Pssst… The Minister's Gay

Consider these words:

McConnell matter-of-factly told me he likely helped write Bush’s 2004 remarks endorsing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Even now the gay speechwriter defends that course. “I believed the president was taking a principled position, and the words he spoke on that issue were always reasonable and tolerant. That hasn’t always been the spirit of the debate, but it’s always been the spirit of George W. Bush. There was never a day I wasn’t proud of him and the vice president.”

(Full article here.)

It’s reasonable and tolerant to endorse legislation that restricts an essential human right? And you’re gay, and you’re writing the speech? Oh, and everybody knows you’re gay, since you’re bringing your boyfriend to White House activities?

If any of this makes sense to you, you’re firmly in the closet. Wait—make it stronger—you’re a mote of dust on the top shelf of the closet. But it turns out that McConnell was hardly the only gay staffer at the White House: there were more than seventy of them, a number that has surprised everybody.

By all accounts, Bush was a gracious man who, initially, was hardly the most vehemently homophobic Republican (remember Pat Buchanan?) True, two or three years into his term, he embraced the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but he had appointed openly gay people and committed significant funds to combating AIDS in Africa.

Nor was he the only Republican to go to bat for gay people: there was Ronald Reagan, who as far back as 1978 came out and opposed the Briggs Initiative, which would have forbidden gay people to teach in the public schools. Here’s what a long-term Democrat said about Reagan:

“Never have I been treated more graciously by a human being. He turned opinion around and saved that election for us,” Mixner said. “We would have been in deep trouble. He just thought it was wrong and came out against it.”

Curiously, after not having thought about the Briggs Initiative for years, it’s cropped up twice in the last two days, since I spent a fair amount of time contemplating Troy Perry, the founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, a denomination that currently has 222 congregations in 37 countries.

Born in Northern Florida in 1940, Perry always felt the call to preach—his aunt had been a snake-handling pastor in another state. So he got married, got ordained, and had two kids. Then a sex partner outed him at work.

It happened in those days, and the result was predictable: he was immediately dismissed and the head of the church council threatened to tell his wife. So Perry lost his wife—whom he loved—his kids, and his job.

And if all that weren’t enough, when he finally met a guy he loved, the man dumped him, leading him to attempt suicide. After a period of depression, he went on to found his church, with a ministry specifically for LGBT folk.  

It’s always felt a little bogus to me—why should gay people want to associate with a religion that has some significant homophobic baggage? Shouldn’t we get over it, stop wanting to be accepted, stop needing to be religious? And why does it feel that starting our own church is sad, in a way?

That said, Perry has balls of the most polished brass. They burned down three churches—one incident left 32 people dead. And when the Briggs’ Initiative came up, Perry went on a 17-day hunger fast to raise the money to help defeat the measure. And every Valentine’s Day for years, he and his now-husband went down to the county clerk’s office to ask for a marriage license. When he finally got married, he came back to California and sued the state to recognize his marriage.

He’s fought every battle, and seen a number of victories; he also is a shining example of the power of one person to move mountains. And if I have not been given the gift of faith, I can admire someone who has, and who has led his life according to his beliefs. For those of us who are out and proud, it’s hard not to wonder what seventy gay men and women working in the Bush White House might have accomplished.

Right, Dammit….

Well, well—the Alien Tort Statute rears its lovely head again!

Yesterday’s post was on the struggle of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) to bring an American evangelical minister, Scott Lively, to justice for the crime of going to Uganda and creating a climate of sufficient hate that a law was very nearly passed with the death penalty for some types of homosexual behavior. A federal judge ruled last week that the case could proceed.

And today?

According to Yes!, an online magazine, an attorney, D. Inder Comar, representing a single Iraqi mother has filed a class action suit against George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz; she alleges that they committed a “crime of aggression” under international law. Why? Because the war was not in self defense, nor was it approved by the United Nations.

Sundus Shaker Saleh, the single mother behind the suit, was living peacefully in Iraq before the invasion, and the picture she paints, if not idyllic, is certainly much better than now. People, she said, slept with their doors unlocked, there were no militias or patrols, the infrastructure was intact. After the invasion?

Well, we’ve seen what happened. Saleh no longer felt safe in her home, so she fled to Jordan. Nor was she alone in leaving the country, according to the United Nations High Commissioner, two million other people did as well, and 2.7 million people were internally displaced. That’s over 15% of the population, which was estimated at 31 million in 2009.

