The Big Picture and the Closeup

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Benedict: The Counter-Narrative Forms

          Who was responsible for what?  That will be a hard question for journalists any time they have to find answers within a large and secretive international organization whose headquarters are a sovereign nation, and whose lines of authority are unclear and changing.  Yet that is the task confronting reporters seeking to determine what role and responsibilities Benedict XVI had with respect to the child abuse scandals now roiling the Church.

          Owing to various cases reported on by, among others, the New York Times and the Associated Press, various commentators, including myself in this blog, have concluded that Benedict was “in the loop” at times, either deciding to try to return supposedly rehabilitated priests to action, or having a role in prolonging ecclesiastical trials, or promulgating rules keeping the trials secret.

          There have been two kinds of responses.  One sort, ad hominem attacks on the media as “petty gossips” or classical anti-clericals, of which we saw two instances from the Holy See during Holy Week, is simply vile.  To the extent the reporting resembles gossip, in that it deals with fragments of a story about which the principals keep their silence, that resemblance is entirely the fault of the Church, which withholds much of the salient information.  And certainly anti-clericalism exists, but I see no trace of it in the reporting on which I and much of the responsible comment in the world have been relying.  It is easy to charge anti-clericalism, impossible to refute it objectively, and the charge has a bad history of being true only when the Church has behaved in such a fashion as to provoke it.

          The more reasonable response has been the construction of a counter-narrative, seen for instance in recent comments by William McGurn in theWall Street Journal, Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, and former Archbishop Thomas Brundage , posted online.  In this narrative: a) the reporters are getting key details wrong or omitting them; b) this leads to giving an overall wrong picture; and c) the right picture is of a Pope gradually but decisively growing into the one who blew the whistle, and getting inadequate credit for it.

          Let’s examine these elements.  Exhibit A in all of these comments is Laurie Goodstein’s March 25, 2010 story in the New York Times concerning Rev. Lawrence Murphy, who abused 200 children at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee over three decades.  Goodstein wrote that Murphy “was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system.”  It has been pointed out that the accuracy of this statement depends on how you parse “tried or disciplined.”  By the time of his death in 1998, Murphy had been stripped of his priestly functions (though not his priestly status), had been told not to have unsupervised contact with minors, and had not been the subject of any accusations of misconduct for 24 years.  Moreover, a trial was begun (a fact Goodstein reported) and though it was stopped by Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a fact Goodstein made the centerpiece of her article), it was halted only two days before Murphy’s death (though apparently the Congregation would have known only that Murphy was in bad health) — on compassionate grounds and because Murphy had gone so long without incurring new charges.

          It sounds as if Goodstein, intentionally or not, exaggerated the impunity Murphy enjoyed, and made the trial that Ratzinger shut down seem perhaps more capable of yielding a meaningful outcome than it truly was.  Let us concede this.  Let us go further, and concede that the paper trail stops one or two levels shy of Ratzinger in many of these cases.  (Although not in what as of this writing is the newest one, involving a California priest, Stephen Kiesle, where Ratzinger’s signature is right on the document slowing down a move to defrock him – albeit this was in 1986, before Ratzinger’s awakening to the urgency of getting abusers out from Church-sponsored access to youngsters.)

          How much does it alter the big picture, though?  In the years when the Murphy trial was going forward, Ratzinger was well known to be second only to Pope John Paul II in power and influence within the Church.  He did not use his influence, so far as we know, to publicize what Murphy did, to encourage Murphy’s victims to come forward, to vindicate them publicly or to compensate them.  Instead, he shut down a secret trial, in secret, and, but for the sleuthing of Goodstein and of some victims’ lawyers (excoriated, naturally, in the Wall Street Journal merely because they stand to profit – and the WSJ gets indignant about profit by plaintiffs’ lawyers while cheering the obscene compensation of the titans of Wall Street), we’d never know anything about it at all.  To this day.  And the reason we only find out about this now, and that a Laurie Goodstein finds the salient details a little hard to come by, is that even after the publicity, the Church has not released any documents from the abortive trial: no charging papers, no evidence, no nothing.

          Let us look at the big picture as the Pope’s apologists would have us see it.  They would say that Benedict, whose authority at the Congregation had extended originally to only to those priestly sexual misconduct cases that were an abuse of the confessional, made a welcome change in 2001 by taking the remaining cases away from the Rota, where cases had dragged on for years, and lodging them with the Congregation, where they went much more quickly.

          Moreover, he met with the victims.  And in cooperation with many national Church apparatuses, certainly including the American ones, he finally instituted zero tolerance programs supported by training and backed up by sanctions with teeth.  In short, as Michael Gerson quotes the Rev. Thomas Reese of Georgetown University, “Benedict grew in his understanding of the crisis. Like many other bishops at the beginning, he didn’t understand it. . . . But he grew in his understanding because he listened to what the U.S. bishops had to say. He in fact got it quicker than other people in the Vatican.”

          So, yes, arguably Ratzinger gets credit for closing the barn door.  And he has done it with a fair amount of publicity.  But most of the horses had already fled.  And it’s the fled horses that are at the root of the problem.

          As I’ve been pointing out, the Church unleashed an epidemic of abusive priests on the youth of the world for at least the last two generations.  Clearly, there have been thousands and thousands of victims.  When you create that kind of situation, you have to own up to it.  Not in some generalized statement of regret, but by making it possible for everyone who wishes to know about it to know all about it, except for whatever is necessary to protect the identities of victims who do not wish to be identified.  And of course it may lead to liability, and it may lead to people abandoning the Faith.  But concealment will lead to bigger liability and more apostasy than disclosure.  And, beyond that, disclosure is the morally right thing to do, the only morally right thing.

          The Church has gone in just the opposite direction until recently.  It flagrantly breached its duties of disclosure in promulgating and following the 1962 protocol I wrote about last time, and keeping charges and trials of priests under accusation a secret, and forcing secrecy on the victims as well.  It only slightly veered in the right direction with the changes Ratzinger instituted in 2001, which still subjected the proceedings to “the pontifical secret” – his phrase.  The new policy, to disclose these matters when civil authorities or laws demand, which seems to have been proclaimed this last week, is a good thing, but not the thing required.

