Obama’s rendition

Updated 2 December 2009

Some news in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday.[...] The administration officials, who announced the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused. [...] “The emphasis will be on insuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent over overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations.

There is really not much to say beyond what this blogger wrote in a post published on February 6, and which was titled The Day that Obama’s Hope Died. Hillary Clinton, the head of the State Department, supported the Iraq War, and recently refused to describe the coup d’etat in Honduras as that: a coup. Why should we be reassured that people abducted by the CIA (or perhaps by a private contractor like Blackwater, now renamed as a ridiculous ‘Xe Services’) will escape torture, or as the NY Times has so often called it, ‘torment’?

No, this policy exists because it provides the U.S. government with a way of circumventing its own country’s legislation—legislation that was designed to prevent the illegal abduction and torture of people by the U.S. military, and secret services after the Vietnam and Nixon era excesses—excesses that now seem almost timid by comparison to what is happening today. The Obama policy makes a mockery of the notion of due process, and of the recent U.S. protestations over Scotland’s release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Then again, perhaps it is the other way: if a country feels it can kidnap and torture at will, then of course the head of its FBI would have opposed the application of due process in the Lockerbie case.

The confirmation that renditions will continue means that the slightly ridiculous Reagan era appellation ‘evil empire’ now actually applies to the U.S.. This regardless of the party in power, and the individual who sits in the Oval Office. Doubtless many good people in the U.S. are despairing in much the same way that many of us beyond the U.S. are; the fact nevertheless remains that the Obama administration has effectively sanctioned, and now almost certainly made permanent, the Bush-era authoritarianism. No wonder Obama does not want the U.S. equivalent of a Truth Commission.

How paradoxical—and how tragic—that Obama now inhabits almost exactly the same political place that Bush did: despite his far greater intelligence and worldliness, he too, is but a pawn of the forces that are desperately trying to maintain U.S. ascendancy by recourse to kidnapping and torture.

Update 2 December:  Obama is on course to be a one-term president

The above title would have been unthinkable even a few months ago. Our memories of the despair and desolation generated by the Bush-Cheney administration were still fresh, but rather more importantly, so were the Obama invocations of a new dawn of U.S. politics—this in both the domestic and the international scene. Alas, as early as the beginning of February 2009—some would argue long before—it began to be clear that there would not really be a regime change in what Hugo Chávez rightly describes as ‘el imperio’, the empire. In a post titled ‘Obama, Miliband, and Torture‘, this blog reported on the moves that were afoot in the new administration to quietly reintroduce extraordinary renditions and even the possibility of torture via the backdoor of the classification so used and abused by Bush-Cheney, enemy ‘non-combatants’ and ‘terrorists’. Another post titled ‘The Day that Obama’s Hope Died‘ documented the extent to which Obama had surrounded himself with a coterie of Clinton-era operatives, most of whom were and remain hard-core neoliberals, and political apparatchiks very much in the spell of the kind of corporate welfarism that has long dominated U.S. politics.

In these and other posts, EcoLogics suggested that Obama was thus in some respects a change for the worse: while Bush-Cheney was so obvious and unsubtle in their politics that you could see them coming a mile away, Obama-Clinton are far more astute and are better able to dissimulate the ongoing U.S. abuse of its power. Witness what happened in Honduras (a crass, but not unclever way of eliminating a Chávez ally in Central America), and what is happening now in Colombia. In both cases, we see a return to big stick diplomacy, covered by ambiguous U.S. policy statements in the public domain, and completely unambiguous politics of intervention within the countries themselves. This is precisely the kind of practice that I alluded when I suggested in this blog’s About page that ‘we may face a return to what is, in some respects at least, an older and more hegemonic modus operandi, in Gramsci’s sense of the term.’

The news that Obama is now set to send an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan even as he protests rather loudly that those self-same troops will start coming back in July 2011 confirms this point, albeit in a way that most probably signals the beginning of the end of Obama presidency. It may be argued that an army of occupation such as the U.S. has in Afghanistan can only negotiate its way out of conflict from a position of strength. But such a position is undermined the moment it becomes clear that it is only a matter of time before U.S. domestic politics force that army to leave. The crude power of the Soviet army, unconstrained as it was by the niceties of public opinion, failed to put an end to the mullahs’ might in the 1970s and 80s. What on earth has persuaded Obama-Clinton that they can achieve a different outcome by undercutting themselves in the manner that they just have? If the war is morally bankrupt (which it is), and if it has thus far been fought on entirely the wrong military premises (which it has), America’s generals will now have to deal with the fact that the Taliban simply have sit back and wait for the marines to leave. On the home front, Obama’s political commanders will soon discover that this contradictory manoeuvre will satisfy neither the increasingly hysterical Republicans, nor all those on the political centre-right and centre-left who voted for Obama in order to effect regime change within the U.S.. Obama has just opted for a policy which is the military anologon of his economic policy: in both cases, he has allowed himself to be persuaded by right-wing advisers to enact half-measures which will fail to secure political victory in the upcoming elections, as well as the military and economic fortunes of el imperio in the near future.

