by The End of the 00s

I always found it strange when polemicists denounced George W. Bush for saying, after 9/11, that Americans should go shopping. Andrew Bacevich, who’s emerged as possibly the premiere root-and-branch critic of American militarism, wrote an impassioned op-ed explaining the reasoning behind that critique. “From the very outset, the president described the ‘war on terror’ as a vast undertaking of paramount importance,” Bacevich hectored in 2008. “But he simultaneously urged Americans to carry on as if there were no war.” What in the world were we supposed to do? Stand in line to fill out job applications at munitions factories? Devote a larger percentage of the day to re-spooling footage of the Towers falling? Militarize our lives even further? George Bush could never have exploited that. This was the anti-militarism critique, remember.

Bacevich’s idea was that blocking off the psychic exits-entertainment, principally-to the great terror nightmare of the last decade would have awakened the country to the unbounded costs of a global war. But that goes against the grain of American experience. Consider the origins of Guantanamo Bay, the decade’s trademark symbol of American descent into impunity. Guantanamo was a solution to two legal hurdles that appear to be mutually insurmountable.

First: the longer you hold someone in detention, the likelier it is that he’ll mount a legal challenge to his confinement, even if he’s taken from the battlefields of Afghanistan. So in late 2001, a group of Bush’s lawyers-most notably John Yoo at the Justice Department, David Addington at the White House and Jim Haynes at the Pentagon-argued that those long-term detainees needed to be held on foreign soil, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Guantanamo Bay, a naval base in southeastern Cuba used by the U.S. for 100 years, was a compromise choice.

But. Let’s say you wanted to torture those detainees. There are laws against that. But those laws, like the federal Torture Statute, apply to government employees operating overseas, where, Congress once reasoned, torture is more likely to occur. So to circumvent the federal Torture Statute, the lawyers wrote, Guantanamo is “included within the definition of the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

From that deliberate absurdity-Guantanamo Bay is and is not the United States of America, depending on the law you need to flout-flowed years of descent into rogue-nationhood. This is a sampling of what resulted: An interrogation log of one of several people believed to be the intended 20th 9/11 hijacker records that at 10 a.m. on November 25, 2002 at Guantanamo, Mohammed al-Qahtani (“Detainee #063”) urinated in his pants after his interrogators intravenously administered him fluids for three and a half hours and refused to let him use the bathroom until he told them about new al-Qaeda plots. That was considered a humane alternative to, say, letting dogs maul detainees. Because in the America of the Aughts, we just let detainees think we were going to let the dogs maul them. “Using dogs is equal to the Fear Up technique,” a former Guantanamo commander, Major General Mike Dunlavey, explained to an investigator in 2005, referring to a long-legal interrogation method of exploiting a detainee’s fear of the unknown. “It breaks [detainees’] concentration in response to the interrogation techniques. They would be thinking about that dog.”

Quick: does anyone really think that avoiding an extra trip to H&M; or another Venti Latte would have stopped this kind of depravity?

But let’s be fair to Bacevich. When I visited Guantanamo Bay in the summer of 2005-the middle of this wretched, spiritually-draining decade-the last thing I expected to find was the summit, the epitome, the apotheosis of the Bush era’s epic union of consumerism and brutality. Yes: Guantanamo Bay has a gift shop. I bought this adorable plush iguana there. I’ll explain.

Guantanamo Bay, as we understand it today, is actually two things in one. Ever since the U.S. took it for use as a coaling station during the Spanish-American War, it’s been a 45-square mile naval base and Cold War anachronism. As a result, if you drive through it, you see all the creature comforts necessary for extended naval deployments. Southern-style plantation houses for senior officers and their families. Kindergartens. A giant outdoor movie theater. Sports leagues. And something called a NEX, or a Naval Exchange, the Navy’s equivalent of the Army’s post exchanges. Think of them like a minimally stocked mall compressed into a single store. The NEX is where you get your toiletries, fresh batteries, new DVDs, video games, condoms, new socks and underwear, snacks, somewhat recent magazines. And souvenirs of your tour.

