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.

Helping children, or hunting them?

Today, a bit of news in my state, with the governor signing a bill altering its recent, and notorious safe-haven law permitting parents to drop off children that they do not want/feel-able to care for, at a hospital without being prosecuted for child abandonment. Instead of the law covering all minors, from newborn to 18, the law will now only cover babies one month old, or less.

Why the change? Well apparently most of the children that have been dropped off over the last few months have been teenagers and pre-teens, rather than the archetypal "baby in the basket".

Some scheme permitting the safe drop-off of the "baby-in-a-basket" has a long history in the Western world, with Pope Innocent III

Pope Innocent III

instituting, in the year 1198 AD, a device, the "foundling wheel" in the appropriate Catholic charitable institutions. The foundling wheel was a revolving hollow cylinder with a gap in the side, which would be set in an outside wall. A mother who wished to discard her baby (this was commonly motivated by an out-of-wedlock birth in a moralistic era) would revolve the cylinder until the gap in the side was accessible, place the child inside, and then rotate the cylinder until the opening faced the interior of the building. Since nobody could see the person on the other side of the wall, this device permitted the mother to abandon her baby anonymously, and would discourage the infanticide of unwanted infants.

Foundling wheel at the "Ospedale Santo Spirito in Rome

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Now everyone will acknowledge that parents, including of course, the parents of small babies should take care of them, and not abandon them, but even in the Middle Ages, it was acknowledged that sometimes parents are not willing or able to live up to these obligations and to some degree, the public must step in.

With the Nebraska safe-haven law adjusted to a degree that would suit 12'th century convictions (and to be quite fair, the Nebraska law is generally similar to those anywhere else in the nation) it occurs to me that though "progress" is an overused philosophical theme, social services might, and should be improved beyond medieval levels. Continuing in this vein, it was my assumption that child-protective-services, present in every state, and the very profession "social worker" were in no small part focussed on just that; the rescuing of children in completely dysfunctional families. Thus I have been astonished to see a vast amount of criticism directed at the original Nebraska law covering all minors.

Clearly the concept of state care of older children is not foreign to either Nebraska or the rest of the US. There are more than 500,000, a full half-million children in foster care in the US! Are we supposed to assume that none of the parents of these children might recognize their lack of parenting skills? Sure, dumping your kids is irresponsible, but how many people do YOU know who would actually give away their children? I can see little to celebrate in the behavior of such a parent, but frankly, if there is a parent who does not want to take care of their kids, or who does not think that they are capable of doing so, well I am inclined to agree!

None of this is to say that being given up to the state is not going to be emotionally hurtful to the children involved, but I also do not see how being with a parent who WANTS to give you up is not going to be hurtful. Moreover, if not being with their parents is the worst thing that can happen to a child, bar none, then an entirely different set of reforms need to be implemented, and the better part of the half million young Americans in foster care need to be returned to their parents immediately.

There is in fact, something of a case in the latter concept as a great many children have been taken from their families due to "inadequate housing conditions", something which not uncommonly means that a family does not enough money to afford proper quarters. Kids are effectively being taken from their families because they are poor.

There is a lot of disagreement (in the US at least) about just how much help the state should provide to poor families, but I cannot see any moral means of avoiding the point that any level of poverty that the state does not alleviate and correct is by definition, a level of poverty, with all the conditions that accompany such a state, that cannot justify depriving a person of the custody of their children.

To continue further into the question of poverty alleviation, it is worth noting that a couple of the Nebraska families (profiles of the families are here ) have as their biggest problem, poverty. Nonetheless, ending or reducing poverty should not be a substitute (it is a worthy enough goal on its own!) for a safe haven law because wealth does not eliminate catastrophic parenting, and poverty does not ensure it.

Finally, it is worth noting exactly what motivated the safe-haven dropoffs of older children and teens in the first place. As it happens, almost all of these children were mentally ill, and if you look at their profiles, they were commonly violent. Now it would seem natural for me to have listed this information first, because it is probably easier to understand why a parent would give up their child if he is a knife-wielding psychotic, or is torturing the family pets.

I did not for two reasons. First, I think that it is a vital point that effective child protection demands that social service agencies acknowledge self acknowledged parental incompetence.

Second, I am quite sure that some people will NOT sympathize, and there are other reasons that everyone should agree that the law should be retained, or care outside the family need be provided. In fact, to think so, you would even need to be very concerned about the children. Take Skylar for example.

"Lavennia Coover is a kindergarten teacher and mother of three who says her main goal in life is to get help for her youngest son, Skyler, 11. She said she used the law because Skyler is dangerous. She was worried about the danger to herself but especially to her other son, 12-year-old Colby. She says Skyler often beat up his older brother and threatened him with knives and sharp sticks."

"I mean, he threatened to kill the next-door neighbor little boy, screaming to the top of his lungs," Cynthia said. "I've tried to explain to him by doing that -- if somebody else was to do that -- they would take you to jail. That was where he was going to end up if we didn't do something."

So Cynthia walked through the emergency room doors of Immanuel hospital and there, she said, she talked to a caseworker, but, says she never used the words Safe Haven. She said she told the nurses the boy needed to see his psychiatrist and be readmitted to residential treatment.

Never mind whether or not you suppose that SOME person would be capable of dealing with this. I am fairly certain that there are some people who will NOT, and I should not want to have this fellow, if he does NOT receive parenting that is adequate to his needs, by his own mother's description, roaming the streets of our collective future.

Then there was the 11 year old who;

"had threatened to kill his mother and siblings and had tortured the family cat several times" , was prescribed medication, but refused to take it, and had (mind this is an 11 year old) already been arrested for criminal mischief.

One need not rely on obscure psychological indicators to see that he might become a threat to the public, what with the death threats, but anyone interested might note the animal torture. There are quite a few famous people who liked torturing animals; serial killers Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz (the "Son Of Sam") , Jeffrey Dahmer, and Edmund Kemper for example, or school shooters Brenda Ann Spencer ,Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Luke Woodham ,Michael Carneal ,Andrew Golden and ,Kip Kinkel. I have little doubt that more such examples could be found, but the research is stomach turning, and I think that these examples should serve to make the point!

There is something very wrong with a system, not just in Nebraska, but also around the nation, which is happy to strip children from their homes against the will of their families by the thousands, but which cannot accept a child when the parents recognize that they cannot provide proper care. That so absurd a situation could arise strongly suggests that the social services and child protection agencies have become obsessed with capture and seizure, loosing track of the children in the process.

Most likely, many troubled children and teens require mental health treatment, including inpatient or residential treatment, and would not be, and would not need to be abandoned by their parents, but the rash of safe-haven cases certainly points to a system that is not adequately helping severely troubled children. Beyond the misery of the children themselves, we cannot ignore the fact that anything from a rock, to a knife, to a car or truck can be a lethal weapon in the hands of a violently mental ill individual. To stop headline-grabbing tragedies, we need to ensure that mentally ill minors get treatment and are raised by someone who can handle them.

Links for additional child protection information

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog