The Sonia Factor

Unless a couple of dozen US senators lose their minds at the last minute and vote against their own conscience, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor will make history today by becoming the first Hispanic Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and only the third woman to ever hold that august office.

Republican “anti-Sonia” hardliners, meanwhile, will have sealed their fate by not only alienating the Hispanic constituency (an ever-burgeoning segment of the public, with the Latin population now numbering over 42 million in the United States), but also by locking themselves into their ever more clear-cut image as knee-jerk reactionary dinosaurs wading deeper all the time into the tar pits of their own prejudices.

Try as they might, opposition senators have been unable to dig up any dirt that will stick to the brilliant 55-year-old jurist’s impeccable image. The only arguments that they have been able to raise in the grueling nomination hearings have been superficial to say the least. Every point of debate made against Judge Sotomayor has appeared subjective, involving issues that have seemed to be merely her word against that of the hardliners. They have accused her on the basis of a handful of rulings in her 17-year career on the Federal bench in which they argued that her decisions have disregarded such things as gun rights – as espoused, it bears saying, by the powerful National Rifle Association, not as stated in the Constitution – property rights and job discrimination claims by white employees. But while the opposing senators have continued to hammer on these issues, Sonia Sotomayor has been able to argue in all cases that her decisions stood on legal precedent, and hardliners have been unable to prove her wrong.

Moreover, the three-quarters of the Republicans in the Senate who are expected to vote against Judge Sotomayor have demonstrated in these hearings that their decision to do so is purely political and has more to do with racial issues and wanting to hurt President Obama than with safeguarding the country’s highest court. This is easy to see if you bear in mind that some of her harshest critics prior to the hearings – such as South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who grilled her mercilessly and hostilely in the hearings – have now declared that they will vote in her favor. Her brilliant performance under fire has obviously been the key to swaying these votes.

Republican Kit Bond of Missouri bluntly chided his fellow party members saying that partisanship had no place in debates over judges, adding that, "There's been no significant finding against her, there's been no public uprising against her…I will support her, I'll be proud for her, the community she represents and the American dream she shows is possible."

All things considered, the entire argument against her confirmation, then, has boiled down to a 2001 speech the judge made in which – in a rhetorical twist which even she has admitted was unfortunate – she said that she hoped a “wise Latina” would be able to make better decisions than a white male. Clearly, this was a statement that, if indeed public, had nothing to do with any decision of her court or with her investiture as an official of the Federal Justice System.

Furthermore, much has been made of this snippet of Judge Sotomayor’s statement, but little indeed of the context. First, the venue: The judge was speaking at the University of California at Berkeley, as a guest speaker for a symposium entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation”. The whole point of the speech within the context of such a specific event was for her to illustrate precisely how her ethnic background affected her as a person, a woman, a professional and a judge. It was a personal and somewhat emotional speech in which she pointed out that while she was an American, born and raised in New York City, she was also an American who liked “morcilla and garbanzos”, whose tastes were not only not like those of white mainstream Americans but also not even like those of Mexican Americans. Rather, they were the tastes of a “niuyorican” [New York Rican] a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, whose education was definitively mainstream, but whose background was specifically Hispanic and even more specifically Puerto Rican, within the melting pot of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic culture like that of the United States.

And then there is the specific context of the controversial phrase within the speech itself. Here’s what she actually said: “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences…our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life…Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case.”

This obviously had a positive spin. What she was saying was that diversity was a good thing – something hardliner fundamentalists disagree with, which is precisely what makes them hardliners and fundamentalists – that people with rich life experiences and a more ample view of society and life might well be better equipped to make insightful and judiciously compassionate decisions than those who had led a relatively sheltered or highly indoctrinated existence. She was not, as Republican hardliners tried to make it sound, saying that she could out-think any white man, just because she was Hispanic.

To be familiar with some 450 Federal Court decisions handed down by her, as the senators were, and pretend that this one statement disqualified her was mean-spirited at best and discriminatory at worst – besides being just plain ludicrous and stupid. So much so, that it belies any claim of objectivity these senators could possibly offer and makes manifest the fact that they simply felt threatened as white males by this “uppity Latina”. Far from making her eat her words, however, they made her point by showing just how obtuse a group of powerful white male elitists could be.

The point is that if Sonia Sotomayor had been an Italian-American or an Irish-American, or a German-American, for instance, this type of issue would never have come up in a confirmation hearing. Yet all three of these other ethnic groups saw other moments in the evolution of American society in which their ethnicity might have been questioned or have precluded them from participation at such levels. The triumph of Judge Sotomayor’s appointment, when it comes, is enhanced by the fact that her ethnic group is one that has still not been fully accepted by the American establishment. Her struggle to win a spot on the Supreme Court bench, then, brings to light underlying racial prejudices that still require treatment in the United States. And her victory will have brought the US a step closer to being a truly open society, in deed and in spirit, rather than merely in the letter of the law.

‘Wise Latina’ Proves Simply Brilliant

• Caption: Judge Sonia Sotomayor (Official White House Photo)
  
  

Hey, do you hear that? Me either…That’s the sound of Judge Sonia Sotomayor NOT making headlines. Yesterday morning was the first time in days that President Barack Obama’s controversial pick for the Supreme Court – the first nominee for the high court named by a Democrat in 15 years and the first Hispanic appointee in history – wasn’t leading the news schedules.

I have to admit that, at first, I found the silence eerie and a bit disquieting. But then I checked around a little and figured it out: The usually flamboyant jurist, whose blunt comments have openly rankled conservative white Republican senators had handled herself with such admirable restraint as she stood up to grueling interrogation starting on Monday of this week, that by the end of the week she had successfully “underwhelmed” everybody. No longer even a headliner, she appeared to be on a course toward sure approval, no matter how hard far-right holdouts tried to delay the inevitable. In fact, one could say that, by now, if by some Republican-hardliner “miracle” she were not confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, it would be one of the greatest travesties in the history of Senate oversight.

All week long, in the Senate hearings to decide whether or not lawmakers would honor the President’s wish for her to become one of the nine justices charged with the task of making the country’s most difficult legal decisions, Democrats sought to raise a protective net around Judge Sotomayor, while Republican opponents to her appointment attacked her with rabid enthusiasm, gnashing away at her to see if they could get her to show what they had speculated were her “true colors”.

Before the 17-year veteran of the Federal Courts had ever gotten to the confirmation hearings, far-right senators and news commentators had already done their best to characterize her as a hothead, an activist, a reverse-racist, an over-emotional and perhaps even dangerous Latina of far-left persuasions, who decided cases based more on her gut than on the law. By the time Judge Sotomayor settled into the appointee’s seat before the panel of Senate ‘inquisitors’, a number of mainstream Americans were probably a little surprised that she didn’t arrive wearing olive drab fatigues and puffing a Cuban corona.

But the public hearings put that myth to rest immediately – or rather, Judge Sotomayor’s stunning performance before the hearing committee did. If she was any of the things far-right Republicans tried to lead the public to believe she was with their racist, sexist, paranoid gossip, there was never a glimpse of it all week. In fact, she received and answered (or sidestepped answering) all of their accusatory grilling with serenity, logic, grace and eloquence, demonstrating herself to be the well-focused and utterly brilliant jurist and intellectual that she is.

It was surely clear to no few objective observers that the most fervent of her opponents came to the hearings with an at least pre-conceived if not downright prejudiced bias against her. Their line of questioning made that fairly easy to see. For instance, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham saw nothing wrong with reading out a list of anonymous insults – more than criticisms - from alleged jurists who “knew” Sotomayor. Or did the senator just make them up himself? Anybody who has taken Journalism 101 knows that if you’re going to hurl accusations you had better have the sources to back them up. And in a court of law, Graham’s assertions would certainly have been referred to as “unsubstantiated hearsay” designed to bias the jury.

He claimed he knew of people who had called her “nasty”, “a bit of a bully”, a “terror” and “lacking in judicial temperament”. Graham then asked her if she thought she had a “temperament problem”. (This was tantamount to classic loaded questions of the sort of “Is it true that you’re no longer a drunk?”).

But even as insulting and gratuitous as Graham’s line of sophomoric questioning was, you could almost feel the yogini-like ooooooooooommmmmmmm vibrating in the jurist’s chest as, without allowing a flicker of the irritation she must have felt show on her face, she calmly answered, “No, sir, I can only talk about what I know about my relationships...” adding that she was on cordial terms with those she considered her colleagues, and going on to say, “…when I ask lawyers tough questions, it's to give them an opportunity to explain their positions on both sides and to persuade me that they're right.”

Obviously miffed that he couldn’t get a rise out of her, Graham, himself a lawyer, came back at her again saying, apropos of nothing, “I never liked appearing in court before a judge I thought was a bully.” To which Judge Sotomayor said that she did indeed ask attorneys tough questions, but that she did so even-handedly, on both sides of each case.