Those souvenirs-more on them in a second-would be less discomfiting if a small section of Guantanamo wasn’t reserved for the detention of several hundred alleged terrorists. You heard endlessly throughout this decade they were “the worst of the worst.” But they never were. Those people, like 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were held not by the military but by the CIA, in undisclosed prisons where agency interrogators tortured the shit out of them. (Literally. There was a torture technique called “prolonged diapering.”)

These guys at Guantanamo were sort of like the middle tier: not bad enough for those so-called Black Sites, but too valuable from an intelligence perspective or too dangerous from a military perspective to be held in the U.S.’s huge prison at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. They were held in a place called Camp Delta, a complex of six prisons built in the Aughts after the old open-air mesh cages of Camp X-Ray proved to be insufficient for holding people forever. Camp Delta is just a small slice of Guantanamo. And it’s only a few hundred yards from the NEX.

I was there on a Potemkin tour in the summer of 2005. The military used to arrange for a four-day journalists’ tour so the press could see how great conditions in Guantanamo actually are. Cuba is baking hot in the summer, easily over 100 degrees, and the pace of the tour is accordingly lethargic, which is appropriate, given the fact that you go there to see indefinite detention. Over the course of touring, two right-wing radio journalists and I were given time to speak with Guantanamo’s guards, who told us detainees threw cocktails of body fluids at them. At night, we got drunk with our cheerful Army handlers at the officers’ club and base’s tiki bar, a low-key spot near a cliff on the edge of the island, as they debated whether Star Fleet in Star Trek was a Navy or Air Force outgrowth. (It is very obviously the Navy; Admiral Kirk, fellas.) I bonded with one of my press handlers, an Iraq veteran named Justin Valera Behrens, over our mutual patronage of the fully-nude strip club Super-Sexe when in Montreal. Justin would later return to his Pennsylvania home to run for Congress, unsuccessfully.

All that was to soften us up for what we saw in Camp Delta. Camp Delta-why don’t I just refer you to the magazine piece I wrote about this-is no joke. The individual-detention units, Camps One through Three, feature small metal cages painted green, barely big enough for a bed, a hole in the floor to relieve oneself, and a Qu’ran slung from a surgical mask (to keep it off the ground). An hour of exercise is allotted per day, we were told. (I’m not sure what, if anything, about those conditions have changed in the intervening four years.) Camp Four is the group-detention units, dormitory-style imprisonment for more docile detainees, who get access to board games and a small area for playing soccer in exchange for being calm. Those detainees wear tan jumpsuits. The orange ones are for detainees who pose a danger to the guards. When I walked into Camp Delta, I saw a detainee in an orange jumpsuit being strapped down to the flatbed of a small motorized cart for transport to God-knows-where. He glowered at us when he caught us looking at him. I think back on that when I hear right-wing protesters tell me that their freedom is jeopardized by Obama’s attempts to restore the top marginal tax rate to its 2001 level.

When we were done with our Camp Delta tour, we got into a small bus and drove the five or so minutes it took to get to the NEX for some refreshments. Now, on your way to the NEX from Camp Delta, you encounter something that gives the lie to the idea that Guantanamo detainees are too dangerous to be held in the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, which is the Obama administration’s destination for a still-undetermined number of them. That’s the transplanted bougainvillea of the officers’ families residence. This is literally a small ersatz suburban community with manufactured lawns, looking like the opening credits to Weeds, right downhill from a facility housing hundreds of alleged terrorists. I saw a Big Wheel left out on someone’s porch.

The NEX, however, is even more jarring. On most U.S. military bases overseas, you can buy souvenirs of your tours, and the NEX is no exception. It just happens that Guantanamo souvenirs commemorate service to a policy of extralegal indefinite detention that most of humanity considers barbaric. And this puts Naval officers who aren’t part of the detention facility-and especially their children-in a shitty spot.

