The Tight Connections Between Slavery and War

BY MONTI DATTA, ANGHARAD SMITH AND KEVIN BALE

AUGUST 24, 2022

Relief depicting slaves in chains in the Roman Empire, at Smyrna, 200 CE. Photograph Source: Jun – Flickr: Roman collared slaves – CC BY-SA 2.0

Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family controlled sex trafficking in the United States to the enslavement of fishermen in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry and forced labor in the global electronics supply chain, enslavement knows no bounds.

As scholars of modern slavery, we seek to understand how and why human beings are still bought, owned and sold in the 21st century, in hopes of shaping policies to eradicate these crimes.

Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.

In 2016, the United Nations Security Council named modern slavery a serious concern in areas affected by armed conflict. But researchers still know little about the specifics of how slavery and war are intertwined.

We recently published research analyzing data on armed conflicts around the world to better understand this relationship.

What we found was staggering: The vast majority of armed conflict between 1989 and 2016 used some kind of slavery.

Coding conflict

We used data from an established database about war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), to look at how much, and in what ways, armed conflict intersects with different forms of contemporary slavery.

Our project was inspired by two leading scholars of sexual violence, Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordås. These political scientists used that database to produce their own pioneering database about how rape is used as a weapon of war.

The Uppsala database breaks each conflict into two sides. Side A represents a nation state, and Side B is typically one or more nonstate actors, such as rebel groups or insurgents.

Using that data, our research team examined instances of different forms of slavery, including sex trafficking and forced marriage, child soldiers, forced labor and general human trafficking. This analysis included information from 171 different armed conflicts. Because the use of slavery changes over time, we broke multiyear conflicts into separate “conflict-years” to study them one year at a time, for a total of 1,113 separate cases.

Coding each case to determine what forms of slavery were used, if any, was a challenge. We compared information from a variety of sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, scholarly accounts, journalists’ reporting and documents from governmental and intergovernmental organizations.

Alarming numbers

In our recently published analysis, we found that contemporary slavery is a regular feature of armed conflict. Among the 1,113 cases we analyzed, 87% contained child soldiers – meaning fighters age 15 and younger – 34% included sexual exploitation and forced marriage, about 24% included forced labor and almost 17% included human trafficking.

A global heat map of the frequency of these armed conflicts over time paints a sobering picture. Most conflicts involving enslavement take place in low-income countries, often referred to as the Global South.

About 12% of the conflicts involving some form of enslavement took place in India, where there are several conflicts between the government and nonstate actors. Teen militants are involved in conflicts such as the insurgency in Kashmir and the separatist movement in Assam. About 8% of cases took place in Myanmar, 5% in Ethiopia, 5% in the Philippines and about 3% in Afghanistan, Sudan, Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria and Iraq.

This evidence of enslavement predominately in the Global South may not be surprising, given how poverty and inequality can fuel instability and conflict. However, it helps us reflect upon how these countries’ historic, economic and geopolitical relationships to the Global North also fuel pressure and violence, a theme we hope slavery researchers can study in the future.

Strategic enslavement

Typically, when armed conflict involves slavery, it’s being used for tactical aims: building weapons, for example, or constructing roads and other infrastructure projects to fight a war. But sometimes, slavery is used strategically, as part of an overarching strategy. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used “strategic slavery” in what they called “extermination through labor.” Today, as in the past, strategic slavery is normally part of a larger strategy of genocide.

We found that “strategic enslavement” took place in about 17% of cases. In other words, enslavement was one of the primary objectives of about 17% of the conflicts we examined, and often served the goal of genocide. One example is the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidi minority in the 2014 massacre in Sinjar, Iraq. In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.

The connections between slavery and conflict are vicious but still not well understood. Our next steps include coding historic cases of slavery and conflict going back to World War II, such as how Nazi Germany used forced labor and how Imperial Japan’s military used sexual enslavement. We have published a new data set, “Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict,” and hope other researchers will also use it to help better understand and prevent future violence.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Monti Datta is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond; Angharad Smith is Modern Slavery Programme Officer, United Nations University, and Kevin Bales is Prof. of Contemporary Slavery, Research Director – The Rights Lab, University of Nottingham

More Young Americans are Using Cannabis and Hallucinogens. That’s Good News.

BY THOMAS KNAPP   AUGUST 25, 2022

TwitterRedditEmail

According to a recent National Institutes of Health survey, United Press International reports, “use of marijuana and hallucinogens among young adults in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021.”

