Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Flunking out of the Jon Stewart school of rhetoric.
Once upon a time on The Daily Show, when the Michael Jackson child molestation trial was in full bloom, host Jon Stewart reported that, earlier that day during the trial, the Jackson defense team had called as a witness former child movie star Macaulay Culkin, who testified that he had slept in Jackson's bed and had never been molested.
At which point, Stewart paused and looked at the camera as only he can and said (and I'm paraphrasing), "So ... you're on trial on multiple charges of child molestation, and your best defense is to tell the court, 'Hey ... come on ... there are some children I didn't molest!'"
And on that note, submitted without further comment.
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4 comments:
Okay - so they've "improved" conditions at Guano Bay - lovely.
We still have the US government holding people indefinitely without charge, trial or recourse. (and no, I don't consider the upcoming "tribunals" to be legitimate courts - in either the legal or military sense)
What astounds me is the sense one gets that holding these people is somehow justified.
And don't forget, those detainees are getting two types of fruit!!
Lucky bastards.
A guilded cage is still a cage.
Know why I don't read right wing blogs like Arabian Dissent? Cause to me it's like voluntarily exposing yourself to toxic waste- I can actual feel the brain cells dying as I read.
So let's leave aside for the moment the propriety of taking a 12 year old and a 13 year old away from their families and interning them as terrorists (!) in a prison camp half way around the world for over a year. Although you have to admit that in itself is pretty messed up.
That aside however, has it occured to these people that the experience of 2 children and a teenager held at Gitmo might not exactly be typical of the inmate population as a whole? Maybe even their jailors had enough common sense (unlike their captors, apparently) so see the futility of transporting them to Egypt for torture since it is highly improbable that they were in a position to provide any useful intelligence on al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Or, on the other hand, maybe their experience really is typical of Gitmo inmates. But in that case why does the Bush administration continue to place Gitmo off limits to Red Cross inspections and insist that the people held there do not enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions? If internment at Gitmo really is a walk in the park wouldn't opening it to international scrutiny actually give the Bushites some desperately needed positive PR?
I don't think those of us who are skeptical of American assurances on prisoner treatment are the ones who really need to justify our position however. All we have to do is point to the photos from Abu Ghraib.
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