"You don't need a weatherman/to know which way the wind blows"

Reviewing just some of the stories on torture still making the rounds in the two years since I started posting on the subject, I see nothing has really changed. Here, for example, is the latest:

Buried within three of the Pentagon's official investigations into torture, there's plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the answer is a separate, harsher set of rules for detainee and interrogation operations led by Special Operations Forces -- the elite units specializing in unconventional warfare -- than those that apply for the rest of the U.S. military. Yet none of the inquiries follows through on how highly trained SOF units, increasingly important in the war on terrorism, could have created detention facilities so brutal as to give them the motto "No Blood, No Foul" absent official guidance.

But it's not just buried in the Pentagon's official investigations. It's buried in the news; it's hiding in plain sight, just waiting for someone to finally connect the dots.

A few passes through Google, I was able to come up with eight posts in my blog alone. We know, already, that the Administration wanted special privilege to torture for "enemy combatants," who, not coincidentally, are all the inmates of Gitmo. Why? Because the torture as revealed in 2005 was the result of "ambiguous instructions." And where did those instructions come from? Don't ask; don't tell.

We have known since December of 2005 that, courtesy of James Carroll:

Everytime the Bush administration is caught in one of its repugnant purposes (Thank God, again this year, for Seymour Hersh), the White House declares its intention to stay the course. Torture? Wiretapping? Kidnapping? Deceit? The president's eyes widen: Trust me, he says with a twisted smile. Then he leans closer to display a snarling defiance. The combination reduces his critics to sputters.

"Trust me" and "Screw you!" There's not even a hint of denial there. Carroll is merely being descriptive. Why can't our reporters, or our Senators and Representatives, do the same? Why can't they see that is right in front of them?

We have known, since June 2005, that Gitmo was being called a US "gulag:"

Now, at Guantanamo Bay itself, you don't to rely upon Amnesty International for reports of abuses that have taken place there and of the violation of the Geneva Conventions. In terms of abuses, a Kentucky guardsman, for example, reported detainees whose heads had been slammed into walls.

The FBI agents there at Guantanamo Bay reported their concerns about people held in stress positions for eighteen to twenty-four hours. The Red Cross itself reported on sleep deprivation there.

And we've heard reports of female interrogators smearing what they represented as menstrual blood upon the faces of those prisoners, some of the prisoners there, which certainly is inhumane and degrading treatment, even if it doesn't rise to the level of torture.

Again, you can set aside the reports from third parties like Amnesty International and go straight to the horse's mouth. But again, after two years, we still can't. What's the excuse for the abuses this time? Ambiguous instructions, again? The defense two years ago was a line that would turn out to make Michael Moore happy:

"Let me tell you about Guantanamo. For a lot of these people, they're having better treatment and care than they had when they were in the field in Afghanistan. They're getting healthcare for the first time."

No, it didn't really make Moore happy; he used that line as an excuse to go to Guantanamo for his new film. Turns out the inmates of Gitmo are getting better healthcare than most Americans; but that's another story.

We know they know. The only question is: why don't we know we know? We know Alberto Gonzales was at great pains to redefine "torture". Why, unless it was to permit something the White House knew was going on? And worst of all, we've known since last June that doctors, psychiatrists but later psychologists when the program was revealed, were involved in crafting tortures designed, they hoped, to elicit information, without regard to whether or not such people had any information or, more importantly, to medical and professional ethics. And we know that this was done largely as an experiment in human behavior and behavior modification. We know it was equivalent to the kind of things the Nazis did.

We know all of this, and yet Sy Hersh is on NPR and Wolf Blitzer talking about Taguba and Abu Ghraib, and nobody dares say: "Why, the responsibility is obvious to a child!" There isn't even a mention in these interviews of SERE, or Biscuit teams, not even an acknowledgement that in the wider world the US ran "black prisons" or that the Council of Europe issued a report on the subject. It is all of a piece, yet we don't dare whisper that the pieces fit together into a picture! Listen to the NPR story; nobody wants to say Rumsfeld knew what was going on, not on radio/TV. It's like the movies: what we can say in print, and what we can do in movies, are two different things. Speech is still priviliged over print, and while Hersh can connect the dots in The New Yorker, Michele Norris won't dare do it without a videotaped confession from Donald Rumsfeld himself, accompanied by a sworn affidavit.

Michele Norris and Wolf Blitzer have to wonder: did Rumsfeld know? And have to ask Sy Hersh: do you know that he knew? Do you have the smoking gun? Do you have the sworn affidavit, the videotaped confession? I've never heard Michele Norris be as carefully, professionally skeptical as she was in interviewing another reporter. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that if Donald Rumsfeld didn't know what was going on, he was the most incompetent Secretary in the last 100 years.

No rewards to me for my perspicacity, just an honorable mention: what we are looking for is hiding in plain sight. We have known all of this for over two years. The "smoking gun" is often a nice thing to find in a murder investigation, but it isn't essential for charging an individual with a crime. Anyone even marginally keeping up with the news can see that the torture we keep hearing about is not the result of accident, happenstance, poor oversight, or a breakdown in the chain of command. If the chain were this badly broken, we wouldn't have anyone still fighting in Iraq in an American uniform; they'd have all simply walked away.

How long, O Lord, how long?

UPDATE: Reviewing the Blitzer interview, this is the problem I was referring to:

BLITZER: Well, we’re going to get to that in a minute, but here is what Taguba is quote by you in the article as saying. “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff — the explicit images, the photographs — was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The president had to be aware of this.”

That’s his assumption. He doesn’t know it, for sure. The president says he didn’t know about it; he didn’t see these pictures until he saw them on television.

HERSH: It’s not a question of seeing the pictures. Once they
had the back channel e-mails describing everything, from the field,
guys were saying, hey, boss, let me tell you what’s going on.

It was very serious stuff. The messages were all high priority.
And they go to Rumsfeld’s military aide, who is now a four-star
general running NATO, General Craddock.

And the question is, Rumsfeld acknowledged, sort of, in and out
– it was unclear in his testimony exactly when he told the president, but certainly, by March, he’s talking to the president quite a bit about this.

BLITZER: This was before your article?

HERSH: Oh, my God, two months. Is it possible — you know, the
question you have to ask about the president is this. No matter when he learned, and certainly he learned before it became public, and no matter how detailed it was, is there any evidence that the president of the United States said to Rumsfeld, what’s going on there, Don?

Let’s get an investigation going. Did he do anything? Did he ask for a — did he want to have the generals come in and talk to him about it? Did he want to change the rules? Did he want to improve the conditions?

BLITZER: And what’s the answer?

HERSH: Nada. He did nothing. And you know what it meant?

Inside the chain of command, the military, you get a bad case
like this; it’s all known inside; nobody at the top says another word to you. Everybody understands one thing: this is not a way to get ahead in a career, to start being very tough…

BLITZER: Here’s the White House response. We asked the White
House for a response to your article. “The president addressed this fully. He first saw the pictures on TV and he was upset by them. He called for the investigation to go forward. He found the actions abhorrent and urged the Defense Department to get to the bottom of the matter.

HERSH: It’s not when they saw the photographs. It’s when they
learned how serious it was. They were told in memos what the
photographs showed. They showed this. They showed that.

Blitzer is like a dog with a bone, but the bone is the defense of the President, and Blitzer sounds more like the White House Press Secretary than an even marginally curious journalist. Hersh lays out the problem and calls for the investigation, and Blitzer insists that, since Bush denies having seen the photographs, there's no controversy here. Compare that to the interview with Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: Donald Rumsfeld’s defense is that he first learned of the extent of the abuse after the photographs were made public. This is what he told Congress after the scandal broke in May of 2004.

DONALD RUMSFELD: It breaks our hearts that, in fact, someone didn’t say, “Wait! Look! This is terrible!” We need to do something to manage the -- the legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know and you didn’t know and I didn’t know. And as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press. And there they are.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Donald Rumsfeld, May 7, 2004. Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New Yorker magazine, what did Rumsfeld know? When did he know it? What does General Taguba say?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I’m always amazed hearing that bit that one of his big complaints is that the report that Taguba wrote was leaked. But, anyway, look, actually what you said in the introduction was slightly wrong about -- just in terms of who was responsible for what. Taguba did not begin his job as investigator until the end of January. On January the 13th, I think, or perhaps a day or so -- give me a break on that, I’m not sure -- January the 13th, one of the guys in the military police unit at Abu Ghraib prison, one of the guys whose partners, whose pals, were in the photographs, the infamous photographs -- you know, the pyramids, etc. -- and everybody in the unit was circulating CDs and photographs -- all soldiers have these cell phones with cameras in them -- and he just had it, and he walked in with a CD to the Army Criminal Investigation Division, the Army cops. There was a unit there at Abu Ghraib at the prison.

And within two days after that, the back channel, which is, as you know, not surprisingly, generals talk to each other. They talk to each other in ways that they don’t want anybody to see. Sometimes it’s Monday and, I’m sure, about golf games, but a lot of times, it’s very important. These aren’t classified, per se, because they’re very private. You rarely get a chance to see the back channel.

