On May 1, presumably not as a May day present, the Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj was released from 6 years of imprisonment in Guantanamo. Al-Hajj had been on a hunger strike for more than a year, and was reported to be 40 pounds under his normal weight, and looking far older than his 38 years. Partly this was due to the treatment he received at Guantanamo, America’s infamous torture prison, where he said he was interrogated hundreds of times, and subjected to beatings, extremes of temperature, sexual assault, and threats with military dogs—all the standard methods used by Americans against “terror war” captives in recent years. In addition, al-Hajj was reportedly force fed to keep him alive, a procedure which involved forcing a feeding tube up his nose and into his stomach twice a day, and which exacerbated the throat cancer he has suffered from. As is customary, no charges were offered to justify al-Hajj’s captivity. He was a Sudanese national working as a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, the Arabic news outlet which the United States has constantly attacked, both verbally and physically, since the beginning of its “war on terror.” Upon trying to enter Afghanistan in December 2001 to cover the war there, he was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned over to American forces. Held and abusively interrogated at Bagram Air Force Base and then at another prison facility in Kandahar until June 2002, he was then delivered, bound and gagged, to the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He remained there for 6 years.
In Sudan, where he was hospitalized following his release, Sami al-Hajj has made numerous statements about his imprisonment:
“Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantánamo...rats are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than 50 countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals….For more than seven years, I did not get a chance to be brought before a civil court. To defend their just case and to get the freedom that we’re deprived of, they ignored every kind of law, every kind of religion….
He concluded by saying: “My last message to the US administration is that torture will not stop terrorism—torture is terrorism.”
The U.S. response to al-Hajj’s claims of mistreatment follows a familiar pattern. ABC News featured three unnamed Pentagon “officials” who said that there was nothing to “substantiate his allegations that he was mistreated at Guantanamo.” These same officials tried to dismiss al-Hajj as “a manipulator and a propagandist.” (see Naomi Spencer, “Journalist released from Guantanamo details abuse,” May 5 2008, www.wsws.org) But there are countless accounts corroborating the harsh conditions at Guantanamo, as NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports in a May 4 piece called “A Prison of Shame, and It’s Ours.” Among them are memoirs, some already published, some due out soon, that confirm what Sami al-Hajj and others have described. Murat Kurnaz, a German citizen of Turkish descent, has a newly published memoir about his 5 years there, including long bouts of torture that “included interruptions by a doctor to ensure that he was well enough for torture to continue.” Other books are a memoir by an interpreter of Afghan descent, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, and an account, Kafka Comes to America, by American attorney Steven Wax. According to Kristof, these and other accounts reveal two essential truths about Gitmo: 1) “most of the inmates were probably innocent all along” but were turned over because of the huge cash rewards America offered; and 2) “torture was routine, especially early on. That’s why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.”
Al-Hajj’s release thus leaves us with several disturbing conclusions. It is not just what we now know about the torture tactics at Guantanamo (as well as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and other American “interrogation” sites), though that is injurious enough. It is the attitude of American (usually Bush administration) officials about it, which compounds the injury, for the official response is always the same: these are the “worst of the worst,” and so any tactic that produces the information we need is legitimate. Or, these allegations are simply “propaganda” produced by the “bad guys,” those Arab/Muslim fanatics who seek to harm us. What is left unsaid is the logical conclusion that too many Americans have accepted: we are fighting an inhuman, or sub-human enemy who does not deserve the common decency normally accorded to prisoners. These are not people, like our previous enemies; they are “things” to be manipulated in whatever way we wish.
The truth, however, is that this age-old justification for torture crumbles under even the slightest scrutiny. And that is not only because torture violates all the treaties and laws we have signed over the years, including our own constitution outlawing cruel and inhuman treatment. It is also because we now know that this type of torture did not begin with Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and has not been limited to the Arabs or Muslims we have been at such pains to dehumanize. As Alfred McCoy makes very clear in his A Question of Torture, there is a long history of this new kind of torture that began shortly after World War II, one that has been constantly perfected since then by the CIA among others. These methods were ready and waiting when the so-called “war on terror” was announced after 9/11, and were quickly and eagerly updated and implemented. My next post will go into that aspect of the story in detail. Suffice it to say here that even a cursory look at the methods McCoy lays out proves—even if we doubt the words of Arab/Muslims like Sami al-Hajj—that these torture techniques have been part of the American interrogator’s playbook for nearly a half century now, and have been used not only by American “interrogators” themselves, but spread like a new gospel to our “allies” around the world.
The only question for us who have now become revoltingly aware of such things is how do we, a complacent public, justify standing idly by and letting this happen, letting the perpetrators of this little shop of horrors operating in our name ride off not just unaccountable and unpunished, but richly rewarded for their crimes?
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, May 5, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Why Can't He Close the Deal?
Right after Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary, the pundits were busy dissecting the supposed “failure” of Senator Obama. The main question: “Why Can’t Obama Close the Deal?” Which means, given his big lead and his momentum coming out of the February and March primaries, why can’t he finish off Hillary?
The metaphor, of course, suggests that a presidential nomination is some sort of gunfight at the DC corral. But the metaphor notwithstanding, the reason Obama can’t eliminate his rival is simple: it’s called Racism. This nation always has, and arguably always will be the most racist nation on the planet. And by racism, I am talking specifically about racism against African Americans. The other forms of racism—against Asians and Hispanics and Pacific Islanders and East Indians and American Indians—can, and eventually will recede if not disappear. But the fundamental racism against those who were brought here from Africa as slaves, all the Emanicipation Proclamations and voters’ rights acts and affirmative action programs notwithstanding, persists to this day. It persists in patterns of living, it persists in patterns of education, it persists in the degree of punishment for crime, it persists in longstanding, deep-seated attitudes that are as American as apple pie.
Barack Obama thought he could transcend all this. He thought that his half-white background, his distinguished record at America’s most prestigious university, his stunning ability to speak the language of white folks better than they can themselves speak it, would neutralize all this. He thought that by not exploiting his blackness to garner votes, he could rise above petty racial politics and disarm the racists he must have known still existed in droves. And in a certain sense, and with a younger, more educated electorate, he has succeeded in this. At least partly.
Sadly, he ran into middle America. And middle Americans, not to mention southern and western Americans, have by no means risen above their instinctive racism. Which is to say, their resentment that some uppity Harvard-educated black man—and the one percent doctrine still holds for most Americans, i.e. if you’ve got even one percent African in your genes, you’re black—could actually lay claim to the American throne heretofore reserved for not just whites, but whites of a certain northern European background and skin tone. Preferably with names of only one syllable: Bush, Gore; or maybe two: Clinton, Johnson, Carter, Nixon. But Obama. Lord almighty, how could the Whitest of Houses contain a trisyllabic, fear-evoking name like that?