Prior to the hearings, Graham had been quoted as telling Sotomayor that “unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to be confirmed.” He was apparently trying to provoke just such a ‘meltdown’, but his attempt – clumsy and unsophisticated - was frustrated. In the end, the one who seemed rattled was the senator himself as he churlishly and condescendingly said that perhaps the hearings would provide Judge Sotomayor with “a time for self-reflection”. Nor was it the only time he sought to treat Sotomayor as his inferior. Twice he asked her if she recalled her now famous “wise Latina” remark (which, she had already explained, had been taken out of context and had been meant as a rhetorical device in a debate situation), then calling on her to recite it for the senate panel. When she hedged the second time he said he “had it right here” did she want him to read it? And he proceeded to do so. But to what end, other than harassment and attempted character assassination was anyone’s guess.

Clearly, the only bully in this case was Senator Graham, who seemed to be making a puerile attempt to get back at all those judges of the past that he had just admitted being scared to face in court. And like all bullies, he ended up looking flustered and foolish and decidedly un-gallant when faced with someone of true strength and self-confidence.

Earlier in the week she had also shown this strength when senior Republican committee member and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions badgered her about the same “wise Latina” remark from a 2001 speech she had made and tried to tie this alleged “attitude” to how she would rule in cases with racial implications. She said that it had been a rhetorical device gone awry and indicated that her rulings as a judge were clearly based on the law and not on anything else. The indication was that her record spoke for itself. In further questioning about racial profiling which was also linked to fears of terrorism that have been rampant in the United States ever since the nine-eleven Twin Towers attack, Sotomayor referred to a World War II Supreme Court decision that upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans saying that the decision had been wrong. Considering the obvious parallel with present attempts to combat terrorism, she also explained how current courts could keep from repeating the mistakes of World War II. In conclusion she said: “A judge should never rule from fear. A judge should rule from law and the Constitution.”

By the end of the week Senator Sessions was showing no further interest in blocking Sotomayor’s appointment and even said, “I look forward to you getting that vote before we recess in August.” And Lindsey Graham had gone as far as to say that he “might even vote” for her, stating that her decisions as a judge had been “generally in the mainstream”, an impression echoed by Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

In the end, the conservative Republican committee members’ line of questioning showed that their doubts were obviously more about their own racial bias and unfounded fears than about the judge’s judicial record or her outstanding qualifications as a jurist. And throughout the questioning, Sotomayor consistently managed to underscore the fact that she was precisely what she had had to apologize for being all week long: a “wise Latina” and a brilliant professional, clearly suited to the Supreme Court seat.

Sonia Sotomayor: Does White Make Right?

• Caption: Judge Sonia Sotomayor. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).

US Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has just had a lightning-bolt revelation. Namely, that President Barack Obama’s candidate for the Supreme Court, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is “out of the mainstream”...

I’ll wait a moment for the applause to die down before I go on.

You kind of have to figure that if Senator Sessions is just now noticing this about the New York-born Hispanic judge he either wasn’t listening before or he is just hopelessly obtuse. Well, of course, then there’s the other possibility: that he’s just now bringing it up and saying it on a nationwide news broadcast because he is still hoping against hope to hurt the 55-year-old jurist in the her confirmation hearings that started today, July 13.

One of Judge Sotomayor’s most avid defenders in the Senate, Democrat Patrick Leahy, has sought to show that the scare tactics the Republican opponents to the nomination are using are clearly unwarranted. The Associated Press has quoted him as stating that "…in truth, we do not have to speculate about what kind of a justice she will be because we have seen the kind of judge she has been. She is a judge in which all Americans can have confidence. She has been a judge for all Americans and will be a justice for all Americans…"

Leahy was talking about Sotomayor’s 17-year career as a Federal Judge, an achievement in itself considering that when she rose to the Federal bench she was approximately a decade and a half younger than most jurists are who receive that honor. Leahy stated that her record in the Federal Courts proved that she was “mainstream”.

Senator Leahy is also missing the point, however. Sonia Sotomayor is not mainstream. Not by a long shot. If her nomination makes it through the Senate hearings, she will be only the third woman ever to reach that august post, following the appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 and that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (currently serving) in 1993. She will also be the first Hispanic ever to sit on the Supreme Court bench and only its third minority member in history, sharing this well-deserved honor with Thurgood Marshall (first African American, appointed in 1967) and Clarence Thomas (the only serving black Justice, appointed in 1991). But apart from these obvious differences between Judge Sotomayor and other select jurists who have acceded to the highest court in the land, there is her own personal style to be considered. Sotomayor’s absolutely stunning honesty and audacious directness are what have gotten her into trouble with traditional white male conservative opponents. They question her statements regarding her Latin-ness, about the ability of a “wise Latina” to perhaps make clearer-cut decisions than some white males. And they have strived to connect her straightforward way of talking with her court’s decisions that they have attempted to brand as unfair, when, in fact, if they have erred at all, they have done so on the side of justice for all.

The fact is that what opponents are seeking to pass off as “weaknesses” in the argument for her appointment to the Supreme Court are really among Sonia Sotomayor’s strengths. Saying what the public wants to hear and making judgments according to popular belief rather than being true to oneself and one’s values and making decisions based on sound legal and ethical analysis is not what a Supreme Court justice should be known for, nor should running with the pack.

That Judge Sotomayor is capable of seeing the world from an angle other than that of the head-on mainstream should, in fact, be considered a welcome addition to the Justice system in the United States. Clearly, as a human being, no judge, no matter how lofty a position he or she attains, can see cases without doing so through the filter of their own upbringing, education and ethnic background. While it is their duty to be objective, it is their burden but also their virtue to be able to apply what they know about themselves and their own lives to the decisions they make and the opinions they give. And one would like to think that they are appointed, among other reasons, precisely because of their personal virtues.

The arguments that have been presented against Judge Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court, while dressed up in the guise of judicial issues, have been clearly racist and sexist in their underlying tone. Many mainstream, white, conservative Americans would probably like to continue to think of the Supreme Court as nine gray-headed, grumpy old white men, there to preserve and defend to the death the white Anglo-Saxon Puritan heritage that they would like to perceive as the “real heart and soul” of America. And these people tend to find Sotomayor downright “uppity”. But the truth is that the United States is an immigrant melting pot and that it has been this highly creative life-force that has been responsible for a large proportion of the country’s development and strength, its amazing diversity and its incredible adaptability. Never has this been truer than today, when in just a few short decades, the Hispanic population of the United States has gone from a scant 9 million to more than 45 million today, with projections for as many as 100 million US Hispanics to be living in the country by 2050.

Presuming that Judge Sotomayor should have to “answer for” her ethnicity and gender as an Hispanic woman is unquestionably gender and race-driven. For her opponents to try and pretend that race only enters into the issue in as much as Sonia Sotomayor is viewed as a “racist Latina” is truly hypocritical. Would they permit themselves to be questioned regarding their pride at being of “traditional” white origin or as a result of their making decisions that reflect their own ethnic background? And if not, does their “whiteness” somehow place them in the permanent position of inquisitor rather than respondent?

Fortunately, her approval appears almost assured even if it is highly improbable that she will win the approval rating of her white women predecessors, Sandra Day O’Connor, who received a Senate approval vote of 99 to 0, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who was sworn in after a vote of 96 to 3. In the end, however, the outcome of the vote matters little, as long as it is positive, thus permitting the United States to enjoy the advantage of having a brilliant jurist with a fresh take on major issues sitting on its highest Court.

The Temptations of Torture

US President Barack Obama has been quite clear as regards his stance on waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”: He considers them torture, plain and simple, and under his presidency, the United States will refuse to condone torture under any circumstances…period.

So why does the debate continue about whether or not the United States government can or cannot apply torture under certain circumstances (in which, far-right-wing commentators and torture proponents would have us believe, the ends justify the means)? Why do reporters from right-wing news media continue to hound President Obama on the subject, as if his answer to torture required justification, as if he were the one who was somehow unethical for defending the non-use of torture? Answer: Because certain officials and advisers of the former administration, who decided that they possessed the power to throw more than two centuries of American ethics regarding the inalienable and universal rights of Man out the window may now have to answer for their unmitigated arrogance and absence of moral character. And the possibility that high-ranking officials (including former presidents of the United States of America) might someday be called upon to be accountable for the questionable decisions they make, scares the daylights out of the far right. Why? Because the far right believes in central power, in some people’s being “more equal” than others, in certain rights only applying to “people like oneself”. And they had long sought a leader that was less interested in doing what was right than in doing “whatever it took”, a leader who thought that he was above the law and the Constitution, a leader who would give in to the temptations of torture, the temptations of lawlessness, the temptations of the “hanging judge” mentality of the Old West, a leader who felt that the “expediency” of vigilante “justice” was preferable to the preservation of the highest ideals of a nation that was once the shining beacon of individual and collective rights and the worldwide defender of democratic rule.

