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Edited on Mon Sep-25-06 04:50 PM by Lexingtonian
The Republican argument in Washington about 'tribunals' and rules is at bottom about how to kill the 14 Al Qaeda "leaders" now being held in Guantanamo. They want to do it in a way that looks "legal", i.e. will not get them hauled before ICC in due course and not held up as ridiculous barbarism beyond countenancing by the Supreme Court.
Their problem is, apparently, that they don't have the legally permissible evidence to tie the 14 (or, in particular, probably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) to the 9/11 suicide attacks, let alone proper proof. What they do have is statements achieved by torture.
Our problem is that average Americans, aka moderates, do want the 14 executed and are refusing to hold themselves or the Bush Administration accountable to any serious standard under a pretext that '9/11' is somehow an exceptional event in history rather than a common crime of sorts of relatively large scale and accidentally large casualty count. (Well, it is exceptional in one way- in the damage it did to the average right wing American's post-Cold War undue hyper-bloated selfcongratulatory ego.) Due Process, Equal Protection, Bill of Rights civil rights....you can't get "moderates", let alone right wingers, interested in doing things with a sense of fairness. Habeas Corpus rights are stripped out of the process entirely, because right wingers can not tolerate the thought that any of the 14, or perhaps all, achieve a dropping of the charges for lack of permissible evidence. Or, perhaps, minor sentences or even exoneration as charges prove to be inflated, based in lies and hearsay, and unprovable or factually disprovable in the first place.
This is a debate about how to execute the 14 by jurisprudential weaseling and lies and violations by right wingers and 'conservatives' who have no actual knowledge of history, historical perspective, sense of historical measure, or understanding of the moral imperative to give one's most hated enemies the fairest trials.
The People has a consensus desire and decision to see these 14 executed, and it won't be denied that. The 14 expect it as a matter of course. Democrats simply can't prevent this outbreak of bloodlust leading to ritual murder.
What can be done is that Republicans go so far overboard, get so exposed for this vile glorying and dragging the whole American people into the moral sewer with them, that The People and judiciary get so utterly nauseated beyond selfrespect by the spectacle as to realize that Americans are degrading themselves by this amount of unrestrained villainy and barbarity toward the least popular people in North America.
Then, perhaps, they decide to close the loopholes in enforcement of the 14th Amendment that Republicans use to "legalize" these travesties of "justice" and foreordain an outcome of ritual murderings. (Every 'death penalty' execution is a state sanctioned ritual murder in practice.) To think that Cortez and the Spanish toppled the Aztec empire for its doctrine of ritual murders....
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