Memorial Day

Yesterday my daughter and I went to the New York City Ballet, and before the performance, wandered around the Upper East Side in search of fun street crafts. That's when we saw them: young men and women in uniform enjoying Fleet Week.

Our country is at war and certainly looking at their faces close up, we both understood that we send children to fight our country's battles.

They were so young, no matter how white their uniforms.

Last year I grabbed my camera and went into town to photograph Oyster Bay, NY's annual Memorial Day parade. I asked permission to take the images of people, saying I was an amateur photographer. Lining the main street, which is not called "Main Street," were the residents of this small hamlet, some of whose families have lived here for generations: white, black, Hispanic, old, young. The residents of the assisted living center, with a memory unit, sat outside with their attendants. People brought their children and their dogs. Oyster Bay has two volunteer fire departments; they are around the corner and down the block from each other. I've heard different stories as to why, including that one was Protestant and the other Catholic. The parade was short, our country was at war. Only one veteran of the current war in Iraq wore anything to indicate that he had fought there. Most of the veterans were from Korea, when I toured the American Legion Post, the men complained that the Viet Nam vets rarely came to the Post. I spoke with a World War II vet who was seated in a lawn chair in the shade.

We are still at war although under the leadership of another president. I don't think I want to go to the parade this year. I think I just want to hand water my garden, weed out the far right side in preparation for planting the sun flowers I have growing in pots, and pretend for a day, just a day, that things weren't set in motion eight years ago, if not before, that brought out the utter worst in our country and in our leaders. We allowed those leaders--George Bush and Dick Cheney--to do reprehensible things in our names. President Obama, I suspect, has learned just how reprehensible our treatment of the men held in Guantanamo Bay was, making anything looking like a trial for their crimes nothing like a trial at all.

So although I thank the men and women who are sacrificing their lives and youth for our country, I still deplore that they are and despise the men who brought us to this moment in history. Dick Cheney shouldn't be on television; he should be in prison for war profiteering and failing to uphold the constitution of the United States. George Bush shouldn't be retired in Dallas, but condemned because of his failure to understand the nature of the job of president, the structures of government, and the history of this nation. We shouldn't be making waterboarding into a bet between television pundits, but remember that we tried and convicted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding during World War II. This isn't a day for fireworks and parades, it should be a day of national mourning.

Getting it Right

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. flubbed the presidential oath of office yesterday when he misplaced "faithfully" within the 35 word Constitutional requirement and used the wrong preposition, substituting "to" for "of" when referring to the President of the United States.

Being a strict constitutionalist, and molded by The Federal Society, Roberts gave President Obama, gosh I love writing that, the oath of office again tonight in the Oval Office.

The question I ask is why Roberts didn't have a copy of the oath in front of him at the inauguration: Arrogance, arrogance, arrogance.

Of course, President Obama did the right thing in stopping all military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay for at least 120 days to permit review of the processes. Hopefully this will be the end of these kangaroo trials that make a sham of American law and ideals.

Just announced: President Obama will sign an executive order tomorrow closing Guantanamo Bay within a year!!!!

Texas Senator John Cornyn is holding up the confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General, allegedly wanting assurances that Holder will not prosecute intelligence officers for engaging in torture.

I suggest that this delay in confirmation is murkier than that. First, Cornyn is the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which means he is responsible for raising lots of money. So he has to raise a lot of smoke so it doesn't look like Obama is getting his way on everything without resistance.

But more cynically, Holder stated at his confirmation hearing that waterboarding is torture, simple and clear. Cornyn, acting as a proxy, is afraid of prosecutions of Bush administration officials, like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, for authorizing torture. It isn't the intelligence community he's protecting. It's his fellow Texan!

It would be absolutely inappropriate to ask for assurances from Holder as a condition of confirmation that he won't prosecute anyone, whether a CIA officer or the former President of the United States of America, for violating domestic and international prohibitions against the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading tactics against any suspects.

Holding Bush Officials Accountable

Let's pretend we have a minute to whisper in the ear of President-elect Obama to let him know what we believe the highest priorities should be in his first year.

We know it's the economy, and that the economy should be jump started with some urgent "green" incentives that will create a future for the planet while creating jobs now and rebuilding our disintegrating infrastructure.

We want our troops out of Iraq and not merely transferred to Afghanistan. Yet how should we deal with failed states like Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Iraq, thanks to Bush, (notice that today he finally acknowledged an error in his presidency during an interview with Charlie Gibson)?

What should our role be? Unilateralism certainly isn't the way, as we have seen in the Bush administration, yet does America have the maturity and patience to act multilaterally? Some say that Susan Rice, Obama's choice for US ambassador to the United Nations, is a perfect pick, because she is patient and hardworking, refuses to tolerate genocide, and believes in multilateralism. Obama also intends to make the UN ambassador a cabinet level position again after Bush denigrated the UN and demoted our ambassador.

What about holding the individual members of the Bush administration acountable for the use of torture, illegal wiretapping and eavesdropping, rendition, and kidnapping? In one fell swoop the US could restore its reputation abroad, and ensure that the incoming president would be bound by the rule of law, international treaties, and the balance of powers among the three branches--executive, judiciary, and legislature.

Having just returned from Terezin, the model concentration camp operated by the Nazis that was shown off to the International Red Cross--see we aren't treating our Jews badly--I truly believe that we must investigate and hold the actions taken by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Addington, Yoo, Bybee, Feith, the whole lot of them, to the light of justice so that this will never happen again.

Terezin was divided into two parts: the small fort where political prisoners were held and the town which was used as the model concentration camp for Jews. The small fort had been used as a prison for years, and the individual cells as well as the baracks were horrifying; their walls reeked of pain and cruelty silently. There was torture there and killing: hanging, firing squads, starvation, beheading. And there was a crematorium to get rid of the bodies of both the political prisoners as well as the Jews.

Then there was the town of Terezin, which didn't look at horrible, because today it is a functioning town, but hundreds of thousands of Jews were transported through Terezin throughout the "final solution." When the war began, the town was home to five thousand residents. At its height, over 55,000 Jews were stuffed into the buildings there in inhuman conditions. Almost 100,000 Jews died in Terezin, including some 15,000 children.

Is Guantanamo Bay any different? Cages, no privacy, isolation, torture, enhanced interrogation techniques. There is no excuse. There is no justification. We know about Guantanamo, we might not want to believe it, but there is plenty of testimony out there about what has happened to men incarcerated there. Read "The Green Light" by Philippe Sands in the May issue of Vanity Fair. We don't know about the others, the hundreds, perhaps thousands of men and women who have disappeared into the back rooms of other countries' secret prisons on orders from this administration.

President-elect Obama, restore America's devotion to the rule of law. Restore America's stature. And make sure that you don't have the power to abuse the office of the presidency by bringing those who did to justice. We need to write a truthful history of what happened in America post-911 so that it can never happen again.

Watch a debate between Jack Balkin of Yale Law School and Eric Posner from University of Chicago.