[Dryerase] The Alarm!--Penance and the Penal Colony

[Alarm!Wires]

Penance and The Penal Colony
By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor
This past week, the trials of two men charged with crimes against 
American citizens came within steps of their conclusion. The details of 
the trials and the public discussion surrounding their conclusions are 
saturated with symptoms of the new face of our domestic and foreign 
policy, which has slowly been emerging as the international alliance 
against evil begins to cope with the contradictions of the War on Terror.
These trials set civic standards, and regulate the boundaries (between 
those oppositions of good and evil, moral and immoral, inside and 
outside, civilian and combatant, terrorist and legitimate combatant, 
crime and law) that are so crucial to the maintenance of coercive 
democracy. They are important sites to observe the direction that the 
political climate of the state is heading, dramatic illustrations of 
what is expected of us morally, and what immoralities we will be 
expected to accept.
The defendants in the two trials were in all respects—except the 
broadest political categories—dissimilar and unrelated. Ahmad Omar Saeed 
Sheikh, known generally as Sheikh, was condemned on July 15 by a 
Pakistani judge to die by hanging. The charge was conspiracy to kidnap 
and murder Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl. John Philip Walker 
Lindh, whose charges revolved around his role as a combatant on the 
wrong side of our war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, signed a plea 
bargain—which is likely to be accepted—that limits his sentence to 
approximately 20 years.
Lindh is a 21-year-old from an affluent Marin County family who 
converted to Islam at the age of sixteen. His father was once an 
employee of the Department of Justice. Sheikh, 38, is from an affluent 
family of British Muslims. His father owned a successful clothing 
factory. These are the types of facts that the news media report with 
such pleasure: the scintillating incongruity of rich Westerners who 
somehow wander astray and end up in the worst of all possible 
situations, fighting alongside the fanatics of the third world. This, it 
seems, is the message that we are to glean from these trials, at least 
in part.
But clearly the rhetoric about the two men diverges quickly. The 
proliferation of biographical details that have been uncovered about 
Lindh are implicitly aimed at explaining his wayward path. He was an 
avid hip-hop listener, the BBC reports, as though that somehow 
constitutes some seed that may come to violent fruition. Other sources 
submit that he was subjected to the propaganda of charismatic leaders. 
Lindh’s transgression is somehow inauthentic, dismissed as the product 
of indiscretion or negative external influence.
The transgressions of Sheikh, on the other hand, are something we are to 
believe he carried in his blood.  The profiles of Sheikh emphasize his 
criminal roots as a schoolyard bully, and report that he moved from one 
fundamentalist mission in adulthood to the next, until he finally met 
his end in the Pearl killing. Ironically, the Independent reports “the 
kidnapper made only one mistake, though in hindsight it will be seen as 
a huge blunder. His ransom notes were written in better English than can 
be found on the front pages of Pakistan’s English-language newspapers.”
That ironically impeccable English, however, tells volumes about the 
work that the two trials are meant to perform on the public 
consciousness. The difference between the image of Sheikh and Lindh is 
not, to be fair, entirely far-fetched. Sheikh in fact did have a much 
more serious commitment to the particular brands of Political Islam that 
he advocated than did Lindh. But another operative difference between 
the two men is that they are not, in fact, two rich Westerners of equal 
stature who wandered astray. Lindh’s background (and let this not be 
misconstrued to undermine the severity of the treatment he is actually 
receiving) is staunchly American, and despite the fact that he ventured 
far outside the boundaries of American behavior, he will be allowed back 
provided that he suffers through a certain degree of repentance.
The “you’re either with us or against us” logic of this war clearly 
comes with its qualifications. For Sheikh, his status as an insider to 
the greater western empire is qualified as perpetually contingent by 
virtue of his race. It will be revoked the moment he crosses that 
empire’s boundaries, as evidenced by the fact that he was not extradited 
to Britain despite the death sentence he was given by a court not of his 
country of origin. For Lindh, that qualification is that he can, like 
the biblical prodigal son, have his status of imperial immunity returned 
to him: that he can be purified (cleansed of his anti-American 
transgressions) by penance, bearing in mind that this penance might 