The proof of this, if proof is needed, lies in the numbers. Hillary Clinton has won every large state with a strong rural or powerful working-class population: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and California (large parts of which derive, ultimately, from southern states.) They are also states that harbor immigrants and their children—those who have always been able to derive some comfort from the fact that, though they may be low on the class totem pole, at least they can always look down upon that population which remains permanently below them. To have a representative of that population now lay claim to the highest office in the land is simply too much to bear. He must be brought down. And if Hillary fails to knock him off his horse, we can bet that the Republicans—whose entire winning strategy, from at least the time of Nixon, has been predicated on winning these very same rural and working-class southern and Midwestern voters—will prove only too eager to play their favorite election game, race baiting. Think George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads. Think Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.”
All this gives the lie to the constant protestations by American conservatives of their patriotic veneration for our founding documents: the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the Declaration’s ringing phrase that “all men are created equal.” For when it comes to the privacy of the presidential voting booth, the phrase that really counts is the add-on by Orwell in Animal Farm:
“…but some are more equal than others.”
Anything that challenges, in a fundamental way, that “more equal” status will be met with savagery. And, as we have seen with the Jeremiah Wright ads, it already has.
To be sure, hope springs eternal. America could still right itself, redeem itself. But at this point, it seems to me, ‘closing the deal’ is going to take a miracle.
Lawrence DiStasi
addendum, 4/26/08:
I saw Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers’ Journal last night. First of all, he struck me as an admirable figure—intelligent, passionate, and totally dedicated to his improving his people’s welfare (not to mention the fact that, unlike the Bush administration’s chicken hawks, this man served his country as a Marine for many years before becoming a pastor). Part of that dedication takes the form of his sermons, which educate his congregants about the truth of their past, and the truth of their country’s past. It’s an education that more white people should attend to. Then perhaps, they might not react to Wright’s passionate utterances—the 9/11 chickens coming home to roost; god damn America, etc.—with such condemnation. They might come to realize that though he sometimes lets his rhetoric go over the top, in its essentials Wright’s analysis of the African American condition, as well as the U.S. role in spreading misery both at home and around the globe, is spot on. America has gone around the world acting as if it can dominate and exploit every other nation and its people. It has assassinated or brought down democratically elected leaders in Chile, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Guatemala and elsewhere. It has bombed and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocents along the way, most recently in Iraq. This is what Wright meant by “chickens coming home to roost.” It is what he meant when he said “God damn America,” because for anyone who believes in a god, and that god’s commitment to justice, the statement would have to be credited. Perhaps that’s why it raised such a storm: those who found it offensive may have sensed the justice within it, and found the logical consequences of such divine justice too awful to contemplate. And so, like all who find the truth too mighty to bear, they choose to cling to their illusions and condemn the messenger. Which tactic might work for a while, might work to keep Obama in the Senate for a few more years and consign his pastor to the outer fringes, but it won’t work forever. Sooner or later, we’re all going to have to face those chickens.
The metaphor, of course, suggests that a presidential nomination is some sort of gunfight at the DC corral. But the metaphor notwithstanding, the reason Obama can’t eliminate his rival is simple: it’s called Racism. This nation always has, and arguably always will be the most racist nation on the planet. And by racism, I am talking specifically about racism against African Americans. The other forms of racism—against Asians and Hispanics and Pacific Islanders and East Indians and American Indians—can, and eventually will recede if not disappear. But the fundamental racism against those who were brought here from Africa as slaves, all the Emanicipation Proclamations and voters’ rights acts and affirmative action programs notwithstanding, persists to this day. It persists in patterns of living, it persists in patterns of education, it persists in the degree of punishment for crime, it persists in longstanding, deep-seated attitudes that are as American as apple pie.
Barack Obama thought he could transcend all this. He thought that his half-white background, his distinguished record at America’s most prestigious university, his stunning ability to speak the language of white folks better than they can themselves speak it, would neutralize all this. He thought that by not exploiting his blackness to garner votes, he could rise above petty racial politics and disarm the racists he must have known still existed in droves. And in a certain sense, and with a younger, more educated electorate, he has succeeded in this. At least partly.
Sadly, he ran into middle America. And middle Americans, not to mention southern and western Americans, have by no means risen above their instinctive racism. Which is to say, their resentment that some uppity Harvard-educated black man—and the one percent doctrine still holds for most Americans, i.e. if you’ve got even one percent African in your genes, you’re black—could actually lay claim to the American throne heretofore reserved for not just whites, but whites of a certain northern European background and skin tone. Preferably with names of only one syllable: Bush, Gore; or maybe two: Clinton, Johnson, Carter, Nixon. But Obama. Lord almighty, how could the Whitest of Houses contain a trisyllabic, fear-evoking name like that?
The proof of this, if proof is needed, lies in the numbers. Hillary Clinton has won every large state with a strong rural or powerful working-class population: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and California (large parts of which derive, ultimately, from southern states.) They are also states that harbor immigrants and their children—those who have always been able to derive some comfort from the fact that, though they may be low on the class totem pole, at least they can always look down upon that population which remains permanently below them. To have a representative of that population now lay claim to the highest office in the land is simply too much to bear. He must be brought down. And if Hillary fails to knock him off his horse, we can bet that the Republicans—whose entire winning strategy, from at least the time of Nixon, has been predicated on winning these very same rural and working-class southern and Midwestern voters—will prove only too eager to play their favorite election game, race baiting. Think George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads. Think Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.”
All this gives the lie to the constant protestations by American conservatives of their patriotic veneration for our founding documents: the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the Declaration’s ringing phrase that “all men are created equal.” For when it comes to the privacy of the presidential voting booth, the phrase that really counts is the add-on by Orwell in Animal Farm:
“…but some are more equal than others.”
Anything that challenges, in a fundamental way, that “more equal” status will be met with savagery. And, as we have seen with the Jeremiah Wright ads, it already has.
To be sure, hope springs eternal. America could still right itself, redeem itself. But at this point, it seems to me, ‘closing the deal’ is going to take a miracle.
Lawrence DiStasi
addendum, 4/26/08:
I saw Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers’ Journal last night. First of all, he struck me as an admirable figure—intelligent, passionate, and totally dedicated to his improving his people’s welfare (not to mention the fact that, unlike the Bush administration’s chicken hawks, this man served his country as a Marine for many years before becoming a pastor). Part of that dedication takes the form of his sermons, which educate his congregants about the truth of their past, and the truth of their country’s past. It’s an education that more white people should attend to. Then perhaps, they might not react to Wright’s passionate utterances—the 9/11 chickens coming home to roost; god damn America, etc.—with such condemnation. They might come to realize that though he sometimes lets his rhetoric go over the top, in its essentials Wright’s analysis of the African American condition, as well as the U.S. role in spreading misery both at home and around the globe, is spot on. America has gone around the world acting as if it can dominate and exploit every other nation and its people. It has assassinated or brought down democratically elected leaders in Chile, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Guatemala and elsewhere. It has bombed and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocents along the way, most recently in Iraq. This is what Wright meant by “chickens coming home to roost.” It is what he meant when he said “God damn America,” because for anyone who believes in a god, and that god’s commitment to justice, the statement would have to be credited. Perhaps that’s why it raised such a storm: those who found it offensive may have sensed the justice within it, and found the logical consequences of such divine justice too awful to contemplate. And so, like all who find the truth too mighty to bear, they choose to cling to their illusions and condemn the messenger. Which tactic might work for a while, might work to keep Obama in the Senate for a few more years and consign his pastor to the outer fringes, but it won’t work forever. Sooner or later, we’re all going to have to face those chickens.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
A Concentration of Evil
The more I read about torture by United States agents—CIA operatives, military special forces, hired mercenaries, and military police—the more unsettling the whole sordid situation becomes. The information now at hand is simply unassailable: the United States government consciously set out, after the attacks of 9/11, to “take off the gloves” when dealing with prisoners who might possibly have information about al Quaeda or the Taliban or anyone else in the Arab/Muslim world. Using techniques that had been around for years, some for centuries, some updated specifically for those likely to be captured in the current “war” on terror, intelligence agents determined that they could employ just about any method to extract information. They were aided and abetted and indeed prodded to do so by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and through him, by their commanders. The Secretary of Defense was in turn given the protection of the best legal “minds” in the White House and the Department of Justice, who issued a series of now-famous memos justifying virtually all means of gathering intelligence from captives, most of whom were placed in a category that voided the protections normally due them as prisoners.
All this took place in an atmosphere in which the United States President, George W. Bush, had promised, right after 9/11, to rid the world of evil—by which he meant the evil promulgated by those terrorists who had attacked the World Trade Center.
Instead, what took place was the greatest concentration of evil in the history of the American presidency. Consider who was in that White House. George W. Bush, from the moment he took office, indeed, before he even took office, demonstrated that morals simply did not apply to him. He could piously proclaim the virtues of military service, and remain AWOL from even the minimal duty he was obligated to perform in the Air National Guard. He could inveigh against the so-called Axis of Evil, and at the same time authorize to his staff virtually any measures in pursuing revenge: “any barriers in your way, they are gone.” He could preach about the bestial nature of the terrorists who had attacked our “civilized” values, and at the same time rebuff anyone—this time the Secretary of Defense, no nervous Nellie himself—who protested that retaliatory action could encounter certain legal obstacles:
“I don’t care what the international lawyers say,” brayed the President. “We are going to kick some ass.”
It was this climate created by the President, that led directly to the horrors at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo in Cuba.
But the president was not alone. Smirking quietly but malevolently behind him and beside him always was his president of vice, Richard Cheney. Cheney is that lovely man who once gave the finger in the Senate to a democrat who thwarted him, Senator Patrick Leahy, mouthing presidentially: “Go fuck yourself.” He’s that sporting duck hunter who famously shot his best friend in the face. He’s that zealot who pushed the concept of the unitary presidency—the notion that no law can constrain a president in time of war—to the point that, with the war on terror scheduled to last indefinitely, absolute presidential power becomes indefinite as well. Cheney is also the man in whose office the lawyer David Addington reigns—the one browbeating other white house lawyers to immunize the president and all his men from their crimes.
Then, of course, there were the other ethically-challenged legal eagles: Alberto Gonzalez, who had to resign from his Attorney General post in shame; John Yoo, who coined the term “quaint” to describe the Geneva Conventions, thus making their protections moot; and a host of others dedicated to removing all constraints on the torture of captives so long as the Decider in Chief gave torture his imprimatur. And he did. And they did. And the evil festered and suppurated and spread around the globe. And the White House, and all it touched, became a black house of horrors.
How to explain this? How to explain such a concentration of evil in one place at one time? No one really knows. Perhaps one can only look at it poetically: those who preach the gospel of absolute good and absolute evil, as George Bush has since taking office, as the conservatives have since forever—it is their prime article of faith—must ultimately practice what they preach. They must finally be caught up in the dualism to which they subscribe. For it is in the nature of dualism to be convertible: white easily shades into black, hot inevitably becomes cold, good cannot help but be infected by, and in the end defined by evil.
So it is in the Bush White House. Paint it and sanitize it and bleach it as they will, they can never hide what they have become and what it has become: a white house turned black by, inhabited by demons.
Lawrence DiStasi
All this took place in an atmosphere in which the United States President, George W. Bush, had promised, right after 9/11, to rid the world of evil—by which he meant the evil promulgated by those terrorists who had attacked the World Trade Center.
Instead, what took place was the greatest concentration of evil in the history of the American presidency. Consider who was in that White House. George W. Bush, from the moment he took office, indeed, before he even took office, demonstrated that morals simply did not apply to him. He could piously proclaim the virtues of military service, and remain AWOL from even the minimal duty he was obligated to perform in the Air National Guard. He could inveigh against the so-called Axis of Evil, and at the same time authorize to his staff virtually any measures in pursuing revenge: “any barriers in your way, they are gone.” He could preach about the bestial nature of the terrorists who had attacked our “civilized” values, and at the same time rebuff anyone—this time the Secretary of Defense, no nervous Nellie himself—who protested that retaliatory action could encounter certain legal obstacles:
“I don’t care what the international lawyers say,” brayed the President. “We are going to kick some ass.”
It was this climate created by the President, that led directly to the horrors at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo in Cuba.
But the president was not alone. Smirking quietly but malevolently behind him and beside him always was his president of vice, Richard Cheney. Cheney is that lovely man who once gave the finger in the Senate to a democrat who thwarted him, Senator Patrick Leahy, mouthing presidentially: “Go fuck yourself.” He’s that sporting duck hunter who famously shot his best friend in the face. He’s that zealot who pushed the concept of the unitary presidency—the notion that no law can constrain a president in time of war—to the point that, with the war on terror scheduled to last indefinitely, absolute presidential power becomes indefinite as well. Cheney is also the man in whose office the lawyer David Addington reigns—the one browbeating other white house lawyers to immunize the president and all his men from their crimes.
Then, of course, there were the other ethically-challenged legal eagles: Alberto Gonzalez, who had to resign from his Attorney General post in shame; John Yoo, who coined the term “quaint” to describe the Geneva Conventions, thus making their protections moot; and a host of others dedicated to removing all constraints on the torture of captives so long as the Decider in Chief gave torture his imprimatur. And he did. And they did. And the evil festered and suppurated and spread around the globe. And the White House, and all it touched, became a black house of horrors.
