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.

JAGGED MATURITY

Truthout carries a Consortium News piece by a vet named Sam Provance, entitled “The American Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032707A.shtml). Mr. Provance was a non-com systems administrator in Intelligence Analysis.

He has much to say – from first-hand experience – about the Abu Ghraib investigations, in which the Army investigated itself. It’s all a riveting read and – especially when you get into the parts about singularly uninterested general-officer investigators – it makes you wonder about a lot of things.

I find it even more interesting that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) floats to the surface once again in matters military. There was a screening of a documentary on the investigation held this past February; the screening was to be followed by a discussion led by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and the aforementioned Graham; Kennedy was there from the beginning; Graham – neatly – arrived late ( thereby avoiding having to shake hands or be photographed shaking hands with several of the more significant subjects of the film, including Provance and Brigadier General Karpinski, the Reserve MP general who was blamed for the whole thing).

Graham is most famously known for his public protestations against the Military Commissions Act, standing tall one afternoon with McCain next to the current Service chief JAGs last autumn, vowing that the monstrosity would not pass, and then suddenly folding and voting for it overnight, declaring that they were satisfied that it was fixed and it would work. He appeared to be offended and hurt when his motivations and integrity were in not a few quarters impugned. He has also done a bravura turn at the Hearings in the matter of the fired US Attorneys, trying to spin things such that the fired look merely like hacks who had had their turn in the sun and were now refusing to get off the ferris wheel and give other hacks a chance for a ride.

Provance reports he was stunned when Graham – who had professed himself shocked, shocked, when Provance (in sorta whistleblower mode) had first spoken with him on the phone about Abu Graib – now blithely announced to the insembled entourage that the whole thing was the fault of a few bad apples, after which Gentleman Graham – you can’t make this stuff up! – proceeded to hotly disparage Brigadier General Karpinski … whom he presumed was absent. She shoulda been court-martialed, brayed the Gentleman. She shoulda driven through the Iraqi night to conduct random middle-of-the-night checks; he further brayed that when he had been an active-duty JAG he had always conducted such ‘checks’, checking – he confides – “the dormitory”.

What a JAG officer needs to be wandering around in dormitories (‘barracks’, one ventures to presume – but you never can tell with someone who is simultaneously a lawyer, a politician, and a JAG) full of sleeping enlisted females – or males – is beyond me. The modern American imagination is hard-pressed to conceive of an urgent enlisted need for Counsel in one’s underwear at 3AM. But JAGs are what they are, and Graham has gone further than most. He also may have never had to drive through the Iraqi night, on unlit roads that might be IED’d or registered for ground-fire, in anything less armored than a main battle-tank (which is still pretty vulnerable).

He perhaps hadn’t read up or retained enough of what he read to recall that most of the serious damage at Abu Graib was done by ‘special’ types of personnel specifically with-held from Karpinski’s control. At any rate, his comments are a classic example of the old if vicious military shell-game: having been caught in the act, the bosses ensure that it is the lowest-ranking who are blamed for ‘everything’ and then – having blamed them – other bosses echo back that reprehensible lie and amplify it. Thus Graham: just a few bad little-people did it (and if the camouflage uniforms, termed BDUs, were still forest-green, he might well have blamed ‘the leprechauns’). Then again, Graham may not have known that ‘SecDef’ von Rumsfeld himself was in close touch about the daily torture over there; then again, Graham may know all about it … more than We do, even.

Graham hee-hawed into the faces of serious and concerned citizens he saw out in the hall: twarn’t but a thang, the torture, and – he assured everyone – the American people really don’t care what happened as far as torture is concerned. Tee-hee. The upshot appeared to be that the crowd in front of him was somehow not-American or – indelicately – un-American. Or maybe gay. (At which point we’re back to his wee-hours dormitory-checking again.)

It must have been – as the Brits might say – an extraordinary performance. But it didn’t end there. Karpinski was introduced and an open mike made available to her, upon which she began to fill him in, including the fact that she had asked for a court-martial and the Army actually refused it (too much truth might get out, now that court-martials are conducted under public scrutiny instead of the usual JAG-infested back-alley ‘courtroom’ on a military base).

Graham’s response? To the fact that he had (inaccurately) belittled a general officer whom he thought wasn’t present and then found out was indeed present? To the fact that she then openly called him and his Army handlers cowards? To the fact that she proceeded to rebut every sleazy assertion he had made? The Gentleman smirked and said: “Well, I guess I just lost your vote!” Tee hee.

