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From the New York Times via The Agonist.
3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - Three former members of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves.The new allegations, the first involving members of the elite 82nd Airborne, are contained in a report by Human Rights Watch. The 30-page report does not identify the troops, but one is Capt. Ian Fishback, who has presented some of his allegations in letters this month to top aides of two senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman, and John McCain of Arizona. Captain Fishback approached the Senators’ offices only after he tried to report the allegations to his superiors for 17 months, the aides said. The aides also said they found the captain’s accusations credible enough to warrant investigation.
The captain tried to report the allegations to his superiors for 17 months. Were they all on the phone? Washing their hair? Why wouldn’t they take this report?
This wasn’t at Abu Ghraib:
In separate statements to the human rights organization, Captain Fishback and two sergeants described systematic abuses of Iraqi prisoners, including beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in human pyramids and sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja. Falluja was the site of the major uprising against the American-led occupation in April 2004. The report describes the soldiers’ positions in the unit, but not their names.
Abu Ghraib, as you recall, was just a small group of rogue junior enlisted. No widespread pattern of abuse, no sir. Pure coincidence that these fellows came up with the same things to do to the prisoners.
So, what was being done with these prisoners?
In one incident, the Human Rights Watch report states, an off-duty cook broke a detainee’s leg with a metal baseball bat. Detainees were also stacked, fully clothed, in human pyramids and forced to hold five-gallon water jugs with arms outstretched or do jumping jacks until they passed out, the report says. “We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them,” one sergeant told Human Rights Watch researchers during one of four interviews in July and August. “This happened every day.”
If the Taliban were doing that to captured US troops, what word would you use to describe it? Does that word start with a T? If you had to describe these actions in two words, would those words start with W and C?
All this in the name of gathering intelligence, of course:
“They wanted intel,” said the sergeant, an infantry fire-team leader who served as a guard when no military police soldiers were available. “As long as no PUC’s [persons under control] came up dead, it happened.” He added, “We kept it to broken arms and legs.”
Never mind that the intel you get that way is useless — the prisoner will tell you anything at all to get you to stop hurting him. “Anything at all” isn’t limited to truth and reality. But then, we have it on the highest national authority that “reality” isn’t important.
But was getting intel the only reason for abusing the prisoners?
Not at all:
The sergeant continued: “Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did it for amusement.”
I guess collecting stamps just wasn’t as much fun.
Did we learn anything from Abu Ghraib?
Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, one of the sergeants said, the abuses continued. “We still did it, but we were careful,” he told the human rights group.
Good thought, there, sergeant.
The whole article is worth reading.
This is a sign of a chain of command that’s broken, from top to bottom. This is the time for finger pointing. This is the time for blame. If not now, when?
Write to your senators. Write to your congressman. Write to your governor. Write to the editor of your local newspaper. If you’re outside of the USA, write to your representatives and to your ambassadors. How can anyone remain silent?
How long before the rightwing spin machine starts up on this one? I give it less than 24 hours before they're smearing the sources of this.
The Human Rights Watch report that spurred the NYT story should be read in its entirety. Particularly revelatory is the story of the officer who tried to get some guidance or action from the senior people in his chain of command. Nobody cared until he tried to go to the senate with his story. Then they tried to confine him to base to stop him meeting with senate staffers.
And if it weren't military and in another country, the local DA, and probably the state AG, would be charging them with all kinds of things, including probably the RICO act (pattern or practice of ...).
Of course, we all know that It's Okay to commit crimes in The War Against Terrorists. Excuse me, terrorists aren't an army, they're criminals, and you fight them with lawyers and police, not armies and bombs. And you Do Not Ever use torture on people in their own country, because then you lose whatever support you might have had. (/rant)
(This administration lies the way it breathes: constantly, automatically, and even when not doing so would be greatly to its advantage.)
Everyone should read Billmon as well. This goes so deep into our national psyche. I plan to write Senator Murray and Senator Cantwell tonight after soccer is over.
And ThinkProgress does a little digging into the timeline:
The Captain revealed this abuse to Human Rights Watch in July 2005. He also reported his charges to “three senior Republican senators,” including Majority Leader Bill Frist and Sen. John McCain. The torture, he said, was due primarily to “chronic confusion over U.S. military detention policies and whether or not the Geneva Convention applied.”I love the ideals for which America stands for. I hate and feel disgusted by how far we've fallen from them.
On July 27, the same month the Captain came forward, Sen. Frist single-handedly derailed a bipartisan effort — led by Sen. McCain — to clarify rules for the treatment of enemy prisoners at U.S. prison camps. In what news reports at the time described as an “unusual move,” Frist “simply pulled the bill from consideration” before it could be debated.
You can also find a summary here (Time, online, 9/23/05)
Pattern of Abuse
A decorated Army officer reveals new allegations of detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did the military ignore his charges?
By ADAM ZAGORIN
You can also find a summary here (Time, online, 9/23/05)
Pattern of Abuse
A decorated Army officer reveals new allegations of detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did the military ignore his charges?
By ADAM ZAGORIN
(sorry, the ref got mislaid the first time through)
The other truly nasty downside of behavior like this is that, by now, absolutely no one in the entire world will really believe (collective) you about being upset about systematic torture-for-torture's-sake unless there are a lot of executions of very important people -- Rumsfeld and his top three levels of civilian appointtees are the absolute minimum it would require to have any hope of being convincing.
Having to do that, trying to do that, breaks the Republic in completely permanent ways, because it removes the assurance of personal security from political activity.
The Neocons figured this out ages ago, and from their point of view it's a desired outcome; they want, very much, authoritarian rule and a general agreement in the legitimacy and necessity of the politics of obliteration.
When you consider that Bush is trying (and has so far succeeded) in making it lawful for an American citizen to be held incommunicado, without charges being brought or counsel available, for years ... and when the Attorney General's greatest claim to fame is that he wrote a memo justifying torture -- Bush isn't just trying to roll back the American Revolution. He's trying to overturn the Magna Carta.
Why are the right-wingers letting him do it? Don't they recognize that they, personally, are just one anonymous denunciation away from indefinite detention, subject to the whims of bored jailers?
I want Frist's head, thank you very much, and I don't understand why McCain let himself get derailed since he KNEW ABOUT THIS STUFF. I would like very much to ask him. Damn it, damn it, damn it. The Times story sickened me. Thank you, Jim, for posting it. My senators are Boxer and Feinstein: Boxer should be all over it without prodding, so I guess I'll contact DiFi, and perhaps McCain as well.
Graydon, I think it's so highly unlikely that this will get to Rumsfeld that you shouldn't even bother hoping for it. But I suppose I could be wrong...
Why are the right-wingers letting him do it? Don't they recognize that they, personally, are just one anonymous denunciation away from indefinite detention, subject to the whims of bored jailers?
They don't believe that. They can't believe that; it would make a mockery of their deepest belief, which is that they DESERVE to hold power, and therefore will. They also know that they do not have to fear similar treatment from anyone to the left of them, because lefties are wimps. (I know some Stalinists the right would not be so sanguine about, but the likelihood of them getting into power is so small that they don't even believe it.)
Jim --
Well, no, they don't.
Corporations, medium to big ones, are the default successful social organization in the entire industrial world.
Corporations are socially mediated autocracies. (The ones that function as meritocratic autocracies even as much as they function as socially mediated autocracies are rare and have serious problems staying that way.)
So there are now a lot of people whose default organizational expectation is socially mediated unilateral autocracy -- it is the right, the successful, the appropriate way to run things so far as their emotional map of the world is concerned, and it is also the way they, personally, are getting ahead in life. Of course they're in favour of it!
