View Week 681 Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Yesterday was Supreme Court Monday, and we heard the wisdom from on high in Washington. We also heard from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which issued warrants for the arrest and life imprisonment of Qaddaffi and his sons. Of course the life imprisonment could only come after a conviction, but given that the Court is a nightmare bureaucracy whose members are elected by another nightmare bureaucracy, anyone who falls into its hands is unlikely ever to emerge again.
The United States signed the conventions creating this Kafkaesque institution, but later withdrew, as did Israel, so it is possible that the US might yet be able to arrange transport to exile for the Libyan dictator and his family if that ever becomes preferable to spending millions a week breaking things and killing people in an attempt to protect the people of Libya from Qadaffi’s minions who are said to be breaking things and killing people. Note that while the US no longer recognizes any obligations to the Court, the Libya case was referred to the Court for investigation by an act of the UN Security Council. Presumably the US had a veto which was not exercised. Curiouser and curiouser.
Of course all depends on one’s objectives. If the objective is to slow down and perhaps halt the various operations by all parties breaking things and killing people in Libya, the cheapest and possibly the quickest way would be to use silver bullets. Khadaffi must be discouraged by now, and is probably willing to discuss giving up, provided that he gets to retire and stay rich and that his kids get the same deal. How rich is a matter for negotiations: his notion of rich is probably a lot higher than ours. Still, one can see how this might be negotiated.
If the objective is justice for the Libyan people – who, after all, would probably riot if Gaddafi were to get out of this alive, rich, and safe – then it’s another matter. Justice for dictators and tyrants seems to be agreed on: life imprisonment in a European style prison. There aren’t too many alternatives. There’s no death penalty, and after all, if you get convicted of being a ruthless tyrant and you can’t be taken out in the yard and shot, then what’s left? Besides, International Prison Guards have to eat, too. So there’s some pressure on to snag Qadafi and his boys and drag them off to wherever it is that tax money – inevitably a lot of it American tax money – has paid built to be the 21st Century equivalent of Spandau. Spandau was where we kept the Nazi war criminals that we didn’t hang, and in a fit of absence of mind we tore it down in 1987 after its last – and for more than a decade only – prisoner, Rudolf Hess, died. Still, we can study the Spandau example for hints on how to operate a new International prison system. There are hundreds of pages of regulations, with more added weekly after the prison population got down to seven, and some were added during the decades when Hess was the only prisoner. We can learn from a document like that. I presume that it was destroyed but only after three copies were made and filed.
Of course if the objective is simply to get the Libyan War over with, another possibility would be to hand the problem over to the Seals, Delta Force, and their British equivalents SAS and SBS. Give them a budget and instructions (such as ‘make him dead, and be ready to swear blind that you had no part in doing it’), and be ready to hold a press conference in a few weeks. Don’t add the Agency to the mix unless you’re prepared to wait a while.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has upheld Free Speech by decreeing that California can’t stop the sales of Grand Theft Auto and other games that allow teenagers to steal cars, kill police, and generally wreak virtual mayhem on a bunch of electrons. The Justices lined up in improbable mixes on this one, and Justices Thomas and Breyer dissented entirely. I have only third hand accounts of who said what about which, but I do wonder what if anything was said about the right of the States to impose some – any – cultural standards. I would have thought that preservation of existing culture was sort of the purpose of a State, and that this was the one thing the States didn’t think they were giving up when they formed the Union. Now we explicitly rejected one culture, slavery, with the 13th Amendment, and in the 14th gave Congress the authority to enforce laws and regulations to wipe out some other cultural institutions; but the notion that the States have the right to exist and to preserve their own essences was never given over so far as I know. I don’t see why California can’t forbid the sales of Grant Theft Auto or whatever other video game the legislature, in its great wisdom, chooses to censor; just as Arizona should be free to make playing the game compulsory in the public schools. But that’s another story for another time.
And finally, as noted in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial “Another Political Speech Victory”, the court continues to hack away at the campaign finance “reform” laws which mostly have the effect of protecting incumbents.
