Judge limits what statements can be used in war crimes trial

I’m not entirely atop this trial, which is a shame because I should be. The basics of it all is that Salim Hamdan, driver of and supposedly conspirator with, Osama bin Laden is the first defendant in a war crimes trial held by the United States since Nuremburg. Significant? You betcha.

But there’s a wrinkle in the plans: a judge ruled that evidence obtained through “highly coercive” interrogation isn’t admissable.

At Bagram, Hamdan says he was kept in isolation 24 hours a day with his hands and feet restrained, and armed soldiers prompted him to talk by kneeing him in the back. He says his captors at Panshir repeatedly tied him up, put a bag over his head and knocked him to the ground.

The judge did leave the door open for the prosecution to use other statements Hamdan gave elsewhere in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Defense lawyers asked Allred to throw out all of his interrogations, arguing he incriminated himself under the effects of alleged abuse — including sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.

Let me explain something.

This man is a criminal, or may be at any rate, but he is no different a criminal than any within our borders. There’s this bizarre mode of thought that because he’s Muslim, it means that he operates differently than anyone else and the only way to get information out is via “highly coercive” tactics that would never fly in American prisons. Not only that, but the information obtained in this way is always reliable, unlike what we’d expect if, say, someone got a “confession” out of a robbery suspect by leaving him in a frigid holding cell shackled up for a few weeks until he sputtered it out.

You’d think if these tactics are effective and not at all cruel, we’d be using them in domestic trials. Are we? Nope. Funny how that works.

What DOES McCain know about the Middle East??

I’m seriously asking this now. You can call all these gaffes, but the fact of the matter is McCain is showing an incredible lack of understanding of pretty damn basic concepts over there.

Today’s evidence (h/t AmericaBlog): Apparently Iraq and Pakistan share a border.

Asked by ABC’s Diane Sawyer Monday morning whether the “the situation in Afghanistan in precarious and urgent,” McCain responded:

“I think it’s serious. . . . It’s a serious situation, but there’s a lot of things we need to do. We have a lot of work to do and I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border,” said McCain, R-Ariz., said on “Good Morning America.”

“But Hanlon!” you say. “He was asked about Afghanistan! Obviously he just misspoke!”

But that’s the point. To John McCain, concepts like “Iraq”, “Al Qaeda”, “Afghanistan”, “Shia”, “Sunni”, and “terrorists” are all part of one giant amorphous battleground and enemy force. There is no inter-ethnic tension, no sectarian divides, no difference between any of them. They’re all brown people that live in that big desert area and they all want to alternately kill Americans and hug us, depending on the point McCain needs to make.

That’s why the famous “Iran is training Al Qaeda” gaffe was a big deal. To most people, it was a minor thing because, hey, Al Qaeda is extremists so why does it matter? Unfortunately, the Sunni Al Qaeda isn’t exactly friendly with the Shia Iran (after all, Osama bin Laden once called Iranians a bunch of Shia “dogs and lackies”). This was an off-the-cuff remark that happened thanks to a lack of understanding.

The picture that’s developing is a John McCain who considers Iraq/Afghanistan as less of a real region of the world and more of a place to make political points. Fits well with the article right under this one and helps explain why he doesn’t offer a solution: he doesn’t have a clue. Maybe if he could figure out “a Google” it would help.

McCain’s op-ed and stupid complaints

So apparently John McCain wrote an op-ed to answer Barack Obama’s for the New York times, but they won’t publish it. The gritty details of the thing are on the increasingly even-handed Drudge Report, and I wholly endorse going there to read up on it, as well as the piece itself.

I’ll not waste my normal fifteen paragraphs expounding on why this is a stupid controversy, so I’ll just say this: anyone who bitches that the Times is controlling its content or not giving equal time to the candidates can just cram it up their asses. I’m not sure what bizarro universe everyone else lives in, but in mine papers edit, alter, reject, and make requirements for writers all the time.

Hate to break it to everyone, but editorials get chopped apart and tossed in the can on a daily basis. And don’t give me that “equal time” BS either because if that was genuinely enforced FOX would have gotten shut down in 2004, if not in 2000, when they started running unedited daily updates on what Bush was doing and then once in a while playing a five minute chopped-up Kerry speech clip.

The NYT does not hate McCain. The media adores him. That’s why Wright was a big deal but not Hagee. That’s why no one’s talking about his divorce. That’s why he’s still referred to as a maverick and they stay oddly silent on his litany of flip-flops.

I read the editorial and frankly it isn’t any good. He briefly talks about why the surge worked and spends the rest of it bitching about Obama. Read Obama’s editorial, then read McCain’s again. Obama’s is fair, not venemously political, and talks about how to get out of Iraq. All McCain is doing is bitching about Obama. As the Times said:

Shipley continues: ‘It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq.’

Of course, we’ll never see that, because he has no definition of “victory”, and has no idea what would have to happen to get us out of Iraq, if he actually wants us out of Iraq at all.

Okay? We got that taken care of?