The Iceman Cometh

Army Spc. Sabrina Hartman, 372nd MP Co.,
poses with the body of Iraqi detainee Manadel al-Jamadi

There isn't a more profitable undertaking
for any country than to declare war
on the United States and to be defeated.
--The Mouse That Roared (1959)

To hell with the truth!
As the history of the world proves,
the truth has no bearing on anything
--The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill
________________

Ranger Observation of the Day:
Terrorism Counteraction is Social Security
provided to the world, sans enrollment cost.
The entitlement is funded by the American taxpayer,
borne upon the backs of American servicemen.
It is socialism on a grand scale,
but nobody calls it what it is
_________________

Several recent media events coalesce in Ranger's mind. Justice is not an easy commodity to find these days.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9-11-01 attacks, is on trial but not in a federal court, and evidence of his torture has been ruled inadmissible. It was a destined to be a failed exercise out of the chute.

Why the subterfuge? The defendant knows he was tortured and we know it, so why pretend otherwise? KSM is a criminal and by no stretch a soldier, and he should have been tried as one.

More procedural exemptions when reptilian attorney John Yoo, George W. Bush's best boy, was exonerated by the 4th Federal Circuit court from being held responsible for Jose Padilla's torture complaints because "torture was not defined at the time." When President Obama said this is "a time for reflection, not retribution," he swept away with a statement any hope for justice against the purveyors of torture.

The photo at the top shows a gleeful U.S. service member posing with Manadel al-Jamadi ("The Iceman"), an Abu Ghraib suspect surely killed as a result of this indefinable thing once known as torture. Torture must be like pornography as defined by Justice Potter Stewart: You can't define it, but you know it when you see it. So even if torture remains undefined, homicide does not, and the Iceman was a homicide. Yet Yoo is off the hook for homicide, too.

But Obama also biased the trial of George Zimmerman when he inappropriately said that Trayvon Martin "could have been my son." Why didn't Obama say that Zimmerman could have been his son, for surely we can imagine an upstanding Obama scion being a neighborhood watchman and finding himself in that terrible situation from the other side, too.

And why isn't Yoo charged exactly the same as is George Zimmerman? Did not Yoo's ruling contribute directly to an unknown number of deaths like that of the iceman? Ah, but Yoo is in the privileged strata of humans, doing the dirty work of politicians everywhere. John Yoo screwed the pooch and he will never account for his crime. He is merely consigned to a life in hippy Berkeley, doing penance teaching legal ethics before the privileged offspring of liberals, his own kind of hell.

Odd days when an alleged child pornographer makes it onto the 10 Most Wanted List and will serve more time in jail than the torturers and murderers who walk amongst us. Zimmerman is losing his witnesses due to darkness and poor eyesight; it is a metaphor for the times. The reality is probably closer to the suggestion of an early NPR report -- intimidation. The witnesses live in Zimmerman's complex; angry people will find them, so they are taking the Schultz way out: I saw NOTHING, this after originally claiming the opposite.

So this is what passes for justice today: Lies, hypocrisy, intimidation, power and privilege, with a healthy dose of bigotry and paranoia. If Zimmerman is not convicted, will we be as quiescent as when Yoo was exonerated? As when O.J. was acquitted of killing his white wife, Nicole Brown?