CHASE MADAR AND GITMO

The noted New York attorney Chase Madar writes a nifty short piece in the excellent “The American Conservative” magazine: “Obama’s Gitmo”. (‘The American Conservative’, August 2010, pp.18-20; subscription required for online access.)

I think We have reached the point where the old early-Obama era plaint that nobody has given him a chance can be put aside: the gentleman ‘owns’ Af-Pak and has taken over ownership of Gitmo and all the pomps and works of ‘black holes’ and ‘detention’. If there is a Beltway Blutbund – and there is, although the Record-Keeper may not actually be part of the Beltway Band – then Obama has made his bones, paid his dues, and done what was necessary to assure the rest of the Gang that he can be relied upon.

He joins an elite Band – and only they will be surprised to realize that where there is a Record there will be a Reckoning. And from those who have held great authority much will be required.
Boy, is the Beltway in trouble now!

Thank God that the Feminist Revolution has deconstructed all the capital-letter Beings, except those of the female gender – so perhaps Hecate or Athena or the Parcae will make allowances in light of services to the Revolution.

Let’s see how all that turns out as Time goes by.

Madar reports that Obama – presiding over all that ‘concern’ for the ‘children’, especially their ‘safety’ (once they have survived the ‘choice’ test, anyway) from assorted predators and unhappiness – will now be deploying the full faith and force of the United States government and its military justice system (as polite convention calls it) against – wait for it – a 15 year-old.

Well, he was a 15 year-old when he was captured outside Kabul in 2002. He’s 22 now – and if getting your bum pinched by a lewd old priest will, they say, ruin your life, then what do you suppose this kid’s life is going to be like? For seven Biblical years he has been a ‘detainee’ of the Imperium – and has seen the pictures on the honor-wall change from Bush the Egregious and Cheney the Diabolic to Obama the Good Guy and Biden the Bonhomic.

Not that it’s done the kid any good.

He will not have had his life ruined in vain, however. As a special honor to him, the government and military lawyers have (had to) come up with an entirely new charge: “murder in violation of the rules of war”.

Neat. All the repugnance of a murder and the patriotic cachet of ‘war time’.

Although humanity – in the brief moment of Time since it has managed to somehow put limits on the sovereign power of kings and governments to war and to kill ‘legally’ – has never thought it wise or prudent to go charging anybody with murder on a battlefield – where killing is somehow the thing you’re supposed to do. In fact, more soldiers have been shot by their bosses for not-killing than for killing on a battlefield. That’s the way it is in the precincts of War.

But the kid’s not a POW – he’s a ‘detainee’.

More than 600 of “the worst of the worst” at Gitmo (remember that term of opprobrium?) have been re-classified as the Not-So-Bad-of-the-Bad … according to some theological illumination and mode of revelation vouchsafed only to military honchos and their legal staffs.

The 180 or so remaining include Omar Khadr, our kiddo from Canada. I’m guessing that the efforts to help him – from UNICEF and numerous human-rights groups – have actually sealed his fate: the Imperium can’t let him go, since he will have a camera in front of him instantly – and it will have a microphone attached; the Imperium can’t try him because they haven’t got any evidence – except maybe perhaps according to this Murder-on-the-Battlefield charge, but the charge was devised as an actionable offense long after Khadr was taken, so there’s the old Constitutional Ex Post Facto problem.

But then, since when in the past few decades has any “quaint” Constitutional principle slowed down the Right or the Left in the pursuit of their assorted – and oft dove-tailing – agendas?

And there’s the ancient legal wisdom nulla poene sine lege (no punishment without there first being a law against the act) – but THAT’S Latin and that’s so Western and Male and therefore so patriarchal and oppressive and anyway he’s a guy not a ‘woman’ and on top of all that it’s a national emergency and – why not? – throw in a dash of raison d’etat. Oh, and God’s Will – although there is some question of that Entity’s having been Deconstructed … although rumors of His death may have been greatly exaggerated.

Oh, and there’s the problem of ‘torture’ coming up in the trial to explain his initial, since-retracted ‘confession’. The government seems rather avid to avoid having THAT topic come up for examination, perhaps even more now that “24” has had its Series Finale and that ‘groundswell’ of hoohah-for-torture has sorta gone away.

But then Madar gets to a hugely significant problem, one that is a fatal problem not only in Khadr’s case nor in the military-commissions system but in the entire military justice system itself (although Madar for whatever reasons avoids going all the way back to the mother-system): Undue Command Influence.

To understand this problem, you have to understand the difference between Law as it operates in the American Constitutional civilian system, and Law as it has been snipped and sliced to fit into the military system.

In civilian trials and the process leading up to them, there are – far more than in the military – a roster of independent actors: the law, the judge, the prosecutor and the police, the defense counsel, the jury, and toss in the witnesses. While there are numerous informal connections – especially in, say, a small town or jurisdiction – yet the process is designed to work in such a way that the integrity of all the official actors and their dedication to the Truth above all, works to create the ‘adversarial space’ whereby the case for defense and prosecution is presented to the jury under the gimlet-eye of the judge.

Yes, in civilian praxis there has been a great deal of short-cutting and deal-making; but it’s frowned upon and few will admit it, let alone boast about it publicly.

BUT in the civilian adversarial system there is NO organizational requirement – on the most profound and core level of the essence of the enterprise – that requires that one side (and the ‘government’ side at that!) MUST control the process PRECISELY in order to bring about Victory (= conviction of the accused). AND THAT, on top of all that, all of the major actors in the civilian system (judge, cops, prosecutor, jury, most witnesses, AND the defense counsel) are all employees of one of the Parties to the trial.

But in the military legal system there is all of that. And more.

And that Party is not only ‘the government’ as representing the ‘victim’, and not simply the government as proclaiming itself as the ‘victim’ (the defendant has allegedly committed an act which in addition to its own elements also has harmed ‘good order and discipline’ of the forces), but also the government in the person of the Commanding General (Convening Authority) who decided to order the court-martial in the first place.

So the government - in the person of the Commanding Officer/Convening Authority - is at the same time all of the following: the Sovereign upon whose authority the case is conducted; the 'victim' against whom the defendant has allegedly transgressed; and the Employer of ... the judge, the jury, the prosecutors, the investigators and cops, most of the witnesses, and the defense counsel. Oh, and the defendant too.

And since this is a military setting, then if you are a general-officer, and you outrank everybody else in the courtroom (many of whom are under your command)- then the myriad opportunities for you to exert Command Influence on the outcome of the trial can never be reliably squelched.

Because the essence of a military organization is that it is hierarchical: everything revolves under ‘the Command’ which means the Commanding Officer – and that worthy lives in a world where entire staffs and all career subordinates have honed to a nicety the ability to glean – from the merest lift of an eyebrow or the intonation of a voice – exactly what the Boss does or does not want to see happen.*

So then, in every military operation, you know your Boss expects Victory. That is true for every uniformed member, especially the ones close to the Boss, and on the staff – such as Supply, Operations, Intelligence and – you betcha – lawyers.

So then, since a court-martial is something the Boss orders, and is for you the lawyer exactly the type of military operation that is your specialty, then … you know what you have to do.

And for those in the home audience that think nothing could go wrong in this system because “everybody has sworn an oath to do the thing right” … well, there’s a bridge for sale in Brooklyn you might be interested in. **

So Undue Command Influence is a scam on several levels, and it’s built so deeply into the military legal system – arising, in fact, from the very military soil in which the military justice system’s foundations are laid – that very few folks notice the corrosion.

Command Influence is by its nature corruptive, in this system. You know how corrosive it would be if the Governor called the judge in for a chat just before your case was to come up; why would you think it would be any less grievous a crime against true-process for the commanding general to call the judge in for a review of the judge’s performance the night before your trial? Or maybe for a friendly rubber of bridge? What’s the diff?

So the phrase “Undue” Command Influence is just some cheap rhetorical trick by the military lawyers to trick you into assuming that while there is such a BAD thing as “undue” command influenc , yet still command influence itself is a Good Thing.***

To which the only decent response is something South-Central European: something like Hah! Phooey! I spit three times! … Or words to that effect.

And of course, beyond the simple (but lethal) dynamics of military organization and ethos, there’s the problem that arises when higher-ups are pushing even the Commanding Officer, who is also the Convening Authority in your case, to get some usable ‘results’.

So, for example, if this is going to be Dirty Rifle Awareness Month, then the next 5 shlubs to show up with dirty rifles get a court-martial whose results (foreordained) will “send a message”. Ditto if this is, say, Disrespecting Underperforming Recruits Awareness Month: the next 5 to get caught OR even just the first 5 you can make even a halfway believable case against … are going to ‘become a Message’ as the Zen of military convictions would put it.

You can imagine what would happen if you were to take this already loaded system and put it in the service of a strongly-favored Beltway or White House ‘initiative’ – whether it be gender issues or terrorist issues.

And in this case, Madar notes, the Convening Authority was so eager a scout that he didn’t even wait for ‘guidance’ from above (not to say Above); instead he went forth pre-emptively and “proactively” to make sure he had some cases ready that were “sexy”.

Yes, Virginia, even in today’s (multi or trans) gendered military costume-party, you can still want and get “sexy”.

For a brief moment, Madar loses his way in the ever-shifting sands of spin and subsurface reality that is the Gitmo-Military Justice underworld: “One might expect that a legal system thus rigged would greatly appeal to its prosecutors”. Yea, verily. You not only are pretty much guaranteed a ‘win’ every time you go out to the mound, but you also get medals and promotions on top of that – and all for simply not-being a defender. (Not to worry though. In a masterly show of military personnel management, defense counsel get medals too, so long as they lose the case – and that will tide them over until they too are assigned as prosecutors somewhere, and can really dig into the professional steak.)

“Until now, one would have been wrong.” Willy-Tango-Foxtrot?

