| Moment of Truth / New York Sun Editorial / June 29, 2007 The double murder of the two sons of a freedom-loving Iraqi parliamentarian is presenting President Bush with a moment of truth. It involves Mithal al Alusi, an Iraqi parliamentarian who has fought for a just war against our terrorist enemies, regardless of their confessional stripe. He has helped prosecute the worst of Saddam's henchmen, he has publicly refused to take the lucre of Iran's ambassador, and he has long since decided he would not hide the fact from the Arab and American press that he attended a counter-terrorism conference in Israel. |
(( Hmm -- does the double murder of two persons work out to four coffins or only two? And while we're asking rude questions, did the evil Qommie ambassador try to bribe the new sea-green incorruptible at a press conference or in a crowded marketplace or where was it, exactly? ))
Mr. al-Alusi has paid a price for his principles. On February 8, 2005, assassins out for him murdered his two sons, Ayman and Jamal. Mr. al-Alusi abjured doing what almost any other Iraqi politician would have done — namely, seek the killer and exact revenge. Mr. al-Alusi put his faith in Iraq's fragile justice system. There are now confidential witnesses, including testimony from some of the men involved in the killing, that implicate Iraq's minister of culture, As'ad Kemal al-Hashemi, as the individual who ordered and financed the murder. |
The New York Sunnis have started to forget their English, it looks like, or else M. al-’Alúsí really did go to a notary public and solemnly swear (or, as the case may be, affirm) "I promise I shall seek no private-sector revenge. Nay rather, I hereby put my faith in my neofatherland's fragile justice system." Fragile the invasion-based justice system no doubt is, and in addition to that, somewhat peculiar. "Confidential witnesses" sounds as if it came straight from the Code of Guantánamo. It also makes it rather mysterious that the twistatorialists should know about such witnesses. To be sure, M. al-’Alúsí will have mentioned them in his telephone call to Neocomrade E. Lake, but if these witnesses were really confidential, M. al-’Alúsí would not know they exist himself. Alleged or authentic abjurations notwithstanding, the walí al-dam, "inheritor of the vendetta," is one person it might actually make some kind of sense to keep uninformed about supposed witnesses, even as the alleged perp would of course be another.
It may make only a parochial Westistani sort of legal sense, I suppose, to distinguish so-called "interested parties" from the rest of the human race. M. al-’Alúsí may be indeed the moral titan that the NY Sunnis hype him as, the sole just man at New Gomorrah, or maybe he just happens to agree with their own aggression and occupation politics: either way, he's plainly an interested party according to our traditional canons of courtroom judgment. Accordingly when he behaves as described, our presumption must be that he is a blood relative of the murder victims has a good deal to do with what is going on. It is not logically excluded that he would be as insistent about currat lex! if only complete strangers to M. al-’Alúsí were involved in the case, yet it is in effect juridically excluded: we do not think so highly of the human race (in the courtroom) as to assume that most people can be "interested parties" in the technical sense and yet disinterested judges of the human events involved.
| On Monday, an Iraqi justice signed the warrant for Mr. al-Hashemi's arrest, and American GIs, on orders of General Petraeus, began to accompany the Iraqi national police to his home in Baghdad. Then, as our Eli Lake reported exclusively, General Petraeus's order was overturned in Washington, and the Iraqi police found themselves outgunned at the home of the culture minister. Mr. al-Hashemi then fled to the fortified international zone in the center of Baghdad, where he is holed up at the al-Rashid Hotel, a compound guarded by military contractors who report to America. The contractors refused to let the police enter the hotel. So Mr. al-Alusi pleaded with our embassy in Baghdad to order them to let the police do their job. He was told by the embassy of the country that controls the roads and checkpoints of the international zone, that they would not interfere, that this was an "Iraqi affair." Nonsense. The evidence points to the fact that our policy makers are interfering in the direction of letting this wanted man go. The head of Mr. al-Hashemi's Sunni political bloc, Adnan al-Dulaimi, says a deal is being worked out now to allow Mr. al-Hashemi leave Iraq without facing his charges. |
The Kiddie Krusaders of the NYS run smack up against their own Little Brother at this point, and some really nifty euphemism results: "the country that controls the roads and checkpoints of the international zone." Golly, Mr. Bones, do you think they mean China, or would it be Peru? Perhaps they have been reading M. de Talleyrand about how "nonintervention" is a metaphysical expression that more or less means the same thing as "intervention"?
Considered as an occasion for jolly litigation instead of grave philosophy, the key phrase is "military contractors who report to America." Strictly speaking, of course, the hired hands report to their employin' corporation, which is (presumably) doin' contract work for Crawford's Department of War. Whether that chain of command means that they must do whatever they are ordered to do by armed paleface invaders may well boil down to whether it says so in the particular contract they signed with the militant Bushies. It is well known that such mercs are not at all amenable to M. al-’Alúsí's fatherland's "fragile justice system" -- quite a remarkable fragility in itself! It is less well known, but as I recall nevertheless the case, that mercs are not amenable to the UCMJ either, and that the War Department wants it that way. Can M. al-’Alúsí ask for a Fedguv writ in New York or Washington, then? Well, he can ask, but it hardly seems likely he'll get it. While in New York, he might see if the Security Council would issue him a writ, for some jokesters suppose, when it suits them, that the UN is the true basis of legality in the occupied provinces of the former Iraq. Unfortunately there exists, as far as I am aware, no mechanism for issuing UNSC writs of assistance to private persons, and even if there was, no doubt M. al-Háshimí could skip town long before they cranked it up.
In practice M. al-’Alúsí appealed to the sole agency that might effectively give him what he wants, the invasion-basers themselves.
| The logic — if that's the word — of such a deal would be that in the poisoned factional politics of Iraq, an arrest would look like a Shiite judge pressing a purge of a Sunni politician. The abstract "Sunnis" would thus be spared humiliation. Mr. al-Alusi has told our Eli Lake that he will send Mr. Bush a letter making an appeal to countermand the decision of Ambassador Crocker not to intervene. Mr. al-Alusi said that he met with Mr. Bush at a conference of Arab liberal democrats on June 5 in Prague, where the president asked about his wife in light of the murder of their sons. All eyes will be on the president here. It is a moment for him to back up his noble statements with action, by ordering his diplomats and military officers to let the Iraqi police apprehend Mr. al-Hashemi. No doubt it will be controversial — and even ignite another round of violence. But democracies aren't born without labor, and legal systems gain credibility only by breasting controversy. Justice is blind for a reason. A failure here will have worse consequences than any short-term repercussions. |
The NYS neocomrades don't appreciate that they put themselves in a lose-lose situation here. They will lose if their titanic M. al-’Alúsí doesn't get what he wants, but they will also lose, and probably rather worse, should Little Brother, upon Whom all eyes are fixed!, graciously condescend to bestow the boon prayed for. Nothing could make clearer what a total bushogenic sham the Sovereignty and Independence and Democracy and Constitutionality of neo-Iraq really are, not even to speak of any alleged "justice system." (Some system, that it should "work" that way!)
But in fact the plight of the New York Sunnis is not quite that bleak: "All eyes will be on the president here" is pure piffle. Most of the GOP geniuses don't even have one (1.0) indig hero to care about, and they'll care less how this fuss is resolved. To accuse invasionites of carin' about Rulalaw as a principle would only be ridiculous. Cheapjack rhetorical tinsel like "legal systems gain credibility only by breasting controversy. Justice is blind for a reason" is easy enough to match. No credible legal system ever at any point brought all offenders to book. Part of the blindness of Ms. Justice is, and must be, to all those things that she somehow never got around to doing.
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