Couple that with a combination of really sincerely heartfelt exceptionalism and total, abject ignorance of history and there's enormous perceived benefit and no perceived downside.
This is somewhere past crazed and into "you can't even call that mewling stupid", but it's really there. The base of support really believe that the nasty things will of course never be applied to them.
Lizzy Lynn --
Keep in mind that the members of Congress -- the full Congress, Senate too -- who are not part of the conspiracy are effectively in three categories.
The ones with brain lock of the form "If we really try to fix this, I won't be rich anymore" -- they can't expect to do anything decisive, and trying will have certain high personally costs, and even succeeding would suck, because succeeding means major structural change in how the US does political power mediation. (Such as finding a way to make money stop being speech.)
The ones who are perfectly well aware that there's a slow coup going on, and don't have any options other than raising the standard of the Bill of Rights and starting a civil war or pretending nothing is wrong. (It's clear that, frex, Kerry is firmly of the belief that the civil war would be so insanely expensive that almost anything else is preferable.)
The ones whose emotional expectation is utter corruption, so they don't think anything significantly out of the ordinary is going on.
Given that both of the first two groups are clearly aware that the votes are not being counted, and clearly aware that a moderate amount of political assassination on the part of the conspiracy can't be ruled out, they're not finding themselves with a whole lot of fits-the-current-rules options.
Oh, and as a side note -- I haven't got any hope that this will get to Rumsfeld; I am describing what would have to happen for anyone outside the US to believe that the Sovereign People really are against a policy of widespread gratuitous torture.
When they open up the George W. Bush Presidential Library, there needs to be a tractor-trailer Counter Museum just outside the gates, with big blown-up Abu Ghraib pictures on the outside, and video screens inside running a loop of these soldiers' testimony.
It will be interesting to watch the spin machine get to work here.... (Notice how thoroughly they've destroyed Cindy Sheehan. Even the fact that she lost a son in combat is being used against her, as in "Why did she even let him enlist if she felt this way? She's just feeling guilty...")
The three soldiers who let this out will be villified and lots of untrue things will be said about Human Rights Watch. Ultimately the soldiers (a captain and two sargeants) will be made to pay for having spoken out and nothing else will happen to anyone.
Personally, I'd like to see George, Dick, Donald, and Alberto get treated like these prisoners for, oh, two or three days, including the cameras, and see how long they last. Appeals to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Geneva Convention will not be heard, since they haven't been charged with any crimes and aren't prisoners of war. There are a few other people who also should be in on this, but I don't have names.
When are the UN's black helicopters scheduled to arrive? They might be an improvement.
I e-mailed Boxer, Feinstein, and my Congress-critter.
Why are the right-wingers letting him do it?
One of the checks-and-balances on partisan excess has been the realization that the majority won't be in power forever. What scares me is that the current Republican majority acts in ways that presumes they're never going to give up power.
Last month, I heard a scary new phrase:
"Backlash Insurance", it refers to the Republican efforts to institutionalize a majority through means such as partisan redistricting, destabilizing the funding constituancy groups of the Democratic Party through intimidation or legislation, and appointing as judges those ideologues that are in their 40's-50's to insure multi-generational judicial rule. For the minority-visioned Republicans, it's all about thwarting the majority through undemocratic means, by rigging the system so that even with a 60% majority nationally opposed to their leadership direction, they remain entrenched in power.Around the same time I somehow got on a GOP fundraising call list. They were specifically talking about the "Permanent Republican Majority."
I worry about this country.
Lis: You're not alone. Another part of this is the GOP/neocon assumption that once someone has voted for them, that person will always vote for them. Which has implications I am still working out, including secret ballots that aren't.
I'm wondering about drugs, hypnosis, and the use thereof by Karl and his buddies, at any function where there might be beverages and food served. Possibly I'm just being paranoid.
"I'm wondering about drugs . . ."
Self-righteousness and power.
' The Captain revealed this abuse to Human Rights Watch in July 2005. He also reported his charges to “three senior Republican senators,” including Majority Leader Bill Frist and Sen. John McCain. The torture, he said, was due primarily to “chronic confusion over U.S. military detention policies and whether or not the Geneva Convention applied.” '
I love the implicit assumption that, as long as you're in a situation not covered by the Geneva Convention, it's perfectly FINE to beat people up for fun!
It's depressing how vastly not surprised I am at these revelations.
Have emailed both senators and my representative. The senators are both hardcore Republicans (Dole and Burr) but I hold out foolish hope that maybe, just maybe, enough angry letters from their constituents....and "enough" starts one at a time...
I read Billmon, which made me think about the fact that it's the horrible, depressing, painful things like these that drove me back to belief in God. After the 2004 election I felt compelled to go to church. I had to, and have to, believe that there is a God, that there is an ultimate source of Goodness in the universe, that there really is Right and Wrong, not just power -- and that love, forgiveness, and compassion are on the side of Right. Otherwise I don't know what I would do. I don't know if I would still be alive.
Wow. I got the first of my two free weeks of New York Times delivered to me today, and guess what leaped out at me. Well, I did my duty and wrote my Senator and Congressman. Next is to post that article on my door. Spread the word. Pass it on.
Just. A. Few. Bad. Apples.
Katrina.
Frist's "blind" stock portfolio.
Tom DeLay's accepting of bribes.
The politicaly motivated outing of a CIA agent.
No WMDs.
Enron.
Blah blah blah. Fill in the blanks with yet another scandal that had no impact on Bush, or his political pals.
None of it matters. Bush could rape babies and eat the corpses on national TV, and the Republican voting base wouldn't care.
We *could* be torturing Iraqis just for the fun of it, and we could get away with it, because we *are* getting away with it. Until someone other than Republicans who're all lockstep with Bush get elected, we will continue to get away with it.
Both senators (Isakson, Chambliss), representative (John Barrow), President, Vice-President.
Barrow *might* at least read the email.
None of it matters. Bush could rape babies and eat the corpses on national TV, and the Republican voting base wouldn't care.
Exactly why I was wondering about drugs/hypnosis. On one of the other threads (and I can't track it down easily) it was described as 'Stepford'.
Over on kos they're in the midst of a maelstrom as the pro-Israel types debate the ANSWER folks who put on today's demonstration in DC against the Iraq War b/c ANSWER is extremely critical of Israel. The Dems can't even keep it together to stay on message about the Iraq war, though if you grabbed each of them by their ears and asked if they supported the war, they would 99% say no. It's just that they fall apart squabbling about an issue that should be debated AFTER we get the heck out of Iraq, i.e. Israel's world role and our complicity or not therein.
I cannot see the Republicans ever doing something remotely similar to this, and it is why they can seize the middle ground and hold the country.
Unless the Dems can find someone strong enough to get the warring factions to put down their weapons and at least elect someone other than Republicans, we will not get out of this morass.
I think I'm going to the bookstore tonight. I want to lose myself in some fantasy.
What can I say? As someone who isn't from the US of A (and has no desire to be), I have to admit this just left me completely unsurprised. Now, admittedly I'm a cynic, a pessimist, and someone who disagrees with the prevailing political climate in my own country (.au) but even so... I stop and think about this and realise that it's something I'm coming to accept. I sort-of-know a number of people who are citizens of the US of A through the internet, and I've come to accept that the majority of them don't agree with the decisions of their own government.