I’d like to make again a point made in other Posts on the site. It’s one that is becoming increasingly obvious as time goes on and as more and more Bushist appointees are dragged blinking, smirking, and babbling into the light: they are grossly immature for the responsibilities they being paid to carry and the authority with which they have been invested.

Graham, as a JAG, is clearly so. And here I am not suggesting that the Bushist hiring infection has infiltrated the JAGs. I think it worked very much the other way round: the JAGs have always been looking for kinda immature apparatchiks all along, and the Bushist imperium took notice of that and figured that if the JAGs could get away with it all this time – indeed, make careers and post-careers out of it - then it would be a cakewalk for the Executive Branch in all its post-9/11 puissance.

Now I am not talking about Graham as a Senator. Folks can go and elect any sort of person they want and – let’s face it – not everyone elected to high public office is a paragon of maturity or integrity. I am talking about Graham as a JAG, a ranking officer, and – if you haven’t had many nightmares lately – an appeals-level judge in the military legal system.

But when you think about it, what other kind of person would as rigged a game as the military legal system be able to tolerate? It’s an impossible professional situation: you either have to betray your client or your place on the military ‘team’. There is NO halfway solution to the conundrum of ‘military justice’; both the military and ‘Justice’ make mutually exclusive and ultimate demands. If, say, one branch of a religion demands that the priestesses be pregnant and the other branch demands that the priestesses be virgin, there is no way to simultaneously meet both of those demands. And anyone who tells the assembled faithful differently is lying.

So the JAGs can’t really afford to be looking for Character and Integrity if those virtues need to be platformed by Maturity. A professional grounded in all the afore-mentioned capital-letter words is very quickly going to run into ‘the wall’: you either play on the team and you betray your client’s interests or you stand up for your client and get tossed out. It’s not for nothing that the print advertisement for the JAG corps in the law journals is a grainy black and white of … handcuffs. That’s the level of maturity they’re appealing to. You go much higher and you’re only going to be making trouble for yourself.

This is what’s happened all these years with this sleazy and vicious kabuki called ‘military justice’, even since ‘codified’ by Congress in 1951. The ‘military justice’ system is an impossibility on its face and every effort to conduct its ‘codified’ and ‘legal’ operations is itself a betrayal of the principles it is loudly proclaiming itself to embody. Military-Justice Land resembles nothing so much as Dodge City in the very bad old days, and the aspiring professionals who enter the JAGs will wind up as Mark Twain relates of his young self: “It was no place for a Presbyterian … and I did not remain one very long.”

And we see that the JAGs have added a new dimension to Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’. The morally unimaginative, willfully over-focused Nazi bureaucrats such as Eichmann never pulled triggers or the levers that dropped gas pellets; they simply worked in offices with pencils and rules and calculators and maps and colored markers. They had ‘a job’ to do and they did it as efficiently as they could; they willed themselves not to look up from their desks to see how their little ‘job’ fit into a larger picture. They would allow themselves no such ‘distraction’. They had a ‘job’ to do – and on top of that they were officers. They had their orders. Why complicate life when one is granted such ‘clarity’ as to one’s duty? They were little men.

The usual if mostly unspoken JAG defense of their 'system' is 'Just Trust Us'. After all, they are double professionals: lawyers and military officers. And if you can't trust lawyers and the military, well, who can you trust? Who else y'a gonna call? But we've already seen, recently what all these 'trustworthy' professionals have been doing with the massive amounts of authority that was dumped into their lap by the too-eager authoritarian-buttlickers of the 109th Congress. The DOJ has been ransacking every citizen's privacy, the FBI has been falsely (and criminally?) obtaining information on citizens, god only knows what Homeland Security has been doing with its passenger list data-mining, and even the NYPD sent officers on paid trips all over the place to root out potential disrupters (not to be confused with the sturdy Klingon 'disruptor').

But the JAGs have added a new level: the ‘immaturity’ of the ‘banality of evil’: cocky, smirky, callow … these are a different breed from the Eichmannian drones. And they can go a long way in their guild, fueled by that immaturity. They don’t follow Justice; they make it. They make it do tricks like a trained bear. They’re lawyers and they’re soldiers. Kewl, dudes! And officers and gentlemen. Ja! Yah. They are little, but they’re loud.

And We must beware of them … and all their pomps and all their works.