The case is based on several claims. First, six decades ago, we walked into the Nuremburg Trials and made some bold assertions; here, from the lawsuit Saleh vs Bush filed in the district of Northern California, is what was said at that trial:

16. In his opening statement to the Tribunal, Chief Counsel for the United States Robert H. Jackson stated “This Tribunal . . . represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 17 more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times – aggressive war.”           

17. Chief Prosecutor Jackson argued, “The Charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, ‘under God  and the law.’” (Id.) (emphasis added).

18. Chief Prosecutor Jackson argued, “Any resort to war – to any kind of a war – is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property.” (Emphasis added).

19. He continued, “The very minimum legal consequence of the  treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.” (emphasis added).

20. Chief Prosecutor Jackson recognized that the crime of aggression applied to the United States. He argued, “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” (Id.)

In the suit, Comar also alleged that the planning for the Iraq war was planned by what would be Bush administration officials as far back as 1998, or five years before the actual invasion.

Here’s another copy and paste from the suit:

26. On January 26, 1998, Defendants RUMSFELD and      WOLFOWITZ signed a letter4 to then President William J. Clinton, requesting that the United States implement a “strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” which included a “willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.” Removing Saddam from power had to “become the aim of American foreign policy.” (Emphasis added).

27. From 1997 to 2000, PNAC produced several documents advocating the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.5

28. On May 29, 1998, Defendants RUMSFELD and WOLFOWITZ signed a letter to then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in which they advocated that “U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place,” which included the use of “U.S. and allied military power . . . to help remove Saddam from power.”

So, the question becomes—can this work? Comar argues yes; my gut tells me no, despite wishing deeply that it could. And there is some legal ground—the Westfall Act of 1988—that protects government officials when they are acting within their “scope of employment.”

That’s the first argument that Paul Stephan, a professor at the University of Virginia, brings forth. The second? The crime didn’t take place on U.S. ground. And lastly, the courts are reluctant to get into political issues.

Comar travelled to Jordan, where Saleh had fled with her four children, to meet her; he is now representing her pro bono. But he needs help to meet expenses, to apply pressure on the court, and to raise awareness. Here’s what he writes in the Peope to People blog:

Please join me to make this trial a reality. You can help by supporting our fundraising campaign at indiegogo, by spreading the word about the lawsuits, and by reaching out to me if you want to get involved.

Look, screw the legal aspect of all of this. The damage done by George W. Bush and his government has been incalculable. More, there was no good reason to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction—Hans Blix, the UN inspector, had told both Rice and Tony Blair that in the weeks before. And the Bush administration deliberately lied to the American people—and the congress—in the weeks before the invasion.

In the weeks leading up to the invasion, I kept reading, reading—trying to find something that I had missed in the debate. The argument for the invasion of Iraq appeared the crassest, most errant display of greed, stupidity, and arrogance; surely there must be something I couldn’t see? Could any man be so depraved? Could any country allow a leader to commit such atrocity? I had to be wrong.

I was right.

A Cry to Stamps!

For half a century (OK, really only 48 years) J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, as well as threatening the hell out of everyone. He did it illegally.

For the last ten years (OK, really 12 years) two presidents have signed off on a program that allows the NSA to collect information on our telephone calls, emails, and text messages. They’re doing it legally.

We had all been saying it for years, all of us “radical” people who couldn’t quite get why we had to sit in Vietnamese rice paddies, watch little kids approach, and wonder if they had bombs under their dirty shirts. We spoke out against the infiltrators, the bugged telephones, the informers, all of the people spying on us as we protested an unjust war.

I miss it, those innocent years before we paid others to fight our wars, and before we gave away our privacy to the government, instead of protesting it. And I may as well confess, I’m mostly of the opinion that Edward Snowden acted correctly when he exposed the secret programs that are spying on us all.

Why?

Because we wouldn’t have known, otherwise. And because everything—OK, much of what—we know about J. Edgar Hoover came from a similar action. Somebody—nobody knows who but you can bet it wasn’t for lack of trying—stole secret files from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.

It was a night in 1971, and most of the United States was watching Joe Frazier fight Muhammad Ali. But a guy or guys from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI grabbed a crowbar, wrenched the 2-man FBI office, and filched the files. All in all, over a thousand documents were taken.

