Does anyone but me find it strange, or at least perversely
amusing, that when we round up hundreds of Afghan citizens and
whisk them off to Cuba on the barest suspicion that they may at
some point in the past offered a cup of coffee to an Al Qaida
member, some of whom turn out to be totally innocent even by our
standards, they are afforded the status of cattle suspected of
harboring mad cow disease
– no rights, legal or human of any kind for the foreseeable
future or until the guys with the butterfly nets finally catch John
Ashcroft, whichever comes first, but when we acquire Saddam, the
chiefest bad dude in the ‘hood, the guy we have so demonized that
74 percent of America no longer believe
s he had parents, he is immediately granted the status of a
prisoner of war and has all the rights specified in the Geneva
Convention?
Does anyone but me find it strange, or at least perversely amusing, that when we round up hundreds of Afghan citizens and whisk them off to Cuba on the barest suspicion that they may at some point in the past offered a cup of coffee to an Al Qaida member, some of whom turn out to be totally innocent even by our standards, they are afforded the status of cattle suspected of harboring mad cow disease – no rights, legal or human of any kind for the foreseeable future or until the guys with the butterfly nets finally catch John Ashcroft, whichever comes first, but when we acquire Saddam, the chiefest bad dude in the ‘hood, the guy we have so demonized that 74 percent of America no longer believes he had parents, he is immediately granted the status of a prisoner of war and has all the rights specified in the Geneva Convention?
Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal enough and they make you a king. Perhaps our natural affinity for hierarchy operates on more levels than we want to admit. Saddam, after all, is a bigwig; what you might call a white-collar mass-murderer. He’s kind of the Kenneth Lay of archfiends – palaces, private jets, lots of yes-men scurrying around doing his bidding. Those guys in Afghanistan making $7.34 a year and living in caves, they’re at the blue-collar end of the heinous-criminal scale, working class thugs. So he gets treated with a certain amount of dignity and attention to rules, and they get to live in cages and hope that their captors aren’t playing little jokes on them when they point out which direction is Mecca. If, however, the Marine on duty points north just for fun and they accidentally pray to Santa Claus, too bad – they have no rights.
So now we have high-profile lawyers, guys with serious credentials including former Cabinet officers, volunteering to defend him. This, in my view, is a good thing; attorneys offering to represent unpopular causes and defendants to insure fair trials is a credit to the profession, as when John Adams represented the British soldiers charged with murder in the Boston Massacre, and God knows the profession could use a little credit. But there are no lawyers, high or low profile, representing those dudes currently serving an indeterminate sentence in what looks like a sand trap on a really barren golf course. We say they’re not entitled to defend themselves, not only as to the severity of their crimes, but even as to whether we’re holding the right guy. That’s because we say we’re right and we say we have evidence and we say that letting anybody in on it would be bad for America. And we say that saying “we say” is sufficient to shield the government from all scrutiny. Imagine the precedent we’re setting: how about some time real soon we say the president of France has ties to Al Qaida; we snatch him up as an “enemy combatant,” blindfold him and ship him off to a toxic waste recycling center in Yakima, Wash., for the duration. What are the French gonna do, stop sending us cheese? This “we say” thing has enormous potential for turning things in whatever direction we like. I know, what if we say that the gross national product of Germany is actually a secret Al Qaida bank account, then we seize it? Bye-bye budget deficit.
But “we say” is only good enough for the foot soldiers, the cannon fodder, the disposables. It’s not good enough for Saddam; Lord Sauron gets good treatment, not as a matter of our choice but as a matter of right. Against him charges must be proven with evidence the world can see for itself. He gets a doctor and a lawyer and whatever he needs to put on a proper defense.
The rank-and-file orcs get nothing. Things haven’t changed much since Middle Earth.
