Ken Krayeske

As a freshman at Syracuse University, I failed to understand the depth of depravity lurking in Division I athletics. I knew college sports meant big money, but I underestimated the entitlement and rape culture that went along with it.

Syracuse University never had the great soccer teams of its Big East rivals UConn or St. Johns. But its players nonetheless felt they owned the world because they were big time athletes. This became evident to me one night in February 1991.

A woman I was dating went to a frat party, and when she returned to our dorm, she sought solace in my arms. She wept as we hugged, and I knew something was wrong.

After some prying and arguing, I learned she had been cornered in a closet by a soccer player and he raped her. She did not want to report this to the police. She did not want to seek medical help.

I told her that if she was not going to do anything, I could not help her either. I did not report it. I didn’t know the guy. She wouldn’t cooperate. I regretted it then, and though I can try to forgive my callousness, it makes me feel small now. My own shame  compels me to speak in concert with UConn undergrad Carolyn Luby.

Luby recently wrote a letter to UConn president Susan Herbst decrying UConn’s new aggressive, angry Husky dog cartoon logo as a symbol of rape culture. Luby’s words:

“What terrifies me about the admiration of such traits is that I know what it feels like to have a real life Husky look straight through you and to feel powerless, and to wonder if even the administration cannot ‘mess with them.’ And I know I am not alone.”

UConn ignored Luby. UConn and the entire state of Connecticut refuses to mess with the athletic department, despite the stench of ethical decay wafting from Gampel Pavilion.

Even the former Governor of Connecticut herself, M. Jodi Rell, did not mess with Jim Calhoun when he was an aggressive, mean “big dog” to this very columnist.

I once hoped UConn President Susan Herbst would be more than a corporate caretaker of the state’s flagship university. I hoped Herbst would fight for students, and use her pulpit to argue for free tuition, if not that, then reducing student loan burdens.

Instead, Herbst has shown herself unfit to protect students, and she has positioned herself atop an institution bent on mining its student body for profit and reaping the benefits of capitalist excess.

Last week, the mailman gave me a glossy, four-color magazine from UConn. I am a 2010 graduate of its law school. UConn likely sent this magazine to every graduate of every school, at no small expense, explaining the new logo and look and shortened name (from the University of Connecticut to “UConn”).

The UConn communications department, which boasts 31 employees working in six different sub-departments, needed Nike’s help to not just redesign the logo, but to explain why the redesign benefits everyone.

Surely, these 31 communications personnel provide essential services to the educational mission of the University and keep tuition costs low and insure student loan rates below prime, right? Of course.

Kenneth Best, who more than a decade ago covered UConn basketball for a radio station, now is the Special Projects Editor for the University News and Information Department. If memory serves me, Best was always a PR guy in another field, and the radio gig was a hobby.

And the destruction of journalism has seen good reporters like Stephanie Reitz, once an AP staffer who I worked with at the Waterbury Republican back in the mid-1990s, and Colin Poitras, formerly with the Hartford Courant, flock to the public relations game.

Anyways, Best scribed “Husky Evolution”, a three-page story explaining the new logo. How he didn’t puke when writing the piece is beyond me, but hey, everybody’s gotta eat and pay rent, right?

Best’s propaganda traced the decades-long history of UConn’s cartoon mascot to today’s new mean dog logo.  Emulating legit journalism, Best quoted two sources: UConn’s Kyle Muncy and Nike’s Clint Shaner, the graphic designer who helped create the logo.

When UConn examined its sports programs, Muncy said “we saw that only five of the 24 were using the Husky dog logo on their current uniform…We had become an athletic department and a university that had so many different marks, it was difficult to determine what the brand was.”

Now remember, participating in college sports is about becoming a more well-rounded person, someone whose competition in intercollegiate athletics aids in self-discovery and team building and helps equip them for the challenges of citizenship and life.

So why do we care about brand imaging? It can’t be for Kyle Muncy’s paycheck. Or for the NBA and the NFL’s need for trained bodies from UConn’s minor league teams. Or because Nike needs to sell uniforms.

Shaner is the senior graphic designer for Nike’s Graphic Identity Group, and he can be found online discussing the redesign of the Arizona State University Sun Devils uniforms and logos.

