Dr. King Understood the Power of Unions

By Lee Saunders, The Root

20 January 20

 

n what would have been his 91st birthday, we celebrate the towering legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—his moral force as a faith leader, his devotion to nonviolent resistance and, of course, the sacrifices he made to end legalized segregation in the South.

But there is an often-overlooked aspect of his work: Dr. King was one of his era’s most fearsome champions of working people coming together to organize, build power and improve their lives. Here is how he put it in a speech to the Illinois AFL-CIO convention in October 1965:

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.

Dr. King understood the union difference—the way that a voice on the job and a seat at the table empowers workers of all races. It means a bigger paycheck at the end of the week. It means better health benefits, so you can afford to see a doctor when you’re sick. It means security in retirement when your working days are done. It means the basic dignity and respect you deserve.

And he knew that the wealthy corporate interests seeking to crush labor—to take away the union difference—would resort to dishonesty and demagoguery to gain an edge. Here he is in 1961, warning about the perniciousness of so-called right-to-work laws:

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’…Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights.

Dr. King’s focus on economic issues intensified in the latter part of his life, with the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967. And his very last campaign was a labor action. Dr. King traveled to Memphis in early 1968 to stand with 1,300 African American sanitation workers represented by AFSCME Local 1733, who had gone on strike to protest poverty wages and degrading, deplorable working conditions. They asserted their humanity with a simple, proud slogan: “I AM A MAN.”

On March 18, Dr. King addressed sanitation workers and community members at Mason Temple in Memphis:

“You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity…it has dignity and it has worth…All labor has dignity.”

Two and a half weeks later, on his next trip to Memphis, Dr. King was assassinated. But his message in Memphis and throughout his life continues to be a call to action for everyone who believes in economic justice.

In Dr. King’s name, we keep fighting for the idea that “all labor has dignity,” that the union difference can lift up more working families, invigorating our communities and strengthening the entire nation.

How This Became a Gitmo World

By Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, TomDispatch

20 January 20

 

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In these years, Washington has, in a sense, tortured history.

Early in this century, the Guantánamo Bay detention facility would become the crown jewel of a mini-gulag of torture and mistreatment that the CIA and the U.S. military -- remember those infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq? -- set up as part of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. As I wrote back then, that prison in Cuba had become a key part of “our own global Bermuda Triangle of Injustice.”

Keep in mind that our previous president, Barack Obama, actually wanted to close Guantánamo and signed an executive order to do so “within a year” on his first day in office. Little good that did.

Long before Donald Trump began to claim immunity from anything and everything, this country’s increasingly imperial presidency had become deeply linked to that war on terror, a secret war in which anything went and nothing was considered impermissible. As Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal reported back in 2004, “Bush administration lawyers contended... that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.”

In fact, those lawyers had no shame. In a classic passage from a 2002 Justice Department memo meant to make torture part of that war’s legal arsenal of weaponry, those lawyers claimed that, even to qualify as torture, the treatment of prisoners had to be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." They added that, "for purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years."

To this day, none of those CIA torturers has spent a day in jail for their acts. And despite that Obama executive order, the Guantánamo nightmare not only didn’t end, but -- as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel suggest today -- became an ever more significant part of American life. It would, as they make clear, leave that island (and the CIA “black sites” set up around the world) and head for the mainland. There, Guantánamo-style cruelty has become the order of the day, especially on our southern border, the crown jewel of Donald Trump’s own Bermuda Triangle of Injustice.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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n January 2002, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility in Cuba opened its gates for the first 20 detainees of the war on terror. Within 100 days, 300 of them would arrive, often hooded and in those infamous orange jumpsuits, and that would just be the beginning. At its height, the population would rise to nearly 800 prisoners from 59 countries. Eighteen years later, it still holds 40 prisoners, most of whom will undoubtedly remain there without charges or trial for the rest of their lives. (That’s likely true even of the five who have been cleared for release for more than a decade.) In 2013, journalist Carol Rosenberg astutely labeled them “forever prisoners.” And those detainees are hardly the only enduring legacy of Guantánamo Bay. Thanks to that prison camp, we as a country have come to understand aspects of both the law and policy in new ways that might prove to be “forever changes.”

Here are eight ways in which the toxic policies of that offshore facility have contaminated American institutions, as well as our laws and customs, in the years since 2002.

1. Indefinite detention: The first item on any list of Guantánamo’s offspring would have to be the category “indefinite detention.” In the context of U.S. law, until that long-ago January, the very notion was both foreign and forbidden. Detention without charge or trial was, in fact, precluded by the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process, a reality that had been honored since the founding of the republic. Though the detainees there were eventually granted access to lawyers and the right to have their cases reviewed, for only a handful of them has that right of being charged or released been realized.

