Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Taking responsibility in Haditha

Cover-up is a dirty thing. But that has been the Bush administration’s MO for much of its tenure in executive branch.

In any case, we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s come to this, given that those of us who opposed this war from the beginning questioned the wisdom of our acting as an occupying force. But that is where we are now and that, at base, is the genesis of the Haditha killings.

As The New York Times writes:

Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists’ inquiries forced a more honest review.

The president now promises transparency and accountability, but there is no doubt that when the smoke clears the people who led us into this war and created a culture in which international norms could easily be flouted will remain in their posts.

And, as the Times writes:

It should not surprise anyone that this war — launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results — is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

From My Lai to Haditha

Derrick Z. Jackson makes the connection between the Haditha killings and the other, more recent actions of the military in Iraq. The military is investigating, so it is still too early to cast blame, but it does appear that there has been a patter of abuse on our part caused by mix of anger, exhaustion and the dehumanizing attitude of the men at the top of the military food chain.

Jackson puts it this way in today’s Boston Globe:

No one incident adds up to the single atrocity of My Lai, where US soldiers killed up to 500 Vietnamese civilians. But the mentality appears identical. American soldiers are again in an aimless war, aiming in the end at innocent targets.

A huge part of the problem is that America never did learn its lessons from My Lai. Even though the mere utterance of My Lai stiffens the back of anyone who remembers it, there was, in the end, virtually no punishment for the killings. The only soldier convicted, Lieutenant William Calley, had his sentence reduced to relative insignificance by President Nixon, and was released after three years of house arrest. He went on to sell jewelry in Georgia.

The same pattern has emerged in Iraq. The abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib has resulted in sentences almost exclusively for the grunts, with commanding officers escaping subpoenas and trials. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says over and over how he takes responsibility, without showing any sign of how he has. Bush has handed out medals to top officials of the occupation. The president should indeed be troubled. He should be troubled that the Vietnam syndrome is kicking Iraqi civilians in the teeth and his legacy down the staircase of infamy.

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Our gay-bashing president

The president and his conservative base are hoping to write discrimination into the constitution. The New York Times reports today that the president will support a constitutional amendment that “would prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages.” I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor it.

Here are the links to my columns on the issue:

And I’ll quote with something from the Times:

“This is fundamentally both a civil rights and religious freedom issue and the president’s position of supporting amending the constitution is just dead wrong,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “This is simply to give ammunition to the so-called religious right just to show that the president is still with them.”

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.