But where Madar is going with this is that for a few golden years at Gitmo a wondrous thing happened: young military lawyers (the savvy older ones soon enough came to see that the whole thing was a careerist’s minefield) actually stood up for their clients and were willing to ‘go public’ if they had to.

Those young military lawyers – some of whom perhaps helped Madar – are indeed to be congratulated. But their good works will not go un-noticed “een Behrleeeen” as the Gestapo agents used to hiss in the war movies, and their chances of a long and happy military law career are mostly shot. But they have actually been trying to Do the Right Thing … which is rare enough in any military, but even more so in a declining military where the really good seats for musical career chairs are becoming fewer and farther between.

Madar senses that that Moment is passing. The brave spirits who kept the lamp of opposition burning during the Bush-Cheney Imperium, hoping for the day when a more decent power came into its own, have now seen the White House merely photoshop Obama’s head onto the entire monstrous panoply.

Ach.

So Madar is probably right when he sees that “this may spell the end of a golden chapter in JAG history”. Although I would suggest ‘the end of THE golden chapter in JAG history’ … or perhaps ‘the end of the most unusual and impressive chapter in JAG history’.

As I have often said on this site, in the military world there is no Virtue except Victory. With that anything else can be written-in as a Virtue, but without Victory the losers won’t get to write anything.

And anyone who thinks that if you take the military oath and get some rank on your uniform that you are somehow freed from the surly bonds of Original Sin, take a look at the way the Pentagon has been jiggering the casualty counts – with the help of its Doctors and Nurses – in order to make it seem like there are only 50 or 80 thousand casualties from the Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, instead of the possible half million.****

Truth – as the 18th century Royal Navy sailor would say – “don’t enter into it”.

NOTES

*In their Long March through the military, the cadres of the Feminist Revolution realized this clearly. Hence while 20 or so years ago the civilian world was bethumped by a myriad of laws and regulations promulgated to prevent workplace harassment and increase workplace hiring, the military was bethumped with regulations that specifically warned against facial expressions, tones of voice, OR EVEN the act of not-speaking when a certain subject or person was brought up … as falling afoul of the new gender-programs. Much as Thomas More found to his undoing in Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’, your silence alone could cost you a career in the gender-crazed pandering of the military since Tailhook.

**This is not a new problem – professionals in the military – but it is increasingly lethal as the Imperium embarks on increasingly frakkulent misadventures. If you are, say, a Doctor – then you have taken the Hippocratic Oath. OK, fine. But what happens when you THEN take the Officer’s Oath in the military …? (Hint: the military can send you to the rockpile for disobedience; Hippocrates doesn’t have that authority … not in this world, anyway.) Ditto chaplains (although the Fundamentalists got around this by proclaiming that since the military was run by the US which was Deputized by God, then any military order is God’s order too). And thus also lawyers – and Lady Justice is as toothless, for all practical purposes, as Hippocrates (although there is that next world ... but Americans are notoriously so dazzled by this one that they have never paid much attention).

***Which is why the military approach is such a favorite of prosecutors in this victim-heavy Age: once the dice are as loaded as the military system, then you can pretty much do whatever you want. And also why the military approach is so attractive not only to the Right, but to the cadres of the Left who consider as 'quaint', 'obstructive' and 're-victimizing' any attempt by the legal system (rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, and such) or by the defendant to somehow slow things down to make sure Truth is discovered. The Revolution is not seeking Truth, but only the Correct Outcome; it already knows the Truth and the legal system and the 'trial' is simply to 'show' everybody the power of the Revolution and to 'send a message'.

****See here and here

MILITARY COMMISSIONS-MILITARY JUSTICE

OH YEAH

We are informed that the President is considering allowing guilty pleas for detainees, allowing full trials to be avoided.

As ‘The New York Times’ reports, “the provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques”.

Neat. Since several of the detainees have stated that they are looking to complete themselves by “achieving martyrdom”, it’s a two-fer: the government gets to get rid of them, while avoiding having to have its dirty (bloody, filthy) laundry aired in public, and the condemned get their last wish in full. A three-fer, actually.

A four-fer, even: the military lawyers’ guild gets to avoid having its own far-too complicit involvement exposed. They remain, among far, far too many of the nation’s reporters – and even some influential and otherwise skeptical blog-meisters – as ‘the good guys’.

And their system, in all the arranging of the scene, remains cast as a ‘justice system’. After all, “U.S. military law, which is the model for the military commission rules, bars members of the armed services who are facing capital charges from pleading guilty”. Marvelous. One recalls Stalin’s 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, the text of which gave Soviet citizens more protections before Soviet courts than even the U.S. Constitution.

For Uncle Joe it was a delicious two-fer: you garnered the praise of the world’s little people for so splendidly protecting your citizens from the brute police power of the State, and you guaranteed the outcomes that you wanted – Siberia or the wall.*

The kicker, of course, was there in that little phrase “Soviet courts”: since Stalin owned the judges, the jury, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, the investigators, the interrogators, and the witnesses (all of whom could think, even if they would never dare say, ‘Lubyanka’ and ‘Gulag’) … well, the man could afford to be generous on paper.

This was the system that presented itself to the military and its lawyers when faced with Harry Truman’s 1946 demand, at the behest of many, many thousands of verrrry upset returning servicemen and vets, that the military clean up its ‘justice’ act. Substituting flags and some other American scenery for the dour Soviet furnishings, and after Truman won the 1948 election that they all hoped he would lose, the military smiled a butter-greasy smile and unveiled its “Uniform Code of Military Justice” in 1950. Truman harrumphed that it was the same-old same-old, but he had more pressing problems then, as the Pentagoons had shrewdly figured.

If you can imagine what a ‘plea bargain’ entails in civilian criminal justice, where you’d have to have a lot of money or the assurance of a direct, Cinemascope vision of angels right there in your cell in order to opt for a trial … if you can imagine that, then imagine what a plea bargain would be in the military system, as it embodies the very essence of the Stalinist dynamics. You’d have to have a death-wish to imagine you would prevail.

Which of course brings Us to the present proposal.

In a way, it’s a ‘plea bargain’ without the ‘bargain’. Although, since you have that death-wish anyway, maybe not so much.

David Glazier, a faculty member at the Loyola University Law School, rightly opines that “it’s going to lack international credibility”. And so it will. No other nation in the world considers ‘military justice’ anything else but a put-up job – no other nation, just Us. And many of the nations and peoples of the world are verrrry familiar with the fanged gentility of Stalin’s vampiric justice. But not Us … perhaps the greatest producers and consumers of vampire movies on the planet, and yet We don’t see them right in front of Us. Go figure. It would seem that if you put the right uniform on him, Dracula himself could carry on in broad daylight in this town.

And – in case anybody thinks that this is all far removed from Our many pressing daily concerns – recall that the Framers verrrry clearly caged ‘military justice’ in the seventh Article of the the Fifth Amendment, and that an awful lot of eager prosecutors in the civilian system – whether of the Right or of the Left – admire the military system’s ‘efficiency’.

Such admiration cannot end well for a Constitutional Republic.

NOTES

*You have to recall Felix Dzherzhinsky’s assertion about the true nature of Stalin’s (and all revolutionary and military) justice: “The [police power of the Revolution] does not judge, it strikes” – as nice a military sentiment as you can get from a non-military man.

And, following that oh-so-pretty Constitution of 1936, the 1937 orders to the secret police: for example, to the Western Siberia administrative department – you have four months to find 5,000 Category One Trotskyite terrorists and execute them, and 12,000 Category Two terrorists and imprison them for eight-to-ten years. All of these accused, would of course receive the perfect trial. Such ‘efficiency’! And all in four months.

Trotsky, of course, was Stalin’s rival for the hearts and minds of the Communist membership and the Soviet masses; anybody who thought Trotsky was anything other than a demon was a ‘terrorist’. And for all anybody knows now, if the secret police were behind in their quotas on a given week, they might not even ask you about Trotsky at all. Dosvedanie!

MILITARY JAGS AND THEIR SCHEMES

JAGGED SCHEMES

Glenn Greenwald is conducting an extended and informative exploration of Obama’s sort-of embrace of ‘military commissions’.

A military commission is some form of tribunal (let’s not dignify it with the term ‘court’) run by the military which will theoretically provide an adequate instrument by which detainees can be adjudged to be ‘terrorists’ or not.

Nobody seems to be able to figure out why on earth Obama would embrace them. After all, there are the federal courts, there are courts-martial as conducted by JAGs under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and there is some thought of an international tribunal. Yet Obama has embraced the Bushist military commissions.

I have a thought: he has embraced them because noooooo-body in the Beltway universe wants to be exposed in an open court. The government, claiming ‘national security’ and state-secrets, doesn’t want to publicly air its bloody laundry for the world to see. Large numbers of Beltway biggies ditto, since their active or passive collaboration with the whole torture mess cannot be explained away without looking like a duplicitous – if not indeed treacherous – clown. Even, I’m thinking, the Israeli friends (can no one remember the Mob’s ‘Friends of the Italian Opera’ society in the old films about the 1920s?) are not overly excited about letting Us see exactly how similar to the Israeli ‘war society’ and ‘permanent war culture’ this nation has become, especially since 9-11.

And the JAGs … ah, the JAGs do not want courts-martial because they don’t want a) to have their own core racket – the administration of military ‘justice’ – exposed for all to see, nor b) do they want to be ‘seen’ as associated with the torture mess, nor c) do they want their own complicity (despite their seeming to stand-tall after the cat was undeniably out of the bag) exposed.

