The Philly Inquirer defends Yoo… I respond

(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

There are few things that media pundits can do get the ire of a veteran then trying to tell them what they can, and cannot, speak out upon with authority when the subject is torture, war, and the effects.

Harold Jackson at the Philadelphia Inquirer thought he would defend Mr. Yoo.  

I responded to his article.

Mr. Jackson,

After submitting an email to the Inquirer after I learned that Mr. Yoo was going to become a regular columnist, I decided to check back and see the current state of affairs.  What I found was your editorial.  While I will grant you the benefit of the doubt that Will Bunch may have gotten some of his facts wrong, there are some facts that us writers didn’t get wrong.

1) The Bush administration had already looked into waterboarding prisoners prior to getting their “legal memos”

You can read the sourced timeline at this link.  http://www.foreignpolicy.com/s…  What cannot be disputed from this timeline is that from Dick Cheney’s statement made on Sept. 16,2001, is that the Bush administration had already decided that they were going to do whatever they wanted, whether it was legal or illegal did not matter.  As for Mr. Yoo, his first known “opinion” was:

September 25: Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo submits a memo to the White House advising that Bush may preemptively wage war anywhere in the world, against any country or organization that harbors or supports any terrorist group, linked to the 9/11 attacks or not.

In this very first known memo, Mr. Yoo asserts that America can declare war against any nation in the world without provocation.  This is the first war crime that Mr. Yoo felt George W. Bush could do under the color of a legal memo.

Now, in case the sheer idiocy of this stance escapes you, I’ll give an “everyday” example.  You want to rob a bank, but, you know that is illegal.  Fortunately for you, you happen to know a lawyer who advises you that you surely can rob that bank, legally, and writes you a note telling you so.  You rob the bank.  When it becomes known that you were the bank robber, you hold up the note your lawyer friend gave you and say, “but, I have a note from my lawyer telling me it was legal so you can’t prosecute me.”  Get the idiocy of that now?  However, that is exactly the situation, on a global scale, that occurred during the Bush administration.

2) The talking point that torture was an area that left room for interpretation

After World War II, we tried and convicted Japanese soldiers that tortured our soldiers using water torture.  The act was the same; waterboarding.  The terminology was clear; it was torture.  The consequence was a given; you are guilty of a war crime.  In “legalese”, that is called a judicial precedent.   In 1983, a Texas Sheriff tortured prisoners using waterboarding.  He and four of his deputies were convicted of torturing the prisoners.  Again, in “legalese” this is called a judicial precedent.  Waterboarding was torture and torture was illegal, by federal law as well as international law.  Mr. Yoo and the rest knew this fact.  What they decided to do was to redefine what constituted torture, breaking the legal precedents set by decades of law.  

3) The talking point of “we were merely following what the lawyers told us”

The FBI knew that waterboarding was torture and didn’t buy that defense.  Why?  Because we established during the Nuremberg Trials that “I was simply following orders was no defense.”  The FBI refused to be party to what they knew was torture.  In addition, two American soldiers remain in prison for abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib, and, their defense of “we were following orders” was no defense.

But, let me address the one concrete point you try to assert in your editorial;

“At our urging, Yoo wrote a column explaining his reasoning in writing the memos. That piece allowed our readers to hear him out, and respond with their own thoughts about torture. It was exactly what you want to see newspaper opinion pages do – provide the catalyst for intelligent discourse.”

First of all, the purpose of an opinion page is to give a person a forum to advance a position on a subject.  What follows is not necessarily “intelligent discourse”, nor, should it be at times.  In the 1950’s, a journalist used his nightly broadcast, the equivalent of a newspaper editorial page, to speak out against the thuggery and abuses of one of our elected leaders.  He called for decent Americans to do the right thing.  He called for our elected officials to do the right thing.  He used his position as a journalist to fulfill the duties of the press; be societies watchdog on our elected officials and government, educating the public on the truth.  You may remember that incident in history.  The journalist was Edward R. Murrow.

