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Photos and text, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003,2004,2005,2006 - Alan M. Pavlik
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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Saturday, 5 June 2004

Topic: Photos

Bush in Paris: Exclusive Report for Our Man In Paris

This will appear in tomorrow's edition of Just Above Sunset - from Ric Erickson, editor and publisher of MetropoleParis (and advisor to Just Above Sunset and As Seen from Just Above Sunset).

______

The Week's Manif of the Day

Paris, Saturday, 5. June: - The problem was that there were two other major demos today. All three were in eastern Paris, and all started or ended at Bastille or Replublique. Result - many people went to wrong demo at wrong time and place. Yes, it is true - Paris can host the US President and hold three major demos without anarchy breaking out.

The anti-war demonstration began at Bastille at 5 pm, and set off to march [the fairly short distance] to Republique. When I arrived at Bastille shortly after 5 the place was far from full; it almost looked like a very minor demo. The marchers were loitering in the Boulevard Beaumarchais. I walked up it and it started, but it went very slowly.

This allowed many lost Parisians to 'find' it. Thousands streamed towards Bastille from Republique, often making the march seem as if it was milling around in a clot. Many more joined the tail end at Bastille. When I walked north I passed a small demo, but when I walked back I passed one that had grown considerably in a hour. The police estimate for all of France - there were demos in many other French cities - was 50,000, but organizers estimated 200,000. Also, because of today's timing, it would have been possible to have taken part in all three demos.

Union presence was strong, especially CGT, FO, LO, LCR and Sud, plus there were human rights groups. There was a 'hands off Cuba' group, and pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Human rights in Palestine are linked to human rights in Iraq. The tail end of the march contained many red flags, carried by the leftist party PCF, and ultra-leftist LO and LCR parties, the Trotslyists. (These last two are fielding common candidates for the European elections next Sunday. They might score better than the PCF.)

The mood seemed to be - as it often is - fairly jolly. What better way to spend Saturday afternoon than to march a bit to denounce the 'hyper-puissance,' the United States? Many of the marchers have real problems with their own government, so the opportunity to march for the world's general well-being was refreshing.

A lady I talked to complained about the start location and time mix-up. She had been at Republique and got into the march to protest against the 'reform' of the Securite Sociale (Secu) by mistake. She said her pension was okay so she wasn't worried about the government wrecking it. She perked up a lot when I guessed that a lot more people were joining the end of the parade. This turned out to be true too.
Near the end there were many more red flags. It looked like the PCF has got itself some new ones. They were very red. New were the Cuban protestors. They seemed to have new flags too. The whole thing was followed by punkers with techno music vans. They didn't have any flags. They are beamed out with the noise they have - they are probably unaware of Iraq or Palestine.

The police presence was discrete. Three or four officers from the police prefecture were managing the parade, and that was about it. Radio news and TV-news covered it, with pretty reduced crews. It was featured on the evening's main news show, along with video from Marseille and a couple of other cities.

Jacques and George had a news conference late in the afternoon. Jacques is a professional talker, so he can make things seem to be okay - yatta yatta - wave the hands around; he's animated. George sat there looking like he wished he was home in Crawford. The 'official' word about it was confused, so I guess even the diplomatic French had some problem putting a good spin on it. I expected they would have been very fake-jolly; but I guess George couldn't, wouldn't, play along. Maybe the Pope said he was misbehaving.

Out in Normandy, in beautiful weather, the vets and everybody else did seem to be having a good time. There's all kinds of shows going on - including France-2 TV with its 'longest night' tonight, beginning at midnight, going non-stop until morning.

That's it from Paris.

Bonsoir ? tous

Photos:
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Posted by Alan at 17:56 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Oddities

Things to think about...

These will be published in tomorrow's edition of Just Above Sunset...

Week of June 6, 2004 ...

