Moral leadership of the United States
This is not an exciting, funny, or entertaining approach to a difficult topic. This blog contains a number of lengthy quotes and will not be a quick read. While I could appreciate a Saturday Night Live approach to this topic, that is not what the muse has permitted today. Perhaps another time. Or not!
In the United States the year is 2016. This is the year when this country will elect a new president. My friends who live in other countries such as Australia are closely following the rhetoric of the hotly contested race. Neither major political partly has yet elected a primary candidate. In the United States, there is first a long season of primary elections in which each party in each state votes for the candidate it wants to represent its party in the race for the next president of the country Each party will then host a convention in which the delegates from each state will vote based on the outcome of the primary election in the state it represents. Thereafter the nominated candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties plus any other candidates running will attempt to convince the United States populace or rather the relatively small percentage of the populace in the United States who votes, that they are best qualified to lead the United States as President for a four-year term beginning in January 2017.
Some years there seems to be less difference in the platform of the respective parties and candidates than there are this year. One of the major differences this year is the open stance on such issues as the use of torture in interrogating those who are suspected of having information which might assist in giving the United States government an advantage in any conflict it is fighting. Torture under a program known as rendition has been used by the United States for some time. Wikipedia reports:
“Extraordinary rendition, also called irregular rendition, is the government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.[1]
In the United States, the first well-known rendition case was that of an airline hijacker abducted in Italy and brought to the U.S. for trial, authorized by President Ronald Reagan.[2] President Bill Clinton authorized extraordinary rendition to nations known to practice torture, called torture by proxy.[3] The administration of President George W. Bush "renditioned" hundreds of so-called "illegal combatants" (often never charged with any crime) for torture by proxy, and to US controlled sites for an extensive, advanced interrogation operation program under the euphemism enhanced interrogation.[4] Extraordinary rendition continued with reduced frequency in the Obama administration: instead of subjecting them to advanced interrogation methods, most of those abducted have been conventionally interrogated and subsequently taken to the US for trial.” Obviously, one of the key phrases used here is “Most of those abducted.” As I recall ,even though President Obama public stated that torture would not be used under his administration, he would not go so far as to denounce the previous use of it.
According to an article by Ginger Gibson, the current republican candidates recently stated the following in a publicly televised debate:
“Waterboarding surfaces at debate and divides Republican hopefuls” (February 7, 2016)
By Ginger Gibson
sgnew.yahoo.com
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Seven years after the United States banned waterboarding as an interrogation tactic, two Republican presidential candidates said on Saturday they would revive its use and one of them, billionaire businessman Donald Trump, would go even further.
"I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," Trump said during Saturday night's Republican debate on ABC, days before New Hampshire holds its primary for the Nov. 8 election.
Trumps's rival and a fellow leader in the opinion polls, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said he would only allow limited use of the practice.
Waterboarding - the practice of pouring water over someone’s face to mimic drowning as an interrogation tactic - remains controversial in the United States even after Democratic President Barack Obama banned use of the method days after he took office in 2009.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in 2014, despite the objection of Republicans, that detailed what it called torture tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency, including the extensive use of waterboarding.
Waterboarding came into more common use by the United States during the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American interrogators utilized the tactic to try to garner more information from captives, but critics argued the method never actually yielded any intelligence information.
Republicans have been critical of Obama's decision to eliminate the practice, saying it telegraphs a position of weakness to the nation's enemies and concedes that the United States erred in using waterboarding.
Cruz said he would not "bring it back in any sort of widespread use" and noted that he doesn't believe waterboarding meets the international definition for torture.
"If it were necessary to, say, prevent a city from facing an imminent terrorist attack, you can rest assured that as commander in chief, I would use whatever enhanced interrogation methods we could to keep this country safe,” Cruz said.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio declined to say definitively whether he would reinstitute the use of waterboarding.
"We should not be discussing in a widespread way the exact tactics that we're going to use because that allows terrorists to know to practice how to evade us," Rubio said.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said he would not employ waterboarding.
"Congress has changed the laws and I... think where we stand is the appropriate place," said Bush.”
According to law.cornell.edu, the terms of the Geneva convention of which the United States is a signatory include:
“The 1949 versions of the Conventions, along with two additional Protocols, are in force today.
Convention I: This Convention protects wounded and infirm soldiers and medical personnel against attack, execution without judgment, torture, and assaults upon personal dignity (Article 3). It also grants them the right to proper medical treatment and care.
Convention II: This agreement extended the protections mentioned in the first Convention to shipwrecked soldiers and other naval forces, including special protections afforded to hospital ships.
Convention III: One of the treaties created during the 1949 Convention, this defined what a Prisoner of War was, and accorded them proper and humane treatment as specified by the first Convention. Specifically, it required POWs to give only their name, rank, and serial number to their captors. Nations party to the Convention may not use torture to extract information from POWs.
Convention IV: Under this Convention, civilians are afforded the protections from inhumane treatment and attack afforded in the first Convention to sick and wounded soldiers. Furthermore, additional regulations regarding the treatment of civilians were introduced. Specifically, it prohibits attacks on civilian hospitals, medical transports, etc. It also specifies the right of internees, and those who commit acts of sabotage. Finally, it discusses how occupiers are to treat an occupied populace.”
According to Geneva-academy.ch:
The United States is a party to the Geneva Conventions, with a reservation on the right to impose the death penalty in occupied territory under the Fourth Geneva Convention even if this was not part of the law of the occupied territory. It also made a declaration at the time of ratification of the four Conventions, rejecting the reservations made by other state parties, but accepting treaty relations with all parties 'except as to the changes proposed by such reservations.' It has not acceded to either the First or Second Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, although it signed both in 1977.
Reservations and statements of understanding were made in ratifying the conventions on racial discrimination (ICERD), civil and political rights (ICCPR) and torture (CAT). The US has not accepted the jurisdiction of the treaty bodies (committees) to consider individual complaints against it under these human rights conventions, nor under the convention on discrimination against women (CEDAW). It has signed, but not ratified, the conventions on economic, social and cultural rights (ICESCR), and the rights of the child (CRC).
The convention on excessively dangerous or indiscriminate conventional weapons (CCW), and its five protocols, have all been ratified with reservations. However, the US has not signed the 1997 Ottawa Treaty on anti-personnel landmines, nor the 2008 convention on cluster munitions.
The US signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2000, but subsequently notified the UN Secretary-General that it did not intend to ratify the treaty.”
As I type I am aware of the following:
My education did not include a detailed discussion of the historic stance of the United States in its justification for the exclusions it insisted upon in the Geneva Convention.
The historic use of rendition.
The role of the CIA and other intelligence groups of the United States in using force to guard what it has considered its interest in the affairs of foreign nations.
How the United States justifies the presence of United States troops in as many as 150 nations.
How we, as a nation, reconcile our right wing insistence on being a Christian nation and defense of the use of Christian prayer in public gathering with the defense of the use of many forms of violence including torture.
How we as a nation posit that we have a right to do what we deem is necessary to protect our national interest while defending our right to keep foreign governments from interfering in or having an active role in the affairs of this nation.
I am grateful to the Republican presidential candidates for their honesty. While I am saddened and frightened by the thought that we are publicly providing justification for the entire world to behave as we do, it is a first step towards having a meaningful dialogue. I fear, however, that we as a country will continue to assert our moral superiority over other nations and groups while continuing to justify our use of torture and any other means to protect the so-called interest of the United States.
We need, I believe, to keep opening up this dialogue. Anyone who votes for any candidate of any political party who is in favor of the use of torture or as Mr. Trumps says, "I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," needs to be ready to accept that we are, in effect, stating that indeed, “all is fair in love and war.”
Even when “accidentally” bombing a hospital, we are less than contrite. Our behavior and now our words say more clearly than ever that we believe that all nations and groups can use whatever means necessary to protect what they and their god deems necessary.
Every classroom in the United States from first grade to post graduate school needs to be openly discussing what we, the United States, wants to be its moral footprint. Who are we? Who do we want to be? What are the core values we will demand of our leaders?
These are tough and necessary questions. If the honesty of Mr. Trump, Senator Cruz and Senator Rubio helps us as a nation to discuss these question then we owe them our gratitude. So far, I have not seen any evidence that the citizens of the United States are, in large numbers, saddened and frightened by this admission, and I do not think that the votes of those citizens in New Hampshire will be determined or even greatly influenced by the stance on torture.
