Helena – Page 21 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

How can I not blog when (#2)–

… Britain’s $1.6 billion-worth of brand-new nuclear submarine runs aground off the coast of Scotland while testing its sonar!
Just put this $1.6 billion figure together together with the sad facts of what I just blogged about Haiti, and you’ll see how totally askew the priorities of the so-called “western” nations are today.
Of course, Britain’s defense spending-hole is still tiny compared with ours in the U.S.
As Chas Freeman reminded participants in the conference he spoke at here in DC yesterday:

The roughly $1 trillion we [in the U.S. spend annually] on military and related activities in the budgets for defense, veterans affairs, intelligence, military assistance programs, homeland security, nuclear weapons and propulsion, and the like is two-thirds of government operations. It is all — every cent of it — borrowed from future taxpayers and current trading partners abroad.

Wish I had more time to blog about the conference, which was held by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. But I have some last-minute things to do regarding our two soon-to-appear books from Just World Books!

How can I not blog when–

140 of our neighbors in Haiti have now certifiedly died of cholera, and hundreds of thousands of Haitians also badly affected by last December’s earthquakes are also threatened by it.
And it is not the case that cholera has been “endemic” in Haiti at all, any time in recallable history. This is the first cholera epidemic in the country for a century, the specialists are saying. This is the revisitation of a scourge of the distant past.
I ache for Haiti’s people, and for what the return of this scourge tells us about the broader backward-marching trajectory their country has been taking throughout all the recent decades– decades in which the U.S. has been economically and politically dominant throughout the whole of this region (except in Cuba.)
Haiti is a tragic society in its own right. But for us U.S. citizens it is also a mirror in which we can look, and that tells us a lot about ourselves and our country’s often woefully misguided priorities.
The map accessible through this page on Reliefnet indicates that St. Marc, the epicenter of the epidemic, is some way away from the vast tent encampments that have proliferated around the capital, Port-au-Prince, since the earthquake. But who knows where it will travel to next? The physical and political infrastructure of the whole country has still done little to recover from the quake.
I don’t like to point fingers at a time like this. But Bill Clinton is supposed to be a special U.N envoy for Haitian reconstruction. Maybe he should have been spending more time doing that more effectively and less time running around the U.S. making snarky political comments about Pres. Obama?
Main point, though. Everyone needs to work hard to save lives in Haiti, now. By and large this does not mean shipping a few photogenic Haitian babies out of the country to be adopted by U.S. families. It means rebuilding Haitian families and their livelihoods and social-political infrastructure.

Newsweek: ‘Everyone needs’ Hamas at the table

A really significant article by Babak Dehghanpisheh in this week’s Newsweek: The headline is: “A place for Mr. Meshaal: No one wants the leader of Hamas at the Mideast peace table. But everyone needs him there.”
Of course, it is not true that “No one wants him” there… But we can let that go.
Dehghanpisheh interviewed Meshaal for two hours for the article. He writes,

at least within the realm of rational discussion.

Wow. There on the news pages in the heart of the U.S. MSM! (As opposed to, for example, the many pieces making this same argument that I and others have written in the op-ed pages of a few, relatively open publications like the Christian Science Monitor.)
Too bad Newsweek is kind of going down the tubes financially right now. I’d love to know the inside-the-mag politics behind Dehghanipisheh getting the piece published…
He does seem to attribute Hamas’s shift toward moderation almost wholly to the economic mess he claims that Hamas rule has led to in Gaza– though he gives no evidence of having actually been there. (Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas spokesman there can be interviewed over the phone from anywhere in the world.) People who have been in Gaza note firstly that the intense economic malaise there is due above all to the tight siege Israel maintains around it, and secondly that, given the conditions of the siege, the Strip is actually remarkably well organized.
Oh well, it is still, I think, a sign of changing attitudes towards Israel in many portions of the U.S. political elite that this piece even got published.

