Showing posts with label war crimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war crimes. Show all posts

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Consider the alternative

Erudite Partner tackles the moral dilemma of our moment: can we, in order to block Donald Trump's ambitious fascist plans, vote to re-elect the enabler of Bibi Netanyahu's slaughter of Gaza Palestinians? Can we? She reports a recent conversation.

... [a] college student told us he wouldn’t be voting for Joe Biden—and that none of his friends would either. The president’s initial support of, and later far too-tepid objections to, the genocidal horror transpiring in Gaza were simply too much for him. That Biden has managed to use his executive powers to cancel $138 billion in student debt didn’t outweigh the repugnance he and his friends feel for the president’s largely unquestioning support of Israel’s destruction of that 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. To vote for Biden would be like taking a knife to his conscience. And I do understand.

Oh, do I ever understand! My first vote for President was for Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, a moral coward who dared not repudiate Lyndon Johnson's futile, endless war against the Vietnamese and Vietnamese nationalism. I had spent years working to turn a confused country around, yet I was stuck with only a lesser evil choice. The alternative was Richard Nixon who got us more war and finally corruption and disgrace. 

The E.P. reminds us what we'd get with the alternative to Biden:

... lest we forget, this is the man who tried once before to end American democracy. It would be true madness to give him a second chance.

In the California primary, I left the presidential line blank. I cast that vote before the campaign in Michigan to protest through voting "uncommitted" took off -- my protest was instinctive and it seems about 10 percent of Californians did the same without much organizing.  

But in the fall I'll be working to re-elect Biden in some swing state, I hope. Maybe I'll skip Biden again on my California ballot. But people located where their presidential votes matter, should consider the alternative.

Sunday, February 04, 2024

From the Israeli ground

A Washington Post story about the Israeli war on Gaza as it plays in the city schools reports this from a mother: 

“In Berkeley, you can only be an oppressor or the oppressed,” she said.

Would that reality were so simple! But, all too often, it just isn't. And peace is not advanced by pretending it is. Yes -- Gazans are being wantonly made homeless and slaughtered by superior Israeli fire power. And yes, rightful Palestinian claims in their homeland were being shamelessly erased until Hamas took violent action. But 10/7 was nonetheless criminal and also cannot be erased.

Israeli peace activist Dana Mills (her affiliations include 972+ Magazine and Standing Together) reflects on the horror of struggling for a moral stance while a citizen of a country engaged on atrocity.

... Israelis and Palestinians, both, are constantly frustrated by the unequivocalness in which people from around the world weigh in and tell us what they think we must do in order to save our homelands. The question of having "stakes" in something is very real here. There are degrees of removal from what is happening here. If your family is implicated in what has been unfolding since the 7 October-- on either side-- you are in a different emotional and ideational position than if you are observing it from a distance. If your choices, the issues you're advocating for will have direct consequence on your everyday life you are in a different position to that of advocating for something that will never circle back to you.

Is moral humanism an empty idea, then?

I think not. It is very clear to me that the attack on Gaza is an attack on humanity itself. Not just the humanity of the Palestinian people, but the absolute wreckage, targeting many cultural institutions, demolishing whole neighborhoods--- this is not just an attack on Gazans or Palestinians.

Conversely, I would say that the 7 October attacks were, too, attack on humanity itself. Entering civilian homes at dawn and kidnapping young children is an attack on everyone who is asleep in their bed on an autumnal morning anywhere.

However, I started by writing about Gaza due to the horrendous magnitude-- and longevity-- of the Israeli attack, and thus its consequences. It might be argued that Hamas would have wished to inflict the same devastation on Israel had it had the means. But, well, it didn't.

And the attack on humanity is now apparent from my (wrong) side of history. I can sympathize and understand when people want to act in solidarity with Gaza, even if it pushes them to strange moral positions (and ineffective political positions). I can understand the helplessness of watching this horror unfold live before our eyes and not being able to do anything.

I can also understand those who have stakes in different ways; whose countries send arms to Israel, who feel that their leaders continue to be allies to Netanyahu despite him obviously losing any control over what is unfolding here. I am not a legal scholar so I do not want to weigh on the question of genocide. But I do know an attack of this magnitude warrants a response from humanity at large.

Captured by Mills in Tel Aviv

Condemning the Israeli state that is enacting those actions does not mean losing hold of the humanity of Israelis who are trying -- in different ways-- to resist it. I also feel, strongly, that we, Israelis, are losing our humanity the more this continues, the more we see these horrific actions done in our name. The longer we see our own abducted citizens neglected in the name of revenge and eternal war.

Many of us are trying to hold on to our humanity in different ways: writing, reading, dancing, painting, engaging what it means to be human. This is a grave crisis for anyone who sees themselves as humanist. It is not enough to eternally return to the question of "philosophy after Auschwitz". We need to live life with clear and open eyes to the wrongs enacted by us, around us, in the here and now.