And they found that leader in the person of George W. Bush, who wasn’t averse to giving the “great unread”, movie-culture masses the fantasy they longed for: the one that says, what if there weren’t any rules and you could do whatever you wanted to the “bad guys”? The fantasy that justifies the actions of the “Dirty Harries”, and the “Rambos”, who, from the silver screen, teach the public that there’s a point at which the law no longer works and you have to take justice into your own hands.

Tyranny by Any Other Name

Most of us have that fantasy at one point or another. It is almost natural for us as individuals to have such fantasies and even for us to occasionally be tempted to act them out by getting mad and getting physical. (I myself, in this sense, do not hold myself up as an example, notorious hothead that I am). But in order for civilized society to function properly, the law and its representatives must be coldly, clearly and objectively above such feelings and the system must be devised in such a way as to ensure that officials, including the President – perhaps even especially the President – act not as individuals, but as the worthy representatives of the law, and the keepers of the morals and ethics of the nation. If not, if it becomes the attitude of the Executive that rules are made to be broken, then mob justice will simply run amok and civilization and rule of law will be such in name only, a caricature cited for effect in political rhetoric, because it is the law that is the framework for civilization and if the law and the ethical standards of a people are only applied “when they are convenient”, then they become nothing more than an expression of good intentions. And, in the end, unless they are systematically preserved as inviolable, their application is only as effective as the individual in charge at any given time. So applied (or not), ethical and legal standards eventually cease to exist. They become obsolete and are replaced by the arbitrary decisions of the powers that be.

There is a name for this state of affairs: It is called tyranny. Here, I speak not from a textbook, but from experience, having lived through a decade of this kind of authoritarianism in Argentina back in the mid to late1970s and early ‘80s. Based on that experience – back in the early days of Bush’s war on terrorism, when Guantánamo first became an issue, and when perhaps the greatest living American statesman, Jimmy Carter, was one of the few people speaking out against the holding of political prisoners without trial on the offshore US base – I had an unexpected clash with a friend, an intellectual for whom I have the highest respect, who is as bi-cultural as I myself am – a sort of reverse of my own experience, his having been born in Buenos Aires and then having spent many years living in New York. In the midst of an otherwise friendly phone conversation, I stated my opinion that what was happening in the United States, in view of the special powers the Bush government had granted itself following Nine-Eleven, had clear parallels with what had happened in Argentina (as well as in Chile and Uruguay, for example) in the 1970s.

To my surprise, my friend couldn’t figure out what I was taking about. Well, I explained, suspension of civil and human rights, detention without trial at the disposal of the Executive Branch, military council’s of war instead of proper trials, the use of coercion and mental and physical abuse to elicit confessions, etc., etc. All of those things that the military junta imposed and that, back then, would have been inconceivable in the USA, were now a part of accepted US policy. What the United States is living through, I said, are the early stages of authoritarian rule. My friend found this funny, crazy even. He laughed. Treated me with the condescension reserved for imbeciles and madmen. It wasn’t like that, he insisted. He lived in New York. He knew what he was talking about. I was “misinformed”. It was just these terrorist guys that they were holding, nothing more. It wasn’t as if the whole system were jeopardized.

Frankly, I was shocked that he failed to see the comparison, since he was an expert in political science. Because the very same arguments were used here in Argentina to justify the abuses of power and sidestepping of the law and of the Constitution indulged in by the supposed “defenders of democracy” that stepped in to “save the Republic” in this country in 1976. And at the time, a very broad spectrum of the public agreed that in order to fight terrorism you had to throw the rulebook out the window. But in the end, it would become clear to the majority of Argentines – although the far right here as in the United States, still clings to the idea of the ends justifying the means – that defending democracy and rule of law by suspending them and applying a greater lawlessness to the battle against outlaws was tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bath water. If a single person’s rights were violated, everyone’s rights were violated. Because if it could be done to one today it could be done to all tomorrow.

The arguments applied by the so-called National Reorganization Process in Argentina for methods that were clearly at odds with international standards of decency and respect for human rights and jurisprudence, as well as with the country’s own Constitution and Bill of Rights, were very much like those quoted by the Bush Administration: the existence of aggression by a “non-Western and un-Christian enemy with ties to hostile foreign powers”, the need to fight fire with fire in the kind of “dirty war” waged by lawless terrorists, the “unfortunate reality” of “collateral damage” in confrontations of this kind, the practicality of applying “extraordinary means”, justified by the greater good of saving innocent lives through “expedient preventive action”, the justification of “extraordinary powers” being assumed by the Executive Branch so as to not “tie the hands” of government in the face of a clear and present danger to “the values and way of life of an entire nation”.

But in Argentina, what this led to, in the end, was institutionalized State terror, in which tens of thousands of people were tortured, most of the time simply to “see if they knew anything” rather than based of any proper intelligence, with the “evidence” wrung from non-person prisoners by means of water torture, electric shock, beatings, extreme humiliation, drugs and so on being used to justify the detention and torture of still other thousands, with this in turn leading to the summary executions of as many as 30,000 people still referred to simply as “the missing”.

At this juncture, when the far-right is very vocally accusing President Obama of being soft on terrorism and of endangering the United States by not doing as the Bush Administration did and pretending that the Bill of Rights and the human rights treaties signed, often promoted and once-championed by the US government are non-binding suggestions rather than inviolable statements of principle, it almost seems ironic that one of the main factors in stopping the slaughter in Argentina was then-President Jimmy Carter’s insistence on respect for human rights among all countries that sought friendly ties with Washington. With what face could the United States have judged any other country’s treatment of suspects and prisoners under the Bush Administration? And as a world leader, is this the face that the people of the United States wish the Nation to have: that of a country that condones torture and is not averse to suspending rule of law for the sake of expediency; that of a country that applies one law to certain of its citizens and another to others, or that is exceptionally lawless and cruel in dealing with its prisoners of war, no matter what their nationality may be. And if this is indeed the image we are willing to accept, then, what will be the extent to which we can express outrage when our own citizens are treated with brutality when captured?

A Case in Point

The question is: Can democracy, constitutionality and rule of law escape unscathed from attempts to “work around them”? Once a rule has been broken, is it ever “hard and fast” again? And if not, if every time a single man (in this case, the President of the United States), decides that a situation warrants a constitutional “time-out”, of what use is the law and democracy as our forefathers conceived it? And if the Executive has the power to switch the legal rights of individuals on and off like artificial light and effective darkness, then what is the difference between that and authoritarianism – indeed, between that and tyranny?

Almost as controversial as the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy is the case of the late Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro (b.1916 - d.1978). Moro was a high-profile Italian politician who twice served as the country’s premier (1963-1968 and 1974-1976). On the ever-volatile Italian political scene, he was the country’s longest serving post-war leader and one of the most important figures in the Christian Democracy Party. He was an intellectual and was considered a skilled and patient mediator.

In March of 1978, members of the Red Brigades communist terror organization kidnapped Moro, demanding the release of jailed terrorist leaders in exchange for his freedom. The government took a hard line making, it clear that it refused to deal with terrorists. Despite appeals from Moro’s family that the government save him by any means necessary, the government maintained its position. In view of the government’s refusal to negotiate, the Vatican intervened, with Pope Paul VI calling on the Red Brigades to unconditionally release the former prime minister. When this didn’t work, the Pope offered to take Moro’s place as the terrorists’ hostage if they would agree to the politician’s release. Nothing worked, and after holding Aldo Moro for 54 days, his kidnappers murdered him and left his body in the trunk of a car parked on a street in Rome.

There is now speculation that, despite the fact that the Red Brigades were almost surely involved in the kidnapping and murder, there was collusion with others who stood to gain from his death, including US and other interests in NATO and Moro’s successor and co-party member, Giulio Andreotti. Moro and Andreotti were from different factions of the Christian Democrats. While Andreotti was strongly rumored to have ties to both the CIA and the Italian and US Cosa Nostra and, as such, to be radically anti-communist, Moro, ever the mediator, saw the advantage of bringing members of Italy’s then-influential Communist Party into a coalition government. According to statements attributed to Moro’s widow, the former premier had received such strong warnings not to pursue this idea from U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Nixon Administration) that he had, at the time, become frightened and ill and had considered leaving politics altogether. The ties between Moro’s assassination and Andreotti came up in a trial against the Andreotti years later for the murder of yet another politician and for his alleged Mafia ties. Andreotti was found guilty on a prosecution appeal and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, but the decision was later overturned in a defense appeal, and to this day, the former Prime Minister (now aged 90) sits in the Italian Parliament with the title of Senator for Life.

