the barbarians: I'll be watching you
by Douglas Messerli
This
1975 work (The
Lost Honor of Katrina Blum, the movie
with which I close with these comments)
clearly calls up the illegal public revelations of figures such as Wikileaks
head Julian Assange, Bradford Manning, and, most explicitly, Edward Snowden.
Snowden has attempted to warn us that through the vast NSA “haystack” of
billions of emails, telephone messages, and other everyday communications
anyone might possibly be perceived as a terrorist, and, under quick
investigation, perceived to be involved with terrorism simply because of
suspicion. Writing in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Andrew
Liepman, predictably mocked any of us who might fear of government intrusion
into our lives in an article titled “What Snowden got wrong: Everything”:
The government isn’t
interested in your phone call with your
aunt. Unless she’s a
terrorist.
In
the context of the movie I’ve described above, however, almost anyone might be suspected of terrorism. What about an
accidental meeting? An incident like Katharina’s “one-night” encounter? I am a
publisher, focusing on international writing. What if I get an order from
someone from another country (or from the US for that matter) who happens to be a terrorist? Must I personally know
everyone, even their moral values, with whom I communicate? When does one
suddenly become a “needle,” as Snowden suggested, or, worse yet, a kind of
“nettle,” a twisted weed of irritation.
Soon after 9/11 a friend of mine, born and
raised in Pakistan, was suddenly hounded by the CIA or other government figures
who “visited” him even at a university classroom where he teaches. His American
girlfriend was similarly “stalked.” The owner of my office building, described
how he and his secretary were forced to intervene in the case of one of their
tenants—who they had long known—when he was illegally arrested, imprisoned for
a few weeks, evidently, because he had never sought out US citizenship!
With hundreds of Facebook “friends,”
many of whom I’ve never met, am I and others like me in danger of simply
communicating, through photographs and general information, if one of these
unknown readers happened to be suspected of terrorism? I want to answer Mr.
Liepman by reminding him that most of us, these days, live not in a world of
domestic isolation, writing our aunts and grandmothers only, but often
communicate on an international level, sometimes (particularly on the internet)
with people from all over the world. My six blogs (one each on fiction, poetry,
film, theater, travel, and US cultural masterpieces) receive visitors—for which
I’m very pleased—from across the planet.
Finally, I have one aunt who, although
she is not a terrorist, is an evangelical Christian who has written some pretty
awful things, in the past, about President Obama (she is convinced, for instance,
he was not born in the US). Although I no longer communicate with her, might I
be in trouble if I did? Her kind of limited vision of the world might be seen
by some to be as dangerous as that of an outspoken critic of our country. What
happened to Katharina Blum in Schlöndorff’s and von Trotta’s moving film, might
easily occur again. And yellow journalists, print and digital, are only too
ready to help destroy the lives of innocents. One need only recall the young
Brown University student, Sunil Tripathi,* who, missing from his Providence,
Rhode Island room, suddenly was mistakenly rumored by Reddit and other gossip
Facebook posters to have been the second bomber at the Boston Marathon,
reporters soon after camping out on his family’s lawn in Bryn Mawr,
Pennsylvania. Whether because of these accusations or not, Sunil’s body was
found in the waters off India Point Park in Providence on April 23rd,
a victim, evidently, of suicide.
*There are several recountings of this
on the internet and in print. See, for example, The New York Times, April 25, 2013.
Los
Angeles, August 12, 2013
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (August 2013).
