War Handwavium

Footage from an Apache gun camera as the crew kills a dozen civilians standing in the streets of Iraq, including two Reuters photographers. The US military claimed the civilians died in a battle between US forces and insurgents.

“Coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.” –LtCol Scott Bleichwehl

Reuters demanded an investigation into the killings. The military concluded that the crew had acted in accordance with the rules of engagement. August 2007, Reuters used the Freedom of Information Act to request a copy of the video evidence taken from the Apache. The military would not release the video.

The video has shown up on wikileaks.net

The Apache first attacks the photographers and several civilians, killing most of them, leaving one photographer wounded. A civilian van stops and two civilians get out and carry the photographer to the van. Then the Apache crew destroys the van. US ground forces show up on the scene and find two children inside the van who are wounded but still alive. The military decides to send the wounded children to an Iraqi hospital rather than providing care at a US military hospital.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/04/201045123449200569.html

This is the reality of war. Innocent civilians get killed by the “good” guys.

This is the sort of thing that can be expected during a real war. It doesn’t mean every man and woman in uniform is a bloodthirsty murderer.

What it means is that war is evil, even when fought by the good guys. And for good people to do something evil, it must be because those good people looked at the option of NOT doing something and found it was even MORE EVIL.

War isn’t good, it is the lesser of two evils.

And in the case of Iraq, the test fails. The evil caused by invading far outweighs the evil that would have been to NOT invade. There were no WMD’s, there were no connections between Al Queda and Iraq, there were no major evils that would have occurred if America had NOT invaded Iraq. But this video shows the very real evils that are occurring because we DID invade. Innocent people are being killed by American soldiers.

Even if the American soldiers who pulled the trigger or dropped the bomb is doing so because of a misunderstanding, through no wrong-doing of their own, even if they followed all the rules of engagement correctly, an evil has still been done in the world. Innocent people were killed by Americans. Road to hell, good intentions, and all that.

What the hawks want to do is focus on the fact that the soldiers did no wrong, and they want to portray everyone who is talking about this and pointing to this as if they hate the troops. I’m not saying that these US troops are evil, I’m saying an evil was committed because innocent civilians were killed. And that evil isn’t the lesser of two evils. The evil of NOT invading would have been the better choice, the choice that “good” people would have taken had they approached war with the assumption that evils like this one would happen.

And for all the talk about whether this is an “abberation” or not, it isn’t. This is a normal part of war. The hawks will twist that into calling US troops bloodthirsty killers, but that’s not the case. This is not abberation, it is an expected part of war.

Expecting to go to war without your troops getting involved in the death of civilians or friendly fire incidents is like expecting to go to the Indy 500 and not see a single car crash.

The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United v. FEC decision, declared campaign finance regulations unconstitutional.

A lot of people were upset at this ruling. Glen Greenwald, someone I quote supportively quite a bit on warhw.com, managed to miss the forest for the trees on this one and has thrown down the gauntlet to those who are upset:

“Either the First Amendment allows these speech restrictions or it doesn’t. In general, a law that violates the Constitution can’t be upheld because the law produces good outcomes”

And just slightly later, this:

“those who want to object to the Court’s ruling need to do so on First Amendment grounds.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/22/citizens_united/index.html

Glen, for all the times I’ve quoted you and linked to your articles because of how right you are about something, never, and I mean never, have you been so wrong as you are now.

There is in your demand above an implicit premise: The notion that corporations have the right to free speech in the first place. If corporations have the right to free speech, then yes, any campaign finance law must respect that right.

But people opposing the Court’s ruling aren’t opposing it because they think the government should be able to restrict the freedom of speech, they oppose the ruling because they don’t think corporations have a right to free speech in the first place.

If corporations don’t have the right to free speech, then campaign finanace laws can restrict how corporations move their money around when it comes to political campaigns.

So, to challenge Glenn’s implicit premise, let’s take a look at all the constitutional rights and legal rights besides the right to free speech and see how many corporations have those rights.

How about the right to keep and bear arms? Should AIG be allowed to stockpile weapons so that it may become part of a well regulated militia? The idea is absurd.

