Jonathan P. Baird

It has now been almost three years since the Trump Administration implemented its family separation policy at the Southern border and two years since the issue was widely publicized. While the story has receded from public view, questions remain about what happened and what is continuing to happen. It is only now that the consequences of the family separation policy are coming into clearer focus.

Some of those questions were answered when Physicians for Human Rights, a U.S.-based non-profit that investigates human rights violations around the world, released a new investigative report, “You Will Never See Your Child Again” The Persistent Psychological Effects of Family Separation.

The investigators interviewed 17 adults and 9 children from Central America who had been separated from family members 60 to 69 days. The investigators concluded that the policy of family separation constituted “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” that met a legal definition of torture.

The report itself is very eye-opening and I am going to quote from it liberally. The interviews with adults and children who were victims of the family separations show the vicious intentionality behind the policy. One key finding:

“U.S. officials intentionally carried out actions causing severe pain and suffering, in order to punish, coerce, and intimidate Central American asylum seekers to give up their asylum claims.”

It was the intentionality behind the policy that contributed to why the physicians’ group found the Trump Administration’s policy met a legal definition of torture.

The report found that when immigration authorities abruptly separated parents from their children they were prohibited from saying good-bye or consoling them. Immigration officials forcibly removed children from their parents’ arms, removed parents while their children slept, or simply “disappeared” the children while their parents were in different holding cells or receiving medical care.

Immigration officials failed to provide any explanation as to why families were being separated, where their families were being sent or how they would be reunited.

A mother from El Salvador recounted her interaction with U.S. officials when she asked why her daughter was being taken away from her. The official responded that her daughter was going to be adopted by an American family and she would be deported and would never see her daughter again.

Another mother, when asking about the whereabouts of her child, was ignored by officials and told she was never going to see her daughter again and “she should learn to deal with it”.

Despite being asylum seekers, other parents were accused of breaking the law and were told that separation from their children was punishment for this “crime”.

A mother from Guatemala described immigration authorities using coercive tactics to force her to give up on her asylum claim. She reported that officers told her she was going to be separated from her daughter unless she signed deportation paperwork that was written in English. She said the immigration officials told her they would make sure she would never see her daughter again.

Another mother from Honduras described being told she would be separated from her son. She asked for an explanation and the agent said they were simply “following orders”.

Multiple families expressed a fear of never seeing loved ones again. Two of the mothers interviewed expressed feelings of guilt along with the perception that they were “bad mothers” for letting their children be taken from them. The report says that other parents felt hopeless, were desperate to be reunited with their children, as if their life had no value, and they were shocked this could happen to them in the United States.

Interviewed parents experienced heightened anxiety, frequent crying, nervousness, low appetite, lack of motivation, exhaustion and an inability to sleep. Some reported feeling “devastated”, that their minds were on “overload”, that they could do nothing but think of their children and whether they were safe. Others reported crying and feeling like they were in a “black hole”.

Parents’ grief, despair and terror diminished their ability to concentrate and think clearly to such a degree that it sometimes interfered with their credible fear interviews with asylum officers.

Clinicians wrote that children exhibited reactions that included regression in age-appropriate behavior, crying, not eating, having nightmares and other sleeping difficulties, as well as clinging to parents and feeling scared even after parental reunification.

The interviewed individuals, both adults and children, met diagnostic criteria for at least one mental health disorder including post traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. The clinicians recognized that symptoms were exacerbated by pre-existing trauma from events in the asylum seekers’ home countries. The families had fled physical violence and death threats which led to their making the long and dangerous journey to the U.S..

The report also found that the Department of Homeland Security was unprepared and ill-equipped to handle reunification of families after their separation. The Department originally planned to separate as many as 26,000 children even though they knew they did not have the technological capability to track those cases.

In concluding that the forced separation of children and parents by the Trump Administration met a legal definition of torture, the Physicians for Human Rights utilized the Istanbul Protocol, the UN guidelines for documenting torture.

The Istanbul Protocol, in its upcoming updated editions states that the determining factor for distinguishing torture from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment “may best be understood to be the purpose of the conduct and the powerlessness of the victim, rather than the intensity of the pain or suffering inflicted”.

Here the evidence suggests the harm was severe, especially considering the impact on small children. Government actors carried out the harm and they did it with a clear intentionality related to intimidation and coercion.

