CAWN’T THINK WHY

Over on Truthout (originally a New Republic piece) Jonathan Cohn has an article about Joe Biden (“The Strange Silence on Biden’s Signature Accomplishment”, http://www.truthout.org/article/the-strange-silence-bidens-signature-accomplishment).

We’ve been seeing a lot of this type of thing in regard to the Democratic Party itself and the Democrats’ doings over the past decades, and now We’re seeing it in re Biden. Something the Dems want verrrry much continues to elude their grasp and the writer (and the Dems) simply cawn’t think why. It must be some insidious force: racism, genderism, age-ism, ‘men’ – any one or a combination of those hoary and ancient foes of humanity.

In the present instance, ‘The New Republic’ is in on the act. The prudent reader will hold hem-herself at a certain distance from the emotional tug, so carefully shaped a charge. This is ‘The New Republic’, after all, and after its performance under the former boss Martin Peretz (“Marty’ to his many dear friends and colleagues inside the Beltway) no reader should approach the magazine with shields-down, as they say in Starfleet. It would be hard to say whether the mag is still faithful to its neocon allegiance, thus trying to stealth-deliver a boom-boom into the midst of the Democrats’ current urgent longings, or whether the mag is simply trying to reposition itself (sincerely or tactically) some distance away from its former ‘verities’ and pick up some creds with the resurgent if still fractious Democrats. It’s the Beltway, after all, and in Our modern American reality that’s the equivalent of saying “It’s Chinatown, Jake”.

Mr. Cohn points to the 1994 subset of that year’s crime bill that is colloquially known as the Violence Against Women Act – or VAWA, for short. This alone, he doth affide, is Biden’s “signature accomplishment in domestic policy”.

Well, I agree with Mr. Cohn. And I think that the signature should be most carefully examined.

Cohn runs through some of VAWA’s elements and the context behind them, all from the point of view that the whole thing was A Good Idea, nay A Great Idea. This despite the fact that after the thing was enacted and tossed ticking into the common weal, Biden blurted “It may not be a great law but it sends a great message”. And thereby the tale and therein the rub.

Cohn quotes a domestic violence program director. She says “At that time there were no victim rights and [somebody] had to witness an act of violence in order to prosecute it.” He leaves that snippet of hers out there, and then tosses in a second from her: “The criminal justice system lacked information and training on the dynamics of domestic violence and its effects on the family.”

Blessings and thanks to her. So much is there, hidden in plain sight. And let me preface my thoughts with the proviso – for such is Our modern American reality – that I do not hold any brief for assaults, chimpish or catty, nor for making light of the pain of others; not for nothing has this dimension been characterized as “a vale of tears”.

Somehow ‘victim rights’ is bethump't by a pesky obstruction known as the American and Western legal system (designed, as Correctness has it, by ‘men’, and ‘men’ who are both ‘dead’ and ‘white’). And while Correctness would at this point simply close its briefcase with a loud snap and demand What more do we need to know?, I’d like to carry things forward a bit further.

The particular pesky obstruction is that the American and indeed the West’s legal system had long required that a crime be witnessed, as part of the way to establish that the criminal act actually took place. It’s not a bad requirement, when you think about it. It prevents one person simply telling a court that another person ‘did’ something, in the hope that the court will then deploy the awefull majesty of the State against the accused with no further ado. It prevents fabrications whereby accusations can be made without evidence and hugely consequential State actions taken without evidence (can you say “Iraq”?). It prevents what was and still is a popular and actually essential legal practice of dictatorships, be they of the Left or the Right: denunciation.

Denouncing somebody meant that you could walk up to any officer of the law, claim that so-and-so just did this (or maybe did ‘this’ days, weeks, months, years ago) and the State would without further ado arrest that person. This legal gambit is immensely useful and valuable to a dictatorship: it saves the costs of a huge police force; it makes every citizen a potential informer and agent of the State against every other citizen (or, in advanced usage, against specific groups or classes declared as enemies of the State and of the People); it forces every citizen to continuously fear that State power is only as far away as the nearest person. A marvelous, ingenious little tool.

The problem as the Second Wave feminists (2WF) and assorted victimology advocates saw it was that their largest demographic (women ‘in relationships’, formalized or not) were so frequently in positions where ‘things’ could be done to them when there were – almost by definition – no witnesses around. They were right. And the legal system thus did respond to such he said-she said situations verrrrry slowly, if at all. They were right.

This, they loudly declaimed, was because ‘men’ put together the legal system in such a way as to ‘oppress’ women and give themselves consequence-free opportunities to vent their violence upon women in the oft-hidden intimacy of the sex act, and even more often in the ‘castle’ of the private home, wherein government dare not tread. It was mostly just a ‘male’ plot was what the Western system of justice was, and there could be no other explanation for why the system had not chosen to more forcefully involve itself in matters of intimacy, hearth, and castle for all these long centuries of painful ‘oppression’.

Again, as has so often happened in these ‘advocacy’ matters - We are beginning to find out – this was a hugely selective and self-serving explanation of the problem. Generally, Western justice had had the prudence – if not the humility – to realize that there was no way it could operate in the murky waters of adjudicating within the hugely personal and intimate spheres of relationships and sex. It would take ‘God’ or at least some entity with the skills and powers of a ‘god’ to find out what actually happened, and then to demonstrate through evidence to the parties and the public that its adjudication was grounded in sufficient fact so as to retain the vital public credibility that underlay the very judicial power of the State.

And in the American setting, the Founders were also anxiously obsessed with the myriad ways in which the sleepless police power of the government might – like a vampire trying to enter a house – reintroduce itself into the vital personal and intimate social spaces of the citizens, spaces from which it had only so recently been forcibly ejected and then hemmed in by the strictures of the Constitution and the careful praxis of Western jurisprudence.

This, to the mothers of the revolution, was far too much thinking. Action was required forthwith. If the blacks could be liberated from their few centuries of slavery and oppression, must not the huge female demographic be forthwith liberated from its millennia of ‘oppressions’?

This, We must assume, appeared a doable do to Joe Biden, and a good idea as well.

Revolutions don’t ‘do’ patience or complexity (neither do youth, come to think of it, and those are two of the Dems most significant demographics). ‘Women’ found themselves with a problem, ‘white males’ were a lost cause and certainly ‘white blue collar males’ were a dying breed anyway and soon to go the way of the dodo, so just as a political calculation something had to be done.

And so it was. As reason therefor, the ‘damage’ and the ‘pain’ and the outrageousness of the situation were pushed to the fore. That the police and justicial power of the government might not be able to do the job without deforming itself perhaps fatally, that awakening the power-lust of that power by inviting it into the hearth and heart of individual or personal life might bode large and ill consequences for the Republic and the Constitution, that such efforts would probably fail to pass Constitutional muster except by the most blatant legal fictions and maneuverings … none of these aspects stopped Mr. Biden, if he even considered them in the first place.

And within a very short time of that ‘golden moment’ in 1994, even as “battering” was now being expanded to include phone-call silences, the sex-offense mania got started. Neither has yet stopped.

And then along came Iraq: on the basis of an ‘emergency’, and an ‘outrageous’ one, war was undertaken without evidence or with manufactured evidence, no thought was given for consequences except to immaturely imagine that one’s best-case scenario would be the outcome, the military instrument deployed has been deformed to the point of irreparability even as it has failed in all the tasks assigned to it, huge suffering, injury, and death has been inflicted on vast swaths of foreign peoples, and the entire apparatus of the Branches has revealed itself as deeply corroded – even corrupted.

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

But even if – per impossibile – the war in the East had no connection to the domestic corrosions that preceded it, the domestic corrosions themselves must be seen for what consequences they have generated.

And in that regard, even Cohn, at the end of his piece, is forced to circumspection: “Advocates have claimed that VAWA cut down on domestic violence by 25 percent. And while that figure seems suspiciously high – precise estimates are hard to come by – advocates seem to agree universally about VAWA’s importance and Biden’s role in it.”

Oy.

Only 25 percent? You mean to tell Us that after all the lethal consequences that have followed, even if only domestically – to the integrity and operations of the judicial system, to the legitimacy of the law, to the societal bonds of the ‘American’ identity that are essential to holding this Republic, and this People, together – this monstrosity of a law has only reduced the problem by 25 percent? And probably not even that, since Cohn – I’m going to imagine here – is pulling his punches so as to avoid the Incorrectness and ‘insensitivity’ of questioning the veracity of the “advocates” (though they themselves have already proudly admitted that in the service of their causes “facts don’t matter”). So much for advocacy-science and advocacy-journalism.

And the advocates had better stay agreed on VAWA’s importance. If the mania starts to wear off and questions start to be asked, they may find themselves in some of the same sweaty positions currently afflicting members of the Bushist Imperium – civilian and military – whose actions during their heydays may be dragged into the light of day. And if that day comes they too will claim bemusedly that they cawn’t think why things went wrong or why they are being held to account. Cawn’t think why – maybe it was the gods. Or ‘men’ – they’re always doing baaad things.

And will We ever get back to government ‘of the People, by the People, and for the People’ instead of government-by-advocate (which is itself really only another way of saying government-by-lobbyist)?

Cohn concludes that Biden, for his role in VAWA, “deserves a little more attention”. Well, who could deny it? VAWA and Biden both so deserve.

But such attention, like the Mona Lisa’s smile, could yield a lot more than an observer might wish.

Yet such attention is needed. VAWA and its sister the sex-offense mania are two major pillars holding up the structure of the National Nanny State, and that State is as dangerous to the Republic and to a democratic politics as the National Security State ever was.

What decent human being supports violence? But “the panicked, society-wide attempt to expel contingency from American life” (as his fellow TNR writer Leon Wieseltier puts it in the same issue) – whether out of womens’ pain or their fear or their desire to control every contingency – is twisting the fundamental structures of this constitutional Republic even as its Grounding in a mature People is corroded into dust.

I hold no brief for Chimpery. But I am hugely partial to liberty, to this Republic, to this People’s maturity and common weal, and to “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations”. And I don’t think We’re there yet. Not hardly.

