Category: The Dish

A runway show in China. They really have come a long way, haven’t they?

A Constitutional guide to the issue:

According to CRS, the inherent contempt power is uniquely characterized by "not requiring the cooperation or assistance of either the executive or judicial branches."

While it is true that the President can immunize persons from criminal prosecution, it does not appear that he has authority to immunize a witness from congressional inherent contempt proceeding. . . . A finding of inherent contempt against an executive branch official[] does not appear to be subject to the President’s Pardon power …

Although the contemnor can seek judicial review by means of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the scope of such review may be relatively limited, compared to the plenary review accorded by the courts in cases of conviction under the criminal contempt statute.

Drunk at a press conference; photographed pawing a boob. He really is a French president, isn’t he?

The Law Council of Australia, the country’s national organization for lawyers, has just issued a report on the trial of Aussie national David Hicks under the Bush administration’s military tribunal system. Once again, a coup for building alliances and targeting terror. Money quote:

The "trial" of David Hicks, which took place in March 2007, was a charade.

A pre-trial agreement had been signed and the balance of the legal proceedings was entirely surplus to requirements, although designed to lay a veneer of due process over a political and pragmatic bargain. The veneer cracked immediately.

Ultimately, there has been no benefit from this process; only a corrosion of the rule of law.

No ground can be claimed to have been made in the so-called War on Terror. The Military Commission process at Guantanamo likewise has neither gained from it, nor shown any prospect of improvement.

Predictably, there has been no response from the Australian Government to the consistent and widespread criticism of the Military Commissions and Guantanamo Bay generally. Their support for this process has been shameful.

It’s been happening for quite a while now. Here’s a recent Atlantic report on a Baghdad neighborhood that has undergone such a change. The piece isolates just one street and goes house to house to chronicle the shift. Click on the link to see the map in full detail.

Not from the Onion:

"A Broward prisoner on trial on charges that he masturbated in his jail cell will face a jury of his peers. During jury selection Wednesday in the case of inmate Terry Lee Alexander, all seven jurors admitted to attorneys that they have masturbated. The awkward questioning was posed by defense attorney Kathleen McHugh, who faced 17 prospective jurors and asked point-blank who among them had never masturbated. No hands went up. Then, she went one-by-one, asking each prospective juror if he or she had ever masturbated. All nine men said yes, two of the 10 women said no."

Does Islamist humor exist?

Even Captain Ed wonders:

The instability in the Middle East has forced the hand of the moderate Arab states. They have realized, somewhat belatedly, that the greater threat to their fiefdoms comes not from Israel or the West but from the radicals they have nurtured as threats against both….

These states need to tend to their own back yard. They never really cared about the Palestinian cause, using it as a strawman to channel the rage their populaces felt at their oppression. Now that rage threatens to swallow their regimes …reaching accommodation for the Palestinians will bring them a measure of peace, and hopefully marginalize the radical Islamists they have unleashed.

And Iran threatens to use that weapon against them …

In Israel, meanwhile, there are signs of increasing division between Jews and Arabs.

I just found me some t-shirts.

A reader writes:

I’ve just finished Graham Greene’s "Our Man in Havana" (a marvelous summer read), and was struck by the relevance of one of the dialogs to your blog’s threads on torture. The dialog is between the English protagonist, Wormold, and the Cuban military torturer, Capt. Segura, over a game of checkers:

      ‘Did you torture him?’
      Captain Segura laughed. ‘No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.’
      ‘I didn’t know there were class-distinctions in torture.’
      ‘Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.’
      ‘There’s torture and torture. When they broke up Dr Hasselbacher’s laboratory they were torturing … ?’
      ‘One can never tell what amateurs may do. The police had no concern in that. Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class.’
      ‘Who does?’
      ‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal. You see, I was right to make that king, and now I shall huff you for the last time.’
      ‘You always win, don’t you? That’s an interesting theory of yours.’
      ‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or in the prisons of Lisbon and Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’
      ‘We’re not shocked by that any longer.’
      ‘It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.’

I think perhaps the masses in the US are not currently outraged by the Bush administration’s torture policy because they are torturing those of "the torturable class" – i.e. Arabs, Afghans, and other non-whites.  When they begin sending nice white boys off to be held without trial and tortured, perhaps there will finally be a real outcry. 

What an odd thing to have to hope for.

(Photo: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty.)