Stupid. Stupid. STUPID. Not to mention villainous and contemptible.
Nearly every right-wing American commentator in the last two days has gone doolally about the guilty sentence against a terrorist involved in the infamous bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania. With all the grace and intellectual gravitas of a lynch mob, they all howl at the judge, yell at the jury (traditional legal rights such as being tried by a jury of your peers are only OK until they deliver the result you want, evidently, to these "conservatives"), and rage at the President and the Attorney General. Some demand Eric Holder's resignation. And none of them even mention the yelling, trumpeting elephant in the room: namely, evidence obtained by torture. Unless, of course, it is to describe the ACLU's call to prosecute George W.Bush, who has admitted in writing that he is responsible for authorizing torture, as some kind of perverse anti-Republican plot - rather than the least that any person who believes in the rule of law should do.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the ACLU and Eric Holder - especially his reverse racism and his moral cowardice - but in this matter they are as innocent as newborn babes. The person who insured that most of the evidence against this murderous scum could not be heard in any court of law worth the name was the person who ordered that it should be taken from him by torture. That person was George W. Bush. He says so, and I believe him. And because he says so, he belongs in front of a court of law himself. If there is any legal reason why waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other such charming innovations in police work should not be classified as torture, let him prove it in a court of law; instead of just having it maintained by the conjoined squawking of all his partisan supporters.
The jury hearing the case were in a terrible dilemma, and came out of it honourably if not in a legally snow-white manner. They had a man in front of them who obviuously belonged behind bars for life. They knew that the evidence against him had been obtrained in ways that none of them would countenance for a minute, and that hundreds of pages of it had been struck down by the judge in open court for being tainted by torture. What they did was to find him guilty on a single charge - which still can deliver him to the delightful confines of an American jail for life, and at the very least for twenty long, ugly years - and reject all the others, thus sending a message that the man was a villain but that they were not disposed to uphold, just because of that, the villainy of their own government. That jury behaved far better than the politicians of both sides, and infinitely better than the "conservative" commentariat.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the ACLU and Eric Holder - especially his reverse racism and his moral cowardice - but in this matter they are as innocent as newborn babes. The person who insured that most of the evidence against this murderous scum could not be heard in any court of law worth the name was the person who ordered that it should be taken from him by torture. That person was George W. Bush. He says so, and I believe him. And because he says so, he belongs in front of a court of law himself. If there is any legal reason why waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other such charming innovations in police work should not be classified as torture, let him prove it in a court of law; instead of just having it maintained by the conjoined squawking of all his partisan supporters.
The jury hearing the case were in a terrible dilemma, and came out of it honourably if not in a legally snow-white manner. They had a man in front of them who obviuously belonged behind bars for life. They knew that the evidence against him had been obtrained in ways that none of them would countenance for a minute, and that hundreds of pages of it had been struck down by the judge in open court for being tainted by torture. What they did was to find him guilty on a single charge - which still can deliver him to the delightful confines of an American jail for life, and at the very least for twenty long, ugly years - and reject all the others, thus sending a message that the man was a villain but that they were not disposed to uphold, just because of that, the villainy of their own government. That jury behaved far better than the politicians of both sides, and infinitely better than the "conservative" commentariat.