How to explain this? How to explain such a concentration of evil in one place at one time? No one really knows. Perhaps one can only look at it poetically: those who preach the gospel of absolute good and absolute evil, as George Bush has since taking office, as the conservatives have since forever—it is their prime article of faith—must ultimately practice what they preach. They must finally be caught up in the dualism to which they subscribe. For it is in the nature of dualism to be convertible: white easily shades into black, hot inevitably becomes cold, good cannot help but be infected by, and in the end defined by evil.
So it is in the Bush White House. Paint it and sanitize it and bleach it as they will, they can never hide what they have become and what it has become: a white house turned black by, inhabited by demons.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Here's to You, John Yoo
First, let’s get some facts straight. Attorney John Yoo was an assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, working in the Office of Legal Counsel under his boss, Jay Bybee, during George Bush's first term. This office is supposed to advise all the departments of government on the legality or illegality of their actions. The attorneys work, in the final analysis, not for the President or any of his subordinates, but for the American people. They are obliged to render opinions that are, to put it mildly, legal, according to U.S. and international law.
Second, let’s look at what John Yoo did and why he did it.
To begin with, he essentially argued, in a series of memos, that the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution has no bearing on the President of the United States during wartime. Neither the 5th Amendment’s due process clauses nor the 8th Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment apply to aliens in foreign countries, and even if they did, Yoo maintained, the President is not bound by them. Essentially, this means that the President’s power trumps both the Constitution and the federal statutes that constitute U.S. Law—specifically, any that would constrain his power to find and/or torture those he deems ‘enemies.’ This means that the President can also thumb his nose at foreign laws and treaties, for if he cannot be constrained by U.S. Law, he certainly cannot be constrained by treaties with other nations, such as the Geneva Conventions, even though normally and legally they have the force of the Constitution itself. No matter; the President, wrote Yoo, is “free to override all such laws and treaties at his discretion.” In sum: John Yoo argued that the President has unlimited authority to order war crimes against enemy combatants captured on foreign soil, so long as he decides that such orders are necessary to the nation’s “defense.”
All this is breathtaking enough. What’s worse is that in defending these memos, John Yoo has actually said that they confer on the President the power, if he chooses to use it, to torture children. In a January 2006 interview with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, Yoo argued that there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of even the child of a suspect. Here is the conversation:
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
(see article by Philip Watts, www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11488.htm.)
Of course, we can surmise, the President would always have a “good” reason for crushing a child’s testicles.
So let’s get specific. Let’s take a look at one of the allegedly toothless treaties that John Yoo was referring to—the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment—which the United States signed. Here is what it says:
“The term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining information or a confession…No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” (cited by Anthony Piel, “A Primer on the Law of Torture,” Truthout.org, 11/5/07)
Anyone convicted of such crimes can be punished by life imprisonment or the death penalty. Piel goes on to say that not only is the United States bound by this law, the President cannot grant immunity from its provisions: “The US government crafted, promoted, adopted, signed and ratified the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which therefore automatically becomes the “supreme law of the land,” pursuant to the US Constitution. No enabling legislation is required to give effect to these basic principles of law.”
For a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department to argue otherwise is to essentially argue that the President and all those under him can break the law with impunity. But Yoo not only did this—in direct violation of his legal ethics. He also argued for the immunity of those who followed his memos and broke any such laws. Here is what Yoo writes in another Memo, (as noted by Glenn Greenwald in “John Yoo’s War Crimes,” Salon, April 2, 2008):
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
So there it is. Not only 'could we argue' that the President is above all law prohibiting torture, both domestic and international, so are those Americans (CIA agents, military police and/or interrogators, civilian contractors) who follow his orders and torture or abuse their captives. So are those who command them—the generals, the admirals, the secretaries of defense and war and so on up the chain.
This last part is really the point. We have been given the impression, not least by Yoo himself, that he was trying to formulate difficult policy in the critical and dangerous new conditions created by 9/11, and that government officials were pressing him and his office for guidance on how they should conduct interrogations, how they should treat the dangerous “terrorists” they were capturing. This turns out to be a smokescreen. In fact, as Scott Horton has recently noted in “Yoo Two,” (Harper’s Magazine, April 3, 2008), there were two series of memos, one in August 2002, and one in March 2003. The memos are similar in that they “were issued as part of an actual plan to induce individuals to commit criminal acts by ensuring that their crimes would never be investigated or prosecuted.” Horton calls this effort a “criminal enterprise,” because “Under the standards of U.S. v Altstoetter, it was reasonably foreseeable that the issuance of these memoranda would result in serious harm, including assault, torture, and death, to protected persons in the custody of the United States. Accordingly, each of the actors, including the memoranda writers, is criminally liable.”
This was the “need” to which John Yoo was responding. As a lawyer and professor of United States law, he knew full well that what he was advocating would make those who followed its dictates liable to prosecution for war crimes. So did others in government, and that was the real “crisis” at hand. Naval officers had seen what was happening to “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo under the authority of Yoo’s earlier memo, and had relayed it to Alberto Mora, the general counsel for the Navy in the Pentagon. These practices, along with other questionable techniques authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, including waterboarding, led decent military lawyers to vehemently protest what was going on. These were military lawyers who knew about torture and knew about the consequences for U.S. military personnel if it became known worldwide that the United States was engaging in such practices. When the legal counsel at the Pentagon, William Haynes, began wilting under enormous pressure from such lawyers, he recommended to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that the torture procedures should stop. (see Horton, cited above, and Jane Mayer, “The Memo,” New Yorker Magazine, 2/27/2006.)
Unfortunately for the military, the chicken hawks were in charge. Rumsfeld took his case to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, among others. He needed legal justification for torture, and military lawyers knew too much to give it to him. The political hacks in the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo and his boss Jay Bybee chief among them, had no such qualms. Yoo knew nothing about the military, but he had “read lots of books.” And so he crafted his torture-justifying memos. And those memos were relayed to zealots like Secretary Rumsfeld and his commander at Guantanamo, General Geoffrey Miller. Miller implemented the 'more creative' techniques at Gitmo, was subsequently sent to Abu Ghraib to “gitmoize” that sadly tragic place, and the rest is history (including the death of the so-called “Ice Man” and god knows how many more).
As Scott Horton puts it, Yoo created these memos “as a roadmap to committing crimes and getting away with it.” The roadmap worked. The only sad sacks punished for the scandals at Abu Ghraib have been, as always, the underlings, the so-called “bad apples” in an otherwise pristine barrel, Pvt. Lynndie England, Sgt. Chip Frederick, Cpl. Charles Graner. The war criminals really responsible for those crimes—Yoo and his boss Bybee, Donald Rumseld, Richard Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, General Geoffrey Miller, George Tenet and President George W. Bush, among others—have so far gotten off scott-free.
