Nancy Murray

Profiling in the age of total information awareness

In recent years, a secretive domestic surveillance apparatus has been created in the US in the name of counter-terrorism. Based on the notion of ‘predictive policing’, it aims to gather such detailed information about individuals — ‘total information awareness’ — that it is able to anticipate crimes before they are committed. Linked to the return of racial profiling in the name of the ‘war on terror’ and implemented by local Joint-Terrorism Task Forces, operating effectively with federal powers and little accountability, this new surveillance apparatus is especially focused on Muslims, immigrants and prisoners.

Obama and the global war on terror

Just over two years into the Obama administration, what have been its achievements in relation to the abuses formerly committed by the Bush administration under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’? On his first full day in office, Obama, a former scholar of constitutional law, signed an order to close Guantánamo within one year. However, as the record of the past two years examined here shows, that early promise has not been fulfilled. Instead, the ‘global war on terror’ has continued to be prosecuted by his administration, and, in some areas, the extension of executive power, in apparent defiance of the US Constitution, has gone even further.

The Half Has Never Been Told: slavery and the making of American capitalism, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption

Senegalese, Mauritanian and Jordanian interrogators had done years before – that the evidence against Slahi was so thin as to be worthless. Worse, Couch believed it would be inadmissible. On a visit to Guantánamo he had seen strobe lighting and heard deafening heavy metal sounds and glimpsed ‘a shackled detainee kneeling, mumbling, rocking back and forth. Praying. This man was in agony.’ Couch had a flashback to the worst week of his life – military training to withstand capture and torture – the SERE programme. He recognised that SERE was being used on prisoners. Couch, a devout Christian, had genuine religious misgivings about torture. He told his superior that Slahis interrogation had violated the Geneva Conventions and other treaties, and was rebuffed. Couch refused to prosecute. From the CIA men in tears and wanting out at the sight and sound of Abu Zubaydah being tortured in Thailand, to the interrogators who grew close with Slahi, and the Republican military men like Couch and Hickman who defied military orders, these books show how much insider dissidence there was to the shameful inhumanity and illegality of the war on terror. But none of this has made any impact on the impervious power structure of the US executive. All these books show how these years have profoundly damaged American society’s values, left skilled people impotent, and destroyed the country’s reputation throughout the world.

Book Review: The West Bank Wall: unmaking Palestine

of scholars in conditioning, and authorising, popular sentiments. Said need not, and does not try, to demonstrate that Orientalists manufactured a new set of prejudices in which they tutored the European citizenry. He need only show that, in the bibliophilic manufactory of philology, long-held prejudices acquired distinction. Again, these missteps come from having never come to terms with Said’s intellectual milieu. The epigraph that heads the Said chapter attributes to Said ideas about ‘aporia, ambivalence, and indeterminacy’ that Said went to great lengths to attack over two decades of writing. An elementary familiarity with Said’s career should have told Irwin that, just as it would have told him that Said’s Beginnings was not, as he contends, an effort to elevate the literary critic to an artist but just the opposite – a diagnosis of what was productive (and not) in the ungrounded aestheticism of literary modernism. At times, Irwin’s mistakes are important enough to make his barbs miss their mark entirely. He says, for example, that Said ignores the contributions of Arab academics, among them Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, George Hourani and Abdallah Laroui. Leaving alone that Hourani and Laroui are at several points praised in Said’s writing, Orientalism is in fact dedicated to AbuLughod (and his wife)! It is depressingly common these days for novelists, journalists and the writers of popular non-fiction to think that they can make fun of the humanities without actually working through its materials. Irwin makes that mistake here, and is unlikely to persuade anyone not already inclined to dispatch Said for reasons unrelated to his scholarship. To find a helpful summary of Hariri’s important twelfth-century picaresque taleMaqamat, read Irwin. To grasp how a scholarly field, in the very neutrality of its investments in foreign texts and alien sensibilities, helped authorise conquest, Said’s Orientalism remains one of the most brilliant works of the post-war period. I leave it to readers to decide which of the two virtues is more consequential.

Book Review: Enemy Combatant: a British Muslim’s journey to Guantánamo and back

Then, suddenly, in the midst of all this love and wisdom is his love for Wisden. Not since CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary have I evinced so keen a pleasure at having once, in my Ceylon youth, been a bowler of the wily Tamil googly, the predecessor to Murali’s ‘doosra’. And Searle’s gleeful sighting of Wes Hall reminded me of the time when the West Indies came to Ceylon with their three Ws (Weekes, Worrell and Walcott) and awed us in wonderment at the sunlit poetry of their cricket. And were themselves awed by the prowess of our own joyous, heady, vagrant Satha (Sathasivam) who batted with the grace of a gazelle, the touch of gossamer and the abandon of imperishable youth. If socialism created the fourth international, cricket created the fifth – for cricket is indeed the basis of the Commonwealth, and when the political Commonwealth is gone, there will always be a Commonwealth of cricket – garnered from the green fields of village England, the streets of Trinidad, the beaches of Sri Lanka, the slums of Mumbai. Such memories Chris Searle evokes, such tasks he sets before us, such hope he snatches from the air we breathe. Thank you, Chris.

Book Review: Guantanamo: the war on human rights, Guantanamo: what the world should know

In December 2004, Brian Boyle, the principal deputy associate attorney general for the United States, told a federal district court judge that the US president could imprison a ‘little old lady from Switzerland’ in Guantanamo if she donated to a charity not knowing that her money was eventually used to finance the activity of terrorists. ‘Someone’s intention is clearly not a factor that would disable detention’, he stated (New York Times, 2 December). The definition of an enemy combatant, Boyle maintained, ‘is not limited to someone who carries a weapon’. It would be up to a Guantanamo Combatant Status Review Panel to decide whether to believe the little old lady when she said that she was not an enemy combatant. The fact that shewould not be entitled to a lawyer or to see the evidence against her was of no concern to the Justice Department official. And, yes, he told the judge, the panels could consider evidence obtained through torture: ‘Nothing in the due process clause [of the US Constitution] prohibits them from relying on it.’ Can the rule of law survive what Boyle called the ‘global reach’ of the US-led ‘war on terrorism’? If it does, attorney Michael Ratner and investigative journalist David Rose deserve much of the credit. ‘There should be no place in the world that is a law-free zone, no place in the world where human beings have no rights’, declares