For god and country sing
So loud that rafters ring
And people loudly pray
For victory in the fray
And to humble enemies
In politics and life
So we may so please
Ourselves with ungodly strife
As we center on the mid-term elections and live through the endless billions of dollars in political advertising, I am reminded of a time when my Uncle Steve returned from WW II and presented our family with a captured Wehrmacht issue leather belt with a silver colored buckle emblazoned “Gott Mit Uns.” “God is with us.” Most of us now see that slogan as presumptive, at best, and yet the attempts to bring God into war and politics never cease. My major objection to the sloganeering is that God does not fight wars or run for office and those who invoke God in their partisan endeavors do not speak either for God or me (or you). This alone may be the leading cause supporting atheism, but it does nothing to advance the cause for humanity. It does seem to assist in the pursuit of ignorance in that we can inject God into the trivial or the bizarre to immunize our lies from inspection or to attack the opposition. In recent weeks, we have witnessed the commingling of images of the Constitution, a deliberately non-sectarian document, with religion to immunize the Constitution itself from analysis and to tie “original language” to some undefined fundamentalist concept that was omitted by the writers.
This political season has resounded with cries of returning to the basics, but with images of violence, political and media programs of intolerance and deliberate violation of the Ten Commandments in other ways such as bearing false witness. Why pretend that God is on our side? If he/she were, then the basics are really twisted and God is more capricious than constant. That is probably not as good a bet as the possibility that some people scam the God thing and pretend that anybody who disagrees is sinful and worthy of condemnation, or stoning or maybe a bombing as a teachable moment.
In the bad old days of yore, the Soviet Union (then officially atheist) claimed freedom of religion. You could have any religion you liked. Unfortunately, you could not simultaneously do so and have a job. Jobs were controlled by the State and only professed atheists could hold jobs. Back in the mid sixties, I was on an assignment in eastern Turkey and visited with the pastor of a church in Diyarbakir that dated back to the early third century. The priest was exasperated because, through social pressure, Christians could not practice their religion and simultaneously hold jobs in a way that reminded me of Russia, but without any official sanction. His parish was down to about a dozen families and failing rapidly despite the many bones and relics in dusty shrines. The Baptist church in town was simply blowing in the wind with a few pigeons roosting on the ledge of a broken window inscribed “Gift of the American Bible Society.” More recently, Christians were murdered in their churches by fundamentalists in Iraq despite “Freedom of Religion” being enshrined in their interim constitution.
Here in these United States, we also profess freedom of religion and yet there are a couple of unique twists here that do not exist in most other modern nations. We seem to mix the religious with the profane in unique ways. It is not unusual in some parts of our country to have a common prayer before a football game or a civic meeting although it is sometimes a silent prayer to avoid embarrassing anyone. I vividly recall praying the Lord’s Prayer in junior high and being extremely conscious of the prayer being the Protestant version and not the one I learned as a young Roman Catholic. It was uncomfortable. I also recall living in the American South and traveling in the rural areas in the early sixties. Billboards and local fliers actually depicted John F. Kennedy as the devil incarnate or as a minion of the Pope who was also of the devil. This was true in Georgia and Alabama and it reminded me that the First Amendment right of free speech was never coupled with the responsibility to be either civil or truthful. In some ways, this was a fear of the unknown for them because Catholics were rare in staunchly fundamentalist rural areas. It was simultaneously frightening and comic. Anti-Catholic/anti-Kennedy billboards were interspersed with the more ubiquitous “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards.
Another twist that makes our nation curiously unique in this blending of religion and life is that politics and power may directly join into an explosive mixture resulting in groups such as the Ku Klux Klan that have shown tremendous negative power in our nation. It is a militancy that is reminiscent of the current Taliban. It is also reminiscent of the strident mixing of patriotism with religion. The result is that unless you personally subscribe to a particular brand of fundamental religion, you may be called unpatriotic, or worse, a traitor, but at least a “Socialist” or perhaps “Nazi.” Once this happens, then the degeneration is complete. We see the ends-means inversion where extremists screaming for liberty have lately physically attacked those who do not agree with either the means or the ends. Fundamentalism then also justifies vile lies in order to reach some ultimate truth. Election season only highlights the phenomenon. It is always with us. Sometimes it is under the surface as when we see hyper-patriots wave the flag a bit too much and sometimes it becomes a full blown assault where God is the club used to beat the crap out of logic and imagined enemies. It is ironic that Jesus is quoted as reminding the Pharisees to separate God and country when he asked “Whose image is on the coin?”
