Terrorism

Pentagon Dirty Bombers: Depleted Uranium in the USA

dlindorff — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:27:12 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow
and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit
to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch
of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains
of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield
Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is
a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing
of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a
pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that
any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many
as 2000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa
alone.

But that’s only a small part of the story.

The Army is actually seeking a master permit from the NRC to cover
all the sites where it has fired DU weapons, including penetrator
shells that, unlike the M101, are designed to hit targets and burn on
impact, turning the DU in the warhead into a fine dust of uranium oxide.

Depleted-uranium tipped M101 "spotting round" for Davy Crockett mortar

Uranium particles, whether pure uranium or in an oxidized form, are
alpha emitters, and can be highly carcinogenic and mutagenic if
ingested or inhaled, since they can lodge in one part of the body—the
kidney or lung or gonad, for example—and then irradiate surrounding
cells with large, destructive alpha particles (actually helium atoms),
until some gene is compromised and a cell become malignant.

Among the sites identified by the NRC as being contaminated with DU are:

Ft. Hood, TX
Ft. Benning, GA
Ft. Campbell, KY
Ft. Knox, KY
Ft. Lewis, WA
Ft. Riley, KS
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD
Ft. Dix, NJ
Makua Military Reservation, HI

Other locations identified as having DU weapons contamination are:

China Lake Air Warfare Center, CA
Eglin AFB, Florida,
Nellis AFB, NV
Davis-Monthan AFB
Kirkland AFB, NM
White Sands Missile Range, NM
Ethan Allen Firing Range, VT
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

An application for a 99-year permit to test DU weapons at the NM
Inst. Of Mining and Technology claimed that that site’s test area was
“so contaminated with DU…as to preclude any other use”!

DU weapons have also been used by the Navy at Vieques Island off Puerto Rico (the Navy claimed it was a “mistake.”

The Pentagon continues a long history of claiming that DU is not
dangerous, although this official stance is belied by the warnings it
has given to its troops (though not to civilians in battle zones), to
stay well clear of tanks and other equipment destroyed by US tanks,
which used DU weapons as the ordnance of choice in both the Gulf War
and the current Iraq War. During both wars, DU ammunition was used by
Army and Marine tanks, by the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the A-10 ground
support jet, the Marine Harrier jet, and specially equipped F16 fighter
jets. The Navy also switched from DU ammunition to tungsten ammunition
in its Phalanx anti-missile ship defense system because of health and
environmental concerns with the DU ammo.

The Pentagon denies that it uses depleted uranium in bombs, missiles
and cruise missile warheads, but military personnel have reported their
use in all three delivery systems, and reports exist of DU
bunker-buster bombs, DU-tipped penetrator warheads on Tomahawk cruise
missiles and on some air-to-ground missiles.

It’s a good bet that all US munitions containing DU have been widely tested at various US military bases and testing grounds.

The bottom line is that at the same time that US government is
continuing to warn about the danger of terrorists acquiring the
materials to make a “dirty” bomb that could spread radioactive material
in the US, the US military has for years been doing exactly that, and
continues to do so, with no intention to clean up its messes, many of
which are allowing depleted uranium to percolate into ground water or
flow down streams to more populated areas.

Of course, it could have been worse. The M101 mortar that litters
Pohakuloa was actually designed as a range-finder for the Davy Crocket
mortar, which back in the late 1950s and the 1960s was designed to
allow infantry troops to fire a small “tactical” nuclear mortar shell
at targets just five miles distant. Some 700 of these “little nukes”,
that had a power of “just” several kilotons or less, were made and
actually made their way into the arsenals of troops in Europe and
elsewhere during the Cold War. Fortunately there are no reports of any
of them having been fired off at any of the military’s firing ranges.

Then again, the Pentagon doesn’t exactly have a sterling record
about telling the truth where nuclear weapons and DU weapons are
concerned.

Nor is the NRC to be relied on to protect the American public. As an
administrative judge wrote in a ruling on a case involving DU
contamination at Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana, the NRC exhibited
a “more than casual attitude with regard to decommissioning of sites on
which radioactive materials remain as a potential threat to public
health and safety and to the environment.”

