20.06.2002

Dirty bombs and dirty tricks

The indefinite detention without trial of Abdullah al-Muhajir - also known as Jose Padilla - in the US, represents a massive further attack on civil rights by the Bush administration. The government initially claimed that Padilla/al-Muhajir was an associate of Al Qa'eda who was involved in a conspiracy to explode a radioactive 'dirty bomb' in Washington DC. It rapidly backtracked on this - it has now admitted that there was no bomb, no plan to make such a bomb, and no evidence of anything other than idle speculation and hypothesising about such an event. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has also made clear that the prisoner will not be put on trial, nor punished, but will be held indefinitely for interrogation. Yet unlike other such prisoners - mainly those captured in Afghanistan and held under similar terms in a specially built internment camp at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay - Padilla/al-Muhajir is a US citizen (of Puerto Rican extraction, born in New York). Thus the Bush administration has just appropriated to itself the right to intern and subject to military law, without any legal rights, not just the captives of the war in Afghanistan, but also US citizens themselves, who can now be branded as 'enemy combatants' and locked up indefinitely with no rights. The detention of Padilla/al-Muhajir is an index of the political troubles that are beginning to impinge on the Bush administration's post-September 11 honeymoon with the American public. In the last few weeks, American politics has begun to come back to life, with the revelations of knowledge by US intelligence agencies that some sort of major Al Qa'eda terrorist action was in preparation in the weeks and months prior to the attacks on New York and Washington. It is in response to these revelations that the Democrats in Congress have begun to chip away at Bush's credibility, and have begun to have some impact in the country at large. Cynicism is growing that the regular warnings now issuing from the government of some imminent horrendous terrorist attack are not dictated by any real intelligence, but are merely a device to wrong-foot and silence the administration's critics. The 'dirty bomb' scare certainly appears to be an example of this, as well as serving as a pretext for a legal attack on the democratic rights of US citizens that could in theory remove all legal restraints on the internment of anyone the administration chooses. Padilla/al-Muhajir's lawyer has filed for habeas corpus, and this question may well be fought all the way to the supreme court. It is in the interest of the working class movement and all supporters of democratic rights and civil liberties that the Bush administration be defeated over this extremely dangerous legal attack. The events of September last year were a godsend to the venal and voracious imperialist clique that now governs the United States - the greatest military and economic power in history. At one fell swoop they transformed a presidency that was widely felt, both at home and in the world at large, to be a caricature of isolationism bred of ignorance and imperial arrogance - the presidency of Forrest Gump - into a 'world leader' of imperialist democracy. Widely regarded as having come to power by means of naked electoral fraud, Bush was already shaping up as the least competent and most mocked president since Jimmy Carter. Except that Carter did not generally treat America's allies with such contempt - the Bush administration has been responsible for trampling all over the environmental sensitivities not only of the green lobby, but also of mainstream European liberals and conservatives, and for unilaterally renouncing treaties with Russia signed decades ago. These and other actions have made the Reagan administration look a model of slick diplomacy by comparison. September 11 seemed to make Bush unassailable. The political climate in the US in the aftermath was one of wounded national pride, outrage and incomprehension. A gift for this regime of questionable democratic legitimacy. All those inconvenient questions could be swept aside and an atmosphere of patriotic hysteria created, along with fear of some unseen, unpredictable and deadly adversary. Those asking awkward questions about the administration could easily be accused of aiding the enemy. The clique behind Bush took full advantage of the situation - under the maxim, 'Those who are not with us are with the terrorists'. Dissent was equated, including in part in the popular mind, with 'treason'. In other words McCarthyism rules. This of course went hand in hand with the war in Afghanistan itself - the military dimension of Bush's 'war on terrorism'. The spectacle of manacled Taliban and Al Qa'eda prisoners being dragged off to Guantanamo, interned as so-called 'unlawful combatants' without any legal rights whatsoever, either under the US constitution (as non-US citizens) or as prisoners of war under the Geneva convention, was not merely a draconian action against a wartime enemy. It was also a message to those at home: this can happen to you too. There is, however, a big problem for the Bush administration that makes it difficult to sustain such a political environment for a prolonged period. This is the question of ideology. The witch-hunts in the cold war had a real ideological basis - anti-communism: the fact that the leftist adversaries of US imperialism, those who were likely to attempt to lead real struggles both