{"id":195774,"date":"2021-09-27T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2021-09-27T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=195774"},"modified":"2021-09-24T08:59:23","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T07:59:23","slug":"war-of-terror-legal-colonialism-reincarnated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/09\/war-of-terror-legal-colonialism-reincarnated\/","title":{"rendered":"War of Terror: Legal Colonialism Reincarnated"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did 9\/11 really open a \u2018new\u2019 chapter in U.S. history?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

People look at ‘America’s Response Monument’, a statue commemorating Special Operations forces who fought during the first stages of the Afghanistan war and the Global War on Terror in New York City on August 30, 2021
[Reuters\/Brendan McDermid]<\/p><\/div>\n

18 Sep 2021 – <\/em>In the canon of 9\/11 anniversary essays, \u201cnewness\u201d is a perennial theme: the \u201cunprecedented\u201d changes spawned by an \u201cunprecedented\u201d threat.<\/p>\n

Commentators mourn US\u2019 \u201closs of innocence\u201d \u2013 erasing the blood of centuries of settler colonisation, imperial expansionism, and enslavement from the United States\u2019 historical slate.<\/p>\n

Pundits decry the extension of mass surveillance and erosion of civil liberties as \u201c[Osama] bin Laden\u2019s victory\u201d over American freedoms \u2013 scrubbing the long genealogy of policing, surveillance, and counterinsurgency measures wielded to repress Indigenous, Black, and Latinx dissent in the US.<\/p>\n

Writers lament the transformation of planes from symbols of \u201cfreedom and adventure\u201d into weapons of \u201cfear and suspicion\u201d \u2013 forgetting that the use of planes as instruments of terror was not invented by al-Qaeda in 2001 but by Italian, French, and British colonisers in Libya, Morocco, Iraq, and other laboratories of colonial violence in the early 1900s. The use of \u201cair policing\u201d and bombardment to exert mastery over the colonised presaged the physical and psychological ravages of drone warfare today.<\/p>\n

The 9\/11 narrative of radical historical rupture is sustained by radical historical erasure \u2013 obscuring the continuities between the excised colonial past and the sanitised colonial present.<\/p>\n

In fact, the supposedly new paradigm of post-9\/11 war resembles what military historian John Grenier identified as America\u2019s \u201cfirst way of war\u201d: the totalising assault on Indigenous nations, lying at the genocidal foundations of the American state. From the \u201cIndian Wars\u201d to the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d, the assertion that the targets are too \u201cuncivilised\u201d to obey the (Eurocentric) laws of war has been used to unleash extraordinary violence by the \u201ccivilisers\u201d.<\/p>\n

In its infamous series of War on Terror legal memos, the US government\u2019s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) invoked an impressive array of colonial precedents from around the world: from the Indian Wars and US military occupations of the Philippines and Cuba to authorise the deployment of the military to fight \u201cterrorist activities\u201d within the US; from British colonialism in Kenya, French colonialism in Algeria, and apartheid South Africa to strip captured fighters of Geneva Convention rights; from the Indian Wars again, to legitimise the kangaroo court of the Guantanamo military commissions; from Britain\u2019s colonial project in Ireland and Israel\u2019s in Palestine, to legalise torture cloaked as \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d; and from Israel again, to deny captives access to the International Red Cross.<\/p>\n

In Orientalist eyes, the use of precedent in Islamic legal traditions (taqlid) has been pathologised as yet more evidence of Muslims\u2019 servile subjugation to the past. On the other hand, Western common law\u2019s adherence to precedent \u2013 a vehicle for the continuing reproduction of colonial reasoning \u2013 is celebrated as a hallmark of its exemplary rationality and justice.<\/p>\n

The US Army\u2019s Field Manual for post-9\/11 counterinsurgency (COIN) openly proclaims that it \u201cdraws upon colonial teachings and the US Marines\u2019 code of conduct for occupying Latin American nations\u201d. The laudatory introduction was written by the head of Harvard\u2019s human rights centre \u2013 human rights and colonial imperatives functioning as two sides of the same COIN.<\/p>\n

First on the manual\u2019s recommended reading list of \u201cclassics\u201d is Small Wars, by 19th-century British major general, Charles Callwell. Originally subtitled A Tactical Textbook for Imperial Soldiers, it purportedly \u201cprovides lessons learned [from Callwell\u2019s military experiences in Afghanistan and South Africa] that remain valuable today\u201d.<\/p>\n

One wonders precisely what \u201clessons\u201d are meant to be gleaned from Small Wars, which is replete with such observations as \u201call orientals have an inborn love of trickery and deception\u201d, \u201cthe Red Indians have won an evil notoriety by their duplicity and craftiness\u201d, \u201cin Asia he is the master who seizes the people pitilessly by the throat\u201d, and \u201cfanatics and savages must be thoroughly brought to book and cowed or they will rise again\u201d. In total, it contains more than 100 references to \u201csavages\u201d, \u201cbarbarians\u201d, and the \u201cuncivilised races\u201d.<\/p>\n