In another case, involving cleanup of the ShieldAlloy Metallurgical
Corp.’s site in Newfield, NJ, where DU weapons were made, a judge said,
“at the very least, the (NRC) staff has countenanced…a situation that
will leave the citizens in the area surrounding the activity site in
doubt for close to two decades regarding what measures will ultimately
be taken for their protection.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

dlindorff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:51:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle
by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to
acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them
and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and
grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to
man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune
illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the
general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its
battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common
use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an
approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops
and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to
eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military
affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the
obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry
saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent
Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US
government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

Thai Thi Nga, 16, 2nd-generation victim of US Agent Orange use in Vietnam

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as
many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related
illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of
Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge
who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least
three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans
and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese
in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems
due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and
others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant
care.

Veterans for Peace,
an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health
care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and
equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam—a call which
Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have
found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases
in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels.
The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases
to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach
the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the
way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two
nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later,
but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal
island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate
General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to
use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal
under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the
Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of
civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be
a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing
that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the
Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill
military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials
against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon
in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly
toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares—12% of the total land area of
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country—might be a
war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive
defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was
heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by
the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned
the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to
fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s
criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good
place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace
Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring
President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several
billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of
peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever
given.

Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times could salvage a bit
of its journalistic reputation by having Dao or some other reporter
write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the
people of Vietnam.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Our Neighbors' Keeper: Local Cop Chiefs Want to Create a Nation of Snoops

dlindorff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty
journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I
co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard.
In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security
offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which
provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other
government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of
unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use
policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords
themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA
Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the
LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that
including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our
editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years
later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public
hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with
a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been
arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their
identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern
California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the
City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using
as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal
political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering
rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National
Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city
council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a
shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had
links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was
apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on
leftists and political activists collected by local police all around
the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic
spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate
revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are
local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be
exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been,
especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised
concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by
organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But
city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the
unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country,
who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of
local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for
suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying
on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists,
activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from
terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change,
political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many
other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has
killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects,
contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational
fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and
acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the
National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of
Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom
remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police
departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational
fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a
police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced
conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen
snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks
or acts a little bit different.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Caught in a Lie: US Uses Phosphorus Weapons in Afghanistan

dlindorff — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:41:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

When doctors started reporting that some of the victims of the US bombing of several villages in Farah Province last week—an attack that left between 117 and 147 civilians dead, most of them women and children—were turning up with deep, sharp burns on their body that “looked like” they’d been caused by white phosphorus, the US military was quick to deny responsibility.

US officials—who initially denied that the US had even bombed any civilians in Farah despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including massive craters where houses had once stood—insisted that “no white phosphorus” was used in the attacks on several villages in Farah.

Official military policy on the use of white phosphorus is to only use the high-intensity, self-igniting material as a smoke screen during battles or to illuminate targets, not as a weapon against human beings—even enemy troops.

Now that policy, and the military’s blanket denial that phosphorus was used in Farah, have to be challenged, thanks to a recent report filed from a remote area of Afghanistan by a New York Times reporter.

C.J. Chivers, writing in the May 14 edition of the NY Times, in an article headlined “Korangal Memo: In Bleak Afghan Outpost, Troops Slog On,” wrote of how an embattled US Army unit in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, had come under attack following a morning memorial service for one of its members, Pfc. Richard Demeter, who had been killed the day before by a mine.

Chivers wrote:

“After the ceremony, the violence resumed. The soldiers detected a Taliban spotter on a ridge, which was pounded by mortars and then white phosphorus rounds from a 155 millimeter howitzer.

“What did the insurgents do? When the smoldering subsided, they attacked from exactly the same spot, shelling the outpost with 30-millimeter grenades and putting the soldiers on notice that the last display of firepower had little effect. The Americans escalated. An A-10 aircraft made several gun runs, then dropped a 500-pound bomb.”

It is clear from this passage that the military’s use of the phosphorus shells had not been for the officially sanctioned purpose of providing cover. The soldiers had no intention of climbing that hill to attack the spotter on the ridge themselves. They were trying to destroy him with shells and bombs. In fact, the last thing they would have wanted to do was provide the enemy spotter with a smoke cover, which would have helped him escape, and which also would have hidden him from the A-10 ground attack planes which had been called in to make gun runs at his position. Nor was this a case of illuminating the target. The incident, as Chivers reports, took place in broad daylight.

Clearly then, this article demonstrates that it is routine for US soldiers to call in phosphorus rounds to attack enemy soldiers, which is supposed to be against US military policy for this material. Whoever was manning the howitzer had a stock of the weapons on hand, and was ready to fire them.

