The Creature Politic

If I were designing a policy of torture-for-information, I would avoid using techniques originally intended to elicit false confessions. Unless I were the U.S. government, of course.

I am currently most of the way through reading Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s a fascinating and terrifying book, especially when he touches on the power of large scale industrial systems to effectively force markets to adapt to their products.

Which leads me to this article from 2005, which details Order 81 regarding seed purchases given to Iraqi farmers by Paul Bremer in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion.

Order 81

Among the Bremer decrees was Order 81, “Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law”.

Order 81 gave holders of patents on certain plant varieties, all large foreign multinationals, absolute rights for 20 years over use of their seeds in Iraqi agriculture. The protected plant varieties were Genetically Modified (GMO) plants.

Iraqi seed treasure destroyed

Iraqis have farmed since approximately 8,000 B.C. and developed the seed variety for almost every variety of wheat used in the world today. They did this through a system of saving a share of seeds and replanting, developing new naturally resistant hybrid varieties through the new plantings. That now is de facto illegal under Order 81. For years, the Iraqis held samples of these precious natural seed varieties in a national seed bank, located in Abu Ghraib. Following the US occupation, the invaluable seed bank in Abu Ghraib vanished.

The CPA’s Order 81 turned the food future of Iraq over to global multinational private companies. The details of Order 81 were written for Paul Bremer by Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and crops.

No seeds to plant

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Iraqi farmers were forced to turn to their government Agriculture Ministry for new seeds. Order 81’s declared aim was “to ensure good quality seeds in Iraq and to facilitate Iraq’s accession into the World Trade Organization.” “Good quality” was defined by the occupation authority. As soon as Order 81 had been issued, USAID began delivering thousands of tons of US-origin “high-quality, certified wheat seed” for subsidized, initially near cost-free distribution through the Agriculture Ministry, to desperate Iraqi farmers. The USAID refused to allow independent scientists to determine whether the seed was GMO seed or not.

The purpose of Order 81 was to facilitate the establishment of a new seed market in Iraq, where transnational corporations could sell their seeds – genetically modified– which farmers would have to purchase afresh every season. The old Iraqi constitution had prohibited private ownership of biological resources. The new US-imposed patent law introduced a system of monopoly rights over seeds.

“Let them eat…Pasta?”

Six kinds of wheat seeds were to be developed for Iraq. Three were to be used for farmers to grow wheat that is made into pasta…’ That meant that 50% of the grains being developed by the US in Iraq after 2004 were meant for export as pasta was a food foreign to the Iraqi diet.

In spring 2004 as Order 81 was promulgated by Bremer’s CPA, supporters of the radical young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their newspaper, al Hawza, by US military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of publishing “false articles” that could “pose the real threat of violence.” As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer was, “pursuing a policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to demand their political and individual freedoms.”

When anti-war activists criticize U.S. foreign policy as imperialistic, they are criticizing these kinds of orders first and foremost. If the U.S. carried out its foreign interventions and preemptive wars of choice without also destroying certain very basic forms of personal autonomy among the populations who it supposedly seeks to “liberate”, then the U.S. might begin to have some credibility for its claims to represent …

Whether or not the conversion to genetically modified, American-produced commodity corn offers a net economic benefit to Iraqi farmers (and it does not) should not even need to enter into our evaluation of the orders. Instead, let us consider why Bremer would choose to mandate the purchase of these seeds rather than simply guaranteeing that Iraqi farmers have free access to them. The Coalition Provisional Authority knew that an insufficient number of farmers would consider the seeds worth buying and did not consider dictating planting choices to farmers against their own interests to be in tension with “liberating” them from a tyrannical government. Add in the 20 year contracts and you have the classic methodology of the colonial empires; conquer by force, then demand exclusive trading rights to the detriment of the conquered, and finally gloss it all over with propaganda about “civilizing” or “liberating” the colonized nation.

As the article also implies, pursuing market-share for U.S. agribusiness at the expense of Iraqi citizens also provided legitimacy to the claims of anti-U.S. insurgents. Thus the logic of endless imperial warfare, where the invaders’ meddling gives fuel to resistance movements whose presence allows the invaders to justify to their own home populations the ongoing (or even escalating) presence of troops.

My interview with the Pakistani Spectator can now be found here.

An 11-year-old Romanian girl who was raped by her uncle cannot get an abortion:

“According to the penal code, after the 14th week of pregnancy, termination is only permissible if the mother’s life is endangered or if the foetus suffers from malformation,” said Vica Todosiciuc, head of the Cuza Voda maternity section in the northeastern city of Iasi.

“Having examined the girl, the panel observes that the pregnancy is proceeding naturally and therefore that termination should not be imposed.”

The girl’s parents discovered the pregnancy during a medical check-up two weeks ago after she complained of stomach pains. Police are hunting the uncle, who is said to have fled his home.

“The fact that the pregnancy stemmed from rape was not taken into account by the panel, for two reasons: one, because rape has not been proven; and two, because the penal code does not allow for any exceptions,” Todosiciuc said.

Jill at Feministe had the following observation, among a number of excellent points about how this indicates the “pro-life” position’s disdain for actual, living women:

Second, all that matters is whether the pregnancy is proceeding smoothly. Not whether the girl is going to be further psychologically and emotionally traumatized by the forced pregnancy and childbirth. Not whether there should be other factors taken into account — like maybe the little girl. Only: the incubator is doing its job. Even if she’s a baby herself. Even if she’s willing to go through the humiliation and the difficulty of asking a medical review board for permission to terminate a pregnancy caused by an uncle who raped her.