The ugly truth is that when we use God as the point of our spear to impale our enemies, we defile ourselves, our neighbors, and that very God that we pretend to love. It is also ironic that the very same First Amendment to the Constitution that permits all speech, including hateful speech, also prohibits the union of church and state. Reactionaries will demand the union of their fundamentalist beliefs with the state in the same breath. We must join to deny it. In this election, we have seen Tea Party violence against adversaries in isolated cases and we have seen the media glorify the activity. Don’t be fooled. As long as we merge God and Country, there will always be a fundamentalist fringe. Tea Party signs are only recycled hate from other groups and earlier times. It is an old idea with a new name. As for a “return to the basics,” women could not vote and married women could not enter into contracts. Slaves were worth 3/5 of a person for representation. Search and seizure was physical and not electronic. The new burden on our society is to actually read the Constitution and the amendments to embrace them with a discussion of how they apply instead of forging them into weapons to bludgeon our neighbors.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
01 November 2010
Showing posts with label Constitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Constitution. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Torture by Design and Other Stuff
For those who boast or whine
About intelligent design
And draw lessons from scripture
To create a picture
Of what we humans have done
For security or fun
Need to re-check and squint
To see if we followed the blueprint
We need to review the bidding on torture and related violations of law and the Constitution before we blithely travel down the road to tomorrow’s legal issues. We have endured the painful if titillating exposes of hypocrites wailing over their peccadilloes. Governor Sanford and Senators Ensign and Vitter are merely the latest in a long series of failed humans; some of whom seem bent on throwing stones while forgetting that their positions in life place them in glass houses in full view of the people whom they both resemble and represent. Human failing appears to be part of the human condition and fully bipartisan. If there is a difference, it is that the conservatives run on a platform of holiness and purity while they stumble and fall at the same rate as liberals who are just as human and fallible, but run on platforms that are unrelated to personal perfection. Let us accept that these practices will continue and then devote some energy to issues of Constitutional and international law before we get too distracted.
Let me begin with the absurd posturing by our former Vice President Dick Cheney re the efficacy of torture. While that assertion that torture “worked” is not relevant to the law, it must still be challenged. Let us return to the design of the torture program and how it either evolved or was the product of intelligent design since that is a common mantra of the right wing. We experienced considerable torture at the hands of Chinese and North Korean Communists during the Korean Conflict. The torture resulted in scores of false confessions that were distributed internationally and decried as inhuman and cruel by our government and even our press. The purpose of the torture that was structurally inherent in the design was to elicit confessions…false confessions. After review of the military subjected to torture and countless interviews and study, we recognized that our soldiers were not prepared for the process and that, if they were given an orientation to the techniques of torture, that perhaps there would be increased resistance to signing false statements and fewer incidents in future conflicts. The SERE program was then designed and presented to our military to reduce false confessions by our soldiers. Many of our military personnel were then trained to resist by subjecting them to abbreviated torture techniques. It was not done to train our soldiers in how to inflict torture, but rather to familiarize them with the techniques so that they might be better prepared to resist.
Think about this. The Communists designed a program to elicit false confessions and then exploited those false confessions on the world stage. That was their design and the system worked according to that design. At no time did the Communists assume that their extracted confessions were “truth through torture,” but rather that the many Americans, although not all, were weak enough to succumb to the techniques. The design worked exactly as it should. Given that we, after failing to prevent 9/11, moved to round up “targets” like Sheik Mohammed and torture them without any essential redesign of the program used by the Communists, then why should we suddenly believe that the same design under similar conditions would suddenly produce Truth? This is the equivalent of designing a physical system to extract water from a stone and expecting it to produce fine wine. It’s a miracle! We can be absolute in expecting that physical system to extract water, not wine and we can fully expect that the torture of prisoners by our government produced false confessions. That is the beauty of design. Incidentally, that design is not affected by the good intentions of the torturers to get Truth, or the righteousness of our cause to find the perpetrators of 9/11. Sheik Mohammed has admitted to giving false answers to stop the torture he was subjected to much as our soldiers did upon return to a safe environment at home. Hmm. If Cheney can create wine from water, he missed his calling.