The US initially flatly denied using white phosphorus weapons in Iraq, when reports first began to come out, including from US troops themselves, that they had been used extensively against insurgents defending the city of Fallujah against US Marines in November 2004. Under mounting pressure, the Pentagon first admitted that it had used the chemical in Fallujah but only “for illumination.” Later, the Pentagon added that it had used phosphorus as a “screen” to hide troops. But finally, in 2005, the Pentagon was forced to admit that it had also used white phosphorus directly as a weapon against enemy Iraqi troops in the assault on Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that still held many civilians.

The same pattern of denial and eventual admission regarding the use of this controversial and deadly weapon by US forces now seems to be repeating itself in Afghanistan.

It is odd that given the controversy over the use of white phosphorus weapons, which result in terrible wounds and eventual death as phosphorus particles burn their way down through flesh to the bone and sometimes straight onward through a body, leaving a charred channel of destruction, the New York Times’ Chivers—or more likely his editors back in New York?—ignored any mention of the issue while reporting on the use of the chemical rounds to attack a lone spotter on the ridge.

Given the current controversy over whether the US used white phosphorus shells or bombs in Falah Province only days before, it is hard to understand why the issue wasn’t mentioned in this particular article. Indeed, in the online version of the story, the word phosphorus is set as a hotlink to an article on the controversy over the battlefield use of phosphorus, indicating that at least someone at the Times has integrity and a good news sense.

As for the US government and the Pentagon, it is clear that they know the weapon is a vicious and controversial one, and that besides causing horrific and painful wounds, it is profoundly dangerous for innocent civilians, particularly when used in town or village settings.

It is bad enough that the US is using this weapon. It is even worse that it is forced to lie about it.

Surely if the goal of US policy is to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan’s people, it shouldn’t be using a weapon that causes such terrible and indiscriminate wounds. Then again, maybe winning those hearts and minds isn’t really the goal. Maybe, as in the so-called “Pacification Program” applied by US forces in rural South Vietnam, the goal is to terrorize Afghan villagers in Taliban-dominated regions into rejecting the Taliban in their midst.

Requests for answers from the press office at the Pentagon, and at military headquarters in Afghanistan, regarding US policy on the use of white phosphorus, and on the specific use of the shells mentioned in the New York Times article were ignored.

__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

On Torture and War, Obama Sounds Increasingly, and Disturbingly, Like Bush

dlindorff — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:46:31 -0400

by Dave Lindorff

In reversing himself and declaring that the US government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the US military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

It may well be that, as Obama says, release of those photos could lead to anger in the Islamic world and perhaps to recruitment gains among groups like Al Qaeda that are attacking American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but this is only true because at the same time, the Obama administration is opposing taking any legal action against the people who authorized and promoted that torture.

If the Obama administration were to open a full-scale legal investigation into torture, with an independent prosecutor assigned to go after anyone who violated the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code outlawing torture and the authorization, condoning or covering-up of torture, quite the opposite would happen: people in the Islamic world would see that this nation was coming to terms with those who abused the law.

As things stand, we have a only few people at the very bottom of the chain of command who are doing jail time or suffering administrative punishments for committing acts of torture and abuse which they believed had been ordered and authorized by leaders in the military, the Secretary of Defense's office, and the White House, but not one of those in authority who set the torture of captives in motion has been called to justice. Obama has endorsed that situation by again referring to the torture as just the actions of "a few people."

It was hardly that, however, and he knows it. Torture was a major part of the Bush/Cheney so-called "War" on Terror, and was being conducted on an industrial scale, with White House lawyers providing legal cover, the Secretary of Defense sending memos urging every more aggressive techniques, and government doctors and psychologists working assiduously to make them more "effective."

The illogic of Obama's position on these photos is stunning. Since we know the photos exist, the refusal to make them public can only feed a sense that they must be worse than the horrific photos of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison which were already released. Nobody is going to assume that the photos in the White House's possession are less offensive than what has already been discovered and made public--for why would the administration be worried about that?

The truth is always better than a cover-up, and what we now have the president advocating is a cover-up of American torture.

But that's only part of the president's slide into Cheneyism. We have the president now calling for the possible indefinite detention of terror suspects--an idea that only insures that there will always be an incentive for recruiting more terrorists (to avenge those in captivity)--and that makes a joke of our own Constitution, which guarantees everyone--not just citizens--the right to a trial, the right to a presumption of innocence, and protection from "cruel and unusual punishment," which indefinite detention certainly is.

