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| Power vacuum Nigerians fear crisis with their leader stuck in hospital news.bbc.co.uk |
What is the future of US healthcare? US senators have passed the final Senate version of a historic healthcare reform bill. What is your reaction? newsforums.bbc.co.uk |
The war on terror has been about scaring people, not protecting them | Gary Younge The ease with which the plane bomber could operate exposes the vacuity and recklessness at the heart of the US response to 9/11So there was no ticking time bomb. No urgent need ever arose to torture anybody who was withholding crucial details, so that civilisation as we know it could be saved in the nick of time. No wires had to be tapped, special prisons erected or international accords violated. No innocent people had to be grabbed off the street in their home country, transported across the globe and waterboarded. Drones, daisy-cutters, invasions, occupations were, it has transpired, not necessary.Indeed, when it actually came down to it, to forestall a near-calamitous terrorist atrocity in the US the authorities didn't even have to go in search of information or informants. The alleged terrorist's father came to the US embassy in Nigeria of his own free will and warned them that his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had disappeared and could be in the company of Yemeni terrorists.Meanwhile the National Security Agency had heard that al-Qaida in Yemen was planning to use an unnamed Nigerian in an attack on the US. If that were not enough, then came Abdulmutallab himself, a 23-year-old Nigerian bound for Detroit who bought his ticket in cash, checked in no bags and left no contact information. For seven years the American state manipulated the public with its multicoloured terror alerts. But when all the warning lights were flashing red, it did nothing.To brand this near miss a "systemic failure", as Barack Obama has done, is both true and inadequate. It reduces the moral vacuity, political malevolence and enduring strategic recklessness that has been the enduring response to the 9/11 attacks to a question of managerial competence."Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," explains Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. During the Bush years that terror was routinely leveraged for the purposes of social control, military mobilisation and electoral advantage. Meanwhile, the administrative processes that might prevent the next attack were tragically lacking. In short, Bush's anti-terror strategy was not about protecting people but about scaring them.To galvanise the nation for war abroad and sedate it for repression at home, the previous administration constructed a terror threat that was ubiquitous in character, apocalyptic in scale and imminent in nature. Only then could they counterpose human rights against security as though they were not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.Al-Qaida was only too happy to oblige. In such a state of perpetual crisis both terrorists and reactionaries thrive. Terrorists successfully create a climate of fear; governments successfully exploit that fear to extend their own powers."I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it," said former vice-president Dick Cheney.The trouble is that even by their own shabby standards, none of these "extraordinary measures" have ever worked. No new laws were necessary to stop 9/11. If the immigration services, the FBI and the CIA had been doing their jobs properly, the attacks could have been prevented.Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the US government undertook the "preventative detention" of about 5,000 men on the basis of their birthplace and later sought a further 19,000 "voluntary interviews". Over the next year, more than 170,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea were fingerprinted and interviewed in a programme of "special registration". None of these produced a single terrorism conviction.This set the pattern for the years to come: wiretapping, rendition, torture, secrecy. Those who otherwise rail against the inefficiency of government argued for more extensive, intrusive state power even as it produced little in the way of results. When confronted with this lamentable record, their only defence was the threat of the next attack. "The next time, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud" said Condoleezza Rice, adding. "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time." Over the last week even once in a while would have looked good.There are precious few partisan points to be made here. Responsibility for Abdulmutallab lies with Obama. He has been in power longer than Bush was when he received the FBI memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US". The Bush administration may have been more alarmist and belligerent, but, despite his more emollient tone, Obama has kept most of the repressive apparatus that Bush constructed intact. Obama has expressed his support for trying Guantánamo prisoners under military commissions, while his CIA chief has expressed his desire to keep extraordinary rendition. Meanwhile, photographs of torture and documents describing videos of these "enhanced interrogations" remain under lock and key."Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place," a former CIA officer told the Washington Post. Casting the escalation of the Afghanistan war as a central front in the war on terror is a potent illustration of how this delusion has continued. Al-Qaida is now more likely to be found in Pakistan, an American ally, than in Afghanistan and the latest threat came via Yemen. Terrorism is a strategy, not a place – attempts to carpet-bomb it or occupy it or conquer it will inevitably fail.Given the nature of terrorism another attack can be predicted with grim certainty. Before 9/11 there was Oklahoma City and before that there was the World Trade Centre. In a nation where the shooting of innocents in schools, colleges, churches and coffee shops is relatively commonplace, it goes without saying that one disturbed individual, with a lethal weapon and with or without an agenda, can inflict a substantial amount of human carnage. If they are working in a team and well resourced, the damage could be huge. All the state can reasonably expect to do is limit the odds.The US has actually done the opposite. Thanks to war and torture it has swelled the number of people who might want to do it harm. Much has been made of Abdulmutallab's radicalisation in London. But there had to be something to radicalise him with. In Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah and elsewhere, the US has provided plenty of material.Meanwhile the institutional stasis within the agencies that are supposed to combat terrorism means that when a potential terrorist actually does rear their head they appear on every radar and yet somehow, all too often, go undetected.So instead of reducing the odds politicians instead invoke them. "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon," Cheney once said, "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response". But it's precisely because their analysis has been so deeply flawed that their response has been so faulty. Until things improve there is a much higher chance that America's anti-terror efforts will repeat themselves: first as farce and then as human tragedy.United StatesGlobal terrorismBarack ObamaYemenCIAGeorge BushDick CheneyGary Youngeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