The fifteenth amendment says the right to vote cannot be infringed because of color. The ninteenth amendment says the right to vote cannot be infringed because of gender. The twenty-fourth amendment says the right to vote shall not be denied by a poll tax. The twenty-six amendment says the right to vote shall not be abridged by age. So, given that voting is a right, protected by four amendments in the Constitution, should AIG be allowed to vote in an election?

This is the absurdity of granting corporations personhood: rights meant to protect humans codified in the Constitution are twisted until they become rights of corporations.

Human rights are not corporate rights.

People vote, corporations don’t.

But Glenn demands that if we disagree with the Supreme Court decision of Citizens United v. FEC must disagree “on First Amendment grounds”. Glenn forbids us to disagree with the whole idea of “corporate rights” and corporate “personhood”. He has ruled them off limits.

And, yes, if one accepts the premise that corporations are persons, and if one accepts the premise that persons have rights like free speech, then one would have to conclude that the Supreme Court made the right decision.

But the premise is flawed and the conclusion is wrong.

While I’m talking about what is and is not allowed by the Constitution, I’d like to bring up one of my favorite clauses:

Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce.

And by regulate, I don’t mean simply that Congress can bail out banks and corporations that are too big to fail. I mean that Congress has the Power (and the responsibility and duty) to regulate the abuse of power that comes from money and monopolies.

I’m not talking about corporate welfare, golden parachutes, outrageous executive bonuses, and free money for corporations. I’m talking about Teddy Roosevelt-style trust busting, monopoly shattering, minimum wage demanding, worker safety imposing, and product safety requiring kinds of regulation.

Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce.

The thing about corporations and free speech and campaign finance is that no one is saying that the CEO of AIG can’t donate money to Bush’s campaign. What they’re saying is that AIG itself, the corporate entity that gets to hide behind the corporate veil because the law deigns it to be so that it will encourage investing and commerce, that corporation has no right mucking about in politics.

None.

The CEO of Walmart has a right to vote for whoever he wants to vote for when he walks into the voting booth. But Walmart Incorporated, the artificial entity that is headquartered in Arkansas, has NO RIGHT TO VOTE.

NONE.

Now, if Walmart Corporation sued for the right to vote and the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, said that Walmart had the right to vote in political elections, and if people were upset about that decision, but Glenn Greenwald said that people must object to the ruling on 15th, 19th, 24th, and 25th ammendment grounds, well, hopefully, the absurdity of the demand would be obvious.

Corporations do not have the right to vote in political elections. Corporations do not have the right to free speech.

Humans have the right to vote and the right to free speech and all the other human rights codified in the Constitution. And I understand that people sometimes use corporations as a channel for their speech, so there is some issues with the concept of regulating corporate speech as it may regulate individual speech.

But when it comes to campaign contributions, donating money to a political campaign, that should be as obviously wrong as shouting “fire” in a movie theater and saying it is free speech.

Free Speech doesn’t give you the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. And the right to vote doesn’t extend to corporations. The right to contribute to political campaigns is a human right, not a corporate right.

People vote. Corporations don’t.

First, the background from Glenn Greenwald:

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and then “rendered” by the U.S. to multiple countries (such as Morocco); held incommunicado (no access to lawyers, the International Red Cross or anyone else) and interrogated by U.S. agents until 2004; and then shipped off to Guantanamo, where he has remained ever since.

In May, 2008, Mohamed was accused in a Guantanamo military commission with various acts of Terrorism that carry the death penalty if he’s convicted. The key evidence against him are the confessions the U.S. obtained during that 2002-2004 time period. After charging him, the U.S. Government refused to provide his lawyers with documents and other evidence that would enable Mohamed to prove that those confessions were obtained via torture.

Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration leaned on the British government to stop the publication of documents that showed the US tortured Mohamed. Right wingers claimed that releasing this information would result in fire and brimstone falling from the sky, cats and dogs sleeping together, the end of the world as we know it.

But on 10 February 2010, the British courts ruled the documents must be released, that the fact that the US tortured Mohamed must be made public.

Now, I grant you that it’s only been a week, but it would appear that the world hasn’t come to an end. Though, my cat and my dog have been getting along better than usual.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/19/exceptionalism/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/10/law-binyam-mohamed-case

19 December 2009, D.C. cop, Detective Baylor pulled out his gun during a snowball fight, probably because a snowball hit his shiny Hummer.