What you advocate is that an editorial page is the place where anyone should be given a place to defend their illegalities, tell “their side” of the story, so that people can “talk about it”.  So, you, Mr. Jackson, feel that Charles Manson should be hired by the Inquirer as a columnist?  That he should be given a public forum to tell “his side” of the story?  And hey, because he is taking his time out to write, he should be paid for it?  Right?  No, you are bound to reply, of course not.  Charles Manson is a convicted felon!  Mr. Yoo is merely “alleged” to be one of the lawyers behind the war crimes committed by our country.  However, there would be no difference if prosecutors had merely decided that there was no will to prosecute Charles Manson.  He would merely have been a “alleged” murderer.

You, Mr. Jackson, are exactly the problem with our media today.  You say that you “disagree” with Mr. Yoo’s opinions, but, defend his right to be hired by the Inquirer like this is a matter of you both disagreeing over what to order for dinner instead of the fact that Mr. Yoo helped to perpetrate not one, but several war crimes.  Let me ask you, Mr. Jackson; have you no decency, Sir?

Even as I type this response, you are being eviscerated on national television for your article, and, rightfully so, by Keith Olbermann.  A decent person would have gone to his editor about this hiring, and, if need be, resigned before working with a war criminal, even if our elected leaders today are so pathetic they won’t even prosecute them.  And, before you get huffy and puffy, let me tell you about the times when I did go against my leadership when they made decisions that were just plain wrong.

I was stationed in Incirlik, AB, Turkey, from 1991 until 1993, in the United States Air Force, an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) specialist, and, I was a mere Sergeant.  In 1991, Air Force regulation allowed overseas EOD units to do the base fireworks display for the 4th of July.  In 1993, that regulation was changed so that only certified specialists did the display for the bases.  That change came from an incident that occurred at Incirlik, AB.  The unit superintendent, a Senior Master Sergeant, was told by three of his technicians that the display would go wrong, yet, in a purely political decision, he ordered the display to go as scheduled.  He was told it would go wrong, and, it did go wrong.  People went to the hospital.  I refused to be part of that operation.

In 2006, I went back to Iraq for my second time but as a contractor, the first being in 1991 as active duty, doing ordnance demolition work for a private contractor.  After only two months I asked to leave and return to the United States.  The supervisors I worked for pushed production so hard, that it literally came to the point that people were getting injured daily.  It got so bad that our Safety Officer threatened to shut down our entire operation at that site if injuries continued.  The supervisors determined, wrongly, that the injuries were occurring simply because we weren’t following safety rules instead of the fact that they had raised production levels time and time again to please the Army Corps of Engineers to the point that we couldn’t perform the job safely.  The supervisors wouldn’t budge, and, I left and came home.

So, don’t sit here and tell me that you simply must accept working next to an alleged war criminal.  You do have a choice.  You simply have no honor.

You, and the media pundits like you, have no clue what it means to be deployed into a warzone, much less the devastation that our invasion of Iraq wrought.  You have not sat and talked to average Iraqi citizens, whether they be Shia, Sunni, or Kurd, as I have.  You have not had to ride in an armored convoy as you watched civilian contract security fire upon civilians, the brass of their weapons falling around you as you could only sit and watch, as I have.  Far from being insurgents, the car they fired upon was a man, his wife, and two children.  If I could that plainly from where I sat, no doubt, they could.

Yet, you have the audacity to tell us, the public, the veterans, that your newspaper should give a person who helped bring our country to torture, and, that we are wrong?  No, Sir!  Until you have seen what I have seen, you don’t have the authority to tell me that I am wrong when I speak on these matters!  It was I, not you, who sat in foxholes for our country.  It was I, not you, who put my ass on the line for my constitution, the rule of law, and that our country was better than to torture.  So don’t you dare think you can lecture me on what I know and do not know.

In 1991, I could roam northern Iraq in a hum-vee with only two people in it safely.  We had no security forces.  No security escorts.  My team chief and I stumbled upon a Kurdish refugee camp and were invited to eat lunch with them, which, we did.  In 2006, I could not travel Iraq without armed escort.  The Iraqi citizen’s I spoke with were glad that we got rid of Saddam Hussein, but, ultimately viewed us, AMERICA, as WORSE.  The Iraqi’s knew about the abuses at Abu Ghraib long before the public in America did, and, they hated us for those abuses.

And yet, there you sit, behind a desk, pontificating about how the person who told George W. Bush that he could attack, invade, and occupy any country, for any reason, pre-emptively, was within “his right”?  And you DEFEND HIM?

No, Sir, you have no decency.

Michael Gass

Air Force Veteran