This week a Federal Judge demanded that the Bush administration release Uighur terrorists from Guantanamo to the Washington DC area. This decision is a natural outgrowth of the sustained attack against the legitimacy of Guantanamo that has taken place since the first prisoners were brought there.
DC court: Let’s release terrorists into the US
Now, unless the 4th District overrules Urbina in the next 72 hours, we will knowingly transport 17 Uighers who lived in terrorist training camps to our nation’s capital, and release them on their own recognizance. Why? Because we can’t send them to China, who might mistreat them. Every other country in the world has more sense than to agree to take these Uigher separatists, who like many of their compatriots, have allied themselves with al-Qaeda. Every other country, that is, except the US, or at least one of its judges.
As luck would have it the 4th District did overrule Urbina, with an emergency stay for one week:
Let’s recap the situation. Our armed forces capture seventeen Uighers in terrorist training camps far from home in Afghanistan. They have received training in al-Qaeda tactics — exactly the kind of people we want to keep out of our country while AQ wages war on the West. We’d like to get them out of Gitmo after having derived what intelligence we can from them, but no one seems terribly interested in taking al-Qaeda terrorists into their countr, either. The Chinese want them, but we’re afraid the terrorists will be mistreated by Beijing, which is suppressing a Uigher insurgency at the moment.
What solution does our brilliant judiciary reach? Let them live in the nation’s capital, the very place al-Qaeda trains its recruits to destroy! What a great idea!
The 4th Circuit has given the Bush administration another week to make its arguments to the entire 19-judge panel. Hopefully, the majority of them show a little more sense than Urbina did, but I’m not entirely optimistic. The appellate courts have shown a desire to run this war as a collective commander-in-chief rather than to follow the laws passed by Congress in dealing with unlawful combatants, who are supposed to have less protection than POWs, not more.
It is hard for most of us to understand the thinking behind a decision that would allow such dangerous, trained killers, to be released into the population, but unfortunately this kind of thinking, that idealizes an unrealistic ideal to the detriment of reality, is rampant in our culture. Richard Fernandez discusses the same thinking occurring in a different venue:
The Associated Press reports that the courts are deciding whether the USN can protect its warships from enemy submarines if that means inconveniencing marine life.
The Supreme Court appeared divided Wednesday over judges’ authority to limit the Navy’s use of sonar to protect whales. … Sonar can interfere with whales’ ability to navigate and communicate. There is also evidence that the technology has caused whales to strand themselves on shore.
The exercises have continued since the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in February that the Navy must limit sonar use when ships get close to marine mammals. …
Western civilization is dying a death by a thousand cuts. The quest for perfection has become such an obsession that it is sought even at the cost of basic functionality. A friend who works at big name consulting firm said that so much attention is focused on ensuring compliance — checking off boxes, making sure that everything is gender-friendly, green, non-racist and whatever else — that sound business is almost an afterthought. In this modern world it’s alright to have something that doesn’t work, so long as it’s perfect.
The paralysis brought on by the need to experience moral perfection has reached ludicrous heights.
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There is something almost insane about these attitudes. It is almost a form of lunacy, and the worse for being completely unnoticed by the lunatics themselves. But if they knew they were crazy, they wouldn’t be, would they?
Update: The Daily Mail reports that a gardener is being ordered to take down the barbed wire fence he put around his gardener in case thieves scratch themselves while stealing from it.
In effect we have idealized and privileged the letter of the law above common sense. Further, the legalistic attempt to force reality into a neat and clean neat template that exists primarily in the imaginations of perfectionist narcissists (who tend to value their own verbiage more than the interests of others) places all of us at risk.