These thoughts did not leave me with a clear action-plan: I do not know what it means to be a humanist during a war/genocide, apart from calling for its end, searching hard for humanism in different corners of your world, finding a way to connect it and encouraging it in myself and others. But I know we are living through a major test for humanity and humanism. May we get through it and learn our lessons.

For Americans who care about peace, all this should be all too familiar. 

We too have launched murderous wars of revenge, slaughtering and torturing Iraqis, Afghans, and so many more. 

And for us, the action plan is simpler -- let's force our government to stop paying for Israel's war. And we can be very glad that there are Israelis, even though only a small remnant, that are struggling to comprehend what peace and justice might mean in their circumstances. We've been there.

Saturday, November 11, 2023

Veterans Day

Although conveniently for working people, the federal holiday was yesterday, I think of November 11 as the "real" Veterans Day. It originated to mark the Armistice which ended the western portion of World War I; at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11 month, the guns finally fell silent.

This Veterans Day, I think, as I often do these days, of the service of my sometime uncle, Brigadier General Johnny Lentz. He counts as a "sometime uncle" because, by the time I came along, my aunt had gone on to husband number three of what was eventually four.

Lentz was the ex-husband my parents were proud to keep a connection with. He served as General George Patton's logistic officer during that tank commander's charge across occupied France and into Germany in 1944-5.

But when the shooting ended, Lentz took up a role which I only discovered much more recently in a book about the development of the laws of war in the post-WWII war crimes trials. 

General Lentz presided over the military court which tried the German officers who had run the Dachau concentration camp. That trial set the pattern for the much more significant Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders; Nuremberg is a prime source of international laws of war recognized by treaty and the United Nations.

After listening to the evidence, and the opportunities for defense, the Dachau tribunal found the defendants guilty. General Lentz pronounced:

'The evidence presented to this court convinced it beyond any doubt that the Dachau concentration camp and its by-camps subjected its inmates to killings, beatings, tortures, indignities, and starvation to an extent and degree that necessitates the indictment of everyone, high and low, who had anything to do with the conduct and operation of the camp. This court reiterates that it sits in judgment under international law and under such laws of humanity and human behavior that are commonly recognized by civilized people.

"Many of the acts committed at Dachau," Lentz said, "clearly had the sanction of the high officials of the German Reich and the de facto laws and customs of the German government. It is the view of this court, however, that when a state sets itself up above reasonably recognized international law, or transcends civilized customs of human behavior, then the individuals effecting such policies must be held responsible for their part in violating international law and the customs and laws to humanity."

That is, this court insisted on the responsibility of individuals for "just following orders." He ordered 38 defendants hanged.

The story of the postwar military tribunals and international law is explored thoroughly in Justice at Dachau which I got out of the San Francisco Public Library. 

Thank you for your service, Uncle Johnny.

Saturday, October 21, 2023

Moral injury compounding death and destruction

Benjamin Wittes edits Lawfare for the Brookings Institution. In the context of exploring Strategy, Law, and Morality in Israel’s Gaza Operation he has written a cogent description of the two societies at war in that benighted corner of the world which captures what Americans don't often know and perhaps are newly learning. 

With the possible exception of the Demilitarized Zone in the Korean peninsula, there is no geographic line in the world across which life changes more dramatically over a shorter distance than the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip.
On one side of the line, the per-capita gross domestic product is $55,000 per year, according to the International Monetary Fund—just over two-thirds that of the United States. The population density is low. While Israel itself packs a lot of people into a small area, in general, the region surrounding the Gaza border lies outside of the sprawl that runs up and down the coastal plain and between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It is dotted with small agricultural villages. The only major city in the region, Ashkelon, is 13 kilometers away and has fewer than 150,000 people—with closer-by Sderot having only about a fifth that many people.
On this side of the line, governance is the province of a modern, highly functional state, overseen by an elected government. Infrastructure is modern. Social services are highly developed. The sovereignty of that state, while controversial in academic circles worldwide and still unrecognized by a number of regional actors, is firmly established and increasingly recognized by the other states in the region. The lingua franca on this side of the line is Hebrew, but depending on precisely where along the border and how far from it you are, the street language for many people may also be Arabic, Russian, or English. 
San Francisco cease fire demonstration
Cross over into Gaza—and, the proximity being what it is, Israeli villages extend right up to the line—and everything changes. The per-capita income plummets by more than 97 percent to around $1,250 per year, according to the World Bank. Worldwide, only wealthy city-states like Monaco and Singapore and jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Macau exceed Gaza’s population density; more than 2 million people are crammed into an area roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Gaza’s infrastructure is a disaster, with drinkable water and electricity alike both scarce, and food insecurity widespread. Government social services are virtually nonexistent. The deprivation is fueled, in part, by a long, partial blockade of the territory maintained by both Israel and Egypt.
The territory is ruled by Hamas, a fundamentalist militia that both the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist organization, which won a legislative election in 2006 and seized executive power in a kind of coup the following year. Hamas’s military infrastructure is deeply embedded within the civilian population with both command centers located in civilian buildings and weapons caches and launch sites based in or near civilian institutions or residences. Sovereignty, however, is undetermined. Israel, which was the occupying power until 2005, makes no sovereign claims over Gaza. Neither does Egypt, which occupied the strip from the time of Israel’s founding until 1967. The Palestinian Authority has never declared a Palestinian state and doesn’t control the territory in any event. And Hamas has not declared itself a sovereign entity either. The spoken language on this side of the line is almost uniformly Arabic. Roughly half of the population is under 18.
I draw this picture of contrast neither to assign blame for the shocking disparity in living conditions evident in the descriptions (there’s enough blame to go around), nor to complain on behalf of Palestinians about their comparative misfortune (though complaint is certainly justified), nor to triumph on behalf of Israelis at their comparative windfall (though the accomplishments of the Israeli state are nothing to sneeze at). 

