Right-Wingers Have Reasons to Worry About Trying KSM

One of my favorite books is by a conservative. Every American should read Stephen L. Carter’s 1996 primer on ethics, “Integrity.” Carter writes that integrity requires doing the right thing, “even at personal cost.” In the world of politics, the example of Al Gore’s father comes to my mind: a senator from Tennessee, Al Gore, Sr. openly opposed segregation and the Vietnam War even though he knew his outspokenness would cause him to lose his 1970 reelection campaign.

Faced with the choice between integrity and expediency, Republicans are taking the low road. Principles? Only when they’re convenient. Never mind the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions or common decency—on the question of what to do about POWs rotting away at Guantánamo Bay concentration camp, right-wingers’ concerns are purely practical.

We are talking, of course, about Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in Manhattan, within walking distance of the World Trade Center Memorial Hole, which marks America’s resilience.

Note: I don’t refer to Mohammed as “9/11 mastermind.” Unlike most Americans, I don’t believe that something is true just because the government says it. Until a jury and the media examine the facts, we have no idea whether Mohammed is guilty of anything. As far as we know, he could be nothing more than a poster child for Pakistani bed-head. Moreover, my distrust multiplies in direct proportion to the number times a suspect has been waterboarded (in Mohammed’s case, at least 183).

Anyway, it’s interesting to watch “law and order” conservatives like Rudy Giuliani talk away basic legal rights like habeas corpus. “[Mohammad] should be tried in a military tribunal,” Giuliani says, “He is a war criminal. This is an act of war.” No, Mr. Mayor, he’s not. And this is no war. Had an actual war been declared, a nation-state would have attacked us. 9/11 was a criminal act, and a terrible one: mass murder, air piracy and property damage. Until Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is tried and convicted in a court of law, however he is an alleged criminal, innocent until proven guilty. Where’d this Giuliani guy go to law school, Wal-Mart?

Among Giuliani’s other worries: “security concerns.” “Just wait and see how much New York City spends on this in order to protect him,” he warns. While we’re at it, think of how much money the government could save by eliminating the criminal justice system! Why not just let the cops shoot anyone they want?

The attorney general’s decision should be commended. He was correct to act independently, without consulting with Obama. It is a long overdue course correction for a government still careening down the road to moral illegitimacy. Still, Holder’s pseudo-conservative critics—wouldn’t a real conservative favor strict adherence to the law, practical concerns like the cost of security be damned?—have good reasons to worry about how the trial will unfold, if and when it actually comes to pass.

For example, Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan fears accused terrorists will exploit their trials. He worries they will “disrupt it and make it a circus and allow them to use it as a platform to push their ideology.” Well, yeah. In political proceedings, the defendants always try to put the state on trial. Unfortunately, the military, CIA and Bush Administration made that outcome inevitable by refusing to treat 9/11 as a crime. Mohammed and his comrades ought to have been turned over to The Hague, where the dull murmur of transcription machines has a way of sucking all the drama out of the most political of trials.

John “Torture Memo” Yoo frets in The Wall Street Journal that “KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.” Though self-serving, it’s an excellent point. The whole sordid story of America’s post-9/11 torture program will be internationally televised.

At Mohammed’s trial the whole world will hear how U.S. soldiers and intelligence agents stabbed, suffocated and sodomized detainees, including kids, most of whom were later determined to be innocent and set free. So much for the Obama effect; traveling overseas is going to suck for Americans from now on.

The government could have avoided this unpleasantness by, oh, not torturing. And, when we citizens heard and read and watched reports that our government was torturing, we could have racked up some integrity points by taking to the streets by the million to demand that it stop. But we had football and “Battlestar Galactica” and reality shows to watch instead. Oh, well.

Now it’s time for America to take its lumps. Even if that means putting KSM on a plane back to Pakistan and watching him arriving home to a hero’s welcome, that’s too bad. Release is how a judge and jury typically treats a man who has been tortured while awaiting custody.

What does Stephen L. Carter think about this? I don’t know, but I’d like to think that (as a conservative) he would agree with me. Integrity requires one to accept responsibility for one’s actions.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the 2002 graphic travelogue “To Afghanistan and Back.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Fort Hood Shootings a Shocker…Why Not U.S. War Crimes?

American lives are worth a lot. So when Americans get killed, it’s a big story. There are lots of editorials. Congressmen call for investigations. We want to find out what happened, why it happened, and how to make sure it never happens again.

The lives of foreigners, on the other hand, are pretty much worthless. Even when they die because Americans killed them, news accounts marking their deaths are short, sweet, and short-lived. Congressional investigations? No way. To the contrary! If anyone is inconsiderate enough to mention the killings of people overseas in a public forum, they get shouted down or simply ignored.

The massacre of 13 soldiers at an Army post in Texas earlier this week places this dichotomy in sharp relief.