          What is required is for the Church to make a clean breast of the whole affair, identifying publicly each priest reasonably believed to have been an abuser and to identify what is known of his crimes, to release all documents related to any ecclesiastical trials (with suitable redactions to protect the identities of the victims), to begin a proactive approach to compensation of victims, and to purge the enablers from the Church hierarchy.  Perhaps those who shielded abusers and delayed justice, like Ratzinger when he protected Kiesle, were not as enlightened as they later became.  But their lack of empathy and honesty and public-spiritedness at the time were nonetheless appalling, and can only be expiated by their leaving the hierarchy now.  A letter like the one protecting Kiesle should be a death warrant for the ecclesiastical career of its signatory, even 25 years later.

          No ifs, ands or buts.

          The counter-narrative may be true.  Perhaps Benedict and his cohorts have grown in wisdom and are now standing guard against abusers.  But they have a past to account for, and they cannot do so while remaining in office.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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The Church in Darkness

I write these words sitting at the back of my church at Easter Vigil.  As we do each year, we have processed into the dark building, candles in hand, and lit them, spreading the light suddenly, dramatically, and we hope, emblematically.  Yet this year my heart is not in it.  This year I cannot recognize in the brightened room the sign of my faith.  Rather, I feel like Isaiah when he observed that clouds cover the earth, and darkness the peoples. 

I am still reeling from the report that the Pope’s personal preacher has devoted part of his Good Friday sermon to comparing the Pope and the church, under pressure to account for their complicity in the abuse of who knows how many children committed to its care over the years, to the Jews in the Holocaust. 

 The comparison is far, far worse than mindless.  It is willfully blind.  It casts the Pope and the hierarchy in the role of victims, and those seeking accountability in the role of persecutors.  This precisely reverses the reality.

 To be sure, there can be times when demands for accountability can be a form of persecution.  In American politics, we have seen phony outrage and claims that someone has to account for something raised to an art form.  We have seen it so often that we know very well what the manufactured version looks like.  What is happening in the Church is nothing of the sort.

Instead, for the longest time, priests have been engaging in rape and abuse.  Not all of them, certainly not anything like the majority of them.  But lots of them.  And the Church has systematically covered up for them.  I blogged last time about two cases of coverup in which the Pope was involved.  Since then we have learned of another two cases in Arizona.  One involved Rev. Michael Teta, of whose case then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger took control in 1992 – and continued to sit on the case until 2004, while Rev. Teta remained on the church payroll and worked with young children outside the church.  The other involved a Msgr. Robert Trupia, whose case stretched out over twelve years while his superior bishops continued to sound the alarm and ask for him to be removed from contact with children. Cardinal Ratzinger was in charge of the case for at least the last year and a half, from February 2003 to August 2004, when Trupia was finally laicized.

It is not victimizing Benedict to insist that he finally tell, in full detail, what happened.  Rather, every day that passes without Benedict and the others involved confessing their roles perpetuates the victimization.  The victimization of the true victims, that is. 

I am fortunate enough personally never to have been sexually abused by my religious preceptors.  But I have met several who were.  And the one thing which is common to all of them is that they crave acknowledgment – maybe not public identification but acknowledgment.  It would do them tremendous good to have their tormentors unmasked, with their deeds named.  Some wish the abuser would face them personally and acknowledge his crimes; others would never willingly have anything to do with abuser ever again.  Some need financial aid for counseling or compensation for more serious emotional injury.  But common to all of them is the desire to have the truth known, in some way.

The canonical trial process the Church used to address charges of priestly sexual abuse was designed, as far as humanly possible, to frustrate that desire for public acknowledgment of the truth.  As we have learned from a secret 1962 protocol in force until 2001, the canonical trials that occurred were themselves to be carried on in secret.  All church personnel who participated were required to maintain secrecy on penalty of excommunication.  Complaining witnesses too were sworn to secrecy about the proceeding.  The 2001 substitute protocol is not explicit about secrecy enjoined upon accusers, but includes the piquant phrase: “Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret.”  And, as if one could not have guessed, Ratzinger’s signature is at the bottom of the 2001 document.

What Benedict and his hierarchy have done, then, is not merely delaying or frustrating accountability; they are prolonging the victimization.  And for the Pope’s personal preacher to compare demands for accountability, the only means of ameliorating the victimization which goes on right to this day, with genocide, is to equate opposites. 

It is grotesque for perpetrators to put themselves on the same moral plane as victims of any sort, let alone victims of one of the greatest wrongs ever committed. 

If anything, it is even more grotesque for them to put the media, where the calls for accountability thrive and the secrets are revealed despite a Church determined to withhold them, on the same moral plane as mass-murdering Nazis.  As James Madison recognized two centuries ago, and as modern life teaches again and again, the press’s proper role is to provide the information the public needs to make wise decisions.

In gradually ferreting out detail by detail, and in assembling the mosaic of this international pattern of abuse of children and young people, the press is only doing the work that the Church itself should have been doing all these years. 

On Good Friday this year, many of the faithful around the world heard the account of the Passion according to St. John.  They heard Jesus’ words to Pilate: “For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”  John 18:37.  By withholding the truth in service to Heaven only knows what supposedly higher priority, Benedict and the hierarchy have therefore placed themselves not merely on the wrong side of history, but very likely on the wrong side of the Master Himself.  Those who put Him to death – they too were all about a coverup, let us recall.

It is that wrong side of history that has me worried most at the moment, though.  It is all very well to denounce how the hierarchy has handled things, another to see how they could be replaced.  Yet if they are allowed to continue their refusals to come clean, and to continue as well simply holding office, the anger will continue to grow.  It seems unlikely to me to stop growing.

Something explosive is therefore gathering force.  I do not know what the blast will look like when it happens.  Isaiah says that the darkness covering the peoples is strictly a temporary thing.  As I sit in the darkened church tonight, I hope he was right.  But I am afraid of explosions.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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by Jack L. B. Gohn 

           The Advocate and the Advisor were both good guys.  For years they had run in the same professional circles, and they got along well.  But the Advocate wanted the world to change.  The Advisor thought the world was pretty good as it was.

            The Advocate wrote newspaper columns and lobbied the people in power for the changes he supported.  The Advisor put in his years in a government agency and absorbed the values of that agency.  He learned that there were reasons things were the way they were, and that there were hazards in disturbing them. 

            One day a new Official came to run the agency, and rewarded the Advisor for his years of service by turning to the Advisor for advice about the agency’s policies.  The Advisor said the policies were just great, and that the Official should do nothing to change them.