at home and abroad against US militarism, could with some degree of accuracy be accused of sharing at least elements of the same formal ideology as the bourgeoisie's Stalinist adversaries. Both in the 50s McCarthyite witch-hunt, and its sequel during the earlier, pre-Gorbachev years of the Reagan administration, the enemy could convincingly be portrayed as 'communism' (and its sympathisers at home and abroad), trading on Stalinism's appalling anti-democratic nature and reputation. The central ideological problem that the Bush administration faces is that its proclaimed adversaries are now a bunch of ultra-reactionary islamic fanatics, many of whom were originally funded by the US government itself in the cold war. Therefore it cannot simply go on accusing its domestic critics of being supporters of its current proclaimed enemies - it simply will not wash with people of ordinary intelligence for very long that left and even liberal critics of its bellicosity are sympathetic to the Bush administration's current adversaries. Leftists are not generally associated in the minds of the American masses with the subjugation of women, state enforcement of religious morality and openly advocating murder of those who defy the pronouncements of various castes of so-called holy men. Rather, this kind of behaviour is familiar to the masses in the conduct of the Christian Coalition, the abortion clinic bombers and murderers of doctors, the preachers against homosexuality and 'sin' who wield so much power in American society and particularly in Bush's own party. Indeed, the activities of these kind of people have rendered American politics pretty strange indeed over the last few decades, roughly coinciding with the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate period, accelerating through the Clinton presidency and reaching something of a climax with the fraudulent election of Bush junior at the beginning of 2001. Considering American politics is not, even formally, divided on class lines, the embittered nature of intra-bourgeois partisan conflict in the US is rather odd and might be thought of as quite idiotic by people concerned to defend the historic interests of the bourgeoisie in that class's most important stronghold. Put simply, there appears to be a wing of the American bourgeoisie that takes great delight in violating the formal democratic rights of elements of its own class whose differences with the right wing over the defence of the capitalist system are purely tactical. Such events as the Clinton impeachment - a political bad joke that would simply never have seen the light of day in virtually any other advanced capitalist country - as well as the flirtation of prominent elements of the Republican Party with armed resistance to the Clinton presidency in the early 1990s, leading to the desperate attempts of the likes of Gingrich to dissociate themselves from the 'militia' movement after the Oklahoma city atrocity of 1995 - as well as the peculiar nature of the current Bush's Florida coup against the Democrats - all testify to something pretty unhealthy within the framework of American bourgeois politics. It is almost as if, having run out of 'communists' to witch-hunt and persecute, as in the McCarthy period, part of the US bourgeois core has, in its thirst for some new set of victims, decided that it would be good sport to attack its own tepid 'liberal' wing in a similar way. A policy that would be considered mad by the bourgeoisies in western Europe seems to be the currently dominant trend in the US, where the bourgeoisie has never had to deal with a real mass party, even a pro-capitalist one, based on the organised working class. Ultimately though, this is not simply a product of the absence of conflict between parties based on different classes as an abstraction, but also has concrete roots in what is still the most devastating loss in US imperialism's history - its losing, dirty war in Vietnam, which was concluded in 1975 with the fall of Saigon to the Vietcong. To put it as succinctly as possible, key elements of the Republican Party, with their origins and mentors in the Nixon-Agnew-Ford administration that finally was forced out of Vietnam by a combination of military reverses and internal dissent, regard their liberal opponents within the framework of bourgeois politics as a bunch of outright traitors, almost as class enemies, and have shown themselves quite willing to use extra-legal measures to defeat them, from Watergate onwards. They view the liberals in a manner analogous to the way Hitler's supporters regarded German social democrats under the Weimar republic - as the architects of a 'stab in the back' that supposedly destabilised the country, forced an American withdrawal and led to defeat in a war they supposedly 'should' have won. What is more infuriating for them is that the US was not some declining empire, but then, as now, the most powerful imperial behemoth in history. Clinton, the draft-dodger and bourgeois anti-war activist, was the personification of this 'enemy within' for the unrepentant and embittered Vietnam hawks. This extended intra-bourgeois blood feud is what, in the absence of any real challenge from the working class below, is driving American politics today in some pretty irrational directions. However, a determined struggle for democratic rights - indeed to extend democracy against all wings of the ruling class - is a key task of communists and socialists, and the working class itself, in the United States. Ian Donovan