Actually, the whole ‘military’ route is rife with troubles. The core difference between ‘commissions’ and ‘courts-martial’ is merely one of degree; both of them are run by an organization that is hierarchical, and that maintains its efficiency and ethos precisely by ensuring that all uniformed folks do what their told. JAGs, as you recall, whether acting this week as ‘judges’, ‘prosecutors’, or ‘defense counsel’, are all uniformed military officers. So are the members of the ‘jury’ and most of the witnesses. The military investigators are not, but their pay, promotions, and bounteous perks all come out of the Pentagon budget.

And while Americans seem somewhat content to assume that ‘military justice’ – at least here – is just Perry Mason in uniform, few other citizens of the world are laboring under such delusions. Indeed, the Pentagon itself is eager to prevent US troops from ever coming into the custody of any government’s military courts (or any other courts) – the Pentagoons know full well how their game is played, and they don’t want to wind up on the business-end of it, don’t want to wind up ‘down-range’ – as they say – of what is and has to be by its very nature a rigged scheme.

Interestingly, there are a couple of JAG-gy pawprints on Obama’s comments. “Military commissions have a long tradition in America”: Well, this is the same long-past-its-sell-by-date baloney that the JAGs use to make it appear that their military justice system ain’t but a thang, nothing but a codification of long-standing American and Western practice.

Not hardly. Yes, the practice of court-martial – a military trial run by the military – has been around for a long long time. But only for specifically military offenses.

The idea of allowing a military court to prosecute the entire national criminal Code, exposing uniformed citizens to the full weight of the government’s criminal-justice authority without a credible, substantive provision of Constitutional rights and protections … this is not something that would have occurred to George Washington. Indeed, the Framers were soooo mistrustful of military justice that the Fifth Amendment specifically prohibited it even among the military unless the nation was actually at war. (This reality was one of the first to be obliterated with the connivance of the Supreme Court, very early in the 19th century, though as recently as Thurgood Marshall’s tenure the point was raised that the text of Fifth Amendment was rather clear on the subject and that consequently the present military-justice arrangements are in violation of the Amendment and have been for quite some time.*)

It was only in Wilson’s time that the military was given the right to prosecute service-members not only for military offenses at any time (already a violation of the Fifth Amendment) but that it could prosecute the entire Criminal Code. This was in 1916. In 1913 Wilson had pushed Congress into ‘delegating’ its power over the currency to the Federal Reserve (which later Wilson, and perhaps We here and now) came to regret.

In 1916 Congress ‘delegated’ the power to conduct criminal prosecutions to the Executive Branch – an act so contrary to the spirit of the Framer’s vision (think: Court of Star Chamber and Cromwell’s Protectorate) that most folks cannot imagine that Congress could do such a thing. Hence Obama’s and some commentators’ reference to “Article II courts”: genuine Constitutional courts are under the authority of Article III of the Constitution, the Judiciary Article. Article II, of course, deals with the Executive. Can you say ‘divine right monarchy’?

Indeed, the recent economic catastrophe has raised some question as to whether Congress even had – or has – the power to ‘delegate’ such a fundamental responsibility to any other person or office or entity or Branch. With the Federal Reserve Congress ‘delegated’ its currency power to the financial moguls (formerly known as the Robber Barons). In its 1916 gambit Congress delegated its authority to conduct Constitutional criminal process to the Executive, and to the military as a sub-branch of the Executive.

The Supreme Court played along, as it always has, by embracing the Alice-in-Wonderland position that a hierarchical organization can own all the ‘players’, and simultaneously play the role of ‘victim’ and ‘judge’, and yet maintain an impartial, fair, and robustly Constitutional competence to try, convict, and imprison. On that thinking, why not let Ford or Microsoft conduct company-justice on their employees?

Surely, the pious assertion that the military officers involved are all ‘honorable’ and would never think to break the law or their Oath (Oaths, plural, in the case of JAGs who are both sworn attorneys and sworn military officers) is nowadays clearly visible as the fairy-tale that it has always been.

And with Joe Biden’s son a JAG, and one influential serving US Senator as a JAG Reserve general officer and former military judge, one has to imagine that if the JAGs wanted to court-martial the detainees, it would happen forthwith.

But Obama, himself a professor of Constitutional law, goes and imperils his absolutely essential credibility by resurrecting the Bushist ‘military commissions’. Let Us assume that he does not have a political death-wish. Why then would he do it? Who would benefit from this frakkery of a change-in-position?

The JAGs, I am saying. They don’t want to risk exposure of their whole racket. After all, a lot of lawyers make a very nice living, and garner lots of status and bennies, administering ‘military justice’. And they don’t want that all to go away. Nor do they care to get any closer to the looming, volatile ‘war crimes’ thing. They are not very interested in being ‘down-range’ of their own system, nor seeing their system exposed for what it has always been: a rigged game, a fraudulent kabuki imitation of actual Constitutionally-protected criminal process, dressed in a uniform and wrapped up in the Flag.

They are presently deep into the strategy of presenting themselves as ‘the good guys’ in the script.

But this power that’s pushing Obama into such an erratic and dangerous orbit is coming from somewhere. And the JAGs and their system are a black-hole presently invisible to media scrutiny (for whatever misch of reasons). Once again, the Beltway’s ‘behind the scenes’ universe is exerting ominous pull on the visible universe of profound public affairs.

Yeah, fix the Hubble telescope. But let Us look at black-holes a lot closer to home. Let Us look verrrry closely and carefully.

NOTES

*For a deeper look at all this, see inter alia my Posts here and here from December of 2006.

MILITARY PROFESSIONALS

The debate over whether psychologists should help the military in pursuing aggressive actions has rekindled, following the newly published emails between several psychologists serving in the military who were assigned to the ‘interrogation’ programs. The article is here. The documents have been posted on the independent website ProPublica.

Once again, I’ll say this.

A ‘professional’ (classically defined as the ‘helping’ professions: doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and clergy) serving in the military is in a potentially treacherous position. As a professional the individual is committed to provide the services that the profession provides, specifically in this case to military personnel. But in order to gain ‘access’ to the highly-closed military ‘world’ and to operate efficiently in it, that professional is also a duly-sworn and commissioned officer in a branch of the Armed Services.

The possibilities for doing good are clear: military members, even in remote locations or locations otherwise inaccessible to civilian professionals can still receive assistance. Further, the professional is to some extent familiar with the problems specific to the military milieu and has the ‘credibility’ (the theory goes) of being in the military and thus ‘one of us’.

But the possibilities for serious complications are also there. As a sworn officer in an organization which is by its very definition and essence hierarchical and command-driven, the professional has to follow orders given by superior authority. The military, after all, is built around command-and-control of all its members by authority ‘higher up the chain’.

You can see where things might well lead, even in the best of times. A professional could be given an order which as a military officer s/he must obey, even if as a professional s/he might feel that the order was not in the best interests of the helping service that is theoretically being provided.

And We are now past the best of times. From now on, wars will be resource wars for an acceptable slice (however 'acceptable' is determined) of an expanding world's shrinking resources - oil, grain, even fresh water. Our military will be under a unique type of pressure and involved in non-traditional forms of warfare, where the boundaries of 'is' and 'isn't' war will blur greatly. And that will create even more sinister complications for professionals as well as far more wrenching 'problems' among military personnel.

Nor is the ‘order’ the only way that command-and-control is exercised. Indeed, the order is pretty much the least frequent form of comamnd-and-control. Dependent on the military for pay, for the essential promotion to higher rank, and for all the benefits upon which a professional might rely for job and financial security and to provide for the professional’s own family, it becomes very difficult to risk all that – plus perhaps even courtmartial - for disobeying an order. And even more cogently, military personnel pride themselves on being ‘team players’; so much so that it is a highly-valued military trait that one is ‘ahead of the wave’ , figuring out beforehand what ‘the command’ will want and doing it without even being told.

And – humans being social animals – even professionals want to be ‘accepted’ in the world in which they work; you don’t want to lose caste or status (or promotability or even – the horror! – retainability) by getting a reputation as somebody who ‘isn’t with the program’, who isn’t a ‘team-player’, or who is even – more horror! – a troublemaker. To get such a ‘reputation’ in a Service which, though it spans the entire globe, has a rumor-tree that operates almost instantaneously … is the mark of military death.

Nor, these days, is the job market really great out there in ‘civilian life’.

So professionals operating in the military service have built their house over two sides of an abyss. It’s sort of like having built a house over the San Andreas fault: great scenery, great location, but every once in a while, very baaaad things are going to happen. And you will have to decide.

As you can imagine, the decision is not often to risk all and stand up against military authority as a matter of principle.* Rather, you will try to go along to get along. Which, in many ways, is the rule of thumb that lubricated the continued and efficient operations of militaries such as the Wehrmacht and the Red Army that were in the service of some very baaaad things.

I wrote not long ago about a dust-up that had developed over military chaplains. (Also, in November of '06, here.) Defending the idea of uniformed chaplains (thus also commissioned officers), a Catholic military sub-bishop named Joseph Estabrook had written a deceptively ‘nice’ and ‘upbeat’ piece in a national journal.

For access to do the ministry, uniformed chaplains were the best solution, he said. And chaplains give good advice, he said, recounting a tale about one ‘Father Bill’ who apparently convinced a Marine general in Iraq to change an entire operational plan and hand out goodies instead of going in with guns drawn. Clearly, if the story is true, it didn’t happen nearly often enough. Nor did the bishop mention whether there were any uniformed chaplains assigned to do ministry at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, where such advice was either never given or not heeded. Nor did any chaplain then feel duty-bound or conscience-bound to speak out.

And given the Fundamentalist Ascendancy in the various chaplain corps in the past two decades, with that Fundy melding of God and Government, and the cocky assurance that America is specially commissioned and authorized to administer God’s world-whacking Will … well, you can see from the ingredients just what type of hash or stew is going to come out of the bubbling pot or ‘hot’ war.

Now in this present case, psychologists in the American Psychological Association – the nation’s premier professional body for psychologists – are upset that some of their number were actively engaged in ‘advising’ about torture methods. And they are right to be professionally concerned.