Wittes continues to discuss both legal and moral implications of Israel's bombing and apparent impending invasion of the Gaza territory. They say they aim to eradicate Hamas in response to the atrocities of 10/7. He asks, can Israel mount an assault that is more than collective punishment, largely of the innocent, more than a reprisal for evil done that itself is evil in return?

You can read his argument yourself. It's very clear. I was most struck by this:

... as I see it anyway, to wage this conflict even in self-defense without a coherent strategy is morally dicey. It is not, to be clear, a war crime. There is no principle of the law of armed conflict that makes it a crime to respond flailingly and without a well-thought-through strategy to an armed attack.  

Yet when a lot of civilians (many of them children) are going to die in a conflict, that fact imparts a certain responsibility to think things through carefully—and specifically to think through the question of how things are going to be better at the end of the conflict than they are now. This same point, by the way, flows from the fact that a lot of Israeli soldiers—for whose lives the Israeli government is more directly accountable—are also going to die. Without a strategy, a sound, well-thought-through strategy, the operation is really just a giant reprisal attack.

... if Israel is not operating pursuant to clear objectives that warrant the cost it is exacting, that is a grave moral problem irrespective of whether the individual strikes are lawful. And it’s a problem that Israel needs to rectify immediately.

Israel's backers, especially the Biden administration, need to be saying this loud and clear.

• • •

After all, the United State, to our sorrow, knows what a war without definable ends looks like. We made exactly that in Afghanistan for 20 years and left, bloodied, without having accomplished anything except spreading misery and a lot of dead Afghans.

Today's New York Times includes a heart-rending account (gift article) by a U.S. Marine veteran sniper turned journalist who got to ride along with a Ukrainian sniper team trying to kill Russian soldiers. 

“I don’t want to kill, but I have to — I’ve seen what they’ve done,” Raptor [Ukrainian sniper's nom de guerre] went on, his own moral and martial purpose linked to the atrocities Russian forces had committed throughout the war. For Raptor, the reason for pulling the trigger was clear. For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.

We found ourselves in the middle of some poorly thought-out counterinsurgency strategy, propping up a corrupt government that collapsed almost as soon as the United States left. We were protecting each other. That became a binding ideology, all the clarity we could summon in the puzzle our politicians in Washington handed us. We stumbled through exhausted, mouthing our lines, until our tours ended and we were discharged.

When Israel's Gaza response concludes -- which it must someday -- will justified rage at Hamas atrocities turn to further moral injury to Israel and the supportive world as well as material injury and death to unfortunate Gazans?

Thursday, August 24, 2023

It's not a pretty picture

 
I guess you'd have to predict this guy couldn't just fade away. More than half a century of imperial promotion, torture, and war-making doesn't lead to a graceful exit.

In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner reminds us of centenarian Henry Kissinger's many contributions to the last eight decades of U.S. efforts to seize and hold onto global hegemony. 

It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.

... Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice — formal or otherwise — to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his hundredth birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.
... If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.  ...
Read it all.

Sunday, July 30, 2023

On the bombing of cities

Historian Adam Tooze has responded to the Oppenheimer movie about the scientist and the A-Bomb with a reminder that American and British bombing campaigns against cities in WWII can be seen as "the most concentrated expression of modern industrialism."  Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most remembered episodes. Eighty years ago this summer, the Allied bombing of Hamburg incinerated at least 40,000 humans.

On the ascending curve of aerial attacks on cities - a terrifying vision that haunted the 20th century - a crescendo that started in earnest in Guernica in 1937 and continued with the attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, the London Blitz and Coventry, after the RAF’s 1000-bomber raid on Cologne in 1942 and the sustained campaign against the German industrial centers of the Ruhr in the spring of 1943, Hamburg marked a point of culmination. It was the first aerial attack that came close to fully destroying a big city and rendering it at least temporarily uninhabitable. It was an important way-station en route to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
... The temperatures generated by the fire storm were unprecedented and anticipated those of the atomic explosions to come. Glass and metal melted. Bodies were mummified en masse.
In the aftermath, one million people were forced to flee the city in panic. In Berlin, in Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry the mood was apocalyptic. If the British and American bombers could do this to any German city at will, Speer remarked that the German economic planners might as well put a bullet in their brains.
... The most devastating single aerial attack of the war came not in Europe but in Japan, with the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10 1945, which likely killed over 100,000 people. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was not an isolated or unprecedented act of urbicide. It was the deliberate and long-planned extension of a campaign that first showed its terrifying potential in Hamburg 80 years ago.
Though historians have thoroughly documented all this, such is still not a common understanding in the Anglosphere, where we still (for some good reasons as well as morally ignorant ones) cling to the notion of WWII as "the good war."