The war in Afghanistan, which now must be called Obama's War, thanks to his policy of escalation, is also becoming Cheneyesque, with the firing of Gen. David McKiernan, and his replacement as head of the Afghanistan War by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Gen. McChrystal hails from the Special Forces, and played a role in the torture that was integral to the US war and occupation in Iraq. Far from being put in charge of operations in Afghanistan, where public backing for the US military is virtually non-existent at this point, McChrystal should be facing investigation and possible prosecution here at home for his role in torture of captives.

It has never made sense to initiate a war in Afghanistan in order to go after a band of criminal terrorists hidiing out in the mountains. Bush and Cheney turned what should have been a focused hunt for Al Qaeda terrorists into a war on the Taliban government and ultimately the people of Afghanistan. Obama has continued that error, and now blithely hyphenates the terms Al Qaeda and Taliban in defining the "enemy" of American forces in that country.

Such a war can never be won, and can only lead to tragedy, not just for the people of Afghanistan, for whom it is already that, but for American troops and ultimately for America itself.

It is a war that never should have been fought, and which now should be ended as rapidly as possible.

Obama at this point, by covering up for official torture, and by signing on to and expanding the war in Afghanistan, is dooming his presidency, further staining the reputation of the United States, and ultimately furthering the decline of the country that was set in motion by his predecessors.

____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Judge Bybee and the Challenge of Removing a Stain on the Legal System

dlindorff — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:54:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in the state of New
York ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to
step down from his bench and leave his position following his
disbarment for allegedly “misusing” $9000 in a client’s account prior
to his election as a judge. In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced
something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been
disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for
“swindling an older woman of her house and savings” as an attorney six
years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position. Under state law
in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge
Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he
continued to collect his salary. Only the state’s Judicial Standards
Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could
remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a
similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an Appellate Judge
which began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department
of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for
the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as
waterboarding, sleep deprivation, body slamming and other measures on
captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

It is now being reported that the Justice Department is about to
release a review the department’s ethics unit, the Office of
Professional Responsibility, which will report on that memo, as well as
other memos written by Bybee’s then colleagues in the Office of Legal
Counsel, John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley University’s law
school, and Steven Bradbury, and that the report will recommend
disbarment for the three men. That would put the matter in the hands of
the states where each man is licensed to practice law—in Bybee’s case,
the state of Nevada. According to the New York Times, the 220-page
internal review of Bybee’s, Yoo’s and Bradbury’s actions as counsel to
the White House amounted to “serious lapses of judgment” that could
warrant reprimands or disbarment.

What sets Bybee apart from the other two men is that after his work
in the Bush/Cheney administration, he went on to become a federal judge
with a lifetime appointment. Furthermore, unlike North Carolina, and
many other states, there is no requirement that a federal judge have a
law degree or be a lawyer , much less be a licensed one. While every
judge on the federal bench is, in fact, a lawyer in good standing with
their state bar, technically they do not have to be.

Judges in many state courts can be removed from office by the
judicial conduct committees operated by those states’ supreme courts,
but federal judges can only be “disciplined” by the federal judicial
system’s office of judicial conduct, not removed from office. A
disciplined judge might be prevented from hearing cases or from signing
court orders, but removal from office, under the Constitution, requires
impeachment by a majority of the House of Representatives, and
conviction by a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

At the same time, it would likely be a huge embarrassment to the
judicial system if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred for ethical lapses
and for what the forthcoming Justice Department investigation is
reportedly calling “serious lapses of judgment,” and then continued to
serve as a judge in one of the second highest courts in the land.

Prof. Deborah Rhode, director of the Center for the Legal
Profession at the Stanford University School of Law, commented, “I
would imaging that anything that would be enough to disbar you would be
enough to remove you from the bench,” when asked what the impact of a
disbarment of a judge would be in the federal courts.

Certainly, if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred by the Nevada court,
there would be mounting calls for his impeachment by Congress. It is
certainly possible too, that if Bybee didn’t simply resign at that
point, the House, heavily Democratic, could initiate impeachment
proceedings and that he would be impeached, since not only would he
have been disbarred and criticized strongly by the Justice Department
Office of Professional Responsibility, but his actual memo, released by
the Obama White House, has him offering legal cover for clear
violations of the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions, to which
the US is a signatory.

Whether House prosecutors could convince all Senate Democrats, plus
independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and seven Republicans to reach
the required 67 votes needed to convict (assuming no abstentions), is
an open question.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson Law School in
San Diego, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, notes that while
the Constitution says judges may only be removed from office by the
process of impeachment, it also says: “The Judges, both of the supreme
and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.”

