(no subject)

I am sick and tired of this shit. Not just the lies (“this is not the America I know”) but rather the facile conniving at turning the rest of us into either Sgt. Schultz or concentration camp guards (and before some idiot comes in and tries to invoke Godwin... when the analogy is apt, there is no reason not to use it. Pretending America is in some way so special that our shit can’t stink is exactly the sort of complicity Eisenhower had the people who’d been ignoring the camps dragged through them to see. When someone goes wrong, you have to tell them).

For the past few weeks the apologists and torture mongers (like Cheney, and Bush, who have, both, now admitted to authorising, even selecting specific tortures. Not with the shame of someone who did something in a moment of weakness, but rather the pride of someone who expects to get an economium and a gold watch as they leave the company) have been running about setting the stage for a general amnesty of those who committed heinous crimes.

Am I hyperbolic? No. I am apoplectic. This is not the country I signed up to defend. It’s not the country I, with reservations, went to war to serve. This is a bunch of people making the Nuremberg Defense, “We were only following orders.” It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now. Up until a few years ago the consensus was that defense was not only inadequate to get one off the hook, it wasn’t even ameliorating. Some orders were so bad that following them was something we’d hang one by the neck for.

No longer. The people who spent all of my lifetime (going on 42 years now) saying, “actions have consequences,” and, “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” and a whole lot of other moralistic stuff about the “absolutes” which can’t be negotiated... well they don’t seem to care that they have tossed it all in a cocked hat.

We are told, by all sorts of, “serious” people that the people who carried out the tortures ought not be prosecuted. Why? Because they were following orders. The people who gave the orders... they are off the hook because they were given advice by people like Bybee and Yoo.

Bybee and Yoo (and the other enablers) are off the hook because they had good intentions.

Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

I can go into any prison in the world, and find a whole lot of people who committed their crimes with the best of rationalised intentions. They did it to feed their families, or to get back at a company which cheated them. They killed whomever it was because he was going to ruin someone’s life, etc., etc., etc. I don’t see anyone saying we need to examine their motives and think about why they did it.

No. See they weren’t trying to serve some higher purpose, they are just common criminals.

Well guess what... the people who rationalised, the people who authorised, the people who organised, and the people who carried out the regime of torture our president, vice president and their consiglieri admit they set into motion... those are some uncommon criminals.

If I were given the authority to deal with them (which, thank God I will never be given), I’d toss them in an oubliette. Being less than kind, I’d let them have unlimited water, and; not quite enough, food. Slow starvation. Years of wasting misery to contemplate how far they’ve fallen. Time to ponder the sort of disgust required to make the effort to keep them in such squalor and misery.

I don’t hate them. I despise them. I loathe them. I will not shed a tear when they die, but I don’t hate them. They are so far from my ken that, like rabid dogs, they aren’t something one can identify with enough to hate.

I grew up in a country I knew to be flawed. We committed genocides, both active and passive. We created, fostered and even nurtured a system of chattel slavery horrific in its nature. We treated the people we’d wronged with that system like beasts afterwards.

We destroyed nations, and propped up terrible dictators, because a company which wanted to grow bananas on the cheap hated the idea of giving an honest wage for an honest days work.

I knew all that. And I accepted it. I believed in progress. I believed our Ideals were something we, as a people, were striving for. Were we perfect? No. Were we the best thing going? Who knows. But we had something. The rest of the world had hope. Even when we were engaged in the most egregious of violations of the ideals we were espousing, we managed to convince most of the world we were failing.

Not ignoring, not betraying, not abandoning those ideals. No, we were failing at them. We were falling short of ourselves.

I can’t believe that anymore. Not right now. Not when my nation is led by people who say, “We can’t look back to what we did, we have to look ahead to the future,” and follow it up with, “the people who tortured were just following orders and the people who gave the orders were afraid the Nation was in dire peril.”

Oh goody. Stalin could make the argument. Heck, he did. He starved Ukraine because it was needful for the rest of the Soviet Union. He built the gulag because those people were trying to destroy the State from inside. The Taliban sentenced missionaries to death because they were undermining the state.

