The US had a legal/political coup of sorts in 2000, but we’ve not yet given it a name. The military’s long institutional history is something this nation badly needs at present, when people seem to have so little sense of the past. It’s destabilizing for any culture to be so ‘in the moment’ 24/7/365 as America is today; films like “John Adams” become increasingly valuable for an overworked, stressed population.

The military has ‘discipline‘. If one assumes the word originally meant ‘disciple‘ ( ’student of a mentor’) then if used prudently, military discipline can produce good leadership and good outcomes over time.

What we’re stuck with are reckless people who use the US military as photo op backgrounds for POLITICAL, rather than military, objectives. (My contempt knows no bounds! Or, to put it in klynn’s terms, Bu$hCo shows no sense of the extent to which their own safety relies on others; hence, they trivialize the sacrifices made by members of the US military(!)

One is left wondering how young Bush, or FiveDefermentsCheney, managed to so utterly escape the prudent corrections of military discipline. If they had a shroud of respect for the military, they could not have treated Shinseki so contemptibly.

The US used assumed that civilian leadership actually respected military experience and advice. Given what we’ve seen, one can only assume that the current WH seeks bootlickers, rather than military expertise. (It does not speak well for Petraeus that the WH seems to think he’s such a great guy.)

Beyond appalling.

After Terror, A Secret Rewriting Of Military Law.

Tim Golden, NYT, 10/2404

Going back to the golden oldies, this 10/24/2004 WaPo article reminds that there was a Flanigan/Yoo inspired memo about the acceptablity of shooting down US planes, and also about using the Iraq tactics of bombing homes and children on a wing and a prayer of “getting” an insurgent to add to the body count —– right here at home. While Flanigan apparently wasn’t offering up any of his 14 kids for that experiment in Constitutional Yoo-Who, exchanges between Flanigan and Yoo generated a memo, 11 days after 9/11, that:

… listed an inventory of possible operations: shooting down a civilian airliner hijacked by terrorists; setting up military checkpoints inside an American city; employing surveillance methods more sophisticated than those available to law enforcement; or using military forces “to raid or attack dwellings where terrorists were thought to be, despite risks that third parties could be killed or injured by exchanges of fire.”

Mr. Yoo noted that those actions could raise constitutional issues, but said that in the face of devastating terrorist attacks, “the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties.”

Yeah, using the American military to kill American children in their “dwellings” – I guess some wild eyed cretins might imagine that would be an “infringment” on liberties. Can’t imagine how Haditha happened, huh, after a green light to do pretty much the same thing here at home. Thank God for the way Honore responded when we did get military support to NOLA. It makes you wonder if the delay was really just incompetence, or a behind the scenes fight over whether or not they could use NOLA as an excuse to implement some of the Flanigan/Yoo/DOJ proposals.

And you know, I hate to make any generalizations, but maybe it’s just a really horrible idea to let ex-Silberman clerks anywhere near power, huh?

One young lawyer recalled looking around the room during a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft. “Of 10 people, 7 of us were former Silberman clerks,” he said.

And Berenson, in that article, indicates how much the lawyers wanted to take risk.

“Legally, the watchword became ‘forward-leaning,’ ” said a former associate White House counsel, Bradford Berenson, “by which everybody meant: ‘We want to be aggressive. We want to take risks.’ ”

Well, why the hell isn’t Congress or anyone else giving those armchair warriors exactly what they want? Send them to Iraq for trial – after all, it may be a bit of a “risk” but that’s what they all wanted. Since they’ve been given everything else they wanted, power, money, a thoroughly corrupted Dept. of Justice, a US enamored with torture of innocent people, support for gulags, a nation striken by the effects of a pursuit of a war of depravity, etc. — why hold back on this one last thing they wanted?

They wanted to take risks. The nation should quit insulating them; preventing them from embracing what they wanted most. No consequences means no risk. They really should be given the gift of risk that they so selflessly passed on to others.