The report also concluded that the Trump Administration policy and practice of family separation committed the crime of enforced disappearance which is prohibited under international law. Enforced disappearance is defined as any deprivation of liberty by the state where there is concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.

While a federal court judge issued a nationwide injunction on the family separation policy back in June 2018 and President Trump signed an Executive Order supposedly stopping family separations, at least 1142 children have been separated from their families since the official end of the policy.

Untreated trauma can have chronic and long-lasting effects on children and adults. As the report says, those who experience trauma, especially as children, have higher rates of chronic medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and premature death. There is also an increased risk of psychiatric disorders.

This story is not over and advocates must maintain a high level of vigilance that more family separations and enforced disappearances do not reoccur.

During the Trump years, cruelty has become the new normal. Children in cages and separated families have lowered the bar on horrors to be tolerated and what is deemed acceptable conduct by public officials. Still, occasionally a story comes along that manages to shock even the most jaded. Such a story is the saga of Nathaniel Woods, a 43 year old Black man from Alabama who is no longer among the living.

The state of Alabama executed Woods by lethal injection on March 5.

Martin Luther King III responded to Woods’ execution this way:

“In the case of Nathaniel Woods, the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Governor of the State of Alabama are reprehensible, and have potentially contributed to an irreversible injustice. It makes a mockery of justice and constitutional guarantees to a fair trial.”

Woods was a drug dealer. The State of Alabama convicted Woods of capital murder in 2005 in connection with the 2004 murder of three Birmingham Alabama police officers. Under the Alabama felony murder rule, if someone kills a person during the commission of a crime, an accomplice is as guilty as the person who pulls the trigger.

Woods did not kill any of the three police officers who died on June 17, 2004. Nor did he own or possess a gun. He was a drug dealer in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The officers had obtained a misdemeanor warrant for Woods’ arrest. As came out later, two of the officers were involved in a scheme to protect the drug dealers in exchange for cash. Tyran Cooper, the drug dealer who ran his business out of his home, had fallen behind in his payments to the police. Woods was selling drugs out of Cooper’s home.

When the police came to Cooper’s home, the confessed shooter, Kerry Spencer, shot the police officers impulsively. He testified he had been napping and he fired instinctively when he woke up and saw guns pointed in his direction. Whether this is true or not, the shootings were a unilateral, sudden action.

The only surviving officer in the raid, Michael Collins, testified that when he entered the house, Woods surrendered and begged officers not to pepper spray him. This was corroborated by the shooter Kerry Spencer in his own trial. Spencer testified that Woods had nothing to do with the killings. He said Woods yelled at the police: “I give up. I give up. Just don’t spray me with that mace”.

According to Spencer, the police did pepper spray Woods and Woods was holding his face “like he was in pain”.

At trial, Woods had court-appointed lawyers who had never handled a capital case. The lawyers very inadequately represented Woods. They wrongly told him that the prosecution had to prove he was the shooter to be convicted of capital murder. They failed to advise him about an offered 20 to 25 year plea deal. His lawyers missed appeal deadlines and made strategic mistakes that barred the courts from considering arguments that could have been made on his behalf.

Alabama is the only state in America where a defendant can receive the death penalty without a unanimous jury verdict, something else Woods never knew. The jury sentenced Woods to death on a 10-2 vote.

At the trial, since the prosecutors had no objective evidence that Woods planned the crime or participated in it, they offered that he hated the police. Prosecutors presented lyrics to a supposedly original song they said Woods wrote. The lyrics cited expressed lack of remorse for killing police officers.

It turned out that Woods did not write the song. After the court bought the argument and convicted him, it was ascertained that the lyrics the prosectors used came from a song “High-Powered” on Dr Dre’s album The Chronic.

Before Woods’ execution, two state witnesses signed affidavits that they were threatened into cooperating with the prosecution.

At the end, Woods’ clemency attorney was successful in creating some awareness that not everything at the trial was kosher. Alabama Senator Doug Jones said,

“Given the questions and mitigating issues involved in this case and the finality of a death sentence – a delay is warranted to provide time for a thorough review of all the facts and circumstances to truly ensure that justice is done.”

Hundreds of thousands of people appealed to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey for clemency. A change.org petition seeking to stop the execution gathered more than 100,000 signatures at the time of Woods’ execution. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian West and the family of former Alabama and Green Bay Packer quarterback, Bart Starr, also weighed in for clemency.

As expected, Republican Governor Ivey denied Woods’ request for clemency. Then, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary stay on the execution. However, for reasons not explained, the Court, after four hours, lifted the stay to allow the execution to go forward.