Worse, though, is that the then-president of that Association, one Gerald Koocher, currently a dean of the School of Health Sciences at Simmons College, had commissioned a task-force to ‘report’ on the matter, and then quietly assigned several serving military psychologists to sit on the panel. By a remarkable coincidence, the panel ‘reported’ that everything was fine and that there was nothing to see here.

Koocher defends himself by saying that it was “important to hear from military psychologists who faced the ethical dilemmas”. Nice, and even true. But they could have been called as witnesses rather than been given voting power over the final ‘report’.

He then goes on to declare plaintively that “working for the military is a legitimate occupation for people”. And so it pretty much is. For ‘people’. But We are talking about professionals here, and professionals are not just ‘people’. Either Koocher is not really an acute thinker or else he is not being completely upfront. Neither possibility impresses.

Koocher’s situation also reveals the potential exposure that all of the national professional Associations face: if you take a stand for your profession’s principles, then you are going to close off a lot of really nice-paying jobs and perks for your membership, including perks and bennies which extend beyond the term of military service.

This is especially the case of the lawyers, whose retired ‘JAGs’ have gone on to be law school Deans, heads of legal think-tanks, court personnel (including civilian judges at various levels and even one who was Clerk of the US Supreme Court). One went on to the US Senate, where he sits even now, keeping an eye on JAG interests and standing tall for the reprehensible Military Commissions Act of 2006, granting immunity from prosecution preemptively to everybody who was only ‘following orders’ in the matter of torture. Nice efficiency. Ja! The Vice-President’s son himself, in addition to his day-job as Attorney General of the Great State of Delaware, is also a Reserve JAG. This is one verrrry entrenched union, one verrrry well-oiled and well-connected ‘machine’. (And still very much a 'player'; see here.) The American Bar Association has so far managed to squelch any serious public consideration of the whole thing.

At this point, the cat being , as aforementioned, out of the bag, a number of senior military psychologists have come forward to the prayer-rail and declared themselves agin’ torture. But of course.

“First do no harm” is the Prime Directive of the medical and psychological professions and in one way or another it’s in the Oath they take upon entering their profession. That’s going to be a bit of a job, given that they have committed themselves, by a second Oath, to doing the bidding of an organization (and for some years now a nation) that believes that anything done in the ‘good’ cause of God’s Will – as interpreted by the Command Authority and blessed with the grape juice of Fundamentalist ritual – is pretty much OK, and further that any doubt about that is a form of sin-treason second to none.

Bush and Cheney had no such problem with the Oaths that they took. They simply declared themselves to be the sole deciders of what was OK in their pursuit of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution (as the Oath ‘quaintly’ puts it). After much prayer and deliberation, they decided that they would rather wage war. As far as ‘seeing that the laws be faithfully executed’, Mr. Bush simultaneously absolved himself of the responsibility and authorized the wholesale breaking of ‘the laws’. And to think that they used to make fun of the Pope, not so long ago, imagining that he frequently absolved himself beforehand of any sins he might commit, went to an orgy, and then came back and went to confession to himself. **

Maybe We might consider the Bush presidency as the ‘Renaissance papacy’ of American history.
NOTE

*Yes, I know that in 2006 the military chief lawyers ‘stood tall’ against ‘torture’. This was after years of torture, when the cat was already out of the bag, and there were ugly possibilities of prosecution – potentially even for war-crimes (more horror!) - that had to be preemptively squelched. Hence the well-rehearsed kabuki of the most senior military attorneys ‘standing tall’. And even of the system allowing a couple of hardy souls to try to provide a substantive defense of the accused. Such genuinely committed professionals are expendable; once the heat is off they will find themselves in the same position as those Red Army officers who were detailed to do liaison work with the Allied armies: once the war was over, Stalin treated all such personnel as potentially traitorous for having spent so much time ‘among the West’ – and to Siberia, or a wall, they went. Which in military terms nowadays here would mean no promotion and the resulting release from the Service; after the rumor-mill had already made you an ‘untouchable’ in many of the daily rituals of military life.

**You can’t, by the way, ‘go to confession to yourself’, even if you’re the Pope. Catholic theology always had some senses of checks-and-balances in the face of the stubborn reality of human sinfulness. An insight that America has lost recently, to be replaced with a Fundamentalist assurance that if you’ve decided that you’re doing God’s will, then nothing you can do is going to be a sin anyway. It’s a treacherous take on Augustine’s ancient and complex advice: Ama Deum et fac quod vis – Love God and do what you will. The hardest part of the advice is unpacking that ‘Ama Deum’: where far too often the average, over-eager believer will simply say Yeah, I really do love God – and then go and do whatever s/he wants. Religion is not for kids; it’s even hard for adults, because even though their frontal lobes are fully formed they may not have been well-developed; and then there’s always the ‘stubbornness of sin thing’.

BE YE NOT DECEIVED

There’s an editorial in ‘The Los Angeles Times’ going through the pros and cons of the US participating in the International Criminal Court. It’s well worth a look.

After Nuremberg, the nations of the world largely saw a value in erecting an international tribunal to handle cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Especially when committed by nations or by individuals whose national governments were unable – or unwilling – to prosecute them. A Treaty containing the plan was finally circulated to the nations by the UN in 1998.

Nicely, the piece notes that Clinton wasn’t all that happy with the idea. He waited until the very last days of his Administration before signing the treaty, but then never sent it to the Senate for ratification. Cute. Bush the Egregious, of course, “unsigned” the Treaty in 2002, and then went so far as to get a supine Congress to pass a frakking law authorizing the Executive to invade any country that dared to hold a US citizen on any such charge, and rescue same.

You’d think that any American aware of what went on in World War Two would approve of the whole idea of an International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide. And whether ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’. The ‘liberal’ would want one more arrow in the quiver of ‘justice’ for the afflicted, and the ‘conservative’ would want one more arrow in the quiver of law and order.

But no. After all, apparently, in World War Two the world-powers who perpetrated aggressive war and torture for their own enrichment and expansion were the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. But nowadays the world-power is (fill in the blank). Nor do the revolutionistas of the American Left nor the God-authorized invaders of the American Right care to acknowledge any earthly power above their own.

Usually, in the popular American police procedural, when somebody opposes ‘going to court’ the cops and the viewer can conclude with assurance that said person is guilty as sin. Why that is not true in the ongoing soap-opera that national news has become is a subject Rod Serling would no doubt have wanted to present for your consideration.

Saving itself from saying too much, the editorial firmly states that in the matter of countries whose politics preclude prosecution or whose courts are in thrall to the controlling regime, “the notion that this could apply to the United States is laughable”. I would say that “the notion” is certainly open to discussion, but – alas – far too serious for it to be a laughing matter.

And of course, what exposure would it create for Our Israeli ‘ally’ – the one that refuses to sign a treaty of alliance with Us ? The one that killed Our sailors in cold-blood on that bright June day forty-two years ago? The one whose senior military guidance to the troops currently dealing with Gaza is to “take a page from the Warsaw Ghetto”? You recall the Warsaw Ghetto: where the Germans walled up an entire population of Jewish men, women, and children in a very small urban neighborhood , and then attacked it with troops, artillery, planes – and destroyed them like fish shot in a barrel. The most senior German generals were hung – by the Allies – with the memory of that ‘operation’ fresh in everybody’s mind.

The idea of an International Court along the lines of Nuremberg seems to be making a lot of self-proclaimed ‘good guys’ verrrry uncomfortable. In standard police procedure, when apparently ‘innocent’ folk suddenly get verrrry nervous in the mere presence of a police officer, you want to look more carefully at them and what they might be up to. The claim is that the Court might be used improperly, but I’m sure Al Capone would have liked to have voiced the same misgivings about courts and law enforcement in general as his reason for avoiding the subject. If memory serves, several of the defendants at Nuremberg did raise the point – but their prior actions had spoken louder than any words they might have come up with to escape the consequences of their spree.

Like a resourceful vampire, the military JAG Corps keep turning up in these things, trying to find a way in for itself – getting an invitation over the doorstep. A former Navy lawyer-admiral, John Hutson , proposes with sly innocence that perhaps American participation could be vetted by a panel of legal experts “from outside the government”. Say – oh, ummmmmmm – a panel of retired military lawyers. Yah. Oh yeah!

“Outside the government”? These are so-called lawyers who have made a career out of subordinating their responsibilities to truth and justice to their responsibilities as military officers with promotions and careers to keep up. Outside the government? These are the worst form of apparatchiks – at least the outright political appointee is a hack who makes no pretentions about it. The JAGs insist on the respect due to their ‘professional character’ as attorneys committed to ‘justice’, all the while taking their pay and promotions and medals and ribbons and perk-bloated retirement from the hand of their master.

But of course, it would be a great two-fer: JAGs in such a position could protect their official masters while also protecting their own kind. After all* it was only after quite a few years that the JAGs noticed – as if by inadvertence – that baaad things were going on justice-wise and all that; they are in this mess up to their ears. And if you think the depths of JAG participation have now been plumbed, hold that thought – as Stephen Lendman notes, there are a number of Navy ships that serve as “floating prisons”, at sea and in international waters, in whose dark bellies assorted ‘detainees’, ‘enemy combatants’ and other such flotsam and jetsam have been held and mistreated. Lendman mentions USS Bataan, a ship large enough to have its own military lawyer (and doctor and chaplain). But then, Gitmo had its own military lawyer (and doctors and chaplains) too. And We didn’t hear much from them, did We?

Their plan now will be an extension of their plan that has worked so well in the military justice system: in exchange for protecting the bosses (almost no general or admiral has ever been court-martialled) they themselves are protected from courtmartial (the proportion of JAGs courtmartialled is only a bit higher than that of the flag officers).