In a post from almost three years ago, The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection, I discussed part of the treatment of a young woman who insisted that the world should adhere to the standards she set for it and in doing so, put herself at great risk:
Many years ago a young woman entered Psychoanalysis for chronic problems she was having in maintaining her relationships. She announced at the start that she was an ardent feminist and that her feelings about this were not subjects for analytic review. Early in her treatment, her primary interest seemed to be to initiate arguments with me over male perfidy and oppression of women. It was not easy to maintain my neutral position in the face of near constant attack. (Her attacks felt like assaults, usually couched in terms of the patriarchal form and design of the analytic situation where I sat back like a typical male authority figure and made her suffer from my inane and stupid comments.) After several months of this I began to wonder if I would ever be able to actually start the process of exploring, as therapeutic allies, how her mind works, rather than remaining stuck in the "inherently oppressive" analysis, which was the only way she could experience my efforts. The breakthrough came when she casually mentioned toward the end of one session that her ankle was bothering her and she was annoyed (she was almost always annoyed about something, I might add) that she wouldn't be able to jog that night. Since I knew that she was living in a marginal area of Manhattan and this was at a time when crime was at high levels and much in the news, I had concerns that her jogging might be putting her at risk. When I asked her where she jogged, she confirmed that she jogged in a relatively dangerous area. Her response to my comment to that effect was that women should be allowed to jog wherever and whenever they wished without fear of men and that nothing and nobody, including me, was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.
I was greatly relieved that it did not take long for her to recognize that her angry feminism (which had roots in long term feelings of disgust with her mother and envy of her brother's exalted position in her family) was inadvertently providing her with a rationalization for dangerous and self destructive behavior. I should point out that both of us agreed that she and every other woman should be free to jog wherever and whenever they wished, but reality required that until such time as this Utopian ideal could be arranged, prudence dictated that she jog at a different time and place as was her wont. When, as often was reported in the news in those days, a woman was assaulted and badly injured near the area she had been jogging, she responded with an anxiety attack; she was stricken with the thought that it could have been her and that there was an unconscious part of her mind that had been inviting just such an outcome. This was the true beginning of a very successful analytic treatment.
The civil liberties absolutists (who I discuss in that post and are behind the current situation with the Uighers), the Barack Obama campaign and their supporters in the MSM who try to intimidate and shut down all discussion of reasonable questions about him (with cries of racism and more overt intimidation tactics) are all, in their own way, attempting to protect a particular sanitized and idealized version of reality in which there are no problems without solutions and no difficulties without designated villains. Sadly, reality is far more messy and dirty than the world in which these people insist on living. The more power such people have, the more likely that when reality reasserts itself, truly dangerous excesses will emerge (both from the perfectionists who would have to redouble their efforts to protect their world view and an enraged populace who, at moments of great fear, would be willing to wreck our civil liberties in pursuit of safety.) As I presciently noted at the end of my post three years ago:
The civil liberties absolutists, on the other hand, present a more complicated scenario. They are much more like my young female patient. They insist that the world should be the way they want it to be, and further, try to force others to collude with them in imagining the world is the way they wish. If they win one victory, they need to escalate; this is the logic of the pursuit of perfection. Thus, if the administration agrees to allow lawyers to visit inmates in Guantanamo, they cannot be satisfied, but then must escalate to demanding full rights of access to the American legal system. If they ever were to become successful at getting people to agree with them, their logic insists that the West effectively disarm; we must stop all NSA intercepts, stop monitoring Mosques and other locations, and maintain the inviolability of personal privacy from any government intrusion. Because their true demands are so extreme, they can only face marginalization by pressing their agenda; further, if they truly cared about civil liberties, they would find a way to compromise because the greatest risk to civil liberties would be posed by a second attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse. Were such an attack to occur, all notions of acceptable limits of governmental intrusion would be jettisoned, with the agreement of the vast majority of the American people. In either case, whether they win or lose the current argument, they ultimately must lose.
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The fact that those who cry loudest about the Bush administration abusing civil liberties (in the absence of any real evidence for specific abuses) are doomed to lose no matter what the outcome, is evidence that they are expressing, through often elegant and elaborate rationalizations, a true self-destructive wish which is hidden and unrecognized. The fact that they are willing to risk the lives of others in order to hold onto their ideological position is further evidence of the aggression that contaminates their purity of vision.
... those who refuse to compromise their extremist positions end up undermining their own cause. This is self-destruction by any name. The demand for perfect protection of civil liberties undermines the cause of civil liberties, undermines the proponents of such maximalist demands, and threatens to undermine the fundamental rights of all of us to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We must be vigilant not to allow their self destructive behavior to endanger those of us who do not share their pathology.
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