The disparity between romance and reality, the world of the beautiful people and the workaday world, gives rise to an ironic detachment that dulls pain but also cripples the will to change social conditions, to make even modest improvements in work and play, and to restore dignity to everyday life.
- Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

Obstinacy and heat in sticking to one's opinions is the surest proof of stupidity.
- Michel Eyguem de Montaigne (1533-1592)

No man's opinions can be worth holding unless he knows how to deny them easily and gracefully upon occasion in the cause of charity.
- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

In fact, what we call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.
- Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)

Fight someone every day, but never fight unimportant people.
- Alexandre Dumas

Doing good on even the tiniest scale requires more intelligence than most people possess. They ought to be content with keeping out of mischief; it's easier and doesn't have such frightful results as trying to do good in the wrong way. Twiddling the thumbs and having good manners are much more helpful, in most cases, than rushing about with good intentions and doing things.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, may scorn them; but he who as any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same na?ve humanism. The great world, so far as we can know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us either happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance and are best corrected by a little astronomy.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Posted by Alan at 13:02 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Photos

Saturday morning in Hollywood and everything is lining up for a good day...

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Friday, 4 June 2004

Topic: Making Use of History

Books: We ARE the good guys, and always have been...

Robert Lilly, criminology professor at Northern Kentucky University, has a book not yet published here - perhaps the translation is not quite complete.

The book?

La Face cach?e des GI's. Les Viols commis par des Soldats Am?ricains en France, Angleterre et en Allemagne pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale 1942-1945
Paris: ?ditions Payot et Rivages, 2003.
Pr?sentation : Broch? - 445 g - 14 cm x 22 cm
ISBN : 2228897558 - EAN : 9782228897556

The GIs' Hidden Face?

What is this about?

A commentary at alapage.com:
L'image du soldat en service en Europe comme "symbole am?ricain" est tout sauf exacte. La participation de "la plus glorieuse g?n?ration qu'aucune soci?t? ait jamais engendr?e" - comme les Am?ricains se plaisent ? dire - ? la victoire de 1945 comporte une odieuse face cach?e, l'un des comportements les moins h?ro?ques et les plus brutaux dont un soldat puisse se rendre coupable : le viol. S'appuyant sur des archives des tribunaux militaires am?ricains inexploit?es depuis plus de soixante ans, Robert Lilly montre que, entre le 8 octobre 1942, date du premier viol jug? en Angleterre, et le 23 septembre 1945, date du dernier viol jug? en Allemagne, 17 000 femmes environ furent victimes de viols commis par des soldats am?ricains en Angleterre, en France et en Allemagne. Pi?ces ? l'appui, il dresse la typologie de ces viols, explique qui ?taient les violeurs, quelles ?taient leurs motivations et leur modus operandi, fait le portrait de leurs victimes, fait entendre leur voix exacte, ainsi que celle des procureurs et des avocats. Il montre enfin que les sch?mas de viols changent ?norm?ment en France compar? ? ce qui s'?tait pass? en Angleterre et ? ce qui se passera en Allemagne ; les sanctions militaires chang?rent ?galement, les punitions refl?tant la diff?rence de perception que les Am?ricains avaient des param?tres id?ologiques de chaque pays, de ses habitants et de ses r?fugi?s.
Ah, but if your French is not up to speed today, the Associated Press has you covered.

See U.S. GIs in France: 60 years later, some are exploring the downside
Jamey Keaten, Friday, June 04, 2004

The AP item has been picked up in the Canadian press, by Fox News, and by the Boston Herald and The Guardian and most every service out there.

It opens like this:
PARIS (AP) - With crushing firepower, U.S.-led forces stormed into a proud nation under the yoke of a murderous tyrant to cries of joy from a liberated public. Then came the less uplifting work of running an occupation.

Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003? No. France from D-Day and the two years of American occupation that followed.

U.S. President George W. Bush and other leaders gathering on the beaches of Normandy this weekend will celebrate the heroism and ingenuity of June 6, 1944. But some scholars are paying closer attention to what followed as the victors settled in - black market trade, armed robbery, looting and rape.

Only a small minority of GIs were involved, but ...
This is not "The Greatest Generation" stuff, obviously. But the fellow from Kentucky is quoted as saying, ""There is a great, ugly underbelly that has not been really explored."

Well, yes, this could be.

But our troops were greeted pretty warmly. That is not in dispute.
"There remains a huge recognition toward the liberators; they are still heroes," said Elizabeth Coquart, journalist and author of La France des GIs (France of the GIs). "But that doesn't mean we can't judge and say, 'Yes, some GIs behaved badly."'