Bybee in his 2002 memo (actually largely written by his subordinate
at the time, John Yoo, but approved and signed by Bybee), tries to
argue that what the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code define
as torture—namely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,”—actually is
only “torture” if it is “equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death,” a patently absurd interpretation
since it would be impossible to imaging “degrading treatment” rising to
that level of pain. Bybee’s memo went on to say that even if US
personnel did actually torture a captive, it would not be a violation
of the law or the conventions if the torturer didn’t have a “specific
intent” to cause pain. Going even further, he wrote that even if the
torturer had a specific intent to cause pain, “a showing that an
individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not
produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent.”

As I wrote in an article on April 20 on my website ThisCantBeHappening.net,
Judge Bybee himself, in an opinion written in 2006, mercilessly mocked
this kind of legal sophism, saying: “The only thing we have to enforce
our judgments is the power of our words. When these words lose their
ordinary meaning—when they become so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean—we cede our own right to be taken
seriously.” (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.)

It seems clear that acting as a “mob attorney” for the White House,
artfully misinterpreting a criminal statute (Sections 2340-2340A of
title 18 of the United States Code implements the provisions of the
Geneva Conventions, making them an integral part of US law) outlawing
any form of torture in order to provide legal cover for criminal
behavior by American forces and the CIA towards captives in the “War”
on Terror would meet the definition “Bad Behavior,” warranting
impeachment.

Whether Democrats in Congress, who in recent years have
demonstrated an astonishing lack of courage and respect for the
Constitution, will rise to the occasion is another matter, especially
with a new Democratic president who has made it clear he is loath to
hold the prior administration to account for any of its crimes or
clearly unconstitutional behavior.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Free John Walker Lindh, Bush's and Cheney's First Torture Victim!

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:47:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff),
Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he
was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at
the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun a program of
brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of
middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed
an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school,
he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18,
he began studying at a madrassa, or religious school. There he learned
about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free
that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a
brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of
that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh
volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration
officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with
Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for
a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more
useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered
America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a
fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and
the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war
against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was
still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the
Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces
troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there
or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t
just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an
American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg)
Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by
American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American
amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped
naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed
inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the
cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His
interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him
repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and
word that his parents had already arranged for representation was
withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in
his case to protest and ultimately resign).

At some point during this abuse, Lindh caved in to his fears of
death at the hands of his captors and signed a “confession” to being a
traitor to America. At that point he was flown back to the US, where
Attorney General Ashcroft touted him as the “American Taliban,”
initially vowing to try him for treason (which carries a death
sentence).

What changed things dramatically, as I reported in 2005, was a
decision by Federal District Judge T.S.Ellis to permit Lindh and his
defense team—over strenuous government objections--to challenge that
confession letter by introducing evidence that Lindh had signed it will
being subjected to torture at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The judge
ruled that Lindh would be able to call witnesses from Guantanamo and
from among the soldiers where he had been held in Afghanistan.
Suddenly, the Justice Department, in the person of Michael Chertoff,
then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and in charge
of terrorism prosecutions, offered a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it
a plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in marked
contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced,
as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New
Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges in return to a guilty plea
to the two minor charges, but only if—and this is the key—Lindh would
cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing into torture. Under the
offered deal, Lindh would also have to sign a letter stating that he
had “not been intentionally mistreated” by his American captors, and
waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the
future. Lindh agreed, but following sentencing, Chertoff also added a
gag order, technically a “special administrative measure,” barring
Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his
sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried great lengths to
completely silence Lindh. His wasn’t just the first trial in the “War
on Terror.” Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney
torture program.

Now that we have the trail of memoranda that set that wretched
torture campaign in motion, it’s time for the Obama Justice Department
to free Lindh. If President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
think Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens suffered from malicious prosecution and
were willing to drop charges against him, they certainly should toss
out the case against Lindh, who besides being innocent of the original
serious charges leveled against him, was a victim of war crimes
perpetrated by his own fellow Americans, and authorized by his own
government. His arrest, conviction and sentencing are a travesty of
justice, and perhaps, given that torture is a criminal offense in the
US Code, even constitute a crime of cover-up. He should be the first
witness in any official investigation by Congress or the attorney
general’s office into the origins of the Bush/Cheney torture campaign.

