Tuesday, July 22, 2008

lawyer joke or
joke lawyer,
but not really funny either way

"We are confronted not with a hostile foreign state whose fighters wear uniforms and abide by the laws of war themselves, but rather with a dispersed group of non-state terrorists who wear no uniforms and abide by neither laws nor the norms of civilization."

Michael Mukasey, the U.S. Attorney General
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but these "terrorists" sound to me not like an army which requires a war, but like a criminal gang which requires a police force. Instead*, we get the nation's top lawyer insisting that he needs new laws to suspend parts of the constitution that keep him from doing whatever he feels like doing to anyone he feels like labelling as a "terrorist".

Now, I'm not trying to defend the Taliban here, but in the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, he has been accused of delivering weaponry to al Qaeda. But al Qaeda would have been fighting alongside (and as a part of) the Taliban, which was, at the time, the government of Afghanistan, and however big a bunch of bastards they may have been, they were still the government, and they were fighting off an invading force. You may not agree with them, but they had that right. So where's the war crime, except in the heads of the Bush Administration? And what does it say when the nation's top lawyer wants to throw away the laws which he is supposed to uphold?

* for now we'll ignore the trillion-dollar war which is destroying the country.

1 comment:

Kel said...

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but these "terrorists" sound to me not like an army which requires a war, but like a criminal gang which requires a police force.

That's exactly what's required Dave. But Karl Rove has defined this as an inadequate "Liberal" response. The last thing we are allowed to encourage in the war on a noun is common sense.