The indefinite detention that began at Guantánamo Bay has now spawned its mirror image in the camps for undocumented immigrants (and their children) along the U.S. Mexican border. Even the optics there are proving to be carbon copies of Guantánamo: the open-air wire cages, the armed guards, and the physical abuse of migrants and asylum seekers, both adults and children. At Guantánamo Bay, the government didn’t distinguish between juveniles and adults until years after the facility had opened, another example of a policy Gitmo brought into existence that was previously inconceivable in the U.S. legal system. In some ways, in fact, the situation at the border may be even worse, as the detained there are kept in unsanitary conditions without sufficient access to doctors.

And here’s another way the border is one-upping Guantánamo. The government was required to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its wartime detention facilities, so the health and medical conditions at Gitmo were monitored and kept to a relatively decent standard once those initial three months of open-air cages ended. In the border detention centers, however, tots have been left in soiled diapers, housed along with their mothers and fathers in bitterly cold, jail-like conditions, and denied adequate medical attention, including vaccines.

2. A new legal language for the purpose of bypassing the law: From the very start, Guantánamo challenged the normal language of law and democracy. The detainees there could not be called “prisoners” as they would then have been considered “prisoners of war” and so subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The cages and later prefab prison complexes (transported from Indiana) could not be labeled “prisons” for the same reason. So the government invented a new term, “enemy combatant,” derived from “unlawful enemy belligerent,” that did have legal standing. The point, of course, was to create a whole new legal category that, like the offshore prison itself, would be immune to existing laws, American or international, pertaining to prisoners of war.

This evasion of the law has not only persisted to this day, but has crept into other areas of Washington’s foreign policy. Recently, for instance, Trump administration lawyers invoked the term “enemy combatant” to justify the drone killing of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Iraq. Meanwhile, at the border, asylum seekers have been transformed into “illegal immigrants” and, on that basis, denied essential rights.

3. Legal cover: While a new language was being institutionalized, the Department of Justice offered its own version of legal cover. Its Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) was enlisted to provide often-secret legal justifications for the policies underlying what was then being called the Global War on Terror. The OLC would, in fact, devise farfetched rationales for many previously outlawed policies of that war, most notoriously the CIA’s torture and interrogation programs whose “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used at the Agency’s “black sites” (or secret prisons) around the world upon a number of high-profile detainees later sent to Guantánamo.

Before 9/11, few outsiders even knew of the existence of the Office of Legal Counsel. In the years since, however, it’s become the White House’s go-to department for contorted, often secret legal “opinions” meant to justify previously questionable or unauthorized executive actions. Notoriously, OLC memos justified “targeted killings” by drone of key figures in terror groups, including an American citizen. Recently, for instance, that office has been used to explain away a number of things, including why a sitting president cannot be indicted (see: former special counsel Robert Mueller) or the granting of absolute immunity to White House officials so they can defy subpoenas to testify before Congress (see: House impeachment hearings). And as any OLC memos can be kept secret, who’s to know, for instance, whether or not similar legal memos were written to cover acts like the recent killing of Major General Suleimani?

4. The sidelining and removal of professionals: From its inception, Guantánamo’s supervisors shoved aside any professionals or government officials who stood in their way. Notably, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed individuals to run Guantánamo who would report directly to him rather than go through any pre-existing chain of command. In that way, he effectively removed those who would contradict his orders or the policies put in place under his command, including, for instance, that prisoners on hunger strikes should be force-fed.

In the Trump era, this dislike of professionals has spread through many agencies and departments of the government. The twist now is that those professionals are often leaving by choice. The State Department, for instance, has dwindled steadily in size since Donald Trump took office, as those disagreeing with administration policies have simply quit or retired in significant numbers. Similarly, at the Pentagon, in a steady drumbeat, officials have resigned or been fired due to policy disagreements.

5. The use of the military for detention operations: In the fall of 2002, General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, complained to Rumsfeld that his troops were being wasted on detainee operations. Hundreds of prisoners had been captured in the invasion of Afghanistan that began in October 2001 and Army personnel were being asked to serve as guards in the detention centers set up at the new American military bases in that country. Though many of those detainees would subsequently be transferred to Guantánamo, the military was not off the hook. A joint task force of all four of its branches would be deployed to Guantánamo to serve as guards for the arriving detainees. Some of them insisted that it was not a task they were prepared for, that their previous service as guards at military brigs for service personnel who had broken the law was hardly proper preparation for guarding prisoners from the battlefield. But to no avail.