Two weeks later, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times got manila envelopes with copies of documents. There was the report on sending a tape to Martin Luther King; the tape showed King in his hotel room with women, not his wife. That came accompanied by a note: “King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”

That presumably meant suicide, which was the option actress Jean Seberg opted for, after a (false) rumor was published saying that the father of her unborn child was a Black Panther, not her French husband.

Want more? Here’s one writer on the subject:

The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening revelations of the Media documents. Underground newspapers were targeted. Students (and their professors) were targeted. Celebrities were targeted. The Communist Party of the U.S.A., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Organizing Committee, the Black Panther Party, the Women's Strike for Peace -- all were targeted. "Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one memo said.

 Attorney General John N. Mitchell asked Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, saying that doing so could “endanger people’s lives”—those people out there spyi…err, collecting information vital for our national security.

It was only through that one act—forcing a window, raiding two file cabinets—that we understood or rather we knew what we had always known. As well, we got a new term—COINTELPRO, or counter-intelligence program.

A few months after the break-in, Daniel Ellsberg came forth with the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the government knew early on that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and that the Johnson administration had lied to the people, and to the Congress. All of that lead to the Church Committee, which has been described as the most—well, here’s Wikipedia….

Together, the Church Committee's reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but more than 50,000 pages have since been declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

The report revealed that it wasn’t just at home that our intelligence system had gone seriously off whack. Here’s more Wikipedia, from the same source:

Among the matters investigated were attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles's plan, approved by the President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.

So now we have a president who is telling us that we should trust these secret programs because there is a mechanism to oversee them and so all is OK. But, in fact, a meeting that was called before the Snowden affair of the heads of the intelligence agencies and Congress had only 48 senators and representatives show up. The meeting was on a Friday afternoon—the boys skipped out early that day.

Oh, and the FISA judges approved every request from the NSA—all 1856 of them. Odd, why am I thinking just now of rubber stamps?

Hmmm, you know, it’s not a bad idea I have. Readers of this blog know that, for seven years, I worked for a small company named Wal-Mart. My efforts in that enterprise consisted largely of sitting a room, pounding on tables, and throwing pencils at small groups of people. That all ended one Friday morning, after the company had done an extensive re-alignment. I was outta line.

So what to do now?

Readers, be the first on your block to buy in. Give yourself a double shot of self congratulations by helping a deserving blogger and your government. For ten bucks (plus handling and shipping, as well as taxes where applicabl… oh, and you ladies down there in Tobago—I know you’re there—I gotta charge more) I’ll send you this valuable item, which you in turn (and in protest) can send to the federal government. The one crucial thing they obviously don’t have….

Victims and Victor

Rachel Maddow surprisingly doesn’t make the obvious point in the clip below, when she talks about the Carnival Triumph debacle—the poop cruise, as she calls it—and the eight years that we suffered through George W. Bush. The Triumph passengers had a horrific week-long vacation. We spent 8 years while the ship drifted aimlessly, and then fell recklessly into maelstroms. Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Guantanamo, the War in Iraq, Katrina, the erosion of the worldwide goodwill after September 11^th, the list goes on and on.

Or rather, the poop kept rising while the ship kept sinking.

It was a disaster at every turn, and I was fortunate, I now realize, that I was so exhausted by Wal-Mart and Franny that very little of it got in. Yes, I read the headlines, skimmed the articles, and then went out to the back of the building to make my morning call to Franny. Then it was eight hours of teaching, an hour or two of emails / writing / class preparation / brownnosing the Human Resources ladies. (Yes, I caved to pressure, I’m sorry to say, and used to force myself to spend 20 minutes chatting with people in the department. I had been told, you see, that some people felt I was aloof, that I wasn’t fully a part of the department. So chatting I did….)

So all the five presidents and all the first ladies (minus Nancy) got together down in Texas to dedicate the new George W. Bush Library. And of course they would; it’s a club, after all, that handful of ex-presidents, and there must be a tacit disagreement. Once you’re out of office, your job is to shut up. Do good works: solve global warming or AIDS in Africa or build houses for the poor—but shut up.

And no one is gonna deny—the job’s not easy. My problem with W is that for him, it was. He was arrogant and entitled and too stupid to know how stupid he was on the first day of his presidency, when he inherited a country largely on its feet, and W was just as arrogant / entitled / etc. on the last day of his presidency. The difference?