According to the survey, 43% of young adults admitted to having used cannabis in the past year, with 8% saying they’ve tried LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, or other “hallucinogens.”

That, believe it or not, is good news.  Both of these “drug” categories have a history of use as long as the history of humanity, with known medical and mental benefits, few negative side effects, and virtually no correlation to violent behaviors.

None of these items should have ever been illegal to use, possess, sell, or grow/manufacture in the first place, and increasing familiarity with them continues to feed  growing opposition to the  “war on drugs.”

They’re all, in three words, “safer than alcohol.”

Which, the same survey says, remains the most popular “drug,” with binge drinking rebounding from a 2020 low and “high-intensity” drinking steadily increasing.

That’s the bad news.

If I knew one of my children (all now thankfully and safely out of their teens) was going out to “party,” and that recreational substances would be involved, I’d much rather they got into a bag of weed or some mushroom caps than into a case of beer or a fifth of bourbon. There’s just less potential for senseless brawls, sexual assault, or driving while impaired.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve personally got nothing against alcohol, and don’t think it should be illegal. I use it, although these days I drink maybe a six-pack of beer and a few ounces of whiskey a year; it used to be … well, quite a bit more.

Here’s the thing:

People have both self-medicated and recreationally dosed themselves with various things since there have been humans.

They’ll keep doing so, even if politicians get together and decree that they mustn’t.

The choice we face is not between a society of junkies and a “drug-free America.” History has taught us that neither of those things is going to happen.

The choice is between a society where we’re free to choose what we eat, drink, smoke, or otherwise ingest — and are responsible for what follows — or a society where eating, drinking, smoking, or otherwise ingesting the “wrong” substance may mean prison whether we harmed anyone else or not.

We’re moving in the former direction. And should continue to do so.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Yoga Versus Democracy?

BY EVAN STEWART – JAIME KUCINSKAS

AUGUST 25, 2022
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Image by Anupam Mahapatra.

As the United States gets less religious, is it also getting more selfish?

Historically, religious Americans have been civically engaged. Through churches and other faith-based organizations, congregants volunteer, engage in local and national civic organizations and pursue political goals.

Today – the rise of a politically potent religious right over the past 50 years notwithstanding – fewer Americans identify with formal religions. Gallup found that 47% of Americans reported church membership in 2020, down from 70% in the 1990s; nearly a quarter of Americans have no religious affiliation.

Meanwhile, other kinds of meaningful practice are on the rise, from meditation and yoga to new secular rituals like Sunday assemblies “without God.” Between 2012 and 2017, the percentage of American adults who meditated rose from 4.1% to 14.2%, according to a 2018 CDC report. The number of those who practiced yoga jumped from 9.5% to 14.3%. Not everyone considers these practices “spiritual,” but many do pursue them as an alternative to religious engagement.

Some critics question whether this new focus on mindfulness and self-care is making Americans more self-centered. They suggest religiously disengaged Americans are channeling their energies into themselves and their careers rather than into civic pursuits that may benefit the public.

As sociologists who study religion and public life, we wanted to answer that question. We used survey data to compare how these two groups of spiritual and religious Americans vote, volunteer and otherwise get involved in their communities.

Spiritually selfish or religiously alienated?

Our research began with the assumption that moving from organized religious practices to spiritual practices could have one of two effects on greater American society.

Spiritual practice could lead people to focus on more selfish or self-interested pursuits, such as their own personal development and career progress, to the detriment of U.S. society and democracy.

This is the argument sociologist Carolyn Chen pursues in her new book “Work, Pray, Code,” about how meditators in Silicon Valley are re-imagining Buddhist practices as productivity tools. As one employee described a company mindfulness program, it helped her “self-manage” and “not get triggered.” While these skills made her happier and gave her “the clarity to handle the complex problems of the company,” Chen shows how they also teach employees to put work first, sacrificing other kinds of social connection.

Bringing spiritual practice into the office may give workers deeper purpose and meaning, but Chen says it can have some unintended consequences.

When workplaces fulfill workers’ most personal needs – providing not only meals and laundry but also recreational activities, spiritual coaches and mindfulness sessions – skilled workers end up spending most of their time at work. They invest in their company’s social capital rather than building ties with their neighbors, religious congregations and other civic groups. They are less likely to frequent local businesses.

Chen suggests that this disinvestment in community can ultimately lead to cuts in public services and weaken democracy.

Alternatively, our research posited, spiritual practices may serve as a substitute for religion. This explanation may hold especially true among Americans disaffected by the rightward lurch that now divides many congregations, exacerbating cultural fissures around race, gender and sexual orientation.

