I Agree with Obama on Guantanamo but….

I agree with President Obama. It’s unacceptable that we, the US, have kept people as prisoners for as long as ten years without trial or any other procedure that could conceivably result in their release or  conviction.

Let me say first that it’s not an issue of toughness or not toughness. I, for one, think it’s ridiculous to invoke the Geneva Conventions to protect people who burn women and children alive and who assassinate while wearing  civilian clothing. I am also in favor of making their lives difficult, of increasing the hardship of doing their disgusting job any way we can. That would include making a public announcement that specific individuals may be volatilized from the sky anytime, any place. That sure would create a circle of isolation around them. I would also be in favor of including an option to surrender and be investigated (by us.) I don’t understand why this option does not already exist.

There are three purposes for keeping people locked up. One is  to secure them while they await trial. The lock-up time in this case should be as short as technically possible. The second reason is that they are serving a prison term, a punishment imposed  after a conviction of guilt in a well-described, appropriate procedure.

The third reason  to prevent people from leaving is to keep them out of any situation where they can hurt others. Thus, the classical treatment of prisoners of war is to secure them until there is peace. No punishment ought to be intended. In fact, there is international agreement that such prisoners should be treated the same as the soldiers of the nation detaining them.  Again, to punish people, you have to try them formally and to find them guilty of something. That’s true even if the accused are prisoners of war, for example. A prisoner of war may also be guilty of crimes. The two issues are separate.  A civilized society should not allow its collective judgment to drift from one situation to the other.

I often hear comments among my fellow conservatives that obscure the existence of a line separating the task of punishing terrorists from the mission to keep them out of our harm’s way. I also hear an absence, the absence of realization that the issue if not one of some Middle-Eastern strangers’ – many of whom openly hate us – rights. It’s about our rights. (It always is, in the final analysis.) Confinement to a small space open has not chosen is experienced as  punishment regardless of intent.  It’ s even the most severe punishment several other civilized societies have. I agree with President Obama that we should not punish severely individuals who may be completely innocent. They may be people who are no more guilty of violence against the United States and against Americans than I am. (Repeat this sentence. Make th”I” yourself.” )

I suspect many of my fellow conservatives believe in their hearts that those detained by American forces because they are suspected of terrorism must be at least a little guilty, or guilty of something. Of course, there is no such thing as being a little guilty in our legal tradition. The idea belongs in totalitarian societies.

If we need to control  some people’s movements for the third reason, to prevent from from doing us harm, in a war that may never end, we owe it to ourselves  as a nation to develop inventive solutions that don’t confuse our need to be safe with the imposition of undeserved punishment. I can think of two such solutions .

We could develop a place to keep them that does not resemble prison except that it should be guarded from intrusion by outside forces. High-tech surveillance methods on the periphery of such a place connected to  missiles, for example come to mind. I am thinking of a sort of armed  Club Fed. It could even be a Guantanamo Two, a decent resort where the detainees could lead a life more closely approximating  normal life. Inside the resort, they would govern themselves as befit people who are not in jail or prison. There is no reason why they couldn’t have a normal family life with spouses and children. I can hear some already snickering about the cost of such a scheme. It’ s extremely unlikely that it would be more expensive to maintain than the highest security jail this country has ever had. It would also be less expensive than war, any kind of war.

There is another, a sort of libertarian solution to the problem of neutralizing those we suspect of wishing to do us harm.  We could try to free them  on bail. Let me explain: There are millions of individuals around the world and thousands of organizations who profess to be terminally disgusted by the very existence of Guantanamo prison. Among the latter are hundreds of Muslim non-government organizations (NGOs). Some of the latter have thousands and tens of thousands of  members. The US government could negotiate the transfer of custody to private NGOs of inmates who have been held for several years and who are not slated to be tried. The US government could ask for a vertiginous bail amount, millions or even billions of dollars per inmate so transferred. The bail money would be refunded after  a determined number of years (say, when the detainee reaches a certain age) if the detainee had not been killed or recaptured in the process of conducting or of supporting terrorist activities.

