Last Train to Nuremburg ...

... Last train to Nuremberg!
All on board!

Do I see Lieutenant Calley?
Do I see Captain Medina?
Do I see Gen'ral Koster and all his crew?
Do I see President Nixon?
Do I see both houses of Congress?
Do I see the voters, me and you?

Who held the rifle? Who gave the orders?
Who planned the campaign to lay waste the land?
Who manufactured the bullet? Who paid the taxes?
Tell me, is that blood upon my hands?

If five hundred thousand mothers went to Washington
And said, "Bring all of our boys home without delay!"
Would the man they came to see, say he was too busy?
Would he say he had to watch a football game?

Last Train to Nuremburg by Pete Seeger

I heard this on Pandora yesterday and it nicely fit into what I was going to talk about anyway. Pete Seeger wrote this song during the Vietnam War. Calley, Medina, and Koster all had degrees of complicity in the My Lai Massacre and it's subsequent cover-up.

The My Lai Massacre ... was the mass murder conducted by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968 of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and majority of whom were women, children, and elderly people.

Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.

... When the incident became public knowledge in 1969, it prompted widespread outrage around the world. The massacre also reduced U.S. support at home for the Vietnam War. Three U.S. servicemen who made an effort to halt the massacre and protect the wounded were denounced by U.S. Congressmen, received hate mail, death threats and mutilated animals on their doorsteps. Only 30 years after the event were their efforts honored.

The song intimates that the troops involved and their superiors were not the only ones guilty. Nixon (and various other Presidents) were guilty for conducting the war at all. We, as citizens, were guilty for voting for these people and for paying taxes to fund illegal wars. We had "blood upon my hands", all of us. And we continue to. We comfort ourselves that when bad things happen, it's someone else's fault.

Bad actions by bad people do not doom our world. What curses us is that supposedly good people will do and support the most vile acts because they were told it was OK by someone of authority. We tell ourselves that we are not personally guilty because it was given a pass by our President, our church leader, our "freedom fighters". It's OK to invade Iraq because they have WMD's ... OK, Mr. President, whatever you say. It's OK to torture because they might give us some important information ... OK, Mr. Vice-President. It's OK to hate gays because God says so ... OK, Pastor. It's OK that I shot that illegal alien because he was on the wrong side of some arbitrary line ... OK, Mr. Minuteman, you were just fighting for our "liberty".

What is this that comforts us in our guilt? Is it a defense mechanism or is it just human nature? There was a great discussion on Science Friday on NPR yesterday about the famous research psychologist Stanley Milgram. Besides conducting studies which became the basis of six degrees of separation, he is most famous for the Milgram Experiment:

"The experimenter orders the teacher , the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner , who is actually an actor and confidant. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level."

The supposed shock levels increased all the way to 450 volts, a fatal level. An unbelievable 65% of the participants continued to administer a shock all the way up to this level merely because they were told to do so. Only one person refused to administer the shock before the 300 volt level. Milgram's conclusions:

"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study ...

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

Milgram's experiment was in response to the crimes of the Nazis and the complicity of the German people. But it's relevance to any situation where good people "go along" with the crowd is obvious. In effect, we're all on that "last train to Nuremburg".

Torture

"The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers" -- Carl Jung

I'll tell you what torture is. It's listening to Dick Cheney. Why he even has a pulpit to yell from is beyond me. You don't hear W taking the time to make speeches defending torture.

This week's dueling speeches by President Obama and former Vice-President Dick Cheney have brought into focus the great divide between those that see the moral problem with "anything goes" security and those that watch 24 too much.

Some highlights from Obama's speech:

... I know that we must never — ever — turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.

I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset — in war and peace; in times of ease and in eras of upheaval.

Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world.

It is the reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they’d receive better treatment from America’s armed forces than from their own government.

It is the reason why America has benefited from strong alliances that amplified our power, and drawn a sharp and moral contrast with our adversaries.

...From Europe to the Pacific, we have been a nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are.

Optimistic, patriotic (in a good way), moral.

Cheney took a different tact ... defensive, misleading, appealing to fear. Cheney hoped to rebut Obama's speech, but instead responded with his own speech rife with misstatements, bravado and outright lies. It seemed to be more of a preemptive strike at avoiding jail time (his daughter agrees), than an honest defense of interrogation techniques.

Cheney cited the support of Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, but Blair's words hardly sound like support:

"there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

From other Bush era officials:

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Mueller Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

Tom Ridge, the original Director of Homeland Security, and someone who would know about terrorist threats:

... he disagreed with Vice President Cheney’s claim that President Obama is making the country less secure. “Yeah, I disagree with Dick Cheney,” said Ridge ... “It’s just the whole notion of a Republican vice president giving a speech after the incumbent Democratic president,” he said. “It’s gotta go beyond the politics of either party.”

Senator John McCain (someone who knows more about torture than another politician):

“When you have a majority of Americans, seventy-something percent, saying we shouldn't torture, then I’m not sure it helps for the Vice President to go out and continue to espouse that position,”

... Cheney, he says, “believes that waterboarding doesn’t fall under the Geneva Conventions and that it’s not a form of torture. But you know, it goes back to the Spanish Inquisition.”

... McCain reiterated that waterboarding is “not a new technique, and it is certainly torture.” “You hear it from al Qaeda operatives that when we torture people and it becomes public, then it helps them recruit,” he said.

Some (Joe Scarborough) have compared Cheney to Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessup, positively:

The Cheney-esque Jessup defends his decision by saying, “[his] death, while tragic, probably saved lives” and “[y]ou have no idea how to defend a nation. All you did was weaken a country today.” So in that sense, yes — Cheney’s speech yesterday was “straight out of ‘A Few Good Men.’”

Joe omits the end of the movie where Tom Cruise's character replies:

“[Y]ou’re under arrest, you son of a bitch,”

Let's hope that life imitate art.

I'm sick of these people who give tacit approval to torture out of some so-called noble reason. If the specious "terrorist with a ticking bomb" arguments make you sleep better at night, so be it. But real life is not an episode of 24. We not only debase ourselves, we breed the very thing we say we are fighting. The ends do not justify the means. We have to be better. We must appeal to the "better angels of our nature".

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." -- Friedrich Nietzche