"NY TIMES" STILL IMPRESSES

I’ve gone over the 2nd and 3rd Parts of the Goodnough-Davey series of sex-offenders and the policy and science of sex-offenses (Part 1 was discussed in an earlier Post, “NY Times Impresses” yesterday). (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/us/05civil.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

The series is a fine piece of reporting. But one point has to be made before we begin, and it is not the fault of the authors. Reflecting the (hardly accidental) vagueness that exists in this sex-offense stuff, the article mostly uses the term "sex offender" to cover a range of crimes and convicts that is vastly larger than what most of us see on TV news. The term "sex offender" as it is currently deployed in the media and in law and in public discourse covers a range of actions from a stranger-adult abducting, raping, and even killing a child (of the same or opposite sex) through the 'date-rape' type of case and on down through peeing (or technically: being seen to pee) in a public place (which might be behind a tree in a park in the night-time). Readers in matters related to sex-offenses have to continually ensure that they are not automatically equating the term "sex offender" with child-rapist/murderer or serial rapist, nor that they are allowing themselves to imagine a particularly vivid TV-news segment everytime they encounter the term "sex offense". The vast majority of persons classified by the very recent term "sex offender" are at the mid-lower levels of the range that defines the class.

Part 3 is the more significant for me. Part 2 recounts in detail the failure of a for-profit enterprise in – but of course – The Great State of Florida – where some market-driven company was contracted to come in and run the sex-offender civil confinement facility. Such facilities, we recall, are the key to the Supreme Court’s looking-glass fiction that if you lock people up as soon as they’re out of prison in order to get them therapy, then even if there’s no therapy to give, it’s not ‘punishment’ and it’s Constitutionally sweet. Ach ja!

As always in this sex-offense thing, we see the consequences of government’s removing the rules and opening everything up, having already whipped up a popular frenzy that panders to some folks’ lesser and more primitive instincts and subdues their ability to raise questions and think things through. (And does that sound like something connected to the Iraq war run-up?)

The courts’ substantive removal of such legal gate-keeping as Rules of Evidence, the guarantee that out of ‘respect’ and ‘sensitivity’ no claim would be questioned in court or in the media, the selective reporting of such claims as if they were facts and the automatic enrobing of claimants as ‘victims’ without any effort to verify their claims … all of this has been discussed at length in earlier Posts (see any Post with “Sex” in the title).

A “cottage industry” (and kudos to the authors for using the term) of “professionals” grew up around the now tax-fattened purses opened by state and national government to ‘do the science’ that must always accompany and smooth the path of the latest juggernaut. The relevant Advocacy spun its gambit as having been prompted by brilliantly and courageously discovered new-knowledge that had somehow escaped the notice of all the dumb, sleazy, secretive (and man-dominated) generations of humanity’s past umpty-thousand years,; now “professionals” would get to define their market-share by coming up with the “knowledge” about the awfulness of the whole thing and all of those ‘things’ now called “sex offenders”.

Of course, it had to be the correct “knowledge”. If you – say – did a very careful professional study of all the already-accepted studies that had been lying around quietly for years, and simply reported that you had noticed that those studies did not support the “knowledge” about the awfulness of it all, then you could find yourself in the dangerous position of having the national legislature itself pass a Resolution denouncing you. Much like scientists of an earlier era who had the bad luck to notice that Hitler’s Aryan race theory seemed to be a bit off or that Stalin’s theories about almost everything seemed to lack a basis in provable fact. Reichstag, Praesidium, Congress … they all get to seem the same after a while, I guess. At least when it comes to the pursuit of genuine knowledge. And of Truth.

Anyhoo, once the ‘civil confinement’ stuff came up (and it was seen as ‘cutting edge’ rather than as an ominous mimicry of totalitarian praxis), a whole new business opportunity opened up: private sector companies that would come in and ‘run’ these civil confinement facilities, creating jobs for pork-friendly communities while saving the host-state the expense of hiring more costly (and unionized) state employees. This was a refinement (so to speak) of the lucrative private-prison industries gambit that had sprung up a decade before.

Alas. The business plan for the private-prison industries was insufficient for the civil-confinement industry. The former merely had to keep convicts locked up; it didn’t need ‘science’ – all it needed was ‘law’ and it already had that. During the Twelve Years (abetted at every step by the Clinton administration) the goal of actually ‘correcting’ or ‘rehabilitating’ inmates in prisons was tossed out; warehouse the garbage and keep them off the streets – that was the plan. (That ‘plan’ - which was really more of a desire than a real plan – did not plan ahead to the post-confinement phase, when all these gentlemen would complete their sentences and come back to town … another curious similarity to the Iraq war script.)

The poor civil-confinement entrepreneur was handed a truly wormy apple by the Supreme and the lesser Courts: in order to justify the legal fiction that allowed this game in the first place, the confiner would have to come up with at least a reasonable simulacrum of ‘scientific knowledge’ upon which some now or future ‘therapy’ could be based, or at least hopefully asserted.

So to Part 3 where the authors gamely raise the issue of the lack of “scientific” and “professional” grounding, not only for the “civil commitment” gambit but for the whole “sex offense” category itself. They quote some “experts”, and here I have to note something tactical before we get to the content. The two “experts” are from differently-named organizations: the “Justice Research Institute” and “New England Forensic Associates”. The “Justice” entity does not easily show up in Google, but the name of the expert shows up, under another umbrella organization; the “New England” entity shows up, but that expert is also listed on the other expert’s entity. Both seem to be commercial or at least private enterprises, and not associated with any major institution of learning or medicine; both entities and both experts seem to have strong ties to law enforcement and criminal-justice education.

And the town in which the “Justice” entity’s actual organization is supposed to be located – “Accord, MA” – doesn’t exist … the zip code is assigned to a single PO Box number, the PO Box number given as the address of the “Justice” entity. All of which shows to go ya: there are many of these for-profit, free-lance outfits, with a surfeit of “Doctors”, “Directors” and so forth – sorta like think-tanks in Washington; these worthies have “treated” hundreds and thousands of sex-offenders and “forensically evaluated” even more hundreds and thousands; they are all very closely-connected to law enforcement and criminal justice type operations, where they have lectured, taught, advised, and otherwise greatly – if vaguely – surfed the Great Wave.

My thought is that the above oddnesses represent an effort to inflate the 'expert' network while simultaneously hiding its actual (small) size. 'Experts' who at first glance belong to different organizations are actually simply using different business cards that they had printed up; quoted as if they were two laregly separate professionals creates an 'echo' effect that lends to their comments a heavier weight. Offices that aren't actually accessible (perhaps even existent) prevent the curious from seeing just what shoe-box operations are really being run in this thing.

Two significant content-problems plague these heroes. First, sex-offensery (may I?) has “never been regarded as a legitimate and recognized topic for research by psychologists”. We are left to presume – these ‘experts’ no doubt hope – that this is due to the evil and secretive machinations of stodgy and male-dominated bureaucracies that for eons have with-held or suppressed the saving knowledge that would – through the well-remunerated services of these ‘experts’ – save many from much suffering and pain and ensure much ‘healing’ and ‘closure’. Actually, the mainstream science and research community seems to have realized a scientifically invalid monstrosity – this sex-offender ‘diagnosis’ – for the media-created, politically useful cultural artifact that it actually is, and backed away from getting itself mixed up in the whole thing. The American Psychiatric Association, if memory serves, said as much years ago.

This also helps to explain the second problem: “[S]ex offenders present major challenges as research subjects”. Yes, especially since most serious and competent researchers aren’t going to go near this hydra-headed, hydra-hearted Ponzi-scheme with a ten-foot pole, especially since if they have the (very probable) bad luck to find out that reality doesn’t agree with the sex-offense Script as it has become codified, then they and their institutions and colleagues could lose government funding and get a Resolution passed against them by Congress (which up until recently has had lots of time on its hands, since it had let the Unitarium run the country and the war). But that, of course, has left the ‘field’ wide open to the claims, assertions, ruminations and reminiscences of the for-profit, ad-hoc, criminal-justice roadies and freelance ‘experts’.

And while it is in no way suggested that all persons caught up in the toils of the sex-offensery are ‘innocent’, no rational being in his (always ‘his’) right mind would want to be forthcoming to ‘researchers’ who are clearly law-enforcement roadies or victim-oriented or Script/ideology-driven or simply amateurs. And let’s not forget that the chances have always been excellent that anything an already-convicted or a suspected offender says to a ‘researcher’ would very likely wind up as evidence when the research notes found their way to authorities.

The ‘experts’ intimate to us unwashed that the problems are due to the Sex-Offender (as a type) being “secretive”. It is not unreasonable to imagine that any criminal would want to keep quiet about divulging fresh evidence against himself to authorities, and it is granted that the intricate internal dynamics of the human psyche in matters of sex often result in a certain reticence. It is also not unreasonable to note that such a ‘mysterious’ subject would also serve as an ever-ready cover for the lack of any serious (and ‘correct’) results of such ‘research’ as might be conducted.

But the authors – and they really are full of surprises, given the media’s performance in this whole thing to date – reveal on their own that another reason for the paucity of research is that “there are far fewer convicted sex offenders that most other kinds of criminals”. Now this gives one pause. Yes, the Advocacy has pre-positioned an explanation for this eventuality: there are – we must believe – 5 or 10 or ‘X’ times as many cases of ‘molestation’ and ‘abuse’ as are reported to the authorities, but everything related to sex is so ‘secretive’ and ‘mysterious’ that nothing can be proved but this itself only proves that we need more laws and more millions of bucks and more of everything, and for a long time.

But there are plenty of Americans still above-ground who remember the missile-gap and the bomber-gap before that; many more who recall the Gulf of Tonkin and the consequences that went on long after it was admitted to be an artifact; many many more who recall national security estimates of Iraq and its WMD. If We are to People this country nowadays then – at the very least – assertions of vast numbers of anything, even rabbits, must be looked at carefully. Had that been done just five years ago, what might have been prevented for which We and the world must now pay?

Another possible explanation for the paucity of sex-offender research subjects is that there just aren’t that many of them. That even after all the restraints upon untruth had been compromised and the definition of a sex-offense had been expanded to include everything but ‘bad thoughts’ and all the consequences for untruth had been removed and all the media had put everyone on alert … even with all that, there simply aren’t that many sex-offenders – at least, compared to what we have been led to believe: slavering hordes, working individually or in cells, either mindless, sex-addled golems or mysterious and powerful super-perps working alone or in concert, but also your local store-keeper, your local priest, your uncle and your dad, and as always, the ice cream guy. Just about, it is clear, every type of monster in every grade-D 1950s sci-fi or monster flik.

