United States Air Force Judge Advocate General Jack Rives

Major General Jack Rives, the Judge Advocate General of the United States Air Force, spoke at the University of Georgia School of Law today. I had an opportunity to listen to Maj. Gen. Rives speak, and to participate in his question and answer session.

Maj. Gen. Rives is a man of strict morality and perfect composure. Following a brief presentation about the Air Force JAG Corps, Maj. Gen. Rives fielded questions from the audience. Rives, not one to shy away from his opinion on sensitive topics, challenged the audience to ask him questions about absolutely anything. As a 2-star General, Rives benefits from being able to speak his mind freely; when he is called on by Congress, or in fact when he speaks at all, he is free to express his opinion on Military Law and Policies up to and including the directives issued by civilian military leaders in the Department of Defense and elsewhere.

Following a question about the United States Armed Forces policies and practices on detention of enemy combatants, and the interrogation procedures used in some of those situations, Maj. Gen. Rives made his views clear. It is his opinion that failing to adhere to the Geneva Convention harms the American mission abroad in several profound ways. Realizing that our enemies have ignored these standards in the past, Maj. Gen. Rives nonetheless believes that failure to maintain these standards will open the floodgates for our enemies or potential enemies to further flout those rules to the detriment of our uniformed personnel. Rives went on to say that torturing or illegally detaining enemy combatants seriously hampers his particular mission, and the mission of the Corps he commands, to seek justice.

Maj. Gen. Rives was the first among senior judge advocates to condemn draft interrogation policies from a Defense Department working group led by the Air Force General Counsel in February 2003. The memo was revised, and Rives concedes that much of the offensive material was removed when he saw it again in March of 2003. However, neither Rives nor his colleagues from the other branches were advised of the memo when it was published the next month; Rives and his military colleagues did not learn of the memo, as distributed, until June of the next year, after the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the news.

Maj. Gen. Rives is also a staunch believer in the "Rule of Law;" he believes that a court system is the best way to ensure that right and wrong are understood, and that people in violation of those codes of right and wrong should have the benefit of a system that is fair. As applies to our current involvement in the Middle East, Rives went on to say that this does not require imposing our system of justice, but explaining why our system of justice operates the way it does and allowing people to develop their own system based upon that knowledge. He did go on to say that Sharia Law, as imposed by fundamentalist Islamic governments, may claim to be the "Rule of Law," but its policies regarding women, other religious groups, and other ethnic groups do not meet the fundamental standards of fairness that Rives envisions.

At the end of the question and answer session, a member of the audience asked Maj. Gen. Rives about his outlook for the war in Iraq. Maj. Gen. Rives responded with the following quote: “If there is national will [here in the United States], we can do things to position the Iraqis more for success. I'm not sure the American national will is there, but it's more important on the part of the Iraqis... My personal view is I'm not sure we'll get there.”

EDIT - Corrected the 4th paragraph.