AMERICAN FATWA

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Holder: Osama bin Laden will never face U.S. trial

The comparison to convicted killer Manson angered Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who said it showed the Obama administration doesn't understand the American public's desire to treat terrorists as wartime enemies, not criminal defendants.

“My constituents and I just have a deep-seated and profound philosophical difference with the Obama administration,” Culberson said.

Holder, his voice rising, charged that Culberson's arguments ignored basic facts about the law and the fight against terrorists.

“Let's deal with reality,” Holder said. Bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom.”

Pressed further on that point, Holder said: “The possibility of catching him alive is infinitesimal. He will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people so he can't be captured by us.”

More here.

If I understand that correctly, the US Attorney General just issued a death warrant. I didn't know he, or any other US official for that matter, excluding maybe judges after a conviction, had that power. Actually, he doesn't have that power. The Constitution clearly states that nobody can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. That is, Americans, unlike radical Muslim extremists, don't issue death fatwas.

This pretty much encapsulates the madness that has gripped our culture in the years since 9/11. Even though Americans are far more likely to die from a lightning strike than by the work of terrorists, our fear has caused us to act irrationally, again and again, abandoning what makes our nation unique in the world, trashing liberty and inalienable rights, all in order to live out a Hollywood revenge fantasy. We torture now. We listen to people's phone calls and read their emails. We invade whatever sovereign nation we want, for whatever reason we feel like. We deny criminals, and the public on which they have preyed, their day in court. Democrat, Republican, it doesn't matter. It is as though this nation, or at least everybody who attempts to speak on its behalf, collectively decided on September 12, 2001, to renounce everything for which America once stood.

This is not the nation I understood it to be for the first thirty two years of my life.

Personally, I think it's psychotic to keep terrorists out of the courts. The right wing has done its usual crackerjack propaganda job of making the trial process out to be a kind of social welfare for violent extremists. To be fair, all defendants in US courts have rights, which is how it must be if the process is to have any credibility at all. But conservatives have painted this concept as somehow anti-American: "They're terrorists; why should we coddle them with rights?!?" I mean, they've even blasted the DoJ for hiring lawyers who have represented Gitmo detainees. What these fear-mongering idiots don't get is that trials are as much for victims and the public at large as they are for criminals, and I say "criminals" because terrorists don't belong to any nation's army. Terrorists are not soldiers; they are murderers. Convicting murderers in a fair and impartial trial is a triumph for civilization, as well as a massive philosophical strike against the barbaric lawlessness and anarchy these terrorists represent.

Murdering them, however, does nothing but validate their point of view.

I credit Eric Holder for observing that these anti-American conservatives don't know what the fuck they're talking about, but he's as lame as all get out for trying to calm them by issuing what amounts to a death fatwa for bin Laden. That is, he might as well be arguing their point for them.

These are fucked up times.

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