            One night shortly after the Official came to power, he was the guest of honor at a dinner.  The Advocate attended the dinner, and, in the general discussion, criticized the agency’s existing policies.  The Official said he was being advised by the Advisor, and doubted the need for change.  “Oh,” said the Advocate, “the Advisor has been doing his job too long.  You shouldn’t be listening to him.”

            The Official went on listening to the Advisor anyway.  And word of the Advocate’s remark came to the ears of the Advisor.  The Advisor was furious.  He sat on his grudge for some years, but one day, when the Advisor and the Advocate were dealing with each other on other business, the Advisor’s wrath bubbled over.

            “You told my brand-new boss to fire me!” the Advisor exclaimed.  “No,” said the Advocate, “I told him not to listen to you.  I’m sorry your feelings were hurt.”  And of course a great deal more was said.

            As always happens in such confrontations, the parties also had plenty of leisure to consider the matter afterwards.  History does not record what the Advisor thought, but these were the ruminations of the Advocate …

           “He was part-way right,” the Advocate thought.  “I wasn’t telling the Official to fire the Advisor, but I was begging the Official to take the Advisor out of the policy-advising loop just after he had got into it.  I was trying to spike the Advisor’s career.”  And what kind of person does that – especially to someone he respects? the Advocate asked himself.

            Someone who cares about the policies in play, the answer came back.  The Advisor had quite decidedly made himself the foe of the policy changes the Advocate was quite sure were needed.  He had identified himself with a status quo that needed changing.

            Hence the Advocate, to do his job thoroughly, had to propose that the Official ignore the Advisor, even if that were bad for the Advisor’s career.  This was sad, but it was inherent in the Advisor’s job – and the Advocate’s.

            You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, the Advocate thought.  To be a serious policy advocate will at times require opposing the career goals of certain public officials.  Major changes usually fail unless partisans of the old ways are pulled away from the controls. 

            And government employees who make policy are expected to know this going in, whether it’s written down or not.  They are accountable for their views, and the currency in which they render account may well be their careers.  That is a major reason why political appointees and policy-making officials are more apt to serve at someone’s pleasure, without civil service protections.

            This is not necessarily personal, the Advocate reflected, just the rules of the game.  The well-known friendship of Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy was deep, but each of them would have cheered had the other one’s Senate seat changed parties.  Each lent aid and comfort to his friend’s political foes.  Their opposition was as real as their friendship – and each was legitimate.

            Having elevated himself into the world of policy-making, the Advocate’s friend the Advisor had thus opened himself up to calls for his ouster, calls delivered by people like the Advocate who bore him no personal ill-will.

            Of course there had been more to the conversation.  “Who appointed you to sit in judgment over people and policies?” the Advisor had asked the Advocate.  “Lawmakers haven’t passed the laws you propose, and courts have rejected your views of the laws that exist.  Maybe they’re right and you’re wrong?”

            The Advocate certainly had to acknowledge that possibility.  And the Advocate knew that that possibility carried with it a great responsibility.  Before you yell “Off with their heads!” about the ancien régime, you had better be as sure as possible that you are right about the reasons why.  You had better weigh carefully the merits of the status quo.  And if you speak ill of anyone, you had better do it on good evidence, for serious reasons and carefully, not for sport. 

            To help the Advocate examine his conscience in this wise, the Advisor, an heir to the best traditions of public service in his agency, extolled how honorable, public spirited, and under-appreciated he and his colleagues were.  Could the Advocate say the same about himself?  Or was the Advocate just ego-tripping?

            In the end, the Advocate concluded, after trying to think it through, no one can fully answer such a question for himself.  Humans are not well-equipped to be reliable in introspection.  But if, along with Martin Luther, you feel that you can do no other, then you have to proceed.

            And sometimes that does mean calling for public servants to step aside.  And because this is not some abstract exercise, but one in which the things you say might lead to people getting hurt, you cannot be shocked or hurt in your turn when you occasion hurt feelings and hard feelings. 

            It’s nothing personal.  And it’s all personal.

            The Advocate and the Advisor were both good guys.   But there were limits to how good they could be to each other.  One was, after all, an Advisor.  And the other was an Advocate.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Benedict: Unfit to Serve

          It seems pretty clear, from two reports in yesterday’s New York Times, that the Pope was implicated in two separate coverups of child abuse by priests.  In one instance from 1996, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a body with some jurisdiction to sanction priestly abuse, ignored two complaints about the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who apparently molested 200 boys at a school for the deaf, and then, to all appearances, Ratzinger, through his second-in-command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, put a stop to a secret canonical trial of Father Murphy.  In another instance from 1980, it appeared that then-Archbishop Ratzinger lent himself and his archdiocese to the process of shifting around rather than exposing and discharging a priest, in this case a Rev. Peter Hulleman, known to have molested children.

          Acknowledging that the practice Benedict engaged in – try to get them treated, hush the matter up, and put them back in service – was standard operating procedure for the Church of that era, for my money these revelations show that Benedict is absolutely unqualified to serve as pontiff.  I’m not saying Benedict is evil (I have no idea), but I am saying he’s not papal timber.

          If the faith is about anything it must be about the truth.  Either there is a God who gives our lives meaning and purpose, or there isn’t.  And those who teach that God exists are pulling against the weight of considerable evidence, it must be said.  If they are to dispel our reasonable doubts, they must be visibly and consistently honest and reliable.  Someone who has participated in a coverup of criminal activity simply cannot command our trust that way.

          There’s more to it than that, though.  I know from my own religious upbringing that a large part of the process of developing faith is being taught by holy people.  People who are close to God can help us see Him/Her.  With all the disillusionments I and every Catholic of my generation has gone through, I still believe there are holy people (many of them being of other creeds, I can add, but that’s okay; they still help us understand and believe). 

          The Church has invested a great deal of energy in trying to make us picture a guild of allegedly celibate males as the acme and epitome of teachable holiness.  Look at the pantheon of canonized saints (i.e. men and women whom the Church has picked out as patterns of holiness), and pick out how many of them were explicitly sexually active during their holy time.  You won’t find many.  (Saints sexually active in their misspent youth like Augustine don’t count towards that total.)  Look for the women.  You won’t find many.  Look for lay people.  You won’t find many.  It’s priests who are the vanguard of official sainthood, and priests we are mainly encouraged to look to, both those in the great hereafter and those who are here.

