Red, White, and Truth

Earlier this year Senator Leahy called for the establishment of a "truth commission" to investigate crimes committed by the Bush administration carried out during "The Global War on Terror." Aside from a committee hearing and a House bill that failed to gain any traction, the idea of prosecuting US government agents for gross human rights violations faded away. That is until late last month when Attorney General Holder officially opened an investigation into whether any CIA interrogators crossed legal boundaries.

This investigation poses an interesting question--should we investigate the crimes of past administrations? The answer is, of course, an absolute yes. Even if they were done under the guise of protecting American lives the actions of leaders should not be immune from scrutiny and, if necessary, prosecution. However, in this case a truth and reconciliation commission would be an error.

To begin with, American society does not place very much value on truth and reconciliation commissions. This is not to say restorative justice is without its merits or even that one theory of justice is better than another. The opinion of the average American is that criminals should be punished, they should not spend months recounting their crimes and then receive immunity. Widespread support of the death penalty is but one example of the rigid view Americans have justice. For many citizens a TRC would not bring sufficient legal closure to the crimes in question.

A critical element of restorative justice is that the victims and the prepetrators establish a dialogue. However, in the case of this proposed committee the only dialogue will be between different branches of government. Those who were tortured will not have an opportunity to address their traumas or demand confessions from their interrogators. The US government would be putting the US government on trial. One political party would be tsk-tsking another. It is an act of political theater in the highest degree. Prior TRCs, like those in South Africa and East Timor, are a symbolic breaks with the past and a declaration to the world that new states have risen from the ashes of the old. A commission established by the United States would have no such symbolic weight.

Another critical element of TRCs is the confessional aspect. Confessions and testimonies create an unassailable historical record and contribute to the victims sense of healing. There is a repentant aspect to this--perpetrators need to admit they committed wrongful acts. I cannot speak to the thoughts of all the interrogators, but based on recent statements by a high-ranking Bush administration official there appears to be no form of regret for the possible illegal actions taken. I realize Senator Leahy was careful to designate his proposed commission only a "truth commission", leaving out any reconcilation aspect. But again, as discussed in the paragraphs above, just airing the truth lacks any closure.

It is obvious that any human rights violations committed by the Bush administration cannot go unpunished. Those who responsible must answer for what they have done. The two paths proposed have their strengths, but they also have their weaknesses. We should find a solution where justice is pursued, but not weighed down by politics.

An Open Letter to the President

Dear President Obama:

Recently you have been accused of being a Nazi, a socialist, and/or a Nazi werewolf. While some of your critics are clearly insane they do have a point--it's time to give up on health care reform. If the complete absence of any logical, rational, or coherent thought among these people has proven anything it's that someone, somewhere has failed them. This is why I urge you to begin an immediate and swift reform of the public school system. Because people need to know that Kristallnacht does not mean"Night of the Single-Payer System."

Regards,

Karl

Nazi Hunting

No doubt attempting to capitalize on the most recent Tarantino picture, the Washington Post ran a story today about the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the unit charged with hunting down Nazis living in the United States.

Now here's the thing about Nazis- most of them are dead or very close to it. The article opens with OSI's latest victory, deporting 89 year old John Demjajuk to Germany. Shockingly, Jason Bourne style car chases were not involved.

The OSI was supremely aware of this ticking clock and so it was in 2004 that Congress expanded the unit's mandate to include hunting down people who were involved in a broad range of human rights violations. Unfortunately, what Congress was not aware of was that some big time human rights violators were already here on American soil. In fact, one of them used to be the dude in charge of the DOJ.

Hypocrisy aside, the question we need to ask is is the OSI still a useful institution? The Post article seems to think so and cites a number of organizations that agree. Not to beat a dead horse or to sound insensitive, but old Nazis are, well, old. Not only have they probably burnt through any resources that was keeping them hidden and protected but in a decade the problem is going to solve itself. So OSI's successes aren't particularly impressive. And the most high-profile case in recent years involving a war criminal on U.S. soil, that of Charles "Chuckie" Taylor, Jr., did not involve the OSI.

