Permit me to put on a different hat. Admittedly, it is moth-eaten and worn with age, but it may still rank as a hat. It dates back to the late 1960s when I became a member of the board of directors of a small bank near the University of Chicago where I was then teaching.
The Hyde Park Bank was both “progressive” in that it lent money to a variety of “minority” (that is mainly black-owned) enterprises and successful in that it acquired several other Chicago-area banks and founded two more. It was ultimately “sold down the river” to become through various mergers a part of the Chase system. But I made enough money from it — despite the fact that it was both progressive and honest — to put my children through college.
Let me address that issue of honesty. I served as chairman of the audit committee of the Board and so was schooled in what might be termed the ethics or at least the legalities of banking. I was sternly told that I was the “point man” of the Board and that if bank employees engaged in illegal or even imprudent activities, I was both legally and morally bound — and commercially wisely guided in my own interests — to report them. Otherwise, I was personally culpable. It would not be the bank that was guilty but I.
It is from this background that I have watched the various Treasury and Justice Department agreements to punish banking irregularities and/or felonies. Some of these abuses have been huge. As William K. Black points out in his book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, the old fashioned way, hiding behind a bandana and waving a pistol, was not very efficient. People like John Dillinger and Slick Willie Sutton were amateurs. They made off with just the small change.
What they didn’t know was that banks keep little more than the change physically in their buildings. The really big money is in their distant accounts. But that, of course, is well known to the truly professional bank thieves. They would not bother threatening the clerks who cash the checks and accept the deposits.
The serious thieves would go where the big money is. Which is what they did, making off with the real stuff through various kinds of market and exchange manipulations, abuses which have brought fines of about $100 billion in the U.S., about a quarter of that amount in Europe and more than $4 billion more in the UK .
Staggering figures, but what do they indicate? First, of course, that means some people have been stealing the world blind and at least a few got caught. That should be horrifying to us all because their behavior caused – or at least greatly intensified – the world financial crisis in which so many people were grievously hurt.
But some of us sigh with relief, knowing that the fines show that “the system works” and that bad actions bring retribution on the guilty. But wait a minute. Is this really so?
As we all know from the media, not a single bank officer has been put into prison for actions that cost the United States an almost unimaginable amount of money and cost many of our fellow citizens their homes and jobs. To the best of my knowledge none of the culprits has even been charged.
Rather, what the government has done is to fine the banks. But even if we accept the legal fiction that corporations are “persons,” that is a rather curious action for three reasons:
First, whether banks are or are not legally “persons,” they do not make decisions. It is the officers who make the decisions and the directors who either allow them to do so or do not prevent them from doing so. In other words, putting it bluntly, there are identifiable human beings who are making the decisions and are responsible for those decisions. Banks do not act; bank officials act.
Second, if a bank is fined, who pays the fine? The answer is simple: the stockholders. Some of them will be officers and directors, admittedly, but most are not. Some of the stockholders, no doubt, are public entities — pension funds, colleges and universities, foundations – while many others are simply private citizens who have no hand in the illegal or immoral activities. That is to say, in the current policy of our government, many of them are being punished for what they did not do.
The third reason why I find the government reaction curious is proportionality – does the punishment, even if it were correctly directed, fit the crime? It seems to me ludicrous to suggest that it does. If a druggie can be sent to prison for being caught with a few ounces of heroin in his pocket or if a robber who holds up a filling station for $50 is imprisoned for five years, what should happen to the person who “steals” a billion dollars or whose violation of the law causes millions of people to lose their houses and jobs?
It seems to me that we urgently need to rethink the relationship of our financial institutions and those who run them to the law and demand that the government stop evading its evident, logical and legal responsibilities. It needs to enforce the law or the financial world, on which we obviously so heavily depend, will be just a jungle, red in tooth and claw, where the strong eat the weak.
Or, is the power of the money already too strong? Is the law just a scrap of paper applied disproportionately to people without money or power? Obviously, the fountainhead of our legal system, Congress, almost to each man or woman in it, is for rent or for sale. Indeed, Congress no longer makes even a pretense of making the national wellbeing as its guide.
But, from my former days in the U.S. government, I was sure that officials in the Executive Branch were more honorable — or perhaps just more fearful of being caught. Today, I am less sure. Are they now, too, “on the take?” If not, why do the people in charge of the Departments of the Treasury and Justice close their eyes to illegal actions by bank officers responsible for financial crimes?
Doing so is, in effect, to give our financial system a poison pill from which our Republic may not be able to recover. Almost worse: Why do so few citizens seem to care?
~
William R. Polk is a veteran foreign policy consultant, author and professor who taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. President John F. Kennedy appointed Polk to the State Department’s Policy Planning Council where he served during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His books include: Violent Politics: Insurgency and Terrorism; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; Personal History: Living in Interesting Times;Distant Thunder: Reflections on the Dangers of Our Times; and Humpty Dumpty: The Fate of Regime Change.
The recent crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and explosion on launch three days earlier of an Antares rocket further underline the dangers of inserting nuclear material in the always perilous space flight equation—as the U.S. and Russia still plan.
“SpaceShipTwo has experienced an in-flight anomaly,” Virgin Galactic tweeted after the spacecraft, on which $500 million has been spent for development, exploded on October 31 after being released by its mother ship. One pilot was killed, another seriously injured. Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic founder, hoped to begin flying passengers on SpaceShipTwo this spring. Some 800 people, including actor Leonard DiCaprio and physicist Steven Hawking, have signed up for $250,000-a person tickets to take a suborbital ride. SpaceShipTwo debris was spread over the Mojave Desert in California.
Three days before, on Wallops Island, Virginia, an Antares rocket operated by Orbital Sciences Corp. blew up seconds after launch. It was carrying 5,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station. The cost of the rocket alone was put at $200 million. NASA, in a statement, said that the rocket “suffered a catastrophic anomaly.” The word anomaly, defined as something that deviates from what is standard, normal or expected, has for years been a space program euphemism for a disastrous accident.
“These two recent space ‘anomalies’ remind us that technology frequently goes wrong,” said Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. www.space4peace.org “When you consider adding nuclear power into the mix it becomes an explosive combination. We’ve long been sounding the alarm that nuclear power in space is not something the public nor the planet can afford to take a chance on.”
But “adding nuclear power into the mix” is exactly what the U.S. and Russia are planning. Both countries have been using nuclear power on space missions for decades—and accidents involving their nuclear-powered space devices have happened with substantial amounts of radioactive particles released on Earth.
Now, a major expansion in space nuclear power activity is planned with the development by both nations of nuclear-powered rockets for trips to Mars.
