Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  To do otherwise than comply with the Geneva Conventions under all circumstances risks waging such an unlimited war that we are no longer perceived to be a nation that values the Rule of Law or supports human rights. Other nations learn from our actions more than our words. If we move away from the Geneva Conventions and toward unlimited warfare, our own troops are imperiled in this war and future wars by our enemies who will follow suit.

  If the United States complies with the rules of conduct as laid out by the Geneva Conventions, we can endeavor to force others, including our enemies, to comply as well. The converse is also true. If we fail to live up to the aspirations of the Geneva Conventions, we will have served as the wrong kind of role model. We will have stepped down from the pulpit from which we can preach adherence to the Rule of Law in war.

  In the wake of World War II, the U.S. leadership advocated the adoption and reaffirmation of the Conventions because they served the ultimate interest of the United States. Eisenhower, Truman, Marshall, Senator Vinson and others envisioned another step in the historical journey toward the quintessential oxymoron, civilized warfare. They supported the warf-ighting concepts contained in the Geneva Conventions because those rules would protect U.S. troops in the field. Their concern was to safeguard our troops from mistreatment by the enemy, not to protect the enemy from mistreatment by U.S. forces. Judge Gonzales's memorandum completely eviscerated the original vision of the Geneva Conventions.

  Where GPW talks about scrip, athletic uniforms, commissaries and the like, American proponents were thinking of the treatment we could demand for U.S. prisoners of war, not how we should avoid providing those amenities to enemy prisoners we held. Far from being quaint, these stand as bulwarks protecting U.S. troops who are captured.

  Our disregard for the Conventions will likely deter potential future allies from joining us. If we comply with the Geneva Conventions only when it's convenient, who will fight alongside us? The answer is only other nations that also don't want to be hamstrung by so-called quaint and obsolete rules. We will become an outlaw nation that wages unlimited warfare, and only like-minded renegade nations will fight with us.

  Since World War II, and looking into the foreseeable future, United States armed forces are more forward-deployed both in terms of numbers of deployments and numbers of troops than all other nations combined. What this means in practical terms is that adherence to the Geneva Conventions is more important to us than to any other nation. We should be the nation demanding adherence under any and all circumstances because we will benefit the most.

  Judge Gonzales also bears responsibility, along with others, for the memoranda that were written to inform those in government and the military about the definitions of torture, defenses, and authority of the President acting as Commander-in-Chief. The Bybee and Yoo memoranda are chilling. They read as though they were written in another country, one that does not honor the Rule of Law or advocate on behalf of human rights. They contained an air of desperation: this is the worst war ever and justifies almost anything in order to win. The concept is that as long as you are a smart enough lawyer, you can find an argument to justify anything. Torture is limited to “inflict(ing) pain that is difficult to endure … equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death” (Bybee Memo).

  Even if you surpass that lofty standard, your defenses include “necessity” and “self-defense” (meaning defense of the nation, not personal self-defense). Basically, anything that inhibits the President's discretion is unconstitutional and anything that carries it out is permitted.

  No mention is made of U.S. military regulations. All services have their own regulations relating to these issues. The U.S. Army Field Manual 34–52 is representative. It states:

  U.S. policy expressly prohibits acts of violence or intimidation, including physical or mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to inhumane treatment as a means of or aid to interrogation. Such illegal acts are not authorized and will not be condoned by the U.S. Army. Acts in violation of these prohibitions are criminal acts punishable under the U.C.M.J. If there is doubt as to the legality of a proposed form of interrogation not specifically authorized in this manual, the advice of the command judge advocate should be sought before using the method in question.

  Although Judge Gonzales would surely consider it quaint and obsolete, this is long-standing U.S. military doctrine.

  Significantly, these opinions and legal arguments weren't written in some law review article or in an op-ed piece to stimulate national debate. They were written to inform the President as Commander-in-Chief. Unfortunately, we saw the result of that kind of situational, shortsighted legal analysis.

  This advice given to the President by Judge Gonzales was not offered with an eye to protecting American troops, as it may seem to be upon a superficial consideration. In both the short term and the long term, this advice doesn't protect our armed forces; it imperils them. It enables them to engage in the sort of reprehensible conduct we have seen, and it will enable our enemy to also engage in such conduct with impunity.

  There are two great spines that run down the back of military discipline. They are accountability and the chain of command. These profound concepts are separate, but related. The concept of accountability means that you may delegate authority, but you can never delegate responsibility. Responsibility always remains with the person in charge.

  The chain of command enables the military to operate effectively and efficiently. For good or evil, what starts at the top drops like a rock down the chain of command. Soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen execute the orders of those at the top of the chain and adopt their attitude. Consequently, those at the top have a legal and moral responsibility to protect their subordinates. We don't want the subordinates to feel compelled to second guess the legality, morality, or wisdom of what is decided above them in the chain of command.