The immediate police response was to deny it:

Assistant Chief Peter Newsham tells LL: “There was no police pulling guns on snowball people.”

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/12/19/did-d-c-cops-overreact-to-snowball-fight-14th-and-u/

But Erik Wemple from the Washington City Paper has an interesting article about how the Washington Post may have tried to deny a cop would do something wrong here:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/12/22/washington-post-sits-on-eyewitness-account/

Wemple reports that a Washing Post aide, Stephen Lowman, happened to be at the snowball fight when Baylor showed up with gun drawn and that Lowman called the Post around 3 pm to give them a heads up on the story.

No biggie so far.

Around 3:46, the Washington City Paper posted a photo showing Baylor at the snowball fight with gun drawn here:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/12/19/did-d-c-cops-overreact-to-snowball-fight-14th-and-u/

There were also a number of videos of the incident showing up on YouTube.

Wemple then writes:

at 5:40 pm, the inexplicable takes place: The Washington Post files a post by Zapotosky and Martin Weilrefuting the photographic evidence already on the Web and taking the official position of the D.C. Police Department.

You can read the article here:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/police-looking-into-incident-a.html

So, someone who worked at the Post was at the snowball fight and called the Post to report that a cop showed up with his gun drawn. Pictures and video start showing up on the web showing the gun. But the Post decides to report the police version of the story, that the cop acted “appropriately”.

One might dismiss this as the result of a bunch of old crumudeons who don’t know what the internet is writing news reports. But the Washington Post has been shwoing a right wing slant lately (it has steadfastly defended the Iraq war and Glenn Greenwald has noted, in one day it posted 8 op eds from two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America’s largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist.)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/11/06/washington_post/index.html

And one might wonder whether this article faithfully reporting the State-Sanctioned-Force-Should-Not-Be-Questioned approach is really just the result of intentional war handwavium.

Glenn Greenwald talks about Sami al-Hajj:

Sami al-Hajj, … Al Jazeera cameraman … was abducted by the U.S. in late 2001, tortured at Bagram, sent to Guantanamo for seven years — where he was never charged with any crime and was interrogated overwhelmingly about Al Jazeera’s operations, not about Terrorism — and then suddenly released without explanation last year

And then he mentions this little nugget:

a Nexis search of media outlets finds that “Roxana Saberi” — the American journalist detained for three months by Iran and then quickly given a trial and appeal — was mentioned 2,201 times during the first two months of her ordeal alone; by contrast “Sami al-Haj” was mentioned a grand total of 101 times during the first six years of his lawless detention at Guantanamo.

So, an American journalist imprisoned by big, bad Iranian government for three months gets the American news whipped up in a furor over human rights abuses, but a Sudanese cameraman is imprisoned by the United States government for years, and the American news can barely be bothered to report it.

This is nothing but tribalism, the notion that right and wrong is not determined by what you do, but by what tribe you belong to.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/23/objectivity/index.html

“In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

–Thomas Jefferson

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/08/obama/index.html

Via Glen Greenwald here:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/08/obama/index.html

The article was originally about the blind loyalists of Obama but the above clip shows the blind loyalists of Palin. It seems to be a part of human nature not restricted to one particular political party.

In 2002, a Canadian named Maher Arar was detained by US officials while traveling through JFK airport, accused of being a terrorist, held for two weeks without access to a lawyer or anyone on the outside, then shipped off to Syria where he was tortured for 10 months.

Arar was completely innocent and had no connections to terrorism.

The Canadian government did a full investigation, realized Arar was innocent, publicly disclosd a report of what happened and what went wrong, publicly apologized to Arar, and paid Arer a $9 million dollar settlement.

In contrast, the US government has never admitted doing anything wrong, has never publicly acknowledged what it did, and has repeatedly taken steps to muzzle any attempts to get the US Courts to look at what happened to Arar.

Yesterday the US Courts dismissed Arar’s case entirely, saying that even if the government did violate Arar’s constitutional rights, Arar had no right to sue.

It’s all handwavium, pure and simple. Bury the truth so long as any of the wrongdoers are still alive.

