The National Review describes a situation that occurs all too often. A task is undertaken which can only be accomplished imperfectly. But as Saul Alinsky once said, the Man can be beaten to death with his own rule-book; and so when the task is performed imperfectly, an extraordinary amount of money must be expended at the margins to make things “just so”. The example in this case involves 17 al-Qaeda suspects of Chinese nationality who must be released from Guantanamo. But since they cannot be released into China, which does not share the aspiration to perfection, they must be released into the US. (Hat tip: Tigerhawk)
Last June, five Supreme Court justices dreamed up a constitutional right for aliens held as enemy combatants to challenge their wartime detention in court. Now the bitter fruits of the Boumediene decision are plain to see: In Washington, a federal judge has ordered the release — into the United States — of 17 men captured near Tora Bora after the American invasion of Afghanistan….
The State Department has worked diligently to find a country willing to take the Uighurs — in fact, State has already persuaded Albania to accept five of their countrymen. China wants these detainees back, but we cannot send them there without violating a treaty obligation against transfer to a country where persecution is foreseeable. And under pressure from Beijing, to say nothing of their own security interests, other countries have refused to accept them.
None of this mattered to Judge Urbina, whose ruling makes a daunting diplomatic task even more difficult. Even allowing that Judge Urbina, appointed by President Clinton in 1994, felt the Uighurs’ pain, one might hope he’d have reasoned that people who attend jihadist camps assume the risks of jihad. The judge worries about the Uighurs’ rights, but what about the rights of the American people?
The incident illustrates another unremarked phenomenon. The US is implicitly considered the provider of last recourse, not only in economic terms but also with respect to security affairs. The Uighur case suggests that even with respect to human rights, America is expected to be the final guarantor that things work out ‘just so’. The concept is similar to dining out a restaurant where everyone eats as much as he wants of whatever he wants. But they are only expected to contribute as much as they feel like. So if the bill for ten diners comes to $1,000 and 9 diners kick in ten bucks, each the provider of last recourse ponies up for $910. (Hat tip: correction by reader below) Unless he does so he is ’shirking a moral oblgation’.
Whether the subject is the world financial system, the preservation of world peace or the human rights of 17 al-Qaeda suspects the presumed source of all that will make it good are the American people. Judge Urbina might argue that his only job is to enforce what he considers the law. Where the resources come from to carry out his judgments is not his problem. That brings to mind an apocryphal anecdote about a former German rocket scientist who was applying to join NASA. When asked about his role in the V-2 attacks on London he answered, “my job was to get the rockets up. Where they came down was not my department.”
But ultimately it is someone’s department. Judge Urbina can optimize within the terms of reference of his legal world without regard to its impact on the larger system because of the presumption that some reserve exists to square the circle. For decades the US had the design margin to get ends to meet. But years of doing so have eroded the margin to the point where it may no longer exist. And the inability to meet that margin comes at the inopportune time when the public expects the margin to exist as a matter of right.
But the music must always play. One day one of the released al-Qaeda may commit an act of terrorism in the US but even then no blame will attach to anyone who actually released him. Even mistakes can still be retrospectively justified by the curious argument of “why didn’t you stop me from making that mistake?” Even today there are people who can say, with a straight face, it was your fault for not stopping me from stealing. For in the world of ‘just so’ we are guaranteed against our own misjudgements. The entitlement to perfection is absolute. That’s the argument the nine diners can make to the tenth who must make up the difference. ‘You knew the rules when you sat down at the table. So pay up the $910 and let’s drink to that.’
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42 Comments
1. mezzrow:$910.
Otherwise he’s a greedhead, and probably a racist. Don’t expect these guys to cut the provider of last resort one bit of slack, Wretchard.
Dang, it’s grim. We’re going to see so much more of this. When lives are lost as a result, the media will keep it a virtual secret.
Oct 15, 2008 - 2:41 pm 2. Patriot Front:It’s already happening. Detainees released from Gitmo have returned to the battlefield to fire on our boys. The Constitution is becoming a suicide pact, and 55% of the country couldn’t care less.
Today at lunch, I overheard a guy in the booth behind to me bitching about his stock portfolio.
He said something remarkable, “9/11 really killed me.” That’s where you will find the the collective head of the American electorate.
