This weekend in the reading roundup:
Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
Photo credit: Jenny Downing
This weekend in the reading roundup:
Have a good weekend!
Photo credit: peperonigialli
Recent weeks have been awash with media anxiety over a series of 'new' drug crazes sweeping across the United Kingdom. First it was reports that university students are commonly resorting to using 'smart drugs'-- mostly Ritalin and Modafinil--in order to give them an edge in preparing papers and revising for exams. Then it was the identification of a mephedrone use epidemic amongst UK youth, initially spurred by an erroneous report that over 180 students at a school had missed classes due to consumption of the substance. In the United States, recent years have seen the rise in reports of Pharm Parties-- social gatherings where teens allegedly swap random prescription medications--and the great Jenkem scare of 2007.
There are some common themes in the way that these stories are presented. First, in every case, all of the reporting is primarily based on rumour, unsubstantiated anecdotes, speculation,or inferential interpretation of tenuously related data.
Second, in most of these stories--save for Jenkem--what we see is in fact quite an old phenomena being dressed up as 'new'. For example, university students taking substances in order to raise their levels of alertness is not a recent development. Nor is the social practice of teenagers congregating together for the purposes of taking drugs. Similarly, that people ingest substances that give them a rush is not a 21st century phenomena devoid of historical precedent.
Third, hyperbole is the means by which these stories must be conveyed. It is not just an exaggeration of the events, effects or compositions of the substances, and who is using them that is required. Rather the emphasis must be on what these activities are said to represent: a loss of ethics, hedonistic degeneration, corrupted youth, and moral decay. The consequences are then said to be eschatological --or in case of Jenkem, perhaps scatological?--resulting in the destruction of an entire social structure and way of life.
Fourth, given the outrageous claims that are being made and that many of these claims are devoid of any corroborating evidence, they all turn to linking the threats to children. And all children are not equal in these stories. It is important that white middle class kids be identified as at risk because those are the children we are supposed to really care about.
Fifth, the linking of particular forms of drug use with children not only catalyzes the reactionary safety impulse of parents, it also locates the threat in a world (i.e., youth culture) that is familiar but still somewhat alien, making the claims seem much more plausible than they might otherwise.
Sixth, while children and youth are identified as the principle actors in these stories, they are granted no degree of agency towards the provision of their own well-being. Instead, children are framed as objects in need of protection. This framing is important because the assumed inability of youth to make reasoned decisions immediately precludes policy options--such as evidence-based drug education initiatives--in favour of panoptic surveillance and draconian criminal prohibitions that do very little to address the public health aspects of illicit drug use or to prevent the recurrence of recent tragedies.
Analytically, what is interesting is the work that is done by the substances themselves to make these stories appear plausible. What is it about prescription medications that makes the practice of artificial stimulation that much more dangerous or unethical than downing multiple cups of coffee, energy drinks, or over-the-counter sleep suppressants? Why is mephedrone that much more pernicious than extreme sports or marathon running where preventable injuries and deaths are quite common?
There is also no acknowledgment of the social-medical context that may be contributing to contemporary youth drug consumption patterns. Given the increasing numbers of children who are being prescribed Ritalin and other drugs to make them more docile and compliant in under-funded classrooms (in 2005 over 23 million prescriptions were filled in the US alone), not only are many of these drugs more widely available, but a culture of regularized drug taking for the purposes of altering mood has been established. But acknowledgment would uncomfortably shift the source of the problem away from reckless youth or foreign producers to parents, teachers, and doctors who have been complicit in the construction of a brave new world.
So what can be done? Charlie Brooker may have it right. Rather than focusing efforts on prohibiting drugs, perhaps its high time that we banned tabloid journalism? Or, in the very least, the people responsible for whipping up fear and outrage ought to be held to account.
As information about Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan--a coalition offensive purportedly against a key Taliban stronghold of 80,000 residents called Marjah--becomes available from web muckrakers like BagnewsNotes and Truthout, I can't help but think of the following passage from Jean Baudrillard's essay on Simulacra and Simulations:
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true...
...Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
In many ways, we can see Afghanistan as a governing assemblage of simulacra: democracy, humanitarianism, human rights, community capacity building, reconstruction, and the war on terror. Unfortunately, the bodies of the dead, maimed, sick, and injured--from all sides--remind us that the desert of the real is also a very brutal place.
Photo credit: Paolo Alfieri (his flickr-stream of Afghan landscapes is pretty stunning)
This weekend in the reading roundup:
And congratulations to David Campbell and Sharron Lovell on being awarded the 'Online excellence in projects for mid-sized websites' by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers at the 15th Annual Best in Journalism Competition for the multi-media project 'Living in the Shadows'.
Living in the Shadows: China's Internal Migrants from David Campbell on Vimeo.
Have a good weekend.Image of a personal twitter network: Nimages DR
This weekend in the reading roundup:
Some food for thought...
Photo credit: jurvetson
The controversy surrounding the targeted killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, (allegedly) by members of the Israeli Mossad continues to grow in the UK. While the focus has been on the use of UK and Irish passports to facilitate the entry of agents into Dubai, there are some other interesting issues brought forward by this case.
The first is to keep in mind that targeted killings in the Israeli context are an adminstrative decision taken within the cabinet and office of the Prime Minister. And as administration decisions, they are shaped by a political-legal context.