One big U.S. site for this is NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “NASA Researchers Studying Advanced Nuclear Rocket Technologies,” announced NASA last year. At the center, it said, “The Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion team is tackling a three-year project to demonstrate the viability of nuclear propulsion technologies.” In them, a “nuclear rocket uses a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen to very high temperatures, which expands through a nozzle to generate thrust. Nuclear rocket engines generate higher thrust and are more than twice as efficient as conventional chemical engines.”
“A first-generation nuclear cryogenic propulsion system could propel human explorers to Mars more efficiently than conventional spacecraft, reducing crew’s exposure to harmful space radiation and other effects of long-term space missions,” NASA went on. “It could also transport heavy cargo and science payloads.”
And out at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the DUFF project—for Demonstrating Using Flattop Fissions—is moving ahead to develop a “robust fission reactor prototype that could be used as a power system for space travel,” according to Technews World. The laboratory’s Advanced Nuclear Technology Division is running the joint Department of Energy-NASA project. “Nuclear Power Could Blast Humans Into Deep Space,” was the headline of Technewsworld’s 2012 article about it. It quoted Dr. Michael Gruntman, professor of aerospace engineering and systems architecture at the University of Southern California, saying,“If we want solar system exploration, we must utilize nuclear technology.” The article declared: “Without the risk, there will be no reward.”
And in Texas, near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the Ad Astra Rocket Company of former U.S. astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz is busy working on what it calls the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket or VASMIR. Chang-Diaz began Ad Astra after retiring from NASA in 2005. He’s its president and CEO. The VASMIR system could utilize solar power, related Space News last year, but “using a VASMIR engine to make a superfast Mars run would require incorporating a nuclear reactor that cranks out megawatts of power, Chang-Diaz said, adding that developing this type of powerful reactor should be high on the nation’s to-do list.” Chang-Diaz told Voice of America that by using a nuclear reactor for power “we could do a mission to Mars that would take about 39 days, one-way.” NASA Director Charles Bolden, also a former astronaut as well as a Marine Corps major general, has been a booster of Ad Asra’s project.
Ad Astra and the Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion project have said their designs would include nuclear systems only starting up when “out of the atmosphere” to prevent, in the event of an accident, “spreading radiation back to Earth.”
However, this isn’t a fail-safe plan. The Soviet Union followed this practice on the satellites powered by nuclear reactors that it launched between the 1960s and 1980s. This included the Cosmos 954. Its on board reactor was only allowed to go critical after it was in orbit, but it subsequently came crashing back to Earth in 1978, breaking up and spreading radioactive debris on the Northwest Territories of Canada.
As to Russia now, “A ground-breaking Russian nuclear space travel propulsion system will be ready by 2017 and will power a ship capable of long-haul interplanetary missions by 2025, giving Russia a head start in the outer-space race,” the Russian news agency RT reported in 2012. “Nuclear power has generally been considered a valid alternative to fossil fuels to power space craft, as it is the only energy source capable of producing the enormous thrust needed for interplanetary travel…. The revolutionary propulsion system falls in line with recently announced plans for Russia to conquer space… Entitled Space Development Strategies up to 2030, Russia aims to send probes to Mars, Jupiter, and Venus, as well as establish a series of bases on the moon.”
This year OSnet Daily, in an article headlined “Russia advances development of nuclear powered Spacecraft,” reported that in 2013 work on the Russian nuclear rocket moved “to the design stage.”
As for space probes, many U.S. and Russian probes have until recently gotten their on board electrical power from systems fueled with plutonium— hotly radioactive from the start.
Also, the U.S. has begun to power Mars rovers with plutonium. After using solar power on Mars rovers, in 2012 NASA launched a Mars rover it named Curiosity fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium. NASA plans to launch a Mars rover nearly identical to Curiosity, which it is calling Mars 2020, in 2020.
As devastating in terms of financial damage were last week’s explosions of the Virgin Galactic SpaceshipTwo and Antares rocket, an accident involving a nuclear-powered vehicle or device could be far more costly.
The NASA Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Curiosity (then called Mars Science Laboratory) mission states, for example, that the cost of decontamination of areas affected by dispersed plutonium would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
Odds of an accident were acknowledged as being low. The EIS said a launch accident discharging plutonium had a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined… within… 62 miles of the launch pad” on Cape Canaveral, Florida. The EIS said that “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released was 1-in-220. If there were an accident resulting in plutonium fallout that occurred before the rocket carrying Curiosity broke through Earth’s gravitational field, people could be affected in a broad swath of Earth “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude” on Earth, said the EIS.
Gagnon said at the time: “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry… The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
Curiosity made it up, and to Mars.
But in NASA’s history of nuclear power shots, happening since the 1950s, there have been accidents. The worst among the 26 U.S. space nuclear missions listed in the Curiosity EIS occurred in 1964 and involved the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. Its plutonium fuel dispersed widely That accident spurred NASA to develop solar energy for satellites and now all satellites are solar-powered as is the International Space Station.
And in recent times, solar power has been increasingly shown to be practical even to generate on board electricity for missions far out in space. On its way to Jupiter now is NASA’s Juno space probe, chemically-propelled and with solar photovoltaic panels generating all its on board electricity. When Juno reaches Jupiter in 2016 it will be nearly 500 million miles from the Sun, but the high-efficiency solar cells will still be generating power.
Advances, too, have been made in propelling spacecraft in the vacuum of space. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in 2010 launched what it termed a “space yacht” it called Ikaros which successfully got its propulsion power from the pressure on its large sails of ionizing particles emitted by the Sun.
Among other ways of propelling spacecraft, discussed at a Starship Congress last year in Texas was a system using orbiting lasers to direct beams on to a spacecraft. The magazine New Scientist said “beam sails are regarded as the most promising tech for a starship.”
A scientist long-involved in laser space power research is Geoff Landis of the Photovoltaics and Space Environment Branch at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland who, in a 2002 NASA publication, “The Edge of Sunshine,” wrote: “In the long term, solar arrays will not have to rely on the Sun. We’re investigating the concept of using lasers to beam photons to solar arrays. If you make a powerful enough laser and can aim the beam, there’s really isn’t any edge to sunshine—with a big enough lens, we could beam light to a space-probe halfway to alpha-Centauri!”
Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, unlike their Jewish neighbors are not defined as citizens of Israel, nor are they considered citizens of Palestine. Instead they balance precariously in a state of half existence, battling through papers and bureaucratic barriers that have been put in place with the aim of completely erasing them.
Following the 1967 war, Israel took control of the whole of Jerusalem, annexing East Jerusalem which was under the control of Jordan at the time. After the annexation, Israel conducted a census in these areas and granted permanent residency status to those present. Persons not present, many who were forced to flee as a result of the violence, lost their right to reside in their beloved city overnight.