Oct 15, 2008 - 2:48 pm 3. Cannoneer No. 4:I wish we had been using Gitmo to deprogram fanatics and turn them to the Light Side. Or implanting RFID chips in their butts and turning them loose for us to track them back to their nest.
Turned Uighurs infiltrated back into Turkestan might be useful to us should the Chicoms need their attitude adjusted. We ought not rely on Han sources to decide who is a jihadi and who is a Uighur resisiting Han domination.
Land pirates, brigands and franc-tireurs taken in arms on the battlefield used to be summarily executed. Now they get Caribbean gourmet vacations at U.S. taxpayer expense. We can’t even muster up the moral rectitude to hang sea pirates.
The weight of collective absurdities sinks the legitimacy of the government that allows them.
Oct 15, 2008 - 2:57 pm 4. Pascal:I recall — though it may be urban legend — how a nineteenth century city council in Chicago legally set the value of pi to a nice round value of three. Somehow that ruling got reversed.
Could we be at the stage where sanity is so stretched that there is no margin to recover from moronic blunders? Or must we come to the conclusion that even where insane obsessions are not deliberate, the precautionary principle demands that we presume they are? The ombudsman’s axe has long been absent from hallowed halls.
Oct 15, 2008 - 3:16 pm 5. Clevername:($9 * 10) + $900 = $990, not $1000.
Oct 15, 2008 - 3:31 pm 6. Nomenklatura:It’s no better in Europe. The sad joke there is that the one thing you must do before becoming an illegal immigrant to the EU is murder one of your neighbors.
As long as you have a death sentence pending in your home country, for any reason, the authorities in the EU cannot send you back, and have to release you.
EU governments are not permitted to make an agreement with a foreign government that your death sentence will not be carried out and you will be imprisoned instead, because any foreign government evil and backward enough not in agreement with the EU moralists that the death penalty should be abolished is ipso facto not to be trusted.
At some point this fundamental lack of seriousness will become an issue. Those responsible will try to blame the public for the resulting backlash, but those same people will have by then spent years and years doing their utmost to ensure that the public has no available alternative.
Oct 15, 2008 - 3:33 pm 7. slade:the precautionary principle – Pascal
The Precautionary Principle is a truly devious ideological concept to infiltrate (post) modern thinking.
An aberration of risk management.
Oct 15, 2008 - 3:37 pm 8. Pascal:I know slade. And you probably know that I’ve railed against it here before. In this particular application, I am implying that what has been good for the goose sure seems fitting sauce for the gander.
Oct 15, 2008 - 3:43 pm 9. slade:Yes Pascal. Which is why the markets are “broken” as avatars of rational thinking.
Oct 15, 2008 - 5:00 pm 10. Paul:“Gather ’round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown,
“Ha, Nazi, Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.**
You too may be a big hero,
Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero.
“In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I’m learning Chinese!” says Wernher von Braun.
Tom Lehrer, lyrics to “Wernher von Braun”, 1965
Oct 15, 2008 - 5:21 pm 11. AZM:Someone who knows this stuff, please educate us: What is the protocol in a military engagement re: the taking of prisoners? Is there a bias toward withholding fire and taking prisoners?
What I am trying to get at is this: What were the circumstances under which the Uighurs were taken prisoners? (not in legal terms, in plain practical terms).
Oct 15, 2008 - 5:32 pm 12. RWE:Back in March of 2001 a law firm filed a case in Federal Court in D.C. on behalf of those who had been incarcerated in a horrible prison. Gitmo did not exist as a prison at that time, so they chose another one: Auschwitz.
Yes, THAT Auschwitz, the concentration camp operated by the Nazis in WWII. The law firm charged that if the U.S. had bombed the railroad lines leading to Auschwitz leading to the camp the Germans would have not been able to use it to eliminate all the Jewish people interred there. The suit asked for $40 billion.
Now, aside from the simple fact that the U.S. could not have bombed the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, this raises the specter of being sued for not doing something that you could not have done anyway to correct a wrong that was not your fault in the first place.
It appears you can be sued for not having enough Design Margin, even in something you were not involved in.
Oct 15, 2008 - 5:38 pm 13. veracious:The fundamental problem seems to be that the judgicary has been politicized. This is the one branch of government which had to be limited to _law_ and not the politics of the law. I’ve always felt that: for man’s law to be right(eous) it must be logical, one of the most logical systems ever. After all, the fate of _real_ people is held in its grip; the power of life and death. As soon as the socialists realized how difficult it was to change USA constitutionally, ie., passing new laws in the legislature, they determined to prey upon the easier, judicial branch.