While interesting and revealing, these facts are not, in themselves, the point. What is germane, however, is that despite the extremely high profile and importance of the Moro abduction and in spite of the political machinations behind it, government and security officials at the time refused to bend the law to fit their political needs. Italy’s staunch pro-human rights stance remained firm despite the formidable threats posed at the time by the Red Brigades on the one hand and the long-standing Mafia on the other. When it was widely suggested that certain political-profiled prisoners’ feet should be put to the coals in order to expedite the investigation and secure the immediate release of the former prime minister, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa – a ranking officer in the Italian Carabinieri and one of the architects of the country’s anti-terrorist policies and enforcement strategies – is quoted as having responded: "Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

Dalla Chiesa himself was murdered along with his wife and driver by the Mafia in 1982. But that didn’t make him any less right about what he said. Although the fight waged by all legal means against the Sicilian Mafia and the Red Brigades brought the assassinations of numerous law enforcement and justice officials, persistent legal action eventually brought the substantial dismantling and stunning debilitation of both movements and the clear strengthening of Italy as both a political power and as a paladin of civilized culture and society.

But Does It Work?

Torture as an interrogation technique is highly questionable, not only from a moral and ethical standpoint but also with respect to its actual efficacy. Here in Argentina false leads gained through torture were, perhaps, the singlemost cause for the subsequent torture and summary executions of other people who were absolutely innocent of any links with terrorism. Torturing someone beyond all boundaries of human resistance while repeating a question or demand obviously begs an answer – whatever answer pops into his/her head – from the torture victim. In Argentina, it was reportedly not uncommon for interrogators to simply repeat, “I want a name! A name! A name!”, while punctuating each demand for a name with a blow from a nightstick, a kick in the ribs or a punch in the face. After long minutes of mistreatment, prisoners would obviously come up with a name…any name: an rival, a casual acquaintance, their landlord, their boss, any name at all that might stop the abuse.

Or in other words, such unsophisticated techniques often lead to bad intelligence. And experienced intelligence agents and military interrogators in the United States are not unaware of this. There is reason to believe that intelligence professionals may well have been bullied into using the techniques by political officers in the Bush Administration, judging from reports that show that more than a few of them have left little doubt that they find torture an unreliable tool for extracting sound information.

In 2005, the New York Times quoted CIA Inspector General John Helgerwon as saying in a 2004 report that the so-called EITs (advanced interrogation techniques) “appeared to constitute cruel and degrading treatment under the [Geneva] Convention” – an international treaty that the United States has waved in the faces of its enemies in successive wars when these foreign powers have mistreated US captives.

Former CIA officer Bob Baer is reported to have told ABC News that torture made for “bad interrogation”. He said: “I mean, you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture’s bad enough.”

Another former CIA officer, Larry Johnson, who also served for a period as Deputy Director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Office wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “What real field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust…than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets.”

ABC and other media have quoted CIA sources as saying that certain presumably crucial information extracted from Libyan-born al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh al Libi through torture ended up being proven false. Al Libi was subjected to the whole battery of progressively harsher “enhanced interrogation techniques” over a two-week period, and finally broke after being waterboarded and left to stand naked overnight in a cold cell, while being periodically hosed down with cold water. The statements he gave under duress where largely the basis for the Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq possessed biochemical weapons and trained al Qaeda members in their use. In other words, his confession was a major plank in the administration’s platform for launching its attack on Iraq. It was later established by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that Al Libi really had no such knowledge and had only told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear – either to purposely mislead them or simply in order to make the torture stop.The DIA said in an official report that the Libyan’s statements were “unreliable”, since he could provide no further details to corroborate his confession resulting from torture.

Justice Where Justice Is Due

President Obama has been criticized for leaving the decision as to whether to try officials who condoned and ordered torture under the Bush Administration to Justice and the Courts.

Hard-line liberals had hoped the President would be an avenging angel, who would swoop down on human rights violators in government and make them pay for undermining North America’s image and substance as a staunch defender of human rights and rule of law. Far right-wingers wanted him to “show patriotism” by intervening and granting immunity to those who permitted and ordered the use of the torture techniques – which they whimsically refer to as EITs.

But in the end, the criticism in both camps is morally, politically and ethically misplaced, since in the hands of Justice is precisely where that decision must lie, not in those of the Chief of State, if Americans’ rights are to be properly protected and tyranny is to be kept at bay.

Obama and the ‘tea-ed off’ GOP

For a lot of people abroad who were following the events of last week in the United States on TV, this whole thing about the “tea parties” held around the country must have been baffling. In fact, with what some Americans themselves know about our history in this day and age, in which vast sectors of the population appear to have developed a virulent allergy to books and reading, it was probably just as puzzling an event to many of them as well. The fact is, however, that the original “Boston Tea Party”, was a brief but very major event in American history, since it constituted a catalytic episode in the run-up to the Revolution against British imperialist tyranny.

Caption: "The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor", an 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier.

The ones who know precisely how important that “party” was, however, are the guys in the Republican Party’s dirty-tricks think tank who organized and promoted it. And don’t give me that bull about how it was a spontaneous outpouring of American anti-tax and anti-liberal sentiment, because I’m not buying it. You don’t get the kind of press this protest got – especially on “fair and balance” Fox news (come on, Murdock, gimme a break!) – if it’s a spontaneous grassroots thing, especially not when it all ostensibly came together “overnight”. And particularly not when they bring out the big guns in prime time to rally ‘round the cause.

Fox and (Dubya’s) Friends.

Take “registered independent” (as he reminds us, ad pukeum) Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who “doth protest too much” when anyone accuses him of being a conservative lackey, but who, if he doesn’t already have a GOP elephant tattooed on his chest, should really get one, because he clearly got hit in butt with the White House door when ex-President Bush left office and is ticked off about it. Yes, Bill, we can tell. If not, his night-time “news” commentary show, The O’Reilly Factor, wouldn’t keep on defending the Bush Administration tooth and nail every evening, when it’s so obviously a new day in Washington. I means, geez louise, Bill! Get the heck over it! Dubya’s gone home. He’s through. And unless you’re going to stop toiling every single night with all of the rest of the far-right dinosaurs on your show (like your buddy and arch-conservative pit-bull Newt Gingrich) to prepare the groundwork for the next election four years down the road, then maybe you ought to quit insisting about how “independent” you are or how “fair and balanced” Fox is. How can you expect decent, fair-minded folks not to call you (to paraphrase one of your favorite epithets) a “rightwing loon” when you rant and rave like you do every night against the Obama Administration. Especially when the guy who writes your multi-million-dollar pay check each year (Fox President Roger Ailes) was a media consultant for Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush (the elder) – let’s face it, telling three US Presidents, all from the same party, how to meet the press, seems like a trend – before he was recruited from NBC’s cable division by Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdock to create Fox News.

And then there’s Sean Hannity who follows O’Reilly each night with practically the same format as his – bash everyone left of Adolph Hitler – but in this case, with no apologies for being a frothing-at-the-mouth far-right mad dog. Even the Fox News management seems to have thought that Hannity was too right to be “right” and for 12 years created a parody of fairness by running him alongside “Fox liberal” (and I use the term advisedly) Alan Colmes. Colmes’ job was basically to lose every argument and let Hannity bully and dump on him every night, but still, there was a limit to just how insanely far-right Hannity could get without someone saying, “Hey, wait a minute, Sean, get a grip!”

But even the almost comatosely mild Alan Colmes apparently decided a dozen seasons of playing the “straw man” to Sean Hannity’s ruthless attacks was more than enough and this year left the show, according to him, “to make a greater contribution” to the network. If his personal blog, Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, is anything to go by, Alan’s “greater contribution” isn’t going to scare Hannity in the ratings. Topping yesterday’s items was this lead, and I quote:

“Edgar Mitchell, who flew on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission to the moon, says there is extraterrestrial life, and that it’s being concealed by the United States government, among others.”

The story’s legitimate enough, though not original – it has already been on other TV channels as a human interest feature – but is just the sort of thing that promises to keep Colmes’ “contribution” as zanily “liberal” as possible and keep him or anybody else from undermining the apparent intention of Fox News to destabilize and, if possible, destroy the current administration of the United States.