Of course, in the contemporary counterterrorism lexicon, \u201csavages\u201d are no longer officially referred to as \u201csavages\u201d. Instead, new terms such as \u201cunlawful enemy combatants\u201d have been devised, to justify expulsions from the protections of international humanitarian law.<\/p>\n

Similarly, societies are no longer overtly branded as \u201cuncivilised\u201d to rationalise imperial aggression, invasion, and overhaul. Instead, the targets for such interventions are now described as \u201cfailed\u201d states, or \u201cunwilling or unable\u201d to eliminate threats harboured within. The \u201cunwilling or unable\u201d doctrine \u2013 popularised in the War on Terror \u2013 was first advanced by the US and Israel in the 1970s, to attempt to accord a patina of legality to their extraterritorial exercises of military force.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe very process of asserting newness [in the wake of 9\/11] is a key political manoeuvre that allows proponents of radical international reform to justify, more successfully than was previously possible, many of their pre-existing imperial ambitions,\u201d legal scholar and UN expert Obiora Okafor observed.<\/p>\n

For example, European colonial jurists such as 16th century Francisco de Vitoria \u2013 now memorialised as a liberal defender of human rights \u2013 argued that in the so-called \u201cnew world\u201d of the Americas, \u201cpermanent\u201d total war was \u201cnecessary to secure peace\u201d; centuries before George W Bush made \u201chumanitarian\u201d aggression great again.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the appeal to newness is itself an old imperial tactic, Okafor reminds: \u201cNewness and difference were pivotal elements in the absurd series of sixteenth and nineteenth century legal manoeuvres that ultimately led to foreign Europeans conferring on themselves the international legal right to coercively occupy and govern lands [in the Americas, Africa, and Asia].\u201d<\/p>\n

While the terminology has been rebranded and the legal framework revamped, the underlying dynamic of differentiation and domination remains. As in\u00a0previous colonial periods, the dominated are not simply\u00a0excluded\u00a0from law, but\u00a0included\u00a0in order to be subjugated.<\/p>\n

To label this regime of terror as \u201cwar\u201d is misleading, since war connotes a situation in which both sides are legally entitled to use violence and are vulnerable to violence in return. Rather, as in the colonial slaughter fields and torture chambers of decades past, what imperial powers seek is a one-way licence for brutalisation and control.<\/p>\n

This is manifest in the US\u2019s demonisation and prosecution of Muslim fighters, such as former Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, as \u201cterrorists\u201d for killing US soldiers \u2013 legitimate military targets, under the international laws of war. In contrast, the prolific killing of Afghan, Pakistani, Somali, and Yemeni civilians by US forces is routinely exonerated, written off as \u201ccollateral damage\u201d or \u201cenemies killed in action\u201d if disclosed at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe WAT [War Against Terror] represents a set of policies and principles that reproduces the structure of the civilising mission,\u201d legal scholar Antony Anghie warned in his foundational book, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. \u201cIt is precisely by invoking the primordial, imperial structures latent within international law that this supposedly new initiative seeks to disrupt and transform existing international law \u2026 relying for its power on a very ancient set of ideas \u2013 regarding self-defence, humanitarian intervention and conquest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet colonialism and imperialism are perpetually cast as an aberration: a response to \u201ctheir\u201d inherent violence, never a manifestation of \u201cours\u201d. Colonial violence has been largely expunged from legal histories, despite its central formative role, and marginalised as \u201csmall wars\u201d \u2013 \u201cthereby managing to dismiss what has in fact been by far the most common form of warfare in the modern world\u201d, political theorist Mark Neocleous points out.<\/p>\n

Historical \u201cfathers\u201d of international law such as Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, Emer de Vattel, Henry Dunant, and Friedrich von Martens have been laundered of their colonial entanglements and lionised; so too are the current-day architects of imperial atrocities being cleansed of their infamy in the present.<\/p>\n

OLC torture memos author John Yoo is now a law professor at a prestigious school, his boss Jay Bybee is an appellate court judge, and Alberto Gonzales, the White House lawyer who embraced their tortured logic, is a law school dean. Meanwhile, liberated survivors of the Guantanamo torture camp are left struggling with physical and psychological disabilities, and scraping by on the poverty line; all of their efforts to seek reparations from US government officials have been dismissed by US courts. Empire means never having to say you\u2019re sorry.<\/p>\n

What we are told to \u201cnever forget\u201d and what we are made to \u201calways forget\u201d are two sides of the same operation of power. And so the colonial present continues, inscribing each new chapter of violence as if it was the first.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"Azeezah<\/a>Azeezah Kanji –\u00a0<\/em><\/a>Legal academic and writer based in Toronto<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

18 Sep 2021 – Did 9\/11 really open a \u2018new\u2019 chapter in U.S. history? What we are told to \u201cnever forget\u201d and what we are made to \u201calways forget\u201d are two sides of the same operation of power. And so the colonial present continues, inscribing each new chapter of violence as if it was the first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":195775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[2477,867,1284,551,880,70,2686,492],"class_list":["post-195774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-9-11","tag-anglo-america","tag-false-flag","tag-neocolonialism","tag-state-terrorism","tag-usa","tag-war-of-terror","tag-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}