Military Commissions, and Omissions

The morning paper brings news that the government’s initial prosecution under the new and improved military commission process for Guantanamo is not going so well. It seems that the first up is a young man who was “captured” –laying on a battlefield, badly wounded—at the age of fifteen, and subsequently charged with tossing a grenade that killed an American soldier. This was in early 2002. the young man has grown up in the Cuban prison camp. He was threatened, implicitly, with gang rape in an American prison if he did not confess (the interrogator has admitted to this in court), so he confessed. But it seems that certain backward parts of the world look down on such practices as torture, or imprisoning children, or waiting eight years and longer to bring an accused to trial.

The Republicans accused the Obama administration, fifteen minutes after Bush left office, with coddling terrorists because, the military commissions Guantanamo inhabitants were being tried and convicted (the latter being considered a natural concomitant to the former, in Republican-speak). So the Attorney General arranged, with the endorsement of the Mayor of New York, to conduct civilian trials in federal court in Manhattan. The Republicans, though, objected to this as being way too dangerous, like the plan, also scuttled for the same reason, to house the remaining Guantanamo “detainees” in a rural prison in Illinois that is otherwise unoccupied. It’s funny how those who are always crowing about how tough we Yanks are, how “these colors don’t run,” etc., find it too dangerous to house fifteen year-old non-English speakers* in maximum security prisons on American soil.  

*Actually, Omar Khadr, the fifteen year-old in question, being a Canadian, probably speaks English at least as well as G. W. Bush.

So, no trials in the tried and true US court system; it’s back to military tribunals. But the tribunals are stalled because of the “danger to lower Manhattan” controversy that basically shut down the entire process, except for the initial five who had been selected for military trials; and as luck would have it, the case that progressed most expeditiously happened to be that of a fifteen year-old who speaks English and so can be quoted in the press as taking offense at being offered a minimal sentence just so he would agree to a plea deal and spare the government the embarrassment of trying him. He argues that he is not guilty –the nerve of this guy!

And, as a sort of final indignity to the entire sad affair, the Obama administration’s pledge of transparency has been rather damaged in the performance by the Pentagon’s decision to bar from the proceedings two reporters. The reporters were eventually allowed back, but according to the Times they “had to acknowledge in writing to the Defense Department that they understood that they had violated military rules by disclosing the identity of an Army interrogator, even though his name was already publicly known.” So there you have it: it is an offense against the Defense Department’s rules “to disclose information that the military deems “protected,” even if that information has already been disclosed” as reported in the Times.

Why is all this important? Because if the Department of Defense can make its own rules, separate and apart from the US Constitution or other laws, it is a short step to go from that to starting wars on flimsy pretexts, conducting secret operations untroubled by Congressional supervision, conducting military operations, abductions and imprisonment without disclosure of the identity of those imprisoned or even the fact that they have been taken into custody, and similar operations in clandestine fashion within the US as well as elsewhere in the world.  Oh, wait.

The Internet Makes Possible So Much

But it makes one thing impossible, and that is to escape the conclusion that the average American is not only marginally literate, at best; he is unutterably, inalterably, stupid.

Don't agree? Try reading, for an hour, the comments posted to virtually any news item displayed on Yahoo.

They don't call it "yahoo" for nothing.

An Open Letter

Dear Representative Stupak:

Well, you have come out, forcefully, against the latest version of Congressional Health Care Sausage, by stating that you will not vote for the bill that might allow reconciliation of the House and Senate versions, and so produce at long last a giant step along the road to health care reform.

Your opposition is principled: the Senate bill (which the House would pass, under the current plan) provides for a taxpayer subsidy of abortion; at least, you think it does. You oppose abortion. End of story; end of debate.

I believe your position represents the greatest single threat to the continued prosperity of American democracy. That's right: greater than the "socialism" that is so feared by the wingnuts, greater than the moral hazard risk that the financial machinations of the past year have produced, greater even than the destructive, anti-democratic United States Senate and its cloture rules.*

Don't get me wrong: I am all for principle. I believe we should all live our lives according to our principles. Unfortunately, you seem to want to force me to live my life according to your principles, which is coercive beyond any concept that can be reconciled with American democracy.

My principles include an opposition to war. Also, an opposition to killing other human beings.

Other citizens have principled objections to the teaching of evolution in public schools, to the lack of religious symbols in public places, to divorce, to the charging of interest, to the eating of pork, to gay marriage or any gay association at all (indeed, it appears that some Americans have supported an effort to make homosexual association in Uganda punishable by death). We are a diverse country; we have diverse views. Normal citizens advocate their views in the public sphere according to their preferences.