Perhaps they are all laughing privately amongst themselves. Then again, perhaps not. Though they may, like John Yoo (now safely, and to my mind scandalously, welcomed back to his academic post at Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley) continue to defend their actions as necessary in a time of war, perhaps they should also remember that the conventions against torture specifically state that “no exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification for torture.” Perhaps they should also remember what Anthony Piel, cited above, reminds us:
“…there is no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
So here’s to you, John Yoo. You’ve served your masters well, and duly collected your due. Although, it may be, you’ll yet see another turn of the screw.
Lawrence DiStasi
Second, let’s look at what John Yoo did and why he did it.
To begin with, he essentially argued, in a series of memos, that the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution has no bearing on the President of the United States during wartime. Neither the 5th Amendment’s due process clauses nor the 8th Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment apply to aliens in foreign countries, and even if they did, Yoo maintained, the President is not bound by them. Essentially, this means that the President’s power trumps both the Constitution and the federal statutes that constitute U.S. Law—specifically, any that would constrain his power to find and/or torture those he deems ‘enemies.’ This means that the President can also thumb his nose at foreign laws and treaties, for if he cannot be constrained by U.S. Law, he certainly cannot be constrained by treaties with other nations, such as the Geneva Conventions, even though normally and legally they have the force of the Constitution itself. No matter; the President, wrote Yoo, is “free to override all such laws and treaties at his discretion.” In sum: John Yoo argued that the President has unlimited authority to order war crimes against enemy combatants captured on foreign soil, so long as he decides that such orders are necessary to the nation’s “defense.”
All this is breathtaking enough. What’s worse is that in defending these memos, John Yoo has actually said that they confer on the President the power, if he chooses to use it, to torture children. In a January 2006 interview with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, Yoo argued that there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of even the child of a suspect. Here is the conversation:
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
(see article by Philip Watts, www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11488.htm.)
Of course, we can surmise, the President would always have a “good” reason for crushing a child’s testicles.
So let’s get specific. Let’s take a look at one of the allegedly toothless treaties that John Yoo was referring to—the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment—which the United States signed. Here is what it says:
“The term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining information or a confession…No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” (cited by Anthony Piel, “A Primer on the Law of Torture,” Truthout.org, 11/5/07)
Anyone convicted of such crimes can be punished by life imprisonment or the death penalty. Piel goes on to say that not only is the United States bound by this law, the President cannot grant immunity from its provisions: “The US government crafted, promoted, adopted, signed and ratified the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which therefore automatically becomes the “supreme law of the land,” pursuant to the US Constitution. No enabling legislation is required to give effect to these basic principles of law.”
For a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department to argue otherwise is to essentially argue that the President and all those under him can break the law with impunity. But Yoo not only did this—in direct violation of his legal ethics. He also argued for the immunity of those who followed his memos and broke any such laws. Here is what Yoo writes in another Memo, (as noted by Glenn Greenwald in “John Yoo’s War Crimes,” Salon, April 2, 2008):
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
So there it is. Not only 'could we argue' that the President is above all law prohibiting torture, both domestic and international, so are those Americans (CIA agents, military police and/or interrogators, civilian contractors) who follow his orders and torture or abuse their captives. So are those who command them—the generals, the admirals, the secretaries of defense and war and so on up the chain.
This last part is really the point. We have been given the impression, not least by Yoo himself, that he was trying to formulate difficult policy in the critical and dangerous new conditions created by 9/11, and that government officials were pressing him and his office for guidance on how they should conduct interrogations, how they should treat the dangerous “terrorists” they were capturing. This turns out to be a smokescreen. In fact, as Scott Horton has recently noted in “Yoo Two,” (Harper’s Magazine, April 3, 2008), there were two series of memos, one in August 2002, and one in March 2003. The memos are similar in that they “were issued as part of an actual plan to induce individuals to commit criminal acts by ensuring that their crimes would never be investigated or prosecuted.” Horton calls this effort a “criminal enterprise,” because “Under the standards of U.S. v Altstoetter, it was reasonably foreseeable that the issuance of these memoranda would result in serious harm, including assault, torture, and death, to protected persons in the custody of the United States. Accordingly, each of the actors, including the memoranda writers, is criminally liable.”
This was the “need” to which John Yoo was responding. As a lawyer and professor of United States law, he knew full well that what he was advocating would make those who followed its dictates liable to prosecution for war crimes. So did others in government, and that was the real “crisis” at hand. Naval officers had seen what was happening to “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo under the authority of Yoo’s earlier memo, and had relayed it to Alberto Mora, the general counsel for the Navy in the Pentagon. These practices, along with other questionable techniques authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, including waterboarding, led decent military lawyers to vehemently protest what was going on. These were military lawyers who knew about torture and knew about the consequences for U.S. military personnel if it became known worldwide that the United States was engaging in such practices. When the legal counsel at the Pentagon, William Haynes, began wilting under enormous pressure from such lawyers, he recommended to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that the torture procedures should stop. (see Horton, cited above, and Jane Mayer, “The Memo,” New Yorker Magazine, 2/27/2006.)
Unfortunately for the military, the chicken hawks were in charge. Rumsfeld took his case to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, among others. He needed legal justification for torture, and military lawyers knew too much to give it to him. The political hacks in the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo and his boss Jay Bybee chief among them, had no such qualms. Yoo knew nothing about the military, but he had “read lots of books.” And so he crafted his torture-justifying memos. And those memos were relayed to zealots like Secretary Rumsfeld and his commander at Guantanamo, General Geoffrey Miller. Miller implemented the 'more creative' techniques at Gitmo, was subsequently sent to Abu Ghraib to “gitmoize” that sadly tragic place, and the rest is history (including the death of the so-called “Ice Man” and god knows how many more).
As Scott Horton puts it, Yoo created these memos “as a roadmap to committing crimes and getting away with it.” The roadmap worked. The only sad sacks punished for the scandals at Abu Ghraib have been, as always, the underlings, the so-called “bad apples” in an otherwise pristine barrel, Pvt. Lynndie England, Sgt. Chip Frederick, Cpl. Charles Graner. The war criminals really responsible for those crimes—Yoo and his boss Bybee, Donald Rumseld, Richard Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, General Geoffrey Miller, George Tenet and President George W. Bush, among others—have so far gotten off scott-free.
Perhaps they are all laughing privately amongst themselves. Then again, perhaps not. Though they may, like John Yoo (now safely, and to my mind scandalously, welcomed back to his academic post at Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley) continue to defend their actions as necessary in a time of war, perhaps they should also remember that the conventions against torture specifically state that “no exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification for torture.” Perhaps they should also remember what Anthony Piel, cited above, reminds us:
“…there is no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
So here’s to you, John Yoo. You’ve served your masters well, and duly collected your due. Although, it may be, you’ll yet see another turn of the screw.