Reading Tooze on urbicide-past had great resonance for me as it threw me back into the moment, in 1963 as an impressionable high school sophomore, when I first encountered the possibility that, though the Nazis had been unspeakably evil, "the West" had its own faults. I had a sort of in-school paper route that year, distributing paper copies of the New York Times delivered daily to a few student and faculty subscribers. For this I earned a few dollars a month which were all mine -- and which I immediately blew on a paperback book sale rake next to the school's administrative office. I don't imagine anyone else ever bought any book from that very haphazard collection, but I experienced buying from it as a tiny taste of freedom.

Somehow Dwight MacDonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist caught my attention. Why it was there I don't know; MacDonald wrote cultural criticism for the New Yorker, and was a moderately well-known intellectual pundit. He'd have a successful Substack nowadays. The heart of this volume was the story of how he stopped being a very ordinary 1930s American leftist, took up Trotskyism and recovered, and made his unhappy peace with the 1950s United States as the world's lesser evil.

In the main essay, first published before the end of the European war in March 1945, he struggles with the morality of the Allies, already fully aware of Auschwitz, the attempted extermination of all European Jews and other misfits, as well as Nazi atrocities across occupied Europe. But even then -- before Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- he wasn't about to let the Allies off an ethical hook for the bombings of cities.

There was much moral indignation, for example, about the [V-8] rocket bombs [aimed by the Germans at London]. But the effects of "saturation bombing," which the British and American air forces have brought to a high degree of perfection, are just as indiscriminate and much more murderous. "The Allied air chiefs," states this morning's paper, "have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers. ... The Allied view is that bombardment of large German cities creates immediate need for relief. This is moved into the bombed areas by rail and road, and not only creates a traffic problem but draws transport away from the battle front. Evacuations of the homeless has the same result." The only mistake in the above is to say the decision has just been adopted ...
Even in 1945, even during a "good war," it was possible to observe that much of what one's "own side" was doing was immoral -- and to wrestle vigorously with the implications. Not necessarily to condemn one's side (MacDonald at length does not) but neither to erase crimes. 

In 1953, MacDonald added a footnote:

Six months after this was written, “we” humane and democratic Ameri­cans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying in the twinkling of an eye some 90,000 civilians— men, women, and children. This was the climax of the Anglo-American Policy of massacring civilian populations from the air, a policy which later evidence shows to have been morally indefensible, politically disastrous, and militarily of dubious value.
Not surprisingly, in 1963, I had never encountered anything like this moral complexity. MacDonald gave me a righteous preparation for the decade of Civil Rights struggle and Vietnam -- not mention his introduction to the Catholic Worker, a New Yorker profile of Dorothy Day, also reprinted in this book.

• • •

I think I'm going to skip the Oppenheimer film; I've agonized plenty over that era and the reviews don't point me to anything new. Besides, I seldom warm to movies. In 2011, I wrote up the book the film is based on here on the blog if anyone is interested.

Sunday, September 05, 2021

A 9/11 wars after-action assessment and more

In the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada, the highly regarded non-fiction book reviewer, has written an insightful survey of some of the literature of the War on Terror: 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

Some telling excerpts; I highly recommend the whole:

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. ... 
...  In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized. It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism. 
... The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/11 world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kicking.
Lozada has chosen a valuable catalogue of horrors to highlight -- but I can't help mourning what's missing from it. In addition to these book-length journalistic critiques -- "just the facts" deeply reported if morally informed -- the "War on Terror" has left us with a vast literature in a number of genres.
• There was the deeply disillusioned, essentially conservative, military take from retired colonel Andrew Bacevich in America's War for the Greater Middle East
• The grunts on the ground have tried to explain what the war meant in their lives. In What It's Like to Go to War,  Karl Marlantes compares his war -- Vietnam -- with the experiences of another generation of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. 
• Joshua E.S. Phillips tells the story of U.S. soldiers and torture in a painful, caring little volume, None of Us Were Like This Before. This one deserved more visibility than it seemed to get. 
• National Book Award judges did take notice of a truly successful fictional portrait an enlisted man's mindset: Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk. Highly recommended, especially for football fans. 
Union Square, New York City, September 22, 2001.
I don't think we have yet a broad, thoughtful, book-length account of the citizen peace movement in this country against the War on Terror and its permutations. There were always nay-sayers from the first moments after 9/11, while the Towers site still smoldered. Those masks date from 2001.