  If the message that is transmitted is that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to the war on terror, then that is the message that will be executed. The law and over 200 years of U.S. military tradition say that those at the top are responsible for the consequences. Law isn't practiced in a vacuum. It's practiced in real life. This isn't just a quaint academic exercise. It affects human beings and the world order.

  The United States is now without a peer competitor. This places an awesome responsibility on us because there is no nation or coalition of nations that can forestall our national will. By in large, we can do what we want in the world if we rely solely on military might. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to also rely on our integrity as a nation in making decisions about the role we will play. It doesn't make us small or weak to voluntarily inhibit our free will; indeed, it is an indication of great strength and discipline.

  The war on terror may be crucial to our survival. But we will survive, and there will be other wars to fight in the future just as there have always been in the past. We cannot lose our soul in this fight. If we do, even if we win the military battles, the victories will by Pyrrhic, and we will have lost the war.

  The question before the Court and you, Gentlemen of the jury, is not of small or private concern. It is not the cause of one poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! … It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty. And I make no doubt but your upright conduct this day will not only entitle you to the love and esteem of your fellow citizens, but every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honor you as men who have baffled the attempt of tyranny, and by an impartial and uncorrupt verdict have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbors, that to which nature and the laws of our country have given us a right: to liberty of both exposing and opposing arbitrary power (in these parts of the world at least) BY SPEAKING AND WRITING TRUTH.

  —Andew Hamilton, attorney, August 4, 1735,

  arguing on behalf of his client, John P
eter

  Zenger, accused of publishing “seditious

  libels” in his New York Weekly Journal,

  though it was not denied by the court or the

  prosecution that what he printed was true

  SO MUCH FOR THE FOURTH ESTATE:

  OUR IMPERIAL PRESS

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Tom Engelhardt, who runs the perceptive and insightful Tomdispatch.com, points to a fundamental issue that societies like ours – where “the people” allegedly call the shots on matters of national interest – face when going to war. What side is the press on? Ours is almost exclusively on the side of putting facts and legitimate debate well below “rallying around the President in time of war.” This may not be a unique event in the history of nations. Nevertheless, one wonders how well this approach serves the truth, the people, or the real good of the nation. It is especially ironic in view of the self-aggrandizing claims of our “fearless” press corps to be the “watchdog” of society, the domestic frontline protecting freedom from the encroachment of tyranny, and the singular honest broker holding the powerful to account.

  As it turns out, the press has throughout the entire Iraq war debacle accepted the Bush-administration line that war was the necessary and right course for America. Sometimes a nation's leaders can be wrong, and if there's any value in having a free press, one would think it would be in exploring all the facts and perspectives surrounding a case such as Iraq, where the potential error of the nation's leaders can be costly and deadly. Yet the facts suggest that the press in large measure cooperated more than willingly with a blatant propaganda campaign waged by the White House to encourage people to support what would have been unthinkable had all the facts been discussed publicly. It has also adopted the deceitful rhetoric of the basic Bush-administration position: we and our handful of puppets are “Americans and Iraqis,” while they are “terrorists.” But can our journalists really be that credulous and, frankly, that incompetent? This insanity is what Tom Engelhardt explores, and he does so persuasively.

  CHAPTER

  32

  Chronicles of Abdication:

  Press Coverage of the War in Iraq

  ………

  Tom Engelhardt

  EVERY NOW AND then, an article catches my eye that seems to sum up the worst of Washington-based access journalism (“just the spin, ma'am”) in our imperial press. On Friday, the morning of the second presidential debate, just such a piece, “Pentagon Sets Steps to Retake Iraq Rebel Sites,” made it onto the front-page of my hometown newspaper and I thought it might be worth taking a little time to consider it.

  1. Yellow Journalism: “Anonymous” Lives and Thrives in Washington

  Written by two veteran New York Times correspondents, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, it began, “Pentagon planners and military commanders have identified 20 to 30 towns and cities in Iraq that must be brought under control before nationwide elections can be held in January, and have devised detailed ways of deciding which ones should be early priorities, according to senior administration and military officials.”

  There, right in paragraph one, were those unnamed “senior administration and military officials” who so populate our elite press that they sometimes present crowd-control problems. These are the people our most prestigious newspapers just love to trust and who, anonymous as they are, make reading those papers a ridiculous act of faith for the rest of us. At a time when Senator Kerry had accused the Bush administration of not having a “plan” for Iraq, other than “more of the same,” here was a piece that claimed exactly the opposite. Such a plan, the “U.S. National Strategy for Supporting Iraq,” was detailed; it had been written over the summer and represented a “six-pronged strategy”; it embodied a “new” approach for the U.S. in Iraq “approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration” – and the confirmation of the truth and accuracy of all this was that lovely little kicker at the end of a sentence: “officials said.” According to Schmitt and Shanker, “the officials” (born, I assume, to Mr. and Mrs. Official) called the plan “a comprehensive guideline to their actions in the next few months.”

