Jurassic Park, Psuedo-events, and Prisons
The fallout from Abu Ghraib

by Stan Goff

Reprinted from FTW

Part Seven

The State of Pennsylvania convicted Nicholas Yarris of rape and murder in 1981. Yarris was sentenced to die, but in 2003 – thankfully, after an appeals process had kept him off the execution table – DNA evidence was presented in the face of relentless opposition by the state that exonerated Yarris. Yarris was then released from Greene State Correctional Institution’s death row.

His story was a local scandal, but it quickly faded. What brought Yarris back into the limelight was his recollection of a prison guard at Greene State, named Charles Graner, Jr. If that name rings a bell, it is not ringing from Pennsylvania, but from Iraq.

Graner is one of the tiny handful of prison guards who have been indicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, where as Specialist Graner – US Army Reserve – he was photographed grinning over the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees, most of whom were rounded up randomly on US military sweeps.

“I was just sickened by it because I know what he used to do. And I can only imagine without the restraint of any supervision over there, what he was doing,” Yarris told an interviewer in May. (Cable Network News, story at http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking2/CNN-AbuGharaib.html )

Yarris, who knew Graner for five years, said that there was nothing surprising about either Graner’s behavior or that of the other guards… at least not to anyone familiar with prison life in the United States.

“Charles was just filled with the glee of opportunity to go over there. Because he said as we were walking down the corridor, ‘I can’t wait to go kill some sand niggers,’” reported Yarris.

Yarris recalled how Graner would smile just as he had in the imfamous photos when guards spit in prisoners’ trays, how he would gratuitously humiliate prisoners during strip searches, and how he used to provoke prisoners into a rage for his own entertainment. As a matter of public record, Graner was accused of beating prisoners at Greene State and even of concealing razor blades in their food, though – as is almost always the case in all US prisons – he was exonerated of all charges.

While many will be quick to (rightly) indict Graner for his sexual sadism, it is also important to understand the institutional and systemic dynamics of prison to begin talking about what prisons are and where we are headed in terms of social control in the future.

I cannot help but refer back to the Stanford Prison Experiment here, but while this explains the subjective experience of prison, for both prisoners and guards, it sheds little light on the structural reasons for the cancerous growth of prisons in the US, for the expanded use of mass detentions as part of US military doctrine post-9/11, or the historical tendencies behind the latter-day expansion of prisons in conjunction with the massive militarization of US domestic police forces.

We have all heard about the alleged propensity of the Chinese to use incarceration as a means of social control.

But studies show that China has 1.51 million inmates with a gross population of 1.3 billion. The United States now has 2.03 million behind bars, which translates into 701 people out of every 100,000 in the US, while China is locking folks up at a measly rate of 117 per 100,000. The second highest rate is in Russia, at 606 per 100,000, and that is in the wake of a history of draconian barracks-socialism, followed by gangster-capitalism. George W. Bush keeps telling everyone that “terrorists” hate us because they “hate freedom.” If that were the case, using prison figures, these same freedom haters should be casting confetti over us.

We have not only 2.03 million locked up, but an additional 5 million under the supervision of the criminal justice system, that is, on probation or parole.

We should be asking the question why. Statistics don’t show crime rates rising, and in fact our crime rates are in some cases lower than countries with far lower rates of incarceration. The answers are hidden inside the general numbers and in history.

It is important to point out that all credible research indicates that the experience of prison renders an inmate more likely, not less likely, to commit more and more serious crimes. So we are not incarcerating to rehabilitate or to protect the public. The ex-convict is far more dangerous than the first offender who does not serve time. Research also indicates that it would cost less to educate than incarcerate young people, so there is no cost-benefit to society. If we are to understand the social rationale for prison, we first have to discard these intuitive answers and hypothesize other ones in their stead. Most social scientists who are outside the gravitational pull of officialdom posit three things: profit, population control, and surveillance.

These are also the motives that lie behind the systemic integration of domestic police doctrine and the developing doctrine of the US military overseas.

I need to point out before going any further that “motives” are not synonymous with some vast, totalizing conspiracy, but that they develop in response to contingencies. This is a point that – when confused – gets lost in a false dichotomy of conspiracy/system.

History is not engineered. It is a process – as Ian Malcom would tell us – that is in some sense deterministic even as it is paradoxically unpredictable. But it is being determined by long term secular trends that are both inertial and beyond the control of any individual, or institution for that matter.

