Driving Home, page 44
The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
“Determines” should be ringed with a red pencil, and so should “future acts,” with its implicit license for preemptive warfare, but the trickiest word is that “such” in the final clause. “Such … persons” seems to mean “persons of that sort”—an infinitely expandable category. In effect, the AUMF entitled the Bush administration to use all necessary force not just against terrorists but against persons determined by the president to be of the terrorist sort—such as Ehab Elmaghraby, the Tipton Three, and Moazzam Begg, along with charitable elderly Swiss ladies and Irish ESL teachers. The concrete, chain-link, and razor-wire architecture of Guantánamo rose as a forbidding monument to the extraordinary power invested by the nation in its commander in chief and his circle of close advisers. Like warrantless wiretapping, the camp is one of the multitude of examples of how the executive has claimed exceptional liberty from the law on the grounds of its commission to fight the war on terror as it—and it alone—determines.
Liberals, appalled by Guantánamo and all it represents, have cheered too early and too often when the Supreme Court has appeared to bring the camp within the sway of national and international law, only to see the administration wriggle out from under each new decision. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor memorably wrote that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President,” but the stinging ruling had little more effect on the running of the place than, say, a New York Times column by Paul Krugman might have done. Yasser Hamdi himself was eventually released, but the intolerable conditions of his incarceration at Guantánamo remain for others to endure. Writing in the spring of 2006, before the Supreme Court ruled on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on June 29, blocking military tribunals and affirming that detainees were protected by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, Joseph Margulies came to the depressing conclusion that despite a succession of critical Supreme Court decisions, “Camp Delta continues in 2006 much as it began in 2002.”
On the face of it, the decision on Salim Hamdan in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was more far-reaching and consequential than those on Rasul and Hamdi. Once again, editorialists and human-rights advocates applauded the ruling. The New York Times reported:
The decision was such a sweeping and categorical defeat for the Bush administration that it left human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of Guantánamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words like “fantastic,” “amazing,” “remarkable.” Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a public interest law firm in New York that represents hundreds of detainees, said, “It doesn’t get any better.”
Once again, the administration vowed to accept the decision and “looked forward” to working with Congress to resolve the issue. Once again, after a couple of days of liberal euphoria, a rash of hitherto invisible fine print broke out in both the decision itself and the administration’s response to it. Once again, it looked as if the Supreme Court had delivered to the commander in chief not a mighty blow, as was first thought, but a slight passing inconvenience.
Yet familiar as this sequence of events was, one aspect seemed new. In the past, the administration had mainly to deal with the scruples of squeamish judges, like the now retired Justice O’Connor and the eighty-six-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens. But by the summer of 2006, the legislative branch, seeing its own powers neutered, or at least diminished, by the “unitary executive theory” and Bush’s eight-hundred-plus “signing statements,” was starting to cavil at the administration’s seizure of the right to operate above and beyond the law. As the prime symbol of that right, Guantánamo appeared more vulnerable than it ever had. In 2002 it was a monument to extraordinary circumstances and extraordinary presidential power. Until just a few weeks ago, it was looking more and more—even to an apparently growing number of Republicans in Congress—like a grim cautionary monument to the arrogance of the presidency that went too far.
Then, on August 10, came news of the alleged terrorist plot in Britain, which was said to involve the downing of up to a dozen U.S.-bound airliners with liquid explosives. With impressive speed, the Bush administration moved to exploit the climate of suddenly renewed fear of an atrocity comparable to the attacks of September 2001. High on the administration’s agenda was the issue of the Guantánamo military tribunals. As the Times reported on August 12:
Insisting on anonymity, a senior administration official in Washington said news of the plot against airliners would add momentum to efforts to create military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees that would strictly limit defendants’ rights.