Shortly before Governor Ivey denied Woods’ clemency request, Kimberly Chisholm Simmons, a sister of one of the officers killed in the shooting unsuccessfully attempted to reach the governor. She was told Governor Ivey was unavailable at a meeting. In a statement, she wrote:

“I do not think Nathaniel is guilty of murder. Please do not move forward with the hasty decision to execute Nathaniel. My conscience will not let me live with this if he dies. I beg you to have mercy on him.”

Unfortunately, in the matter of the law, mercy often does not register and it did not here. The law should be about drawing appropriate distinctions, especially in matters of life and death. Considering the finality of death, you might think care would go into such consequential decisions. No good explanations were offered by the Governor or any court for why Nathaniel Woods had to die.

I would not expect much from a Southern governor like Kay Ivey. Alabama is indelibly stained with an overwhelming history of racism. The U.S. Supreme Court is another story.

It has gotten to a point where the expectation is that on matters of racial justice, the Court will do the wrong thing. And that is true even when the immediate issue is the life of an African American man who, in no way, deserves the death penalty.

The court’s action in not stopping the unjust execution of Nathaniel Woods is consistent with that institution’s dismal history on race matters. Currently the Court majority appears caught up in a version of color-blindness. The blindness is in not seeing the racism. Historically, hundreds of black people have been lynched in Alabama. That is a history that remains minimized by the state of Alabama and the U.S. Supreme Court. Nathaniel Woods is just the latest victim of a legal lynching.

A central part of the Trump re-election strategy is the use of red-baiting. Red-baiting is the use of false or groundless accusations that someone is a communist. It is a vicious, fear-creation tactic which has been used for over 100 years to discredit people, destroy their reputations and careers, and cause their public harassment and shunning.

Republicans and conservatives have long used red-baiting to argue against anyone who has advocated for a more equitable distribution of wealth in America. They have tried to demonize any deviation from free-market economic policy as socialistic and anti-American. During the 20th century, red-baiting Republican politicians shamelessly ruined the lives of numerous outspoken progressives.

President Trump is already falsely calling Bernie Sanders a communist. He is also talking about how Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union in the 1980’s.

Left out is the fact that Sanders’ trip to the Soviet Union was part of his official duties as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Burlington was a sister city with Yaroslavl, a city 160 miles north of Moscow. Sanders and his wife Jane were part of a ten person delegation under the auspices of Sister City International, an organization created by President Eisenhower, to promote peace and understanding through connections between cities.

This year we can expect an avalanche of negative ads dwelling on the red-baiting theme. Republicans are licking their chops thinking red-baiting is such a killer tactic but they could not be more wrong. Not only is it a dishonest tactic, it is outdated and has a declining audience.

Republicans have been saying and will be saying Democrats are part of a radical, socialist agenda that will take away your private health insurance. Whichever Democrat wins the party’s nomination, they will be tagged as socialist, communist or ultra-radical by Trump and his supporters. Such talking points are entirely predictable but they are nothing more than a smear.

Name-calling “communist” as a way to trash people has a long history in America. I would go back to the first Red Scare in 1920. In the aftermath of the Russian revolution, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used fear of a socialist revolution happening here as justification for rounding up 4000 people all over the country, holding them in seclusion for long periods, conducting secret hearings and ordering their deportation.

During the Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt was branded an ultra-radical and a socialist by his Republican opponents who hated the New Deal. All FDR’s New Deal programs were attacked as “socialist”. Roosevelt was considered a traitor by the billionaire class of his day.

The Cold War was the high point of red-baiting. Senator Joseph McCarthy demagogically accused many people in public life of being communist. Loyalty investigations conducted by congressional committees, particularly the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC, traumatized people on the left and put many on the defensive. HUAC equated dissent with being un-American.

The right wing media of the day worked together with Senator McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and congressional committees to blacklist former New Deal progressives, federal employees, academics and artists. McCarthy and his collaborators destroyed many careers. Back then, just the accusation of being a communist caused economic ruin as those accused often lost their jobs. Public shunning moved many into the shadows and a precarious economic existence.

While it is commonly forgotten now, Republicans and Southern segregationist Democrats called Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement “communist”. FBI Director Hoover was obsessed with showing King had communist ties.

Since the 1960’s, activists who supported racial integration, opposed foreign wars, questioned the nuclear arms race or who have called for higher taxes on the rich have been called “communist” by those who favor the status quo.