And not only do they have a mole in the system from the Right - the execrable Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) who is a JAG Reserve general and former military appellate judge - but also from the Left - Joe Biden's kid, whose day job is Attorney General of Delaware where the banks and credit card companies have found a home, is a Reserve JAG, currently facing the rigors of military lawyer life on 'active' duty.

Let Us not be deceived: In this whole 'opening' to the idea of an ICC there is a something-else in sheep's clothing. At this point, just as in so many of the domestic messes (the economy and the consequences of decades of ideological feminism come quickly to mind), there are now numerous Beltway biggies in the Legislative as well as Executive Branches, Democrats as well as Republicans, military officers as well as high officials, who formally qualify for 'war crimes' prosecution (and - hardly improbably - conviction). Yoo, Cheney, Rumsfeld ... they're only the tippy-tip of the huge iceberg of filth that has formed under Our very noses. So, a shrewd and pre-emptive two-fer for the Beltway is to a) agree to participation in the ICC while b) placing upon Our participation the rider that a screening group of 'disinterested' professional worthies will vette every potential prosecution of any American 'citizen' (and that doesn't really mean Joe Six-Pack). And what better bunch for the Beltway to rely on than those bemedalled, sleazy-shrewd, 'loyal' professional ho's of fake-Justice and Empire, the JAGs?

Neat. It's another replay of the JAGs' tried and true Military Justice modus operandi: bray loud and proud that you have an open and honest system, while behind the scenes pulling all the strings and controlling all the outcomes, in the service of your friends and benefactors and bosses.

To the Treaty regarding the International Criminal Court I’d say (as does the editorial): let the President sign it and send it along to the Senate – those PAC-pawed worthies can then show Us how they handle a real hot potato.

To the insidious offer that retired JAGs be the gatekeepers of international justice for war crimes I can suggest no better response than that of the late Brigadier General McAulliffe at Bastogne: “Nuts”.

NOTE

*There are those few JAGs who, now that the pressure is on, have been suffered to vigorously represent their clients at Guantanamo. But they are allowed to do so by the bosses simply to ‘keep up appearances’ and after the heat dies down these hardy, decent and courageous souls will be dealt with in the same spirit as Stalin dealt with returning Red Army ‘heroes’ who had spent too much time near the West and the Allies.

WAR COMES TO THE MAKERS OF WAR

That phrase comes from the old ‘Victory At Sea’ series. It referred to the American bombing of Japan starting in ’44 as the island airbases within range of the Home Islands became operational.
McClatchy reports that state and national pols from the great state of South Carolina are fixin’ to pass a law that if Guantanamo detainees come to the Charleston Navy Brig, why they’ll shut the electricity off to it (not to the entire Base, mind you, since the Yankee Navy employs a whole passel of red-blooded patriots in town, and the Yankee military is one of the State’s biggest employers).

Charleston, you may recall, fired the opening shots in the Civil War, cannonading Fort Sumter on a fine April morning in 1861 – and with great gusto. It later made a lesser – if less egregious – mark in history when General Sherman, fresh from the capture of Atlanta and his march through the great State of Georgia to Savannah, started making his way up the coast. The good citizens of Charleston had their remaining slaves take all their valuables, good furnishings, good silver and flatware up to Columbia, the State capitol, figuring to outfox ‘Uncle Billy’ and his bhoys, who were no doubt coming now to repay the compliment of 1861 with fire and iron. Alas, the bringer of war – kind of foxy himself – bypassed the makers of war and brought war inland up to Columbia, razing the place – and all the Charleston crockery to boot.

It’s that sort of place. A North Carolinian, in the brouhaha leading up to that terrible War, reflected morosely that his State was “a vale of humility, situated between two humps of pride”, the other hump being Virginia, home to Richmond and now bedroom to the Beltway. What evah is a body to do?

Now comes a sizable delegation of legislators in the matter of the great War on Terrah. Or Terr-er.

Having plumped for the whole thing, having cheered the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act and all the other pomps and works for which History is fixin’ to hold somebody responsible, South Carolina is yet again faced with the prospect of a great War ‘coming home’. And again, they don’t much cotton to it. What evah shall they do?

They will legislate and pass a law. No gimlet-eyed stiff, upper lip for them. No sir! To the inkwells! To the touchpads! To the klieg lights! To the South Carolinians, as to their predecessors the Japanese, ‘war ‘ is something that happens to other people.

Nor are they alone. The good citizens of the great State of Kansas, specifically of the County of Leavenworth, situated therein and duly constituted, are equally shocked, shocked, at the thought that their ‘war’ might take up residence. They are home to a lucrative spread of military installations, not the least of which is the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where the Army goes to learn how to fight and win its wars (the curriculum is yet again in the process of revision, as we speak).

The good burghers also enjoy the employment opportunities afforded by several houses of incarceration within their jurisdiction. There is a county lock-up, a State lock-up, the big and semi-famous Federal lock-up known colloquially as “Leavenworth”, and a private-enterprise lock-up to handle inmates from States whose own zeal for righteousness and justice has overtaxed their brick-and-bar facilities.

And there is the military’s Disciplinary Barracks, a prison for all those caught in the quite possibly unconstitutional toils of the military justice system. That facility, recently moved into a Supermax complex when the old 19th century monstrosity was finally replaced a few years ago, was until 2001 proud of housing ‘the worst of the worst’, such as pudgy, soft-fingered Air Force Master Sergeants who, being ‘military’, were more dangerous than any other criminal in the country because ‘they knew how to use guns’. The thought of such personnel posing more of a danger than any 1st-year gang member can only bring a rueful smile to those who are familiar with military hyperbole, which to the military mind is almost indistinguishable from truth. Which is a trait the military now shares with the polarized Right and Left in the country.

But now, suddenly, the hapless inmates at the United States Disciplinary Barracks (its formal title) are demoted to just hapless-inmates; the ‘worst of the worst’ have suddenly been discovered to be a motley of teens, wandering Uighurs, and various bearded folk from what were supposed to remain far-distant battlefields – or, at least, ‘theaters of operation’.

Having demonstrated that it is utterly unable and unwilling to have to defend its actions in any civilian court, and faced with an increasingly restive military lawyer corps that is beginning to get fits of the vapours from thinking far too much about ‘abstractions’ and ‘concepts’ such as ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘war crimes’, the jailors are now in a quandary: How do you let go of a wolf you have not only trapped and shackled but have grabbed by the ears? How back away now? And who’s going to take the wolf off your hands and ‘home to their place’? Without your own pretty face getting bitten off in the process?

But if there’s one thing America has in abundance after 40 years of Left and Right demonizations, it’s prisons. And that’s why now the burghers and solons of these prison locales are looking out and up with about the same mixture of surprise, apprehension, and irritated confoundment as the Tokyo denizens who looked up to see Billy Mitchell’s B-25s coming in over the rooftops: This – is happening – to us? Do they know who we are? And the classic whine: Why usssss?

Suddenly the good patriotic folk are thinking of States’ rights and the heartless intrusions of a ‘fedril gummint’ which they had heretofore known only as a friendly and reliable cash-cow, delivering paychecks and subsidies with an inspiring regularity; an affable donkey, a mule faithfully schlepping the bounty of the public till to those shrewd enough to have gotten on the ‘good’ list.

Yea, these be strange times, and We shall see strange things.

In what has to be construed as a definitive proof of the existence of a God Who Laughs to Scorn, well-coiffed and well-shod solons known for their jingo, macho, kill-em-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out support of the frakkery on the Eastern Front are now buzzing about like overstuffed bees, essaying a stentorian bray to the effect that nobody is going to bring the war into their back yard. Harrrrrrumph!

It’s one thing to have a bunch of chained unfortunates safely warehoused in this or that well-walled facility, where their years of rot and vegetation can be made to manure the rich pastures of local emolument, and where their bedraggled and dispirited and disoriented families can come to visit and have to spread some cash at the local strip-malls and fleabags. It’s another thing to have folks who – if the stories about them be true – are connected to distant, very unhappy, and very resourceful associates and relatives, who might themselves decide to pay a visit.

And who knows whether such stories about them are indeed true? The fog of war, alas. The thing that gets kids in uniform killed and generals given a free pass to come up with further nebulous theories about the properties and dynamics of fog. But always over there. Somewhere. Somewhere else.

Curiously, in the august halls of the Senate, the execrable Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not one of the pack, allowing his stable-mate, Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to do that thing with the snorting and the stamping of the hooves and the flaring of wide nostrils and the shaking of antlers, horns, or large floppy ears.

And thereby hangs Graham’s tale, as it were. He is up to his own floppy ears in the equally execrable military justice system, being a general in its Reserve and a former Judge on what must be formally termed, and with a straight face, its ‘appeals’ court. The military’s attorneys, now combining the famous characteristics of that trade with all the worst elements of the professionals-in-the-military conundrum, are – as said previously – thinking very much of ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘war crimes’. And not in the abstract, but as something that may yet happen … to them.

With a few honorable exceptions who are trying to actually defend their clients, the JAGs are most solicitous of supporting this President as they were the prior specimen. And therefore at this point they would very much like someone to take the ‘wolves’ off their hands. The less the JAGs are seen near these folks, the less chance that people might start wondering just what the JAGs’ role has been in this whole dark and unholy mess. I’m waiting for DVD copies of ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ to start disappearing from shelves and catalogs in the name of ‘national security’; my bet is that they have not been available at military PX’s and Exchanges for quite some time.

The war, if not yet Nuremberg, is coming home.

It is becoming repugnant, what is happening now. Although the war has been coming home in the form of dead and wrecked veterans for years, only now, and for this, are the pols rising up on their hind legs.

The dead can be buried. The wounded can be clucked ruefully about over coffee at the local diner. But the ‘enemy’, now the ‘enemy’ is coming. What do you do with them? What do you do with what you have done to them?