The crack cocaine epidemic in South Los Angeles is a perfect example. The Iran-Contra conspirators were certainly involved in a conspiracy, but the conspiracy was to end-run the Boland Amendment prohibiting any further material aid to the Nicaraguan terrorists earlier organized by the CIA. It was a contingent conspiracy, as all conspiracies are. The Cold War was a larger, more over-determining backdrop, which was itself embedded in an historical epoch defined by two apocalyptic inter-imperialist wars, which was more deeply a result of the generalization of modern capitalism into a thorough-going world system that was repeatedly running into its own material limits. And that global generalization was an outgrowth of uneven development and qualitative changes rendered by technology. The dumping of cheap cocaine into the lap of “Freeway Rick” Ross that opened up the crack-highway into LA’s most desperate de-industrialized crisis centers, and the consequent social disaster, were not designs of the CIA despite the Agency’s legendary racism. It was simply the path of least resistance in the specific circumstances – a definite by-product of racial-economic apartheid, but not a conspiracy – and of malicious neglect after the crack epidemic took root – again a neglect borne of racism.

South Central LA serves as a microcosm to understand more global developments, which have to be understood simultaneously through demographics and technology.

The majority of the world now, for the first time in history, lives in cities.

When cities first began developing, there was an economic “pull” to their centers created by the development of productive forces no longer based directly on the land. As these cities were rapidly converted into industrial centers however, requiring huge inputs of human labor, land enclosure and other despotic methods for pushing people off the land were employed to force them into the urban work forces. The development of capitalist-industrial agriculture (copied in large part by socialist states) accelerated this trend, as fewer and fewer people were required to create more and more food and other agricultural products.

People were no longer driven into the cities to work in Dickesnian conditions, they were abandoned to the cities by these massive land enclosures. At first, this created what Marx wryly called a “reserve army of labor” to drive wages down and profits up. But as technology became more and more sophisticated, particularly after World War II, and more particularly with the introduction of the microprocessor, there were more and more goods being produced using fewer and fewer people, and the “reserve army” is now being transformed into an inutile (from the point of view of ruling circles) surplus population. A population that is increasingly young, increasingly unemployed, jammed increasingly into mega-cities with a decreasing public capacity to support them with services or even basic infrastructure.

These urban agglomerations of tens of millions (Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Jakarta, Osaka, Dehli, Bombay, Los Angeles, Cairo, Calcutta, Manila, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Moscow, Rio De Janeiro, Paris, Rhein-Ruhr, Tehran, et al – don’t forget Baghdad) with their ever more hellish slums and the expulsion of masses of people from the official economy, become unofficial economies unto themselves – criminal gangs and syndicates in some cases – or they become points of white-hot political resistance. The potential and the reality is… they are both.

This is the basis for understanding the apparent merger of police and military functions. The social control function of the police and the strategic-political control function of the military have seen their battlegrounds merge into these urban agglomerations. Neither the militarization of police nor the “policification” of the military is indicative of any overarching idea to merge. They are adaptive measures, and indicators of the increasing difficulty, and urgency, of social control.

The American troops in Iraq can complain to the high heavens that they are unprepared and untrained to take on constabulary functions, but the fact is that is now part and parcel of every military occupation. And the helmeted, assault-rifle toting cops we see at every US demonstration, as well as the SWAT teams that are now used routinely for simple drug busts, are real (over)reactions to real threats in a society that is becoming ever more polarized, both economically and politically.

It also explains the exponential growth of US prisons.

Profit is not always the direct motive in policy that is ultimately geared to protect a profit-taking regime. So the dots don’t connect one-to-one. If you look for investment opportunities in the wake of the most recent US-sponsored coup d’etat in Haiti, for example, you will be hard pressed to make a credible case for such a hypothesis. But when you look at the larger geo-strategic picture, with huge investments in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the proximity of anathematic Cuba, and you factor in rising Puerto Rican nationalism, the independent course being charted by oil-giant Venezuela, the civil war in Colombia, and popular resistance to US neoliberalism in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador, then you begin to see why it is a bad idea to allow Haiti – generally considered weak in the region – to kick sand in the face of American neoliberals. It “demonstration effect” in reverse.

