Fruit of the forbidden tree
Occasionally I read blogs. Yesterday I came across this:
I think that [some random blogger] speaks for all level-headed liberals when she says that she won't lose any sleep over Saddam's execution, if the death sentence survives the appellate process, but ...
I read the original. In a blog I never read (too nasty too often). A lawyer being ... non-lawyerly.
A mock trial, under mock rules of evidence and procedure, with mock witnesses presenting mock evidence to a mock judiciary, authorized by a mock government under a mock constitution, the products of a mock election and a mock constitutional drafting process, respectively. As organic to an Arab nation as the bunnyhop with smiles and sidearms.
In states with still-intact legalistic political cultures, the choreograhed dancing is absent. Is the death penalty ever justified? Is the so-called "court" recognizable under International Law? Are the schedule and outcome dicta of a foreign power for its own domestic consumption?
We know, finally, who ordered the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer Sr, for trying to register blacks to vote. The conviction of Samuel H. Bowers, an Imperial Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, was just one in string of civil rights killings to be successfully prosecuted in the South decades after the crimes were actually committed.
Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in 1994 for the 1963 sniper killing of Medgar Evers, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of the 1963 bombing of the 16th street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the murder of Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Edgar Ray Killen was convicted last June of manslaughter in the killings of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney in 1964.
We will never know who Timothy McVeigh fingered in his 10th year of a lifetime of confinement, because he was executed while the aura of his extremism was still upon him.
Executions always destroys the best evidence, the disclosure of the covert, the actual conspiracy, rather than the fragments caught by blind luck and startled investigators harried for prompt results.
I doubt that "all level-headed liberals" sail the same vessel of dreams that floats the younger Bush and friends. But I know that some do. Can you pick out the RNC operative in the photo?