September 6 brought two new developments: Bush announced that fourteen top terror suspects—including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—who were previously held at secret foreign prisons by the CIA had been transferred to Guantánamo Bay and will be tried (Congress permitting) by military tribunals; and the Pentagon issued a new army manual prohibiting ten specific forms of torture and “degrading treatment,” which was seen in some quarters as implicitly granting detainees full rights under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Once again, hopeful liberals were inclined to see concessions by the administration to the rule of law. Ingenious electoral maneuvers? A “significant retreat” (as the London Times billed it)? Another temporizing rhetorical sleight of hand? We’ll see.
New York Review of Books, October 2006
* Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989, pp. 22–26.
† See psywarrior.com/afghanleaf40.html.
‡ Newsweek, December 27, 2004/January 3, 2005.
A Postregional City
WHEN I ARRIVED in Seattle in 1990, one had only to look from the streets to the water to see the city’s essential history: slow-moving tugs towing rafts of logs like floating islands; Japanese-flagged freighters laden with raw timber destined for the Tokyo construction industry; husband-and-wife gillnetting boats laying nets across the tide for Puget Sound salmon. Squint, and you could almost see Seattle as it was in the 1850s: a sheltered deep-water harbor on the edge of a limitless forest of massive Douglas firs and cypresses, with an abundant fishery on its front doorstep. Given such lavish natural resources, it would be hard for a city founded here to fail. Add a railroad connection to the interior (James J. Hill’s Great Northern transcontinental line reached Seattle in 1893, in ample time for the Klondike gold rush of 1897) and the place was bound to enjoy the kind of extravagant and unruly success that is both the blessing and curse of the American boomtown.
Yet even in 1990 there was a rootedness to Seattle that evaded most boomtowns. The cautious, Lutheran, Scandinavian character of so many of its settlers perhaps helped; likewise the Lutheran, Scandinavian quality of its weather. Manic elation is difficult to sustain under the low gray skies of the Pacific Northwest, and Seattle was never likely to emulate the dizzy excesses of Los Angeles or Las Vegas. Hemmed in by parallel mountain ranges to the west and east, its livelihood grounded in tall trees and deep water, the city stood at an odd, proud, provincial angle to the rest of the United States, insulated by its geography from the crazes and fashions that took hold elsewhere.
Entirely predictably, the city’s first “big” business was Henry Yesler’s steam sawmill, built in 1853 on Elliott Bay at the foot of what is now Yesler Way. Docks, mills, salmon canneries, and shipbuilding yards quickly assembled themselves along the waterfront, forming a basic infrastructure that shaped Seattle’s development for more than a hundred years. When William Boeing, president of a family-owned timber company based in Aberdeen, Washington, entered the aircraft-manufacturing business in 1916, he moved into a bankrupt yacht yard on the Duwamish River, where he employed shipwrights to construct his first planes. Built on the “stick-and-stringer” principle, with light wooden frames sheathed in fabric instead of timber planking, early Boeings, such as the Model C training seaplane, were like featherweight avian boats (lovely examples of these shipshape planes hang from the ceilings of the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field airport). So the pedigree of the 787 Dreamliner is thoroughbred Seattle, reaching back to the fir forest, the mill, and the delicate skills of the boatbuilder with his spokeshave and chisel.
When I arrived here, I cherished this kind of logical continuity. No city I knew seemed on such comfortable and unself-conscious terms with its own beginnings. I warmed to Seattle’s downtown, its modest cluster of skyscrapers rising from streets still dominated by turn-of-the-century brick-and-stucco examples of Far West neoclassical swank. Rebuilt after a fire leveled most of the business district in 1889, Seattle had Roman dreams of the grandeur yet to come, and its hotels, clubs, department stores, and theatres were designed like palaces in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. In a region of logging and mining camps, of here-today-and-gone-tomorrow, the city itself meant to stay for the ages.
