Everyone Okay With this Brand of Justice?

I.

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Letter to three students (1967)

Imagine this scenario: The Second World War has come to a conclusion. The Nazis and the Japanese fascists have been defeated, the great powers have met and decided who will occupy and control what territory, and the armed forces of the Allies are returning to their homelands. And so attention is turned to prosecuting those believed to be guilty of war crimes, the trials of which in the European theater are to take place in the German city of Nuremberg. But wait. Representatives of the four major allies — the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — have met with the top 20 defendants and have reported that these guys are not so bad after all, they are very sorry for what they did, and they promise they’ll never do it again. So, the four major allies have decided not to look backwards, but to look to the future. We’ll not hold any of those Nazis responsible for the crimes they allegedly committed in Nazi-occupied countries or in the concentration and extermination camps in Germany and eastern Europe. We'll just send them home.

Everyone okay with this brand of justice?

II.

I beseech your Majesty, let me have justice, and I will then trust the law.

Elizabeth Hoby Russell (1528-1609)
English diarist and courtier
Spoken to King James I, 1603

Or, imagine this scenario: On April 19, 1995, a bomb planted in a panel truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City goes off killing 168 people and injuring 450 in the deadliest act of terrorism ever to occur within the United States prior to September 11, 2001. Following an amazingly proficient investigation and some very good luck, three days later Timothy McVeigh is arrested and charged with 11 federal offenses. Although federal prosecutors intended to prosecute McVeigh for his crimes and, if convicted, seek the death penalty, just before his trial is to commence, the prosecutors hold a press conference and state that they have talked at length with the subject and found him not so bad after all, that the guy was sorry for what he did, and that he promised never to do it again. So, despite the trauma to the nation, they decided it was best not to look backwards, but to look to the future. Pursuant to a plea agreement, McVeigh would be sentenced to two years probation, required to wear an electronic monitoring device for six months, prohibited from leaving the country, and would be released on his own recognizance.

Everyone okay with this brand of justice?

III.

More than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States. . . . One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.

President George W. Bush
2003 State of the Union Address

Or this one: In March 2004, members of the United States military are found by a commission headed by Major General Antonio M. Taguba to have committed the following acts of “intentional abuse of detainees” at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq: “punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture; photographing a male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; and taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.”

Following publication of what became known as the Taguba report, one male military policeman is sentenced to ten years in a military prison, one female military policewoman is sentenced to three years, and a female commissioned officer is demoted. Not one person higher in command, military or civilian, is touched by the military justice system. Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States world-wide is trashed, the military demoralized, the nation embarrassed and outraged, the Bush administration reduced to stupid and inane retorts and excuses — and, oh yes, Major General Taguba forced into retirement for effectively carrying out his assignment. That done, our government decides it’s best not to look backward, but to look to the future.

Everyone okay with this brand of justice?

IV.

We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might want to look at these laws, and that might provide comfort to you.

President George W. Bush
after being asked if torture was justified
June 10, 2004

We need to get to the bottom of what happened — and why — so we make sure it never happens again.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D.VT)
Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee

And how about this one? Following the issuance of legal memoranda by the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice in 2002, the Pentagon and the CIA develop an “enhanced interrogation program” (as former Vice President Cheney recently called it) at several prison sites including Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and a number of secret or “dark” sites located elsewhere in the world (Syria, Morocco, Thailand, Poland). The techniques authorized in connection with this system include waterboarding (simulated drowning), walling (use of a plastic neck collar to throw detainees against a wall), head slapping, sleep deprivation, light deprivation, excessive exposure to light, excessive exposure to sound, exposure to extreme hot and cold temperatures, stress positions, removal of clothing, threats to family, wrapping a detainee’s head in duct tape, use of military dogs — the list goes on and on. (Some of these techniques meet the internationally accepted definition of torture, some are referred to cynically as “torture light.”)

After years of detention (often in solitary confinement) without being charged, without the benefit of an attorney, and without trial, and after more than seven years of habeas corpus litigation in federal courts resulting in four important Supreme Court decisions favoring the detainees, as well as continuing requests by the ACLU for the production of documents and photographs pursuant to a federal statute, some of the procedures and some of the persons involved in the development and implementation of these procedures are brought to light. At this point, despite investigations and findings by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Senate Armed Forces Committee, not one person, military or civilian, responsible for enhanced interrogation practices is touched by either the military or civilian justice systems. Nonetheless, the president states that the CIA operatives who administered torture would not be prosecuted criminally; and, indeed, should they be sued in civil court by their victims for their wrongdoings, the United States would pay any judgment entered against them and pay their attorney fees as well. In addition, although several federal courts order release of the photographs of the acts of torture, the Obama administration announces it will oppose their release in further court proceedings. The reason? It’s time to “move beyond a dark and painful chapter in our history,” said the president.

Everyone okay with this brand of justice?

