Rotten apple
This stuck out to me when reading Obama's horrible speech:For the first time since 2002, we are providing the necessary resources and strategic direction to take the fight to the extremists who attacked us on 9/11 in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This is precisely the lie that was used to justify invading Iraq. But the people the US is murdering in Pakistan were not involved in 9/11, nor were the Taliban. Yes, OBL was in Afghanistan, and you can argue that the Taliban were protecting him (more accurately, "a" Taliban given that the people who now represent the Taliban are not coterminous with the people who were then, by any means), but they were not in any way involved. The Taliban have never attacked the US, have never had the intention of it and, even were it within their means, they would not conceive that intention. (How can I say that? Because the Taliban are, above all else, a Pashtun movement. As with many Islamists, they do not have the broad vision of an OBL; they are focused on an internal objective: Afghanistan (or in some cases, Pashtunistan), not a Caliphate.)
So most Americans probably don't care about killing a few guys in turbans, their wives and children and some bystanders, but they should care about this:
there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.
The principle that the executive cannot arbitrarily imprison others is fundamental to the rule of law. It is the beginning of liberty, the sine qua non of any republic of laws, or any republic that even wants to pretend to be based on the rule of law.
If you cannot present evidence of someone's wrongdoing, under the rule of law he must be presumed not to have done wrong. This is justice as we understand it. Although it is my belief that the law as a body is perverse and does not serve the people, I also believe that it is not possible for humans to live freely in states without the rule of law. I also believe it is better for the weak to be oppressed by the powerful using the means of the law than for the powerful simply to exercise their power without even the restraints they impose upon themselves. I am not a utopian, by any stretch, and I think that at least putting those restraints out into the open is the better course.
That there is even a debate in America over whether torturers should face repercussions from the law, or whether it is right or wrong to detain people who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, wrongdoing, and in some cases clearly would have no case at all to answer, unless you truly believe that being Muslim should be criminalised, is not just worrying. It is disgusting. America always was putrid. Now it has stripped away the pretence that it is anything else. It's laid bare as the rotten apple it is.
posted by Dr Zen @ 2:02 pm
1 Comments:
boots sez:
"This stuck out to me..."
Misplaced parentheticals will do that to the editorial eye.
"The principle that the executive cannot arbitrarily imprison others is fundamental to the rule of law. ... If you cannot present evidence of someone's wrongdoing, under the rule of law he must be presumed not to have done wrong."
It's a farking mess innit. Bush grabbed them up and stuck them away because he was an idiot in a panic. Now Obama is trying to turn them lose to find the senate saying "we don't want them here and you'll get no funds for releasing them".
I pity Obama trying to deal with it. Poor barstid basically has two choices, an executive order to turn them loose immediately before congress can find out and overturn it, or asking the UN to take them on. Personally I'd think about an executive order to accidentally leave the door open at night so they can escape to Cuba, but that's a chickenshit approach because they may have families in the US they want to return to.
"America always was putrid. Now it has stripped away the pretence that it is anything else."
Lawyers suck. There are challenges to which no good answer is possible within any given massive set of written laws. It is the misfortune of the US to have found itself in a position that requires its legal government to shoot itself in the left foot to avoid fear or the right foot to pursue justice.
The question of how much extra abuse a country's citizens will endure if they think it is abuse of their own choice truly is a Great Experiment.
The blame cannot be laid fully on the doorstep of the US, since it is the existence of other nations' armies and contention for supposedly limited resources that forbids the US abandoning all its armies, and the same paranoia that ensures the existence of enemies too fearful to leave living next door without locking up before bed.
Man, not just the US, has created machines of government and economy that are too large for proper control and given control instead to bodies of law that those with crowbars twist and bend for individual power and profit in the guise of law.
Sad fucking shame humans think they have to do all this shit, the race might better be extinct than chewing on its own limbs.
Perhaps the growing global depression will cause a worldwide collapse of governments that allows something less bad to rise from their rubble. No good answer when the choice between living with cancer or cutting out one's life is accepted as inescapable.
Perhaps we should have a "World Get Stoned Fuck And Whine" day to at least add some fun to the miserable mix.
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