Category Archives: War

CIA torture, Mercedes, Audi, and the Nazis

Americana, War

Mercedes Benz-0823

A little more than a week ago, during a news conference on Friday, August 1st, Obama said We tortured some folks, and went on to say It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. Either statement seems a little strange, together, they seem even more strange. Calling the US Army Military Police and CIA waterboarding, sodomizing, sleep depriving, freezing, and even beating, to the point of killing, various helpless people in their custody, tortured some folks, seems to be a bit aw shucksy. 

When I first saw the pictures of our troops torturing terrorist at Abu Ghraib prison, I was shocked and embarrassed. To me, it never seemed likely that it was just a couple of stupid, low-level G.I.s. Still, I had no idea how high up the chain of command, the crime of torture would go. And murder, as far as that goes.

It wasn’t until a week later, and – I think partially in response to what Obama said – that Dean Baquet, The Executive Editor of The New York Times, wrote Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture….Given those changes, reporters urged that The Times recalibrate its language. I agreed. So from now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information. The gist of the article – editorial? – between the opening quote and the ending quote, where the four dots are above, is that, heretofore there was not enough detail to know if it was torture. Of course there was enough detail, there just hadn’t been enough time after the torture.

Shortly after Mercedes’ 100th anniversary, Daimler-Benz opened its private records that showed they were a major player in the Nazi regime. It started in 1931 when Mercedes advertised in Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper known for its anti-Semitic tirades and culminated – I guess you could say – with Mercedes  using slave labor during World War II. BMW has now admitted that they used about 20,000 slaves during the war. Just recently, Audi has gone publicwith its culpability during the nazi era. In Audi’s – then called Auto Union but with the same four ring logo – case, Dr. Richard Bruhn, ran the company before, during, and after the war. Under his tenure Audi used about 20,000 slaves and about 4,500 disabled workers were sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp where they were killed. There is talk that his picture may come off the wall.

I don’t know anybody who thinks what Mercedes, BMW, and Audi did was acceptable human behavior and it took them a long time to face that. Obama doesn’t want us to be too sanctimonious in the period of our national panic after 911. Organizations, like people, don’t like to admit to being criminals. Everybody wants there to be a justifying reason that makes it OK to torture, kill, or roundup and put people in Concentration Camps, this one Special Time. I think it is still too soon for us to admit that just because we were panicking, it isn’t OK to torture. Or kill people with drones.

Mathew Brady’s picture of General U. S. Grant and the new American Hero

Americana, War, What's a man?

This is a very much modified copy of a post I made in 2009. I am reposting it now because, 150 years ago, the Army of The Potomac was in the middle of what is now known as The Overland Campaign. Grant  and Lee had battled to a draw in The Wilderness on May 5th through the 7th, 1864. This is where the Army of The Potomac learned that Grant was a different kind of general and they were going to become a different kind of Army.

Up until now, the Army of The Potomac would move south, fight the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, and win lose or draw – sadly, it was often lose – retreat to rebuild and re-provision for the next battle. This time, when Grant pulled his troops out of the battle-line, it was not to retreat, but to move further south to attack again at Spotsylvania Court House (May 8–21), then again and again. This was total war. Grant had said I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer, and he meant it.

Grant had come to do a job and he did it. The picture below shows just that.

This is a new kind of portrait and Grant was a new kind of general. The picture was probably taken during the Overland Campaign just after the battle of Cold Harbor. Grant is not the patrician hero, Grant, like Lincoln, was a mid-westerner. A common man. In this picture, he is tired, his eyes are sad, his boots are muddy. This is probably Matthew Bradley’s most famous photo. Not only because of it’s informality, but because it is so penetrating. I have read that a good portrait is an artifact of a relationship. This is a portrait of a real man, the dynamic new kind of American from the West.

Grant was the new American hero. The quiet man just doing his job. John Wayne. Gary Cooper in High Noon.  No braggadocio flourishes, just quietly getting the job done.

