War – Page 4 – Feministe

Steven Green is standing trial for the murder of Abeer Kassem al-Janabi and her family. The details are horrifying. (Trigger warning on those links and the rest of this post).

Green has pleaded not guilty to killing 14-year-old Abeer. The crime he is accused of is nearly unimaginable:

Prosecutors have said Green was the triggerman among a group of soldiers who attacked the family March 12, 2006 near Mahmoudiya, Iraq. They said he shot 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi’s parents and 6-year-old sister, then was the third to rape the teen before shooting her in the face several times

There doesn’t seem to be a question of whether Green participated in the gang rape and murder or Abeer, and the murder of her family. The issue is his role in the crime, and his culpability:

Defense attorneys have asked jurors to consider the “context” of war surrounding Green, painting a picture of young soldiers in harsh wartime conditions, lacking leadership and receiving little help from the Army to deal with the loss of friends.

…yeah, not buying it.

On the one hand, I do think it’s fair to place some amount of blame on the “context” — and by “context,” I mean the U.S. military and Green’s superiors. When we dehumanize Iraqis, torture with impunity and build a military industrial complex that relies on brute violence (and often sexualized, hyper-masculine constructions of violence) for supremacy, we shouldn’t be surprised when individual soldiers do really terrible, sexually violent things to the people they have branded sub-human. But of course, “we shouldn’t be surprised” doesn’t translate into “we shouldn’t punish them.” I hope Green and the other men who raped and killed Abeer and murdered her family rot in jail for a long, long time.

What He Said.

Just go read Glenn.

War Crimes

Yeah, we commit them in secret prisons.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted.

In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.

The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.

Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture. The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes trials after World War II for
…
Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A.’s methods and the Justice Department’s long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.

You can read the memos here. It’s really disturbing stuff, and it’s quite honestly humiliating — the United States’ status as some sort of moral beacon faded long ago (if it ever existed), but certainly we’re supposed to be better than this. And while I’m not a big fan of punitive punishment, the lack of accountability here is startling:

Within minutes of the release of the memos, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that the memos illustrated the need for his proposed independent commission of inquiry, which would offer immunity in return for candid testimony.

Mr. Obama condemned what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history” and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again. But he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the program, saying that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

A dark chapter in our history? The past? Sure, it is “past” insofar as four years ago is “the past,” but come on now — it’s hardly so far back in history that we should close the book on it and move on. It just happened. Many of the people who authorized and implemented these procedures are still in positions of power; none of them, as far as I know, have had to pay any penance for the crimes they committed or encouraged.

Of course, it’s not so easy to pinpoint exactly who should be paying penance, and for what. The people who actually carried out the torture did so under orders from above; they were told that they had the legal go-ahead. The lawyers who wrote the memos certainly came to some reprehensible conclusions, but they weren’t the policy-makers or the order-givers, even if they knew that their recommendations would translate into policy. I personally believe that the buck stops at the highest levels of power — clearly the higher-ups in the Bush administration not only knew what was going on, but pushed their legal experts to come to these conclusions. In doing so, they put American citizens in legally precarious situations — for all their America-loving talk, they encouraged CIA operatives to commit war crimes, and opened all of those people up to potential prosecution. It doesn’t look like the CIA officers are going to be prosecuted, but they were put in a very troublesome situation — and many of them did very troublesome things.

Mr. Obama said that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted, but he left open the possibility that anyone who acted without legal authorization could still face criminal penalties. He did not address whether lawyers who authorized the use of the interrogation techniques should face some kind of penalty.

I hope some sort of investigation is launched, but I also hope that we don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. I obviously don’t have a ton of sympathy for torturers, but I’m also not sure that they guy working at a prison in Aghanistan, who’s being told by everyone from the President of the United States on down to use “harsh” techniques in order to get information from detainees, and who is operating under significant personal stress in an organization that relies heavily on hierarchy, is the person who should be held ultimately accountable. I would much rather see the people who were in positions of real power and authority have to answer for this.

The New York Times offers a round-up of blog and op/ed opinionson the torture memos. It’s well worth a read.

300 Women March for Rights in Afghanistan

I’m sure that you’ve already seen this elsewhere, but it’s certainly worth posting again.

