care in reducing “collateral damage” in their “neutralization” efforts. Yet as Fuller notes in his book (page 214), “the U.S. government did not always know the identity or affiliations of those killed in its drone strikes.”

So who counts, and who doesn’t? Whose humanity is to be celebrated (pilots of RPAs?), and whose humanity (innocent victims) is to be suppressed?

Addendum: On how the U.S. seriously undercounts civilian deaths in its air strikes, see this article.

America’s Cascading Disaster in Afghanistan

the Oval Offrice ... — A U.S. government promotional photo. Pamela notes, “Look closely at the expressions on the faces of the Afghans.”

By Pamela

Editor’s Intro: I asked Pamela if I could highlight a recent comment she made at this site about the U.S. military’s approach to Afghanistan. Not only did she give me her permission: she elaborated on her point in an email. Pamela, a former aid worker with a decade’s worth of on-the-ground experience in Afghanistan, worked with the Afghan people in relationships characterized by trust and friendship. Her words should be read by all Americans, especially our foreign policy “experts.” W.J. Astore

Cascading disaster is an apt term for the U.S. military’s strategy in Afghanistan, which involves the indiscriminate killing of terrorist leaders, whether Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS or whatever else.

In addition to heavily underreported civilian casualties, U.S. military strikes increase the ferocity of those terrorist outfits. Not just because those outfits want to show the world how strong they are. There is another element which arguably is even worse, as it is virtually impossible to reverse. Each “neutralized” leader leaves a power void within his organization and a number of usually younger and more ruthless members start fighting among each other to take over — with cruelty and spectacular attacks obviously being stronger “election” arguments than a “softy” willingness and capacity for peaceful dialogue.

Thus in Afghanistan the original Taliban – the ones who were ousted in 2001 – probably could have been convinced to take part in negotiations. They were an unsavory lot to have as a government, with medieval habits, but they were not terrorists like the ones nowadays. Few people know that in 2000 the British charity Christianaid (yes, with such a provocative name) had an office there, run by a female Australian doctor with her husband and little Sam, their six-month-old son. They enjoyed it very much and the Taliban had no objection against a foreign woman providing medical care to women and children, despite the obvious need for careful diplomacy.

Since then, however, there have been so many cascading series of eliminations of Taliban leaders at all levels – all for the purpose of PR spin rather than any coherent strategy – that we now have the umptiest generation, which has lost whatever dignity and humanity their predecessors may have had.

Furthermore, we knew the original Taliban leaders, and they were relatively predictable. Each new batch needs to be infiltrated, investigated and analyzed from scratch, after which we kill those too. What a waste of energy and knowledge! But President Trump believes that the evident lack of success is caused by too little rather than too much bombing/eliminating, so this vicious cascade can be expected to go on and on until doomsday.

This “destroy the Taliban by assassination” strategy has one more layer: the eroding authority of their original leaders. By continuously eliminating (often after several failed attempts in which civilians are killed instead) successive leaders at all levels — from village to nation-wide – the U.S. has shattered the Taliban into different splinter factions, each with its own power structure & power struggles. This has increased pressure and violence at the village level, as people who during the day were already pressured by coalition armies and at night by the Taliban, ended up with several competing “Taliban” factions all pressuring them to join. Some of these factions were foreign, as Afghan friends would tell me, meaning they were from some other part of Afghanistan, not necessarily from a different country, which made it even harder to negotiate with them. Multiple terrorist factions contributed to anarchy in which common criminality has flourished.

At the same time, as this cascading fracturing continued, successive local “terrorist” leaders became increasingly detached from central top leadership and therefore any negotiations with Mullah Omar or any other grey eminence might not translate into concrete changes in the field.

Negotiations should have been conducted in 2002, when the Taliban had been wiped out, which then was no major feat as the vast majority of its followers had been coerced into joining and were only too happy to have been delivered from this burden and being able to return home.

So few true believers were left in 2002 that the Taliban was in a very weak bargaining position, a perfect starting point for negotiations.

Systematic demonizing by the U.S., however, and the ludicrous strategy of killing them one by one — which is as absurd as believing that the best way to eliminate ants is by crushing them one at a time as they appear at our sugar bowl — have led to what we have now: a thoroughly opaque playing field with regularly shifting alliances and competition, which makes it even harder to keep track of who’s who, with whom, against whom. This increasingly chaotic situation makes counter-terror operations even more complicated (spectacular attacks may have more centralized backing, but smaller attacks are often initiated by local splinter factions).