"It's the same as in Iraq," she said. "Any military occupation - whatever it may be - grows intolerable over time."
So do we stretch the parallel to fit - France at the end of WWII and our "bad apples" (and their leaders) doing awful things in that prison outside of Baghdad?

The AP writer suggests there are limits to the parallels with Iraq.
France was a country already battered by four years of foreign domination, but it quickly had a provisional government in place. The Americans faced nothing resembling the Iraqi insurgency, and they left it to the French to deal with its Nazi collaborators.

And the occupation, though big, was short, compared with that of postwar Germany. According to the U.S. Army Center for Military History in Washington, 750,000 American soldiers remained in France in October 1945 - five months after the war's end. By June '46, the last 24,000 were on their way out. Britain also had troops in France, but far fewer.
But the fellow from Kentucky contends that while there were rapes (les viols) by GIs in France, the number of cases "skyrocketed" when U.S. soldiers rolled into Germany and the war was wrapping up.

How does he know that?

It seems Lilly says he was inspired to examine rape by GIs from stories by his father and uncle, both Second World War veterans. (Curious family revelation, that!) And Lilly estimates there were 3,620 rapes by U.S. soldiers in France from June 1944 to June 1945 - and apparently he was using military records as his source.

Why would he use military records? Funny thing - it seems things were a bit different back then.
While U.S. soldiers were exempt from prosecution in French courts, those who were court-martialed often received severe punishment.

Of 139 soldiers suspected of rape in the specific cases Lilly turned up, 116 were convicted, his book says. He found that 70 soldiers were executed for crimes in the entire European theatre during the war.
It seems times have changed. We have three guilty pleas in the prison scandal so far. Executions? No - dishonorable discharge and loss of pay will do these days. Is that progress? Perhaps so. Perhaps not.

But then again, the French summary comments on this - les sanctions militaires chang?rent ?galement, les punitions refl?tant la diff?rence de perception que les Am?ricains avaient des param?tres id?ologiques de chaque pays, de ses habitants et de ses r?fugi?s....

We severely punished those who raped and otherwise abused the French and Germans. We understood the ideology of those countries - and we knew these folks. We had centuries of experience with them. They were a bit like us, really. The French helped us in our revolution. The Germans supplied mercenaries to help out Washington. They were us - as we are a nation of immigrants, and mostly European immigrants. We don't "get" Arabs and Muslims in this way. They lose. The punishment matches what we understand of the people who were wronged.

Anyway, how does one explain what happened then, since we are having a national debate over how to explain what's happening with the prison abuse business right now?

Elizabeth Coquart, the journalist quoted above, says only a "handful" of GIs, about one per cent of those stationed here until France set up its own government in 1946, were involved in misbehavior and crime. And AP runs this by Peter Caddick Adams, a military historian at Britain's Royal Military College of Science, and he says, well, the guys were bored - "When you get a lot of bored rear-echelon troops with a lot of time on their hands, you get excesses of behavior."

Ah, yes, I suppose you do.

But what else was different then? Well, there were posters in police stations across France that reminded the local officers not to prosecute GIs suspected of wrongdoing but to hand them over to U.S. authorities. I guess the idea was that everyone knew the United States didn't tolerate such stuff and would take care of the misbehaving occupation troops, and severely punish the bad apples, so the speak.

No one believes that now. That is not going to work in Baghdad, particularly after the June 30 change in status. No way. It's almost like no one trusts us any more. Now, why would that be?

But here's a classic French existentialist shrug - Elizabeth Coquart, the journalist quoted above, says this sort of thing is, well, just what happens: ""It was just the behavior of an army that, like any victorious army, feels authorized to do anything it wants: taking women, taking the spoils... It's the prize of many armies."

We're no different? George says we are.

Posted by Alan at 15:49 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 4 June 2004 16:10 PDT home

Thursday, 3 June 2004

Topic: Iraq

Soldiers

We've all seen the news.

