‘What are you fighting for?’

Israeli attorney demands principled fight against terrorism

Amos N. Guiora’s wife once told him that it is not a matter of chance that he is bald. Rather, it resulted from the stress of his previous job, Guiora said to some 60 people at Tuesday’s meeting of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Benjamin Cardozo Society.

Guiora in his nearly 20 years in the Israel Defense Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps was involved in high pressure and controversial situations, including discussions and negotiations with Palestinian terrorists.

He was one of those legal authorities that military commanders would wake at 3 a.m. in order to ask if it was legal for them to take certain actions against Israel’s enemies — and he often had to tell them no, he said.

Now a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University, Guiora criticized how the United States is conducting its war against Islamicist terrorists in a speech on “Legal Aspects of Counter-Terrorism: International Law and Morality in Armed Conflict.”

Guiora — who also is director of the Institute for Global Security, Law and Policy — said he is second to no one in despising terrorists, especially since he has had to spend many hours dealing with them.

“But these bastards have rights,” he told the audience gathered in the Chai Point dining room. “If we forget that, we forget who we are” and what values and principles we are fighting to defend, he said.

Guiora said he recently visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He learned that the future officers of the U.S. Army are learning physical combat, liberal arts and “spiritual development” (which he warned involved the “Christianizing of the U.S. military”).

But they are not being taught subjects that are vital to winning the war against Islamicist terrorism, such as Arabic, Middle East culture, international law, relations with the news media and “morality in conflict,” he said.

Guiora also said he wished the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress “would be more active” in overseeing the policies and behavior of military and administration personnel.

He blasted the memo that U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote to White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales in August 2002 justifying use of torture in the war on terrorism.

Yoo’s arguments were “mental gymnastics at their worst,” and the memo helped “create an environment and atmosphere” that “flows downward” from commanders to soldiers, and that led to such abuses as those at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, Guiora said.

In Israel, all military commanders are aware that “every decision is petitionable” to the High Court of Justice, which strives to make sure that the IDF “acts in a lawful way,” Guiora said.

Guiora quoted a former IDF chief of staff as having said that Israel’s “real battle” is “not against Palestinian terrorism” but is “for the moral soul of the IDF.”

Guiora said he understands, and has had to tell commanders, that adherence to such principles may mean Israeli soldiers have to fight “with one arm tied behind their backs” while the enemy can use “both arms in front.”

But that is part of the price of a “civil and democratic society,” he said. Otherwise, “at the end of the day, we will become like them.”

“The moment you can’t look at yourself in the mirror, what are you fighting for?” he said.

The Cardozo Society’s purpose is “to celebrate the legal profession’s commitment to the principles of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.” Society co-chairs are Daniel E. Goldberg and Sheryn Bruehl.