Lawrence DiStasi
Friday, March 21, 2008
Mannaggia l'America
With all the furor and rage being expended over the past comments of Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright—especially his phrase that God Bless America really should be God Damn America—a person would think that such blasphemy had never before been heard in the history of the world. The truth is, I used to hear it almost every day. And it came from the mouth of my father, an Italian immigrant, and it came in his native language: Mannaggia l’America. And the truth is that it was rather a commonplace among Italian immigrants of that pre- and post-WWII era.
Now I can’t speak for others, but I do know what was behind my father’s use of the phrase, and it was something similar to what was behind Wright’s. That is, my father was railing at the fact that in his view as an Italian, America lacked respect for both quality and equality alike. As a hairdresser, he knew this firsthand. He invested his entire life in quality work. And what constantly drove him to distraction was the fact that peers of his were making fortunes by running strings of beauty shops devoted to quantity. “Get’ em in, get ‘em out, give ‘em dye jobs, frizzy hair, whatever they want.” My father refused to do this. Refused to ever touch hair dye because he knew, from his chemistry work, that it was poisonous. Just as he knew that the cold-wave solutions being initially marketed in those days, were even more toxic to human skin. He also considered his judgment as an‘artist of hair’ so inarguable that he refused to cater to his customers’ whims of the moment: “If they didn’t like what I wanted to do, I’d throw them out.” All this led to declining popularity and success. All of which, in his eyes, was due to a total lack of respect for quality work in mannaggia l’America.
He ran up against the same problem in every business he ever tried. After a heart attack made it impossible for him to continue as a hairdresser, he tried building houses. He went broke on his commitment to building quality dwellings rather than hastily-raised shacks that he could sell on the cheap. And in the final movement of his life—wherein he tried desperately to market his formula for a permanent wave solution that curled hair without heat and without toxicity—he was unceremoniously rebuffed by the large corporations then making millions: they told him they didn’t care about burnt scalps and lawsuits because they had lawyers sufficient to minimize the few settlements they had to pay. Mannaggia l’America.
It was his constant lament. For the America he encountered was even less interested in equality. As an Italian immigrant he was considered, when he arrived, one of the great unwashed, the detritus being vomited up by Europe to occupy the slums of American cities and pollute the American dream. And though he made Herculean strides in learning the language (in spite of being expelled from 6th grade), and the codes of the polite society he catered to in his beauty shop, he knew how white America assessed him—as a “dago,” as a “wop,” as a creature only nominally less degraded than the African Americans it had enslaved and dehumanized even in its founding document. The only equality that perhaps meant something was the equality of money. If one made enough money, then one might get to be equal. Otherwise, forget it. America—its creed, its commerce, its holidays, its fundamental attitude about life—was nothing, he insisted, but a “money-making proposition.” Those who made it in such a place were for the most part “thieves within the law.” Mannaggia l’America.
The interesting thing to me today is that though he clearly understood the fundamental larceny of American business, he probably didn’t know the whole truth of it. He didn’t know, as we now do, that the real truth behind Pastor Wright’s prediction that God will sooner or later “damn America” stems from an understanding of American history: its theft of the land from its original inhabitants starting with its ‘discovery’; its continuing theft of the West and Southwest from Mexico and any other people or entity that threatened its “manifest destiny”; the theft by those who run the government and the corporations for their profit and control; the theft that continues by corporations driving the economic conquest that now covers the entire globe, placing whole countries and their people in thrall; and of course the theft Pastor Wright was talking about—the continuing theft of the lives of the millions of Africans brought here in chains, and kept in the chains of poverty and injustice even into our own time. He didn’t know about that, my father, though he intuited it from what he knew—that those who control the money control the government and controlling the government means controlling the laws, which in turn means being free to be “thieves within the law.” This is the freedom that flag-waving Americans are really talking about: the freedom to plunder all those who have what we want. And, as John Perkins makes clear in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the freedom to sanction or starve out or bring down or invade or eliminate any leader or country that refuses to accommodate that theft. As a partial list, just think Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, not to mention the places like Pakistan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan where we prop up our dictators of choice.
So, as far as my father would have been concerned, the Reverend Wright was right. If there is any justice in this world—and that is not at all a foregone conclusion—the forces that operate the universe (call it God if you like; karma if you like; history if you like) will eventually damn America as they eventually damned Rome. For though the packing of the courts with Neanderthals guarantees that the law in its conventional sense cannot provide real justice, the higher law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (some might call it “blowback”) perhaps can. We have already seen something like it working in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on 9/11, and in the money markets; and we will, I am afraid, continue to hear mannaggias upon l'america for some time to come.
Lawrence DiStasi
Now I can’t speak for others, but I do know what was behind my father’s use of the phrase, and it was something similar to what was behind Wright’s. That is, my father was railing at the fact that in his view as an Italian, America lacked respect for both quality and equality alike. As a hairdresser, he knew this firsthand. He invested his entire life in quality work. And what constantly drove him to distraction was the fact that peers of his were making fortunes by running strings of beauty shops devoted to quantity. “Get’ em in, get ‘em out, give ‘em dye jobs, frizzy hair, whatever they want.” My father refused to do this. Refused to ever touch hair dye because he knew, from his chemistry work, that it was poisonous. Just as he knew that the cold-wave solutions being initially marketed in those days, were even more toxic to human skin. He also considered his judgment as an‘artist of hair’ so inarguable that he refused to cater to his customers’ whims of the moment: “If they didn’t like what I wanted to do, I’d throw them out.” All this led to declining popularity and success. All of which, in his eyes, was due to a total lack of respect for quality work in mannaggia l’America.
He ran up against the same problem in every business he ever tried. After a heart attack made it impossible for him to continue as a hairdresser, he tried building houses. He went broke on his commitment to building quality dwellings rather than hastily-raised shacks that he could sell on the cheap. And in the final movement of his life—wherein he tried desperately to market his formula for a permanent wave solution that curled hair without heat and without toxicity—he was unceremoniously rebuffed by the large corporations then making millions: they told him they didn’t care about burnt scalps and lawsuits because they had lawyers sufficient to minimize the few settlements they had to pay. Mannaggia l’America.
It was his constant lament. For the America he encountered was even less interested in equality. As an Italian immigrant he was considered, when he arrived, one of the great unwashed, the detritus being vomited up by Europe to occupy the slums of American cities and pollute the American dream. And though he made Herculean strides in learning the language (in spite of being expelled from 6th grade), and the codes of the polite society he catered to in his beauty shop, he knew how white America assessed him—as a “dago,” as a “wop,” as a creature only nominally less degraded than the African Americans it had enslaved and dehumanized even in its founding document. The only equality that perhaps meant something was the equality of money. If one made enough money, then one might get to be equal. Otherwise, forget it. America—its creed, its commerce, its holidays, its fundamental attitude about life—was nothing, he insisted, but a “money-making proposition.” Those who made it in such a place were for the most part “thieves within the law.” Mannaggia l’America.