And thus we come, courtesy of this valuable series of reports, to this exquisite and so predictable bureaucratic gambit: since there is so little reliable research, why then few of the civilly-confined can be released. That they were confined on the basis of almost no scientific ‘knowledge’ is irrelevant; that they cannot be released without such scientific ‘knowledge’ is self-evident. Yah. No wonder Bush and Cheney figured We would fall for anything.

The ‘science’ of “risk assessment” is brought back, but not too deeply. None of these ‘experts’ wants to risk revealing the Justice Department’s own sex-offender unit’s report (a matter of public record) that sex-offenders have a lower recidivism rate than almost any other type of convict.

Dr. Eric Janus is quoted; he is the author of a book discussed on this site in the second half of the Post “Prosec Nation”. A law school professor, he tries to square the circle by admitting that we know almost nothing about sex-offenses and -offenders, but that feminism has contributed hugely to what little knowledge we do have, and that if we were just to put more money into research we’d know a lot more someday.

This begins to sound like a Pentagon general currently describing the Iraq war. It refuses to speak the huge and profound question it raises: if we know so little now, then on what reliable and justifiable grounds have we for years now frightened the citizenry, punctured the legal and constitutional walls precisely designed to protect the Republic from excessive intrusion by the police power of the government, un-Truthed our society, and created a new scape-goat class of ‘dangerous other’ upon whom all manner of venom and civic-disablements have been heaped? What – it may be asked – in hell have We gone and done? On what grounds? Or is that too ‘masculine’ a question? Too ‘insensitive’ an approach?

Janus is to be thanked for pointing out that we should be putting our money into ‘research’ and not into ‘punitive’ measures, and that’s nice enough. But it still begs the sturdy 1940's question: is this trip necessary? Is there actually a sufficiently large and identifiable reality that poses a large enough threat that We should so lasciviously endanger the vessel of this Republic to explore and conquer it? If a commanding officer loses an aircraft carrier and its entire crew of five thousand by trying to save ‘just one’ person adrift on the horizon, is that a desirable outcome? Hard questions. Not really telegenic for TV news or for soundbites. But then again, neither were the questions that – if properly deliberated and answered – would have prevented the mistakes of the Iraq misadventure.

We are at the point now where We are repeating mistakes before We have even forgotten the history. Indeed, the mistake was that We created no history of questioning in the first place. This is a peculiarly American type of doom. Weirdly American. We need not surrender to it.

FALCONS ARE PREDATORS

Mike Whitney has a jaw-dropping report over on Atlantic Free Press (“Operation FALCON and the Looming Police State”, (http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1055/81/).

It’s one of those put-things-together pieces that enables us to suddenly climb above the Fog of Daily Events and clearly perceive a pattern threaded in among the boom-buzz.

In this case: since 2005 the government has been ‘coordinating’ local and State as well as federal police agencies, and these armadas of cops have been conducting ‘sweeps’ named Operation Falcon (I and II have already been held).

Whitney leads off his piece with a quotation from Hitler’s justification of the Night of the Long Knives in June, 1934: his sudden round-up of S.A. leaders without warrants and executing them without trial or any judicial process whatsoever. It was an ‘emergency’, Hitler said matter-of-factly, and no good leader can stand by when his people are threatened by such evil. Ja.

Once again, the treacherous Alberto Gonzales – this time assisted by the Director of the US Marshal’s Office, one Ben Reyna – is behind this. The Marshal’s Office is a shrewd pick: a 2nd-tier ‘law enforcement’ agency, but with a national writ: it isn’t as loaded with baggage and claimed-turf as are the FBI, DEA, and others, yet it can operate nationwide to implement the plan.

The plan, actually, is even more classically Hitlerian than the quotation and the round-up context suggests. Whitney is right to focus on the very early 1930s when considering historical precedents to our present situation here; most Americans – those who are still even modestly familiar with the Second World War era at all – are familiar with the period 1939-1945, the span of the War itself in Europe. But it was in the very early 1930s that Hitler began his quick march through German society and government. The task was to subvert and control the government and the people as quickly as possible without at the same time frightening them with the full vision of what he had in store for them and the country.

The overall strategy he called “Gleichschaltung”, the ‘coordination’ of all institutions of the German nation and State so as to operate more ‘efficiently’ with the central (and Nazi) government in Berlin. We often forget that in January 1933 all that Hitler took over was the Chancellorship of a democratic, constitutional Republic, and one whose individual states (Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, and so forth) were still kind of independent of the government in Berlin, and had become especially so since the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918. Hitler’s immediate problem was to bring all of the still-powerful State governments under the control of the national government in Berlin.

Thus universities and schools, the media, the unions, even the churches would be ‘coordinated’ with the government in Berlin and thus with the Nazi plan and vision. So while the States were put under increasing pressure to cede authority to Berlin, they were also undermined by the Nazis’ going directly to the various institutions and in yet another end-run going directly to the people (das Volk) themselves.

But first the police. Before anything else, the police agencies had to be ‘coordinated’ throughout the country. Goring and later Himmler held the post of head of the Prussian police, and authority over the police agencies of the several German States was quickly transferred to them in order to meet the ongoing ‘emergency’ of German existence more efficiently. Who could say no to that?

From Hollywood, we picture Germany in that time as run by the Gestapo in long leather coats and wide-brimmed fedoras, and by the S.S. in their black uniforms and boots. But there weren’t that many of either, really (Hitler never managed to achieve the proportional saturation of police agents to citizens that Stalin and the postwar Communist satellites achieved); much of Hitler’s police work was done by local guys just doing their job, their mothers and wives and kids happy that Pappi wasn’t on the Eastern Front. Just local kids doing their bit. And once the police were ‘coordinated’, then Goebbels went right to work making them ‘heroes’, and would any good German disobey such heroes?

Whitney’s report on the FALCON initiative, therefore, is a huge and terrible piece of news. Taken in conjunction – as Whitney notes – with the Military Commissions Act, the Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Acts, the Warner Defense Authorization Act, and I would add the effort to secure control of all of the U.S. Attorneys (to ‘coordinate’ against troublesome citizens a-n-d to prevent prosecutions of Bushista pals) this FALCON initiative is revealed as the implementation of the actual, hand-on, boots-on-the-ground, operational control of the police throughout the nation – down to the local level. How excited the local and State officers are about all this is a greatly interesting question. And an urgent one. Far earlier than any of our troops who might one day be deployed domestically, the cops may find themselves in the position of being ordered to do things to American citizens … and unlike the troops, cops are naturally set up to work in and among the citizenry, and to arrest folks, and lock them up, and even shoot them if the occasion arises.

The justification of 'efficiency' and the minimization that it's 'just more efficient' and 'just the next logical step' have to be dismissed forthwith. Democracy, and certainly this one, is precisely designed not to be efficient. The checks-and-balances are there precisely to keep a too-great momentum from building up. They serve as baffles in a tanker: to keep the fluid from building up an inertial momentum that enables it to overturn the whole rig. It may be a tad 'inefficient' for the freee flow of the fluid, but that - for the sake of survival - is precisely the point: the fluid, which is the reason the tanker is built, can destroy the tanker if it's not prevented by those 'inefficient' but utterly life-saving baffles. Bush's 'war', and the 'war on crime' that has led to the Krime state, both lubricate - from Right and from Left - the slide toward the utter efficiency (in theory, anyway) of totalitarian and military government. And history shows that by the time such a theory is proven to be a deadly pipedream, death and destruction are almost always triumphant.

It is an open question whether all of this represents an abstract course that any central government would – upon reflection - have to devise and follow in order to perfect its control of a democratically divided nation, or whether the Bush government (very possibly with the help of those eerily Central-European, World-War-Two-besotted neocons) is actually running Hitler’s gameplan here and now. And all this time we’ve been mocking the truly mockable neocons for ‘doing’ Churchill; when all the while they’ve really been channeling Hitler. You can’t leave History alone for a minute, folks! You cain’t never tell where in tarnation that sum-bee’s gonna head off to next! Stonewall Jackson and Hitler – courtesy of the Fundamentalist Southrons and the Hapsburgian neocons.

And don’t look so surprised. Since 1945 we’ve taken a whole bunch of stuff from Hitler: rockets and ballistic missiles, jets, blitzkrieg (now known more cockily as Shock & Awe), the whole concept of Air-Land Warfare, and even the damned shape of the helmets. Before the present sad exigencies occasioned by the problems on our own eastern front, it was the dream of every Army and Marine troop commander to instill into his unit the remarkable spirit and initiative instituted throughout the enlisted, NCO, and junior-officer ranks of the Wehrmacht; not – of course – that you’d ever say it straight out at an American Legion rubber-chicken banquet.

And Whitney blesses us with the news that the neocon American Enterprise Institute is already proposing to Congress that in the event of a ‘major catastrophic emergency’ it be permitted to the Executive to APPOINT persons to Congress. But of course! And we could call it the Kongress-tag, or the Reichskongress, or – why complicate things? – the Reichstag.

After what Congress has supinely and treacherously allowed over the course of the Twelve Years, would we get good odds from any bookie on this possibility?

The FALCON sweeps were announced in media articles that all seemed suspiciously the same, glorifying the program. Even more suspiciously, he reports, most of those articles have now disappeared from Google. And how does anything ever disappear from Google? Have you ever tried to get inaccurate stuff about yourself erased from Google? Google, like the SS and the Gestapo, never ever destroys a file.

And of course, the FALCON ‘emergencies’ were aimed at those handy horribles: sex offenders. Who could argue with swooping down like flocks of predator-birds to sweep up sex-offenders? Soccer moms are down with that; and we might recall in those numerous film clips of Berlin parades after 1934, there were a lot of very proper looking ladies – flowered hats, tasteful gloves and accessories, who had mastered the intricacies of holding a handbag and not exposing one’s underarm (the horror!) while yet delivering an enthusiastic Nazi straight-arm salute. Ever resourceful! Of course, the best solution for the problem is to get oneself and one’s hubby invited to the private reception, where one can dispense with the raucous salute and simply burble one’s name to Power over a flute of champagne. Ach ja. Sehr tastevoll.