Free John Walker Lindh!
_______________
(Note: This article was offered to the Nation magazine, and
rejected. It was also offered to Salon magazine, which never responded.)
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed?

dlindorff — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:31:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

I’ll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out.
But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly
wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the
NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush
Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper
conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli
government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s
warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her
being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

At the time of the taping of Harman’s incriminating phone
conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and
ultimately successfully) to get the New York Times to hold
off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James
Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans’
phone and internet communications.

According to a report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly,
the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged
Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage
charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby
accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli
government (the case against AIPAC’s Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman
is still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy
of which was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to
have AIPAC lobby, and more specifically to have a it arrange for a
wealthy Jewish pro-Israel donor in California donate money to Rep.
Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she became House Speaker, to
name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of
the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to help, was heard to
say, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times,
which ran a story on the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI
to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom
the administration was relying to help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times, editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and, according to a federal district judge, illegal) NSA spying program.

There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary
glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the
centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments
to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for
members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were
doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli
government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning,
and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. Instead, they
flock enmasse to its annual meetings, as President Obama did almost
immediately upon winning the November election, and a large proportion
of both houses from both parties happily accept its campaign largesse.

A second, even bigger, issue is the NSA’s spying activities
themselves. According to CQ, the particular wiretap that caught Rep.
Harman inflagrante with an Israeli agent was a court-approved tap—part
of an investigation into Israeli government spying activities. But even
if this is true—and at this point, we’re relying on what the government
is telling us about it—it shows how dangerous the broader unwarranted
monitoring program of the NSA has been, and remains. Back in 1978,
Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA) in
direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and
subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using
the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war
activists, and of members of Congress. To prevent such
police-state outrages in the future, Congress passed the FISA
legislation, establishing a secret court staffed by a panel of
top-security-cleared federal judges, whose sole responsibility was to
consider and grant requests from the NSA for warrants to conduct secret
electronic surveillance within the US or involving American citizens
abroad.

President Bush used the pretext of the 9-11 attacks to secretly
order the NSA to begin a massive compaign of surveillance without going
through the FISA Court for warrants, even secretly soliciting the
cooperation of the nation’s several telecom companies in splicing in
routers at their switching hubs to make it possible to monitor all
conversations moving across the wires and the internet. It seemed to
some observers, myself included, that the only reason the
administration could have had for bypassing the FISA court (which over
30 years of operation has been incredibly accommodating of government
spying requests) was that it was planning to engage in spying that
would outrage the public and the Congress and even the FISA judges. It
also seemed likely, given the Bush/Cheney administration’s public
stance that everyone was either “with us or against us,” and that
critics of the administration’s “War on Terror” or of its plans to
invade Iraq, were “unpatriotic” or “soft on terror,” that congressional
opponents of the administration would be obvious—and indeed
irresistible--targets of that surveillance.

Now that we have seen proof that the administration was not above
using its NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it
becomes absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department
investigate to see whether other members of Congress were also victims
of agency spying, and whether others besides Rep. Harmon were similarly
extorted or otherwise compromised.

The American public can, at this point, have zero confidence in the
integrity of the Congress or of their own representatives, knowing that
politicians and government officials may be acting not in the public
interest but rather under duress in the interest of those who control
the National Security Agency. We can have zero confidence either in the
integrity of the president, who likewise may well have been compromised
by NSA surveillance conducted on him before he became president.

The only possible position for the public to adopt as of today is to be suspicious of any politician who opposes a full and public investigation
into the NSA’s seven-year-long campaign of sweeping, warrantless
electronic eavesdropping, since opposition to such an investigation, in
the wake of the Harman episode, could well be an indication that the
political figure in question is afraid she or he has been monitored, or
worse, that she or he has been threatened by those who have the
records. Every citizen concerned about the fate of American democracy
should demand that his or her senators and representative promptly call
for such a public probe.

It is no longer a wild idea at all to imagine that our Congress has
been reduced to the status of a Potemkin legislature because of real or
imagined spying by the NSA.

_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Torturing Judge Bybee: Make Him Eat His Own Words

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:55:49 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If the day comes that Congress finally does its duty and begins an
impeachment effort against 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee,
the former Bush assistant attorney general who in 2002 authored a key
memo justifying the use of torture against captives in the Afghanistan
invasion and the so-called “War on Terror,” it would be fitting
punishment to watch him squirm as his own words as a judge were played
back to him.

It was as an Appeals Court Judge Bybee, sitting on a case being
heard in 2006 by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that he wrote the
following words:

“The only thing we have to enforce our judgements is the power
of our words. When these words lose their ordinary meaning—when they
become so elastic that they may mean the opposite of what they appear
to mean—we cede our own right to be taken seriously.” (Amalgamated
Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.).

