Musings From The Edge: Testing American Justice Creditibilty

There is little I can say here that will change the way anyone in this country thinks about terrorists or the American Justice System. Today there is more than just a little uproar about the conviction of Ahmed Ghailani of one count of conspiracy to destroy U.S. property while acquitting him of over 280 other criminal counts, including 224 counts of murder, which occurred in two United States embassy bombings in 1998. It appears that a major problem in the government’s case arose from the judge denying the testimony of a key witness who was present at a foreign prison where Ghailani had been taken and tortured, excuse me, where they used enhanced interrogation techniques on him. (That is Cheney-Bush speak for Torture).

Before you conservative numb nuts start frothing at the mouth let’s examine a few things. You can chew your cud and gnash your teeth in a moment. This person was accused and arrested after an investigation using dubious investigative techniques. He wasn’t capture on a battlefield in the act of fighting against soldiers anymore than a gangbanger on the Southside of Chicago or South Central Los Angeles might have been. Certainly no more than Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols was doing toward the federal building in Oklahoma City. Yet, the uproar is two fold; 1) that he was only found guilty of one charge, and 2) the administration was wrong to trust the civilian court system with this case because it did not find him guilty of all the charges. What they are saying is that before this man ever got to trial, any trial, tribunal or anything else. It did not make any difference how they went about it; give him a fair trial then hang the guilty bastard. WE, under the banner of FREEDOM and JUSTICE for all have taken it for granted that a man who was tortured in a rendition prison by the CIA is already guilty of everything that the Bush Administration said he was. Why, because the Bush Administration and the CIA would not lie to us. Nah, not the same people who took us into Iraq under false pretenses,… Never happen. But even more than that, much more than that, this has tested the credibility of our justice and our belief in it, and we have failed BIG TIME.

Because I know the slowness by which the neo-con brain works I going to try explain this in some different way and maybe on a different level, say, sixth grade, so they can maybe get an inkling of what I am talking about. Once upon a time there were these people living a land far away from their King. The King called them colonists and said that they were still his subjects and ruled over them. He even sent his soldiers to this land to make sure that they followed his rules and paid him his taxes. These soldiers in the name of the King used some really bad tactics against these colonists like storming into their houses, taking them to jail for not paying their taxes, talking bad about the King, or anything else they wanted to put them in jail for. You still with me there, Vern. Anyway, to make a long story short, these colonists, we now call them “Founding Fathers” experienced first hand what happens when people and their government get out of control. They understood the dangers of assuming guilt of persons based on accusations (remember the witch trials), the inherent dangers of allowing the government to torture people into confessing (like the pressing rock and the star chamber), and holding people indefinitely without a fair and public trial. People today who claim to be constitutionalists are only that way when it is convenient for them, or when they can selectively pick out which part of the Constitution they want to use for their own purposes. They tend to forget that the document was meant to be taken as a whole, not on a piece by piece basis.

So, let me conclude my little tirade, lecture, tantrum, or whatever by saying that by and large many, if not most people in this country have forgotten the underpinnings and the core values this country was built upon. It is that the country was built around a concept of laws and justice that were intended to treat all persons equal under the law. Since we became a nation others around the world have watched as we have set examples of how people should be treated and, while we have stumbled in the past, we have always tried not to make the same mistakes again. But, this time, we are letting all of our past mistakes stare us in the face all at one time and, as a people, we are failing miserably. We show no belief in the very foundation of our justice system. We are showing the worst prejudice and bigotry perhaps since the turn of the twentieth century. Our political rhetoric sounds more like a “Banana Republic” than the greatest nation on earth. It is becoming more difficult every day to know what an American really is any more. And most of all, the credibility of our justice system is down the tubes. Have a nice life folks.

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