All US law must be created in the legislative branch, this is a foundation principle of our Constitutional Republic.
What do the elders have to say? First the theme:
“History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.”
— Mark Twain
Then the metaphors:
“If once they ["our people"] become inattentive to the public affairs, you
and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become
wolves.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter from Paris, 1787
“The germ of destruction of our nation is in the power of the judiciary…”
— Thomas Jefferson (1821)
“The Judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and
Oct 15, 2008 - 5:47 pm 14. veracious:miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of
our confederated fabric.”
— Thomas Jefferson (1820)
Oh, and notice the common impropriety between judges creating law out of _thin_air_ and the Federal Reserve creating money the same way. Both are bastards to our ways and are now causing problems too big to be ignored.
NOTE: The Federal Reserve has never been audited. That really ought to make one think about it all.
Oct 15, 2008 - 5:51 pm 15. Hanoi Paris Hilton:“my job was to get the rockets up. Where they came down was not my department.”
That wasn’t an apocryphal anecdote, that was a regular, 1950s TV routine of old guard borscht circuit comedian Sid Caeser.
Oct 15, 2008 - 5:54 pm 16. RWE:Von Braun’s quote most recalled at the Cape is that “The object of a missile program should be to make the target area more dangerous than the launch site.”
Oct 15, 2008 - 6:02 pm 17. Patriot Front:@AZM ref: Taking of prisoners
Oct 15, 2008 - 6:07 pm 18. peterike:The US Military has a basic rule governing the right to kill vs. taking prisoners. On the first pass through a military objective (imagine sprinting through a raid on a compound or a roadside ambush), all hostiles can be shot in accordance with ROE. When the operators run through the objective, they will likely want to turn around & search for intel / casualties, or occupy the objective. During this 2nd sweep, it’s time for first aid and flex cuffs.
The sad joke there is that the one thing you must do before becoming an illegal immigrant to the EU is murder one of your neighbors.
You ought to encourage that. It effectively would cut the potential illegal invader class in half.
Oct 15, 2008 - 6:10 pm 19. newscaper:Tom Lehrer’s satire song
“Werner Von Braun”
“Ze rockets go up, ze rockets go down. That’s not my department” said Werner Von Braun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
Oct 15, 2008 - 6:46 pm 20. Kinuachdrach:Is the release of the Uighurs any siller than so much else that happens in today’s legal system?
There was a case of a 16-year old murderer who was held in Juvenile Detention until he was 18 & then released (without even a criminal record); because being a juvenile was more important than being a murderer.
This is the Achilles’ Heel of the left-wing take-over of the legal system. Ultimately, the Law loses the respect & confidence of the people. And who knows where that will lead?
Oct 15, 2008 - 6:58 pm 21. Patriot Front:The Achilles’ Heel is already severed, yet the liberals still walk high & mighty. In Detroit, Nathaniel Abraham was the youngest murderer in the nation’s history to be tried as an adult. He was convicted of killing a man for no reason whatsoever. He just wanted to shoot someone, so he did. He was 11 years old. He spent a few years in juvie jail while the State of Michigan spent millions on his education and reform.
Oct 15, 2008 - 7:16 pm 22. RWE:After being out a matter of months, he was arrested for dealing large amounts of X. The citizens are confused and disgusted. Yet in Michigan, we vote for democrats, all the while we wonder why our state is collapsing around us.
No matter what happens, there will be no awakening; not here anyway.
I have told y’all of the case of the man in my home town who, fired upon by a burgler (8 rounds of 9MM) , returned fire (one round of .22), hit the burgler and then was sued by the career crimminal (17 prior felony convictions) and lost his home as a result.
My definition of Hate Crime: A Leftist admission that the crimminal justice system is so screwed up that sometimes even they get upset at letting it proceed normally.
Oct 15, 2008 - 7:27 pm 23. American Muslim:It is over!
Allah (swt) was with Sheik Obama tonight as he crushed the infidel McCain.
Face reality. Embrace Islam now and live in peace in submission to the will of Almighty Allah (swt).
Your grandchildren will be Muslim.
Allahu akbar!