The interesting thing to me today is that though he clearly understood the fundamental larceny of American business, he probably didn’t know the whole truth of it. He didn’t know, as we now do, that the real truth behind Pastor Wright’s prediction that God will sooner or later “damn America” stems from an understanding of American history: its theft of the land from its original inhabitants starting with its ‘discovery’; its continuing theft of the West and Southwest from Mexico and any other people or entity that threatened its “manifest destiny”; the theft by those who run the government and the corporations for their profit and control; the theft that continues by corporations driving the economic conquest that now covers the entire globe, placing whole countries and their people in thrall; and of course the theft Pastor Wright was talking about—the continuing theft of the lives of the millions of Africans brought here in chains, and kept in the chains of poverty and injustice even into our own time. He didn’t know about that, my father, though he intuited it from what he knew—that those who control the money control the government and controlling the government means controlling the laws, which in turn means being free to be “thieves within the law.” This is the freedom that flag-waving Americans are really talking about: the freedom to plunder all those who have what we want. And, as John Perkins makes clear in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the freedom to sanction or starve out or bring down or invade or eliminate any leader or country that refuses to accommodate that theft. As a partial list, just think Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, not to mention the places like Pakistan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan where we prop up our dictators of choice.
So, as far as my father would have been concerned, the Reverend Wright was right. If there is any justice in this world—and that is not at all a foregone conclusion—the forces that operate the universe (call it God if you like; karma if you like; history if you like) will eventually damn America as they eventually damned Rome. For though the packing of the courts with Neanderthals guarantees that the law in its conventional sense cannot provide real justice, the higher law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (some might call it “blowback”) perhaps can. We have already seen something like it working in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on 9/11, and in the money markets; and we will, I am afraid, continue to hear mannaggias upon l'america for some time to come.
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, March 17, 2008
Winter Soldier
I don’t know how many of my readers had the opportunity to listen to the Winter Soldier conference put on by Iraq Veterans Against the War this weekend, but it was a riveting, emotionally devastating primer on the cost of the Iraq War in lives, treasure, and the mental and physical health of the soldiers who have been induced to fight it. Panel after panel, presenter after presenter revealed personal stories about the damage that has been done. Nearly every panelist referred to the “war” as what it really is: an OCCUPATION, an illegal occupation of a people who were already prostrate from a dozen years of our sanctions and bombing, and who, with the arrival of American soldiers, were treated like criminals in their own country, arrested without cause, curfewed in houses that, in Iraq’s summer heat, were literally ovens.
And then there were the horror stories of what each soldier had done, the atrocities each was led to commit as part of that occupation. The brutalizing of women and children. The random arrests of every Iraqi male caught in the frequent sweeps of neighborhoods. The killing, without thought, of anyone who made or appeared to make a false move. All of it made possible by the training each had received, to wit, that Iraqis are subhuman, that they are “ragheads” or “haggis” responsible for 9/11 (it has been proven Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Quaeda) and thus undeserving of any human compassion whatever. One soldier described how the term “haggi” actually derives from the Islamic tradition of the Hagg, the pilgrimage to Mecca every Muslim is supposed to make at least once. Hence, he said sadly, the holiest tradition of an entire religious faith is trampled and reduced to a term of utter contempt.
Some of these soldiers and marines were interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and described the brutal tactics they used, and, when they were unwilling to perform as expected, those used by others. A soldier named Michael told of one detainee who was writhing strangely and acting crazily. Sensing insulin deprivation, Michael took a sugar reading and found it at 450, many times the normal range. Michael called the hospital, asking permission from the doctor to transfer the detainee, clearly in shock, to her facility. The captain refused, refused several times. The detainee was then taken to another area, and when his strange behavior continued, classified as a resister and put outside, manacled, in the hot sun as punishment. He died roasting and writhing in agony.
Another soldier related his experience with stop loss—the ploy by which the military, unable to attract new recruits, has been forcing troops who have finished their duty tours to be corralled into repeated deployments. This, and the brutality he was forced to employ in Iraq (at one point, he had his sights trained on a 6-year-old boy on a roof), eventually turned a gung-ho teenager eager, after 9/11, to kill all Middle Easterners, into a broken alcoholic who tried to commit suicide. But instead of giving him help, the United States Army discharged him with a general discharge for insubordinate behavior, leaving him with no benefits whatever, able to hold only a job as a pizza delivery boy. Among the military duties that led to his breakdown, he said, was his task of photographing dead Iraqis and sending the photos to superiors for use in “building the morale” of American troops.
A Marine, Jason Wayne Lemue, served three duty tours in Iraq. On his first, he learned the rules of engagement. “My commander told me, ‘Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved,’ that was our mission on our first tour,” he said of his first deployment during the invasion nearly five years ago. Lemue went on to relate that, “After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew” meant that people were to be killed. “I can’t tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us.” (Quoted in “Rules of Engagement Thrown out the Window” by Dahr Jamail, Common Dreams, 3/15/08.)
Of course, Marine corporal Jason Washburn also explained the corollary—that American troops were instructed to carry shovels and “drop weapons” on their missions in case of an 'accidental' shooting. A shovel or weapon found near a dead Iraqi was sufficient evidence to justify his death as a terrorist.
Such testimony, along with apologies by many of the panelists for the destruction they inflicted on innocent people, is enough to make anyone weep. Many in the audience did. And so, to the cost of this illegal and criminal war—now estimated at $300 billion a year by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz in The Three Trillion Dollar War (that is nearly a billion dollars every day just for keeping the war machine going, nevermind the cost of replacing a broken military when it’s over and the broken human beings who will be needing veterans’ benefits for years to come)—there is the human cost. The cost of devastated lives and devastated psyches and devastated families, and, let us never forget, a country and an entire people that lies in ruins.
As one contemplates the horror of what the United States has done, and keeps doing, and the fact that we cannot, after Winter Soldier, claim ignorance, the words of T.S. Eliot come, almost unbidden, to mind:
“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Lawrence DiStasi
And then there were the horror stories of what each soldier had done, the atrocities each was led to commit as part of that occupation. The brutalizing of women and children. The random arrests of every Iraqi male caught in the frequent sweeps of neighborhoods. The killing, without thought, of anyone who made or appeared to make a false move. All of it made possible by the training each had received, to wit, that Iraqis are subhuman, that they are “ragheads” or “haggis” responsible for 9/11 (it has been proven Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Quaeda) and thus undeserving of any human compassion whatever. One soldier described how the term “haggi” actually derives from the Islamic tradition of the Hagg, the pilgrimage to Mecca every Muslim is supposed to make at least once. Hence, he said sadly, the holiest tradition of an entire religious faith is trampled and reduced to a term of utter contempt.