To be deadly honest, I'm quite willing to accept that the majority of US citizens don't approve of torture, war crimes, or even of the current war. I just don't think it'll make a blind bit of difference. Folksen, you're in the same position as the English populace at the beginning of the English Civil War - your ostensible leader is leading you in directions you don't want to go, and those who are supposed to be restraining him (the nobles, in my historical example) are either too caught in the web of positive consequences to them of his behaviour, or too frightened of the negative consequences of speaking out to be bothered with their own responsibilities.
Unfortunately, my opinion is that it's going to need something more than letters and protests to make a change here.
I love the ideals for which America stands for. I hate and feel disgusted by how far we've fallen from them.
Like Meg, I'm not a US citizen and I've only just moved to the country (following the jobs, inevitably). I have plenty of friends, American and otherwise, who love the ideals of the country. Somehow I can't get into the same frame of mind - I suppose it's partly because most of what I've always seen reported is incidents like this. The ideals of the Founding Fathers seem a long way away. Even the often laudable behaviour of American GIs in WW2 seems like a different era. What has happened? Is this kind of degeneration inevitable in any powerful country?
I'm beginning to wonder whether there is a parallel to be drawn between the US constitution and the founding principles of communist Russia; and the Bible and Koran for that matter. If you found your civilisation on a text stating certain firm and valuable principles, does that end up doing more to encourage the replacement of ethical thought with mere exegesis? I mean, do we argue about how to interpret the constitution, or the Bible, or the Geneva convention, at the expense of asking whether something is right? Does the existence of a constitution encourage a secular fundamentalism (in the worst sense)? Sometimes the British system of reinventing the law case-by-case seems to be a less dangerous procedure.
Don't get me wrong: I have no quarrel with the ideals of the constitution or the existence of a Bill of Rights. And I know that many Americans make good ethical decisions for themselves. I'm currently teaching college students about Just War theory, and whether Christian, conservative, liberal, socialist, or dull, or uninterested, each one of them will volunteer the idea that there is an ethical requirement to treat enemy soldiers with respect for their humanity - and that the kind of torture we're seeing here is a violation of that. And it's not that they are unusually smart: it's just that they have been asked the question. What is it about those making the decisions about this war that stops them doing and thinking the same thing?
I'm not sure this is very clear. It's difficult to find much of value to say.
"something more than letters and protests"
Those are still necessary . . . just not sufficient.
Things like this make me ponder hanging it up. I want to know who the Intel guys who told them to do this were.
Then I want to never be allowed in a room alone with them.
I've talked about this before. This shit is nonsense. On the guys who won't answer aren't gonna because you beat on them, and the ones who will, don't need to be beaten on.
I'm tired I ahave outrage fatigue. I am so tired of being furious that (and I've been swapping war stories with my father, and drinking the leftovers of the port I was poaching pears in, so I'm mellow) I can't actually express my fury.
I want to hurt people. I want to string them up. I want to try them, put them in stocks, mock them in public, brand them, imprison them and then tell the world about them when they get released.
I know all this is wrong to want (well apart from trying them and imprisoning them), but I want to.
I want to offer them freedom for telling the truth about the orders they got, and who gave them and who authorised them and take it as high as it goes and hale them before the Hague and see them in the cell next to Milosovic.
And when those people die, I intend to piss on their grave, no matter if they get called to account or not.
And it was the 82nd Airborne who were sent to New Orleans.
If you're letting soldiers get away with this sort of behavious, what does it do to their collective relationship to civilians?
Watching news footage on the BBC, when they started patrolling, I was struck how similar they looked to similar pictures from Africa. And I wasn't sure why. Was it just the black faces of the soldiers?
Could it be something less innocent?
I just don't know...
And a side thought on cliches...
It's easy to imagine the British Army having a friendly football match with the locals.
The idea of a friendly American Football match just doesn't seem plausible. Baseball, perhaps?
That captain's ass is grass. He's likely gotten as far as he's going to get in rank in the military, unless there is a decapitation attack by Congress on the executive branch of US Government and the chain of command deep into the military, throwing a whole bunch of people into Leavenworth for a long, long time.
It's not the military I was in--there was training back then that legimate orders required three things:
1. They had to be legal.
2. They had to comprehensible/make sense.
3. They had to be able to be accomplished--ordering someone to go sit at the bottom of the pool for a half an hour without a snorkel or scuba gear of such, it an illegal order, for example.
Orders which failed any or all of those three tests, it was the duty of the military member to at least protest, if not refuse to carry out (with the CYA memo documenting the circumstances and entering an official protest).
The Air Force Academy scandals that have been occurring during Schmuck's Misadministation are indicative of systematic corruption, degradation, and malfeasance at high levels. The Naval Academy was more successful at covering up gender abuse than the Air Force Academy, apparently, there was a recent report that came out, that's gotten little attention, that the same types of abuse that had occurred at the Air Force Academy to the female cadets, had also happened to female cadets are the Naval Academy. And then there is the promotion and partisanship favoring Christianity and Christians, particularly promoting and encouraging on-campus Evangelical Christian proselytizing and disrespecting non-Christians in particular, that was occurring at the Air Force Academy.
The military upper ranks seem to be loaded with slime like Lt. Gen. Boykin, a bigot whose bigotry seemed to help his career and promotion, as opposed to being busted down at least as far and Custer, and retired with prejudice, and full of self-serving lickspittles to the treasonous Bush Misadministration and the Republicraps in the majority in both houses of Congress.
They are not loyal to the oaths they took to uphold the Constitution of the United States, in carrying out and failing to refuse to accede to the torture carried out in Iraq,they have abrogated the Constitution and their oaths to uphold it. They are oathbreaking stinking scum, committers of high treason, and deserve the full measure of that law they have transgressed with their broken oaths, applied to them.
As far back as 1976, Prof. Norman Dixon was worrying about the sources of military incompetence. He was concerned about the training of junior officers, among other things.
He remarked that at Sandhurst, and at West Point and at Annapolis, at least, officers in training were required to memorise swathes of meaningless detail (about, for example, the performance of every piece of ordnance preserved on the campus, including cannon from the War of 1812; formulae for calculating to the second the amount of time to graduation so as to instantly answer an upperclassman's enquiry) and were required to march exactly parallel or perpendicularly to the sides of buildings, even when alone. There were countless other practices of a similar nature. The whole effect was to remove from the graduating stream any person who questioned authority; any person who thought for hirself; any person who attempted anything innovative; any person who was anything other than submissive and obsequious to those above him or her. At the same time it encouraged the most extreme authoritarian behaviour - amounting to actual physical abuse and cruelty - towards those below.
Nothing that I have read regarding the training of officers indicates that the system has changed, at any of those places, except that there has been some shortening of the courses in some places.
I have seen no specific detail regarding the regimen at the Australian counterpart to those famous colleges. However, successive (I might say perennial) scandals involving brutality and mindless bastardisation give me no confidence that matters are any better there.
It goes without saying that training junior officers in this fashion might as well be designed to turn out bigots, bullies and mindless automata.
It just keeps getting worse, doesn't it?
"Don't they recognize that they, personally, are just one anonymous denunciation away from indefinite detention, subject to the whims of bored jailers?"
They identify with the jailers, not the jailed. There is an utter failure of imagination.
