Ending Dissent in America

Compassion. That may be what brought down Major General Thomas Fiscus, until recently the chief military lawyer for the Air Force.

Fiscus opposed torture, which has more or less been official U.S. policy under Bush:

In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters held prisoner at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But military interrogators at Guantanamo complained to superior officers that techniques they were asked to use, such as stripping prisoners to humiliate them and using dogs to scare them, were abusive. That provoked an extended Defense Department review, during which military lawyers for each of the services forcefully expressed their concerns, officials said.

After an intense bureaucratic struggle, the lawyers, including Fiscus, persuaded Rumsfeld to rescind his approval of those interrogation procedures.

[Excerpted from Top Air Force Lawyer Steps Aside, Washington Post, September 30, 2004.]

The Post is not being very straightforward, by the way, in this summary of the torture that has been taking place. It's been more gruesome and horrific than that. (It's been reported elsewhere and I will not describe it.)

Fiscus had U.S. and international law on his side -- but not the White House, and not Congress, as a Washington Post editorial titled War Crimes observes. Perhaps U.S. courts will eventually put a stop to this barbarity. But for now, as the editorial says, "the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government."

The failure of the American system to address these open violations of U.S. and international law is what has led the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to turn to the German Federal Prosecutor's Office:

On November 30, 2004, CCR and four Iraqi citizens filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor's Office. Under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, suspected war criminals may be prosecuted irrespective of where they are located. The German Code of Crimes against International Law states: "This Act shall apply to all criminal offenses against international law designated under this Act even when the offence was committed abroad and bears no relation to Germany." The U.S. officials charged include Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Former CIA Director George Tenet [and others]. The criminal complaint seeks an investigation into war crimes allegedly carried out by high ranking United States civilian and military officials.

[Edited excerpt from CCR Seeks Criminal Investigation in Germany. See also: Petition to German Prosecutor. ("It is critical that he hear from you so he knows that people around the world support this effort.")]

In objecting to the obscenity that is torture, Fiscus was not promoting his own interests. He's not friends with the miserable detainees; he doesn't have business ties to them; and he wasn't endearing himself to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

Fiscus objected because he has human feelings and a conscience -- because he is someone who actually has "moral values."

But he had opposed the White House. And somehow, it came to light that for a decade, he'd been breaking some rules:

The former chief military lawyer for the Air Force has been formally reprimanded for conduct unbecoming an officer because of improper relationships with more than a dozen women, the Air Force said on Wednesday.

The officer, Maj. Gen. Thomas Fiscus, was given a formal reprimand and ordered to forfeit pay for unbecoming conduct, fraternization, obstruction of justice and violating a lawful general regulation, the Air Force said.

In violation of military rules, General Fiscus had sexual affairs over the last decade with more than a dozen female officers, enlisted women and civilians, an investigation found. These affairs were generally consensual, and any other incidents were minor cases of inappropriate touching, investigators found.

General Fiscus, who oversaw 1,300 military lawyers and 300 civilian lawyers, as well as 1,000 military paralegals and 600 other civilian workers, could face additional action, including being disbarred, officials said.

[Excerpted from Air Force Reprimands General for Numerous Sexual Affairs, New York Times, December 23, 2004.]

As David Sheldon, a defense lawyer specializing in military cases, comments: "The timing of it is certainly suspect, given [Fiscus's] office's opposing OSD [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] on detainee issues." (Quoted in Top Air Force Lawyer Steps Aside.)

How, I wondered, might an intolerant administration suppress dissent among the general U.S. population, which is not bound by anachronistic fraternization rules?

Of course, it would be child's play for the omnipotent U.S. government to cause an annoying person to have an "accident" -- a plane crash, an auto collision, an encounter with a stray bullet -- or to simply disappear. So to make the question interesting one has to introduce the perhaps fanciful stipulation that the executive branch confine itself to legal measures.

The trick is to find some offense which is rarely prosecuted even though great numbers of people are guilty of it. That's the ticket for a government to selectively target and punish dissenters -- or to preempt dissent by letting everyone know they're vulnerable.

What might that offense be? Hint: again, it involves the ancient taboo of sex.

Naomi Wolf writes:

Porn is the wallpaper of our lives now. It has breached the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, has become pornographized. Young men and women are being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training.

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual "mission creep" of how pornography--and now Internet pornography--has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer--or flirtatiously suggest--the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax--just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina--which, by the way, used to have a pretty high "exchange value," as Marxist economists would say--wasn't enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn--and certainly the Internet--made routine use of all available female orifices.

The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the "cool girls" go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses a la Britney and Madonna.

[Edited excerpt from The Porn Myth, New York Magazine, October 20, 2003.

A companion article in the same issue says:

In the same manner that looking for flings online went from deviant to de rigueur behavior, the mass consumption of cyberporn has slyly moved from the pathetic stereotypes (fugitive perverts, frustrated husbands) into the potent mainstream (young professionals, perhaps your boyfriend).

We live in a society that not only has embraced porn but giddily lavishes it with high-brow attention. Frank Rich "analyzes" adult entertainment in the Times. Writer Irvine Welsh revisits the Trainspotting crew as it makes a skin flick in his latest novel, Porno. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders offers a coffee-table book of photographs of porn stars--with essays by literary types--and it's snatched up by an A-list publisher. Porn is not merely acceptable; it's hip.

[Excerpted from Not Tonight, Honey. I'm Logging On, by David Amsden, New York Magazine, October 20, 2003.]

So what do you do, if you're the Attorney General, and someone has been criticizing your president, and you want to make that critic shut up? Porn, of course, is legal, and hardly even embarrassing, judging from the above.

But not child porn. That's totally different -- and it's your opportunity as AG to make that critic radioactive, so everyone rushes to abandon him.

What you do is take a look at the fellow's Internet traffic. Quite possibly the NSA or some other agency already has a record of his traffic for the past ten years. Run those thousands of hot girls through the computer. You'd be unlucky indeed if not even one of them was a twelve-year-old.

Of course this method wouldn't snare any "person of interest" -- it's merely a promising first stab. Homeland Security has lots more data on everyone. And if the truth can't discredit a target, there are plenty of alternatives (perhaps the FBI's labs).

Where there's a will, there's a way. And the case of Thomas Fiscus suggests the will is there.

Related: The World's Beacon of Democracy -- Today