At its core, red-baiting is a means to deflect attention from real issues like corruption, income inequality, health care and climate change. If you are focused on a distraction like Trump wants, you are not focusing on real problems.

In the case of Bernie Sanders, red-baiting attacks have been a staple in the Republican playbook for 30 years but they have never worked in Vermont and there is no reason to think they will work now.

Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist but, in practice, he is a New Deal-type Democrat who highlights the needs of working class people much like FDR did. For anyone with knowledge of the left political tradition, Sanders is a moderate. His ideas are hardly radical. They are common fare in Europe and Scandinavia, part of the social democratic tradition. Sanders is more of a left wing populist than a socialist.

Instead of the New Deal, now you have the Green New Deal. Other ideas have become almost mainstream. Whether it is $15 minimum wage, Medicare For All, or cancelling student loan debt, other Democratic candidates have broadly similar ideas.

The irony of the Republican use of red-baiting is that at the same time Trump red-baits, he maintains a bizarrely deferential attitude towards the authoritarian Russian President Putin that is still unexplained. Who can forget Trump’s embarrassing performance at Helsinki when he stood on the stage with Putin and trusted Putin’s denials about Russian election interference in the 2016 election over the findings of American intelligence agencies.

With Republicans, not that long ago, it used to be all about the bad Russians. Republicans used to criticize authoritarian dictators but not any more. Trump exchanges love letters with Kim Jong-un. He has praised the Saudi royals, proto-fascists like Jair Bolsanaro, and generals like Egypt’s el-Sisi.

Considering the authoritarian leaders Trump pals around with and openly embraces, red-baiting accusations against any Democrat are hypocritical. At the same time as Trump red-baits, he is guilty of the same charge he makes against his opponents. In his association with foreign dictators and authoritarian leaders, Trump is far more compromised than any Democratic candidate.

Notably, and unlike Sanders, Trump refuses to tell the Russians to stay out of our elections. Likely, he does not want to give up any advantage.

Red-baiting is intended to narrow the spectrum of what it is possible to achieve politically. It has historically been used against all kinds of change agents. In light of our history of Red Scares, it would be foolish to ignore the tactic and simply assume it will be ineffective. Resuscitating a boogeyman is an old political trick. Red-baiting should be confronted and exposed as the ethically challenged practice it is.

In a little-noticed move, the Trump Administration expanded its contested travel ban to six new countries. Under the new ban, nationals of Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgystan will not be able to get visas to live and work in the U.S..

Nationals of Sudan and Tanzania will not be able to participate in the diversity visa lottery program, a program that issues up to 50,000 visas a year from nations that send few immigrants to the U.S..

The ban is expected to affect more than 350 million people, close to one-quarter of the 1.2 billion people living in Africa. Nigeria alone has a population of over 190 million people. The new ban takes effect on February 22.

When Trump initiated the original travel ban in January 2017, popularly known as the Muslim ban, it is worth recalling that he said it was a temporary measure until “they figured out what the hell was going on”.

So you have to ask, why has it not been temporary and why is the list of countries expanding? Why is Nigeria on the list, which has the sixth-largest Christian population in the world?

I think it is a blatant appeal to racism and xenophobia. In an election year it is about throwing red meat to the white supremacists and run-of-the-mill racists who populate part of Trump’s base.

Have any Africans been doing anything that threatens Americans on the home front lately or even in the last ten years? The answer is “no”.

Between 1975-2016, not a single person born in Nigeria, Eritrea, Tanzania, or Sudan killed any American in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The same is also true for Myanmar.

Because of the existence of Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgency in northern Nigeria, there is some impression of a possible threat. However, this threat is to the Nigerian state, not the U.S. homeland.

Part of the Trump re-election strategy is to point the finger of blame at immigrants. Needing a group Trump can demagogue about, Africans join Mexican rapists, Central American drug gangs, and caravans of refugees. Facts and honesty are of no consequence. Whatever serves scare-mongering is the agenda. Africans become part of the cavalcade of fantasy suspects who might take jobs from “real Americans”.

Trump’s version of making America great again is about keeping foreigners out, building a wall, saying, in effect, America for Americans. The pitch is a ploy to fear of the stranger, especially of the dark-skinned variety. At the same time, Trump postures as a friend of workers and as someone who can speak the language of the common people.