The same might be said of the gay marriage debate. Unless one understands that right-wing opposition to any changes in a retrograde and static definition of marriage is actually an attempt to preserve a sexual division of labor, upon which profit depends absolutely (read Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, and Nancy F. Cott’s Public Vows, if you want the evidence.), there appears no “obvious” connection.

What is “obvious” is frequently not as obvious as it seems.

Profit is also not a prime motive for prisons themselves, even though large numbers of well-meaning progressives pay a lot of lip service to something called the prison-industrial complex, suggesting that prisons can be profitable in themselves. In fact, the evidence suggests that this simply is not true, nor will it ever be.

Capital accumulation depends on political stability, and for that – especially when the accumulation process itself is now characterized by extreme social disequilibrium, described above – there must be in place effective measures for social control.

Christian Parenti has looked into this question of the prison-industrial complex more deeply than most. He has noted that the explosion of prisons in the US began in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, followed by the anti-war movement, followed by the Black Power movement and a period of labor militancy in the 70s. In reaction to these incipient social revolutions, there was a period of extreme reaction that led directly to the election of Ronald Reagan.

Parenti:

“The sixties brought the civil-rights movement, the black-power movement, the poor people’s movement, the antiwar movement, and all sorts of informal rebellion. At first, the police were unable to contain this uprising, which was a big embarrassment for the U.S., because we were waging a bitter ideological struggle with the Soviets to prove that capitalism and liberal democracy were better than socialism. When the entire world saw images of Watts and Detroit going up in flames and angry black people describing in detail how they were being held down by the system, it put the lie to the idea of true democracy and racial progress in the U.S. So the federal government was very concerned about the failure of the police to contain the rebellion.

“The nation’s economic troubles really began in the late 1960s, by which time the postwar boom had pretty much petered out. The conditions that had sustained the “golden era” of American capitalism were gone, and so were the abnormally high profit rates of that era. Big business in the U.S. faced ever-higher tax rates and wage demands. Out of this came the economic crisis of the seventies: rising unemployment simultaneous with rising wages — something that had never happened before. In part, this was due to the fact that working people still had a safety net. If you were treated poorly at your job, you could quit, get food stamps, and go to community college. Strikers in the early seventies received welfare.

“In the eighties, Reagan dealt with all of this by cutting taxes on corporations, attacking labor, eviscerating social services, and so on. As a result, by the mid-eighties, profit rates had been restored, labor had been cowed, and the cost of maintaining the state had been shifted from business to everyone else. But this transformation created a massive new wave of poverty, and the war on drugs was a response to these newly reemerging class distinctions. It served to segregate and contain the dangerous classes.

“Though the poor were not rebelling, they were still a threat. Poor people threaten the system’s legitimacy in that they make the social structure appear unjust. They also pose an aesthetic threat, scaring and disturbing the moneyed classes by showing up in inconvenient places. And whether or not poor people are, at the moment, organized and rebelling, there’s always the threat that they will. So, with Reaganomics, we again find massive resources being poured into policing.”

Parenti has shown, however, that privatized prisons, the bogey-man of the “prison-industrial” left, have been economic (as well as humanitarian) nightmares. A few profiteers have made some money, but mostly through the subsidies detailed in their fat cost-plus government contracts. The net effect of the expansion of prisons in the US has been an economic drag.

The attempt to explain prisons through bald greed is emblematic of the left’s reluctance ever since McCarthyism to explain problems systemically, resorting instead to Ralph Nader-ish empiricism, that is, seeking evidence of a ‘smoking gun’ payoff. In most cases, the empirical case is solid. Corporations do pay outlandish CEO salaries, despoil the environment, and rip off workers and consumers. But in the case of prisons, this payoff-analysis misses the mark, and in the process exposes the weakness of this strictly empirical approach. The dots don’t always lead directly to a funding stream.

Prison is part of an effort to extend state control over the population, and not just physical control, but psychological control.

Jeremy Bentham, writing in 1791, described his own prison fantasy, an exposition of a Utilitarian form of social engineering which he called the Panopticon. Translated, this means the “see-all.” When he wrote it, incarceration was actually considered a humane alternative to the fate of most criminals. For Bentham, the Panopticon was an actual structure, built in such a way that radial enclosures as incarceration dormitories (but also factories, schools, and even hospitals – anyplace where the people within required full time oversight), and a small staff located strategically in the center could maintain 24-7 surveillance. A good brief description of Bantham’s notion is available at http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10390.