What happened in Taguba’s case is, by the time he got on the job in late January and was given the assignment, the back channel had -- there had been five, six, seven messages already, very explicit messages. He was given copies of those messages. By the 15th, the military assistant to Rumsfeld, the three-star general, the military assistant to Wolfowitz, the director of the joint staff or the joint chiefs of staff, probably the most important position in the joint chiefs, various sorted other generals with direct ties to the leadership, -- and, of course, when you’re talking to Rumsfeld’s military assistant, a general then named Craddock -- I mentioned him earlier -- you’re talking to Rumsfeld; that’s how you communicate with him in this system -- they were given explicit memoranda and details, particularly very vivid, graphic descriptions of what the photographs show. As Taguba said, you didn’t need to “see” the photographs -- that is, quote/unquote “see” -- to know what was on them. So Rumsfeld’s defense that he didn’t see them ’til right before, therefore he didn’t realize how serious this was, is sort of shredded by these back-channel messages.

There were exchange after exchange. I quote some of them to some degree. It was in one of these messages there was something rather explicit about the actions against women, more than has been made public, that you mentioned earlier, too. So what you have is a body of evidence that shows that the senior leadership was extremely aware of how serious this was. By the 20th -- one of the memos on the 20th was simply saying -- one of the memos said, “Is this as real as it seems? YES” -- Y-E-S, in capital letters, you know -- “Are there photographs? YES. Is it pretty devastating? YES” And there was a lot of -- actually, I should say, honorable and direct chit-chat in the back channel about “Let’s deal with this correctly. This is huge. We’ve got to make sure we don’t mess this one up. Maybe we should make it public ourselves.” All of this was being done. General Myers, actually, in one of his appearances before Congress mentioned the back channel, but not quite by saying it. He said, “Well, we received a series of messages very earlier on with a lot of details, including accounts of the photographs.” He did say that at one point. So even he is contradicting Rumsfeld.

But it’s a position that I think if you’re Rumsfeld -- well, I’ll just tell you what happened to Taguba. Taguba finishes his report in late February, early March. Nobody wants to read it. He can’t get people to read his report. He’s trying to get the upper echelon. That’s part of his job, is to go to the command structure and inform them of what he’s found. His investigation is not criminal. At the same time, the Army investigators and the cops are doing a criminal investigation into the kids in the photographs. His investigation is really more about the politics of the event and the overall level of responsibility, not about, you know, what you’re going to do to each kid in the photographs. One three-star general refused to see the photographs and explicitly said to him, “Look, if I look at these, then I have knowledge of them, then I have to act. I don’t want knowledge.” Basically, that was the position. Only one general, the head of the Army, Pete Schoomaker, actually read it and later sent Taguba a very kind note and a gracious note about how competent it was. But the rest of them simply didn’t want to know.

And again, by March, you’ve got a chain of command, you’ve got a lot of generals working for a very tough guy, Rumsfeld. They know this incident went down. They know everybody knows a lot about it. Rumsfeld has testified differently about when he talked to the President on various occasions, either late January, early February, but certainly he and Myers both testified they spent time with Bush on this. And I have two things to say about that. One, of course, is, if nobody knew anything and we had no idea how serious it is and, as Rumsfeld has said repeatedly in testimony, 18,000 court-martials a year, why are they talking to the President about it? What do they have to tell the President for about it if it’s not -- if nothing anybody had any idea how serious it was?

And given the fact that they did talk to the President -- and what the President did is really the crux of what I see. That’s how I ended my story writing about this. Bush, at some point, whether it was in January, February or March, was made aware of the details, maybe not all the salient details, but many of them. And what did he do? Did he say, “Rummy, I want some generals heads”? Did he say, “I want an investigation”? Did he say, “We’ve got to stop this practice”? What he did was, Amy, was nada. So inside the chain, this very sensitive, you know, hummahumma instrument of the military, everybody knew by the spring of ’04 investigating detainee abuse is not a way to get a third star if you’re two-star and not a way to get ahead.

And certainly Taguba, by then, knew it. Among the things he told me was, from the moment he got the assignment, he isolated -- there were twenty-three people on his staff, including many career officers, colonels, etc. -- he isolated everybody. He was going to be the point man on this so nobody’s career could get hurt except his. He was the front guy, and he was aware, very aware, of the dangers.

And there’s an amazing, I think, and astonishing moment in the article -- and to give you some idea of his integrity, the New Yorker has this very complicated and detailed fact-checking process, in which no matter how many times they sing and dance, somebody from the New Yorker fact-checking staff sits down with Taguba for a day and goes over everything very carefully. And this is his chance to opt out, say “I don’t remember it that way. That’s not right.” There’s a scene where in April General Abizaid, John Abizaid, not a bad guy, the commander who retired early this year, allegedly because he wanted to retire, but actually I think he was fired. But that’s another story. Abizaid is in Kuwait. He’s in the back seat. He’s driving with Tony Taguba. The report’s not published yet, but it’s done. It’s sitting there. And he says to Tony, as Taguba remembers it -- and we certainly gave Abizaid and everybody a chance with email messages and telephone calls and long summaries of what we’re doing, including to Rumsfeld; everybody got a chance to comment on this weeks before the story was published -- we are not trying to sandbag anybody -- Abizaid said to Taguba, “You know, Tony,” -- and the message was -- “the only victim of this, the only person that’s going to get hurt in this, is you, if you don’t watch it.” And Taguba said he remembered thinking then -- he said to me that “I had been in the Army then for thirty-two years, and it was the first time I thought I was in the Mafia.”

And what about connecting the dots?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, what happened is -- now you’re getting to the part of the story that really is the most fascinating for me, that’s very -- the press hasn’t looked at this yet, and I hope they do. What happened to Taguba is -- very quickly, first of all, the first thing that happened is he right away instinctively knew that what these kids were doing, the major thing they were doing, the major abuse was this: the MP’s defense was, under the Army regulations, military policemen who run a prison -- and this was a reserve unit from West Virginia. These kids basically were trained to be traffic cops. They were given just a little bit of training about running a prison.

The way it works is -- the regulations are very clear. The people running the prison run the prison. They feed them, house them, take care of them. They don’t do anything else. They don’t get involved in interrogations, because otherwise you break up the trust, which you can only -- you know, you have to have a prison run -- it has to run orderly. The people have to assume that the MPs are not there to do anything but take care of them.

In this case, what happened is, the MPs were under instructions from the fall of ’03, when the games began, to soften up the prisoners for the military intelligence people, for the interrogators, because the insurgency was on -- it became very heavily the previous late summer -- and there was a lot of panic in the White House about not knowing much about the insurgency, hence the decision to increase the pressure and get more intelligence from the prison population, particularly the young males who were assumed to be, many of them, knowledgeable of the insurgency.

So the MP’s job was to do whatever they could -- keep them awake at night, the prisoners. They kept them unclothed. They kept them unfed. They mistreated them. All designed to soften them up for the intelligence process. Taguba understood that had to be a high order, but he was boxed in. The order which he was given was to investigate the MP brigade or battalion -- it’s a brigade -- and nothing more. He couldn’t go beyond that.

But inevitably, he ran into a Lieutenant Colonel Jordan, and he saw signs of very sophisticated intelligence activity inside the prison, certainly among some of the more valuable -- they call high-value targets. Jordan was listed as the executive officer of the military intelligence unit that was at Abu Ghraib, the interrogation unit, but he denied being that. They couldn’t find him for weeks. When they did find him, he showed up in civilian clothes, wanted to know if he had to shave off his beard. He apparently had grown a beard. He had to. And in general, his story was so riddled with untruths and mistruths. In any case, Taguba had his rights read to him. Jordan’s now the only officer facing charges out of this affair. Seven enlisted men had been charged and sentenced and convicted, but no officer. He’s the first officer facing charges. And so, Taguba began to realize there was something going on outside there.

He also knew, as he did his investigation and was given more access, and particularly as his investigation came to an end, he began to understand that there was a huge secret codicil going on, and about which I probably -- one of the things that interested him the most about me was I had written back in 2004, did three articles for the New Yorker, and the third one talked about the secret world, the world of JSOC, Joint Special Operation Command operations, military task force, high-level units that had no -- that reported to nobody but God, basically to the Secretary of Defense through a back channel.

And so, what he stumbled into, what he was really dealing with, was, as I wrote in the article, is the decision of the Secretary of Defense -- and I’m told with the concurrence of Cheney, one never knows where the President is on this, but I assume he had to be aware of what was going on, Cheney certainly was -- they decided in the fall of ’03 we were doing what they call “strategic interrogation” -- I’m not quite sure what that means -- strategic interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo. And it was decided to send a commander of Guantanamo, a major general named Geoff Miller, to Iraq to train the kids there, instruct them and set up rules and procedures for doing strategic interrogation. And so, you were bringing in some of the Special Forces, and some of the more high-level intelligence activity techniques into Abu Ghraib.

And it’s my belief -- so I’ve been told by my sources, not Taguba; the story is partly about Taguba and partly about this -- that what happened was, the White House, and basically Rumsfeld, was in a real problem when Abu Ghraib broke. If you have a full investigation into Abu Ghraib, you’re going to stumble into the very, very highly classified -- in fact, the most classified there -- most of the missions, the task forces, were put into what they called the SAP, the Special Access Program, the highest level of secrecy in the government -- the U-2 spy plane was built in a SAP, for example -- mostly used for technical stuff. But under Rumsfeld, after 9/11, it began being used for field operations.

These guys -- we now probably in as many as thirteen countries, the President of the United States has delegated a hundred killer teams, they call them, from the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC -- they have been given pre-delegation. When they find a high-value target, they can act against them, capture, or in most cases, kill. So you’re given a group of guys that are given the authority to kill in North Africa, the Middle East, obviously, also in other parts of Africa. They have been given the authority to kill or make contact on site. They go into a country without clearing it with the ambassador or the CIA station chief. This is going on now. And this technique -- some of their techniques were brought into Abu Ghraib. And so, if you do a full investigation into Abu Ghraib, you could unravel a lot of stuff nobody wanted to unravel then.

All of this, of course, is in the New Yorker article. But as I said above: so long as we only say it in print, not out loud, it isn't "real." We can, for example, kill children in novels (The Lovely Bones is told from the point of view of a dead child. It's been a very popular novel.) But we can't do that on film. As Eliot's bird said, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." And the reality Blitzer and Norris are evading? Well, remember the Taguba story is about Abu Ghraib. For me, this is the "money quote" in the Democracy Now! interview:

And Schmidt, in his investigation, in his testimony, said the most amazing thing. He repeated it to me when I talked to him by phone a couple months ago. He said -- basically what he said, “You know, if you really think about Guantanamo, but for a camera,” he said, “it was Abu Ghraib.” There were times then with some of the prisoners, with the dogs, and the women sexually abusing them in certain ways, you know, flaunting themselves, menstrual blood being poured on them, these Muslim men, nakedness, twenty hours of music a day. As he said, “but for a camera, it would be Abu Graib.” So, look, the Senate right now has got a group of guys, Carl Levin, looking into this, and let’s just wish them well.

Guantanamo: Abu Ghraib without the cameras.

Which means, of course, the President can remain ignorant; because there will never be any photographs for him to see.

My Father's Day Cards can beat up your Father's Day Cards!

As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls

I'm assuming this is the Tena I know from Eschaton and from comments here more recently. I really don't want to comment on the underlying controversy, because I don't want to judge it or the people involved, or even what is, or is not, happening. Frankly, this largely strikes me as: A) Tena's business, and I won't judge it, or B) something appropriate for the late, lamented Metacomments (which more or less lives on as Whiskey Fire).

Anyway...

What prompted me to write on this at all was the prime post up now (though maybe not later), and the comments to it. Again, no comment on the comments (to each her or his own opinion, thank you very much!), just an observation on the situation. I've noticed blog traffic here is down, sharply. So it goes. I've seen indications that it is down on other blogs as well, which leads me to think it's not just me, or the fact I'm not political/funny/religious enough, or whatever drives the traffic in left blogistan. So it goes, again. I'm left wondering, and wouldn't know without the kind of extensive research I have no interest in conducting, if blogistan isn't changing, a change inevitable given the state of play in American politics and its id, left blogistan.

Maybe it's just the summer; but I don't think so. After all, when has a Presidential campaign started earlier than now? And Bush's popularity and approval are hardly rising. But nothing seems to put a dent in their determination to abuse their power as grotesguely as they can, such as the newest wrinkle on the attorney firing scandal:

Gonzales described what he delicately calls ‘a more vigorous and a little bit more formal process’ for annually evaluating prosecutors. What that means, as he explained it, is hauling in every U.S. attorney for a meeting to hear, among other things, politicians’ beefs against the prosecutor.” The Chicago Tribune’s Andrew Zajac writes, “If that should happen, expect the fair-mindedness and independence Americans still count on from their Justice Department to slip.”

"Slip" is putting it mildly. "Disappear" is the verb I would choose. And clearly this is not a bug; it's a feature. So what is left blogistan doing about it?

Getting outraged, of course; but how much outrage can you muster before your outrage output begins to decline? Patrick Leahy is outraged, but Abu Gonzales is still Attorney General, and even the "vote of no-confidence," as much of a political prank as that was, went nowhere. It would seem the GOP is no longer in power, but the Democrats don't know how to wield the power they have. In this interregnum, all manner of monsters appear. And the worst monster is exhaustion. Unable to stir the faithful any longer, left blogistan, even as it rejoices in its power, seems to be losing it.

"Seems to be." Mark that. I'm still a skeptic on whatever power left blogistan ever actually had, but that's another discussion. My point here is not to bring this around to a question of power, but to a question of sociology. Because what's at play here is something even a person with only passing acquaintance with the concepts of sociology (i.e., yours truly) can see as inevitable. It's all a matter of defining the group.

Everything in that post from Tena's blog can be read through the terms of sociology: Group boundaries, meaning and belonging, social solidarity and, especially for this discussion, internal homogeneity. The phenomena of exclusion from the group, in other words, is not a phenomenon at all: it's a function of group dynamics. When the homogeneity stops being about the "trolls" (i.e., those who disagree with the consensus of the group) it inevitably starts being about who is left. Does this mean groups invariably winnow down to one person? No, of course not. But the process is part of group identity. What I see going on, at least as described in Tena's post and the comments, is familiar from American Protestantism, where churches are formed based on whether or not the Sanctuary should have the carpet replaced or the organ restored (I kid you not; I know of churches which have split on such a basis), or perhaps slightly more reasonably, what language should be used in worship. (Up until the 1930's, or even later, it wasn't uncommon to find German churches still worshipping in German, in America). And then there's the Proximity Principle:

"We have to meet people to form relationships with them. Therefore, our relationships form within groups. We rarely become connected with a person from another part of our community unless we meet in organized group activity. As research demonstrates, much of the reason people's networks consist of people so similar to themselves is due to the homogenous nature of their social groups As a group becomes more central for its members, its members more often find friendship within the group."

And as the group becomes more and more the source of friendships, the groups becomes more and more tightly knit.

In the context in which I quoted it, that principle applies to churches which become exclusive groups, passively hostile (without ever meaning to be) to newcomers. Many popular blogs suffer from this problem. But it has a corollary for established members: as friendships form, they don't always form among and betweeen the oldest members of the group (not age old, but in terms of membership in the group). As the group becomes more tightly knit, in other words, it also begins to exclude people out. Powerlines shift, and old members find themselves suddenly no longer the "Inside" members. And as the group becomes more central for its members, who is "in" and who is "out" becomes more important to the group. In the power struggle that inevitably ensues, someone loses.

And that's what we're seeing in left blogistan, too. Blogs have become incredibly important to some people. And yet, in the power struggle to determine who sets the group boundaries, and how the group is identified, what its internal homogeneity will be based on, the zero sum game of groups says someone is left out. And that someone may well be a person who was "in" just a short time before.

Which, you will pardon the observation, is why the kingdom of God is extended to the least and the last, first. Which is why the parable of the workers in the vineyard is so telling. In that parable, no one is excluded from the group, but neither is a hierarchy observed. All the workers are paid the same wage, whether they worked all day, or only for one hour. There is no advantage to the first, no "inside" group which gains more from being in the group longer. But that, of course, is of another world; which is the ethical as well as spiritual point of proclaiming the kingdom. Because you can't proclaim the values of this world, and of another world, simultaneously. And it's why the Kingdom of God is permanent, whereas the kingdoms or blog fiefdoms of this world are transient: because the kingdom of God is based, not on the power to identify the group and who is allowed membership there, but on the powerlessness of God, who offers everything to everyone.

Take that less than seriously, it turns into a maudlin point that critiques human made groups. Take it seriously enough, the squabbles of groups no longer matter. Stand somewhere in between, and look at both, and you can at least see where you are standing.

Set the comparison aside (and admittedly, it is an awkward one if taken as a criticism of the controversy, which it isn't meant to be) and this is still an inevitable "growing pain" of a community which may go from virtual to real, or may simply end up replicating high school all over again, as we are each reminded once more that we aren't sitting at the cool table. And that would be a pity; but it would also be in accord with the observations of sociology.

An Update (making this longer than it needs to be): A colloquy between Phila 'n' me.

Tena was one of the first commenters I regularly read in the months I spent lurking at Eschaton, and she was one of the first to welcome me when I started posting. She's been more or less the heart and soul of the place for me ever since, so I'd take her complaints very seriously even if I didn't know a number of 'em to be true. And the same goes for you.

That said, I can't entirely agree with this:

"And as the group becomes more central for its members, who is "in" and who is "out" becomes more important to the group. In the power struggle that inevitably ensues, someone loses."

Do you really think Eschaton commenters have made an attempt - implicit or otherwise - to define who is "out"? God knows there's a lot of bickering and ill-temper there, and plenty of unnecessary cruelty and aggression, and various shifting allegiances (if you can call 'em that). I've been driven away from there more than once, because I've been irked by regulars or trolls, or because I'm sick unto death of the way I come across on screen.

But it seems to me that a lot of the discussion of who "belongs" comes from people who believe that there really are "Kings and Queens of Eschaton"...which I think is at best a misperception, and at worst a bid for negative attention.