Decades on, the situation remains much the same for the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. Despite being born in the city, they are denied the rights of a citizen and obtaining citizenship of any other country would bring an end to even their limited status. Becoming a citizen of a state that has illegally annexed their land also does not appeal.
As permanent residents they are passport-less, cannot travel freely across Israeli borders and cannot vote in Israeli national elections. For them, staying in their city is hinged on what is called the “Centre of Life Policy”. In December 1995, without prior notice, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior decided that permanent residency, unlike citizenship, was to be a matter of daily reality. The policy means to retain residency you must continuously prove that the center of your life is in Jerusalem.
In order to prove their “center of life” to the ministry, Palestinian residents must endlessly collect documents such as receipts of medical treatment in Jerusalem hospitals or school registration forms. The authorities scrupulously pore over these papers, even sending unannounced inspectors to investigate deeper.
Obtaining citizenship or permanent residency in another country, despite not being considered a citizen of any state, results in revocation of their status. Spending too long abroad can also lead to the same- all East Jerusalem Palestinians who had not lived there for seven year or more lost their right to after the 1995 decision. Since 1967, more than 14, 000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem have had their status as permanent residents revoked by the State.
Those who have had their status revoked face a life in hiding if they wish to remain, unable to register for university studies, apply for a job, sign up for an HMO or open a bank account.
In contrast, seventy percent of Jewish Israelis may hold two passports and can travel freely and relocate without fear that their citizenship will ever be revoked.
“You are constantly under watch all the time, from the day you are born and it doesn’t leave you until the day you die,” said Noa Diamond from Israeli rights group HaMoked. “It is a life facing the unknown. You have to plan your life on the Ministry of Interiors decisions.”
The Ministry can be especially cruel when it comes to the checks, scrutinizing the amount spent on electricity and saying it is too little for the whole family to be using it or the size of the apartment on the tax bill will be highlighted and the authorities will question if all the children can actually fit in this. The impromptu investigations can include inspectors checking the wardrobe of the family and deciding whether there is sufficient clothing in it or opening the fridge and evaluating its contents. “We are talking about the poorest socio-economic population, and the Ministry of the Interior is using their terrible socio-economic situation against them,” added Diamond.
The myriad of rules and regulations make normal family life difficult, even impossible. For example if X who holds a Jerusalem permanent resident ID marries Y from the West Bank, Y will not automatically be granted the right to reside with his wife- the couple can apply for “family reunification” when Y is 35 years old or over.
X won’t be able to live with her husband in the West Bank without fearing her residency rights will be revoked as her “center of life” will no longer be in Jerusalem. If she did move to the West Bank, like many Jerusalemites are forced to as a result of an artificial housing crisis brought on by discriminatory planning regulations, she will also not automatically receive a Palestinian ID card.
If they did apply for family reunification, which is normally a process that results in citizenship or permanent residency for the spouse in other countries, Y will only ever be eligible to receive an army permit which has to be renewed yearly indefinitely and limits all their actions (children from 14 onwards who apply for family reunification also only receive this). A change is Israel’s policy following HaMoked’s petition to the supreme court finally allows holders of permits to work as of 2013, but Diamond insists this is just “lip service” since high taxes make hiring Palestinians in this situation uneconomical.
If Y leaves the country and fails to renew this permit every year, he loses his right to ever return. Right of residency will not automatically pass onto their child. X will have to prove her centre of life is in Jerusalem before her child can be registered. Until she has done that the child will have no official residency status and will be exempt from certain social benefits.
People have a constant anxiousness about their status changing, noted Diamond. She said: “The main thing that strikes you when you meet people in this situation is they are constantly worrying about the bureaucracy to prove their centre of life is Jerusalem.”
“This is a tool Israel is using in order to push people out” said Diamond. “The goal is to have the minimum amount of Palestinians as permanent residents.”
Jalal Abukhater lived in this precarious situation for most of his childhood. Once a school boy studying in Ramallah, while living in East Jerusalem to retain his Jerusalem ID, he talked to MEMO about life being stateless. “I am not a full citizen of the state of Israel. Neither am I a full citizen of the Palestinian Authority. I am not even Jordanian. I do not hold any official nationality nor am I allowed to hold any.”
Life was like “living in purgatory,” he said. The separation wall that encircled Jerusalem turned the ten minute journey to school into a much longer ordeal as traffic waiting to get through the checkpoint clogged the road. His West Bank ID holding friends could not visit him.
But he added: “Staying in Jerusalem is resistance.”
Political language can be used, George Orwell said in 1946, “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In order to justify its global assassination program, the Obama administration has had to stretch words beyond their natural breaking points. For instance, any male 14 years or older found dead in a drone strike zone is a “combatant” unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving him innocent. We are also informed that the constitutional guarantee of “due process” does not imply that the government must precede an execution with a trial. I think the one word most degraded and twisted these days, to the goriest ends, is the word “imminent.”
Just what constitutes an “imminent” threat? Our government has long taken bold advantage of the American public’s willingness to support lavish spending on armaments and to accept civilian casualties in military adventures abroad and depletion of domestic programs at home, when told these are necessary responses to deflect precisely such threats. The government has vastly expanded the meaning of the word “imminent.” This new definition is crucial to the U.S. drone program, designed for projecting lethal force throughout the world. It provides a legal and moral pretext for the annihilation of people far away who pose no real threat to us at all.
The use of armed remotely controlled drones as the United States’ favored weapon in its “war on terror” is increasing exponentially in recent years, raising many disturbing questions. Wielding 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles, Predator and Reaper drones are not the precise and surgical instruments of war so effusively praised by President Obama for “narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among.” It is widely acknowledged that the majority of those killed in drone attacks are unintended, collateral victims. The deaths of the drones’ intended targets and how they are chosen should be no less troubling.
Those deliberately targeted by drones are often far from conflict zones, often they are in countries with whom the U.S. is not at war and on some occasions have been U.S. citizens. They are rarely “taken out” in the heat of battle or while engaged in hostile actions and are more likely to be killed (with anyone in their vicinity) at a wedding, at a funeral, at work, hoeing in the garden, driving down the highway or enjoying a meal with family and friends. These deaths are counted as something other than murder only for the curious insistence by the government’s lawyers that each of these victims represent an “imminent” threat to our lives and safety here at home in the U.S.
