Buttons

I have some. Not so many, and not so many; which can be pushed, as most people. Getting rid of hot button reactions is part of training interrogators.

So the places I have buttons tend to be ones in which I'm not dealing with people directly. Today I discovered I have a newish one.

Someone, elsewhere, used a nom de web to make a gratuitous insult of Guardsmen. My pride (and to some degree, my personal honor) were offended.

_____________________________

Kent State University

Now really, what kind of incident could possibly happen? These Guardsmen (and women) are trained professionals, after all.

_____________________________

The e-mail attached to that name is bogus.

So it was done, I think, with the intent to offend.

Forget Kent State; as you know it, or as it was (which is more complicated than the mythic imagery, and the protest songs have it. No, the governor should not have deployed the Guard. No, they didn't just open fire into a peaceful crowd. No, it wasn't good, and nobody (save perhaps the actual people who got hit) comes out of it with clean hands. Try to put aside the details of it, while I parse out what irritated/irritates me about this).

This guy grabbed the iconography of Kent State to tar everyone in the Guard as not merely incompetent, but as thugs, who are either incapable of being restrained; or actively taking part in the violent suppression of their fellows.

He did it with a dig that I might not have noticed much (because the incompentent, undertrained Guard is a common trope, and the majority of us having a year in a combat zone [and no small number with more than that; in more than one] seems to be conveniently ignored), save for the screen name.

It was a very clever piece of juxtaposition. By putting that place/incident, against the imputation of poor-training (this was a thread on airport security) he managed to imply a host of possible ills (angry crowd, irked at TSA's treatment, getting a volley of rifle fire, random person, ID'd in panick as, "having a bomb" getting shot... shades of the poor bastard shot as he tried to leave the plane, or any other idiot situation where panic would be expected to be possible) leading to unjustified death.

And that unjustified death being used/useful, to a gov't which wants to make the populace afraid, and more tractable, while showing a "powerful" reaction to intangible enemies.

But that's when I think about what it was which was bubbling in the back of my mind.

In the front I was just pissed off.

Whose ass is getting covered?

I've been railing about torture for a long time. I've been against it, professionally (as opposed to intellectually), for almost 15 years. My opposition has led some to call me a left-wing radical. So be it. I think it morally wrong, and I don't see any reason to trim my sails on this just because a lot of people have their panties in a twist and watched a couple too many cop shows where the bad was beaten into confessing.

I've also been saying the War Crimes Act of 1996 gives all the needed ammo to prosecute people who practice it (even the guys from Blackwater, and the the like, who seem to have immunity from all laws, because they are not in the military; and so are exempt from the UCMJ, and not in the US, and have been exempted from local law [which means, technically, if I cap one, I can be hanged, but if they cap a soldier, the worst that can be done is to send them home as persona non grata]) because it says that things done overseas are covered by it.

For some reason the present administration seems loathe to use this tool.

But not to ammend it.

According to the AP

The White House, without elaboration, said in a statement that the bill "will apply to any conduct by any U.S. personnel, whether committed before or after the law is enacted."

Two attorneys said that the draft is in the revision stage but that the administration seems intent on pushing forward the draft's major points in Congress after Labor Day. The two attorneys spoke on condition of anonymity because their sources did not authorize them to release the information.

"I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That's why it's so dangerous," said a third attorney, Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

Fidell said the initiative is "not just protection of political appointees, but also CIA personnel who led interrogations."

What I see in it isn't the protection of the guys twisting fingers and using TA-312s to zap people, no. What I see is the guys who wrote the memos, who drafted the policy letters, who told Colonels, to tell sergeants to do the dirty deeds feeling the chilling effects of a subpoena coming down the pike at some time in the future.

The present mood of the country isn't so pleasant. Bush has an approval rating in the 30s. Cheney, well I think he's still in double digits, but it's been as low as 13, so that's not saying much.

Lieberman lost his primary, and there are rumors swirling about that the Republican Party is expecting to lose either the House, or the Sentate, and perhaps both (which might be good, might be bad, it depends on just how the members look to use the powers being in the Majority gives them; certainly they've not known how to be an effective Minority, but I digress). They are probably looking at losing a couple of gubenatorial races.

So perhaps someone with a conscience, and a sense of justice, might decide to look into the details of how the "abberations" came to be.

JAG has been against torture (and the proposed tribunals, and the ignoring of the Geneva Conventions, and, and, and...) from the get-go. Which, I think, is part of why things have been going so slowly; it's like trying to get a doctor to administer a legal injection... no matter that the law says it's ok, they won't do it.

So this shit comes down the pike, insulating those who made it happen, as well as those who did it; and there's no way in hell that a law specifically going after them is going to pass, if this thing does. You can bet the Republicans will be able to hold enough party discipline to keep a filibuster going.