Yesterday, 300 women in Afghanistan marched in the streets to protest a new law which affects the Shia minority of the population. It says that a woman cannot leave or work outside of the home without her husband’s permission, that she cannot refuse his requests to “make herself up,” and also that marital rape is a-okay. The women were met with 1,000 male counter-protesters, who hurled verbal abuse at them, threatened violence, and actually enacted violence in the form of throwing stones at the women:

The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”

The women scattered as the men moved in.

“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”

The women ran to the bus and dived inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

“Whores!”

But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.

With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked two miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law’s repeal.

“Whenever a man wants sex, we cannot refuse,” said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the marchers. “It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants.”

Like everyone else, I am astounded at the bravery of these women and their activism.

Afghanistan’s President Karzai seems to be softening his stance and indicating that “the most controversial parts of the law” might be repealed, as the law has not yet been officially published and can therefore be changed. But it seems that the women are demanding a full repeal of the law, period. And it also seems that’s the absolute right stance to take.

President Obama has thus far indicated that he thinks the law is “abhorrent,” but has done nothing to stand with the women who oppose the law or to pressure Karzai to listen to them. You can sign a petition telling him to do just that.

ETA: Commenter Forrester has decided to match the first $1,000 of Feministe donations made to RAWA in solidarity with the women who took place in this march. If you donate online, forward those receipts to cara.kulwicki at gmail dot com so that I can verify with Forrester that they were made!

Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue

A guest post by Rebecca of City of Ladies

Peace and hello. The Feministe crew have generously invited me to guest-post here about the Israel-Gaza conflict. I’ll spare you the biography and just say as background that I’m a blue-state Reform Jew with an Israeli-born mother who’s about ready to disown me (not literally) because I support peace in Gaza. (How about that ceasefire, eh.)

This post is in three parts: Israel-Republicanism, One State, Two State, Multiethnic State, Jew State, and Shalom/Salaam.

—

Israel-Republicanism

While I discuss below issues that are more specifically related to the current war, I’d like to first counter, somewhat obliquely, David Schraub’s earlier posts on anti-Semitism.¹ I agree when David says that, as with other forms of bigotry, it’s the victims of that bigotry that should get to define what is and what is not anti-Semitism.

However. Criticism of Israel’s actions is not, in and of itself, anti-Semitic. Period.

Most American Jews I know are, if not always liberal, at least consistent Democrats. (Except for my uncle. Does everyone have a Republican uncle?) Which is why it confuses and saddens me when so many of them adopt what I call a Republican position with respect to Israel.² Meaning they take as their motto the saying “My country, right or wrong” without adding the coda that liberals do: “if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right.” Rather than seeing the conflict as the complex and nuanced situation it is, they see it in black and white – “you’re either with us or against us.” In short, large numbers of American Jews that are progressive about American politics are total right-wing nutjobs when it comes to Israel.

Why is this? Why this willful blindness, this Israel-Republicanism? Does it stem from religious conviction? Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia? A belief that Jews have just been persecuted enough? Simply a facet of American privilege? I suspect it’s all of these.

Homelessness Increases Among Female Veterans

It looks like the rates of homelessness among female veterans are rising:

Even including the 20 or so beds that would make up the new women’s home, Ms. Kiss described a grim calculus for female veterans. Ten years ago women represented 3 percent of homeless veterans, she said, compared with 5 percent now. About 180,000 female troops now serve in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, it’s still important to note that the vast majority of homeless veterans are male, and the number of homeless female veterans is rather disproportionately low compared to their numbers in the military overall. But the bad news is, firstly, that their numbers just may rise when they finally come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And secondly, there are fewer services out there to cater to them:

A FAR-REACHING network of private and public agencies serves homeless veterans in Connecticut, with group homes and caseworkers helping former military members live normally again. But that network now faces the fallout from a signal change in the nation’s military policy — namely, the shift to female combatants. The number of homeless female veterans is also growing, with fewer resources to help them.

Earlier this month, though, an organization that runs two group homes for homeless male veterans in Bridgeport sought to build a similar facility in Norwalk for women. The organization, the Applied Behavioral Rehabilitation Institute, was outbid in its effort to buy city land for the project, but the leaders of the initiative said that if it did not happen in Norwalk, they would find someplace else.

And Lord knows that unless Obama makes some incredibly significant changes, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs won’t be looking after them.

