I wanted it to be you so bad

Karl Rove said liberals wanted to respond to the 9/11 attacks with "indictments and therapy".  The "therapy" part doesn't bother me.  He's teasing.  I can take a little teasing, and I've never proposed therapy for terrorists anyway, so I don't take it personally.  "Indictments", though, I believe seeking indictments was the proper course of action.  That's why we were after bin Laden, to try him and punish him with the full authority of civil justice.

Is "indictment" now another word for propagandist thugs to bandy about when they want to suggest someone is soft?  Are we soft if we seek recourse for a wrong through a legal system instead of just busting out the guns and clubs?  Does Viagra cause war?

Maritime historian and legal scholar Douglas R. Burgess argues in the current issue of Legal Affairs magazine (brought to my attention by today's NYT)that terrorism is a new form of piracy, and the legal structure that evolved for fighting pirates can be readily adapted to fight terrorists.  Part of the reason Bushco has been able to do whatever the fuck they want since 9/11 is because international law offers little guidance for defining and punishing terror.  Alberto Gonzales was charged with researching legal avenues for handling 9/11, but his approach was to disassemble (that means 'to take apart') international law, not find creative ways to bring it to bear.

Why has it taken us almost five years to see terrorism as piracy?  It's not like there weren't clues.  Modern maritime piracy, which mainly occurs in Southeast Asia, is closely linked to militant Islamic groups operating in those regions.  Hijacking airplanes is sometimes called "air piracy".  Maybe the most crucial thing to notice, though, is that it did not take five years.  Stanford Professor Emeritus Ronald Hilton was drawing the link between terrorism and piracy within a month of 9/11.

The answer, of course, is that Bushco was never looking for legal guidance.  They were looking for excuses for lawlessness, for Donald Rumsfeld to personally authorize torture, for Ashcroft to round up the worst prison guards and reward them with lucrative contracts in overseas prisons, for cranking the whole military-industrial machine above idling speed.  It's easy enough to rail at those Halliburtonized sissies, but that's not where I'm going.

I was thinking instead about a nation that responds to adversity by marshalling its strengths -- freedom, innovation, debate, diversity, a strong tradition of egalitarian justice -- instead of pandering to the values of old Europe from which we once freed ourselves -- nationalism, theocracy, imperialism, fuedalism.  What if the President on 9/11/2001 had summoned our best thinkers, politics aside, to Washington?  What if he gathered experts in international law to apply the lessons of hundreds of years of legal tradition to this new problem?  What if he had assembled experts on Islam and Middle Eastern history and politics to advise him on how to proceed without arousing more hatred?  What if he had said, "This is a big problem, let's work on it together."?

What if we were a nation that expected such leadership?  What if we were so committed to democracy as to recognize how democracies actually work -- by bringing together the most trusted and respected among us to air a diversity of ideas and solutions then debate and determine the wisest course of action?  What if we elected men and women because we trust their wisdom and judgment, not because they've committed themselves a priori to Solution B to Problem X?

Why do we think democracy will work if we elect close-minded ideologues?  Why do we think guys who can garner millions in donations from wealthy interests will work for our best interests?  Is it because all we aspire to is currying favor from those wealthy interests so they'll hire us?  People actually liked that awful "You've Got Mail" movie where the megacorporate scion not only killed the little bookstore, but got the girl too.  What an indictment of the American spirit.  We need therapy.

Comments

[gypsy frocks]

Yeah, one of the favorite slurs of the war hawks is to say that liberals see terrorism as a "law enforcement problem" rather than as a Clash of Civilizations requiring a never-ending War on Terror. They also spent a while sneering at people who wanted to talk about "root causes" of Islamic fundamentalism -- until they themselves started eventually talking about root causes and the need for democracy, personal freedoms, economic opportunity, religious tolerance, etc. etc.

What's funny is that they're pro-law enforcement in any context except this one. And all I know is that if some suicide bomber blows himself up in Times Square or the Mall of America or whatever, it's going to be because of a failure of law enforcement, not a failure to recognize a Clash of Civilizations.

[hellbent]

Oh crap. I forgot to throw in a http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/BG1720.cfm>link to a report pointing out how much more effective the law enforcement response to terrorism has been than the military response, both in terms of absolute number of terrorists stopped and in terms of dollars spent. The report is from the leftist panty-wastes at the Heritage Foundation.

It's not really fair to judge every dollar spent in Iraq on the basis of fighting terrorism, of course. There are so many other purposes served by those expenditures -- enriching the Carlyle Group, paying back campaign donors, pumping up Halliburton stock. It's not just about terrorism, though it does seem to be all about piracy.

[SayUncle]

Interesting take regarding the pirates. It seems that international law provides is leeway and, hence, not guidance. IIRC, international law dictates that non-uniformed combatants can be executed on the spot. I'm not proposing that but noting that there's a lot of wiggle-room in international law that can lead to bad ju-ju.

[hellbent]

Piracy law allows pirates to be captured anywhere by anyone. I doubt seriously that it condones execution without trial, but leeway is exactly the point. We didn't need to do anything reckless like declaring the Geneva Conventions "quaint". We didn't need to debase our system of justice by inventing a new extralegal system of detention and interrogation for "enemy combatants". We didn't need to debase ourselves as citizens by giving the executive branch carte blanche to do as it pleased.

We already had the leeway. Perhaps most critically, we did not need to link terrorists to states so as to excuse warfare tactics like invasion. We could have simply declared jurisdiction over al Qaeda members wherever they might be, sending special forces soldiers across national boundaries under the rubric of piracy law.

We should have figured this out under Clinton. Clinton deferred opportunities to capture bin Laden because he felt he had no legal structure to operate in. He had piracy law. This article is essentially a rational, literate take on the old "Clinton let bin Laden go" line.

Of course, at the time, legal minds were preoccupied with impeachment law instead of struggling with ways to fight terrorism, which gets back to my point. We allow our elected leaders to co-opt our democracy to stage partisan squabbles and power plays instead of insisting on leaders who can harness the power of democracy to make our nation stronger, more just, and more free.