David Brooks doesn’t think we should try Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in the US because he will then have a mouthpiece to spout off whatever he wants and more terrorists will germinate and blow up the weedy patch of WTC remains. Of course, at-large bin Laden actually does spout off whatever he wants from time to time, or used to–it was always news and doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Arguably, those tapes should have been bigger news than they were, but that’s a tangent.
However, Sarah Palin doesn’t think the US should try Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in the US because of the possibility that he might go free on a technicality. This, IMHO, is way worse than David Brooks’ middling phobia. You might as well say we should dispense with trials for all crimes above x level of heinousness, because if the judicial outcomes don’t match the state’s preferences or the court of public opinion’s bloodlust, what’s the point? Palin, although she is a crazy liar–although although I’m totes going to read her book–is more or less voicing the circular logic behind torture and the covering-up of torture, vis-a-vis the legal system. Any information extracted by torture, no matter how damning, would give even the laziest defense attorney a major weapon against government prosecutors.
Therefore, we shouldn’t torture anyone. Or fuck with evidence. Or do any of the myriad things that cause judges to throw a case out–if the government can’t find competent legal professionals to handle supremely important cases, the country really ought to to disband and start again, maybe letting ants or bees try this time.
In any case, the strident opposition to trial by jury is kind of curious. I wondered once if citizens feel good when people like Bernie Madoff get sentences far beyond their possible life span–such a pointless exercise is designed to capture and focus popular outrage (or, in Madoff’s case, highly affluent outrage). Now I’m reconsidering. Palin and her ilk barely tolerate a legal system in which “obviously” guilty people are set free when the State violates their rights to due process. Clearly, about 50 million Americans would prefer shooting them all and letting God sort them out, getting their hands a little dirty, locking them up and throwing away the key, or some other reductive cliche. They want their gorilla-ish dislike known: justice should be swift and harsh and any quibbling about due process or equality under the law is a useless intrusion by the weak.
It almost seems as if there is some cosmic balance at work, wherein all the “lost opportunities” to come down hard on criminals who got off must be evened out by obscenely excessive sentences heaped on those who managed to run the gauntlet without some ACLU intervening when their rights are trampled on. In other words, people freed on technicalities must have their punishments transferred, or else a certain segment of the population will feel personally dispossessed in an increasingly immoral society.
If Khalid Sheikh Muhammad is to be brought to justice, justice-as-tedious-process may have to be abolished. It’s What We’re Fighting For, after all.