“They loved to tell me my sexuality doesn’t define me,” one 25-year-old former evangelical, Christian Ethan Stalker, told the Religion News Service in 2021 in describing his former church. “But they shoved a handful of verses down my throat that completely sexualize me as a gay person and … dismissed who I am as a complex human being. That was a huge problem for me.”

Engaged on all fronts

To answer our research question about spirituality and civic engagement, we used a new nationally representative survey of Americans studied in 2020.

We examined the political behaviors of people who engaged in activities such as yoga, meditation, making art, walking in nature, praying and attending religious services. The political activities we measured included voting, volunteering, contacting representatives, protesting and donating to political campaigns.

We then compared those behaviors, distinguishing between people who see these activities as spiritual and those who see the same activities as religious.

Our new study, published in the journal American Sociological Review, finds that spiritual practitioners are just as likely to engage in political activities as the religious.

After we controlled for demographic factors such as age, race and gender, frequent spiritual practitioners were about 30% more likely than nonpractitioners to report doing at least one political activity in the past year. Likewise, devoted religious practitioners were also about 30% more likely to report one of these political behaviors than respondents who do not practice religion.

In other words, we found heightened political engagement among both the religious and spiritual, compared with other people.

Our findings bolster similar conclusions made recently by sociologist Brian Steensland and his colleagues in another studyon spiritual people and civic involvement.

Uncovering the spiritual as a political force

The spiritual practitioners we identified seemed particularly likely to be disaffected by the rightward turn in some congregations in recent years. On average, Democrats, women and people who identified as lesbian, gay and bisexual reported more frequent spiritual practices.

We suspect these groups are engaging in American politics in innovative ways, such as through online groups and retreats that re-imagine spiritual community and democratic engagement.

Our research recognizes progressive spiritual practitioners as a growing but largely unrecognized, underestimated and misunderstood political force.

In his influential book “Bowling Alone,” Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam suggests American religious disaffiliation is part of a larger trend of overall civic decline. Americans have been disengaging for decades from all kinds of civic groups, from bowling leagues and unions to parent-teacher organizations.

Our study gives good reason to reassess what being an “engaged citizen” means in the 21st century. People may change what they do on a Sunday morning, but checking out of church doesn’t necessarily imply checking out of the political process.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.  

EXPLAINER
The algorithms behind the spread of online antisemitism

Researchers find social media technology and business model algorithms ensure that ‘the more engagement a post receives, the more users see it,’ driving antisemitic content online

By SABINE VON MERING and MONIKA HÜBSCHERT

An iPhone displays the Facebook app in New Orleans, Aug. 11, 2019. (AP/Jenny Kane)

THE CONVERSATION via AP — Antisemitic incidents have shown a sharp rise in the US. The Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights group that has been tracking cases since 1979, found that there were 2,717 incidents in 2021. This represents an increase of 34% over 2020.

In Europe, the European Commission found a sevenfold increase in antisemitic postings across French language accounts, and an over thirteenfold increase in antisemitic comments within German channels during the pandemic.

Together with other scholars who study antisemitism, we started to look at how technology and the business models of the social media platforms were driving antisemitism. A 2022 book that we co-edited, “Antisemitism on Social Media,” offers perspectives from the US, Germany, Denmark, Israel, India, UK and Sweden on how algorithms on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube contribute to spreading antisemitism.

What does antisemitism on social media look like?

Hatred against Jews on social media is often expressed in stereotypical depictions of Jews that stem from Nazi propaganda or in denial of the Holocaust.

Antisemitic social media posts also express hatred toward Jews that is based on the notion that all Jews are Zionist – that is, they are part of the national movement supporting Israel as a Jewish state – and Zionism is constructed as innately evil.

However, today’s antisemitism is not only directed at Israelis, and it does not always take the form of traditional slogans or hate speech.

Illustrative – Photo of the logo of US social network company Twitter displayed on the screen of a smartphone, May 2, 2019. (LOIC VENANCE / AFP)

Contemporary antisemitism manifests itself in various forms such as GIFs, memes, vlogs, comments and reactions such as likes and dislikes on the platforms.

Scholar Sophie Schmalenberger found that antisemitism is expressed not just in blunt, hurtful language and images on social media, but also in coded forms that may easily remain undetected. For example, on Facebook, Germany’s radical right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, omits the mentioning of the Holocaust in posts about the Second World War. It also uses antisemitic language and rhetoric that present antisemitism as acceptable.

