Bruce Perens is a noted Open-Source advocate, former employee of Pixar Animation, compelling writer, and noted programmer. He spoke a few years ago at the annual convention for the Utah State University Free Software and Linux User’s Group. Well, OK, calling it a convention when it only involved a few dozen people is a bit of a stretch.
Anyway, I was impressed by his ideas, though he’s definitely a better writer than presenter. In person, he’s actually a bit… what’s the best description… non-charismatic. But he’s been a seminal influence in the Free and Open-Source software communities, and his opinions have a great deal of respect for being on-target. Over the last few years, it seems his attention has been largely focussed on the legal issues related to free software, and broadening more and more into over-arching issues of freedom in the U.S. and abroad. He released the piece below in the early-morning hours today. Do you think he’s right?
Why Our Boys Tortured and Murdered Prisoners
Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com>American GIs have tortured and murdered prisoners in Iraq. How could Americans have done this? Because we showed our GIs, by our example, that the rules have changed, that this isn’t the America they knew.
We started by showing them their votes wouldn’t be counted. Problems with ballots in Florida, the state governed by Mr. Bush’s brother, were severe enough to put in doubt which candidate won the election. Studies commissioned by two different newspapers concluded that Mr. Gore should have been declared the winner.
We showed them that our courts were biased. When the Supreme Court had to rule upon the failed election, the vote of the judges was divided upon political party lines.
We showed them that they’d lay their lives down for a lie. Saddam Hussein was a monster. But the weapons of mass destruction that Mr. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq still haven’t been found. And there doesn’t seem to be any connection between Iraq and 9/11. Ex Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill reports that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11 and the election.
We showed them that our leaders embrace our enemies. George Bush Senior’s Carlyle Group handled the bin Laden family’s investments. Days after 9/11, while U.S. airspace was still closed to regular citizens, private jets sanctioned by the Bush administration evacuated 140 high-ranking Saudi Arabians, including the bin Laden family, from the United States. In 1983, while the U.S. was still assisting the dictator, Donald Rumsfeld was photographed shaking hands with Saadam Hussein.
We showed them that the White House was run for private financial gain. Vice President Cheney’s Haliburton Company was made the prime contractor for the tremendous project to rehabilitate Iraq. Mr. Bush didn’t even want to put this contract out for competitive bid. Oilman Bush maintained close connections with the fraudulent Enron executives and allowed them to directly set American energy policy.
We showed them that separation of church and state did not exist. The ban on stem-cell research, the ban on partial-birth abortion when the mother’s health would be at risk from continuation of the pregnancy, and the furor over same-sex marriage has shown that many states and the federal government still allow religion to drive civil law.
We showed them that America had become intolerant, and that our priorities were not with our soldiers in Iraq. While our boys were dying in Iraq and the torture had already started, we preferred to concern ourselves with a fit of national prudery over the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast on television.
We showed them that civil liberties had been erased. The draconian PATRIOT act allows Americans to be jailed without any charges, without the right to confront witnesses against them, and they can be kept in jail indefinitely without a trail. It legalizes search and seizure without probable cause, denies the accused’s right to legal counsel, and restricts the right to free speech.
We Americans showed our boys that all of the things we held sacred about The Land of The Free were dead. Should it then have been any surprise that, following our example, their actions would not be unlike those of Nazi death-camp guards?
Mr. Bush is responsible. It is the social changes of the Bush administration, not Mr. Rumsfeld’s supervision of the Armed Forces, that set the context for the torture and murders.
We can prevent more torture and murder by showing our boys that America is not a lie. To do so, we must reverse the damage that Mr. Bush has done to our nation. The first step upon that path is to vote him out of office.
Bruce Perens
The master version of this editorial is at http://perens.com/Articles/WhyOurBoys.html Please check that location for the most recent version.
You may re-publish this editorial. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion. Most recent edit date: Mon May 10 14:31:20 UTC 2004
More discussion on slashdot
He posted this as a journal entry on Slashdot here
—
Matthew P. Barnson
After re-reading and thinking…
Sorry to reply to myself so much today, but after reading & thinking about this posting, I’ve realized I don’t agree with much of it. Will post more later.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Not Agreeing Too Much
Here’s why I don’t agree: because he’s using the incident to mouth off about larger issues that have, in my opinion, no direct corollary.
Bruce has most likely never served and thus never gone through basic training, officer candidate school, etc.
Our soldiers aren’t 34 year-old state military representatives with master’s degrees. They are trained killers.