He remarked that at Sandhurst, and at West Point and at Annapolis, at least, officers in training were required to memorise swathes of meaningless detail (about, for example, the performance of every piece of ordnance preserved on the campus, including cannon from the War of 1812; formulae for calculating to the second the amount of time to graduation so as to instantly answer an upperclassman's enquiry) and were required to march exactly parallel or perpendicularly to the sides of buildings, even when alone. There were countless other practices of a similar nature. The whole effect was to remove from the graduating stream any person who questioned authority; any person who thought for hirself; any person who attempted anything innovative; any person who was anything other than submissive and obsequious to those above him or her.In Turkmenistan, the dictator Sapurmurat Niyazov (or 'Turkmenbashi' -- Father of the Turkmen) has written a mystical tract called the Ruhnama. Anyone who wants to pass an exam, get a government job, pass the driving test, etc., has to memorise a large chunk of it and answer questions about it, including such arcane details as the name of Niyazov's horse's mother. I imagine that forcing people to fill their heads with such nonsense has the same purpose in Turkmenistan as it does at West Point. (I don't know if the same kind of thing still goes on at Sandhurst, but I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised if it does.)
Niyazov's other achievements include closing all the hospitals outside the capital (and replacing nurses with soldiers) and building a giant golden statue of himself that rotates to face the sun. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union he was a garden-variety Communist Party hack (he supported the 1991 coup against Gorbachev), so I wonder whether he's really an insane megalomaniac or has decided that making people think that you're an insane megalomaniac is a good way to stay in power.
I fear Graydon is right.
We have two superimposed social/political systems -- the republican/democratic model to which most governments adhere, and the embedded model of absolute autocracy by which most corporations are run. This is what you'd expect to happen when the corporate autocrats get their hands on the levers of power in a republic.
I don't have an immediate answer for this. I fear any answer is going to hark back to Thomas Jefferson's quote (or was it Washington?) about trees, liberty, and irrigation with the blood of patriots.
A reminder that neither corporate rule over our republican/democratic model, nor the imperial abuses of power in far-off dominions, nor the Congressional whitewashing of torture and quiet American acceptance of the same, are anything new in our history...
Dave: West Point was exactly the same when it turned out General MacArthur, who certainly was innovative and flexible and arguably invented a new form of warfare.
Candle: I've wondered the same thing about venerating the words rather than the spirit. Unwritten constitutions are also a problem, however. Thatcher violated the British constitution all over the place, and nobody could say anything but "Nnnng?!" Blair is following down that same path.
Canada has a constitution that seems to work by case law -- there was a case where a court decided that there wasn't anything about it in the constitution but it was the kind of thing they'd have put in if they'd thought of it so they supposed the right existed.
"I love the ideals for which America stands for. I hate and feel disgusted by how far we've fallen from them."
I am an American and I completely agree with this.
I actually marched in the anti-Bush protest in DC yesterday. I hadn't realized how anti-Israel some of the marchers were, though there were many Jewish people at the march. It's kind of sad because there's lots of blame to go around on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
But, still, even those of us who believe in a free Israel AND Palestine, felt it was more important to show opposition to our own government than to merely fight amongst ourselves.
Watching the counter-demonstration was kind of fascinating. You'd see signs along the lines of "We're fighting for your freedom." Honestly, I think the last war Americans fought for "American freedom" might have been WWII. Anyone who thinks the Iraqi war is being fought for "American freedom" is many cards short of a full deck.
And the latest prisoner abuse evidence...completely disgusting. I'm particularly disappointed by McCain, who ought to know better.
Jo: Oh, quite so, but I would rejoin that no educational system ever totally succeeds in its objectives with all participants. Military academies cannot be expected to turn every person who passes through them into a mindless brute and bully, hard though they may try. Some human beings retain genuine creativity, despite everything.
They try pretty hard, though.
And I'm an Australian, so as far as MacArthur is concerned, please let's not go there.
And a side thought on cliches...It's easy to imagine the British Army having a friendly football match with the locals.
The idea of a friendly American Football match just doesn't seem plausible. Baseball, perhaps?
Well, to speak of another time and another America, there is a reason that Japan has a professional baseball league.
On Charlie Stross's point about superimposed systems, there is a legitimate question about whether the more authoritarian mode of pre-Enlightenment societies ever really went away. The United States certainly has a distinct upper class, with direct continuity going back in some cases to the founding of the Republic (when the du Ponts made gunpowder for the revolution) --- and in many cases (Rockefellers, Mellons, etc.) to the 19th century. And a lot of what we're seeing in recent politics is scions of those families, like Richard Mellon Scaife, patron of numerous right-wing "think tanks", taking conscious and direct action to reshape society towards their own ends. But never mind that --- my point here is simply that these people exist. Though here in America, we wouldn't dream of calling them a titled nobility; instead, we call them Old Money.
As to what those ends are, John Holbo has an interesting take here, based on a close reading of their propagandist, David Frum:
The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundaton is hereby laid for a desirable social order.
So, if you want to undestand what's going on in America, that's as good a thing to read as any. I might also quote another propagandist of theirs, Niall Ferguson (unusually well-placed; faculty of Harvard right now) whose recent book Colossus says that Europe is doomed to be a second-rate power because it lets its proles take long vacations, and advocates that America be an imperial power --- though one problem with that idea, he will acknowledge, is that our lower class historically hasn't been desperate enough to want to build careers by enforcing order in the colonies. Well, I'm not sure what histories of our occupation of the Phillippines he's been reading, but regardless, looks like we're working on that now.
(And then, on a last, SFnal note, there's the Baroque Cycle, which is ostensibly about the construction of a new System of the World, the one we think we live in today, run by engines of commerce and not the will of an aristocracy. But particularly in the volume with that title, Stephenson seems to be hinting at a different view, in which the aristocracy has not so much vanished as put on a mask...)
Laurie, there's lots of blame to go around on all sides of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, indeed. (Although the conflict would be resolved the moment all parties gave up the fight and shared power on the same strip of land... ...equal rights to all, one-man-one-vote, all that good stuff that works so well in democracies. Except when it doesn't, and therein lies the dynamite.)
But there's a common thread between a bunch of westerners showing up in Iraq and taking over (2003) and a bunch of westerners showing up in Palestine and taking over (first crusade, Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1917, 1948, 1967...) - and many of the same people object to both varietiers of arbitrariness.
There are many ethical/philosophical good reasons to object to it, but there's also one large and flashing practical one: subjugated people fight back. Sometimes it takes only days (Falujah) sometimes it takes years of mistreatment until a subjugated group fights back (about which, perhaps the Or Commission report will be enlightening to you. There are some excerpts here: http://jewishcleveland.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=84031 and if you read Hebrew, I can direct you to the full text, which makes rather horrifying reading for someone who believes in the American ideal of all-men-created-equal, equal-before-the-law or even the much weaker principle of fair play. Which is what the commission was on about.)
I think that this issue is very difficult for people who support the Israel-is-a-state-for-Jews-and-anyone-else-should-go-away side of things. My only comfort in this (as an American who lived in Israel for 30 years and knows it inside and out) is that I know the extent to which propaganda was used to recruit American Jewry to the flag of Israel-is-right-no-matter-what. I have faith that as more information gets out, the people whom I know to be fair and careful thinkers will abandon that position and back more globally the principles of fairness, etc., that were so crucial in libertating *them* from the opressions *they* faced.
And hopefully, the river of blood will subside.
Dave Luckett: Military academies cannot be expected to turn every person who passes through them into a mindless brute and bully, hard though they may try.
Hoo-boy. I've met quite a few Annapolis, West Point and Air Force Academy graduates, and on the whole I've been more impressed by them than by most of the Ivy League graduates I've met. The good ones tend to be very flexible thinkers and effective leaders. They do run more conservative than I'd like, but I haven't met too many bible-thumping wackos from those schools, either.