In February 2013, a U.S. Department of Justice White Paper, “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or an Associated Force,” was leaked by NBC News. This paper sheds some light on the legal justification for drone assassinations and explains the new and more flexible definition of the word “imminent.” “First,” it declares, “the condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
Before the Department of Justice lawyers got a hold of it, the meaning of the word “imminent” was unmistakably clear. Various dictionaries of the English language are all in agreement that that the word “imminent” explicitly denotes something definite and immediate, “likely to occur at any moment,” “impending,” “ready to take place,” “looming,” “pending,” “threatening,” “around the corner.” Nor has the legal definition of the word left room for ambiguity. After World War II, the Nuremberg Tribunal reaffirmed a 19th-century formulation of customary international law written by Daniel Webster, which said that the necessity for preemptive use of force in self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” That was in the past. Now, any possible future threat – and any person on earth who arguably might pose one – however remote, can satisfy the new definition. As far as the Justice Department is concerned, an “imminent” threat is now whomever an “informed high-level U.S. government official” determines to be such, based on evidence known to that official alone, never to be made public or reviewed by any court.
The breadth of the government’s definition of “imminent” is murderous in its enormity. It is all the more ironic that the same Department of Justice will also regularly define the word so narrowly as to convict and imprison law abiding and responsible citizens who act to defend the innocent from genuinely imminent harm by the actions of the U.S. government. On example especially relevant to the issue of killing by drone is the case of the “Creech 14.”
After the first act of nonviolent resistance to the lethal use of unmanned and remotely controlled drones in the United States took place at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada back in April, 2009, it took more than a year before the 14 of us accused of criminal trespass had our day in court. As this was the first opportunity for activists to “put drones on trial” at a time when few Americans were aware they even existed, we were especially diligent in preparing our case, to argue clearly and cogently, not in order to keep ourselves out of jail but for the sake of those who have died and those who live in fear of the drones. With coaching by some fine trial lawyers, our intention was to represent ourselves and drawing on humanitarian international law, to offer a strong defense of necessity, even while we were aware that there was little chance that the court would hear our arguments.
The defense of necessity, that one has not committed a crime if an act that is otherwise illegal was done to prevent a greater harm or crime from being perpetrated, is recognized by the Supreme Court as a part of the common law. It is not an exotic or even a particularly unusual defense. “The rationale behind the necessity defense is that sometimes, in a particular situation, a technical breach of the law is more advantageous to society than the consequence of strict adherence to the law,” says West’s Encyclopedia of American Law “The defense is often used successfully in cases that involve a Trespass on property to save a person’s life or property.” It might appear, then, that this defense is a natural one for minor infractions such as our alleged trespass, intended to stop the use of drones in a war of aggression, the crime against peace that the Nuremburg Tribunal named “the supreme international crime.”
In reality, though, courts in the U.S. almost never allow the necessity defense to be raised in cases like ours. Most of us were experienced enough not to be surprised when we finally got to the Justice Court in Las Vegas in September, 2010, and Judge Jensen ruled in lockstep with his judicial colleagues. He insisted at the onset of our case that he was having none of it. “Go ahead,” he said, allowing us to call our expert witnesses but sternly forbidding us from asking them any questions that matter. “Understand, it is only going to be limited to trespass, what knowledge he or she has, if any, whether you were or were not out at the base. We’re not getting into international laws; that’s not the issue. That’s not the issue. What the government is doing wrong, that’s not the issue. The issue is trespass.”
Our co-defendant Steve Kelly followed the judge’s instructions and questioned our first witness, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, about his firsthand knowledge of trespass laws from working at the Department of Justice during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Steve specifically guided the witness to speak of “the cases of trespass … of lunch counter activities where laws stated you were not to sit at certain lunch counters” in the struggle for civil rights. Ramsey Clark acknowledged that those arrested for violating these laws had not committed crimes. Steve pushed his luck with the judge and offered the classic illustration of the necessity defense: “A situation where there is a ‘no trespassing’ sign and there is smoke coming out of a door or a window and a person is up on the upper floor in need of help. To enter that building, in a real narrow technical sense, would be trespass. Is there a possibility, in the long run, it wouldn’t be trespass to help the person upstairs?” Ramsey replied, “We would hope so, wouldn’t we? To have a baby burn to death or something, because of a ‘no trespass’ sign would be poor public policy to put it mildly. Criminal.”
Judge Jensen by this time was obviously intrigued. His ruling to limit the testimony to trespass held, but as his fascination grew, so his interpretation of his own order grew more elastic. Over the repeated objections of the prosecution team, the judge allowed limited but powerful testimony from Ramsey and our other witnesses, retired US Army Colonel and former diplomat Ann Wright and Loyola Law School Professor Bill Quigley that put our alleged trespass into its context as an act to stop a heinous crime.
I had the honor of making the closing statement for the accused, which I ended with, “We 14 are the ones who are seeing the smoke from the burning house and we are not going to be stopped by a ‘no trespassing’ sign from going to the burning children.”
Our appreciation for a judge’s extraordinary attention to the facts of the case aside, we still expected nothing but an immediate conviction and sentencing. Judge Jensen surprised us: “I consider it more than just a plain trespass trial. A lot of serious issues are at stake here. So I’m going to take it under advisement and I will render a written decision. And it may take me two to three months to do so, because I want to make sure that I’m right on whatever I rule on.”
When we returned to Las Vegas in January, 2011, Judge Jensen read his decision that it was just a plain trespass trial, after all and we were guilty. Among several justifications for convicting us, the judge rejected what he called “the Defendants’ claim of necessity” because “first, the Defendants failed to show that their protest was designed to prevent ‘imminent’ harm.” He faulted our case for not presenting the court with “evidence that any military activities involving drones were being conducted or about to be conducted on the day of the Defendants’ arrest,” seeming to forget that he had ordered us not to submit any such evidence, even if we had it.
Judge Jensen’s verdict was amply supported by the precedents he cited, including a 1991 appellate court ruling, U.S. v Schoon, that concerned a protest aimed to “keep US tax dollars out of El Salvador” at an IRS office in Tucson. In this protest, the Ninth Circuit ruled, “the requisite imminence was lacking.” In other words, because the harm protested was taking place in El Salvador, a trespass in Tucson cannot be justified. So, Judge Jensen reasoned, burning children in a house in Afghanistan cannot excuse a trespass in Nevada.
The NBC leak of that Department of Justice White Paper wouldn’t happen for two more years (call it suppression of evidence?) and as far as Judge Jensen knew, the dictionary definition of “imminent” was still operant. Even so, had we been allowed to testify beyond the narrow confines set at trial, we would have shown that with new satellite technology, the lethal threat we were addressing there is always imminent by any reasonable definition of the word. Although the victims of drone violence on the day of our arrest were indeed far away in Afghanistan and Iraq, those crimes were actually being committed by combatants sitting at computer screens, engaged in real-time hostilities in trailers on the base, not so far at all from where we were apprehended by Air Force police.
