Being Israel and protecting the values on which it was founded is one helluva tough job, but a funny thing happened on the way to the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state: It has subsumed some of those values for political convenience and is kissing George Bush’s ass when it comes to torture.

This has great pertinence because Israel apparently is one of the relatively few countries that would roll out the welcome mat for administration officials who approved of and participated in the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the Rumsfeld Gulag in violation of international law. As a consequence, they might risk arrest as war criminals in, say, France, Germany or Italy.

Said Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff of those officials — all practicing attorneys — in a pointed public statement:

“Haynes, Feith Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and — at the apex — Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.”

It should be noted that Wilkerson can be outspoken to the point of intemperance, and he is no friend of the conservatives who run Israel.

It is no surprise that he would mention Saudia Arabia, a safe country for sure for those administration lawyers given its own religious and cultural embrace of torture. But Israel? A nation that emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s embrace of the very torture techniques that the CIA and other U.S. operatives have used?

How terribly sad.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to previous torture-related posts.

The Soldier’s Promise

Tiny Prayer

“New seed roots
most deeply
in the places
that are most empty.”

————
CODA
[The Soldier’s Promise] “Tiny Prayer”, excerpted from book The Faithful Gardener: AWise Tale About That Which Can Never Die by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ©1996, All Rights Reserved, Harper Collins/ HarperSanFrancisco

All the announcements and tributes mention Congressman Tom Lantos’ distinction as being the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress. I don’t know how many Holocaust survivors have ever run for congress, but regardless, the fact that he will no longer bring the ideas and experience of that distinction to the legislative branch of our American government is unfortunate.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

As the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, Tom Lantos devoted his life to shining a bright light on dark corners of oppression. He used his chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee to empower the powerless and give voice to the voiceless throughout the world.

Capitol Briefing:

Though a party-line Democrat on most issues, Lantos was known for teaming up with conservatives on the panel like Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) to bring scrutiny to the suppression of free speech in China and other issues. He also teamed up with many Republicans to back the Iraq war and advocate staunch support for Israel.

House Republican Whip Roy Blunt:

“Chairman Lantos will be remembered as a man of uncommon integrity and sincere moral conviction — and a public servant who never wavered in his pursuit of a better, freer and more religiously tolerant world,” House Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri said in a statement.

JTA:

Lantos was not afraid to take on his allies. On the foreign affairs committee, he blasted Silicon Valley giants like Google and Yahho for colluding with China’s government in censorship. He authored tough Iran sanctions legislation but broke with pro-Israel orthodoxy by offering to meet with the Islamic Republic’s leaders. Pro-Israel groups also opposed a non-binding resolution that recognized the Ottoman era massacres of Armenians as a genocide, worried that it would cause a rift between Israel and Turkey — Lantos pushed it through the committee, unwilling to countenance what he saw as genocide revisionism.

His appeal crossed political aisles: Both the National Jewish Democratic Council and the Republican Jewish Coalition issued statements mourning his passing. Top Republicans on his committee also chimed in: “An unfailingly gracious and courageous man, Tom was recognized by friends and colleagues alike as a leader who left an enviable legacy of service to his country,” said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the committee’s ranking member.

DNC:

Our nation has lost a great public servant with the passing of Representative Tom Lantos. In serving his constituents and his country, Tom never forgot the Democratic Party’s ideals of freedom, fairness, and opportunity for all. As Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he was an authority on foreign policy issues and a voice for the oppressed. The only Holocaust survivor in Congress, he was a forceful and passionate advocate for civil liberties and human rights. Today, I join with countless others across the country in offering my thoughts and prayers to Rep. Lantos’ family and friends as we honor his life and legacy.

NJDC:

Among his first major legislative accomplishments was legislation to give honorary citizenship to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, a hero, who protected Lantos and many others from the Nazis. He went on to sponsor U.S. aid for Eastern European countries that had broken the shackles of communism, and became a strong voice of conscience against human rights abuses in China He was one of the leading voices in the House for sanctioning Myanmar’s regime due to human rights abuses. Among his other accomplishments, Rep. Lantos teamed with the late GOP Rep. Henry Hyde to secure $1.3 billion to fight AIDS around the world and to incentivize India to cooperate with international weapons inspectors.

Save the GOP:

In October, when Dutch parliament members came to Washington to complain to congress about Guantanamo Bay, Lantos reminded them that if not for the United States, they would be a province of Nazi Germany. He also added that “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.”