South Sudan head snubs presidency South Sudan leader Salva Kiir is to seek re-election in that post rather than going for the national presidency, his party announces. news.bbc.co.uk |
The trouble with the A word | John Harris 'Aspiration' is worse than just a vapid bit of rhetoric – it betrays an insidious cross-party con trickSeveral centuries ago, when I began my writing career in the music press, a moment of revelation arrived one slow Wednesday morning – when a colleague pointed out that too much of our magazine's copy was riddled with hackneyed words that no one in the real world would even think about using. Instead of "carry", writers would use "brandish"; instead of "name", we thought there was something inexplicably clever about "moniker"; it pains me to recall that books were occasionally described as "tomes". The result: thousands of readers who must have thought they were reading the work of people who were either eccentric or downright weird.A lot of people must feel similarly about that tired cliche "aspiration". Beyond either politicians or people who work in marketing, you will almost never hear the word uttered by anybody – but it decisively entered politics during the 1990s, and the entire Westminster class has never looked back. In his new year message, David Cameron assured anyone who was listening that "because we are progressives … we will support aspiration". Nick Clegg may not be quite so keen, but his cuttings file is still peppered with warm words about "mobility and aspiration". And just look at the rambling but much-hyped speech Brown gave to the Fabian Society the weekend before last, which set out Labour's election stall – "aspiration" versus Tory austerity, in a nutshell – with the aid of the usual boilerplate: "People's aspirations are on the ballot paper … I believe in an aspirational Britain … Labour is backing Britain's aspirations."Less strident than "ambition" – although in another desperate moment, Brown launched an aborted "age of ambition" in March 2008 – the "A" word has been part of the New Labour lexicon from the off. A good place to start is The Unfinished Revolution, the New Labour history written by Philip Gould, which finds Blair, Brown et al soaking up a new "politics of the middle class" from Bill Clinton's Democrats and, circa 1994, Blair reassuring his public that "your aspirations are our aspirations". By way of backstory, Gould angrily recalls his party's supposed abandonment of "ordinary people with suburban dreams, who worked hard to improve their homes and their lives; to get gradually better cars, washing machines and televisions; to go on holiday in Spain rather than Bournemouth". Brown reprised much the same spiel when he spoke to the Fabians, describing people's "dreams" as a matter of "owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business".And of course, a lot of this stuff seems perfectly reasonable. On the left, it reminds more hair-shirted types of the great popular quest for security, comfort, and material advancement; on the right, it underlines the fact that deference is long dead, and – Cameroons take note – post-Thatcher Conservatism must always at least partly speak with a thrustingly arriviste accent. But in its modern context, aspiration also has a more mendacious aspect: as the catch-all justification for politicians' refusal to do anything convincing about concentrations of wealth and privilege at the top.It's no coincidence that talk of aspiration has returned just as ministers have apparently served notice that the new 50p tax rate should be temporary (Mandelson most pointedly, though Alistair Darling seems supportive); nor that in sticking to plans to cut inheritance tax for Britain's richest estates, the Tories bemoan a "tax on aspiration". Such is a cross-party con-trick that you also hear from the commentariat: an imagined unity of interest between millionaires and the "aspirational" residents of Gould's suburbs, usually expressed in very strange terms indeed.Not that long ago, having obviously never visited the place, one unnamed senior Labour figure expressed the curious view that "£150,000 isn't a lot in Reading". Just last week, in a piece mocking Brown's sudden reconversion to the politics of aspiration, a newspaper columnist close to the more Blairite elements in the cabinet equated the UK's social middle with "ballet classes and Sicilian olive oil". A salient fact, while we're here: when the 50p rate was introduced, one poll found 57% of people – including, one would imagine, the residents of scores of Middle England marginals – in favour, with only 22% opposed. Among the latter group, it soon transpired, was the increasingly wealthy and assuredly aspirational Tony Blair, who reportedly thought expecting slightly more from people earning £150,000 or over "unacceptable". Funny, that.Worse still is another one of the "A" word's most insidious connotations: that aspiration is the preserve of the relatively affluent. Here, the reporting of Brown's recent manoeuvres tells you a lot: one recent interview with Mandelson, for instance, repeated the claim that he had won the battle over whether Labour "should focus on its core vote or aspiration". The pretty outrageous implication, echoed down the years by Labour politicians who should really know better, is that what remains of the working class has surrendered the ethos of self-improvement to people higher up the scale.But again, some statistics spring to mind: at the last count, for instance, more than 80% of even the most deprived young people wanted to stay in education post-16, and over half hoped to go to university. The big issue, to resume a seemingly endless argument, is not the absence of aspiration, but that lowly share of the national cake that far too many politicians want to avoid talking about.And so to one last point. If we really have to talk about aspiration, we're going to need a rather more fleshed-out definition. Albeit for only two sentences, Brown's Fabian speech also talked about aspirations that "go beyond the material concerns", and made reference to how we feel about "the environment we share", and "the pressures they feel in balancing work and family life". But here's the problem: quite apart from its brevity and half-heartedness, none of this seemed to have been included in the pre-speech briefings, an omission which pointed up how awkwardly it sits with Labour's current pitch to voters.Ignore those sides of people's lives, and you end up with two difficulties. First, you get the kind of arid, almost meaningless politics that reduces parties to retailers, as seen in 2005, when Labour pledged to help more people "earn and own", and reduced its offer to a set of individualist bullet points: "your family better off", "your child achieving more". Post-crash, that will surely cut precious little ice – though an equal danger is the prospect of politicians, like bad music hacks, speaking a contrived and cynical language unique to themselves. And even if 2010 supposedly presents us with the most important political choice in years, who will listen to that?General election 2010Gordon BrownTony BlairPeter MandelsonTax and spendingJohn Harrisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |