NYTimes Opinion

 The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us

By FRANK RICH

Published: October 14, 2007

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Has The Bell Tolled?

Is this the first blow to a unified Republican Party? Is a split coming down the line, and if it is, will the Democrats have a similar fracture?

The Text:

REPORTS have surfaced in the press about a meeting that occurred last Saturday in Salt Lake City involving more than 50 pro-family leaders. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss our response if both the Democratic and Republican Parties nominate standard-bearers who are supportive of abortion. Although I was neither the convener nor the moderator of the meeting, I’d like to offer several brief clarifications about its outcome and implications.

After two hours of deliberation, we voted on a resolution that can be summarized as follows: If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate. Those agreeing with the proposition were invited to stand. The result was almost unanimous.

The other issue discussed at length concerned the advisability of creating a third party if Democrats and Republicans do indeed abandon the sanctity of human life and other traditional family values. Though there was some support for the proposal, no consensus emerged.

Speaking personally, and not for the organization I represent or the other leaders gathered in Salt Lake City, I firmly believe that the selection of a president should begin with a recommitment to traditional moral values and beliefs. Those include the sanctity of human life, the institution of marriage, and other inviolable pro-family principles. Only after that determination is made can the acceptability of a nominee be assessed.

The other approach, which I find problematic, is to choose a candidate according to the likelihood of electoral success or failure. Polls don’t measure right and wrong; voting according to the possibility of winning or losing can lead directly to the compromise of one’s principles. In the present political climate, it could result in the abandonment of cherished beliefs that conservative Christians have promoted and defended for decades. Winning the presidential election is vitally important, but not at the expense of what we hold most dear.

One other clarification is germane, even though unrelated to the meeting in Salt Lake City. The secular news media has been reporting in recent months that the conservative Christian movement is hopelessly fractured and internally antagonistic. The Los Angeles Times reported on Monday, for example, that supporters of traditional family values are rapidly “splintering.” That is not true. The near unanimity in Salt Lake City is evidence of much greater harmony than supposed. Admittedly, differences of opinion exist among us about our choices for president.

That divergence is entirely reasonable, now just over a year before the national election. It is hardly indicative of a “splintering” of old alliances. If the major political parties decide to abandon conservative principles, the cohesion of pro-family advocates will be all too apparent in 2008.

James C. Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family Action, is the author of “Bringing Up Boys: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Men.”

Canada keeps looking better…

Israel and Censorship at Harvard

The Article: Israel and Censorship at Harvard by J. Lorand Matory in yesterday’s edition of the Harvard Crimson.

The Text: Since Vietnam, Israel has become the heartbeat of U.S. foreign policy and a litmus test of what can be debated—and even of who will be allowed to speak—on university campuses. This year, the Congress of the University and College Union—the British lecturers’ union—proposed a boycott of Israeli universities and academics for what it regards as their complicity in 40 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. This boycott has its counterpart in a decades-old U.S. practice of threatening, defaming, or censoring scholars who dare to criticize Israel.

Two years ago at Harvard, a social scientist who was the most widely cited in his area of study but who had, in a popular book, criticized the U.S.-Israel alliance, became the subject of insinuations that he was anti-Semitic—insinuations that were likely fatal to his candidacy. In recent years, at least three professors—Oxford’s Tom Paulin, DePaul’s Norman Finkelstein, and Rutgers’ Robert Trivers—have been invited to speak at Harvard and then disinvited after complaints that they had spoken critically of Israel or disagreed sharply with Harvard Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz regarding Israel’s military conduct.

In a 2006 faculty meeting, Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse vocalized the underlying rationale of such censorship as few other professors have dared. Denying that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are separate phenomena, she declared anti-Zionism—that is, the rejection of the racially-based claim that Jewish people have a collective right to Palestine—the worst kind of anti-Semitism. For such defenders of Israel, any acknowledgment that Zionism in principle and in practice violates Palestinian rights is tantamount to an endorsement of the Holocaust.

But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans? Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty? In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections. Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on European bank accounts, property, and compensation for labor expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s? As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-Europeans was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defense of slavery in the mid-19th.

However, what follows is the most important question for the health of the academic and moral community that we share here at Harvard: How can one engage in a critical and nonetheless loving conversation about Zionism with a community as gravely traumatized as the Jewish people? The question has become particularly difficult to answer since Harvard’s previous president publicly declared that petitions against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza were a form of anti-Semitism, comparable to vandalizing Jewish gravestones.

My aim here is not to preach but to insist upon my right, and others’, to a conversation full of respect and free of intimidation, one that presumes no monopolies on suffering, one in which all racism and anti-Semitism—whether against Semitic Jews, Semitic Christians, Semitic Druzes or Semitic Muslims—is equally impermissible. I am troubled that Dershowitz escaped former University President Lawrence H. Summers’ criticism when he endorsed Israel’s torture of Palestinian prisoners. And Wisse’s ghastly 1988 description of Palestinian refugees as “people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery” elicited no demand for retraction.

In my country, people tremble in the fear of losing their friends, jobs, advertising revenues, campaign contributions, and alumni donations if they question Zionism or Israeli policy—despite the billions of our tax dollars paid annually for Israel’s defense and sustenance. Even the Israeli military hosts freer debates about this issue than any U.S. university does. One result: Israel has now withdrawn from Gaza, an action that Summers slammed Harvard and MIT professors as anti-Semitic for even contemplating.

My position is difficult not just because I have colleagues and friends who disagree but because I have no Palestinian friends. For every five Jewish people I have loved, I hardly know one Arab. Indeed, I am troubled by the insouciance of the Arab and Muslim world in the face of unjust suffering by people who look like me. A region so publicly committed to its anti-racist religious tradition remains mute over the atrocities of the Arab and Islamic government of Sudan against Africans in Darfur and the south. Osama bin Laden and his cheerleaders treat as insignificant the deaths of hundreds of non-partisan Africans in the bombings of the U.S. embassies at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Thus, my concerns about Zionism are motivated by neither pro-Arab nor anti-Jewish bias, but by the fear that those who dismiss all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism—or, equally often, as Jewish self-hatred—risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Israel’s defenders convince the world that all legitimately Jewish people are Zionists and that Jewish people are uniform in their opinions about Israel and its policies, then the convinced will conclude that condemning Israel or its policies requires them to hate Jewish people.

Moreover, by intimidating those who are reasonable enough to separate their criticism of Israel from the criticism of Jewish people as a whole—as we must—discourses like Summers’ risk leaving the conversation to the people least able to engage tête-à-tête rather than gun-to-gun, bomb-to-bomb, and plane-to-tower. For that reason, I fear that the pronouncements of Summers—and our many colleagues who would stifle debate about Israel—are themselves “anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.”

The Analysis: See here.

CBS is a Giant Douche

The Text:

On August 10, the CBS Early Show came to Kansas City, Missouri.

Using Liberty Memorial Park, the Early Show was featuring the country western band Big & Rich, which is famous for “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” and for leading audiences in the Pledge of Allegiance.

When the local peace community heard that the Early Show was coming to the park, activists hoped to get their message to a national audience.

“I received an e-mail about the event and a flier from the Early Show inviting people to attend,” says Ira Harritt, Kansas City area program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). “I rsvp’d, saying some people from the AFSC would be there.”

Harritt recruited people to come and carry some AFSC “Cost of War” banners. These are seven feet long and three feet high, and they all give different answers to the question: “One Day of the Iraq War Equals.” (Such as $720 million, or 84 elementary schools, etc.)

“We started assembling the banners in the park,” Harritt says, “and immediately, a CBS staff person said, ‘You can’t be here. You can’t have those here.’ ”

Harritt and the other activists challenged her, saying, “This is a public park. We have a right to be here,” he recalls. And the anti-war activists had a lawyer with them who defended their right to be there.

They reached a compromise. The CBS employee, along with security, allowed them to stay in the park so long as they did not get into camera view.

“I promise you the TV cameras will not span this area,” the CBS employee said.

That’s not exactly what the protesters had hoped for.

“I was very disappointed,” says Harritt. “CBS was censoring what messages Kansas Cityans were bringing to the Early Show.”

Harritt says other signs were allowed to be seen on camera.

“One was supporting the Navy,” he says. “One said, ‘Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.’ There were signs for things for sale, and commercial signs.”

Harritt finds that inconsistent and troubling.

“Given that the Iraq War is the most important issue on people’s minds,” he says, “that they wouldn’t allow this opinion to be on the public airwaves means that they want to make sure that the messages don’t conflict with the large multinationals that are profiting from this war.”

CBS wouldn’t even allow Harritt to circulate an anti-war petition where he wanted to in the park, he says. The petition was to defund the war and refund human needs.