In an earlier Post on this site (“When Crime Goes Bad”) it had been proposed that we are now faced with a new and very dangerous phenomenon: the purposeful use of ‘Crime’ to stampede and manipulate The People into accepting the increasing – perhaps defining - police power of the central government. A society thus governed by the (impossible) goal of eliminating ‘Crime’, a society thus wracked by wave after wave of ‘crimes’ and ‘criminals’ whose significance is purely virtual, virtually created overnight, a society thus addled and beset by such an endless cycle of ‘emergencies of Crime’ is a society beset by Krime. And a government that deploys ‘Crime’ primarily for the purposes of extending its police power and controlling the citizenry through fear and anxiety is the National Krime State.

I also think that for the purposes of this Krime State sex-offenders play the role of the homosexuals and the Jews in the early years of the Third Reich: their ‘crimes’, and even their very presence among das Volk – walking among them and participating in society, constituted an ‘emergency’ for which the police power had to be expanded and the police to be allowed to do things that would not under normal circumstances be tolerated.

Who remembers ‘sex offenses’ before 15-20 years ago? Was there ever a time when sexual assaults were legal? Was there ever a time when sex with children was considered a good thing, consensual or otherwise? No. And yet suddenly, in the huge betrayals of the hugely wasted 1990s, there are ‘sex offenders’ and ‘sex offenses’, uttered in the same tones that were once reserved for ‘communists’ and ‘witches’. And – far more ominously, and far more relevant to what we are facing now – the police power of the States and of the central government was expanded to deal with the emergency.

The question has been posed more than once on this site: can it be any surprise that having watched the successful invention and deployment of the ‘sex offender’ in the 1990s (and in Clinton’s Administration), in 2001 the Incumbency felt like it could invent Saddam as a world-threatening dictator and literally create out of whole cloth his imminently deployable weapons of mass destruction? It’s not hard to imagine that on the basis of watching Our sorry performance in the sex-offender mania, then selling pre-emptive war on Saddam would be a slam-dunk and a cake-walk and that the war’s creators in Washington would be greeted as liberators BY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. And so they were. Until they lost. Americans are nothing if not practical, and there’s nothing more practical than losing interest in a losing cause. Especially when the losing cause starts to demonstrate a distinct ability to generate unpleasant consequences.

The sex-offender mania is only just beginning to demonstrate its consequences, the ones that weren’t printed up in the brochure: perversion of our system of laws and of Law itself; perversion of our law enforcement; perversion of scientific, medical, and psychological expertise in the service of extending and sustaining the mania; perversion even of our political structures as Congress found it impossible as well as unpleasant to make any attempt to infuse reason and proportion into such discussion as was allowed; perversion of our Constitutional ethos as police powers and prosecutorial authority were engorged by legislators and law-makers at all levels who were eager to avoid looking like obstructors of the ‘justice’ or being tarred as ‘supporters’ of perversion. The hot ironies!

And how similar then was the sorry, supine, infamous and treacherous truckling to the Unitarium after 2001, when ‘Islamofascist totalitarians’ became the ‘sex offenders’ of American foreign affairs, and it was lazily decidered to just go swoop-and-scoop those raghead pervs and toss their asses in the hoosegow after a nice perp-walk and Register ‘em all. Yah. That works. Maybe make’em wear tee-shirts and have to use colored license-plates. Maybe even wear a colored triangle on their clothing – no, wait, that’s not an Islamic thing … that’s … ach ja.

History and Consequences are coming back. In fact, they’re here. Adapting themselves to current American praxis, they may not stop to knock when they come through the front door.

WHEN CRIME GOES BAD

A previous Post (“Crime and Governance”) had discussed a very valuable book by Jon Simon entitled “Governing Through Crime”.

His thesis is that over the course of the past half-century or so “crime” has gone from being an unavoidable aspect of life that the government – with its monopoly on violence – has a responsibility to address within the framework of Constitutional praxis to being the blazing pretext upon which the police power of the government can continually expand into the lives of citizens.

Concomitantly, the ‘ideal citizen’ now is not the frontiersman or the pioneer or the farmer or the industrial worker but rather the ‘victim of crime’. And for that ‘victim’, and on behalf of that ‘victim’, the police power of the government will wage sleepless – even pre-emptive – war against perps perverse, probable, possible. The media, needless to say, find such ‘wars’ hugely telegenic and tirelessly profitable; far more than oil wells, the public’s capacity to feel fear and anxiety, the public’s capacity to seek vengeance, the public’s dark but abiding dislike of ‘others’, the public’s capacity to feel better when strong actions are taken, never run dry.

The consequences of drinking too deeply too long from such wells are only now becoming clear.

And so, Simon says, ‘crime’ becomes ‘Crime’: not an event or a pattern of acts, perpetrated by identifiable individuals and addressable by competent police action and judiciously formulated social policy – all with the Constitutional framework. Rather: a handy torch that will stampede the citizen-herd into granting (or at least acquiescing-in) the exponentially increasing authority of the government to expand the writ of its police power. Feelings are all: frighten them, outrage them, get them all worked up – just don’t let them slow down to think or to look or to ask questions.

Do whatever it takes to find perpetrators of great evil. If there aren’t enough of them, if they aren’t doing enough awful stuff, hook up with the media and create the appearance that they are.

Do not go near ‘malefactors of great wealth’. Keep it all focused on ‘perpetrators of great evil’. What is vivid and awful is best; that it might be infrequent or even rare is of no consequence. What might have happened is good enough; that it might not have happened or could not have happened is of much less consequence.

On the basis of the ‘emergency’ such awfulness creates, get citizens used to your doing things that not so long ago were considered beyond police or government authority. Keep up the pressure on the citizens through more vivid and sustained and selective focus on the worst possible crime. Don’t let anyone snow you with ‘reason’ or ‘thought’.

Label anyone who questions your authority to go after a perp as a perp himself.

Remind everyone who sees you: you are doing this for the people. Promise them that you will enforce zero-tolerance; heck, tell them you’re going to eradicate evil.

If they question your authority, tell them that you as the police are the moral guardians of society and anyone who questions what you do must be immoral.

The media will help you with all of this.

Extremism in the service of the citizens’ safety is no vice. Moderation is no virtue.

**

The similarity of all this to the German experience of the early-1930s cannot be gainsaid.

In that prior Post I named the type of government that would pursue such a programme as the “National Crime State”, a mode of governance based on warring-against-crime the same way that the National Security State is based on preserving “national security”.

But I don’t think that’s adequate. Grammatically, “Crime” still looks too much like "crime”. And we are all by now conditioned – and not inappropriately – to hiss and claw when we encounter the subject of crime.

I’m going to call it Krime. I define Krime as the use of criminal activity – real or imagined – or victimization by criminal activity – actual or feared – by the government as a pretext for expanding its powers within our society and our culture, by manipulating the acquiescence of the citizens through fear and/or outrage.

I am not thereby plumping for a return to the 1960s’ idea that criminals are simply misunderstood or that crime is simply activity that the police disapprove of or the French idea that crime is so crazy to begin with that a perpetrator is by definition too whacked-out to be held responsible and prosecuted.

But I am asserting that crime must be dealt with through intelligent and effective law enforcement and criminal justice praxis and social policy, after due deliberation by citizens widely and accurately informed by a responsible media, and after some consensus has been reached by the citizenry in its vital Constitutional role as The People.

And I am asserting that in consequence of the foregoing, such enforcement and praxis must conform to the traditional Western principles of Justice enshrined in the Constitution, and that the Integrity of Constitutional Process must take priority over the immediate furtherance of any tactical cause through the implementation of any programme, however well-intentioned or worthwhile.

That being said, I’d say that Krime is the greatest threat this country faces right now.

1st LT. WATADA AND THE ULTIMATE QUESTION

In her article “Watada follows the rules of military dissent” on Truthout (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021207S.shtml) retired Colonel Ann Wright very competently reviews the appropriate manner in which a member of the military can and must dissent, when operating on that dangerous ground whereon one must consider the legality or illegality of an order.

Recent Watada-related Posts on this site have discussed this, and so have the Posts such as “Bishops Bomb” and Warrior Professionals” but Wright actually quotes the military-judge in the case and his bon-mot demands a riff. The defense attorney, Mr. Seitz, was asking Watada’s battalion commander questions about the opinions voiced by retired generals and others. When suddenly, sounds issued from Judge Head’s head to the effect that Seitz had to “move on” because he was getting too close to “the ultimate question”. The ultimate question. The Ultimate Question. As in “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

Military music can’t hold a candle to Burt Bacharach, and military justice can only hold a torch to whatever it comes near … but this ultimate-question business goes to the heart of the matter and it’s about as close as you’ll ever see military justice come to peering into its own abyss. Classically, the military Presider (‘judge’ is utterly misleading in the military context) wants to avoid The Ultimate Question. And well he should. And well that his bosses told him to. Because if there is one thing the military doesn’t like at all it’s Capital Letter Words (e.g. Virtue, Character, Justice, Truth … or, frankly, God). None of those CLWs are welcome unless they are completely subjugated to the military’s own CLW – Victory – and are only in the parade to provide window-dressing. Any hint of independence and the CLWs are out the door, out the window, off the base, out of the Service.

What 1st Lt. Watada did was to accept the reality and the authority of the classic CLWs and allowed them, in his conscience, to judge (precisely the right word in this context) the military’s and the government’s actions. Individual conscience is to governments and militaries what holy water is to vampires. And even modestly accurate and resourceful media coverage is to governments and militaries what sunlight is to a vampire. Thus we watched the vampire brood writhe and finally retreat, unholy smoke coming out of their heads. It was – as Mark Twain would have said – “a heart-warming spectacle”.

It also has to be said: the work of the media in this case went a long way toward nullifying the military’s massive initial advantage: not only did Watada face the absurdly biased dynamics of military justice, but he also faced a public now saturated with the many ladlings of Hollywood gravy poured thickly to mask the rancid meat of the National Crime State. Didja ever watch “JAGS”? That piece of utter and calculated fantasy is no doubt anchored in the minds of many as a true-story picture of what goes on in military justice (“JAGS” is gone now after a long run; the even more unreal “NCIS” still rawks on, packing in the patriotic, sleuthing couch potatoes week after week.)