About Black Cats and Right Wing Professors

When this blog published a brief post, ‘In praise of Obama’, several fellow wordpress.com users sent comments almost before I’d dotted the last i and crossed last t. The comments were all quite polite, but conveyed more or less the same message: EcoLogics had got its facts wrong, there was nothing racist about the Cambridge policeman’s actions in Professor Henry Louis Gates’ home.

Yesterday another event made headlines which poses much the same issues raised by the Gates affair. EcoLogics will be posting a detailed analysis of this matter soon, but in the meantime, here is a very brief summary of what happened.

1. On August 10, Niall Ferguson published an op-ed piece in the Financial Times that began as follows: ‘President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just over six months in the world’s biggest and toughest job.’

2. It seems that a number of people wrote to the FT.com website denouncing the comparison, and one or two supported it. But the matter became an ‘affair célèbre’ when at least two well-known columnists took up the issue: Paul Krugman, in his nytimes.com blog, and James Fallows, in his Atlantic column. If readers follow the links, they will be able to see each writer’s argument for themselves.

3. Ferguson was evidently enraged by the criticism, and wrote to Krugman and Fallows enjoining them to publish what he represented as a refutation by none other than Henry Louis Gates himself:

‘As you both took exception to my comparison of the President with Felix the Cat, my favorite cartoon character, implying it was racist and recommending I consult Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I have now done so [note: in fact, only Fallows suggested that Ferguson should ‘have a beer’ with Gates]. He has taken the trouble to consult others in the field of African-American Studies, including our colleague Lawrence D. Bobo, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, and has written to me as follows:

“None of us thought of Felix as black, unlike some of the racially-questionable caricatures Disney used. Felix’s blackness, like Mickey’s and Minnie’s, was like a suit of clothes, not a skin color. … You are safe on this one.”’

You can read Krugman’s rejoinder here, and Fallows’ here. To see Ferguson’s defence, you may wish to read his account in the Huffington Post.

EcoLogics is interested in various aspects of this debate.

The first point, which was raised by Krugman in his first post, is how the Financial Times allowed the piece to be published in the first place. Despite the best efforts of some right wing professors and commentators, we still live in a society that has social codes that are meant to suppress sexist, racist, and other ideological forms of expression. In the wake of Ferguson’s piece, it would appear that the editors of the Financial Times have effectively thrown down the gauntlet. If the FT has allowed this one to pass, then in principle nothing should prevent columnists from beginning articles with comments such as the one offered as a counter-example by Fallows: ‘”Jackie Chan reminds me of Pluto. One of the best-loved characters from the Disney studio, Pluto was not only yellow. He was also very, very likable.”‘

Perhaps the reason why Fallows offered this example is because most people don’t have a vocabulary with which to explain why or how Ferguson’s article might be, indeed should be regarded as being racist—or as this blogger would put it, as being a text that may well provoke racism. And indeed the second point to be made is that, in the absence of a critical vocabulary, those who denounce racism may be quite easily browbeaten into silence (which is what Ferguson unwisely and ineffectually attempted to do to Krugman and to Fallows) or provoked into statements which leave them looking like the proverbial bull in a china shop (Krugman avoided this too when he neatly returned the ball to Ferguson by noting that it had never occurred to him that Felix the Cat was Afro-American).

The third point is to express surprise that Gates is reportedly backing Ferguson up. We probably haven’t heard the end of this story. On the one hand, Fallows’ account of the differendum notes that Ferguson initially back-tracked on his claim that Gates had ‘rubbished’ any suggestion that the article was racist—an accusation that was not actually made by either Krugman or Fallows. On the other hand, this blogger would be very interested to read what if anything has been left out of the Gates’ quote: note the ‘…’ between ‘not a skin color’ and ‘You are safe on this one.’

Gates’ supposed ‘all clear’ is nonetheless surprising because there can be little doubt that the comparison was indeed racist, in the sense that it focused attention on Obama’s ‘race’. However, it did so in a manner that, in the present ideological climate, can apparently be plausibly denied. In the same way that the policeman tried to argue that Gates’ arrest was grounded in Gates’ own behaviour, Ferguson could, and did suggest that all he was saying is that both Felix the Cat and Obama are black: ‘As for the word “black”, it’s the same one used by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Harvard Black Alumni Society, among others.’

