By Malcolm
Shore
Last week, students at Fordham University
angrily and forcefully denounced war, torture, and the overall Bush agenda.
First, through a campus-sponsored presentation by former CIA
analyst and current impeachment advocate Ray McGovern, and then, by way of an
anti-war rally on campus two days later, students at the Bronx college
expressed their outrage with the nearly five-year-old Iraq war and occupation,
as well as with systematic torture carried out openly by their government.
At both events, several students wore orange
“Drive Out the Bush Regime” bandanas, signifying their embrace of the
responsibility and opportunity to lead the charge in bringing such crimes
against humanity to a halt.
The moral cost of these crimes, measured in human death and
suffering, was a major theme of McGovern’s speech and of the rally, both of
which were organized by the Fordham Antiwar Coalition.
Students hung an orange banner outside a campus cafeteria
building that announced the number of Iraqis killed to date during the war:
1,173,743.
“Violence is so present in our culture, and it has become so
normalized,” Allison Kelly, a senior, told a crowd of about 30 students at
Friday’s demonstration, acknowledging the previous day’s school shooting at Northern Illinois University
that had resulted in six deaths. “Over a million Iraqis killed. And it is just
a number, but each of those represents a human killed. We forget that.”
During his speech Wednesday night, McGovern, too, reminded his
audience that the Iraq
war and occupation had killed 1 million Iraqis, and he added that the war had
created about 4 million internal and external refuges, and claimed roughly 4000
American soldiers. He told students that
the death and destruction visited upon Iraq
was utterly unjustified, and the result of the U.S. government’s desire to control
the country’s oil reserves and create permanent military bases there.
Indeed, his lecture matched the spirit of the George Orwell
quote read by Fordham student Anthony Dimieri as he introduced McGovern: “In
times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”: McGovern
condemned the shameless lies used to hoodwink the American populous into war,
showing video clips of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell saying, just months
before 9/11, that Iraq posed no significant threat to the world.
“We were asked to believe,” McGovern told the crowd of
between 100 and people, “that after 9/11, weapons of mass destruction descended
from the heavens like manna.”
McGovern said that surveys taken of the Iraqi people showed
that the majority of the population blames the American occupation for the
deterioration of their nation and wants U.S. troops to leave. He said the U.S.
military should withdraw all troops from Iraq within six months, and that
Bush and Cheney should be impeached for launching a war of aggression, a clear
violation of international law.
McGovern said it was outrageous that Congressional Democrats
such as Jerrold Nadler-chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s
Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee-Nancy Pelosi, and
John Conyers refused to employ the mechanism of impeachment, despite the fact
that impeachment was put in the Constitution for the very purpose of removing
tyrants such as the Bush Regime from office. He attributed the unwillingness of
Congress to pursue impeachment to “crass political calculations” that equated
rocking the boat politically with risking losing the 2008 election.
McGovern was at least as forceful in denouncing U.S. torture
and those who try to justify it. He said the practice was immoral, ineffective,
scarred those who carried it out as well as the national reputation of the
United States, and endangered members of the U.S. military. He expressed disbelief that the government,
and some prominent voices outside of it, would openly try to defend the
practice. McGovern recalled being
floored about three years ago when the host of a radio program invited him to
speak about torture and informed him that, indeed, he would face an opponent
arguing “the other side.”
He also noted that Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who
infamously refuses to classify waterboarding as torture, had 18 years of
Catholic education.
“I only had 17 [years,],” McGovern quipped. “I guess I
missed the year where they explained it’s ok to torture folks.”
Significantly, in the service of establishing that torture
has been sanctioned from the highest levels of government, McGovern directed
students to go online and examine the January 25, 2002 memo written by Alberto
Gonzalez to George W. Bush.
The memo, which Bush
subsequently adopted as official government policy, states: “In its treatment
of detainees the U.S.
will continue to be constrained by its commitment to treat the detainees
humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military
necessity, in a matter consistent with the principles of GPW [Geneva
Conventions].” (Italics added)
McGovern referred to this ominous language as the
“mack-truck-sized loophole” that Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and others
exploited to claim a legal mandate to torture prisoners.
Following his speech, McGovern took questions from students
for an additional hour. One audience member asked McGovern to explain the
rationale used by those who actually favor torture. McGovern cited the “otherworldly” ticking
time bomb scenario, a hypothetical situation in which a known terrorist refuses
to divulge information about a bomb that is set to explode. McGovern said that
while this scenario might be frequently depicted on television shows such as
“24,” it is completely unrealistic in real life because one could never know if such an apparent
threat were real. “So that’s all they
got?” the student wondered. McGovern
said that this was the main pro-torture position he was aware of.
Another questioner asked if he thought the Bush Regime would
actually dare attack Iran,
knowing the latter could retaliate by shutting down the Strait
of Hormuz and blocking access to the world’s oil supply. McGovern
replied that he found it “completely feasible” that the U.S. would attack Iran
before Bush leaves office, through helping to instigate a conflict between Iran and Israel and then using that as the
pretext to strike. He added that if
impeachment proceedings were taken up against Bush and Cheney, it would inspire
the military to refuse to carry out attack orders on Iran.
