At War, At Home and Abroad
One week in, and it's already been quite a year. What does it mean to be at war?
It has been two weeks since I’ve written an article for Wide Left. Some of that is because of the holidays, but a lot of it is because the purview of Wide Left’s coverage range is broad and events have piled up over the past few weeks.
I had planned to write about the illegal strike on Venezuela, a war-not-war, earlier this week. I had to drop that to pick up a piece Wide Left will be publishing about our All-Pro teams and postseason awards. As I began writing that piece, I saw the news that ICE agents killed a woman in the Powderhorn neighborhood, a walk not too far from my current home and just blocks away from where I nearly purchased a house six years ago.
Her name is Renee Nicole Good. Within minutes of the report that ICE officer Jonathan Ross murdered Good, the Department of Homeland Security released statements arguing, absurdly, that Ross’ decision to shoot was motivated by a legitimate fear for his life and that Good attempted to run him over in an act of “domestic terrorism.” They chose to defend his actions before they could conduct any reasonable investigation.
The initial statements made by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem are so far off from reality that they demonstrate the knee-jerk willingness to lie to defend their fascistic actions more than truly investigate an incident of brutality from law enforcement.
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly, and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him, and my understanding is that she was hit and is deceased.
Dozens of videos of the incident exist on social media and multiple video forensics teams, including those at the New York Times, Washington Post and Bellingcat, have demonstrated the absurdity of those claims. Ross, violating DHS policy by approaching the vehicle from the front and obstructing it, easily sidestepped a vehicle turning away from him and shot Good in the face multiple times.
The Department of Justice’s Use of Force policies have gone somewhat viral in response to the Good’s murder, but it should be noted that ICE officers fall under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, whose use of force policies are slightly different.
Nevertheless, the text of the DHS guidance policies and the jurisprudence surrounding deadly force would suggest that the decision to shoot clearly violated policy, particularly because shooting is not considered justified if one can “[move] out of the path of the vehicle.”
This is, of course, only relevant in a world where law could be objective and we had a reasonable belief that it would be enforced.
Witnesses described contradictory orders given to Good and also described ICE officers as obstructing the arrival of medical aid.
Later that day, a close friend of mine had plans to attend an ICE observer training. Another close friend of mine attended one on Monday. Since writing my post on attending No Kings the day a shooter killed state representative Melissa Hortman, along with her husband, while critically injuring state senator John Hoffman, his wife and his daughter, I have attended a few anti-ICE protests and at least one anti-ICE action besides.
Between text messages telling me to be safe and other text messages asking me to attend another action, it feels like I’ve never left 2020 behind.
In a sense, all of my political histories — not just 2020 — have clashed together in the past week.
Shadows of Fallujah
In March of 2003, the United States proceeded with “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” ostensibly meant to inhibit then-President Saddam Hussein from deploying weapons of mass destruction.
For a 15-year-old Arif, it was a turning point, politically. It was the first time I had ever felt hopeless — months of protest, impassioned argument, and ardent belief had produced nothing.
It is difficult to overstate how inevitable it felt; the immaterial lack of consequence for a pathetic showing by Colin Powell to make the United States’ case for invasion in front of the United Nations, the continued public case-making for an invasion in the media by pundits and administration officials and the clear bad-faith connections that politicians — mostly Republicans but a good number of Democrats — would imply between the terrorist attacks on September 11 and Hussein.
To a teenager, the concept of clichéd imagery had not yet taken root, so it was impossible not to envision the oncoming war like a roiling black stormcloud, visible on the horizon and impossible to stop or run away from.