This raises the question: how does one describe and evaluate statements such as Ferguson’s, in a way that refutes what might be described, in honour of eponymous professor, as the ‘Ferguson Defence’? Stay tuned for an analysis

Was the Obama Administration involved in the Honduran Coup?

We don’t know—though as noted by critical commentators throughout Latin America, the initial silence of the Obama administration spoke louder than words, and now Hillary Clinton isn’t exactly busting a gut to pressure Micheletti and his cronies to reinstate Zelaya.

Here is an article by Nikolas Kozloff in Counterpunch that sheds light on one possible motivation for direct U.S. involvement in the Honduran coup (beyond the more traditional corporate motivations)

Zelaya, Negroponte and the Controversy at Soto Cano: The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

The Problem with Media Studies

Media Studies is once again under attack by the Conservative Party. If you believe David Cameron, the field of media studies stands as a symbol of all that is wrong in contemporary education. Media Studies is the ‘original’ Mickey Mouse subject, the ‘soft’ alternative par excellence, a pointless subject if ever there was one.

As Media Studies experts in journalism would point out, there is nothing newsworthy in this latest attack—nothing newsworthy, that is, if we stick to the conventional criteria for the word ‘news’. Tory politicians have been attacking Media Studies for the better part of two decades, with anti-media studies hysterias coming and going in much the way that a variety of other moral panics have. The Tories nonetheless know that, when it suits, Media Studies-bashing is likely to mobilise public opinion as much on the right as it is on the left of the educational divide.

The differing, and not-so-differing reasons why Media Studies-bashing is something of a national sport are instructive. Those on the right tend to see Media Studies as a sign of the decay in educational standards. By this account, Media Studies exemplifies a drift not just towards educational ‘naffness’, but towards that evil that is social relativism. For their part, many on the left identify Media Studies with philosophical postmodernism (what many academics would dismiss as a radical variety of social relativism), and assume that anyone doing research in the field (if, indeed, the word ‘research’ can be used to describe someone studying the media) is likely to be wasting precious research grants in order to make much ado about nothing.

Two things unite otherwise different perspectives. First, there is a horror over the perceived erosion of the sacredness of education, and higher education in particular. It is interesting, in this sense, that so little is said by comparison about what is arguably a far greater threat to that self-same sacrality: Brown, Mandelson, Newby et al’s efforts to vocationalise higher education.

Second, whatever their political ideologies, many of the critics tend to be either die-hard empiricists, or hard-core positivists, or amusingly, a mixture of the two. All that really matters in that academic world are empirically-verifiable facts, and facts that can be counted using what tend to be automatically regarded as more ‘objective’ techniques such as surveys and  databases. But of course, as any Tory or New Labour pollster knows, a number can lie far more easily than an epithet can.

This blogger is interested in the contradictions that emerge in what remains an extraordinarily one-sided debate. For starters, the party that specialises in slagging off Media Studies has in its ranks some of the most avid students of public relations, a discipline which some might confuse with Media Studies, and which could itself certainly be accused of social relativism. By this account, David Cameron is a living Media Relativist, if by this we mean an Alan Milburn-like chamaeleon who changes political colours at will to reflect (or deflect) the rising and falling tides of mass-mediated public opinion.

For their part, those who oppose Media Studies as a ‘postmodern’ discipline would do well to reflect on the history of their own discipline. There are few university fields that have not had to fight a struggle to gain the respect of peers in older disciplines, or indeed the seal of approval of the Church or of one or another state institution. Equally if not more importantly, there is no field that can dispense of mass communication, and of mass mediation when it comes to engaging with public opinion both beyond and within the own ranks.

We might note, by way of an extended metaphor, that Galileo Galilei’s success was as much a matter of his heretical theories as it was of his ability to favourably position his work in the Medici court by way of a very astute form of mass communication. As noted by Adrian Johns in his excellent The Nature of the Book, the Medici court identified iconographically with the figure of Jupiter, and so Galileo named his Jovian satellites accordingly in Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger, published in 1610). The ‘Medicean stars’ were the centerpiece of his new book. Some difficulties arose when Galileo was informed that his choice of the name ‘Cosmian’ (after the Medici patriarch, the absolute prince, Cosimo II de’ Medici) would not meet approval. However, a combination of last minute changes, distribution to key princes and cardinals throughout Europe, and the eventual support of the Medici court guaranteed a positive response. Alas, this same logic later worked against Galileo when his ally and patronage broker in Rome, Campioli, fell from grace and so failed to secure a positive reading of Galileo’s later Dialogo Sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems).