“I had been circulating through the crowd of about 1,000 people collecting signatures,” he says, “when this same CBS staffer came by and said, ‘You can’t do that.’ I wasn’t even in camera view. But she reported me to a security officer. He told me I had to leave. A person was signing the petition at that moment. When he finished, the security officer threatened to arrest me if I didn’t move. So I moved.”

Corva Murphy wasn’t so lucky. She got handcuffed.

The 60-year-old activist is a member of Peace Works, an anti-nuclear-weapons group.

She and her husband, Everett, often join the AFSC members at peace rallies. And so they came to Liberty Memorial at 5:00 a.m. on August 10.

“We had our anti-war signs,” she says. “My husband’s is bright yellow with red letters. It says: ‘Out of Iraq Now.’ Mine says: ‘If you like this war, you’re going to love the draft,’ and the words ‘war’ and ‘draft’ are in red letters.”

Corva and Everett Murphy’s son served in Iraq in 2005 as a Navy corpsman.

“He was in Mosul,” she says. “He’s OK, but if this war keeps going, he’ll have to go back.”

Corva Murphy says that’s not the sole reason they are protesting. “We do it for all our sons and daughters, and all the innocent Iraqi people,” she says. “That’s why we’re out there every chance we get.”

At Liberty Memorial, Corva and Everett Murphy decided to stand near where Harry Smith was going to be broadcasting.

She says other people were holding signs, including ones that said, “I Love Big and Rich,” and “Hey Dad, We Made It!”

But it was only their sign that was verboten.

“After a few minutes, somebody from security came and said, ‘You can’t be here.’

Then someone from CBS said: ‘You have to put your signs down. CBS doesn’t want any political signs.’ ”

Corva and Everett Murphy insisted that this was a public park, but they were told it wasn’t.

“My husband said, ‘Yes it is. Our tax dollars pay for this.’ ”

But a police officer responded:

“You’ll really have to go. I’ll escort you. Your friends are down below,” referring to the AFSC demonstrators.

“He escorted us to where the Cost of War banners were,” Corva says. “Then, my husband and I moved about ten feet back to where the steps started up to the main event. We stood there for about five minutes. And then security came again. They told us we’d have to move back and stand in the line with our friends. We couldn’t stand where we were.”

Corva had, by this time, had enough.

“I said, ‘Look, I’m standing here. I’m not moving. This is my right as a citizen.’

“They said, ‘We’ll have to call the police.’

“I said, ‘You just call the police then. I’m not moving.’

“Two police officers arrived.

“One said, ‘If you don’t leave now, I’ll have to arrest you.’

“And I said, ‘You’ll have to arrest me then because I’m not moving back.’

“He said, ‘OK, I’m going to put the cuffs on you.’

“And I said, ‘OK.’

She was not prepared for the cuffing, however.

“Was that ever a shock! They pull your arms behind you real hard, and put those cuffs on you immediately. Your arms are kind of jerked behind.”

Though Murphy was handcuffed, she was not arrested.

She says she even asked the police officer to arrest her. “This will do our cause a lot of good if you do,” she says she told him.

But she says he responded: “I’m not going to arrest you because I’m off duty and that would mean a lot of work for me.”

After a while, the police officer took the cuffs off of her, but “he was always keeping his eyes on me,” she says.

He was nice, though. “He even came by with a nice cold bottle of water for me,” she says.

CBS said in a statement, “We had a huge, enthusiastic crowd that was
very well behaved and appeared to be having a good time. We are unaware of any incidents.”

Mary Vincent, who is on the local AFSC program committee and is a founding member of the Kansas City Iraq Task Force, says there is no doubt that CBS was clearing the field of anti-war signs.

“There was a woman with a CBS badge on who kept going back to the CBS
trailer. And she told us, ‘If those things get on the air, I’m going to lose my job.’ ”

The Link

The Breakdown: One could wax philosophical all day about the erosion of civil liberties, or debate the nuances of public space. We could spend hours pouring over the actions of the officer in the case as well. What is most telling for me though is the behavior from CBS. It is often assumed that the major media companies are working hard to keep coverage of the war, and anti-war movements sanitized. It is another thing entirely though to see that intent so well documented and obviously played out.

If CBS comes to your city for any kind of coverage. Take some time for active dissent. Get on that camera and do anything you can that would make the Disney Westinghouse corporation furious.