For instance: there’s a rack at the NEX filled with refrigerator magnets decorated with kids’ names. Those magnets show a smiling dolphin bursting from some ocean spray in front of a rainbow, above your kid’s name and the legend GUANTANAMO BAY. I was dating a girl named Sue at the time, so I scanned the magnet rack for the S’s.

Then come the t-shirts. There were dozens of them, hanging in rows on the wall like at a skate shop. Again, the shirts were another unfortunate consequence of Guantanamo’s transition into an internationally infamous detention facility. Some of them, trying to be zany, rattled off lists of how you’d know you’ve spent too much time at Guantanamo, like, for instance, apathy to the pine cone-shaped shit excreted by the base’s signature rodent, the Banana Rat. (Of course, the shirts meant how military officers knew they’d spent too much time at Guantanamo, not detainees, who document overlong stays through hunger strikes and habeas corpus petitions and suicide attempts.)

But a minority of the shirts for sale were targeted at the newest NEX customer: the guard. Perhaps, you manned a guard post at the perimeter of Delta. Maybe you’d be interested in a silkscreened black silhouette of your post, above a legend that reads “The Taliban Towers: Five-Star Lodging.” (A star for each of the military services. Yes, they count the Coast Guard.) Or let’s say you were part of the military command supervising the maintenance of the prisons, officially titled the Joint Detention Operations Group. There is a shirt for you, featuring a snarling cartoon pit bull, because — get it? — you serve in the JDOG. (Dunlavey: “Using dogs is equal to the Fear Up technique….”)

My radio-host friends giggled and, truth be told, I giggled along with them. I packed my arms full with $100 worth of shirts to take home for my friends, family and co-workers. The only thing I kept for myself was the adorable 23-inch green plush iguana with GUANTANAMO BAY stitched across both his sides in yellow thread. Some explanation: Guantanamo Bay is a safe haven for iguanas. Cuba has become so poor under the burden of sclerotic communism and decades of U.S. trade sanctions that the populace has taken to eating the once-abundant reptiles. The smart iguanas have migrated to Guantanamo, where U.S. environmental laws protect the endangered creatures. Many open spaces on Guantanamo feature a lazy lizard sunning herself on a flat rock. Naturally, young kids who spend a slice of their life growing up on the base will want a stuffed iguana doll. The NEX is happy to serve that market, offering a snuggle-ready doll manufactured by the Fiesta company of Vernon, California and assembled in China. I picked one up and took him back home, where my dog tried to eat him. Ever since then he’s guarded my desk at work. He’s a conversation starter.

Obama will try to close Guantanamo early next year. There will be no reprisal for anyone who designed the policies that created the detention facility, aside from whatever their consciences impose, and if Dick Cheney’s Politico interviews are any indication, that isn’t much of a penalty. A report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Management that reportedly recommends professional sanctions against Yoo and his former DOJ boss, the federal judge Jay Bybee, has been long suppressed by both the Bush and Obama administrations. Senate reports have exhaustively documented the torture that their work encouraged, at Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. But Yoo still has his tenured teaching position at Berkeley’s prestigious Boalt Hall. His legal expenses, a consequence of defending himself against torture victims who want restitution, are paid for by you, every April 15.

I’d like to say that the end of this horrific decade will end the legacy of places like Guantanamo Bay. But Americans are unique in fooling ourselves that the slate wipes clean every time a calendar year hits a multiple of ten. There is no piece of legal architecture in place today that would prevent the opening of neo-Guantanamo, for the very good reason that the statutes against torture are really fucking clear about prohibiting torture, and they predated Guantanamo — yet still Guantanamo occurred, outside the law, with no consequence for its architects. The Thomson prison, central to Obama’s plans to close Guantanamo, will not allow ex-Guantanamo inmates access to any visitors besides the Red Cross and their lawyers and law enforcement. Its inmates will be tried not in federal courts, but in military commissions that still allow for the admission of hearsay as evidence, something the U.S. Constitution does not look on keenly. Tom Parker of Amnesty International said, on the day the Thomson plan was announced, that all Obama is doing is “changing the Zip Code of Guantanamo.” The best that can be said so far is that it doesn’t have a gift shop.

