Hen-house Politics

by Gordon Cooper

From Broader View Weekly, May 22, 2009

There is a phenomenon that is recognizable by anyone who has raised or observed chickens in confinement. It is the tendency of the hens to attack an injured or sick chicken at the first sight of blood [or] weakness. The whole group will suddenly demonstrate a viciousness and false bravado that is so antithetical to the image of what we call chickens. In other words, when faced with legitimate threats, the tendency of chickens is to become, for lack of a better word…chickens, scattering in diverse directions, squawking for their dear lives. But when they detect blood on the feathers of one of their own, they will unite and peck away until the injured bird is dead. That is referred to as hen-house politics.

The most recent action, taken by the Spanish Court, headed by a Judge Garzon illustrates hen-house politics on a human scale. The charges filed by this court center around whether or not certain attorneys violated International Law by assisting the Justice Department in its definition of approved interrogation techniques to be used on captured terrorists who held information of planned attacks against our citizens.

First of all, as usual, I have to clear up a few foggy points by my brother. It was not the Republicans who accused [Nancy] Pelosi of “complicity in a crime”, that charge came from a reporter during her press conference in which she stammered her way through a prepared statement of what she knew and when she knew it. The Republicans, the CIA officials and I accuse her of duplicity – which is defined as “deceitfulness in speech or conduct; double-dealing” (RHCD). Pelosi along with the other congressional representatives and Senators all signed off on the approved definition of torture in 2005.

That definition, according to an article by John Yoo, one of the attorneys named in the indictment, contains the following qualification:
“Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent to …organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture (under U.S. Law), it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g. lasting for months or even years…We conclude that the statute, taken as a whole, makes plain that it prohibits only extreme acts.”

This is the definition Pelosi and others should have read in 2005. For her and others to now claim they were unaware and to infer that Bush’s Justice Department acted in a solitary way in some dark underbelly of conspiratorial, war-mongering way is both untrue and destructive to our national security.

Now, let us go back to the charges themselves. It is true that these charges have received little attention from our national media, as my brother states in his column. There is a reason for this. Even in the one source that covered it, apart from the myriad of Bush – Deranged web blogs, of course, The New York Times article clearly states that the indictments and subsequent trial is largely symbolic. Even if they were to reach a consensus and convictions were handed out, the teeth are just not there to actually bite into the freedom of Yoo, Gonzales, Bybee, Addington and others. It would only be the toothless beaks of misguided hens attacking the wrong source of danger.

In another article, (“Closing Arguments”, March 15, 2009) Yoo makes the point of refuting the claims by many that civil liberties have been lost and the rule of law has been irreparably damaged by the Bush policies following 9/11. He reminds us that former presidents during other eras of conflict have gone much further in restriction of civil liberties and mistreatment of both civilians and enemy combatants. Yet each generation that followed those times has not only re-instituted lost freedoms, (such as habeas corpus that was suspended by Lincoln and the freedom of movement denied to Japanese Americans by FDR) but has also expanded civil liberties.
Despite the inference made by my brother, we have not lost our moral compass. I believe we made the right choice to use whatever means were available to us by U.S. Law to extract valuable, life-saving information from those who had sworn to destroy unarmed citizens of our American cities. The men who were captured in the act of conspiring against our freedoms are not suffering “significant harm of significant duration” they are alive and well fed with their heads still attached to their shoulders.

For those who suddenly feel compelled to hold others accountable, I would suggest that they compare the number of enemies killed by Gonzales’ Justice Department in Gitmo to the number of U.S. citizens killed by Janet Reno’s Justice Department in Waco, Texas.

The saddest aspect of this whole issue is the fact that while the hens are uniting in their attacks upon the very agents that worked to keep them free from attack, the real danger is from the wolves who are lurking just outside the hen-house door. And they smell blood.