What We Know and What To Do With It

It's taken a long, long time, but finally there is a flood of scholarship that admits the German people knew that the "Final Solution" meant rounding up Jews from throughout Germany and the occupied territories and sending them to their deaths, whether in mass graves, work camps, or gas chambers.

There were just too many witnesses to the arrests, confiscation of property, cramming people onto cattle cars (if they were lucky) or into ditches if they were shot on the spot. These acts were carried out by human beings, German soldiers, some of whom kept diaries, wrote letters, and spoke with colleagues and family. Rail stations had ticket sellers and conductors. The witnesses had nightmares, too.

Read the book reviews in the May issue of The Atlantic, Hitler's Co-Conspirators, for the details of when and how German citizens knew of the "Final Solution," and how that knowledge made them complicit in the exterminations.

The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans, Penguin

Life and Death in the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche, Harvard

Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IX: German Wartime Society 1939–1945, Oxford

Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, by Ian Kershaw, Yale

I'm not saying that the Bush administration's "war on terror" reached the level of the Holocaust. And I resent folks who offer such hyperbolic comparisons. But here is where I do find a parallel: in the complicity.

Now we know. Well, we've known that the White House Principals were obsessively involved in tracking the interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world. Those stories were leaked back in 2004. So when former CIA director Michael Hayden defends the use of torture on, where else but Fox News, we know we are at a turning point.

President Obama, I know it's hard, it's painfully hard to withstand the criticism of authorizing an investigation into just what was done in our names from 2001-2009.

It was torture, no matter what Jay Bybee, John Yoo, or Steven Bradbury called it.

Read this post from Sheri Fink, a medical doctor on propublica.org. It's still torture if it's done in front of doctors:

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the memos is their intimation that medical professionals conducted a form of research on the detainees, clearly without their consent. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” one memo reads. The documentation included not only how long the procedure lasted, how much water was used and how it was poured, but also “if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled… and how the subject looked between each treatment.” Special instructions were also issued with regard to documenting experience with sleep deprivation, and “regular reporting on medical and psychological experiences with the use of these techniques on detainees” was required.

The Nuremberg Code, adopted after the horrors of “medical research” during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other things, the consent of subjects and their ability to call a halt to their participation.

So now we have knowledge, and with that knowledge comes complicity, just like the Germans during World War II, if we don't do anything. That isn't a pleasant comparison, it's uncomfortable. But now that Dick Cheney isn't running the American government, we don't have the same fears of retribution either, not like the fear that silenced the Germans during WWII.

How will we use this knowledge?

Accountability for Nothing

Added to the hubris of admitting that he authorized waterboarding, a form of torture prohibited by international and domestic law, now Dick Cheney is defending Bush by saying that no one saw the financial crisis coming.

How come I did? Last spring I woke up in the middle of the night and informed my no-longer-sleeping husband that we had to pull our money out of the stock market. From everything I had been reading about the banking industry, mortgage market, and the state of the credit card industry, I figured we were in for a big fall. The next day we moved much of our savings, although unfortunately not my 401(k) out of the market.

I'm not that smart. I was just paying attention, as were most of the progressive press, the not so progressive Kevin Phillips, and many other writers. Well, everyone except for the president and vice president who remain with less than two weeks less, far from apologetic for what they have done to this country and the world.

I am becoming less optimistic that Barack Obama is going to hold this current administration accountable for the policies that led to torture, renditioning, and the excesses of the war on terror. However, this isn't about moving forward. This is about reinstating the United States as a lawful nation. This is also about making sure that we don't have these kinds of abuses in the next administration.

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.

Accountability

The rule of law, the bedrock of American democracy, requires accountability. Yet in this fog of incompetence known as the Bush Administration, there has been none. Bush administration officials refuse to respond to Congressional subpoenas, refuse to testify, and just last week, finally, Cheney was ordered by a district court judge to preserve all of his documents, including the embarrassing ones about his energy cabal and his strategies with Congress. That case, of course, will be headed for the Supreme Court.

No accountability for the attacks on September 11, 2001, despite the 911 Commission and the Senate Report on pre-911 intelligence failures.

No accountability for the lies that led the United States to invade Iraq: even with the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Part I and Part II.

No accountability for the failure to act when thousands of Americans were stranded during and through the long wake of Hurricane Katrina, a long wake that continues to this very day.

No accountability for approaching the telecommunications industry without warrants and without authority to set up elaborate spying networks of Americans and citizens of the world.

No accountability for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel rationalizing the use of torture and making up phony legal analysis to rid this administration of the pesky rules of international war, the ones we wrote, called the Geneva Conventions, et al.

No accountability for the Justice Department's use of religious and political litmus tests, which decimated the professionalism of the Justice Department, including the Honors Program and the Voting Rights Section.

No accountability for the massive failure of the financial markets, every day losing millions of ordinary people's savings and retirement funds, pushing families into foreclosure and homelessness, and creating a world-wide financial crisis.

Today, finally, a little accountability. Mukasey has just announced that he is appointing a special prosecutor to look into the firings of the nine US attorneys, firings that were prompted solely because these professional men and women refused to take the Bush loyalty test.

The way America used to spread democracy was through our system of laws not through pre emptive attacks. Look around the world and see how many post-colonial constitutions are based on ours. Yet the impact of American aspirational law is dwindling. Fewer foreign courts rely on US Supreme Court analysis to justify their decisions.

These days, foreign courts in developed democracies often cite the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in cases concerning equality, liberty and prohibitions against cruel treatment, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of the Yale Law School. In those areas, Dean Koh said, “they tend not to look to the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

In the time it took for me to draft this post, the New York Stock market's Dow Jones Industrial Average just sunk over 100 points. Now another 10 while editing. Still going down after I updated the posting to reflect the appointment of a special prosecutor!