The FBI is already helping Army investigators. In addition, Senator Joe Lieberman has announced that his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will launch a full investigation into “every angle” of the shooting, including the motives of the suspect and whether or not government eavesdroppers could have prevented it by notifying Army officials of his contacts with a radical Muslim cleric. Over in the House, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat, has summoned national intelligence director Dennis Blair to answer questions about Fort Hood before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

But wait—there’s more. “Other committees may also launch investigations into how the Army missed warning signs about the accused,” reports The Politico.

All sorts of hands are being wrung.

Major Hasan, an army psychiatrist, ministered to victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome who told him terrible stories about combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Should someone have helped him cope too?

Ordered to deploy to the war zone, he asked not to go—and was refused. Should the Army be more flexible?

Is it reasonable to ask a religious Muslim to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq, wars where he would be asked to kill his coreligionists?

Then there are the phone taps. “U.S. military officials said intelligence agencies intercepted communications between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a former imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington suburb,” reported CNN. “Al-Awlaki, who left the United States in 2002 and is believed to be living in Yemen, was the subject of several federal investigations dating back to the late 1990s, but was never charged.” As jihadis do at the start of an attack, Hasan reportedly cried “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire. Shouldn’t someone have noticed that the nice shrink with the dopey smile had become a radical Islamist?

The shock, grief and soul-searching are all reasonable reactions to a brutal and tragic event. But it’s not hard to imagine how it looks to the outside world. While the media and public obsess over the deaths of 13 fellow Americans, they ignore the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

The American military has killed roughly two million people in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Those attacks were illegal—no declaration of war, no UN mandate—and are largely recognized as such by the American public. Many of the victims were killed with chemical and radioactive weapons, and some while under torture. In other words, these are crimes—some of the biggest mass murders in human history.

So where are the Congressional investigations? Don’t we want to find out what happened, how it happened, and make sure it never happens again? Apparently not.

President Obama has chosen to “move forward” instead. No one—not George W. Bush, nor his advisers, nor the military officers who carried out his illegal orders, is being held accountable.

There are no angry editorials. The illegal wars, instead of being brought to an end, are being ramped up. The crimes—yes, including the torture—continues. But it’s OK—as long as it doesn’t happen here in the United States. It’s OK to rain death on Pakistanis using drone planes…gotta spare those precious American lives!

Mass murder is shocking when the victims are Americans; it’s doubly shocking when it happens in America.

Thirteen soldiers die in Texas and it’s all we talk about. Two million die in Afghanistan and Iraq and we don’t notice and we don’t even want to hear about it. Only 12 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Afghanistan on a map.

The punk band T.S.O.L. wrote the soundtrack to this attitude a quarter-century ago: “We live in the American zone/Free of fear in our American home/Swimming pool and digital phone.”

Still wondering why they hate us?

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the 2002 graphic travelogue “To Afghanistan and Back.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Failure on H1N1 Highlights a Bigger Crisis

America’s scandalous lame (non-)response to the swine flu pandemic isn’t a big deal. Not compared to, say, the melting of the polar ice cap. It isn’t torture. Or war. It pales next to giving hundreds of billions of dollars to wealthy bankers and nothing to homeowners facing foreclosure. But it sure is interesting.

First the Obama Administration committed the classic mistake of governance: they overpromised and underdelivered, failing to ensure Americans had enough H1N1 vaccine. Summertime estimates of 120 million doses fell to 40 million and then 28 million. In fairness to Obama Administration officials, vaccine production is an inherently unpredictable business; the swine flu antigen simply grew slower than that of other flus.

But here’s what’s weird: Even after the feds learned there wouldn’t be enough vaccine to go around, they urged everyone to demand it from their doctors. Lines reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1970s sprang up outside clinics.

At many locations, hundreds of people were turned away. Hint to Secretary Sebelius: they won’t go back.

More telling were the White House’s inability to see the crisis coming coupled with its knee-jerk reliance on free markets. With the air out of the capitalist balloon since September 2008, why on earth would Obama & Co. trust private pharmaceutical corporations to do the job? A pandemic calls for a sweeping response such as temporary or permanent nationalization of drug companies.

Moreover, the decision to outsource most of the production overseas baffles the mind. Four out of five of the vaccine makers hired by the U.S. government were in other countries. CSL Ltd., one of the four and based in Australia, met its own country’s needs first.

Now there’s an idea.

Also indicative of America’s “can’t do” spirit in the Age of Obama is the government’s unwillingness to impose common sense on the cheapest of the cheap: employers.

A hundred years after the rise of unionism, nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers get no paid sick days. Add that to employees at other firms who have already used up their meager allotment, and those who are afraid to take a day off lest they get targeted for layoffs, and you’ve got trouble: tens of millions of people mixing it up at work, many of them carrying a highly contagious, potentially lethal virus.