Oct 15, 2008 - 8:25 pm 24. Alexis:I found the following comment under “Precautionary Principle” at Wikipedia.
The formal concept evolved out of the German socio-legal tradition in the 1930s, centering on the concept of good household management.
During the 1930’s, Germany was also called Das Dritte Reich.
Oct 15, 2008 - 8:33 pm 25. Pascal:The Precautionary Principle fueled the drive to ban Freons and is fueling the drive to get us to acquiesce to the fears over global warming.
Oct 15, 2008 - 8:41 pm 26. biggie:As you have found, it has been around for some time. It also is at the core of policies driving drastic human depopulation.
Is there any way to prosecute these 17 in any jurisdiction in the US that could put them away for life or execute them?
How is this not like giving some vanquished foe more tanks, guns and planes?
Oct 15, 2008 - 8:44 pm 27. Robohobo:AM! Soooooo good to see you, you troll child.
So, is Obama a Muslim? Inquiring minds wnat to know what psychopaths think.
Oct 15, 2008 - 8:57 pm 28. Bridget:Where does Judge Urbina live? Release them in his neighborhood.
Oct 15, 2008 - 9:15 pm 29. Pascal:It would appear that Obama must be, for
1. we know that he was declared as one by both his fathers on his school enrollment.
2. Islam treats those who leave Islam (apostates) far more drastically than it does people of the book (dhimmis).
and 3. There have been no fatwas issued on Obama for apostasy.
Thus, the radical Islamic world believes he is still Muslim. That faith permits its adherents to act as if they are not Muslims to advance its goals.
Not proof he is still Muslim; but highly likely since the most radical mullahs are convinced he is.
Oct 15, 2008 - 9:23 pm 30. Tamquam Leo Rugiens:Bridget:
Where does Judge Urbina live? Release them in his neighborhood.
No, his neighbors, despite their sins, don’t deserve this. Judge Urbina is personally responsible for housing them in his own residence at his own expense and is legally responsible for their actions in all matters. He should be sued for massive damages if they step even 1mm out of line.
Oct 15, 2008 - 9:58 pm 31. Tamquam Leo Rugiens:There must be a rock somewhere which is submerged during a high tide and is large enough to hold them. Place them there. If anyone wants them, let them come get them.
Some nice fresh chum might be dropped in the water just a high tide approaches.
Oct 15, 2008 - 10:03 pm 32. fred:There is only one remedy for this kind of madness: the fruits of these miscarriages of jurisprudence must come back to haunt lawyers and the people. Only when we have been chewed in the ass severely will we finally get it. Sometimes life is no more complicated than that. We all learn from our mistakes and stupidity (or we should). But it seems the only profession in this nation that is by law insulated from their own recklessness is the judiciary. A way has to be found to restore the balance of the laws of nature and human trail and error to the orbits of these judges.
Oct 15, 2008 - 10:36 pm 33. Bob Murphy:@RWE
“I have told y’all of the case of the man in my home town who, fired upon by a burgler (8 rounds of 9MM) , returned fire (one round of .22), hit the burgler and then was sued by the career crimminal (17 prior felony convictions) and lost his home as a result.”
Serves him right for using a .22.
Oct 16, 2008 - 12:16 am 34. cedarford:Patriot Front:
It’s already happening. Detainees released from Gitmo have returned to the battlefield to fire on our boys. The Constitution is becoming a suicide pact, and 55% of the country couldn’t care less.
Today at lunch, I overheard a guy in the booth behind to me bitching about his stock portfolio.
He said something remarkable, “9/11 really killed me.” That’s where you will find the the collective head of the American electorate.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive of American’s significant economic concerns – or the absolute connection between a healthy economy and a good military.
9/11 inflicted far more damage that the small number of casualties and few acres affected (few, as military attacks generally go). 9/11 “killed” the portfolios of millions and wrecked businesses, not just in the area of the plane’s impact – but in air services, etc., etc. Don’t diminish their losses just because they weren’t part of America’s Greatest Victims…Ever.
Today’s economic catastrophie is another reminder, as if the Soviet economic collapse wasn’t enough – that when the economy hurts badly – security and the military will suffer and the weakened nation’s ability to project force and influence others is badly impacted.
