Unhappy News: Mike Ford

I don't have much energy for writing here during the week, so I probably am not the first person to tell you that John M. "Mike" Ford died on Monday. His death was a shock, but alas not a surprise.

I didn't know Mike well, but I knew him off and on for a long time--I first met him at a fannish party in 1986; worked with him at Crossover in the 1990s; and ran into him occasionally online and off in the years following. Here are a couple of my anecdotes, and what i wrote about him for the Unplugged Games mailing list.

( Hic sunt anecdotes )

Unhappy news: You are mistaken; no one is screaming

I'm pretty sure I've quoted this before, but someone (Mark Kleiman? Matt Yglesias?) once said that he had originally thought of the modern Republican coalition as split into two camps--those who wanted to undo the Great Society and those who wanted to undo the New Deal. Then, as the Bush agenda became clearer, he thought it was split between those who wanted to roll back Reconstruction and those who wanted to roll back the Reformation.

As of yesterday, it is the opinion of the US Senate that we should undo Magna Carta.

A special place in hell is reserved for John McCain, who himself was subjected to wartime torture, giving the thumb's-up to waterboarding and The Conveyer. And right next to him is Arlen Specter, who condemned the Military Commissions Act for voiding habeas corpus and then voted for it anyway.

Here's where we are now:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the few short years since the first shackled Afghanshuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a globalnetwork of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

--14,000 detainees held in U.S. wartime prisons

Here's how we got here:

When U.S. civilian airplanes were spotted in late 2002 taking trips to and from Andrews Air Force Base, and making stops in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, journalists and plane-spotters wondered what was going on. It soon became clear that these planes were part of the largest covert operation since the Cold War era. Called extraordinary rendition, the practice involves CIA officials or contractors kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons around the world where they are held and often tortured, either at the hands of the host-country’s government or by CIA personnel themselves.

--Tracking the "Torture Taxi"

Here's where we end up:

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it -- but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.

--The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

And lest you think I'm being hyperbolic--I am, after all, a self-proclaimed political anger junkie:

(Q:) Didn't the Soviets mostly imprison and abuse their own citizens? So isn't it true that, in the American case, the "gulag" is a response to a real or perceived national security threat, while the Soviets were simply seeking to crush dissent?

(A:) During the Cold War the idea arose that the Gulag was primarily an instrument of terror to crush dissent. But declassified Soviet documents do not bear this out. By far, most of the people who landed in the Gulag were there for garden-variety offenses: theft of property, assault, hooliganism, and white-collar crime. They were not influential intellectuals who posed a threat to the regime, but poor, uneducated,and culturally marginalized peasants who broke draconian laws in order to make a living. The search for terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan has also targeted the weak and vulnerable. United States Army officials admit that 90 percent of the civilians detained in Iraq were later released without charges. The dragnet in Afghanistan also seems to have netted civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The detention of people who turn out to be innocent bystanders gives a new definition to the phrase "non-combatants."

--Six Questions on the American "Gulag" for Historian Kate Brown