WAR CRIMES: Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.

Preserved from today's headlines:

On opposite poles: two Mormons on torture

Preserved from the Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_12239925?source=most_viewed
Updated:04/27/2009 06:08:52 PM MDT


Just weeks into the war in Iraq, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley said the conflict could be justified as an effort to defend liberty and depose a dictator.

God would not hold soldiers responsible "as agents of their government in carrying forward that which they are legally obligated to do."

But, like church leaders before him, he said nothing about torture.

Into that gap, two faithful Mormons -- an interrogator and a government attorney -- reached very different conclusions of conscience:

Long before Hinckley spoke, Justice Department attorney Jay Bybee signed the infamous memo outlining a 10-step checklist of horrors that ended with making al Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed think they were drowning -- a total of 266 times.

Just five months after that conference talk, Army interrogator Alyssa Peterson killed herself after refusing to use the degrading techniques Bybee endorsed on prisoners at her air base in Tal Afar.

Since President Barack Obama released four Justice Department memos detailing this country's post-9/11 descent into the heart of darkness, Peterson and Bybee's stories have been spliced and splashed about the blogosphere, in newspapers and on cable. Along with the two CIA psychologists known around the office as the "Mormon Mafia," they're a curiosity: Members of the same faith who arrived at opposing extremes of the torture debate with very different results.

For his good soldiering, Bybee got a tenured post on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

For her conscientious objecting, Peterson was reprimanded and relegated to grunt work.

Six years on, it's easy to second-guess. The day after the twin towers fell, we all wanted revenge. America was consumed by the kind of xenophobic blood lust that led our grandparents to round up Japanese-Americans and deposit them in detention camps. But 60 years later, we were supposed to have learned from our mistakes.


RIGHT ASCENSION TAKES A STAND

I have heard for years Mormon leaders say "God would not hold soldiers responsible as agents of their government in carrying forward that which they are legally obligated to do." God, however, does not rationalize as mankind when it comes to the distinctions of legal and ethical.

When a soldier gets an order from an officer, whether that officer's order is legal, illegal, good, bad, self-defense, or offensive, the order is an abstraction, an idea. When the soldier does the order, it becomes factual history.

Shakespeare's historical chronicle Henry V features in Act IV an interesting discussion on this subject. The King in disguise wanders through his the night before the Battle of Agincourt and gets into this philosophical discussion

WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

KING HENRY V
So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the
imputation of his wickedness by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a
servant, under his master's command transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in
many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant's
damnation:

but this is not so: the king is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death, when they purpose their services.

Besides, there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers: some peradventure have on them the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder; some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery.

Now, if these men have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God: war is his beadle, war is vengeance; so that here men are punished for before-breach of the king's laws in now the king's quarrel: where they feared the death, they have borne life away; and where they would be safe, they perish: then if they die unprovided, no more is the king guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited.

Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained: and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him
outlive that day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.

WILLIAMS
'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head, the king is not to answer it.

One wishes George W. Bush had such a roundness of style. Oh well. As Sam Dodworth once observed, when he confronted his wife's lover: "This is not Shakespeare. We don't speak in blank verse any more." Even so, there is a certain amount of rationalization in both sides here. However, one should never confuse the appearance of things with the essence of things.


THE CALL TO ACTION

Congress and the Obama Adminstration need to get out of denial. The justice department and the Courts at the Hague should punish everyone that committed crimes against humanity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.