For those who can recall “Perry Mason” or “The Defenders”, there was once a care in TV-land and in this county to respect attorneys who deployed their skills in the service of persons whose lives were at the mercy of the police power of the State. Hollywood also once took its stand against the police power of the State – and especially against the Jim Crow imperium of the Southrons – with such films as “To Kill A Mockingbird”, with Gregory Peck as the courageous small-town defense lawyer, Atticus Finch.

That changed sometime in the late-‘60s. The National Crime State required just the opposite, and the Southrons - surprise! - who hadn't even finished packing up their whips of righteousness after the collapse of Jim Crow, suddenly found themselves back in 'respectable' business again. Instead of weekly demonstrations of defense counsel saving the innocent accused from the stolid and sometimes corrupt hands of the prosecutors and the police, we started to see courageous and upstanding cops and prosecutors using (or bending) the law to nail verrry guilty – and very vividly guilty and unlikable – perps. Thus the supportive, enabling mythology of the National Crime State. Nowadays, it’s all about scientific crime-investigators, weird and almost non-human perps, and creased-pants cops who look like they wouldn’t know what a donut was if they ran over one while jogging in time to their favorite Army exercise chants before going home to cook dinner for the kids and lead the family in the Pledge of Allegiance after Grace. And a fine spectacle it is, indeed.

But spectacle, like the circuses that went with the bread, is not nutritious enough to nourish those parts of the brain that a Citizen has to rely on. You need much more grown-up food for that serious task. And much of it can only be done by reading. And judicious reading at that.

It’s probably no coincidence that the National Crime State hasn’t done much for actual education (although there is now enough official ‘security’ presence in many schools to police a small city). It will only be necessary, in the not too distant future, for individuals to ‘hear and obey’. No ‘speaking’ required or allowed. No thinking necessary or allowed. I’m not plumping for one set of Hollywood biases over another. I’m more concerned that We are able to distinguish Truth and stand by Truth in its hour of need (which ‘hour’ nowadays is 24-7, I’d say). Where are We going? Where are We allowing things to go? And, ultimately, What are We all about? (Hint: “We The People …”).

DEEP-SIX THE ‘24’ MENTALITY

Jane Mayer has an excellent in-depth piece on the mentality behind the TV show “24” and its creator and driving force, one Joel Surnow (“Whatever It Takes”, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070219fa_fact_mayer). We are all in her debt. She has interviewed this fellow and drawn out the essentials of his ‘position’ and limned clearly his enterprise and what that enterprise sucks along in the vortex of its wake.

It becomes clear that he is presiding over a hugely profitable ‘show’. As with American corporations that found trade with Hitler’s Germany extremely profitable in the 1930s (with their engines, vehicles, communications, oil, raw materials, and production skills they provided him with the ‘blitz’ for his blitzkrieg), Surnow has a hard time conceiving of any serious downside to his enterprise.

Unlike those tough-minded, steel-souled moguls of America’s Industrial Age, however, Surnow needs to ‘feel good’ about what he does. And his efforts to justify himself and his program quickly reveal the level of his delusions and/or his duplicitousness.

It’s not enough that he’s happy that “the military loves our show” and that he’s “sold” the show to the Incumbency – “People in the Administration love the series too … It’s a patriotic show”. Not a whiff of concern as to what it means when you’ve been able to please a clientele the likes of the Incumbency. In today’s tenderly brutal America he has to feel ‘right’ – we might say, although not in the full Fundamentalist sense of ‘getting right with God’ … he’s still a denizen of Hollywood, after all.

How can he show the US government and its agents conducting extralegal and illegal torture week after week? “Isn’t it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow, … that even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?” This is the key logical fallacy: that the present Moment is an extreme situation, and therefore extreme measures are called for. It is the ‘military’ approach: the objective is some sort of tangible Victory here and now – anything more ‘abstract’ can be finessed after you’ve won and you write the history.

Those ‘abstractions’ – as we are now seeing clearly – include Integrity, Truth, and Character and the ensuing challenge, the threat, is posed not only to individual military members and each of Us as Citizens, but also to our culture and to this Republic and all that it has come to represent to the hopes of humankind. Collateral losses, perhaps; acceptable. But the military point of view is short-sighted and operates in a selectively-envisioned, Flattened world, not the many-dimensioned vastnesses that are Life and History. The Neocons and the Fundies, like the Revolutionaries of the Identities who paved the way for them, have brought the proverbial knife to the existential gun-fight. And they have dragged the Republic along with them for the ride.

The worst-case scenario reminds us of the old legal dictum that hard cases make bad law. The rare hard case and such resolution as you may achieve in dealing with it … this is not a wise basis for making Law. But basing laws on ‘hard cases’ – which in our media age means vivid and gory cases – has been part of the gameplan of the several Revolutions of the Identities for decades, later to be co-opted by the National Crime State and most recently by the vision of the Neocon-Fundamentalist Imperial State. The turkey of the Left has come home to roost, now bulked-up and fortified by the Right and deployed in the service of “the dark side”, as the Great Vice aptly calls it.

And too, Surnow is sure, “torture works”. Certainly in his series it works just about every time it is deployed (except against our hero). And it is deployed just about every week, several times. He is certain about this, even when – amazingly – the Dean of West Point, a Brigadier General, comes out to LaLa-land with a cohort of experienced interrogation professionals to point out that torture most surely does not work out in the field, out in the real world, and to plead that Surnow stop giving folks such wrong ideas. Surnow is so “certain” about what he ‘knows’ that he cannot afford the time to meet with them, and deputes some underlings to listen politely and maybe scoop up some script points.

You’d think for a poor little Jewish kid whose father was a carpet salesman, and who considers himself a patriotic “conservative”, that an Army general coming all the way from West Point to visit him in his lavish Valley offices would be occasion to go into full red-carpet mode with plenty of photos and a couple of military knick-knacks for the mantel. But no. His hands go over his ears and he pulls the LaLa equivalent of loudly shouting nyah-nyah so he can’t hear what’s being said: he has a conference call with Roger Ailes of Fox News. Oooooh. Oy.

Those ‘hard cases’ however, are indeed justified – we are to understand. As one of Surnow’s staffers (who “has a law degree”) assures Mayer, the “Doctrine of Necessity” (whatever that may be) “says you can occasionally break the law to prevent greater harm”. But “24” breaks the law regularly and frequently, weekly, and makes it seem like a good idea – indeed, like the only good idea.

There is also the thorny fact that the U.N. Convention Against Torture – ratified by the Senate in 1994 and thus possessing the force of Federal law – clearly specifies that “no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever … may be invoked as a justification of torture.” So 9-11 hasn’t “changed everything”? Sharply, that Convention accounts for all the excuses governments and tyrants have given for torture along the long bloody corridor of Time: war, the threat of war, impending political instability “or any other public emergency” … not much room left for justified torture in there; certainly the post-9-11 situation is covered. The ‘emergency’ of “exceptional circumstances” has undone Republics of far greater duration and experience than ours – Rome’s had been going on for a couple-three centuries, through all manner of profound military disasters, before Julius Caesar discovered an emergency that required his more efficient intervention and in effect invaded his own country, with doughty legions whose troops were loyal to him personally. And he – natch – was ‘doing it for Rome’.

But that type of talk is for a “law-school review article”, as one character puts down another who raises a moral and legal objection to some impending act of torture. It’s amazing how these law-and-order types are so quick to dispense with law: we recall Nixon and Agnew and Mitchell and a host of Reagan-era honchos. But of course, the neocons are not into law-and-order: they are making the case for dispensing with the law in the face of the “Emergency”, an emergency which bids fair to last for decades.

And curiously, we have to smile when we recall that many law-school review articles reflect a very cavalier approach to ‘law’ and have for decades: in the service of ‘sensitivity’ and one or another Revolution’s idea of ‘justice’, saws and axes have been taken to Law in order to “reform” it in the service of whatever the particular agenda desires.

Mayer gives us a fascinating bit of history about this ‘ticking time bomb’ justification of torture, the plot device that impels “24” along like an armored (if not actually ‘runaway’) freight train. This ‘ticking time bomb’ was developed to soothe the sensibilities of French Liberals who had to find some way to make their peace with the torture increasingly necessitated by the unsuccessful struggle against the Algerian Revolt. The French Right had no such problems: the Algerians were an inferior people and France could do what France had to do. But the Liberals’ conscience would need more substantive fodder to appease it: and thus the ‘emergency’ of the ‘ticking time bomb’. Ah well, then, the End does indeed justify the Means.

And the minute it’s over, whenever that eventually might be, why France and her troops will snap right back into being upright, virtuous, decent, and civilized. Yah. No chance that the sustained embrace of the Dark Side will do to a nation, a culture, a people and its troops what the sustained winds of the desert mountains do to bristlecone pine. Nah.

But then, weirdly, the show’s staff assures us that “it’s only TV”. “I think”, intones one LaLa honcho, “that people can differentiate between a television show and reality”. Stop it. Stop it right now. You mean the Incumbency only watches it for its “entertainment value”? You mean Bush doesn’t get up after watching an episode and feel good about what he’s been doing? Hell, even Nixon asked to see “Patton” screened before he invaded Cambodia (or did I dream it?)

Can these guys be honest and serious? Haven’t they seen “Oprah”? Reality TV? Local TV news? For decades Theory and its worshippers have insisted that there is no Truth (see, for example, “Libby No Baddy” on this site). All manner of dubious laws have been passed on that assumption. Generations of college students have been taught that – many of whom are now chronologically adults. And our present young – who by definition are not fully equipped to handle ‘reality’ – are also distracted by the omnipresent, insistent allure of games that are far more ‘interesting’ than actual daily life (and … self). And these LaLa’s think that it’s easy for folks nowadays to distinguish between Fantasy and Reality? Especially among that rich target demographic of 8-to-40?

And yet they try to defend their swag and their status by saying that the show is only “wish fulfillment” for “a fantasy of the American people”. Well, there isn’t as much maturity going around among said people, and most surely not in the cloud-cuckoo-land that is Washington City and the Federal Triangle. Even Rush Limbaugh, staring down his nose (or as many noses as he might see on a bad day) scoffs that “It’s just a television show. Get a grip.” So realistic, all of a sudden, these neocons and their chickenhawk, boffo pundits. Yet they once embraced the realism that they could cakewalk and slam-dunk and that they would be greeted as liberators. Such realism.

