Wikileaks document dump: not a triumph for anti-war forces, and not likely to result in War Crimes prosecutions

The giant Wikileaks document-dump has taken place, and all of the usual political elements are in place to regard this as a victory for anti-war, and international law proponents. Superficially, this is true, insofar as US national military forces are dismayed by the release, and insofar as the detailed reports of war are off-putting to many people.

Blunt assessment. Wikileaks release does not legally threaten any significant war-crimes issue for the US, or for any significant number of US soldiers. Moreover, these leaks are more likely to support more war-making than not. Why?

There are two potential US war crimes listed in this article.

1.

Insurgents try to surrender to helicopter gunship, and are gunned down. Unnattractive, and one can easily envision how technological advancement would create additional ethical problems, but US Army lawyer is correct. Individual soldiers cannot surrender to attack aircraft.

The easiest means of understanding this is to use the reciprocity principle. Can attack aircraft or a bomber surrender to an anti-aircraft battery? Not really, and in the same way, ground forces cannot practically surrender to aerial units, except possibly, when large military units engage in mass surrender.

This becomes all the more clear when one considers that aerial assault normally engages forces which are surrounded by their compatriots. Even if one were to imagine that helicopters could drop down to pick up the prisoners (something which is not in fact true, because helicopters will normally have either a configuration, or a load of friendly forces which prevent this) the surrounding enemy forces would attack the aircraft when it slows and enters a vulnerable takeoff and landing phase.

Even for enemy soldiers on the front lines, surrender would require advancing accross no-mans land to meet the enemy. It is unlikely that the soldiers who wanted to surrender would be able to do so on many occasions, because their military compatriots beside and behind them would not allow this. As a practical matter, attack aircraft perform more as munitions than as merciful soldiers in war.

2.

Hundreds of civilians killed at US military checkpoints. Use of completely lethal force, without any particular restraint meets the proportionate use of force standards required in international law because of the use of suicide bombing attack vehicles by Iraqi resistance elements.

Beyond any question of accidental running of military checkpoints by Iraqis, it is highly believable that Iraqi civilians would in fact attempt to run military checkpoints because of the large number of criminals who set up checkpoints for the purposes of theft, and often kidnapping. Thus, while trigger happy action by US forces is likely enough, nothing about gunning down a civilian family stands out as a likely abuse on the basis of the existance of such casualties.

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I would further note that the Wikileaks documents indicate that Iranian forces supported insurgents, trained forces which kidnapped/prisoner-snatched US military personell, and provided chemical weapons for terrorist use.

This information is very likely to be at least partially untrue, and even in the case that it was not, would fall under the heading of covert actions by states, which should be expected, and which would better be ignored on a small scale, than dealt with openly.

With the open release of these reports, the most significant effect will be the strengthening of the hands of those supporting a war with Iran.

It is in fact, not unlikely that the person or persons who leaked this information, in fact did so as a way of boosting US Iranian tensions. Indeed it is quite possible that a foreign intelligence service was involved in this leak, with most of the nations in the Mideast, and several Lebanese and Iraqi factions being likely candidates for such action. Many of these nations have the necessary capabilities due to proximity of US forces, technical skill, or the presence of large numbers of expatriates, or ethnic compatriots in the US military (particularly important to Lebanese factions).

I do not say that Wikileaks is necessarily a great force for evil because of this, but the release of these reports is not a great triumph for the anti-war movement considering just what was released, and considering the timing of the release, after such point as withdrawal from Iraq has become a moot point from a political standpoint in the US.



This is an excellent example of how government leaks can be more a matter of law-breaking, or civil-disobedience, than a matter of simple government openness.

Is the Bibi Aisha Time Magazine cover story a fake?

A question. Does the injured woman in the top two pictures, look like the one in the bottom picture?

The woman in the top two pictures was recently mutilated at the time the picture was taken, and was suffering additionally from a severe beating (which you can see in the bruising on her feet in). The one below appears to have healed wounds. So why is this important?

The woman in the first two pictures, named Nazia, was mutilated by her husband, a man named Mumtaz, in southern Zabul province of Afghanistan

at the age of 17 in the year 2007. This crime was appropriately perceived as a heinous one, by the local population, and local women held a demonstration calling for the immediate arrest of the mutilating criminal, who had highlighted the vile nature of his act by mutilating his wife on the first day of Eid al-Adha. This is one of the major Islamic holidays, lasting for three days. A reasonable social comparison would be if a man in the US were to chop off his wife's ears and nose on Christmas, a holiday that traditionally lasted 12 days, as you might recall from the holiday carol (the one with a "Partridge in a Pear Tree"). Such a crime being committed on such a special day would seem particularly horrific in the US or Afghanistan.

