Letters to the Editor
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@ondelette
You're talking de iure, and I'm talking de facto. Fire bombing Dresden was a war crime. But it was not prosecuted because it was done by the winning side. Sometimes in order to be on the side that wins, one must cross over a line. Like with Hiroshima and Nagasake. Those were criminal acts, but it helped us win the war, so I'm willing to let it go. That's all I'm saying. And I know waterboarding is legally torture and the Geneva Convention and blah blah blah. I have a nebulous definition of torture in my head. Waterboarding doesn't meet it. Sorry.
Although the stakes are much lower, consider a case of statutory rape involving consensual sex between a teenaged boy and his girlfriend who is one week shy of the age of consent. The law says that's bad, but a lot of us would say, "Yeah, but..." That's how I feel about waterboarding. Some people who've "been there" say it is torture, and I couldn't care less.
Maybe I didn't make it clear that I think a wrongly accused man who is rendered and tortured should recover *massive* damages. Obviously any interrogations that result in death need to be prosecuted. But I think this American-exceptionalist idea that we should be above certain things that our enemies are not, is ironic and shortsighted.
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Is Bill Clinton Still President?
Bill Clinton has got to be the most powerful man in the world that after 7 years out of office, his name is still invoked every time a Bush failure is exposed. That has got to be one of the most lame excuses (or dodges) for this PRESENT government and its supporters to use. Under this administration, people have been kidnapped, tortured, and sent to be tortured. And Bush & Co. have also engaged in some of the most undemocratic behavior of any executive branch in recent times. And the best you got is "Clinton did it, too."
Just man up -- If you want to take credit for the "successes", you got to admit to the failures, too. After 7 years, isn't it time for some Bush accountability? After all, he is the Decider, not Clinton.
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This is just the beginning
It can happen to any of us.
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That special brand of Salon b.s.
The Salonistas all seem to say, "You can't justify rendition on the basis that Clinton did it. If Clinton's CIA did it, it was as wrong then as it is now."
Fine. I don't recall saying that "Rendition is questionable, but we say it is okay because Clinton said it way okay." I don't recall EVER justifying anything on the basis that "Clinton did it."
All I say is that the Salonistas' moral outrage, their claimed moral superiority over the Bush Administration, is a joke when it becomes clear that the Bush Administation wasn't even the first to initiate it. You can debate the details of rendition, you can argue over strategic matters. Just don't try to claim moral superiority. The way that Salon readers talk about the Bush Administration, one might think that it was Republicans who were strapping on bomb vests and walking into crowded Baghdad markets, or planting explosives on trains in Europe. Sorry; it is our enemies who are doing that.
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Yeah, money will make it all better if we're wrong about you maybe kinda sorta being kind of a terrorist so we beat you with cables and burn you with cigarette lighters and drown you three or four times a day...
Maybe I didn't make it clear that I think a wrongly accused man who is rendered and tortured should recover *massive* damages.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is what your country has sunk to.
I know Maher Arar's family.
If you did, and you had an atom of humanity or compassion in your body and soul, you would vomit before you would be able to make a statement like aeschylus' above.
You don't completely destroy a person's life down to the very core of his being, shatter his family, terrify his children, mentally torture his wife, destroy his career, and torture their body and mind for months and months, until they confess to doing terrible things they never did to make it stop, on a freaking suspicion, never examined in a court of law, just because if you were wrong, you can give them "massive damages".
That you can suggest this is a reasonable compromise makes me seriously wonder to what degree the US is becoming a nation of sociopaths when it comes to every brown person of middle eastern descent.
F%#king money. F5#king Americans.
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@Nulla Sallus
Which leads me to believe that while noble and probably worthwhile the whole notion of what a legal war is, and how it's prosecuted is meaningless. Moreover it really only applies to a small community of modern western nations who ever bothered to give 'rules of war' lip service. Do you think in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Subsaharan Africa, Tibet, the Caucuses, the middle east, North Africa they or WE care who does what to whom or who gets butchered? Because no one cares. There is no such thing as a warcrime in Congo. At best, in the few places the west bothers to get involved in, like Sierre Leone, we hold trials for a few toppled leaders and hope someone gets exiled.
But the idea that all those other places are prosecuting wars according to some convention is laughable....
...So you have a few choices. You can not bother to be worried how those angry foreigners manage their states, and honestly you don't want to know. Or you can criticize them all and prosecute them all with more than the obligatory memos from AI.
What a novel idea! If you check some history, instead of using these arguments as a condescending indictment of any attempts to prosecute war crimes, you'll find that for well over 100 years people have been asking for the establishment of a permanent, neutral, impartial court for war crimes with the power to subpoena, arrest, and prosecute. A silly little convention in Rome a few years ago actually set down foundations for it. It had some problems still to be worked out, and for that reason the U.S. signed the treaties but withheld ratification until those problems could be worked out.
Then a bunch of mobsters with an attitude for war crimes not unlike the one you are demonstrating, but far beyond what you would do, the intent of committing war crimes with impunity to show that chickenshit military and that risk-averse CIA how to do their jobs, withdrew from the treaty and began a rampage of war crimes, power grabs, and pre-emptive/preventive war.
So don't lecture others on the inefficacy of war crimes tribunals until we see your wholehearted and unequivocal support for the International Criminal Court, a court first proposed in the late 1890's for all the reasons you mentioned. When something is very needed, but the solutions proposed are imperfect, you fix the solutions, you don't chuck 'em and head off down the road to torture, inhumanity, and perdition.