Either some would take up this offer of privatization of custody or not. If the offer were taken, we would at least have put some distance between us and the practical problems of dealing with people we think dangerous. (This includes, as I write, the horror of force-feeding.) Relapses of terrorists would become more publicized than they are now, less subject to the constant suspicion that the US is manipulating appearances.  At the very least, if there was no no rush to adopt Guantanamo detainees, it would be nice to point  out the hypocrisy of our critics.

Terrorism Failing

This is the third posting about the Boston Marathon bombings.

The 9/11 attack was a masterpiece of terrorism. If you think about it as an organizer, it’s difficult to imagine greater success for such modest inputs. The 9/11 horror demonstrated resourcefulness, imagination, and a fine understanding of the delicateness of the springs of American society.

In spite of its brilliance, the attack also failed eventually because no one- not even Americans – fathoms the deep-seated resiliency of this society. In particular, young people reared in chronically sick, often barely functioning national societies – that I won’t name – where privilege and family connections reign supreme, cannot begin to understand the strength inherent in democratic capitalism. Because their countries’ institutions would collapse from a single-finger push, they have trouble imagining that ours will rebound from a full blow to the face. (Not enough has been written to explain to the world the idea of American exceptionalism. Americans are not arrogant; they suffer from misplaced humility.)

The Boston Marathon bomb assassinations suggest that our war on terrorism is succeeding. The only successful attack on American soil in thirteen years did pathetically little damage to this society. Even for the most optimistic terrorists, bagging an eight-year old, a young Chinese student, and a lady restaurant manager must not give much cause for celebration. I don’t make light of the many others who were wounded, many atrociously. I just think that in the bloody arithmetic of terrorism it’s only the body count that matters ultimately. To gain face with your fellow-terrorists, to earn respect, you have to kill large numbers of kuffars; And you get more points the more important they are. Or you have to cripple the country, or part of it, economically.

The Boston bombs achieved none of this. The city shut down for a day. Peace officers logged thousands of extra-hours. The Republic will survive just fine. And, I know how callous this sounds but the death toll in the Boston massacre, including its aftermath, was on the level of a bad weekend on the road in the Monterey-Santa Cruz area.

The alleged terrorists looked almost pathetic. Pressure-cookers make only poor man’s bombs. (Compare with the panache of high-jacked, fuel-laden airliners.). The alleged terrorists did not even have the kind of competence needed to construct an escape plan two-bit bank robbers routinely pick up from movies. It seems almost incredible that they did not even have a getaway car ready, that they had to highjack one, a really good way to get caught. The younger suspect apparently even ran over his brother’s body – dead or alive- in his bumbling haste to flee from the police. This is the kind of event of which black comedy is made!

Note that the alleged terrorists were intent on escaping. They did their best although it was not good enough. This contrasts badly with the eighteen “martyrs” from 9/11 some of whom, at least, knew they were going to their deaths. The prospect of Paradise has lost its luster apparently. (Incidentally, I was one of the first, years ago, to affirm that the Muslim world did not have an inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers. I argued at the time the simple position that Muslims, by and large, just want what we all want: a chance to live their lives in peace and to raise their children.)

This act of terrorism at the Boston Marathon looked almost silly. It suggests to me that jhadists have run out of breath, that they inspire few capable people. (Or perhaps, the fact finally got around that the seventy-two virgins waiting impatiently in Paradise is just a mistranslation, that it’s really one seventy-two year old virgin.) Yes, terrorism against American must look like a discouraging prospect.

We have become vigilant except when the terrorists live inside one of our most cherished institutions such as the armed forces. There was the shoe-bomber, the panty-bomber, and the Time Square bomber, all miserable failures. There were countless others dreamers-for-glory who are now rotting in federal and state prisons without having ever lifted a finger against this great nation except in their sickly imaginations. And there was also one Major Hasan who succeeded beyond all hopes because those who should have stopped him closed their eyes with great determination. We have found the terrorists’ accomplices; they are us, or the criminally silly among us.