In a way, it’s like the national undercurrent of unfocused concern over what to do with the more-than-Soviet percentages of imprisoned citizens now starting to ‘come back’ into ‘polite society’? You can’t – yet, anyway – ‘civilly confine’ all of them because of what they ‘might do’. What now then?

There’s something of Cavafy in all of this, in all of this bustling and braying. But he saw, as We must sooner or later come to see, that “the barbarians were, somehow, a solution”. A solution to a vast national failure – not in war, but deeper than that.

Much, much deeper.

ADDENDUM

Daniel Nasaw reports that this has now broadened to a wider Republican Congressional groundswell.

CRIMES AND WAR

Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith write about “Will War Crimes Be Outed?” in an article originally in ‘The Nation’ but also on Truthout, and available here.

It will be interesting to see if We can judge Ourselves with as much gimlet-eyed clarity as We did the Nazi functionaries 60-odd years ago. Going out and renting ‘Judgment at Nuremberg” from 1961, drawing near to the flint and glint of a by-then-craggy Spencer Tracy’s back-country judge, and sensing the heat and sharpness of his focus on truth and justice, and then imagining some of Our own Beltway macher and their enablers trying to swing into their vaudeville in the unwavering beam of that steely glare … well, that’s an exercise in a sort of civic prayer, the kind that the lesser-visioned might accompany with popcorn, but the larger-souled with sackcloth-and-ashes. Feel free to try it.

Tracy’s judge is rooted like a rock in concepts of decency and truth and professional responsibility – especially when one wields the power of high justice . Such a ‘character’ is not to be found inside the Beltway these days … anywhere. And to the pleas that in the service of a ‘larger good’ or of the ‘needs of the People and Nation’ certain allowances must – ach! – be made by any ‘responsible’ official, especially one of the ‘elite’ who ‘know’ … he is unmoved. Like an Old Testament prophet, or like an Old Testament ‘God’, his gaze – bearing within it a steady and solid stream of truth – he is unswerving. Perhaps his is a ‘moral equivalent’ to war, a moral equivalent to Sherman’s orders to his subordinate commanders: we are here to march from Atlanta and take Savannah , so do not let yourselves be distracted from the road.

Neither the fuzzy ‘optimism’ of the Sixties hippy nor the everything-is-good-because-nothing-is-bad deconstruction of the Seventies social-revolutionaries would tolerate such ‘rigidity’, such ‘judgmentalism’. Are We the better for that? Nor is this a subtle refutation of such social progress as has been made in recent decades. But such progress – to the extent that it actually is progress – should always have been seen truthfully for what it represented: as both a desirable ‘good’ and a tremendously fraught challenge that would require the most careful and deliberated calibration to avoid creating at least as much regression as progress, if not perhaps more.

At this point The People are comprised of so many who have been raised in such an atmosphere, who have grown to an adulthood built on the bright, shifty sands of ‘life’s a beach’ rather than the hard, straight surfaces of a Road that must be travelled without distraction.

It’s curious that as the military virtues inculcated by the military service of so many Americans in World War Two have faded – such that the citizenry have become less ‘military’ – yet the government has sought to militarize the citizenry. At the higher end of its range, military service inculcates habits of self-organization and self-discipline and teamwork and an abiding alertness to one’s surroundings and an unsleeping questioning as to whether ‘this’ contemplated action will yield the needed results and at what cost; this is distinct from what used to be thought of as the ‘civilian’ approach: less of all that – a more expansive concern for the self’s comforts and amusements, less awareness of the ‘cost’ of everything, measured against a ‘goal’ or an ‘objective’, less trellis-ing of the individual on an overriding purpose.

Yet as those qualities faded from the national characteristics – or withered under the dual assaults of death and deconstruction - the increasingly Shape-less citizenry came to rely on the government, as if it were an exo-skeleton, for purpose and objective and discipline and – oy! – meaning itself.

No government deserves that much dependence. And not Washington or Jefferson or Jackson or Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt would have expected it or thought it healthy from a civic point of view. The current generations have wound up as ‘other-directed’ as the Fifties’ popular sociologists had feared those generations were becoming. Though few wear ‘gray flannel suits’ anymore, yet many are indeed ‘organization’ folks, unable to stand on their own, detached from their own interior strengths, ignorant (and thus at the mercy) of their weaknesses, penned up in a flatness fenced and policed by forces – social and ‘business’ then, ‘patriotic’ and governmental now – outside of themselves. The new film ‘Revolutionary Road’ doesn’t simply limn the aimless emptiness of the Fifties and its ‘adults’, but touches more deeply into the great abyss of meaninglessness lurking in all human beings, against which the adult must early and ever strive to impose a Shape and bring forth order and fruit from such dull chaos. Nor could the moist though brightly colored clay of a James Dean or Brando’s defiant-biker offer a reliably constructive and life-giving alternative, one that would put a firm foundation under a citizen capable of taking one’s place among The People. And the Republic is thus greatly diminished. As We are now seeing.

What can We expect at this point from a political leadership that has for decades shaped itself in such a way as to profitably deal with an increasingly dependent citizenry? The pols are clay – whether mushy or brittle – because the citizenry who elect them have become, in far too many instances, mushy or brittle.

And like the urban crowds ever milling about in the HBO series “Rome”, We now appear to them and their corporate masters and media enablers as nothing more than a milling mass of sheep, to be placated (millions of anything – even sheep – can cause a lot of trouble if they stampede) while the ‘great ones’, the magnates and the optimes pursue their various plots and plans.

But I can’t let pass a point raised by “law professors Anthony D’Amato and Jordan J. Paust (the latter a Professor at Northwestern School of Law): Obama is required to faithfully execute the laws and if credible accusations of law-breaking are put forth, he cannot choose whether or not to investigate.

True enough.

But Professor Paust is also a former Army JAG and, as well, on the faculty of the “Judge Advocate General’s School”. So I have to point out what I have pointed out several times before, especially in Posts in the latter months of 2006 and the Spring of 2007: in the matter of war crimes and the endless ‘insults’ to the rule of law and the spirit of American law, the military justice system is not the redeemer of the present unholy situation; it is rather the source, fount, and origin of it. Bush did not oppose military law; he simply took it recklessly to a higher level, one dangerously more exposed to the possibility of public view (and, hopefully, review).

I make no judgment as to the integrity of Professor Paust’s personal position. An ‘upside’ to the catastrophe of the past several years is that there are now younger JAGs (Paust himself is only a Captain at this point) who refuse to acquiesce in the prostitution of Western law as it applies to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to torture and ‘enhanced interrogation’ (that phrase borrowed shamelessly from Himmler). Or he may be simply contributing – knowingly or not – to the JAGs’ effort to save their core operation by getting themselves out in front of the exposure of Bushist illegality, hoping that We will unthinkingly make the inference that if the JAGs are ‘against illegality’ then their system of military justice must be ‘good’.

And that inference would not be justified.

The system itself is the problem: ‘company justice’, where the legal system is seen as an arm of the command that brings the charges to begin with, and where all the players are on the same side except the defendant him/herself.

Surely, if Congress were to pass legislation to the effect that the General Motors Corporation is so essential and unique that it should be allowed to have such authority over its employees that it can prosecute the entire criminal code – using judges, prosecutors, investigators, defense counsel, and jury members in the pay of the Corporation, and assuming that almost all of the witnesses would also be employees of the Corporation … if Congress were to do that, We would not, could not, stand for it.

Yet staging such a kabuki is precisely what the military system does.

We are currently seeing the emergence of a debate about the Federal Reserve that bears much relevance to the problem. In 1913 Wilson (who later bitterly acknowledged that he had ‘ruined his country’ by doing it) got Congress to go along with the erection of the Federal Reserve authority. In essence, Congress ‘delegated’ its constitutional control over the money supply, and delegated it to gentlepersons who, for all their specialized knowledge, had a very great deal to personally gain from such control. There was, and always has been, a profound constitutional question as to whether Congress even has the authority to ‘delegate’ its power over the currency and the money supply to some other entity.

A few years later, on the eve of World War 1, the military – unsleeping in its sharp lookout for the aggrandizement o fits authority and its role - approached Congress and sought the authority to prosecute not only the old Articles of War, but rather the entire criminal code, through its courtsmartial. In order to do an end-run around the clear strictures that the Constitution placed on Congressionally-erected courts (so-called Article Three courts, named after that section of the Constitution governing judicial procedure), the generals proposed that Congress ‘delegate’ its authority to the military, although the military’s command authority stemmed from Article Two, the Executive; Congress, thus, would be delegating its power to the Executive - and precisely, its power over criminal process, so carefully structured by the Founders. The Constitution and the Founders most specifically did not want the Executive to be running a criminal court system; the Founders recalled such legal abominations as the Court of Star Chamber, that answered to the Crown and the Sovereign as late as the era of Tudor and Elizabethan England.

But Congress’s enabling of the Federal Reserve authority just a few years before was a ‘delegation’ that had breached the firewall, and the generals were trained to take advantage of any breach of any wall that limited or confined their authority and range of operation.

There remains the profound Constitutional question as to whether Congress even has the power to make that delegation. And thus whether the military has or has ever had any right to conduct ‘criminal’ justice. Indeed, it was not until the Gingrich Ascendancy in 1994 that the military felt ‘safe’ enough to suddenly label its assorted ‘courts’ and investigative services as ‘criminal’: thus the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Naval Criminal Investigative Services (irony, alas, is lost on the Pentagon mind), among others. These pretensions were therefore formalized only recently, and effected ‘overnight’ (think of how much it cost to change all the badges, stationery, door and building signs, and templates for court documents).

This question joins the older and rather clear problem in the Constitution: in the Fifth Amendment the Founders clearly placed a comma in such a way as to forbid the military to conduct its own trials of its soldiers except in time of war.* That’s how nervous the Founders were not only about a standing army, but about an army dispensing’ justice’ through its command structure.