Chas Freeman’s somber look at U.S. Middle East policy

I am happy to be able to publish here– with his permission– the text of the presentation that Amb. Chas W. Freeman, Jr., made at a conference on the Middle East held at Tufts University, October 14-15. Freeman’s book America’s Misadventures in the Middle East is, of course, the first title to be published by my new publishing company, Just World Books.
Two days before the Tufts event, Freeman launched the book at a swanky lunch organized by the international affairs committee of the Cosmos Club, in Washington, DC. I have audio of the book launch that I am about to put up onto the JWB website. Not surprisingly, he made many of the same points at the two events. (So you will have the choice of either reading them here, or listening to him delivering them in his wonderful, gravelly voice, over there.)
They were very important points to make. He invited his American audiences to engage some serious empathy, and to imagine how they (we) would feel if our country had been subjected to the kinds and scales of wounding that our government’s policies have inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan– and have helped to bring about in the Israeli-Palestinian theater, especially among Palestinians– over the past decade.
He also made some very important arguments about the damage that the policies pursued by Washington in the Middle East over the past decade has inflicted on our country: the huge losses inflicted in terms of human lives, money– and the assault on so many of our key values that Washington’s endless warmongering has caused.
The very last argument he makes in the text below is central, I think.
But let me let him speak for himself.

Remarks to the Fares Center Conference,
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts,
October 15, 2010
by Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
As an American, I look at the results of U.S. policies in the Middle East and they remind me of the T-shirt someone once gave me. It said: “Sinatra is dead. Elvis is dead. And me, I don’t feel so good.”
The Middle East is a constant reminder that a clear conscience is usually a sign of either a faulty memory or a severe case of arrogant amorality. It is not a badge of innocence. These days, we meticulously tally our own battlefield dead; we do not count the numbers of foreigners who perish at our hands or those of our allies. Yet each death is a tragedy that extinguishes one soul and wounds others. This deserves our grief. If we cannot feel it, we may justly be charged with inhumanity.
All that is required to be hated is to do hateful things. Apparent indifference to the pain and humiliation one has inflicted further outrages its victims, their families, and their friends. As the Golden Rule, common – in one form or another – to all religions, implicitly warns, moral blindness is contagious. That is why warring parties engaged in tit for tat come in time to resemble each other rather than to sharpen their differences.
War is in fact not the spectator sport that the fans who watch it on television or on big screens in theaters imagine. Nor is it the “cakewalk” that its armchair advocates sometimes suggest it might be. War is traumatic for all its participants. Recent experience suggests that 30 percent of troops develop serious mental health problems that dog them after they leave the battlefield. But what of the peoples soldiers seek to punish or pacify? To understand the hatreds war unleashes and its lasting psychological and political consequences, one has only to translate foreign casualty figures into terms we Americans can relate to. You can do this by imagining that the same percentages of Americans might die or suffer injury as foreigners have. Then think about the impact that level of physical and moral insult would have on us.
Consider, for example, the two sides of the Israel-Palestine struggle. So far in this century – since September 29, 2000, when Ariel Sharon marched into the Al Aqsa mosque and ignited the Intifada of that name, about 850 Israeli Jews have died at the hands of Palestinians, 125 or so of them children. That’s equivalent to 45,000 dead Americans, including about 6,800 children. It’s a level of mayhem we Americans cannot begin to understand. But, over the same period, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 6,600 or so Palestinians, at least 1,315 of whom were children. In American terms, that’s equivalent to 460,000 U.S. dead, including 95,000 children. Meanwhile, the American equivalent of almost 500,000 Israelis and 2.9 million Palestinians have been injured. To put it mildly, the human experiences these figures enumerate are not conducive to peace or goodwill among men and women in the Holy Land or anywhere with emotional ties to them.
We all know that events in the Holy Land have an impact far beyond it. American sympathy for Israel and kinship with Jewish settlers assure that Jewish deaths there arouse anti-Arab and anti-Muslim passions here, even as the toll on Palestinians is seldom, if ever, mentioned. But, among the world’s 340 million Arabs and 1.6 billion Muslims, all eyes are on the resistance of Palestinians to continuing ethnic cleansing and the American subsidies and political support for Israel that facilitates their suffering. The chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a primary purpose of that criminal assault on the United States was to focus “the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people . . . .” The occupation and attempted pacification of other Muslim lands like Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the shocking hate speech about Islam that now pervades American politics lend credence to widening Muslim belief in a U.S. crusade against Islam and its believers.

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U.S. supports Taliban talks; Still opposing Hamas??

So here are Sec. of State Hillary Clinton and SecDef Bob Gates now saying they support– and are giving active support to– the Afghan government’s initiative to negotiate with the Taliban. But the U.S. government continues to completely oppose any attempt by any parties, Palestinian or other, to reach out and deal with the Hamas government that, lest we forget, was democratically elected in Palestine in January 2006.
How does that work again? And why?
Let us remember about those January 2006 elections that the ground-rules for their conduct, including who could run and how the elections would be organized, were all agreed to in advance by Washington (and Israel). And the elections themselves were universally judged free and fair. But when those candidates from the pro-Hamas “Change and Reform” party ended up winning, Washington and Israel immediately joined in throwing a tight blockade around Gaza and funding and mobilizing anti-democratic, Contras-like forces within Palestinian society with the aim of overthrowing the elected leadership.
Potent warnings also went out at that time– from israel but with Washington’s clear backing– that any Palestinian independent politician who would join a Hamas-led coalition would be a target for “the very worst outcome” possible.
Human rights and women’s rights? The records on these issues of the two movements– Taliban and Hamas– are like night and day. Hamas is an enthusiastic proponent of women’s education and the full integration of women into all areas of society. Hamas even has four or five female MP’s. Indeed, many Palestinians say it was the women’s vote that gave Hamas its victory in 2006.
So once again, could somebody tell me: Why support negotiations with the Taliban, but continue ruthlessly opposing and suppressing Hamas?
Anyone?

Jones’s departure– linked to dog-wagging?

I am still trying to get my head around why– less than a month before a crucial mid-term election– Obama’s national security adviser (until Friday), Gen. Jim Jones, felt now would be a good time to leave.
Of course, it is not clear at all yet whether Jones took the initiative to leave the White House, or was pushed. But the timing looks inauspicious in the extreme. Especially coming so close on the heels of the resignation of Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel– who left, it seems, more to further his own personal political agenda than with the president’s agenda in mind.
Leaving (or being replaced) right after a midterm election, you can understand. But just 3.5 weeks beforehand? Doesn’t this make the presidency look inept, unclear, and weak? If Gen. Jones had been sincere in his commitment to serving this president… and being a longtime officer in the Marine Corps, and all… the fact of his departure at this particular time has to be significant.
It certainly seems to me as though he felt he lost out on some very significant policy debate inside the administration; and that was what provoked his departure.
Not like Cyrus Vance, an ethical and decent man who as Secretary of State strongly opposed Pres. Carter’s (as it turned out, ill-fated) attempt to rescue the hostages using a whiz-bang military intervention, but who until after the intervention had been tried– and failed– to make public the fact of his previously decided resignation.
Not like Colin Powell, either, who overcame his own strong reservations about George W. Bush’s rush to invade Iraq and who will be forever remembered as the weak-willed soul who chose to collude in that (even more ill-fated) intervention at a point– in February 2003– when he was possibly the one person on the planet who could have stopped it in its tracks.
So now, Jim Jones has resigned. Why?
Several reporters are saying that Bob Woodward’s publication of so many details in his latest book, Obama’s Wars, about the difficulties Jones has had fitting in with Obama’s more “political”, predominantly Chicago-based team may well have pushed Jones to resign right now.
I don’t buy it. I don’t think that a guy who’s a much decorated Marine Corps general is going to be so easily intimidated or embarrassed. Throughout much of his tenure, remember, Jones has been the subject of intermittent whispering campaigns. None of them sent him to the point of resignation.
Why now?
Will we wake up some day between now and the November 2 election and discover that Obama has signed off on some “spectacular” military adventure whose intent is, overwhelmingly, to try to shock the country into swinging behind the Democrats in the election? The “Wag the Dog” scenario. That’s one strong candidate for an explanation of why now, of all times, a national security adviser would resign.
Another is that maybe Jones wanted Obama to do something more forceful and principled about the Israeli government’s utter disrespect of international law and Obama’s wishes regarding its continuous campaign of land-grabbing in Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank.
Let us not forget that the man who is now filling Jones’s shoes, Tom Donilon, is a politician well honed in the arts of inside-the-Washington-Beltway politicking (and with almost zero experience of international affairs.) And by all accounts it was Tom Donilon who cleared the path for Dennis Ross to glide back in from being board chair of the Jerusalem-based “Jewish People’s Policy Planning Institute” to lording it over Obama’s originally designated envoy for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Sen. George Mitchell– to the point where Ross now has all the reins of Washington’s Middle East policy firmly in his own hands.
Or, as M.J. Rosenberg puts it, so much more succinctly than I have, “Jones Out, Ross In: Middle East Burns.”
But with all due respect to M.J., I still don’t think that either he or Mitchell Plitnick, whom he quotes extensively in that piece, have really addressed the core question regarding Jones’s resignation: Why now?
In Woodward’s book, there are a few tantalizing vignettes about Jones’s often difficult relationship with Donilon.
On p.199, Woodward writes that Jones “was impressed” with what Donilon was able to achieve in the frequent meetings he chaired, that brought together the deputy-level people from all the big national-security departments and agencies–