The goal of the military acadamies is not to turn out mindless brutes. It's to turn out effective leaders. Right now, I think that of the US academies, only the Air Force Academy may be too far gone to save without starting from the ground up.
As to the "mindless memorization," they're also institutions, and institutions have traditions. Why does medical training make residents stay up for days at a time? Why do business schools load up the work so that all-nighters are essential? Why does law school take three years when the content could be covered in two? For better or worse, tradition.
Like it or not, we need a strong military and the academies and other military educational institutions, like the language school in Monterey, CA, are essential to this end. What we also need is civilian leadership that doesn't think of the military as just so many toy soldiers. The problem lies more at the top of our governments than at the top of the military.
'You'd see signs along the lines of "We're fighting for your freedom." Honestly, I think the last war Americans fought for "American freedom" might have been WWII. Anyone who thinks the Iraqi war is being fought for "American freedom" is many cards short of a full deck.'
Thank you.
I've been trying to find the words this for some time.
An especially infuriating variant: "They're putting their lives on the line so you can have freedom of speech!"
Charlie Stross:
I don't have an immediate answer for this. I fear any answer is going to hark back to Thomas Jefferson's quote (or was it Washington?) about trees, liberty, and irrigation with the blood of patriots.
Terry Karney:
I want to hurt people. I want to string them up. I want to try them, put them in stocks, mock them in public, brand them, imprison them and then tell the world about them when they get released.
Yeah, wouldn't it be great if the good guys got to do all the killing and torturing? Of course, we're so enlightened that if we did it it would be completely justified, limited only to the manifestly guilty, and not at all like the sadistic lashing-out that yahoos did after 9/11; and there would be no chance at all of it expanding into a reign of terror.
(I know, that was probably the point you were making.)
I really must learn to use emoticons. Is there one that means "my tongue is so far in my cheek that it's sticking out of my ear"?
I've met quite a few Annapolis, West Point and Air Force Academy graduates, and on the whole I've been more impressed by them than by most of the Ivy League graduates I've met.
A friend of my brother's graduated from the naval academy and then, because he'd been so high in his class, was sent to Stanford by the navy for an advanced degree. He said after getting to Stanford that he was terrified there, because nobody was going to hold his hand and make sure he passed his classes, whereas at the academy, they did everything possible, up to and including dumbing down content, to make sure nobody failed. The level of rigor had been higher in his high school than at the academy.
But admittedly, that can be separate from the issue of whether they're taught to be good leaders. You can lead very well without being able to do calculus.
I fear any answer is going to hark back to Thomas Jefferson's quote (or was it Washington?) about trees, liberty, and irrigation with the blood of patriots.
Which will not happen. The American Liberal does not fight. The reason the GOP doesn't even try to hide what they are doing anymore is that the own the government, they own the press, and they know the opposition won't truly fight. They might protest, but when push comes to shove, they'll run. When the lines form, the rethugs will quickly kill and string up a few liberals, and then simply march the rest into the camps.
Quit planning on how to save the US, and start planning on how to deal with the US as a hostile country. We were lost on Dec. 12, 2000.
Oh, it may look like Bush is slipping now. Of course it does. It's an odd year. He always sucks in odd years. Then the year changes, Rove makes a few phone calls, and lots of New Evidence Of Evil Liberals is released, and the polls spike nicely in time for the next "election", which is rigged anyway, just to be sure.
Repeat, each time, ripping out a few more rights, stealing a few hundred more billion, and so forth. Repeat. Forever.
Marie - funny you mention Stanford, because of all the Ivies, I've been least impressed by its graduates. I didn't realize that there was so much hand-holding at the academies. The academics of the academy grads I ment in business school (small sample size) were merely OK, but they were darn good organizers.
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Dave - Yes, please do use emoticons. (Please note - I am NOT trying to offend, but I am being honest.) After the fiction and contemporary music discussions, it's hard to tell if you're serious, joking or just going after a reaction.
Erik, giving up is just not an option.
I am not sure what does constitute an acceptable option, but although that irrigation plan is distasteful, the alternative is much, much worse.
I happen to be involved in a translation project which really brings home to me the consequences of the sudden disenfranchisement of large segments of a population. The results tend to involve worse consequences than the alternative you suggest (read, extensively, what happened to the non-Jewish population of Palestine in 1948). It follows Kant's categorical imperative to the point where suicide bombings make sense to large enough a section of a population to gain acceptance for them.
We do not need to go there.
That said, the Democratic party is not showing much initiative by way of getting the current batch of bad eggs out of the mix. Perhaps a better path would be via the Republican party itself?
Oh, it may look like Bush is slipping now. Of course it does. It's an odd year. He always sucks in odd years. Then the year changes, Rove makes a few phone calls, and lots of New Evidence Of Evil Liberals is released, and the polls spike nicely in time for the next "election", which is rigged anyway, just to be sure.
Erik, the statement about the polls, at least, isn't consistent with the evidence. Bush's popularity has spiked three times: once after Sept. 11, once for the invasion of Iraq, once for the capture of Saddam. Each spike was half as large as the last and dissipated more quickly. The Saddam spike barely lasted a month.
The general trend outside of those spikes has always been downward, except during the 2004 election campaign. This was a massive, extremely expensive propaganda/smear campaign that slowly pushed up his approval percentage by somewhere between 5 and 10 points over a period of several months; this marginal effect only worked because the electorate was close to fifty-fifty to begin with.
Once the effort was expended, he started to lose minds again, and he's never been this far down. It looked as if the slide was leveling off for a while, but it looks to me as if it actually started to accelerate again just before hurricane Katrina, as a result of Cindy Sheehan being camped out on his doorstep.
When you lose a lot it's easy to come to the conclusion that you'll always lose, that losing is what you do, and that the only way out is to kill a whole lot of people. It is a strange kind of inverted faith to stick with this when the people seem to be moving toward you. I am not there yet, not now.
Stefan: "The goal of the military acadamies is not to turn out mindless brutes. It's to turn out effective leaders."
Then why are our officers acting like mindless brutes?
Charlie, "the republican/democratic model to which most governments adhere, and the embedded model of absolute autocracy by which most corporations are run." To some extent, social order is like climate; a complex system which can take on the settled state for a time, but which is never actually stable. So societies can jump from one state to another; these are not distict--the a society in a democratic and liberal state can jump to a different part of the social "attractor", as it were, and turn dictatorial and brutal. We bow to the monkey god: every human society is built from elements of ape behavior. But the arrangement of the bows is significant.
Then why are our officers acting like mindless brutes?
So far, the only officer involved that we know attended the Military Academy was the one who reported the problem.
Erik Olson:
"I fear any answer is going to hark back to Thomas Jefferson's quote (or was it Washington?) about trees, liberty, and irrigation with the blood of patriots."
Which will not happen. The American Liberal does not fight.
What made you think I was suggesting the liberals would shed blood? (Other than their own exsanguination. Yes, I'm being bleakly pessimistic here.)
On the up-side: if this goes on, if it isn't all a bad dream, the USA will be irrelevant in another generation.
(The down-side of this is that we have to hope China sorts itself out first.)
James D. McDonald:Why are the right-wingers letting him do it? Don't they recognize that they, personally, are just one anonymous denunciation away from indefinite detention, subject to the whims of bored jailers?
Because they buy into the Wild West theory of the Second Amendment. They are the group with the bumper stickers which read, "when the revolution comes, we'll be the one's with guns."
