August 02, 2006

Self-Parody Alert (III)

Welcome to Mark Levin's topsy-turvy world:

I want to congratulate the attorneys who work with me at Landmark Legal Foundation for tenaciously pursuing the untold story of the systematic abuse of American MPs by the al-Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Chuckle. Yes Mark, detainees kept in penal colonies for years do nasty things, like throw urine and feces at their guards. Does this mean then that the writ of habeas corpus is a nullity, and that the Magna Carta should be tossed over-board too? Back to 1215 then, so as to wage the war on terror with the fortitude that Mark so nobly brings to bear, brandishing his Freedom of Information Act privileges like a bona fide American hero and embattled (by the weak-kneed PC, defeatist brigades!) Brandisher-of-the-Truth.

Does Levin have the slightest clue what a total debacle Gitmo has been, in the context of a global counter-insurgency where we need to persuade people we are the good guys, and where images of Muslim males being carted around in wheel-barrows in their orange prison jumpers--amidst the razor-wire of the "tropics"--has dealt our international image grevious blows? And, mere media images aside (public diplomacy is girlie-man fare, of course, for the tough guys at NRO) does Levin have a clue how serious a blow it is to our reputation as leading avatar of human rights on the global stage--among key international players--given that such a legal black hole has been allowed to fester like an open sore now for almost half a decade? He should ask our friends like the British Attorney General, or the Danish Prime Minister or Angela 'Back Rub' Merkel. These are true friends advising us in good faith, not just pestful, self-indulgent cat-calls emitting from perfidious Jacques, or hypocritical Vladimir, and so on. And sometimes, as we've all learned in life at times, it pays to heed the advice of one's good friends. But perhaps they are just soft-nosed Euro-weenies to the man (and woman), unhelpfully trying to put an end to Mark's brave new world of water-boarding and indefinite detention and new paradigmist 'military necessity' interrogation techniques--that he and his ilk so desparately wish to force down our collective throats.

Really, you can't make this stuff up, in terms of missing the plot (Levin, again: "the untold story of the systematic abuse of American MPs by the al-Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay"!), it's such an Orwellian theater of the absurd. Meantime, in the linked AP piece, Levin contends:"Lawyers for the detainees have done a great job painting their clients as innocent victims of U.S. abuse when the fact is that these detainees, as a group, are barbaric and extremely dangerous." As a group, eh? All 450 of them, to a man? I mean, there are quite a few detainees at Gitmo, after all, and nothing in Mark's surreally shameless attempt at bamboozlement conclusively proves every last one of them is hurling feces around, or such (ed. note: This is not to say that malicious and coordinated attacks on guards haven't taken place, in occasional "waves", and by quite a number of them. But certainly not each and every one of them, unless Mark can conclusively prove to us hapless terrorist enablers otherwise, that is...).

Look, Levin's intent is transparently clear, isn't it? He wants us to believe every last detainee in Guantanamo is a hardened, worst-of-the-lot al-Qaeda terrorist (make no mistake, some are, but again, not all), so that they would be damn lucky even to get a military tribunal (and not the Lindsay Graham watered-down pansy style ones, mind you, let alone UCMJ-compliant court martial type proceedings, which is just out and out the height of sissy-dom in Mondo Levin). It's really interesting the lengths some commenters will go to try to rationalize these piss-poor policies, or a little spot of torture, or casting aside impestuously (like scared little cherubs) the Geneva Conventions. But still, gotta give Mark an “A” for effort no? The iguana tail was a particularly nice touch--injecting as it did a note of the dehumanizing macabre (read the AP story for details on this last)—the better so we can move swiftly to exterminate these heathen soonest, or keep them locked up for another few decades, so as not to waste any crocodile tears on ‘em.

P.S. Coming soon in this space, a road-map on how to close Guantanamo by the end of Bush's term (in other words, what to do with the different classes of detainees there, the worst of whom need to be tried via court martial type proceedings and, if found guilty via a judicious process, subjected to the worst penalties the relevant laws afford), as no one in the Administration appears to be adequately moving the ball on said subject, so it is left to us disgruntled hand-wringers, it appears, to come up with a game-plan.