From the New York Times -
Army Extending Service for G.I.'s Due in War Zones
Eric Schmitt, June 3, 2004
The Army announced Wednesday that it would require all soldiers bound for Iraq and Afghanistan to extend their active duty at least until their units have returned home from duty there, a move that could keep thousands of troops in the service for months longer than they expected over the next several years.
From the Associated Press -
Army Plan Aims to Keep Soldiers on Duty
John J. Lumpkin, June 3, 2004, 12:05 AM CDT
The announcement Wednesday, an expansion of a program called "stop-loss," affects units that are 90 days or less from deploying.... The Army is struggling to find fresh units to continue the occupation of Iraq. Almost every combat unit has faced or will face duty there or in Afghanistan, and increased violence has forced the deployment of an additional 20,000 troops to the Iraq region, straining units even further.
A quick analysis from Matthew Yglesias in The American Prospect here -
This is probably the correct response to the manpower situation the military's currently facing, but it's obviously not viable -- or, really, acceptable -- as a long-term solution. What's worse, the more the military burdens the volunteers it's got, the harder it's going to be to recruit people in the future. Members of the National Guard have come to learn that they've committed themselves to something much more arduous than they might have initially believed, and now the active-duty military is learning that the stated lengths of their enlistments can be deceptive. The country needs a real answer to this manpower problem -- a higher end-strength and a restructuring to produce more of the kind of troops we need, and fewer who are better-suited for outdated tasks.
Maybe so.

From the Los Angeles Times, more detail -

Troops Told They Can't Leave Army
'Stop-loss orders' keep soldiers in service if their units are set to be deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. Officials call move 'finger in the dike.'
Esther Schrader, Times Staff Writer, Thursday, June 03, 2004
The Army has undertaken a series of recent measures to satisfy the personnel demands being imposed by the extended overseas conflicts.

Last week, a unit that for decades has had the job of preparing other deploying units at one of the Army's two elite training centers, the 1st Battalion of the 509th Parachute Infantry at Ft. Polk, La., was told that more than half of its soldiers would be sent to combat. It is the first combat deployment for the unit since World War II.

Army planners also are considering mobilizing its sister training unit, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California...

Last month, the 10th Mountain Division, which has already served once in Afghanistan and once in Iraq, got orders to deploy to Iraq again. In addition, a brigade of 3,600 troops based for decades in South Korea will be moved to Iraq.

In a further effort to bolster its numbers, the Army over the past year has called up about 5,000 members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a pool of veterans recently released from active duty, cadets at service academies and college students on military scholarships. The Ready Reserve, which is not required to continue training, is supposed to be called up only in a national emergency. Members of the reserve were last called up in small numbers in 1990, in preparation for the Persian Gulf War.
The Times also reports this is a bit controversial in the military.
"I've led troops for the past two years on the small unit level, and these are not guys who are unpatriotic in any way. They volunteered and in many cases have served multiple tours," said Andrew Exum, 25, a former Army captain who served in a special operations unit in Iraq and Afghanistan and has written a book based on his experiences.

"We're the ones who serve our country proudly and we're happy to do so. But we'd like to be able to plan on doing something else," Exum said. "There are a lot of guys who would just like to go to college, to start a family, and now their future plans are thrown into turmoil. These are the guys who are not going to say no to old Uncle Sam."
Well, yes. That is true.

Let's seem - we're short on troops so we're are sending all the training units from the National Training Center at Fort Irwin out in Barstow into combat in Iraq. Training the outgoing units is too much of a luxury - it's all on the job training from now on. And we're pulling in troops from the Korean peninsula.

Not good.

So what do you say to these guys?

Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier, has some advice.

See Hold On to Your Humanity
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
Counterpunch Issue of November 14 / 23, 2003

Here's some of it:
I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you--some more extreme than others--are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.

In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all.

The essence of all this shit was that we had to "stay the course in Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.

When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.

When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote.

What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and committing rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me--just in country--and the people who had done those things to them.

What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children.

My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.

So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.

And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of the Vietcong.
Well, you get the idea. Click on the link for the whole thing.

Here's Goff's take on the challenge -
... In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back in Washington DC with their fat fucking asses stuffed full of cordon blue and caviar.

They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.

That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water.