Trump gets to define who is an American and who is an alien. Race has long been a major factor in separating those who supposedly qualify as legitimate Americans and those who remain suspect.

This is not the first time there has been an African immigration ban. The 1924 immigration act also discriminated against immigrants from Africa. In that era, immigration restrictions based on race were celebrated. Africa’s visas were set at the minimal level of 100 a year.

In the 1920’s, immigration policy and law-making were heavily influenced by the famed eugenicist, Madison Grant, who was a racist and an anti-semite. In his book, The Passing of the Great Race, Grant argued Nordic superiority and he opposed interracial mixing. Grant was a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt and he was not an isolated voice favoring racism and xenophobia. He was mainstream, just one of many with similar views.

No longer do you hear talk of racial purity but earlier generations of immigration restrictionists supported Jim Crow segregation and the exclusion of Africans, Asians, Jews and Mexicans from eligibility for citizenship.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Trump an assist when it upheld the third version of his travel ban in the case of Hawaii v. Trump. In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the President had authority, in the interests of national security, to suspend entry of any class of aliens.

Interestingly, in her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor invoked the similarity between the Muslim ban and the Japanese-American internment. Both cases featured an ill-defined threat to national security.

The Trump Administration is again using national security as the rationale for the Africa ban. They are saying that five of the countries on the list fail to comply with information-sharing requirements so that foreign nationals can be properly vetted for entry into the country.

Trump’s own words belie the national security rationale. When discussing immigration from African countries with a group of senators, Trump asked why America would want immigrants from “all these shithole countries” and said the U.S. should get more people from countries like Norway. He also said, when discussing issuance of visas from Nigeria, that once Nigerians had seen the U.S., they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.

I think the African ban needs to be seen in the context of our longstanding xenophobia which has been a constant thread in American history. There have really been two competing threads since our early history. The “we are a nation of immigrants” thread which is welcoming and the racist xenophobic thread which is the opposite.

Americans have a history of being wary of almost every group of foreigners who have come to the United States. Germans, Irish, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Mexicans, and Muslims have all been labeled threatening.

Now come Africans and Burmese. Trump’’s xenophobic and racist pitch is in keeping with our historic worst impulses. It should be remembered that the Rohingya Muslim people have been facing the possibility of genocide. Myanmar security forces have been carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against them. Now is a bad time to be closing the immigration door. On a smaller scale, it is reminiscent of past errors when we kept out victims of genocide.

One day, as with the Japanese-American internment, the current effort to use immigration policy to further a racial agenda will again be found to be unconstitutional. It is tragic to see a bad pattern in American history repeating.

,

Probably readers saw the recent story about Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, comparing the abortion rights debate to the struggle to end slavery. As a partisan of the anti-choice side, DeVos compared the choice to have an abortion with the choice to own slaves.

Speaking at the Colorado Christian University on January 22, Secretary DeVos said:

“Lincoln contended with the pro-choice arguments of his day. They suggested that a state’s choice to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it. Well, President Lincoln reminded those pro-choicers that a vast portion of the American people do not look upon that matter as being this very little thing. They look upon it as a vast moral evil.”

DeVos is certainly not the first to make this argument. The anti-abortion movement has long seen itself as fighting for the rights of a voiceless, marginalized group. I recall Ben Carson, when he ran for President, comparing abortion to slavery. He had compared women who have abortions to slavemasters.

It is routine to see Roe v Wade compared to Dred Scott, the Supreme Court decision that upheld slavery.

Also, the anti-abortion movement has often compared abortion to the Holocaust. For example, just this last year, Alabama’s newly-passed abortion ban explicitly compared abortion to the Holocaust.

While political movements often use historical analogies, the comparison of abortion with slavery and the Holocaust is a non-starter. And it is not just the obvious difficulty of comparing the experience of an unborn child to that of a slave or a Holocaust victim.

Slavery was, in part, a slave-breeding industry. Slaveowners saw their laborers as breeding stock. Slaveowners expected their female slaves to produce marketable children. More slaves equaled more money for the slaveowners.

Slavery was all about reproductive coercion. As Imani Gandy has written:

“If you think about it, the claim that abortion is like slavery is exactly backwards. I’m not a fan of comparing anything to slavery that is not slavery, but I’m fairly certain that we can all agree that slaveowners systematically forced Black women to give birth.”