           It’s time to stop looking so fixedly at the priests, at least as we recruit them today.  It’s time to stop pretending that celibacy is either healthy or achievable for most people, or that it is a particularly reliable path to holiness.  It’s time to stop pretending that most priests can stop having sex lives, or that the supposed suppression of their sexuality makes them holier with any reliability.  It’s time to recognize that the reason most people who do it gravitate towards a life of ostensible priestly celibacy is that it frees them from something, be it demands for the give-and-take of family life, expectations of heterosexuality, or scrutiny of their activities with children.  It has precious little, much of the time, to do with holiness. 

          Let me be clear; I am not saying that celibacy is never achievable and/or never frees people up to be holy.  Sometimes it achieves those ends, and I have been fortunate enough to know some splendid priests I believe were able to follow bona fide celibacy as a path to holiness.  (I should add though that the very holiest priest I ever knew, the one who had the most to do with my beliefs to this day, I am pretty certain was actively gay, God rest his soul.) 

          What I am saying is this: that populating the priesthood (the supposed holiness specialists, if you will) solely with purportedly celibate males has proven a disaster in good measure because it encourages the flock to look for patterns of holiness amongst a group whose members will more often than not be either sexually or socially dysfunctional to a degree, or closeted homosexuals who may have chosen ostensible celibacy as a cover for something good and natural but not necessarily spiritual, or at worst frank predators who chose ostensible celibacy as a cover for something bad that was certainly not spiritual. (A friend told me that the dullest, most content-less sermons she ever sat through were delivered by a priest she later heard had been an abuser.)

          The deception that Benedict contributed to in his by-the-late-20^th-Century-book approach to priestly child abusers was all about shoring up that image of the priesthood and the mystique that made it almost the exclusive pattern of holiness – and by implication distracting the flock from the more reliable, not to mention applicable, exemplars of faith, most of whom would be lay people of every marital status and sexual orientation.

          I cannot count how many Catholics I know who have been turned away from their faith, not so much by the abuse as by the coverup.  We need a pope who had no association with those callous lies. 

          We need to start focusing on the people in our midst who really can tell us about God — and few of them are priests.  The present pope will never tolerate that shift of focus. 

          And we need to integrate the priesthood now.  No good can come of excluding the sexually active, the avowedly homosexual, the married, and the female any more.  We have seen that exclusion, and we know how it inevitably ends, with scandal and coverups.  The present pope will never allow the priesthood the required kind of inclusiveness.  But it needs to happen.

          For all these reasons, Benedict should go.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: What They Were Thinking 

Published in the Maryland Daily Record February 21, 2010

          The battle to abolish “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (the policy against allowing openly gay people to serve in the military) is picking up steam.  Consider this Round 2 of the fight.  Round 1 ended when DADT passed in 1993.[1]  But it is the same fight: to get gays and lesbians accepted in the services.  Which makes it worthwhile for today’s “DADT-abolitionists” to ponder the question: What were they thinking in Round 1?  What did they say then? 

          The most obvious thing they were thinking was that they had to compromise.  President Clinton had made a campaign promise to abolish the then-existing policy excluding from the military all homosexuals, closeted or out, active or gay only in their own minds.  But he found that the military was trying to keep the policy intact.  Abolitionists and defenders of the status quo fought to a draw: a policy modification that theoretically allowed gays and lesbians to keep their orientation and sex practices private.  In exchange for staying closeted, they could stay in uniform.  It seems clear that this compromise has failed; people keep getting dragged out of the mandated closet,[2] and the inhabitants of the closet are growing restless. 

          In short, the fight was not then, and surely is not now, over degrees of outness, but over homosexuality itself.  So again: what were the prohibitionists’ concerns? 

          One thread running through congressional testimony was that some people are just uncomfortable being around gay people or object morally to homosexual acts. 

          Senator Dan Coats typified the approach: “Many people who serve in the military today share a viewpoint that allowing homosexuals to serve in the military goes against their religious beliefs or moral convictions…”  He feared that some who felt that way might not enlist or stay enlisted.  In other words, it’s not that we’re necessarily discriminatory ourselves, just that we want to retain the discriminatory people we recruit.  The interesting thing, though, is that of the 13 servicemen summoned to oppose allowing out servicemen to serve, only one said he would actually quit if this happened.  Others who adverted to the issue merely expressed the sense that other servicepeople would be hostile and/or quit. 

          A variation was: even if we don’t discriminate, the discriminatory people already there would make life too hard for the gays, and we’d be distracted from the military mission by the imperative to protect the sexual minority.  As Admiral Thomas Moorer told Congress, young sailors “will spot a homosexual a mile away as soon as he comes in, and they’ll have to name him Tessie, or Agnes, or whatever.”  A Marine sergeant worried that if he had to protect gay marines who reported to him, the straight ones would start questioning his own sexuality. 

          Given changing times, the “Tessie or Agnes” scenario might not happen much today.  But even if were likely, it shouldn’t drive public policy. One person’s rights or privileges under the law should not be cut off merely because of other people’s discomfort, disapproval or derision.[3]  The Supreme Court rightly rejected this justification in Lawrence v. Texas as it related to criminalizing homosexual behavior.  We can sympathize with those whom gays make uncomfortable (their loss, after all); we cannot make that discomfort the basis of a policy that disqualifies gays from the privilege of serving. 

          The military rejected a similar line when the armed forces desegregated in 1948.  The inevitable reminders of this precedent in 1993 were met with the argument that race is inherent while sexual orientation is a matter of choice or conduct.[4]  I’d question both propositions, but even if they were right, so what?  Discrimination is discrimination.  Would it be any more appropriate to reject a soldier because of her legitimate choices than because of what she cannot control? 

          Coats also gave voice in his remarks to another main argument: that when people have to sleep around each other and get naked around each other, which happens in military environments, sexual attraction may result.  That sounds reasonable.  But then there is a leap to the proposition that this is destructive of good order and discipline.  A similar jump is also found in the “findings” portion of the DADT statute.[5]  There is something missing in the middle there: the part that explains why sexual interest by gay or lesbian service members destroys that good order and discipline.  How exactly does that destruction work? 

          I could hardly find anyone coming out and saying it, but the missing piece has to be the fear that gay servicepeople will sometimes act on that sexual attraction: that they will leer or proposition or rape, in other words.  And we can agree, without getting down to specifics, that these behaviors, if they happened, might be deleterious to good order and discipline.  Go to any athletic club, though, and watch all the straight guys and gay guys changing clothes and showering together.  See much leering?  Or discomfort?  I thought not. 