Antisemitism may take on subtle forms such as in emojis. The emoji combination of a star of David, a Jewish symbol, and a rat resembles the Nazi propaganda likening Jews to vermin. In Nazi Germany, the constant repetition and normalization of such depictions led to the dehumanization of Jews and eventually the acceptance of genocide.

US President Joe Biden lays a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust

 memorial in Jerusalem, July 13, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Other forms of antisemitism on social media are antisemitic troll attacks. Users organize to disrupt online events by flooding them with messages that deny the Holocaust or spread conspiracy myths, as QAnon does.

Scholars Gabi Weimann and Natalie Masri have studied TikTok. They found that kids and young adults are especially in danger of being exposed, often unwittingly, to antisemitism on the very popular and fast-growing platform, which already counts over one billion users worldwide.

Some of the content that is posted combines clips of footage from Nazi Germany with new text belittling or making fun of the victims of the Holocaust.

The continuous exposure to antisemitic content at a young age, scholars say, can lead to both normalization of the content and radicalization of the Tik-Tok viewer.
Algorithmic antisemitism

Antisemitism is fueled by algorithms, which are programmed to register engagement. This ensures that the more engagement a post receives, the more users see it. Engagement includes all reactions such as likes and dislikes, shares and comments, including counter comments. The problem is that reactions to posts also trigger rewarding dopamine hits in users.

Because outrageous content creates the most engagement, users feel more encouraged to post hateful content.

However, even social media users who post critical comments on hateful content don’t realize that because of the way algorithms work, they end up contributing to its spread.

In this illustrative photo from July 10, 2019, the Facebook logo 

is seen on a computer in Washington. (Alastair Pike/AFP)

Research on video recommendations on YouTube also shows how algorithms gradually lead users to more radical content. Algorithmic antisemitism is thus a form of what criminologist Matthew Williams calls “algorithmic hate” in his book “The Science of Hate.”

What can be done about it?

To combat antisemitism on social media, strategies need to be evidence-based. But neither social media companies nor researchers have devoted enough time and resources to this issue so far.

The study of antisemitism on social media poses unique challenges to researchers: They need access to the data and funding to be able to help develop effective counterstrategies. So far, scholars depend on the cooperation of the social media companies to access the data, which is mostly unregulated.

Social media companies have implemented guidelines on reporting antisemitism on social media, and civil society organizations have been demanding action against algorithmic antisemitism. However, the measures taken so far are woefully inadequate, if not dangerous. For example, counterspeech, which is often promoted as a possible strategy, tends to amplify hateful content.

To meaningfully address antisemitic hate speech, social media companies would need to change the algorithms that collect and curate user data for advertisement companies, which make up a large part of their revenue.

There is a global, borderless spread of antisemitic posts on social media happening on an unprecedented scale. We believe it will require the collective efforts of social media companies, researchers and civil society to combat this problem.

CORPUS DELICTI***

Taliban say they've not found

body of al Qaeda leader

FILE PHOTO: A photo of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is seen in this

 still image taken from a video

Thu, August 25, 2022

KABUL (Reuters) - The Taliban have not found the body of Ayman al-Zawahiri and are continuing investigations, group spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said on Thursday, after the United States said they killed the al Qaeda leader in an airstrike in Kabul last month.

The United States killed Zawahiri with a missile fired from a drone while he stood on a balcony at his hideout in July, U.S. officials said, in the biggest blow to al Qaeda since U.S. Navy SEALS shot dead Osama bin Laden more than a decade ago.

***TIL:"no body, no murder" rule have arisen from the "Campden Wonder" case occurred in the 1660s A local man vanished …

reddit.com/r/todayilearned · Jan 2, 2019 · Article from: en.wikipedia.org

The Many Lives of Ayman al-Zawahiri

BY BINOY KAMPMARK        AUGUST 25, 2022

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told.  Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.  On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, while standing on his balcony.

Terrorism and security pundits, whose views are best considered from afar with stern scrutiny, are predictably speculating that the killing will have some effect on al-Qaida but are incapable of showing how.  Vanda Felbab-Brown at Brookings is convinced that “his death with have a negative strategic and demoralizing impact on al-Qaida” though gives no inkling of how this might be so.  Even by her own admission, Zawahiri was not “involved in daily tactical al-Qaida planning”.