The government does not believe that it needs to have “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future” to establish an imminent threat and so carry out extrajudicial executions of human beings anywhere on the planet. Citizens who act to stop killing by drones, on the other hand, are required to have specific “evidence that any military activities involving drones were being conducted or about to be conducted,” in order to justify nonviolently entering into government property. The government’s position on this lacks coherence, at best. Even after the publication of its White Paper, the Department of Justice continues to block defendants accused of trespass from even mentioning the fact that they were arrested while responding to an imminent threat to innocent life, and the courts obligingly accept this contradiction.
The defense of necessity does not simply justify actions that technically violate the law. “Necessity,” says West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, is “a defense asserted by a criminal or civil defendant that he or she had no choice but to break the law.” As Ramsey Clark testified in the Las Vegas courtroom four years ago, “to have a baby burn to death because of a ‘no trespass sign’ would be poor public policy to put it mildly.” In a time of burning children, the “no trespassing” signs attached to the fences that protect the crimes executed with drones and other instruments of terror hold no potency and they do not command our obedience. The courts that do not recognize this reality allow themselves to be used as instruments of governmental malfeasance.
There have been many more trials since the Creech 14 and in the meanwhile, many more children have been incinerated by missiles fired from drones. On December 10, International Human Rights Day, Georgia Walker and Kathy Kelly will go to trial in U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Missouri, after they peacefully brought their grievance and a loaf of bread onto Whiteman Air Force Base, another in the growing number of stateside remote control killer drone centers.
Two years ago in that same court in a similar case, Judge Whitworth rejected the necessity defense offered by Ron Faust and myself, subsequently sentencing Ron to five years of probation and sending me to prison for six months. It is to be hoped that Judge Whitworth will take advantage of this second chance that Kathy and Georgia courageously offer and exonerate himself and his profession.
Each year many thousands of tourists visit the site of the notorious Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, not far from Munich. They see the crematory, the memorial shrines, and the museum. And in recent years, as an almost daily fixture, they see Martin Zaidenstadt. This elderly Jewish man lectures visitors to Dachau on his experiences as a wartime prisoner there. He is particularly passionate about the horrors of the camp’s gas chamber where, he explains, many prisoners were put to death with poison gas. He even claims that this gas chamber served as a model for Auschwitz (New York Times, Oct. 26, 1997). Zaidenstadt’s listeners respond to his heart-rending testimony with unquestioning sympathy. Many reach generously into their wallets.
But now a new 50-minute documentary film, “Martin,” and a new book, The Last Survivor: In Search of Martin Zaidenstadt, written by journalist Timothy W. Ryback and published by Pantheon, have subjected that testimony to critical review. Ryback establishes that the octogenarian Zaidenstadt was born in Jedwabne, Poland, but that his story of Dachau internment is a fraud. He probably never visited the camp until the 1990s, says Ryback, and his tales of gas chamber killings are untrue.
Although supposedly authoritative evidence of gas chamber killings at Dachau has been cited over the years — including “eyewitness” testimony at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-46 — today no reputable historian credits such claims. It is widely acknowledged, even by the well-known “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, that no one was ever “gassed” at the camp. (See, for example, “Wiesenthal Re-Confirms: ‘No Extermination Camps on German Soil’,” The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1993, pp. 9-12.)
In today’s cultural climate, one is obliged to regard “Holocaust survivors” such as Zaidenstadt with an almost reverential indulgence. For example, the director of the state-run Dachau camp memorial, Barbara Distel, seems unbothered by Zaidenstadt’s deceit. Even though she is a government official, she permits his mendacious pan-handling. (One can hardly imagine Distel tolerating anyone who spent hours explaining to camp site visitors that American GIs who liberated the camp on April 29, 1945, summarily killed 500 German prisoners there. For more on this, see, J. Cobden, “The Dachau Gas Chamber Myth,” March-April 1995 Journal, pp. 14-26.)
Also typical is the attitude of Howard Kaplan, a Jewish writer in Los Angeles. In a recent article about Zaidenstadt published in an influential Israeli magazine, he acknowledges that “a difficult question arises from Martin’s fabrications,” but concludes on an upbeat note: “But is exaggerating the horror really an affront to truth? I’m not persuaded… What matters is that Martin has ultimately found his way back to Judaism at the doors of the crematorium.” (H. Kaplan, “The Man by the Door,” The Jerusalem Report, April 10, 2000, pp. 46-47.)
A recent New York Times article about the new “Martin” film acknowledges that Zaidenstadt’s “assertion” of Dachau gassings is “contrary to the official stories.” But instead of forthrightly identifying his “provocative contentions” as lies, the Times coyly tells readers: “In the end we learn that Mr. Zaidenstadt’s version of things isn’t entirely reliable, but isn’t to be dismissed either… The implicit message of ‘Martin’ [is] that everyone has a truth to deliver…” (“Holocaust Documentary Explores One Man’s Truth,” April 3, 2000.)
No one seems concerned about the toll that such deceit takes on the residents of the Bavarian town of Dachau, who must live in the shadow of the camp’s government-promoted infamy. For example, to avoid the stigma of having children born in the notorious city, many expectant mothers go elsewhere to deliver their babies.
The Zaidenstadt story points up the social-intellectual corruption that is an intrinsic by-product of what Rabbi Michael Goldberg (in his 1995 book Why Should Jews Survive?) aptly calls “the Holocaust cult.” All the same, Zaidenstadt now joins a growing list of demonstrably false “Holocaust survivor” eyewitnesses — a slate that includes Jerzy Kosinski and best-selling author Binjamin Wilkomirski. (See “Holocaust Survivor Memoir Exposed as Fraud,” Sept.-Oct. 1998 Journal, pp. 15-16.)
The Brazilian Truth Commission has released its official figures documenting the total number of missing and people killed in Brazil during the military dictatorship which lasted from 1964 until 1985. According to the Commission, at least 421 people were killed or disappeared during the 21 year period.
Investigators from the Commission told Spainish newspaper El Pais state that the figures are subject to change since they are in the beginning phase of their investigation.
As part of the investigation, the truth committee identified secret torture centers and private companies that collaborated with the military regime.
However, in 1979 an Amnesty Law pardoned the military for the crimes committed during the dictatorship, freeing at least 25,000 people.
The Truth Commission was originally established in 2012 by President Dilma Rousseff. From 1970 to 1973, Rousseff was detained and tortured by the dictatorship.
The commission will give it’s final report on Dec.10, and it will be used as evidence that the State committed crimes against the Brazilian people, which has long been denied by the military.