Lantos himself was an opponent of the Bush administration on the prosecution of the war, on Guantanamo, and on most other issues. But he never balked at an opportunity to defend the United States against those that would denigrate it. He recognized that politics stops at the waters edge. He was a great man, and he will be missed in Washington.

Z.L. (usually lowercase) stands for Zachor Livracha (may his memory be for a blessing).

Washington Post:

Rep. Tom Lantos, 80, a California Democrat whose experience during the Holocaust shaped his concern for human rights and his staunch view in favor of U.S. military intervention abroad, died early this morning, a spokeswoman told the Associated Press. He had esophageal cancer and died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.

Lantos, born in Budapest to Hungarian Jews, served 14 terms in the House of Representatives. He is the only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress. His district included southwest San Francisco and much of San Mateo County, where he was known for supporting the socially liberal agenda of his constituents. Last year, he announced he would not seek reelection because of his cancer treatment.

Lantos was a powerful figure on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, where he had been the senior Democratic member since 2001 and its chairman since 2007.

For years, he sided with Republican neoconservatives who believe the United States should assert democracy abroad and use the military to intervene when a moral imperative or national interest is at stake.

In 2002, he supported the congressional resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq and played a decisive role to gain Democratic support for the measure.

On the House floor at the time, he noted his own past as a Nazi-resistance fighter. “Had the United States and its allies confronted Hitler earlier, had we acted sooner to stymie his evil designs, the 51 million lives needlessly lost during that war could have been saved,” he said. “Just as leaders and diplomats who appeased Hitler at Munich in 1938 stand humiliated before history, so will we if we appease Saddam Hussein today.”

But after the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, Lantos became increasingly critical about the direction of the war and called for large withdrawals of American troops. He also held more than a dozen hearings on the situation.

The (NYC) Jewish Week:

Capitol Hill veterans describe Lantos - courtly, loquacious but tough - as a throwback to an earlier generation of lawmakers who were able to work across party and ideological lines.

The reaction from Jewish groups to the news was swift.

“For years people have looked to Congressman Tom Lantos as the conscience of the United States Congress,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA). “Chairman Lantos was a leader on so many issues of concern to the Jewish community such as anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Israel.”

William Daroff, vice president for public policy of the United Jewish Communities (UJC), said Lantos “was a great friend of the Jewish community and the Jewish Federation system. As Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Lantos steered a steady ship during a particularly tumultuous time in American foreign policy.”

“We mourn the loss of Congressman Lantos,” said Nathan Diament, Washington director for the Orthodox Union. “He was a proud supporter of Israel and a proud Jew. His presence will be sorely missed.”

In announcing his expected retirement last month, Lantos said “It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a Member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”

No immediate link to anything currently in the news, though it does remind me of my Dartmouth L.J. paper. I just wanted to save it for later:

The question of how Jews would fit in when cultural and linguistic identity became the basis of citizenship, and the Volksgeist was embodied in a Volksstaat, could be answered in only one of two ways. Either the Jews had to surrender their Jewishness and become good Germans or there would be no place for them. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a liberal assimilationist perspective was ascendant in German thought, but beneath it lurked a deep intolerance of the Jew who remained distinctive. In 1793, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who professed to be advocating that Jews be given “human rights,” put the choice before them in starkly brutal terms: “As for giving them [the Jews] civil rights, I see no remedy [*72] but that their heads should be cut off in one night and replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea.”

George M. Fredrickson, Racism: An Introduction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002), 71-72.

Similar sentiments were expressed in France during this time period. And, of course, this theory of enlightenment universalism is the guiding force behind much of modern Western philosophy in America and Europe — including the “color-blind” theory of race relations and the doctrine of strict separation between Church and State.

Notice how obliterating Jewish distinctiveness was cast as being in accordance with securing human rights — Jews literally had to be destroyed in order to be saved. The evident Christian overtones accentuate the fact that this “liberal” revolution was hardly the break from the past that it used to be — it merely found new language to express its fear of Jewish difference and its desire for Jews to disappear. Given that the “universal” personhood Jews were expected to assimilate into was based on a Christian norm, even the desire for conversion is barely affected. All that changed was the removal of the few protections Jews had when their oppression was strictly theological: at least some Christians theologians had some need for some living Jews — the model expressed here explicitly wanted all Jews to disappear and pointedly chose a very violent metaphor to bring across its point.

It’s no wonder that many post-Holocaust theorists consider the Shoah to be the bastard child of the Enlightenment.

Cross-posted to The Debate Link

California Democrat Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has announced he is retiring after being diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. Lantos has been a passionate defender of human rights while serving in the House, and the only Holocaust survivor serving anywhere in Congress. Unsurprisingly, he has been a particularly early and vocal Congressional leader on Darfur.

Via Kos, who had been supporting a primary challenge against Lantos due to his relatively-hawkish foreign policy views. I hope that, with his impending retirement, we can put aside differences over Iraq and respect his years of public service and his amazing life story (and of course, wish him a full recovery).

That the Justice Department and the CIA announced today, three days after it was first noted that ‘interrogations’ video tapes were missing, that they will probe destruction of taped interrogations… that may be less important to many of us, than this other issue….

There’s another critical reason why many of us who are shrinks want to retrieve and view, not just the two missing videotapes of CIA interrogations of two al Qaeda suspects, but many more of the tapes of so-called interrogations

Why? It’s our opinion that we think we will find sickening evidence that people of our own profession will be on those tapes, egregiously misguided or demented members of our own profession for whom the gloss of ‘being important’ to a government, has overwhelmed their decency utterly.

We think those tapes hold stomach-turning evidence that some in our profession have helped to ‘supervise, and predict and prophesy’ to those who are doing the direct torture –— the psychological breaking points of those being tortured.

The prestigious American Psychological Association has had so many important social justice outreaches over the decades, and so many good souls as members, (including those vociferously speaking out about what they see as APA’s ‘if/but’ defense and acceptance of torture under certain conditions)…. But, the APA may never recover from its public ambivalence about torture of human beings under President Bush’s administration.

That an organization of healers and helpers could not unequivocally step up and say, ‘We refuse to participate in any way to torture others,’ is surely the darkest moment in the profession worldwide since April of 1945.

Only the heart that is not stone, cries out. Only the mind that flows for life, cries out.

There is an old story my father used to tell about a war that came across the land. As the marauding tribe came across the mountains, the stones who loved the village people cried out that the enemy was on the way. Thus alerted by the cries of the stones, many villages were saved.

And this is why people have such love of mountains and magnitude, for they learned to be in each others’ protection.

Years of peace ensued. Then, one day another marauding tribe swept down out of the Urals with intent to find and pillage the peaceful farm families. The wicked riders stopped by a great lake to water their horses, clean their bloody swords in the water, and bath their blood soaked armor. But, the water cried out. “I am being defiled! Defiled, not by the sons of man, but by the sons of hell!”

And the villagers heard the water cry out and thus were able to save themselves.

This is why the people love to be near water, This is why they guard the water from harm, because of the troth that was made with water eons before… when water cried out to save the people, and thus the people and the water came into the protection of each other.

……..The misuse of water to misuse and harm humans: Defilement of all concerned, is just the right phrase.

Even when you think you have seen it all

Those of you who know me, know I’ve been a practicing psychoanalyst for decades. I’ve also served as Chair of the Colorado State Grievance board and as a member for more than 13 years… a board which, with the District Attorney’s office, hears monthly cases of mental health professionals who have been grieved against for allegedly violating standard practice, state law.

While 90% of shrinks are well trained and ethical, the 10% who aren’t, well, over those years on the Grievance Board, I thought I had seen it all.

Sexual intrusions on vulnerable patients by so-called professionals, sexual acts on children; crazy therapeutic techniques that have no treatment value in reality, one of them resulting in the death of a child at therapists’ hands, frauds of many kinds, bleeding patients for money, addicted psychology professionals, pushing suicidal patients into suicide, health insurance frauds, practicing outside one’s area of training and expertise, holding oneself out as a this, when in fact they were something else entirely.

But, I hadn’t see it all.

This past many years have been the saddest of times for those of us who are healers.

Never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined that the issue of torture would be put to us and that we would not as a group rise up en-masse to utterly and unequivocally condemn torture, no rationalizations or ifs, ands, or buts.

But, astonishing to anyone with a room temperature IQ and a sense of decency, that’s not what happened.