This holiday crime had a political angle however. The criminal's brother was a policeman working for the US-backed Afghan government.

Switch to the present. The second woman, if she is in fact, a second woman, is supposedly named Bibi Aisha, is purportedly 18 or 19 in 2010, depending on whether you accept the New York Times or CNN account, and according to a rash

of recent news articles, most notably a cover story for Time Magazine, was also mutilated by her husband, but in this version of the story, there is a different political angle. The husband,

all ten of his brothers, and his father are reportedly, members of the Taliban, the scene of the crime has shifted to Oruzgan province,

and the crime took place just last year. Also in THIS version of the story, the mutilation is not the solitary outrageous crime of an abusive husband, who performed the mutilation, and beat his wife severely, according to the report, breaking a number of bones and smashing her teeth. Rather, in this second case, or perhaps, second version of the story, the brutal mutilation was done according to the orders of a Taliban judge.

So what is going on? Are these in fact two different women, or is there just one woman? If you look at the two pictures, they look very much like the same person separated only by the passage of a couple of years, a suntan, and the facial swelling visible in the first pictures induced by a brutal beating and her mutilation. Not only is there an extreme similarity of features (particularly when you account for the swelling around her mouth, where her vile husband smashed her teeth), but you can also see that the mutilations are very, very similar. In the case of the ear mutilations in particular, what are the chances that two brutal husbands will produce so similar results when they decide to hack off their wife's ears, and this just happening to two entirely different women with similar/identical features? Indeed the similarity in ear shape is very suggestive of identity in and of itself, because human ears vary in shape to the point that they are often used to confirm the identity of people in photographs in criminal cases. In very few such cases is part of the ear actually missing.

The chances seem even smaller when you look at the age of Nazia, being 17 in December 2007, with the reported age of "Bibi Aisha" being supposedly 18 or 19 in 2010. This is very close to what you would expect if the first victim was given a new name for propaganda purposes, and made a bit younger to build sympathy (needless to say, the woman or women deserve the utmost sympathy whatever their age(s).

I suspect that another clue as to whether or not the Time story about "Bibi Aisha" is in fact a separate case can be found in the story itself, although this theory hinges on some analysis of Taliban application of Islamic law (if I am wrong in this particular analysis, and this can be shown, I will of course remove this part of the analysis, but my being wrong about this does not obviate the question of the identity of "Bibi Aisha", or her attackers).

According to the story, the poor woman was mutilated on the orders of the Taliban, and then left for dead. Having your nose and part of your ears cut off is not especially likely to kill you however, although it is a horrible crime. The Taliban are experienced in warfare, given the history of Afghanistan, and with so many nasty wounds around, they would be unlikely not to know about this. But why would somebody make up a story about her being left for dead, given the extremity of the crime we KNOW was committed against her?

Well in fact, the Taliban are notorious for their enforcement of extreme and archaic punishments for crimes, (or sins). The Taliban would punish a woman who was an adulterer; they would kill her! The Taliban may be brutal, but they are not particularly capricious about whether or not to apply Islamic law however. To punish a woman for adultery under Islamic law requires proof, and in Islamic law this means witnesses. A jealous and abusive husband might well have problems here, especially since making a false, or simply unproven accusation of this sort can carry a significant penalty under Islamic law; up to 80 lashes with a whip. If "Bibi Aisha" did cheat on her husband, and there were a bunch of witnesses, then the Taliban might well have stoned her to death, but the jealous maniac of a husband who would cut his wife's nose off could not expect his paranoia to be satisfied just because of this. For what it is worth, the Taliban, who by no means deny that they punish adultery, deny that she was ever accused in, or punished by, a Taliban religious court.

The problem, the great big problem, is that on one hand the Taliban are a bunch of violent extremists, who eagerly go about enforcing an extreme and restrictive law. On the other hand, the US backed government is not as extreme, but doesn't much enforce the law. or at least does not enforce the law very reliably or fairly.

If the Taliban just enforced reasonable laws, it is doubtful that even the might of the US government could have stopped them from winning in Afghanistan a long while back. On the other hand, particularly with the might of the US government behind them, but mainly because of how extreme the Taliban are, it is doubtful that the Afghan government could have failed to win, also a long while back if they weren't continually setting new records for corruption and abuse.