From early on, Seattle had a canny grasp of how to act as a provincial capital. Its potential hinterland was vast if underpopulated, stretching to Alaska in the north and beyond the Rocky Mountains to the east, a nearly boundless territory of isolated, makeshift towns whose inhabitants might reasonably consider it their center for shopping, entertainment, medical facilities, and higher education (the very large and highly ranked University of Washington began life as Territorial University in Seattle in 1861, just ten years after the arrival of the first settlers). The behavior of the city during the gold rush was typical: when prospectors swarmed through en route to the Klondike diggings, Seattleites mostly stayed home, preferring to make reliable fortunes from the miners rather than chance their luck in the gold fields. Stores sold clothing, shovels, pans, sluice boxes, and hydraulic equipment to the stampede of hopefuls, and for those few who returned with money in their pockets, the city laid on whorehouses, dives, casinos, restaurants, and burlesque shows. Seattle effectively turned Alaska into its own client-state, making the last open frontier dependent on it for shipping, supplies, and services, handsomely enriching itself in the process.
Few cities have enjoyed such a long-distance reach into their hinterlands. In the mid-1990s, I conducted an experiment. Driving eastward, I stopped at subsequent towns to find out where allegiance to Seattle’s big-league sports teams—the Mariners in baseball, the Seahawks in football—shifted to the Minnesota Twins and Vikings. At the five-hundred-mile mark, Missoula, Montana, was solidly for Seattle. I crossed the Continental Divide near Butte and drove on to Billings, where, with eight hundred and thirty miles on the clock, I saw a travel agency advertising weekend packages to Seattle, with hotel, Mariners tickets, and a show at the 5th Avenue Theatre thrown in. A day or two later, more than a thousand miles from Seattle, I was at a barbecue lunch on a North Dakota ranch. After a long morning’s calf branding, Minneapolis now six hundred miles away, I asked my neighbor which baseball team was most closely followed in these parts. “Mariners,” he gruffly said, as if dismissing a silly question. Seattle’s reach is that long. The Montana novelist Deirdre McNamer had a piece in the New York Times Magazine not long ago, describing how she and a Missoula friend would drive to Seattle to get their hair done. Five hundred miles for a haircut.
It’s been a long while since I last saw a gillnetter at work off Seattle’s waterfront, a laden timber freighter heading north, or even a log tow. Puget Sound chinook salmon are now listed under the Endangered Species Act. Market changes and Clinton-era restrictions on logging in federal lands have drastically reduced the visibility of the timber industry. Most of the lumber mills, whose acrid steam used to give the coastal Northwest its characteristic smell, have closed down during my time here.
Seventeen years ago, Seattle was still, if only just, a regional city, connected with its hinterland by a complex skein of cultural and economic threads and tendons. Grunge rock—the music for which Seattle was becoming famous when I first arrived—provides a nice example. Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, the founding members of Nirvana, both came, in Cobain’s words, “from the bowels of a redneck logger town called Aberdeen, WA,” but it took Seattle, the local metropolis, with its clubs, record producers, and studios (and its ready supply of heroin) to broadcast to the world the band’s drum-heavy strain of backcountry Weltschmerz and fury.
Like the wood-products industry, the rock scene depended on a close symbiotic relationship between outlying counties and a provincial hub. Since then, Seattle has become postregional, paying far closer attention to the hourly fluctuations of the NASDAQ and Nikkei indices than it does to what’s happening in its immediate vicinity. Increasingly divorced from the hinterland, it now seems to float more in virtual space than in the regional space that until surprisingly recently used to define and sustain it. For both the hinterlanders and many old-guard Seattleites, this uprooting has been a painful and incomprehensible process, alienating them from the city they’d long regarded as theirs by right of birth.
Microsoft came here with its twenty-eight employees from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1979, for a tangle of reasons. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were returning to their hometown; the high-tech side of Boeing had warmed the bed for the nascent software industry; the University of Washington was turning out a steady supply of graduates in computer science; the growing satellite cities of Bellevue and Redmond on the east side of Lake Washington offered cheaper office space than could be found in the Bay Area, which was considered as a possible alternative; Gates’s Seattle network of influential family and friends could be counted on as a deep pool of advisers and investors; and the out-of-the-way character of the city provided the right atmosphere in which to develop a then-experimental—and always congenitally secretive—company.