The addition of ISIS further complicated the situation, as the Taliban have been fiercely fighting them — Afghans generally do not like Arabs nor any other foreigners who want to impose their ways — and thus the absurd situation developed in which everyone is fighting everyone — Taliban, ISIS, Haqqani et al, the Afghan army & police, coalition-supported local militias and coalition armies themselves. A bit like the present proxy-wars in the Middle East in a nutshell.

We also tend to forget that the Taliban — for all their senseless cruelty and often medieval ideas — were welcomed in 1996 with a huge sigh of relief when they cleaned up the murderous chaos of the civil war and restored law and order. When asking Afghan friends what part of their experiences since 1979 was the worst, they all would name the civil war. Unfortunately power corrupts and soon this relief was replaced with a different kind of horror. The Taliban regime was loathed but at least was relatively predictable. One could somehow adapt to its rules.

I am convinced that given a bit more time, the Afghans would have gotten rid of that regime themselves and the ensuing civil war would have been relatively short-lived as then they all were thoroughly fed-up with fighting.

Today, the chaos and corruption in Afghanistan is being hidden further, as the U.S.-led coalition acts to suppress information, specifically the reports of SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. John Sopko, the head of SIGAR, has always been a hero of mine, shining a bright light on the mess that otherwise was swept under the carpet.

Now even that light is being switched off.

America’s Cowardly Prison in Cuba

W.J. Astore

The U.S. government still keeps 41 prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba. Incredibly, some of these so-called alien enemy combatants have been imprisoned for up to 15 years without benefit of trial; indeed, without even being charged with a crime. How is this possible in a democracy? What does it say about our country?

I happen to own an old map of Cuba from 1897 that shows Guantánamo Bay, which is along the southeastern coast of Cuba. Here’s a photo of a segment of my old map that shows the Bahia de Guantánamo:

Who could have predicted that when our government, in an imperial land grab, “leased” this base from Cuba in 1903, it would become a century later the site of a loathsome prison for Muslim men snatched mostly from central Asia in a “global war on terror”?

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government needed a place to send prisoners gathered in the chaotic roundup of suspects in the war’s opening stages. Among other locations they chose the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, considered a “safe” spot since it’s both isolated and not in the USA while also being far from the eyes of the media. What was an expedient, a temporary holding facility, became permanent. President Obama vowed to close it and failed; President Trump has vowed to expand it with fresh batches of prisoners.

In a remarkable piece at TomDispatch.com, Erin Thompson reminds us that the prisoners at Guantánamo are human beings. She did (and does) this by curating and displaying their art works. Their paintings, ship models, and other creations remind us that they exist, that they create, that they hope, that they dream. The U.S. government has responded by asserting ownership rights over their art.

America’s prison at Guantánamo Bay has been a spectacular fail. Its very existence amounts to a huge propaganda victory for terrorists and would-be terrorists everywhere. It’s a stain on our democracy (what’s left of it). In the eyes of much of the world, it reveals the USA itself to be a terrorist.

The persistence of this prison shows America is losing its own “war on terror.” Our government lacks the courage to try these men because of fear a few might go free and perhaps spearhead future attacks, despite a national security complex that spends roughly three quarters of a trillion dollars to predict and prevent such attacks.

To paraphrase Shakespeare in Julius Caesar: Cowards die a thousand deaths; a hero dies but once. By keeping this prison open, and by refusing to offer justice to its occupants out of fear of what they might do if released, we are dying a thousand deaths.

Trump’s Afghan War Speech: More of the Same, With More Killing

download — Trump, surrounded by troops and patriotic bunting, defines his “new” Afghan strategy (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

W.J. Astore

As a private citizen and presidential candidate, Donald Trump railed against the Afghan war. A waste, he said. Americans should withdraw, he said. But in last night’s speech, Trump went against his own instincts (so he said) and went with the failed policies of his predecessors. The war will continue, no timetable set, no troop levels determined, with conditions on the ground dictating America’s actions, according to the president.

What caught my attention, beyond the usual paeans of praise to America’s “warriors” and “warfighters,” was the specious reasoning to justify the continuation of the war. Trump gave three reasons, so let’s take them one at a time:

“First, our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives …”

It’s piss-poor reasoning to argue that, because a lot of people have sacrificed and died in a war, the war should continue (with more people dying) to justify those previous sacrifices. By this logic, the more who die, the more we should keep fighting, meaning more dead, meaning more fighting, and so on. Where is the honor and “worthy” outcome here?

