Respect is the main lesson of 'suds summit'

SAT., AUG 1, 2009 - 4:10 PM
Wisconsin State Journal
By DAVID COUPER

The "suds summit" is over.
After nearly two weeks of furor and national introspection, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with the professor and the cop.
The professor said: "We hit it off right from the beginning. When he's not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy."
The cop said: "What you had today was two gentlemen who agreed to disagree on a particular issue."
But two "gentlemen" two weeks ago had a major disagreement that ended up in the White House.
Was this the teaching moment in American race relations that many of us were hoping for, or was it something else? To me, this is more about class than race. And the real issue is whether the police have to keep calm under provocation and not use arrest as a way to try to gain respect from citizens.
In my first year as a police officer, a wise old sergeant gave me some good advice. I had exchanged heated words with a person I had stopped for a traffic violation. Afterward, the sergeant took me aside and told me: "David, it's our job to keep our cool when everyone else is losing theirs. That's what police do."
He also didn't believe that disrespecting the police, "contempt of cop," was something that should prompt an arrest.
His advice served me well during almost a decade patrolling high-crime, inner-city Minneapolis. And it stayed with me when I became chief of the Madison Police Department.
It was why, when I first came to Madison, I said my job was to build a department of police officers who were also "human behavior experts" -- police officers who were able to understand the problems police get themselves into.
Depending on who tells the story about what happened on the afternoon of July 16, it goes something like this: A black college professor returning home from vacation is unable to open his front door. He forces the door open and enters just as a suspicious neighbor calls police. A white police sergeant arrives and asks the homeowner for identification.
Heated words are exchanged inside the home. The professor is asked to step outside where he is arrested for disorderly conduct. He is handcuffed, taken to the police station, booked, photographed, and, about four hours later, charges are dropped and the professor is released.
In the inner city, this is not an unusual occurrence. What made this case different was that Henry Louis Gates is a Harvard professor. And what really made it different was Sgt. James Crowley feeling he had been disrespected.
Civil rights advocates say this proves the police are racially profiling. Police leaders say it has nothing to do with race and citizens should cooperate with police -- not insult them.
There are explanations, excuses and counter-charges from all sides.
But class and respect are the best explanations for what went wrong. It was a meeting between two men wanting respect in a society not conditioned to give it to them.
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield joked about wanting a "little respect," but this is no joking matter -- and Rodney didn't wear a badge and carry a gun.
And that's why the responsibility here is clearly and primarily on the police. They are the representatives of our government and the protectors of our Constitution. They are, and should be trained, to keep their cool because often citizens do not keep theirs.
Respect does not come from using either fear or force. Police earn the community's respect by staying calm -- even under a barrage of hostile and contemptible language.
This does not mean that police should no nothing when they are physically pushed or shoved. Gates did not lay his hands on Crowley nor push him. If he had, I might not be writing this.
President Obama may have spoken too quickly in calling the actions of the police "stupid." But the officer's action was unnecessary. This arrest should not have happened. Period.
If my old sergeant were still alive and had sat in on the "beer summit," he would have told them all to settle down. And as he was leaving, I am sure he would take Crowley aside and remind him that it's our job to keep our cool -- even when Harvard professors don't.
Couper, Blue Mounds, served as Madison police chief from 1972 to 1993. He is also a member of the Clarence Kailin Chapter of Veterans For Peace.

Health care rally coverage missing

MON., JUL 27, 2009 - 5:34 PM

Wisconsin State Journal

As a longtime State Journal subscriber I was disappointed that you did not give any coverage to the Saturday health care march and rally at the state Capitol.

There were about 1,000 people there with banners and signs, led by a brassy New Orleans-style band cakewalking up State Street.

U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin spoke out for a single-payer plan, as did people who thought they had decent insurance but had their claims for critical care denied. An emergency room doctor from UW Hospital described the plight of a newly diagnosed diabetic who couldn't afford his insulin.

When we are in a health care crisis, it confounds me that the State Journal chose to give front-page coverage to Civil War re-enactors at Camp Randall rather than efforts to change our health care delivery system that will affect everybody.

-- Richard Chamberlin, Monona

Richard is a member of the Clarence Kailin chapter of Veterans for Peace.

Why the Torture Photos Should Be Released - A Call to Vote No on War Funding Bill

Recently Senators Lieberman and Graham authored a horrendous addition to the 2009 War Supplemental bill. Their addition says "a photograph that was taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States" will not become public if "the disclosure of that photograph would endanger—(A) citizens of the United States; or(B) members of the Armed Forces or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States." The photograph has to be certified "endgangering" by the SecDef in consultation with the Chair of the JCS.