The lack of US counter-terrorism capabilities, not to mention officially stationed personnel in Afghanistan, is no problem for Felbab-Brown.  She admires the US forces for still getting the job done, if it can be put as crudely as that. This killing was an “impressive show of the effectiveness and persistence of US counterterrorism efforts”.  Scorn is also reserved for the Taliban, who seemed to be playing host and continuing old habits of supping from the same bowl.

President Joe Biden also took pride in noting that such killings could be executed at a distance, and without the need for an ongoing US garrison.  “When I ended our military mission in Afghanistan almost a year ago, I made the decision that after 20 years of war, the United States no longer needed thousands of boots on the ground in Afghanistan to protect America from terrorists who seek to do us harm.”

In November 2020, another commentator from the Brookings stable, Daniel Byman, wrote something almost identical in flavour to that of Felbab-Brown.  Zawahiri had, on that occasion, had another one of his death flourishes, reportedlyexpiring in Afghanistan from “natural causes”.

Byman was keen to speculate.  “If Zawahri is dead, where will al-Qaida go next and what kind of movement will Zawahri’s successor inherit?”  With classroom authority, Byman opined that, “Leaders matter tremendously for terrorist groups, especially jihadi ones, which often rise and fall based on the fortunes of their emir.”

As things transpired, the leader in question was very much alive and kicking and reports of his death had been embarrassingly exaggerated.  He appeared in a video message celebrating the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, released on September 11, 2021.

The al-Qaida leader certainly has form.  In August 2008, Zawahiri’s fate was of such interest to CBS News as to prompt a bold pronouncement.  He was said to be in “severe pain” and in need of urgent treatment for injuries sustained in a strike.  Lara Logan, the CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent, had supposedly secured a letter written by local Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud making that point.  The injuries were said to be so critical that the leader was “possibly dead”.  Logan acknowledged that there had been “false death rumours” floating around previously about the al-Qaida figure, but no denials had been issued from Pakistan, the US or al-Qaida websites.  Not exactly formidably deductive.

Zawahiri has encountered death yet again, this time at the end of a drone strike on a safe house in Kabul.  But things were far from clear.  Former head of the National Directorate of Security in Afghanistan, Rahmatullah Nabil, claimed it was “an American strike on IS-K” (Islamic State-Khorasan Province) that took place on July 31.  Not so, according to Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan vice-president, who attributed responsibility to the Pakistani Airforce.

The Taliban followed up, with spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirming that the strike had, in fact, been the work of a US drone.  “Such actions are a repetition of the failed experiences of the past 20 years and are against the interests of the US, Afghanistan and the region,” Mujahid added.

US President Joe Biden duly issued his video-briefing corroborating the attack.  Not that this necessarily clarified matters regarding Zawahiri.  John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, admittedthat no DNA evidence had been obtained.  Cockily, he asserted that, “based on multiple sources and methods that we’ve gathered information from, we don’t need it.”

The pattern of killings and assassinations gloried in, only to be revised or disproved later, is very much part of the counterterrorist manual.  US officials have indulged in this before, notably in the context of Osama bin Laden.  At a certain point in time, it became irrelevant whether he lived or otherwise.  The figure had died on so many occasions as to become a simulacrum, existing in an absurdist drama known as terrorism studies and “counter-terrorist operations”.  At best, the obsession with capturing and killing him provided the personal touch, an individual whose targeting gave reassurance that wrongs could somehow be righted by disposing of him in extrajudicial fashion.

Bin Laden’s slaying by the Navy Seals in May 2011 had a cinematic element and, in a rather fitting way, reconciled his dead-yet-not-dead existence to celluloid.   The White House Situation Room showed President Barack Obama and his officials glued to the screen as the events in Abbottabad, Pakistan unfolded.  Ghoulish reality television unfolded before an audience grimly transfixed, horrified and entertained.

Like his predecessor felled by US bullets, Zawahiri’s demise hardly changes the dynamic of the terrorist franchise he led.  Killing such a man is not quite the equivalent of doing away with the manager of a banking branch, but the principle has a similarity to it.  Such entities will continue to thrive, fed by the very forces that often claim to suppress them.  Adherents will always be found; the hangman will never be disappointed.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

The Assassination of Ayman al-Zawahri

BY JACOB G. HORNBERGER   AUGUST 24, 2022

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

While U.S. officials and their acolytes in the mainstream press have described the U.S. national-security establishment’s recent assassination of Ayman al-Zawahri as a great victory for President Biden and the U.S. “global war on terror,” it is important to keep in mind that the assassination was just plain murder on the part of America’s federal killing machine.

