"I'm not welcome there.
People there don't look at the fact
that I knew right from wrong," he said.
"They look at the fact that I
put an Iraqi before an American."
- Joseph M. Darby, the American soldier who reported the sexual humiliation of Iraqis held prisoner at Abu Ghraib by U.S. troops in Baghdad, commenting on how he is treated by his hometown folk and some members of his family.
The reason for including this here (the article is below) is that it shows very succinctly a basic principle of Constitutional law. It's about how people see things, down deep.
Different people, different views, down deep.
There were people in Germany, Poland, France, the Netherlands, and, no doubt, other countries, who hid out Jews during the Hitler regime. Righteous gentiles, the government of Israel calls them and has a monument to them, Yad Vashem. Few in number, they saw the wrongness of Hitler and mustered the courage to do something about it. We don't hear about the righteous ones who were shot or gassed.
Darby did the right thing. A fellow soldier passed him a diskette containing images. Among the images were the disturbing ones. Darby turned the offending photos over to the Criminal Investigation Division. The result was splayed over the front pages of the world and showed us up for the people we are, no better, and no worse, than people everywhere. Sinners. Evildoers, George W.
The thing is we don't like to admit this. It undermines our faith. In ourself.
Darby, however, is like the people who hid out Anne Frank in Amsterdam in violation of the law. I know, you can't run a train if everyone gets to steer, but we need more people like those who hid out Anne Frank and blew the whistle on us at Abu Ghraib.
The price, unfortunately, for getting caught is to be taken out and shot. Darby's fellow soldiers were apparently out to do him in. He had to sleep with a .45. They had to smuggle him out of the compound rolled in a carpet.
We would say he did the right thing. Good for the prisoners, good for the country. Weed out the miscreants who do us dirty, what the big organizations like to claim is only a few bad apples. People are people and apples are apples. People aren't apples. Some get it and some don't. Darby got it.
Some of his neighbors and family don't get it. They read the same facts as being disloyal to Americans. Maybe there's a higher God than Americans, although I wouldn't try telling that to the Americans. Has Rumsfeld given Darby a medal of courage? A medal of honor? Has anyone else?
Why not, I wonder?
The man is the tallest American of all, a man who, like Gary Cooper standing up to evildoers at the O.K. Corral, triumphed and saved the country. Acting alone. No support. Saw what was wrong and did the right thing. And this country lets Darby go it alone. This is a shame.
Darby's fellow townsmen see him as favoring Iraqis over Americans. Darby sees his actions as knowing the difference between right and wrong. He was never taught to treat prisoners like that. He was taught he must disobey illegal orders, if ordered. He did the right thing and is now paying the price, a price he must've anticipated. He slept with a .45. A man with no organizational protection, until smuggled out and furloughed, at long last.
I say Darby is a hero. My hero of the war. He showed us what it is to be a good American. America at its best.
But others see it differently. He did wrong. He supported Iraqis over Americans.
Are Americans better than Iraqis?
Do Iraqis deserve inhumane treatment because they're Iraqis and are fighting both with each other and with us because they don't want us interfering in their power struggles.
When a person becomes an enemy, is he less human? Are you willing to apply your answer to justify whatever treatment that entails when an American is captured by an enemy? Do you think the Americans who were held and tortured at the Hanoi Hilton, such as Sen. John McCain, were allowed to be treated inhumanely and without respect because, after all, they were the enemy to the North Vietnamese?
If we can look down on our prisoners, why can't the enemy?
This is why even in war, especially in war, we have codes of humane treatment of the enemy. Chivalric codes in the days of yore, the Geneva Conventions today.
But Pres. Bush and his White House law office has long opposed the rules prohibiting us from torturing and otherwise mistreating our prisoners. We spirit them around the world to places where they can be physically tortured. We only torture their minds, as though this is not as bad. Let's see George W. trussed up in a woman's bra and panties and held in isolation except when mocked by guards and interrogators.
This is not American.
It's not right.
It's also not favoring Americans over Iraqis.
It's favoring Americans as Americans.
We don't want to lower ourselves to the moral equivalent of the Gestapo or the S.S. or the North Vietnamese.
What good is it to win a war but to lose our soul?
This is what happens when you don't look or turn a blind eye.
The fact is that our military is more aware of this than most of us are. Military lawyers have fought the Bush Administration, its Justice Department, tooth and nail over the mistreatment of prisoners. Why is that, I wonder. Perhaps its because our military knows full well that it goes into harms way every day of the year, and risks a shoot-down over hostile territory, and it's almost all hostile where they go, and they don't want to hear their captors saying, "We're only doing what you do."
We need to be better than our enemy, otherwise we're no better than our enemy, or maybe even worse, which is Un-American.
Even at the risk of seeming to treat the enemy better than we treat Americans, for this is surely a false view.