In early 2008, I assembled a five part series on the peace movement for a conference of Historians Against the War. Looking these posts over more than 10 years later, they still provide a decent survey in what turned out to be still early days.
Part One: Trying to find the ground under our feet: 2001-2002  
Part Two: Afghanistan and the Iraq invasion; the antiwar movement builds some infrastructure and tries some initiatives: 2002-2003  
Part Three: Liberal elites get the bad news: U.S. has "lost" Iraq war; Presidential election subsumes activism: 2004-2005  
Part Four: Peace movement finds causes to support; Insurgent new Democrats and a counterculture emerge: 2005-2008  
Part Five: Lessons: 2001-2008
The grouplet that called itself Historians against the War now calls itself Historians for Peace and Democracy. This seems on point twenty years after 9/11.

Thursday, May 06, 2021

Boasting of torture

Warning: this story is stomach turning.

Former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher is Donald Trump's kind of guy. He was tried in a military court for stabbing a severely injured ISIS prisoner in the neck and got off on that particular charge. But he was convicted, among other misdeeds, of posing with the corpse. [See below] The former president was easily convinced this was just the sort of behavior he wanted in the nation's fighting forces. He supported Gallagher and eventually gave him a broad pardon.

The Navy didn't want its guys running around without discipline, so it tried various measures within its jurisdiction to mark that Gallagher had crossed a line. Trump didn't like that either. The affair bounced around the chain of command, eventually leading to Trump's own chosen Navy Secretary getting booted.

At Task and Purpose, Jeff Schogol reports on Gallagher's current boasts, now that he's off the legal hook. 

... Gallagher has told “The Line” [a podcast] that the SEALs were not tending to the fighter’s injuries; rather, they decided to conduct “medical treatment on him until he’s gone.” 
“I mean, he was going to die, regardless,” Gallagher said. “We weren’t taking any prisoners." 
He also claimed that every member of his platoon, including one SEAL who later reportedly described Gallagher as “evil” to investigators, all agreed to torture the ISIS fighter to death. 
“Everybody knew what was going on,” Gallagher said. “It’s the only truthful thing to this whole process; and then the rest of it just is like a bunch of contorted lies to, like, pin that whole scenario on me.” 
“I didn’t stab him,” Gallagher continued. “I didn’t stab that dude. That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done – and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him.”
We can only hope that Gallagher is boasting about torturing the prisoner to amp up his right-wing notoriety. He's found a sweet grift, being the right's favorite war criminal. Though the whole platoon is pictured here, we know some of them turned Gallagher in and called him "freaking evil."

These stories from the forever wars keep sending me back to the story of the U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Seeing the terrible stacks of prisoner bodies everywhere, their first impulse was simply to shoot every German in sight. But officers made them stop, insisted the German commanders get a trial with explicit evidence and defense lawyers -- and then quickly hanged the men convicted. This proceeding set the model for the better known Nuremberg trials. 

Warriors aren't angels but they need not be allowed to become devils either.

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Choices leaders make

I am haunted by a photo. 

The location is inside the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in southern Germany, on the day in 1945 when U.S. troops fought their way inside. They found starving men and corpses all around. A train engine was hitched to 39 boxcars packed with the bodies of some 2000 prisoners. The SS camp guards had meant to hide their crimes, steaming away with the physical evidence. U.S. troops, hardened veterans who had fought their way north from Italy, just lost it.  At one confused moment, some lined SS men up against a wall and began gunning them down.

Their commander, Lt. Colonel Felix Sparks, ordered the Americans to stop shooting, holding up his hand and firing into the air. Confronted with horror, he demanded discipline.

Subsequently, Dachau became the site of the first postwar war crimes tribunal which set the legal precedents and patterns for the subsequent Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Sparks' intervention in the midst of natural human reaction to atrocity created the context for that legal process to be invented. Some number of Germans were killed, but Sparks would not allow his men to unleash their appropriate passions.

•••

Under the Trump presidency, it has repeatedly felt as if rightful order -- the rule of law, simple decency -- depended on a fragile bulwark provided by career professionals whose conception of doing their job impeded the Leader's autocratic aspirations. Most recently I pointed to the security professionals working to ensure we could have an undamaged election; one of these, Christopher Krebs, has since paid the price of doing his duty, getting fired by tweet for his honesty.

At Dachau, Lt. Colonel Sparks' adherence to his professional code interrupted what could have been mass vengeance. His soldiers' reaction to the vile house of horror they had liberated feels utterly understandable. Sparks stood apart. How does that happen?

His commanding officers certainly preferred that the troops maintain good discipline, if only because the alternative -- massacre responding to massacre -- would have led to lengthy inquiries. But somehow the leaders of the time, civilian and military, had inculcated a sense that their armies were fighting for higher purposes than necessity and survival. Even in the midst of death and destruction, many of these men believed their sacrifice was not only for their buddies and to get back to their families, but also for democracy, decency, humanity.

•••

It was empire up against other peoples' aspirations -- and Vietnam in particular -- that shattered that belief structure, I think. It had value, even if always partially delusional. Once broken, it became almost impossibly hard to reestablish, though the contemporary US military has tried pretty hard. No wonder Donald Trump had to pardon the war criminal SEAL Eddie Gallagher.