The current codification of the military justice system – the Uniform Code of Military Justice – was deployed in 1950, only after the generals had stiffed Harry Truman for five years; Truman had been deluged by complaints about military justice from returning vets in 1945 and even General Jimmy Doolittle’s blue-ribbon commission recommended major changes to reduce the very ‘command influence’ that was the precise reason the generals wanted to be a so-called Executive court rather than an Article Three court (bound by all the Constitutional strictures).

How to keep their ‘criminal’ power without accepting the Constitutional strictures? The generals and the JAGs borrowed from Stalin’s playbook of the mid-1930s: if you own all the players, you can make all the ‘guarantees’ and pious promises you want, even in writing, because when push came to shove your players would perform exactly as you wanted them to. The players in this case being the judges, prosecutors, investigators, defense counsel, and any witness in uniform who wanted to keep his or her job.

Truman was displeased, and said so publicly. But it was the Cold War and the Commies were everywhere. He couldn't afford to take on the Pentagon and a hive of career-hungry lawyers.

And here We are.

As the citizenry becomes less able to Shape their own individual lives, as the government intends to exercise even more power over them for ‘national security’ or for their own good, a militarized justice system will serve the purposes of control far more efficiently than the ‘old’ (perhaps ‘quaint’?) Constitutional system of adversarial justice.

Things are taking an ominous turn indeed.

Now Bush has gone and thrown the whole racket into the bright light of day, and the JAGs have to do something to save their core racket, as well as avoid getting themselves into … ummm … a ‘Nuremberg situation’ where they will have to fall back on the ‘only following orders’ defense.

Before they had sunk to the level where they made the Emperor’s horse a god, the Roman Senate exercised a crucial wariness of uniforms and swords operating anywhere except far away on the fields of actual battle. Caesar’s grafting of a military and imperial template upon the old Republic spelled its doom. And Rome did not end well, nor did its Citizens.

This was a lesson not lost on the Founders.

Our dependence on things military – on government – almost to the exclusion of any personal independence of spirit and vision, of personal and civic character, will continue to corrode even as it corrupts The People.

This is Our rendezvous with destiny. This is the challenge of Our time.

____________________________________________________
* The actual text is: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger".

Note the effect of the comma after "Militia"; it extends the following phrase ("when in actual service ...") to cover both of the preceding clauses ("or in the Militia" and "except in cases ...").

WHY WOULD THEY?

I can’t overlook what Joe Biden said. And what some other highly-placed Beltway players said when they amplified his comment.

Judith Young has usefully gathered together some notable comments on Biden’s October 22nd statement in her article “October Surprises in a Culture of Death”, Saturday 25th October on the site Atlantic Free Press (http://:www.atlanticfreepress.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5474&Itemid

Biden observed that Obama should expect that he would be “tested” within six months of his inauguration and this ‘testing’ will come in the form of a “generated” international crisis that will “force him to make unpopular” decisions.

Colin Powell – back hanging around the limelight – added that this ‘test’ would come “within a day or two after the inauguration”. Also back hanging around, Madeleine Albright (she who pronounced herself content killing half a million Iraqi children, in a ‘good’ cause, of course) called Biden’s statement “a statement of fact” in the sense that one must always be prepared for “something unexpected”.

Of course, this assumes that the Bush banditti – who certainly have ‘motive’ and ‘opportunity’ – do not declare a ‘martial law emergency’ before the election or between the election (which will presumably go to the Democrats) and the inauguration. And that strikes me as a somewhat generous assumption.

It is a sign of how far We have fallen that in this Year of the Independence of the United States the Two-Hundred-and-Thirty-Second, it is being discussed among Us whether there will be what is in effect a coup d’etat in this country. Lovely. And not by ‘the military’ – steely-eyed, ambitious uber-generals, ala Caesar – as was feared in the Cold War, but by the Presidency itself.

Of course, after decades of politely assuming that the ‘radical politics’ and ‘radical democracy’ of the Revolutions of the Identities were simply an extension of the long-tradition of New Deal and Progressive enfranchisements and ‘liberations’ and ‘empowerments’, and carried out so often under the rubric of ‘reform’ in the face of ‘emergencies’ and ‘outrages’ that played on the citizenry’s purported (or actual) fears and anxieties, who can be surprised that the national discourse is sufficiently debauched as to contemplate over morning coffee that the ‘Unitary’ Executive – quite possibly with the acquiescence of Congress (so far gone down the path of ‘bipartisan’ acquiescence as perhaps now to be known as ‘Gongress’) - and certainly with the ‘balanced’ and ‘patriotic’ cheerleading of the mainstream media, will establish itself as a dictatorial power? Perhaps without over much ‘pushback’ from the Supreme Court that gave Us Bush in the first place, a long eight years ago that now can be seen as an irretrievable watershed in America’s history that will mark this generation down – probably in dishonor – “to the latest generation”.

That all of this might – it is also being wondered – happen as a ‘false flag’ event (i.e. that the ‘emergency’ will actually be manufactured by Our own agencies specifically to provide a pretext for such an assault on democracy and the Republic) can hardly be considered excessive or fantastic. What LBJ did with the Tonkin Gulf in August of 1964 pales (somewhat) next to the ominous doings surrounding the killings of JFK, RFK, and MLK in the years when Hoover’s FBI could be counted upon not to do much against any perpetrators, and far more recently the most suspicious ‘anthrax’ scares of the fall of 2001, precisely targeted at Senators who robustly doubted the wisdom of the Patriot Act.

And again, ‘manufactured’ emergencies have been the staple of Identity and ‘victim’ agitprop for decades now, all for a ‘good’ cause, of course. As will any possible take-over be trumpeted as being for a ‘good’ cause.

Is it possible, one might ask, that both sides of the national political spectrum would go along with this? Abet it? But of course this question itself has long been outdistanced by the political realities that have developed over the past few decades. There are not ‘two sides’, and have not been at least since Tip O’Neill decided in the mid-‘70s that the Dems’ only hope was to stymie both the populist genie and the Identity-Politics demon that had been simultaneously released in 1968 and to throw in the Dems’ lot with Big Money, the military-industrial-complex, and the forces of corporate-inspired and corporate-funded ‘order’.

Reagan’s massive contribution was to put a happy-face on the whole thing, spinning it as ‘morning in America’ and unleashing the dogs of Greed domestically as the dogs of War were being sent out on preparatory hunting trips abroad. George the I’s happy fate was to burnish the continuation of Reagan’s policies with a military adventure marvelously provided by Saddam’s invading Kuwait, thereby offering a pretext for U.S. involvement in the Middle East, home of the oil supplies whose control provided the only - yet so perfect – solution to America’s growing energy-dependence and economic and debt problems. Clinton’s massive contribution was to place upon the whole queasy monstrousness the seal of the traditional Party of the little people and the working man, and to call it Good. Feh.

And here We are.

The Republicans – more specifically the Bush banditti – would certainly have motive to get control of the Republic before ‘politics’ in the form of the national elections exposed them to actual legal consequences for their decade-long spree. And surely, martial law would result in the huge expansion of the spirit of ‘military justice’, which is by its very nature and in its very essence subservient to the ‘command authority’ which its JAG priests serve (the genuinely committed and courageous advocates at Gitmo, those few and honorable counsel, very respectfully excepted).

But the Democrats also have ‘motive’, and their recent assurances that there will be no legal consequences for the Bushisti may be more than election-year fake-promises. After all, given the economic catastrophe, any such indulgence of legality and the administration of justice would quickly spread to the princes of the finance-sector which Senator Biden, among others, has served with a hound-like alacrity surpassed only by the truly-revolting, vulpine Phil Gramm, and that wouldn’t do at all, they being such ‘fine Americans’ – We saw this defense rehearsed when the reprehensible Scooter Libby sought to get himself out from under his prison sentence. His excuse – We recall – succeeded.

And if the economy continues to go south and worse - if this mess starts to reduce daily life toward the outlines of East Germany in the bad old days - then the Beltway banditti will immediately seek to fortify themselves. It may be that in their deepest counsels they're wondering why We have let them get away with so much for so long already. That, indeed, will be the hallmark question about this era. You might want to get ahead of 'history' and jot down a few possible reasons for yourself now.

Additionally, the Dems are now in a very difficult position: Obama’s campaign, and especially as it has been embroiled in the events of the economic catastrophe, has willy or nilly re-ignited the fires of a genuine democratic politics – which from the Beltway point of view is bad enough – and equally raised the ante of the Identities who sense that this is their Big Chance to make or break their agendas. It’s 1968 again.

Nor can the Democrats – they see now – possibly satisfy the Identities (they saw that decades ago) but worse, they can no longer simply pander to them; the demands of the Identities have proven to be unworkable and in many cases far more destructive than ‘liberating’ or ‘empowering’. Nor can the Dems turn on their corporate paymasters and hold those well-heeled vampires to account on behalf of the interests of The People that they purportedly represent in the spirit of FDR.

And with Our social unity and common identity as Americans now shot after 40 years of Identity Politics, what else might keep the citizenry in even a minimal state of cohesion except 'war' and the enforced 'unity' of martial law?

In this sense, some ‘tightening’ of American politics, i.e. some much closer approximation to martial law, would appear as a wondrous two-fer or three-fer. They could tamp down or patriotically put aside genuine aspirations for a recovery of a truly democratic politics, while simultaneously doing the same to the demands of the Identities, and without risking ‘electoral’ and ‘political’ consequences. They could simultaneously brush aside any calls for imposing legal consequences upon the Malefactors of Great Wealth or the Bush banditti, because of whatever ‘emergency’ has ‘happened’ and also simply because in martial law the ‘command authority’ doesn’t have to frakkin explain itself to anybody – it don’t need no stinkin badges.