Planes smashed into the World Trade Center. You get sent oversees to hunt down the killers in Afghanistan. You get redeployed to Iraq. You get put on a range detail for months. You live in constant fear of a car bomb while working the check point every morning. There is conflicting news on the war front about a return home. You capture some Iraqi prisoners. They start mouthing off to you. You’ve been drinking.
Not that any situational description is correct, and not that any formal report will accurately capture the soldiers’ frame of mind, but by attributing the torture to some highbrow constitutional and civic-oriented mantra, Bruce shows he has never hung out with Marines in a bar.
Get In Groove, Sammy G
I Kill People For A Living
My father-in-law had an excellent response when people would ask him what his profession was:
One might think it’s just funny, but it’s not. It’s serious. In the Army, you are either in the business of killing people, or in support services for people to kill other people. And either way, you’re trained in both how to do it, and, with few exceptions, you possess the required mindset to casually kill a perceived enemy. It’s neither bad nor good: it’s simply a requirement to be an effective soldier.
When I look at the pictures of the Iraqi hostages, and the grinning noncom female officer waving to the camera, I can visualize the situation. Mostly National Guard and Reservists, these MP’s didn’t have training in what is and is not acceptable under the Geneva Conventions. They were doing what they thought they needed to do to the enemy to get answers. When you’re trained to kill, anything that leaves the enemy alive seems less serious than that. Why would someone pose for a picture like that? Because when you’re hanging out in the barracks, they’d probably be good for a laugh.
And the ones that die are just more collateral damage. It’s just a part of the war.
I don’t totally agree with the mindset, but I can understand it. In a small part, however, it does seem to be Bush’s fault. We are holding prisoners in Cuba right now that are listed as “unlawful combatants” — despite that they are, in truth, prisoners of war, by labelling them Unlawful Combatants, the U.S. can refuse to treat them according to Geneva Conventions for POW’s, including blaring loud music at them day and night, among other abuses. I think the overall effect of these incidents will be to focus attention on adherence to the Conventions, and we’ll have to get all our collective ducks in a row over it.
But overall, I think Bruce, much as I love his writings on open-source software, and his advocacy for free speech rights in code, is pushing an agenda with his piece, rather than seeing things as they really are.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
He’s stretching
I agree with the earlier points: Bruce is trying to make a point against Bush, and he’s trying to tie it to the prisoners abuse in Iraq, but the connection doesn’t fit. Matt made a good point about the National Guard being untrained, but I think they’re a little bit PO-ed at the gov’t as well.
When you sign up for the reserves, it’s pushed as 1 weekend a month and 2 weeks a year. You know in the back of your mind that you’re now the property of the guard, but for a long time, it was rare that you got called up. Now, we have guardsmen pulling over 1 year shifts in the desert in Iraq. I don’t know about you, but even I would have some serious lapses in judgement if I were in such a situation.
The problem is that someone higher up needed to lay down the law and prevent this, but that didn’t happen. Unfortunately, those way high up will find someone not so high up to take the fall.
As for Bruce’s points, we could go back to Clinton or Kennedy or Eisenhower or any political power and see the same things he refers to. Bush has done some scary things, and I’m seriously considering not voting for him. But I can’t remember in my life anyone I’ve really supported as a candidate.
Perot? 🙂
As the Beastie Boys said in “Skills To Pay The Bills:”
My $.02
Weed
The last president I really liked…
The last president I really remember liking was Ronald Reagan.
Why?
He had a really cool last name, he talked like a very nice man, and my parents liked him. I was 7 when he was voted in, and 15 when his running mate was up for his turn (GW Bush Sr.). I supported GW Bush Sr., of course, being from Republican upbringing, but started to question his judgement, particularly at a time when I wrote a song called “So Far Away” about people I knew who were in Iraq for the first Gulf War. The lyrics went like this:
A child cries in the night For a war she can’t fight And a daddy Who’s in the field.
She sits alone in the dark clutching her broken heart Through the storm Turned to a shield.
So far away Can he feel her love? So far away When the push turned to shove Being so far away Does she know why he’s there? So far away Does he know that she cares?
(Quick segue from 4/4 to 6/4 time)
{CHORUS} Cry for your mothers, your fathers Your sisters and brothers Your sons and your daughters Who are so far away.
Cry to the angels Away in the heavens Who can’t even hear you They’re so far away {END CHORUS}
(Segue to a martial beat) Just keep holding on For the war must be won Don’t fight a war here at home
The fires still burn Will we ever learn That together we’re never alone?
