Category Archives: Everything Else

10 Years in Iraq: The Fragrance of Flowers. The Horror of War. The Burden of Doing Justice in its Wake

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Abeer

Note to readers: The post below was one I wrote not in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, but an anniversary of the atrocities at Al-Mahmudiyah. I’ve since realized the post is more appropriate for publication at a significant anniversary of the invasion. The reason is simple: The atrocities at Mahmudiyah are as intrinsic and foreseeable an aspect of war as any that can be imagined. The designers of the war must never be allowed to escape that.

“Abeer” translates in Arabic to “the fragrance of flowers” and was the name given to the 14 year-old girl ruthlessly raped and murdered, along with her parents and six year-old sister, on March 12, 2006, near the town of Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq. The murderers were a group of American soldiers, stationed at a nearby checkpoint in an especially brutal time after the American invasion three years previous.

Of the many honorable men and women I met serving as a civilian in the Army JAG Corps, the one I came to know the best was among the first and most involved prosecutors in the Al-Mahmudiyah massacre. It wasn’t enough that he endured a difficult and dangerous deployment as part of the 101st Airborne Division. He was also saddled with bringing, of all things, the weight of that crime home with him as he handled the case near Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He did this while readjusting to stateside and family life as a husband and father. He’ll acknowledge that burden if it’s pointed out. But he will never, ever complain about it. First, because by God’s grace, his own family is intact and healthy, and he was able to hold them when he returned. Second, because seeking justice for Abeer and her family was an honor he accepted with humility and a deep sense of duty that I found typical in the Army JAG Corps. He sought justice for his Army and his country. But I suspect most of all he sought justice for for Abeer, and the details he came to know of her life and the unspeakable circumstances of her death.

The details are public, if you want them. I can tell you that nightmares are all you’re likely to get for mining them, and I say this as a trained absorber of such things.

The Army JAG Corps ignored several things I encouraged them to address while I served as a consultant. In a time where soldier suicides are spiking in particular, perhaps the most puzzling to me was refusing (to my knowledge and based on their responses to me at the time) to even look into proactive assistance for JAG prosecutors and defenders who must absorb, if not horrors like Mahmudiyah on a daily basis, then things like increasingly detailed and technologically advanced videos of children used in pornography or worse.

And then there is war, the ones we’ve been waging now on the backs of a volunteer military and its valiant but exhausted support bulwark for nearly 12 years. Among myriad other things, war requires the prosecution and defense of combatants accused of atrocities and horrors more regularly than many grasp.

I blame Mahmudiyah solely on the men who conceived and carried it out. They represent nothing but themselves; not the US Army, not the stress of combat (which the vast majority of soldiers endure without resorting to murder and rape) and not even the war itself. Regardless, the men and women who must address legally what military conflict inevitably produces must be cared for during that process. Of its many poisons, war vomits things like Mahmudiyah regularly. It did so at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, at My Lai,Quan Ngai, in Kandahar, Afghanistan. It has done so in every war and under every flag unfurled since the beginning of combat.

The architects of the 2003 Iraq War, just as the drum-beaters for Vietnam, may argue with scholarly confidence that they were right, or with grave regret that they were wrong. But none may claim a lack of foreseeability for one single thing that occurred or will occur as a result of their decisions. No act, no matter how shocking, how damning, how soul-crushing and freakishly inhuman, is unforeseeable the moment war is engaged.

Similarly, the stress of sorting out, in courts of military justice, the details of anything war yields is also foreseeable and addressable. It’s not enough to own, no matter how deeply, what war really is. We must also support appropriately those who must seek justice in its wake.

 

 

 

 

 

Virginia, Blood and Soil

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VSPAlexandria Police

Through five European dominated centuries, Virginia soil has been stained red time and time again. The Civil War alone drew so much blood- along the turnpikes and rivers, in the killing fields and tree lines- it’s a wonder it wasn’t coughed up by the tired, stomped-on ground tasked with absorbing it.

Within eight days of each other this month, the blood of two men, both police officers, again stained Virginia ground in two places quite familiar with its presence. One occurred in Alexandria, the contested and then occupied port city just south of Washington, and one in Dinwiddie County, southeast of Petersburg and cross-hatched within the brutal conquest of Richmond and then the Confederacy.

One man lost his life at the scene. The other, thankfully, clings to life.

I know Peter Laboy, the officer shot in Alexandria on a traffic stop who, as of this writing, thankfully survives and improves. We were rookies at exactly the same time in early 1997, him of the Alexandria Police Department and me as an Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney.  As I learned to prosecute Driving While Intoxicated cases, Peter was learning to write them up; I would spend time with him on nights I was riding along with the evening and midnight divisions in search of drunk drivers. He was kind, boyish and soft-spoken in those days, not yet possessed of the confidence I imagine he has now as a veteran of the city’s elite motor unit.

I did not know Junius Walker, the Master Trooper and 35 year-veteran of the Virginia State Police who was shot and killed when he stopped to assist a motorist along I-85. He seems like a fine man and exactly the kind of cop who made me truly enjoy the interaction I had with police officers and state troopers over the years. I do know well the desolate, wooded stretch of road he was killed along, and I doubt I will travel it again without thinking of him. 

