It was a real Rove moment. George W. Bush at the rostrum in front of a room full of 9-11 victim families, announcing his new policy on the disposition of detainees held in the never-ending “war on terror.” (God forbid our official enemies should declare a similar “war on air power” or “war on artillery”). 
Dubya pulled most of his trademark non-sequitur facial expressions ( the “by crackee” squint-smirk, the long “get it? get it?” glare) and was generally in form for this photo-op as he promised to bring the 9-11 plotters to justice for the nearly 3,000 lives lost on that awful day. And yet, as well received as his words were among that group, I wonder if anyone there pondered how Bush has brought about, by his own count, at least ten times as many deaths in Iraq — and really more like 50 times as many by the most realistic reckoning — as a result of the war of choice he initiated in the name of their fallen loved ones. I know that a good many 9-11 families are none too happy about being used in such a manner… and they can expect the memory of their loss to be invoked regularly in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections.
So what is this thing called guilt? What meaning does it have if it is only applied to those who lack the power and resources to avoid apprehension and prosecution? Recent experience suggests it has very little meaning at all except as a marketing tool — recall the Saddam trial and all of his unindicted Reagan-era co-conspirators. Actually, I had occasion to hear one of the great legal minds behind the administration’s war on terror this week. NPR’s “Day to Day” was interviewing John Yoo, author of Bush’s legal justification for torture and detention without due process. Yoo drew a distinction between “war time” and normal circumstances, arguing that it is not practical to apply the niceties of constitutional rights to combatants captured on the field of battle. Of course, what he didn’t discuss was how many of these “combatants” were pulled from their homes in, say, Lahore or Karachi, and thrown into a black hole where they were beaten, humiliated, and held without legal recourse for up to three years before being released on the admission that they were innocent all along. In Yoo’s legal world, it’s okay to hold someone like that until the end of the “conflict” (i.e. forever) — just arrest everyone you can get your hands on (or pay a bounty for) and sort them out later.
Fact is, this denial of rights is criminal in the extreme, and the Bush team knows it. That’s why they are so dead set against any international legal architecture of justice — not because they fear U.S. soldiers will be dragged off to the Hague (as they claim) but because they see themselves in the dock one day, facing charges of unlawful abduction, torture, mass murder, and the supreme crime of waging aggressive war against a nation for no legitimate reason, at the cost of many tens of thousands of lives. So as you pause for your solemn moment of silence this Monday, think not only of those who perished in the 9-11 attacks, but also of those who have died since as a result of our political culture’s thirst for blood and our own indifference to the suffering of others. Let us duly mourn our failure to stop this before so many were forced to pay with their lives (including nearly as many Americans as died on that fateful day five years ago).
And so long as your head is bowed, think of that Pet Goat Bush was reading about as the WTC burned and ask yourself why the hell this man is still being allowed to run our nation into the ground.
luv u,
jp