George Monbiot – columnist with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. “Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”
Tom Wigley – of Climate-Gate infamy, he’s a senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research. “We need nuclear power to solve this problem … people don’t realise just how bad climate change is.”
James Hansen – author of Storms of My Grandchildren.
Barry W Brook – is the Director of Climate Science at Adelaide University, and Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, is on the board of the Science Council for Global Initiatives and the International Awards Committee of the Global Energy Prize.
Gwyneth Cravens – novelist and journalist, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.
Ted Nordhaus – Chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, political strategist and author of Break Through, Why We Can’t Leave Saving The Planet To Environmentalists.
Mark Lynas – author of The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, also a frequent speaker around the world on climate change science and policy. “Let me be very clear. Without nuclear, the battle against global warming is as good as lost.”
Tom Blees – author of Prescription for the Planet (the seemingly “intractable” problem of nuclear waste is “nothing of the kind”) has “probably done more than anybody to move people to the cause of nuclear power.” Tom also heads the Science Council for Global Initiatives.
Professor Gerry Thomas – of the Imperial College, London, “I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation.”
James Lovelock – celebrated father of the Gaia principle.
Fred Pearce – an environment writer with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change.
Stewart Brand – a prominent pro-nuclear “environmentalist” and author of Whole Earth Discipline: Why dense cities, nuclear power, transgenic crops, restored wildlands and geoengineering are necessary.
Ken Caldiera – with the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution, recently co-authored an open letter to the environmental movement urging them to bring their support behind the development of new nuclear power.
Kerry Emmanuel – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on attribution of climate change to hurricane events.
Rachel Pritzker – is the founder and president of the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Rachel currently chairs the advisory board of the Breakthrough Institute.
Suzanne Hobbs-Baker – the brain behind Pop Atomic Studios, an organisation which uses the power of visual and liberal arts to “enrich” the public discussion on atomic energy.
Ed Davey – UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, “When I have listened to the arguments of pro-nuclear Liberal Democrats in recent years, the one argument I found increasingly difficult to answer is the climate-change argument, because climate change poses a real and massive danger to our planet. Not keeping a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity as an option looks reckless when we don’t know the future.”
Spain’s deeply rooted distrust of popular participation in democratic processes is reminiscent of the swift, top-down transition some forty years ago. As such, it is a painful reminder of Spain’s unfinished revolution.
Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy has been extolled as a model to emulate for democratizing nations across the globe. Following the death of General Franco in 1975, King Juan Carlos transformed the authoritarian regime into a European democracy, and did so without shedding a drop of blood. And yet Spanish democracy nowadays is not without its critics. The Catalan movement for independence unveils just what’s amiss in Spain’s celebrated democratic transition.
In Berlin last week, constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman singled out the Spanish transition to democracy as one lacking in authenticity and, ultimately, in legitimacy. The transition was negotiated between elites behind closed doors. Franco’s heir, King Juan Carlos, essentially preempted a revolt by co-opting opposition leaders Adolfo Suarez and Santiago Carrillo. A new constitution was drafted and passed through a popular referendum in 1978. Unlike the constitutional referenda in Spain’s northern neighbor France, however, the new law of the land was not subject to political debate. The public was never fully mobilized.
This peaceful yet ‘unauthentic’ transition to democracy planted the seeds for grievances from Spain’s regional minorities. In its cultural and linguistic diversity, Spain resembles modern-day Switzerland and Belgium — a fact that Catalans are quick to point out. Yet this heterogeneity is not reflected in the Spanish constitution. The law of 1978 granted minorities broader powers than were in place, including a regional government, a state police force and recognition of minority languages. As has become clear in the decades to follow, and again in recent months, the same constitution also impedes minorities’ right to self-determination.
Spain’s brisk constitutional process did not do justice to its regional minorities. Ethnically diverse democracies often thrive on complex power-sharing arrangements. A number of European countries, including Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and, more recently, Bosnia, can attest to this. History has taught us that in ethnically diverse states, identity ought to take center stage when constitutions are drafted, or significant portions of the population will feel unrepresented and may eventually wish to jump ship, or worse.
The tense standoff between Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the president of Catalunya’s regional government Artur Mas has revealed Spain’s unbudging resistance to a democratic resolution of Catalans’ grievances. Madrid blocked not only the official referendum but also an unofficial consultation on Catalan independence through Spain’s Constitutional Court. (And it takes any opportunity to block social and economic legislation passed by the Catalan government.) Rajoy has refused to negotiate with the Catalan region and has called the recent referendum – which the region held in defiance of the Court’s ruling – an act of political propaganda.
Spain’s intransigence is but a symptom of a deeper problem. Recall the brutal repression of high school students and teachers demonstrating in Valencia three years ago. The use of pain-inducing sound cannons, batons and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters is common practice in Spain. A bill introduced by the conservative Partido Popular in 2013 proposes to fine protesters up to 30.000€ for civil disobedience, videotaping the police or for simply gathering in front of parliament. Excessive use of force against demonstrators and repressive laws that restrict freedom of expression and assembly ignited a public statement by Amnesty International in 2011 (and again in 2013 and 2014). Spain’s deeply rooted distrust of popular participation in democratic processes is reminiscent of the swift, top-down transition some forty years ago. As such, it is a painful reminder of Spain’s unfinished revolution.
While Spain’s elite — and particularly its conservative Partido Popular under Aznar and Rajoy — continues to practice politics old style, a new generation of politically active citizens gives reasons for hope. The peaceful and well-organized referendum in Catalonia last week is the culmination of a years-long grassroots movement, on which Artur Mas piggybacked two years ago. The rise of Podemos in the recent European elections is yet another example of grassroots at work. The far-left party rose not out of the Socialists but out of the indignados movement which itself gave rise to Occupy and numerous other social movements across the globe. A new generation of Spanish citizens is demanding inclusion in its state’s governance.
Modern-day Spain made its first steps to democracy thanks to one leader’s political will. Franco’s heir invited outsider elites to take part in shaping Spain’s future in 1975. It is high time that Spain extend decision-making privileges once again — this time to its citizens. Spanish citizens, Catalans included, should determine their own future — be that a new constitutional arrangement or the breakup of the Spanish monarchy.
Dani Marinova does research on political representation and democratization at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. In 2011-2012 she was a visiting researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and attended several peaceful protests in Catalonia.
By John Chuckman | Aletho News | November 13, 2014
No matter what high-blown claims the politicians make each year on Remembrance Day, The Great War was essentially a fight between two branches of a single royal family over the balance of power on the continent of Europe, British foreign policy holding to a longstanding principle that no one nation should ever be permitted to dominate the continent.
