No, I’m not talking about The Joker.
I’m not a big fan of what Rebecca McKinnon calls “parachute journalists” — reporters who spend a very limited time in a country and then write stories describing “ancient ethnic hatreds” and “the profound despair of local villagers,” as if they had spent the last thirty years living there. It’s the war correspondent ethos run amok.
The latest is from Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, who spent two whole days in Guantanamo covering the war crimes trial of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver.
That said, I did find one item in Rosenberg’s story interesting:
In the al Qaeda world of driver Salim Hamdan, exhortations to martyrdom and railing at the infidels can become mind-numbing. Or so claimed several FBI agents who testified last week at the trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver, the Yemeni with a fourth-grade education. ”Mr. Hamdan pretty much got tired of hearing the same thing over and over again,” said FBI Agent George Crouch Jr. And so, he “tuned out.”
I haven’t seen this reported anywhere else, and it certainly makes sense. If you’ve ever been in a car with a bunch of metalheads listening to Motörhead at maximum volume, sooner or later you’re going to start tuning out Lemmy, no matter how awesome a rock god he may be.
What isn’t clear from Rosenberg’s account is whether the FBI agents were testifying for the prosecution or the defense. You’d think that would be an important detail, one worthy of putting in the freaking story.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Rosenberg’s story is its sheer banality. She makes it sound no different from a visit to District Court — if a District Court sold “Got Freedom?” t-shirts** and kept bottled water in a portable mortuary.
This is the best the Bush Administration could do? Set aside, just for a moment, the due process violations and the allegations of torture. Assume, just for a moment, that the Bush Administration is right — that these guys deserve to have the book thrown at them. I know that it’s hard to do without causing your brain to explode, but just for argument’s sake, go along with me for a minute.
So the trials start. And who’s the first defendant? Osama’s driver. A guy with a fourth-grade education. Do they think he’s Alfred to Osama’s Batman or something? Or that he’s the criminal mastermind? Seriously? Maybe it would help if The Wall Street Murdoch Journal ran an op-ed called “What Hamdin and The Joker Have in Common.”
If the Allies had used the Bush Administration’s approach after World War II, they would have started with, I don’t know, Ezra Pound before they got around to prosecuting Goebbels, Speer, et. al. That is if Pound was a retarded 19-year-old from West Virginia.
It just doesn’t make any sense. But then again, you’d think I would have learned by now not to expect sanity, logic, or even consistency from the gang of thugs we call the Bush Administration.
**Shouldn’t the t-shirts read “Don’t Got Freedom”?? It is Guantanamo, after all.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia, used under a GNU Free Documentation License.
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