Remora

LI likes a hard hitting first graf. Why go to a boxing match if the fighters aren't going to mix it up? As the rounds toll by, one understands a little hanging onto the ropes, but one wants to see a little blood in the first round, at least. Similarly, we have such steak tartar tastes in news pieces -- a journalist should come out from his corner with appropriate growling, and wound up. So we liked this graf from Josh Gerstein's story about the continuing scandal of the government sponsored kidnappings of Middle Eastern men in this country:

"Last month, Colin Powell unveiled the State Department's annual report on human rights. Not surprisingly, the report faults authoritarian regimes such as China, Iraq, and North Korea for imprisoning people without charge and for holding legal proceedings in secret. What it neglects to mention is that in the past year those two practices have also become widespread in the United States."

The article rehearses the sad state of civil liberties, when it comes to men named Mohammed or, of course, Osama since 9/11. It focuses particularly on the New York City judge who is condemning many of these people to indefinite sequestration as "material witnesses" (ah, the lawyers wink, another material witness): Michael Mukasey. Mukasey sounds like a man on a mission. "Within days of the September 11 strikes, Mukasey announced that court hearings in all of the material-witness cases would be closed to the press and the public on the grounds that they were connected to a grand jury probe. (Grand juries, by law and tradition, usually carry out their business in secret.) The transcripts, dockets, and court orders in the material-witness cases remain sealed. Last fall Mukasey's secretary told The Washington Post that Mukasey wanted the cases kept secret "forever."
"

Forever is a long long time -- inaccessible to most of us, but not, perhaps, so much to Mukasey, one of whose colleagues is 95, and many of whose co-judges are over the age of 65: "Nearly 40 percent of the nation's more than 1,200 working federal judges are on senior status." Eternity, for Mukasey and his like, is less a theological issue than a tenure description.

There's a decidedly tedious news release from Human Rights Watch about conditions in the U.S. jails for these detainees, which seems designed, mainly, to show that HRW is there. It isn't doing much there, but by God, they want to see where these prisoners shower. Why this sound and lack of fury, one wonders. Touring the jails is good -- LI applauds this, and besides, our Lord Jesus Christ seems to find visiting prisoners of such high merit those who do it are conducted to the right hand of God, and ... well, live happily ever afterward. But shouldn't we be seeing jeremiads? Shouldn't human rights organizations be attacking with fire and brimstone this gross, massive abuse of judicial power? Apparently that is is off the agenda, apparently. There's an arrogance in a U.S. based Human Rights organization adopting such a tepid attitude that one wonders what is behind it. Is HRW afraid of angering some donation base? Or is it easier to condemn Albania, or Macedonia, or whatever onia, than going after the District court for the Southern District of New York?