Nor does Biden – certainly – need to make any great changes to his modus operandi. He has in the past robustly brayed his support for unconstitutional laws and his son, conveniently, is a JAG full versed in the queasy usefulness of the military legal system and a professional bedfellow of the that poison dwarf, Lindsey Graham, who with McCain pimped the Military Commissions Act two years ago (which also included a no-consequences-for-torturers clause).

This gambit, of course, would be a domestic replay of the entire Iraq invasion: a glorious two-fer or three-fer that would establish the U.S. as a stakeholder in the oil-rich heartlands of Eurasia (where it would otherwise have no seat at the table of the 21st century’s Great Game), and also would provide control of the oil that would erase all the sins and failures of its debt-and-paper-based economic policies since Reagan’s day, while simultaneously enriching the oil and other corporations (whom Bush, Cheney, and Rice served prior to their ‘public service’), and providing as well the opportunity to militarize the American mentality even as it privatized the military with the infusion of far more reliable imperial storm-troopers in the form of the Blackwater mercenaries. Everybody wins – except The People.

And - the hot and repulsive ironies! – ‘the troops’, who are mired in several losing Fourth-Generation-War frakfests while being simultaneously berated as sex-maniacs by a feminism that is running its own game-plan altogether.

We are going to be laughed out of the history-books in the not-too-distant future.

But We are going to meanly lose this Republic before that, if We do not start to ‘get it’, to grasp just what is at stake here and what is going on around Us, or may be at this moment “slouching toward” Us “to be born”.

The Dems can’t go back. And they can’t go forward. And for any one of a dozen reasons - the plundered and ruined economy, the immoral and failing wars, the broad and sustained pattern of Beltway dishonesty to The People, the constitutional insults of torture and half a hundred assaults on civil liberties - the history-machers inside Fortress Beltway may be figuring that there's gonna be a whole lotta angry folks around soon, on all sides of all the issues, and precautions must be taken. What may or may not have occurred to them is that a crisis in the legitimacy of the entire government as it has presently devolved may also occur - even if only (but who can be certain?) taking the form of a third party. They have to change the rules of the game itself. Which is precisely what the Founders feared and sought to avoid.

But in the wake of ‘deconstruction’ and financial ‘deregulation’, they will try to spin this as just a form of ‘Executive’ deregulation. And Gongress will go along. And We can only pray that the Supreme Court will not.

And nobody really knows whether the troops (and the ominously attired police and even the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies) will go along with such a game; they – after all – are the ‘teeth’ and the ‘claws’ of any such monster. As Maria Doria Russell noted, “Hitler never personally fired a weapon; all the evil he ever did, was done for him by others”. Those ‘others’ were not simply rabid slavering Party members and leering Gestapo agents, but fearful and cowed judges (think Burt Lancaster and the other accused German judges in “Judgment at Nuremberg”), dedicated career police officers, and millions of youngsters who patriotically answered their country’s ‘call’ by putting on uniforms and obediently following orders. And the ‘press’ barons, whose game-book now guides the Foxified corporate media here today.

Nor do We need – nor were We ever intended to have – a “protective father figure”. That was not included in the role of the Executive by the Founders. Lincoln was never so considered, even after the assassination and his apotheosis. It was only as the American male became used to ‘salary’ and the economy became so awesomely concentrated and complex that FDR came to be seen – to a generation who knew no other President in the 12 years of their growing up – any other President, that calm and ringing voice of inspiration that came into their living rooms on the radio every week as their world, it seemed, was teetering into the abyss.

Nor did the feminization consequent upon ‘feminism’ nor the youth-worship inherent in the bobby-soxers that came to whacky engorgement in the Boomers do anything but increase this ‘father-need’ among a citizenry that was originally conceived as being adult and able to manage its own affairs with some amount of self-possession and focus on the vitally important roles of Citizen and People.

It is another of those under-appreciated whackeries of American politics since 1968 that as the feminists were doing everything they could to discredit actual fathers and daddies and ‘men’, yet somehow they triggered a deeper need for a ‘national father’ who would console and bring closure to the many ‘victims’ of man’s chimpish world. We may not be an imperial people with no-clothes, but We most certainly have been an imperial-people parading around with some mighty ripped and mismatched threads, all the while secure in the assumption that everybody else on the planet saw Us as ‘the indispensable nation’ that knew what the frak We were doing.

And it is one of the ominous yet under-appreciated dangers that has evolved over that same period, that the Power-People, whose wealth bribed the politicians who were eager to preserve their sinecures in the first place, found a way to harness that whackery, and so in the end the Identities have indeed turned Us into donkeys, although they had been going for ‘chimps’ and ‘baboons’. Donkeys who will now be so desperate for whatever wage and financial bones might be tossed to Us that We will not dare to rock the boat and stand up to re-assert the Founders’ authority vested in Us.

We may have reached the point reached by Germany in the early 1930s and France in the mid-1930s: things are so messed up that authoritarian ‘order’ is the only thing will ‘work’ any longer. ‘Democracy’ will be blamed, as being the font of all the undisciplined and unthinking destruction of the national unity and productiveness. Which is precisely what ‘deconstruction’ was designed to do by its creators and clearly labeled as such. We can’t say there was no skull-and-crossbones on the package before it was eagerly opened and injected.

We face a rendezvous with Destiny as great if not greater than that which faced ‘the greatest generation’. And unlike the members of that generation, We cannot console and encourage Ourselves that We were simply minding Our own business until – in FDR’s ringing phrase – We “were deliberately and dastardly attacked”. We are about to be attacked by Our own government. And We have invited it.

As George II said, in what may be the most self-incriminating Freudian slip ever uttered from within Fortress Beltway: “they hate Us for Our liberties”.

What say We?

BIDEN TO WAR?

Word is out that Beau Biden, son of Joe Biden, is off to Iraq since his Reserve unit was called up.
To the colors and all that.

Some thoughts come to me.

Young Biden is the Attorney-General of the great state of Delaware. It is highly unlikely, and ill-advised, that he should be ‘at the front’ – by this time it is presumed that all American schoolchildren have learned that in Iraq there really is no ‘front’, or rather: the whole country is ‘the front’. Green Zone included.

To send somebody of such public significance ‘to the front’ actually puts any troops around him in even greater danger than they are now. The Brits realized this recently when they removed Prince Harry from ‘the front’ because his very presence constituted too much of a threat: not only that he might be wounded or killed, but that his very presence would ‘target’ that unit in the eyes of would-be assassins and those who – like Biden’s father in a way – love to make very public ‘statements’. Surely the Army cannot be serious in sending him ‘to the front’.

Additionally, as John Eisenhower, 80-plus year-old former Army officer son of Dwight D. Eisenhower has recently written somewhere that when as a young Army officer he wanted to go to the front in Korea when his father was running for President, he and his dad (a former 5-star general and career West Pointer, you recall) had a conversation in which Dad told Junior: if you go, and get captured, I will have to immediately resign the Presidency because otherwise it will create the impression that I am conducting the national business of war with an eye to my own very personal concerns as to your welfare. The agreement subsequently reached by Dad and Junior was that Junior would ‘make sure’ that he was never captured … i.e., that he would shoot himself if it appeared he were about to fall into enemy hands.

Now if the Army is about to send the Attorney-General of Delaware into harm’s way, then it is also about to send the son of a possible (probable) Vice-President of the United States into harm’s way. Let it be assumed that Iraq and Afghanistan will not be ‘over’ by November. The Army is going to send Beau Biden into the middle of that frakfest, he being son of the Vice-President presumptive?

But … the news reports that the unit whose departure Jawin’ Joe proudly saw off a day or two ago is actually going to a stateside base where it will ‘prepare and train’ for going to Iraq in several months. Ah. After the election. By which point, Pappy presumably having been elected Veep, it would be contrary to any sane national or military policy to send the son into harm’s way. Ah.

Additionally, the son is not a combat infantry officer. Or cavalry. Or artillery. Or air. He is – actually – a lawyer. A Jag officer. Ah. These types are staff officers. They stay at headquarters and do not go too close to the front or to the troops (excepting for that rather curious Jag, Lindsey Graham, who in his own telling, used to prowl about barracks full of sleeping women – and men – troops at night to see who might need a lawyer). Ah.

The military lawyers have not had too rough a time of it over there. Partially because (unless the troops are sleeping, it would seem) they are not around the front very much; ‘deposing’ Osama is not meant in the legal sense, and Saddam has already been, as it were, ‘deposed’. Perhaps also because – in their diabolic and inscrutably semi-oriental way – Osama’s folk or whoever have come to the astute conclusion that the military lawyers are more of a strategic asset to the cause than a liability. Diabolical of them to notice. No wonder the Fundamentalist chaplainry considers the whole region ripe for the righteous sword.

So if he were to go over there, Beau-boy would not be exactly at the cannon’s mouth. And by the time he might even be ‘ready’ to go over there, Pappy may be Veep-elect. In which case – as any general or diplomat could tell you – it would actually be endangering ‘the troops’ to send Beau-chik over there. And even if it goes the other way, Beau-boy is still Attorney-General of Delaware and the Army will suddenly profess itself shocked, shocked, to discover the fact and will with great reluctance cancel his orders to deploy. Though if that were to be the case, and given the modern Republicans’ penchant for revenge, Beau-Boy may be well-advised to go anyway.

But the chances in almost any case of his actually getting his ‘important’ butt onto a transport plane are nil.

And for reasons that are standard and conventional military wisdom in all the armies and governments of the civilized world.

Which then raises the question: What just happened in front of the adoring cameras here? Does anyone in authority in the pictures actually believe that this boy-chik is going over there? If they do, then they know squat about things military and diplomatic. If they don’t believe it, then what the frak was all this proud and choked-up ‘goodbye and good luck’ stuff in front of the cameras?

Anybody?