Which is not to say that the problem doesn't boil down to power of an even more pointless kind than usual. But I don't think it's fair to talk about how the group "begins to exclude people out," without acknowledging first that some people who perceive or represent themselves as excluded actually aren't, and second that presenting oneself as "someone who doesn't belong" - and attacking people who allegedly do belong - is a normal way of standing out in a crowd. Thhere's dysfunction and self-aggrandizement on every side of this issue; "groupthink" barely scratches the surface, and as we know from the Culture Wars, accusations of elitism aren't always made in good faith. It's fine to complain about the exclusiveness of the "cool table," but its attractiveness is based on its exclusiveness; as usual, we give people the power they have over us, and then resent them for being who we made them.

None of which is directed at Tena. I'm just confused sometimes about what people expect from blog communities, or to what extent blogs actually are communities in any really realistic sense. Just as there's more fighting and flirting in comment threads than you'll usually see in real life, there's a tendency to project one's idealized notions of community on to what I see as a fairly ambiguous and unnatural form of interaction.

If that makes any sense...
Phila, Pizen Sarpint

My reply:

Phila-

I would split the baby: yes, I think there's a tendency toward hierarchy at Eschton, as there is in any group that begins to self-identify. No, I don't think it's fatal. Yes, I agree, the interaction is entirely unnatural.

The latter is the real rub.

There were a lot of comments about Tena the other day at Eschaton, most of them very negative ("Ding, dong, the witch is dead!"), although even to say "most" is to commit the sin of noticing that is negative and ignoring what is positive. There were also the usual defenses: (A) it's Atrios' blog or (B) "Get over yourself!" None of it was terribly insightful, compassionate, nor even particularly constructive. But at heart, it all had to do with defending the right of the "Community" to be what it wanted to be, and to reject the antibody of critique, even from someone like Tena.

You disagree with the "consensus" of any commenting community, even at Eschaton, at your peril.

The curious thing is the nature of the community. Upwards of 150 people on Haloscan there at anyone time and maybe 10% or so of that number actively commenting. Who's zoomin' who? It is, to me, the entirely unnatural nature of the interaction that's most curious, and most problematic. Obviously some take it as merely a place to spout off. Some see it, in harshly naturalistic terms, as a place of no pity (I met similar opinions at "Table Talk" on Salon back in the Clinton years).

And some see it as an extended family, and are quite hurt when the family stops being...familial. I didn't know the story of what happened for Tena until she posted it here in comments. But I think the incident arose, still, from the desire of someone (in this case Atrios) to decide who was "in" and who was "out" of the community. And the dominant opinion of the community, judging from the other day, seemed to be: justice served, on Woody if not (necessarily) on Tena. And justice is almost always a way of deciding who is "in" and who is "out."

Just when you think it can't get any worse

Seymour Hersh on Abu Ghraib.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”

There is always a reckoning. The only question is: who pays?

Of course, that's the problem:

When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

But don't ask, we won't have to tell:

“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

Reading this article, it suddenly dawns on me that Rumsfeld didn't resign to take one for the team, nor to fall on his sword.

He did it to kill any interest in any further inquiry into Abu Ghraib. Because the fact that he knew all about it, even as he said he knew nothing, is crystal clear.

As Abraham Joshuah Herschel said: “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” This is an Administration that eschews responsibility at every opportunity.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

Vanity of vanities....

I heard Michael Parenti quoting this today:

[T]he policy of the [Roman] Empire was directed only toward its preservation and therefore was not imperialist within our definition. True, there was almost continuous warfare, because the existing situation could be maintained only by military means. Individual emperors (Germanicus, for example) might wage war for its own sake, in keeping with our definition, but neither the Senate nor the emperors were generally inclined toward new conquests. Even Augustus did no more than secure the frontiers. After Germanicus had been recalled, Tiberius tried to put into effect a policy of peace toward the Germans. And even Trajan’s conquests can be explained from a desire to render the empire more tenable. Most of the emperors tried to solve the problem by concessions and appeasement. But from the Punic Wars to Augustus there was undoubtedly an imperialist period, a time of unbounded will to conquest.

The policies of this epoch are not as naively manifest as those in the other cases discussed so far. Here is the classic example of that kind of insincerity in both foreign and domestic affairs which permeates not only avowed motives but also probably the conscious motives of the actors themselves—of that policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism.

There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted.

The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people.

Even less than in the cases that have already been discussed, can an attempt be made here to comprehend these wars of conquest from the point of view of concrete objectives. Here there was neither a warrior nation in our sense, nor, in the beginning, a military despotism or an aristocracy of specifically military orientation. Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain.

It was certainly not the Italian peasant. The conquests gained him nothing—on the contrary, they made possible competition on the part of foreign grain, one of the causes for his disappearance. He may not have been able to foresee that eventuality in the republican period, but he did feel all the more keenly the burden of military service that was always interfering with his concerns, often destroying his livelihood.

True, it was this class that gave rise to the caste of professional soldiers who remained in the military service beyond the minimum term of enlistment. But in the first place, the rise of that estate was only a consequence of the policy of war, and, in the second place, even these people had no real interest in war. They were not impelled by savage pugnacity, but by hope for a secure old age, preferably the allotment of a small farm. And the veteran would much rather have such a farm at home than somewhere in Syria or Britain. As for war booty, the emperor used it to pay his debts or to stage circuses at Rome. The soldiers never saw much of it.

Joseph Schumpeter, economist, on Imperial Rome. Sounds a lot like Dom Crossan, actually:

The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory, or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace.

Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus' footsteps, and they both claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice, or, more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace.

They build a case for that which involves most of the book In Search of Paul. But it does explain where Mussolini got it:

I was just reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, which is Carlo Levi's account of his year in exile in Lucania - the back of beyond - in Italy under Mussolini. During that year Italy declared war on Abbyssinia. Word for word, this is what Levi tells the reader Mussolini told Italians:

"Abbyssinia hates us for our freedom."

I about stroked out when I read that. Word for word.
Tena

And then you put this into the mix:

"Well, not everything Hitler did was bad"

A member of my family's synagogue was an old-school German Jew: her opinion of Hitler was "Germans supported him because he was exactly the kind of leader we needed: he remilitarized the Rhineland, he dealt with the Communist provocateurs, he gave us Germans a much needed sense of national pride -- it was a shame he was so anti-Semitic and racist".
DAS

We have met the enemy. He is us. And there is indeed nothing new under the sun. We who are Christian have to rememember the kingdom of God is not merely imminent, but it is already here. Sometimes that is our only hope.

"Sick" is too kind an adjective

A break from our relentless pursuit of definitions to recommend that, if you didn't hear/see it yesterday, you really should listen to the Democracy Now! stories on Michael Moore's new film, "Sicko."

I mean, you gotta love a movie that uses this for a trailer:

GEORGE BUSH: We got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many ob-gyns aren't able to practice their love with women all over this country.

[music]

NARRATOR: When Michael Moore decided to make a movie on the health care industry, top-level executives were on the defensive. What were they hiding?

EXECUTIVE: That's not on, right?

MICHAEL MOORE: No.

EXECUTIVE: Okay.

EXECUTIVE: The intent is to maximize profits.

MICHAEL MOORE: If you denied more people health care you got a bonus?

WOMAN: When you don't spend money on somebody, it is a savings to the company.

POLITICIAN: I want America to have the finest health care in the world.

MICHAEL MOORE: Four health care lobbyists for every member of Congress. Here's what is what it costs to buy these men, and this woman, and this guy, and this guy. And the United States slipped to 37 in healthcare around the world - just slightly ahead of Slovenia.

[laughter]

HEALTH CARE WORKER: I denied a necessary a man a necessary operation and thus caused his death. This secured my reputation and it ensured my continued advancement in the health care field.

NARRATOR: In the world's richest country...

WOMAN: I work three jobs.

BUSH: You work three jobs?

WOMAN: Yes.

BUSH: Uniquely American isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic.

NARRATOR: Laughter isn't the best medicine.

WOMAN: I get a bill from my insurance company telling me that the ambulance ride wasn't pre-approved. I don't know when I was supposed to pre-approve it. After I gained consciousness in the car? Before I got in the ambulance?

NARRATOR: It's the only medicine.

MICHAEL MOORE: There's actually one place on American soil that had free universal health care.

MICHAEL MOORE: Which way to Guantanamo Bay?

GOVT OFFICIAL: Detainees representing a threat to our national security are given access to top-notch medical facilities.

MICHAEL MOORE: Permission to enter. I have three 9/11 rescue workers. They just want some medical attention - the same kind the evildoers are getting...Hello?

NARRATOR: Michael Moore's Sicko.

I say "stories" because that link will get you to the remarks made by Mr. Moore to the California State Assembly. This link will take you to the people featured in the film, and their comments on the state of American healthcare. It's worse than being 37th in the world; much worse:

DAWNELLE KEYES: On May 6, 1993 my 18-month-old daughter Michelle became very ill. She was vomiting, had diarrhea and was having trouble breathing and a very high temperature. I called an ambulance, which took her to the nearest emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center in Los Angeles. The doctors believed she probably had a bacterial infection, which could be treated with antibiotics. But he didn't conduct a simple blood culture or treat her with antibiotics because our health plan, Kaiser, told him not to. You see, Martin Luther King hospital was not a Kaiser facility. Kaiser said the simple test and treatment had to be done in a Kaiser hospital. But Michelle became sicker and sicker. She became lethargic and unresponsive. I pleaded to them. I pleaded for her treatment. And no one would give her antibiotics. Over two hours later Michelle had a seizure. Only an hour after that Michelle was transferred by ambulance to Kaiser. Within 15 minutes of arriving, she died.