By God’s design we all return to the earth, bones and flesh to dust again. But a somber salute should be offered to these two men who most recently gave early to the earth precious blood in service to their Commonwealth. May that already hallowed ground not be burdened again with the red stain of violence for a long, long time.

Mark Hasse, Lay At Rest, And With Honor

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In the courtyard of the National Advocacy Center, the premier US training facility for prosecutors in Columbia, South Carolina, there is a monument to prosecuting attorneys who have been killed in relation to their official duties. A section of it is shown above, including the name of Sean Healy, a bright, rookie ADA in the Bronx, New York who was gunned down senselessly in August of 1990 near the same office I worked in on E. 161st Street.

Fallen prosecutors constitue an honored and thankfully small group. Like judges, they aren’t frequently targeted by the defendants they interact with in court. Most criminals consider the justice process a cost of doing business. Over the years I encountered men I prosecuted, whether successfully or not, in the communities where I lived and worked, sometimes months or years after the fact. The vast majority were polite and cordial, some actually friendly. Where they were concerned, it wasn’t personal. And they were right; even in my work where facts can be horrific and emotions run high, it wasn’t.

I got one death threat in over ten years as a trial attorney that I thought was credible. It arose out of a misdemeanor domestic violence case I tried that was from my perspective unremarkable. I’m sure it had little to do with me as the prosecutor and more to do with the wandering focus of the defendant who threatened a few times to kill me, once on a DC street where I somehow crossed his path on the way to a hockey game with a friend. For a while I ignored it, until one day at a post-trial hearing where he stared at me until he caught my eye, then drew his index finger over his throat and pointed at me. At that point I told Randy Sengel, the Commonwealth’s Attorney for the City of Alexandria, Virginia where I was then a junior ACA. Randy is a deeply respected, honorable public servant and brilliant man, but perhaps known most for his sphinx-like reticence and un-rattled, deadpan approach to just about everything. When I gave him the details, he told me it was rare but that it happened, and that I should call a detective nicknamed Scotty and make a report.

But Scotty was a homicide detective, I pointed out.

“Yeah,” Randy said with a shrug. “If someone threatens your life, that’s what you do.”

I made the report, Detective Scott did his job, the guy eventually turned his focus elsewhere, and I’m still here. Mark Hasse, a veteran and apparently well-respected assistant district attorney from near Dallas, Texas, is not. Hasse was gunned down, execution style, outside of his office last week, very possibly in relation to his duties as a felony ADA. Investigators are searching desperately for answers, but eight days later they appear to remain elusive. He will be laid to rest tomorrow. 

Hasse appears to have been a valued prosecutor and a well-liked figure in both the courtroom and the community. If his service was cut short by murderers out to silence him and and thwart the process he sought to uphold, that act is indeed “an attack on our criminal justice system” as a Texas judge referred to it. Targeting those in the system, whether police, prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys or jurors, is the final assault on the rule of law.

Of course, front line responders like police officers remain in far more danger. I drove extensively through Southern California this past week and was sobered to see how many highways are dedicated to members of the California Highway Patrol who died in the line. For now, at least, most of us in the system who practice law are far safer in our duties. Still, if Hasse was killed in the name of blurring the line between civil society and what lies beneath, then everyone- within Kaufman, Texas and far beyond- should be gravely concerned.

 

 

Chris Brown Is Making Choices He Can Fully Control, And They’re Getting Worse

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I’ve noted before in this space that I lack the enviable crystal ball. But I’ll go out on a limb anyway: Chris Brown doesn’t have “anger management” issues in the way they are usually imagined. Most intimate partner abusers don’t. Indeed, they manage their anger extremely well. They incorporate it into their daily routines as a necessary adjunct of controlling, bullying and humiliating others as it suits them. 

It’s a wager on my part, but frankly one I’m willing to bet very big on: Chris Brown doesn’t hit people or intimidate them because he can’t help himself. He does it because it pleases and amuses him at the time he chooses to do it. Throwing chairs through windows (where the hell were the LA DA’s office or the probation officer in April of 2012 with a motion to revoke then, by the way?) might be more indicative of rage; the tantrum of a toddler who is unhappy with being to forced to acknowledge his actions. But even an act like that- absent compelling evidence to the contrary- is something that Brown chose to do, not one that he was willed otherwise to do. 

As I learned in 15 years of dealing with intimate partner violence, both sexual and physical, an “inability to maintain control” of one’s emotions is usually not the issue with domestic abusers. Instead, most use the tools of physical and emotional violence as keenly as a surgeon does a scalpel. And yet most court systems in the US and beyond continue to seek solutions to family violence under this “management” model, viewing the abuser as a somehow diseased and mostly helpless creature, trapped tragically in the claws of a relentless compulsion to beat and control weaker people around him who don’t react in ways that immediately satisfy him (or her, in same-sex relationships in particular). And worse, the management model often if unwittingly assumes some “partial responsibility” on the part of the victims who had the bad luck to land within the abuser’s sphere of influence and/or arms-reach. It’s a family problem, after all. Sure. Except that it isn’t. It’s an abuser’s problem. The family is usually relatively powerless and legally, socially paralyzed. Their only “problem” is what’s being visited on them. Violence toward them is not of their making. Ever. 