“Second, the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable. 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because that country was ruled by a government that gave comfort and shelter to terrorists. A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al Qaeda, would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11th.”

Actually, the consequences of an American withdrawal are both unpredictable and (most probably) acceptable. Sure, terrorist organizations may gain impetus from an American withdrawal. It’s also possible that a notoriously corrupt Afghan government might finally negotiate with the Taliban and other organizations, and that regional power brokers like Pakistan and Iran, who have their own interests in regional stability, might broker a settlement that Americans could live with.

Trump further argued that a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 led to “hard-won gains slip[ping] back into the hands of terrorist enemies. Our soldiers watched as cities they had fought for, and bled to liberate, and won, were occupied by a terrorist group called ISIS.” The truth is far more complex. The prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq helped to create ISIS in the first place, and failed American efforts to create and train reliable Iraqi security forces contributed to easy ISIS victories after U.S. forces left in 2011.

“Third and finally, I concluded that the security threats we face in Afghanistan and the broader region are immense. Today, 20 U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations are active in Afghanistan and Pakistan — the highest concentration in any region anywhere in the world.”

Isn’t it remarkable that, after sixteen years of sustained effort by the U.S. military, the Af-Pak region is now home to 20+ terrorist organizations? The “highest concentration” in the world? Is this not an admission of the utter failure of U.S. policy and actions since 2001? How is this failure to be rectified by yet more U.S. attacks?

Trump said the new American goal is to kill terrorists. This is not a strategy. It’s a perpetual and deadly game of Whac-A-Mole. That’s what Trump’s vaunted new strategy boils down to, despite the talk of economic pressure and working with Pakistan and India and other regional powers.

On Afghanistan, Trump should have listened to his instincts and withdrawn. Instead, he listened to “his” generals. With Trump, the generals won this round. What they can’t win, however, is the war.

National Insecurity

What are the real threats that Americans face daily?

Tom Engelhardt. TomDispatch.com.

If you want to know just what kind of mental space Washington’s still-growing cult of “national security” would like to take us into, consider a recent comment by retired general and Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. In late May on Fox and Friends, he claimed that “the American public would ‘never leave the house’ if they knew what he knew about terrorist threats.”

That seems like a reasonable summary of the national security state’s goal in the post-9/11 era: keep Americans in a fear-filled psychic-lockdown mode when it comes to supposed threats to our safety. Or put another way, the U.S. is a country in which the growing power of that shadow state and its staggering funding over the last decade and a half has been based largely on the promotion of the dangers of a single relatively small peril to Americans: “terrorism.” And as commonly used, that term doesn’t even encompass all the acts of political harm, hatred, and intimidation on the landscape, just those caused by a disparate group of Islamic extremists, who employ the tactics by which such terrorism is now defined. Let’s start with the irony that, despite the trillions of dollars that have poured into the country’s 17 intelligence agencies, its post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon in these years, the damage such terrorists have been able to inflict from Boston to San Bernardino to Orlando, while modest in a cumulative sense, has obviously by no means been stopped. That, in turn, makes the never-ending flow of American taxpayer dollars into what we like to call “national security” seem a poor investment indeed.

To deal with so many of the other perils in American life, it would occur to no one to build a massive and secretive government machinery of prevention. I’m thinking, for instance, of tots who pick up guns left lying around and kill others or themselves, or of men who pick up guns or other weapons and kill their wives or girlfriends. Both those phenomena have been deadlier to citizens of the United States in these years than the danger against which the national security state supposedly defends us. And I’m not even mentioning here the neo-Nazi and other white terrorists who seem to have been given a kind of green light in the Trump era (or even the disturbed Bernie Sanders supporter who just went after congressional Republicans on a ball field in Virginia). Despite their rising acts of mayhem, there is no suggestion that you need to shelter in place from them. And I’m certainly not going to dwell on the obvious: if you really wanted to protect yourself from one of the most devastating killers this society faces, you might leave your house with alacrity, but you’d never get into your car or any other vehicle. (In 2015, 38,300 people died on American roads and yet constant fear about cars is not a characteristic of this country.)