It was the 20th Century French philosopher, Michel Foucault, studying the phenomenon of prisons as a social disciplinary institution, who adopted Bentham’s concrete proposal as a metaphor for the increasingly technological security state… a Panopticon society, in which tabs are kept on all of us. http://cartome.org/foucault.htm

Foucault was writing in the sixties, and he was focused on the increasing moderation of direct repression. This was a period when Western Europe and the US were still seeing a steady increase in living standards for their majorities – in fact, when many working people had come to think of themselves as “middle class,” and a period of intense technological innovation (driven in large part by military research and development).

He had studied the question of social discipline and punishment dating back to Medieval Europe. His most dramatic point was that Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, articulated in the late 18th Century coincided with the take-off of capitalism – a system that was massively diversifying the activities of populations, and that required frequent displacement of those populations to keep up with its frenetic pace of technical change and boom-bust cycles.

In the feudal system, Foucault noted, power was easily projected from the landed aristocracy onto one, static, easily subjectable class that was tied to the land – serfs – and even in Classical antiquity, the system of slavery was one that was subjected to disequilibrium more often than not by environmental catastrophe or war… not by market forces. Power projection was direct and brutal. And it was sustained by spectacle as its most potent form of intimidation: huge palaces, public executions, festivals, and so on. So this was an external subjugation accompanied by intimidation that brought the public together to face their masters’ power directly and collectively. Death, dungeon, and exile were measures to expel the criminal or the rebel from the body politic.
Bentham’s Panopticon, on the other hand, augured a new form of control, one that was detailed, built into every aspect of the social structure, to establish surveillance that would become more and more ubiquitous, even as was no longer identified directly with the ruling class – a structure designed to discipline, not expel.

The emerging and dynamic social system required a form of discipline that was not merely punitive, but that would increase productivity, and one where norms were not established by decree, which identified them too directly with a ruler, but by norms ‘established’ by science and institutions that would permeate every aspect of every life, no matter how much mobility was required of individuals. It was to be a substitution of disciplines – plural – in place of discipline as a characteristic of the whole population.

Foucault:

“Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.”

Surveillance is established in the prisons, yes, but also in the hospitals, the factories, and the schools… and from there reaching even into the family.

The beauty of the Panopticon is not that it removes the ruling class as a target; it is that it establishes a generalized, impersonal, “faceless gaze.” Everyone becomes aware that they are under someone’s surveillance in virtually every situation, and this surveillance constitutes not the one discipline of the edict, but the multiple disciplines in a complex society that needs its subjects to police themselves. It is the internalization of “the gaze” by each individual that circumscribes her behavior and mitigates the propensity to “act out” (using the therapeutic double-speak of the Panotpicon) as either criminal or rebel.

Prison was both one of those Panoptic institutions and a last resort for the bodies of recalcitrants. The “spectacle of power” was replaced by conformity enforced in multiple dimensions and structured to rationalize the complexity and disequilibrium of an ever more generalized capital accumulation regime. Outright fear was replaced by an unfocused anxiety that could conceal itself from easy critical interpretation.

This system of Panoptic conformity still prevails in the average white suburb of the United States, though as even that “urban ring,” as Mike Davis calls it, begins to disintegrate, the white suburb will become subject to the return of the spectacle.

That spectacle, as Parenti points out so eloquently in his must-read Lockdown America, is returning, with the Panopticon as its high-tech adjunct, in a period of global crisis, while Foucault’s observations about “moderation” of direct repression are being dramatically reversed.

It was in the wake of Vietnam and the accompanying social upheavals that the American political establishment began to compare policing to counter-insurgency. It was also during this era that military technology began finding its way into the hands of the police. From the more global macro-perspective, this was when the same technological advances began to dramatically increase the output of workers worldwide, leading to a sustained over-accumulation crisis, that resulted not in the laying off of large swaths of the world’s wage labor, but expelling them from the production process altogether.

In the United States, that process – as it always does – was a last in, first out affair, and the industrial urban cores that had attracted millions of Latinos into the Southwest and millions of African Americans from the Black Belt into the industrial north began to disintegrate, it left behind a nationwide network of people trapped in these ghettoized cores with rising unemployment and attendant rises in social rebellion and criminal enterprise. The transfer of military technology and doctrine into these crisis centers, polarized these communities into areas that were not so much policed as militarily occupied by the police.

