Beautiful Horizons

Precisely Why George W. Bush is a Coward

I watched a segment of Matt Lauer's interview with former President George W. Bush. When asked about waterboarding, Bush commented that it was legal because a lawyer(s) told him so.

Notwithstanding the fact that the matter has not been adjudicated, and while lawyers are certainly capable of giving advice, but it is not definitive. That's why we have courts - and I'm sure the former president does not want to have a day in court on this matter. One can question in which direction Bush's moral compass, assuming he has one, is pointing. If his lawyer told him it was legal to crush a detainee's testicles would he have that done?

But here's where his cravenness comes to light. Lauer attempted to ask Bush how he would respond if  US soldier faced such treatment, upon which Bush interrupted him by saying that he didn't want to debate this question.

One can certainly understand why: any time a US soldier is a POW and gets tortured, Bush has pissed away our moral authority to protest torture. He, of course, despite the swagger, is too much of a coward to acknowledge this.

America's Mengele

It's truly hard to comprehend how horrible this is:

From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases> in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.

American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.

Here's why this post was given its title:

In a twist to the revelation, the public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades. Late in his own life, Dr. Cutler continued to defend the Tuskegee work.

Am I being a bit over the top? Perhaps, but consent should be obtained from any individual undergoing a medical experiment and such consent should be informed. If Dr. Cutler was afraid that he would not be able to obtain consent, perhaps he should have conducted the expirements on himself or his colleagues - with their informed consent.

Brilliant

Not content to let John Yoo figuratively wipe his ass with the Convention Against Torture, an enterprising artist has found a way for him to do so literally:

Astiz in the Dock

There is probably no more horrific story from Argentina's Dirty War than that of Alfredo Astiz. Astiz was a navy captain who infiltrated the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers of some of the disappeared who were probably the single greatest thorn in the side of the brutal junta.

Astiz's actions resulted in the torture and disappearance of several people including this particularly horrific case:

Mr. Astiz, 58, is accused of playing a central role in the kidnappings and disappearance of two French nuns, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet; an investigative journalist, Rodolfo Walsh; and several founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group that began gathering in the plaza outside the presidential palace shortly after the 1976 military coup to demand answers about their children’s whereabouts.

[...]

Witnesses said Sister Duquet was imprisoned at the Navy Mechanics School before her body was tossed from a plane into the Atlantic Ocean on one of many “flights of death” meant to dispose of prisoners’ bodies.

But currents pushed her body ashore, and she was buried in an unmarked grave. It was not until 2005 that Argentine forensic anthropologists identified her remains and those of another of the group’s founders, Azucena Villaflor.

What is exceptionally disturbing about his actions are these two facts:

• The Madres were neither using nor advocating violence.
• Asti'z's lawyer in the article linked above essentially tries to use the Nuremberg defense here:

Mr. Astiz denies knowing about the death flights, and his lawyer says that as a uniformed member of the military he was following orders to protect the nation from extremist violence.

He has been convicted in absentia in France for the murder of the nuns and has also been Sconvicted in absentia in Italy for killing three Italian citizens, is wanted in Sweden for the disappearance of a teenager and missed out on being convicted in Argentina as the result of an amnesty, essentially extorted by a restive military.

That amnesty has now been tossed out by Argentina's courts and Astiz at long last is facing justice. His trial started this past Friday, the day after Human Rights Day.

Jail actually may be the safest place for him:

On his way to a meeting in the tidy Palermo district here [in 1997], Jorge Oscar Ocampo suddenly began shouting and swinging at a blond, baby-faced man who passed him on the street.

''Why don't you torture me now?'' Mr. Ocampo yelled at the man, whom he recognized as Alfredo Astiz, a retired navy captain, who Mr. Ocampo said had beaten and tortured his wife and child during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

[...]

[In 1995], Alfredo Chavez, a former prisoner at a secret detention center during the military dictatorship, pummeled Mr. Astiz after spotting him on vacation at the Andean ski resort of Bariloche in southern Argentina.

Mr. Astiz sued Mr. Chavez, a municipal worker, but the courts dismissed the case, and the Bariloche City Council declared the former navy captain persona non grata.

An Argentinean friend once told me that since that last incident took place in Bariloche, every year on the anniversary, an informal celebration takes place. Perhaps soon they'll have even more cause to celebrate.

Let the healing begin.

Never In My Name

I don't want to comment too much on the Torture Memos as I haven't yet read them , except to point out that Glenn Greenwald has the takeaway here:

They explicitly recognized that the techniques they were authorizing were ones that we condemned other countries for using -- including as "torture" -- but nonetheless approved them, explicitly saying that the standards we impose on others do not bind us in any way

So when someone is aware that the act that they are facilitating is a crime, yet they continue to facilitate it, what possible affirmative defense could they have? 9/11 made torture legal?

Senator Leahy is right: at minimum there should be a truth commission. I would even be willing to let those who did so under orders off, provided the intellectual authors of these acts face justice.

While the Obama administration has said that they have no plans to prosecute CIA agents involved in the torture, they have no say about possible civil actions, some of which could be initiated under the Torture Victim's Protection Act (TVPA).

The TVPA was signed into law by George H. W. Bush.