Deferring to Jihad

The excruciating care that the judicial procedure in the United States is undertaking to demonstrate to themselves and the world at large how civil and respectful they are, even toward those whose vehemently violent hatred leading to mass slaughter of their citizens, is playing out in an improvised courthouse in initial arraignment proceedings at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base.

Not quite turning the other cheek, but fairly close to it.  While the religion of the West is reviled, that of Islam is exquisitely respected, the planners and executors of the deaths of almost three thousand Americans, treated with deference, given Korans, permitted to make a mockery of American justice proceedings, disruptions occurring while the five accused proceed to turn to Mecca and pray.

"These men have endured years of inhumane treatment and torture  This treatment has had serious long-term effects and will ultimately infect every aspects of this military commission tribunal", announced defence lawyer James Connell.  "The accused refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the military commissions as demonstrated through their silence."

Inhumane treatment and torture is indeed very bad form.  Civilized people and civilized nations do not, should not succumb to the unworthy temptation to treat those who relish and revel in violently dispatching those whom they consider enemies, with a like unconcern for human rights.  Evidently Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was repeatedly waterboarded, deprived of sleep, his co-accused similarly abused.

Which is not very nice, not at all.  But can we come back down to Earth and consider the crimes with which these five men, violent, vicious jihadists all, whose criminal success in mass murder brought them to this trial, are accused of?  The defendants are charged with "conspiracy, attacking civilians, murder and violation of the law of war, destruction, hijacking and terrorism".

Their planned, wildly successful, lethal attack on civilian infrastructure for the direct purpose of murdering as many innocent civilians as possible brought them to Guantanamo, brought them the investigative ire of those charged with finding evidence that would bring them to justice.  The five men, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the ringleader of this little cell, along with Ali Abdul al-Azia Ali, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al Hawsawi, Tamzi bin-al-Shibh, are all proud to be warriors of Islam.

There is an ultimate price to be paid in any society for human slaughter.  But they will not co-operate with the proceedings, preferring to ignore stolidly all that surrounds them.  They are also skilled at the very simple trick that all such as they know how to employ.  The sensitivities of the Western world with respect to human rights and the rule of law represent also their frail weakness.

And it is that weakness that Islamists exploit, using it as a very sharp, pointed tool that manages to elicit, unerringly, sympathy directed toward them, because though whom they have wronged by any standards of human decency, have 'wronged' them in turn by the standards of their own legal and humanitarian restraints, they present as the victims.

And so, they flaunt their wounds, both physical and metaphysical.  "It's not possible to torture someone and at some point of the road say everything we went through is clear.  My client has been tortured, the US. government, my country, tortured this man", bleated the empathetic enabler.