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.

Honor?

I gotta be honest—there are some concepts I just don’t get.

Take my first three years at Wal-Mart, for example. My supervisor changed jobs in my first week of work. Then the director of the department quit. It was all a muddle, and they left me blissfully alone, never bothering to “evaluate” me.

Well, that was perfectly fine. My old boss, Ofelia, had never really evaluated me. Or rather, she was always evaluating me.

“How are you liking your classes,” she’d say in low tones and with a you-can-tell-me-anything look.

“Wonderful,” the student would whisper.

“Ofelia, you pumping the students again!?” I’d boom….

So I was nicely under the radar—the best place to be in corporate America. Had I stayed there, I might still be there….

“That’s a lack of respect,” cried one of the students. “You have to demand an evaluation!”

Why? Would it help me? Did my boss know anything about what I was doing? (Answer—no, which she cheerfully admitted. So she did what Ofelia did, and figured all was well….) They gave me a raise every year, evaluated or not, so there was no financial motive.

But respect is a big thing down here—and the phrase una falta de respeto signals serious annoyance and hurt. And I am as deaf to it as Beethoven was to his last symphony.

In the first place, if I perceive that someone has dissed (seriously expected that to get red-squiggled, but no, it passes!) me, is it true? A boss irritably asks for a report that is overdue, the student comes in the very highest dudgeon to class and reports this assault on her dignity. Time for an open-door! (Read, jump one level over the supervisor and complain….)

I would be delicate. Wasn’t the report overdue?

Right—so maybe the supervisor was having a bad day and his supervisor was riding him for the report—or the information in it—and yes, he should have been nice. Maybe.

Or maybe not?

The second problem I have with all this respect stuff is that I can’t figure out how someone’s bad behavior to me diminishes me. My boss at Wal-Mart told me the shocking story of a boss at another renowned company—3M. She had submitted a report. And he threw it on the floor, denouncing her and it.

In a staff meeting.

Not the classic example of Minnesota nice.

Right—that truly is an assault. But did anyone in the room think that the report was bad? Did anyone think that the boss was anything but a pathetically weak, rude and petty tyrant? His behavior diminished him, not my boss.

OK—now we come to honor. Susan, in perceptive comments, rightly points out that “honor killings” predate religions, and are not endorsed in the Qur’an. In fact, just the opposite.

And she sent me to an interesting—however chilling—Wikipedia article on the subject.

Well, well—the old problem sticks its head up again. Because whatever the Qur’an says or doesn’t say on the matter, twenty percent of Jordanians—in one survey—think it does.

And it may be that I am just as ill-informed as those twenty percent. I didn’t know, for example, that there are a dozen or so honor killings in Great Britain, every year. I vaguely knew that there are honor killings of guys engaging in homosexual acts. Nor did I know that honor killings in the United States both exist and are probably under-reported, since people want to be politically correct and respect “cultural differences.”

Did your blood pressure just rise?

Should have. But apparently some people value correct over life. Here’s one citation from the Wikipedia article:

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, an anthropology professor at Rhode Island College, explains how honor killings can be viewed in cultural relativist terms. She writes that the act, or even alleged act, of any female sexual misconduct, upsets moral order for the culture of interest and bloodshed is the only way to remove any shame brought about by the actions and restore social equilibrium.[9]

Yeah? You know, I’m not sure if this “explanation” has crossed the line and joined into “justification.” I also don’t see that we get much from this point of view.

The real truth—in my view—comes from another writer, also a woman. Try this out….

As noted by Christian Arab writer, Norma Khouri, honor killings originate from the belief that a woman’s chastity is the property of her families, a cultural norm that comes "from our ancient tribal days, from the Hammurabi and Assyrian tribes of 1200 B.C."[31]

More like it, hunh? And could we add that 3212 or more years have passed, and men are still valuing women only for their ability to make more men? Or more chattel that might later produce more men?

There’s cold reasoning and hot reasoning, the social psychologists say. Cold reasoning is what you imagine you’d do in a given situation. Hot reasoning is what you think and do in the situation itself. In other words, it’s easy to look on in indignation at the American soldiers torturing guys in the prison in Iraq. You’d never do that!

But you weren’t there. You didn’t see the mine blow up, the body parts of your best buddy fly past you, feel your bowels turn to water as you shit on yourself. You don’t know terror.

And it may be that it’s easy to think about cultures relatively in Rhode Island. So maybe Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban should watch the clip below.