Nina G. Stillman, a lawyer with a New York law firm that advises companies on sick-leave policy, told The New York Times: “Employers who do not offer sick days are not prepared to offer them now, and they recognize that this may result in not achieving what they say they would like, which is that people who are sick stay home.”

Translation: employers don’t give a damn about health of the country. Well, maybe a damn. Not a nickel.

One of the nation’s largest employers, actually threatens to fire workers who get sick. Reports the Times: “At Wal-Mart, when employees miss one or more days because of illness or other reasons, they generally get a demerit point. Once employees obtain four points over a six-month period, they begin receiving warnings that can lead to dismissal.”

Note to firing squads of the future: see above paragraph.

A country with a strong, well-run government would order employers to give all employees with flu-like symptoms paid time off from work. But Barack Obama, in thrall to and in the pockets of big business, hasn’t lifted a finger to spare us from misery—and deaths—that are totally unnecessary.

One of the most reliable indicators of a country’s political and social viability is its ability to respond to an emergency. Are leaders able to react quickly and forcefully, like JFK during the Cuban missile crisis? Or do they get caught flat-footed? Is the government dysfunctional, with each branch waiting for some other agency to act?

The United States has faced four major challenges in this new century: the stolen election of 2000, 9/11, Katrina, and the Depression that began a little over one year ago. Each crisis metastasized within a different medium (politics, military, domestic governance, economy), each essential to maintaining a successful nation-state. Tellingly, the U.S. failed each test.

Will the H1N1 pandemic rises to those events’ status as signal catastrophes? I don’t know. But it highlights what many of us have suspected for years: the U.S. has entered an irreversible decline.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the upcoming graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the 2002 graphic travelogue “To Afghanistan and Back.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

President Maintains “Right” to Kill American Citizens

Shortly after 9/11, George W. Bush secretly signed two executive orders. Both violated basic constitutional protections as well as U.S. obligations under international treaties, yet both carried the force of law.

They still do.

The first order grants the president (and other officials, including the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security and presumably certain postal clerks) the right to declare anyone—including an American citizen—an “unlawful enemy combatant.” A person so declared has no redress, no way to appeal, no ability to challenge that designation. Once a person has been named an enemy combatant, according to the Bush Administration—and now to the Obama Administration—he has no rights. He can be held without charges forever, tortured, you name it—well, actually, the president or the secretary of defense names it.

In the second covert executive order, Bush authorized the CIA to target and assassinate said “enemy combatants”—again, including American citizens.

These two documents first came into play on November 3, 2002, when a CIA-operated Predator drone plane violating Yemeni airspace fired a Hellfire missile at a car containing Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, supposedly Al Qaeda’s #1 man in Yemen at the time.

U.S. officials didn’t know that an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, was riding along. (You know what they say about hitchhiking.) “The Bush administration said the killing of an American in this fashion was legal…this is legal because the president and his lawyers say so—it’s not much more complicated than that,” CBS News reported at the time. “I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here,” said Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, after the CIA assassinations. “He’s well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority.”

It’s right there in the Constitution between the right to tax and the repeal of Prohibition.

Anyway, Congress tried to clarify matters in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, part of which—the section that eliminated the writ of habeas corpus—got struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. But the rest of the MCA remains in force, including a passage that defines an enemy combatant as anyone who provides “material support” to the “enemy.” And who is the enemy? The enemy is anyone the president says it/he/she/they is.

Again, there is no distinction between foreigners and U.S. citizens.

Jose Padilla, the so-called would-be “dirty bomber” held in a Navy brig since 2002, was tried and convicted of such “material support” charges in 2007. (The government couldn’t prosecute Padilla for their original dirty bomb charges because they had tortured him so severely that he had been reduced to mental mush.)

Now that times have supposedly changed, it’s time to ask: why hasn’t President Obama abrogated Bush’s controversial executive orders? If Obama truly seeks a break with the lawlessness of the prior administration, what better way to enact it?

Simply put, no one man—not even a nice, articulate, charismatic one—ought to claim the right to suspend a person’s constitutional rights. Not in America. Certainly no one man—not even a young, handsome, likeable one—should be able to have anyone he wants whacked. Even in dictatorships, the right of life and death is reserved for judges and juries operating under a system purportedly designed to support impartiality and a search for the truth.

But that’s not the case here in the United States. In 2002 Scott Silliman, director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University asked: “Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in Washington, D.C., under [the Bush] theory? The answer is yes, you could.”

Nothing much has changed since then. Obama has eliminated the use of the phrase “enemy combatant,” but The New York Times reported that the change is merely meant to “symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies.” The words may have changed, but Obama attorney general Eric Holder’s definition of who can and cannot be held, said the Times, is “not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”

These days, Obama has ramped up the assassination of political opponents of the U.S. and the U.S.-aligned authoritarian regime in Pakistan, deploying more Predator drone plane attacks than Bush. But that’s just for now. Obama could still personally order a government agency to murder you.