Spencer Ackerman covers national security for the Washington Independent. He has written for such fanzines as Inside Front, Viral or Bacterial? and Supplicant, but these days he maintains a blog called Attackerman.

by John Del Signore

Previously in our tale of Christmas-time Santa-employment: Part One.

One my first day, Patricia the Saks Santa-wrangler and I rode the escalators up to the eighth floor and turned off into a long, gray hallway lined with lockers. Sales clerks squeezed by us carrying trays of food and drink.

“There’s an employee cafeteria back here in case you ever want anything to eat,” she said.

“Nobody likes a skinny Santa!”

“Right. Here we are.”

Patricia opened a door into a storage closet packed with boxes. On a hanger against the wall, my costume dangled like a velvet noose. It was a bulging one-piece padded shell with red velvet pants sewn into a candy-cane top with little pockets. The ensemble was accented with black boots and a floor-length red velvet cape that would get stuck in the escalator if I didn’t hike it up. The white beard, wig, red cap and gloves were piled on the floor.

She pointed out an enormous red velvet sack.

“That’s for the candy canes, which are in these boxes. Here’s a copy of your schedule. You get a half-hour break at 3:30. The men’s room is down the hall if you need to use that. So… What else? I think that’s everything. Any questions? Okay, great! Well, have fun.”

She stepped out of the room but immediately poked her head in.

“One more thing: there’s another guy who uses the costume on your days off, so just try to keep it clean, okay?”

And that explained why the inside of the suit was damp! At least now I know it’s not urine, I thought to myself.

Or do I?

Half an hour later, I stepped out onto the floor of Saks Fifth Avenue as the living embodiment of Saint Nicholas, Father of Modern Christmas, a 6’3″ elf-rustler in charge of churning out the cheer.

“Oh, look! It’s Santa! Look, hon! LOOK! SANTA!”

They set upon me immediately, at least twenty of them. Blinded by the flashing cameras, I sprayed candy-canes in a circle and yelled ‘Ho-Ho-Ho!’ in my jolliest James Earl Jones voice. My senses were swimming in the inferno of the suit.

It was that irritating sensation of wearing too many layers in a crowded shopping mall, cursing yourself for not leaving your coat in the car. But the Santa suit generated the warmth of not one overcoat, but four. Plus gloves. Plus a thick hat covering your head to make sure no heat escapes, and beneath that hat, a wig that hangs down the back of your neck, and a scratchy beard that smothers your face, so that the only part of your entire body exposed to the world is that small region beneath the eyes where your cheeks glow like jolly little blazing tree stumps.

Within minutes the inner foam of the fat suit had the consistency of steamed cabbage. But the perspiration didn’t stop there. My feet were pitiful little Pomeranians melting in a microwave set on high.

“Aren’t you a little young to be Santa?” one elderly woman quipped, the first of thousands to fire that hardball at me.

“Oh, young lady, flattery will get you everywhere,” I chuckled, hugging her with one arm and then staggering on through the throng.

Saks does Santa a little differently than most department stores. Instead of a single seat of power in the center of the store, they employ a ‘Roving Santa’ to wander around spreading the Good Consumer News. According to Patricia’s schedule, my day began up on the eighth floor at noon. Santa was to spend a half-hour on each floor, finally finishing on the main floor for the last hour, from five to six: prime time.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” I choked, passing out candy canes to customers as they stepped off the escalator on the eighth floor. “Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!”