The US backed Afghan government has a terrible record of not prosecuting men with government connections for violence against women. Nadia Anjuman, for example, was Afghanistan's most famous and popular female poet, known not only in Afghanistan, but in the neighboring nations besides. She was murdered by her politically connected abusive husband, but the US-backed Afghan government only sentenced him to five years in jail.......... and then let him out after one month. Nadia Anjuman was famous and popular, but even she would not receive justice under the Karzai government. With Nadia Anjuman being murdered with impunity by her husband in 2005, Mumtaz, the husband of Nazia might have thought that in 2007 he also could get away with mutilating his wife because his brother was a policeman.

The Anjuman case is a good example of my point about the "rock and a hard place" choice as it is viewed by the Afghan population. The murdered poet Nadia Anjuman had, under the Taliban, been forced to take literature classes in secret, she and other women resorting to the ruse of a sewing school, in order to evade Taliban prohibitions on women's education. To quote Leila Razeqi, the woman who actually set up the secret women's literature classes, "If the Taliban were here they would have punished her husband, and maybe that would be better.” You and I might not agree with this sentiment, but the Karzai government is apparently bad enough that Afghans are likely to.

The cover story in Time however, is telling a somewhat different story. Instead of domestic abuse being a universal problem that shows up worst where the government is the most corrupt, the story becomes more black and white. Everybody knows that the Taliban are cruel, but the cover article tries to tie them to unusual punishment as well, not just cruel punishment. As the political slant in Time Magazine goes, this is "What happens If We Leave Afghanistan". Well "what happens" may be a phony story, but if it is not, then supporting the Karzai government does not come off any better by comparison. Instead of a woman with her nose and ears cut off, we would have......... a younger woman, seemingly a near twin, with her nose and ears cut off, PLUS with her teeth broken, and bones broken. What an improvement.

If you have any sympathy for "Bibi Aisha", there is another horrible possibility, or perhaps probability to consider. She cannot read or write, and according to the New York Times, had never heard of Time Magazine, until she was given a copy of the issue with her name on it. Now if she is in fact, the same woman as Nazia, who was mutilated in 2007, she was mutilated by a man connected to the Karzai government, not the Taliban. Time Magazine "confirmed that she is in a secret location protected by armed guards", armed guards who are on the side of the Karzai government, so this poor woman may still be in the hands of forces that are, so far as she knows, from the same group as the man who mutilated her. Now, according to the New York Times, she "did not remember how she managed to walk away to find help" from the site of her mutilation. What sort of threats might she be getting from her armed "protectors" now to make her tell the "right" story?

"Bibi Aisha" is being brought to the United States for surgery, so she could be rescued, if in fact she is being held as a propaganda pawn, but this would certainly require that some journalist can get to the truth of the situation. Even if Bibi Aisha and Nazia are in fact different people, we need journalists, bloggers, and everyone who cares to see that women are not mutilated, to work to make sure that the public knows that the problem of violence against women, even the most severe kinds, is certainly not confined to the Taliban.

The REAL reason "Why Obama Can't Move the Health-Care Numbers"

There was an interesting article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal about the reason that Obama is having so much trouble passing a national health care plan. For many people who are left/liberal (term varies depending on where you live in the world) the opinions of so right/conservative a paper are of little value of course, but whatever your political orientation, the similarities in outlook between all the elements of the US political system is so striking. Their conclusion

"The reason President Obama can't move the numbers and build public support is because the fundamentals are stacked against him. Most voters believe the current plan will harm the economy, cost more than projected, raise the cost of care, and lead to higher middle-class taxes."

This is interesting because here we have Rasmussen the commercial pollster, widely acknowledged to be a conservative, and a Clinton pollster both agreeing that the widespread opposition to the Obama health care plan is due mainly to the fact that people are opposed to its budget and public spending implications. The odd thing about this is that it places exactly the same emphasis of what is important in health care that Obama himself did. I think that this is fairly strong evidence that the "spending" over "health care" emphasis nearly defines 'establishment' thinking in the United States.

It is of course, very important to note that, yes, the health care plan is not supported by the public, but I must also say that I think that this analysis is almost entirely wrong. It was scarcely news that many people opposed national health care on cost grounds. What was new with Obama was that the number of such people had declined to a level that was clearly less than half of the public at large.

The assumption seems to be that what has changed to make so much of the public who previously supported national health care change their views, is simply that the financial crisis makes the public regard national health care as being unaffordable.