{CHORUS AD NAUSEUM}
— Matthew P. Barnson
The problem with arguments like these..
You always hear.. “we did this and we did that”, and therefore, this happened.
For instance: I’ve actually heard people say, “Well, America had it coming” regarding 9/11.
No, we didn’t. A wacked out guy got other wacked out guys to kill people who had nothing to do with it.
Again, this guy is trying to say that because og poltics, these people tortured iraqi prisoners, almost as a political statement? No.. these people got a bit power-mad, and took out their frustrations on people who didn’t deserve it.
Individual choice, thats all Im saying
…
meh.
hm
While I agree with all of Bruce’s points on their own merit (i.e. all that stuff has in fact happened), I don’t think they had any direct effect on the torture of Iraqi prisoners.
The simple fact, as Sam pointed out, is that our military encourages that type of behavior. They reward people for being MORE aggressive, for thinking less and acting more. The people committing the torture probably had no idea that 90% of the prisoners were arrested as a “mistake” (the number released by the Red Cross this morning), and many of them probably thought that they were torturing people directly responsible for 9/11.
While I still blame Rumsfeld, because he’s smart enough to know better and almost certainly allowed this behavior to continue, I think the greatest blame lies with our military philosophy itself. Instead of training soldiers to think for themselves and respect human life, we’re creating brainless killing machines.
— Ben Schuman Mad, Mad Tenor
Ben Ben Ben
Ben,
Be careful of the mass generalization here…you know as well as I do that the army doesn’t manufacture brainless killing machines. The Army manufactures soldiers who are trained killers who obey the orders of their commanding officers. If there had been a commanding officer who had stood up for the prisoners’ rights in Iraq, then the abuse wouldn’t have taken place.
My wife was in the Air National guard, and she says that they teach you from day one that you follows your commanding officers’ orders UNLESS THEY VIOLATE A KNOWN RULE. However, peer pressure probably prevented anyone from standing up and doing what was right, except for the dude who took notes and sent them back home.
I work for a company that contracts for the military a lot, and I’ve met a bunch of military personnel who are nice, articulate, and smart. However, every one of them had that air about them that they could take care of matters if it came to that. That doesn’t make them a robot, just trained to kill.
Ben, do you to make such statements as “brainless killing machines”? That sort of generalization sounds like something that would have led to the abuse of the Iraqis (“oh, all these dust-devils were part of 9/11!’) I could make such statements about opera singers or lawyers or members of the jewish persuation or a whole lot of things, but I know that the generalizations are not true 🙂 I just think that if you were stuck in the desert, away from your family, with terrorists waiting to take you out with guerilla tactics at any time, you might feel differently about Iraqi rights than you do now safe in NYC working for a law firm.
Not trying to fight, just trying to make sure you view the world fairly…
My $.02 Weed
My bad
Weed,
I apologize for the generalization. “Brainless killing machines” was a bit over the top – like you say, the military creates trained killers who IN MOST CASES are taught not to question orders.
But the point I was trying to make was not that they blindly follow orders no matter what (obviously that can’t be true or there would never have been a whistleblower), but that they reward aggression. They support the kind of gung-ho attitude that, in the wrong circumstances, would cause soldiers to go over-the-line with the way they treat their prisoners. Surely they were working under the assumption that these people were the ones they were fighting (which has turned out to be not true in 90% of the cases) and some may even have believed that they were abusing people who were directly or indirectly responsible for 9/11. Frankly, I don’t blame the individual soldiers. I blame the commanding officers, the ones with degrees from academies, the ones who studied the Geneva Convention and should know better.
— Ben Schuman Mad, Mad Tenor
Should See What They’re Doing To Us
An interesting article this morning depicts some soldiers actually in support of the captive torture. Their comment: “you should see pictures of what they’re (Iraqis) doing to us.”
Now, we all recognize that our position as a superpower is to enforce a higher, more conscionable democratic law while preparing Iraq for autonomous independence. We’re supposed to be following all the Geneva convention laws, rules of engagement, etc. But, I’m sorry, if I’m in Iraq as a trained killer, and there’s all kinds of terrible, lawless behavior coming at me from the enemy, then I’m inclined to do something descpicable in return. I’m not condoning or endorsing the torture of Iraqi prisoners. I’m just writing that the situation is what it is, and the result shouldn’t be so shocking.
I wonder if Bruce would be gracious enough to write the same article from the Iraqi viewpoint. Something like: “Why Our Teenagers Hate So Much They Don’t Think Twice Before Strapping A Bomb To Their Chest.”
Get In Groove, Sammy G