... I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something - something that craved other people's pain. Just to make sure I wasn't regarded as a "fucking missionary" or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people too crazy to fuck with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone's house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly a second thought. People who had the power of life and death--because they could.

The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to you, and what you have done and can't take back.

It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to "niggers" here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive, even when that wasn't true, but something inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby.

Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you might not get until it's too late. When you take away the humanity of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because it is standing in the way.

So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics--drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, especially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient.

You can ever escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that you needed that to survive, that you took things away from people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get back.

... So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated.

... I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.

Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there like another corpse.
This is pretty straightforward advice, if somewhat subversive.

My friend John, a Vietnam veteran himself, reacts:
When I returned from Vietnam, I went to Chicago to visit my brother. We went to visit his 5-year-old daughter who was in a local hospital. She was doing well, but there was a very thin child in the same pediatrics ward sitting in a wheel chair looking very sad, not participating in play with the other children, looking as though he had no inspirations. My brother tried to cheer him up with kind conversation. He got ice cream for this child, and spent several hours attending, very passionately, to him. I heard him ask the nurse if the child had family or other visitors.

One reason I remember that day so well is because he showed so much kindness, patience, care and concern for this child's well being and I watched quietly for hours but I really didn't give a damn about that child's condition. That is what happens to one when all humanity is lost. Fortunately, with the help of family and friends, most of it has been recovered.

Stan Goff is right on the money.
John recovered. I know him. I don't know how hard it was for him to return.

Phillip Raines commented -
I found that read stirring too, and was hit most of all by the impending loss of humanity from being in combat. When survival is a matter of fact and keen priority, something's gotta go. Things that are most near get shut down. I'm glad to hear that an antidote to the damage exists, and wouldn't you know it would come form the people who care about you? That is not the guys in $5000 suits that Goff refers to, spouting off bravery from safe and cushy Washington. I believe as the writer said, they don't give a shit about you soldier, not in any depth.

A couple of quick points. I spoke with Chip Carter, who reads foreign affairs journals as part of work with the Carter Center. I learned that human right abuses from other countries that had previously tempered their practices, would now be resumed, and Geneva conventions taken more lightly, because of the Iraqi prison photos. They see that as long as you refer to an enemy as a terrorist, or maybe even an insurgent, then you can get away with, well... you know.
Yep.

Well, there is a UN human rights report due out soon.

What about it?

See US frantic to soften harsh language in UN rights report on Iraq
AFP, Wednesday June 2, 20048:43 PM ET

This is ironic:
The United States is scrambling to soften allegedly harsh and inflammatory criticism of the US-led coalition in Iraq that is expected to be contained in a UN human rights report to be released this week, US officials said.

...The officials said US diplomats are lobbying for language in a report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to be toned down in a bid to prevent a new firestorm of controversy over the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees by US troops at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

... The final version of the report is to be released Friday at UN human rights headquarters in Geneva and Washington fears that, without changes, its publication could complicate efforts to secure passage of a new UN Security Council resolution on Iraq, the officials told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Got it?

How did we get into this mess? Bad soldiers? Hardly.

See Wise Counsel
Appoint a special counsel to investigate Geneva violations.
Neal Katyal - Posted Friday, May 28, 2004, at 1:50 PM PT - SLATE.COM

Now Neal Katyal teaches law at Georgetown University. He is chief counsel to the military defense lawyers in the Guant?namo case pending at the Supreme Court.

What's he argue?
In the past week, details have emerged of not only more prisoner abuse in Iraq, but also a concerted effort by the president's chief lawyer to try to insulate such abuse from domestic criminal investigation. A 2002 memorandum from White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales tells the president to refuse to apply the protection of the Geneva Conventions to detainees because Americans could be charged in domestic courts with war crimes. Now that photos and Army reports suggest that just such crimes have been committed, a criminal investigation is necessary. And because the administration's own memoranda reveal that it tried to adopt policies to frustrate precisely such prosecutions, the attorney general must now appoint an outside prosecutor to investigate whether war crimes actually occurred.

This is the paradigmatic case for a special counsel.
Really. The whole thing is long and detailed, a legal argument.

And there is a smoking gun.

And it is not in the hands of a soldier.

Posted by Alan at 21:28 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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