The country was lurching on the edge of financial collapse, the rest of the world despised us, global warming was no longer a theory but a fact, and the United States Constitution had been overridden.

And the worst thing? Through a combination of arrogance and stupidity, Bush never realized the damage he had done. In fact, he said recently that he was “comfortable” with the decisions he had made.

Yeah?

We’ll never see him brought to justice, and I suppose he had to build his damn library, and he could hardly not do that and not dedicate it, and so he invited the boys down to Texas and they sighed and crossed a day out of their lives and whooped it up down in Texas with W and Laura.

And yes, by tomorrow we will have forgotten about it. And if Rachel Maddow is wondering, I can tell her that yes, last week there was a day when four cruise ships sailed into the old city, and walking Calle del Cristo felt more like Des Moines than San Juan. If the Carnival Triumph ever happened, you wouldn’t have known it as you found it impossible to move any faster than the gawking, open-mouthed couple ahead of you permitted.

We forget, the rest of the world does not. Often, of course, because so much happens over-there done by you-know-whom. Take a look at this:

 PAKISTAN

Name | Age | Gender

Noor Aziz | 8 | male


Abdul Wasit | 17 | male


Noor Syed | 8 | male


Wajid Noor | 9 | male


Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male


Ayeesha | 3 | female


Qari Alamzeb | 14| male


Shoaib | 8 | male


Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male


Tariq Aziz | 16 | male


Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male


Maezol Khan | 8 | female


Nasir Khan | male


Naeem Khan | male


Naeemullah | male


Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male


Azizul Wahab | 15 | male


Fazal Wahab | 16 | male


Ziauddin | 16 | male


Mohammad Yunus | 16 | male


Fazal Hakim | 19 | male


Ilyas | 13 | male


Sohail | 7 | male


Asadullah | 9 | male


Khalilullah | 9 | male


Noor Mohammad | 8 | male


Khalid | 12 | male


Saifullah | 9 | male


Mashooq Jan | 15 | male


Nawab | 17 | male


Sultanat Khan | 16 | male


Ziaur Rahman | 13 | male


Noor Mohammad | 15 | male


Mohammad Yaas Khan | 16 | male


Qari Alamzeb | 14 | male


Ziaur Rahman | 17 | male


Abdullah | 18 | male


Ikramullah Zada | 17 | male


Inayatur Rehman | 16 | male


Shahbuddin | 15 | male


Yahya Khan | 16 |male


Rahatullah |17 | male


Mohammad Salim | 11 | male


Shahjehan | 15 | male


Gul Sher Khan | 15 | male


Bakht Muneer | 14 | male


Numair | 14 | male


Mashooq Khan | 16 | male


Ihsanullah | 16 | male


Luqman | 12 | male


Jannatullah | 13 | male


Ismail | 12 | male


Taseel Khan | 18 | male


Zaheeruddin | 16 | male


Qari Ishaq | 19 | male


Jamshed Khan | 14 | male


Alam Nabi | 11 | male


Qari Abdul Karim | 19 | male


Rahmatullah | 14 | male


Abdus Samad | 17 | male


Siraj | 16 | male


Saeedullah | 17 | male


Abdul Waris | 16 | male


Darvesh | 13 | male


Ameer Said | 15 | male


Shaukat | 14 | male


Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male


Salman | 12 | male


Fazal Wahab | 18 | male


Baacha Rahman | 13 | male


Wali-ur-Rahman | 17 | male


Iftikhar | 17 | male


Inayatullah | 15 | male


Mashooq Khan | 16 | male


Ihsanullah | 16 | male


Luqman | 12 | male


Jannatullah | 13 | male


Ismail | 12 | male


Abdul Waris | 16 | male


Darvesh | 13 | male


Ameer Said | 15 | male


Shaukat | 14 | male


Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male


Adnan | 16 | male


Najibullah | 13 | male


Naeemullah | 17 | male


Hizbullah | 10 | male


Kitab Gul | 12 | male


Wilayat Khan | 11 | male


Zabihullah | 16 | male


Shehzad Gul | 11 | male


Shabir | 15 | male


Qari Sharifullah | 17 | male


Shafiullah | 16 | male


Nimatullah | 14 | male


Shakirullah | 16 | male


Talha | 8 | male

Right—so what is it? It’s the list of kids who have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan.

