Reflections of a stormy petrel

Nearly every right-wing American commentator in the last two days has gone doolally about the guilty sentence against a terrorist involved in the infamous bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania. With all the grace and intellectual gravitas of a lynch mob, they all howl at the judge, yell at the jury (traditional legal rights such as being tried by a jury of your peers are only OK until they deliver the result you want, evidently, to these "conservatives"), and rage at the President and the Attorney General. Some demand Eric Holder's resignation. And none of them even mention the yelling, trumpeting elephant in the room: namely, evidence obtained by torture. Unless, of course, it is to describe the ACLU's call to prosecute George W.Bush, who has admitted in writing that he is responsible for authorizing torture, as some kind of perverse anti-Republican plot - rather than the least that any person who believes in the rule of law should do.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike the ACLU and Eric Holder - especially his reverse racism and his moral cowardice - but in this matter they are as innocent as newborn babes. The person who insured that most of the evidence against this murderous scum could not be heard in any court of law worth the name was the person who ordered that it should be taken from him by torture. That person was George W. Bush. He says so, and I believe him. And because he says so, he belongs in front of a court of law himself. If there is any legal reason why waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other such charming innovations in police work should not be classified as torture, let him prove it in a court of law; instead of just having it maintained by the conjoined squawking of all his partisan supporters.

The jury hearing the case were in a terrible dilemma, and came out of it honourably if not in a legally snow-white manner. They had a man in front of them who obviuously belonged behind bars for life. They knew that the evidence against him had been obtrained in ways that none of them would countenance for a minute, and that hundreds of pages of it had been struck down by the judge in open court for being tainted by torture. What they did was to find him guilty on a single charge - which still can deliver him to the delightful confines of an American jail for life, and at the very least for twenty long, ugly years - and reject all the others, thus sending a message that the man was a villain but that they were not disposed to uphold, just because of that, the villainy of their own government. That jury behaved far better than the politicians of both sides, and infinitely better than the "conservative" commentariat.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/08/MN061AVC89.DTL
And I am. Wanna bet that a few unlucky underlings will now be fed into the criminal justice system for doing what this bastard had advised they should do?
EDITED IN: Of course, if he gets away with it, what about those further up the chain of command who authorized it? The highest placed person whose fingerprints are on the decision to use torture is former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Years ago, I made an unserious entry comparing her to Henry Kissinger; to which someone replied, equally in jest, to ask whether this meant she was a war criminal. Alas, we were both more in the right than we imagined.

If the Republicans wanted to win at the coming elections - and, perhaps even more important, not to confirm every commonplace of anti-American propaganda throughout the world - they should have sent Cheney (and perhaps Rumsfeld) on a diplomatic mission to Antarctica for the last couple of months. His outburst about pretend drowning being a legitimate kind of interrogation has been manna to al-Jazeera, MoveOn.org, the Daily Kos, and the Brutish Broadcasting Creeperation. But what was worse was the number of would-be reasonable Republican columnists, people who claim to be the real mainstream of American society - and, increasingly, are - who, instead of suggesting that he should suffer from a few weeks of laringytis or that he should retire to the Rockies to fish and shoot deer, have lined up to support him, even claiming that pretend drowning is not torture. All of it, mind you, said with the earnest, moralizing tone with which they (rightly) denounce the New Jerk Dimes' assaults on American security and the crass exploitation of Mark Foley's flirts with young adults by the party of gay rights. Be serious: do you imagine that if such... call them procedures... were used by any American cop, against the worst, most murderous, and most provenly guilty, of gang members - the case against the gang member would not collapse in court, and the cop and his accomplices would not go to jail, among the execrations and disgust of all decent Americans? Have you morons learned nothing from the Abu Ghraib calamity? The West is held to a higher standard of behaviour than the stateless gangs of murderous thugs who hate it; and rightly so, for these are the standards we chose for ourselves. To imagine that American citizens are protected from treatment that is acceptable even for criminals of other countries is to make a nonsense of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. This should not even need saying; it should be as obvious as the sun in the sky. But evidently Cheney and a number of Republicans are blind to self-evidence.

A curse on the party spirit, and a plague on both your houses. The Foley affair showed the Democrats eager to throw overboard every bit of principle they had ever claimed with respect to gay rights, merely in order to show a little-known Republican in a bad light; and the water-torture affair now shows hordes of Republicans willing to throw overboard the very historical principles they claim to live by, the principles upon which the Republic was founded, just in order to support a morally tone-deaf old man. I can see the need of things like Guantanamo, special courts, and even limitations on published evidence, because this security crisis - it is hard to call it a war, though it has some of the features of one - is something completely new in the last few centuries of history: militarized banditry with a politico-religious justification, yet leaderless and stateless, with no state to hold responsible (though many are accomplices) for its soldiers' behaviour, no common uniform, organization, or aims, supported by an anarchic network of mosques, self-proclaimed leaders, Islamic financiers, and deviant secret services. In these circumstances, to hold the enemy to every word of the Geneva Conventions, which none of them ever signed, which none of them regard except with derision, and which never envisaged worldwide banditry of their kind is, whatever the US Supreme Court may happen to think, total insanity. But there is something much more important than the Geneva Conventions, which, after all, only codify the transient and ever-changing laws of war; and that is our own collective conscience, the values in whose name we have built our societies, the values in whose name our fathers fought and died against kings and tyrants. And if Dick Cheney thinks that these grey old rules may carelessly be broken for the delusion of advantage against a fanatical enemy, then he is almost as revolutionary and as destructive as that enemy; and to that extent, he has to be rejected by the sane majority of both parties.