Those comparing slavery and abortion are not looking at what actually happened during slavery. The historians Ned and Constance Sublette show that breeding was an obsession for Southern men of property. Slavery was a license for libertine behavior and sexual violence against slaves was a norm. The Sublettes write:

“The girl who tried to refuse being bred might be beaten, and in the end, the girl who wasn’t a “good breeder” could expect to be sold South, which was commonly understood to be the worst thing that could happen. There she would work among strangers under an overseer’s lash in the cotton fields, or finish her life after a few years on one of Louisiana’s sugar plantations.”

Home remedies for contraception and abortion were a form of resistance for Black women who were subject to rape and sexual violence by slaveowners. Slaveowners wanted babies for profit. The more babies produced, the more money made. Selling slaves was a big part of the profitability of slavery.

The anti-abortion movement misses how preventing birth and avoiding bringing children into a horrible world was the real opposition to slavery. Black women knew their children would be forced to live as chattel.

More generally, the anti-abortion movement trivializes and devalues the harm of slavery. Slavery went on for centuries and its residual effects still shape our world. It was a permanent, lifelong condition, not temporary, like pregnancy. The harm alleged by the anti-abortion movement about women who have abortions is a nullity. It is speculation about potential life, not lived life. There is an incongruity in comparing the historical experience of slaves to an unknown.

I think that same thing is true for comparisons with the Holocaust. The death of six million Jewish people (and millions more if you count all the victims) who were living their lives is vastly different than concepts about lives the might have been but never were.

The Holocaust was about extermination of Jews because of a vicious hatred, anti-semitism. Even if opponents of abortion intensely dislike the choice made by women who decide to have abortions, abortion is about a personal, individual choice made by a woman in consultation with her doctor.

There are many different reasons why a woman might choose to have an abortion. It could be because of an inability to care for a child, danger to the health of the mother or health issues with the fetus. It could also be because the woman was a victim of rape or incest. In none of these circumstances is the choice about hatred.

Unlike abortion, which is about an individual choice compelled by circumstances, the Holocaust was a state-enforced series of genocidal policies designed to eradicate groups of people. The moving party was the German Nazi government enforcing and institutionalizing mass murder based on hate.

As a Jewish person, I find the appropriation of the Holocaust by the anti-abortion movement offensive. As with slavery, there is a difference between real life suffering and an intellectual construction. I would note that Jewish law allows abortion, believing that life starts at birth and that a mother’s life should never be sacrificed to save a fetus.

It is also hard for me to forget the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian by an anti-abortion fanatic. Dr. Slepian was an abortion provider in Buffalo, New York. He also happened to be Jewish. Dr. Slepian was shot in the back through a window in his kitchen after he returned from Friday night services.

There is something terribly wrong with invoking the Holocaust to strip women of their fundamental right to bodily autonomy.

DeVos was also wrong that a “vast portion of the American people” considered slavery wrong before the Civil War. Abolitionists did not gain much support until the 1840’s and 1850’s and even then they were still a minority. When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Southern whites and most Northerners still supported slavery and white supremacy and saw Black people as inferior.

While I understand why the anti-abortion movement would want to align with great moral movements, abortion is nothing like slavery or the Holocaust. Those analogies fail.

President Donald Trump’s disrespect for the law has never been on greater display than in the state-sponsored murder of Qassim Soleimani. Soleimani was a high ranking official of the Iranian government. He was de facto the second highest ranking official of Iran.

The U.S. military killed Soleimani in a drone strike carried out on January 3.

While not an exact comparison, Soleimani held a position in Iran equivalent to Vice President Mike Pence or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was not a rogue terrorist or even someone like Osama Bin Laden. While he had plenty of blood on his hands, that does not change the fact Soleimani, as an Iranian military commander, was a high-level state actor.

You might not know it from much of the media coverage of the event but political assassinations like the hit on Soleimani are against the law. There is a legal ban on assassinations.

The ban on assassinations goes back to the 1970’s. In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an Executive Order banning “political assassinations”. This came in the aftermath of the Church Committee investigation which revealed the the CIA had attempted to kill a number of foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro.

President Carter strengthened the assassination ban in his own Executive Order by extending it to include “persons employed by or acting on behalf of the United States”.

In 1981, President Reagan issued a new Executive Order which remains the law of the land today. Executive Order 12333 states:

“No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

In addition to the Executive Orders, assassination runs afoul of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the federal constitution and well-established international law including the 1907 Hague Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Unfortunately, since the 1990’s there has been a long pattern of skirting the assassination ban when targets have been classified as under the umbrella of terrorism. This has gone on with both Republicans and Democrats. The U.S. Congress has never legislated the issue of assassination. The journalist James Risen explains the evolution this way:

“”…the reform-minded 1970’s now seem quaint in a nation whose greatest military innovation in the 21st century has been the targeted killing of individuals by remote control.”