Which is weird. But not nearly as weird as the fact that you probably don’t care enough to do something about it.

(Ted Rall is the author of “To Afghanistan and Back,” the first book about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Among its chapters is one titled “How We Lost the Afghan War.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Remote Attacks Inflame Afghan Anti-Americanism

The killing of Afghan civilians, usually caused by inadvertent American and NATO airstrikes, has become the most sensitive issue between the Afghans and their Western guests.” So reports The New York Times Magazine in the latest installment of its ongoing “There’s a new general in charge and he’s cool and maybe he can win the war” series. This decade’s war: Afghanistan. week’s star: General Stanley McChrystal. Alas, poor Petraeus, we hardly knew ye.

As a World War II buff, I mourn the fact that the Magazine wasn’t around in 1943. Imagine the over-the-top insensitivity: “The killing of Jews, usually caused by inadvertent German and Axis deportations, has become the most sensitive issue between the French and their Teutonic guests.”

“Inadvertant” airstikes?

“Guests”?

Many of the botched airstrikes have been carried out by Predator drone planes remote-controlled by CIA and USAF personnel watching computer screens thousands of miles away. One click of a mouse and a Hellfire missile bearing a 20-pound blast fragmentation warhead zooms towards its target. Despite numerous killings of civilians, drones are popular with the military because they keep soldiers out of harm’s way.

Like a lot ideas, it only seems like a good one before you think about it. America’s obsession with protecting its own people is at the heart of Afghans’ contempt for the U.S. occupation. And Afghan resentment is the biggest reason the war effort has been doomed from the start.

To Afghans on the ground, drones symbolize American callousness and project a smug sense of superiority. Because they protect us at the Afghans’ expense. New York Times reporter David Rhode, the journalist kidnapped by neo-Taliban militants and held in Afghanistan and Pakistan for nine months, describes their “terrifying presence”:

“Remotely piloted, propeller-driven airplanes, they could easily be heard as they circled overhead for hours. To the naked eye, they were small dots in the sky. But their missiles had a range of several miles. We knew we could be immolated without warning.”

To the dead, death is death—how you die doesn’t matter in the end. To the living, it’s all that matters.

Would you rather lose the love of your life to a drunk driver? Or because she rushed into a burning building to save a child? Afghanistan is a martial society. As an Afghan, how would you rather lose your son—in the heat of battle or to some alien contraption buzzing around in response to the movement of a joystick in Virginia?

Unlike his predecessors McChrystal knows that every “inadvertent airstrike” prompts a certain number of Afghans to join or support Afghan resistance forces. “Gentlemen,” he tells a morning briefing of NATO generals, “we need to understand the implications of what we are doing. Airpower contains the seeds of our own destruction. A guy with a long-barrel rifle runs into a compound, and we drop a 500-pound bomb on it? If we lose airpower irresponsibly, we can lose this fight.” Later that day, the Times reporter who recorded that statement wrote, McChrystal said he planned on “banning bombs and missiles in populated areas unless his men were in danger of being overrun.”

An improvement, no doubt. But in Afghanistan and everywhere else, all use of airpower is irresponsible. Whether piloting a B-52 at 35,000 feet or wiggling a joystick 8,000 miles away, fighting a war at a distance means chucking ordnance willy-nilly into people and situations you can’t see or know anything about.

And those people will hate you for it.

In the short term, remote drone warfare offers the tantalizing prospect of killing your enemies without risking your own forces. “In Pakistan, a CIA-led program using Predator drones to hunt down and kill leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has proven remarkably successful, even if controversial within Pakistan itself,” reports the Times. “To date, American officials say, they have killed 11 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, without having to launch large-scale military operations across the border.”

In the long term, however, the geopolitical risks eclipse any short-term gains. Note the “even if.” Drone plane attacks brought Pakistani anti-Americanism to a boil and led to the collapse of the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally. Meanwhile, like most cell-based guerrilla organizations, Al Qaeda’s structure ensures that no man is indispensable. It simply appointed new members to the positions vacated by the Hellfire victims.

If the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is destined to fail, it would be nice to see it end with more dignity. In an ideal world, President Obama would sign legislation outlawing the manufacture, deployment or use of Predator and similar drone bomber technology, and urge other nations to do the same. In a somewhat decent world, he would withdraw rather than send more troops to Afghanistan. And in the crappy world we call home, the least we can do is kill Afghans with flesh-and-blood soldiers rather than drone planes.

(Ted Rall is the author of “To Afghanistan and Back,” the first book about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Among its chapters is one titled “How We Lost the Afghan War.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL