"The diamond that cuts through illusion."

Assata Shakur and the Racism of Security

In this third and final excerpt from my recent work on U.S. national security, I consider the case of Assata Shakur, retroactively designated a "domestic terrorist" under the post-9/11 Patriot Act. The continuity between the national-security response to black radicalism and the present heightened response to Islamic radicalism made me think about security at large as an inherently racialized, racist form.

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“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle or else it will define us,” President Obama said in his recent “dronetánamo” speech in which he laid out plans to scale back the war on terrorism. But the example of Assata Shakur shows how much terrorism already “defines us.”

On May 2nd, just weeks before the President’s speech, Shakur was added to the FBI’s “most wanted terrorist” list—40 years after her alleged murder of a New Jersey state trooper. Long in exile in Cuba, she was first designated a terrorist in 2005, under the Patriot Act’s reconceptualization of “domestic terrorism.” According to this new definition, which is U.S. law, an act of domestic terrorism must

A)   involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;

B)   appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

C)   occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. (“Patriot Act” 106)

But the FBI has never explained how Shakur meets part B of this definition. In its press release announcing her addition to its “most wanted terrorists” list, it simply calls her a “domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement officer execution-style” (Woodruff). Furthermore, Shakur was already convicted of this crime; she’s wanted for extradition to serve the remainder of her prison sentence. Finally, Shakur’s conviction—which the government pursued through three acquittals, three dismissals, and one mistrial on separate charges—remains disputed (“Who is Assata Shakur?”). After all, the FBI didn’t just act violently against black-radical groups, or foment violence between them. It also outright manufactured charges of violence, as in the 1969-1970 prosecution of the “Panther 21,” who were charged far in excess of their alleged plot to dynamite two New York City police stations and a school—and were acquitted largely because the jury recognized the defendants had been framed for political reasons (Zimroth 6-7). Given the FBI’s COINTELPRO initiatives against both black-radical groups and Cuba, the “most wanted terrorist” label, which comes with a poster of Shakur “prepared in English and Spanish” and a $2 million reward for “information leading to [her] capture and return” (Woodruff), seems designed to lay the groundwork for an illegal mission to retrieve her from a country imaginatively considered a state sponsor of terrorism. As the U.S. continues to violate other nations’ sovereignty in pursuit of its terror objectives, a well-compensated tip on Shakur’s specific whereabouts in Cuba might be all the FBI needs to get her.

Against such institutionalized, operative definitions of terrorism, which hold that the U.S. can never be the perpetrator of terrorism but only the victim of terrorism—whose national security is always at risk even as that national security is used as a pretense to make other nations insecure—there would seem to be no way out. Although COINTELPRO ended because of public exposure, the forms of national security today remain mostly hidden, classified and accessible to only those with the proper security clearance. And certainly the stakes are higher today given the wider reach of the global war on terrorism. The Citizens’ Commission members who stole incriminating files from an FBI field office were never apprehended, but if they had been, it’s not hard to imagine what they would’ve been charged with: burglary. That was the charge the Watergate burglars were slapped with in 1972, the year following the Citizens’ Commission action. Today, Bradley Manning stands charged with aiding the enemy, which carries a life sentence. Aiding the enemy “usually means material aid—the statute mentions ‘arms, ammunition, supplies, money, or other things’”; the last time someone was charged for passing information was 1863 (Davidson). Manning is also charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, the same charge the Justice Department is pursuing in its investigation into who leaked national-security information to the AP and other news outlets. It would seem the U.S. government is using all its power to stop the flow of its secrets to the public.

Manning’s contributions to WikiLeaks go some way toward detailing the excesses of the U.S. war machine abroad, but that’s just one aspect of the national-security apparatus. Within the “homeland,” national security is deployed in various ways: in the context of immigration and border security; nuclear and other weapons storage; currency and monetary policy; and, as we have seen, state secrets. It’s also deployed against U.S. citizens, as the NYPD’s comprehensive infiltration of Muslim communities in the New York City metropolitan area shows—an operation the NYPD, working with the CIA, has yet to be held accountable for (although it has admitted the operation yielded no useful intelligence). According to the Associated Press’s Pulitzer-winning coverage, which relied heavily on Freedom of Information Act requests, the NYPD’s action here bore the main hallmarks of COINTELPRO’s involvement with black-radical groups some 25 years earlier: specifically, a wide-scale surveillance program coupled with the use of double agents and informants. The AP’s reporting, and the raw files it obtained by FOIA, are available on a website (“Highlights of AP’s”), but the overall archive of the NYPD’s operation remains to be built. As a public investigation seems unlikely, that archive will have to be constructed with FOIA requests. Such a tactic suggests that opponents of the state of exception can use exceptions to the state’s rule by law to mount a counter-offensive.

Finally, it’s important to note that New York area Muslims aren’t the only people to be racially profiled by the NYPD. Though 9/11 gave the department a rationale to do so—the kind of rationale I’ve been calling imagined—it has systematically racially profiled people of color, via stop-and-frisk, over this same time period as well. Whether this means the NYPD’s exceptional response to 9/11 has influenced other forms of policing is unclear, but it does make me wonder whether the very notion of security—national or municipal, public or private, or intersecting versions of these and others—is inherently racialized. Given the settler-colonial origins of the U.S., in which security was established, materially and conceptually, in opposition to the brown bodies of indigenous tribal peoples, it would seem that the figure of security has always been white, and the figure of the threat to that security always of color. In this way, the FBI, CIA, and NYPD are only the latest figures of security, and Al Qaeda, Muslims, and black and brown New York City men—and radicals of all kinds—the latest figures of threat.

Cross-posted to my research Tumblr.

Previously: "National Security as Racism"

"The #NSAFiles and the End of COINTELPRO"

National Security as Racism

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from my recent research on the history of U.S. national security, particularly its specific origins in the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign against black-radical groups. The following excerpt returns to the 1975-76 Senate Church Committee to show how national security is a form of institutionalized racism. Given the attention to the NSA-files leak, it's important to remember who the targets of national-security operations are: threats to white U.S. supremacy.

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The second aspect of the committee’s work I want to highlight concerns the COINTELPRO campaign against the Panthers, to which the committee gave special focus. In the report on COINTELPRO, the Panthers are the only targeted group to receive its own sub-report, titled “The FBI’s Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party” (“Book III” 185). The report begins by noting that the Panthers were not among the original list of groups targeted when the black-nationalist campaign began in August 1967. However, “[b]y July 1969, the Black Panthers had become the primary focus of the program, and was ultimately the target of 288 of the total 295 authorized ‘Black Nationalist’ COINTELPRO actions” (188). The report further notes that despite COINTELPRO’s ostensible mission to prevent violence, “some of the FBI’s tactics against the BPP were clearly intended to foster violence, and many others could reasonably have been expected to cause violence.” Indeed, the report concludes that the FBI “engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest” (189).

The report goes on to detail numerous examples demonstrating these claims, but I think this last point—that the FBI “responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest”—is the most useful for thinking about how the U.S. national-security apparatus is responding to the “deep-seated social problems” of today. That is to say, if Islamic terrorism is largely motivated by opposition to the U.S.’s global political, military, economic, cultural, and secular imperialism, then the U.S. government, not limited to intelligence agencies, has responded—most recently—by waging two wars in Muslim-majority countries and using drones to prosecute the more nebulous “war on terror” in several other Muslim-majority countries. This point is often made—that U.S. warfare in the Muslim “world” incites terrorism—but I would argue it bears greater significance knowing that this model of protecting national security has its roots in a domestic context: namely, the FBI’s battle with the Black Panthers.

The Church Committee report on COINTELPRO contains one more point that deepens my aforementioned claim: that instead of protecting national security and preventing violence, as the FBI said its purpose was, the program was really about preventing “dissident” groups from changing the existing “social order.” I want to quote at length from the committee’s description of the program:

COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government’s power to proceed overtly against dissident groups; it ended in 1971 with the threat of public exposure. In the intervening 15 years, the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence. (“Book III” 3)

Three pages later, the report points out the falsity of the national-security rationale:

Protecting national security and preventing violence are the purposes advanced by the Bureau for COINTELPRO. There is another purpose for COINTELPRO which is not explicit but which offers the only explanation for those actions which had no conceivable rational relationship to either national security or violent activity. The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order. (6)

What becomes clear in these passages is that whatever purpose COINTELPRO may have had vis-à-vis national security, the program’s actions had nothing to do with national security. Instead, the program worked to “maintain” a particular social order. In this way, national security was imagined as the reason for COINTELPRO’s mission, and the “political violence” of groups like the Panthers imagined as the “threat” to that national security. In contrast to this imagined dynamic, however, COINTELPRO deployed political violence to prevent dissident groups, but particularly the Panthers, from changing a social order that was, and remains, white supremacist. The “dangerous ideas” of the Panthers weren’t a threat to national security but to white power. The dangerous ideas were conflated with material danger—“dangerous groups”—in order to promulgate the imagined vulnerability of the nation, when in fact it was white nationalism that was vulnerable. COINTELPRO became a way to further marginalize already marginalized groups by overriding their “First Amendment rights of speech and association.”

Accordingly, COINTELPRO’s management of the racial threat must be seen in the context of other forms of institutional racism carried out by other institutional actors in the late 1960s and continuing until today. I’m reminded here of Rod Ferguson’s work, for instance, on the ways the public university managed racially diverse students at the onset of open admissions. But unlike public universities, which operate in public and are thus subject to public pressure, such as the student activism at City College that forced the institution to accede to certain demands about inclusion, COINTELPRO operated in secret and was therefore more able to deter inclusion.

We must keep this legacy of exclusionary “national security” in mind as we consider the expanded version of COINTELPRO tactics currently deployed against Muslims in the U.S. and abroad. That is to say, the “war on terror” is more properly understood as a war on ideas, in which the ideas have been figured as a violent threat to national security. This may seem a self-evident point to some, but certainly it’s a more influential point given the history from which it emerges. If the U.S.’s prosecution of Islamic terrorism is seen as part of a national pattern of political discrimination and not as an initiative uniquely warranted by 9/11 or phantasmatic “facts on the ground,” the case against exceptional politics—to stop surveilling Muslims for no other reason than they’re Muslim—would seem to gather strength.

Cross-posted to my research Tumblr.

Previously: "The #NSAFiles and the End of COINTELPRO"

The #NSAFiles and the End of COINTELPRO

When the NSA files story broke last Thursday, I'd just finished a seminar paper that argues the FBI's secret COINTELPRO campaign against the Black Panthers from 1967-1971 is a valuable, if unrealized, precedent for the U.S.'s post-9/11 dragnet against an omnipresent, pervasive, imagined Muslim terrorist "threat." Today Edward Snowden announced he was the leaker of the files, joining the company of Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, and the anonymous Citizens' Commission activists who brought COINTELPRO to a halt in '71. An excerpt from my paper:

But whereas the Panthers and other black-radical groups were a rather narrow “threat” to national security—that is, the threat was defined as membership in one of a specific set of groups—in the post-9/11 context, anyone who’s Muslim is regarded as a threat—as a subject who can be radicalized. I want to argue that this is the first critical benefit of extending the current U.S. state of exception to encompass the COINTELPRO campaign against black-radical groups: it reveals how U.S. national-security apparatus and discourse have grown exponentially since that campaign began in 1967. As both the FBI’s infiltration of Salahuddin Muhammad’s New York mosque (“Entrapment or Foiling Terror?”) and the New York Police Department’s much more extensive infiltration of Muslim communities in the New York City metropolitan area (“Highlights of AP’s Probe”) show, there’s no longer a limit to what law-enforcement agencies can do in their effort to root out the terrorist/radical threat.

There once was a limit, though: COINTELPRO, a secret program since its inception, was halted in 1971 six weeks after a group known as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a field office outside Philadelphia and “stole at least eight hundred documents,” as Tim Weiner writes in his 2012 history of the FBI (a history that contains only nine references to the Panthers). The burglars, who were never caught, disseminated the files, describing FBI informant operations on 22 college campuses and the surveillance of the Panthers’ Philadelphia chapter, to members of Congress and the media, though it took a year before either group acted. Nevertheless, Hoover acted first, ending COINTELPRO before the “deepest secrets of the FBI [were] exposed” (293). I believe this is the second critical benefit of returning COINTELPRO to the frame of analysis concerning post-9/11 exceptional politics: that pernicious national-security programs can be held accountable, and even ended, by public knowledge.

Four years later, the public knowledge of COINTELPRO, along with U.S. intelligence operations overall, would grow substantially with a Senate investigation. The Church Committee, as the Senate committee charged with the investigation became known (after its chairman, Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho), was the progenitor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (currently chaired by Dianne Feinstein). The committee released 14 reports in 1975 and 1976, totaling thousands of pages, which detailed the illegal actions of U.S. intelligence over the years, everything from the Army opening the mail of civilians to the CIA’s attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. Altogether, the committee’s findings were an unprecedented public archive of information concerning national security; an additional 50,000 pages were released in 1992. This Church Committee archive, however, would later be surpassed exponentially by the national-security archive Bradley Manning gave to WikiLeaks in 2010, which, among other documents and videos, included some 500,000 reports produced by the U.S. Army (according to various news reports).

In terms of the deliberative work of the committee, I want to highlight two aspects central to my developing argument in this essay. The first concerns the committee’s conclusion that U.S. intelligence programs as a whole tended to operate outside the law—which is to say, based on exception:

The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the “national security” the law did not apply. (“Book II” 137)

Thus, 26 years before the Patriot Act greatly expanded U.S. intelligence gathering to respond to 9/11 and the Islamic threat, creating a new state of exception on the basis of protecting national security, a U.S. Senate committee had rebuked the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies for their illegal tactics in service to national security. Not only were the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens “infringed,” but the “law did not apply.” We would do well to remember this history when considering the politics and policies of terrorism today. On the one hand, there’s a precedent for illegal U.S. intelligence work, to which current illegal intelligence work adheres. On the other hand, there’s also a precedent for ending such work, which suggests that today’s illegal activities may well come to an end as well. Perhaps, contra Agamben, security need not inexorably increase; perhaps it has a limit.

Cross-posted to my research Tumblr.

#FreeCooperUnion

I participated in and documented the rally at Cooper Union tonight in support of the student and faculty sit-in of the president's office (ongoing as I post this). After more than a century of being free of charge, the school now plans to charge tuition. My Storify.

Florent Morellet on Historic Preservation and NYC

"You can't preserve everything," Florent Morellet, pioneering meat-market restaurateur, said Thursday night at a Historic Districts Council screening of the 2009 documentary about the rise and fall of his eponymous French diner. The stories of Morellet, his restaurant (which closed in '08), and the meat market have been well told over the years, but the Frenchman's rebirth as a quasi-anti-preservationist could be fresh narrative terrain: Now a member of the community board that serves the neighborhood, Soho, in which he lives, Morellet professed to have lost interest in the meatpacking district, having turned his attention instead to high-rises, urban density, and sustainability.

"It's not about the buildings, it's about the people," he ramblingly opined after the screening at the Tribeca Film Center. "That's what we as preservationists have to think about. High rise is the future, that's what's sustainable. We have to start leveling the suburbs and bringing them to the city, to the core, where there's transit. Apartment buildings of 100 stories! Going against that is immoral, because it's green."

Not exactly the talking points of New York's historic-preservation community, whose latest success is getting a distinctly low-rise section of the East Village landmarked, but that's part of Morellet's charm: he's unpredictable.

He's also, again, ahead of the trend. "There should be high rises on the avenues of the East Village," he said—and along the northern reaches of Third Avenue, there already are.

Bachmann Glittered: 5 Reasons It's a Good Thing

1. Glitter satirizes her hyper-femininity, a key cause of her popularity.

2. Glitter has become a decidedly queer object. Deployed by queer activists upon a decidedly anti-queer figure, Bachmann's anti-queer record and discourse are exposed—and visually so, which yields maximum media impact.

3. A glittered Bachmann is a queered Bachmann. Via crafty activist sleight-of-hand, Bachmann becomes the figure of her ire for a moment—nay, permanently, given the visual evidence.

4. The glitter action shows that the Republican 2012 presidential field can't escape their anti-queer records and discourse—indeed, that the electorate will be reminded of their hateful positions and speech.

5. Glitter is fun!

Other reasons why a beglittered Bachmann is a good thing? Post them in the comments!