Consider a moderate American, reasonably patriotic – who has just lost half his families life savings, his wife who had the family’s health care coverage just got hit in the mass layoffs now starting, and most good jobs within a 100 mile radius have been wiped out by Ruling Elites in the Republican and Democratic Parties resetting them up in Asia. In vast swaths of the country, unlike in the past – there are no other potential employers..
Oh, and he found out he cannot sell his house…and move to some state like a jobless Dustbowl refugee to where people still have a shot at a good job. And even then, if he does sell his house at a huge loss and moves to be freer job-hunting – he competes against foreigners pouring across the Open Border Bush, McCain, the Democrats, and Republican Corporatists want wide open…
Now try to impress on that moderate, reasonable American that his loss of life savings, economic security, health care, and possibly his home is not as important – as “fighting Islamofascists, bringing democracy at a cost of a trillion a nation to “noble freedom-lovers who hate us and kill us as we save them for democracy and freedom!” Tell that person, who may have been supportive of the military and buying F-22s at 350 million a copy back in 2002 – that nothing has changed. And we still need to neglect the economy and his shattered dreams so we ” can protect Israel, have a military where cost is no object, launch new wars of liberation, and buy more exorbitantly expensive gear to replace or improve upon the stuff lost or burned out in the two endless wars Bush is now fighting.
When you come down to it, 200 million deeply fearful of their family’s economic future and access to health care politically trumps the 30 million or so that focus on “Islamofascism”, “liberating” ungrateful 3rd Worlders, or think that the loss of a few dozen to a few thousand in an enemy attack is all we should really care about…
The collective head of the American electorate is in the right place. More concerned with “how can I protect my family and regain all we have lost” than in the Ukraine or Israel’s fate – or a another attack hitting us..
Terrorism has lost it’s place as the most important threat. It is now well down the list of threats Americans collectively think are dire and urgent. The risk of an “Islamofascist” killing them or members of their immediate friends and family seem low, very unlikely to happen to them. The threat of job loss, bankruptcy from one major health event, a sharply diminished future and standard of living for their offspring, a resurgence in violent crime as others lose their economic future? – That seems a much higher threat.
Oct 16, 2008 - 12:56 am 35. Fletcher Christian:AM, I’m not going to waste any more of my time and effort on trying to write something literary.
Simply: I don’t have any children. My sister’s grandchildren will be whatever they want to be – that’s the way we do things, here where the agents of Satan don’t rule.
Your grandchildren will be dead. Not buried, just dead.
Oct 16, 2008 - 1:46 am 36. sf:RWE: How ’bout a link to the story about the guy in your neighborhood who returned fire at the many who invaded his home, hit him, was sued by him and lost his home as a result of the suit?
Oct 16, 2008 - 6:19 am 37. RWE:Bob Murphy and sf:
I have no link. It happened to a friend of my brother’s. in Columbia, SC.
And when the judgement was rendered – carefully calculated to equal the equity in the home he had been defending – he informed the judge that he had disposed of the .22 and had purchased a 30′Ought 6. The judge replied “I understand perfectly.”
Oct 16, 2008 - 9:31 am 38. MNotaro:Pretty soon, no one will need a green card if these lefty illuminati politicians get into DC…it will just be an open door policy!
Oct 16, 2008 - 10:52 am 39. Scott:With the North American union on its way, and the AMERO dollar we all won’t need anything..but the “chip”. Of course this will be after we fight the martial law that’s coming.
Oct 16, 2008 - 7:20 pm 40. No Other Choice, Really « Psssst! Over Here!:[...] More at Belmont Club. [...]
Oct 17, 2008 - 5:01 am 41. vulcanchief:Why won’t anyone in the Executive show some intestinal fortitude? If the courts say we have to release the seventeen peaceful gents because they have done no wrong, then the Executive should be able to say ” Well, since the court has ruled these people have done no wrong, there is no reason to believe that the Government of China should have any beef with them either. So therefore the Court cannot be used to argue against their return to China.”
Oct 17, 2008 - 10:38 am 42. Ursus Maritimus:“Major Reid didn’t mention San Francisco. He had one of us apes summarize the negotiated treaty of New
Delhi, discuss how it ignored prisoners of war . . . and, by implication, dropped the subject forever; the
armistice became a stalemate and prisoners stayed where they were — on one side; on the other side they
were turned loose and, during the Disorders, made their way home — or not if they didn’t want to.”
R. A. Heinlein
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