The New York Times recently ran an op-ed saying that Obama is right in calling for torture photos to not be released. The author, Philip Gourevitch, is also the co- author with Errol Morris of a book titiled: The Ballad of Abu Ghraib in which he interviews the military members who served at Abu Grhraib but says at the end that no photos are in the book because they can be found elsewhere. To support his op-ed he says, "They are mistaken. Just as it was a public service to release the Abu Ghraib photographs five years ago, Mr. Obama is right today to say we don't need more of them.

The president claims that a new round of images of prisoner abuse flashing around the globe would enflame America's enemies and endanger our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. There's no doubt about it: the policies that the photographs depict have already done terrible damage to America's cause.

But there's another critical consideration. Releasing additional photographs would not be telling us anything that we don't already know. We don't need to see a picture to know that American interrogators used waterboarding — a crime our military has prosecuted as torture for more than a century — when we can see former Vice President Dick Cheney taking credit for having people waterboarded."

What Gourevitch, Morris, and Obama fail to comprehend is that we must show our military members and society at large what is unacceptable not by separating out a few bad apples as Bush called them. Obama has committed similar mistakes in saying that "what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals" when describing the torture. According to Edward Tick, the author of War and the Soul, we "must expose atrocities as soon as possible to curb troops from giving free rein to their primal impulses."… "Most offenders in these modern massacres (My Lai, No Gun Ri, Abu Ghraib) have been ordinary people, not sadists or psychopaths." They are simply a product of their situation, what Rober Jay Lifton calls an "atrocity-producing situation." "When fear, threat, violence, loss, proximity to death, moral confusion, alienation, disbelief, immersion in horror, power, and control over others, and sheer exhaustion coincide long enough - and when the enemy has been sufficiently dehumanized – we are in an atrocity-producing situation." This situation allows normal people, not bad apples, not a small number of individuals, our brothers and sisters in the military to descend into horrific action sometimes condoned by their superiors. By singling out supposed bad apples, the behavior is not properly condoned. To prevent future actions we must show what has been done and reinforce that this is unacceptable behavior from a bad situation that can be committed by any person who is thrust into such a situation. To prevent them from committing it we must open our soul to the brutality and commit to showing that it is unacceptable no matter how bad of a position someone may be placed in.

The same New York Times op-ed shows those committing and documenting their acts thought it to be wrong but were never told it was wrong. "What were the pictures for? "Just to show what was going on," Ms. Harman said. To say, "Look, I have proof, you can't deny it." Sometimes she and her fellow guards posed alongside their abused wards, but most of her photos from Abu Ghraib have a purely documentary quality — solitary prisoners, stripped and manacled in their cells, stretched over bed frames or forced to balance on a box. Cpl. Charles Graner, the M.P. in charge of the night shift on the intelligence block that fall, also took photographs. And Corporal Graner, too, spoke of his snapshots as a form of "proof." He showed the pictures to his superior officers, medics, lawyers.

Later, he told Army investigators how he had routinely beat up prisoners for interrogators, or kept them up all night, making them crawl naked back and forth across the floor. "Was all this stuff wrong?" he said. "Yeah." But his point was that it was no secret. He kept getting praised for his work."

In reading Tick's book it is clear that as a nation if we are to reconcile our conscience we must acknowledge wrongdoing and talk about it instead of hiding it and placing blame on individuals. By adding such a ridiculous earmark to the war funding bill, Sen. Lieberman and Graham are harming our nation. The request by the ACLU for the photos asks for the investigative files for the photos not just the photo itself deflating Gourevitch's argument that "Photographs cannot show us a chain of command, or Washington decision making. Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation." There is an old saying that the truth shall set us free. If we are truly a beacon of what the world should be we should release torture photos and work for peace and prosperity instead of just talking about it while doing the complete opposite.

There are many other reasons to oppose the 2009 War Supplemental, but including legislation banning the release of torture photos is important enough by itself to call for a vote against it.

Todd Dennis is a U.S. Submarine Service veteran, a board member of the Clarence Kailin Chapter of Veterans For Peace and the President of the Madison Chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He is currently an outreach staff member at the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice. He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire.

Obama's letting Bush team decide when to end wars

Daryl is a member of the Clarence Kailin Chapter of Veterans for Peace

Obama's letting Bush team decide when to end wars
The Capital Times
6/06/2009 7:01 am

Dear Editor: Perpetual war.It seems there was a bunch of neo-cons in the Bush bunch that believed we should have this -- I suppose for the war profits that would go to their friends. Americans rose up to definitively reject the present wars, let alone an infinite series of successors, by electing Barack Obama president-- who as a candidate promised to get us out by 2010 at the latest.