Glenn Ligon and the 1968 Memphis Strike

Glenn Ligon’s 1988 work Untitled (I Am a Man), a replica of the sign carried by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, is a prime example of his appropriative strategy. Not an original sign itself, nor an identical reproduction of one, Ligon’s painting is rather an appropriation of the sign, so that the words “I Am a Man” simultaneously exist in three separate but related contexts: the original historical context in which the message emerged, the context in which Ligon rendered that message, and the context in which a viewer apprehends the message. Indeed, Ligon sought to show in Untitled (I Am a Man) the “changing notions of what it means to carry a sign that says ‘I Am a Man’”—a kinetic discourse that, for him, is represented in part by the cracks on the painting’s surface. “The piece was made using oil paint and enamel paint mixed together, and that’s not a good combination,” Ligon has explained. “The minute I made the painting it started to crack, and given the subject matter, I thought that was interesting.”

Memphis 1968 is remembered as the place and year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, but the reason the civil rights leader came to Memphis—the sanitation strike—is less often recalled. On February 1st of that year, two black sanitation workers were accidentally killed when they were sucked into the compactor of a garbage truck. The tragedy underscored the inequity of the sanitation business, which was run by whites but carried out by an almost exclusively black workforce under vile, discriminatory conditions. As historian Michael K. Honey writes: “Hauling garbage was the kind of work the city assigned to blacks only." The men’s deaths were the proverbial last straw: eleven days later, on Lincoln’s birthday, some 1300 workers went on strike. The message they held aloft for the next two months—“I Am a Man”—responded as much to longstanding discourse that marginalized black people as less than human as it did to daily put-downs of “boy” from white supervisors. “‘I Am a Man’ meant freedom,” one sanitation worker recalled. “All we wanted was some decent working conditions, and a decent salary. And be treated like men, not like boys.”

One has to wonder, of course, which men were excluded from this effort to attain “freedom,” given that in 1968, one year before Stonewall, queer men of color certainly faced a double bind of delimited manhood—and this historical tension surely informed Ligon’s appropriation of the slogan in 1988. Indeed, the historical moment of the making of Untitled (I Am a Man) was suffused with its own tensions around queerness, not least because of the AIDS crisis and the rise of the Christian right, which found easy targets in “gay art.” (Ligon’s first professional exhibition was a 1989 group show—the same year a Mapplethorpe solo show was famously cancelled at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. due to conservative outcry.) Ligon’s painting, then, highlights racial, gender, and sexual oppression—and the intersectional work performed by these fields of power—in two separate historical moments.

Furthermore, Ligon’s appropriated, reworked image excavates the historical centrality of queerness—of twinned homoeroticism and homophobia—to racial oppression at large. Eric Lott identifies this dialectic as the basis of minstrelsy, and also as a chief reason for the failure of “a possible interracial labor alliance” in the nineteenth century—a failure whose implications lingered long into the twentieth century. (Memphis’s political leaders, after all, refused to recognize the sanitation workers as members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the standoff only ended when the city finally conceded such recognition.) To my eyes, the specter of this dialectic, of this lost promise, haunts the Ligon painting. The work’s formal elements even record this fissure: oil and enamel mixed together results in surface cracks.

But what I also see in Untitled (I Am a Man) are the cracks, as it were, in today’s historical moment, in which the presence and power of a black man in the White House has spurred thinly veiled racialized opposition in the form of the tea party movement and persistent questions about a putatively missing birth certificate. Interestingly enough, the Obamas, perhaps in a gesture to their pathbreaking role, picked a Ligon to adorn their private quarters. A part of the same series that includes the Hurston quotations, Black Like Me No. 2 (1992) foregrounds a line from John Howard Griffin’s 1961 memoir Black Like Me, about the white author’s experience of darkening his skin and traveling the South as a “black” person. “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,” the canvas reads—a lesson about how flimsy the notion of racial essentialism, and a politics based on it, is.

Further reading: Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign; Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Glenn Ligon's America

NYT slide show.

Ligon (after a preface) on "Untitled (I Am a Man)," 1988.

'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repealed!

My take for New York mag's Daily Intel on today's Senate vote repealing "don't ask, don't tell" 17 years after it was enacted—and 41 years since Stonewall. Gay rights have come a long way, baby. We used to hate the military!