Our “trump cards” diplomatically have been a historically practice of a “fair” human rights record (with genuine domestic struggles) and provision of aid… Both based on a historical-cultural notions of fair play and rights declared in our Constitution. Those are gone…

Looking at the historical notion of “fair play”…

The game is played as an end in itself, participated in simply for the joy of taking part. Attitudes which involve going for victory at all costs are totally despised.

Self-control and above all the control of one’s feelings whether one wins or loses.The idea of “Fair Play”, ie. The equal chances of both sides, combined with a total respect for the rules of the game, and a knightly approach of “friendly rivalry” between the opponents.

Fair Play meant more than just keeping to the rules. In the ideal situation, sport had one simple aim: to provide one with fun, enjoyment, and pleasure. The historical development of the Laws of the Game show how agreement on the rules was closely linked to a social control which was both strict and there for all to see. The “Cambridge Rules” which were published in 1848, were the ancestors of our present Laws of the Game, reflecting the social attitudes of the middle and upper classes of Victorian England.

The idea of a referee, as an external and effective social control, was only introduced in 1871 when entry to the FA cup was opened to all clubs, including those of the working classes. This required new forms of control. The “Honour of the Gentleman” no longer held for all concerned. Football was no longer played just for fun.

Success at the game became a part of the war between the classes. For the ordinary folk, it became a way to move up the social or economic ladder; for the nobility it became a way to demonstrate superiority in the political set-up. Obviously in this game, the new rules of fair play were no longer valid� Fair Play had lost its social foundations.

Later, due to more sporting competitions involving increasing numbers of media attention, the idea of fair play was reduced to the view of “an acceptable foul”, meaning one which avoided injuring the opponent. The idea of fair play moved from being a matter of attitude to a question of expediency, a weighing up the costs and effectiveness: how much can I (still) allow myself to play fairly? Sport had adapted itself to the norms and values of modern society, more precisely, to those of a society where success means everything. Standards for what is considered fair play had fallen dramatically.

With this crumbling of “fair play” our country has diverted our long standing foreign policy record. Paul Kurtz wrote:

Something awful seems to be happening to the traditional American sense of fair play and goodwill. The public response in support of the victims of September 11 notwithstanding, in general there seems to be a decline of empathy and altruism. Perhaps I am overreacting, but this deficiency seems to assume many forms.

What immediately comes to mind is our treatment of prisoners. I refer first to the great flap that emerged worldwide over the Bush administration’s refusal to place the prisoners of war captured in Afghanistan under the rules of the Geneva Convention. They are “unlawful combatants,” we were told; or they are “dangerous and our guards need to be protected”; or, in still another statement, “They do not deserve any better.” I’ve always thought that the Geneva Convention provided commendable rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war, rules that all civilized nations should follow. The prisoners are being treated “humanely,” we were told. Surely, we would want our own soldiers, if captured anywhere in the world, to be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention. How can we demand this in the future if we violate these rules today? President Bush relented after much criticism at home and abroad and grudgingly declared that Taliban prisoners would come under the Geneva Convention, but not members of the Al Qaeda. Many critics believe that this concession does not go far enough.

Of course our foundational push of Fair Play and Good Will have their original roots in Natural Law. Because of the intersection between natural law and natural rights, this intersection has been cited as a component in United States Declaration of Independence.

Beyond the erosion of “Fair Play,” much has gone done the pike to erode our legal practice of it in policy. Obviously, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld has been a hero for this administration with his “roughly comparable empowerment mode…power, disability, liabilty,immunity…” Yoo must find him a hero of sorts…

Colonel Lang words have pushed me to read Normativity and Norms by Stanley Paulson in order to understand the development of such sick realities in our nation’s policies and legal defense of such policies …

One of the blessings of this country that we can lose sight of in times like these is the strong tradition that has emerged within the military itself of the military’s subservience to civilian control. Up until the present day we have never had, to the best of my limited knowledge, a serious coup attempt from within the military against the government. Senior military leaders by and large sees their role as giving the civilian leadership their best strategic and tactical advice in assisting the latter in framing their policy options, but when an option is selected for implementation their obligation from then on is to salute and carry it out to the best of their ability. When one compares this tradition in our country with the revolving door coups d’etat that occur elsewhere, one realizes how fortunate we are.