Lisa Love was the vice president for athletics at Arizona, and her quote from an April 12, 2011 press release heralding the new ASU logo and specially created font (by Nike!) sounds like the vomit from Muncy and Best now:

“When I arrived at ASU six years ago I noticed we were an athletics program which featured different shades of maroon and gold, different logos, multiple fonts and uniforms…There was a lack of real consistency with regard to our brand.”

Nike drives the collegiate athletic ship.  Nothing like creating a need for new product and selling it. I wonder what Carolyn Luby would think of ASU’s new logo: a very sharp lined, aggressive, militaristic trident. It is not the smiley little Sun Devil of days of yore.

A trident is an ancient phallic symbol, wielded by the mythological King Neptune. But ASU would tell you this isn’t about emphasizing male domination. In 2009, ASU paid $850,000 to a woman raped by a Sun Devil football player.

But UConn and Nike will tell you it’s wrong to think of rape culture, putting athletes on a pedestal or selling merchandise. They want you to forget Nate Miles and his violence against women. UConn wants to you to believe the consistent brand image allows college athletes to wear uniforms reflecting who they truly are, so they can be educated to become better citizens.

UConn’s new logo is about “athleticism, determination, and aggressiveness in competition,” said Muncy, adding that student-athletes contributed to the design. “They didn’t feel the existing mark reflected who they are and didn’t adequately embody the characteristics of a Husky,” he said. I say horse manure.

Explain to me again why I didn’t receive a four-color glossy magazine from Susan Herbst explaining why UConn was organizing all its students on all its campuses to support Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal that student loans get the same interest rates that banks do, less than one percent? Because Herbst’s a fraud?

Explain to me again why there isn’t a whole glossy magazine from UConn decrying the Obama administration’s $51 billion profit from student loans this year? Because UConn’s corporate class depends on this disgusting practice for its existence?

Capitalism demands exploitation. Capitalism demands meat to grind into profit. Capitalism demands complicity from winners and defeat from losers.

Anoint as victors the Muncys, the Nikes, the Herbsts, the Calhouns. Silence as vanquished the Lubys scorned, the violated restraining orders, the students in debt, the women sewing in sweatshops, the raped weeping and thirsting for justice.

For the lawyers who advised the Bush administration on torture, there should be no war crimes trials or prosecutions, at least according to former Acting Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal.

Katyal deserves enormous respect, but I do not abide with these remarks, given at a lunch in his honor. The Young Lawyers Section of the Connecticut Bar Association on Monday, May 6, at Amarante’s Sea Cliff in New Haven recognized Katyal for his leadership and accomplished life.

“The question of how we deal with the past is an important one,” Katyal said. “I do not think talk of prosecuting (former U.S. Attorney General) Michael Mukasey or (former Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of the Legal Counsel) John Yoo makes any sense. It is hard for us to understand what leaders were going through in the wake of 9/11.”

Katyal will cut lawyers slack where I won’t. His point of view demands an ear, because at 42 years old, he has accomplished more than most ever will in their whole lives: Yale Law, District Court Clerkship, Supreme Court  Clerkship, and a career that follows such laurels.

This man who embodies meritocracy served as President Obama’s Acting Solicitor General, the attorney who represents the United States in appeals courts. From that position, Katyal argued more than a dozen cases before the United States Supreme Court.

One of those cases was to free former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft from liability for inhumane treatment of detainees in the war on terror. Everyone – even right wing religious zealots from Texas – deserve counsel. It is a fundamental human right.

Katyal knows this, as he has also represented the despised: alleged terrorists. As pro bono counsel, he was counsel for Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni man captured by the Bush dragnet in the war on terror.

In Katyal’s first oral argument with the Supremes, he won a decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that delivered a major blow to the Bush administration’s war on terror. Hamdan is a free man now, thanks to Katyal outfoxing Republicans in the U.S. Senate. This win demonstrates how the right to counsel preserves civil liberties.

That may be the point Katyal tries to make in saying that Yoo, who presided over the infamous Torture Memos, should be free from international war criminal liability. Yet the Torture Memos deserve no quarter, and on his second day in office, President Obama repudiated the legal advice in the Torture Memos.

