Thursday, November 15, 2001

Remora

Limited inc thought that Bushy's hunting metaphors about Afghanistan were way too Big Daddy -- going hunting for those otherskinned coons, it just conjures up the images, n'est-ce pas? And lately the Big Daddy side has been putting its foot down. The booted black foot. Since it looks like we might capture some jihadists, yesterday an emergency decree came down that should be rejected with revulsion by the right thinking. Oh, not that it is going to be. Not when people want blood on their tongue, want to taste it. Here's the WP headline: Military May Try Terrorism Cases: Bush Cites 'Emergency'
By George Lardner Jr. and Peter Slevin
And here are the last grafs:

"Some legal scholars such as John Norton Moore, director of the Center for National Security Law, had favored the creation of an international tribunal by the United Nations Security Council to deal with the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, but others said such tribunals typically drag on for years and lose impact.

"This was an armed attack on the United States, not just a mass murder or a serial killing," said Philip A. Lacovara, a former deputy solicitor general. "It is appropriate to deal with it as a crime against humanity." He also noted that international tribunals created by the United Nations do not authorize the death penalty."

Ah, without the death penalty what good is a court? You can't eat your vittles if you don't kill em first. Who, by the way, is this Lacovara character? Here's his resume.
.htm. A quick computer search reveals that Lacovara has had the fortune to be persecuted as too liberal by certain conservative Republicans in the Reagan years, and the even greater fortune of having argued in the Supreme Court against Nixon's special privileges argument in re his tapes during the golden Watergate years. Such gestures towards a certain inner decency have made him a much quoted man; mostly, his quotes are standard right-wing boilerplate. Never say that dissent, when used cleverly, is a bar to advancement.

Michael Ryan at Tom Paine writes a short protesting note about, well, the injustice of the executive order.

Here are two grafs:
"... now, thanks to an executive order, those of us who don't hold American citizenship -- visitors, green card holders, legal aliens, illegal aliens -- can forget all about the civil liberties that go with due process in the American justice system.

"People of my generation shuddered at Costa Gavras' film Z, which depicted what can happen in a civilized society like Greece when the military takes over the so-called "justice" system. All of us were outraged when Alberto Fujimori's Peru introduced trial by anonymous military judges. We rail against the Chinese system of dragging dissenters before rigged courts before packing them off for decades of imprisonment. Now we seem to be ready to go down the same road."

We are going down that road with this order. No doubt. The unjustifiable detentions, the signs from the margins that marginal political belief is being harried -- it is back to nightside. And, really, it is so tiresome to write about -- Limited Inc can't even find anything clever to say in defense of the obvious, which is that Bush's emergency order is odious, repulsive to decency, and a blot on his already very much blotted reign.


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