Untitled Document

22 May 2004

Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs

The storms blew through last night but we were lucky. None of them hit Big Pink head on. Instead they smashed into Gaithersburg to the north. But the air mass changed and water came and this morning the locusts are muted, their humming subdued in the background. The air is as moist as a towel left on the bathroom floor.

I fired up the computer as I walked by to start the coffee. There was a plate with the remains of a tossed salad from last night in which I had lost interest. I thought about some scrambled eggs, but just that effort fatgued me.

Rather than think, I sat down at the computer and answered a brief polemic about war crimes from one of my oldest friends. He takes delight in fulminating about the incompetence of the Administration, and given how easy they have made it of late, he has had rich and fecund material to work with.

According to the Times, the bad guys drove a Chevrolet in front of the house of another member of the Iraqi Governing Council. They say the hulk of the big American car was thrown seventy-five feet after it was detonated. More Iraqis are dead, five at least. And the Army is now chasing after nine suspicious deaths in the prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.

My friend posed it as a legal question:

"I see that Bush has repudiated the 1949 Geneva convention. Does this make him an international outlaw and war criminal??

The Pentagon and Bush "line of BS" that these prison outrages were perpetrated by a few Appalachian bad apples seems to be unraveling.

I think that the policy of prison conduct has come from the "top".

Do you see impeachment or resignation in the future??

I think more of us will be calling for one or the other."

I thought about it for a moment. I'm not calling for anything but some sort of victory for the West against the sea of angry bearded young men. I don't think that is too much to ask for. When the story of the prison abuse first broke, I remembered the words of the people I knew in the covered side of the business, on both sides of the Pond.

They knew some different standard would have to be applied to the monsters among us, and they also knew that having taken the step over the edge of the slippery slope, were headed to a heap at the bottom of a steep hill.

Good and honorable friends have responded with just horror at it all, and I agree with them. But I also found myself shrugging. This is not the same as the mass graves and the mutilations standard for our opponents. While we must hold ourselves to a higher standard, this is, after all, war.

I have associates who have high regard for the Jordanian and Bahraini Services that have little compunction for nicety, and quite efficiently service their rulers without the graves. But perhaps on this path the graves are inevitable. I don't know. I began to isolate myself from the constant drumbeat of the media reporting.

I smiled grimly when I saw this. It brought home the context of this matter, having lived it myself: For me it was 1978. But for this fighter pilot it was 1986, and the hi-jinks were exactly the same:

"I was taken into custody by the U.S. government in a little known facility in Warner Springs CA, subjected to beatings, public nudity, put in stressful positions, subjected to the water board, deprived of sleep and food, interrogated at all hours of the day and night, intimidated with firearms and had only a coffee can for a toilet in my 3'x3'x4' cell. What was my offense? I was in Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) School, a prerequisite before I could fly over hostile territory. Funny, we called it training. Imagine my surprise to learn I had been the victim of 'atrocities…"'

The important distinction was that we had a reasonable expectation of getting out of Warner Springs, though they lied to us often.

So, among less important issues like missing trains and trying to secure official documents for my kids, been concerned about how to deal with the Geneva Convention and the Code of Conduct in the context of the prison fiasco. I heard something about how the Administration framed the debate on this matter in the early days of the war. I Googled it up to refresh my thinking and wrote back:

"Yo, Buddy! I think that were the U.S. to be the occupied power, there would be no question that he would be off to the Hague with people like Milosovic, under someone else's strict interpretation of the law.

But we do not have to rely on international convention. This is also about the interpretation of U.S. Code.

Bush's prosecution is unlikely to happen, at least in the near term, though after office I am confident that there will be suits that dog him the rest of his days.

Gonzales looked at the Convention and found some of the provisions to be antiquated and "quaint."

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez put the opinion together for the President. The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of newly authorized and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism

The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes urged Bush to declare the war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

The pivot point for Gonzales was the 1996 War Crimes Act that banned Americans from committing war crimes. It was a Clinton-era law passed in the spirit of Kosovo, and in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City, the same time as Jaime Gorelick was drafting the language which made communications between CIA and FBI more difficult.

The war in the Balkans, fought to liberate Muslims from rapacious Serbs, set us up to be murdered by the Jihadists.

That said, the legislation made criminal under U.S. (not international) law "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions.

Since the law applies specifically to "U.S. officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush he needed some wiggle room.

That spawned the declaration that the "enemy combatants" of the Taliban and Al Qaida fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections. It was the Administration hope that this would inoculate them from liability and reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.

Nothing happens by accident. The Convention had to go. But of course neither the Taliban nor al Qaida nor any of the franchise terror groups are signatories to the treaty anyway.

How can you have a treaty with entities that didn't sign, and cheerfully flew airliners into buildings and which considers the beheading of its hostages as political theater?"

I finished with the rhetorical flourish and mashed the button. I shivered and realized I had sweated through the t-shirt I wore to bed last night.

I am tired, tired to the bone. I need to shake the soggy remains of this cold and I need a vacation and the little cottage with the white picket fence.

Next week the pool opens at Big Pink, and I will be able to plunge some of this away and bask deep in the blue water.

I scrambled some eggs and ate while looking at the rest of the unanswered mail from the week. I threw out the remains of the salad.

I mean, who could eat salad in the morning? Rabbits?