The lie is that many if not most domestic disputes involve either or both 1) struggling perpetrators dealing with their “own issues,” and 2) at least “partially culpable” victims of threats, fists or worse. This might have fooled me as well had I not been bullied as a kid and tortured by older boys who I witnessed turn their predilections off switch-like were I lucky enough to have a supportive adult walk into the room. It might have made sense to me had I not been involved in the lives of hundreds of women, children and some men- both personally and professionally- who spent years in fear of perhaps emotionally damaged but still fully sentient and controlled beings who made the conscious choice to act cruelly and violently because it was what they wanted to do at the time. 

I’m not claiming that Brown is not an emotionally limited individual (for whatever reasons) or that nothing can be done to assist him in becoming a less violent man. I simply believe that, from what I can gather, Chris Brown is less a helpless pawn of anger and more an impulsive, likely manipulative, abusive individual who may not respond to anything but punishment in terms of behavior modification. 

And I can say with absolute certainly that Rihanna, whatever other character flaws or foibles she has borne up untill now, was utterly blameless with regard to what Brown did to her, in a car, with club-like fists and his teeth, in March of 2009. He was rightfully convicted of a serious felony, and he should be punished now with incarceration for not honoring the conditions of the remarkably lenient sentence he received for doing so. He continues to make choices, and they continue to get worse. It’s time to honor the law and limit them further.

Thank You, Edward I. Koch

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I’m 45 and I’ve been in love twice. Once with a woman and once with a city. I fell in love with the woman at 42. I fell in love with the city around fourth grade. It is the city of my birth, but federal employment removed my father and mother, both native New Yorkers, to the Washington, DC suburbs before my third birthday.  Instead of navigating New York the way cousins and friends did through the hard years of the 70′s and 80′s, I loved it from afar, coveting visits and planning the eventual triumphant return as a Grown-Up that would be my destiny.

The problem was that fourth grade, the year my heart opened and I knew love for the first time, was 1977. Haunted by a serial killer and crippled by a blackout, ’77 was the year that, by most reasonable measurements, the object of my affections was declared dead.

It wasn’t just the crime stats and socio-economic shifts of the 70’s that told me so.  It was also the mantra I heard incessantly through conversation aimed both at me and above my head, either in my father’s house or at the houses of my relatives back in the 212.  My ubiquitous childhood memories are of the spicy smell of tomato sauce in the kitchens, the mustiness of wood paneling in basement rec-rooms, and the god-awful, never-gonna-turn-it-around, descent into white-flight, urban blight, talk of the Death of the City. The past was great. The present was awful. The future looked worse. All that I loved about the city, I was told with the occasional wagging finger, had the depth and breadth of a yellowing photograph of smiling relatives dressed in black beside an impossibly large and equally black car. All that was good about it, I was told, was no longer.  Best to look toward the cities that had a future. Boise. Charlotte. Anywhere in California.  New York was gone, the leader of a band of lesser rust-belt cities like it, marching toward the graveyard in a funeral dirge.

A giant of a mayor named Fiorello H. LaGuardia signed the birth certificates of my mother and father, one of whom was born to a man whose “usual occupation” was that of fruit peddler. They arrived in dark times, but to a great city. Mine had been signed by John V. Lindsey. Lindsey called being mayor of New York “the second toughest job in America” and then seemed to demonstrate that difficulty by presiding over a slide that looked more like free fall by the time he dumped what was left into the lap of Abe Beame in 1973.

But then there was Ed Koch, seizing control over the spiral in the winter of 1978, that frigid and dark reflection of the steaming, violent summer that preceded it. Koch loved New York unashamedly and unabashedly. His cheers for the city were louder in my ears than the head-shaking disparagement, the insistence on the superiority of the Sun Belt, and the cynical drone of disco. He made it okay for me to remain secretly in love, and I love him still for it.

Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg have reaped most of the credit for the relative Disneyland that is the New York City to which I have finally returned. Their initiatives, the work of visionaries like William Bratton, the relentless draw of New York come hell or high water, and host of other factors have quieted the dirges.

Neither Koch nor his successors have been miracle workers; Intractable problems remain in the city I love, and I count among my proudest accomplishments the tiny role I was able to play battling crime in its poorest, still toughest borough. That brief, two-year stint as a Bronx ADA and New York City employee pales in comparison to the efforts of hundreds of colleagues and millions of fellow New Yorkers who continue to work, officially or unofficially, to make the city’s heart beat as strong as ever.

Still, I was grateful for the chance to do my part, and I remain eternally grateful to the man who gave me the secret inspiration as a child in love to do so. God bless and keep you, Your Honor.