Risen writes that the explosion of technology – new aviation, missile guidance and surveillance monitoring – has been an irresistible lure for both parties’ political leaders. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have developed kill lists. They can always count on compliant government lawyers who issue secret legal opinions that justify their killings. This has been true with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Trump.

I think Obama pioneered the way for Trump with his drone-based killings of individuals deemed a threat to national security.

Under current law, Trump had no right to order the killing of one of the highest-ranking military leaders of a foreign state with which the U.S. was not at war. While Trump had campaigned on an attitude of belligerence toward Iran and opposition to the nuclear deal made by Obama, as a matter of international law, the United States has not been engaged in an ongoing armed conflict with Iran.

There is no justification for assassinating foreign officials, including Soleimani. Regardless of his changing litany of self-justifying reasons, Trump’s ordered-murder was an aggressive act of war. Imagine if Iran had assassinated Vice-President Pence. I think it is fair to say the reaction would have been extreme. The murder of Soleimani was extremely provocative unless your goal is to get into a war.

There was initially some effort made by Trump Administration officials to say that Soleimani’s killing prevented imminent attack on American interests. In his most recent explanations for the murder, Trump himself undermined the idea that Soleimani posed an imminent threat to U.S. interests or embassies.

According to audio obtained by CNN and the Washington Post, on January 17 Trump told his campaign donors at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Soleimani “was saying bad things about our country”. Earlier in the week, Trump tweeted “it doesn’t really matter” whether Soleimani posed an imminent threat to the United States “because of his horrible past”.

Ironically, Soleimani was widely credited with majorly contributing to the defeat of ISIS in Iraq.

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that political speech and writing are “largely the defense of the indefensible”. Orwell said political language “..is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”.

You can call it an “extrajudicial execution” or a “targeted killing” or some other euphemism but murder remains murder. It is a violation of the human right to life enshrined in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The United States ratified this human rights covenant in 1992. It is a party to the covenant

Assassination can be a two way street. The murder of Soleimani sets a dangerous precedent. Other states may decide to follow our example. Reducing the taboo on assassination could produce blowback.

It is little known but Congress could have taken steps to prevent actions like the Soleimani assassination. In 2019, California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have prohibited offensive actions like the Soleimani assassination. Congress removed Khanna’s amendment from the final bill.

Along with Republicans, too many Democrats have given Trump a blank check on military action. There should be Congressional investigation into the ever-changing, shallow justifications offered by the Trump Administration to support the Soleimani assassination. They have needlessly and recklessly brought us to the brink of war.

We were misled into Vietnam and Iraq by lies. Now another administration is lying about imminent threats posed by a Middle Eastern country. We have traveled this road before and the results have not just been tragic, they have been horrifying.

On January 5, the Iraqi Parliament voted to end the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil. This vote was in response to the Trump Administration’s assassination of the Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani. About 5000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

The Iraqi Parliament’s request for U.S. troops to leave seems to me a marker and an opportunity to critically evaluate that war. It has been 17 years since Americans invited themselves into Iraq. I wanted to look at reasons given for why the war was fought as well as outcomes.

Iraq was the bait-and-switch war. Al Qaeda in 2001 operated out of Afghanistan but we somehow had to fight in Iraq. Everyone now knows the reasons originally given by the U.S. government to justify the Iraq war were false. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. There was no Iraqi connection to Al Qaeda.

Still, the U.S. war in Iraq has persisted. The costs have not been insignificant. At an approximately three trillion dollar price tag, 4550 U.S. soldiers have died and 3,793 U.S. contractors. The estimate for Iraqi deaths is in the 200,000 range.

I do not see this war as an example of good intentions gone awry. It was more a crime against humanity. President George W. Bush and his colleagues used the panic created by the events of 9/11 to indulge in wishful thinking. We would be welcomed as liberators. Iraq would be a cake walk.

This was the fantasy spun by the neo-conservatives surrounding Bush. With zero understanding of Iraqi society, they believed with Saddam Hussein gone, Iraq would become a model democracy and a compliant U.S. ally.