include torture.
In fact, it was speculated about both cases that the defendants were 
tortured in the aftermath of their capture. For Sheikh, the fact that he 
was in Pakistani provisional custody for nearly two-and-a-half months 
before formal charges were brought against him was ample indication for 
many observers of his trial that he had a confession literally “beat out 
of him.” As far as Lindh was concerned, we need not speculate on the 
treatment he was subjected to before he was transferred to federal 
custody on US soil. It is unclear how many Marines took ‘souvenir 
pictures’ of Lindh while he was strapped to a gurney in the belly of a 
cargo container on the deck of a US ship. No doubt, many of us have seen 
the pictures of a young man with plastic handcuffs ratcheted tightly 
around his wrists and straps across his legs, chest arms, and eyes. He 
was bound naked, and anyone who knows the climate of that region in 
December knows that the lack of appropriate protective clothing alone is 
tantamount to torture.
But we will never see the fallout of this mistreatment by our government 
officials; part of Lindh’s plea bargain required him to drop any claims 
of mistreatment while in US custody. It remains legally invisible 
alongside the countless and no-doubt-more-egregious abuses committed 
against Lindh’s comrades who happened to be so unfortunate as not to be 
born on American soil to rich parents. For those Taliban combatants, 
torture is nothing more than a legitimate extraction of information 
necessary for the maintenance of “homeland security.” We should 
anticipate that their stay in “Camp X-Ray” (the military concentration 
of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) will within our lifetime go down 
as one of the grossest offenses against human dignity committed by our 
state in its history.
For Lindh, however, the violence committed against him, no matter how 
intolerable, can be seen as a nationalist purifying ritual: a public 
display to ensure the American public that we know how to make our 
wayward sons loyal again. The proliferation of comparisons between the 
secret military tribunals legalized by GW Bush’s executive order—dating 
coincidentally from about the time of Walker’s arrest—and Franz Kafka’s 
story of totalitarian excess “The Penal Colony” are not misplaced. In 
that story, the sentence levied against a criminal is inscribed onto the 
convict’s body over the course of half a day by a mechanical plotter of 
needles. The intention is that the prisoner will recognize the law that 
he broke in the same moment that he dies.
In the case of Lindh, punishment is, of course, less severe. He was 
spared the secret military tribunals to which Sheikh would certainly 
have been subjected had the US extradition charges against him passed. 
For Lindh, furthermore, the death penalty is not on the horizon, and 
clearly the offer made to him by our attorney general was meant to 
“preserve his future” as his attorneys put it in press conferences 
regarding the plea bargain.
But the lessons of an empire intent on preserving the rules of its own 
law are nevertheless being inscribed on the body and life of Lindh. The 
torture that he was subjected to in the early stages of his 
incarceration began to wane as he came closer to home, as his hair was 
cut, his beard trimmed, and the accent of a man who had not spoken 
English frequently in the preceding two years was polished off. He was 
stripped of the Taliban identity that he had assumed through the 
repentance that is so intimately tied to the puritanical roots of the 
American empire. Suddenly we could see him as one of our own again.
But the quest for purity that he had been on, by testimony of his 
parents, is as misguided as that of our criminal system in cleansing him 
of his political pubescence in his years in Afghanistan. The world is 
not organized into purified moral blocks, and it would behoove us to 
remember this when dealing with people like Sheikh, who are driven to 
commit indefensible violence by an outrage about the indefensible 
actions of our government. Upon kidnapping Daniel Pearl (a journalist 
who incidentally was known to challenge the rabid pro-US stance of his 
editorial staff on occasion), Sheikh and his fellow kidnappers said they 
would begin to treat Pearl humanely the moment the Afghan prisoners in 
Guantanamo bay were treated similarly.
And no matter how misguided—nay, disingenuous—those claims for 
reciprocity and fairness sound coming from such politically questionable 
sources (let’s not forget that Bin Laden asserted that no American 
should feel safe until every Palestinian in the West Bank felt secure), 
most of us are left to wonder how long it will be until we take those 
demands seriously. How many times will we watch the intolerable violence 
of our own state effect counterviolence until we realize that the 
problem really starts at home.
 
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