The biographical information of one of the homeless women interviewed for the article also made me take pause, and consider that there might be a connection between the sexual violence epidemic in the military and female veteran homelessness. Seventy-six percent of homeless veterans experience drug, alcohol or mental health problems; and while combat on its own can certainly be enough to bring about these issues, we know that sexual violence is also an indicator for substance abuse, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Stop Military Rape’s statistics seem to back up my hunches further.

Yes I do have a point, and it’s this: the rates of homelessness, not to mention stubstance abuse, trauma and other lasting impacts of combat, need to be dealt with across the board, for both men and women. But the solutions might not be the same across the board, because the causes may also be different. And in working out solutions to this problem — real, long-term solutions that go beyond the necessity of providing beds for people to sleep in — that needs to be taken into account.

“What is bad for the Jews is better for Zionism.”

The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes by Avraham Burg
(Palgrave Macmillan)

When liberals and radicals discuss the occupation of Palestine, two soundbites tend to emerge: “How can Jews persecute Arabs when they themselves were persecuted? They know better!” and “It’s like when an abused child grows up to abuse their own children. It’s just something that happens.” There are elements of truth to both assertions, but each one shaves off so much of the complexity behind Israeli aggression that neither one is very useful in understanding how to end it. Auschwitz survivor Ruth Kluger, in her memoir Still Alive,, addresses the idea that “Jews should know better” in a scene where she takes a group of university students to task for comparing Israel to the Nazis. “Auschwitz was no instructional institution,” she scolds them. “You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance.” And it’s true. When you experience violence, you learn violence. The idea that genocide turns people into enlightened beings is preposterous.

However, the opposite assertion – that Israel is like an abused child – can be shallow and insulting. A human being operates on emotion and impulse just as much as logic and rationality; we forgive individuals for acting without thinking. A government, on the other hand, must be held to a higher standard. To say that Israel is just an abuser and that’s all there is to it is to give up on Israel’s capacity for good, and to give up on that is to dismiss the possibility of a Palestinian state and peace in the region.

Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, doesn’t flinch from the complex web of trauma, pride, anger, sadness, and paranoia that has led Israeli citizens to condone the slaughter of Palestinians. The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes doesn’t address the manipulation of Holocaust remembrance by Israeli and American politicians, the Christian Zionist movement, global anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiment, or the other external factors that fuel Israel’s various military endeavors; instead, his half-memoir, half-polemic dissects the psychology behind Israel’s preference for violence over diplomacy, and makes the case for why Israel cannot achieve peace and stability until it stops seeing every threat as a potential Shoah.

A Farewell Kiss

As promised, today is the virtual shoe throw hosted by Lisa at My Ecdysis, in solidarity with the “Iraqi shoe-thrower” Muntader al-Zaidi, and in a final act of extreme disapproval towards Bush on what is finally his last day in office.

As Lisa said best: in defiance of terror, in defiance of war, and in defiance of violence (and yes, in the spirit of a bit of fun), we at Feministe virtually throw our shoes at outgoing president George W. Bush:

Cara kicks things off right with some heavy-duty boots:

The Moustache Clowns Present: Proportionate Response

Where would we be without clowns and jesters? We would take everything too seriously. Even the most horrifyingly serious, grim and deadly injustices being perpetrated right now. We would only have lengthy, angry discussions running to hundreds of posts, about what’s right and what’s wrong, history, religion, the morality of having a home vs. not having one. We would have no antidote for the indelible weariness in our hearts as we watch more innocents die in flames and rubble.

Well, thankfully we do have clowns and jesters. Even ones that are willing to take on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Yes, folks, in what you are about to see, missiles are represented by spitballs and the leveling of neighborhoods by a rolled-up newspaper. The intent is not to diminsh, of course. But there’s a point there, and it is hopefully one that weighs lighter on your heart than the lengthy tomes of recent conversations here.

Here’s their bio: The Moustache Clowns believe in a world where justice isn’t only for the people in power. Individually, they have performed trapeze, acrobatics, vaudeville, burlesque, ballet, modern dance, Purimshpiels, Sukkos Mobs, and have trained in slapstick, clowning, aerial work, classical dance, and statistical modelling.

Also, one of them is a regular poster here on Feministe as arielariel.

Category: War

Interrogating Torture

Trial for soldier accused of raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl