Military Justice and the War

Interesting article. NPR tries to spin it against the Bush administration, but it seems to me that the controversy reflects more the politicization of and conflicting goals being pursued by today’s JAG corps. On the one hand the govt biases the Haditha trial in favor of the prosecution. On the other hand (the only side of the issue NPR notices) there are complaints about detainees in Guantanamo — men who could have been summarily executed without legal controversy when they were caught on the battlefield — who are being prosecuted based on confessions extracted by means that would be unacceptable under domestic law.

The controversy over Guantanamo confessions is really the smallest part of a much larger issue, which NPR ignores and whose resolution is not yet clear, about how we should treat hostile war detainees who don’t fit old legal categories such as POW or civilian internee. The anti-war Left pretends that the only question is whether Bush plays by the rules. But the more important question is how to modernize rules which don’t fit current reality and which make it harder for us to fight. The question of how to modernize these rules, if not resolved, will dog any coming Democratic administration as much as it does the current Republican one. Pretending that Bush is the problem only delays the inevitable reckoning.

It seems that the JAG community lags the rest of our military in addressing these issues.

Goon Squad

A speech by David Horowitz at Emory University was shut down by rowdy “protesters.” He was scarcely able to finish a single sentence, and had to leave after only half an hour. More here.

Credit where credit is due: After the event disintegrated into a shambles, the president of the Muslim Students Association came over to Horowitz at Starbucks and expressed her regret at what had happened. Horowitz opines that most of the disrupters were leftist non-students over the age of 30.

Maybe so. But this kind of thing happens far too frequently at American universities. There are few other venues in which one could get away with this kind of disruptive behavior. Try it at your local Rotary club and I bet you will find yourself spending the night in jail. Too many American universities have promulgated that idea that no one should ever be exposed to speech that makes them feel “uncomfortable” and have winked at actions like stealing and destroying newspapers with content someone dislikes. The wimp’s veto, the heckler’s veto, and the thug’s veto have all become common in academia. Indeed, there was virtually no old-media coverage of the Emory incident. Apparently, the shutting down of free speech in academia has become so common that it isn’t even news.

See my Goon Squad thread for many examples of thuggish behavior, especially in academia.

Following an incident at San Francisco State University, a campus Jewish leader named Laurie Zoloth summed up the situation there iin these words: “This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control.”

If thuggish political behavior is allowed to become the norm in academia, it is only a matter of time until such behavior becomes the norm in the larger society as well.

The Democratic Candidates Debate

Somehow I found myself watching part of it. This is how it looked to me:

Hillary: I have always been against the war, and as soon as I am elected we will begin withdrawing our troops. Except for a few troops who may be needed to guard our embassy. Oh, and fight Al Qaeda. Not more than 150,000 troops, tops. And no more warmongering like what President Bush is always doing. Oh yeah, Iran had better not try anything funny. But if they do, it’ll be President Bush’s fault for not being nice to them. And as for those wascally Iwanians, I promise to promise to consider to do my very best. Maybe.

Obama: I am more against the war than you are. Did I say war? What war? Don’t let the neocons fool you with their fearmongering. Remember, the USA can only remain strong by ignoring threats. For us to recognize those threats would be like forfeiting a game of chicken, and we would lose our national manhood. And even though we have no enemies, I pledge to negotiate with them. Except Pakistan, which I would treat differently, though I’m not quite sure how.

Read more

Robert Goulet, RIP

The speeches from Camelot were riveting, even on a small black and white screen, as Richard Burton recited them, sitting in a quiet spotlight beside Dick Cavett. Julie Andrews seemed made to show us what England and youth and the lusty month of May were all about. But holding his own with them was the darkly handsome Robert Goulet – born in Massachusetts but of French Canadian stock and apparently perfectly cast. Indeed, to many of us who never set foot in a Broadway theater, Robert Goulet remained Lancelot. The mere shadows of what these three must have been in person, they could still ground the stage of Ed Sullivan and the other great variety shows of the fifties and sixties. But if Burton’s quiet reading deepened the shadows on Cavett, Goulet’s voice filled the speakers on our old tv sets that were only capable of hinting at his power.

Forty years later, his voiceovers endear him to our grand children. And older, we laugh with him, as Goulet‘s loose humor enriched commercials for ESPN and Emerald Nuts. The romantic lead matured and he charmed with the quirky humor of his guest spot on Police Squad! and then Naked Gun with fellow Canadian Leslie Neilson. At 73, that great baritone has died, waiting on a lung transplant. But to many of my generation he remains the dashing and seductive knight, his eyes following Burton, betraying the complexity of admiration and the difficulty of restraint.

YouTube houses Goulet’s moving rendition of another of the great classics of the high water decade in musical theater -the “Soliloquy” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.

(And perhaps the juxtaposition of Porter Wagoner and Robert Goulet, of T. H. White and Dolly Parton, of Zucker and Hee Haw! might hint at the rich hybrids that grew from Albion’s seed planted on our shore.)

Power… and the naive

Two frequent topics intersect in this Wall Street Journal article from today, October 29th titled “Power Firms Grapple with Tough Decisions”. The topics are 1) journalists that don’t understand what they are writing about 2) the impossibility of improving our US infrastructure in today’s legal and regulatory climate.

The journalist writes that “A year ago, it looked as if 100 coal-fired plants might get built.”

Only an incredibly naive person who didn’t understand anything about the history of the US energy industry would have assumed for an instant that ONE HUNDRED coal-fired plants could possibly be built in the US. Let’s sum up the power situation for you:

1) NUCLEAR – great, unless you worry about storing the radioactive waste
2) HYDRO – great, unless you love fish and babbling brooks
3) COAL – great, unless you worry about global warming
4) NATURAL GAS – great, unless you are paying the bill
5) SOLAR – great, unless you need power on peak and the sun isn’t shining
6) WIND – great, unless you don’t like the way they look, slice birds, and the fact that they are unreliable on peak

Read more