This context is one that has been recently influenced by legal advice given to the Israeli government as well as two high profile constitutional challenges to legality of assassination under the Basic Law. A 2002 recommendation by the Judge Advocate General (JAG) of the Israel Defense Forces outlined four essential conditions that must be satisfied before a targeted killing can take place. First, the Palestinian Authority must ignore appeals for arrests of persons of interest. Second, Israeli security forces must reach the conclusion through careful assessment that they cannot arrest the persons of interest themselves. Third, any attack must be proportional. Fourth, a targeted killing should only be done to prevent an imminent or future attack; retribution or revenge are not justifications. These conditions were supported in rulings given by the Israeli High Court in 2002 and 2006 affirming the legality of targeted killing, with the later decision adding the requirement of an independent investigation following every instance.
Beyond the important issues of legality at both the national and international levels, I think it is also beneficial to analyse how it has become possible for a tactical success to be both a strategic and political failure under the terms and calculations by which the Israel state governs its own conduct.
Israeli standard operation procedure in intelligence matters is to neither confirm nor deny reports of tactical operations. Yet, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post, at least two Israeli cabinet members--Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Science and Technology Minister Daniel Herschkowitz--have already pretty much come out and credited the Mossad with involvement.
If the Mossad was involved, as stated above, the decision to assassinate would have been made at the level of the Prime Minister with the involvement of members of the cabinet. However, it is not necessarily the case that Binyamin Netanyahu or other members of the cabinet would have been specifically briefed on the logistical details of the operation (i.e., the use of foreign passports) though I would suspect that some indication that it might be taking place in a third party state would have been indicated given the potential political fallout. But since this operation was taking place outside of Israel or Palestine and Israeli citizens face travel restrictions in the region, the Prime Minister and others would have had to have been tacitly aware that entry into Dubai by agents was not going to be on Israeli passports.
In addition, while no government likes the idea of their passports being used--or forged-- to facilitate the intelligence operations of other states, what I think is qualitatively different in this case is that living British citizens have had their identities stolen. Culturally, the fear of identity theft is quite profound. Thus, I suspect that many people who might not have been particularly bothered by the murder itself--or Israel's use of targeted killing more generally--find themselves very ill at ease at the idea that agents of a foreign government might decide to steal their identity in order to commit actions that could burden them with profound legal liabilities while having profound consequences for their ability to travel, earn a living, or live in the absence of fear of reprisal.
So beyond the usual concerns of conducting a targeted killing, this operation assumed additional risks. While hindsight is always 20-20, this indirect--and non-consensual--involvement of additional state parties by using their passports and, more importantly, stealing the identities of their citizens was diplomatically reckless.
The imprudence becomes all the more apparent when the general consensus amongst analysts is that the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is not a substantial loss to Hamas. Reports on his life history emphasize that although he was heavily involved in bringing arms into Palestine, he was not a particularly high-profile or publicly charismatic member of the organization. Moreover, his function as an arms dealer and smuggler are easily replaceable. The risks taken in the commissioning of his assassination therefore seem well out of proportion to his strategic significance. Thus, one wonders if this was less a case of preventing an imminent or future attack (as advised under the JAG guidelines) and simply a case of retribution? If so, this operation would be at direct odds with the already lenient procedural rules governing the use of targeted killing in Israel.
The key question then is whether the death of al-Mabhouh will be framed this way within Israeli political discourses and if so, what the--if any-- longer range political consequences might be for the Likud government.
Update:
'Israel remains silent...' from guardian.co.uk
Photo credit: mrbill
Last week, Glenn Greenwald wrote a very thoughtful piece over at salon.com in response to a Washington Post article by Dana Priest detailing the use of decapitation strikes against alleged terrorist suspects in Yemen. The main focus for Greenwald's ire was the following information conveyed in the Washington Post report:
Greenwald's argument is that by targeting American citizens, the Obama administration is essentially engaged in the practice of extra-judicial killing, which is not only a violation of international law (1989 UN Principles), but also contradictory to the American position to condemn other regimes who kill citizens outside of due process.
While I am very sympathetic his arguments and to the general condemnation of the use of targeted killing in the war on terror, the classification of decapitation strikes as extra-judicial killing--though occupying the moral high-ground--misses the legal mark.
Extra-judicial killing is understood within the law to be primarily concerned with meting out punishment outside of due process. In other words, extra-judicial killing is an act of retribution meant to punish someone for a (perceived) transgression and to serve as a deterrent to those who might wish to follow their lead.
What the Obama administration and previous Bush administrations have been very careful to do is frame their use of targeted killing as a pre-emptive tactic against imminent threats or, more controversially, those with the capabilities to pose a threat. In doing so, they have positioned targeted killing (and pre-emptive strikes more generally) as the appropriate tactical response to the strategic problem of facing an adversary who cannot be deterred. Thus, the official goal isn't punishment, retribution, or deterrence but prevention within what is presented as an armed conflict without precedent.
This framing then takes targeted killing outside of the areas of international human rights law where one might be able to make a case that this indeed constitutes extra-judicial killing and places it squarely within jus ad bellum (right to war) and jus in bello (right conduct in war) considerations .
To be clear, I am not arguing that targeting killing is justifiable on this basis because even under the laws of war, it occupies legal ground that can be challenged. Moreover, the law in these areas is rife with ambiguities about how key principles like imminence, proportionality, combatant status, named targeting, and last resort are to be understood in the contemporary security environment.
My point is that too often in critiquing the practices that have become a part of the war on terror, we operate under the assumption that they are in direct violation of the law. The problem though, is that in most cases, however abhorrent the practices may be themselves, a credible--though not necessarily convincing--legal defense can be given.
The law is but one part of the political dynamics underpinning the war on terror and cannot be separated from them.Therefore, we do ourselves no favors in reifying the law or expecting that the law on its own can right the wrongs and excesses of the national security state.
Photo credits: kamshots and wili_hybrid
This weekend in the reading roundup:
Keep safe everyone.
Photo credit: audi insperation