Katyal is now in private practice, but his heart is still in government work. His talk for the Young Lawyer’s section focused on a lawyer’s ethical responsibility in war time.

He told stories of how the Office of the Solicitor General in World War II suppressed evidence that would have likely changed the Supreme Court’s decision in the infamous Korematsu case – which constitutionalized Japanese internment camps on the American west coast.

None of those government lawyers apparently ever suffered consequences for seemingly unethical conduct in failing to have candor towards a tribunal. Yet Katyal argues the fog of war merits impunity and protects the dispensing of wrong legal advice.

If the Nuremburg Tribunals told us that acting on orders we know to be wrong is punishable, how can Katyal justify advocating for attorney absolution in national security exigencies?

For those in the internment camps, justice took decades. And even still, people were never made whole. Government lawyers who do harm should not be free from prosecution. Where is the justice for those harmed by dishonest government lawyers?

And listening to the erudite Katyal, I thought of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, and wonder if Katyal sees Jackson as a role model. I want someone like Katyal to prosecute an American Nuremburg, trying the Bush actors who stepped over the line in the War on Terror, elected officials, military personnel, and their lawyers.

Katyal’s statements paint lawyers as some priestly class who we should protect because the right to receive legal counsel is sacred. Readers may recall this column two weeks ago dissected Mukasey’s reluctance to label waterboarding torture, and his failure to face the consequences that arise from that recognition.

I asked Katyal about what happens when America comes to its senses and recognizes waterboarding is torture (as we did when Pol Pot and the Cambodians did it). What do war crimes tribunals look like for high level officials in the Bush Administration?

He acknowledged that waterboarding is wrong and beyond the pale, but immediately after 9/11, American leaders confronted hard choices.

“I don’t like the legal process coming in and criminalizing these decisions,” Katyal said. He noted that he has not been shy about criticizing George W. Bush, and he added that there seems to be a degree of personalization directed towards those at the top of the Bush legal chain.

“At the end of the day, they were lawyers, not clients,” Katyal said. “Lawyers have a duty to say something is illegal and immoral, but the real issue are the folks who gave the orders. The legal advice may have been deficient, but there is a line we do not want to cross.”

Lawyers have a duty to make arguments for their clients. But what happens when those arguments seek to destroy other sacred human rights, like the right to be free from torture?

In areas of national security, where grey areas blur the clarity of law, Katyal said “I’m reluctant to go down that road.” And that is the fog of war: grey areas settling over what centuries of human experience have shown us as moral behavior.

And if we examine 9/11 as blowback from decades of American imperialism, justifying bad lawyering through the lens of a self-inflicted “national security” exigency holds no water.

Katyal seems to leave the door open for prosecution of the clients who made decisions based on this legal advice. Because of the format of the talk, I could not ask the follow up about prosecuting the non-lawyers.

But we must not place lawyers above the fray, where the authors of the torture memos like Jay Bybee parsed what pain is, and picked apart the definitions of words to bend the law to fit the policies already sought (or perhaps already in place).

What of the CIA lawyers who authorize drone strikes on children or who authorized the extraordinary rendition program?  Do we let these word priests of the cult of torture scot-free because spooks deserve lawyers, too?

Right is right and wrong is wrong. Waterboarding is torture. Those who helped it happen should bear responsibility for it. And not prosecuting the lawyers for war crimes leaves gaping holes for non-lawyers to escape through.

What if Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, should we ever prosecute them, employ a chicken-and-egg defense: My lawyer said waterboarding was legal, my counsel is not being prosecuted, so I, following his advice, shouldn’t be prosecuted either.

One doubts Katyal would absolve former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, and Nixonian lawyers John Dean and Charles Colson from criminal liability in Watergate because they were lawyers, giving war-time advice to President Nixon?

After all, part of Watergate was about breaking into Vietnam War whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. While the Pentagon Papers were a breach of national security (not 9/11), it all comes back to preserving American military dominance here and overseas.

Where government attorneys draft analyses to fit desired outcomes for the American imperial machine, we have to police the legal field. Lawyers cannot be above the law. As bright as Katyal may be, his opinion of not prosecuting bad lawyers for war crimes looks and sounds dim to me.