An exaggeration? Suffice it to say that after cheerleading for the “tea parties” for days on end, Sean Hannity last night interviewed former Vice President Richard Cheney and the clear theme of his questioning was “just how dangerous is Barack Obama to the security of the United States and the world?” Cheney, the most dangerous vice president in history, as current Vice President Joe Biden once referred to him, was only too happy to comply in the orchestrated, nightly character assassination that Fox has sought to carry out since Day One of the Obama Presidency. The virulence of Hannity’s attacks is the kind formerly reserved by rightwing commentators only for figures like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, openly considered enemies of the United States. But it should be remembered that the person he is attacking in this way now is the overwhelmingly elected Chief of State of his own country, and his intention is obvious: to undermine the presidency of the United States of America. If the shoe were on the other foot, and the person under such virulent attack were George W. Bush instead of Barack Obama, both Hannity and O’Reilly would surely be asking their audiences if the perpetrator weren’t, perhaps, a terrorist and deserving of waterboarding to find out whom he is working for.

But, okay, let’s all pretend we don’t know who’s behind the “tea parties” – like many tried to pretend they didn’t know Nixon was behind the Watergate break-in scandal that ended up costing him his presidency – and just agree that whoever organized them, their purpose was to send out a message of rebellion, with a pseudo-patriotic bent.

The Original Festivities.

The original Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, three years before the 13 original New England colonies declared their independence from Britain and engaged the crown in full-scale war. Details are somewhat sketchy as to the event itself, but not so regarding the context. What it boils down to is that friends of the Court who formed part of the British East India Company – a concern that was long at the forefront of British expansionism – lost some of the tax breaks that it had been receiving under former agreements for the tea they brought into England from abroad. The East India Company did not supply tea directly to the American colonies, but sold it at auction in England to tea merchants who then exported it to the colonies, adding their commissions to the cost. However, when the crown imposed its thirst for greater revenues on the East India Company’s tea trade, it was the American colonists who took the hit for the higher costs that the East India monopoly passed on to the tea merchants.

To add insult to injury, the colonists could buy their tea much more cheaply from Dutch traders, for instance, but the East India monopoly began to lose vast sums of money to these traders from other countries. To get around this, the solution arrived at by the British government, with a nod from King George, was the Tea Act of 1773. This law gave the East India Company a full refund of a 25% tax it paid on the tea it imported into England, while permitting the monopoly, for the first time, to export tea directly to the colonies. This allowed it to cut out the cost of middle men and to better compete with Dutch traders. But to further cripple the competition, the only merchants that could handle tea in the colonies were now crown-appointed colonial merchants in major American ports, with any purchases they made elsewhere becoming tantamount to smuggling. The main fly in the ointment, however, was a tax known as the Townshend Tax that was only paid on tea shipped to the colonies. It was a direct imperial tax on the settlers and was considered discriminatory by the colonists. Those who favored the tax in Britain argued that it was used to defray the cost of salaries paid to British officials in the colonies. If the tax were repealed the risk was that payment of colonial officials would eventually become the responsibility of the colonists themselves and the fear was that the imperial officials’ loyalty would eventually lie with the British Americans who paid them, rather than with the crown. So the controversial tax on tea stood.

The colonists of Massachusetts protested that they had a right to only pay taxes levied by their elected colonial representatives – and this was backed by earlier agreements hammered out with the crown – since, in England itself, they were not adequately and directly represented and, therefore, whatever was dictated in this way was basically tyranny. Furthermore, it seemed to them that they were the butt of a cruel irony since the Townshend Tax paid colonial officials whose very job it was to protect the interests of the crown in detriment to those of the colonists themselves.

And they were not alone in their protests. By the time of the uprising in Massachusetts, demonstrators in three other colonies had already managed to prevent British merchant ships from unloading taxed tea in their ports. But the crown had apparently decided to make a stand in Boston Harbor and Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson was under pressure to keep the protest from succeeding in the influential Massachusetts Colony. Despite his subjects’ fervent requests – and, eventually, heated demands, with angry rallies in Boston where protesters numbered in the thousands – that the tea be turned away from the harbor, the governor refused to be a part of the self-styled embargo and the tea landed on Boston’s wharf, backed and enforced by the governorship.

Hutchinson was obviously out of touch with the depth of sentiment among the colonists he governed regarding actions taken by a Parliament on the other side of the ocean in which they had no direct representation and it was his stubborn refusal to listen to reason that led to the direct action taken by a group of what today would probably be called “terrorists” and “leftwing loons” – especially by “conservatives” of the ilk of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and former Speaker of the House Gingrich.

Details of this action, as I say, are sketchy but it seems that somewhere between 30 and 130 men (…um, what shall we call them? Militant activists? Far-left extremists? Freedom fighters? Enemy terrorists? Far-left loons? Patriots? Pinheads? You call it, O’Reilly…), some disguised as Indians to avoid identification, climbed aboard the ships under cover of night, broke open the crates on board and dumped the taxed tea into the waters of the Boston Harbor.

British demands that the rebel colony pay for the damages were rejected, resulting in a British embargo on trade with Massachusetts until reparation was made. It was indeed a controversial point, and even some people who would later be considered major American patriots, such as Benjamin Franklin, thought such a vandalistic act was going too far and that reparation should be made. But the stand-off between the colonies and the crown over this and other increasingly coercive acts on the part of the British government eventually led to the first shots of the Revolution’s being fired just two years later.

Tea Parties Today.

So what does this have to do with last week’s “tea parties” organized and orchestrated across the United States? In point of fact, nothing. Indeed, it is important here – since the GOP has insisted on making the comparison by shamelessly using an act of rebellion against imperialist tyranny with a tax package passed by the elected Congress of the United States in a desperate effort to clean up the ungodly mess that an eight-year Republican administration left behind – to figure out who’s who in this farcical tableau.

What every schoolchild recalls about the Boston Tea Party is that it was about “taxation without representation”. But what no one knows without in-depth study of the event, is that the accent was on representation. The tax was no more than a symbol of imperial tyranny. What the colonists were seeking by refusing to pay the Townshend tax was self-determination and what the British crown was seeking by insisting on imposing it was authoritarian control over its American subjects. The protests of last week that shamelessly sought to link the Obama Administration’s policies to this historical event were about perceived high taxes. That was never the issue in the Boston Tea Party. In fact, with the passage of the Tea Act, certain taxes were repealed and the price of tea in the colonies went down to such a degree that it became competitive with smuggled Dutch tea. The Townshend tax on the colonists was only 3%. So the protest and direct action were not because of taxation as such, but because of the principle involved. What the colonists rejected was London’s tyrannical decision to impose a tax in which they had no say and from which they derived no benefits. What they were opposing was despotic interference in their internal affairs. The tax was merely a symbol of their enslavement to and exploitation by the crown.

Last week’s protest has nothing to do with anything except the GOP’s whining about losing the election last November and being so soundly trounced by Barack Obama. Typically, rather than seeking to cooperate and help find a consensual solution to a grave crisis that is affecting the nation, the ultra-conservative political machine is busy seeking ways of taking advantage of the situation in order to undermine the authority of the Democratic Administration and further deepen the perception of crisis and chaos, with the aim of weakening the president’s position at every turn and ensuring that he will be replaced by a Republican at the end of his four years. It is an attitude that is unworthy and unpatriotic, but, unfortunately, not unexpected in a group of self-interested, far-right radicals who refuse to admit that the problem, like the bailout itself, started with them and that it is now President Obama’s job to try and fix the overwhelming mess they left behind.

Malvinas: Where the ‘Proceso’ Went to Die

This week marks the 27^th anniversary of the Argentine Armed Forces Government’s pre-emptive takeover of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands on April 2, 1982. The move triggered a 10-week conflict with Britain that cost 649 Argentine and 258 British lives. It was also the beginning of the end for the ‘Proceso’ dictatorship.

Invasion Day – April 2, 1982.

I recall the morning that Buenos Aires and the nation as a whole awoke to find that the Armed Forces had taken over the Malvinas (Falklands) from the British. It was an unseasonably cold and crisp day. Barely the start of South American autumn, but a sharp Patagonian wind had cleared away the clouds, chilled the air and left the sky a deep and limpid blue. It was as if the weather itself were announcing the advent of the series of events that would follow in the freezing climate of the sub-Antarctic islands.

But on that date, in Buenos Aires, it was a gorgeous, clear, cold and sunny day. I walked the streets of downtown to ‘test the waters’ before going in to work. I was general news editor and an editorial writer for the English-language Buenos Aires Herald at the time. Normally, I wouldn’t have been headed for work before mid-afternoon (when you work for a daily, you do the bulk of your actual writing at night, although you’re usually busy, one way or another, all day as well), but considering the top news of the day, I wanted to get an early start.

One of the first signs of reaction I noted was that Harrods, the emblematically English department store was absolutely festooned with sky-blue and white Argentine flags, dozens of them, the larger the better and no vestige of a Union Jack anywhere in sight. Furthermore, the store would, in short order, put out a press release reminding everyone that it had long since been bought out by Italian and other interests.