My colleagues and I had to definitively separate ourselves from ANY professional organization that holds itself out as a helper and healer of human beings, if that organization will NOT make a definitive statement condemning not only torture, including water boarding, but also far more shockingly, that publicly and privately allows their members the hideous option to, if they choose, PARTICIPATE in torture with the government.

Yes, you read that right.

There isn’t a set of words dark enough to describe this shame to our profession of healing and helping.

I don’t know a single shrink of conscience who supports any other psychologist, psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, for any reason whatsoever, to twist their and our professional/human promise “to help, and if they cannot help, to do no harm”…. into a poisonous brew of misguided faux-patriotism, financial gain from pulling down a government contract, and all that participating willingly in such nefarious and inhumane matters, points to.

Forgive me,

Read the rest of this entry »

Huckabee calls post-Roe v. Wade America a “holocaust”. This is how the GOP thinks it will attract Jewish voters? Oh, and this isn’t the first time Huckabee’s been a bit loose with Shoah references either.

I have broken what for me has been a cardinal rule in recent days in using Nazi analogies when writing about the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as well as a deafening lack of response from most Americans to this and other outrages not unlike the Germans who failed to speak out about the excesses of the Third Reich.

Nazi analogies usually are bad because they stifle debate and inevitably trigger side debates about whether comparing someone to Hitler or something contemporary to an aspect of the Third Reich is appropriate, let alone in good taste. And then further side debates about whether calling someone a Nazi is as bad as calling them, say, a “kike” or “nigger.”

Then there is Godwin’s Law, which states that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

As a longtime newspaper editor, I forbade use of Nazi analogies by my reporters because they were unnecessarily inflammatory and the comparisons invariably were exaggerated.

Many a public official has found to their dismay that the backlash against offhanded Nazi analogizing is far more damaging than their remark is effective. Then there is CNN pop-off Lou Dobbs, who earlier this year became the umpteenth media maven to feel the wrath of Jewish groups for breaking their secret rule book of inappropriate analogies after he accused advocates for illegal immigrants of using propaganda techniques employed by Nazis.

I bring some personal baggage to the issue, as well. I am proud to say that Jewish blood courses through my body, my family lost a number of relatives in Hitler’s death camps and a dear Jewish uncle survived years as an American POW because he happened to be a dentist and worked on the teeth of his captors. So I suppose that I am even more on guard for false or misplaced analogizing.

Having said all that, I have broken my rule for a couple of reasons . . .

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

And so on the second day of the seventh month of the fifth year of the war in Iraq, the final episode of Ken Burns’ The War ran on PBS. This vivid mosaic of World War II at home and abroad was a big hit by public broadcasting standards, drawing the most viewers since an episode of Antiques Roadshow in 2000, although falling far short of prime-time heavy hitters like CSI and Desperate Housewives.

We probably have to take Burns at his word that The War was not intended as a counterpoint to the Iraq war, and indeed pre-production of the documentary did get underway well before the drive on Baghdad.

But in an era when the images and sounds that come through our ever larger TVs have an outsized ability to grab and hold our attention, The War is a powerful if apparently unintentional indictment of today’s war, and most notably the arrogance and folly of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the other members of the Neocon Poets Society.

Whether the men and women who fought and sacrificed in World War II were nobler than the men and women who fight and sacrifice today is not an issue, but the powerful message of “A World Without War,” the ironically titled final episode of Burns’ seven-part, 14½-hour documentary is unequivocal:

The GIs who landed on Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion, who liberated Hitler’s death camps in Austria and Germany, who fought to victory on Okinawa as their foxholes filled with the guts of thousands of killed and suicided Japanese, knew exactly what their war was about.

They were constantly reminded of what their war was about by President Roosevelt, a great man whose great ego was matched by an ability to inspire Americans to make the enormous sacrifices necessary to defeat a fascist demon that threatened to devour the planet and destroy our most precious freedoms.

The GIs who are fighting in the streets of Baghdad and the desert wastes of Anbar have only the vaguest idea of what their war is about.

They are constantly if unintentionally reminded of the core disingenuousity of their war by President Bush, a small man who also has a great ego but cannot camouflage his failures of leadership behind flag waving and false analogies to FDR’s war as he prattles on about the demon of the hour – first Saddam Hussein, then the insurgency, then Al Qaeda and now Iran – and whose war threatens to devour the Middle East and policies at home undermine those precious freedoms.