There’s another point to mention here. Some of the more supposedly moderate anti-choice types like to mention their support for an exception in the case of rape. Romania clearly does not have such an exception, but even if it did, consider Todosiciuc’s first point; rape has not been proven in the eyes of the review board.

If the so-called moderate pro-lifers had their way in the U.S. a woman would have only until the beginning of her third trimester to legally prove rape. After that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which does not include a rape provision, would come into effect. Proving rape, whether in a court or before some sort of review board (and the Men’s Rights Activists would, in this hypothetical, lobby hard to make sure that courts were the only available venue for proving rape), will always be a difficult and time-consuming process. Proving anything in our legal system is difficult and time-consuming; proving something simultaneously so truly serious and so seldom taken seriously within the tiny two-trimester timeframe would be virtually impossible.

Here’s the AP report:

A federal appeals court, in the first case it reviewed, has overturned the Pentagon’s classification of a Guantanamo detainee as an enemy combatant.

A three judge-panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said Huzaifa Parhat (pronounced hoo-ZY’-fah PAHR’-haht), a Chinese Muslim known as a Uighur, is not an enemy combatant, undermining the basis for his more than six years in detention.

The court rejected the Bush administration’s argument that the president has the power to detain people who never took up arms against the U.S.

The Washington Post also has a more detailed report, which points out that Parhat was accused of training with an al-Qaeda associated Uighur organization that seeks independence from China. His defense claimed there was no evidence that he had ever been a member of the group in question and further that this group was not involved in anti-U.S. terrorism. The courts appears to have agreed with both of those claims, thus finally taking a step reestablish the principle that the U.S. should only detain as enemy combatants (if they must even detain anyone at all using an ad hoc classification intended solely to open the door to Geneva Convention violations) those who have in fact been engaged in some of combatant against the U.S.

It’s a small but quite significant step in the right direct. Paired with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on habeas corpus, it means that “Parhat can seek his immediate release”. Hopefully, and I think it likely, the Supreme Court will uphold this decision, thus creating a strong precedent for future detainees who make it to civilian appeals courts.

One concrete plan of action available is punish those Democrats responsible for the new FISA bill. Glenn Greewnald, along with some of Ron Paul’s money-bomb organizers and the ACLU are putting together a plan to do exactly that.

Here’s a link to their Blue America PAC fundraising site. Currently they’ve raised a little over $300,000 for use in advertisements against House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, with the goal of ultimately launching a full-scale campaign to force him out of his leadership position. Here’s Gleen Greenwald explaining campaign against Hoyer, and here is his more general strategy.

Here is the announcement from Break the Matrix, the Ron Paul supporter contingent of this unusual coalition. 

Clearly this sort of electoral strategy is not sufficient, but it is a necessary component of any larger, more comprehensive plan. Politicians complicit in these kind of grotesque abuses of our civil liberties (and especially those, like Hoyer, responsible for them) will only change their ways if continuing to support them poses a significant career risk.

So give early and give often.

Finally, here is a link to the ACLU’s page for contacting your Senator to ask them to fight against the bill.

Over at Open Left, Paul Rosenberg perfectly captures the problem with the Democratic response to retroactive immunity (as well as the underlying failure of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama to actually lead the opposition to the worst of the Bush Administration’s policies. I would expand on it, but there’s really no need:

It’s elementary, really.  The terrorists’ strategy is to draw out the “true face” of an evil and oppressive regime, so that the people will rise up against it.  Of necessity, the terrorists strike innocents, because this is the only way to strike terror, and thus draw a repressive response. Whether they realize it or not, the terrorists are counting on the government they oppose being run by men just like themselves-men who believe in force, not law.  So long as this is true, the terrorists win.

For five long years, the terrorists were winning, because the Bush Administration was run by men just like them.  Instead of going after those who attacked us, the Bush Administration took out its enemies list and went after them, instead.  Top of the list was Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqi regime.  Nothing could have delighted bin Laden more.  We knocked off his chief ideological rival, and fully validated his claim that America’s interest and intent lay with fighting Muslims and occupying their lands.

Then in November 2006, the Democrats won the mid-term election.  

But it’s worse than that.  And the Congressional Democrats had made it abundantly clear.  It’s not just the Bush Administration that thinks like terrorists, and therefore is blindly committed to helping them win.  The Democrats are just as heedless and contemptuous of the rule of law as the Republicans are.  Which means that, so far as they are concerned, bin Laden was right.  We don’t stand for anything higher or better.  When push comes to shove, we believe in brute force and violence, not the rule of law.  We are barbarians, the same as he.

It should have been a turning point-not just the election, but the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that recommended a plan of withdrawal from Iraq.  It was far from a perfect plan, especially since it called for enforcing an oil law that was sure to enrage the Iraqi people, but compared to Bush’s post-9/11 conduct it represented a dramatic improvement. Even with this bipartisan cover, however, the Democrats proved entirely inept.  Within a matter of weeks a new escalation was announced-along with strict instructions not to call it what it was-an escalation. Instead, we were all supposed to call it “the surge,” as if it were something that college football fans did to pump up the home team.After the initial ineptitude, we’ve been treated to a year and a half of more of the same, sometimes spectacularly so-with the clamor to denounce MoveOn-more often in passive frustration mode.  The missed opportunities have been legion.  We could have been actively tearing down the Bush Administration lies-as in the virtually ignored Winter Soldier hearings held by the Out of Iraq Caucus several weeks ago.  Why was this not an official committee hearing instead?  Why wasn’t it a joint House/Senate hearing?  Why wasn’t it held within days of Bush putting out his escalation plan?  Why?  Because the Democratic Party has ceased to be a functioning political entity, that’s why.  Even with majorities in both houses, they can’t even mount an effective opposition, much less act like a governing legislative majority.