The large English-speaking and Anglo communities in Argentina had long thought of Harrods as an oasis of English popular culture on the posh Florida pedestrian street in the heart of the city. Opened in 1912, it was the first and only foreign branch ever founded by the famed London emporium, and although it became independent of its English parent store in the late 1940s, until the morning of April 2, 1982, it had remained a British icon in downtown Buenos Aires. Now, suddenly, it was demonstratively, almost ‘euphorically’ Argentine.

And a little further down the street, it would only be a matter of hours before the ever-traditional Franco-Inglesa pharmacy and fine perfume store would scratch the gold-lettered second half of its name off the windows and paint it over on its sign to become merely “the Franco”. Nor would these be the only victims of combined paranoia and anti-Anglo jingoism to suffer modification.

It was a Friday, but from early on, as people started finding out the news, it began to have a holiday feel. Perhaps, a better than holiday feel. People seemed excited but happy, smiling and nodding to each other on the street, stopping to chat about the news. And little by little, people began gravitating toward the main square of the city, Plaza de Mayo, where a spontaneous demonstration was taking shape, under the nervously watchful eyes of Federal Policemen whose number also began to climb as the day went on.

None of this was normal under the iron-handed government of the National Reorganization Process, or ‘Proceso’ as it was known for short. Gatherings had been banned since 1976, following the coup that brought the ‘Proceso’ to power, as was union activity, political parties, and any other kind of cultural group or association that might be construed as threatening to the military government. Of late, the ‘Proceso’ had become even more paranoid than usual. It was losing its grip and it knew it. So its reactions to political demonstrations that, little by little, were again beginning to rear their heads, had become increasingly severe and violent.

But today they were reading the crowds differently. There was no belligerence in those headed for the Plaza. There was only jubilation and rampant national sentiment. They were going there to celebrate, to congratulate the very dictators that had repressed them for seven long years, to thank them for taking back what British colonialism had usurped so long ago from Argentina’s sovereign territory. It was a far cry from the attitude of growing unrest that had been seething just beneath the surface and that, just that week, in the final days of March, had boiled over into unbridled violence.

Spare the Rod...

You can beat a dog to make it obey. Tie it up and beat it hard enough and it’ll cringe every time you draw near and try its best not to displease you in order not to be beaten. For a while, at least. Until it gets accustomed to the pain and violence and decides to bite back. And beating a dog will never make it loyal. It’ll only make it wary, terrified and, ultimately, mean. Show weakness, show the slightest sign of helplessness and you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn on you and tear your throat out. It’s a basic and primitive law of survival. It takes no human (or humane) sentiment into account. It is when all that exists is the power of brute force exercised by one over the position of weakness of another. It’s an almost baseless relationship that only stands on might and abuse, with no love lost between the parties involved and with each wanting what’s worst for the other. It is the tense “peace” and order of a prison, the ever-shaky standoff between life-long prisoner and jailer.

This was the relationship that Argentina’s military came to have with common society in the bad old days of the National Reorganization Process (1976-1983). At first, like a starved and frightened dog, society had cozy up to a new master and licked its hand, hoping for protection from the other one that it had chosen, but that was now starving and abusing it, the one that demanded loyalty and gave abuse in return. But it didn’t take long to find out that the 1976 coup was all about leaping from the skillet into the scorching fires of authoritarian hell.

The Armed Forces government’s top brass swaggered over the human and civil rights of the people like feudal lords, taking and doing whatever they wished and killing off those who stood in their way. The abusive practices of those who served them were as consummately vile as any that might invade your worst nightmares. Beatings with nightsticks and rifle butts, electric cattle prods applied to gums, genitals and other sensitive body parts, and water and suffocation torture of all kinds (wet submarine, dry submarine, waterboarding, etc.) were standard operating procedure to be applied to just about anyone questioned by military and security forces. And here the word anybody meant just that: anybody, at any time and practically at random.

But even worse things were done to the people who fell into the limbo of “the missing”: repeated rapes and beatings, the abuse of pregnant women by inserting electrodes into their bodies and torturing their unborn babies in the womb, bodily mutilation with blowtorches, hanging prisoners by their wrists or thumbs or ankles and beating them with clubs – in short, every kind of atrocious torment that a perverted mind could conjure up – all cowardly, all despicable. And then there were the other abuses and atrocities: extortion of the families of the “missing” in which they gave everything they had worked for to try and save a loved one that they would, nonetheless, never see again; pregnant political prisoners separated from their babies and murdered after giving birth in prison, their babies then being given over to an ad hoc “adoption agency” that provided children to barren friends of the regime; mere high school children jailed, tortured and murdered for protesting a hike in the price of the school bus ticket; truckloads of prisoners taken to remote sites, machine-gunned en masse and their bodies blown up with dynamite; prisoners drugged and pushed from military helicopters to their deaths in the River Plate or in the ocean; business people accused of subversion and jailed, their businesses confiscated and their personal properties snatched because their interests conflicted with those of the despots in power; so-called third-world clerics summarily executed for speaking out, for defending Christian ethics, for calling for an end to the madness, for ministering to the poor.

People were scared. People didn’t talk about what was going on. They pretended not to know. They looked away, as they might look away from a facility for the criminally insane, not wanting to imagine what went on in there, afraid that by looking they might make the madness spill out into the street and grab them, afraid that they themselves might end up “inside”. But although they “didn’t know”, they knew enough to warn their loved ones not to “get into anything”, not to “mess with politics”, not to look authority in the eye, to lower their eyes, to lower their heads, to ‘circulate’.

Breaking Point: The Jimmy Carter Era.

By 1982, the situation could no longer be ignored. With very occasional exceptions, the military had, by then, made just about everybody disappear that they planned to. There was no longer any “enemy” for them to pretend to be fighting. The “subversives” were all dead or gone or crushed beyond being any danger to the regime. The ‘Proceso’ now talked in the past tense about the “dirty war” it had supposedly had to fight in order to “save the Christian and Western world”. But its international image had been so tarnished by then that even the common folk back home could no longer pretend nothing had happened: International organizations were calling for an end to the regime and the advent of democratic elections. Human rights groups targeted the ‘Proceso’ as one of the bloodiest and most abusive regimes in the world. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo had been on major television news programs in the Unites States and Europe, calling for the “return alive” of their missing children and grandchildren. Renowned news columnists and writers had described the atrocities committed and called on their governments to censure the regime.

Four years of the Jimmy Carter Administration (1977-1981) in Washington had also made a major difference. After decades of US policy that took a hands-off approach to “friendly dictators”, President Carter imposed a foreign policy whose key tenet was the protection of human rights through diplomacy. The dichotomy of US foreign policy up to then had always been that while Washington preached democracy, rule of law and the Bill of Rights as basic inalienable human and civil rights at home, it applied a double standard elsewhere, as if to say that North Americans were just a little more human than the people who had to live under the heels of dictators’ boots in rightwing regimes that posed as front men for the US in its war on communism. Never in modern times had a US president emphasized as much as Jimmy Carter did the idea that US foreign policy should reflect the highest human ideals of the United States and Western democracy.

He named staunch human rights activist Patricia Murphy Derian to be his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs and she immediately took on the authoritarian regimes in places like Chile, Paraguay and Argentina, as well as in apartheid-era South Africa and elsewhere. President Carter was criticized by the right for overlooking human rights abuses in Korea, China, Iran and other Eastern countries but his concentration on cleaning up the human rights situation in Latin America and putting these countries on the road to democracy was clearly a question of starting in his own backyard and turning the Americas into a showcase for basic Early American ideals.

The Derian Factor.

Assistant Secretary Derian proved a tenacious defender of that policy and of human rights in general. In the case of Argentina, she called a spade a spade, openly accusing the regime of crimes against humanity and becoming instrumental in setting up an inspection mission that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IHRC) carried out in Argentina under authority from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1979. It was also in that year that she helped secure the release of Jacobo Timerman, owner and publisher of the center-left newspaper, La Opinión, who had been imprisoned and tortured after being falsely accused of helping launder leftwing terrorist extortion money. Her campaign to gain Timerman’s release helped catapult his case to the forefront of international interest and put such intense pressure on the Argentine military that they finally had to let him go. Although the regime showed its displeasure at having to do so by taking over Timerman’s paper, stealing his property and stripping him of his citizenship before letting him leave the country, his release still caused ultra-rightwing factions in the Army to accuse the junta of being soft on terrorism and to stage a military revolt in the interior of the country that was eventually put down, but not without loss of face and power for the leaders of the ‘Proceso’.

Assistant Secretary Derian’s actions so infuriated the Argentine military that they internally declared her their Public Enemy Number One and are even reported to have entertained plans to have her killed. (Not surprising, since this was how they had been handling the opposition of every color up to then, and they were clearly arrogant enough to think they could get away with it).