And this is after they admit that the show “plays off real anxieties of the American people”. Yes, it does. And very shrewdly. And it’s making a fortune … playing on those anxieties. Whether Americans need their anxieties played off of (sorry) or whether Americans need to face up to actuality (let’s put ‘reality’ up on blocks for a while) is a very good question. Our maturity’s skills – thus our Citizen skills and our People-ing skills – have been under sustained if masked assault by the National Security State, the consumerism amplified by corporate-level and electronic mass advertising, the Kennedy/Boomer infatuation with ‘youth’, the stampeding urgencies of the assorted Revolutions of the Identities, the National Crime State, Fundamentalist emotionalism, and Neocon Imperialistic adventure – for half a century. We need to get back into the maturity-zone, and quickly.

Jack Bauer is “a patriot”. And are we all then to prove our ‘patriotism’ by torturing? Or can we do it on the cheap, by proxy, by approving Jack’s lascivious torturing and the torturing carried on by all the other upstanding civil servants who follow the Unitary Leader-in-Chief? Achieving an identity on the cheap has been one of the awefull temptations to human beings, individually and collectively throughout History.

They insist that they are “conservatives”. Yet what sort of ‘conservative’? They have a disregard for Law; they consider the Constitutional ethos inefficient for the waging of semi-permanent war and they insist we must embark on a course of semi-permanent war; they have embraced the feminist and Fundamentalist rejection of Enlightenment reason and operate instead on the quick-burning fuel of passion; they seek to wield the hugely-swollen government authority as a weapon against the enemies of their choice, foreign and domestic; they have effected a pathetic withering of public Virtue and Character into the frenzied frothing over matters of sex; and in all things, a pervasive and sustained disregard for maturity and Truth. What sort of ‘conservative’ is this?

True ‘professionals’ (another candidate for being put up on blocks), the LaLa’s pooh-pooh the reasoned and urgently pressed remonstrances of the authentic military and interrogation professionals that their weekly offerings are conveying – with mind-paralyzing seductiveness – a hugely inaccurate impression of torture’s effectiveness in the acquisition of usable information. Similar to their ‘conservative’ compatriots in Executive service, the LaLa’s have no patience with any information that does not fit into their agenda (rather similar to certain types of mentally-challenged children).

And also similar to their Executive compatriots, they consider the information to be not- useful for their purposes. To the LaLa’s, careful and rational interrogation is as inconvenient as due process is to the Executive. It is not telegenic; it does not titillate as does the sight of (shrewdly unshown) torture and the visceral (vividly shown) physical consequences; rational interrogation is as quaint – we might say – as the Geneva Conventions and the clanky, inefficient, now unpatriotic insistence on Constitutional requirements.

Real men nowadays, perhaps capable of eating quiche, do not quibble over the “niceties” of due process when there’s manly work to be done. To an audience of boys looking to prove their manhood and fathers who have little enough opportunity to demonstrate virility in these softened times, to an audience of citizens who are becoming – it has to be said – increasingly jaded and ‘hooked on’ the quick-burning if ephemeral stimulation of vividly portrayed passion and violence … to such audience, the repeated and vivid presentation of torture as successful and as without lasting consequence to the torturer is hugely toxic.

Can it be any wonder that consequences did not enter into the minds of any of the Executive’s audiences when the assorted gambits that constitute the Iraq misadventure were announced? Surely it is no surprise that consequences did not enter into the minds of the Executive or of the Executive himself. For among certain circles with access to powers and power greater than the world has ever seen, the cocksureness that is indicative of a dangerous immaturity has been erected into a virtue and a badge of honor as unmistakable as the varsity letter on a football jacket. Or a cheerleader’s jacket . If they give letters for that.

That power and those powers are exercised on Our authority.

And we are indebted to Mayer for unearthing another morsel: Clarence Thomas and his wife dine with Surnow, Limbaugh is there. Sausages and the social calendars of Supreme Court Justices: perhaps it’s better not to see what they’re made of. In consequence, a talkshop is planned at which the boss of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff (he too is doing a heckuvva job) brays that “24” “reflects real life”. Does it really? If so, it reflects the hall-of-mirrors Misch between cause and effect, fiction and actuality, fantasy and … well, what is not fantastic in a world where ‘reality’ can be created by whomever has the best-deployed ‘spin’? Where there is no Truth, what phantasmagoria can not be put forward as reality? When there is no Reason or ability to reason what phantasmagoria cannot be mistaken for reality? For Truth?

Lastly, Surnow plays the disturbing gambit that “conservatives are the new oppressed class” nowadays. This queasy gambit would never have been possible if the assorted Revolutions, abetted by the well-rewarded self-interested media, had not spent decades stifling public discussion and – unintentionally or otherwise – corroding and corrupting the public ability to deliberate matters of the gravest and largest importance to all. Having raised up the ‘victim’ as the undoubtable demander of our attention and our indulgence, the Revolutions thus created a potent fiction that has become all too real. And now that mythic ‘Victim’ has been co-opted by the Right (which as it is presently constituted is no ‘conservatism’ but in a perverse mirror image of the Left is rather a revolution – or several flavors of revolution - itself). The ‘Victim’ is now the front for the National Crime State.

And the National Crime State is now fueling the National Imperial/Fundamentalist State. We have a synergy here, as they say in LaLa Land. We have several massive fires now burning toward each other, and they’re close enough to start the thermal currents that induce a firestorm. “24” is only television. This Republic has to be more to us than that. Or it will be history.

CRIME AND GOVERNANCE

Max Boot has an Op-ed in the “Los Angeles Times” (“Keys to a successful surge”. www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot7feb07,0,4299148,print.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail).

He discusses the cutting-edge in Counterinsurgency Theory. Several points draw his attention: A) The population will be governed in its loyalties by which side demonstrates the most strength and can control violence to its own purposes; B) Insurgents will not be hindered if when arrested by lawful authority they can take advantage of “the many normal safeguards built into the judicial system” to effect their quick release; C) “Clearly, more than any other kind of warfare, counterinsurgency must respect the principle of a single direction. A single boss must direct the operations from beginning until the end”; D) “Control of the population begins obviously with a thorough census. Every inhabitant must be registered and given a foolproof identity card.”

Let us pass over with only a moment’s serious regard the fact that you can’t – apparently – start operating a Democracy if you’re faced with a counterinsurgency. The best you can go for appears to be some form of military-authoritarian boot-camp society. Let us note soberly that having once ensconced a military and a junta-government in such a strong position as this Theory requires, the odds of thus further developing in an orderly fashion into full popular Democracy are somewhere south of zilch.

Let us instead give full and undivided attention to the thought that this very same Counterinsurgency Theory seems to be the operative model for governing here, at home, domestically, in these United States. Whether pressed by the Neocons for the purpose of spackling up the population to serve the needs of empire, or by the Fundamentalistics in order to spackle up the population to serve the needs of a vengeful “Jee-zuzz”, or by assorted Identities to ensure no popular opposition to their various agendas, or by the ‘soccer parents’ to ensure that their children – increasingly carrying on in their parents’ absence – will grow up (as if in compensation) in a risk-free, totally secure ‘world’ … this Counterinsurgency Theory seems to have become the many-rooted, de facto governing model for this Republic.

And that means that We The People are now simply envisioned as “the population”, an easily excitable, not very with-it, herbivorous herd that needs to be controlled and headed in the ‘right’ direction. Among whom there are un-named hordes of wild criminals of various violent proclivities, seeking to do to “us” on a daily basis what was done to the Twin Towers all in the space of a few minutes.

Staring at those disturbing tea-leaves, wondering where all this came from and how it has managed to become the domestic policy of the United States, then pick up the newly-published “Governing Through Crime” by Jonathan Simon (Oxford University Press).

Simon’s thesis is that somewhere in Time our government ceased to simply ‘govern crime’ and sought instead, and with a sustained and mighty effort, to govern THROUGH crime. The ideal ‘citizen’ and the ‘idealized political subject’ of the government then ceased to be ‘the yeoman farmer’ of the early 1800s, the pioneer, the industrial worker of the later 1800s, the immigrant of the early 1900s … but rather became ‘the potential victim of crime’. And the job of the government has thus mutated into serving that idealized citizen-victim by avenging and even preventing the crime that endangers that idealized citizen. This has become the American ‘Script’, the American ‘Story’ for this era.

We are well-advised to consider that if it goes on, it will also be the last-ever American Story, at least insofar as we are a Republic.

The job of the American government is thus not the preservation of rights, nor the protection of pioneers, nor the opening up of ‘new lands on the frontier’, nor the protection of the worker’s rights and the owner’s rights, nor the provision of jobs and great public works nor the guarantee of decent wages and reliable jobs, nor even the provision of decent education (who nowadays can say what should be taught?). Indeed, given the peaking of the American postwar production hegemony in 1969, the government wasn’t going to be able to keep any such promises. And given the Vietnam War it wasn’t going to able to guarantee ever-victorious military undertakings either.

What then was a government to do?

J. Edgar Hoover, of course, had been an early federal-expansionist via the police power of the government. Taking over the predecessor to the FBI just after World War I, he quickly cut his teeth on ‘Reds’, and when that ‘Scare’ was surfed out, he was on to ‘gangsters’: not, curiously, the big mob bosses, but the more vulnerable independent (if showy) entrepreneurs, especially ones who drove automobiles across State lines. Here was a fine new frontier for the Federal police power to colonize, and it did.

After the diversions of World War Two and the occasional Nazi spy, there was another Scare involving the Soviets and Joe McCarthy, and then – amazingly – it was Bobby Kennedy – himself a former prosecutor – who saw ‘crime’ as an excellent vehicle for enhancing his brother’s and his own political service.

After the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and RKF himself, and the profoundly jarring experiences of the urban riots of the later ‘60s, and the overall Anything Goes attitude of the Boomers (in their youth), the Omnibus Safe Streets Act of 1968 becomes, for Simon, the foundation for an American “National Crime State” (my own term) that rivals Gore Vidal’s description of the National Security State that arose after World War 2.