In addition to the problem of a system working according to design, there is the nagging reality of the law. Our Constitution and international laws to which we are party specifically prohibits torture. Techniques such as waterboarding have been cited repeatedly in precedent as prohibited and illegal. Our own findings in the Nuremburg trials led to punishment of the perpetrators and even to the officials and legal authorities that provided covering opinions. Herbert Klemm was convicted by a U.S. military tribunal for a legal position he took that advocated taking rights away from people that contributed to the abuse of these groups. This places Yoo and other Bush administration lawyers in the similar position of supporting torture through memos and other means that advocated positions that attempted to rewrite common definitions of torture, for example, to provide a fig leaf to cover Bush and Cheney. Limiting the definition of torture as “deliberately inflicting grievous bodily harm such as organ failure” is a bogus opinion on its face and could be prosecuted by others using our own precedent against Klemm. Even if some court would exonerate Bush and Cheney due to their ignorance, Yoo and others might be prosecuted based upon the assumption that an attorney would be required to issue an opinion that recognizes common international law and our own laws on the subject. A lawyer calling a pig a diamond does not materially alter the nature of the pig. Torture is torture regardless of what Yoo called it.
More recently, we have been informed that Cheney apparently failed to notify Congress of an assassination program being established in violation of specific law created by our Legislature that required briefing on CIA programs. Further, an earlier Congress eliminated political assassinations as policy in the 1970s as a result of the Phoenix Program disclosures in Vietnam and Cambodia. This is a double problem for the Cheney office (hiding an illegal program from Congress). We probably all guessed that Cheney who apparently drinks liberally but is conservative in most other aspects of life would be on the wrong side of the law, but we simply did not understand the depth of his involvement. It now seems that Cheney was not only personally cherry-picking intelligence, but he was directing actions to change the rules of behavior for our intelligence forces and perhaps saw himself as 007 with license to kill. This is troubling on an international as well as a national level because, just as we did not inform Congress, we also failed to inform our allies. That usually gets them ticked off.
Where to from here? We cannot make believe that this history did not happen. We have a major economic crisis, yes, but the law is always with us. The crisis in economics will pass. If we do not pursue the law, then some day, when we least expect it, the law may pursue us. On that tenuous note, we are all guilty of contributing to the delinquency of an administration if we look the other way…and that is true for both the perpetrating Bush Administration and the following Obama Administration. I am fully aware that Obama does not want to delay health care and recovery from this recession, but just how many people will it require to simply follow the law where it takes us? Will history be any kinder to Obama for doing nothing than it will for Bush and Cheney for the violations? Should it?
We need to use our powers as citizens to cry out for justice. It will take months and compromise is unacceptable, but we cannot simply stand by and allow our great nation to shrink from our joint and aggregate responsibility to ensure that justice prevails. Is it worse to admit our failings and to repair them or to pretend that we have no faults when the hypocrisy is screaming to us and to the world as we wait? Remember Sanford, Ensign and Vitter? It is not their failings but their hypocrisy that angers us. Let us not be hypocrites. Yes, we failed. Now let us repair the damage by welcoming Justice without reservation and let the lady with the blindfold do her thing.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
15 July 2009
About intelligent design
And draw lessons from scripture
To create a picture
Of what we humans have done
For security or fun
Need to re-check and squint
To see if we followed the blueprint
We need to review the bidding on torture and related violations of law and the Constitution before we blithely travel down the road to tomorrow’s legal issues. We have endured the painful if titillating exposes of hypocrites wailing over their peccadilloes. Governor Sanford and Senators Ensign and Vitter are merely the latest in a long series of failed humans; some of whom seem bent on throwing stones while forgetting that their positions in life place them in glass houses in full view of the people whom they both resemble and represent. Human failing appears to be part of the human condition and fully bipartisan. If there is a difference, it is that the conservatives run on a platform of holiness and purity while they stumble and fall at the same rate as liberals who are just as human and fallible, but run on platforms that are unrelated to personal perfection. Let us accept that these practices will continue and then devote some energy to issues of Constitutional and international law before we get too distracted.