It’s true that when Islamic terrorists strike, as in two grim incidents in England recently, the media and the security state ramp up our fears to remarkable heights, making Americans increasingly anxious about something that’s unlikely to harm them. Looked at from a different angle, the version of national security on which that shadow state funds itself has some of the obvious hallmarks of both an elaborate sham and scam and yet it is seldom challenged here. It’s become so much a part of the landscape that few even think to question it.

In his latest post, Ira Chernus, TomDispatch regular and professor of religious studies, reminds us that it hasn’t always been so, that there was a moment just a half-century ago when the very idea of American national security was confronted at such a basic level that, ironically, the challenge wasn’t even understood as such. In this particular lockdown moment, however, perhaps it’s worth staying in your house and following Chernus, who’s visited the 1960s before for this website, on a long, strange trip back to 1967 and the famed Summer of Love. Tom

Be sure to read the entire post, “A Psychedelic Spin on National Security,” by Ira Chernus, at TomDispatch.com. Ah, to have a “summer of love” again!

Sun Tzu, Steve Bannon, and the Trump White House “Warriors”

steve-bannon-interview-on-donald-trump — Steve Bannon, self-professed student of the Art of War (Getty Images)

W.J. Astore

A favorite book of Steve Bannon’s is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. A classic of military strategy, The Art of War was compiled during the Warring States period (403-221 BCE) in ancient Chinese history. It was a time of intense civil warfare in China, a time when a cessation in fighting was merely a pause between the next round of battles among warlords. It’s still widely read today for its insights into war, its clever stratagems and tactics, and its lessons into human nature and behavior.

Bannon, who served in the U.S. Navy, is an armchair strategist with an affinity for military history books. He appears to believe in inevitable conflict between the Judeo-Christian West, which he favors due to its “enlightened” values, and the World of Islam, which he sees as retrograde and barbaric when compared to the West. He sees the world as already being in a “warring states” period writ large, a realm of conflict marked by “holy war” to be mastered by warrior/scholars like himself.

Joining him in this belief is Donald Trump, who took great pains to recite the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” in his speech before Congress, as if using these words were a mark of personal courage on his part. Trump has boasted about winning the “next” war, as if war during his presidency is inevitable. And I suppose it is, with Trump at the helm and advisers like Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller pursuing a bellicose hardline against Islam.

Be careful what you wish for, Trump and cronies, and be especially careful about declaring victory in wars before you’ve even fought them. Here Sun Tzu has much to teach our “warriors” in the White House.

For one thing, Sun Tzu writes that a battle is best won without fighting at all. Said Sun Tzu: “Fighting and winning a hundred wars is not the greatest good. Winning without having to fight is.” In other words, you set the stage so carefully that the enemy must surrender or face obliteration before the curtain is even raised on war.

Secondly, Sun Tzu warns about the folly of protracted wars, how they deplete the national budget and weaken a state, especially when support among the people is tepid. Warfare, notes Sun Tzu, must be treated with the greatest caution, even as it is waged with great cunning. Best of all is to outsmart the enemy; next best is to form alliances, to build a much bigger army than the enemy, which may force them to capitulate. Worst of all is to get bogged down in long wars, especially in cities, which require expensive sieges that wear on both sides (just ask the Germans at Stalingrad about this).

Ultimately, Sun Tzu writes that by understanding oneself and one’s enemy, a skilled leader can engage in a hundred battles without ever being in serious danger. But an unskilled leader who does not truly know his own nature or that of his enemies is one who is fated always to lose. Trump, who fancies himself a great leader and who is ignorant of foreign nations and peoples, does not inspire confidence here, even as he promises the American people that we’re going to win so much, we’ll get bored with winning.

Sun Tzu puts great emphasis on careful planning and sober deliberation before launching attacks. If the recent Yemen raid is any indicator, Trump is neither a careful planner nor a sober deliberator. Indeed, Trump’s personal qualities expose him to being manipulated by a cunning enemy. In listing the personal traits that are dangerous in a commander, Sun Tzu mentions “quick to anger” as well as “self-consciousness” or vanity. One who’s quick to anger can be goaded by insults into making poor decisions; one who’s vain and self-conscious can be humiliated or manipulated into rash action.

Trump promises an American military that is so big and so strong that no country will dare attack us. Yet Trump himself, surrounded by his “warrior” advisers, isn’t content to build a huge military while not using it. Indeed, Trump is already using it, notably in Yemen, pursuing policies that are fated to perpetuate warfare around the globe. And it’s hardly encouraging that, after the failed Yemen raid, Trump shifted the blame to his generals rather than taking it himself.