          Anyway, with gender integration, nudity aside, the services already have all the issues with sexual attraction.  We know, from recent pregnancy statistics, that heterosexual interest among servicemembers is often reciprocated – and from military rape statistics that it is often acted on when it isn’t reciprocated.  There is already a lot of welcome and unwelcome sexual attraction among servicemembers.  Good order and discipline suffers from both, no doubt, but the remedy is to make and enforce rules about how to deal with sexual attraction, not to kick women (or men) out of the military.  

          Adding gays and lesbians to the mix (to the extent they’re not already there) looks like changing some of the dancing partners but not the dance.  Perhaps, if we could live in that mythical time when combat units consisted exclusively of heterosexual males, we could eliminate these issues.  Female servicemembers are here to stay, however, and universal heterosexuality was doubtless a myth anyway.  Rear Admiral Robert Spiro told a lurid tale of a ship during World War II where some gay sailors made unwelcome advances to straight sailors.  His point was the disruptiveness of these gays.  But his story revealed what statistics would have led one to predict: gays were there then.  And indeed, most witnesses at all the hearings acknowledged that there were plenty of closeted gays and lesbians in the military, many serving with distinction. 

          The prohibitionists’ unstated nightmare scenario was exemplified in Spiro’s story: gay men propositioning straight men.  Exactly why this prospect excited such distress (a serviceman could simply say no, just as he could to a woman) is hard to comprehend, but obviously it loomed large in the prohibitionists’ fears.  Because we have never tried a military where uncloseted gays and lesbians could freely serve, we can’t be certain there wouldn’t be more unwelcome sexual advances.  But the experience of the many, many countries where gays serve openly is that there is not much to fear.  The key to success in a military where two sexes and multiple orientations exist is a good sexual harassment policy, well enforced. 

          As this record shows, the prohibitionists were not benighted fools.  They were just, with all due and sincere respect, wrong.  And they still are.       

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[1].         The policy is actually embodied in several different documents, including the statute, 10 USC § 654, parts of 32 CFR Part 41, and numerous service branch regulations.

[2].         Ironically, discharges of gays and lesbians went up dramatically (as well as anti-homosexual harassment incidents) in the years after the promulgation of DADT.  See the statistics and facts in Conduct Unbecoming: The Tenth Annual Report on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass” (2004).  Wikipedia updates those statistics, suggesting that the purging of homosexuals has gone down somewhat in subsequent years, but still exceeded 400 in 2009.

[3].         Charles Moskos, a sociologist who had much praise for racial integration in the military, nonetheless became the chief architect of DADT, and subsequently defended this approach by his oft-quoted remark that “prudes have rights.”

[4].         Senator Trent Lott (later ironically notorious for a remark that seemed like an indirect disparagement of the civil rights movement as “all these troubles”), typified this approach: “Skin color is a benign, nonbehavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.”

[5].         See the logical jump between 10 USC § 654(a)(14) and (15).

Copyright © Jack L. B. Gohn

                                                             by Jack L. B. Gohn

             “We are at war against al Quaeda,” said President Obama on January 7, giving lip service, and not for the first time, to a notion the Framers would have found absurd: that an undeclared conflict with a stateless group boasting no army and only a few thousand adherents was a war.  No doubt he signed on to this misuse of the term “war” because to fail to do so would have left him politically exposed to attacks from the right.  But most likely he also misused the term because, increasingly, “war” looks like the only legal justification for potentially lifelong detention of around 50 of the Guantanamo detainees deemed especially dangerous, while denying them a court trial or even a military commission hearing.

             The trouble is, this justification may not justify enough and, at the same time, much too much.

            We have most of the Bush administration memos now; we know what theories the Bush lawyers tried to rely upon for open-ended detention before the Supreme Court intervened.  We don’t know much about the Obama administration’s justifications.  In May, Obama said he’d ask for authorizing legislation.  After backpedaling from that statement in subsequent months, the Justice Department issued a September statement, apparently unposted on the Department website, reportedly relying on these detainees’ status as combatants. No one returned my call to Justice seeking a spokesman on this.[1]  So we’re guessing here.                                                                             

            However, we are safe in assuming that, just like the Bush theorists, Obama’s team reasons that combatants captured in a war can be detained for the duration.  Since the detainees are accused of no crime (attacking the U.S. by means that accord with the laws of war is lawful for combatants), they do not belong in either the civilian or the military justice system.  But it still accords with the laws of war to hold them.

            There are some problems with this neat formulation, however, when applied in a situation that bears almost none of the traditional hallmarks of war. 

            Because there will be no surrenders, peace treaties or armistices, we know already that we shall lack the all the signal events that ordinarily enable us to distinguish when a war comes to an end.  (Under the law of war, once a war ends combatants must be promptly repatriated.)[2]  And if, as seems likely, this “war” will last a lifetime, then there must be some recognition of the right of the individual combatant detainee unilaterally to cease being a combatant.  Otherwise we are likely to be detaining large numbers of people for a status that they once occupied but in no meaningful way continue to do.

            The Supreme Court held in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) that detainees must have a neutral forum before which to challenge the government’s original classification of them as combatants.  It would seem that the same should be done for those who claim not to be combatants any longer.  And indeed, standing orders of the Department of Defense dating to 2006 apparently call for such cases to be “reviewed periodically by a competent authority.”[3]   So, if we insist on buying into the war rationale, we need a way of making periodic individualized determinations about detainees’ current statuses.

             The way we used to make those individualized and periodic determinations was through Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which, however, virtually never found anyone not to have been or to have ceased to be a combatant.  This system was obviously dysfunctional.  The Supreme Court ended it in 2008 with Boumediene v. Bush, but if there is a replacement system, it has not yet been well publicized.

             So we have killed off the one process we had going to make this necessary determination, and now the detainees are even worse off.  When we restart it, and we’ll have to, it will be a daunting task.

             This is not the kind of decision we as a nation have much experience even attempting.  We do not ordinarily restrict anyone’s liberty on account of things he or she might do in future.  The two closest analogues I can think of are our handling of the criminally insane, and our parole and probation systems.  Neither is much help, because both are premised on the assumption that there is something wrong with the person under scrutiny.  The wrong thing, insanity or criminality, is justly regarded as being a perceptible defect in the wholeness or integrity of the personality.  And the reality is, such defects often are quite perceptible.