Unfortunately, I cannot affect, in significant fashion, the fact that the United States participates in war, or that it devotes nearly a trillion dollars per year to its military establishment. I cannot even effectively prevent the U.S., and its states, from executing those convicted of certain crimes; even in the face of strong evidence that innocent people are still being executed in this country, I have no effective way of stopping that. I could, of course, go to great lengths personally to state my principled objections, and to publicize my views. I could write letters; and if I were persistent enough or lucky enough or rich enough, I could perhaps have my own newspaper or television program to use as a forum for this. Hell, if I were rich enough, I could buy a seat in the Congress and vote for the abolition of those things I find objectionable.

But more realistically, I could refuse, as some have done, to pay the portion of my federal income tax bill that is devoted to the military. I could chain myself to the death house fence at some state prison.

I could, in other words, take a serious personal risk, and accept the consequences, in order to assert my principles and avoid violating them even by proxy. I could go to jail to advance my cause.

Not you. You don't have to worry about personal risk: the expression of your principles comes cheap, by virtue of your position. Your big risk, I suppose, is that you might calculate incorrectly and lose an election. If you offend enough people in Washington, you might get a crappy office and less-desirable committee assignments.

I am sure that it is only a matter of time until your example prompts some red state congressman to vote against some funding bill because it threatens some child, somewhere, with exposure to a federally-financed discussion of evolution. Or perhaps some senator has a principled objection to the use of the term "Civil War" to describe The War Between The States. We can't have federal funds paying for that, can we? Or, if we oppose gay marriage, let's ban the use of federal funds to pay for the courts in Washington, D.C., now that it has legalized the practice.

You are prepared to use your opposition to something that is legal as a club with which to push your view to the detriment of us all. And there is absolutely no difference between your principled stance and a similar stance by a congressman who holds one of the other principled views mentioned above: I know it's legal, but I don't like it; so, to prevent it, I will do damage to efforts to address some other widely-perceived need.

Fine; go ahead. You are a poster child for the balkanization of American politics. If you have your way, then the Congress will do nothing. Not because nothing is needed; but because there will always be a single individual, or a small group of individuals, who happen to have the power to rob us all, to thwart our expressed ideals and goals.

In the name of principle.



*I am being precise here.

America's Army

You will be happy to learn, as was I, that version 3.0.7 of America's Army has corrected the annoying problem of weapons suddenly disappearing. In addition, grenades will now display properly, and the problem of killing oneself with a grenade has been fixed. They've even addressed the issue of player name-length!


Not that things are perfect, as one "Phoenix" posted on the AA3 blog: "Now just fix the part where I empty an entire clip into someone only to have him turn around and shoot once and kill me, and walk away without a scratch.." 


I know that would seriously upset my day.


What is this all about? Well, I must confess I came late to the subject, myself. "AA3" is, of course, the third (major) version of America's Army, a video game that is so good that it is used by the U.S. Army as a training exercise. One commentator said that, if you give the Army combat simulation training to an 18 year-old, he already knows most of it.


Video games make killing fun! And why shouldn't the ordinary foot-soldier enjoy the same convenience of killing by remote control that the pilots of drone aircraft get, sipping their coffee in Texas while destroying bad guys (and the occasional village) in Pakistan? what's the qualitative difference between killing on-screen and killing on-scene?


"Well, things aren't quite so antiseptic on a real battlefield," one reviewer cautioned. "And sometimes, in actual combat, you have to go tell your buddy's wife that his brains are scattered over some mountainside and he won't be coming home."


Bummer. Where's the reset button?

M.S.

Attending my commencement at Iowa City long ago, my father, who never went to college and had a self-made man's robust disdain for things academic, said, "Well, last year you got your B.S.* --everybody knows what that is. And now you've got your M.S: that's just More of the Same. When're you going to get your Piled higher and Deeper?"

       *Actually, it was a BA (and an MA); but even my father understood poetic license.

I seem to keep running across MS, if not PhD. A late example is the sodden, tear- and beer-stained resignation of the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor of the state of Illinois, who, only days after his winning the primary election, was apparently discovered to have (1) abused his former wife, (2) abused steroids, presumably in a different fashion, and (3) held a knife to the throat of a former girlfriend (who, the news helpfully added, was a prostitute, although it was not made clear whether this factoid cast further  aspersions on him or, contrariwise, mitigated the offense).

The resignation took place during the Super Bowl, in a Chicago bar. And he really did cry. Scott Lee Cohen (actually sort of a cool name for a political candidate), who had been spamming me for weeks in the run-up to his unexpected electoral triumph, has seen his star fall even more rapidly than it rose. Of course, Democratic politics in Illinois are now, as always, in pretty much of a muddle: who should have the now-vacant ballot slot bestowed on him? the runner-up? the third- or fourth-place finisher, each of whom has claims to enormous, heretofore untapped, political resources that will benefit the ticket? The personal preference of the Governor?

