State Of Exception, After The Torture Vote
- Naeem Mohaiemen

About culture's re-engagement with the war on something, Martin Amis
recently said:
"As Norman Mailer said when 9/11 happened, the temptation to charge
in should be resisted because what happens with writing is that you
receive the stimuli and they go down into your subconscious, and what
settles settles, and what doesn't doesn't. You find, after a couple
of years, that you've got something to write about. It's part of your
silent anxiety about what Don DeLillo calls the world hum."

The world hum right now is last week's stunning vote to authorize new
powers to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions on torture. Aziz Huq of
NYU Brennan Center (and Visible Collective) calls it "a bill that
strikes harder at American liberties and at the fundamentals of
American government than any since the authorization of the Japanese
internment."

Even the NYT was moved to apoplexy:
"[The new law] allows the president to identify enemies, imprison
them indefinitely and interrogate them - albeit with a ban on the
harshest treatment - beyond the reach of the full court reviews
traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.
Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over
terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this
summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of
White House policy."

We are now in that space that Francois Saint Bonnet called the space
of "imbalance between public law and political fact." Looking at the
proposal for a suspension of the French constitution, Giorgio Agamben
traces two models - one where wartime powers spread into civilian
space, the other wherein individual liberties are suspended from the
constitution. The merging of these two trajectories produces the
state of exception.

The argument that a sitting President of the United States has the
power, unique among all signatories to the Geneva Conventions, to
reinterpret what constitutes torture, is a full-force realization of
a state of exception. It can also take on the contours of notstand
("state of necessity"), state of siege, or emergency powers. But not
yet that trigger-term: martial law (that's for Thailand, so the
yammering classes can breathe a sigh of relief).

How will the citizens of this nation respond? Voting for Democrats at
midterms is one very micro (but tangible) baby step. But more
systematic, wide-ranging meditations on the changing nature of the
soul of continental United States are needed.

Protest action is mounting after last week's vote. Some of it is
incandescent with purpose.

Organized groups are doing a lot more than just writing. Artists,
activists, lawyers, clergy, labor, academics, and many other levels
of society are mobilizing for this week's nationwide protests to
"Drive Out The Bush Regime."

Two key events:
October 2: Mobilizing Meetings
October 5: National Protests
[details below]

Is this wishful thinking, visual resistance, building capacity,
symbolic theater, or all of the above? Only way to find out is to
attend the meetings and rallies, starting with tonight.

In a word: participate

No time for armchair analysts.

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References
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October 5: Drive Out Bush Regime
http://www.worldcantwait.net

Aziz Huq on Military Commissions Act of 2006
http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/commentary/20060926_huq.html

Aziz Huq on Terror 2016
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/28/terror_2016.php

Ariel Dorfman on Torture
http://tinyurl.com/lnfza

Torture Not An American Value
http://tinyurl.com/zy7j2

This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like
http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php

How Would A Patriot Act?
http://tinyurl.com/m9hm9

Comfortably Numb
http://tinyurl.com/zkv9y

Banned On Airplanes: Craig Murray's New Book
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1867840,00.html