Boston revealed what many of us already suspected to be true. Terrorism does not succeed against this society when we don’t cooperate with it. It has stopped capturing our imaginations. It’s on its way to becoming just one of those things, like ammonia leaks from a gas plant in Texas.

Two more things:

This posting and my two preceding postings on the Boston Marathon bombings assume that the suspect brothers did it. I am confident in believing that they did although I don’t trust the Obama administration to tell the truth because of the Benghazi massacre mystery. I don’t trust the Department of Justice, and I don’t trust the FBI all that much either. I just think conspiracies involving potential hundreds of individuals and several different organizations (police organizations) are so unlikely, they are not worth worrying about.

On Monday 04/22/13, the Department of Justice announced that the surviving brother would be tried in a civilian (federal) court. This comes as a relief because he is clearly a terrorist and President Obama has claimed the right to execute such people on his say-so. Legally, I am not sure even a drone assassination of that American citizen was out of the question. I would have given him a wide berth, for sure.

Terrorists: The Immigration Side of the Story

I think the war on terrorism has taken a turn for the better. More on this below or later. First, I have to give my immigrant’s reactions to the Boston Marathon assassinations aftermath.

As I pick it up from the Wall Street Journal and from what I glean on Fox, NPR and also TV5, the French language international channel, the suspects’ story does not quite add up.

They are Chechens who apparently never lived in Chechnya. Chechnya is a republic inside the Russian Federation. It was devastated by a civil war and by the ensuing repression from the Russian Federation. Note: I am a man of culture: When I say “Russia” I mean “Russia;” it means the same as the “Russian Federation.” If I wanted to say something else, I would say something else. A Chechen nationalist movement seeking independence from Russia is dormant but surely still around. One of its arms is a terrorist organization active in non-Chechen areas of Russia including in Moscow. The terrorist Chechen organization appears to be also a violent jihadist organization. Whatever its real goals are or are not, it does not mind killing kaffirs, including kaffir children.

The suspect brothers apparently obtained asylum in the US on the basis of their Chechen ethnicity. Their putative oppressors must have been Russians. I mean the majority population of the Russian Federation. They are people whose native language is exclusively Russian. If they are not Communists, they are Christian Orthodox or they are descendants of either, or they are Jewish. Their last names end in “ov” (or “ova”) or in “of” (or “ova”) unless they are German-sounding names. Their names never end in “ev.” That’s the suffix for a Muslim name.

I have a problem with the fact that the brothers were apparently never in Chechnya where they could have been oppressed. They obtained their asylum when they were living in Kyrgyzstan. That’s an independent, a sovereign republic. It’s not part of Russia. About 85% of the population there is Muslim. It’s not clear who would have oppressed the brothers’ Chechen family. It doubt it could have been the 10% Russians (see above minority) in the country. If they were that dominant, it would have come to my ears, I believe. There has been strife within Kyrgyzstan in the past between the majority Kyrgyz and the large Uzbek minority. But why would anyone give any sort of attention to a tiny number of Chechen refugees. What would be the point of persecuting them? I think, not one. Why did the brother Tsarnaev receive asylum in the US? Was there big-time lying involved?

To make things more complicated if no more unlikely, it appears that the brothers traveled to the US from Dagestan. That’s another small republic inside Russia. What kind of refuge is a country dominated by your persecutors? Why spend any time there at all if you don’t have to and you fear the persecution of those who dominate that small republic? And by, the by the way, both of the brothers’ parents, separately appeared to be living back in Russia, somewhere in the Russian federation when the events unrolled. Check this out: They had been granted US asylum and then, they fled their refuge to go back to the center of their alleged persecution.

Independently, both parents appear to be deranged. The father openly threatened the US on radios (“All hell will break lose” [if the police kills my second son.]) He was living in Russia, within easy reach of his alleged persecutors’ police when he said that. It does not add up.

The mother asserted categorically that her sons had been “set up.” Think about it. Even if you are the kind of person who likes conspiracies, who, what would set up young Muslims from a national origin not one American in fifty has heard of? What would be the point when you could set up someone who at least looked the part, a dark-skinned Pakistani, or a Palestinian with a checkered kaffieh, or a shifty-looking Saudi?

