Informant38

Wolf Blitzer interviewed Ramsay Clark on CNN tonight. Saddam Hussein threatened to walk out of his trial today. Clark is serving on his defense team.
It was an exercise in dissonance to see Clark interviewed, because you wouldn't expect that in a totalitarian state, he wouldn't have a voice in the national media.
But then the manner of the interview was part of the smugness of the elect.
But then there were all these crafty little aspects.
Clark had a relatively long say-so on the importance of the trial, not to Saddam, but to us and for the fate of humanity. If it's not seen as a fair trial, Clark said, there'd be a tearing apart of the Arab world,with obvious dire consequences.
For quite a bit of the time he was speaking, especially when he spoke the longest during the interview, the split screen was 3/5 devoted to a silent image of Saddam speaking in the court room, gesticulating with his hands, while the sound was Clark, speaking from an image in the upper left corner of the screen, making a reasoned and sincere attempt to point out that the presumption of innocence is the baserock of our system of justice. The effect was a Satanically precise almost lip-synch.
The rest of the time the imagery cut back and forth between Blitzer and Clark. When Clark was onscreen during that part of the interview, under his image in white letters on a red background it said "Saddam's Lawyer". Not "Ramsay Clark, Saddam's Lawyer".
Blitzer asked Clark how he felt about Saddam having gassed the Kurds, and Clark pointed out calmly and reasonably that that hadn't been proved, that that was in fact the purpose of the trial, and that if you're going to go into it convinced of his guilt beforehand, it's all about punishment first and then a trial - which is the standard-issue mockery of justice.
Clark made the point almost in passing that the legitimacy of the court itself was in question, that when Bush announces that Saddam will be getting a fair trial it's deceptive, because Paul Bremer created virtually everything about it, from the constitution to the judiciary. And Paul Bremer was appointed by Bush.
Clark repeatedly said that he believed in the concept of innocent until proven guilty, and that he was trying to keep an open mind.
That's as American as anything can be.
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Blitzer also interviewed David Ensor, CNN's intelligence, or security, or intelligence and security, correspondent. The subject was the revelations of CIA-run secret prisons and the extra-legal detaining and torture of unknown numbers of people in those secret prisons. Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen now suing the CIA for torturing him was, in Mr. Ensor's words, not a snow-white character. [The Khaled El-Masri who's suing George Tenet as head of the CIA was evidently picked up simply because he had the same name as someone on one of the lists such people keep of those they want to imprison and torture to make the world safe from people who would imprison and torture innocent people. So Ensor's saying that he may not have been the targeted Khaled El-Masri, but he was no angel.]
That would be pertinent only if the morality of torturing people functioned on a sliding scale.
Ensor pretty much delivered the party line for the entire interview, smacking line-drive soundbites off Blitzer's lobbed-in questions.
One point that seemed pertinent was Ensor's manly rebuttal of European criticism of the now openly practiced "extraordinary rendition".
Ensor said that the European governments questioning the morality of the US were hypocritical because they were themselves directly involved in it through their own security agencies and, key point - they were benefiting from the detaining and torture of potential terrorists, however secretly done, because the lives of Europeans had been saved by these means.
The assumption I guess is that it works. No proof was offered, possibly because none exists.
But that would only be important if the morality or immorality of extraordinary rendition depended on whether it works or not. Something that the 20th century returned to repeatedly was the idea that some actions are so immoral they can never be justified. The Geneva Accords, which the current players seem to want to use as a training manual, were an attempt to codify that idea.
I don't recall the universal adoption of the principle that anything that saves your life is preferable to anything that takes it.
This completely undermines the concept of nobility and heroic sacrifice, and makes the refusal of the righteous to pollute themselves with cowardice and treachery a kind of tactical mistake.
It places the self at the center of the moral universe.