Yet causing words to become “so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean” was precisely the goal of the
48-page memo, just released by the Obama Administration, which Bybee
wrote for the Bush/Cheney White House authorizing the use of what any
ordinary person, and indeed the US Criminal Code, would define as
torture against captives held in Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and
elsewhere.

The actual Geneva Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, incorporated in 1996 by
act of Congress as a part of the US Criminal Code, Title 18, Sections
2340-2340A, is quite unambiguous in its proscription. As Bybee notes in
his memo, the Convention Against Torture defines torture as:

“…any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or
mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as
obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession,
punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is
suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a
third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind,
when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or
with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person
acting in an official capacity."

Now we know that what US CIA agents, military interrogators, and
even prison guards charged with “softening up” detainees, were doing to
captives included repeated waterboardings (over 100 times in the case
of some captives), slamming into walls while leashed to a neck
restraint, enforced sleeplessness for as long as 11 days at a time,
subjection to prolonged periods of extreme heat or cold, attacks by
dogs, being locked in a box with biting insects, etc. ad nauseum.

Yet Bybee, in his capacity as counsel to the president in the
office of the Attorney General, went to great creative lengths to make
the words in that act “elastic” to the point that they “lose their
ordinary meaning.”

For example, in his memo Bybee wrote:

“We…conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhumane or
degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite
intensity to fall within Sec. 2340A’s proscription against torture.”

Then, because he saw that that term “severe” in the statute was
problematic, Bybee went out of his way to try to make it mean something
more extreme. He found a legal case involving a hospital that was being
sued for refusing to admit an emergency medical patient, concluding
that severe pain would have to be pain “equivalent to (sic) intensity
to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ
failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”

Obviously, when someone says they have a “severe headache” or tells
the doctor that they have a “severe pain” in their lower back, they
aren’t talking about facing death, organ failure of impairment of
bodily function. They are using the word in its “ordinary meaning” to
communicate that they are hurting badly. But then Asst. Attorney
General Bybee isn’t interested in what Judge Bybee called “the ordinary
meaning” of words. He’s looking for weasel words. He’s trying to get
words to be “elastic,” and to mean “the opposite of what they appear to
mean.”

But Bybee also recognized in the event that Bush or his
subordinates were someday to be hauled before a court and prosecuted
for war crimes, he would need to offer them a second line of defense,
so, ever the good mob attorney, the future appellate court judge
offered up this beauty:

“To violate Section 2340A, the statute requires that severe
pain and suffering must be inflicted with specific intent. In order for
a defendant to have acted with specific intent, he must expressly
intend to achieve the forbidden act.”

What this means, writes Bybee, is that, “If the defendant [the
government torturer] acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was
reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would
have acted with only general intent” but not “specific intent” to cause
pain.” Put another way, he writes, “As a theoretical matter therefore,
knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not
constitute specific intent.”

How’s that for elastic? Let’s imagine a killer who fires a gun at a
victim, hitting him square between the eyes and killing him. He could
offer up the Bybee Defense, arguing that when he pointed his gun
towards the victim, at a range of 10 feet, he knew that death was
“reasonably likely” to result from his actions, “but no more.” Using
Bybee’s reasoning here, he should not be convicted, or even charged
with first-degree murder, because he lacked “specific intent” to kill.

But Bybee, noting that a jury might not buy such a line of defense,
offers up yet another rationale for torture not being torture. He
writes, in the memo:

“Furthermore, a showing that an individual acted with a good
faith belief that his conduct would not produce a result that the law
prohibits negates specific intent.”

Call this the Faith-Based No Torture Defense. According to FBNTD,
if you don’t believe you are torturing someone, you aren’t torturing
them. Here Bybee turns to case law with, not a torture case, but rather
the example of a defendant in a mail fraud trial, who successfully
argued that if he had a good faith belief that the material he was
mailing was truthful, he wasn’t guilty of mail fraud. But of course,
torture isn’t mail fraud, and the evidence of the pain and suffering
being inflicted at the hands of the torturer is right there before his
eyes, whatever he may “believe.”

Let’s face it. This word-twisting judge, sitting in his black robes
in a court that ranks just below the US Supreme Court in importance, is
a disgrace not just to the US court system, not just to the legal
profession, but to the English language.