But President Obama retained a lot of the Bush team: the secretary of defense and all the generals leading the wars, and he appointed a hawkish secretary of state. It appears the hawkish advisers have persuaded him to at least let them squawk about 10-year wars, and to expand the Afghan war into Pakistan and put 20,000 more troops there. As someone who strongly supported Mr. Obama, I am very distressed at the direction in which he seems to be going. I would urge him to force Gen. George Casey to disown his remarks about a 10-year war in Iraq or fire him if he will not. He should also consider replacing any other general who will not support his policies.

Lastly, I would strongly urge him to state publicly and unequivocally that he intends to remove all troops and bases from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan as soon as possible.

Daryl Sherman, Madison

Another story 21- by David Giffey

Each year Memorial Day brings forth speeches, editorials, essays, poems, songs, and other attempts by survivors and non-participants to comprehend and justify war. The libraries of war songs and stories grow over time in inverse proportion to our collective memory of the harsh realities of death, destruction, and disruption that are the essence of war.

Fading memories seem unable to bear what really happened.

Was that true for my grandfather? I can only speculate, born 15 years, as I was, after grandpa died in 1926.

His first name was Herman. Information about him is limited but compelling, as collected by my brother, our family’s faithful historian.

Grandpa’s obituary, published under the headline “Veteran is Buried Tues.,” tells many stories. He died in 1926 at a son’s house in the Town of Springvale, Fond du Lac County, five weeks after suffering a stroke on his way home from the national Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) convention. He was 77.

What was the GAR? Grandpa’s obituary didn’t describe the GAR, a very political fraternal organization of veterans of the Union Army who served in the Civil War. The GAR, similar to mainstream veterans’ groups today, was so influential after its founding in 1866, one year after the Civil War ended, that no Republican was nominated to the presidency without GAR endorsement until 1908.

The obituary continues: “The deceased was born in a log cabin in Oct. 22, 1849 near West Bend.” Wait a minute! If he was born in 1849, how could he have been a Union soldier?

In the next paragraph we learn: “Mr. Giffey’s service in the war was twice refused because of his youth. The first time he enlisted he got to Milwaukee and the second time he was returned from St. Louis. Finally, at the age of 14, he was accepted as a drummer boy. He celebrated his 15th birthday at Appomattox Courthouse (Virginia), where he was on duty. He was a member of Co. I, 17th Wisconsin Volunteers. He participated in Sherman’s march to the sea, and was imprisoned in the Libby prison (Richmond, Virginia) for two months. He was wounded in the leg and captured at the battle of Wilcox Ridge. This wound caused him to limp the rest of his life, and he carried a cane during his last years.”

My brother’s research indicates that our great-grandmother signed a consent form stipulating that her son was 17 years old when, in fact, he wasn’t even 15. She probably received $200 or $300 as a “substitute fee” paid by a conscripted person prosperous enough to pay the fee and avoid military service. That fee could be compared to deferments enjoyed by college students during the Vietnam War. Wealth and military service have long been incompatible.

What could motivate a teenager to so eagerly march off to probable death? Did Herman see himself as freeing the slaves? I doubt it. Probably, as my brother suggested, he was tired of milking cows and the Union army needed bodies.

One hundred years after my grandfather was discharged from service, I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. In the 43 years since I returned from that war, I’ve puzzled over my motives as well. A burning desire to sacrifice myself in order to “keep America free” never entered my thoughts. America wasn’t endangered, as we have learned, by that civil war in Southeast Asia. I went to war under orders. The fact that my name isn’t among the 1.3 million Americans killed outright in wars since 1775 is a matter of pure luck. So, while my heart is emptied at Memorial Day each year at the thought of loved ones grieving for their lost soldiers, I can’t restrain myself from asking: Why war?

With that question in mind, we embarked on another walk last Saturday along part of Highway 14. It was the 140th time since the beginning of the current war in Iraq six years ago that I’ve walked along the road carrying a sign saying “Peace.” The day was pleasant, calm and cloudless. Most people passing by ignored us. A few waved and gave us the peace sign. Fewer still were hostile and gave us half of the peace sign.

Two days later during Memorial Day programs in two River Valley schools I listened to the solemn recitation of hundreds of names of local veterans now dead. The roll calls were long and growing longer.

I’ve heard the term “Nobody wants war” while observing citizens near and far embrace war after war. And I’ve also observed, with wonder, how the word “peace” elicits angry responses. If I could talk to my grandfather, I’d tell him that I think war isn’t inevitable, that peace is attainable and not just another story.

