Demonic (8 page)

As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar.

If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain.
³⁶

Was this a harrowing account of U.S. brutality or the premise for a children’s book? “Zubaydah and the Very Scary Caterpillar.” Get Owen Wilson to do the voices and you’ve got a hit cartoon movie on your hands.

The
New York Times
didn’t use the words “brutal,” “horror,” or “inhumane” in reference to the beating of Reginald Denny but was quick to attach such descriptions to the treatment of terrorists at Guantánamo.

These headlines referred to the detainees in Guantánamo:

• At Human Rights Film Festival,
Horror and Hope
³⁷
(“graphic depiction … stomach-turning experiences of abuse and humiliation … devastating indictment … inhumane treatment of prisoners”)

• Taking a Long, Bumpy Ride to Systematic Brutality
³⁸

• Justice 5, Brutality 4
³⁹

These were
Times
headlines referring to the attack on Reginald Denny:

• Trucker Beaten in Riot Is Hospitalized Again
⁴⁰

• 5th Man Held in Los Angeles in Beating of a Truck Driver
⁴¹

• 60 Arrested in Disturbance at Site of Los Angeles Riots
⁴²

Bob Herbert titled a column about the nationwide riots after the Rodney King verdicts “That Weird Day.”
⁴³
A column on Guantánamo was titled “Madness and Shame.”
⁴⁴

Could we run a photo of the cinder block dropping on Reginald Denny’s head next to a photo of the caterpillar?

What if we had treated the top leaders of al Qaeda the way a completely innocent bystander was treated in the L.A. riots? Would Maxine Waters defend it?

Other “corrective” techniques used against top-ranking al Qaeda members included facial slaps, abdominal slaps, facial holds, and “attention
grasps.”
⁴⁵
If you can’t quite picture “the grasp,” think back to every department store you have ever been in where you saw a mother trying to get her misbehaving child’s attention.

Reginald Denny will never again be able to drive a truck or operate heavy machinery.
⁴⁶
(Whereas Abu Zubaydah feels uneasy whenever he sees a butterfly.)

But Maxine Waters, who ferociously defended Damian Williams, remains an honored guest at MSNBC, where Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann were convinced that once Americans found out the CIA was depriving al Qaeda terrorists of sleep, there would be a revolt.

Contrasting the treatment of Reginald Denny and Abu Zubaydah makes no sense to liberals. They can’t see contradictions, so their minds go blank. You might as well be speaking to them in Urdu.

But for breathtaking cognitive dissonance, nothing beats the Left’s comparative ranking of Attorneys General Janet Reno and John Ashcroft. Ashcroft was regularly referred to by liberals as the worst attorney general in human history—and that was in his honeymoon phase, before they started saying he was as bad as Osama bin Laden.

The
New York Times
’s Paul Krugman called Ashcroft “the worst attorney general in history”
⁴⁷
—less charitable than even Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union, who said Ashcroft “will turn out to be
one of the worst
attorney generals in American history.”
⁴⁸
Rutgers University law professor Frank Askin said Ashcroft was “the worst attorney general in my memory,” adding, “There’s nothing good I can say about him. I’m glad he’s gone.”
⁴⁹

Ashcroft was repeatedly called a fascist—in the pages of
The Nation
magazine, by elderly protesters at Ashcroft’s speeches, and in college faculty lounges. Handgun Control Inc. compared Ashcroft’s positions to those of “convicted mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh,” and the
Los Angeles Times
ran a cartoon with Ashcroft in the white robe and hood of a Klansman.
⁵⁰
Presidential candidate Howard Dean proclaimed that Ashcroft was “not a patriot” and, of course, compared him to Joe McCarthy.
⁵¹
John Edwards accused him of trying “to take away our rights, our freedoms, and our liberties.”
⁵²
Legendary
New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis compared him to Osama bin Laden.
⁵³

All in all, it was the worst celebrity roast I’ve ever attended.

How about we compare Ashcroft to Janet Reno? It’s not as if you have to go back to the Garfield administration to find an attorney general who was arguably worse than Ashcroft. Let’s look at the attorney general he
succeeded
.

Attorney General Reno’s military-style attack on a religious sect in Waco, Texas, led to the greatest number of U.S. civilians ever killed by the government in the history of the United States. The sect’s leader, David Koresh, may have run a weird cult, but that falls under “I don’t approve,” not “This is a threat to the domestic tranquillity of the nation.” Reno wanted to target religious fanatics, and the ATF wanted a military confrontation as a demonstration of their manliness, so Americans had to die.

More Americans were killed at Waco than at any of the various markers on the Left’s via dolorosa—more than at Kent State (4 killed), more than as a result of the Haymarket Square prosecutions (4 executed), more than at Three Mile Island (0 died).