  A “comprehensive guideline” – and this only got you through paragraph two of a front-page column of print and two more columns on page 12 (the catch-all page which held the rest of the Iraq news that day); 30 paragraphs, 1,593 words on the “plan,” including convenient-for-the-administration “news” that “President Bush has been briefed on it, administration officials said.” (This, by the way, on the same day that the Times allowed former Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer to write “What I Really Said About Iraq,” an op-ed in which he ate crow for his embarrassing comments that week at an insurance convention in West Virginia. These had confirmed Democratic criticisms that from second one the Bush administration had not put enough troops on the ground. Bremer was, he told Times readers, putting his remarks “in the correct context.” What he actually did, while re-pledging his fealty to George Bush and his “vision” for Iraq, was to re-edit subtly those “remarks,” as Joshua Marshall pointed out at his Talkingpointsmemo.com website. What, according to the Washington Post, Bremer had originally said was: “The single most important change – the one thing that would have improved the situation [in Iraq] – would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout.” In the Times op-ed, he reworded that critique thusly: “I believe it would have been helpful to have had more troops early on to stop the looting that did so much damage to Iraq's already decrepit infrastructure.” But I digress.)

  A reading of the Shanker and Schmitt piece does not reveal whether either journalist actually laid eyes on the plan they were describing; certainly, as their sources described it to them, it sounded like a remarkably empty, even laughable, set of “classified directives” to make the front-page. For instance, there is this choice passage: “For each of the cities identified as guerrilla strongholds or vulnerable to falling into insurgent hands, a set of measurements was created to track whether the rebels' grip was being loosened by initiatives of the new Iraqi government, using such criteria as the numbers of Iraqi security personnel on patrol, voter registration, economic development and health care.”

  It's a passage that does at least contain eerie echoes of the Vietnam War. Then, our military “measured” everything from dead bodies to “enemy base areas neutralized” and toted it all up in either the Hamlet Evaluation System (after which hamlets in South Vietnam were rated A – “A super hamlet. Just about everything going right in both security and development” – to E – “Definitely under VC control. Local [government] officials and our advisers don't enter except on military operation”), or in the many indices of the Measurement of Progress system. All of this was then quantified in elaborate “attrition” charts and diagrams with multi-colored bar graphs illustrating various “trends” in death and destruction and used to give visiting politicians or the folks back in Washington a little more fantasy news on the “progress” being made in the war.

  As in Vietnam, this sort of thing in Iraq is sure to prove laughable on the ground because the territories being “measured” are largely beyond the reach of American intelligence or governmental control. Such “measurements,” if ever actually carried out, will likely prove to be desperately surreal affairs, except back home where they may, as in the New York Times, have their uses.

  Similarly, consider the six “prongs” of the new strategy (on which the President has been briefed), as related by various “officials.” These turn out to be such brain-dazzling “basic priorities” as: “to neutralize insurgents, ensure legitimate elections, create jobs and provide essential services, establish foundations for a strong economy, develop good governance and the rule of law and increase international support for the effort.” Homer Simpson, were he a Times reader, would surely have said, “Doh!”

  Or here's another gem of supposed front-page-worthy wisdom from the “plan,” as “summarized” by “one senior administration official�
��: “Use the economic tools and the governance tools to separate out hard-core insurgents you have to deal with by force from those people who are shooting at us because somebody's paying them $100 a week.” Now, it's true that military people in Iraq officially lump together terrorist groups with the homegrown and increasingly substantial Iraqi resistance and call them all “anti-Iraqi forces” (the troops we are training are, of course, the “Iraqi forces”). But if our military or civilian leaders really believe that all they have to do is use those “governance” and “economic tools” to separate the “hard-core” from unemployed Iraqis being paid to kill, then our whole counterinsurgency effort is already brain-dead and it's not just our President and a few neocons who are living in a world of fantasy spin. The other, more logical conclusion might be that this dazzling document, worth a front-page scoop and tons of Times granted anonymity, is in fact largely a propaganda document rather than a planning one. If the speakers – you can't quite give them the dignity or integrity of calling them leakers – had real confidence in the plan, wouldn't they have wanted their real names associated with it?

  Almost the only substantive information in the piece comes not in quotes from squadrons of unnamed officials, but in the form of periodic caveats from Schmitt and Shanker, two old pros, about the unplanned and completely disastrous situation in Iraq. (“As American military deaths have increased in Iraq and commanders struggle to combat a tenacious insurgency …. “)

  On close inspection, the plan, news of which was evidently offered exclusively to the New York Times, proves to be a strange mix of fantasy and emptiness, at least as reported in the imperial paper of choice. But there's no question that getting it onto the front page of the Times with the media equivalent of immunity was a modest coup for the Bush administration. First of all, the front page of the Times ratified that there is such a “plan” at a moment when the administration had been embarrassed by Iraq's devolution into reconstruction-less chaos and the loss of significant portions of the country to the insurgents. Under the circumstances, this was a small domestic triumph of planning.