I went to court to hold accountable those who were responsible for Michelle’s death. As my attorney put it, Michelle died, not because a doctor didn't know what to do, but because of her health care coverage status. We won our case but, sadly, the jury award was cut to a fraction of what they felt was fair because of a horrible California law that caps damages in these kinds of cases called MICRA. This law has been on the books since 1975 and should be re-appealed. My case is a good example of why we need guaranteed and universal health care in California and in America. No one should ever have to go through what my family had to go through. I hope the movie Sicko, which I am proud to be a part of on behalf of my daughter, helps achieve that goal. My daughter was not treated and died because she was in the ER that was not affiliated with her health plan. This should never happen in America. Had it not happened, my daughter would be 15-and-a-half years of age and enjoying high school. Thank you.

No, no; don't stop now. Tip of the iceberg. Let's hear some stories about hospitals dumping patients on Skid Row in Los Angeles (the increasingly inaptly named):

Three years ago, my predecessors found that a woman had been dropped off by a hospital. She walked in with an IV in her arm, sat down in our guest area and died 10 minutes later from pneumonia. We set up what is now called a hospital dump can out in front of the building. And in the fall of 2005, we had a gentleman show up in a gurney, having seizures and the hospital attempted to drop him off, but the captain of the police force, Andy Smith, happened to be at our place in a meeting, he ran down, intervened, made the man – the ambulance driver - put him back in the ambulance and sent him back to the hospital. Shortly after that, in December, an undocumented day laborer showed up covered in blood. He’d just been released from a hospital in Arcadia, brought all the way to downtown Skid Row, walked in, we took him back to our guest area and shortly thereafter, he became so ill from the beating he had taken right before he went to the hospital, that we had to call the medics and haul him back to the hospital. He stayed there for several days.

That was publicized. I think eleven hospitals were documented as doing drop-offs. It was somewhat publicized. But in March of 2006, I was standing outside with the moms from the Mission, waiting for their kids to return. Their bus had been in an accident, so I was out much later than I normally would have been. I couldn't believe my eyes as the cab pulled up and did a u-turn. And a little lady in a nightgown stepped out of the back of the cab, unassisted, was given no directions to our door. She's several hundred feet from our door. She started walking northward on San Pedro to some of the meanest streets in the United States. Fortunately, I was there. I called the Captain, Andy Smith. I sent a staff person to rescue the lady that I later found out was Carol Reyes. Hospital document showed she had high blood pressure, a low-grade fever, had dementia so bad that she didn't know time or place. Yet she was brought 20 miles to be dropped off on to the meanest street of our city.

Absorb all of that: it started three years ago. It go so bad, so frequent and constant, the mission set up a camera to videotape it. It took almost three years for this to get bad enough to gain public attention, world-wide attention. We are the richest country in the world. We consider ourselves "compassionate."

We lie to ourselves so we will sleep better. Because even the attention to Carol Reyes didn't stop anything:

Unfortunately, there have been over 35 hospital drop-offs since Carroll Reyes made the news. One man, a paraplegic, dropped off without a wheelchair without a walker, dropped himself out of the van onto the curb with his clothes in his mouth and colostomy bag ruptured. Fortunately, one good thing that came out of this was that twelve homeless witnesses stepped forward and said enough is enough. No more of this kind of treatment for human beings.

We don't have human beings in this country anymore; we have economic units. We value people based on what they produce for the GNP, based on what the Dow-Jones did today, based on the value of someone else's stock portfolio. Don't tell me we don't, because after three years of dumping patients on Skid Row and no one asking questions, even after it becaume an issue, 35 more patients were dumped. And if that doesn't bother you, listen to Dr. Linda Peeno:

LINDA PEENO: I should say right from the beginning that when you see the film this afternoon, you’re gonna think that I’m an imposter, because when Michael's team called me about a year ago to talk to me about the film, I was actually so despondent about health care that I couldn't give an interview. So they had to use the old material. And so it was just so exciting for me to see all those nurses today. I just cannot tell you. After twenty years of trying to get people to pay attention to exactly what Michael said, and what shocked me into this and the thing that will be the focus in the movie is that as a young, naive physician twenty years ago, I realized that with just a flick of a pen I could condemn a person to death and did, all because he was expensive. And I have already seen references to the fact that that case is too old, it is a mere anecdote, all the things that came out when I testified eleven years ago before Congress. But, when I testified in 1996 in May before Congress about this case, I realized just the other day as I was thinking about this, I could give exactly the same testimony again, exactly, word for word, I would only have to add that things have become unimaginably worse. I think the thing that had begun to defeat me over the past couple of years is the thousands and thousands of e-mails I would get from people every week, to the point where I couldn't even stand to turn my computer on.

This system is of our doing, our manufacture, our making. This is no force of nature, no hurricane from the Atlantic, no earthquake or drought or famine; this is entirely human-made, and we are the humans making it.

I can't wait for this movie to come out. But I don't have high hopes it will even start a national conversation on this topic. I've seen people deny responsibilty for their own actions before. It's so reflexive, I'd almost call it an instinct.

In the Church, we call it "original sin."

Enemy Combatant

I'm not satisfied that any of this is definitive, but I've done a little digging (googling, actually) into the issue of 'enemy combatant,' and this is what I've come up with.

The term seems to have originated in Ex Parte Quirin, a habeas case involving German born persons all of whom had lived in the US prior to WWII. (The General Counsel of the Department of Defense rested his argument/definition on Quirin in December, 2002. I can't find anything, or anyone, who cites a use or definition of the term earlier than Quirin.) There was a citizenship question for at least one defendant, but the Court ruled that issue irrelevant in light of its holding. All the defendants were brought to the US in a German U-boat and smuggled into the country with the aim of furthering the German war effort. If I read the opinion correctly, after they were captured, FDR responded:

The President, as President and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, by Order of July 2, 1942, appointed a Military Commission and directed it to try petitioners for offenses against the law of war and the Articles of War, and prescribed regulations for the procedure on the trial and for review of the record of the trial and of any judgment or sentence of the Commission. On the same day, by Proclamation, the President declared that 'all persons who are subjects, citizens or residents of any nation at war with the United States or who give obedience to or act under the direction of any such nation, and who during time of war enter or attempt to enter the United States ... through coastal or boundary defenses, and are charged with committing or attempting or preparing to commit sabotage, espionage, hostile or warlike acts, or violations of the law of war, shall be subject to the law of war and to the jurisdiction of military tribunals'.

The Proclamation also stated in terms that all such persons were denied access to the courts.

For "Articles of War" we would, today, read "UCMJ." Part of the issue raised by the defendants was the legality of this Presidential Order. They argued that they must be tried in a civilian court, that the President had no authority to declare their cases could only be heard under the Articles of War in a military court. The Supreme Court disagreed, in part because:

Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military
tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful.

Note the Court uses the term "unlawful belligerent." A whole 'nother post (or two!) rests in the transition we've made since World War II from "War Department" to "Defense Department," from "Articles of War" to "Uniform Code of Military Justice," and from "unlawful belligerent" to "unlawful combatant." Euphemism makes so many foul things so much more palatable.

That's as much of Quirin as is relevant, here. Whether Quirin gives the President the power he claims today, is quite another matter. According to Wikipedia (I told you this was not carefully researched!), pursuant to AUMF, Bush, on November 13, 2001, issued "a Presidential Military Order: 'Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism' ". This order specifically found that:

Given the danger to the safety of the United States and the nature of international terrorism, and to the extent provided by and under this order, I find consistent with section 836 of title 10, United States Code, that it is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.

And the order basically covers anyone who is not a US citizen:

The term "individual subject to this order" shall mean any individual who is not a United States citizen with respect to whom I determine from time to time in writing that:

(1) there is reason to believe that such individual, at the relevant times,

(i) is or was a member of the organization known as al Qaida;

(ii) has engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit,
acts of international terrorism, or acts in preparation therefor,
that have caused, threaten to cause, or have as their aim to
cause, injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its
citizens, national security, foreign policy, or economy; or

(iii) has knowingly harbored one or more individuals described in subparagraphs (i) or (ii) of subsection 2(a)(1) of this order;

and

(2) it is in the interest of the United States that such individual
be subject to this order.

It also, by the way, gives an extraordinary amount of power to the Secretary of Defense, and is clearly the basis for the "black prisons" in Europe:

Sec. 3. Detention Authority of the Secretary of Defense. Any individual subject to this order shall be --

(a) detained at an appropriate location designated by the Secretary of Defense outside or within the United States;

(b) treated humanely, without any adverse distinction based on race, color, religion, gender, birth, wealth, or any similar criteria;

(c) afforded adequate food, drinking water, shelter, clothing, and medical treatment;

(d) allowed the free exercise of religion consistent with the requirements of such detention; and

(e) detained in accordance with such other conditions as the Secretary of Defense may prescribe.

The Pentagon, 4 years later, issued a broader, much more comprehensive definition of "enemy combatant." Which may explain why the "black prisons" were run by the CIA. As for the application of this order only to US citizens, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals soon ruled that the President had the power to declare them "enemy combatants," too. That was the Hamdi case, where the Supreme Court reversed and remanded to allow Hamdi "a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker." Which puts the recent 4th Circuit ruling in a very interesting light, indeed.