•••

I've written about Dachau before when I was surprised to discover an uncle had been a figure in that story.

Apparently Netflix has issued a new documentary about Felix Sparks' unit. I won't be watching it because I don't watch war films. H/t to an interview in Task and Purpose for introducing me to the photo.

Friday, September 11, 2020

After September 11 2001: the victims became the perpetrators

It was both wrong and stupid to respond to a criminal atrocity by making wars without end. We have a national responsibility, however little we want to take it up. Some of us know that.

Friday, June 07, 2019

About those war criminals


Erudite Partner is at it again, reminding us that there are -- or ought to be -- ethical and legal limits, even in war. And its not just groundlevel grunts who violate ...

Trump’s Plan to Pardon War Criminals is Outrageous, but the Higher-Ups were Never even Charged.

Read all about it!

Thursday, May 10, 2018

The good solider Haspel testified

Gina Haspel had her public confirmation hearing for the position of CIA Director before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday. She's a career professional officer who headed up a torture site in Thailand during the GW Bush era and later had a leading role in ordering the destruction of the videotapes that showed what her agency did to detainees.

One of the oddest things about her nomination to such a public role is that the CIA refuses to declassify most details of her career (claiming agents/assets might be outed). So we are left without any real information about what she's done/her qualifications. The CIA says she's great. It seems to me that in a democracy citizens who are not Senators deserve to know more than that her agency likes her -- a lot more.

Erudite Partner did commentary during the hearing for Pacifica station KPFA; after all, torture is her subject. Here's the audio.

The following reflections are mine, not the resident expert's.
  • The Democratic Senators' questions seemed sharper than they often have been in such settings. New Mexico's Martin Heinrich nailed the key issue, to my way of thinking:

    “I know you believed it was legal... ... I want to trust that you have the moral compass you said you have. You're giving very legalistic answers to very moral questions.”

  • Nothing I heard suggests Haspel has real qualms about the torture program. She's not prepared to say torture didn't serve the project of defeating terrorist enemies -- though the 6000 page classified Senate Intelligence Committee report apparently came to that conclusion.

    “We got valuable information from debriefing of al-Qaeda detainees,” she told Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.). “I don’t think it’s knowable whether interrogation techniques played a role in that.”

  • She said she wouldn't restart the torture program. It was hard to tell whether she was promising to stand up to the bully in the White House. (Trump thinks we didn't torture enough.) She seemed to equivocate.

    “No one should get credit for simply agreeing to follow the law. That’s the least we should expect from any nominee and certainly the director of the CIA,” [Senator Mark] Warner told Haspel ...

  • Perhaps inevitably since we're not allowed to know anything about her accomplishments, she heavily emphasized her identification with the Agency.

    Haspel cited her support from the rank and file in the agency, noting that “they know that I don’t need time to learn the business of what CIA does. ... I know CIA like the back of my hand,” she said. “I know them, I know the threats we face, and I know what we need to be successful in our mission.”

She's such an unfamiliar, opaque figure that I am allowing myself luxury of trying to form a picture of what sort of person she revealed herself to be. (Usually one has more to go on than one hearing, but that's the situation in which we find ourselves.)

I think she's one smart, tough woman who came up wanting to be a warrior, a hero. There's weren't a huge number of venues for a woman with such an ambition when she joined the CIA in 1985. In the Agency, she found her tribe, her vocation where she could fulfill her ambition. She was very good at whatever they threw at her. She seems to equate loyalty to the Agency with loyalty the people of the United States -- without any inkling that there might be any daylight between those two goods. Perhaps that's inevitable in someone whose life has cloistered her within a dangerous, secret, social niche. It hardly seems good preparation to be anything more than a good soldier. But the job of CIA Director necessarily requires some understanding of a messy civilian society -- a society whose preservation is ultimately the only reason that her warrior caste is privileged to exist.

I don't know if she'll be confirmed; the White House apparently had to persuade her not to back out of the confirmation process last week.

The hearing didn't win any trust from me (not that this was ever likely.) A good soldier is a dangerous weapon when the Commander in Chief cares not a fig for law, decency, or morals.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

War criminal named to head the CIA

You don't have to take my word for label in the headline. The NY Times reports Gina Haspel

played a direct role in the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition program,” under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.

The C.I.A.’s first overseas detention site was in Thailand. It was run by Ms. Haspel, who oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Mr. Zubaydah alone was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide.

Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper says this record shouldn't worry us.

“I think Gina will be excellent as director, as long as she is ready to be fired at a moment’s notice,” Clapper said in remarks posted to the Cipher Brief news site.

I am not reassured. Haspel already showed she rolls over and plays dead when higher authorities want wrongdoing hidden:

Haspel later served as chief of staff to the head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, when he ordered the destruction of dozens of videotapes made at the Thailand site.