“No,” you say. “It can’t be. You trawled through the Internet and found a site to your liking, and now you’re ramming anti-America propaganda down our throats.”

http://www.policymic.com/articles/24164/a-list-of-children-killed-by-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-and-yemen

Well, it’s true—I haven’t checked out this site, which, by the way, adduces a Colombia Law School Human Rights Institute study that says that up to 98% of drone deaths are civilians.

But of course we do remember, on those rare occasions when the carnage takes place on our soil. We read the three thousand names every September 11^th.  Next April 15^th, there will be ceremonies, minutes of silence, bowed heads, tears and prayers.

I’m guilty of it myself. I had written about Tomas Young, the Iraq vet who wrote an angry last letter to George W. Bush, and then set himself the date of 20 April 2013 as the start date for his fast until his death.

20 April 2013—the day after two young men shut down an entire city plus several substantial suburbs / small towns. These “terrorists” killed five people and maimed over 150 victims.

Horrifying and completely indefensible.

But what would you say if you were the family of Luqman / 12 / male—to choose at random just one of the names on  the list above?

And sadly, there is a group of Americans who will remember—or rather, who are incapable of not remembering.

Guys like Tomas Young, whose damage is physical, if they’re lucky. Or guys who have the worst fate thrust on them. Guys with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, guys who startle awake at 2AM when a car backfires, guys who take their wives “hostage” when their kid forgets not to slam the screen door.

Round Two

You know the story as well as I do: the two explosions; the 78 year-old runner blown to the street; the smoke lifting; the stunned man filming the event, who can only keep saying “Oh, my God.”

So it’s happened again, a dozen years after September 2001. We have spent billions of dollars on “security,” we’ve lost significant amounts of freedom, we have allowed the government to strip us of rights in order to “protect” us. In addition, we’ve lost the ability to think, and fallen victim to fear. Does anybody really think that having zillions of people scrutinize us as we empty our pockets and take off our shoes and belts and go through metal detectors at our airports is making us safer? Wouldn’t a simple lock on the cockpit door have done the trick? And why, since hijacking has been around since the 60’s, wasn’t it standard procedure to lock the cockpit?

So yes, I watched the videos compulsively yesterday, until it occurred to me—it wasn’t doing my stomach any good. Nor was it being particular useful to the people of Boston, so why was I doing it?

Later I wondered—under what circumstances would I ever put a bomb (or two or four, however many there were) in a crowd full of innocent people? Would I ever? Would I ever have so much hurt, so much pain, that it would give rise to that level of rage and bile?

I hope not.

OK—Adolf Hitler. When would I have the necessary knowledge to justify putting the bomb under his desk? Would I need to have seen the concentration camps? Would hearing accounts be enough? Would just seeing the Jews crammed in the cattle cars be sufficient?

So now the country is watching a city block of Boston, Massachusetts, and scratching their heads and saying, “why do they hate us?” The answer, most people think, is that there is such a thing as evil, and the people who perpetrated this deed were evil.

Well, I think there’s an alternative explanation, and the New York Times reported on it today. “US Practiced Torture After 9/11,” announced the headline, and my response was, predictably, “duh….”

Of course we were practicing torture—will anybody in the world forget that sadistic photograph of the female soldier, her cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, her foot resting on top of a heap of naked prisoners? We admitted that we water-boarded, it was reported that the justice department had written memos, and that we had signed off on these “interrogation” techniques, but that no—national security, we couldn’t read them.

So it was a true “dog bites man” moment for me, but not, apparently for a Republican guy named Asa Hutchinson, who served under Bush as head of the Drug Enforcement Agency and undersecretary of the Homeland Security. He was the Republican balance to a bipartisan report, and he initially started out believing that no, there was no torture committed. But here’s what the New York Times has him saying:

“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.

“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”

He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”

Yeah? Wanna ask the rest of the world?

I read once that there was a British maxim—a man is judged by how he treats his enemy. And nations as well; that said, how well do we score?

Well, the Army Field Manual on Interrogation may reveal a hint or two; section M allows for interrogation sessions for up to 40 consecutive hours.

“Doesn’t sound like much,” you say. Right, but try staying awake from 8AM Monday morning to midnight the next day—that’s 40 hours.