It was the Johnson administration that began the Panoptic technical integration of US domestic law enforcement and criminal justice systems, using military doctrine, technology, and information standardization techniques, when he signed into existence the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Parenti writes:

“It was in the midst of this storm [Vietnam, marches, riots, et al] that President Johnson, stubbornly losing the war in Southeast Aisa, began edging towards a new war at home. In 1967 he took drug enforcement and regulation away from the Treasury and FDA respectively, and handed both to Attorney General Ramsey Clark at the Justice Department, creating a new agency called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the precursor of today’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). At the same time Johnson called on Congress to create a new “super agency” to strengthen ties between the federal government and local police. Over the next decade that body, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), spent billions of dollars in an effort to reshape, retool, and rationalize American policing. Along with money, the federal government doled out military weaponry, communications technology, and special training.”

But it was the paranoid Nixon administration that really stepped on the accelerator, and the motif was race war.

Hatchet man H. R. Halderman, remembering his years with Nixon, stated that Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

This admission from Halderman coincides nicely with the Republican “southern strategy” employed by Nixon to split the Democratic Party by appealing to its white supremacist southern wing, and which has entrenched the Republican Party in the South to this day. But as Halderman said, “devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The politically-coded language of race evolved from Nixon defining race in terms of counter-insurgency, to Reagan’s “welfare queens,” to Bush Sr.’s Willie Horton ads, to the so-called “war on drugs.” The common denominator accompanying this coded racism was the increasing use of the criminal justice system as a political demonstration of the will to suppress and lock up Black and Brown people.

A game of tragic political one-upmanship began that fed on itself, where political opponents were “soft on:” Communism, crime, drugs… choose one. This created a self-perpetuating dynamic of accelerated incarceration, with the introduction of three-strikes, mandatory minimums, and a new form of policing called “zero-tolerance” that resembled, more than anything in the history of American law enforcement, the military occupation of poor communities.

It is important to note, in the interest of both honesty and clarity, that this process was not strictly ideological, and not solely political opportunism. Black and Brown communities, especially in the wake of deindustrialization, were and are the sites of higher crime rates, higher addiction rates, and greater potential for political rebellion. It was the militarized response to this dysfunction – one that was both economic and social in its origins – that exacerbated the polarization between these communities and the criminal justice system.

To connect this phenomenon to the international scene where we tend to see imperialism more crisply, we need to change our terms and assumptions with regard to race. Racism is an ideology that creates an unscientific privileged category called “white,” then decides who doesn’t qualify. It uses a set of shifting phenotypes to define non-white – also grotesquely unscientific – which correspond to the general social position of this phenotypic group. It makes all sorts of pseudo-hereditary claims that support the idea of some manner of “racial superiority.” But we need to see racism as the skin on this beast, and ask the deeper questions about what is under the skin… what is the real nature of this system? When we begin to look at the specific historical development of African Americans, however (one example, there are more among Hispano-Latinas, etc.), we can see them not as a race but as a “people,” that is a community that shares a common history distinct from the common history of the dominant society they find themselves in. They have been on a completely different developmental path.

There is not a single empirical index that can be tracked over time that does not support this thesis, and this is not merely quantitative, that is, differences in average Black net worth versus average white net worth, etc. Patterns of economic ownership, as pointed out by researchers like Earl Ofari as early as 1975, when he showed that among basic industries in the US – primary production, and not retail/service – there were exactly zero African American owners. It is this absence of ownership that shows the power of productive property is not only “bourgeois,” it is “white” (and male). The affluent among African Americans are in roles that are utterly dependent within the dominant (white… or imperial!) economy of American production and finance. African American elites are comparable in position not to the white elite in the US, but to the comprador classes in other nations whose economies are satellites to the dominant US economy. In other words, African America can be more precisely defined not as a “race,” but as a nation – a dependent nation, or if you like, a peripheral nation… exactly like many of the countries on the receiving end of imperialist interventions.

We can rightly think of the US criminal justice and prison system as an imperial intervention.

It should not be surprising then that with shared technologies diffusing into the police and military, and their similar roles as guarantors of national subjugation (knowingly or not), that the distinctions between these two armed bodies are growing increasingly difficult to define. It is also important to note that this national subordination is not a system set up in response to a malevolent ideology, racism, but a structural necessity for continued capital accumulation.