Let me begin with the absurd posturing by our former Vice President Dick Cheney re the efficacy of torture. While that assertion that torture “worked” is not relevant to the law, it must still be challenged. Let us return to the design of the torture program and how it either evolved or was the product of intelligent design since that is a common mantra of the right wing. We experienced considerable torture at the hands of Chinese and North Korean Communists during the Korean Conflict. The torture resulted in scores of false confessions that were distributed internationally and decried as inhuman and cruel by our government and even our press. The purpose of the torture that was structurally inherent in the design was to elicit confessions…false confessions. After review of the military subjected to torture and countless interviews and study, we recognized that our soldiers were not prepared for the process and that, if they were given an orientation to the techniques of torture, that perhaps there would be increased resistance to signing false statements and fewer incidents in future conflicts. The SERE program was then designed and presented to our military to reduce false confessions by our soldiers. Many of our military personnel were then trained to resist by subjecting them to abbreviated torture techniques. It was not done to train our soldiers in how to inflict torture, but rather to familiarize them with the techniques so that they might be better prepared to resist.
Think about this. The Communists designed a program to elicit false confessions and then exploited those false confessions on the world stage. That was their design and the system worked according to that design. At no time did the Communists assume that their extracted confessions were “truth through torture,” but rather that the many Americans, although not all, were weak enough to succumb to the techniques. The design worked exactly as it should. Given that we, after failing to prevent 9/11, moved to round up “targets” like Sheik Mohammed and torture them without any essential redesign of the program used by the Communists, then why should we suddenly believe that the same design under similar conditions would suddenly produce Truth? This is the equivalent of designing a physical system to extract water from a stone and expecting it to produce fine wine. It’s a miracle! We can be absolute in expecting that physical system to extract water, not wine and we can fully expect that the torture of prisoners by our government produced false confessions. That is the beauty of design. Incidentally, that design is not affected by the good intentions of the torturers to get Truth, or the righteousness of our cause to find the perpetrators of 9/11. Sheik Mohammed has admitted to giving false answers to stop the torture he was subjected to much as our soldiers did upon return to a safe environment at home. Hmm. If Cheney can create wine from water, he missed his calling.
In addition to the problem of a system working according to design, there is the nagging reality of the law. Our Constitution and international laws to which we are party specifically prohibits torture. Techniques such as waterboarding have been cited repeatedly in precedent as prohibited and illegal. Our own findings in the Nuremburg trials led to punishment of the perpetrators and even to the officials and legal authorities that provided covering opinions. Herbert Klemm was convicted by a U.S. military tribunal for a legal position he took that advocated taking rights away from people that contributed to the abuse of these groups. This places Yoo and other Bush administration lawyers in the similar position of supporting torture through memos and other means that advocated positions that attempted to rewrite common definitions of torture, for example, to provide a fig leaf to cover Bush and Cheney. Limiting the definition of torture as “deliberately inflicting grievous bodily harm such as organ failure” is a bogus opinion on its face and could be prosecuted by others using our own precedent against Klemm. Even if some court would exonerate Bush and Cheney due to their ignorance, Yoo and others might be prosecuted based upon the assumption that an attorney would be required to issue an opinion that recognizes common international law and our own laws on the subject. A lawyer calling a pig a diamond does not materially alter the nature of the pig. Torture is torture regardless of what Yoo called it.
More recently, we have been informed that Cheney apparently failed to notify Congress of an assassination program being established in violation of specific law created by our Legislature that required briefing on CIA programs. Further, an earlier Congress eliminated political assassinations as policy in the 1970s as a result of the Phoenix Program disclosures in Vietnam and Cambodia. This is a double problem for the Cheney office (hiding an illegal program from Congress). We probably all guessed that Cheney who apparently drinks liberally but is conservative in most other aspects of life would be on the wrong side of the law, but we simply did not understand the depth of his involvement. It now seems that Cheney was not only personally cherry-picking intelligence, but he was directing actions to change the rules of behavior for our intelligence forces and perhaps saw himself as 007 with license to kill. This is troubling on an international as well as a national level because, just as we did not inform Congress, we also failed to inform our allies. That usually gets them ticked off.