By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the very caricature our enemies have sought to make of us. True, that miserable man who pulled out his hair as he lay on the floor at Guantanamo may eventually tell his interrogators what he knows, or what they want to hear. But for America, torture is self-defeating; for a strong country it is in the end a strategy of weakness. . . . [T]he road back — to justice, order and propriety — will be very long. Torture will belong to us all.

Mark Danner
Author and Journalist
“We Are All Torturers Now”
New York Times (January 6, 2005)



And oh, by the way, as I'm sure you know, the first two scenarios are fictitious. The last two are true (so far).

Where Have All the Protests Gone?

On Monday of this week (May 11), IndyFlix sponsored a showing of “Finding Our Voices” at the State Theater in downtown Traverse City. This is a film about the ways in which Americans expressed their dissent to the war in Iraq over the past eight years. It features the voices of six persons: the mother of a New York City fireman killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center; the mother of a young soldier who was killed in Iraq, three weeks after he returned, reluctantly, for his second tour of duty; a soldier who was a squad leader in Baghdad who, when furloughed home refused to follow orders to return to Iraq, went AWOL, became a conscientious objector and spent nine months in a military prison; another soldier who became entirely disenchanted with what he saw and did in Iraq and founded an organization of Iraq veterans against the war; a social activist and the founder of Code Pink; and a black Christian minister-activist from New York City. The most recent peace demonstration shown in the film took place at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis last summer.

The film, and the lives of those it featured, was inspiring. But the predominant feeling I had watching it was sadness, sadness over the fact that we in this country have lost our way and that in spite of the good things that have happened since last November, we still haven’t found it. Dazzled by the election, dazzled by the inauguration, dazzled by the first 100 days, we are, sadly, still lost. I had the feeling that if my one of my highschool-age grandkids would have seen the movie with me, she might have said, “Grandpa, this movie is sooo over, it’s sooo yesterday.”

Which reminded me of the piece by Dexter Filkins that appears in the current issue (May 20) of The New Republic (www.tnr.com). Filkins is a reporter for the New York Times and is one of the most respected war correspondents in the world today; he covered the war in Iraq since its inception (out of which came his acclaimed book, The Forever War) and is now doing it all over again in Afghanistan. I’m not going to tell you what Filkins said in his article (which is a review of Thomas Ricks’ new book on the surge, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008); I’m going to quote verbatim its first two paragraphs:

“From centrality to banality: perhaps no other event in modern American history has gone from being contentious to being forgotten as quickly as the war in Iraq. Remember the war? It consumed a trillion American dollars, devoured a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, squandered a country’s reputation, and destroyed an American presidency. Given the retreat of the American press — the first American withdrawal from Iraq, you might say — one could almost be excused, in the spring of 2009, for forgetting that 140,000 American troops are still fighting and dying there.

“That an undertaking as momentous and as costly as America’s war in Iraq could vanish so quickly from the forefront of the national consciousness does not speak well of the United States in the early twenty-first century: not for its seriousness and not for its sense of responsibility. The American people, we are told, appear to be exhausted by the war in Iraq. But exhausted by what, exactly? Certainly not from fighting it. The fighting is done by kids from the towns between the coasts, not by any of the big shots who really matter. And they are not exhausted by paying for it, either: another generation will do that. No, when Americans say that they are tired of the war in Iraq, what they really mean is that they are tired of watching it on television or of reading about it on the Internet. As entertainment, as Topic A, the agony has become a bore. 'A car bomb exploded today in a crowded Baghdad marketplace killing 53 and wounding 112.' Click.”

There were about 25 people there to watch the film Monday evening, one of the lowest turn-outs of the IndyFlix series at the State.

“Finding Our Voices.” Ho-hum.

It was so over, so yesterday.

Click.


Postscript

I shouldn’t mislead you. Despite his intelligence and incisive reporting, you’re probably not going to find Dexter Filkins in the front lines of an anti-war demonstration. He’s too much a “realist” for that and, besides, he (and Thomas Ricks) are of the view that the United States has so terribly and so tragically screwed things up in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East that we can’t in good conscience just get up one morning, blow a bugle, and march out of there.

Moreover, he and Ricks are also of the view that, though the results are not all in, the surge appears to have been a success, at least for the short term. Filkins writes: “Today, in the spring of 2009, it no longer really matters whether Bush was brilliant or stupid, a man who listened to reason or an idiot savant struck, Forrest Gump-like, by a fleeting insight. Whatever one’s view of the war, it is impossible to deny that in the eleventh hour Bush was right. The gamble has worked, at least so far.”

Nonetheless, the “greatest irony of the surge,” says Filkins, is that, even if temporary, even if “the outcome of the war in Iraq is still up for grabs,” its success has “all but ensured an even longer American commitment to the people of Iraq. And, we might as well add, to the people of Afghanistan.” Filkins then comes on with this admonition: “America, take note: we are still in the middle of two terrible and complicated wars, and we are likely to be fighting them for many years to come, even if we lose.”

So much for over. So much for yesterday.

Maybe, just maybe, with this realization, the peace movement in this country — and in our community — can find its voice, once again.