April 6th, 2005 §
I have been hounded by some readers about my lack of mention of the Iraq War’s anniversary. “How could you forget this and also important items x and y?” I have lacked the mention of many important things, so let me catch up on them all at once:
More on DeLay and Cornyn and the independant judiciary and why I’m pissed off at Democrats in a bit.
March 7th, 2005 §
Via Under The Same Sun, the Washington Post had the audacity to carry a story in which an objector to American detainee torture policy was shipped home restrained to a backboard. The punchline is that the objector was a California National Guard Sergeant serving in Army Intelligence and the guy who stripped him of his security clearance, had him forcibly classified as unstable and then bounced him out of the unit was his Commanding Officer.
The soldier complained that he had had to resuscitate abused detainees and urged the unit’s withdrawal. He told investigators that the unit’s commander, an Army captain, responded by giving him “30 seconds to withdraw my request or he was going to send me forcibly to go see a psychiatrist.” The soldier added: “I told him I was not going to withdraw my request and at that time he confiscated my weapon and informed me he was withdrawing my security clearance and was placing me under 24-hour surveillance.”
A witness in his unit told investigators that the captain later pressured a military doctor — who had found the soldier stable — into doing another emergency evaluation, saying: “I don’t care what you saw or heard, he is imbalanced, and I want him out of here.”
The next day, after the doctor did another evaluation, the soldier was evacuated from Iraq in restraints on a stretcher to a military hospital in Germany, despite having been given no official diagnosis, according to the documents. A military doctor in Germany ruled he was in stable mental health, according to the documents, but sent him back to the United States for what the soldier recalls the doctor describing as his “safety.”
I spend a considerable amount of time studying human rights abuses and the efforts to fix countries after rights abuse atrocities – think apartheid, Pinochet, Rwanda, etc – have occured and those in power have (hopefully) been deposed. The resulting treatment for the country is usually a truth and reconciliation commission that, in many cases, trades amnesty for full disclosure from perpetrators on every side of the conflict. However, it is often the case that the new government is still beholden to or under some auspices of control of the old boss, or the judiciary and enforcement capability of the new government is still in an infant state, and the truth commissions aren’t able to do anything resembling a good job.
Another road block impeding NGO’s and truth commissions are the involvement of outside actors – in many cases when other major world powers are involved in human rights abuses by way of funding and training, those countries get a pass from the truth commission, or the truth commission is explicitly not allowed to pursue any lines of investigation involving that outside actor.
I believe it is safe to say that we may not ever see a truth commission in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we won’t see an external one dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan for a generation.
So support your troops, Dear Readers. California National Guard Sgt. Greg Ford may end up being denied services and benefits he has earned through valorous service to our country because of his forced and false classification as unstable. Since many organizations are trying to get Congress to investigate the widespread abuse of detainees, write or call your Congressman, the Army, the DOD, and the White House and find out what’s being done.
February 3rd, 2005 §
I have written here about Alberto Gonzales and the process of his confirmation in the Senate, but I have not written about what has been said during that process. I have had the opportunity to review the things said on both sides, and I feel as if there were some alarming elements contained therein.
The opposition raised the spectre of Abu Ghraib and the role Gonzales played as White House Counsel in his judgement concerning the legality of torture and how the American military should view the Geneva Conventions within the context of our current operations in the War on Terror.
Those for Gonzales, roundly comprised of Senate Republicans, spoke about Gonzales’ humble beginnings, his distinguished career as a legal professional, and his sober judgement of the legality of using torture against enemies of the United States.
I watched Senator John Cornyn, representing my beloved state of Texas, deliver the following defense of Alberto Gonzales’ counsel to the White House:
According to Article 4 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, though, only lawful combatants are eligible for POW protections. The Red Cross’s own guidelines state that to earn POW status, combatants must satisfy all four conditions of lawful combat: being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates, having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, carrying arms openly, and conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Accordingly, Mr. Bush determined that the United States shall treat all detainees humanely, but that as a legal matter, neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban militia are legally entitled to the convention’s protections. The former is not even a state, let alone a party to the Geneva Convention, while the latter does not comply with all four required conditions of lawful combat.
