"With every passing day, it becomes clearer that
America is far from witnessing the final dark hours of the war on terror - and
that any suggestion to the contrary is an illusion. While the war of the drones
is in full swing, the country continues to live in a state of democratic limbo that
fills defenders of civil liberties with increasing consternation. For example,
it has come to the attention of the students at Yale University that the
Pentagon plans an interrogation training center there, which they would like to
see led by a psychiatrist famous for his studies on how Arabs and Muslims 'lie.'"
Assata Shakur, a member of the Black Panther Party wanted by U.S. authorities for decades, has suddenly become the first woman ever on the U.S. terrorist watch list. Having sought refuge in Cuba, is she a 'freedom fighter' being denied her constitutional rights under America's 'war on terror'?
In
September 2001, George W. Bush launched a "crusade against terror" that
culminated in a disastrous, illegitimate ten-year war in Iraq. Doubtless, in
celebration of this glorious episode, his brand new presidential library
features an interactive game about said war, offering a beautified account of
the conflict, presenting it as having been just and inevitable in order to
ensure American security in the face of the "terrorist" threat -
"terrorist" being the operative word.
In
the name of this war on terrorists, torture is now practiced in Guantanamo,
where about 20 detainees are on hunger strike in protest the inhumane
conditions of their detention. They are tied to chairs and force-fed via a
tube.
As
DzhokharTsarnaev, the
surviving brother implicated in the Boston marathon attacks, has been given the
status of a terrorist, he is being deprived of his constitutional right as an
American citizen to have his rights read to him - including the right to remain
silent. Perhaps the latter did indeed have political motives for wanting to
kill innocent civilians en masse, and therefore deserves to be called a
terrorist.
Nonetheless,
one cannot help but notice how this stigmatizing word condemns people to
symbolic exclusion from the American national sphere. To call DzhokharTsarnaev a "terrorist,"
to insist on mentioning his "dark" complexion as has been done in the
press, and to presume that he is a jihadist, is to rhetorically erase the stark
reality: that this young man is an American, and it is the United States, to a
great degree, that created him, just as it created Adam Lanza, who shot dozens
of children in Newtown. Senator Claire McKaskill still asks herself whether he,
too, should be referred to as a "terrorist."
AMERICAN SECURITY
SERVICES
It
is in this context that we must understand the decision taken last week by the
American security services - including the Department of Justice - to add Black
female militant AssataShakur to its list of
most wanted terrorists - a list created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in
2001, and which includes the names of 32 men, most of them Muslims from the
Middle East. Shakur, who is the aunt of rapper TupacShakur, was born Joanne Byron, and had already
been named a "domestic terrorist" (in French we would refer to her as
a "terroriste intérieure")
under the Patriot Act
(an antiterrorist law).
Today,
the former Black Panther militant, who has spent the last 29 years in Cuba
where she has the status of a political refugee, has seen the "reward"
for her capture double in value. Her new status and the sum of $2 million are
doubtless intended to induce the ageing Castroist
regime to give in and grant the U.S. government Shakur's
extradition.
In
1973, the New York activist was arrested and convicted for the murder of a
policeman during a shootout in New Jersey. Even though she herself had been
shot twice in the back and all the charges against her soon turned out to
be baseless, she remained in prison, where she was subject to numerous forms of
abuse before escaping in 1979 and settling in Cuba.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
A
sister-in-arms of Angela
Davis, whose story is now being made into a film, Shakur's
case is the exact opposite of Tsarnaev's: we can say
with certainty that her cause and struggle were and remain political, but we
cannot say that she is a criminal and that she killed for her cause.
With
every passing day, it becomes clearer that America is far from witnessing
the final dark hours of the war on terror - and that any suggestion to the
contrary is an illusion. While the war of the drones is in full swing, the
country continues to live in a state of democratic limbo that fills defenders
of civil liberties with increasing consternation. For example, it has come to
the attention of the students at Yale University that the Pentagon plans an
interrogation training center there, which they would like to see led by a
psychiatrist famous for his studies on how Arabs and Muslims “lie.” Meanwhile,
thousands of illegal Hispanic immigrants are stopped and asked to show their IDs,
given a criminal record and imprisoned in the name of the Patriot Act.
Let
us also not forget the fact that since 2001, Black people in New York and
Atlanta are eighteen times more likely than Whites to be stopped and questioned
on the street by police. This is an intolerable form of discrimination, which
the official line justifies with the necessary war on terror.
President
Barack Obama bears a historic responsibility for the perpetuation of this state
of lawlessness. He talks about closing Guantanamo - an old promise of his -
while forgetting rather quickly that he is the one who signed the National
Defense Authorization Act of 2005 [reauthorized in 2013], which to this day
forbids the funding of prisoner transfers on American soil, and therefore, it
is in his power to have the 86 exonerated prisoners at Guantanamo released or
extradited. Far from being in line with his commitments and the honorable
intentions he has declared, by putting Shakur on the list of “main terrorist
threats to the country,” his administration is participating in the malevolent
phenomenon, part of which is to identify people of color as terrorists. The
administration is also making its contribution to the lethal crusade against
terror, now being fought in Obama's name.
*Dr. Sylvie
Laurent received her Ph.D. in American Studies in 2007 at La Sorbonne University
in Paris. She taught history in public high school after her aggregation in
1998, and since 2006, she has been an assistant professor at Sciences-Po in
Paris where she teaches various seminars on African-American history and
culture.