This year, 2009, Obama publicly acknowledged and apologized for the US involvement in Operation Ajax, the 1953 CIA operation to overthrow the democratic government of Iran and install a puppet dictator in the form of the Shah. From 1953 until 2008, the US government had never publicly acknowledged its role in the overthrow of a democratic Iran. For 56 years, the US went about its business in denial.

Obama’s apology to the world was a victory for truth, but it didn’t cost Obama or the administration very much. None of them had been involved in the 1953 operation. None of them were guilty. None of them were culpable. Obama was admitting the guilt of people who were dead, not of something he had done himself.

Apologizing for someone else is only slightly less cowardly than not apologizing at all. True courage, true integrity, would come from a person apologizing for something they themselves had done wrong.

But it seems that 56 years isn’t all that unusual for Americans to come to terms with its actions.

In the 1940′s, America put Americans of Japanese decent into internment camps, a massive failing of justice and liberty. It wasn’t until the mid 1980′s when the US government acknoweldged the wrongness and injustice of its actions, long after the wrongdoers themselves were dead, long after many of the people who had suffered the injustice were dead too. It took 40 years for the US government to apologize and recompense the remaining survivors and the heirs of those who had been imprisoned for the misdeeds of the previous administrations.

Reparations for slavery have never been made, a century after slavery was abolished in America.

So, it seems that 50 years isn’t too unusual of a waiting period for the US government to acknowledge the truth of its actions, apologize to its victims (or the heirs of its victims) for its misdeeds, and compensate its victims (or the heirs of its victims) in some way.

In Maher Arar’s case, Arar was tortured in 2002. That would mean that whatever form of the US government is around in 2052 might finally apologize for what it did to Arar. Arar was born in 1970, so he would be 82 years old if he’s still alive at that point. But the people who tortured him, who ordered his torture, who approved the programs that allowed his torture, they’ll most likely all have died of old age by then. The US Court that ruled that Arar cannot sue, they will all by dead by 2052.

Arar will likely be dead by then too, and whoever is president in 2052 may not even be born yet.

But what sort of “justice” is it if the heirs of the guilty are the only ones who can apologize to the heirs of the victims?

Can there be no justice now? Can Obama not fight for justice today? Or must we wait until all the wrong-doers are dead before the truth can be spoken about what they did?

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/03/arar/index.html

Dick Cheney can’t remember a damn thing about Valerie Plame.

Now that we’ve gotten the “amnesia episode” out of the way, we’re still waiting for the “Evil Twin” episode, and the “Dream Sequence” episode. Dick Cheney, after all, is a soap opera.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/10/22-things-dick-cheney-cant-remember-about-plame-case

CNN “fact checks” a Saturday Night Live skit but lets Republicans torture and execute the truth and respond with “We’ll have to leave it there.”

From digby

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/where-do-they-get-their-wack-ideas-part.html

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband is multimillionaire, Richard Blum. Mr. Feinstein owns about 25% of a company called URS. URS does a lot of contracts with the US Military. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars a pop.

Charles Lewis, executive of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity watchdog group in Washington, asked “Why hasn’t she expressed outrage about some of the potential conflicts with people in or close to the Bush administration?” Dick Cheney’s connections with Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, was fodder for outrage over Cheney’s invasion of Iraq. Maybe Misses Feinstein didn’t object to Cheney’s conflict of interest because she had her own conflict of interest.

Glenn Greenwald highlights Feinstein’s voting record. She authorized the Iraq invasion, she funded the Iraq war without a timetable for withdrawal that her fellow Democrats wanted. She supported the Patriot Act. She helped General Hayden get confirmed as CIA director even though he presided over the illegal wiretapping program. The supported Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General even after he refused to answer basic questions about torture. And in October of 2009, she used her position as Chair of the Intelligence Committee to gut most proposed reforms to the Patriot Act.

And now Misses Feinstein is leading the charge to put public pressure on Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. A war that could profit her husband with millions of dollars.

If you are a Democrat and you live in California, I suggest you write your Little Orphan Annie of a Senator and tell her that she should stop working to get her Daddy Warbucks of a husband military contracts and start working to end Bush’s wars and Bush’s Patriot Act and Bush’s wiretapping programs.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/13/afghanistan/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/04/27/BA284459.DTL

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/10/11/afghanistan___the_proxy_war/