What should disturb us about this defense, regularly championed in the media on op-ed pages around our country and often espoused by Republican elected officials, is what it says about their shared perception of America’s role in the world. It says that while we speak clearly of our commitment to freedom and regularly defend the individual human rights of people around the world, we are content to merely adhere to the letter of the law when exerting our considerable force.
If we, the United States of America, are to safeguard freedom and liberty around the world, we would do well to do better than we have to. We would do well to do more than what is strictly required. What message does this send to the rest of the world?
What our leaders and thinkers are saying when they invoke the strict legality of the Geneva Conventions is that they endorse torture to meet our needs if we can get away with it. They are saying that if an enemy does not meet a certain set of codified requirements, the enemy does not deserve the protection of their basic human rights the Geneva Conventions afford. They are saying that theenemy is not worthy of our mercy, only of our retribution.
It is not the accceptance and utilization of extreme measures in the face of imminent danger to American lives that should disturb us as citizens of this world, but rather the a policy of extreme measures writ large for application on the greater field of battle in the War in Iraq. The abject humliation and fear the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were exposed to had nothing to do with protecting American lives or national security – it was instead the total failure of human decency by those charged with not only protecting America but also defending the liberty of a people unable to claim it for themselves, and likewise charged with delivering the message and cause of freedom to the wider world. Charged, in fact, with deliverance itself.
This instance of action against what we as Americans believe in is what Senator Cornyn and his colleagues were defending. To say that Gonzales was charged not with deciding the morality of a policy but only the legality of that policy is indicative of a larger problem in a larger set of choices and administration. Alberto Gonzales answered to his client, and now George Bush wishes to make him the employee of the American people.
We can do better. We can engage in the selection of a slate of representative officials that take into consideration the larger consequences of the decisions they make. Alberto Gonzales has already enabled the United States government to come up short of our ideals and what we defend, and instead to meet only our explicit legal obligations, as opposed to our greater humanitarian responsibilities to the world at large. He should not be allowed to do so again.
If we are to be stewards of liberty and messengers of freedom, if we are to end tyranny in the world at large, and if we are to be the shining beacon of humanity and democracy that we so emphatically seek to be, we not only can do better, we must do better.
January 31st, 2005 §
In a breaking story released predictably at an ungodly hour on a Sunday, the CPA was audited and the resulting report shows that around $9,000,000,000.00 is missing, misappropriated, or impossible to account for.
The official who led the authority, L. Paul Bremer III, submitted a blistering written reply to the findings, saying the report had “many misconceptions and inaccuracies” and lacked professional judgment.
Bremer said the report “assumes that Western-style budgeting and accounting procedures could be immediately and fully implemented in the midst of a war.”
So says L. Paul from now until the end of all things. Being in the midst of a war does not, however, explain all of the report’s findings, like those which follow the jump:
Authority staff learned that 8,206 guards were on the payroll at one ministry, but only 602 could be accounted for, the report said. At another ministry, US officials indicated there were 1,417 guards on the payroll but could confirm only 642. When staff members of the US occupation government recommended that payrolls be verified before salary payments, authority financial officials “stated the [authority] would rather overpay salaries than risk not paying employees and inciting violence,” the inspector general said.
It is possible that I’m being a little hard on L. Paul, and there are some difficulties involved in managing a country you just invaded. Among L. Paul’s other rebuttals were these reasonable factoids:
With more than a million Iraqi families depending on government salaries, there would have been an increased security threat if civil servants had not been paid until modern pay records were developed.
US policy was to build up the Iraqi force guarding government facilities, and it was better to accept an imperfect payroll system than “to stop paying armed, young men” providing security.
The report was suggesting the authority “should have placed hundreds of [authority] auditors” in Iraqi ministries, contrary to US and UN policy of giving Iraqi ministers responsibility for budgets.
