BlogHer - Fear Up Harsh - Comments

what to do?

Kim Ponders — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:38:39 -0600

Lisa, et al,

to my mind, the single best thing we can do is encourage/foster/vote for a national discusssion on what is to be our policy concerning the treatment of suspected war criminals. There are two primary concerns, here:

1. Legal: The Geneva Conventions is part of international law. We are obliged to follow it. It's not an option.

2. Policy: If we, as a nation, have elected to disregard the GC (come what may from the international community), then what, exactly, is our policy? Never in history has our policy equated to whatever we can rationalize at the furthest reaches of the law.

We also need to pull back power from the executive branch--the only way to do this is through voting.

Is all lost?

Lisa Stone — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 15:13:22 -0600

I second Professor Kim's question: I also would like to hear both of your recommendations for action. Is former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor doing the right thing by taking to the podium to warn about the risk of dictatorship as Prof. Kim wrote earlier today? How about George Clooney? Russ Feingold?

As President Bush begins another round of speeches advocating for the war in Iraq, I would really like to see an omnipartisan approach to what Clooney describes:

...One of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we're all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it's not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.

Ironically, this pullquote from self-outing "Liberal" Clooney's piece on the Huffpo today reminds me of a quote by self-outed conservative Capt. Ed, whom I quoted when two women were bounced from the president's state of the union speech for their t-shirts. The captain said:

"Since when have we become so fragile that the wearing of a protest t-shirt become so unsettling? ...a fashion crime should not equate to police action, and arresting someone for wearing a dumb t-shirt should not happen in America."

So - what should Americans who want to support the troops AND the constitution they're signed up to fight for do next?

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

Heartbreaking

Kim Pearson — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:57:47 -0600

Major Heivilin, the sorrow in your message is almost palpable. What do you think that we as citizens can do?

And Kim, thanks for starting an important discussion.

Professor Kim

All is lost

heivilinj — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:18:37 -0600

I recall, many years ago, our (Army) training on the "laws of war" and the accounts I read of the massacre at My Lai. I remember thinking about how it would be to fight the Soviet Army if it invaded West Germany. And knowing that in the unfortunate event we were captured that, although it might be hard, it would be survivable. I thought back on the things I'd read about prisoners of war in Vietnam and the difficulty they faced. The Hanoi Hilton. Bamboo cages and starvation. Torture beyond endurance.

So it looked like progress from 1971 when the nature of "conduct during wartime" began to change. That the military had a new code of behavior which was being endorse and taught. Questioning "illegal orders" and whether something was morally the correct thing to do. It seemed that it was unlikely given the fast paced nature of modern conflict that we would have to consider many of those questions, especially as a combat engineer, just moments behind the lead on forces.

And now it seems to be seriously at risk if not already gone. Are we still proud to have served now that what we sacrificed for is being ground down?

Jim Heivilin
MAJ, EN, USAR

Kim, wonderful posting! When

nelle2nelle — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:54:08 -0600

Kim, wonderful posting!

When we resort to such methodology to reach our ends, we do so out of convenience. We convince ourselves it is the only way, because following a respect for rights takes work.

Unfortunately, the lower road hurts us all, it devalues us all. When I was a child, one would read National Geographic and occasionally see someone's home in some far flung part of the world... with a picture of Kennedy in it. Think we will see this with George Bush? Why not? Part of that answer lies in one being a humanitarian people believed in, the other as someone who is ruthless and bullying.

That this breakdown in our respect for rights coincides with the rise of the religious right is an interesting phenomenon.

nelle

Fear Up Harsh

Kim Ponders — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:36:58 -0600

Last week's New Yorker highlighted the 2 year efforts of Alberto J. Mora, the Navy's former general counsel, to avoid interrogation techniques like "fear up harsh"-increasing the prisoner's fear level to such extreme that he feels compelled to confess-that violate the Geneva Conventions.

You might think, from reading certain columnists who support the current list of interrogation techniques, that the Geneva Conventions are just a nice, polite kind of hand-shake formed in the old days of gentlemanly war and are no long really applicable to the modern war on terror. One recent article in The Jurist blankly dismisses the long standing policy of the United States to embrace the Geneva Conventions, not as a set of guidelines, but as the core of international humanitarian law-a fundamental law that limits the barbarity of war.

The terrorists who struck on 9/11 had no such standards to uphold, and thus nothing to lose except their underprivileged lives, but we do.
That was the point Mora made when he went public in the New Yorker with a 22-page memo documenting his long, unsuccessful struggle to keep Bush administration officials not only within the law, but also within the our long-standing tradition of fair and humane war practice.

In 2002, Mora learned that Muhammed al- Qahtani, the suspected twentieth hijacker from 9/11, had been "subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called "invasion of space by a female"; forced to wear women's underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days."

He went forward with the information, trying to shape a policy within the standards of the Geneva Conventions, but after two years of work, he learned that forces in the Justice Department-among them Alberto Gonzalez, now Attorney General-had essentially outmaneuvered him, producing, in Mora's words, "an extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the president's commander in chief authority."

John Yoo, a young an influential lawyer in the administration, was the author of the presiding opinion, which gives the President essential cart blanche in its dealings with prisoners of the war on terror.

That includes torture.

Mora told the New Yorker, "If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America-even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles."

You can't blame the administration for wanting to keep us safe, but how far will we go in the quest for a security state? Are we willing to corrupt the whole country in order to save it? As Mora pointed out in the article, if everything is permissible and nothing is prohibited, then what good is the law?

Our alarming disregard of the Geneva Conventions after the 9/11 attacks is, to me, the worst crime we have committed against ourselves as a free and open democracy since the days of Japanese internment during WWII. In allowing ourselves to commit torture on war criminals, we have negated the very values we stand for.