This story reminds us of the fact that the politics of mass communication have been a key aspect of academic study for centuries. But it also reminds us of the importance to academia, and to politics more generally, of signs — that is to say, of symbolic forms of the kind that Media Studies engages in academic study. It might be objected that academics no longer have to name their stars after the wealthy, but that would be to miss the more general point. As  Bruno Latour has shown, far from being a quaint matter of naming heavenly bodies in the 17th century, the business of constructing and interpreting signs remains an essential aspect of any form of scientific practice.

EcoLogics thereby suspects that if Media Studies attracts the opprobrium that it does, it is for reasons that are quite different from those bandied about by right-wing politicians, and some left-wing academics.

First, there is, paradoxically, a conflation of what positivists would describe as the subject and object of research. Put more simply, in the minds of some of the critics, the researchers have somehow become identified with what is being researched, and so Media Studies is confused with the media. In the minds of those who both hate and use the media, Media Studies may thus be equated with the unclean.

Second, invectives based on a hate of semiotics (the study of signs) overlook the importance of semiotics to the own field; a contempt of Media Studies may thereby be a way of dealing with what Freudian psychologists have long described as the return of the repressed. We live immersed in, and determined by signs—though of course not only signs—however much we may be dismayed by this fact.

The third motivation for the attack is perhaps the most odious: some on both the right and the left fear that the study of soap operas and reality TV shows, computer games and a variety of everyday forms of communication is a sign of the vulgarisation of academia. The word ‘vulgarity’ would of course never be used in public, but there can be little doubt that part of what is at issue is a class-based politics of distinction: why should academics study popular culture, i.e. the things enjoyed by working men and women?

From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that the UK’s latest educational cri de coeur comes from none other than the Conservative Party—the party which is now trying to style itself as the PPP (the People’s Progressive Party), but whose leading members historically tried to keep working men and women from obtaining formal education in the first place. Funny how history repeats itself: imagine what would happen to politics as we know it today if everyone in the UK was forced to take, as part of the national curriculum, courses that taught them how to be critical vis-a-vis the media…

The Guardian and Peter Mandelson

Updated 30 September 2009

See also the more recent Learning to love Peter—or leaving The Guardian

A newspaper editor has a number of ways in which s/he can attempt to make or break a politician. The editor’s arsenal ranges from utter silence—total exclusion of someone’s views—to a Murdochian unleashing of the proverbial hounds of the hunt. In between these two extremes we find a variety of linguistic and para-linguistic instruments, not all of which are readily identified by even relatively expert readers. To mention just a few of the more obvious tools of the trade, there’s the prominence of the headline; the adjectives chosen (or not) for the linguistic account; the size, angle, lighting, framing and expression of any photographs; the framing of the article (or photograph) by other news items; appeals to ‘common sense’… the list could go on and on and on.

The word ‘attempt’ is nonetheless key because there is no guarantee that readers will buy the story: literally or figuratively. On the day that a particular politician’s campaign is to be launched (or destroyed), some other event may explode across the news-scape, redirecting readers’ attentions away from any planned making or unmaking of. Then again, a good (or inconvenient) portion of the readership may simply be on holiday. To be sure, politicians are usually made—or broken—over a much longer period of time.

Equally importantly, in the absence of the aforementioned distractions the editor may fail to persuade a significant number of readers to abandon old prejudices, or indeed, to acquire new ones. To put the matter somewhat academically, any student of mass communication knows (or should know) that bullet theories of media effects are as good as the tacit model that they silently advance: words are no more bullets than bullets are words.

Then again, a reader can be struck by a choice of words, and as Russian politicians and their Chechen henchmen have shown, a journalist can be silenced by a bullet.

This is a long way of saying that on August 10, 2009, The Guardian knew full well what it was doing when it decided to foreground a Decca Aitkenhead interview with Peter Mandelson. Many readers may not have seen the interview, let alone the editorial that accompanied it. Those who did see them were not necessarily persuaded by either. And those who were persuaded may well have been persuaded in different ways about different aspects of the first or the second representation. Few things in the world of mass communication are what they seem at first glance, or even, on second thought.

But that verity does not contradict the fact that the world of the news media is littered with efforts to determine the meanings derived from a first glance, and indeed, from a second or even a third thought. EcoLogics suggests that the editors of The Guardian were trying to determine the nature of both glance and thought where Peter Mandelson is concerned.

