Live Not By Lies

When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ``I am violence. Run away, make way for me--I will crush you.'' But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally--since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies--all loyalty lies in that.

Excerpt from Live Not By Lies, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
RIP

Please take a moment and go read the whole thing. It sits on one side of a balance. With it sit the quaint notion of Rule of Law and all that it represents.

On the other side we have one of the more despicable judicial proceedings of our time. The first military commission trial goes to jury today and it is a sad cynical affair. It has been called Potemkin in nature, but I wonder if such a term could truly encompass the layering of lies, double speak and grotesque posturing that makes up this event.

From the LA Times we have:

The war crimes case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan today goes to a jury of his enemies, hand-selected by the Pentagon official who charged him on behalf of a president who has ordered him imprisoned even if acquitted. ...

Hamdan's defense was encumbered by "protective orders" that prohibited even the mention of the CIA or its handling of Hamdan during a month in late 2001 when the defendant disappeared into "a black hole" in Afghanistan, said the tribunal's deputy defense chief, Michael J. Berrigan. He called the two-week trial an "obscenity." ...

Citing national security concerns, none of the agents nor the reports from CIA interrogations of Hamdan were available to the defense. Four prosecution witnesses testified anonymously, and two Army special forces officers called by the defense were questioned behind closed doors, with no media or independent observers allowed.

What riles me the most is that this is a war crimes tribunal. Think about that in all of it's grotesque irony. The ACLU has a few things to say:

"This trial has been an embarrassment. It's embarrassing that the United States would convene the first tribunal since World War II to prosecute such a lowly and marginal figure, and it's embarrassing that this system has been devised to allow prosecution of the alleged crimes of the detainees while covering up the crimes committed against them," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. ...

"From Hamdan's perspective, this is a Potemkin proceeding," Wizner said, a dry run to provide assurance that no barriers arise to the introduction of coerced evidence or hearsay in future trials. [Emphasis added]

(text and form borrowed heavily from a Cab Drollery posting on this).

We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today's modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all opportunities for our descendants--but just don't disturb our fragile existence. We lack staunchness, pride and enthusiasm. We don't even fear universal nuclear death, and we don't fear a third world war. We have already taken refuge in the crevices. We just fear acts of civil courage.

end