Hey, what do you know? We put a terrorist on trial in New York -- And not just any terrorist, either. Dead Osama bin Laden's living son-in-law! -- and we convicted him and nobody sent fleets of jihadi bat-missiles into Manhattan armed with nuclear weapons and frickin' laser beams on their heads. So, scoreboard, right?
One critic of Mr. Holder's decision to prosecute Mr. Abu Ghaith in federal court, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said after the verdict that the defendant should have been held as an enemy combatant and interrogated for intelligence gathering purposes. On Thursday, Mr. Graham said in a telephone interview, "I applaud the judge and the jury; they did their job," but added, "We're not fighting a crime here; we're fighting a war." "This guy is so connected to the organization," he said. "He was a treasure trove of potential information, and we blew it."...After being advised of his rights and waiving them, he answered questions for hours. An F.B.I. summary of the interrogation runs 21 pages. Mr. Abu Ghaith described his time in Afghanistan, his interactions with Bin Laden, his imprisonment in Iran and other topics. But Mr. Graham said, "It should have been a 200-page statement, taken over weeks or months." He added, "We lost an opportunity here with this guy."
I may simply be dense, but it sure seems to me that Huckleberry J. Butchmeup is pining for thumbscrews here, and waxing nostalgic over black sites and packing crates at Bagram. He was first to the fainting couch when the possibility of trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in New York City was raised, and worked to make that trial impossible, because of his fear of jihadi bat-missiles and KSM's well-known hypnotic powers which would be used to Muslimize everyone in the tri-state area. And we have now passed into the period in which many of the criminals of the late Avignon Presidency are being more open about the pride they take in their history of governmental sociopathy.
If I would have to do it all over again, I would," Cheney said. "The results speak for themselves." Many consider the use of waterboarding to be torture, with many people calling the former Vice President a war criminal for his endorsement of the technique, but Cheney disagrees. "Some people called it torture. It wasn't torture," Cheney told AU's television station ATV.
Waterboard the sick sonuvabitch and see what he thinks then.
And here comes another accessory before the fact...
ERROL MORRIS: What about all these so-called torture memos?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, there were what? One or two or three. I don't know the number, but there were not all of these so-called memos. They were mischaracterized as torture memos, and they came not out of the Bush administration, per se; they came out of the U.S. Department of Justice, blessed by the attorney general, the senior legal official of the United States of America, having been nominated by a president and confirmed by the United States Senate overwhelmingly. Little different cast I just put on it than the one you did. I'll chalk that one up.
You don't go to war with the psycho you want, you go to war with the psycho you have.
(Also, and not for nothing, Condi Rice, the worst National Security Advisor ever, is out beating the war drums again. Talk about getting the band back together.)
And all of this fond nostalgia for the good old days of war crimes is taking place against the backdrop of the fight between the Senate and the CIA about the release of the report on the Agency's involvement in torturing people. This is what happens when the country is morally unmoored from its conscience by people with none of their own. This is what torture does to a democracy. It inevitably, and permanently, corrupts everything it touches.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