             Combatancy is not a defect: three notable combatants in U.S. history bore the names George Washington. Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower.  The combatancy problem is most likely not that the detainees weren’t combatants, it’s that they weren’t our combatants.

             One can of course argue that terrorism is an illegitimate kind of warfare, and that anyone who was part of a terrorist army by definition did have something wrong with him, but that is tantamount to saying that terrorism is war crime by definition.  If we say that, then we can and should prosecute those we believe practiced it.  If we insist on detaining people just as combatants, however, we are also, like it or not, detaining them for exercising their rights under the laws of war. 

             So: Imprison a man for eight years and say whether he’s still a combatant.  How do you do it?  There’s no defect you can hunt for, just allegiances and a willingness to fight for them.  And even at our worst moments after 9/11, we as a nation never signed on to anti-Muslim bigotry.  Being Muslim is still neither a crime nor of itself a badge of combatancy.  In the end, you’re asking about a detainee’s beliefs on a level more specific than mere religion. 

             The records that were released by the old CSRTs were full of data about the past – about a detainee’s acts of war, his training, his connections before capture.  As the detention grows ever longer – and in a few more years, some of the detainees will have spent half their lives behind bars – the evidence must concern who the detainees have become now. If a man prevented from fighting denies the intent to fight, how can we know otherwise?  Without armies, without uniforms, without the possibility of engaging in acts of war while in captivity, the detainee’s heart is where the combatancy lies, or does not, and so the detainees’ hearts must be the focus of the inquiry.  It has to be a matter of beliefs a man holds.  That’s hard to prove.

             And anyway, are we really ready to hold people without trial forever merely because of their beliefs?  What other beliefs might we decide allowed us to imprison without trial?  Do we want our presidents empowered to imprison people simply for their beliefs?

            That is why the war theory is a mistake.  Terrorism is crime, and if we treat it as such, we know exactly what we are doing. We know how to deal with the potential future dangerousness of criminals, be they garden variety or war criminals.  Of course, with all the torture-tainted evidence required to achieve convictions, it wouldn’t be easy.  But unlike the war paradigm, it at least wouldn’t be absurd.

                                                                                                                                  

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[1].         A few days after my deadline for this piece, anonymous administration spokespersons leaked to the Washington Post and to the New York Times the administration’s plans, roughly as described here, and, as predicted, made vague references to POW status for the now indefinitely detained.

[2].         Third Geneva Convention, Art. 118.

[3].         That language applies to “unlawful noncombatants” only – a category the Supreme Court may have rejected, but it appears to embrace all of the men we are speaking of here.

 

                                                      Copyright © Jack L. B. Gohn

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Patrick Kennedy and Communion

News that Rhode Island Archbishop Thomas Tobin asked Congressman Patrick Kennedy in 2007 to stop receiving Communion because of his public stance on abortion is a perfect example of the insanity loose in my Catholic Church these days. 

We are supposed to be witnesses of Christ’s love and his example – Catholics at all poles of all debates agree on that premise.  Given that premise, what then do we observe about Jesus’ example?  Why, he’s the guy who gets taken to task for dining with sinners.  Matthew 9:9-13; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:30-32.  And it should be noted that in response, Jesus doesn’t deny that the people he’s eating with are sinners, or suggest that his questioners are wrong about that.  He simply says that the sinners need most of all to be with him, so he can call them to repentance. 

So granting (without conceding) where Tobin and his ilk are starting from, that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights are committing grave sin, how on earth do Tobin et al. get to their conclusion that the politicians should be cast out from the sacred meal?  Are the politicians in question not, on the authority of divine example, to be regarded as the ones who need it most of all (accompanied with however many admonitions about the supposed sinfulness of their outlook and actions)? 

It was reported that Archbishop Raymond Burke asserts it is simply a matter of Church law, which unambiguously (so he says) commands this.  He didn’t cite chapter and verse, and I’m no canon lawyer.  But assuming he’s correct, isn’t this a case of Church law seeking to be greater than the God who founded the Church? 

Burke’s gloss on this is that pro-choice politicians who receive Communion are attempting to “us[e] that reception for political leverage.”  Could be.  No doubt, though, that some of the sinners who broke bread with Jesus were also attempting to make a point of their own.  They surely must have hoped that they could be seen with this prophet and holy man, and still go on being what they were.  And no doubt they hoped that this would make the world think better of the sins the sinners would not necessarily give up.  It didn’t deter Jesus.  Jesus, as we know, was never deterred because he might be victimized or exploited.

 If you are a follower of Jesus, therefore, you simply do not get to cast someone seeking to break bread with you out from your midst because you believe, however profoundly, that he or she is sinful.

 A proposition which will come in handy for Archbishops Tobin and Burke if they ever have the courage to ask to dine with me.  Because I think they’re plenty sinful.  Lucky for them I try to be a good Christian.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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 Those New York Trials: Par for the Terrorist Course

           It is astonishing how, since the last election, the party out of power has claimed with utter assurance and zero accuracy that various Administration actions or policies are radical departures from the way things always were.  For example, we often heard from the right during the Sotomayor confirmation process that the view that judges are supposed to make law was some dangerous liberal innovation, though every first-year law student knows judge-made law is a legitimate and critical aspect of jurisprudence.  The most recent eruption of such nonsense: After Attorney General Holder announced plans to try five 9/11 plotters in U.S. District Court in New York City, we heard repeatedly that it was odd, if not downright perverse, to apply ordinary American criminal justice in such a case.

           The stance of Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire was typical: “These people are evil people.  They represent a cause which wants to destroy this nation. If they have the opportunity and were to get free, they would try to destroy this country.  There’s no reason we should have them in the criminal justice system.”  Military commissions are held up as some kind of norm from which the choice of criminal courts is some strange deviation.  “We’re reaching out to give terrorists a benefit that is unnecessary,” said Rudy Giuliani.

           Uh, not really, notwithstanding that Holder himself claimed he had a choice.  We have practically no history of using military commissions against civilians.  The Supreme Court in Ex Parte Milligan (1866) held that under the U.S. constitutional order civilians cannot be tried in the United States by military commissions while Article III courts are open and available.  And the technicality that these defendants were in Guantanamo, not in the United States, would not disturb the applicability of the U.S. constitutional order, not since Boumediene v. Bush (2008).  So it’s not clear at all that civilians can even be constitutionally tried by commission.