I hate to say this – again – but there must be thousands of cases of immigration gone wrong, some starting with lies. Many of those are bearing grudges. Some just return home. Others stay put, grudge and all, nursing their bitterness. Personal failure in this wide-open tolerant society is more likely to induce bitterness than does failure in a closed, traditional, frozen, economically stagnant society. Here, it’s your fault, period!

Of these thousands and thousands failed immigrants only very few turn to blind violence against the society that took them in. I can’t help notice that in this case, the young failed immigrant who turned terrorist also made his girlfriend cover up with Islamic dress. Some of my habitual critics will argue with a straight face that this is just another coincidence. Sure thing, a Lutheran who insists his wife wear a dress to church is just as likely to implode into terrorist violence!

Do the areas of darkness in this story of failed immigration call for a second look at the major immigration reform currently waiting in the wings? You bet! And did you notice any Mexican element in this story?

(More coming.)

My personal views on violent jihadism are expressed in a piece I posted on the occasion of the Benghazi massacre of Americans:

http://factsmatter.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/levelling-with-muslims/

A Family-Plus Outing

I am at the beach in that state of dreaminess that watching children playing in the wavelets on a warm day induces. I am keeping an eye on my lovely and tough grand-daughter who is three. She is doing interesting things in the shallows of a Pacific Ocean that’s not too cold for once.

My eyes are drawn to a small girl in a short wetsuit who looks a bit like my grand-daughter from a distance. But the girl is both smaller and older, maybe around five. And she is a blonde with very white skin while my grandchild has apricot skin and brown hair. (It’s a long story, another one! Let’s just say that she has Indian blood, from India, that is.) The little fay stranger holds a tiny boogie-board in both hands and fiercely throws herself into the small waves brandishing the board in front of her. This goes on for a long time without the girl ever coming close to catching a wave. I can only admire that strange little girl’s determination. She seems even tougher, even more determined, than my grand-daughter and that, has never, never happened on that particular beach, not once!

There are plenty of parents at the water’s edge keeping an eye on their offspring. I notice from the corner of my eye a woman who is looking at the little girl from a fair distance. I guess she must be in charge of the girl. There is something strange about the putative mother though. She is covered from head to ankle and she wears a full hijab, the Islamic head covering, and there is even a straw-hat on top of of the hijab. I inch close to her because I am a conscientious social scientist. Soon, it becomes obvious to her that I am watching a little girl in a wetsuit as is she. I smile at the woman and make some anodyne comment. She answers calmly in an equally meaningless way. She has said enough for me to notice that she has a foreign accent that sounds more or less French. I ask her in French if she speaks French. She responds in the same language in a sing-song accent but with perfect fluency. She says she is Romanian. The Romanians I meet all speak good French, even once a traffic cop in Bucharest, a long time ago. (That’s in a story published in the periodical “Liberty.” ) I can’t see any of her hair but the veiled Romanian lady has bright blue eyes. Hence the little girl’s coloring. She adds that her husband knows French very well because he is from Morocco. (Most Moroccans get most of their schooling mostly in French.)

In the meantime, two boys, seven or eight or nine, in full wetsuits, approach the little girl and talk to her kindly in a language I don’t understand. I just know it’s not Romanian. They handle her sweetly for a little while. The youngest boy plants a kiss on the girl’s cheek. The two boys are rather dark skinned and they both have brown hair. They could be my grand-daughter’s siblings in fact. Do you see where this is going?

Then, the Romanian lady begins looking outward, toward goings-on in the bigger waves, one hundred yards off the beach. A man in a bathing suit is frolicking there quite competently. This draws my attention because I seldom see a man over twenty-five in water over his head, and almost never one who does not wear a wetsuit. Few contemporary American men seems to be competent ocean bathers. Or those who are all take up surfing and never show up on family beaches. And others may be competent but too lazy or too wussy actually to swim in our cold central California ocean. It’s remarkable because I see women swimming in simple bathing suits fairly frequently.

