If I was more ambitious I'd devote an entire blog, or several hundred book pages, to the issue of the WaPo editorial page. To the way in which it's stable of right-wing columnist and opinion writers like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, Anne Applebaum, Michael Gerson, Ruth Marcus, Michael Kinsely and William freaking Kristol (among others) are "balanced out" by such opposite numbers as...David Broder? (suuuuure.) Richard Cohen? (Ugh.) Fred Hiatt? (riiiiiight) David Ignatius? (please, just stop.)
The only consistently liberal voice on the page is Eugene Robinson, and he is hardly up to the job all by himself. While he seems like a genuinely nice guy on T.V. (perhaps not so difficult givent hat he often sits next to Pat Buchannan), his opinion columns suffer from the standard mainstream liberal wussiness that cedes the vital ground before the debate even begins.
In his latest column, Robinson has his moments in fighting absurd Republican arguments against trying Khalid Sheik-Mohammed in New York. "Putting KSM and the others on trial in a civilian proceeding on U.S. soil is not just a duty but also an opportunity," he says. "It's a way to show that we do not have one system of justice for ourselves and another for Muslims, that we give defendants their day in court, that we insist they be vigorously defended by competent counsel -- that we really do practice what we preach." Right on, Gene. But it doesn't last long:
...the critics can't really think a judge is going to give Khalid Sheik Mohammed an open microphone to spew his jihadist views, or fear that a jury -- sitting just blocks from Ground Zero -- will look for reasons to let an accused mass murderer off on some technicality.
Aww, I thought we needed to have a have a war of ideas, Gene! How can we do that if he's not allowed to express his ideas? Now of course there are rules in a courtroom, and he won't really be able to just take a microphone and start ranting--nobody can do that in a criminal trial. But, moreover: so what if he did? Republicans use this as one of their main arguments against having the trial in New York--that KSM is going to use witchcraft and convert people to a life of terrorism by talking about how he truly and deeply believes with all his heart that killing innocent civilians is God's duty. And how does Robinson deal with this assumption? Does he laugh at it? Does he defend the right to a fair trial as a necessary component of a free and impartial justice system? (Hint: nope.)
The second part of the sentence is even worse. "Don't worry," he says, "the jury will find him guilty." Wait...what? The reason it's okay to have a civil trial of someone accused of plotting 9/11...is because we know he's guilty? What if he didn't do it? What if he was a patsy set up by OBL to take the fall?
I know we all watch Judge Judy and that OJ Simpson happened a million years ago and so we're all legal experts now especially when it comes to evil terrorists, but...how the fuck does anybody know who's guilty before they've gone to trial?
That's why we have trials--to determine guilt, or innocence. Or at least it is in the imaginary universe I learned about in school. In modern America, I guess we have trials when we're sure we can get the conviction. Because otherwise, KSM would just sit in prison for the rest of his life.
And that, of course, is what is happening to those Guantanamo detainees for whom the government isn't sure it can get a conviction in a civil trial, whether because they'd be exonerated due to torture or the evidence is otherwise tainted or non-existent. They're going to stay at Guantanamo forever, or until the right wing rage and fear-dressed-up-as-manly-toughness chills out a tiny bit. (Whichever comes first.) And this is what completely destroys the Obama administration's rationale for trying KSM in the first place, as Greenwald noted last week. If we're trying him in civilian court because he's entitled to a fair trial (or else he'd have to be treated as a POW and released in a timely manner), then why don't we try or release all the other detainees?
Because it's just a political ploy. Because Obama wants the dum-dums in the media to say, "look, he's not Bush! He's giving a terrorist a trial!"
As though going through with the farce, with its entirely foregone conclusion, in a legal trial with lawyers and evidence and everything that's been the foundation of international law for several thousands of years, is deserving of praise.
Or of being labeled "liberal," for that matter.
Robinson continues on sensibly enough:
It's amazing that so many people who insist on the "war on terrorism" framework apparently have such little interest in understanding the enemy, which seems to me the only way to find the enemy's vulnerabilities. The jihadist narrative is largely about justice, or rather what radical imams and their followers perceive as injustice.
Exactly. That's why we need to have the war of ideas, right? To talk about how their interpretations of history are wrong. Unfortunately, he continues:
In the enemy's version of history, the West -- meaning the United States, Israel, Britain and what used to be called Christendom -- has a long history of exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves. In this warped worldview, we deserve any atrocities that jihadist "warriors" might commit against us.
Protesting that all this is absurd and obscene does not make it go away.
A crucial element of the conservative frame can be found in Robinson's use of the word "we." "We" occupy Muslim lands..."We" install corrupt lackeys..."We" reserve these luxuries for ourselves. The implication is that average Joes like you and me and Eugene Robinson--we didn't do these things! Therefore why should we suffer? And he's absolutely right. We didn't do this, and we shouldn't suffer.
But even if "we" didn't do these things, they still managed to happen. The history of grievances Robinson lists is certainly absurd and obscene--but it is also objectively true. As Paul Wolfowitz admitted back in 2003, American troops bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq and caused the deaths of over 100,000 of its citizens because we wanted its oil. Our man in Afghanistan was just reelected despite unequivocal evidence of widespread electoral fraud. Obama continues to supply an overwhelming amount of military aid to Israel, even as Jewish settlements continue to expand in the West Bank; four million people in Gaza are now cut off from the rest of the world by an Israeli blockade that keeps out cement, glass, plastic, steel, and children's toys for fear that they will be used to make bombs or rockets. And of course, we are refusing to extend the right to fair trial to any of these accused terrorists. That's exactly what this debate is all about. We can argue about the relative merits of these actions--arguments can and have long been made to the effect that the Iraq and Afghani invasions, the corrupt leaders, the denial of habeaus corpus are all necessary evils. And nothing can ever justify terrorist attacks on defenseless civilians. But this does nothing to alter the fact that American oppression is a fact of daily life for millions of Muslims.
A vast, vast majority of those millions do not engage in terrorist attacks. But a tiny handful do. And it's the very essence of a blame-the-victim, heads-in-the-sand, root-causes-be-damned conservative mentality to claim that the legitimate grievances that those millions have with our policies are invalidated by the fact that the crazies among them engage in terrorism.
If Eugene Robinson were really interested in finding out what motivates the terrorists, he might start by examining his own biases. That alone would hasten the end of the "war on terrorism"-- more so than whatever will happen in this "trial of the century." (Hint: he's guilty.)
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