The Lieutenant Governor-ship, an office for which one party's nominee, years ago, ran on the sole proposal that the office itself should be eliminated, has become a hot commodity, now that, for the third time in my own recollection, a former governor seems to be on his way to prison and so was, last year, relieved of his post by our alert legislators.

For me, all this was a billboard on the expressway: I felt free to ignore it, because of a recent personal decision. I no longer participate in the electoral process. After decades of patriotically voting, even in Chicago's oddly-timed and inconvenient (so as to minimize turnout and thus insulate the political machine from casual voter disgust) municipal elections, I decided this winter to dispense with that formality. As long as one senator in D.C. can thwart the electorally-expressed will of a majority of the population, and forbid the President his choice of a cabinet member, agency head, or sanitary district commissioner, who am I to presume to express my preferences by voting?

It's FOP; and having identified it, if tardily, I owe it to my self-respect to walk away from it. After all, I'm a Dapper Dan man.

... and I see it everywhere.

1.  "Moderate" congressional Democrats, out to kill health care reform because ... well, because it seems un-American, I guess (everyone in the world except Americans, by definition, are un-American; and everybody but Americans has access to reasonable government-provided health care, or to health insurance. Q.e.d: it's un-American!), seize now on abortion language, now on the public option, now on extending Medicare --which, of course, they are out to protect!--, now on the budget. Face it: Nelson, Lieberman, and their ilk are simply (1) stupid, if they believe what they say they believe (this apparently hits close to the mark in the case of Lieberman, who doesn't seem to know what he actually thinks), or (2) lying, like the guy who doesn't want to buy any magazine subscriptions but is too wimpy to just say so, and so hems and haws about details and so delays the kid, who really has no chance at all at this house, from going on to the next one.
     The U.S. Congress is full of worthless hacks and should be done away with.

2.  The President consulted a general, who (incredible surprise!) said he needed more troops. And as soon as a general says it, it is sacred writ. I'm trying to remember the last time a general (not Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney, who never went near a war) said that fewer troops would be the way to go.
     Now we have a strategy that cannot be explained without resort to metaphor.

3.  Goldman Sachs needed not only lots of government money (briefly); it needed preferential access to H1N1 flu vaccine. It got both, and now it turns its very patrician nose up at the country and the government, plotting to make its next killing on carbon trading or new financial derivatives that shouldn't be regulated because that would interfere with the "market." This behavior is not exactly a surprise, as most of the government's financial regulators seem mysteriously to have come from Goldman Sachs and so the guys in the five thousand-dollar suits feel protected, with justification.
     But while millions remain unemployed and Wall Street has enjoyed a huge year, what I want to know is, where are the mobs that should be tearing apart those marble columns in lower Manhattan and yanking these guys out of their limos for a little tarring and feathering? Americans like to complain. From the comfort of their recliners in front of wide-screen flat panel televisions. We may have screwed everything up; but at least, when our lives were threatened, the generation of the sixties raised a little hell in the streets. The kids today moan into their chai tea that there are no jobs; then they take their advanced degrees and sweep up before closing. They are willing to smoke grass, but not to cause trouble --looks bad on the resume.
  At least we waited until our thirties and forties to sell out.

There is a lot more FOP out there, pretty much everywhere I look. Don't even get me started on Mayor Daley's cash cow (the public assets of the citizens of Chicago).

But I am dispirited, for now.

Race Justice

(written June 4, 2009)


Now we must listen to the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh telling us that Judge Sotomayor is disqualified for consideration for the Supreme Court because of her comment that a Latina judge might make a better decision than a white male judge, because of "the richness of her experience."

And it is from the font and bastion of racism in the society, these past two generations, viz. the "intellectual leaders" of the party that made racism its chief tool, that we must abide such nonsense.

Consider the probable career path of a female or minority person, now in his or her fifties, who has been successful in virtually any field in this country. Think of the professional environment in which such a person was nurtured, and the sea in which he or she swam, metaphorically speaking. Allow, even, the possibility that such a person has succeeded through only a modicum of merit and with a large serving of affirmative action.

Can you doubt that, in order to rise to whatever level such a person has achieved, that person would have experienced, every day of his life, the world of the majority white male culture? And would not such a person have learned the conventions, the rules, the behaviors, even the prejudices, of the majority?

Could one seriously argue that a white male in the same profession would have had a comparable exposure to the world of the minorities, and absorbed in a comparable fashion their worldview?
So, wasn't Judge Sotomayor simply stating a rather pedestrian truth, namely that a successful minority person, whatever other characteristics he or she had developed, would have perforce had a richer, in some ways broader, understanding than a member of the majority? Wouldn't this, most likely, be true in any environment?

Maybe she shouldn't have said it; maybe she said it poorly. But let's move on!