SCORE

As Dade County (Florida) state attorney, Janet Reno made a name for herself as one of the leading witch-hunters in the notorious “child molestation” cases from the eighties, when convictions of innocent Americans were won on the basis of heavily coached testimony from small children. In 1984, Reno’s office charged Grant Snowden with child molestation and convicted him of molesting a child, who was four years old when the abuse allegedly occurred seven years earlier. Snowden, the most decorated police officer in the history of the South Miami Police Department, was sentenced to five life terms—and was imprisoned with people he had put there. He served twelve years before his conviction was finally overturned by a federal court in an opinion that ridiculed the evidence against him and called his trial “fundamentally unfair.”

In a massive criminal justice system, mistakes will be made from time to time. But Janet Reno put people like Snowden in prison not only for crimes that they didn’t commit—but for crimes that never
happened. Such was the soccer-mom-induced hysteria of the eighties, when innocent people were prosecuted for fantastical crimes concocted in therapists’ offices.

SCORE

On August 19, 1991, rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death in Crown Heights by a black racist mob shouting, “Kill the Jew!” as retaliation for another Hasidic man killing a black child in a car accident hours earlier. In a far clearer case of racial jury nullification than the first Rodney King verdict, a jury composed of nine blacks and three Puerto Ricans acquitted Lemrick Nelson Jr. of the murder—despite the fact that the police found the bloody murder weapon in his pocket and Rosenbaum’s blood on his clothes, and that Rosenbaum, as he lay dying, had identified Nelson as his assailant.

The Hasidic community immediately appealed to the attorney general for a federal civil rights prosecution of Nelson. Reno responded with utter mystification at the idea that anyone’s civil rights had been violated.
Civil rights? Where do you get that?

Because they were chanting “Kill the Jew,” Rosenbaum is a Jew, and they killed him.

Huh. That’s a peculiar interpretation of civil rights. It sounds a little harebrained to me, but I guess I could have someone look into it
.

It took two years of nonstop lobbying from the date of Nelson’s acquittal to get Reno to bring a civil rights case against him.

SCORE

Janet Reno presided over the leak of Richard Jewell’s name to the media, implicating him in the Atlanta Olympic park bombing in 1996, for which she later apologized.

SCORE

Reno also seized young Elián González from his Miami relatives to forcibly return him to his sperm-donor, illegitimate father living in Castro’s Cuba.

SCORE

In what factless, rationality-free universe is Ashcroft a civil liberties nightmare while Janet Reno represents the golden age of attorneys general? From the phony child-abuse cases of the eighties when Reno was a Miami prosecutor to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious violations of Americans’ basic civil liberties in the nation’s history. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing attorneys in the Bush administration in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, but of liberal Democrat Janet Reno, serving in peacetime.

The Left’s estimation of Ashcroft versus Reno goes well beyond simple partisanship. It would be as if conservatives obsessively denounced President Obama as the worst public speaker ever to sit in the Oval Office, while demanding that everyone acknowledge Bush as a modern-day Demosthenes.

To maintain that sort of contradiction in one’s mind is pathological. It is the pathological response of a crowd, as described by Le Bon—the “incapacity to reason,” “absence of judgment,”
⁵⁴
and “complete lack of critical spirit”
⁵⁵
—that permits such wild contradictions and “does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions.”
⁵⁶

A liberal is a person who:

• worships President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who carpet-bombed German cities and executed an American-born spy captured on U.S. soil after a secret military trial—but screams that Bush was guilty of war crimes;

• is crazy about Michael Moore—but against child obesity;

• tapes over the sign that said “Too Many Jews at Harvard” with a sign that says, “Ethnic Quotas This Way”;

• is enraged with Karl Rove for releasing the name of a CIA paper-pusher (which he didn’t do)—but are copacetic with WikiLeaks putting hundreds of thousands of classified national security documents on the Internet;

• categorically opposes the death penalty for convicted murderers—but venerates it as a “constitutional right” for innocent, unborn babies;

• hysterically opposed taking out Saddam Hussein, a mass murderer who gassed his own people and presided over “rape rooms”—but weepily demands that we intervene in Rwanda for humanitarian reasons;

• claims to be pro-children—but supports the public schools;

• champions women’s and gay rights—but ignores the brutal treatment of women and gays by Muslims;

• same sentence as above, except take out the words “gay” and replace the word “Muslims” with “Bill Clinton”;

• claims it was a vicious slander to be called a communist in the fifties—but didn’t see anything wrong with being a communist in the fifties;

• advocates unfettered scientific research and debate—but then, with no evidence, simply declares discussions about evolution and global warming closed;