“Come on, Santa, put a little more oomph into that Ho-Ho-Ho!” a woman with two teenage boys ordered as she grabbed a candy-cane from my hand.

It became immediately clear that I wasn’t going to cut it. Already I could feel a rash forming around my lips from the wet beard. My break was not for three more hours-and then it would be back in the suit for another three-hour shift of joy and cheer. I ducked behind a row of mannequins and yanked my beard down to breathe.

This wasn’t worth it. Not for the money, not for the power, not even for the chance to inculcate children with Marxist ideology.

But just when I was about to tear off the wig and head back downriver, I suddenly remembered my old friend alcohol. Yes, it made perfect sense. Santa has to get jolly somehow, doesn’t he?

The mere thought of oiling the furnace with the balm of cheap whiskey was enough to bring the sparkle back to Santa’s eye.

I slapped the beard back on and returned to the floor. Three boys stepped off the elevator with their mother.

“Merry Christmas, boys!” I cried.

“We’re Jewish,” said their mother. Yes, the boys did appear to be wearing yarmulkes. They were but the first of many Jews to receive accidental Christmas blessings from an insensitive Santa.

So my little life as a sodden saint began. I quickly found a nice routine for myself. I would swing by the employee cafeteria at eleven-thirty and fill up a giant cup halfway to the top with ginger ale and plenty of ice. (I’d also grab a large frozen yogurt.) Then I would lock myself in Santa’s little changing room, fill the rest of the Big-Gulp with Wild Turkey, and quickly consume the beverage and frozen dessert while putting on the sweaty layers of foam.

Time flies when you’re lost in a steamy, booze-soaked haze. In fact, the first three hours of my shift were usually when my most inspired work occurred.

It’s important to keep in mind here that unlike most department stores, there is no children’s toy department at Saks. This is not to say that a steady stream of li’l ones didn’t find me, but the vast bulk of my audience consisted of solitary women. Many of these women looked remarkably similar, inching up toward middle age. Nearly all were severely thin. They picked through the array of high-end merchandise with palpable ennui, but when their eyes fell upon the six-foot-four Santa, enormous smiles would creak across their faces.

As these women approached me to accept a candy-cane from my gloved hand, I would look into their eyes and sometimes glimpse the adult pushing the little girl aside. When they realized that standing before them was no geriatric elf, but a healthy young man buried away under all that hair and fat, the innuendo would begin.

The following are comments made to Santa Claus by women, either alone or shopping with friends:

“Ooh, Santa, you know how naughty I’ve been this year because you’ve seen me when I’m sleeping.”

“Oh, Santa, I’d like to see what you’ve got for me under that suit.” (Sometimes accompanied by attempted grab at Santa’s ass.)

“Oh, Santa, I want to come for a ride in your sleigh. Why don’t you to take me up to the North Pole — so I can melt it.”

“Santa, I’ve been so naughty, I can’t wait for you to stuff my stocking with your hot, black coal.”

I swear on Donner and Blitzen, these are actual quotes, to which I would usually respond with: “Ho! Ho! Ho! Why don’t you give Santa your phone number?” Never had one taker.

Why did these women feel such a feral need to sexual harass an innocent young (and pretty drunk) man drowning in his own sweat? One theory is the obvious some-kinda-Oedipal urge of the young girl for the old man. But I was not actually an old man, and they were definitely not young girls, so go figure. Maybe it had something to do with sexual-harassment payback. Now it was the man’s turn to be the (literally) hot young thing in uncomfortable shoes, and they finally got to don the hard hat and heckle.

Or perhaps they really did want to unwrap Santa’s package, but when he actually set it under the tree they were too timid to take it.

Tomorrow, our concluding installment, in which-well, did you think this was going to end particularly well for Santa?

John Del Signore is currently employed by Gothamist.

Dan Schneider, who is responsible for pretty much every non-animated show on Nickelodeon, has a list of “funny” phrases that deserve to be retired. It includes “Did I say that out loud,” “Too much information!” and the ever-popular “Really?” I would add the “with [X]’s [genitalia]” construction, but otherwise, yes.