Rodriguez wrote in his memoir that Haspel “drafted a cable” ordering the tapes’ destruction in 2005 as the program came under mounting public scrutiny and that he then “took a deep breath of weary satisfaction and hit Send.”

Those wusses Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham have made clucking noises about appointing a known torturer. Will they voter to confirm one?

Meanwhile California Senator Diane Feinstein, who as the lead promoter of the Congressional Torture Report which the Obama administration and the CIA tried to kill, seems to have gone squishy on the perpetrators of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

On Tuesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., signaled that she might be open to supporting Haspel's confirmation, despite her work on the black sites.

"It's no secret I've had concerns in the past with her connection to the CIA torture program and have spent time with her discussing this," Feinstein said in a statement. "To the best of my knowledge she has been a good deputy director and I look forward to the opportunity to speak with her again."

We continue to be shamed by the legacy of the Bush Administration's embrace of what Dick Cheney called "the dark side."

UPDATE: Now Senator Feinstein has gone squishy on being squishy. It's hard to pin that one down.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

People must demand prevention of nuclear war, again

Erudite Partner writes about growing up under the threat of the bomb -- and how, despite the terror, we must do everything we can to make sure our nightmares never become reality.

Our fingers are far removed from the levers of power, while the tiny digits of the man occupying the “adult day care center” we call the White House hover dangerously close to what people my age used to call “the Button.” Nevertheless, I think there may still be time to put our collective foot on the brakes ...

Read it all at The Nation.

Friday, April 07, 2017

If only the president weren't most unstable element here ...

As I post this, we're apparently lobbing missiles at targets in Syria. The U.S. can certainly do that; there is no sign whatsoever that there are any plans for what comes after places and people go boom.

Erudite Partner has published an exhaustive catalog of the crimes the Great Tangerine has indicated he'd like to commit in lieu of developing a foreign policy with discernible objectives: Donald Trump Has a Passionate Desire to Bring Back Torture.

And that's if he doesn't decide he can only demonstrate his manhood by nuking someone ...

Friday, November 18, 2016

The stain of fear


Did her editors make her write these lead sentences?

“It feels like 9/11.” That’s one of the many heartbroken comments I overheard among shell-shocked New Yorkers the wake of the election of Donald Trump. Now, the differences of magnitude and factual reality between the murder of 3,000 individuals and the prophesies of doomsayers predicting fascism under Trump are fairly apparent. ...

Writing at the Atlantic, Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, does not explicate further, but this opening seems to suggest that 9/11 was a more consequential event than the free election last week of our aspiring autocrat by a bare minority of our citizens.

That's nuts. The murderous attacks of 9/11, for all their shock and horror, were pinpricks on the U.S. state. Sure, we the people were rendered numb and aghast by the sight of burning jumpers and the crashing towers, but those events were no threat to this nation or most of us individually. Anyone who had been paying attention to U.S. behavior (especially outside our borders) knew there were people willing to die to hurt us. But the damage they could do was limited to a made-for-TV movie in Lower Manhattan. Our timid, imbecile "leaders" managed to make the aftermath into an ongoing threat, but that's been fully explicated by now.

After her unpromising opening, Greenberg goes on to lay out in all its horror how the crimes of the Bush administration and their extension by the Obama administration eviscerated restraints on torture and civil liberties. She does a clear, honorable, job of it and does not mince words:

With Donald Trump’s inauguration looming, a justified terror that law-breaking policies could return, and that new, aggressive violations of civil liberties could be brought to life, now stalks the republic. With Trump’s cavalier dismissal of civil liberties—through statements like “torture works,” among other things—he alludes to an even broader application of the policies that tarnished the Bush administration. While we don’t yet know whether Trump will fulfill his promises, we do know what happened the last time a president chose to sidestep the rule of law.

Among those lessons: When the White House asks, the rules can be broken as rapidly as dutiful government lawyers can put their pens to paper. ...

No, the horrors of 9/11 were not worse; they (and our reactions) were prelude to today's horror. Greenberg is too realistic an observer of reality not to know this. Maybe her editors will figure it out ...

The photo is one of the less shocking images from the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib where torture was routinely applied to Iraqi captives by U.S. personnel.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Mohamedou Slahi has been released from Guantanamo

The ACLU provides this video. After more than a decade of captivity, Slahi explains:

Forgiveness is my inexhaustible resource ...

For more on this remarkable man's imprisonment, torture, and moral fortitude, read his amazing Guantanamo Diary.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Extrajudicial execution: it's not just something cops do too often


Turkey's President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan claims this gentleman, Fethullah Gulen, was responsible for the coup attempt by the military to overthrow him last week. Gulen lives in rural Pennsylvania.

Glenn Greenwald asks:

In light of the presence on U.S. soil of someone the Turkish government regards as a “terrorist” and a direct threat to its national security, would Turkey be justified in dispatching a weaponized drone over Pennsylvania to find and kill Gulen if the U.S. continues to refuse to turn him over ...?

This question makes a good introduction to Erudite Partner's current article on the legal and moral implications of the U.S. policy of remote assassination of perceived enemies in the forever war: The Trojan Drone: An Illegal Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance.

