CSotD: Embarrassment and other war crimes
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Ann Telnaes doesn't do a lot of non-animated cartoons these days — or at least not where I can find them — but, besides her current, animated work, she keeps a modest blog that is worth visiting and which she illustrates most times with something small, perhaps clipped from an earlier piece.
So I was delighted to find this full-blown-and-contemporaneous panel, which calls the Justice Department to task for its mistreatment of Bradley Manning. And, y'know, of the Constitution of the United States and stuff.
I was even more delighted to hear that, whatever his sentence turns out to be, he will get about four months chopped off in addition to the three years for time served, because of illegal maltreatment during the period of solitary confinement referenced in Ann's cartoon.
No, it's not much. But it's there, and its presence matters a lot: It puts the "illegal" in "illegal maltreatment," at a time in history when maltreatment itself seems to fall into a gray area.
In the case of Daniel Ellsburg, who was quite prepared to face time for his leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the outrageous prosecutorial misconduct of the Nixon White House caused the judge to drop the charges against him. This instance, however, is different because, though grotesquely punitive, it seems to have been separate from the case itself and didn't result in having to exclude major portions of the evidence against him.
I'm willing to stipulate that we've sunk to quite a low level when there is encouragement to be found in an official ruling of "Are you shitting me?" but here we are.
I'm also willing to stipulate that, if it had been me or one of my kids who had been put through those nine months of hell on earth, I would not be forgiving, but let me make clear that I'm not forgiving anyone anyway.
What I'm saying is that I am less concerned with the harm done to this individual than I am with the harm done to our nation.
And that, while Abu Ghraib can be seen as a locally originating horror, the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and of Bradley Manning is not something that occurred in some distant place without top level scrutiny.
Start with this understanding: War is hell.
Sherman reportedly did not toss that remark off lightly, but meant it quite seriously, in the context of cooling the armchair ardor of those who romanticize battle.
Nor, a half century later, was Wilfred Owen making chit-chat when he wrote:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
It is becoming harder and harder to preserve the image of the virtuous warrior, or the comforting notion that only the dead and visibly maimed are harmed in war.
The Crimean War was the first major conflict fought under public scrutiny, which meant that, given telegraphs and railroads, the only buffer to protect Cardigan, Lucan and Raglan from the full impact of their colossal incompetence was the stirring pen of Tennyson, who at least made heroes of the dead, though even he acknowledged that "someone had blundered."
With Vietnam, the revelations of My Lai were greeted with horror by most people, though the hawks quickly accused the media of disloyalty and began a flurry of buck-passing that ended with petitions demanding pardons for the few who were found guilty, more or less on the basis that war is hell and, besides, everybody was doing it.
Similar backlash followed when the Winter Soldier project revealed that My Lai, though a major atrocity, was not a total anomaly: There is a type of patriot who equates silence with loyalty, but, then again, there is a type that does not.
And so Bradley Manning tells us what we don't want to know, and what we have known since the days of Troy.
He broke the law to do so, and he does need to pay the piper. And knocking 112 days off his sentence is symbolically extremely important but will likely be spit-in-the-ocean as actual compensation, unless the judge hands out a very light sentence.
So what harm did he do?
A Department of Defense spokeman explained: "We're in a 21st century conflict and a big
part of that conflict is a battle of ideas. So if you can embarrass
the United States, if you can make them look bad in the eyes of the
world, that's actually part of war. It's asymmetric war. I think Bradley was a frontline warrior against his own country."
Fair enough.
What punishment, then, for a leadership that embarrassed the United States and made us look so bad in the eyes of the world that we have to turn belly-side-up to Vladimir-freaking-Putin with promises of good behavior?
Yeah, you know, the guy whose birthday coincided with the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta. How much asymmetrical embarrassment is that?
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