Having just completed the above comments,
on August 18, 2013 I was faced with an
intelligent long essay in The New York Times Magazine, “Snowden’s People,” by Peter Maass, which revealed—at least to me—how
wrong the American government has been about the activities of Edward Snowden,
and just how brave have been Snowden’s “people,” Laura Poitras—an independent
documentary film-maker who had already been working on US and other government
surveillance of individuals, when Snowden first contacted her—and Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for the British
paper The Guardian, whom Snowden had
attempted, unsuccessfully, to contact even before Poitras. Together, the two formed a bond, at first very
cautious, contacting Snowden, and gradually building a sense of trust that
turned into complete support of the so-called “whistleblower” that might be
described as a sense of moral outrage. Just reading this essay, and realizing
the extent to which the US government and others have gone to intimidate and
even terrorize the brave reporter and documentary writer, should, I would argue, bring every American’s
blood to a boil. But then most Americans, seemingly, cannot begin to comprehend
what Snowden’s revelations about how thoroughly our privacy has been erased in
way unimaginable even by the prescient writer George Orwell. While American
government officials and the President himself continue to mumble on about the
need for protection from terrorists, we have little evidence as a people, that
this vast network of information being collected by the NSA, CIA, and other
government spying organizations really do focus in on terrorism as opposed to
just a vast collection of information on every single American and foreign
contacted by Americans who go about their daily business. Certainly Poitras, as
the article reveals, who has undergone hours of pointless interrogation every
time she has attempted to travel, no longer has any personal privacy,
recognizing at the end of this highly lucid but emotional piece, “I don’t know
if I’ll ever to be able to live someplace and feel like I have my privacy”
again.
Despite everything I’ve read by
government authorities, and I feel I am a fairly reasonable and, at times,
gullible being, I cannot perceive these two “reporters” and Snowden’s own
actions, (despite the pretend outrage of the actually conservative-pretend-liberal
Diane Feinstein’s feisty proclamations) as anything but saintly. Certainly,
such revelations might well reveal our weaknesses to terrorists and others who
might seek to destroy our “democracy,” but do we, truly, have a democracy when
such vast governmental powers are keep secret from the very people they are
supposedly intended to protect? Might a democratic society be able to make
these decisions for themselves instead of secretive government officials behind
closed doors? As in a Kafka novel, everything has been reversed. People are
suspected before they have even done anything, their personal records compiled,
with the government’s ready ability to enter into those e-mails, internet site
visitations, and private phone calls simply if they might suppose some nefarious connection, however
innocently that “connection” might have been. As opposed to the major premise
of our justice system, that an individual is innocent until proven guilty, the
NSA, CIA and other information-gathering systems seem to presume that we all
might be guilty unless proven innocent.
Peter Maass’ report shook my faith in the
government to the core: could this really all be happening in a seemingly enlightened
democratic country? Of course I knew of all those terrible years of government abnegation of Japanese-American
citizen’s rights during the early years of World War II, the attacks on so many
politicized (and even non-political) Americans during the McCarthy years—to say
nothing of the Jim Crow laws against Blacks through the century. I lived
through the nefarious lies of our government’s involvement in Viet Nam, saw
whole South American dictatorships rise and fall with CIA involvement. I knew
the history of our government in relationship to American Indian history and
land-rights. I knew well how the government treated illegal aliens and even,
sometimes, foreign visitors to our shores. I even knew that, since Howard and I
were acquaintances of Vice-President Walter Mondale and his wife, and I had
visited their home, during his presidential run, a couple of times, that I had
surely been under surveillance by the FBI. When you live in Washington, D.C.,
you become somewhat inured to these things. But the fact the Obama
administration was somehow collecting all the data that my numerous internet
visits and international and local telephone calls might reveal has made me
quite furious. I am not a terrorist, and, despite my open criticisms of
government, I care about and love this country. Why had I and all my neighbors,
friends, and even poosible enemies, suddenly become suspicious beings in our own homes?
The very next day, Monday, August 19th,
things got worse, when Greenwald’s Brazilian companion, David Miranda, carrying
encrypted computer data between Laura Pointras (now in Berlin) and Greenwald,
was stopped and interviewed for nine hours (the limit of England’s Section 7 of
their Terrorism Act) about his activities. It is clear that Miranda, not even a
journalist, is no terrorist, but it is also clear that London’s Metropolitan
Police Service—with notice to the Prime Minister, the British Secret Service, and
the American government—was involved with what I see as a completely “illegal”
arrest, determined to abuse this provision to find any secret information they
might. Miranda and Greenwald threaten to sue, and Greenwald’s paper The Guardian is behind him, having themselves been
previously threatened for presenting the Snowden leaks. Unlike the United
States, Britain has neither a written constitution nor Bill of Rights. Several
human rights figures, such as Robert Wintemute at King’s College, London, hope
that Miranda will indeed sue. But the British government, meanwhile, continues
to assert their rights to stop Miranda despite his lack of involvement with any
terrorist threat. What is even more disturbing is that they confiscated his
computer, cellphone, and thumb-drives, ultimately, with The Guardian editor called to their offices to oversee
the act, destroying them—personal
property being purposely destroyed instead of returned—although it is clear,
from the Guardian’s viewpoint that
this was better to destroy them than simply leaving the files to the British
authorities. Obviously, those authorizes must have already copied them—but
fortunately, so too had Greenwald and Pointras, who insist the information will
eventually come out. As expected, however, the time period was extended, and
the British authorities have claimed (without revealing any evidence) that the
Snowden material is utterly dangerous, and should be allowed to be released.