I notice that the man the Romanian lady is watching is not alone. He is in the company of a woman who also seems to know what she is doing in the waves. That second woman is also clad in a full Islamic outfit. A hijab that must be tightly held to her hair by numerous pins covers her head. She seems dark-skinned. From a distance, she appears attractive. You can tell she has a slim body. She does not swim much but it’s obvious that she can and it’s obvious she enjoys the fairly big waves. After a while, the man and his woman companion do what loving couples often do in the ocean when they think they are far enough. They feel each other up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man had attempted to prove to the woman that the cold water had not diminished him. It all looked familiar to a habitual beach-goer like me except the woman’s outfit, of course.

After a while, the mermaid leaves the water and goes with a beach-bag toward the building where you can change. The man also comes out of the water after a little while. He exchanges a few words I don’t hear with the Romanian lady. Then, he walks toward me a with a friendly smile. He offers his hand and introduces himself as a Moroccan. Not to brag but I already guessed this, down to the town where he had lived in Morocco. (Rabat, on the Atlantic Ocean where there are big waves and the water is on the cool side.) He and his family have been in the US for nine years. They live in Santa Clara (in Silicone Valley). And no, he is not associated with the large Islamic center there. He is an accountant. I don’t want to pry. I tell him I used to be French. He is a little puzzled, a little interested but his peripheral vision grasps something that draws him to the spot where the children and the lady swimmer, now changed into long dry clothes, are sitting.

After a little while, he ambles back to me holding a metal mug full of very hot, mint flavored Moroccan-style tea. When I am finished, I am smart enough not to walk to his spot to return the mug. (I keep telling you I am a distinguished social scientist!) The two hijab-covered women and the three children are now bunched together on the warm sand. The man comes back to me with a half of a Moroccan cookie. And then, he returns to pick up his mug.

The Moroccan accountant has been more than friendly. He has been more cordial, has shown greater hospitality than would come forth with Americans casually met at the beach (and Americans are almost always very friendly at the beach except when they are drunk which makes them territorial). Yet no intimacy has developed at all between me, a man alone with a small child, and the Moroccan family. He has kept me at a distance while befriending me. Any contact with another man who is not a relative is haram for certain kinds of Muslims. It’s simply forbidden, even on a beach, even in California. I don’t know the Moroccan’s name though he knows mine. We will not contact each other again as is common here among francophones after a chance encounter.

There are several stories in my story. First, a polygamous family is thriving in our midst. It resides in this paragon of modern life, Silicone Valley. How they manage their family life from a legal standpoint, I don’t know. But there is probably no California law preventing a man from living under the same roof with both his wife and his mistress. (The main reason non-Muslims like me seldom try it is simply abject fear of their wives.) There is obvious affection between the children from the two wives. Of course, I don’t have the answer to the main and louche question: How do the wives get along? Yet, I noticed that they wore outfits of similar colors, grays and blues. It’s not far-fetched to guess that they might borrow clothes from each other, like sisters. Their common husband seems perfectly at ease. In the short span of our tiny conversations, he used the words, “my wife” with respect to both women in turn. No explanation necessary, he thought.

Second, America is open-minded and California is both open-minded and excessively cordial. Relax! The old underlying charges of racism and xenophobia against Americans have become absurd. They have lost all their currency in my lifetime.

Third, I am pretty sure that there are not native-born Muslims in Romania. Have not been for at least a century. (A Romanian reader of mine will correct me if I am wrong on this point. He corrects me on everything else, so, why not?) The blue-eyed woman Mom with the hair veil is a convert to Islam.

Fourth, something happened to me on that beach (again). I am realist. I know that more than 9/10 of terrorist acts worldwide in the past twenty years were committed by people who called themselves Muslims. And all terrorists acts against America and Americans. The connection with my beach acquaintances is fairly straightforward, I think. Islamic garb is not a fact of life, it’s a chosen part of a chosen life-style. The choice also constitutes a forthright rejection of my civilization and of some of its central values. Notwithstanding what silly feminists want you to believe, central among those central values is the Western belief that women are full human beings. Full adult human beings are sexual beings. Any repression of the harmless affirmation of their sexuality is an attack on my civilization. Sex repression is repression; it’s usually the first repression, in fact. As I often affirm, with practically no contradiction: Show me a woman who never acts a little sluttish in her appearence and I will show you a repressed woman or a depressed woman.

