01/26/15 – Gabriel Schivone – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Did you notice the Tom Dispatch piece on antiwar.com today?
It was, well, it's still at tomdispatch.com, and we're running it under Tom's name today at antiwar.com.
And it's called Bringing the Battlefield to the Border, or Gaza in Arizona, How Israeli High Tech Firms Will Up-Armor the U.S.-Mexican Border.
My God.
It's by Todd Miller and Gabriel M. Chavon.
And I got Gabriel on the line here.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you for having me.
I'm fine.
Thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
It says here you're a writer from Tucson, and you blog at the Electronic Intifada.
Very good.
Okay, so what a nightmare.
I guess, first of all, the article tends to really focus on Arizona.
Is that because they're kind of ahead of the curve on hiring Israelis to teach them how to build separation barriers?
In the cases here in southern Arizona, yes, that's correct.
And in the case of the federal government, it's long been a focus of U.S. border enforcement and immigration strategy, really since Clinton.
And now, are you metal detecting on a beach right now somewhere?
No, I'm actually in a building at the University of Arizona.
But I won't get here too much.
No, it's all right.
I'm just kind of playing around.
Okay, so I guess go ahead and start the story where you started here.
I won't even try to say the guy's first name, right, because it's too many vowels in a row for me.
IDF General came and gave a PowerPoint to these guys explaining here's what we're going to do.
Yeah, imagine the scene.
You're in a big arena where you expect to have sports events happening and lots of cheering.
That day, there was a lot of cheering, but from different people and in a different way.
And there were lots of border police folks in their uniforms, there were corporate executives in their suits.
And this Israeli Brigadier General is, I mean, he says, he clicks on screen, like he said, his PowerPoint presentation showing the enclosure wall in Gaza that the United States is paying for and that Israel maintains.
And he says, we have learned a lot from Gaza.
It's a great laboratory.
And he was surrounded by all sorts of high tech gadgets in the latest border policing technology.
There were things like surveillance balloons with high powered cameras floating over.
There were desert camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin, the largest military defense company in the world.
There were seismic sensor systems that detect the movement of people and all the other wonders of modern border policing.
But this wasn't a scene like, as we say, sketched out by a top dystopian writer like Ray Bradbury.
It was the top corporate techno innovators on the planet.
And he wasn't, this Israeli general wasn't surrounded by the Mediterranean, right by Gaza and some military installation.
He was in West Texas.
And he was speaking to U.S. corporate and border enforcement leaders about how his country has exploited an open air prison laboratory, which is Gaza, to modify and to perfect their latest border control and population control and military gadgets.
Yeah, it's always fun when they talk about experimenting and this kind of thing you get.
It reminds me of THX 1138, where they're torturing Robert Duvall.
But on the this side of the glass, they're having this very normal kind of conversation about, well, no, turn the dial.
No, you got it up a little too high there, buddy.
You know, where they're just playing with us like we're Gitmo inmates, you know.
And there really is a lot of truth there in terms of, I mean, I'm at the U of A right now, University of Arizona, and there is a detachment between scientific, talented engineers and leaders and scientists and the consequences of their work.
And this detachment is all sorts of moral and social, like you were saying, you know, on one end, there's this plated glass that can be the metaphor for outside the walls of the classroom where the police, where military is actually using their scientific applications and massacring people.
Oh, man.
So now you talk in here about the drones and the money and how Obama gave this big announcement.
And as you mentioned here, all the press attention got soaked up in the amnesty or not and how many people are going to be allowed to stay versus being deported.
But then, so everyone ended up overlooking just how much bipartisanship was going in to this border police state here.
And that's also really been lost in the whole discussion because what's really been taking the headlines and the so-called controversy is these narrow...
I'm sorry, you know what?
I'm terrible at watching the clock and we started late and I screwed up.
We got to go out to this break.
But when we get back, we'll be back with Gabriel Chavon about the new Israeli border between Texas, Arizona and Mexico.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Gabriel M. Chavon and he wrote this piece for Tom Dispatch, co-authored it with Todd Miller.
It's at TomDispatch.com and running today at AntiWar.com.
Gaza in Arizona, oh man, well, if I believed in collectivism and collective punishment like the Israelis and the American government do, then I would say that we deserve this.
But I don't believe in that.
It's of course innocent people, not those who support it who will be the victims, who already are the victims.
So that's the way that goes.
So if you could please, Gabriel, give us a little bit of a picture of what kind of changes we're really talking about, because they've been building fences and they've been expanding the funding and buying more trucks and hiring more federal cops down there on the border since quite a few years ago now, right?