The whole issue of individual privacy has become—as we know it always has
been—a political issue. People in control obviously want to remain in control!
At the very moment I am writing this
essay, the NSA, highly castigated by an 85-page ruling by Judge John D. Bates,
form chief judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, for
illegally collecting domestic e-mails and other internet communications of
Americans, has pretended a total absolution of their acts, as if this
public accusation might diffuse the increasing criticism and
revelations. This seems to me to be a weak attempt to squirm out of the
fact that they’ve been so completely caught with their hand in the
cookie-jar—although my metaphors cannot match the horrendousness of the NSA’s
acts.
And behavior around the world might be
even more disturbing as other revelations have suggested that NSA has targeted
numerous countries, including friends such as Britain, Brazil, Argentina, and
Germany and enemies such as Iran. Germany, given the history of the film I
reviewed above and changes after in German governmental behavior, has been
particularly outraged by the NSA’s actions in gathering information and
breaking into media and other sites internationally, and Brazil has expressed
outrage for the security breaches.
President Obama,
continues to pretend a concern for these acts, but seems to suggest that by the
Bates declarations show that “the system is working.” The problem, of course,
is not whether or not the “system” works, but that that there is such a system
that has been monstrously established. Obama continuously pretends concern,
but, in a much darker side of his personality, continues to seek out all people
like Snowden and Manning before him as criminals, in order to bring them to
justice. He has threatened more journalists and others than any President
before him with legal action. Although I’d like to believe in his “concerns,” I
no longer, with conscience can. He appears to be a kind of likeable liar. It’s
just words, while we all must look for action, changes in the “system” he
continues to is necessary to protect us. As Glenn Greenwald said today
(September 1, 2013) on a CNN interview, the NSA has created the largest spying
system ever, incorporating all information around
the world, suggesting that they had turned the great tool of democratization,
the internet, into a force that totally may have totally done away with
privacy. After the Snowden revelations, we might say that the world has now
witnessed the end the private self. We are now all in the limelight, perverse
celebrities in a world not of our own making, without perhaps even knowing it.
On
September 6, 2013, through the New York Times, the leaks from the Snowden tapes further revealed that the NSA has
worked intensely to breach the encrypted information of various internet
communication organizations, seemingly, as the government might express it, to
protect the communication giants, but also, more likely, to again intervene on
public privacy, sometimes working with the organizations themselves, even
threatening them, to find ways to further intrude upon public messages.
Although they have worked hard to keep secret the organizations involved from
public revelation, it is quite clear, if one reads between the lines, that vast
publicly shared organizations such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, and
other communication giants have probably worked with the government and the
British GCHQ, sometimes the NSA outrightly paying them for their involvement,
to collect as much information as possible from the consumers. We might even
wonder why Google, in particular, has offered up so much space to allow the
vast blogs and email spaces, mostly without cost, to millions of
individuals—including, I might add, my own six blog sites. What may seem like a
gracious invitation to help spread internet information internationally, which
is how I have used this open invitation, could actually be perceived as a way
to collect vast amounts of information that might reveal, even if one might
naively perceive it as positive, information may possibly be used against the
millions of individuals that have used these sources. I have, on the surface,
no difficulty in having government authorities read my several blogs on poetry,
fiction, drama, film, and American classics—unless, of course, they are
perceived by stupid and incompetent authorities as somehow “dangerous” simply
because of their call for international relationships. That my press makes no
money, and that I publish bilingual editions in several languages (one,
recently in Chinese, another in Dutch) might almost make my various activities
seem almost as a “duck in the water,” ready to be shot down for its seemingly
suspicious existence. I am not a capitalist, nor a mindless promoter of
loyalist American artistic activity, advocating, as I do, an international
perspective for no financial gain—in short, for what I might imagine as the
many mindless NSA moles, pounding out their keyboards, as a kind of
inexplicable terrorist for advocating an international literary perspective for
no other reason than the love of literature! How might that ever be explained?
