By the 1990s, Imad Mughniyeh was actually indicted - in Argentina of all
places. He was charged with the bombing of a Jewish community center in
Buenos Aires, which killed 85, and was named in an arrest warrant in
connection with an earlier blast at the Israeli embassy there. His
connections to both were so clear that even Argentina's lax authorities
finally had to take notice. (Gentle Reader may recall that always simpatico
Buenos Aires was the sometime home of a mild-mannered genocidist named Adolf
Eichmann before he was extradited to Israel with shocking disregard for the
formalities.)
The FBI almost caught up with the elusive Mr. Mughniyeh in 1995 during a
scheduled layover of a Middle East Airlines flight in Saudi Arabia, but our
ever helpful Saudi friends, with their well-known regard for civil
liberties, waved the plane on. Again and again, the long arm of the law
proved remarkably short in the case of Imad Mughniyeh. Not till last week
did he who lived by the car bomb die by it.
But what solid evidence was there against the much sought-after Mr.
Mughniyeh except a raft of investigations around the world, maybe a trial in
absentia or two, and common knowledge?
As an Arkansas legislator of my acquaintance likes to tell people who say
they've heard so much about him, "They never proved those charges!"
On the basis of apparently only coincidental if convincing evidence, the
secretive Mr. Mughniyeh's nice car now has been reduced to a smudge on the
asphalt of a fashionable Damascus street - without even a preliminary
hearing, a writ of habeas corpus, or a FISA warrant. Where is the ACLU when
you need it?
The sudden, not to say explosive demise of Mr. Mughniyeh is part of a
disturbing pattern: Start by blowing up notorious terrorists and soon you'll
be tapping their phone conversations without a warrant.
Just imagine what might have happened to this innocent (until proven guilty)
subject if he had come into American custody. Why, he might have been
waterboarded!
Oh, the horror. Look what happened when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now formally
accused of having been the driving force behind the attacks of September
11th, was subjected to this watery treatment. Word is it took only 45
seconds or so before the previously recalcitrant terrorist decided it would
be the better course of valor to reveal al-Qaida's table of organization in
Europe, information that may have spared who knows how many lives.
But what are mere lives compared to the polemics of pundits, politicians and
other such purists? Waterboarding, they have concluded, is torture, and
torture is illegal, ergo waterboarding was, is and always will be illegal.
No need for a court actually to rule. Yet this stubborn administration
refuses to forswear its theoretical use in the always unforeseeable future,
as if circumstances might still alter cases.
Or as Alexander Hamilton put it succinctly in the Federalist Papers, "It is
impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national
exigencies, or the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may
be necessary to satisfy them."
But that was before we had all these diviners who know the United States of
America is so secure that such means will never be necessary to protect it.
Call it a September 10th cast of mind. It was widespread before December 7,
1941, too.
As for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who did fall into American hands, he is now to
be tried by a military commission. But military trials for illegal
combatants, even if they go back to George Washington's continental army,
have come under fire, too, and by the time all the lawyering is done, the
accused my have died peacefully of old age in some Club Fed.
Times have changed since Franklin Roosevelt used military commissions to try
a group of German saboteurs, including one U.S. citizen, who'd been
apprehended on these shores. Their trial took all of three weeks and
promptly led to a number of summary executions. But of course that war was
different; we intended to win it.
This country has many arrows in its quiver, and some need never be used, but
why forswear a single one? The answer is obvious in this case: So that a
prospective Khalid Sheik Mohammed can be assured that he need never fear
being led to the edge of a watery grave, then returned to life only in order
to reveal the names and whereabouts of his co-conspirators, and finally be
executed without honor by order of a military court, as befits a mass
murderer who has broken all the laws of war and humanity. Surely that kind
of justice, and deterrence, belongs to a less enlightened era. Just as does
the summary execution of Imad Mughniyeh last week just because he deserved
it.
This latest, shocking disregard for the rights of a long-sought suspect
finally tracked down in Damascus bears all the marks of a CIA operation,
except of course that it was effective. Congress needs to round up the usual
suspects at once, issue subpoenas all around, roundly condemn the Bush
administration for its disregard for civil liberties, and begin a
full-fledged investigation in that order. Sentence First, Verdict
Afterwards!
But suspicion already has shifted to the Israelis, as it always does. To
quote Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad agent, "No matter who did it, they're
going to blame us." Why not? It's tradition!
Jerusalem, of course, has denied responsibility/credit for Mr. Mughniyeh's
untimely end. Just as Israel used to officially explain that a suspicious
structure on its territory - in the little town of Dimona in the Negev - was
just a little ol' textile plant. Even if it did bear an uncanny resemblance
to a nuclear reactor. Now the world is told that the Mossad had nothing to
do with this latest little operation in Damascus. Uh huh.
Clearly an emergency session of the UN Security Council needs to be called
at once and still another solemn resolution passed condemning Israel for
another heinous act of self-defense. Once again it seems to have
assassinated a terrorist leader for no better reason than his dedication to
its destruction and to violence in general.
Surely no one can claim that justice was done in the murderous Mr.
Mughniyeh's case. Considering the almost instantaneous effect of a
well-placed car bomb, he scarcely suffered.