Federal officials and their mainstream press have justified al-Zawahri’s killing on two grounds: (1) by claiming that al-Zawahri participated in the 9/11 attacks and (2) by claiming that the killing was simply part of their “global war on terror.” 

Both justifications, however, are nothing more than rationalizations for a state-sponsored murder on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment.

Let’s keep in mind something important: terrorism is not an act of war. It is a federal criminal offense. That includes the 9/11 attacks. As acts of terrorism, the 9/11 attacks were federal criminal offenses. 

Consider all the federal prosecutions for terrorism that have taken place in U.S. district courts in New York, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere for many years. There is a simple reason for those prosecutions: Terrorism is a federal criminal offense. If it were an act of war, there never would have been those criminal prosecutions. Instead, there would have simply been prisoner-of-war camps, like in regular wars. In regular wars, no soldier is criminally prosecuted for murder for killing an enemy soldier. That’s because in war, soldiers are legally entitled to kill the enemy.

In 1993, terrorists set off a bomb in the World Trade Center. The bombing didn’t bring down the towers but it did kill and injure multitudes of people. It was no different in principle from the later attacks on 9/11. When Ramzi Yousef, one of the people who committed the 1993 attack, was later taken into custody, he was not placed in a prisoner-of war-camp. Instead, he was prosecuted in federal district court. Again, that’s because terrorism is a federal criminal offense, not an act of war.

Because the magnitude of the death and damage was so much greater with the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon and the CIA succeeded in perverting and warping America’s founding judicial system. After those attacks, they established a torture and prison camp in Cuba. Why Cuba? Their aim was to establish a Constitution-free zone where they could bring any suspected terrorist in the world and do whatever they wanted to him, without any judicial interference whatsoever. That included such things as torture, indefinite detention, and extra-judicial execution. 

The Supreme Court declared that it had jurisdiction over the Cuba center but then, in an act of extreme passivity, permitted the Pentagon and the CIA to establish a dual judicial system, one that would operate alongside the federal judicial system. The Pentagon and the CIA would have the omnipotent authority to decide whether to send terrorism suspects through the federal system or through their kangaroo military-tribunal system. 

The Gitmo system has always been flagrantly unconstitutional. But the federal judiciary has always been deferential to the Pentagon and the CIA. That’s why there are still prisoners at Gitmo who have been incarcerated and tortured for decades without even the semblance of a trial, in flagrant violation of the right to a speedy trial guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishments.

After the 9/11 attacks, the national-security establishment also claimed that it had the authority to assassinate anyone it considered to be a terrorist. As I document in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, this power of assassination came into existence long before the 9/11 attacks, but by and large, it was kept under wraps and not publicized widely by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Not so after 9/11, however. At that point, assassination became a well-established, widely publicized power of the CIA and the Pentagon. From that point on, they didn’t have to bring suspected terrorists to justice, either in the federal court system or the tribunal system at Gitmo. They could just kill suspected terrorists on sight. That included American citizens.

There was always one great big legal problem, however, with their program of state-sponsored assassination: The Constitution, which not only does not delegate a power of assassination to federal officials but also, through the Fifth Amendment, expressly prohibits the federal taking of life without due process of law — i.e., without formal notice and a trial.

The Constitution, however, proved to be no obstacle to state-sponsored assassinations simply because the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary played their standard deferential and passive role by upholding this omnipotent, totalitarian, dark-side power. 

It is worth mentioning that there is no indication that al-Zawahri was participating in any anti-American terrorist operation at the time of his assassination. His killing appears to be nothing more than but an extrajudicial act of deadly vengeance in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks more than 20 years ago. It’s also worth mentioning that al-Zawahri was never convicted of participating in the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, as U.S. officials have slowly and reluctantly released their highly secret stash of evidence regarding 9/11 over the years, the great weight and preponderance of that evidence seems to point to the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia as the orchestrator of the 9/11 attacks. Of course, the Pentagon and the CIA would have every incentive to protect the murderous Saudi regime given that it provides much of the oil that funds their massive worldwide military  machine.

Our American ancestors brought into existence the greatest judicial system in history. It was a system that admittedly permitted some guilty people to go free, but with the aim of ensuring that innocent people were never punished, killed, tortured, or abused. That system worked well for some 150 years. Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the CIA have destroyed it, as we have most recently seen with their extrajudicial murder of accused terrorist Ayman al-Zawahri.

This first appeared on Jacob Hornberger’s Explore Freedom blog.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.