They don't imagine they might be powerless. They don't believe (which is croggling given the underpinnings of their reactionsism) the Gov't will come for them, only for other people.
Matt McIrvin: You left out the next two sentences, "I know all this is wrong to want (well apart from trying them and imprisoning them), but I want to.
I want to offer them freedom for telling the truth about the orders they got, and who gave them and who authorised them and take it as high as it goes and hale them before the Hague and see them in the cell next to Milosovic.
" As well as the eaerlier sentence, I want to never be allowed alone in a room with them."
I know that what I want is wrong. I even know that what I want won't make me feel better, once I've done (during, well I hope never to find out how I'd feel during), but I am not a nice person. I am civilised. I want lots of things which are morally questionable.
I know they are questionable, some of them (like taking an interrogator who tortures people and leaving him with a razor blade and telling him he has 20 minutes to kill himself, or someone will be along to do it for him, and with much less speed, or care for his comfort) aren't questionable, they are flat out evil.
I know those things should never be done. But it doesn't stop me from pondering them.
I was going to stay out of this, but then I saw on a CNN crawl that the 82nd Airborne has been moved from NO to Lafayette. There is flooding, and plenty of people without electricity--I was going to say "without power," but in this day and age that could be misinterpreted--but there has been neither trouble nor rumors thereof. Now I'm wondering why a nice small laid-back Cajun city would need a bunch of thugs to "keep the peace."
Erik, giving up is just not an option.
Funny, if that was the case, Bush would be hanging from a tree by now. You already have given up. You keep thinking that things like "elections" matter. You think a protest will help -- but the so called opposition party won't show up.
Meanwhile, the GOP shuts down more right, steals more money, and kills more people.
Repeat until dead, arguing the whole time about what "Right vs. wrong" means, and how you can't resort to violence, because that would be wrong.
On the up-side: if this goes on, if it isn't all a bad dream, the USA will be irrelevant in another generation.
Charlie: No nation with 5000+ nuclear weapons and the ability to place them anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes or less is irrelevant.
Imagine Germany in 1945 with the same capability. Because that's the road we're heading down. When the economy collapses because of oil, BushCo will not go down quietly. They'll tell everyone all the oil is theirs, and when China or the UK or Iraq -- or anyone -- argues, cities will die.
These are people who postulate the end of the world as a goal. And they don't give a flying fuck how many other people they kill.
Erik,
Thinking out the options carefully and thoroughly is not the same as giving up.
I have found several examples in history where violence didn't make things much worse. Not many, though. In the current situation in the U.S., violent attack on what is perceived to be the legitimate governemnt would make things much worse, and give the blackhats a good reason to shut down the pieces of civil liberties they haven't gotten to, quite yet.
As to arguments of the "it's 1933, you're in Berlin, CHOOSE!" variety - instant gratification isn't important. What is at stake is bigger than rightnowness. I have a gut-level faith in the evnetual correction mechanism working in the U.S. Maudlin patriotism, perhaps, but it *is* my country, right or wrong: when right to celebrate, when wrong to set right.
And with all that I know about humans, government, and uprisings, I believe that a U.S. groundroots uprising (Initifada?) would make things worse, rather than better. Despite the tempting notion of Gordian solutions and swiftly resolved heroism.
I'm a big fan of playing percentages, and don't like dualism, so I have to guess that if I were in this situation I probably would be one of the enablers/permitters. I'd like to think that I'd be one of the whistle-blowers, and I hope I wouldn't be one of the criminal abusers, but the odds are higher that I'd be at least a garden-variety monster than someone willing to risk his career for the sake of men I've been taught are The Enemy.
My sympathies are with the victims, not the perpetrators, and maybe I'd behave as well as I'd like, but I'm not going to turn the perpetrators of these vile acts into yet another Other, as over-used and clichéd as that sentiment might be.
(I'm limiting this to myself not just out of boundless egotism, but because I'm the only one I really know: courtesy demands that I assume that you fine people out there would be better.)
OK, this is serious, and this is what I meant to say:
I think it likely that the sheer prestige (from ancient days) of some of the military academies has the effect of raising the standard of their graduates, because it raises that of their inductees. I include among these institutions West Point, Annapolis and Sandhurst, and even Duntroon, our own equivalent. There is no doubt of the prestige of these institutions.
However, I have seen descriptions of practices at these places that appal me. The practices include ritualised cruelty, the enforcement of mindless authoritarianism, empty and useless memorisation of ephemera, institutionalised bullying, idiotic and time-wasting rites with no useful purpose, and the elevation of irrational and mechanical practices into compulsions and dogma.
I quite agree that some officers emerge from this regimen with their creativity, humanity and intelligence intact; and I would agree that these officers would be all the more remarkable for that. It is even possible that the experience might have the effect of making rational and enlightened values all the more precious to them by contrast.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but think that these practices will often have the reverse effect: that they will tend to produce young officers whose approach to problems is to apply rote, effort and dogma; whose relationship to subordinates is characterised by bullying and authoritarian bluster, and to superiors by fawning and obsequiousness; who put their faith in ritual, not ratiocination; and whose loyalty implies blind obedience, and excludes the demonstration to their superiors of uncomfortable truths.
I am greatly reassured to hear that the officer who reported the abuses was in fact a graduate of the Military Academy, and I salute his ability to stay on mission despite all. I commend his courage, too. An officer and a gentleman, and a credit to his training and his country. There must be something in the former despite my misgivings. There is, to my mind, certainly a very great deal in the latter, despite the misgivings of others here.
I have no real experience of any of the military academies or their graduates (with the exception of an ethics professor from Annapolis who gave a guest lecture here - I left with the impression that she was employed to justify what the Navy did, rather than to think critically about it, but that may have been my own prejudice). On the other hand, my father was an officer in the British Navy and trained at Dartmouth Naval College. He left the Navy once his tour of duty was over with similar objections to the ones Dave Luckett is making: that far too much of the training was intended (often explicitly) to inculcate mindless obedience at the expense of initiative or even thought.
I don't think this is necessarily to consider the academies or their graduates as worthless. The justification, I think, is that soldiers very often need to be able to act immediately on orders from above, need to have marching and orderly behaviour, and factual knowledge, available as second nature: one of the fundamental principles of modern western armed forces, at least since the Romans, is that the most efficient and effective means of achieving one's aim is for the commanding officer to make the decisions and his (or her) subordinates to follow them. It's debatable whether this is true, but I think the argument is explicitly made. And it isn't blatantly obvious that it is untrue. (After all, who wants to deal with a disorganised and ill-disciplined occupying army?)
Of course, the system falls down when the commanding officer (or commander-in-chief) has no ethical awareness, or is simply unprincipled. It also fails when commanding officers forget that the idea was for *somebody* to make the decisions rather than to rely on the ritual and tradition to make it for them. I'm not sure we can blame the rituals for this: it should be possible to encourage discipline while retaining room for independent thought. The problem is when discipline is equated (by instructors or students) with mindlessness.
Probably you all knew that already. My father, incidentally, still resents being disciplined for walking up the wrong set of steps at Dartmouth. I can't say I blame him.
Unwritten constitutions are also a problem, however. Thatcher violated the British constitution all over the place, and nobody could say anything but "Nnnng?!" Blair is following down that same path.
Well, yes, and things are by no means perfect in the UK. (What was that recent proposal to bring back the detention of suspected terrorists without charge or trial? I'm half-Irish, and let's say I'm not convinced that the terror laws of the 70s are a great model for the UK to return to.)