It was also a war between the world’s greatest existing imperial power, Britain, and another state, Germany, which aspired to become a greater imperial power than it was.
To a considerable extent, it was a war resulting from large standing armies and great arms races, a telling indictment of those who preach the false gospel of ever-greater military strength to defend freedom. As with any huge, shiny new investment, great armies will always be used, and the results are almost invariably great misery.
The First World War was not a war to end all wars, as a slogan of the time claimed. If anything, it was a precursor for a great many wars to follow, and, most importantly, it was a powerful and important cause of World War II.
It also was not a war about democracy since none of the participants, including Britain, would qualify as democracies by any reasonable reckoning with their heavily limited voting franchise and government structures stacked in the interests of old and privileged orders, quite apart from their holding empires whose populations enjoyed no franchise at all.
The war was also one of history’s great instances of mass hysteria, particularly among the young men of several countries. In Britain, there have been many laments over the loss of some fine and promising young men who rushed to join up. In Germany, it was no different, and we note one young man, then of no importance, by the name of Adolph Hitler rushing to join up, much as his British contemporaries, to share in the “glory.”
Today, we pretend shock that young men sometimes go abroad to fight for a cause, religious or otherwise, but compared to the mass insanity of World War I, what we see today is truly petty. The authorities everywhere then made great efforts to push young men, using songs, marching bands, slogans, shame and social pressure in many forms, and countless lies. The nonsense about the Kaiser’s troops bayonetting babies was one example, a lie served up again decades later with a slight twist by George Bush the Elder’s government as it desperately wanted support to invade Iraq, the babies the second time around supposedly being ripped from respirators.
World War I made absolutely no sense. It achieved nothing worth achieving, and it did so at immense cost. Apart from killing about 20,000,000 people, the war left countless crippled and disabled and created a great swathe of destruction across Europe.
If Germany had been allowed to dominate Europe for a time, it would have made comparatively little difference to the lives of most people. Indeed, today, that is the situation we find in the European Union.
It is important to realize that large wars are always revolutionary in nature, and no one at the outset can possibly predict the outcomes of such chaotic storms in terms of social, economic, and political change. World War I very much set the stage, with huge losses of men and the incompetence demonstrated by Imperial commanders, for the Communists to take power in Russia, a development which led ultimately to the Cold War.
The War’s immense costs and the realization by millions of soldiers from abroad that they fought for a nation which gave them no rights provided the great first blow towards ending the British Empire. The approaching World War II would finish the work of imperial rot and collapse.
The First World War set the stage for the rise of Hitler less than two decades later and made inevitable the catastrophe of World War II, which would inflict at least two and a half times as many deaths again and would see such horrors as the Holocaust and the use of atomic bombs.
So why, about a century later, do we still treat The Great War with reverence and sentimental remembrance?
The act of remembrance actually contradicts the sound human tendency to forget terrible experiences. Of course, we hear repeated countless times the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” one of those glib and catchy sayings which seem at first hearing to carry some deep truth. Just the consideration that in real life no two events ever can be identical makes the saying a pleasantly-phrased nonsense, resembling the aphorisms on far lighter subjects from Oscar Wilde.
Those repeating the glib phrase as received wisdom from an unimpeachable prophet always neglect to remind us of the importance of scrupulously defining what it is that you are remembering. If we remember World War One for exactly what it was, and not for what we wish it had been, we see a vast, pointless slaughter that succeeded in setting conditions for still more slaughter. Never repeating it would be a blessing indeed.
But if we see it as moving and inspirational, if we associate its name with thoughts of ending war or protecting democracy or of great camaraderie and shared hardship, if we are emotionally moved by troops in uniforms and flags flying and bugles and drumbeats, then we most assuredly will repeat it, as we have already done more than once, and I’m pretty sure that’s what the arrogant politicians and jingoes want us ready to do.
Remembrance Day surely is not about the loss of life, as we pretend it is, because the only way to hold those or any lives sacred is not to send them off to war in the first place. The ugly truth is that governments, run by men with great egos – likely more often than not, actual narcissists – who are supported by privileged wealth wanting to keep or expand its privilege, make the decision for wars largely on the basis of fairly primitive instincts, instincts about being first or not letting a competitor gain an advantage, or just vague and meaningless stuff about being manly or resolute – standing your ground, keeping a stiff upper lip, putting up with no nonsense, showing your manhood, and so on and so forth.
One American politician, in a play on an infamous quote by George Wallace, said no one would ever “out-commie” him again in an election. Such was the thinking of Lyndon Johnson in making the fatal decision to start a major war in Southeast Asia. On just such hormone-laden considerations hung a decade’s brutal fighting and the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese.
The real reason for the ceremonies and parades and speeches is to keep young men keen to go and kill and die, there being no group of humans more subject to cheap emotional appeals about glory and heroism than young men, as we see, ad nauseam, generation after generation.
As I’ve written before, humans are little more than chimpanzees with larger brains, those larger brains enabling us to magnify immensely the power of our murderous instincts, a fact we seem determined proudly to display every Remembrance Day.
The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read, because it demonstrates exactly what lengths the intelligence community is willing to go to—and what happens when they take the fruits of the surveillance they’ve done and unleash it on a target.
The anonymous letter was the result of the FBI’s comprehensive surveillance and harassment strategy against Dr. King, which included bugging his hotel rooms, photographic surveillance, and physical observation of King’s movements by FBI agents. The agency also attempted to break up his marriage by sending selectively edited “personal moments he shared with friends and women” to his wife.
Portions of the letter had been previously redacted. One of these portions contains a claim that the letter was written by another African-American: “King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all us Negroes.” It goes on to say “We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done.” This line is key, because part of the FBI’s strategy was to try to fracture movements and pit leaders against one another.
The entire letter could have been taken from a page of GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG)—though perhaps as an email or series of tweets. The British spying agency GCHQ is one of the NSA’s closest partners. The mission of JTRIG, a unit within GCHQ, is to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them.” And there’s little reason to believe the NSA and FBI aren’t using such tactics.
The implications of these types of strategies in the digital age are chilling. Imagine Facebook chats, porn viewing history, emails, and more made public to discredit a leader who threatens the status quo, or used to blackmail a reluctant target into becoming an FBI informant. These are not far-fetched ideas. They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices illustrate that reality richly.
The newly unredacted portions shed light on the government’s sordid scheme to harass and discredit Dr. King. One paragraph states:
No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record.
And of course, the letter ends with an ominous threat:
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
There’s a lesson to learn here: history must play a central role in the debate around spying today. As Professor Gage states:
Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.