Today, that military has been deployed in a similar fashion to the southern border in support of detention operations there, a steady presence of more than 5,000 troops since the early days of the Trump presidency, including active-duty military personnel and the National Guard. Under U.S. law, the military is not authorized to carry out domestic law enforcement. A letter from 30 members of Congress to Pentagon Principal Deputy Inspector General Glenn Fine made the point: "The military should have no role in enforcing domestic law, which is why Trump’s troop deployment to the southern border risks eroding the laws and norms that have kept the military and domestic law enforcement separate." Fine is now conducting a review of that deployment, but who knows when (or even if) it will see the light of day.

6. Secrecy and the withholding of information: When it came to Guantánamo, Pentagon officials discussing the number of detainees there would usually offer only approximations, rather than specific numbers, just as they would generally not mention the names of the prisoners. Journalists were normally kept from the facility and photographs forbidden. Meanwhile, a blanket of secrecy shrouded the prior treatment of those detainees, many of whom had been subjected to abuse and torture at the black sites where they were held before being transported to Gitmo.

Today, on the border, the policy towards journalists, infamously dubbed “the enemies of the people” by this president, has been distinctly Gitmo-ish. Information has been withheld and efforts have been made to keep both journalists and photographers from border detention camps. Journalistic Freedom of Information Act requests have often been the singular means by which the public has gotten some insight into government border policies. Even members of Congress have been denied access to the detention facilities, while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency has failed to keep records that would enable migrant families to reunite or let any oversight agency accurately determine the number of detainees, particularly children, being held.

In the theater of war, similar secrecy persists. Just this month, for example, the administration refused to present Congress (no less the public) with evidence of its assertion that the Iranian major general it assassinated by drone posed an imminent threat to the United States and its interests.

7. Disregard for international law and treaties: In characterizing the Geneva Convention as “quaint” and “obsolete” as part of its justification for the detention and treatment of prisoners in the war on terror, President George W. Bush’s administration began to steadily eat away at Washington’s adherence to international treaties and conventions to which it had previously been both a signatory and a principal moral force. What followed, for instance, was a contravention of the Convention Against Torture, both in the CIA’s global torture program and in Washington’s toleration of the mistreatment of detainees it rendered to other countries.

The lack of respect for treaty obligations and for the sanctity of international cooperation in matters affecting world peace, health, and harmony has only spread in these years with Trump administration decisions to withdraw from agreements and treaties of various sorts. These included: the Paris climate accord, the nuclear agreement with Iran, and Cold War-era nuclear arms treaties with Russia (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement last year and, more recently, the ignoring of warnings from the Russians that there will not be sufficient time to negotiate the renewal of the essential New Start nuclear arms limitation agreement that will lapse in 2021). As a result, the world has become a more dangerous and unpredictable place.

8. Lack of accountability: Although some of the newly legalized policies of the Bush era, including the use of torture, were ended by the Obama administration, there has been no appetite for holding government officials responsible for illegal and unconstitutional conduct. As President Obama so classically put it when it came to taking action to hold individuals accountable for the CIA’s torture program, it was time “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Today, Donald Trump and his team expect a similar kind of Gitmo-style impunity for themselves. As he’s said many times, “I can do whatever I want as president.” The withholding of military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to get information on rival Joe Biden (and his son) is but one example of the license he’s taken. A sense of immunity from the law is deeply entrenched in this administration (as the refusal of his key officials to testify before the House of Representatives has shown).

It’s worth noting that the House impeachment of the president was a rare step forward when it comes to holding officials accountable for violations of the law in this era (though conviction in the Senate is essentially unimaginable). Whether such accountability will ever take hold in the context of global policy -- in the killing of Suleimani, in the separation of children from their families at the border, or in the context of election interference -- remains to be seen. At the moment, it seems unlikely indeed. After all, we still live in the Guantánamo era.

The toll of the war on terror in terms of lives and treasure has been well documented. It has cost American taxpayers at least $6.4 trillion (and probably far more than that), while resulting in the deaths of up to 500,000 people, nearly half of whom are estimated to have been civilians (a number that doesn’t include indirect deaths from disease, starvation and other war-related causes). Meanwhile, a new Gitmo-ized narrative for the law and national security policy has come into being.

The irony is unmistakable. The Guantánamo Bay detention facility was purposely established outside the U.S. so that it would not be subject to the country’s normal laws and policies. As many warned at the time, the notion that it would remain separate and anomalous was sure to be illusory. And indeed that has proved to be so.

Instead of remaining an offshore anomaly, Guantánamo has moved incrementally onshore and that is undeniably its indelible legacy.

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Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, as well as the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief. She is the author and editor of many books, including Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State and The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days.

Joshua L. Dratel, a New York-based lawyer, litigates key national security cases involving terrorism, surveillance, and whistleblowers. He is a contributor to Greenberg’s newest volume, Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink.

Julia Tedesco helped with research for this article.