Pick your poison, because THIS is what’s out there today: Jingle Jugs are on sale for $9.99! or “what are you going to do? tell mom and dad i uploaded your dick sucking list to facebook?” Can’t we just call it Christmas already? Also, I cannot imagine how awful it must be to be a teenager in this modern era.

For those that bought our 2010 Benefit Calendar, a few things! It looks like they’re shipping, so, 1) Here is an explanatory one-pager that you can print yourself, in case you’re giving these as gifts and you want it explained what the heck is going on here: It is a PDF file. 2) When the money comes through, which should be just after New Year’s, we are going to send Zack a nice chunk of change. Yay! Good job! And 3) Now a few words from Zack! (And also a picture of him on a fake fur rug in a Santa hat, in honor of the season.)

Zack writes:

I have been blown away by all of the kind words-this having all started with a piece of an old box and some leftover house paint. I don’t consider any of what I do extraordinary; it’s just something I feel I have to do, none of which would be possible without the people that have preceded me while putting so much on the line. If it wasn’t for things like One magazine, or a few pissed-off drag queens at a rundown bar called the Stonewall, I wouldn’t have the ability to write into the local paper or to stand on the court house lawn protesting-doing something that, not 50 years ago, could have resulted in jail or worse. I think that everyone fights for gay rights in their own way but in the end it all builds to the same goals and dreams. The drag queens are out there with a self confidence that most will never know, while the protesters are aggressive in their willingness to put themselves on the forefront of the fight for equality. There are people working through political means who call their representatives and do the footwork of building legislation. The act of coming out or starting a family are all ways that push equality. Once people see that, yes. we are gay but we are sons, daughters, neighbors, parents, or friends they can put it into perspective. We are both all over and hiding in plain sight. Thanks again for this, your kindness, and to everyone that takes a stand in their own way. P.S. straight friends: sometimes we don’t give you your well deserved high fives, so: UP HIGH!

Word!

“What I’d like someday is to own a porcupine.”
-Subway vigilante Bernie Goetz chats with Cindy Adams. It was 25 years ago on this very day that Goetz, uh, “gained worldwide but unnecessary fame when he shot up four troublemakers on a train.” Happy Anniversary!

I cannot understand why Obama took so long to make his decision on what to do in Afghanistan. Look how simple it all seems!

Even though we are mired in a terrible recession, crime continues to fall nationwide. No one is quite sure why, but theories include extended unemployment benefits, the effects of the stimulus program, and the fact that pretty much everyone is sitting around at home doing nothing now, making burglary more difficult. Or maybe YOU JUST AREN’T TRYING HARD ENOUGH. “Property crimes” are down 6.1%. Americans really are getting lazier. [Via]

“Insurgents think of things we didn’t think about or were too lazy to mull over much. They have the spirits of street fighters. But whether you like them personally doesn’t really matter. That economy that flattened dreams all over? It emboldened them,” says today’s Observer, delivering their end-of-year list of 56 or so hot young-ish people (under 40) making inroads in our various economies. Okay, well, here we are on the Internet, which is the department of petty complaints, so: While the economy may have emboldened these great people, it sure didn’t emblacken them. Of the 56 people included, there’s one Southeast-Asian-American, one lone black man, one African-born woman of Indian descent, one Indian-American guy, one Australian of Sri Lankan descent, one biracial Mexican-American and two gay dudes. Plus one lady that at least looks lady-loving but probably is not. That’s 90% white and 97% straight. (Though, to be fair, there are also two dude business partners who used to work for Scott Rudin on the list, so you know: let’s just put them down as questionable. Heh.) Also? Not very many Jews, which is actually the weirdest thing of all.

If you’re traveling from JFK’s Delta terminal today, expect delays. And possibly tear gas.