The recent release of films \u201cArgo\u201d and \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d and the success of Showtime\u2019s \u201cHomeland,\u201d underscore the unresolved and bitter conflict between Washington and the wider Muslim world.\u00a0 The question rages, Why are many Muslim majority populations opposed to the United States Government?\u00a0 As George W. Bush asked after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Why is there such hatred of America in some Islamic countries?\u00a0 Bush said that many Muslims abhor the United States because of our elected form of government and the many constitutional freedoms it provides.\u00a0 My response is different.\u00a0 They hate us, to use this phrase, because the United States is an imperial empire that occupies, abuses, and humiliates \u2013 either directly or by proxy \u2013 people in the Muslim world.\u00a0 America is a place of democratic institutions and genuine promise for many of its citizens.\u00a0 But America is also a bully country that uses military bases, contract mercenaries, black site prisons, drone killings and occasional Qur\u2019an desecrations to enforce its will and degrade the humanity of Muslim populations throughout the world.<\/p>\n
The United States\u2019 occupation of Muslim majority countries creates a powder keg of anger in the Islamic world.\u00a0 Anti-Western resentment plays out against a backdrop of America\u2019s direct military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan; military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt; long-standing economic support of Israel\u2019s occupation of Palestine; deployment of the Navy\u2019s 5th<\/sup> Fleet in the Persian Gulf and surrounding waters; and escalating drone strikes in the Middle East, Asia and Northern Africa.\u00a0 This climate of American control creates the conditions for deep-felt hostility toward the US.\u00a0 It is the seedbed of reactionary terrorism against Western interests.<\/p>\n American power foments systemic indifference toward the humanity of other people, even to the point of assigning less value to the life of say, a Yemeni or Sudanese person, than an American citizen.\u00a0 It is impossible to get a reliable count of the war dead and civilian casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters.\u00a0 The US military doesn\u2019t keep these statistics.\u00a0 The daily loss of life and so-called collateral damage to families and children appears irrelevant to our war efforts.\u00a0 Moreover, as Judith Butler writes, \u201cThere are no obituaries of the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be.\u00a0 If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition.\u201d[1]<\/a> The lives lost to America\u2019s war machine do not count.\u00a0 These foreign dead persons are not \u201cgrievable,\u201d as Butler argues, because their lives are not human lives for whom public mourning and sympathy are expected emotions.<\/p>\n Black site and indefinite detention prisons add more fuel to the time bomb of anti-American distrust and humiliation.\u00a0 Dehumanizing interrogation techniques, harsh imprisonment without legal representation, and the absence of judicial review have made American war prisons abroad a source of ongoing shame and outrage.\u00a0 Once a beacon of international standards for wartime incarceration, now the American military penal system is known worldwide for its abject sadism.<\/p>\n In the early 2000s, Abu Ghraib was the notorious US Iraqi prison where the army used torture, chainings, handcuffing, rape, hooding, forced nudity, temperature extremes, corpse desecration, sleep and food deprivation, solitary confinement, hangings, electrocution, acid pours, absence of sanitation, and genital mutilation to dehumanize and emasculate detainees in the US-Iraq War.\u00a0 In this same period and continuing into the present, Afghan militants have been held at the Bagram Air Base where similar atrocities have occurred, including beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual assault, shackling, sensory disorientation, stress positioning, and guard dog threats.\u00a0 The same horrors have also been perpetrated against inmates at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp at the US Naval Base in Cuba, where torture has been confirmed, even by US Government officials, including forced drug injections, water boarding, exposure to the elements, and blows to the head.<\/p>\n Black site prisons round out the extra-legal extremes that have rendered the United States an object of opprobrium.\u00a0 In the early 2000s the CIA used a policy of kidnapping without trial (so-called extraordinary renditions) to detain and hold incommunicado suspected enemies of US interests.\u00a0 These vanishing individuals were deposited at black site detention facilities, often administered by CIA contractors, who used torture to get information.\u00a0 The black sites were a nightmare world where people were taken off the street and dumped into oblivion.\u00a0 In this world, no charges were filed against detainees, no legal representation was offered to them, and no forms of legal redress were possible on their behalf.\u00a0 Habeas corpus, one of the hallmarks of Western jurisprudence that insures that a detainee has the right to publicly appear in court, was specifically disallowed.\u00a0 Dozens of such black hole sites were located throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.<\/p>\n Georgio Agamben analyzes how the United States now functions in a state of \u201cpermanent exception and emergency\u201d where the suspension of fair and humane treatment of detained persons has become the new normal.[2]<\/a> Barak Obama\u2019s decision in 2009 to close CIA black sites may have appeared to lift the state of emergency, but as recently as 2011 the US military was compelled to admit that it had detained incommunicado a Somali man for two months aboard a navy vessel. \u00a0As last reported, the Obama administration was trying to decide whether and how to prosecute the man in a military or civilian court.[3]<\/a> In a period of sustained crisis where non-state global actors are viewed as hell-bent on destroying America, international treaties for the just treatment of prisoners continue to be set aside in favor of extra-judicial renditions and disappearances.