| Tuesday,
May 11, 1999
Of course I don't really want to prosecute the pilot and bombardier of that B2 that hit
the Chinese Embassy. What I want to do is open up the question of what the pilot should
have done. Forget that it was the wrong target; suppose the building were exactly what the
new Map agency (and we see here some CIA turf war going on, I think) thought it was. It is
an agency of newbies, mostly, carved out of the Agency's turf and handed over to a brand
new group of uncertain abilities with little experience, but the pilot can't assume
incompetence (Or malice). Assume the target was what we thought, a civilian ministry
building in Belgrade.
The chances of collateral damage in attacking a downtown building in a major city are
enormous; you have to assume there will be some. There is no declared war.
It would not be ethical or moral for a private citizen to take a truck bomb to Belgrade
and park it outside that building and detonate it, even though that would be a more
certain way to determine that it was the right target. That would be called terrorism.
Now put the truck driver in uniform and order him to do it. Is it all right now? No war
is declared, and while the Department of Defense says this is "combat" it really
isn't: the pilot is far more likely to be injured in a bad landing than by enemy action.
This isn't combat it's bombardment, and not appreciably different from the days when
gunboats stood off the coast of some minor power and lobbed shells in the general
direction of the customs house to teach the wogs a lesson about paying their bills. All
the Powers did it, and the United States used regularly to denounce them for doing it and
forbid them from doing it in this hemisphere.
So: you are put in uniform and told to take a truck bomb to downtown Belgrade (or
Toronto, if we decide that the Canadians are mistreating the Quebecois): is this an order
blindly to be obeyed, and is it right that you plead "I was only following
orders" if you are apprehended after the act and turned over to, say, the
International Court of Justice?
That is really the question I am raising. The Constitution of the United States
incorporates treaties into the supreme law of the land. The US, whether wisely or not,
joined the United Nations, with appropriate treaties duly ratified by the Senate. One of
the provisions of the UN Charter is that you do not go bombard other states, and threats
to the peace are to go to the Security Council: that was the authority that sent my
generation to Korea, for example. Whether or not the Korean War was a Civil War, defense
of South Korea was duly authorized by the UN (not merely SEATO).
Under the Constitution, are you authorized to drop bombs on civilian cities absent
either a Declaration of War or some UN Security Council Order (which we might argue has
become co-equal with the Congress in being able to commit US troops to combat? Is that a
good idea?) -- but are you, personally, now ethically, morally, or legally allowed to take
to Belgrade a truck full of nitrocellulose or ANFO or whatever your bang-bang of choice
will be, leave it outside a government ministry building, and blow it off in the middle of
the night: simply because you are now a soldier in the US Army and you are only following
orders?
That's the debate I'd like to open. It's a serious one. Just what IS the enforcement
mechanism of the Constitution? In England Parliament regularly executed Royal Ministers
for following the orders of the King. That was known to the Framers, who put the war power
of the US, not in the executive, but in the Congress.
Does the Constitution apply to the armed forces of the United States? We aren't
speaking here of a crisis situation, US citizens in trouble in a foreign port and the
Marines sent in to rescue them. We're talking about the slow and deliberate destruction of
a government building in a sovereign nation with whom we are not at war, but which the
President has decided is mistreating its citizens.
Uh -- would Mexico be justified in bombing Minnesota over the Bureau of Indian Affairs
treatment of the San Carlos Apaches? Suicidal, of course, but would it be MORAL?
I suppose we are learning one thing out of the Balkans
fiasco: we no longer know how to do things well. Even getting what amounts to
a free ride, we weren't able to end the air defenses in Yugoslavia because we have lost
most of the capability. The electronics warfare part of USAF was disbanded by Clinton's
people, presumably to save money. This means we go hours to days to evaluate and destroy
an air defense radar, not moments as in the Gulf War. We now have to hit them with
missiles that look about 30 degrees ahead, not 360 degrees, because we shot up all the
better ones, and they were not replaced.
If an Administration wanted to disarm the United States without appearing to do so, it
would be hard to imagine a procedure that would do it better than what has happened since
the Gulf War. In Clinton's 6 years we have become the only superpower -- and hollowed out
the imperial forces, many of which have about the capabilities of Imperial Storm Troopers.
Which is frustrating for all concerned, and particularly for the professional officer
corps -- many of whom are leaving in droves. One does not suppose the White House wants to
disarm the US ("Those are OUR bombers now…") but it is being accomplished
anyway.
Perhaps all this will wake the Congress to its Constitutional task: to raise and
support Armies. In a word, to "provide for the common defense."
William Saffire today says:
> I called three friends in the
Departments of Energy, Defense and Justice
> and asked them to turn on their office computers and read to me the
> first banner that came on their screens.
>
> "Anyone using this system expressly consents to monitoring" is the
> message. Government employees using Government equipment on Government
> time thus waive privacy claims. Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who downloaded
> millions of lines of the nation’s most secret codes to a computer easy
> to penetrate, also signed a waiver consenting to a search of his
> computer without his knowledge.
He points out that all Los Alamos people have signed waivers. So why did Attorney
General Reno personally prevent the counter-espionage people from searching Lee's computer
in the name of some kind of Constitutional right? What is going on here? Is it time
to be really paranoid yet?
===
I am off shortly to be Guest of Honor at OASIS,
a science fiction convention in Orlando, Florida. This will likely be the last day of
activity here until next Monday. I do have Outlook on my portable, and if I have any time
at all I'll try to deal with the most important mail, but no promises.
I'm also taking my wife to EPCOT which she has never seen. In the 60's Mr. Disney asked
some of us at Pepperdine Research to look into a way to build an experimental research
community which would do real advanced planning research for Tomorrow, and pay its
expenses and salaries out of income from tourists and visitors; it should be tied to
DisneyWorld but not be a part of it, and would be a separate non-profit corporation. One
question, for instance: could research and experiments in nuclear fusion power be made
entertaining enough that people would pay to see what was going on, and thus support it?
If not fusion energy, what might be? Can scientific research be made entertaining to
tourists? Can you have "hamster tubes" with people-movers going through a lab,
or will this drive the lab people insane? What about legal liabilities? And so forth.
We drew up some plans, but Mr. Disney didn't get to implement them, and after he died
EPCOT became, so far as I can see, just another theme park, with no actual
"community" (the original notion was to house the science people there -- to
create a kind of Institute For Advanced Studies, but to be supported from income derived
from tourism). It is thus a bit sad for me, although no doubt the stockholders are
happier.
Anyway, that is where we will be for a few days. I'll be around here a few more hours.
When I get back I intend to install Windows 2000 = NT 5 which I am told does NOT get
slower and slower as time goes on. We will see....
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