We've been down this road once or twice before; and I don't think the ride is getting any smoother for Gonzales or his boss. But it's pretty clear "enemy combatant" means "Anyone I want it to mean," if you're the President. It's also clear the courts are less and less impressed with that claim of authority, the further away we get from 9/11.

UPDATE:

A case in point, if only because it involves the issues of imprisonment, judges, and the 4th Circuit, again:

Walton never appeared to waver from his opinion that a delay was unwarranted. After 12 prominent law professors filed documents supporting Libby's request, the judge waved it off as "not something I would expect from a first-year in law school."

He also said he received several "angry, harassing, mean-spirited" letters and phone calls following his sentencing but said they wouldn't factor into his decision.

Libby is the highest ranking government official ordered to prison since the Iran Contra affair. His monthlong trial offered a rare glimpse into the White House in the early days of the Iraq war.

Trial testimony showed that Cheney was eager to beat back criticism of prewar intelligence. One of the administration's most outspoken critics in mid-2003 was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Amid a flury of news coverage of that criticism, Bush administration officials leaked to reporters that fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked as an undercover analyst for CIA. That disclosure in a syndicated newspaper column touched off a leak investigation that brought senior White House officials, including Bush and Cheney, in for questioning.

Libby argued he had a good chance of persuading an appeals court that, when Attorney General John Ashcroft and other senior Justice Department officials recused themselves from the leak investigation, they gave Fitzgerald unconstitutional and unchecked authority.

Walton was skeptical, saying the alternative was to put someone with White House ties in charge of an investigation into the highest levels of the Bush administration.

"If that's going to be how we have to operate, our system is going to be in serious trouble with the average Joe on the street who thinks the system is unfair already," Walton said.

Federal judges are ferociously independent. Any judge tends to rule his courtroom like a fiefdom, the better to assure you the full weight of the State is behind her/him. But I've seen state judges intimidated by public figure (like former state AG's), although I've seen state judges who don't give a wet snap for any lawyer in their courtroom, because they treat all of them equally.

But Federal judge simply don't intimidate. My first brush with one was in a complex products liability case involving the fairly novel (at the time) question of holding a defense contractor (McDonnell Douglas) liable for the design of an ejector seat on an A-10 "Warthog" that broke the pilot's neck when he had to eject. Both sides figured the trial would go for weeks, with all the experts and evidence they'd need to present on either product design, or how the manufacturer had built what the Pentagon had ordered (it's a complex process, getting a military plane into commission). The Federal judge gave them one week. No more. Two and a half days for the plaintiff (IIRC), and a day apiece, or so, for the two defendants (MCDouglas and Fairchild, the builder of the plane).

Federal judges do things their way. For which we should all be grateful. What makes me say that? The last line of the article:

Walton is a Republican judge whom Bush put on the bench in his first term.

I'm not jumping for joy that Scooter Libby is going to jail. I just want the laws applied to everyone, equally. When a Bush appointee and I can agree on that, there is at least reason to expect signs of hope from our legal system. The support for the legal positions of this Administration just continue to erode.

Speaking of "defining evil"

"Military justice is to justice as military music is to music."

What I know of military law is contained in that cliche, one I remember from my Criminal Law professor decades ago. So when the Center for American Progress says the detainees in Gitmo should be tried in Kansas under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I am less than sanguine about the prospect. I agree with Colin Powell: let these "terrorists" be tried in a civilian court, with the full protection of the criminal law, because the circumstances of their capture and detention is dubious enough. Mike Huckabee, (yes, that Mike Huckabee) on the other hand, is just plain crazy:

BLITZER: But the argument isn’t so much the physical condition as to the legal system that they face. These suspected terrorists, these detainees are being held, by and large, without charges, without any evidence. They’re just being kept there indefinitely. And that’s causing a smear on the U.S. reputation.

HUCKABEE: I understand that. But I’ll tell you, if we let somebody out and it turns out that they come and fly an airliner into one of our skyscrapers, we’re going to be asking, how come we didn’t stop them? We had them detained.

There’s not a perfect solution. The perfect solution is to get people to quit being terrorists. And that’s not something we can easily control. If we’re going to make a mistake right now, let’s make it on the side of protecting the American people. That’s the number one role and responsibility that an American president has right now.

Funny we don't apply that standard to everyone we have in jail now for serious crimes, isn't it? Maybe because we can't build enough prisons. Maybe because that concept undermines any notion of "justice," or even a "system." We declare you guilty, we lock you up, problem solved! We don' need no steenken' badges!

Does protecting the American people really mean destroying the system we cherish in order to save it? Because these are the conditions he is talking about:

JONATHAN HARETZ: Well, um, initially, he was subjected to…well, uh, held incommunicado as I mentioned, without any access to anyone in the outside world. He was held in a tiny cell with no one to talk to. Um, there was no, it was all metallic services, he developed severe pain, he was denied things like a blanket, denied the Koran, subjected to religious abuse, not permitted to practice Islam, um, denied any kind of stimulation, of any - what I mean by - any books, any knowledge of what was going on. Just basically locked in a cell 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not permitted to see sunlight. There were threats were made against him, against his family, that they would – his family would be sent to Egypt, that his wife would be raped. Uh, just actually horrible, horrible things. This has improved somewhat, in part with response to the lawsuit we filed, and part, response to actually the men and women at the military brig, who are not setting the policy, and are, are um, you know, realize they have a human being there, and are acting accordingly. But uh, you know, at the highest levels of government, there was a decision made to detain him as “enemy combatant”, to subject him to this kind of torture and abuse that you can’t get away with in the civilian justice system, because its just flatly illegal and unconstitutional.

Note, first, that simple humanity is trying to triumph over abstractions such as "enemy combatant," a determination made by people who wouldn't know Mr. al-Mari if he shook their hand. Note, too, that Ali al-Marri was arrested in the US, and is being held in a military prison. Jonathan Hafetz, his lawyer, speaks continually of the military in his interview. Since when did we pass a law that the US military was judge, jury, and executioner of sentence on anyone the President labelled "enemy combatant"? And I don't consider the ex-post facto authorization of the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" to be a valid authorization of that authority, especially in the case of Mr. al-Marri. Why is this man in a military prison, and being subjected (apparently) the military law?

And, as I was saying, maybe we were the good guys in WWII only because we weren't the bad guys:

The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

King, 88, served under Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who was the chief prosecutor at the trials created by the Allied powers to try Nazi military and political leaders after World War Two in Nuremberg, Germany.

"The concept of a fair trial is part of our tradition, our heritage," King said from Ohio, where he lives. "That's what made Nuremberg so immortal -- fairness, a presumption of innocence, adequate defense counsel, opportunities to see the documents that they're being tried with."

And this was for the Nazis, the people we still uphold as the standard of human evil. What of the people in Gitmo?

King, who teaches law at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, also questioned whether former Guantanamo prisoner David Hicks deserved to be tried as a war criminal. After being held at Guantanamo for more than five years, the Australian pleaded guilty in March to a charge of providing material support for terrorism and was sent home to serve the rest of his nine-month sentence.

"He's not an arch-criminal type, just a guy who was disaffected from the system," King said.

Hicks, who admitted training with al Qaeda and briefly fighting on its side in Afghanistan, is the only person convicted in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals.

And the world knows this, if our politicians do not:

What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges levelled against them and without any judicial oversight – denied the possibility of defending themselves. Still ohers have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operations of which have been concealed ever since.

2. Some individuals were kept in secret detention centres for periods of several years, where they were subjected to degrading treatment and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”
(essentially a euphemism for a kind of torture), in the name of gathering information, however unsound, which the United States claims has protected our common security. Elsewhere, others have been transferred thousands of miles into prisons whose locations they may never know, interrogated ceaselessly, physically and psychologically abused, before being released because they were plainly not the people being sought. After the suffering they went through, they were released without a word of apology or any compensation – with one remarkable exception owing to the ethical and responsible approach of the Canadian authorities – and also have to put up with the opprobrium of doubts surrounding their innocence and, right here in Europe, racist harassment fuelled by certain media outlets. These are the terrible consequences of what in some quarters is called the “war on terror.”

3. While the strategy in question was devised and put in place by the current United States administration to deal with the threat of global terrorism, it has only been made possible by the collaboration at various institutional levels of America’s many partner countries.

This perhaps deserves a seperate post; but it is all of a piece. Consider, for example, the remarks of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe:

I have just seen the follow up report investigating allegations of “extraordinary renditions” and secret detentions in Council of Europe member states, which was prepared by Dick Marty and made public today by the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly.

It is too early to make any definite judgment on the content, but it is evident that Dick Marty and his team have invested a great deal of effort and that his conclusions are a matter of concern. They should be carefully studied by the governments of all Council of Europe member states.

The report also adds additional weight to the need for Council of Europe governments to take action on the recommendations which I made to them a year ago, and which contain specific proposals on how to prevent such violations of human rights in the future.