but he also resented the close relationship that Donilon had with [Rahm] Emanuel. He still chafed that the main pipeline cntinued to be Emanual-Donilon, who were like two tuning forks– when one vibrated, so did the other.

Woodward also writes that during a performance review discussion he had with Donilon, Jones criticized his deputy for never having gone to Iraq or Afghanistan “or really left the office for a serious field trip.” And this:

Second, Jones continued, you frequently pop off with absolute declarations about places you’ve never been, leaders you’ve never met, or colleagues you work with.

So there we have a picture of Donilon as the ultimate Washington Beltway insider. (As is his wife, who is Mrs. Biden’s chief of staff.) Small wonder, if his main frame of reference is what people are saying and thinking in the heavily Lobby-saturated halls of Capitol Hill– rather than in the world beyond America’s shores– that he thinks that having Dennis Ross guide the country’s policies on Palestine and Iran is quite the best thing to do.
Very, very disturbing to have this man now as national security adviser.
Scarier still: he already has a strong record of having forcefully pursued policies that led our country to the brink of disaster. From 1999 through 2005 he was legal counsel and a “top strategic thinker” at the government-backed mortgage company Fannie Mae. Those were the go-go years in mortgage banking, when Fannie Mae and its young cousin Freddie Mac were crucial, government-backed enablers of some of the worst financial excesses that led to the crash of September 2008.
Tom Donilon was never held to any account for his actions during those years. And now, here he comes again…
But I still want to focus on the question of why did Gen. Jones decide to leave now??

Chas Freeman book: Buy it on Amazon!

We’ve done it! The paperback version of Amb. Chas Freeman’s book, America’s Misadventures in the Middle East, is now available for purchase through Amazon. The paperback, hardcover, and e-book versions of the book will all be available through other sales channels in the near future. But for now, you can be the first on your block to order Amb. Freeman’s fabulous book, which is an author-curated compilation of his essays—many of them previously unpublished—on U.S. policy in the Middle East from 1990 through 2010.
The three titles that will follow Freeman’s from Just World Books in Fall 2010 are all books that bloggers on foreign affairs have “self-curated” from among their own best previous oeuvre. You can find the whole line-up on this page on our website. Just World Books’s stated goal is to publish “Timely Books for Changing Times”– and I hope you agree with me that all these books certainly fit that category!
I hope, obviously, that you buy– and enjoy!–Freeman’s book. (Buy lots of copies! It will make a great holiday gift for friends and family!)
Sadly, the way we are producing the book means that Amazon won’t allow us to discount it. But if you buy multiple copies, at least you can save some on the shipping costs… no small matter, these days.
Also, I am not sure yet how the availability of the book to non-U.S. destinations will be organized. If you live in such a place and have any problems ordering it, let me know. I am hoping that my deal with Amazon will also put the book onto Amazon.co.uk, but I need to figure that out.
In addition, I would really welcome any help you could give in spreading the word about this important book. Here are some ways you might do this:

contact my margeting guy

our Facebook page

I am really psyched that we got the book onto the Amazon site and available for purchase today. The publishing model I created eight months ago and have been following ever since promises most of our authors a maximum three-month turnaround time from the date we accept their manuscript to the date it is available for purchase. When I created the model, I still wasn’t sure we could do it. Now, we have! Of course, it helped a lot that Freeman’s manuscript was beautifully written and altogether in great shape. It came in to me on July 7, and I accepted it for publication almost immediately.
And now it’s a book. Wow.
… Now, our editing and layout teams are hard at work on the other three books in the Fall list. They’re doing a fabulous job– professional, and deeply committed to our goal of speedy turnaround.
Have you checked the website recently? We’ve been putting a lot of new content up there, including a couple more podcasts over the past two weeks, news about our authors’ continued blogging and writing activities, and some of the great advance praise we’ve already received for Laila El-Haddad’s Gaza Mom book…

When is an act of war not an act of war?

The inimitable Matt Duss has a great post on Wonk Room today in which he notes that recent polling data from CBS News and Vanity Fair “indicates pretty strongly that Americans are not in favor of a U.S. war with Iran.”
He adds, however, that supporters of a U.S. war on Iran realize that a “war”, as such, is very unpopular– and hence, they prefer to couch their bellophilic musings in the less openly warlike (and more apparently “neutral”, or “surgical”) discourse of “military strikes”, “air strikes”, etc.
Thus, as Duss notes, though CBS and VF found that only around 10% of Americans would admit to supporting a “war” on Iran even if it tested a nuclear bomb or attacked Israel, when the Chicago Council on Global Affairs carried out its nationwide opinion survey recently it showed that Americans were “evenly divided” on whether Washington should launch military strikes against Iran “if diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions fail to stop or slow down Iran’s nuclear program.” (p.46 of the Chicago Council survey, PDF here.)
Well, two things are happening there to produce this interesting juxtaposition of results. Note first of all the difference in the scenarios the two polls were referring to. CBS/VF was asking what policies should be pursued if Iran actually tests a nuclear bomb, while the Chicago Council poll was referring merely to the (slightly vague) scenario in which– according to undefined criteria and unidentified judges of those criteria– it might seem that diplomatic efforts and sanctions have “failed to slow or stop” Iran’s nuclear program. (With the unexamined assumption embedded in there being that– “of course”– Iran’s program is indeed aiming straight at the possession of nuclear weapons… Wow!)
And so, under those circumstances, which might occur at a point when Iran’s nuclear-tech programs are still at a point far short of possession or testing of a nuclear weapon, around half the Americans surveyed say they would favor the launching of a “military strike” against Iran… Whereas a presumably similar sample of Americans, when asked the slightly different question about what would justify an American war against Iran, overwhelmingly say that even Iran’s performance of an actual nuclear weapon test would not persuade them that a war as such would be justified.
Oh, what a difference those weasel words, a “military strike”, can make!
But make no mistake about it, an unprovoked attack against the territory of another country is an act of war…. An act of war does not require the formal “declaration” of a state of war. The state of war is initiated with the launching of an act of war itself. A declaration of war can come after (or even, as as often happened in recent times, not at all.)
Think Pearl Harbor.
And this, I think, is where Matt Duss was a little misleading. He was robust in arguing that a Western “military strike” against Iran would indeed lead to a war. But his argumentation there suggested strongly that this would happen only because the hostilities would be long-drawn-out. He wrote, “war is what it would be. The idea that the U.S. or Israel will deal with the problem through a few days or weeks of air strikes should be put to rest.”
Japan’s air attack on Pearl Harbor did not last more than a few hours. But it was certainly more than grave enough to justify– under the international law situation prevailing at the time– the U.S. entry into the broader war on the anti-Japanese side, and therefore the United States’ sperpetration of all kinds of hostile acts against Japanese targets both inside and outside Japan.
In 1945, as the Crimes of War website notes,

the United Nations Charter banned the first use of force, putting an end to declarations of war. Article 2(4) of the Charter states: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”