Written February 9, 2016
This is not an exciting, funny, or entertaining approach to a difficult topic. This blog contains a number of lengthy quotes and will not be a quick read. While I could appreciate a Saturday Night Live approach to this topic, that is not what the muse has permitted today. Perhaps another time. Or not!
In the United States the year is 2016. This is the year when this country will elect a new president. My friends who live in other countries such as Australia are closely following the rhetoric of the hotly contested race. Neither major political partly has yet elected a primary candidate. In the United States, there is first a long season of primary elections in which each party in each state votes for the candidate it wants to represent its party in the race for the next president of the country Each party will then host a convention in which the delegates from each state will vote based on the outcome of the primary election in the state it represents. Thereafter the nominated candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties plus any other candidates running will attempt to convince the United States populace or rather the relatively small percentage of the populace in the United States who votes, that they are best qualified to lead the United States as President for a four-year term beginning in January 2017.
Some years there seems to be less difference in the platform of the respective parties and candidates than there are this year. One of the major differences this year is the open stance on such issues as the use of torture in interrogating those who are suspected of having information which might assist in giving the United States government an advantage in any conflict it is fighting. Torture under a program known as rendition has been used by the United States for some time. Wikipedia reports:
“Extraordinary rendition, also called irregular rendition, is the government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.[1]
In the United States, the first well-known rendition case was that of an airline hijacker abducted in Italy and brought to the U.S. for trial, authorized by President Ronald Reagan.[2] President Bill Clinton authorized extraordinary rendition to nations known to practice torture, called torture by proxy.[3] The administration of President George W. Bush "renditioned" hundreds of so-called "illegal combatants" (often never charged with any crime) for torture by proxy, and to US controlled sites for an extensive, advanced interrogation operation program under the euphemism enhanced interrogation.[4] Extraordinary rendition continued with reduced frequency in the Obama administration: instead of subjecting them to advanced interrogation methods, most of those abducted have been conventionally interrogated and subsequently taken to the US for trial.” Obviously, one of the key phrases used here is “Most of those abducted.” As I recall ,even though President Obama public stated that torture would not be used under his administration, he would not go so far as to denounce the previous use of it.
According to an article by Ginger Gibson, the current republican candidates recently stated the following in a publicly televised debate:
“Waterboarding surfaces at debate and divides Republican hopefuls” (February 7, 2016)
By Ginger Gibson
sgnew.yahoo.com
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Seven years after the United States banned waterboarding as an interrogation tactic, two Republican presidential candidates said on Saturday they would revive its use and one of them, billionaire businessman Donald Trump, would go even further.
"I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," Trump said during Saturday night's Republican debate on ABC, days before New Hampshire holds its primary for the Nov. 8 election.
Trumps's rival and a fellow leader in the opinion polls, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said he would only allow limited use of the practice.
Waterboarding - the practice of pouring water over someone’s face to mimic drowning as an interrogation tactic - remains controversial in the United States even after Democratic President Barack Obama banned use of the method days after he took office in 2009.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in 2014, despite the objection of Republicans, that detailed what it called torture tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency, including the extensive use of waterboarding.
Waterboarding came into more common use by the United States during the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American interrogators utilized the tactic to try to garner more information from captives, but critics argued the method never actually yielded any intelligence information.
Republicans have been critical of Obama's decision to eliminate the practice, saying it telegraphs a position of weakness to the nation's enemies and concedes that the United States erred in using waterboarding.
Cruz said he would not "bring it back in any sort of widespread use" and noted that he doesn't believe waterboarding meets the international definition for torture.
"If it were necessary to, say, prevent a city from facing an imminent terrorist attack, you can rest assured that as commander in chief, I would use whatever enhanced interrogation methods we could to keep this country safe,” Cruz said.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio declined to say definitively whether he would reinstitute the use of waterboarding.
"We should not be discussing in a widespread way the exact tactics that we're going to use because that allows terrorists to know to practice how to evade us," Rubio said.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said he would not employ waterboarding.
"Congress has changed the laws and I... think where we stand is the appropriate place," said Bush.”
According to law.cornell.edu, the terms of the Geneva convention of which the United States is a signatory include:
“The 1949 versions of the Conventions, along with two additional Protocols, are in force today.
Convention I: This Convention protects wounded and infirm soldiers and medical personnel against attack, execution without judgment, torture, and assaults upon personal dignity (Article 3). It also grants them the right to proper medical treatment and care.
Convention II: This agreement extended the protections mentioned in the first Convention to shipwrecked soldiers and other naval forces, including special protections afforded to hospital ships.
Convention III: One of the treaties created during the 1949 Convention, this defined what a Prisoner of War was, and accorded them proper and humane treatment as specified by the first Convention. Specifically, it required POWs to give only their name, rank, and serial number to their captors. Nations party to the Convention may not use torture to extract information from POWs.
Convention IV: Under this Convention, civilians are afforded the protections from inhumane treatment and attack afforded in the first Convention to sick and wounded soldiers. Furthermore, additional regulations regarding the treatment of civilians were introduced. Specifically, it prohibits attacks on civilian hospitals, medical transports, etc. It also specifies the right of internees, and those who commit acts of sabotage. Finally, it discusses how occupiers are to treat an occupied populace.”
According to Geneva-academy.ch:
The United States is a party to the Geneva Conventions, with a reservation on the right to impose the death penalty in occupied territory under the Fourth Geneva Convention even if this was not part of the law of the occupied territory. It also made a declaration at the time of ratification of the four Conventions, rejecting the reservations made by other state parties, but accepting treaty relations with all parties 'except as to the changes proposed by such reservations.' It has not acceded to either the First or Second Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, although it signed both in 1977.
Reservations and statements of understanding were made in ratifying the conventions on racial discrimination (ICERD), civil and political rights (ICCPR) and torture (CAT). The US has not accepted the jurisdiction of the treaty bodies (committees) to consider individual complaints against it under these human rights conventions, nor under the convention on discrimination against women (CEDAW). It has signed, but not ratified, the conventions on economic, social and cultural rights (ICESCR), and the rights of the child (CRC).
The convention on excessively dangerous or indiscriminate conventional weapons (CCW), and its five protocols, have all been ratified with reservations. However, the US has not signed the 1997 Ottawa Treaty on anti-personnel landmines, nor the 2008 convention on cluster munitions.
The US signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2000, but subsequently notified the UN Secretary-General that it did not intend to ratify the treaty.”
As I type I am aware of the following:
My education did not include a detailed discussion of the historic stance of the United States in its justification for the exclusions it insisted upon in the Geneva Convention.
The historic use of rendition.
The role of the CIA and other intelligence groups of the United States in using force to guard what it has considered its interest in the affairs of foreign nations.
How the United States justifies the presence of United States troops in as many as 150 nations.
How we, as a nation, reconcile our right wing insistence on being a Christian nation and defense of the use of Christian prayer in public gathering with the defense of the use of many forms of violence including torture.
How we as a nation posit that we have a right to do what we deem is necessary to protect our national interest while defending our right to keep foreign governments from interfering in or having an active role in the affairs of this nation.
I am grateful to the Republican presidential candidates for their honesty. While I am saddened and frightened by the thought that we are publicly providing justification for the entire world to behave as we do, it is a first step towards having a meaningful dialogue. I fear, however, that we as a country will continue to assert our moral superiority over other nations and groups while continuing to justify our use of torture and any other means to protect the so-called interest of the United States.
We need, I believe, to keep opening up this dialogue. Anyone who votes for any candidate of any political party who is in favor of the use of torture or as Mr. Trumps says, "I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," needs to be ready to accept that we are, in effect, stating that indeed, “all is fair in love and war.”
Even when “accidentally” bombing a hospital, we are less than contrite. Our behavior and now our words say more clearly than ever that we believe that all nations and groups can use whatever means necessary to protect what they and their god deems necessary.
Every classroom in the United States from first grade to post graduate school needs to be openly discussing what we, the United States, wants to be its moral footprint. Who are we? Who do we want to be? What are the core values we will demand of our leaders?
These are tough and necessary questions. If the honesty of Mr. Trump, Senator Cruz and Senator Rubio helps us as a nation to discuss these question then we owe them our gratitude. So far, I have not seen any evidence that the citizens of the United States are, in large numbers, saddened and frightened by this admission, and I do not think that the votes of those citizens in New Hampshire will be determined or even greatly influenced by the stance on torture.
Written February 9, 2016
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