Follow the Yellow Brick Road
London subway posterA Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to
against every government, and what no just government
should refuse, or rest on inference
--Thomas Jefferson
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America is dealing off the bottom of the deck, and the Joker keeps coming up.
How shall the federal court system confront the violations perpetrated by U.S. officials in the democracy's Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©)?
What should be done about the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by government agents while executing the Commander in Chief's PWOT? Offenses would include but not be limited to killing and bombing "suspected" terrorists, both persons and locations, warrantless wiretaps, revocation of habeas corpus for American citizens and extraordinary renditions.
Against the "worst of the worst," things like solitary confinement and detention of individuals taken from the battlefield and held without charges, open-ended incarceration and torture.
Most Americans believe that scum-sucking terrorists should be convicted by any means available. Some recognize the administration's initial error and see the consequences that flow from that, i.e., that their very detention has radicalized the detained members and their associates, if they were not already so. However, they figure, they must therefore be kept indefinitely in the gulag lest there be a Solzhenitsyn among them.
Most likely neither the tortured nor the torturers will ever receive justice from our criminal justice system. The torturers will not be tried because the witnesses to their torture will never materialize to identify these "loyal Americans." The entire system was designed to provide anonymity to the Central Intelligence Agency contract interrogators, the largely nameless and faceless legions covered by code names and nom de guerres.
The U.S. does not want to prosecute its war criminals because we know the real culprits will walk after a few low-level sacrificial lambs are herded up to the altar.
Ranger anxiously awaits the civil suits that will result from this PWOT's illegal detentions. This will probably be the only legal recourse that the detainees will have to gain a semblance of justice. The U.S. should be held accountable at every level for its cynical and corrupt response to terrorism.
How does a democratic nation following such a convoluted road sustain the fiction that it is a nation of law and decency?
Labels: criminal culpability in pwot, gitmo prisoners released, phony war on terror
posted by rangeragainstwar at 7:41 PM
2 Comments:
once torture has entered into the room neither justice nor truth can remain.
by allowing it to happen, by standing by while it occured the entire mechanism of investigation, intelligence, adjudication, and military process are all tainted beyond the ability to use.
i've never been a torture moralist. if torture had been an effective means of obtaining a tactical or strategic advantage i would have made torquemada look like a pussy.
i am a torture pragmatist. i'm against it because it's ineffective, and also counterproductive. there are many who believe that al qaeda's genesis was in the torture dungeons of egypt. the founders were people who were scooped off the streets and out of the colleges of egypt, kidnapped without charge, tortured without conscience, convicted without process. they were also tortured during their captivity.
they finally were released. and what was loosed on the world were some absolutely depraved antagonists. antagonists who hated the very idea of a state which would do these terrible things.
all they wanted was to make sure that other people were introduced to the pain, and helplessness that they had been dealt.
MB,
I agree with your assessment of the Egyptian genesis of these groups to include AQ.However let's widen the search to include Saudi/Jordanian involvement in the developement of these movements. All groups followed evolutionarily to the present generation of the threat.
As you indicate it just doesn't work.Maybe it appears that it does but that is illusion and wishful , deluded thinking done by armchair commandos and soldiers of fiction types.
jim
ps -recently i heard this term in a gunshop-CLOSET COMMANDO.I'll have to use it sometime. jim
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