Well, it is true that that prohibition on the launching of acts of war–and even on the voicing of threats of such acts–has become sadly diluted in the 65 years since 1945. (The U.S. government itself has done a lot, especially under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush, to hasten that dilution. So has Israel over the years.) But the prohibition still stands. It applies equally to the United States, and to Iran, and to all other states.
As revealed in the CBS/VF poll, the American people seem to have a gut understanding of the wrongness of starting a war.
But ask them about “military strikes”? Then, their answer is different.
The weasel words by which the warmongers try to tell people that an act of war is somehow not actually an act of war but only a “military strike” should be everywhere challenged.
And yes, that would include Sen. Joe Lieberman, who on Sept. 30 told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that “the military option [is a] real and credible alternative policy” to diplomacy and sanctions, in dealing with Iran… But also that, ”we’re not talking a war.”
(Kudos to Ali Gharib and his colleagues for picking up on Lieberman’s dreadful weaseliness.)

23% of Israelis ready to leave Israel at any hint of problems?

In the latest issue of the always informative journal Middle East Policy, University of Pennsylvania prof Ian Lustick expresses the notable observation that,

Last year, a poll by David Menashri of the Iran center at Tel Aviv University reported … that 70 percent of Israeli Jews said they would not consider emigrating if Iran got the bomb. That’s an odd way to report a finding — how many would not consider emigrating. So there is deep fear.

I guess I have seen several references to the judgment that has apparently been reached by several Israeli decision-makers to the effect that the main bad thing that would ensue for Israel if Iran gets nuclear weapons is not necessarily a high probability that this would be used against Israel– which, goodness only knows, has 1,000 times the capability to deter such an action– but rather that Iran’s attainment of nuclear weapons would cause a mass flight of Israelis from the country.
But I hadn’t seen any reference to any data on this until I read Lustick’s piece. Then I Googled around a bit and found this report in Haaretz from May 2009. And actually, despite the way that Lustick wrote about the way the poll’s findings were reported, Haaretz reported outright that,

Some 23 percent of Israelis would consider leaving the country if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, according to a poll conducted on behalf of the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.

So much for them thinking that Israel is their eternal homeland, etc etc. As one expert on Algeria’s long battle for independence from France commented to me, “This makes Israeli attitudes seem very close to those of the French pieds noirs colonists in Algeria. The vast majority of them fled back to France when the going got tough and Algeria won its independence.” That, even though until that point they had all been adamant that Algeria was an integral part of France.
Or, one might say, the attitude of those many “White” former South Africans whom one meets in various spots around the world today, in which they have resettled after “giving up” on South Africa.
From the point of view of hardline Zionists, Jewish Israelis probably have far too many options for citizenship or longterm residence in other places around the world today. For starters, just about all of them could settle in the U.S. tomorrow if they chose, no questions asked. In addition, as my friend Yossi Alpher explained to me a couple of years ago in Tel Aviv, since the end of the Cold War a couple of million Jewish Israelis have either hung onto the citizenship they formerly had in the former Soviet Union or the countries of (former) Eastern Europe– or, in many cases, the Israeli children and grandchildren of people who fled to Israel from Eastern Europe during the Nazi era have been going back to Poland, or Hungary, or Slovakia, or wherever and reclaiming their citizenship “rights” there by inheritance… Something that’s especially valuable now that all those former Warsaw Pact countries are now firmly in the E.U.
(That, while they continue to totally deny to the Palestinian refugees any analogous right to return to their grandparent’s homes and properties within what is now Israel.)
But the bottom line in this phenomenon of Israelis being ready to leave so easily– if Iran even gets, let alone shows any sign of moving towards using nuclear weapons– seems to be that actually, the Zionist project of building Israel as the last, safest haven for Jewish people worldwide seems not to be terribly successful.
… All the above is interesting and notable even though I– like many other people– have still not seen any evidence that convinces me that the Iranian government is in fact aiming at building a nuclear weapon. This is more about Israel than it is about Iran.
Anyway, the rest of what Lustick writes there is also well analyzed and important.

That all-American urge to punish

On Thursday afternoon I took the long drive down to the far southeastern corner of Virginia and took part in solemn observances to mark– and protest– our state’s killing of one of its citizens, Teresa Lewis.
It was a big and moving event. I was there not only as an individual but also in my capacity as a board member of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, so I spoke to a few media people in that capacity.
By far the most engaging person in the field outside Greensville ‘Correctional’ Center, where Teresa Lewis lost all hope of ever being further ‘corrected’ was Rev. Lynn Litchfield, who had been Teresa’s pastor for several years when Teresa was still in Fluvanna Woman’s Prison, near Charlottesville. Lynn had spent 2.5 hours with Teresa on Wednesday; and she spoke with great emotion and sincerity about how Teresa had, many times over the years, expressed remorse for the part she played (albeit only a small, facilitating part– no-one ever claimed she pulled the trigger) in the shooting murder of her husband and stepson back in 2003.
Lynn read out the portion of the scriptures that Teresa had asked her to read. (Phil.I, 12-28) Some 60 of us in the prayer circle sang and prayed together. And as Teresa was being killed we clanged a great heavy bell there in the darkening field.
I first became engaged in anti-death penalty activism shortly after my family and I moved into Virginia in 1997– coming from the District of Columbia, a jurisdiction that doesn’t have the death penalty (except the federal death penalty.) I was taken aback at the idea that by moving across the Potomac River into Virginia we were moving back into the Middle Ages… What with the death penalty and the still-standing laws that made sodomy into a felony…
A couple of years later, I was trying to weigh up how to divide my time and my concern between activism on death penalty issues here in my home state and on war-and-peace issues internationally. One of my Quaker friends helped clarify matters, saying quite simply that “It’s all the same urge, at home and abroad: It’s the urge to punish. It’s the stance that says ‘We are right, and we have the right to enact serious punishment on anyone we disagree with.'”
It’s also the point of view that holds that punishing, punishing, punishing all the time is somehow the “right” thing do– even when that punishing gets in the way of resolving conflicts or other problems.
It’s that self-righteous position that says that “we” are so right that we don’t even need to listen to anyone else… Not a Teresa Lewis… Not a Fidel Castro… Not an Ismail Haniyeh… Not the entire population of Gaza and the West Bank, which voted Haniyeh’s party into office in 2006… No, no-one else at all. Because, you see, “we” Americans are so inherently virtuous that we are always right; and anyone who challenges us is necessarily wrong, and should be punished.
Teresa Lewis, by her own account and that of the state, did one pretty bad thing at one point in her life. The state ignored her borderline mental retardation and determined that she had been “the mastermind” in the plot to kill her husband Julian Lewis, and that the two men who were the triggermen had somehow been only her pawns. They got life in prison– though one of them later bragged about how he had set her up, flirted with her, and preyed on her in order to pursue his tragic loser’s dream of somehow making it big as a respected and well-off “hit man.” He later killed himself in prison… The tragedies go on and on.
Meantime, we have still at large in our country, several people who have perpetrated acts very, very much more serious than Teresa Lewis’s. People who knowingly misled the public and jerked our government into launching a quite unjustified– and completely tragic– invasion of Iraq. People who instituted waterboarding and other forms of torture, disappearances, and international renditions… People who argued that in 2006 Israel should be “allowed” to continue its unjustified bombardment of Lebanon– for 33 whole days– or its equally unjustified bombardment of Gaza in 2008-09… And all those people have been allowed to walk away quite freely. They are in our midst at think tanks in Washington DC. They have the blood of so many innocents on their hands.
(This “urge to punish” is not, it turns out, omnidirectional in America. It very much depends on politics– and money. If you are poor and can’t afford a decent lawyer, you are 1,000 more times more likely to be on death row than if you’re a well-paid lobbyist, lawyer, banker– or Elliott Abrams.)
A state– any state– is a fallible, human institution. No state has the right to designate for killing off the battlefield (or even, I would argue, on it… but let’s stick to off-battlefield killings for now) any human person, whether at home or abroad.
At home, the idea that a economically disadvantaged, slightly simple-minded person like Teresa gets designated for killing is an outrage. Abroad, the idea that there are young American men sitting in military bases far from any battlefield, armed with killer drones and lists of names of people who are to be killed, is equally an outrage.
Who compiles those lists of names? Based on what evidence? No-one knows! It is truly an international Star Chamber, and it should be abhorrent to us all.
There are– in all these cases– good, solid alternatives to state killing. Alternatives that will be more effective in protecting the lives of innocents. At home and abroad– state killing must stop.