The group of neo-conservatives surrounding Bush played a pivotal role in pushing the U.S. intervention. However, the neo-con focus was on getting to Baghdad – not on what to do once Baghdad was captured. Cluelessness competed with greed after the invasion. Who can forget the arrogance and hubris of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and the whole collection of neo-cons who engineered the invasion. They believed their own fantasies.

Magical thinking dominated. It is easy to focus on the incompetence but Bush and his lieutenants seriously believed the war would be easy.

I find some other explanations for why the Iraqi war was fought less persuasive. Oil and its pursuit are always mentioned but I do not see it as a primary reason. I know Trump has said, “Why don’t we simply take their oil?” but since the invasion in 2003, more oil concessions have gone to Norway, France, China, and Russia. Of 11 contracts Iraq has signed, only one went to a U.S. company, Exxon Mobil.

Another explanation is that the war was fought to expand U.S. global dominance. This explanation ignores the conflict inside the U.S. foreign policy establishment at the time of the invasion. The old foreign policy establishment reflected in figures like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker opposed the war. They clung to a more realpolitick view, dubious of easy victories.

One notable outcome of the war was the emergence of ISIS which formed in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion and occupation. Without the U.S. invasion, there was no ISIS.

Another outcome was the public re-emergence of torture, especially at Abu Ghraib prison. Army regulations and the Geneva Conventions were routinely violated. In 2004, photos emerged showing prisoners on leashes and bodies piled atop each other in a pyramid. Ignoring law, Trump has called for bringing back widely denounced torture techniques like waterboarding.

It is not clear that anything positive has come out of the war. The internal Sunni/Shia division remains as prominent as ever. Saddam is gone but 2.7 million Iraqis have been displaced. Over 1.5 million U.S. servicemen and women have cycled through Iraq with many multiple deployments.

The Iraq war has produced a generation of traumatized veterans. The amount of PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and major depression is incalculable. The wounds generated by IED’s are gruesome. Loss of legs, fingers, hands and arms have been common. There are also smashed genitals.

Part of the post-war picture is soldier suicide. Last September, the Department of Veteran Affairs reported that at least 60,000 veterans died by suicide between 2008 and 2017. That is an average of 6,000 veterans dying annually (about 20 suicides per day) and the data shows that the suicide rate is increasing. Firearms were the method of suicide in 70.7% of male veteran suicide deaths and 42.2% of female veteran suicide deaths in 2017.

Surprisingly, in spite of this disastrous history, many of the same voices that pushed for war with Iraq are now pushing for war with Iran.

Former New York Times writer Judith Miller, George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and political operative Karl Rove have all been out there, beating the war drum. They are joined by Fox News Trump mouthpiece Sean Hannity who has suggested the U.S. should bomb Iranian oil refineries and Trump insiders like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo. I also should mention former Trump national security advisor, John Bolton, a well-known Iran war hawk, who cheered the Soleimani assassination.

Talk about a pointless war. These warmongers must concoct pretexts for aggression. There is no justification for any war with Iran. As I recall, it is the Trump Administration which recklessly withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal that many observers believed was working. Depicting Iran as the greatest threat toward peace is nonsense.

Those with even a rudimentary knowledge of Middle East history should recall that the United States overthrew the Iranian government led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 and placed the Shah in power. Iran’s 1979 revolution was a response to our imperialism. The Shah was a widely reviled dictator who was a U.S. puppet.

Here in the United States we are in desperate need of an antiwar movement. There are multiple reasons a war against Iran makes little sense. Besides the lack of rationale for such a war, Iran is a far more formidable foe than Iraq ever was. Iran has three times the number of people Iraq did in 2003 and it is about three and a half times as big.

Iran is far more fortified than Iraq ever was and its geography has been difficult for invaders. A conflict could lead to thousands or hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded. Millions of refugees would likely be seeking an escape from the war zone. The possibilities are hellish. The potential for destabilization of the whole region exists.

It is worth thinking about how ISIS emerged from the ashes of the U.S. invasion in Iraq. The aftermath of an Iran war could birth ISIS equivalents or worse. Desperation in the context of a power vacuum typically ends badly.

The experience of the Iraq war dictates heavily against any more Middle Eastern wars and especially against American involvement. The American people are again being sold lies minimizing the risks and danger of a war. It is late to be going along with more neo-con magical thinking.

I am reminded of the Vietnam Syndrome. Ever since the Vietnam war, American presidents have worried about public aversion to our overseas military adventures. We could use a rebirth of that syndrome right now.