That sort of justification is without limit. Any abuse can be rationalised in the interest of saving the State.

Well, that’s not the state I want to live in. Obama has a chance to fix it. If he repudiates torture, closes Gitmo, releases everyone who was tortured; because the rule of Law demands it (better a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent should be falsely bound). If he does those things then the Ideal of “America” may yet recover.

That’s a second best. The thing to hope for is investigations, and; where there is evidence of crime, prosecutions. No one gets a pass. No one gets to be, “the good soldier” who was only “following orders.” The fish rots from the head down (and all that talk of, “a few bad apples”.... well one bad apple spoils the barrel). Officers are supposed to get harsher punishments for the same offences. Why? Because responsibility increases as one gets closer to the origination of an order.

If Presidents didn't mandate it, then generals wouldn't order it. If the generals didn’t order it, the colonels wouldn’t organise it, and the sergeants wouldn’t carry it out.

Which is why we need to have investigations, and the results have to be made public. If we don’t address it, well the rot is there, and it ignoring it won’t fix it. Rot spreads. The only disinfectant for this is sunlight, lots of sunlight.

Duty, Honor, Country

I want to expand a bit on something I said in my last post. “This is not the country I signed up to defend. It’s not the country I, with reservations, went to war to serve.” Ignoring that there are no idealists in foxholes (atheists can be found), I did enlist (in part) from a desire to serve.

Not to “defend liberty”. No. That’s too plastic, and abusable a concept to be worthy of claiming it as an ideal. I signed up because I believed in the bedrock issues of the Declaration of Independence, their implementation in the Constitution, and their explication in the Gettysburg Address.

Really, the third is the one which had the greatest suasive power to my enlisting.

The Gettysburg Address was about the why of that war. Right up front: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

That’s what the war was about. It wasn't about states' rights. It was about whether a democracy, based on the idea of equality, could “long endure.” That’s what I signed up to defend. I don’t give a rat’s ass about “spreading democracy.” I like to see equality spread. If that means democracy (which seems the best bet) then so be it.

The “War on Terror” has to change. It has to become what it ought to have been from the beginning. A police action. Not in the fictional, "we aren’t in a war in Viet-nam” sort of way, but the “arrest the bad guys who are planning to rob the bank” sort of way.

Because the "War on Terror" is proving corrosive to the idea that all men are created equal. There is no way to reconcile that with the idea of indefinite detention of whomever the president wants to declare an enemy combatant. No way.

The meat of the Declaration of Independence (when one gets past the first bit) is really straightforward too. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

There you go. All men. Not all men who happen to be white. Not all Americans. Not all people who live in a country we like.

Everyone, full stop.

We used to act on that principle. Not perfectly, but it was the basis for our laws. The idea that the President can wave his hand and erase those rights is anathema.

That’s why leaving Iraq isn’t a big deal to me. We’ve blown it. I don’t see any way we can make it better. So why keep spending our blood and treasure to screw the pooch even worse? When the blowback starts to work toward making the President a kingly figure?

People like to say we can’t quit, because that dishonors the dead. We can’t let their sacrifice be in vain.

The last part of the Gettysburg Address answers that. ”It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

I’ve got the campaign medal for this little adventure. I knew some of the 4,222 (last I checked) of those honored dead. Three of them were in the battalion I was with in theater. One of them was from my battalion (but later). Some I knew. At Charlie Co. Dining Ins we toast them. Their memories go into the grog bowl, and silly-buggers in their honor come out of it.

They don’t die in vain if we “lose” Iraq. They die in vain if we start to let people have privilege. When we start to turn abuses into normal operating procedures. When we forget the mayors, governors, assembly members, representatives, senators and presidents are, at best, primus inter pares for a sum of years, and more often just the hired help.

They, as much (and perhaps more) than any others need to be reminded the law is even-handed, and no one is exempt from it.

That’s why I want investigations, impeachments and prison for those who are convicted. Because I have dead friends who deserve no less. Because they gave that “last full measure of devotion” for that idea.

Because they were right to do so. Because to do any less is to spit on their graves and tarnish their memory.