McGovern did express a couple of troublesome positions
during the question-and-answer session. For instance, when one audience member
expressed his feeling that the U.S.
should withdraw immediately from Iraq rather than over the course of
six months, McGovern begged to differ. “It’s just a matter of logistics,” he
said. “There’s 170 thousand troops. It’s gonna take six months. Beware of those
who talk about an abrupt, precipitous withdrawal.” Curiously, he also stated that, “I think the
draft was the right way to go for our country.”
Overall, however, McGovern’s speech was characterized by
powerful exposure and condemnation of the Bush Regime’s crimes against
humanity, and an unmistakable call to resist these crimes and for students to
urge the university administration to do the same.
After McGovern spoke on Wednesday, Fordham students talked
about the challenges of translating broad sentiment against the war into action
to bring the war to an end. “Everyone I
talk to at school seems to care,” one senior said. “But no one seems to show up
[to events].” When asked what he thought
accounted for that disparity, he turned introspective.
“I don’t know. Why don’t I act enough?” he asked
rhetorically, before aiming to answer his own question. “I feel as though
there’s a lack of things for me to do. Instead of taking that as motivation, I
let that be a reason to not do anything.”
When asked what the world would look like if his desires
could be translated directly into policy, the student said, “We wouldn’t be
fighting any wars. Nobody would need a military. We”d be doing a lot
more-particularly in this country-to deal with environmental issues.”
Fordham Antiwar Coalition members Shauna Barry, a junior,
and Allison Kelly, a senior, said they were struggling to change the terms of
conversation at their campus: That most students were against the war in
general terms, but were often hesitant to call unequivocally for total
withdrawal of U.S. troops, or for impeachment; Barry attributed this reluctance
either to a lack of education about the issues, or to a feeling that taking
these positions was not “politically correct.”
Still, the students said that by calling for the U.S. military to pull out of Iraq, and by delving into questions such as the
implications of a U.S.
military defeat in Iraq
or an immediate withdrawal, they are indeed changing the tenor of campus
dialogue.
“Our events are forcing other students to ask us
those questions,” Kelly said.
Other students felt that a large portion of the student body
had failed to confront the immorality of the war crimes being committed by
their government. After speaking at Friday’s demonstration, freshman Sakura
Kelly said that recognizing heinous acts are being committed in your name
brings with it a responsibility to act, and suggested many students were not
inclined to embrace this responsibility and disrupt their sense of normalcy.
“People like to live their daily lives, eat their bagels, and drink their
Starbucks coffee,” Kelly said.
Both at Friday’s antiwar rally and at McGovern’s
presentation Wednesday, Kelly said that students need to come to the forefront
of resistance movements in order to end the war in Iraq.
While only about 30 people-the majority of them
students-attended Friday’s rally, those who were there spoke with inspiring
passion and anger about the injustice and immorality of the Iraq War and called
on the university’s student body and administration to similarly speak out. Fordham is a Jesuit University,
and like the alumnus McGovern, several students drew on their theological
education or personal faith in speaking of the need to resist crimes against
humanity. At Friday’s rally, Sakura
Kelly read a prayer she had composed, which contrasted the relative comfort of
her life with the living hell faced by the people of Iraq, and emphasized her
responsibility to act. “Help me not to forget today, tomorrow, for every day
this unjust war continues, as long as the people of Iraq suffer, as long as our men and
women face unnecessary combat,” reads an excerpt of the prayer, ” I cannot stay
complacent in my life here.”
One topic on which students expressed differing and somewhat
complex views was the impact of the current election cycle on the political
landscape. Pat Tool, a junior, said he had neither confidence that the
elections would bring the Iraq
war to an end, nor any faith in the remaining candidates. “There’s no candidate
who wants the troops out,” Tool said. “One [McCain] says for 100 to 1000 years,
they”ll be there. Everyone else is indefinite.”
Sakura Kelly felt the elections were a diversion-and worse-
from the atrocities being carried out by our government. Another excerpt from
her prayer read, “I plea to you, in a time that I have lost faith in my
government. I plead to you in a time where a solution is not only unclear but
manipulated into political platforms.”
Afterwords, she explained the meaning behind these lines. “People aren’t
really considering the lives at hand,” Kelly said. “It’s all about what gets
more votes.”
On the other hand, the senior who contemplated why he
himself wasn’t more active said after McGovern’s presentation that he felt any
of the current batches of candidates-Republican or Democrat-would be an
improvement over the Bush Regime.
Some students simultaneously viewed the elections as an
important and positive phenomenon overall, and as a mechanism that nevertheless
was shifting national discourse away from the war crimes being committed in
their name. Allison Kelly and Shauna Barry said they thought the Iraq war and
other key issues had effectively been taken off the table during this election
season, but, paradoxically, that the elections had empowered Fordham students
to engage key political questions and made them feel they have a voice and a
stake in answering those questions.
“I think the elections have actually done wonders for us
locally,” Barry said.
But while the students interviewed at McGovern’s speech and
Friday’s protest held different views on the elections, they shared in common a
sense of outrage and compulsion to act in the face of it.
Dimieri, one of the last speakers on Friday, noted that many
students were casually walking by the banner that announced the Iraqi death
toll.
“They go to the cafeteria and they”re able to eat,” Dimieri
said. “It should make you sick!”