<\/p>\n The strange and disturbing case of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif illustrates the far reach of America\u2019s state of emergency regarding foreign terrorism suspects.\u00a0 In 2001, Latif was picked up in Afghanistan for a $5,000.00 bounty and sent to Guantanamo soon after the US invasion of Iraq in response to the 9\/11 attacks.\u00a0 Originally from Yemen, Latif claimed to be in the region to seek medical treatment after a car accident.\u00a0 The US said he was a Taliban sympathizer, a claim based on an alleged confession he made during an interrogation.\u00a0 Latif then languished at Guantanamo for ten years, only recently being given access to counsel in a disputed habeas corpus lawsuit against the US government.\u00a0 Latif said he was initially placed in solitary confinement for years, pepper sprayed, beaten, subjected to stress positions and extreme temperature variations, denied access to medical care, and at times stripped of clothing or a mattress to sleep on.\u00a0 Latif died in September 2012.\u00a0 His death was ruled a suicide based on what appeared to be a self-administered medication overdose \u2013 even though, apparently, he was regularly surveilled by cameras and guards throughout his detention.\u00a0 The Department of Defense, military tribunals under the Bush and Obama administrations, and a US District Court justice had ordered Latif\u2019s release form Guantanamo, but a three judge Court of Appeals panel overturned these decisions and Latif was kept locked up indefinitely.[4]<\/a> Latif\u2019s decade of incarceration, for reasons many in the US government and judiciary admitted were unsubstantiated, underscores the arbitrary and capricious nature of American military justice.<\/p>\n Other provocations and injuries to Muslim communities continue apace.\u00a0 Desecrations of the Qur\u2019an \u2013 American soldiers defiled copies of the Qur\u2019an in front of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo in 2005, and again thoughtlessly burned copies at a trash dump at Bagram in 2012 \u2013 and Drone strikes against suspected militants \u2013 targeted killings, without judicial review, that kill scores of civilians as well \u2013 have further filled the swamp of anti-American hostilities.\u00a0 In response, anti-Western terrorism continues to grow out of this toxic mix \u2013 from the suicide plot against the USS Cole in 2000, and the September 11, 2001 attacks, to the killing of the US ambassador in Benghazi last year.<\/p>\n One wonders, What if this situation of American imperialism were reversed?\u00a0 What if a Pax Arabia or Pax Islamica were to triumph on the world stage, instead of the Pax Americana that is regnant today? How would Americans feel if the Muslim world engaged in systematic and illegal practices to subjugate US citizens through force and humiliation?\u00a0 How would Americans react if Muslim-identified countries, for decades, had occupied American soil through military interventions and forward military bases; instituted a structural system of illegal and black site prisons where torture and the degrading treatment of inmates were regularly practiced; championed the occasional desecration of sacred objects; and spearheaded the regular invasion of the physical and psychic space of US population centers through drone strikes, invasion threats, foreign military and industrial contractors, navy surveillance, economic blockades and the like?<\/p>\n If the tables were turned, if the United States, to be graphic, had suffered through regular, high-casualty ground wars in Los Angeles and New York; if occupying forces were now stationed in Seattle, Wichita, Chicago, and Providence; if torture chambers were set up in Cleveland and Raleigh to beat and dehumanize American detainees; if an Arab client state, say the Philippines, was given control of the Western seaboard or \u201cWest Bank\u201d of the states of Washington and Oregon; if across the US, drone attacks, on the one hand, and seizure of US financial and material assets, on the other, were used to terrorize and marginalize American citizens; and, perhaps most ominously, if military bases were set up just outside the capital to guard Washington\u2019s cultural patrimony, and occasional burnings of the Bible and the US constitution were an ugly ritual practice taking place at these bases, then how would Americans feel?\u00a0 Would they not feel brutalized and victimized by this sort of daily, soul-killing abuse and humiliation?\u00a0 And, as such, would not many Americans consider it justified for their fellow countrymen to take up the cause of freedom and employ by any means necessary the lethal means to liberate their own homeland?<\/p>\n Military occupation of other countries, and the systemic employment of torture to dehumanize foreign detainees, is a spreading stain on the conscience of the American body politic.\u00a0 Illegal wars and inmate abuse is toxic to the soul of any country.\u00a0 As a people who espouse an ethical foreign policy focused on human rights, America and its leaders have lost their moral compass.<\/p>\n Arundhati Roy says that bin Laden was \u201csculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America\u2019s foreign policy.\u201d[5]<\/a> The truth of this statement speaks to many people in the Muslim world, and helps to explain their anger toward the US.\u00a0 America\u2019s scorched earth policy in war, detention, and occupation has created a breeding ground of resentment.\u00a0 Bin Laden, and, by extension, anti-American terrorism, is the disfigured \u201cspare rib\u201d that has grown out of this breeding ground.\u00a0 But if the situation were reversed \u2013 if the Middle East were to lay waste to US sovereignty, human rights, and even sacred symbols \u2013 I argue that many Americans themselves would feel justified in striking back, even in terror, to reclaim their territorial integrity and national pride. \u00a0Washington must now face its own time of reckoning. \u00a0Until and when the United States learns to treat all people, even those it deems its enemies, as bearers of inherent worth and dignity, this country will not find common ground in its relations with Muslim populations at home and abroad.<\/p>\n
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