Apparently, all the 9/11 defendants will die of old age before the legal process can get its act together to put them on trial. It’s really impossible to exaggerate how badly the Bush administration screwed up the response to those attacks.
If the law was applied in any kind of normal sense, all the co-conspirators would have to be released because their habeas corpus rights were denied and because the evidence is tainted and because they were tortured and because they were denied counsel and because the FBI tried to recruit their counsel and because of ten other reasons I can’t even think of.
Of course, it’s unthinkable that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Ramzi bin al-Shibh would be set free under any circumstances. But that’s what would happen if we were willing to live with the consequences of the Bush/Cheney regime’s missteps. And that should be tattooed on the foreheads of not only Bush and Cheney, but Condi and Rummy and Stephen Hadley and Scooter Libby and Andy Card and Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of those incompetent lunatics.
The litany of those Bush admin names is as potent and depressing as the names of Nixon’s hatchet men, which we are still unable to forget: Hunt, Liddy, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, etc…
Same game, different players.
AG
In that, you are probably correct, Arthur.
And now we have the 9/11 families saying Obama is sabotaging the trails so they can be moved to federal court. Ugh!! I doubt that’s the case because we saw how fast they backed off when Chuckie Schumer and Co. pitched a shit fit. They don’t want to go through that crap again.
Why do you think they’re incompetent? If we’d just followed their original plan – to let the law be whatever they felt like it should be on any particular day – we wouldn’t have any of these problems. Sure, we’d be shredding the constitution and any remaining pretense of democracy, but wasn’t that exactly the point?
The “lunatic” part you’re completely correct about. But there’s just too much evidence that the Bush cabal knew exactly what it was doing. Look at how much power accrued to the executive branch, how much wealth accrued to the one percent (and friends of the Bush family in particular, c.f. Blackwater and Carlisle), and how bald-faced lies became an acceptable political “tactic,” morally problematic only if they don’t achieve the desired horse race objective. Then tell me they weren’t competent. They were. Terrifyingly so. And by embracing the worst parts of their civil liberties practices, and preemptively closing the book on all the egregious lawbreaking, Obama managed to routinize it all as bipartisan precedent – with a generous assist from the lapdog Village media.
And all this just in time to ensure the federal government can do nothing significant to even slow down our hurtling toward climate catastrophe. At least the Bush family bought itself an extra generation or so of comfort and wealth through disaster capitalism and control of ever-more-expensive fossil fuels, before civilization collapse breaches even the richest gated compounds and private islands.
It’s easier to think the Bush regime was incompetent. The alternative explanation, that they were extremely competent sociopaths, is just too damned depressing.
I have never understood why the Bush administration didn’t just treat these fellows nicely, feed’em well, keep’em for a decently long period (12-18 months), and send them back to wherever they got picked up from with nice comments made about them in the press when we sent them back. If we’d really wanted to put icing on the cake, we could have arranged to give them periodic retainers, just privately enough to make some people think it was trying to be hidden. Anything we think we could have done to them would pale by comparison to what their compatriots would do once they thought they were compromised. Doubt amongst the enemy about who were friends and who might be traitors and turncoats would have done far more to assist in dissolving those organizations opposed to our interests than the efforts we’ve wasted for the last twelve years. Of course, for some men, it just feels so much better being macho and ineffective than being clever and devastating.