           Yes, uniformed combatants against us can be tried by military commission – for war crimes.  But these particular defendants are specifically 9/11 conspirators.  They are not uniformed military, and what they are being called to account for is not a war crime. 

           It is all very well for us to speak of a war on terror, but there has been no state of war, constitutionally speaking, with al Quaeda.  Call the armed conflicts following our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan wars if you like, though technically I would disagree.  But the struggle with this stateless organization does not rise to that level.  As explained in earlier columns, even if we set aside the Constitution’s view of war as something only Congress can initiate, and then only by a formal declaration, war has still traditionally meant the clash of sovereign nations through duly constituted armed forces.  The label of war is momentous, and has momentous consequences, which is why the Framers tried to keep that label reserved for very particular circumstances.  There was no war waged on 9/11.  It was momentous; it was terrible.  But it was terrorism, not war.  There is no al Quaeda nation or army.

           And, even if the name of war had fit, it would ill become the nation which obliterated Hiroshima to speak of attacks on this nation’s cities or transportation, carried out in the course of such a war, as war crimes.  We have no moral standing to make that charge.  And it might not fit if we tried.  It arguably accords with the laws of war to ditch airliners in the sides of enemy buildings, because killing enemy personnel (even in many cases civilian personnel) and destroying their economic infrastructure is permitted to combatants.  So it is far from clear that, even if the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by uniformed military, these would have been war crimes.  It is, however, beyond doubt a violation of U.S. and New York State criminal law for civilians to attack skyscrapers with airplanes.  Good old-fashioned civilian criminal charges like conspiracy and murder fit beautifully, especially when the perpetrators are civilians.

           And we have a long history of trying civilian terrorists, including Islamic fundamentalists, as civilian defendants.  That includes terrorists who engage in paramilitary training, like Randy Weaver and his Aryan Nation separatists, al-Quaeda terrorists like Omar Abdel Rahman, Islamic lone wolf terrorists like Richard Reid, and mass murderer terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.

           In other words, we do not ordinarily regard facing Article III justice as some privilege too precious and dignified to be accorded to civilian defendants charged with terrorism.  And we almost never resort to military commissions for that purpose.

           Yes, we do expose ourselves to certain things with civilian trials.  Listening to the criticisms, one hears recurring themes:

 •        “This will give them a forum to attack the U.S., attack the West, attack torture, make the government a defendant.”  It is entirely to be expected that the defendants will try these things.  Most judges give such efforts very little scope.  Frankly, however, if some of that talk is permitted, I would expect most of it to ring quite hollow (the torture part excepted).  Somehow, our system has survived over two centuries of defendants being free to try to make the government a defendant.  I don’t notice too many people thinking the worse of the government because of such attempts.

 •        “It will make martyrs of them.”  No more so than military commissions; arguably less.

 •        “They’ll find out our intelligence secrets as part of discovery and make them part of the public record.”  As I’ve pointed out before, we have laws and procedures in place that should restrict access to and use of intelligence secrets – and we have, in the courts, the expertise with applying these laws and procedures.

 •        “They could get the cases dismissed on a technicality.”  The only technicality that comes readily to mind is the contamination of evidence by torture.  And all public indications are that the cases assembled against these defendants have been carefully purged of evidence obtained directly or indirectly from torture.  In the view of alarmists, “technicalities” are arbitrary and unpredictable visitations of the fates, uncontrollable and unpreventable.  In reality, conscientious prosecutors can foresee and avoid or prevent the irruption of “technicalities.” If there really were any rule of law that ended up requiring dismissal, then it would have to be so weighty that dismissal would be the correct response.  I frankly would not bet so much as a dime that these cases will ever be dismissed even if by rights they should be.  But if they were, I’d look for a rearrest by another sovereign, the military or New York State.  The chance of these defendants ever walking free is nil.

 •        “Rules of evidence will apply.”  Why, yes, and as these men will be on trial for their lives, it would seem appropriate to allow them the same protections given others charged with the most serious crimes.  We do not ordinarily lower the standard of proof for graver charges.  There would be no evident reason to start now.

           This is not some bizarre innovation, then.  It’s the way we always try civilians accused of terrorism.  It might be expensive, dangerous, even unwise.  But it is not unconventional.  And those calling it that should know better.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

Slipping Through the Cracks 

            We have two wars going at the moment.  We have a defense budget of between $600 and 700 billion, depending on how you count.  We have approximately 1.5 million active-duty service men and women.  No one would dispute that the Pentagon, where all this is centered, is a beat full of important stories.  

            There are many Pentagon-accredited journalists to cover all this activity for domestic consumers of print news.  But according to one published estimate, U.S. newspapers and wire services are fielding only twelve true Pentagon bureaus, fixed locations with full-time staff.  And this number may be generous.  A friend who staffs one of those bureaus says that only three daily newspapers (the usual suspects, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal) are really on-site in consistent and significant numbers.  Lacking such commitment, he believes the others are not significant players. 

            At best, three to twelve-ish bureaus cannot possibly cover it all.  There are 23,000 employees in that building alone.  The question is not whether we are missing stories, but what stories we are missing.  Think military strategy, procurement, the social role of the Armed Forces, Guantanamo detainees. Then think of a hockey goalie tending a mile-wide net.  And that’s just on the Pentagon beat. 

            To give you a larger sense of what’s being missed, consider just one missed tale from another beat, the Bernie Madoff scandal.  This was really two scandals for the price of one.  There was the biggest Ponzi scheme in history (that we know of yet, at least), and the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to catch Madoff all the while he was raking in Gargantuan portions of investor money and claiming absurdly winning results.  This story was handed to the Wall Street Journal by Harry Markopolos, not once, but repeatedly.  Markopolos, then portfolio manager for Ramparts Investment Management Company, a Boston investment and hedge fund house, kept tipping off an ace investigative reporter for the Journal, the late John Wilke, giving him what should have been adequate information to begin the investigation.  Reportedly, Markopolos was able to show that what Madoff claimed to be accomplishing was literally impossible.  

            Wilke had two problems.  One was management at the Journal which would never give him the green light to investigate Madoff.  The other: Wilke had his hands full; he was writing about another alleged fraudster, Mario Gabelli, and Congressional earmarks – both worthy stories. So there was a legitimate reason for Wilke not to investigate Madoff.  But for the entire Journal?  

