Crimes of Power & States of Impunity: The U.S. Response to Terror

Notes

181 Notes Chapter 1 A Post–9/11 World 1. The body of literature on elite criminality features numerous influential books.The list provided here is not intended to be exhaustive: Barak (1991), Chambliss (1988), Ermann and Lundman (1987), Friedrichs (2004), Green andWard (2004), Haveman and Smeulers (2008), Kauzlarich and Kramer (1998), Michalowski and Kramer (2006a),Passas and Goodwin (2005),Ross (2000a,2000b),Ruggiero (2001),Schafer (1974),Sutherland (1985),Tillman and Indergaard (2005),Tombs andWhyte (2003), Tunnell (1993),Welch (2006a). 2. Michalowski and Kramer examined three top journals: Criminology (the official journal of the American Criminological Society), Justice Quarterly (the official journal of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences), and the British Journal of Criminology. Between 2000 and 2005, those journals together published 575 articles, of which 18 fell into the category of state, corporate, white collar, or political crimes. 3. Green and Ward do not argue that all deprivations of human freedom and wellbeing constitute crimes: “That would be to equate ‘crime’ with the much broader concept of‘social harm,’and would call for a kind of analysis that goes beyond criminology (2004, 8; see Hillyard, Pantazis, Gordon, and Tombs 2004). Moreover, it is important to be wary of how the language of human rights is being used to justify war, or what Chomsky (1999) refers to the “new military humanism,” whereby political leaders of powerful nations claim that bombings and other military adventures are important tools to protect human rights (see Gearty 2006). Chapter 2 A New Configuration of Power 1. Ericson (2007) distinguishes between two fundamental forms of counter-law. First is counter-law I—known as laws against law—and second is counter-law II—or surveillant assemblages.Throughout this work, the term counter-law refers to the first form, laws against law. 2. “Military order on detention, treatment and the trial of certain noncitizens in the war on terrorism,” 66 Federal Register 57831, 2001. 3. “Procedures for trials by military commissions of certain non-United States citizens in the war on terror against terror,” Department of Defense Military Commission Order No. 1, March 21, 2002. 4. P.L. 107–40 Sec.2(a), September 18, 2001. 5. Efforts by theWhite House to sidestep its obligations under the Convention against Torture, in addition to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICCPR ratified in 1992 and key federal statutes that prohibit torture, worry the human rights community. Compounding matters, several government officials have publicly revealed that they endorse interrogation tactics that reside in the ambit of torture.While being questioned by the Senate, Porter J. Goss, director of the CIA, was confronted by Senator John McCain (R–AZ),who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. When McCain asked Goss about the CIA’s reported use of “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe that he will drown, Goss replied only that the approach fell into “an area of what I will call professional interrogation techniques” (Jehl 2005,A11). 6. With an expansionist ambition, known as manifest destiny, the United States participated in the slave industry, expropriated land from indigenous Americans, and devised the Monroe Doctrine by declaring North and South America as an exclusive American region of the globe. Wars with Mexico and later Spain furthered American borders and established several colonies in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Given the relative youthfulness of the United States as a nation, there is considerable evidence that it has had—and continues to have—a unique imperial streak (Ferguson 2005, see Aronowitz and Gautney 2003) 7. While maintaining its status as a superpower since World War II, the United States became truly hegemonic at the end of the ColdWar,when the Soviet Union collapsed along with its own brand of imperialism. That historical moment gave rise to the United States as an unrivaled hyperpower, producing an era in which American military would operate with relative impunity as evidenced by the quick invasions of Panama and Grenada.Both of those military interventions served as virtual tuneups for the first GulfWar. Still, there emerged a political contest over how to capitalize on the opportunities delivered by the decline of the Soviet Union. On one side of the debate are the global friendly internationalists typified in the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; on the other are the neoconservatives known for their fiercely nationalist, unilateralist, and militarist versions of American open-door imperialism.“It was this latter group that would,surprisingly...