Yeah, this is just a double expansion of the already unprecedented immigration enforcement apparatus.
So think of it as a balloon, just more and more and more expanding and what's going to happen as the human consequences of it are catastrophic and victims in the thousands and especially those who bear the brunt are undocumented migrants who are crossing the desert and dying in huge numbers and then those who face regular abuse and mistreatment in especially border patrol short-term custody and disappear in ICE prisons and that's their word.
The word disappear, which we can remember from the dirty wars and terrorist wars in Central America that the United States was funding in the 80s and 70s and before.
Oh man, it's just amazing that they would, I guess, you know, out of the mouths of babes kind of thing, right?
Where they don't know the connotation, they're just being honest.
Yeah, especially some of the people we quote in the article, they're very enthusiastic because they see this as a very exciting time for them.
The sort of corporate university intellectuals, they feel like they have the answer to a border problem and then there's profit to be made, so they're very excited.
When we talk with them, you can see it in the twinkle in their eye and they're very bubbly contrasted with when you talk with border patrol, for example, they'll talk in a very militaristic, calculated way of speaking, you know, neutralizing a threat and battlefield type discussion, but contrasted with that and corporate types and their suits and scientists in their labs, they talk very, very coolly, very excitedly about these prospects.
Right.
Yeah, people really need to understand how that works where, you know, when an expert comes to tell a bunch of meathead cops about here's the reality of how the Muslims are or here's what you need to know about our war with illegal immigration, they're basically filling empty vessels here and, you know, even if they make straight A's in that, it's still, that's all they know if they even get that right.
And it can be very, you know, very thin bases for the kind of things, like you're saying, just using the militarist terminology about, you know, enemies here and sectors to patrol there and this kind of thing escalates what is a civilian law enforcement matter at worst really into a virtual war zone.
And the responsibility really lies with us, with taxpayers and even intellectuals that, as you say, are filling empty vessels.
I mean, at the end of the day, border and military soldiers, they're following orders.
The ones who are designing policy and the ones who are helping design those policy are intellectuals and corporate innovators and the civilian chain of command.
And that's where social organizing can have a great impact.
Well, you know, you mentioned the Lockheed armored personnel carrier there.
So man, basically there goes the store right there.
We know they got their lobbyists and state legislators are no match for them in a million years.
But what are, you mentioned the intellectuals, the universities and the researchers.
And can you tell us some more of the companies and describe a little bit more of the vested interests who are so excited about this?
Sure.
Well, I'll stick to Tucson and Southern Arizona.
That's where this partnership is really crystallized here at the triangular partnership.
Think of it as here is the point in Southern Arizona and the sides of it come from Israel and Southern Arizona and Mexico.
And the headquarters are right here in Tucson.
The way that they described it to me and they call it global advantage is taking the best prospects, economic prospects of Mexican low wage labor to manufacture the high tech policing goods provided by Israeli companies that are lured to Southern Arizona to set up offices and build this metaphorical and literal boundary building complex here in Southern Arizona.
And the way that they do it is taking the regional strength that Southern Arizona and the technology clusters have to offer here that no other tech parks in the country and North America have to offer because they have something unique here.
And in many ways, they're right because they're in the belly of the beast.
You can say here in Southern Arizona, where it's long been the focus of federal government state resources to expand this border security enforcement ballooning apparatus.
They're right here.
And that's why they're very excited.
I mean, they bring the best of their university intellectual resources.
Man, isn't that just a tragedy that they've got Mexican employees making all the technology of their enslavement?
That's just sad.
It's like Palestinians who are reduced to having to work building the Israeli settlements on the West Bank because it's the only way they can feed their family, make it through the week to fight another day.
Exactly.
And many of them are referred to as Mexicans in the occupied territory because of the the industrial lingo is exported from what was experimented on migrants who worked in California.
And I'm specifically talking about the date pruning industry and the method of manual pruning of date trees was done by Mexican migrant workers.
They perfected it.
And then that kind of industry language of date pruning came to be brought along that short term name, which is Mexican.
So you'll see a cab drivers, migrant workers and others who are Palestinian being referred to as Mexican in the settlement.
Ain't that fitting?
Yeah.
Where Americans have a birthright to live and they don't.
Just incredible.
I'm sorry we can't keep going.
We're all out of time here and I got you on late and everything.
But thank you so much for your time today, Gabriel.
Thank you.
All right.
That's Gabriel M.
Chivoni.
He's at TomDispatch.com and Electronic Intifada.
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