The language used by the lead investigator is really quite blunt:

Invoking state secrets in such a way that they apply even years after the event is unacceptable in a democratic state based on the rule of law. It is frankly all the more shocking when the very body invoking such secrets attempts to define their concept and scope, as a means of shirking responsibility. The invocation of state secrets should not be permitted when it is used to conceal human rights violations and it should, in any case, be subject to rigorous oversight. Here again, Canada seems to demonstrate the right approach, as will be seen later in this report.

7. There is now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania. These two countries were already named in connection with secret detentions by Human Rights Watch in November 2005. At the explicit request of the American government, the Washington Post simply referred generically to "eastern European democracies", although it was aware of the countries actually concerned. It should be noted that ABC did also name Poland and Romania in an item on its website, but their names were removed very quickly in circumstances which were explained in our previous report. We have also had clear and detailed confirmation from our own sources, in both the American intelligence services and the countries concerned, that the two countries did host secret detention centres under a special CIA programme established by the American administration in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 to “kill, capture and detain” terrorist suspects deemed to be of “high value”. Our findings are further corroborated by flight data of which Poland, in particular, claims to be unaware and which we have been able to verify using various other documentary sources.

8. The secret detention facilities in Europe were run directly and exclusively by the CIA. To our knowledge, the local staff had no meaningful contact with the prisoners and performed purely logistical duties such as securing the outer perimeter. The local authorities were not supposed to be aware of the exact number or the identities of the prisoners who passed through the facilities – this was information they did not “need to know.” While it is likely that very few people in the countries concerned, including in the governments themselves, knew of the existence of the centres, we have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories.

I am compelled to point out the Washington Post has reported on this memorandum, but you will look in vain for any mention of its involvement in this story as cited in the memorandum. Even Eugene Robinson is more discreet than that. Always a better narrative when we can make sure "they" are the ones responsible. Robinson, in fact, quotes approvingly what he calls the "conclusion" of this memorandum, which is in paragraphs 14 and 15"

14 We are fully aware of the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the danger it poses to our societies. However, we believe that the end does not justify the means in this area either. The fight against terrorism must not serve as an excuse for systematic recourse to illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. I hold this view not only because methods of this nature conflict with the constitutional order of all civilised countries and are ethically unacceptable, but also because they are not effective from the perspective of a genuine long-term response to terrorism.

15 We have said it before and others have said it much more forcefully, but we must repeat it here: having recourse to abuse and illegal acts actually amounts to a resounding failure of our system and plays right into the hands of the criminals who seek to destroy our societies through terror. Moreover, in the process, we give these criminals a degree of legitimacy – that of fighting an unfair system – and also generate sympathy for their cause, which cannot but serve as an encouragement to them and their supporters.

But the memorandum is much more concrete than that:

16. The fact is that there is no real international strategy against terrorism, and Europe seems to have been tragically passive in this regard. The refusal to establish and recognise a functioning international judicial and prosecution system is also a major weakness in our efforts to combat international terrorism. We also agree with the view expressed by Amnesty International in its recent annual report: governments are taking advantage of the fear generated by the terrorist threat to impose arbitrary restrictions on fundamental freedoms. At the same time, they are paying no attention to developments in other areas that claim many more lives, or they display a disconcerting degree of passivity. We need only cast our minds to human trafficking or the arms trade: how is it possible, for example, that aeroplanes full of weapons continue to land regularly in Darfur, where a human tragedy with tens of thousands of victims is unfolding?

17. In our view, it is also necessary to draw attention to an aspect we believe to be very dangerous: the legitimate fight against terrorism must not serve as a pretext for provoking racist and Islamophobic reactions among the public. The Council of Europe has rightly recognised the fundamental importance of intercultural and interfaith dialogue. The member states and observers really should carry these efforts forward and maintain the utmost of vigilance on the issue. Any excesses in this respect could have disastrous consequences in terms of an expanded future terrorist
threat.

18. In the course of our investigations and through various specific circumstances, we have become aware of certain special mechanisms, many of them covert, employed by intelligence services in their counter-terrorist activities. It is not for us to judge these methods, although in this area, too, great liberties appear to be taken with lawfulness. Many of these methods give rise to chain reactions of blackmail and lies between different agencies and institutions in individual states, as well as between states. Therein may lie at least a partial explanation for certain governments’ fierce opposition to revealing the truth. We cannot go into the details of this phenomenon without putting human lives at risk. Let me reiterate that we are fully convinced of the strategic importance of the work of intelligence services in combating terrorism. However, we believe equally strongly that the relevant agencies need to be subject to codes of conduct, accompanied by robust and thorough supervision.

Indeed, the memorandum ends with this observation:

We must condemn the attitude of the many countries that did not deem it necessary to reply to the questionnaire we sent them through their national delegations. Similarly, NATO has never replied to our correspondence.

So much for our good intentions. And so much for relying on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, too (there is a serious jurisdictional question there; and to the extent Congress even gave the UCMJ jurisdiction over non-military personnel in these matters, I think it should be withdrawn.). After all that, the Huckabee defense is really all we have left: hey, military prison ain't that bad! You should see how we treat our own citizens in Arkansas!

Wait; that sounded better before I said it....

Can we first define "evil"?

The nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in February, 2007:

In his opening remarks, Mullen, a Vietnam War veteran, told Pearl Harbor sailors: “I honestly believe this is the most dangerous time in my life.

“The enemy now is basically evil and fundamentally hates everything we are — the democratic principles for which we stand … This war is going to go on for a long time. It’s a generational war.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick, apparently without irony, would label this attitude "making war to keep peace." And, apparently, it really is all about "how we comprehend evil." So let's consider, outside a religious context, if we can, what "evil" means.

Is it slasher films and "gorenography"? There is more than a passing connection. "Hostel II" is, once again, set in Europe. Americans have always known, implicitly now, but explicitly before, that Europe was "decadent," so the premise of the films is easily accepted in that setting. Then again, all the victims are unpleasant and deserving of punishment (just as in the slasher films, where the teenagers who engage in hot sex for our prurient viewing, are the first to die at the hands of the maniac killer); so we get to eat our cake and have it, too. Just as easily, we can believe (though this is not a chicken or egg proposition vis a vis horror films) that the world outside our borders is decadent (just as it once was inside our borders, until we "pacified" the natives by exterminating them) and so we must make war in order to assure peace.

It's not that I don't think evil is a real concept, names a true thing, has, as we loosely say, "existence." But evil should be, always was, extraordinary; it was a word set aside for the worst imaginable. Adolf Hitler was evil, we were told. The Holocaust was evil. It was so evil, we had to coin a new word for it: genocide. Extraordinary Evil: Why Genocide Happens, a book coming out in the fall, captures that meaning, almost preserves it, now. Because evil is on its way to becoming banal, when it isn't linked to religion. And it's hard to argue that claiming the people killing in the name of, on behalf of, because of, or simply for the reason of, a religion, is not itself a religious use of the word. Moreover, it makes the conflict of "good" (us) and "evil" (them) religious as well. No one doubted when we took on the Axis powers that they were evil (if only because they were agressors); but no one cast the battle in explicitly, or even implicit, religious terms. Any who did were clearly marginalized at the time, and by history. But now we've come to rely on evil as our good. We need evil in order to justify our violence. This is an old song in American history, but it can only carry us for so long. Having declared Hitler evil, how do we go higher? When evil is no longer evil enough, what do we look for then?

There are two ways to approach this: one is philosophical/theological, and abstract. The "irony of American history," if you will; the idea of a pure nation (America) in a fallen world (everybody else). We cling to that one whether it is in our foreign policy, or our choice of horror films. What Adm. Mullen wants to claim is an exalted status for us, one that sets us apart from our enemies in every way. No surprise: Alberto Gonzales has made the same claim. Niebuhr, as I said before, saw this. Niebuhr, as it turns out, was also too much of an optimist, and not enough of a Calvinist:

"The Christian understanding of human nature, of course, is that we are always like our enemy. Reinhold Niebuhr called it the "Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue." Writing about America's response to Communism during the Cold War, Niebuhr noted the irony of our opposition to Communism:

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency. In any event we have to deal with a vast religious-political movement which generates more extravagant forms of political injustice and cruelty out of the pretensions of innocency than we have ever known in human history.

"Niebuhr was writing about the tendency of America to become like the Marxist system it then fiercely opposed, often with the same language of facing a "new enemy" in a "perpetual war." But he was optimistic that matters would not decay to the point that the Marxist systems would become indistinguishable from the American one:

The liberal world which opposes this monstrous evil is filled ironically with milder forms of the same pretension. Fortunately they have not resulted in the same evils, partly because they are not as consistently held; and partly because we have not invested our ostensible "innocents" with inordinate power. Though a tremendous amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself in American culture, our political institutions contain many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon. According to the accepted theory, our democracy owes everything to the believers in the innocency and perfectibility of man and little to the reservations about human nature which emanated from the Christianity of New England. But fortunately there are quite a few accents in our constitution which spell out the warning of John Cotton: "Let all the world give mortall man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . And they that have the liberty to speak great things you will find that they will speak: great blasphemies."