Where to from here? We cannot make believe that this history did not happen. We have a major economic crisis, yes, but the law is always with us. The crisis in economics will pass. If we do not pursue the law, then some day, when we least expect it, the law may pursue us. On that tenuous note, we are all guilty of contributing to the delinquency of an administration if we look the other way…and that is true for both the perpetrating Bush Administration and the following Obama Administration. I am fully aware that Obama does not want to delay health care and recovery from this recession, but just how many people will it require to simply follow the law where it takes us? Will history be any kinder to Obama for doing nothing than it will for Bush and Cheney for the violations? Should it?
We need to use our powers as citizens to cry out for justice. It will take months and compromise is unacceptable, but we cannot simply stand by and allow our great nation to shrink from our joint and aggregate responsibility to ensure that justice prevails. Is it worse to admit our failings and to repair them or to pretend that we have no faults when the hypocrisy is screaming to us and to the world as we wait? Remember Sanford, Ensign and Vitter? It is not their failings but their hypocrisy that angers us. Let us not be hypocrites. Yes, we failed. Now let us repair the damage by welcoming Justice without reservation and let the lady with the blindfold do her thing.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
15 July 2009
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Defend the Constitution or Bush: Your Choice
Recall that swearing in
And reach beyond the grin
Of satisfaction
For attraction
To a vow to defend
Without an end
Our Constitution’s words
From all herds
Without and within
Including next of kin
I have a brief but true story that needs to be told, but first I want to comment on the recent words by General Ricardo Sanchez. When I first read them, I was flooded with mixed emotions. While I firmly believe that he had every right to criticize his civilian leaders and I agree with many of his conclusions, I was annoyed if not angry that he said nothing when he had the power to influence events in Iraq and I could not help but wonder why. Could it be that his job was so important that he said “Yessir, yessir, three bags full" during his tenure as Commander in Iraq, but felt that he could not speak truth to power without punishment of some kind? I have lost my anger and I feel that I understand that he may actually be doing some good by enabling discussion of leader performance in Iraq.
My story begins when I was a major leading several instructors at an Army school. One instructor, CPT S. came to me and reported that the class commander had asked a question and that he had answered truthfully. The class had been on break when the guidon bearer got careless and placed the class guidon in a spot where it was picked up by one of the cadre. After the break, the cadre leader asked the class commander where the guidon was. When he stated that he did not know but that the class had it at the break, he was told that the entire class should produce 5 cases of beer for the cadre in order to get it back. The question the student commander asked my instructor was simply: “Is that my only choice?” CPT S. correctly stated that if the guidon was misappropriated to extort beer from the students that, indeed, there were other choices.
I supported CPT S. without reservation and called JAG to be sure that it was a matter of record and that I would not tolerate retaliation against the class or its student commander. My boss, LTC R. supported me and the lines were quickly drawn with his boss, COL H. in strong opposition. Soon, this tempest in a beer glass escalated to the point where CPT S. was threatened. I asked for a summit conference with COL H. with my boss being present to defuse the situation. There was no mollifying the colonel and soon there were threats against the student commander and I again called JAG to investigate the threats of dismissal for him. JAG interceded and the student graduated from the basic course despite the anger of the colonel and the cadre. My boss later protected me in his rating but could not shield me from my endorser (the colonel), nor could he protect himself from the same colonel.
Colonel H. invoked “tradition” as his written reason for a lowered endorsement for me and also for my boss’ lowered rating. I do not regret my actions nor would I choose to change my decision. I have lost no sleep over it because extortion is illegal and if that is a tradition, it is not a tradition worth maintaining. I refused an order from the colonel to support the cadre and simultaneously violate my oath as an officer and he refused to put the order in writing as I requested at the summit conference, so I took the hit along with my boss. Stuff happens.