Microsoft’s impact on Seattle was already making itself felt on the streets when I arrived. Its young workforce, androgynously dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts, topped by Velcro-fastened outdoor gear from Eddie Bauer and REI, looked like a culture in the making. Their air of perpetual studentdom was reinforced by Microsoft calling its headquarters “the campus,” and they worked eccentric, studentlike “all-nighters,” which explained their seemingly permanent attachment to paper cups of espresso coffee. Caffeine was their acceptable vice, as cigarettes and martinis had been to earlier generations, and a symbol of their sleepless labors at the keyboard. Had Howard Schultz (who bought out Starbucks from his former employers in 1987) not existed, Seattle would’ve had to invent him.
Not since the great influx of blue-collar workers who came from the south and east to work for Boeing during the Second World War had Seattle seen such a tide of incomers. The college-educated migrants of the 1990s, most from the urban East Coast and California, generated a riot of new construction: for them, pastel-colored condo blocks, mountain-bike shops, branches of Starbucks on every other corner, kayak schools, and assembly-required furniture showrooms sprang suddenly into being. Outside of Abu Dhabi in the 1970s, I’d never seen so many tall cranes maneuvering ponderously against the sky.
The rise and rise of Microsoft has had an intense magnetic force, drawing into its field dozens of small software outfits angling to be acquired by the “big M.” Departing executives, retiring from Microsoft when their stock options “vested,” set up their own Seattle-based enterprises, such as Rob Glaser’s RealNetworks. Other businesses, such as Expedia.com, were spun off from their parent company but stayed in the city. Seattle, swarming with qualified job seekers (the inept waiter at one’s restaurant table almost invariably a recent arrival, with a degree in computing), became the perfect site for Internet-related start-ups, from Amazon in 1994 to Zillow just last year (this is a site where, dear to Seattle’s moneymaking heart, you can surveill your own and your neighbors’ houses and check their current market prices). By the mid-1990s, it was far easier to find obliging venture capitalists (or “VCs,” like the Viet Cong) than it was to find a carpenter or plumber. For a period, the city seemed flooded with money in search of the next smart idea to be hatched by a couple of kids in a garage.
Such a bonanza might have overwhelmed a smaller city, but Seattle was sufficiently big and diversified to seem on the surface rather underwhelmed by its latest stroke of fortune: having taken the gold rush in its stride, it wasn’t about to have its head unduly turned by Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. It helped that much of the frenetic action was taking place across the water on the East Side, in Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond, which indigenous Seattleites tend to consider as remote as a chunk of Southern California that has unaccountably washed up on their shore. Boeing, the grizzled giant, supplied a surprising counterbalance; even after its head office moved to Chicago in 2001, it remains Seattle’s biggest employer of local labor, outstripping Microsoft by a ratio of almost two to one (60,000 to 35,000). With queues of container ships anchored in Elliott Bay, waiting to be unloaded at the docks on Harbor Island, and the Alaskan fishing fleet headquartered at Fishermen’s Terminal on the Ship Canal, it was possible, if you chose your vantage point with care, to pretend that the city was going about its business as usual, more seaport and manufacturing center than Silicon Valley North.
It took the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization in late November 1999 to fully expose the deepening rift between the old city and the new. This was at the delirious top of the boom, with the NASDAQ set to break 4,000 by Christmas and venture capital growing on trees. At the “Battle of Seattle,” the headlines and pictures were overly concerned with black-masked “Oregon anarchists” smashing the windows of chain stores and looting them; but what I saw was an enormous, mostly local, all-age crowd of men and women—welders, machinists, dockers, store clerks, fishermen, timber-industry workers, students—marching together under the aegis of the union federation AFL-CIO, in a peaceful and sometimes witty demonstration. “Globalization” was the catchword of the moment, but the real target was much closer to home.