Weakening the military’s image still further, in 1980 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, an Argentine artist and human rights activist who was tortured and held for 14 months by the ‘Proceso’ before international outcry brought his release.

With Ms. Derian leading the action, President Carter slapped sanctions on Argentina for failing to heed his demands that human rights be respected, alienating the leaders of the ‘Proceso’, but at the same time drawing ever-increasing international media attention to what was going on, and making it impossible for the military to operate with the kind of impunity that they had early on after the coup. Suddenly, the ‘Proceso’ was high-profile and its image was abysmal.

This obviously weakened its position at home as well. You can’t ‘tie your dog up and beat it’ before the eyes of the whole world, because somebody bigger and stronger is almost bound to intervene and stop you – and perhaps hit you with your very own stick. Which was precisely what President Carter did, because one of the sanctions imposed was keeping the Argentine military from getting their hands on US arms if they were going to use them to repress their own people.

Just Call Me Pontius Massera.

Ms. Derian would remain a champion of human rights in Argentina long after she and Mr. Carter were out of office. When the respective military juntas were tried for human rights violations after democracy was restored, the former Assistant Secretary of State went to Buenos Aires to testify against them. One of the most chilling parts of her testimony had to do with a meeting she had with Admiral Emilio Massera to explain the Carter Administration’s policy to him.

Massera was a cynic and a bully. He was also apparently hopelessly obtuse if he thought he could pull the wool over the eyes of such a thorough investigator and such a brilliant intellectual as Patricia Derian. Or perhaps he was simply so arrogant that he thought he could convince her of whatever sort of spurious nonsense he made up.

At any rate, when Assistant Secretary Derian met with him on August 10, 1977 (when the worst human rights violations of the ‘Proceso’ were in full swing) and bluntly told him that Washington was aware of the abuses being perpetrated by the regime and that they would absolutely have a negative impact on relations with the United States if they didn’t stop immediately, Admiral Massera said that the Navy hadn’t tortured anyone. It was the Army and Air Force that did those things, he said.

Ms. Derian was flabbergasted by the denial. She stated that she was in possession of hundreds of reports from people tortured by naval officers. Moreover, she had reports from people within the Argentine Navy itself, as well as from within the Army and the Air Force. Massera again denied all participation, saying that he had made special efforts to keep union leaders safe after the coup and that this was why they were being held aboard a ship anchored off shore. (There were already reports by that time that Light and Power Union Leader Oscar Smith, for example, had been murdered and his body disposed of at the Naval Mechanics School, so the falsehood of his statements was almost laughable, had the cases not been so tragic).

Losing patience, Assistant Secretary Derian said that in one of the reports, she had seen a layout of the very building where she was meeting with Massera, and she added: “It’s possible that, as we speak, someone is being tortured on the floor below us.”

Then, she would be astonished as Massera broke into a broad leering grin, made a histrionic hand-washing gesture and said: “You remember what happened to Pontius Pilot, right?”

Ms. Derian would have to wait nearly three decades to receive the recognition she deserved for hobbling the dictatorship and very likely saving thousands more lives that would otherwise have been taken, but finally, in 2006, she was awarded the Order of the Liberator General San Martín, with the rank of Officer – the highest decoration granted by the Argentine government to foreign officials.

Enter Ronald Reagan.

Be that as it may, by the start of the South Atlantic War, the regime had already gotten chummy with Washington again, thanks to former actor and governor Ronald Reagan’s election win over Mr. Carter in 1981. Mr. Reagan had an old-time rightist approach to foreign policy and almost immediately sent his foreign policy architect, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to let the ‘Proceso’ leaders know that the Jimmy Carter era was stone cold dead and that from now on they would no longer have to fret about pesky human rights investigators out of Washington.

Dr. Kirkpatrick was a fervent anti-communist and the author of what came to be known as the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”, one of the main principles of which was the exact opposite of the Carter policy pinning US support to democratic government and, above all, respect for human rights.

The Kirkpatrick policy advocated Washington’s support of just about any kind of government, including harsh rightwing dictatorships, with the only prerequisite for membership in the Reagan Administration’s group of ‘friends’ being hard-line opposition to all things leftist. The ‘Proceso’ was, obviously, a shoo-in. It had been so tough on reds that it had wiped out every opponent that ever even dared to blush. And the ‘Proceso’ was more than willing to lend support to Reagan’s rightwing Contra guerrillas (freedom fighters as his administration dubbed them) in Central America.

The Kirkpatrick Doctrine had a side that was obviously ‘for general audiences’ who might find supporting perverse dictatorial regimes distasteful. The theory that supposedly made doing this ‘okay’ was that leftist regimes could never be turned toward democracy, whereas ‘allowing’ rightwing dictatorships to ‘help’ Washington in its war on communism would cement ties between them and the US and permit Washington to eventually give them a friendly nudge toward a US-style democratic system.

In theory, it almost sounded plausible, as espoused by the brilliant Dr. Kirkpatrick. But in fact, it didn’t always work. For instance, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, better known as the Shah of Iran, was brought to power as a rightwing dictator through a CIA plot called Operation Ajax that ended the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in the 1950s after his administration nationalized Anglo-US oil interests. Previously a figurehead king within a democratic system, the Shah became an absolute monarch with military backing. Although he protected US interests for three and a half decades and practically became a cult icon in the West, he never showed signs of being ‘nudged toward democracy’. On the contrary, his despotic policies and intolerance of dissent were the direct cause of the Iranian Revolution that brought Islamic extremist clerics to power in the late ‘70s, turning Iran into a bitter and dangerous enemy of the United States.

Nor was the definition of ‘rightwing’ always clear. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, for instance, was an Arab Socialist. And yet, because of his position as a bulwark against Iranian advances in the Middle East, he was seen as ‘a friendly’ by Washington. In addition to the billions upon billions of dollars that the US had already pumped into Iraq prior to the Reagan era, the Reagan Administration alone handed Saddam another 40 billion dollars in loans in the 1980s to help him prosecute his war with Iran – a war in which, according to some estimates, a million lives were lost. And in addition, during that same period, Washington sent Saddam billions in direct aid, basically to prevent him from forming any strong alliances with the Soviet Union. Undoing that diplomatic ‘marriage’ is still costing American lives and billions of dollars in US taxpayer money each year to this day.

The ‘Proceso’ was also seen as having certain strategic value in the war on communism with which the Reagan Administration seemed so thoroughly obsessed. And, according to some sources at the time, the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands played a role in certain US contingency plans.

But even President Reagan and Dr. Kirkpatrick couldn’t give the junta free rein to rekindle its “dirty war” in order to stem growing opposition to its permanence in power. With Jimmy Carter, a new ethical line had been drawn in the Americas and even Ronald Reagan couldn’t ignore it completely if he hoped to remain in office for eight years.

A Union Protest Turns Popular Riot.

Although the Armed Forces obviously already had their invasion of the islands well under way by the end of March, it was still a well-kept secret from the rest of the world, and particularly from the Argentine people, who had been tolerating the perversely repressive ‘Proceso’ for six long and harrowing years. The Carter years and international repudiation for the regime, despite Washington’s newfound love affair with it, had so undermined its image that Argentines were no longer willing to put up with its permanence in power and were clamoring for a political opening. And with the whole world now watching, the tactics the dictatorship had applied back in 1976 had been rendered out of the question.

Just four days before that crisp, sunny April 2^nd, when I had walked the downtown streets of Buenos Aires and watched people spontaneously gathering in Plaza de Mayo to celebrate the Malvinas takeover, I had also been out observing the scene in the heart of the city. And on that day, Tuesday, March 30, 1982, people had also gathered in the center of the capital city, not to celebrate but to protest against the ‘Proceso’.

The protest began as a general strike and mobilization called by the Peronist labor unions grouped in the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). The demonstration was commanded by the CGT’s firebrand leader, Saúl Ubaldini. The strike and mass protest were billed as a call for “peace, bread and jobs”. It was the most serious protest the military regime had had to face in its six years in power and it gravely challenged the dictatorship’s ability to continue to repress the tide of popular support for a return to democracy.

The Interior Ministry had banned the mass protest, claiming that it might have permitted a peaceful protest, but that the CGT had neglected to request the proper permit. The march, the government said, would not be allowed. But Saúl Ubaldini pushed ahead with his plans, claiming that the dictatorship had run its course, undermined by internal contradictions and reaching the point of collapse in the midst of an economic crisis that was starving the nation’s workers.

Emboldened by the CGT’s decision to forge ahead, other civil, political and social organizations joined the march. Despite an intimidating display of police and military power, the protest drew a crowd of some 50,000 workers, students and other young people. And these began to be joined by some of the passersby, who, inspired by the resolve of the marchers, decided that they too had had enough of the dictatorship and that the time had come to start bringing it down.