Capital accumulation in today’s world rests directly on its ability to unequally exploit non-capitalist sectors of the world system. I have explored this thesis in much greater detail in the series, Iran in the Gunsights – Is the Bush administration about to commit the fatal imperial error in Iran? (Part 1 and Part 2) While being a racist can be counted a personal character defect and a moral failure, rac-ism is an ideology that justifies a more fundamental economic reality, and that economic reality is a national reality… whether we see it in African America or in Latin America or in Iraq or in Palestine.

Essential to the exercise of that kind of colonial power is the ability to both monitor and control of the object-population. In the case of decaying American urban cores and of many other under-developed nations, these populations have evolved away from their former utility as cheap labor – like they were when Foucault was talking about moderation – and become merely surplus populations in a global system where fewer and fewer people are required to valorize the total world capital.

Their situation should also be a bellwether for the ever-more-besieged American “middle class,” which has become the principle domestic pawn in the dangerous and un-winnable game being played by the US empire. It is their living standard that will now come under attack. In the short term, that is happening through financial manipulation and the further disappearance of living-wage jobs. The tremendous personal debt burden that is mounting in this sector, fueled by low interest rates and equity loans from mortgage refinancing, is the latest maneuver to prop up this sector’s role as global consumer, is a time bomb that will explode directly under the former labor aristocracy’s feet. And the liquidation of the commons – from Medicare to Social Security to public services – constitutes a transfer of wealth saved by these working people directly into the speculative money pit that is Wall Street. Meanwhile, the bill to the United States from Treasury loans to other nations – already impossible to pay – grows exponentially to pay the cost of the military that temporarily secures the global periphery and the rentier states of the Persian Gulf that underwrites the whole system. As we saw with the taxpayer bailouts of the Savings and Loan criminals as well as the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund, these burdens will invoke the “too big to fail” principle, and this so-called middle class will pick up the tab. These chickens are coming home to roost… soon, beginning when the housing bubble bursts within the next year or so.

Then they begin to become the problem population. Poor and angry, it’s a hell of a combination, and one that requires increased oversight. That’s where Panopticism is still relevant, as one facet of the technological build-up of the supreme state to monitor and control restive populations.

The larger capacity, for which Iraq was to become a kind of proving ground, is the ability to employ a spectrum of force in urban environments up to and including urban civil war. This is the directly “appropriate” response to a world with billions of ever-more-urbanized surplus people.
The process begins with innovation, then proceeds to standardization and generalization, as we have seen in the blending of police and military functions that corresponds to an increasingly uniform (urban, unemployed, young) and crisis-ridden human eco-system.

With this more openly warlike state prevailing, and particularly with the new rationale for US state power domestically and abroad being “terrorism,” another unscientific concept employed for all forms of resistance to US-state hegemony, the Spectacle – as Christian Parenti has pointed out – has come back into its own in the form of cultural militarism.

In reality, military technology and training do not make people safer. Military gear brings embedded in it a set of militaristic social relations. Aggressive group tactics, automatic weapons, and infrared scopes all displace and preclude the social skills, forbearance, and individual discretion essential to accountable and effective civilian policing. The metaphor of war also implies the possibility of victory in which one side vanquishes another… But the military world view is not confined to the ranks of SWAT. Tactical units, having close relations with the armed forces, act as ideological transmission-belts between the military and regular police.

When I was in Special Forces, there was already an ongoing program of direct cooperation between the Border Patrol and active duty military units, a secret program that was outed when a Marine sniper killed an innocent 18-year old shepherd on the Texas-Mexico border in 1997. The news media ignored the story as much as possible, and questions about posse comitatus, the law that forbids US military to conduct law enforcement activity, were evaded.

The USAPATRIOT Act, then, while sinister, should not be surprising. It simply attempts to extend and further integrate a Panoptic process that was already in motion. Suddenly people became alert that their library selections might be monitored, but the reality is that through thousands of digitally encoded transaction every day, we have all already been enclosed in the “dossier society.” And many Americans, as evidenced by how they welcomed increased repression and surveillance in the wake of September 11, have already “internalized the Panopticon gaze,” just as we now embrace militarism in our books, television programs, and movies. It is rare indeed to see a cultural representation of the Military-Panopticon state that does not make its enforcers the sympathetic protagonists.

We don’t just obey. We glorify… we mythologize those whom we obey.

The Prison fits into this picture both as part of the threatening spectacle – the place none of us wants to go, a kind of deterrent against any resistance – and as a public ritual of revenge against the dark Other. This applies in the United States, and it applies in Iraq.