And the very fact that it was officially permitted led to other things, not officially permitted. Here’s one chilling sentence from the Times story:

The C.I.A. not only water boarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

Oh, and here’s another one:

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Nor does the report spare the Obama administration:

While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

Well, you know where I land on this issue. Obama didn’t want to focus on the past, he said, he wanted to focus on the future, going forward.

Lovely sentiment.

Bullshit.

No president is gonna go after a former president, for the simple fact that every president is going to BE at some point a former president.

So now we know. Oops, so sorry—looks like we went a little overboard.

Is that enough?

Let’s see—what time is it, over there in the Hague?

War Criminals and Heroes

Looking back at it, it was a time when George Orwell took charge of the script, and we all reacted accordingly.

No one I knew thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No one I knew favored bombing the hell out of Iraq, or believed that we could do it, put a government in place, and then leave. No one I knew thought this was about anything more than oil, or possibly saving the US dollar (a report in Vanity Fair suggested that Hussein might change oil payments from dollars to the Euro, striking a crippling blow to the US currency).

Unfortunately, what we knew made no difference. Because in the months following the September 11^th attacks, a half-witted American president was cajoled / coerced / convinced to engage in a war with Iraq that was and is illegal and immoral.

And the people who did speak up against it?

Well, one was Phil Donahue, who had the highest ratings for a talk show at the time. But an internal memo from his network, MSNBC, revealed that he was fired for opposing George W. Bush—not, as the network stated, for poor ratings.

Well, we know the rest of the story. Or rather, we don’t. It’s certainly true that there were no WMDs, and we’ve learned that taking a nation from dictatorship to anarchy doesn’t do much good. We’ve also seen that putting a generation of American soldiers through the agony of war tears lives and families apart.

We haven’t seen much of what it’s done to Iraqi families, and statistics vary—is it hundreds of thousands dead, or more than a million? Nor have we seen the campus riots that we did in the Vietnam War—we have outsourced the army to our poor, and who cares about them?

In a picture that is unimaginably cynical enters one man, Tomas Young, who believes, who trusts, who takes what he sees at face value. He believes George W. Bush, and enlists two days after the September 11^th attacks. He prepares to deploy to Afghanistan.

Instead, he is sent to Iraq.

And five days later, is shot by a sniper. He’s paralyzed from the nipples down, and will never walk again.

And things go badly for him—a pulmonary embolism leaves him slurring his words, he cannot feed himself, he suffers excruciating pain in his abdomen and has to have a colostomy. Oh, and his only food is liquid nutrition, which he receives by feeding tube.

He doesn’t, however, stop speaking out. And Tomas Young spoke out last week on the tenth anniversary of the War in Iraq. He said what should be said—that Bush and Blair were and are war criminals. He also announced that he’s had enough; he will stop taking any nourishment or fluids, and fast until the end.

Young is 33 years old.

Readers of Iguanas will know: my mother made the same decision as Young. He is, however, half a century younger than she was when she decided to die.

Which made it difficult—how to get the hospice care needed to support him through this process? Ironically, it was through the same term, “failure to thrive,” that ended up on my mother’s death certificate.

I completely get Young’s decision to die. And he’s not alone in thinking that justice has not been done in the case of two leaders who violated the 1945 UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So says Michael Mansfield, a British lawyer who led the Legal Action Against War protest in 2003. Mansfield points out that the charter specifically forbids a preemptive strike on the basis of a perceived threat. Yet that’s what Blair and Bush did by manipulating flawed data.

And we, of course, let them get away with it. So now we have a new generation of vets suffering from brain disorders and shell shock. We have lives that are so much ruined that death becomes the only acceptable way out. And we have the moral responsibility to demand that the ICC—the International Criminal Court—try Bush and Blair for war crimes.

Oh, and Bush? What’s he up to, nowadays, as Tomas Young prepares to end a decade of suffering?

All of Washington is talking about it—he’s taken up painting.

Can’t tell—is it one step up or down from Ecce Mono?

Doña Ilia Charms the Plaza

We’re forty lives short of California.

It took us an hour and 45 minutes to read through Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and Arkansas.

It felt like a performance—mouth was dry, hands were shaky, my focus had narrowed. Pablo picked up on it, and asked if I was OK.

“Nerves,” I said.

So what was there to be nervous about?