US and ARVN soldiers waterboard a North Vietnamese prisoner during Operation Wheeler in 1967
On November 12—thirteen years after the onset of George W. Bush’s dirty underground war against “unlawful combatants”—the Obama administration finally told the United Nations Committee Against Torture that the United States believed, in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski, “that torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment are forbidden in all places, at all times, with no exceptions.” Finally! Not so fast.
Torture is as old as human civilization. Assyrians skinned victims alive. Torture was a routine feature of Greek and Roman interrogations. Execution by torture took the form of crucifixion for the Romans, stoning for the Jews, and desert sun death for the Egyptians. Chinese emperors preferred lingchi—the slow slicing—of their prisoners (the infamous “death by a thousand cuts”). The Aztecs favored blood sacrifices that included consumption of the hearts of their victims.
Torture was not the sole preserve of heathens and idolators. The Dominicans, endlessly inventive in the torture of “heretics” and “witches” in Spain, made sexual humiliation of victims their trademark. John Calvin had a fellow early Protestant tortured and beheaded. Guy Fawkes spent time on the rack following his capture during the Gunpowder Plot.
As with slavery and the mass execution of hostages, torture slowly, fitfully came to be seen as barbaric and ineffective, although it took over two millennia for official if hypocritical and imperfect bans to appear. The British outlawed “cruel and unusual” punishment in the Bill of Rights of 1689; the prohibition protected Britons only as American, Boer, Irish, Indian, and Iraqi patriots knew well. The Americans included a similar ban in the Eighth Amendment to their Constitution—which applied only to citizens, not slaves or Natives. And lynching did not of course end following the Reconstruction Amendments. Napoleon forbade the use of torture by his armies in 1798, history forgotten by French troops in Algeria a century and a half later. Pius VII waited until 1816 to overturn the papal bull of 1252 permitting torture during the Inquisition. The Chinese outlawed lingchi in 1905 (which did not stop Nationalists and Communists from torturing one another before and during the Civil War).
The horrors of the twentieth century’s two world wars led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which effectively (in the legal sense of the word) banned torture of civilians or military personnel. That these icons of international law weren’t effective in reality became abundantly clear during the counter-insurgencies waged by the United States and European imperial powers resistant to decolonization of the Third World from the late forties through the mid-seventies. They were joined by the secret police of the Soviet bloc controlling Eastern European dependencies. They were joined too by the secret police and armed forces of dozens of Arab monarchies, and Latin American, African and Asian (military) dictatorships. Torture during the Cold War knew no ideological or territorial boundaries.
The United States and the Soviet Union masterfully outsourced and offshored torture during their decades long rivalry. Vast empires run by remote brutes require burden sharing with local brutes. The Soviets trained East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Poles in the dark arts. As Chomsky and Herman detailed in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979), Americans trained military and police in twenty-six countries that according to Amnesty International practiced torture. These included Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil.
The Pentagon cast further light on the postwar American way of torture with the release of seven “intelligence training” manuals in 1996. Written and perfected by the CIA during spasms of concentrated violence like Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam, the manuals were widely distributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and put into practice by Special Forces Mobile Training Teams. US Special Forces are today present (mostly on training missions) in more than one hundred countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan. The US Army’s School of the Americas crafted a custom manual for Central and Latin American trainees.
By the eighties, amidst the bloody interventions of the Reagan administration and the brutal Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the world was ready to make another effort at outlawing torture. The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment was adopted in 1984, entered into force in 1987, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988, and ratified by Congress during Bill Clinton’s first term in 1994. The US—with the largest prison population in the world—failed to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention (adopted in 2002; entered into force in 2006) that provides for regular, unannounced visits to prisons and detention centers, and for private interviews with detainees.
Barak Obama first criticized the Bush record on torture following revelations that emerged from the Senate confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General in 2005. Gonzalez claimed that the provisions of the Convention Against Torture did not govern official US behavior against “aliens” overseas. Obama was a strong rhetorical supporter of the legislation reaffirming official US condemnation of torture that passed the following year (to which George Bush added a signing statement permitting the CIA to continue should the Commander in Chief deem it necessary).
On his second day in office, Obama issued Executive Order 13491—“Ensuring Lawful Interrogations”—to revoke Bush’s Executive Order 13440 of 2007 (designed to further ‘legalize’ CIA detention and “interrogation” of al Qaeda and Taliban “unlawful enemy combatants” after the fact; Bush’s lawyers first invented the category of “unlawful enemy combatant” in 2002). The long international nightmare of official US endorsement of torture—brought to life in the shameful corridors of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the CIA’s “black sites”—appeared over. Not even close.
The Convention on Torture, other international treaties, and domestic law require the president to investigate allegations of torture, and to prosecute those responsible. Obama has, contrary to the law, shown zero interest in pursuing Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice or the other enablers and defenders of criminal behavior in the country’s name; “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” There’s been no full-scale public inquiry into or publication of the various torture memos written by John Woo, or other records of official lawlessness. Neither have we witnessed a reckoning by the Obama Justice Department with the illegal and outrageous practice of extraordinary rendition.
The White House (with the CIA looking over its shoulder) holds up publication of a five hundred page executive summary of the Senate’s 6300 page report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. Chances are that what finally squirts out will be so blacked out as to further shield the evildoers.
Indefinite detentions in Guantanamo likely violate the Convention; the failure to offer redress to detainees certainly does. US military commissions violate at least two articles of the Convention. US refusal to grant independent monitors access to Guantanamo violates at least two articles of the Convention. Transfer of prisoners to countries known to practice torture (common during the Bush years) clearly violates the Convention. Hyper-aggressive domestic counter-terror investigations (especially the widespread use of sting operations by the FBI) appear to violate “human rights safeguards in law and practice.”
“Special housing units,” supermax cells, and other forms of solitary confinement of domestic prisoners, including children, clearly constitute torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. On any given day, more than 80,000 people are held in isolation in US federal and state prisons. Capital punishment appears to most civilized peoples as torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Continued US failure to put in place adequate safeguards against sexual assault in state and federal prisons violates the Convention.
Local police departments’ failure to pursue allegations of sexual assault (the most underreported crime in the country) violates victims’ right to be free from mistreatment. The epidemic of police killings, brutality, racial profiling, and asset seizures is among the most egregious violations of the Convention during the Obama years. The policy of deporting immigrants (including especially unaccompanied children) without proper screening to assess their prospects for torture or mistreatment violates the Convention, and deserves a special place in the annals of perfidy.
When George Bush declared “we don’t torture,” the world knew it was a lie. What about when Nobel Peace Prize winner Barak Obama says it?
Steve Breyman is a former William C. Foster Visiting Scholar Fellow in the US State Department. Reach him at breyms@rpi.edu
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
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