There is more: When they are allowed to, women everywhere advertise their wares. Often, they even do it where they risk their lives by doing so. That’s hard-wired behavior. I has to be. That’s the normal way and the natural way for women to attract a mate. Where this path is closed, women are the object of arranged marriages. Mostly, with arranged marriage frequently goes the status of women as chattel. To a large extent, it’s either cleavage or slavery.

A combination of crass ignorance and of benevolence causes many Americans to believe that Muslim women who wear full Islamic garb, including the hijab, are just following their religion. It’s not so. The Koran says nothing about women covering their hair. Neither do the oldest hadiths, the most valid sources by Muslim jurisprudence. The Koran simply recommends in general terms that women be “modest.” The people on the beach have decided to follow a certain brand of Islam. To believe otherwise is to affirm that the millions of Muslims women who dress like my sister are all, without exception, bad Muslims. That’s ridiculous. The rejection of my civilization implicit in female Islamic garb is deliberate, aggressive, in my face

And polygamy is rare today in the Islamo-Arab world. It’s especially rare in the middle-classes. There might even be only one Moroccan accountant in the whole world who is a polygamist and I know him! Although it’s explicitly allowed, polygamy is considered backward. It’s also a conscious rejection of the modern world I inhabit and in which millions of Muslims reside happily.

Next linkage: Do violent jihadists recruit from social milieus where women act just like Methodist Americans, or yet, from that part of Muslim society where young women wear crotch miniskirts (I have seen those)? Or do they focus their recruiting attention on the men from families where women are covered from the top of their heads to their ankle and where a man may have four “Moms”?

And here I go again, I have to tell you what I did not say. I did not say that all, or most, or many hijab wearers engender terrorists. Or that polygamists do. I would bet good money that the extended family on the beach are not terrorists and are no aiding and abetting terrorism in any tangible way. What I did say is that terrorists are unlikely to come from groups were women go bare-headed and from women who have one husband each. So, I have every reason to detest that particular brand of Muslims. That’s the brand whose very appearance proclaims that they dislike and feel contempt for my world. In fact, I am ready to dislike them on sight and I am suspicious of them. Men whose women wear the hijab I suspect of being capable of routinely committing horrendous crimes against women and little girls, with the approval of their brand of religion. And mass murder is only one of those crimes and not necessarily the worst crime.

So, did the chance meeting on a Santa Cruz beach change my mind about anything? No, it did not as the last paragraphs above indicate. The encounter, and the kindness of a mug of tea and half a cookie have done something to me though. Together, they have smoothed my angles. They have made my potential hostility less potent, at least for a while. It did not take much. And it always works out that way. I have known Muslims all my life. I can’t remember a single individual Muslim I disliked. A handful of Muslims are close to my heart as I write. Over the years, my liking of individual Muslims has murkied up my analysis quite a lot. Also, and I doubt the polygamist was thinking that way, I would bet he was not because a strong sense of hospitality is a big part of Arab culture but, if his hospitality had been an intended investment in peace, it would have been a good investment.

I wonder if our own national policies are ever based on the same model. I wonder if any part of our federal government understands the art of rounding off angles, of smoothing relations with small gestures. When I was in Morocco, five years ago, Dolly Parton and Ray Charles traveled in the taxis with me and they walked though the souks alongside me. I am hoping that the State Department or any branch of the federal government is handing out fifty cent music CDs through the Arab world the way the polygamist handed me a mug of tea on that Santa Cruz beach.

Note: Of course, I will publish integrally on this blog any comment or, at least any comment that is not an appeal to crime. I welcome especially comments from Muslims. I may add my own comment to any comment, of course.