The Coming Guantanamo Trial

Here we are with a lame duck President trying to figure out his legacy and the Republican party trying to figure out how to stop what has been a pretty broadly held assumption that the the Democrats would continue their 2006 election victory into a 2008 presidential campaign. Once again the conservatives will use “fear” as their way out.

I have observed with some amazement how the Karl Rove crowd would spare absolutely nothing to get the “scare the life out of them” strategy into play. Let me go back to the 9/11 Republican playbook for one example. FBI agent Rawley was scheduled to testify before a Senate committee on the 9/11 disaster. Remember, she tried to warn her superiors about some weird guys who were training to fly super jets, but not to take off and land them. She thought it warranted some serious investigation, but her Washington superiors at headquarters thought she was just an alarmist.

What did Rove do to kill her testimony? The idea of the “Department of Homeland Security” had been planned for some time. Rove decided to change the timing. He pushed the plan on to the front pages and that pushed the Rawley testimony into the shredder. Instead of holding people responsible for the intelligence failure, we got this bullshit that “nobody could connect the dots.” We were paying our intelligence agencies 28 billion a year and the poor fellows couldn't connect the dots. Honestly now?

The Bush administration has refused to hold anyone in Washington responsible for what happened on 9/11, as that might imply that we were at least partly responsible. This would diminish the level of fear and increase our level of responsibility. The Bush administration has never admitted that we had a failure, either at home or in Iraq or anywhere else. This is also why they have not really hunted down Osama bin Laden. He’s more useful out there alive as a real threat, a real live contributor to the program of fear.

Basically fear has been the strategy of the the Bush administration. Perhaps you thought that, with his last nine months in office, he would just float out to Crawford, Texas to be forgotten. Not so quick. The 2008 election is too important to just fade away.

Here comes the new fear scenario. After five years of detention, the administration has decided that this is the time to charge and try six of the Guantanomo inmates for the 9/11 attacks on the World trade Center. Be prepared to see all the horrors of the 9/11 explosions trotted out again to have us once again relive that trauma. The trials will be conducted by Military Tribunals. Why not in our regular court system? Because that would require that the lawyers defending the accused would have access to the all the documents, as well as the right of the defendants to confront their accusers.

(Nobody is quite sure what the procedure is in a Military Tribunal. The military says it is having trouble finding any lawyers who would be willing to defend the accused. One of the accused who may well be a little off his rocker is claiming that he was the sole person responsible for the 9/11 attack. Obviously there is much to be said about the whole weird “Military Tribunal” bit. This is not my major concern in writing this blog.)

I am convinced that this is the same “scare em to death” technique that seemed to work so well for Bush, at least up until the 2006 election. Yet, if the Democrats run from fear that they will be considered soft on terrorism, it could work again. An additional factor adding to the fear is the deteriorating economy. People are justifiably worried about their pocket books and their ability to continue a life of high wire spending. If the fear barometer climbs above 102, I believe McCain will win the election simply because the fever will have scared our citizenry enough to send them voting for a warrior who can make them feel more safe. From what I hear so far from the McCain camp, this will definitely be there ace card, “scare em into voting for an experienced old fighter.”

We need to take the “scare ‘em strategy” head on. If the Democrats waffle in the face of an onslaught of “swift boat-like” attacks, they will self-immolate and lose the election. Just keep in mind that fear has been the chosen tactic of all those who have wanted to get a firm control on their populace, whether it was Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Putin or Karl Rove.

I believe this message is so important that it needs to be passed on to all who are concerned about the outcome of the 2008 election.

Thank you Kate N.H.W.Y.