 

 

San Francisco from near Nike Missile Site SF-88-L

Americana, Around home, War

View from Nike Battery-1128

I had lunch with my daughter a couple of days ago and, concerned about traffic crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, I left for home early. There wasn’t any traffic, so I took a detour up to an old Nike Hercules battery overlooking San Francisco. Standing there, looking at the view, I remembered one warm summer morning in 1965, when I drove a general up to this battery.

I was a Sergeant – a buck sergeant, E5 – teaching Germans  at Orogrande, New Mexico, when I met General Lolli. He had recently taken over the 28th NORAD Region – I thought it was the Eighth Region, but Google tells me, No, it was the Twenty Eight NORAD/Western NORAD Region – and Lolli was on a tour of various training facilities. Since I was from the Bay Area, he asked me if I wanted to be stationed in Sausalito and be his driver. I said something like Yes! Sir! and told my fellow teachers and my commander that I would soon be transferred to San Francisco. Then…nothing happened; for just long enough for everybody to think I had become slightly delusional. It wasn’t until about two weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon, that I was called into my Battery Commander’s office and told to report to Major General Andrew Lolli at Hamilton Air Force Base by 8 AM the following Monday.

While we were stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, Lolli was an Army general – the only Army commander of a NORAD region – and I was his Army driver so I had to live at an Army facility. Fort Baker was the closest Army barracks and I had a private room near the entry (General Lolli lived at the Fontana West in San Francisco). Almost every morning, he would drive across the Golden Gate bridge and pick me up at Fort Baker, I would salute him and then drive him to Hamilton. On this particular morning, Lolli told me to drive him up the hill to the Nike Hercules Missile Site overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

As an aside, this was the height of the Cold War and the country was in full, paranoic, war hysteria. Schoolkids would practice hiding under our desks when the air raid sirens went off outside; F 101 Voodoo fighters, would take off out of Hamilton Air Base, looking for nuclear armed Russian TU-16 Badger heavy bombers; and our final defence was a series of twenty four Nike Hercules Surface to Air Missile – SAMs to the cognoscenti – sites around the Bay Area. I am not sure if this battery had missiles armed with nuclear weapons but the system was designed for nukes. End aside.

As we drove up to the site, Lolli called in a mock attack and, when we got there, the klaxon was going off and everybody was running to their battle stations. The missile site had probably been at DEFCON 5, but Lolli had now called it up to DEFCON 1, Air Defense Warning – RED. I don’t know if targets had been assigned, but the blast doors were opened and the missiles were brought up on their elevators, ready to launch.

I was standing way out of the way – way out of the way, not being nuclear cleared – next to a guard, and, to make conversation, I asked him how he liked being stationed in Sausalito. I was shocked when he said, It is terrible duty, nobody likes military people in the Bay Area, San Francisco is too expensive, and the weather sucks. It was hard to not agree about the weather. It was a warm summer morning almost everyplace but here; here we stood in a cold wind that was pushing the wet fog past us and then through the Golden Gate. The pavement was wet and slick  and, in the distance, we could hear, but not see, lonely fog horns. Waiting for the All Clear, I thought, The weather may be crummy but this is San Francisco and my dating prospects are much better here than Orogrande or Korea.

When the All Clear finally did come and General Lolli got back in the car, he was furious. It had taken about fifteen minutes too long to come up to DEFCON 1 and Lolli has just relieved a full-bird-Colonel of his command. As we drove down the hill, the General said, If this had been real, I would have lost San Francisco.

Now, almost 49 years later, we are in a warm spell, the only fog is across The Bridge, the Nike Hercules Missile Site is no longer operational, and San Francisco is still there, sparkling in the sun. I watch a freighter go under The Bridge and a Raven joins me. Maybe she wants me to give her – and I am saying her with no idea if it is a him or a her – some food, maybe he is just enjoying the view like me, maybe she wants to chastise me for all the harm my race has done to the planet. I tell her,  Hey, it could be worse, we could have fired off those missiles, we could have destroyed everything in a flash, more than 10,000 flashes, actually. But since you are here, just stay still and look over here, let me get your picture.

View from Nike Battery-1136

View from Nike Battery-1137 View from Nike Battery-1147

 

Syria

Americana, War

Feeling lucky? I read a couple of days ago that only about nine percent of the American public wants us to get into a war over Syria. Count me in the other 93% on this one. It is easy to say that Americans are tired of war, and we are, but there also seems to be a no plan problem here. How does a Syrian intervention fit into our overall Middle Eastern Strategy? Oh, and by the way, what is out overall Middle Eastern Strategy?

According to Reuters, The United States made clear on Friday that it would punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the “brutal and flagrant” chemical weapons attack that it says killed more than 1,400 people in Damascus last week. What wasn’t made clear is that any punishing of Bashar al-Assad is really punishing someone else. By killing them, or trying to kill them.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, punishment is a dish best served hot. The longer we wait, the less it seems like there is a connection between what we are doing and what Syria did.

Obama said yesterday that we have to attack Assad, because our credibility is on the line. In other words, he is saying we are going to to destroy stuff in Syria and kill people in Syria for reasons that have nothing to do with Syria. It is now because our credibility is on the line. If our reason becomes about us, it really is not legitimate. The only legitimate reason for bombing Syria is to save Syrian lives and suffering. Bombing to save face isn’t bombing Syria to help its people.

It also seems to me that if we threaten to bomb somebody next time it,  it would still be a threat even if we didn’t bomb this time. It still would depend on the circumstances.

Bradley Manning

Americana, War

Bradley ManningBefore, I start I want to acknowledge that Bradley Manning has much bigger attachments than most people and that includes me. He is one of the few people in the world that have been willing to make a huge personal sacrifice to do what they think is right.

Carol Burnett once said that Comedy is Tragedy plus Time. I think a corollary of that might be A Hero is a Traitor plus Time. Maybe you don’t think Bradley Manning  is a hero – although I think he is – and the judge has already ruled that he is not a traitor by throwing out the charge of  Aiding the Enemy, and it is still too early to look at Manning and see reality through the fog of our own preconceptions, but he has exposed to light a dark part of our National Character.

Today, most people think that Daniel Ellsberg, if not a hero, was a patriot and a positive contributor to our collective history.  But, that is now. In January of 1973, he was thought a traitor by the government and brought to trail under the Espionage Act as well as charges of theft and conspiracy. He would have gone to jail for up to 115 years if the judge hadn’t thrown out the case because of government misconduct. That is much less likely to happen in the military court where Manning is being tried.

What Ellsberg did do was embarrass the United States – or, more accurately, the Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy Administrations, or, even more accurately, powerful, people in those administrations – by showing, in Ellsberg’s words, that the [Nixon and] Johnson Administrations had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance. Bradley Manning has done pretty much of the same thing only with alot more documents.

Among  91,731 other classified documents, Manning gave WikiLeaks videos of an American helicopter airstrike in Baghdad in 2007 and an airstrike in Granai, Afghanistan in 2009. Both airstrikes were most likely accidents and both were classified. The 2007 airstrike was  was against a journalist and two other men who were Reuters employees carrying cameras (the helicopter then fired on a van that stopped to help). The 2009 airstrike killed somewhere between 86–147 Afghan civilians (depending on who is counting).

We don’t like to admit that we kill journalists or civilians in our  hygienic wars and, when we do kill them, it often gets covered up. To kill journalists or civilians is embarrassing. I don’t think that making wars and killing seem civilized and controllable is in the best interest of the United States and I don’t think that the guy who exposes these cover-ups  should be put in jail.

Democracy is doomed without informed citizens, says Robert Meeropola, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s son, and I believe he is right. That is where I disagree with the Obama Administration. Maybe I don’t disagree with Obama himself, maybe he really does still believe in the transparency that he ran on. Maybe his administration is going after Manning only because they think they have no political choice, or, maybe they are only trying to cover their asses. I hope Obama still believes in transparency, but I don’t know and have no way of knowing, so I can only hope.