            The Journal, in fairness, was off pursuing the backdated options scandal, reportage which would ultimately win a Pulitzer. Still, the Journal doubtless has the largest fleet of correspondents covering the financial markets of any U.S. newspaper.  If they were stretched too thin to handle this story, which turned out to be a matter of financial life and death for thousands, then who could possibly have had the resources?  Well, we know the answer for that: nobody.  And that wasn’t even the biggest missed story: the then-upcoming mortgage meltdown would come to dwarf it. 

            It wouldn’t be such a problem if anyone could get newspaper-style coverage elsewhere.  But as I pointed out last time, it’s not readily available in today’s media universe. 

            Oddly, this does not exactly mean the death of print journalism.  We know from a February report issued by the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism that the number of press passes issued by the U.S. Senate, for instance, has grown somewhat in recent years.  But the new passes are for media outlets like industry publications, trade journals and foreign news organizations, not domestic newspapers.  For Senate newspaper and wire service accreditations, by contrast, there was a 17% drop just this past year.  

            Print journalism is not disappearing; it’s just being put on retainer (and a short leash) by private interests.  In a piquant example from the report, Bloomberg News went from zero Senate-accredited reporters in the mid-1980s to 112 in 2008.  And if you can afford the $18,000-a-year rental on one of their machines, you can read all of what those 112 journalists write (some is otherwise available to the public).  Or if you want to read the Platts newsletter on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, one of 15 Platts products, come up with $2,495 and it’s yours.  Can’t afford it?  Ah, well, your misfortune. 

            That privatization of the journalists working the national beats will have political consequences.  They have disappeared first from the regional newspapers like the Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  And we know, for instance, that it was a by-word in the George W. Bush White House that no one cared what appeared on the front page of the New York Times.  It was felt, rightly or wrongly, that the Times had little persuasive force with the voters Bush’s handlers wished to persuade.  Instead, White House concern focused on the front pages of the “regionals.”  The Bush team cultivated the journalists who wrote for those pages. 

            That attitude and strategy would fail today.  If the regionals cover national stories at all, which is increasingly not the case, they will probably be reprinting copy from the New York Times or the AP.  Losing regional reporters covering national stories doesn’t just hurt liberals, then; it also preempts messages right-wingers would like to send.  Democracy requires more voices. 

            Regionals filled another important function: keeping local readers informed of what their particular Washington representatives were doing.  But now, as the Pew report recounts, when Washington correspondent Jonathan Kaplan was laid off from the Portland, Maine paper in 2008, he was writing an in-depth story about the relations between Maine’s two senators, reportedly an interesting tale.  No one will provide that kind of coverage now.  Maine’s voters are permanently the poorer.                                               

            Which is not to say that the regionals are doing a good job of covering their own turf either.  For just one instance among multitudes, legend has it that my local paper, the Baltimore Sun, once employed four full-time reporters literally covering the turf: Maryland’s horse industry and racing.  Now the task is kind of shared between a couple of multitasking reporters who also have other duties.  Horse breeding and racing is in decline, but is still a major Maryland industry.  Is The Sun doing more on this important subject with less? Well, of the last four horse racing clips posted on the Sun website before I started to write this (October 19), two were from the AP concerning racing elsewhere, and two were simply raw results sent by the Maryland Jockey Club.  This isn’t even doing less with less; it’s doing nothing with less.[1]  Nor is The Baltimore Brew, the blog positioned as a “Sun-in-exile” for former Sun reporters, covering racing.[2]  Racing coverage is just  about gone. 

            Big and little, stories slip through the cracks, and the cracks keep getting wider.

 

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^[1]           In fairness, on October 20, there were two stories by local journalists about the bankruptcy of Magna, owner of the two Maryland thoroughbred tracks, and local regulatory response.

^[2]           A keyword search of their website on 10/19/09 for “racing” came up with no hits.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Complicating the Afghanistan Debate

As Administration insiders take sides on whether to “surge,” stand pat, or stand down in Afghanistan, the anti-surge forces have drawn support from word that we are doing very well with our ongoing campaign against Al Quaeda using drones and, no doubt, human intelligence.  Apparently we have killed or captured half the Al Quaeda leaders we had targeted in Afghanistan over the past year. 

Remember that it was Afghanistan’s sheltering of Al Quaeda, in particular the 9/11 conspirators, that ostensibly led us to take out the Taliban government in the first place.  We are enjoying success at that enterprise, however, without eliminating the Taliban.  And so, the logic would seem to suggest, maybe we don’t have to beat the Taliban to beat Al Quaeda.  

There are good arguments on the other side.  If we didn’t have our armies there, Al Quaeda would enjoy greater geographical range and hence be harder to trace and target, it is said.  That sounds reasonable.  And we can assume that if we leave or lose Afghanistan, Al Quaeda’s fighters who are hiding in Pakistan will come back too. 

Beyond that, it is urged that we should be trying to beat the Taliban as an objective in its own right.  Or as a means to protect Afghanistan’s women, whom we have every reason to believe will be as disenfranchised and brutalized upon the Taliban’s return as they were when the Taliban held power.  (See The Kite Runner for details.) 

There are obviously no perfect answers here.  However, restricting our focus to the tactical question of Al Quaeda for the moment, we have to weigh the inevitable cost in lives and money and foregone national opportunity to hold off the Taliban against the increased risk if we let events in Afghanistan take their course.  (Which probably means letting the Taliban win again, honestly.)  Do we really want to fight a whole large nationalist movement (however hateful) just to stop a separate small (if historically effective) terrorist front? 

It has been fashionable since the days of Cheney and Rumsfeld to assume that a military effort backed by a national security-focused state is the only way to prevent further terrorism arriving on our shores.  To me, a sincere effort to be the kind of country young Muslim men don’t easily hate would be the better primary tactic to achieve this end.  And you cannot do that with too much militarization and/or too much focus on national security.  The spiritual habits such things engender inevitably (and rightly) make people hate us.  In short, we have to choose on this one; we cannot have it both ways.  

So let the debate about Afghanistan be about Afghanistan, not about Al Quaeda.  But we should recognize that if we are tough about Afghanistan, if we choose continued warfare, we shall remain the crusaders Al Quaeda hates.  If we stand down in Afghanistan, however, we undercut stereotypes Al Quaeda relies upon.  And that, plus the cost of what may be a hopeless war anyhow, should be powerful incentive not to prolong an endless war.  (A war which is 8 years old today.)

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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