Return to the Iraq war and General Sanchez. General Sanchez had Abu Ghraib happen right under his nose as well as on his watch and it appears that he chose to minimize it as documented in the Taguba Report. He accepted the troop number limitations, deployments, and other high level decisions without public comment. Would Sanchez have lost his job if he had commented publicly or even privately? Absolutely! Did he lose his job anyway? Yup…he never lost the smell of Abu Ghraib and he was retired without getting that fourth star. The satisfaction of making the right moral and ethical decision is not in the reward that you might get, but in being at peace with yourself for living up to your oath. You may take a hit…even a big hit, but if General Sanchez felt the nation was ill served by the national policy and the decisions, was it his choice or was it his duty to say so clearly and maybe even in a summit conference with the boss’ boss? I vote for duty. General Sanchez was a little late, but he finally made roll call. Don’t expect kudos, General Sanchez. Expect punishment from those who disagree and you will never be disappointed. By the way, the cadre never extorted for beer again, so maybe my own little decision had some positive effect in that small way.
Regards,
George Giacoppe
LTC, USA, Retired
And reach beyond the grin
Of satisfaction
For attraction
To a vow to defend
Without an end
Our Constitution’s words
From all herds
Without and within
Including next of kin
I have a brief but true story that needs to be told, but first I want to comment on the recent words by General Ricardo Sanchez. When I first read them, I was flooded with mixed emotions. While I firmly believe that he had every right to criticize his civilian leaders and I agree with many of his conclusions, I was annoyed if not angry that he said nothing when he had the power to influence events in Iraq and I could not help but wonder why. Could it be that his job was so important that he said “Yessir, yessir, three bags full" during his tenure as Commander in Iraq, but felt that he could not speak truth to power without punishment of some kind? I have lost my anger and I feel that I understand that he may actually be doing some good by enabling discussion of leader performance in Iraq.
My story begins when I was a major leading several instructors at an Army school. One instructor, CPT S. came to me and reported that the class commander had asked a question and that he had answered truthfully. The class had been on break when the guidon bearer got careless and placed the class guidon in a spot where it was picked up by one of the cadre. After the break, the cadre leader asked the class commander where the guidon was. When he stated that he did not know but that the class had it at the break, he was told that the entire class should produce 5 cases of beer for the cadre in order to get it back. The question the student commander asked my instructor was simply: “Is that my only choice?” CPT S. correctly stated that if the guidon was misappropriated to extort beer from the students that, indeed, there were other choices.
I supported CPT S. without reservation and called JAG to be sure that it was a matter of record and that I would not tolerate retaliation against the class or its student commander. My boss, LTC R. supported me and the lines were quickly drawn with his boss, COL H. in strong opposition. Soon, this tempest in a beer glass escalated to the point where CPT S. was threatened. I asked for a summit conference with COL H. with my boss being present to defuse the situation. There was no mollifying the colonel and soon there were threats against the student commander and I again called JAG to investigate the threats of dismissal for him. JAG interceded and the student graduated from the basic course despite the anger of the colonel and the cadre. My boss later protected me in his rating but could not shield me from my endorser (the colonel), nor could he protect himself from the same colonel.
Colonel H. invoked “tradition” as his written reason for a lowered endorsement for me and also for my boss’ lowered rating. I do not regret my actions nor would I choose to change my decision. I have lost no sleep over it because extortion is illegal and if that is a tradition, it is not a tradition worth maintaining. I refused an order from the colonel to support the cadre and simultaneously violate my oath as an officer and he refused to put the order in writing as I requested at the summit conference, so I took the hit along with my boss. Stuff happens.
Return to the Iraq war and General Sanchez. General Sanchez had Abu Ghraib happen right under his nose as well as on his watch and it appears that he chose to minimize it as documented in the Taguba Report. He accepted the troop number limitations, deployments, and other high level decisions without public comment. Would Sanchez have lost his job if he had commented publicly or even privately? Absolutely! Did he lose his job anyway? Yup…he never lost the smell of Abu Ghraib and he was retired without getting that fourth star. The satisfaction of making the right moral and ethical decision is not in the reward that you might get, but in being at peace with yourself for living up to your oath. You may take a hit…even a big hit, but if General Sanchez felt the nation was ill served by the national policy and the decisions, was it his choice or was it his duty to say so clearly and maybe even in a summit conference with the boss’ boss? I vote for duty. General Sanchez was a little late, but he finally made roll call. Don’t expect kudos, General Sanchez. Expect punishment from those who disagree and you will never be disappointed. By the way, the cadre never extorted for beer again, so maybe my own little decision had some positive effect in that small way.
Regards,
George Giacoppe
LTC, USA, Retired
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