Later in September of this year, it was
revealed that the agency had collected far more telephone and e-mail
information on individuals who had nothing to do with terrorism. As a New York Times editorial summarized the seemingly endless situation:
The violations were both so frequent and so systemic…that the privacy
safeguards the court ordered ‘never functioned effectively.’ Alarmingly, the
agency itself acknowledged that ‘there was no single person who had a complete
technical understand’ of the system its analysts were using.” As the judge who
who heard the case in 2009 ruled, there is “little reason to believe that the
most recent discovery of a systemic, ongoing violation…will be the last.” The
very same day The Guardian and Los
Angeles Times revealed that a lot of the
raw citizen information that the NSA collected was shared, without sorting,
with the government of Israel; there is no evidence that Israel destroyed this
tangential and often meaningless information.
In an excellent summary of NSA and CIA
intelligence-gathering systems and their secrecy from even members of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reiterated not only the illegitimacy of numerous of these
organizations’ meta-data gathering but both President Bush’s and President
Obama’s administration obfuscations of the facts. The December 16th
essay describes the long-time efforts of Oregon senator Ron Wyden and a few
others who have joined together in what they describe as the Ben Franklin
caucus (in honor of Franklin’s “admonition that a society that will trade
essential liberty for short-term security deserves neither”) to defeat the
Patriot Act and stop the huge meta-data gathering operations, as
opposed to Senator Diane Feinstein and the majority of Intelligence Committee
members who allow themselves to be led by intelligence gatherers rather than attempting
to dictate their limits. Along with Snowden’s important revelations, this essay
should outrage Americans who to date have seemingly demonstrated no major
concern in having nearly all of their e-mails and telephone calls tracked, with
perhaps thousands of them—either intentionally or unintentionally—actually
being read without any “reasonable, articulable suspicion” (RAS) or approval by
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA).
After reading this essay, it would be hard
for anyone to imagine that if Edward Snowden had attempted to simply “report”
his discoveries to “authorities,”—whoever these authorities might have
been—would have resulted in anything but his dismissal and arrest. And I have
been continually outraged by the President’s administration members and members
of the intelligence community who describe Snowden as a traitor and even
suggest, without any real evidence, that he spied for the Chinese or Russian governments.
It all reminds me, somewhat, of the
frightening scene in Luchino Visconti’s film, The Damned, in which the Nazi SS officer Aschenbach
shows his cousin Sophie, the heir of a large German steel plant, the Gestapo’s
secret file room.
Aschenbach: These are the most complete
archives ever conceived. This
is
the secret Germany. Nothing is lacking, You can even
find
your history and Frederick’s. Can you believe it? You
see
it’s not very difficult to enter into the lives of people. Every
German
citizen today is potentially one of our informers.
The
collected thinking of our people is now complete. Don’t
you
think that is the true miracle of the Third Reich?
Finally, on December 16 of this year,
Judge Richard J. Leon (a George W. Bush appointee) ruled the NSA bulk
collection of telephone messages to be unconstitutional: describing it was a
truly Orwellian phenomenon.
I cannot imagine a
more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary
invasion' than this systematic
and high-tech collection
and retention of personal data on virtually
every single
citizen for purposes of querying and
analyzing it without
prior judicial approval.
Leon suggested
that James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, would be “aghast.”
The judgment, however, applies only to the individuals who brought the issue to
court, and the judge, moreover, immediately stayed his own decision to allow
the government to file an appeal.