This militarism is an extremely sexualized militarism, as militarism is wont to be, but it tells us about much more than merely the military and our cultural worship of it.

The greatest fear that first time internees in US prisons report is the fear of being raped. This is the one social circumstance where men share this fear with women – who live in sub-clinical dread of this possibility every day of their lives. If this doesn’t lead us to re-examine our male-supremacist construction of sexuality as violence, then we are unlikely to ever get it. Sexual penetration is constructed as a form of dominance and also as a form of intentional humiliation, a form of revenge. And it is widely known that prison rape in the United States is not merely overlooked, it is sometimes encouraged by management. The threat of sexualized violence, of violent sexuality, is a key dimension of social control.

Why are we surprised, then, that in Abu Ghraib the handful of perpetrators who have been named have indicated that they felt they were avenging 9/11? How much more clear can the racial-colonial-sexual connection be? Our enemies are always “feminized,” that is portrayed as irrationally emotional, hyper-sensual, and cowardly… or virtuously obedient – the colonial analog for the whore-Madonna complex.

No aspect of socialization is as pre-literate and emotionally charged as our sexual identity, an identity that is ruthlessly policed almost from birth. And so no aspect of our personality is so vulnerable to attack. That women were involved in these abuses does not mitigate this one iota. Zillah Eisenstein referred to these women, appropriately I think, as “gender decoys,” and she connects it right back to US criminal “justice.”

These women should be held responsible and accountable; but they also are gender decoys. As decoys they create confusion by participating in the very sexual humiliation that their gender is usually victim to. This gender swapping and switching leaves masculinist/racialized gender in place. Just the sex has changed; the uniform remains the same. Male or female can be a masculinized commander, or imperial collaborator while white women look like masculinist empire builders and brown men look like women and homos. Whenever power and domination are exposed in their ugly form like at Abu Ghraib the embedded sexual and racialized meanings of power are revealed. Racism and sexism are always in play together because they each construct the other. When one is revealed the other is laying in wait. Salient examples of the hybrid relation between race, sex, and gender are the O.J. Simpson trial, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the beatings of Rodney King and Abner Louima and their aftermaths. One was never sure if the issues were racialized sex or sexualized racism or whether they are ever truly separable. In the case of Abu Ghraib, racial codings are used to deeply seed gender meanings and their confusion to build empire. A man who is treated like a woman becomes less than human–not a white man–like the black slave woman, and not white women. Muslim men, along with Jews and Semitic men of all religions are then viewed as not virile like white men. This is somewhat like the Black slave man who was forced to watch the rape of his lover or child by the master; except the Black man is made `different’ than the white man, in his hyper rather than homosexuality. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=12&ItemID=5751

These are the true cultural artifacts of imperialism, belying the pseudo-events we see each day, and so when the center cannot hold, we will say, again, “What happened?”

* * *

The United States of America is a collection of people, but it is also a state – the same and not the same. Liberals and conservatives will argue about who has the best plan to protect the state and the people (though the first is paramount for both of them) from these new enemies. But the fact is, and this must be faced, there can be no protection. September 11th showed that anyone who wants to get at a thing badly enough can do so. As an ex-special operations soldier, I can sit in my living room and spin out perfectly feasible and devastating attacks against a multiplicity of targets more easily than I can do the research for this article… and if I were determined to carry one of them out, there is little anyone could do to stop me. All I lack is the motive.

But the actions of our state at home and abroad are creating motives faster than they can interdict potential actors. The war in Iraq is already lost, and so each day we will continue to watch bodies being sacrificed to this vanity.

We are like the characters in Jurassic Park, climbing a Panoptic perimeter fence designed to contain the dangerous animals, now attempting to escape them, as one of our associates on another part of the island prepares to re-start the electric current passing through it.

“Little doubt is thus left about the fact that the theses… are anchored in a deep-lying belief in mankind’s immortality. Some of their defenders have even urged us to have faith in the human species: such faith will triumph over all limitations. But neither faith nor assurance from some famous academic chair could alter the fact that, according to the basic law of thermodynamics, mankind’s dowry is finite. Even if one were inclined to believe in the possible refutation of these principles in the future, one still must not act on that faith now. We must take into account that evolution does not consist of a linear repetition, even though over short intervals it may fool us into the contrary belief.”

-Nicholas Georgescu-Roegan