Ham-dumb
Didn’t the U.S. military see Saving Private Ryan? Don’t they remember how the intepreter Upham argues for the life of a German captive, whom Captain Miller (the Tom Hanks character) ultimately releases … only to see the guy come back and ultimately deliver the round that fells Miller as well?
It was all I could think of when I read that Salim Ahmed Hamdan … onetime driver for none other than Osama bin Laden … would be sent back home to Yemen to serve out his sentence.
Hmmmmmm. Don’t I recall somehow that Yemen is rather of a hotbed of al Qaeda activity … the USS Cole was attacked there? Didn’t CIA Director Hayden just admit that “North Africa, East Africa, Yemen serve as kind of a counterweight to the good news out of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?”
And we’re sending one of Osama’s boys back to a major front on the war on terror? As Ed Morrissey at HotAir points out, “Yemen has a habit of either releasing terrorists on their own recognizance or allowing them to ‘escape’.”
I guess we’re hoping that the “low-level aide” will quietly take up residence with his wife and two children? Maybe he’ll buy a briefcase and go to work in Dunder/Mifflin’s local office in Yemen.
Harrumph.
The selfsame day as this news arrives, Bret Stephens pointedly asks on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal why we don’t hang pirates anymore. Notes Stephens, “the question defines a fault line in the civilized world’s view about the latest encroachment of barbarism.”
So does the treatment of Hamdan.
And so do, less directly, the issues raised in a column directly beneath Stephens’ by William McGurn on the California Supreme Court’s decision to hear challenges to Proposition 8 forbidding same-sex marriage.
Stephens points to “legal exquisiteness” that denies civilization the ability to apprehend, hold or try pirates, and concludes, “A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it.”
McGurn, less judgmental about homosexuality than I would be, laments the way in which judicial interference has decimated our ability to resolve moral issues such as partial-birth abortion or gay marriage.
The point is the same. In the old days, we knew how to deal with these things.
William McKinley’s assassin was executed just less than two months after he shot the Chief Executive and barely more than six weeks after the President died.
Pirates used to be summarily tried and hanged on the very ship by which they were captured.
Homosexuals? Sodomy laws were rarely enforced unless public behavior was involved. But there was a quiet social contract by which gays kept their sexual orientation largely to themselves and their activities behind closed doors.
Hamdan? In the old days, given his close association with the most vicious and dangerous terrorist of our time, he would have been tried by a commission, dragged before a firing squad shortly after his capture and dispatched.
The world once knew that harsh measures were sometimes required to protect ourselves and preserve society. Not keeping pirates as guests on Naval ships with world-class healthcare, as Stephens describes. Not running a humane prison at Guantanomo and still incurring the world’s wrath for “torturing” terrorists. Not providing court-mandated means, going beyond simply protecting the “rights” of people whose private behavior in fact constitutes a public-health menace to a sanction equal to that of the most fundamental building block of society.
And not returning a personal aide to one of history’s most horrendous war criminals to the front while the conflict still rages.
Who knows? Maybe Hamdan impressed the officers with “Please, I like America! Fancy schmancy! What a cinch! Go fly a kite! Cat got your tongue! Hill of beans! Betty Boop, what a dish. Betty Grable, nice gams.”
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