Friday, July 08, 2016

Criminals in our midst

A British report -- named after the author Sir John Chilcott -- has told us what we already knew about the U.S. and British war on Iraq: this was an con job perpetrated by elites on their own peoples. They knew or could have known (and if you are the government that's just as bad) that Saddam Hussein was no threat to anyone but his own people. They knew or could have known that they had no plans for what would happen once their armies had crashed into Iraq's cities. They knew or could have known that the country was likely to tear itself apart in sectarian and ethnic rivalries once the dictator was removed. They knew or could have known that thousands of Iraqis who had never wronged them in any way would die and/or be made refugees on their initiative. But they made their war anyway and have paid no penalty for instigating the carnage that continues to this day. They should be defendants on a trial for disturbing the peace of the world, not comfortably retired.

Erudite Partner (Rebecca Gordon) responded to the report at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, always a good source on the interactions between the Muslim world and the West. Her article, Surprise! It was a War Crime, is worth checking out in full. Some highlights:

... members of the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and his longtime associate Paul Wolfowitz, actually came into office with an explicit plan ... The ultimate goal would be a realignment of power in the Middle East, with Syria destabilized, a Hashemite king ruling Iraq, and a new regional alliance among Turkey, Jordan, and Israel.

Syria has certainly been “rolled back” in a civil war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and made over half its population either internal or external refugees.The US invasion or Iraq did not cause the Syrian civil war, but it unleashed the shock waves—as Wolfowitz and his co-authors predicted and hoped—that made it possible, as well as creating the conditions for the rise of extremist forces like the Islamic State.

... It’s clear, too, from the Senate torture report and other public records, that U.S. torture in the “war on terror” began because Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush needed a reason to invade Iraq. The CIA tortured Abu Zubaydah into saying that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. They shipped a Libyan named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who probably had been an al Qaeda trainer, to Egypt. There he was waterboarded until he agreed to the proposition that, as President Bush put it in an October 2002 speech to the nation, “Iraq has trained al Qaeda in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” Donald Rumsfeld wrote his famous memo okaying torture at Guantánamo in hopes that someone there would say the same thing. ...

These men, and their underlings, and their abettors should be in the dock.

Friday, May 06, 2016

Four decades of European barbarism

The title of Ian Kershaw's history, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, got my attention by getting the periodization right. We've achieved enough distance on World War I and World War II to see them as just a single, awful, very long, war -- a convulsion emanating from one continent that engulfed the globe.

When I read a sweeping history written for a popular audience that covers material in which I'm moderately well read, what fascinates me is the historiography, how the author has chosen to structure his story. This British historian of Hitler's Germany is wonderfully clear about the frame in which he is writing: his subject is

four interlocking major elements of comprehensive crisis, unique to these decades: (1) an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism; (2) bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism; (3) acute class conflict -- now given concrete focus through the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and (4) a protracted crisis of capitalism (which many observers thought was terminal).

Most European history currently being written in English is bent on correcting an overemphasis on western and northern Europe prevailing during the Cold War when Russia's trauma's and the dramas and horrors of central Europe were ignored "behind the Iron Curtain". If this volume did nothing else, its insistence that Russia, and the Baltic States, and the Balkans and all the other countries of the continent matter along with Britain, France, Germany and the Scandinavians makes a necessary correction to many previous narratives.

Often Kershaw emphasizes continuity as well as change. This is particularly true in reference to violent anti-Semitism whose potency he documents in the societies of Eastern and Central Europe throughout the period, from well before the first "Great War" and into the aftermath of Nazism's unspeakable culmination.

In seeking to understand the Europe that emerged from war's barbarism, Kershaw again identifies four themes that pointed into the next era:

... beneath the surface of Europe's dark age people's lives did continue to be shaped or reshaped in quiet transitions, unbroken if not untouched by the trauma... [These included] economic and social change[s], the role of the Christian Churches, the reaction of intellectuals and the 'culture industry'.

I would not have thought of the churches, since I would have assumed the carnage ended their widespread influence, even hegemony, over social life. Kershaw showed me I was generalizing too much from northern European experience.

This is a very good survey of some awful times and places. My chief complaint is that its broad European focus obscures the role of world wide empire in the war(s). Kershaw's sharp attention to all parts of Europe leaves little room for anything beyond cursory mention of the impacts of that continent's rivalries elsewhere. Sykes/Picot is more mentioned than explicated, as are the seething Indian subcontinent and Indochina. There was a lot of world and a great deal of war that gets short shrift here, as does the agency of non-European peoples.

This volume is the eighth part of a Penguin History of Europe series. Kershaw is to be the author of a subsequent volume bringing European history up the present. It will be interesting to read how he writes of a time when Europe became, though still rich and influential, so much less central to global developments. That's a big shift. And Kershaw is writing it in a moment when the configurations of European stability seem more precarious than in several decades. I look forward to whatever he writes; he's an insightful narrator.