The regime panicked and ordered the protest crushed. Riot forces armed with tear gas, nightsticks and weapons loaded with rubber bullets, as well as their regulation arms, advanced on the crowds. Many people broke and ran, adding to the confusion, but significant numbers of grimly stubborn protestors stood their ground and clashed head-on with riot police, turning the wooden staves of their protest signs into clubs with which to return the blows they received, lobbing tear gas canisters back at the cops and converting trash dumpsters and cans into makeshift barricades, setting their contents ablaze. Riot-control detachments from the Federal Police Infantry Guard – under Army command since the coup – chased rioters that fled the Plaza down central side streets, using their riot shields to surround themselves and becoming a human battering ram, reminiscent of the Roman army’s tortoise maneuver, so that as the protestors mingled with the passersby on the streets, these too became fair game as the armored platoons ran roughshod over whomever wondered into their path. Office and shop workers took refuge in stores that remained open, but many had already lowered their security curtains to avoid damage. At the center of the protest, however, the direct confrontation continued, as well-organized squads of union and political activists attacked individual mounted police, pulling them from their mounts or even dragging their horses down, jerking the cops from their saddles amidst a barrage of kicks and blows.

And then something started happening that the police and military hadn’t counted on: white-collar workers in the surrounding office buildings started hurling anything they could lay their hands on from the windows and balconies – chucking out wastebaskets, paper weights, phonebooks, staplers, flower pots, anything heavy enough to do some damage – in a bid to injure or intimidate the riot squads and make them retreat.

Clearly, this was no longer a labor union protest, but a spontaneous outpouring of repudiation and hatred for the dictatorial regime. Skirmishes raged on for six hours, as rioters broke for the side streets, thus disbanding the solid police and military front that had been holding firm in the Plaza. When things grew quiet that night, the streets were littered with debris and small fires burned in the makeshift barricades that remained, giving off an eerie flickering glow and lending the usually civilized city a savage, dangerous atmosphere.

Nor was this the only protest: In Rosario, Mar del Plata, Neuquén and other cities in the interior, police and rioters clashed in similar demonstrations. In the Andean city of Mendoza, the protest and clashes between rioters and police ended in the killing of unionist Dalmiro Flores, sparking still further ill-feeling and unrest. Civil disobedience had burst from the box the military had kept it in for more than half a decade, and it clearly wasn’t going to be easy to put it back.

A Common Cause.

On April 2^nd, however, one never could have imagined that all of this had taken place just a few days earlier.

Now the square in front of Government House was teeming with well-wishers. Why such a radical change of mood? Because Argentina’s claim to the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands was an almost universal common cause among the country’s people. It was, in a word, Argentina’s “Alamo”, an issue about which there was no question: The Malvinas were Argentine and the British (who had held the archipelago since 1833), were trespassers there.

The ‘Proceso’ generals and admirals knew that if they could win the Malvinas back, it might well consolidate their political power and line the rest of the country up behind them at a time when the country’s tottering economy was making it increasingly difficult to maintain order. Their certainty of this was clearly bolstered by reassurances provided by Nicanor Costa Méndez, who became the ‘Proceso’ government’s Foreign Minister at the end of 1981. Dr. Costa Méndez was chief advisor to then-President Leopoldo Galtieri, who had taken over the reins from General Roberto Viola in what was basically a palace coup. General Galtieri probably entertained visions of becoming a popular authoritarian president. He retained control of the Army after ousting General Viola instead of naming a new Army chief as the previous ‘Proceso’ presidents had done, began talking about an eventual political opening and permitted limited dissent, all of this quite probably on the advice of Costa Méndez, who was a career diplomat.

General Galtieri gives the high sign to well-wishers on April 2, 1982

In the process of trying to legitimize the regime’s image, they had, of late, been courting international organizations in a bid to generate backing for their call for negotiations to end a century and half of British colonialism in the tiny, remote enclave located less than 300 miles off Argentine shores and, so the government argued, forming part of the nation’s continental shelf.

Dr. Costa Méndez was well-spoken in English and had apparently gained certain respect in both Washington and London. General Galtieri, for his part, seemed to make a hit with the Pentagon crowd. A tall, swaggering, tough-talking, blue-eyed hard drinker with a voice like gravel and a jaw like a lantern, he couldn’t help but remind more than a few military men of George Scott playing General George Patton. Between the two of them, General Galtieri and Dr. Costa Méndez had managed to get a tentative indication from Reagan’s Washington that the US might be willing to support a request from Argentina that Britain start thinking about giving the islands back.

But what now seems utterly delusional on the part of both men is their having convinced each other that the US would remain neutral in the face of an armed invasion of an ostensibly British territory, or that Britain had become such a second-rate power that it would permit a tin-pot South American dictatorship to take over one of its possessions without doing something about it. This seems clear, no matter how enthused Washington might have appeared about the possibility of setting up a US base on the islands once Britain had handed them over. Britain had never considered the Falklands of strategic importance, while the United States, in its Cold War with the Soviets, might well have – and was, in fact, strongly rumored to – as a sort of natural aircraft carrier in the South Atlantic. But neither did London consider negotiations to recognize Argentina’s claim to be a priority, and Dr. Costa Méndez’s British counterpart, Lord Carrington (and his eventual replacement, Francis Pym), made this clear to an increasingly irritated Costa Méndez. Britain probably would, someday, take a look at some kind of joint administration or even a British phase-out. Just not right now.

But the ‘Proceso’ needed it to happen right now, and if it wasn’t going to, they would make it happen. The first truly clear signal from Washington came once the invasion was practically under way, when General Alexander Haig, who was then US Secretary of State, told Galtieri’s government that if a conflict was in the offing, the Reagan Administration would, of course, side with Britain.

Glory and Disgrace.

Wars are almost always about politicians with veiled or not so veiled interests appealing to patriotic fervor in order to convince soldiers and sailors to march and sail off to battle and give their lives for the ‘higher cause of freedom and justice’. The ten-week South Atlantic War was no different. The Argentine military’s ever more tenuous grip on power and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s flagging level of public confidence were a lethal combination that kept either side from laying down their weapons and going back to the negotiating table under UN supervision. What was truly disgraceful about the war is the political subterfuge and petty interests that spawned it, by appealing to the highest sense of patriotism and ethics of the people of both countries.

What also must be separated from the political issues is how the war was prosecuted on the battlefield by both sides in the conflict.

The same Argentine Armed Forces that had repressed and murdered tens of thousand of its own compatriots, managed to take over the islands in a lightning invasion that was orchestrated in such a way as not to spill a drop of British blood. This mission was carried out so well that the only death on April 2 was that of Marine Lt. Commander Pedro Giachino, leader of the detachment under orders to take over the house of the British governor of the islands. He, an aide and a corpsman were cut down by British Royal Marine fire, when he and his men surrounded the governor’s house and ordered those inside to surrender. The corpsman managed to get himself and the two officers patched up but Commander Giachino succumbed to his wounds. The Royal Marines, meanwhile, hopelessly outnumbered, surrendered.

Officers and men on both sides would later have words of praise for each other’s performance. Reports from Britain would discuss the grit of Argentine soldiers in the field who despite being under-armed, under-clothed and underfed, fought hard, inflicted serious casualties on some of the best trained and best equipped troops anywhere. Argentine soldiers, for their part, would recall how they were better treated and cared for by their British captors than they had been by their own commanders, who had sent them to war with defective equipment, scant munitions, poor training and totally deficient rations.

The conditions of surrender were signed in an atmosphere of mutual respect and honor, and it was only when Argentine fighting men returned to the mainland that they would suffer the oblivion of the vanquished.

Surrendered arms on the ground at Port Stanley (Puerto Argentino)

Malvinas: Where the ‘Proceso’ Died.
Be that as it may, the war attained one major achievement: It spelled the beginning of the end for the National Reorganization Process. Gone from Plaza de Mayo were the fawning crowds of April 2, 1982. With the announcement of the mid-June surrender, the angry throngs of March 30 returned to the center of downtown Buenos Aires, pelting police and paramilitary units with rocks, coins, sticks, anything hard enough to draw blood as they clamored to reach the doors of Government House and kick them in. Rioting and skirmishes raged long into the night and fiery barricades flamed into the early morning hours and smoldered there as the sun came up on the wintery morning of Argentina’s discontent.

Galtieri was removed from office just as he had removed Viola, replaced by a junta that named General Reynaldo Bignone to immediately start guiding the country toward a democratic opening and presidential elections.

The war and the ‘Proceso’ were at an end, but the sense of loss and suffering that both wrought in Argentina continues even today, a quarter-century later.

©2009 by Dan Newland. All Rights Reserved by the Author