He should not only be impeached and removed from his post by
Congress; he should be disbarred by fellow members of his legal
profession and then prosecuted as a war criminal by his former
employer, the US Dept. of Justice, for his role in authorizing and
promoting the use of torture by US military and intelligence agency
personnel. If convicted, he should be sentenced to a long term in jail,
and while confined should be forced to write 100 times a day on a
blackboard:

While Bybee himself may have never personally tortured anything but
the English language, his eventual prosecution for war crimes could be
facilitated by a little legal research he did in that same memo. For as
Bybee noted in that memo, the USA PATRIOT Act, in addition to
eviscerating much of the Bill of Rights, also amended Section 2340A of
the US law prohibiting torture to include the offense of “conspiracy to
commit torture”--and if Bybee’s memo doesn’t meet the definition of
conspiracy, I don’t know what the word conspiracy means.

Hey, I never thought I’d find myself commending the PATRIOT Act,
but here’s one little piece of it that we should not be trying to
rescind.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His most
recent book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama, Seeing Darkness, Conjures Up the Mists of Time

dlindorff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:56:59 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a
year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the
cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the
distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany
(Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the
terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary
bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air
defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With
Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this
made it an inviting target.

Friends and teachers recounted to me the terrors of that night,
when the entire city of several hundred thousand, built mostly of wood,
went up in a giant bonfire so hot and powerful that it sucked people
into it with a 200 mph vortex of inward rushing air. People who hid in
shelters were asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen, while those who tried
to flee sank knee deep into asphalt streets. Two mountains outside town
were man-made piles of rubble left over from the city’s ruins, which
were for the most part just carted away. There was little left to
rebuild.

While I was stunned by the horror of it, I at the time still felt
that after all, Germans had brought this disaster on themselves. After
all, they had allowed the Nazi monsters to gain control of the nation
and then proceeded with a genocidal campaign of extermination of
Jews—even German Jews who were their own neighbors--of Gypsies, of
gays, and of course, of Communists, and had launched a war that
ultimately killed 10s of millions of people around the world.

I mention all this because one thing I noticed back then, not among
young people in Germany, but among adults my parents’ age and older,
was a widespread denial about what Germany had done. And I remember
feeling, as many Americans and Europeans still do, and as many Chinese
and other Asians still feel about Japan, that these two countries have
never been willing to face up to the crimes that they, as a nation,
permitted to happen in their names.

Older and wiser now, I am well aware that our own country has
committed many crimes, some on a scale approaching those of Germany and
Japan: the near extermination of Native Americans, the mass,
centuries-long enslavement and cultural and physical destruction of
millions of African slaves, the use of nuclear bombs on civilian
targets, the decade-long saturation bombing and herbicidal poisoning of
most of Indochina…

It’s a long and terrible list, and for the most part, in our
schools, in our politics, in our histories, we don’t talk about, and
even justify and deny our own atrocities.

Now we have a president who is perhaps doing something worse.
Admitting that the last administration of President George Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up a program of illegal and inhuman
torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and in the
so-called War on Terror that was launched by them in the wake of the
9-11 attacks in 2001, and offering up documentary evidence of the chain
of command that set the country on this criminal course, President
Obama now says that to move beyond this “dark and painful chapter in
our history,” he will not seek or permit any prosecution of those who
committed torture of captives.

“Nothing will be gained,” Obama said, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

I’m not that concerned about whether individual torturers in the
CIA or the military get prosecuted. If the president had said he would
not prosecute people who “thought” they were acting under proper
authority and behaving legally, but then added that he would pursue
those who authorized and ordered them to torture, I would not have
fussed. But that is not what he said. The implication of his statement,
and the fact that he has not, this far into his term, ordered his
Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to investigate those who were
responsible for the crime, given what he clearly knows about its
authors, is the worst possible of travesties, and rises to the level of
a war crime itself.

Now I don’t want to equate America’s torture of a few hundred or a
few thousand captives by making them endure waterboarding or by placing
plastic neckbands and leashes on them and slamming their heads into
walls, with what the victims of Buchenwald or Auschwitz endured, but
that is really not the issue. The issue is, do we as a nation now
subscribe to the idea that the way to deal with evil perpetrated by
ourselves is to bury it?

Isn’t that precisely what we have been for decades accusing the
Germans and the Japanese of doing: burying in the mists of time their
criminal behavior as a people and as a nation?

And now our president—whose own wife and daughters are descendants
of slave victims of another era of American atrocities—is telling us we
should do the same thing as Germany and Japan: forget and move on.

But the president is wrong. Darkness does not go away when the fog comes. It just gets darker.

Let's shine a light. Sign the petition: No Amnesty for Torturers!

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest work
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net