From Russian, Snowden announced, through
reporter Glenn Greenwald, that he had hoped for just such a public airing of
the activities of the NSA and other governmental agencies. “Today, a secret
program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day,
found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many.”
Yet, we are unlikely to see the immediate
cessation of such massive governmental encroachment of individual information.
And, of course, there are numerous other kinds of surveillance methods that are
yet to be perceived. The
New York Times and The Los Angeles
Times revealed that facial scanning by
U.S. security has been highly developed, and will soon be sophisticated enough
to use as a terrorist determent. In other words, the government may, in a few
years, be able to perceive all of us, in any crowd, just by our faces. So we
come to the end of the “masses”: we are each an individual—suddenly documented
singular beings—who are increasingly being seen as dangerous and potential
figures who suddenly might go rogue and destroy the very society of which we
are part. That kind of logic—which might, at first, seem even a bit
appealing—results in its own conclusions: who might not want to destroy a
society that already has presumed you have sought to destroy, and may, at any
moment, threaten and even punish you for the very idea? The barbarians, as the
Greek poet Cavafy predicted, are at the gates: “they are us.”
The further revelation on September 27,
2003 that a small number of NSA workers and other contractors used their
surveillance powers to spy on friends and lovers again brought up the obvious
question of “who’s watching the watchers?” and reanimated the whole conversation
of what these voyeuristic procedures might mean for the culture as a whole, a
question that, in some respects, was brought up in Michael Haenke’s 2005 film, Caché, which I review below.
As Charles Bernstein has
brilliantly summarized, in his aphoristic work, "How Empty Is My Bread
Pudding":
Injustice in the pursuit of order is oppression.
Mendacity
in the pursuit of security is tyranny.
Army leaker Bradford Manning was
sentenced—in what some described as a lenient sentence—to 35 years of
imprisonment. At the grand age of 57—or perhaps as early as 32—he may be freed
to remind us, if he lives out his prison sentence, how misled and perverse our
current policies are about honest revelations of dangerous government
intrigues. The Los
Angeles Times described the sentence as
lenient, but I think The New York Times editorial,
describing it as an “excessive sentence” got it right, arguing “In the drastic
attempt to put Private Manning away for most of the rest of life, prosecutors
were also trying to discourage other potential leakers, but as the continuing
release of classified documents by Edward Snowden show, even the threat of
significant prison time is not a deterrent when people believe their government
keeps too many secrets.”
Perhaps a little government honesty and
revelation might have freed us from the Bradley Mannings, the Edward Snowdens,
and even the Julian Assanges of the world, and allowed these men (one, a
possibly future woman, Bradley Manning uncomfortable with his present gender)
to remain free from the governmental “hounding” which they now face. Of course,
every government has secrets, but when secrets begin to define that government
we can only imagine its quick demise, for surely secrets eat away the very soul
of any open society.
Los
Angeles, August
20-22, 2013, September 1, 2013, September 6, 2013, September 12, 2013,
September 27, 2013, October 21, 2103, December 5, 2013, December 14, 2013,
December 17, 2013.
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August-October 2013).
assimilated (and
even his unassimilated) past into a new future. This poet has often “recreated”
the works of other poets, but in this volume we note that Bernstein is, at times,
almost repeating the structure of one of my earlier books, After, rewriting, reinterpreting, and remaking poems by figures as
various as Baudelaire, Pessoa, Leevi Lehto, Osip Mandelstam, Sylvia Plath,
Frost, Régis Bonvicino, Wallace Stevens, Cole Porter (via Chaucer), Walt
Whitman, Paul Celan, Velimir Khlebnikov, Paolo Leminski, Juão Cabral de Melo
Neto, Victor Hugo, Guilliaume Apollinaire, William Wordsworth, Nerval, and even
me (a work that certainly captures the sense of the poem on which it was based).
Some of these are among the strongest works in this volume, particularly the
Baudelaire, Hugo, and Apollinaire imitations; but all are interesting in that
they reveal a great postmodern poet (Bernstein’s definition of “Postmoderism”:
modernism with a deep sense of guilt) exploring international poets of the
past and present.