War criminals, genocidaries, dictators all need to be put alert, they need to know that justice is waiting for them and they will never find cool ground. But the OSI does not operate like that. Its goal is to ensure that American shores are safe from evil. The rest of the world can do what they want with rights violators (as long as those rights violators are not American citizens, in which case hands off). If the US government was truly serious about holding rights violators accountable there are any number of steps they can take to make this a reality. The least of which is to ratify the Rome Statute and become a full-fledged member of the ICC.

The Well-Loved Parts

Christine Montross went from an MA in French Poetry to medical school. It's a strange leap, unless you were looking for someone to write a beautiful, moving book about the process of becoming a doctor. In that case look no further than Body of Work.

I read the book almost two years ago, but one passage in particular stands out. The scene is a hospital room in the early morning hours; Montross and a resident are finishing up a twenty-four hour shift. One of their patients is on his deathbed surrounded by family. The family has, after much deliberation, has decided to disconnect their patriarch's ventilator and let him pass peacefully on. I'll let her tell the rest of the story-

Once an hour for the next several hours, I quietly knocked and entered Mr. A’s room to check on his exhausted family. Occasionally one or the other of them would leave for a tray of vending-machine coffee or to make a phone call to faraway relatives, but otherwise they remained. When four hours had passed with no apparent change in Mr. A’s condition, I took the resident aside. “I know I haven’t seen this kind of thing before,” I said, “but are you surprised that Mr. A is still alive?”

“Not as all,” he replied with a half smile. “In fact, I would have been surprised otherwise, since I haven’t touched his vent since we came on this morning.” I nearly stumbled as he spoke, picturing this family who was emptied off all reserves, awaiting their unenviable, but peaceful, finality of grief. My shock must have been easily recognizable because the resident quickly continued, “Have you seen the paperwork I have to do for every death on this unit? His own doctor will be on in six hours and can dial the vent down then. No one dies on my clock.”

We say we’ll never get there. I say I’ll never be that. But as doctors-in-training, we are reshaping the ways in which he react—in fact we are suppressing universal reactions of fear and grief and horror. Will I able to suppress some but not all? Will I be able to detach from strangers and maintain humanity with which I would respond to loved ones in similar circumstances? But then I am not bound to consider each patient as I would want my brother to be considered? My partner? My niece? The lines blur, and I am left feeling dissatisfied. I do not wish to blunt the spectrum of my feelings, to lose the discomfort I feel in violent movies, to lack empathy at the bedside of a dying patient. I do not wish to hear “stroke” and think of the distribution of vessels to the brain and territories they serve instead of my grandmother’s now-curled left hand and stooped walk. I do not wish to make love to my partner and think, Latissimus dorsi, umbilicus, myocardium. How much of becoming a doctor demands releasing the well-known and well-loved parts of my self?

It seems to me that humanitarian and human rights work poses a similar quandary. If we allow ourselves to be caught up in the horrific things done to people, if we pause for a moment to remember names and faces, then we become emotionally involved and become invested in a battle than may not necessarily be won. Or we take it too personally and are unable to see the bigger picture. But on the other hand if we refuse to reflect on the details, if we shut out emotions we become hardened and have no stake in righting wrongs. Instead it becomes just a job and our only goal is to get through the day.

So where do we strike the balance? How do we maintain our humanity but not wear it on our sleeves? It's a question I'm afraid I'll never quite have a satisfactory answer to.

Exhuming the Past

Andrew Rice of The New Republic has a written a fascinating article on NBC's new painfully troubling new show "The Wanted" in which alleged do-gooders race around the world confronting alleged war criminals. Rice's piece focuses on the episode of "The Wanted" that tracks down Leopold Munyakazi, a Rwandan exile, professor of French and alleged genocidaire.

And this is where the story gets interesting, because the article is not so much a critique of the show (which is a easy task), but rather an exploration of competing world views--one where the world is black and white and evil will always be evil and one where shades of gray cast shadows over everything. A quote:

After class, a swirling retinue of about ten cameramen, technicians, and professional interrogators descended on Munyakazi, a broad-faced middle-aged man with an accented, lilting voice. The professor, who had been given little notice, was stunned and refused to talk on camera. After some time, two members of the faculty who knew Munyakazi, a philosophy professor and the director of the school's peace-studies program, joined the standoff, which only heightened the tension. The professors angrily challenged the Rwandan prosecutor. "They kept talking about 'competing narratives' of the genocide," Ciralsky [a producer of the show] says. "Which really could be considered code for denying the genocide."