But I still feel - perhaps mistakenly - that the debate in Britain takes place on more sensible terrain. The argument is usually over whether the behaviour of Thatcher and Blair, say, is appropriate or not, rather than whether it is legitimated by the constitution. So at least the ethical question is there.
(There is also a further question, which is: can we do anything about it? But note that if Blair's approval rating were as low as Bush's is now, there would be a real prospect of his removal by his party long before 2008.)
I'm not saying it's ideal, and the lack of written limits on power does seem worrying at times. But it does seem to mean confronting issues directly. As opposed to backing into the matter of abortion via the debate over a Supreme Court appointee and his views on the existence or otherwise of a constitutional right to privacy.
...there wasn't anything about it in the constitution but it was the kind of thing they'd have put in if they'd thought of it so they supposed the right existed.
I quite like this, but even then it seems to arrest a country's development at the moment of its foundation. I suspect James Madison might well have allowed the states to make their own laws on abortion. But that transforms an ethical question into an historical one (and as a professor of history, I think that's a really bad idea!).
Thinks: Might there be a market for What Would James Madison Do? bracelets?
As I think I've said before, I now have my answer to my question, Why didn't all the Jews leave Germany before it was too late? I don't know who my government is likely to target, and I don't know if they'll come for me, but lord knows I've said enough on the Usernet over the years that if they start trawling for anarchists or sexual deviants or atheists, they'll find me.
I don't know what they will do nor how bad it will get. Every time I think I've seen rock bottom, it gets worse. I often think that if I had the brains god gave a door knob, I'd go someplace, durn near anyplace, but here.
But here I am. I'm a frog in a beaker with the heat rising very slowly. I have too many friends, and too many material goods to be very interested in getting the hell out. And even if that weren't true, I have no way to run. I only have debt, no money, and no skills likely to allow me to legally immigrate to, well, anywhere.
I'm not fighting hard enough to say that I love my country and won't leave because I refuse to give up. I am also not leaving, even though I think that things could get a whole lot worse. Like a lot of people, I'm just sitting here.
I do not trust the theory of the pendulum. If that were true, would things have continued to move to the right for forty years straight? Shouldn't there have been some ground regained? But what are the options? If elections are truly corrupt, what do we do?
I suspect that because the infrastructure of modern society is so fragile that a violent revolution is a terrible idea if what you want is to reform, rather than occupy, the country. We are dependent upon big, easily targeted, necessary systems to provide for water, heat, food transport into urban areas, sewage treatment, power, and about every other damn thing that comprises a comfortable physical existence. Nobody likes having their house bombed, even if it is by the good guys.
This gives the government a serious advantage because it maintains the status quo, and severely handicaps the revolutionaries, who need to fuck with the infrastructure in order to over-tax the governmental resources. Unpopular revolutions fall rapidly to a coup or a counter-revolution.
In 1948 somewhere between 700,000 and more than a million Jews (I don't recall the numbers I saw in references) from the Middle East poured into what is today Israel, from countries that included Libya, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, etc. It was about the same number as non-Jews that went in the other directions. The Jewish community in Iraq had been there for over 2500 years, but under the influence of hatemongers of the likes of Amin al-Husseini, elevated by the British to the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who eventually packed up and move to what today is Iraq and who lived in the house that Saddam Hussein grow up in (they were related), there were pogroms organized against the Jews in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of them had been there, and ran for their lives to what today is Israel, from the 1880s or so through until 1948, in the largest numbers in the late 1940s.
The claim that the area that today is Israel was mostly non-Jewish is as accurate as the screed from the Republicrap Noise Machine, and most of it is every bit and impartial and unbiased. There were rotten things done by e.g. the Haganah, but given what some of them had been through, and not only in Europe, but in the surrounding countries--many of the most ardent Likudniks come from families which hand been settled for centuries in Muslim lands, and for millennia in what became Muslim lands (since Islam wasn't around back during the time of the Babylonians, the Persians, etc.) .
There was a large influx of Muslims into what today is Israel during the days of the British Mandate, coming in from the surrounding areas--the Ottoman Empire had deliberately kept the region impoverished and economically destititute. Many of the Jews in Jerusalem and surrounding areas were supported by funds sent by Jews fomr the rest of the know world, a very old tradition which the Greeks in Alexandria in Roman times complained bitterly about (see e.g. Jews in Their Land in Roman Times, I think is the title of one book one book which discusses it....) and which was one of factors leading to a horrendous large scale massacre of Alexandrian Jews, fully two millennia ago. There are extant records, from the Cairo Genizah, of the twice-yearly caravans which took funds to Jerusalem from far-flung Jewish communities to support the Jewish communities in Jerusalem and the Jordan River valley.
Years ago I used to have a lot more sympathy for non-Jews who claimed to be on the short end of the stick with the establishment of Israel. But after more than a half century, what makes them so much more special that people who emigrated to the USA because they were Armenians fleeing from genocidal Turks, of Jewish survivors fled from the countries and the countryfolk of the Europe who stood by or collaboarated in attempted genocide of Jews, of Jews from the Middle East who fled to Israel to escape supression and mayhem and murder in Islamic Middle Eastern countries, than the descendants of those who survived the Trail of Tears in the USA, than the plight of those in ex-Yugoslavia, in Africa, in the Indian subcontent, etc.? Why didn't the countries surround Israle settle the people who on the advice of those countries evacuated (and the people who left fearing for their wellbeing for reasons other than the Arab League telling them to get out of the way of the armies coning to "drive the Jews into the sea") and integrate them into their societies (answer, keeping people from getting citizenship and integrated, created a permanent, disaffected, angry, eager source of human cannon fodder to use as shock troops against "the enemy." I don't have lots of respect for people who decade after decade after decade enthusiatically volunteer on to being throwaway cannon fodder bred and raised. What an utterly stinking, vile, despicable WASTE of human talent and potential.
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Stanford is not and Ivy League, or even Ivy Group, school
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It takes a minimum of 89 minuts to orbit the planet. A suborbital ballistic trajectory therefore is 45 minutes, not 30 minutes, to get to a target on the other side of the planet. And missiles have to fly to where they are programmed to fly to, and if I knew what the "latency" time involved in performing targeting were, I wouldn't provide that information. Directing a precision long-distance Beyond Line of Sight strike interactively is not a trivial undertaking, for a whole lot of different reasons.
There are limits on the ranges of different classes of missiles -- intercontinental missile don't work inside a theater/for "short" ranges where "short" isn't thosands and thousands of miles.
Stanford is not and Ivy League, or even Ivy Group, school
Of course not. But I figured that, in his original point, Larry didn't so much mean actual graduates of actual Ivies as people who went to prestigious universities. I hear people using the term in that loose manner all the time.
Paula,
In 1948, rather a lot happened beyond your description of "Jews pouring into Palestine". This includes an ethnic cleansing of about half of the Arab population residing in Palestine, from just over half of the area - and a military subjugation of the others (read the reference to the Or (or Orr) commission findings, it's upthread).
The numeric balance of population transfer that you claim seems unfair - the Palestinians were forced out of their homes at gunpoint*; the Jews of the Muslim world had a bit more choice in the matter (despite the fact that the Haganah sent emissaries to organize the local young male Jews into armed troops, which may have had something to do with the way Jewish organizations were viewed. Paramilitary orgs are rarely welcome in sovereign countries.)
