Obama’s 'Crusade' Against Terrorism

In September 2001, George W. Bush launched a “crusade against terror,” the highlight of which was a disastrous and illegitimate war in Iraq that lasted 10 years. No doubt looking to celebrate this glorious episode, today he invites visitors to his all-new presidential library to play an interactive game on the aforementioned war, which offers a soothing explanation of a just and inevitable conflict to ensure America’s safety against the threat of “terrorism” — that all-powerful word.

In the name of this war against terrorism, torture is today practiced in Guantanamo, where close to 20 detainees on a hunger strike to denounce the inhumane conditions of their detention were forcibly attached to a chair and fed by a tube.

Because of his status as a declared terrorist, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother implicated in the Boston marathon bombing, was deprived of his constitutional right as an American citizen to be read his rights, including the right to remain silent.* Perhaps Tsarnaev wanted a mass killing of innocent civilians for political reasons and thus deserves the title of terrorist.

But we can’t help but notice that this stigmatizing word is a condemnation that symbolically attempts to exclude U.S. nationals. To call Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a “terrorist,” to insist on his “dark” complexion, as the press did, and to assume his identity as a jihadist, creates a rhetoric that obliterates the harsh reality: This young man is an American and is largely a product of the United States. In this way, he is just like Adam Lanza, who gunned down dozens of children in Newtown. Senator Claire McCaskill is now wondering whether Lanza should not also be called a “terrorist.”

American Security Services

It is in this context that we must understand the decision made last week by American security services — including the Department of Justice — to include the black activist Assata Shakur on the list of most wanted terrorists in the country, a list created after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which contains the names of 32 men, mostly Middle Eastern Muslims. Shakur (birth name JoAnne Byron), the aunt of rapper Tupac Shakur, had already been labeled a “domestic terrorist” pursuant to the Patriot Act (an antiterrorism law).

The former Black Panthers activist has lived in Cuba for 29 years, where she benefits from her status as a political refugee. Today, she saw the “price” of her capture double. With her new status and a $2 million reward, the American government is likely hoping to sway the aging Castro regime and obtain Shakur’s extradition.

In 1973, the New York-based activist was arrested and convicted for the death of a policeman during a shootout in New Jersey. Even though she herself had been shot twice in the back and the charges against her were quickly revealed to have been false, she remained in prison where she received abusive treatment until her escape in 1979 and her move to Cuba.

A sister cause to the fight of Angela Davis, whose struggle is currently playing in cinemas, Shakur is the mirror image of Tsarnaev: We know that her cause and her fight were and continue to be political, but we can’t say that she is a criminal and that she killed for her cause.

Each day, the illusion that America has escaped from the dark days of the war on terror is more striking. While the drone war is in full swing, the country continues to live in a state of democratic suspension that, each day, further dismays defenders of civil liberties. Here, students from Yale University were upset by the proposed establishment of an interrogation training center that the Pentagon would like to see run by a psychiatrist renowned for his studies on how Arabs and Muslims “lie;” there, thousands of undocumented Latinos are checked, monitored and jailed in the name of the Patriot Act.

We should add that since 2001, on the streets of New York or Atlanta, a black person is 18 times more likely to be stopped by police than a white person, an intolerable example of discrimination that we justify as necessary in the war on terror.

President Barack Obama has a historic responsibility in perpetuating this state of lawlessness. He speaks today about closing Guantanamo, an old promise, but forgets a little too quickly that it was he who signed the National Defense Authorization Act in 2005, which to date prohibits funding for the transfer of prisoners on American soil, and that it is in his power to release or extradite the 86 prisoners. Far from being in line with his commitments and declarations of good intentions, his administration, by this incomprehensible decision to put Shakur on the list of “major terrorist threats against the country,” participates in the venomous pursuit of identifying “swarthy” terrorists and lends its weight to the disastrous crusade against terror, which is now part of Obama’s legacy, too.

*Editor’s note: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was, in fact, read his Miranda rights after an initial delay.