Delivered by George W. Bush with a discernible high school parking lot swagger in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, this statement followed his murky identification of alleged Al Qaeda operatives who had been captured or otherwise apprehended, one allegedly a "logistics coordinator" for a terrorist camp in Afghanistan.
In so many words, the putative President of the United States indicated that such persons have been neutralized. His tone clearly suggested that they had been executed. If an Al Qaeda "logistics coordinator" was publicly tried and sentenced in any American court or elsewhere, it escaped the notice of the press. And the statement indicates that more than one were so dealt with.
Having encountered strong resistance to its executive-order military tribunal initiative, it appears that this Administration may have gone ahead and achieved its ends in secrecy. The notion of clandestine executions constituting a presidential view of American justice meted out to foreigners, let alone citizens, is profoundly troubling. Conservative columnist George Will, visibly startled, breathlessly read back from his notes in the rushed final moments of post-address network television commentary.
On second viewing, Mr. Bush's demeanor in delivering this assurance—which was vigorously applauded on both sides of the joint session aisle—was a picture of the gloating, evil stupidity that Americans are trained to associate with foreign dictators and terrorists. Because he is so rarely allowed to ad lib, one tends to assume that this statement and its accompanying body language were rehearsed.
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Sol Wachtler, former Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, was quoted for many pithy propositions of law ("A marriage license does not grant a man leave to forcibly rape his wife with impunity"), but also of legal procedure, most famously perhaps, his remark about the prosecutor's ease of success in the non-adversarial grand jury process: "Any half-way decent lawyer could convict a ham sandwich."
This remark came redolently to mind as C-SPAN broadcast George Bush's popular statesman, General Colin Powell, presenting evidence before the United Nations Security Council of Iraq's alleged concealment of weapons produced and harbored in contravention of a 12-year series of prohibitive UN Resolutions since the end of the Gulf War—which, incidentally, first brought the General to the notice of a broad television viewership (and draft-pickers in the GOP).
Despite a PR build-up styled on a saturation ad campaign for a Bruce Willis blockbuster and promises of overwhelming and convincing proofs based on CIA intelligence-gathering (lately declassified?), General Powell consumed less time less effectively and used fewer audio-visual aids than General "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf or Ross Perot with their respective maps and pie charts. General Powell read aloud, General Powell played subtitled audiotapes. Like a prosecutor, he performed unopposed for a captive audience. But General Powell, whatever his other battle credentials, is not a 'half-way decent' lawyer.
He failed to demonstrate even a rudimentary "chain of possession" with respect to the audiotapes, or even who recorded and translated them, where and when. Since there is anecdotal evidence from immigrant New York shopkeepers that the translations were inaccurate, it is especially curious that General Powell would venture into a hall full of top-notch Arabic linguists and expect none of them to notice a shabby rendering of 18-wheeler grunts engaged in what Camille Paglia called "peek-a-boo." Of course, the average American viewer was not well-equipped to evaluate the tapes' probity, perfect translations, or not. Which is precisely why—after Mr. Powell's long-delayed testimony before the world's premier supranational deliberative body was hyped as the "smoking gun" retrieved by the world's most fearsome intelligence complex—rudimentary rules of evidence were due at least perfunctory respect, and that a priori, given the egregious nature of the charge and sentence urged for the accused.
In view of the proclaimed importance of the presentation, its putative sources, and the sophistication of the audience assembled to hear it, one marvels at the judgment of those who permitted the Secretary of State to talk through his hat, offering up for his peers' solemn consideration as evidence of the current assessment of Iraqi weapon concealment practices the plagiarized 1991 article of a California post-grad (the helpful parts of which were reportedly cut and pasted into shape by a State Department secretary). An alert Cambridge expert recognized the work from its subsequent publication in an academic review, and went to the British press. While the Bush Administration offhandedly spun the incident, Downing Street was "plunged into acute international embarrassment" accordingly to The Guardian.
"Whitehall's dismay," the article continued, "was compounded by the knowledge that the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday [saying,] 'I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed…which describes in exquisite detail [vide: current] Iraqi deception activities'." The Observer warned, "At best, this episode demonstrates incompetence and the failure to oversee the most important claims which the Government puts into the public domain. At worst, a deliberate attempt to hoodwink and mislead the public will undermine trust in anything the Government says about the Iraqi threat at this vital time. . . . Nothing will corrode trust more than to be caught out trying to insult the intelligence of the British public." (2/9: "The Dossier That Shamed Britain")
Red-State America was scandalized by a President's overly cautious testimony about the extent of his intimacy with a willing intern. While Europeans chuckled, family show hosts and politicians here at every level were plagued by their constituents' urgent question: "What are we supposed to tell our children?" A Republican-dominated Judiciary Committee and House eagerly responded: "Tell them to watch us take him down."
As a practical matter, what was at stake for the distressed parent was a child's image of a hallowed 18th century American cherry tree. Mr. Powell's was no half-way decent lawyer's presentation and, arguably, no half-way decent eighth-grader's. But what was at stake this week, as the Secretary of State cheated on his homework and the pilgrims arrived at Mecca, was indisputably more sacred than all the cedars in Lebanon.