It is the unspoken and rarely seen growth and subsurface efflorescence of this National Crime State – its mentality, its vision of the place of the individual citizen and of the role of the government (Federal and State) and of the prosecutor, and the ‘changes’ (to put it nicely) it required in American law and justicial practice – that Simon isolates as the great and dangerous development underlying the challenges the Republic faces today.
When the Democrats (see the earliest Posts on this site) embraced the assorted Revolutions of the Identities in the later 1960s and afterwards, the (hardly unrelated) spike in ‘crime’ – from ‘pot’ to ‘drugs’ to all sorts of violent acts to all sorts of arguably ‘deviant’ behavior and acts – became a richly potent wedge for the now-waxing Republicans, precisely as the ability of the Federal government to continue the essential New Deal preconditions of constant expanding economic well-being decreased. Nixon was a ‘law and order’ man who was gonna get ‘tough on crime’. He and Agnew and Mitchell …

The Reagan-era, ushered in by his election to the Presidency in 1980 but pre-figured in his tough-on-crime governorship of California in the mid-‘60s, capitalized on the crime issue, focusing on the South American drug-lords (while barely noticing the S&Ls being devoured by assorted well-connected Republican-leaning piranha and sharks). To meet the emergency and the threat posed by those South American drug lords the ‘war on drugs’ was declared, and all manner of jurisprudential damage was done to constitutional structures in an effort to get a clear line of attack on drug-lords, drug-sellers, even drug-users.

Simon doesn’t spend as much time as might be spent on a couple of other monster developments, but he raises them and limns them accurately enough. First, the development throughout the 1970s of womens-liberation issues in such a direction that women’s vulnerability to men was presented as primarily a violent-crime issue, toward the meeting of which ‘emergency’ and the ‘suffering and outrage of the victims’ Federal police power had to be expanded even more than it had been in the civil-rights era of the late 1950s and the whole of the 1960s.

Second, the (distracting) framing of many of the Democrat-connected social changes as ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ issues, abortion quickly passing pot-smoking and ‘free love’ as a powerful trellis upon which oppositional forces could shape themselves, with (Republican) governmental help. To add to this the Fundamentalistic sensibility – Manichaean, intolerant of ambiguity and impatient of dissent or delay in the gratifications of its vision – created (I would say) an intensely powerful cultural fire, one that could be stoked to power large engines indeed.

That the Fundamentalistic sensibility as described is in a sense a mirror-image of the ‘revolutionary’ sensibility of that age’s feminism and the advocacy stance of other emerging ‘Identities’ merely indicates how inter-tangled these powerful societal and cultural forces were beneath the surface appearances of polarization and ‘total oppositeness’. And the governmental march toward enhanced police powers, necessary to re-authorize itself as the Avenger and Crime-Preventer to the American citizen (white, black, male, female, young, old … any victimization would do, so long as it was not economic or ‘class’ related).

He spends some time with one of the most powerful loci of these titanic forces: the sex mania that united ‘parents’ and ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘women’ against (the least numerous forms of) men and the most outrageous, if rare, types of sex-related crime. That this mania is still raging and Mr. Simon still has a scholarly career to keep might explain his less-than-extensive treatment of this still-roaring conflagration, but he does discuss the issue and everything he says is accurate.

And he does give substantive treatment to the sex-offense mania’s immediate predecessor: the domestic violence surge, which resulted in liberty and privacy being interfered with by the government merely on the allegations of an individual – a hole cut in the watertight bulkhead of Constitutional protection which – whatever its good intentions – has created damage that may never properly be mended.

Very interestingly, within this National Crime State he distinguishes between the enhancement of the role of the prosecutor and the weakening of the role of the judge. This, I think, is one of the quiet and almost counter-intuitive developments that has helped militarize (and thus threaten) the classic constitutional praxis of law enforcement and the administration of justice. The judge in the American system, in his/her sentencing power, wields the power of mitigating punishment if – s/he decides – this particular case so warrants. But it is precisely the need of the National Crime State to demonstrate its authority to the citizenry, and strengthen its bond to the (law-abiding) citizenry, by most vividly if not also floridly demonstrating its punitive power and resolve.

To secure that objective, the role of judges has been publicly defamed and – the pols eagerly piling on – statutorily restricted and decreased. Prosecutors, as the efficient avengers of the victim and comrade-in-arms of the sturdy but hard-pressed police, can cut through the ‘crap’ (we think of Max Boot’s counterinsurgency theorems) to secure the objective, the victory, of conviction and maximum imprisonment.

And prison itself – once a method of rehabilitating and ‘correcting’ the inmate – now becomes a technology-saturated ‘warehousing of garbage’ operation, the objective merely being to make the inmate’s life as risk-free (to any of the staff) as possible by isolating him (mostly ‘him’) from human contacts. But there are few supermaxes, although it’s a vision to sweeten the dreams of far too many victims, advocates, media types, pols, and citizens – although not, I think, of so many prison-administration professionals.

And more abstractly but hardly less cogently, he spends some time on the consequences of this National Crime State (again, my term, not his) on American civic and societal and cultural life. The embrace of the illusion that there could ever be anything such as perfect security or total safety or zero-tolerance; the formulation of one’s personal and social identity as a victim – whether passive and ‘devastated’ or enraged and vengeful; the acceptance of the non-humanity and the non-rights of (large) numbers of citizens, whether having been convicted of a crime or not; the approval of the government’s authority to ‘preventively’ incarcerate persons targeted as ‘potential’ criminals (and who isn’t?); the learned and reinforced mistrust of large numbers of other citizens, be they strangers or family members or persons of societal or cultural ‘authority’ … what will be the effects – specific and cumulative – of all these?

I would add, in the light of Max Boot’s musings, that the needs of the National Crime State and of the National Security State and of the National At-War-With-Terrorism State and the National Empire-for-Survival State … they all require sorta the same type of folks for their populations. And that type is not the Citizen, nor in the aggregate The People, nor necessarily educated nor independent nor mature nor spiritually nor morally developed.

The challenges that faced 1st Lt. Watada (see the Post immediately preceding this) are facing Us as The People. Our rendezvous with destiny is here now, calling Our name.

IT ONLY LOOKS LEVEL

The ‘judge’ in the Watada case has declared a mistrial. Scott Galindez and Geoffrey Millard report on Truthout (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020707Z.shtml) that this constitutes “a stunning defeat for military prosecutors”.

Not hardly. Their exuberance – bless them – rests on the assumption that the ‘judge’ and the prosecutors are different agents, not therefore ‘working for the same side’; if that’s accurate then the ‘judge’ has freely and independently made a judgment ‘against’ the prosecutors. Military justice being what it is, however, that scenario is not possible.

I tend to think that the ‘judge’ realized – or was told to realize – that the whole thing was going south and had to be stopped before the court-martial itself began to resemble the Iraq debacle that sparked it.

Things reached this pass partly because the prosecutors pigged things up; but then, in a rigged system (and don’t think the JAGs don’t know it from the get-go) you don’t need brains to be a ‘prosecutor’; you’re a shoo-in to win no matter what. So they tend not only to be not so sharp, but kinda cocky and in-your-face. And most of the time that’s enough to get them along quite nicely, thank you. Let's not forget: the official JAG advertisement that caught their eye in the law school journal was of a set of handcuffs - and that turned them on.

BUT BUT BUT this time the media were there. It should raise the reddest of flags that the military justice system does not work smoothly when independent agents (the media, or some of them anyway) are watching. Like visiting Chinese Communist operas, voices start to wobble and strain when the performers suddenly realize that the audience in this city isn’t applauding lustily at the appointed five-minute intervals like they do in Beijing. Like small-town Southron justice, the judge ain’t so cocky and the deputies don’t chaw when they suddenly realize that an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court is sitting in the back (a plot from a ‘30s or early ‘40s Hollywood flick; it may not work today – the deputies might just keep chawin’ secure in the knowledge that the Court thinks they’re doin’ a heckuvva job). In the Watada matter, it is not the Supreme Court but the Press that is watching with a gimlet eye. The ‘success’ of the military smoke-and-mirrors show precisely requires that it not be viewed with a gimlet eye.

Iraq was also once classed as a smoke-and-mirror where everything would work right if you just kept your gimlet eye closed and everything would be on the level if you just held your head at the right angle. But now ‘reality’ has proven to be alive and well; its rumored death was greatly exaggerated. And it is awesome and awefull in its implacable power. We are become like Japan in the Godzilla movies: we have awakened a monster and pissed it off. Or, in the somber assessment of Admiral Yammamoto after Pearl Harbor: “I fear that all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant … and fill it with a terrible resolve.” Our national existence is going to become the Ur-reality show from hell. The usual viewership will no doubt be unequipped to keep up with it.

So this ‘judge’ simply provided a handy smokescreen behind which the battered Army forces could effect their retreat and stave off catastrophe. He took a closer look at the documents, a noble undertaking which he had until now studiously avoided. And suddenly there is grounds for backing away; a sort of military version of “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off”. Potayto was actually Potahto and thus the mistrial is declared loudly to muffle the clanking of the retreating military machinery.

The defense perhaps figured that this was in the best interests of its client, and that may very well be. The issue may never again be joined, the military may bargain quietly but vigorously now for an ‘out of court settlement’ or the face-saving equivalent thereof. Still, having now determined the defense’s strengths (among which is The Press, and I assign that title with respect) the boyos may simply have retreated to consider how to mount a successful assault against some point other than the defense’s strengths. My guess is that the Army will try to do things quietly. Vampires aren’t known for persisting in public, daylight operations. Indeed, they get to be old and strong precisely by not going the celebrity and publicity route; they let their human roadies do that.

And if I might offer one suggestion: will the esteemed (not ironic and not sarcastic) members of the Fourth Estate puhleeze stop framing military-justice in terms of its similarities to real Constitutional process? To say “the military panel” is “similar to a civilian jury” is to say that Al Capone is ‘the noted Chicago businessman’. The similarity is so insignificant next to the actual differences that your description almost rises to the level of misdirection. A civilian jury (however much it may nowadays have been stampeded by sensational pretrial coverage) is and is designed to be a random gathering of independent citizens with no vested interest in anything except – it is piously to be hoped – the Truth of the particular case at hand. A panel of military officers is the equivalent of getting a bunch of eager-to-be-kept football players together at a rubber-stamp session the coach has called to back-up his dismissal of another player. The two groups – jury and panel – are clearly, it is to be hoped, dissimilar.

TRUTH IS MARCHING

The latest report on the Watada trial is on Truthout (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020707K.shtml) in an article by Bill Simpich and Scott Galindez.