As to The claim that the area that today is Israel was mostly non-Jewish - the area that is today under Israel's control *is* about half non-Jewish. That does not count the "right of return" crowed outside of Israel, I'm counting just the local population, people who live there right now. The thing is, there are very different rules for Jews and for Christians and Muslims. 38 years of occupation (and the current situation in Gaza is occupation; for instance, who controls the ports of entry?) mean that middle-aged people have known nothing but the indignity of second-classhood. That's gotta stop.
About the history of Jerusalem and its traditions, I recommend Karen Amrstrong's book Jerusalem, One City, Three Faiths. The book discusses the Jewish, Muslim and Christian roots and claims to the city. I found it terrifying, but enlightening. It might set you striaght about the question of whether Muslims were there, too, or if it was indeed only an "influx during the British Mandate". Karen Amrstrong's book is recommended by Jewish rabbis, so it can't be too far off base.
As for keeping people from getting citizenship and integrated, created a permanent, disaffected, angry, eager source of human cannon fodder to use as shock troops against "the enemy." - you've described with accuracy and compassion the tactics used by Israel on the non-Jewish population under its control (although it does indeed describe the handling of the Palestinian refugees by their neighboring countries). WHY Israel wants to have that situation is beyond me. As I said upthread, one-man/one-vote is the only way the blood will cease fertilizing that ground. (And on other occasions, I've wondered why they all want so very badly to feed the Molloch.)
...people who decade after decade after decade enthusiatically volunteer on to being throwaway cannon fodder bred and raised. What an utterly stinking, vile, despicable WASTE of human talent and potential.
We are in complete agreement about that. I only wish my money, as a U.S. tax-payer, wasn't funding Israel's part in that.
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* I know, that's not the Israeli story; but Israeli historians have had access to archives in recent years, and the story is more complext than was sold to the court of world opinion. For more details, I recommend reading Benny Morris (right wing Israeli who believes a genocide of the Arab population is one of the likely and acceptable outcomes), Tom Segev (more center than Morris), Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim... ...Segev is the best writer of the bunch.
Years ago I used to have a lot more sympathy for non-Jews who claimed to be on the short end of the stick with the establishment of Israel. But after more than a half century, what makes them so much more special...?
I don't claim to be hugely well-informed on the history of the modern Middle East, but at least one distinctive feature of the case of Israel is that the state was created by the mandate of a colonial power in the modern era: that is, that a new nation-state was created where a nation-state had been, without the agreement of (and ultimately to the exclusion, on ethnic or religious grounds, of) a large number of the residents of that state. I don't say this was a unique occurrence: much of eastern Europe, and certainly the former Yugoslavia, can claim the same dubious position (along with Liberia and other modern states). But it is not quite the same as fleeing to join an existing state, as with those immigrants to the US who fled from the Armenian genocide. I don't know that this gives anyone any particular moral rights, though.
This isn't an issue which can be resolved by looking back to some historical justification. It surely can't be a matter of who was persecuted first. I take it that this was in part Paula's point (ie. that everyone involved has been persecuted at some point, and that this gives nobody the moral high ground).
Just to be slightly pedantic, though: the tithes paid to the Jerusalem temple by the Jews of Rome and Alexandria (and elsewhere) are no proof that the area was impoverished, any more than my payment of taxes to the British government from abroad or a Catholic's contributions to the collection-plate prove that those institutions are destitute. And it seems to me misleading to call the riots between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria under the Emperor Claudius a 'massacre' of Jews, even on a small scale: certainly there were ethnic tensions, but in part brought on because the Jewish community enjoyed special privileges not permitted to the Greeks (eg. freedom from Roman taxation on account of those tithes, and the sought-after privilege of not having to serve as a local councillor); and the records, AFAIR, record a series of riots rather than an assault by Greeks alone on Jews alone, and I'm not even sure that they suggest that more Jews than Greeks were killed; and it should be recorded, at least, that the Emperor responded with a formal reaffirmation of the rights of the Jews to their existing privileges.
This can be read the other way, of course, as an early example of ghettoisation, and I don't mean to suggest that the Jews should have taken what they had and kept quiet. Besides, not all emperors were remotely as benign, and the conquest of Judaea and destruction of the temple at Jerusalem were not too far in the future. But to paint the Jews only as victims, and as the only victims, is more of that partial and biased propaganda we are trying to do away with here. This again I take to be Paula's point. Personally, I continue to be annoyed by partisan (mis)readings of history being used to justify present-day policy.
In the modern conflict I don't support the Palestinians; nor do I support the Israelis (and I do my best to think of Israelis as a group distinct from Jews); and I think the British government only made things worse in 1948, and is arguably to blame for the whole present mess.
History can't be taken out of these things entirely. But history isn't on anyone's side. I'm fed up of it being enlisted as a political ally.
Terry, there are people with guns who believe they can defend themselves against the government. I think this is wrong-headed, but it's not the same as believing they're safe because the government will only come for other people.
As for why all the Jews in Nazi Germany didn't leave in time, it's not something I've studied, but I gather many did, but thought France was far enough. Some couldn't get permission to enter other countries. Some presumably didn't have the resources. Some had elderly relatives who wouldn't move and who they weren't willing to abandon. No doubt, some had trouble believing that a nation which had treated them well was going to turn on them so completely.
As a sidetrack, I was surprised to find that a very large part of the Holocaust was of Polish Jews. They had a lot less warning.
As a general point, I believe that refusing to allow refugees into other countries does a *lot* to facilitate genocide.
Right now, the Bushies aren't coming after "us" (those of us who disagree with them).
Of course, they are going after "them" (anyone who looks like a Muslim terrorist). Do those people "deserve" rights? Apparently not. Apparently we now live in a country where people can be held indefinitely. What's wrong with this picture?
And then I remember the very famous writing of Pastor Niemoller:
First the Nazis came…
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
I hate the way the current government is subverting the idea of America. But I don't plan to leave. Yet, anyway.
The only person I knew at all well, who had been to a US military academy - the Air Corps didn't have one back when - had come from one of those old Southern military families, and was trying to follow in the tradition. But left, because of the lack of critical thinking, the overreliance on frontal assault, and the disregard for unnecessary casualties, both their own and civilian. He became a Taoist and a forester.
And the way that American Zionists steadfastly ignore the testimony, both verbal and silent witness, of the Refuseniks, and others like Gil Na'amati, and the amateur artist soldiers from the IDF with their protest multi-media exhibit - is nothing short of shameful.
How ironic that complaints of a left splintered over the politics of Isreal and Palestine would completely derail the discussion in this thread about the torture of prisoners by members of the 82nd Airborne.
Dave Luckett: I've known more than a few officers, and some of those from West Point.
The problem I see with them isn't rote, it's caste. They look after each other, and the history of the Army is such that they tend to do well, out of proportion to their numbers (since acadamy grads make up a small percentage of officers, and not all of them stay in, so the higher number which seem to make flag rank means something is at work. It may be they are, as a class, better officers, but that hasn't been my experience. Like the others the vary).
When they get in a jam, the equivalent of "the blue wall" comes down being a graduate of The Point matters more than the merits of the case.
The reverse is also true, if a Point grad is one of the targets, then (should a Pointer be on the team looking into it) the non-Pointer is likely to be given the harder fall.
This is purely my sense of things, I have no good data to back it up.
The thing to remember is being a success in a political organization (and the Army, esp. at the upper levels, is political, and from three fronts, internal, Governmental and external [press and public]) means knowing how to go along to get along, and that leads to a lot of the sorts of reflexive ass-covering we are seeing here, because the last two are trumping the first (needs of the Army, as an Army, rather than a player in politics).
Sean--anything to avoid the elephant in the living room.
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