Raf carried the camcorder, I carried the materials: the two books of the 33,050 names; the information flyers; two chairs, one for reading, the other for the 33,050 people who are not there.

“You’re such a drama queen,” said Pablo, as I was clothes-pinning the shirt to the back of the chair, and the blue jeans to the seat. “I love it….”

“Let’s go around the plaza and tell people about the project,” I said. So we did for fifteen minutes or so.

“You know, it’s really important to engage with people—that’s what I’ve been learning,” said Pablo.

He’s a social anthropologist, but that’s incidental. He’s also my Puerto Rican brother, who went away for a while and now is back.

So he started the reading the names—Robert Schneider, Marc Perry, Frederick Hogan…. He read for fifteen minutes, and then went off to his next project or commitment. Just before doing so, I ran into my first, and only, gun rights advocate.

“I wonder if you’d read the list of people whose lives have been saved by guns,” he started out.

“No, but if you want to compile the list, you’re more than welcome to sit on the other side of the plaza and read it….”

I’d been dreading meeting this guy or one of his ilk—a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the NRA who recited the Second Amendment word for word, though transposing the militia clause from front to back.

Which he may have done on purpose, since he immediately asked me why we need guns.

“Protection.”

“Yes, and protection from what?”

“I think you’re gonna tell me…”

“The government,” he exploded. “From a tyrannical government. We need to have guns so that in the event of a tyranny, we can rise up and protect our rights!”

I had forgotten one of the great American crazinesses—this wild belief that the damn Federal government is plotting away back there in Washington to take away my rights and my land and my children but by God they step one foot on my land I’ll blow the brains out of them fuckers!

It’s completely irrational, although maybe not. Thanks to George W. Bush and the war on terror (decided not to cap that term….) we’re probably less free than we’ve ever been as a nation and as citizens. But somehow, I don’t think that was what he meant.

“Hitler killed 30 million people and never fired a gun,” he said.

I didn’t get it.

And still don’t. He said that words kill more people than guns.

So guns don’t kill, words kill!

OK—the talk was cordial, respectful. Did he want to go before the camera and give his point of view? This is all about fostering debate.

“No,” he said quickly. And I wondered—what was he afraid of? Because there were many “noes” yesterday—the “no, I’m shy,” the “no, I’ve got to meet someone,” the “no, this isn’t my thing.”

Into the scene improbably walked Nydia, Raf’s sister, who had completely panned the whole idea two days previously. But there’s a thing about Nydia, she’s totally loyal. So if I’m out making a fool out of myself under the hot Caribbean sun, well, she’ll be there.

“I’m here to read names,” she said, kissing me, and then, having heard a bit of the conversation, dropped the news “but guns kill,” onto the man.

“Go give Raf a break,” I said. Somehow, the combination of a strongly emotional, passionate Nydia and a fearful gun owner didn’t seem like a good idea. So she went off to read.

And then, into the plaza and into the picture stepped doña Ilia, Raf’s indomitable 83-year-old mother. Who is here to read as well, and does so, sitting in her walker.

She’s full of charm, this rheumatoid-arthritis-wracked lady who went, almost seven years ago, into cardiac, pulmonary, and kidney arrest, met God and told him to go to hell—she wasn’t ready yet. And so she was moving about the square, telling little girls “Ay, ¡qué linda, m’hija!” and patting them and beaming at the parents. Or she was standing behind Nydia, and proudly holding the sign that announces the project—“30,000 Lives.” Or she was telling the two visitors from Wisconsin about how many of her children went to the University of Wisconsin—three, plus a grandchild.

Nydia more or less trapped a girl into reading—she did so for five minutes and then joined her friends who would do a flash mob and dance. Then the Wisconsin kids took over, the girl reading, the guy holding the sign. Lastly, there was a guy, don Miguel, walking through the plaza and carrying two signs—one in English, the other in Spanish. So he read some names, and then talked about his project—the proposed plan to sell the airport.

It was hot, we were tired, we were done for the day. People had drifted by, taken pictures of us on their cell phones, stopped to chat. The only person who doesn’t have a picture?

Me—completely forgot to bring the stills camera.

No matter—stay tuned for the YouTube clip that will instantly go viral.

How do I know?

Who can resist an 83-year-old lady who told God to take a hike reading names in the middle of a square in San Juan, Puerto Rico?

If anyone can get a message out, doña Ilia can….