David Giffey is the editor of Long Shadows: Veterans’ Paths to Peace.

A tidal wave of consequences from war

Wisconsin State Journal

SAT., MAY 23, 2009 - 12:56 PM

By FRANCES WIEDENHOEFT

It recently occurred to me -- abruptly -- that it is 2009.

I am home again, and America has been at war in Iraq for six years.

America has been in Afghanistan for eight years to help stabilize the country and oust the terrorists who are becoming more obscure with each passing week.

I have been home from Iraq for a year, but this return has been a gradual one. The distraction of the previous year left me feeling weak and unavailable to those I love.

One of many tools I have been using to help clear my mind of the debris of my involvement in six years of war is a specific type of therapy at the Veterans Administration mental health clinic. The therapy is useful and helping me. But initially, I was quite skeptical.

The underlying principal of the therapy, as I understand it, is to confront and resolve our internal moral conflicts related to the war. It was difficult for me to grasp how this would work, because I believe that the fundamental nature of war is a moral conflict.

Our American wars, cynics aside, have been fought at least in principle to defend or save a group of people, except that to save this group of people we need to kill another group of people.

To those of us down on the ground, the picture becomes muddled, and our hearts and souls are the casualties. It doesn't surprise me that so many soldiers are committing suicide. It is a testament to the strength of our soldiers and their families that more are not doing so.

The fundamental moral conflict of war to each individual involved is that killing is meant to be disturbing, horrifying to the human soul. Killing the enemy can be intellectually justified, but war is not discreet, and we witness daily, hourly, the civilian deaths, women, children, elders.

Everyone intimately involved in the process, killing, saving lives, is wounded in ways that do not heal. This is the essence of the human cost of war on our soldiers. These moral conflicts are irresolvable, and not easy to make peace with.

So what do we, as a nation, do?

We should take the instrument of war from our national tool bag only as an absolute last resort, after all other measures have been exhausted, and with brutal appraisal of the human cost, including our own soldiers' psyches.

Fortunately, I have the enduring support of family and community, and the benefit of friendship with older veterans of previous conflicts who have generously shared their experience and shown by example that we can learn to live with our ghosts and demons, and have a full life.

We return and try to pass on this tiny bit of hard-earned truth, that once we resort to war we have unleashed a tidal wave of consequences, most unintended, with damage that can't be undone.

We, the veterans, can be a voice, supported by experience, adamantly maintaining the use of war only as a last resort, and not as the primary means to carry out national policy.

(In memory of Sid Podell)

Frances Wiedenhoeft is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve. She served in Desert Storm 1991, Afghanistan 2003, and Iraq 2007-2008. When not on active duty she works as a nurse anesthetist at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, enjoys time with her daughter and grandsons, and is active in Chapter 25 Veterans for Peace, and veterans groups to support peace, justice, and the welfare of our returning service members.

Following Conscience Should Not Be Punished, Deserves Support

Op-ed submission to my local paper, The Leader Telegram. They never published it...

In Saturday’s paper you ran an AP article saying that Army Reserve member Kristoffer Walker who went AWOL had “received his punishment” as though he was due punishment for following his conscience. This train of thought leads to people blindly following orders which we learned from the Nuremberg trials is not how military personnel should act. His punishment shows that the U.S. military condemns the act of not blindly following orders which is wrong. After his superiors failed to advance his request for a transfer out of Iraq, Kristoffer made the difficult choice to follow his conscience.

By doing so, Kristoffer showed that he had considered the actions he would be taking by redeploying in support an illegal and immoral war of aggression which has been condemned by just war theory. His act of conscience was not the first and will not be the last as the U.S. seems committed to occupy Iraq and deny the Iraqi people self-determination until 2012 if not longer. Kristoffer joins a group of military members and veterans who say that we must act as our conscience directs and not blindly commit acts.

As a former military member, whose conscience was deeply troubled when the invasion and occupation of Iraq began near the end of my military service, I support Kristoffer and others like Matthis Chiroux. When I was in the military there were no public refusals to deploy and I felt alone to be contemplating such issues. Kristoffer is not alone today as there are thousands who have gone AWOL, deserted, or otherwise followed their conscience in opposition to this illegal occupation. In support of Matthis, I am attending his court martial for refusing an Inactive Ready Reserve call-up from the Army last year in St. Louis on Tuesday and I urge others to support our military members who are strong enough to follow their conscience.

Todd E. Dennis

U.S. Navy 1997-2003

Eleva, WI