"The irony now is, in the name of that same Calvinism, the current Administration is hell-bent on tearing apart all of those safeguards against the selfish abuse of power. Niebuhr saw it as The Irony of American History. What he couldn't foresee was just how ironic American history would become, and just how much like our enemy." Niebuhr was more optimistic than that. Interestingly, Al Gore, using Niebuhr, recognizes it:

"Our founders," Gore told [Arianna Huffington], "had an incredibly sophisticated understanding of human nature. They believed that there is the potential for good and bad in all of us. They had a view very similar to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King's guru, who put forth the idea that we all have the potential for good and bad and that the ways in which we relate to one another, and the conditions within which we live our lives, have a big impact on whether our vulnerabilities for bad or abusive behavior increase or decrease."

I would note, as Gore does, that you don't have to be a theologian to understand that human nature is complex, human motivation ambiguous, and that "the conditions within which we live our lives, have a big impact on whether our vulnerabilities for bad or abusive behavior increase or decrease." The Founding Fathers, after all, weren't running a seminary. And, as Auden observed: "I and the public know/what all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom violence is done/Do Violence in return."

The other way to respond to this is concrete. Chris Hedges has a book scheduled for release at the end of the year: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians. I have no more than the catalog copy on it, but it tells you something:

Collateral Damage is organized around key military operations on the battlefield — Convoys, Checkpoints, Detentions, Raids, Suppressive Fire, and “Hearts and Minds.” Hedges and Al-Arian uncover how the very conduct of the war and occupation have turned the American forces into agents of terror for most Iraqis. The military convoys that speed through the centers of towns, often driving on the wrong side of the street or on sidewalks, have become trains of death. Soldiers fire upon Iraqi vehicles with impunity at checkpoints; pregnant women being rushed to hospital have been killed at roadblocks when their husbands failed to slow down and children have watched in horror as their parents have been killed.

Hedges and Al-Arian show how this widespread pattern of civilian killing has fueled the insurgency in Iraq, giving rise to instability, sectarian violence, and total chaos.

I read that, and I think of the "ordinary American" I saw on a panel on CNN yesterday, who kept saying we need to "remove the restrictions" on our military, so they can win. Because, after all, the greatest military power in the world can't be defeated except by its leadership, right? What all schoolchildren learn, and yet some of us still can't learn it. Now can we talk honestly about "evil"? Because those to whom violence is done, have their own understanding of who is "evil."

POWELL: They are. Guantanamo has become a major, a major problem for America’s perception — as it’s seen, the way the world perceives America. And if it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo — not tomorrow, this afternoon. I’d close it. And I’d not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well, then they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system’s all about? And by the way, America, unfortunately, has too many people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus. And so we can handle bad people in our system. And so I would get rid of Guantanamo and I’d get rid of the military commissions system, and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts martial. I would do that because it’s more equatable and it’s more understandable in constitutional terms. But I’d also do it because every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds. So essentially we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it. But remember what I started this discussion saying, don’t let any of them go. Put them in a different system, a system that is experienced, that knows how to handle people like this.

And this, of course, is all just the public narrative, the secular one. These are the arguments you pile up in response to the guy who says the military is "restricted" and could "win" if we'd "just let them." He was quite explicit in what he meant, this unknown gentleman: "Wipe 'em all out, that'll stop 'em," are not his exact words, but very close. "Kill 'em all," the priest allegedly said, "God will know his own." Interestingly, one argument for the historical validity of those words is that they are peculiarly Christian:

The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians. Indeed it is characteristically Christian. It only makes sense to those who believe in heaven and an afterlife. The phrase would be meaningless to an atheist.

Or, for that matter, to any adherent to any other religion which did not accept the fundamentally Platonic doctrine of immortality. Such is the ambiguity of human nature which Christians are called to witness to. As God says to Jeremiah: "The human heart is devious; who can fathom it? I, God, test the heart...." When even God is not sure what human beings will do next, or why, who are we to be sure we can know, and identify, "evil" in others?

It's an interesting concept, "evil," for a number of reasons. It assumes there is an opposing force in the world, which limits the power of God. There is a problem right there, especially for an omnipotent God. If God allows evil to exist, then perhaps Gloucester is right, as "As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods." But if all things come from God, must we now, as Job admonishes his wife, accept ill as well as good? Either God is the author of all we know in this life, or God abdicates a certain portion of it to an evil power who sports with us. It's a bit of a theodicial trap.

So let's back up from evil a moment, and reconsider the thoroughly debased Romantic ideal that it is all about us. That's hard to discard, because it's also the basis of existentialism and, while few of us may claim to be existentialists, or even now understand just what the philosophy espouses, we are hard-pressed to propose another theory of existence that we can subscribe to, a valid alternative that explains "the meaning of life" to us. We are all, in Western culture at least, Romantics through and through. Even questioning "why am I here" is a question of radical self-importance that would have been literally unthinkable earlier than the 19th century in Europe. We like to imagine that is a universal question, but you will search in vain for it in the stories of Chaucer's pilgrims, among Beowulf and his warriors, or in the Iliad or Sophocles' greatest tragedies. If anyone ever earned the right to ask "Why am I here?", it would be Oedipus, yet the question never crosses his lips. Seek it in the Bible; you won't find it there. Even the Westminster Catechism, written long before Wordsworth and Coleridge set pen to paper to re-invent poetry and being creating the modern world, doesn't cast it's first question in terms of "Why am I here?," but speaks of the chief end of humanity. And what is that chief end? "To glorify God and enjoy him sic forever." Not much Romantic purpose, there; not much to validate my individual existence. But that affirmation is part of the narrative of Romanticism, of Western European culture since the 19th century; the narrative of the authors of the catechism was another narrative, a different narrative, a narrative bound up with a confession of faith. And the question is: what happens when you remove that confession of faith from the narrative, but maintain the vocabulary? The authors of the Westminster Catechism were no doubt quite comfortable speaking of "evil." But we are no longer comfortable using their narrative. We like their vocabulary, though. It's familiar, and we think we know what it means. The problem is, of course, we don't; and it's leading us into nightmare.

Evil connected to religion, at least "evil" as traditional Christian doctrine understands it, is not "them" and something "over there." It is the state of human nature, the condition of human existence. But when evil is then reserved for Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, for genocide and terrorism, we quickly remove it from ourselves, convinced we aren't that bad. And we aren't; evil is too easily turned into a club to beat others with, another weapon of our power, our need for control. But then we lose control of "evil," too, and it no longer does our bidding. If only "they" are evil, then only "they" deserve to die, and "wiping them all out" to solve the problem becomes the only solution to every perceived international problem (and national; that same sentiment lies at the heart of the immigration debate today). But if we take evil back into ourselves, if we recognize our complicity in the violence of the world, if we stop thinking of ourselves as "innocent nation" in a "decadent world," perhaps we could start to make a change in the world. For Christians, being "in the world, but not of the world," means recognizing a struggle; Israel called it the "struggle with God." Muslims, as I understand, call it the "jihad," the struggles of the spirit. If those of us who are Christians would start to understand that evil is us, too, perhaps we would start to recognize the struggle is in us, not aimed at us. And the rest of us could at least recognize the religious basis of our vocabulary, and begin to choose our words, as well as our wars, a bit more carefully.

UPDATE:

Robert - I don't know if you heard my story a little while back. This truly stunned me.

I was just reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, which is Carlo Levi's account of his year in exile in Lucania - the back of beyond - in Italy under Mussolini. During that year Italy declared war on Abbyssinia. Word for word, this is what Levi tells the reader Mussolini told Italians:

"Abyssinia hates us for our freedom."

I about stroked out when I read that. Word for word.
Tena

Perhaps the only reason we were the "good guys" in WWII is because we weren't the "bad guys."

UPDATE II:

I feel the need to clarify: When Rick (my grate gud frend, as Molesworth would put it) says this:

"The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians."

This is certainly news to me.

But of course you are right that the first duty to "fight evil" is to fight it within, to struggle against my own evil. That doesn't relieve me of any obligation to recognize that good and evil are capable of gradation and that greater and lesser evils require differing responses. The fact that my motives are always mixed may still require that I take a stand against an external evil. But a failure to sufficiently recognize the ubiquity of original sin, a failure to see that there is no essential difference between myself and an Osama bin Laden, can lead us to become his miror image (and to a large extent, has).

The difficulty is in navigating between the extremes, between, on the one hand, thinking only the other is evil, and, on the other, thinking my own evil is so ingrained that I refuse to confront it outside myself. To act righteously we need both self-knowledge and self-criticism. Our heart is dark, but it's the only thing we've got.
Rick Allen

And I say this:

"The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians."

I don't accept it, either, nor do I consider it Christian. But then, my Christianity makes me a pacifist, which is also a position at odds with "traditionalist Christians," at least as judged by history. And then there is the question of whether I am permitted to do evil in order to oppose evil. Just because the heart is all we've got, doesn't excuse us from responsibility for doing evil.

I don't meant to be critical or issue a rebuke. But morality is something of a zero-sum game for me; you can't excuse your evil by appealing to good intentions. We're right back, in other words, to the question of power. Is it okay for me to wield power, if I intend to do good? That's the usual excuse, but I think the teachings of Jesus undercut every effort we make in that direction. Faith is radical, and radically individual, and it requires a radical trust ("faith") in God, a trust which may appear to be sheer lunacy. Certainly the early church had to struggle for a long time to make sense of the crucifixion.

That ambiguity and lack of clarity is truly at the heart of Christianity. As Paul said, Christians must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, in the apousia, not parousia, of our Lord. It is, indeed, a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.