What was happening was a collision of two different worldviews: the investigative mindset of journalists and prosecutors, with its normative emphasis on evidence, guilt, and verdicts; and the academic mode of inquiry, which is more discursive and wary of definitive judgments. The disdain between the two sides was mutual.

Anyone who closely follows human rights and/or development will know that questions about the commonly accepted narrative of Rwandan genocide have existed for many years. Mamdani has questioned the extent to which there was a clear delination between Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities. More recently, Scott Strauss has debunked the idea that Radio Mille-Collines was a driving force behind the killings. As Rice notes, Des Forges and others were vocal critics of Paul Kagme and the RPF.

There is a certain odious aura around genocide deniers, people who refuse to believe that slaughter happened. But this is not what Munyakazi is. He is a man asking us, imploring us, to dig a little deeper, to ask tough questions. The victims of genocide deserve justice, yes, but they also deserve the truth. It may not be something they will ever get. And is certainly something an hour long television episode will never give them.

Eight Panels That Changed My Life

A typical job interview will include a moment when the person sitting opposite me asks why I want to work for their organization or how I became interested in this particular career. Normally I will deliver a vague answer. Sometimes I’ll reference a book I read a few years ago about Fred Cuny or my general desire to make the world a better place. The ambiguity of my reply is not because I am hiding something or because the true story is immensely boring, it’s because for the longest time I actually didn’t know why I was interested in making the world a better place. There was no singular moment I could point to and say “Yep, there I was, 4:14 pm on August 19^th, 1999, the moment that changed my life.” There was only a collection of moments, of realizations, and even put together they didn’t amount to much. I never actually had an answer. That is until I picked up an old comic book.

I’ll try to give the short and sweet, nerd-lite version. X-Men Alpha is a one-shot comic published in January 1995 to kick-off the “Age of Apocalypse” crossover. So there are these mutants, homo superior, gifted with incredible abilities such as telepathy, flight, etc. They are, for the most part, hated and despised by humans. One mutant, Charles Xavier, dreams of a world where mutants and humans can coexist peacefully. He and his X-Men fight for this better world. Unfortunately, Professor Xavier’s son travels back in time and inadvertently kills his own father. This leaves room for the evil mutant known as Apocalypse to conquer most of the world and establish his Darwinian “survival of the fittest” creed. So dawns the Age of Apocalypse.

The first page of X-Men Alpha is an image of the X-Man Bishop climbing a mountain of corpses lamenting that one never quite gets use to the smell. I was twelve years old when I first saw that panel. When I picked up the very same comic fourteen years later the page was exactly how I remembered it. Especially the faces of the corpses frozen in terror. I was initially shocked by this. Partially because of how incredibly dark this comic was and but mostly because my mind had kept this particular image in mint condition for nearly a decade and half. Not a single line was out of place. I could have drawn the page from memory and I wager I still can.

The X-Men have been used as an allegory for minorities since their initial publication in the 1960s. Xavier is an obvious stand-in for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his arch-enemy, Magneto takes on qualities of Malcolm X. As the civil rights movement began to succeed the X-Men have stood in as metaphors for other groups, such as homosexuals. (Interestingly enough, since the 1980s the X-Men have seen themselves increasingly battling religious fundamentalists.)

I never knew anyone who survived a concentration camp or a killing field. I’ve never met a Bosnian or a Rwandan. But every month I went down to the comic story and continued to read the adventures of Cyclops and Wolverine. Here were people, fictional people, with hopes and dreams, with victories and failures, families and friends. Yes, they were fictional. But they introduced me to prejudice that a white boy growing up in the Connecticut suburbs knew nothing about.

We Now Return You to Regularly Scheduled Rights Abuses

BBC reported last week that the Congolese army has promised to punish any soldiers found guilty of rights abuses, specifically rape. A more cynical blogger might point out that the UN has been demanding an end to these inhumane actions since at least last November or that rape is so endemic in the DRC soldiers are not even the worst perpetrators. Hell, that cranky ole blogger might even use the phrase "Color, me skeptical" in reference to any promised future action by the DRC. But that wouldn't be this blogger. No, sir.