- all quotes from Boston Globe
My initial argument with this is that there is a marked difference between not being able to account for money and not being able to account for employees. It is also an odd argument to say that you don’t want to stop paying the guys with guns when you just fired 400,000 guys with guns. But I’m a professional, so L. Paul gets his say.
So you don’t want to stop paying the guys with the guns, and if you have to have an imperfect payroll system to keep everyone happy, then I suppose you can excuse a small discrepency here or there. That being said, there’s a whole lot of money that can’t be accounted for, and the fact that the CPA’s officials are doing their best to blame it on Iraqis is disappointing. Hell, it’s disappointing that this even happened.
I also should note, as I play the role of Transparency International Devil’s Advocate, that despite the wartime position Iraq found itself in, the disregard of accountability for money and expenditure – and keep in mind, this is the Iraqi people’s money, so if they weren’t dodging mortars I would hope they’d be upset – is a poor precedent to set for an emerging free nation. It doesn’t instill a sense of financial responsibility in… well, in anybody, really.
Seeing as how so much of American credibility rightly rests on the handling of the Iraq war and the resultant foreign policy, we have some important questions to ask. Primary among those is, “Why did it take so long for this come out?” and immediately on the heels of that, “Who are we going to hold accountable for the $9,000,000,000.00 of Iraqi money that has seemingly vanished?”
I’m not saying someone should swing for this, and its fair to say that this will disappear pretty soon and chalked up as economic collateral freedom costs or something, but $9,000,000,000.00 buys a lot of food or medicine or could keep the power and water on in Iraq for at least what, a few weeks?
January 15th, 2005 §
Spc. Graner was found guilty by a true jury of his peers, and may go to jail for around 18 years. Pfc. Lynndie England faces trial some time early this year.
These are the ghouls smiling in the all the famous pictures. England even recently gave birth to a child believed to be Graner’s. The argument these two and their colleagues have posed most often is that they were “just following orders.”
So, following orders absolves some people of some responsibility some of the time in some situations – if anything, soldiers not following orders based on any number of reasons in the current Politco-Military climate has become a regular thing. It also seems to be a foregone conclusion that gleeful, smiling snapshots don’t normally fall under the auspices of most ops, and certainly not in military corrections. It can be also assumed that commands wouldn’t lay along those lines.
On the absolute polar other end of the spectrum, you have Bush, Rumsfeld, and Gonzales. These are the guys who gave the big OK to the use of torture in the War On Terror. Based on a DoJ letter to White House Counsel, Gonzales made recommendations to the Bush Administration along these lines. This is information with which we’re all familiar. You may be less familiar with the White House’s smothering of a Senate bill that would have specifically regulated and forced disclosure of interrogation tactics, while prohibiting intelligence officers from torturing foreign prisoners.
So the quandry is this – where does the buck stop? We’ve all hooted and hollered about holding people high up the chain accountable for not only Abu Ghraib but an entire war based on lies. Rumsfeld and Bush will, barring some sort of legal Holy Grail, be totally bullet-proof at least until 2008. Its becoming common knowledge that the Bush White House is all but done with Rumsfeld, but, again, that pesky Politico-Military Climate comes into play. Firing Rumsfeld now would be the equivalent of admitting defeat, and that, of course, is unacceptable.
The buck doesn’t stop with Graner or England, and it obviously doesn’t make its way to Rumsfeld or Bush. The top legal authority in the United States is the Attorney General, so one might assume that the buck would stop there, but current evidence is to the contrary – Gonzales, the man who made recommendations to the White House as Special Counsel as to the legality of torture (not to mention how to get around the Geneva Conventions) is most likely going to be confirmed this week. The White House refused to make relevant communications available to Congress prior to his confirmation hearing.
The people who did the abusing and torturing are all going to go to jail, but the people who willfully created operating environmments in which that abuse and torture could take place are either immune or getting promoted.