What we are seeing in this decade is the abject failure of the “elected” government to exercise responsible leadership. 40+ years ago Peter Drucker wrote a boook entitled The Effective Executive, and at the outset he defined “effectiveness” as “getting the right things done.” At best, the Bush-Cheney cabal has been “wildly off the mark” (to quote Paul Wolfowitz, one of its more noteworthy idiot savants) in its ability to select “the right things”, and has been unable to do them well in any case. In fact the only things it is competent at are deceiving itself and the American people. People abroad are less gullible. At worst, a plausible case can be made that the cabal set out intentionally to hollow out the institutions of the American democracy in the same way that Julius Caesar did with the Roman Republic. As Hitler said in 1936, “I am not a dictator. I have only simplified democracy.”

One of the many damaging consequences of this situation is that it undermines the respect for some of our best traditions, military subservience to civilian control being one of them. This is especially worrisome today given the degree to which the theocratic right has penetrated the military at all levels. It remains to be seen how this will play out. Will the devout senior officers become disillusioned with the Bush-Cheney gang’s agenda, or will they come to view that agenda as the victim of an insufficiently devout populace that must be dragged kicking and screaming into Armageddon?

Anyway, that was from pp 252-253 of Fear Up Harsh

From

When it became clear that we needed intelligence, and that this would best come from human sources, we fell back on the tactic of using force to get it. We rounded Iraqis up by force, very often at random, and interrogators like myself tried to extract intelligence by force, using either Fear Up Harsh or, in my case and many others, verying types of torture. Getting massive quantities of intelligence, rather than getting quality intelligence, became an end in itself. So I interrogated as many prisoners as possible in a 16-hour day, instead of focusing on the prisoners we knew were most valuable.

… What we did was bad for the Iraqis and bado for our troops. …

But looking back, it came so naturally. Heavy handed tactics in service of a humanitarian goal is absurd, but it is also very American. It was like we wanted to be both feared and loved; to flex our military muscle and have people rush to join the winning team. Isn’t that what we, as Americans, would do? Maybe we’re wrong in saying that Arabs understand only force. Maybe it’s actually we who have that fixation.

At the same time, we really want to believe that we’re good guys. … I’d routinely apologize to prisoners I’d abused, threatened and tortured … but maybe I was acting on a very deep American compulsion to try and believe, and to make others believe, that we are incredibly strong, even brutal, and yet at the same time very compassionate and caring.

…In Baghdad, a New York Times reporter talked to an Iraqi man who’d not only been beaten severly by American troops but had been pissed on as well. But when he got to the American-run hospital, he got the best care we could provide. “I’m really confused. At the base, they beat and tortured me. Here they treat me like a human being.”
…
Love me or I’ll kill you.

From Letter to the Editor (NYT)

Re “ ’03 U.S. Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations”:

It’s high time that the authors of the Bush administration’s legal recipe book for torture be brought out of the kitchen and into the courtroom. Yet despite volumes of highly credible evidence of human rights crimes, or even war crimes, a negligent Congress continues to fail miserably in its responsibility to mandate proper investigations into these cruel policies.

The United States’ moral and political standing in the world have completely eroded, and legitimate prosecutions of crimes against humanity against the United States have been compromised. Congress must finally face its own complicity in torture with concrete measures — not shortsighted hearings — by ordering a full, independent investigation into how torture became United States modus operandi and holding those responsible accountable.

Curt Goering
Deputy Executive Director
Amnesty International USA

New York, April 2, 2008

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