Some of these soldiers and marines were interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and described the brutal tactics they used, and, when they were unwilling to perform as expected, those used by others. A soldier named Michael told of one detainee who was writhing strangely and acting crazily. Sensing insulin deprivation, Michael took a sugar reading and found it at 450, many times the normal range. Michael called the hospital, asking permission from the doctor to transfer the detainee, clearly in shock, to her facility. The captain refused, refused several times. The detainee was then taken to another area, and when his strange behavior continued, classified as a resister and put outside, manacled, in the hot sun as punishment. He died roasting and writhing in agony.
Another soldier related his experience with stop loss—the ploy by which the military, unable to attract new recruits, has been forcing troops who have finished their duty tours to be corralled into repeated deployments. This, and the brutality he was forced to employ in Iraq (at one point, he had his sights trained on a 6-year-old boy on a roof), eventually turned a gung-ho teenager eager, after 9/11, to kill all Middle Easterners, into a broken alcoholic who tried to commit suicide. But instead of giving him help, the United States Army discharged him with a general discharge for insubordinate behavior, leaving him with no benefits whatever, able to hold only a job as a pizza delivery boy. Among the military duties that led to his breakdown, he said, was his task of photographing dead Iraqis and sending the photos to superiors for use in “building the morale” of American troops.
A Marine, Jason Wayne Lemue, served three duty tours in Iraq. On his first, he learned the rules of engagement. “My commander told me, ‘Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved,’ that was our mission on our first tour,” he said of his first deployment during the invasion nearly five years ago. Lemue went on to relate that, “After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew” meant that people were to be killed. “I can’t tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us.” (Quoted in “Rules of Engagement Thrown out the Window” by Dahr Jamail, Common Dreams, 3/15/08.)
Of course, Marine corporal Jason Washburn also explained the corollary—that American troops were instructed to carry shovels and “drop weapons” on their missions in case of an 'accidental' shooting. A shovel or weapon found near a dead Iraqi was sufficient evidence to justify his death as a terrorist.
Such testimony, along with apologies by many of the panelists for the destruction they inflicted on innocent people, is enough to make anyone weep. Many in the audience did. And so, to the cost of this illegal and criminal war—now estimated at $300 billion a year by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz in The Three Trillion Dollar War (that is nearly a billion dollars every day just for keeping the war machine going, nevermind the cost of replacing a broken military when it’s over and the broken human beings who will be needing veterans’ benefits for years to come)—there is the human cost. The cost of devastated lives and devastated psyches and devastated families, and, let us never forget, a country and an entire people that lies in ruins.
As one contemplates the horror of what the United States has done, and keeps doing, and the fact that we cannot, after Winter Soldier, claim ignorance, the words of T.S. Eliot come, almost unbidden, to mind:
“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Lawrence DiStasi
Saturday, March 15, 2008
"Ciao, Geraldine"
About a month ago, I wrote a blog called “The Necessity of Obama,” in which I warned of the imminent appeals to racism sure to emerge once Barack Obama had the Democratic nomination, and the Republicans launched their slime machine. It turns out I was optimistic. The appeal to racism, somewhat covert in the Clinton’s initial slanders, has already gone overt—this time in the person of former vice-presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro. Last week Ferraro opined in an interview with the Torrance "Daily Breeze" that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position..” She expanded on this a couple of times, and then in the subsequent storm, resigned from Hillary’s campaign. The damage, of course, had already been done. Whites, especially white males, especially white working class males reminded of their grievances over affirmative action, have been switching their allegiance in droves. Some have gone to Clinton. Some have already expressed a preference for Republican nominee John McCain. If there is a nightmare for Democrats in the 2008 presidential election, this is it.
For me, the nightmare is doubly troubling. Geraldine Ferraro was a watershed candidate. Not only was she the first woman to have a run at the White House, she was the first Italian American to achieve that kind of prominence. A working class gal from Queens, a former teacher who rose to the halls of Congress, and then to the national ticket for President—this was the American dream made real, the antidote to the common stereotype of Italian Americans as bozos, criminals, prototypical working-class racists. Now, with one remark, she has reactivated all the stereotypes. Sadly, she has probably garnered a lot of sympathy as well. A woman unfairly targeted. A white woman only calling attention to the unfairness of affirmative action.
Sadder still is the dispiriting spectacle of a once-admired woman sinking to gutter level in an effort to help her “sister.” And the conjoined spectacle of the Clintons, once also admirable for their brilliance, their apparent zeal for reform, consistently demonstrating that to win, they have no qualms about sinking to the very same level.
And the saddest thing of all: America running true to form. A brilliant, charismatic black man is running for president, generating enormous energy and enthusiasm unseen in several generations. But the politicians, even those in his own party, cannot seem to bear it; cannot seem to bear losing, for one, but also cannot seem to bear forgoing the opportunity to appeal to racist fears. And so the fear machine has been rolled out, the race machine has been activated, and Obama and his campaign have been forced on the defensive. All the while the pundits, sensing blood in the water, have flocked to the controversy, and magnified it.
No one knows how this will eventually play out. But given this nation’s history, given its enduring commitment to the suppression of every aspiration entertained by its former slaves, the signs are not good. We can say “Ciao” to Geraldine Ferraro. The question is, will we ever ever be able to say “Ciao” to racism?
Lawrence DiStasi
For me, the nightmare is doubly troubling. Geraldine Ferraro was a watershed candidate. Not only was she the first woman to have a run at the White House, she was the first Italian American to achieve that kind of prominence. A working class gal from Queens, a former teacher who rose to the halls of Congress, and then to the national ticket for President—this was the American dream made real, the antidote to the common stereotype of Italian Americans as bozos, criminals, prototypical working-class racists. Now, with one remark, she has reactivated all the stereotypes. Sadly, she has probably garnered a lot of sympathy as well. A woman unfairly targeted. A white woman only calling attention to the unfairness of affirmative action.
Sadder still is the dispiriting spectacle of a once-admired woman sinking to gutter level in an effort to help her “sister.” And the conjoined spectacle of the Clintons, once also admirable for their brilliance, their apparent zeal for reform, consistently demonstrating that to win, they have no qualms about sinking to the very same level.
And the saddest thing of all: America running true to form. A brilliant, charismatic black man is running for president, generating enormous energy and enthusiasm unseen in several generations. But the politicians, even those in his own party, cannot seem to bear it; cannot seem to bear losing, for one, but also cannot seem to bear forgoing the opportunity to appeal to racist fears. And so the fear machine has been rolled out, the race machine has been activated, and Obama and his campaign have been forced on the defensive. All the while the pundits, sensing blood in the water, have flocked to the controversy, and magnified it.
No one knows how this will eventually play out. But given this nation’s history, given its enduring commitment to the suppression of every aspiration entertained by its former slaves, the signs are not good. We can say “Ciao” to Geraldine Ferraro. The question is, will we ever ever be able to say “Ciao” to racism?
Lawrence DiStasi
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