Three points strike me. First, that 1st. Lt. Watada’s comments that “to stop an unjust and illegal war the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it” are characterized by the prosecution (and thus the Army itself) as “disgraceful”. That Watada is actually stating LESS than what this country declared at Nuremberg (i.e. that soldiers MUST refuse to participate in illegal and unjust military orders) escapes the Army’s notice. That had this country chosen to discover Wehrmacht personnel who had chosen to stop fighting because they judged the war to be unjust it might well have given them a ticker-tape parade. (Well, the old ‘America’ would have; the postwar National Security State might well have had them bumped off; the Nazi rocket scientists were quickly absolved and baptized into the cause of democracy, almost as easily as Pastor Haggard – the crystal meth having apparently worn off – has just declared himself to be heterosexual without a doubt; he is, of course, certain that he is “saved”, nor do his colleagues find any reason to disagree.)

Second, that there indeed is a God and that He worketh in mysterious ways – or, as Tolkien noted, the evil that evil entities do oft works to assist the good folk who oppose evil. Having exposed and compromised himself irretrievably by tossing out almost every witness and argument the defense hoped to introduce, the military judge – the marvelously-monnikered Judge Head – was confronted with the bald fact that his own prosecutors then went and opened the door for the key elements of the tossed material to come back into play. They brought in a military ethics expert who, following Watada’s own commanding officer, opined that officers were under no obligation to follow orders that they think are unjust and illegal. Was this military fact news to Judge Head? If so … ? If not …?

Third, that this ethics expert, Dr. Swain, incidentally brought up an old ghost: the ghost of court-martial as an ideal, the professional convening of competent practitioners to discover fact. Swain said “If they [officers who decide an order is illegal] make that determination, they have to be right. If they’re not right, they have to expect to be held accountable.” A court-martial would be convened to determine that fact. This ideal vision is hell-and-gone from the show Judge Head is running (no doubt under orders, unspoken but clear): this is a kabuki exercise the object of which is to declare the defendant guilty and get on with it. For which purpose, ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ (whatever that might be, as Governor Pilate pithily put it) will only get in the way, will only un-simplify and de-clarify what should be an open-and-closed case: What is Truth? We’ll have none of that here, gentlemen! Harrrrrrumph, Harrrrrrumph! Truth is a slam-dunk! Convict him and we will be greeted as liberators! Ach ja!

The current military-justice approach as it has evolved (or devolved) is now the model for civilian justicial praxis throughout the land. In so becoming it has created a monstrous threat to the Republic and to the American ethos and to The People … this is a truth, a reality, that is only just starting to reveal itself. Prosecutors all over the country dream of being able to do it the military way: just reach out and grab somebody and – the amenities having been decently observed – slam-dunk the conviction and get on with it.

Far far far too many folks on the Left and on the Right think that this is a good idea. Woe to the Republic because of them.

But the presence and the active inquiry of the media has opened a path, a Landing Zone. And along that path Truth may march. Glory hallelujah.

WOBBLY ON WATADA

Tomas Tizon has filed a story about the Watada case, "Stand Against Iraq Sends Officer to Trial" (http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020507K.shtml).

We can glide gently by the human-interest elements and - at the very end - focus on the comments of Kathleen Duignan, the "Executive Director" of the National Institue for Military Justice, an organization which is to JAGs what "The Friends of the Italian Opera" was to those dauntless Italo-American businessmen of 1920s' Chicago and New York.

As so often happens in these things, the Watada case is getting 'uncontrolled' media attention, meaning that the NIMJ can't simply call a press conference at its whim to pump its calculated spin into the hungry maws of the media brood. In such situations - as any military commander knows - 'things' can happen that are not always to your advantage: an acute or robust challenge might suddenly present itself not to your strongest force, but rather to one of your garrison or window-dressing units.

Thus it appears that Executive Director Duignan must have been minding the shop when the media called for a comment. She clearly tried to sound nice as she faithfully trumpeted the military line (which is always a defensible fallback position when you'd rather not step into the squishy stuff): "The idea is when you put on a uniform, you put your personal opinions to the side", quotha. This must be the general line of defense that she saw sketched on the wall maps.

But of course, as can happen in this sort of thing, she said more than she would ever have wanted to. She faithfully parroted the military line, but it is precisely the military line that gives its game away.

And a nasty, vicious, duplicitous game it is: One is not supposed to act upon one own's opinions as to one's orders. Fair enough, indeed. Do I really feel like I should drive this tank from the north end of the marshaling yard to the south end? It's not a question a soldier can entertain.

But US military law and our own stated Nuremberg principles and international law do indeed hold invididual soldiers responsible for carrying out illegal orders. (And let's not even get started on 'immoral' ones.) So now: Do I really feel like I should drive this tank over that bunch of civilians standing at the far end of their own back yard? becomes a much more cogent and complicated question indeed.

And here is where the military and its 'justice' system betray their actual operating principles: if you as a soldier are responsible for ensuring that you do not carry out an illegal order, then you as a soldier are going to have to form some very clear opinion as to whether a particular order is indeed - as best as you can make out - 'illegal'. But now when 1st Lt. Watada does precisely this type of formulation in the matter of being ordered to a war that nobody except the two Chief Inmates any longer denies was started with lies and sustained through the treacherous deployment of even more lies, the military piously but grandly seeks to whack him, claiming that 'soldiers don't get to choose'.

Heads the military wins, tails the soldier loses. This is the fundamental operating principle of the military justice system, it always has been, it always will be, there is no escaping it, and all the JAG and JAG-roadie efforts to spice up that core rotteness with complex and arcane confections is simply adding a further layer of rot.

It's been said here before and it is now said here again: covering a military-justice story is like approaching a coven of vampires with holy water. They'll be nice until they can either get you to go away or they can bite you. Meanwhile, whomever it was that they were gang-biting will still remain behind them, almost out of sight. Like Roddy McDowall going up the stairs in the last act of "Fright Night", you have to make yourself take each step. But you have faith in Truth, and you don't trust toothy night-creatures, no matter how wide their smile.

WATADA NADA

Over on Truthout (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/013007J.shtml) there’s an 01/29 AP piece about the Watada trial. The government is dropping two counts of conduct unbecoming. Such a generous and benevolent sovereign, our military. As Ike would say: Yah.

The military justice system has been dealt with elsewhere on this site (“Bishops Bomb”, “Military Just-As”, “Military Justice is No Music” – Parts 1 & 2, “Warrior Professionals”). And the Watada case has been discussed (“Military-isms”).

As indicated in the latter Post, these General Article charges are filler, put in there to beef up the potential jail time and induce any soul foolhardy enough to want to stand up and defend himself to think again and just plead guilty. Siberia being a given, why piss Stalin off by taking up the court’s time? Say you’re sorry, get trucked back to the Lubyanka, and get ready for your long journey. Meals are provided. Be hapski. Your military defender may visit you, perhaps bring a chocolate bar for after your supper. They’ve been known to do that, you know. A glorious system, is it not? Now march.

The reporters are off the hook – they won’t have to show up and testify. But they will ‘stipulate to’ the testimony they would have provided if they had been made to come. Lt. Watada’s civilian defense counsel tries to put a brave face on it: the journalists are “shielded from the heavy hand of the government”. I don’t see how. Yes, the reporters are spared (and the media deprived of) the photogenic footage of reporters forced to testify in a military ‘court’ (yes – the quotes … they are not mean to ‘scare’ but to indicate irony, even sarcasm). Before a military ‘judge’ (ditto). (Then again, the way things are going in the country just now, maybe we should be ‘scared’, certainly more so than most of us right now.)

The reporters are off the hook. But we must hope and pray that they don’t consider themselves off the case. This war, this ‘justice’ system, the Pentagoon bosses who so cynically run it, the oily roadies who spin it … all need to have some serious tire kicked.

But the military is off the hook, too. It doesn’t have to face the prospect of that footage either. And just how much do you want to piss off the media? One of the great rings of defense around the fortress prison of military justice is precisely the media’s fawning or unthinking acceptance of this thing as a legitimate and credible system of administering honest justice. And if they go and piss off the press, then such telegenic flacks and roadies as the National Institute for Military Justice will lose the traction that their smarmy, avuncular lecture-commentary is meant to provide: Ah yes, the wonders of our system – here, let me show you just a bit – but, alas, so much is classified, or beyond the civilian mind – well, just trust us, it works fine, balancing the needs of the government and the rights of the accused to a nicety. Yah.

“They’ve already determined that he’s guilty”, reports the defense counsel. Well, of course. You don’t go and start a military operation if you haven’t yet identified and isolated the ‘enemy’ whose undoing is your tactical objective. (They tried that in the War on Terror, and look what’s happened.) These military justice ‘trials’ are nothing of the sort, and the word ‘trial’ shouldn’t be used because it confuses American and Western jurisprudence with the military operation that courtsmartial fundamentally are. A court-martial is the JAG equivalent of shock&awe, only unlike the actual field operations, the JAG version is guaranteed – think ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. But they get pay and resume notches and sometimes medals for this stuff. And so do the ‘judges’, who are also JAGs. It’s a marvelously constructed system. “What’s the Constitution among friends?” a Tammany-era pol once asked. Even more so, what’s the Constitution among officers and gentlemen?

And they are all honorable men. As the Army spokesman says: Watada’s failure to deploy “is something the military takes very seriously”. Yah. It’s dizzying to try to follow just what things the military bosses take seriously these days. Soon-to-retire generals and admirals buying weapons systems from corporate honchos who then hire them for big bucks as soon as they take off the medal-suit for the last time? Billions of budgeted dollars that cannot be accounted for by the same? Refusal to stand up, put your bemedalled career on the line and speak military truth to power when your troops’ lives are at stake? Nope. Not so serious. But a junior-officer who takes his stand against a war that was started with lies and has been continued with more lies and whose loss is being veiled by even more lies … well now THAT is serious. Harrrrrumph! Yah.

The Army also wants Watada to do at least 18 months in prison. Anything over 12 months would – the law being what it is just now – make him a ‘felon’. Imagine: serial killers, bank robbers, car-jackers, some – at least – of the ubiquitous sex offenders, murderers … and 1st Lt. Watada. The most honorable generals have decreed. Yah.

A damned shame that the ghosts of Arlington can’t speak. But then again, the Universe being what it is, just maybe they will, in their way. Listen for them. They know. And they speak Truth. And We need to hear that.