Remember what Sun Tzu warned about vanity as well as perpetual warfare, especially when your own people are increasingly divided? Something tells me this lesson is lost on Trump, Bannon, and crew. Embracing the stratagems of The Art of War, its emphasis on surprise, subterfuge, deception, and quick strikes, is not enough. You must seek the wisdom at its core, which is very much against war except as a last resort.

Know thyself, said Sun Tzu, echoing the Greek philosopher Socrates. Face yourself squarely, recognize your flaws, your vanity (“All is vanity,” say the Christian Bible, a book Trump professes to treasure), and be careful indeed in unleashing war.

Do Trump, Bannon, and company know themselves, admit to their flaws and vanities, and recognize that war, in all its perils and costs, should be a course of last resort? So far, evidence is wanting.

Update (8/12/17): Bannon has said his concern about a civilizational conflict with Islam dates from his time in the Navy and a visit to Pakistan. Apparently, however, his ship visited Hong Kong rather than Pakistan. Bannon also recalls specific details of Iran — its resemblance to a “primeval” wasteland — that he apparently was not privy to. All this is revealed in an article at The Intercept. Either Bannon’s memory is faulty or he is an esteemed member of the “alternative fact” club, where you just make things up to fit your preconceived notions.

As Peter Maass at The Intercept notes: “It turns out that Bannon, who has drawn a large amount of criticism for his exclusionary stances on race, religion, and immigration, has also inaccurately described his military service, simultaneously creating an erroneous narrative of how he came to an incendiary anti-Muslim worldview that helps shape White House policy.”

“We’re a nation at war”

james_madison_1894_issue-2 — Madison: Permanent war marks the end of democracy

W.J. Astore

Last week, Army General Raymond “Tony” Thomas, head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), expressed his dismay about the Trump administration. “Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil,” Thomas opined. “I hope they sort it out soon because we’re a nation at war.”

What does that mean, we’re a nation at war? Many will think that a dumb question, but is it? Sure, we have roughly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, and that war isn’t over. Sure, the U.S. is still helping Iraqi forces (notably in Mosul) against ISIS and related terrorist groups. Yes, the U.S. and NATO (joined by Russia?) are seeking to corral and eventually to end ISIS and “radical Islamic extremism/terrorism.” But do these efforts constitute a world war, like World Wars I and II?

It doesn’t feel like a war — not in the USA, at least. Congress has made no formal declaration of war. Few Americans are sacrificing (of course, the troops in harm’s way are). There’s no rationing. No tax increases to pay for the war. No national mobilization of resources. No draft. No change in lifestyles or priorities. Nothing. Most Americans go about their lives oblivious to the “war” and its progress (or lack thereof).

Here’s my point. Terrorism, whether radical Islamist or White supremacist or whatever variety, will always be with us. Yes, it must be fought, and in a variety of ways. Police action is one of them. Political and social changes, i.e. reforms, are another. Intelligence gathering. Occasionally, military action is warranted. But to elevate terrorism to an existential threat is to feed the terrorists. “War” is what they want; they feed on that rhetoric of violence, a rhetoric that elevates their (self)-importance. Why feed them?

Another aspect of this: a war on terrorism is essentially a permanent war, since you’ll never get rid of all terrorists. And permanent war is perhaps the greatest enemy of democracy — and a powerful enabler of autocrats. James Madison saw this as clearly as anyone:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare …

After reading Madison, does anyone dedicated to democracy really want to be “at war” for, well, generations? Forever?

Of course, there’s another aspect to General Thomas’s critique that must be mentioned, and that’s his audacity in criticizing the government (and, by extension, his commander-in-chief) for not having its act together in “the war.” Generals are supposed to fight wars, not critique in public the government they serve.

War rhetoric doesn’t just inspire terrorists and empower autocrats while weakening democracy: It also emboldens generals. They begin to think that, if the nation is at war, they should have a powerful role in making sure it runs well, until the state becomes an apparatus of the military (as it did in Germany during World War I, when Field Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff ran Germany from 1916 to its collapse in November 1918). The Trump administration has already put (long-serving and recently retired) generals at the helm of defense, homeland security, and the National Security Council. Remember the days when civilians filled these positions?

One more point: If the U.S. is now “a nation at war,” when, do tell, will we return to being a nation at peace? If the answer is, “When the last terrorist is eliminated,” say goodbye right now to what’s left of American democracy.

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