* * *

Decca Aitkenhead’s Peter Mandelson interview (‘I had to be the hit man’) was very good, whatever one might say about the Guardian‘s ulterior motivations. It was a Machiavellian mirror, if such a thing exists, of Peter Mandelson’s Machiavellianism. Even as it revealed the innumerable ways in which the Prince of Darkness calculates his political relations, it worked quite hard to make these seem funny. As part of this, it attempted to establish an opposition between Mandelson’s aides, who seemed to forever be warning him to keep his mouth shut or to be more careful, and Mandelson himself, who was made to appear to be throwing caution to the wind, and just ‘enjoying himself’.

The article’s stance vis-a-vis this new Mandelson line was remarkably ambiguous; it didn’t quite celebrate it, but it didn’t condemn it either. That said, there was one way in which the interview was anything but ambiguous. It constituted an example of the kind of psychology that may be generated when a journalist is embedded in a military unit pitched in battle. There may have been no incoming mortar shells, but the effect might just as well have been the same: the journalist took us into Mandelson’s unit and made a part of his political war machine. This immersion may well have generated if not a sympathy, then certainly a shared subjectivity of a kind which is least likely to be perceived or understood by readers who don’t have training in media analysis. Again, the point is not to say that this or any other ‘device’ is necessarily effective; but it was rather subtle, and so is less likely to have been noticed by a majority of readers.

Now it might be argued that this was a one-off, a sign of The Guardian’s duty to ‘balance’, that most misleading of all journalistic objectives. In fact, the interview was not only given headline status, but was silently backed up by an editorial that subtly signalled, if not a Guardian volte-face, then certainly a significant change of course. One line in the seemingly even-handed editorial said it all: ‘It is possible – with Mandelson, it sometimes seems anything is possible – that we are now about to meet a man of ideology.’ By saying this, Rusbridger et al dissimulated in principle, if not in effect, the fact that Mandelson has had ideology all along: the ideology of a self-serving neoliberal, one who now, for both tactical and strategic reasons, needs to persuade the mythical, and seemingly gullible centre of the Labour Party that he is really one of ‘us’. It would appear in this sense that the Guardian has become a part of Mandelson’s ultimate public relations campaign.

The Guardian might also try to suggest that it has published critical pieces about Mandelson—for example, the day after the interview appeared, the paper included a piece by Simon Hoggart that did say a few mean things about Mandelson, and included a telling line: ‘Now we have unveiled in the Guardian the latest, newest, shiniest Mandelson, straight from the showroom. He is, he tells us, a pussycat.’ Read in a certain way, this line suggests that the Guardian was in fact unmasking Mandelson’s latest guise; EcoLogics suggest that the combination of ambiguity and embedding analysed above suggests more of an unveiling than an unmasking.

If this analysis is a valid one, we can only guess at The Guardian’s motivations for abandoning their own hitherto admirable political crusade against the sweet stench of corruption that many believe pervades New Labour’s, if not Mandelson’s own designer clothes. Perhaps the newspaper is in such dire financial straits that it dares not contradict what it senses to be a groundswell of pro-Mandelsonian opinion amongst those who still buy the paper. Then again, the editors may have persuaded themselves that for Labour itself it’s Mandelson or bust. Whatever the case, this is one Guardian reader who has lost respect for a paper that until now has been something like a lone critical media voice in New Labour’s—and Peter Mandelson’s—neoliberal jungle.

By way of a postscript, have a look at what the Guardian editors did to a CiF comment that pointed out that the Guardian was in no position to be having a go at the City of London after its own support for Mandelson (was the censorship a helpful suggestion on the part of the New Labour media intelligence unit?) :

What the Guardian does to criticism of its own editorial policies

Here is an image of the way in which the paper headlined Mandelson’s article on 12 August 2009 (Guardian Unlimited, at 8.48am. The printed edition carried an ever bigger headline of Mandelson’s article).

The Guardian supports Peter Mandelson

Have a look also, at the little plug thrown in by the August 13 editorial about unemployment, in which the Guardian both singles out for mention, and agrees with a comment made by Mandelson that things could be ‘much much worse’. Yes indeed; but were it not for Mandelson’s and New Labour’s policies from 1997 onwards, they could be much, much better.

Update September 30:

The paper has gone from a relatively subtle pro-Mandelson stance, to one that is as crass as the videos shown at the height of New Labour’s pathetic final conference (see for example, the emetic http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2009/sep/28/peter-mandelson-career-labour-conference) Here’s a suggestion to Guardian readers: vote with your feet, or rather, with your browser: stop reading the paper in any of its forms. Later this week, EcoLogics will be publishing a post that both explains the need for, and suggests some ways of engaging in, Guardian abstention.