To calm myself, I chose to meditate on the final scene in "The Bridge on the River Kwai," the David Lean film in which Alec Guinness plays the correct British colonel and prisoner of war who's completely lost touch with the larger reality, i.e., the war he's supposed to be fighting. Instead, he has concentrated his mind and efforts on the fine railway bridge he and his troops have built for their Japanese captors in the middle of the jungle. Good show, old boy!
The proper colonel can only watch in horror and dismay as his proud handiwork is destroyed by Allied commandos. His is a madness within the greater madness that is war.
The final words of the film occurred to me when I was warned of the legal risks I risked by accusing the obvious perpetrator of all this mayhem without proper documentation.
Madness, madness . . . . !
After a polite if pointed conversation with my editor's editor, the column's reference to Osama bin Laden was retained.
Still, it would have been a consummation devoutly to be wished if Mr. Bin Laden had indeed shown up to file suit for libel. What a pleasure it would have been to meet him, complete with a welcoming committee from the CIA, FBI, and 101st Airborne, and maybe even get a chance to interrogate him--excuse me, interview him--en route to Guantanamo.
The words linger in my mind -- Madness, Madness! -- and recur every time various lawyers, including the current president of the United States and commander-in-chief of its armed forces, proceeds to explain why we need to follow the rules of criminal procedure in this war rather than the laws of war.
President Obama continues to speak of his predecessor's decisions as "the policies that got us into this mess," even as reality obliges him to adopt them one by one. Whether it's reviving the use of military commissions to try terrorists or keeping tabs on international phone calls or declining to release inflammatory photographs of interrogations. By now he's even following much the same strategy in Afghanistan -- the Surge -- that finally turned things around in Iraq.
But our still new president proposes to close the military prison at Guantanamo by a date certain -- the end of the year -- without having decided just what he's going to do with its occupants. A minor detail.
This president and lawyer can explain his legal rationale at length, plying his profession in the midst of the continuing chaos of war. Listening to his dulcet tones, I think of that single-minded British colonel focusing on his own profession, civil engineering, and building his little bridge in the midst of the jungle, war or no war, and can only think:
Madness, madness.... |