I am very doubtful of this, because the financial crisis has made ordinary people very worried about their jobs being lost in company cutbacks, and there is plenty of news about employers cutting back on the health insurance that they offer. Either job loss or company economizing would endanger the ordinary person's health care, even if they are satisfied with their health insurance. If the public, a majority of whom were satisfied with their insurance before, wanted national health care before, the financial crisis with associated high unemployment is not going to reduce their desire now.

Rather, I believe that the problem is with the Obama administration's health care plan itself, and particularly the emphasis that both he and his administration put on it. People are concerned that the health care that they receive is not going be reliably thorough and of high quality, mainly due to government rationing.

At this point, the average Democrat finally is distinguished from the establishment at large by rolling their eyes at this concern. The public concern is not just an artifact of Republican propaganda however. Rather, the concern is due to the Obama administration's plans, and even their own comments on them.

Obama himself, when questioned about his plan in the New York Times, used his OWN GRANDMOTHER as an example of potential rationing. His grandmother had broken her hip, and as it happened, also had cancer. While the cancer was clearly a serious threat to her longevity, it was not clear that she was going to die in the next days or weeks, and so the broken bone was repaired. This, according to Obama, was a matter that society, and his panels of experts were going to need to have

"a very difficult democratic conversation" about


this conversation needed to be

"guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists"

and at the end of this process, you, when caring for your Grandmother would need to

"have to have some independent group that can give you guidance".

How does this impact the national health care scheme, why

"that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now."

After Obama said such a thing, anybody who is talking about Republican propaganda is simply not paying attention to the real problem. Many Democrats have made excuses for the worrisome statements of Obama's advising health-car ethicist, but the fact of the matter is that Obama's conversations with this creature led him to question the wisdom of repairing his own grandmother's broken bone because she had a serious, but not immediately lethal illness. Broken bones are very painful, and very few people would be happy with the notion of their beloved Granny being forced to spend her last months or years suffering the agony of an untreated broken bone and trapped in bed because of it. Indeed, being locked into near total inactivity in this way is very likely to trigger one or another health problem in an elderly person, and cause their demise.

This little horror would be quite enough reason to distrust the president's health care scheme, but it also points to something else. Many people like to point to other developed nations around the globe, and say "they have national health care and are okay, so national health care in the US is okay too." Indeed building on this misplaced theme, many people around the globe have taken pleasure in poking fun at Americans who have reservations about the plan.

There is a big difference between the US plan and those throughout the globe however. The US national health care scheme is to my knowledge, the ONLY national health care scheme in the world that was planned at the very beginning to REDUCE the amount of health care services consumed that are the standard of care in that nation.

There is a lot of puffery and bluster about eliminating unnecessary care, but it is by no means clear that this care is in fact unnecessary. It is true that much associated with health care is run for profit in the US, and this might confuse someone, particularly if they do not live in the US, but the for-profit health care insurance industry in the US, which ends up paying most health care providers, can only make its money by rejecting unnecessary treatments. Since the insurers make that much more money by rejecting necessary treatment, many Americans are denied treatment that they in fact need. In a system of this sort, there is no real 'low hanging fruit' of clearly unnecessary treatment. When it in fact becomes clear that a treatment is unnecessary, the system weeds out that treatment. There are many ineffective treatments to be found in past medical history, and there will doubtless be more in the future, but the question is whether or not the medical system knows (or at least may easily find out), that a lot of treatments now in use are ineffective, but is using those treatments anyway. It is not objectively clear that "yes" is the answer to this question, much less clear that treatments which are known to be ineffective, but which are in use for some reason after all, will see those reasons overcome. What is left to cut where treatment is concerned, is treatments that some people need, and others do not, at least for the time being.


All those people around the world who now have national health care thus actually have something to worry about. As most people know, medical treatments that begin only in the US are likely to arrive in other developed nations eventually, because it would be difficult to justify not providing health care that is more or less up to "international standards". If a US national health care scheme based on REDUCING the level of care provided becomes law however, any budget troll lurking in the dark corners of your nation's Health Ministry, will now have a nice big international precedent that says that YOUR life isn't actually worth that much, and spending the money on your treatment is a waste.

Many people around the world complain that the United States does not place enough value on human life, and on quality of life. A health care plan of this type is not altogether aimed at making America like the most generous or compassionate of nations. Rather this health care plan aims to reduce the standard of care in a way that more than half of Americans are afraid of, and anchor that cheapened standard of care in claims of effectiveness.